It feels like within Shadowstories lies a very interesting game.
Wait, did you think I was going to talk about rotting meat? Pshh. That’s a discussion for another day, when we’ve alienated all our readers and all that’s left behind is an oozing carcass! (Actually, here I’m misusing the term. Poor “gamey.” It’s so often used to mean something that smells rotten or decayed, like spoiled meat, but really, it just means that it has the odor, or taste, of a wild game meat. The misuse of the word has ruined it.)
No, I mean, an actual game.
We have a universe here comprising a million narrative threads. The invisible galactic strings that hold the Storyverse together are, in Shadowstories, plot threads from limitless stories. These threads bind the whole thing together. And that means anything can happen. You can have a planet of Greek Gods go to war with a mining colony of goblins who unearth the fossils of Aesop’s Fables. You can have relationship dramas and office comedies unfold on a distant world where the inhabitants are not people, but cryptozoological critters. (The yeti stands at the burbling watercooler and whines about how his ex-girlfriend, the Loch Ness Monster, should really be called the Loch Ness Goatsucker! Laugh track! Applause! Forced hilarity ensues!) At the center of all this, you have the Shadowstories, which represent a handful of idiots nominated to rush blindly into danger and save the inhabitants of the Storyverse from… well, themselves, mostly.
See, that’s a game, right there.
The question then becomes one of design and direction.
Will it be a pen-and-paper RPG to start? Could be. It’s certainly our background, and this has a lot of space to grow in that environment. Setting-wise, it’s nigh-infinite. Not much you can’t do. Endless worlds. Limitless tales. You want a satyr character to go on an adventure with a kung-fu space miner and an ancient Sumerian goddess? Done and done!
Of course, even there, then what?
On the one hand, you could go rules-light, and pare it down to the bare bones so you don’t necessarily even need a single gamemaster. You could say, “Fuck dice,” and play this as some kind of awesome narrative collaboration, which is certainly in the spirit of the thing.
On the other hand, you could have a lot of fun with something a bit more crunchy, something that has traits both useful and funny, something with a robust creation system for new planets and encounters and how stories can interact with (or infect) the current tale at hand…
Of course, if you wanted to take it out of the RPG arena, you could do any number of things. A forum game of people collaborating on their own tale in the Storyverse? A crazy “experience design” game that’s immersive and weird and designed to hook new readers? A $10 million dollar MMORPG set in the Storyverse? (Oh, that reminds me: does anyone have ten million dollars they could lend us? And when I say “lend,” I actually mean, “give?” No? Anybody? What if I have a gun? Does that change the equation?)
So, let me put it out to you crazy readerheads.
Let’s say that, in the future, we do a game.
What would you want to see out of a game set in a narrative universe of endless story possibilities?
