Why is it very special? Because it’s by me, of course. Also it’s cross posted, which is the new hotness.

Over on my blog—which I’ve only just remembered that I had—friend of the show: Tarvis North, suggested I talk about inspiration. That’s a rich, meaty vein of veiny, rich meat of a topic. So I applied the question to Shadowstories, remembering its earliest days back when it was a poorly kept slambook writ by a handful of giggling idiots.

It inspired (see what I did there?) me to pull back the curtain on the adolescent and transparent origins behind the characters you see before you every week here at the Storyverse. From back in the day: when Chuck, myself, and a handful of our Creative Writing class first added our characters to the story. They were never intended to be self-inserts, I don’t think we ever considered Grebok to be me, or Chuckles Chuck, etc. If anything, they were avatars (pardon the pun) into the book.

Over the years the little scamps evolved and migrated to the folks we see to the right here. At one point (which was still, like, fifteen years ago. The first time I think we had any illusion of doing something “serious” with it), Chuck and I wrote up a series of origin stories, which finally gave us anything resembling canon. Even then the ideas have continued to mutate into the material that ultimately ended up in the Bios.

That’s who they are now, but let’s take a look at who they were then. Back when they were the barest spermazoa ejaculated out of our deranged, pop-culture drenched brains into the wadded tissue of our high school notebooks.

•••

Lord Chuckles: Avatar of Good

Lord Chuckles origins may not be surprising to those of you with detail-oriented eyes and a love of late 80’s/early 90’s PC gaming.

This was Chuck’s chosen name in the then-popular Ultima series as the, well, the Avatar of Virtue (no relation to the jester from the series, actually. That just happened). It was more or less a play on “Chuck” with the added benefit of being a ridiculous name for a Chosen One type hero person (this isn’t high comedy folks).

Earliest incarnations of Shadowstories played this pretty straight (since we had no hope of publishing, IP issues were somebody else’s problem). In fact, in one of the books—VI, I think—the team spent a good deal of the story in Britannia. It was just that much funnier that the so-called Avatar of Virtue was a prickish fop.

Once we manifested illusions that this was a saleable property, we needed to change Chuckles’ origin. By then the story barely relied on the game (which, by that time, had already boomed and busted online), so it was a fairly easy fix. One that gave us a new bounce of narrative freedom, and Moritania was born (originally Morittannia). Chuckles’ time spent on a garbage scow and ignoble return home were added as send-ups of the Chosen One legacy.

That he’s not technically an Avatar, or that in his apparent embodiment of all things “good” (including fruit-filled pastry and anonymous rest stop handjobs) he’s abandoned those assholes to their fate, only adds to his hilarious mystique.

•••

Grebok, son of Drogmar,

Keeper of the Seven Keys of Ventoozlar

While a more obscure reference, Grebok is arguably the more direct lift.

The name is taken from a line delivered in the MST3K episode: Cave Dwellers. During the long-winded and convoluted exposition (a part we like to call, she had to ask), we are introducted to the incidental character: “Grebok”. Crow supplies the rest of this ridiculous moniker in a master stroke against flimsy fantasy nomenclature (I found an annotation that says it was actually “son of Flockmar, Keeper of the Seven Keys of Pentuzlar.” I am just learning this now). I fell in love. This was literally the funniest thing I’d heard so far. I started using it on the BBS’s and anywhere else it would fit.

Grebok, the character, was originally more Cro-Magnon (or Conan-ish), in keeping with the barest hint of his “source material”.

After we had gotten underway with the first couple of Shadowstories, Chuck and I used to pass a property on the bus with a sign in front announcing it as: Mirador. It was just a suburban plot of land in a rural part of our County. I guess they really identified with lighthouses. I think it was a single story home, even. How that got conflated with the Spanish word for Watchtower is anyone’s guess. I just thought it was a badass fantasy name, and that was the beginning of the end for Grebok’s more Conan-y tropes.

Slowly but surely Mirador grew in my mind, as did Grebok’s role in it. I just heaped layers of my favorite things onto this fantasy planet. It was at turns Final Fantasy/Phantasy Star, Star Wars, Star Trek, D&D, Magic: the Gathering, you name it. Eventually it grew too cumbersome, even for my “but it’s rad” teenage justifications. I refined the idea down but it still held all these really weird artifacts from previous bad ideas. Eventually the only way to parse it all was for Grebok to become the man of two worlds he is now. At times savage and dopey, and other times cultured and well-trained. Somewhere between Conan and Han Solo is the Son of Drogmar.

