>Why tell us about _your_ writing? Will some of your Live Action
>material be showing up as PDFs from Rick? Hopefully, the answer is
>yes. How easy it to write? What sort of things do you look for when
>you're setting it up? What eras/cultures/etc interest you for this
>kind of writing?
It never occured to me to because it's not really on topic for this group. There are a group of us in England who get together at several cons to play freeforms. About once a year those who are interested in writing spend a weekend doing mainly that. We've got to the stage where a group of four or five can write a 15-20 player 2-3 hour game on Friday evening and Saturday and playtest them on Sunday. http://www.uk-freeforms.wikidot.com for those interested. Some of these freeforms are intended to be published as PDFs in the next year or so.
So far there's not been any real interest in writing for Glorantha although I've suggested it. Probably because none of the other writers has any feel for the lozenge.
It's not difficult once you've learnt the techniques. With several experienced writers we have a least one in each group so people with no experience of writing games can contribute and learn at the same time. In fact the success of this approach makes me wonder if something similar could be done with writing tabletop scenarios. It might not even need a weekend, just a half day session at a con.
The main emphasis is on creating a fun game to play although I have a tendency to emphasise different cultures. Get the players thinking outside modern cultural attitudes. Probably the key determinant of setting is can we as writers find enough plot and interesting characters for a typical bunch of modern gamers.
>Personally, I've never written a set-piece freeform myself but I
>spent two years running a VLARP with about 50 players showing up
>every two weeks to play. They are a complete pain to manage plot and
>resource wise in the long term - worse in some ways than a sit down
>campaign.
Getting plot is about a third of the work. We don't just pinch plots from books, plays, films or whatever - we strip-mine whole genres of fiction to get enough for one game. Fortunatly there are quite a few lists of plot ideas available so it's more a matter of tailoring those to the setting than inventing new ones. Writing up the characters is the easy bit and the remaining half of the work is cross checking everything and making sure each player has a decent character and enough to do. The checking is why I don't try to write on my own, I've seen the mistakes that have only got picked up when two others have already checked the original author. I also tend to be more creative when I've someone else to bounce ideas off.
>Say, that's an intesting thought. Has anyone looked at Glorantha LARP
>rules for long term campaigning a-la L5R or World of Darkness or the
>like?
The LARP rules aren't the determinant. Unless the game emphasis is on combat the rules don't really matter. What's important is getting enough plot to keep the characters busy. If you want rules Simon Bray did a variation of the HQ rules for Return to Griffin Mountain. However I'm not sure how much they were actually used when the game was run.
-- Donald Oddy http://www.grove.demon.co.uk/
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