20 Years In Gaming

[gothwalk]

Sometime this month - the exact date escapes me, and defies my historical research capabilities - the 20th anniversary of my picking up a gaming book will happen. It was the summer of 1988, and during the Strawberry Fair in Enniscorthy, I acquired a copy of a book called Fighting Fantasy: The Riddling Reaver, which was an expansion of the Fighting Fantasy game, based very closely on the choose-your-own adventure style solo games. It's gone from there.

To celebrate the anniversary of this, I'm going to be doing some interesting stuff in my campaign world. I invite you - anyone who's reading this - to have some influence on it. I'll be presenting a number of options for you, and you can take up any you want. The first and simplest ones will be a series of LJ polls, with the option to comment. For this, I'll be shamelessly ripping off mytholder's methods in his Now We Are Here game.

At a step up from that, I'll talk you through describing a character in the world, and some of the decisions that character can make as the events unfold - sort of a play-by-email/comment-lite.

For people who're interested, I'll be offering a slightly more intensive play-by-email game, playing through a number of events.

Interaction between your character and the world will also be available by IM, should you have some ideas you want to follow up on.

For those latter two forms, if you had a character in Threshold of Ages or The Big Easy, please drop me a line letting me know roughly what your character would now be up to - or you can come up with a new one, I don't mind. If you played in Kingfisher's Way, and your character was one that might be around 4600 years later (and we haven't already discussed this), fire me a similar mail.

The idea of all of these is to let all of you have some input to my campaign world. There are no obligations for you; I'll extrapolate as I need to.

And finally, this will of course impact on some or all of my present and future tabletop games, and if things go the way I expect them to, there will probably be some one-off tabletop events.

The first LJ poll will appear either later today or tomorrow, and we'll go from there. If you've an idea for a character for any of this you want to talk about now, or if you have any questions, fire them into comments here.

Comments

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

Depends, because it might suck you in. :) However, the basic participation level is "watch the story unfold, tick boxes to make it go the way you like", and the whole thing is designed so that you can drop out at any point, silently or not, and drop back in equally silently or not later, without causing anyone any hassle.