Ooo! Here it is (Cue it up to 2:55).

•••

Lord of the Lemmings

From the game, Lemmings, not-so oddly enough.

Our friend Lupy (who just got married last weekend btw, big w00t) introduced us to the always enigmatic Lord of the Lemmings. It started just BSing and getting into the head of whoever must be laying down all these mono-functional little rodents from this game which delighted us so. When Shadowstories came around, he put himself down as ShadowLord (his current BBS handle), the Lord of the Lemmings.

In his earliest days he supplied the gang with boosts from his signature, situation-appropriate critters. All with self-explanatory names like: Flashlight Lemming, Explosive Lemming, Glasscutter Lemming, Mood Music Lemming, etc. It wasn’t long (possibly as many as five pages) before the “Shadowlord” part got dropped. However, the dire, cloaked look of the character remained well after.

Lupy’s penchant for hijacking Shadowstories with bizarre anecdotes and long winded (if well written) asides, slowly coalesced into the LotL (pronounced Lottle) that we all know and are highly suspicious of these days.

His impending godhood, and ability to move in and out of the story (moreso than his fellow protagonists) are all latter day additions more Chuck and myself than Lupy. However the reverence of a Great Big Lemming, his knack for speaking in sing-song rhyme, and ability to confound all who speak to him are all from the original blueprint.

•••

Gunther P. Washington

Not so much based on any particular person or source of pop culture.

Although his hapless humor was very much in the style of Get A Life, the (too) short-lived sitcom starring Chris Elliot. A favorite of our own pasty, tow-headed friend, Jim. A wunderkind of impeccable comic sensibilities (he was unto Jim Carrey before anyone knew who that was).

It was Jim who first gave us Gunther P. Washington and his lovable loser mystique. His obsession with his “mommy”, love of all things tacky, indomitable sunny attitude, and common foil for Sparky were all the character had in those halcyon days of youth.

Over time, however, the character became more and more the doughy, magnet for big violence and office clerkery, man-child he is today. Not so much a departure from his original purpose considering he didn’t have one, but no less an evolution in concept.

•••

Sparky and R.T. are more or less our own creation. They might be lampoons of Wookie sidekicks and the concept of pilots loving their spaceships a little too much, but not nearly as specific as the above. The Bastard Sun, Skarpo the Wily Bear Magician, Jason Priestley Death, and assorted other characters are more or less our own.

It was primarily the main characters all had their uncreative origins in other media. Whatever was our favorite thing the minute and a half before Chuck handed us an otherwise unexceptional, single-subject notebook is now permanently embedded in the fabric of the Storyverse for all time.

And that, dear readers, is how the sausage got made.

You ask us questions here in the comments.

We’ll answer them, also in the comments.

Obviously, questions about Shadowstories or The Storyverse are not inappropriate.

But, shit, we’re easy like Sunday morning. We’ll answer anything. We’re both Gifted Game Designers (stifledchortle). We’re both writers. We’re both studs (stifledchortlenumbertwo). Each of us is a trained horse whisperer. So, you have a wide open field of questions you can ask us and that we will answer.

So — it’s on you, Shadowpeeps.

Ask us questions.

Go.

Do it.

Now.

What are you waiting for?

A cookie?

We don’t have cookies.

See? First answer to first question. “Q: Do you assholes have cookies?” “A: No, we don’t have any goddamn cookies.”

Listen. Seriously. I need you to sit down. The Phillies lost last night. They lost to the Evil Empire of Baseball. The Yankees, as my wife says, is basically the GOP of baseball. And that shit makes sense. The Yankees have won 27 of 105 World Series championships. They’ve literally played in 40 of those 105 games — 38% of World Series championships. That’s goddamn redonkulous. This makes me sad. I decide to watch baseball this year only to have my heart dragged out of its chest, a funnel of piss vented through the ventricles. I guess I’m almost glad it was the Yankees? They’re easy enough to get behind as a bad guy, and it’s better than being beaten by a mediocre team, like the Arizona D-Bags. Or the Mets. Not that such a matchup would happen in the Series, but hey, shut up, I’m still stung from the 1986 Red Sox / Mets battle, okay? Deal with that.

