Collected dross and pseudo history

From: kmnellist_at_...
Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2003 13:08:40 EST

<< However, discerning the truth about Argrath from KOS is like discerning the
 truth about Arthur from the collected dross, pseudo-history,  half-remembered legends and inspired mythopoetics of a millennia. (The  similarity in names is probably meaningful - Arthur, Argrath, Arkat,  Archilles, Agamemnon, Dent - Arthur Dent... but hey, that's another fan boy  duck chase) >>

Fairly irrelevant but I thought I might share this idea.

I am currenlty trying to work out a game based on just this sort of thing. I had some fun getting players to come up with a "historical" record of the events that were occuring around them. They got extra points for interesting words, obscure references to made up facts, archaic prose styles etc. It was a fun little session and made me want to run a game where the same peevish and jealous scholars argued over half remebered legends, collected dross and pseudo history (to steal a phrase). They would be arguing over the actual fate of the player's own Hero Quest character so in effect the HQ game would be a flashback to the "true" history but as a game, what the scholars "proved" to be the case actually had an effect on that history.

I am probably not making myself very clear here, but I plan to have scholars contesting with each other using HQ mechanics with their various abilities to verify the documents and peculiar fragments they uncover (and make up). I will report back on how it went.

Keith