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.