The popular meme that goes around is that the Yankees buy their championships, which is true to a point in that they have a lot of money to throw around — but, money doesn’t make a team, and it doesn’t craft skill. Of course, the conspiracy theorist in me reminds one that money could in theory purchase shitty calls from dickbucket umpires, and maybe, just maybe, the Phillies got boned on one too many calls over the course of that series — but, I’ll take off my tinfoil hat and shut up, now.

Point of all this is, we’re weepy over here. Our sphincters are still tightened in rage. Hence, no big new post today, except for our lamentations sung over a home plate spattered with red.

In the meantime, I’ma crosspost a little something-something from Terribleminds — J.C. Hutchins is a patron saint of people like us, because he’s a guy who stepped out there when the system wouldn’t give him a boost, and he punted the system in the nuts, spitted in its eye, and cut his own entryway with a reciprocating saw. And now he’s in there with a new book and…

Well. I’ll let the crosspost tell the tale.

***

Normally, I’m not big on recommending books I haven’t read yet. This’ll be an exception to that rule.

7th Son: Descent hits today [edit: actually last week!]. And I’m telling you to go buy it. (Or, if you’re into awesome incentives, buy many.)

Why buy it?

First, J.C. Hutchins is good people. He did it his way. He was not thwarted. The guy’s a goddamn machine. (Or, shit, maybe he has a buncha clones of himself running around. It would explain a lot.) If you do not choose to believe that he is either machine or clone, perhaps consider him in the running for a writer totem spirit — some ancient entity deep in the woods, fueling your beating heart and churning guts with the mighty power of Bad-Ass Writing. (Reference: Check out this interview with Hutchins over the summer for the Workbook Project. Listen here.)

Second, because I went ahead and checked out the first ten chapters of the book, which are free to you should you choose to click here. They’re good. They’re real good. Some books, even good ones, present a kind of “barrier to entry.” Not this. It’s a smooth read. It’s Colt 45 with Lando Calrissian. (Though, it’s arguably also like the Sarlacc, what with the “sucking you in helplessly until it’s done with you” part. But much prettier.)

And that’s that. I’m off to go buy the book. Maybe you want to, too. Honor the totem spirit. Leave a bloody heart on his altar, tonight.

Good time management skills.

*crickets chirping*

*tumbleweeds tumbling*

It goes a little something like this. We are now up to Chapter 49. No, you can’t read that far ahead yet, but that’s how far we’ve gotten. And, we’ve been asked a few times — how do you have the time? Or, we’re told, I wish I had the time to do something like that.

It’s a not unreasonable sentiment.

Or, at least, it’s not an unreasonable sentiment from people who are not the Clock Keepers, Masters of Time Manipulation!

*rad guitar chord*

…

Okay, that’s just a big lie. We do not have magical powers that allow us to change the weave and weft of time. We are not Sorcerous Tempus or Zeitmancers or anything, though we’d pay good money to anybody who can teach us those skills, perhaps via a shady photo-copied manifesto? No? Moving on, then.

What we do have is a basic understanding of how time works.

I have 24 hours in my day. You have 24 hours in your day. Marty has 25-and-a-half hours in his day, but that’s because of a deal he made with Jesus when he was a wee lad — it really doesn’t count, though, because he has to spent at least an hour-and-a-half a day drawing portraits of Jesus on his walls in rustwater and strawberry jam. Hey, I dunno. That’s his business. That’s between him and Doctor Christos, y’dig? Point being, for all intents and purposes, he has 24 hours in his day, too, because Jesus commands that other gifted portion.

I’ve been guilty of saying, “I don’t have the time,” which isn’t an entirely accurate way of saying what I mean. If I say, “I don’t have the money,” that’s possible. Money is finite. If I have five bucks, and that sweet llama ride is six bucks, I’m fucked unless I can get all bargainy on that llama-jockey. Time is infinite. I have 24 hours. You have 24 hours. If I say “I don’t have the time,” what I mean is, “I choose to allocate my hours differently than you.”

That’s all that is.

So, when it comes time to work on this here Shadowstories, we both make the commitment to allocate hours toward it. It’s not like we’re not busy. Marty has children. I have a pornography habit. Marty is captain of the Ladies’ Macrame Auxiliary Union. I have a pornography habit.

