Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Open World Play and Nowhere

Nowhere is the tongue-in-cheek working name for the planet that the Domain Game play-testers have landed on. In less than a week's time though, Nowhere has become a land filled with a lot of “Somewhere Elses”, the various co-creations of peoples from the players themselves.

Unwitting to me, but a welcome development, is the realization that the worldgame is providing another avenue for the open-world play I was writing about last month.

Never one for self-discipline in the face of an easy blog post, I can simply no longer resist the impulse to write about it.

Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Minor Spoiler Alert ahead for play-testers.

In the best example, one husband-and-wife team are not only using existing characters in the Tekumel campaign of Jeff Berry (our “resident” expert on all things Petal Throne-like), but are linking their actions in Nowhere with the limitations and consequences of their home campaign. Read Jim from Netherwerks write-up—complete with nifty illustration of the mysterious obelisk that brought them to the middle of Nowhere--on his blog to get some of the flavor of it .

Similarly, I am digging other spin-off writings from the experiment. Porky has written some ruminations about the nature of inter-dimensional portals and Wicked Murph,a player, shares his utterly unique beetle-riding dwarf nomad culture, the Khalik Vahr here in his own blog (where you can also see Shinobicow, another player, threatening to write up his own Wolf Clan barbarians on his own blog.)

The awesomeness of this open world play and co-creation boggles my poor little brain. I look forward to seeing just how far it can all go in this new year.  

11 comments:

  1. CK, I have to admit that this project just gets cooler by the day. I would love to see it be an ongoing backdrop like a Living Greyhawk or something.

    Keep up the yeoman's work.

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  2. I'm just playing bog standard Celtic elves. But with a halfling accountant/assassin.

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  3. Guard your ledger-books--and back--when Magpie is in town.

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  4. @Fabian: We think that accountant/assassins rock! The Jarpha in Riskail have some of the most feared accountants in all the Connected Territories...but we're not playing Jarpha in this play-test...at least not yet...

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  5. Very cool. It's making me jealous. I wish my scheduled had let me join in. :(

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  6. I can only try to keep up with it all - it boggles my mind too. But I've got nothing on a beetle-riding dwarf nomad culture.

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  7. I'm working with a bunch of Dwarf and Human religious zealots. I hope to have the culture and religion expand and change in new directions however as time goes on. My mind is a fire with possibilities...

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  8. @Simwise
    ...with yaks!

    Seriously another fine addition to the strange stew that is Nowhere.

    @Trey
    Well perhaps by the second round you'll have the time. I will keep a seat at the table open for you (with party hat).

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  9. With Yaks... yes... my secret weapon. hehe.

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  10. Although Magpie is now on a canoe investigating the marshlands, so it could be a short career...

    Yaks - love it.

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  11. Yup, I love me the Wholkswagon-driving dwarves. I started with "I like dwarves". Added a big splash of the Moranth from Steven Erikson's Malazan series, then thought - "what would an underground nomad culture need to survive?" I'm really happy with the Khalik, and this campaign has inspired me to do the most rpg development that I've done in years. Good stuff, all around.

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