Friday, September 16, 2011

RPG Toolset: 12 Word Trick from Ars Ludi

Thanks to Risus Monkey for posting about Microscope (and Corkboard, which looks like another really cool resource!) and thus facilitating our clicking over to the Ars Ludi site and discovering a rather ingenius approach to encapsulating some Mythic Flavor for a setting by boiling it all down to ten or twelve evocative words, weeding-out anything lame or weak, and really getting down to the essence of the setting in a nutshell. What an excellent technique for really, truly getting to the heart and soul of a particular setting. This is a great way to really get things sorted out and to further refine the identity and focus of the campaign, game or setting.

Here's what we came up with for a few of our campaign/setting projects so far:
Ain 4 (Humanspace Empires)
Abandoned, Forgotten, Decayed, Fallow, Horrific, Implications, Consequences, Toxic, Wasteland, Barren, Post-Industrial, Polluted

Riskail
Surreal, Art, Infrastructure, Humanity, Renaissance, Rebirth, Autonomy, Adulthood, Inheritance, Expression, Exploration, Development, Civilization, Networks, Differentiation...

Worldboat at Life's End
Exploration, Mysterious, Collaborative, Technology, Evolving, Independent/Autonomy, Ecology, Vast, Macroscale, Adaptation, Transformation, Survival, (Post Extinction Event)

Bujilli's Sojourn (Zalchis/Labyrinth Lord)
Adventure, Investigation, Experimentation, Sorcery, Journey, Knowledge, Transition, Growing, Experience, Monsters, Exploration, Worlds/Locales (Weird)

Zalchis (Labyrinth Lord/Mutants & Mazes/Mutant Future)
Weird, Post-Cataclysmic, Sorcery, Science, Loss, Entropy, Finality, Endings, Scale, Darkness, Broken/Fragmentary, Challenging, (Transitions)

Tsan Yian (Terminal Space/Swords & Wizardry[White Box]/OD&D)
Degeneration, Corruption, Infection, Mutation, Transformation, Mythos, Hybridization, Rampant, Hubris, Beyond, Outgrowth, Acceleropalypse (Less Tentacles, More Archaia...)
Wermspittle (Labyrinth Lord/*/possibly Savage Worlds)
Exploration, Knowledge, Adventure, Pulp, Crossroads, Bastide, Wilderness, Monsters, Plague, Turmoil, Opportunity, Discovery...Alternate Histories...
Interesting method. We'll try this out with the rest of our efforts and see where it leads.
We've purposefully left-out a few other projects because they're still in the works and need more time to fully ripen before we spring them on anyone outside of our play-testers.

This 12-word method looks like it will be a very useful tool for further refining and developing our various  projects like the Adventure Modules we're building for Zalchis and Wermspittle -- or the Planes of the Paraverse -- or even the Archipelago we've been developing for the Sea of O'sr (Maybe we'll just use 6 or 9 words or less for each island...) -- and this scheme fits nicely into Lester Dent's Master Fiction Plot Formula that he used in developing over a hundred Doc Savage adventures.

Thanks Risus Monkey!

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