Now, yes, sometimes time is allocated in a way that is outside your control. Eight hours at the day job is an intensive affair, and might not leave you time to write. But, during that time you’re telling me you really work straight through every second? You don’t fiddle with your nuts or make push-pin pigs? Don’t you fuckin’ lie to us, now. We’ll smell that lie. Marty has the power of Jesus. The power to smell the stink of deception is just one of his many gifts from the Lord. You eat lunch during that day job, don’t you? You can grab a few minutes here and there to take some notes, devote a little thought toward the project you really want to be working on, instead of that spreadsheet devoted to the cost analysis of new push-pin pig materials.

All I’m saying is, you wonder how we have the time — well, it’s because we have it. Same as you. It’s not like we “make the time,” as some people will say, because that is a magic power we sadly do not possess. That’s pretty much left to Jesus. He makes time in a little factory outside Ronkonkomo. (Did I spell that right? Do I care? No.) We simply choose to allocate some of our time toward this endeavor.

Time is infinite. But life is short.

Allocate your time wisely.

Or, put differently:

Become a Clock Keeper, a Master of Time Manipulation!

* gnarly drum solo*

The question is this:

What Serial Fiction do you read on the web and enjoy?

We want to know. We want to up our game. We already know of some awesome stuff from Friends of the Storyverse (Hell Harbor, Whitechapel, anything from MCM), but we’re on the look-out for more. Quite a lot out there to wade through, so — do you have opinions? What do you read out there in Web-Land? Recommend!

Input!

Give it!

Goal units!

Something!

The comments await, gentleladies and wondermen.

We know it. We can’t help it. We’re crude. We’re callow. We think it’s funny.

But don’t think we don’t discuss it. Frankly, we go back and forth on it. Are we being too rude? Too crude? How many people can we afford to offend? Given some of the stuff I read on the net, or some of the things 12-year-olds say to me on Xbox Live, are we really making that big a splash? Or, are we crossing a line? Will we threaten our already meager readership? Or will they sense us holding back, with our timidity dooming us?

Example.

Chapter 9: The Grassy Knoll. In this chapter, we have the following:

The bluebird appeared again, this time hunkering down in Grebok’s dreadlocks.

“OK,” the bird tweeted. “I went to the mall! I can haz tampons? Pillow Cat is watching your vagina bleed! LOL! Girls are fun! See you in math class!”

“Fuckin’ bird!” he yelled, swatting it off his shoulder. “Make sense, bird! And stop sharing intimate details with me!”

The bird laughed, and dissipated into a pinwheel of 1s and 0s.

This passage warranted lots of discussion down at Storyverse Headquarters, here beneath the crust of the Titan Moon. The original passage actually had a slightly different course: the bluebird alighted upon Grebok’s head, said the tampon thing, and then Grebok punched the bird’s head off.

Why the change?

Well, we worried about that being offensive. See, we’re not making fun of women or tampons. We love women. Sometimes, one of us (and I’m not saying who, coughcoughMarty) wears a beautiful sundress. And we know that tampons aren’t weird. Hell, one of us (coughcoughChuck) likes to clean up spills (biological and otherwise) with tampons, because damnit if they aren’t super-absorbent.

Rather, the joke is that people hop on Twitter (bluebird? Get it?) and spill intimate details, and further, that sometimes people are sort of retarded on the Internet. By having Grebok punch the head off the bird, we worried that it would be misunderstood as “violence against women,” when really, it was “violence against inanity on the Internet.” So, beheading the bird violently was downgraded to just slapping the bird, and the bird laughing as it dissipated it.

And yet, even as the joke stands, we still worry. It references tampons. It references vaginas. Is that offensive? Probably to some. The irony is, some might call this “humor for mature audiences,” but really, a part of it tickles our 12-year-old reptilian brains — truly mature humor probably features jokes about pensions and Merlot and NPR and comes together in an inexplicable cartoon in the New Yorker. In this week’s Wednesday chapter (13: Please Be Patient While We Upgrade), we have our one character Gunther replaced by a literal interpretation of an Internet Troll. Trolls say horrible things. They’re racist. They’re sexist. It’s almost absurd. So, once more, we have to figure out how to milk the Funny out of that while still managing not to make Gunther’s offensive troll-talk emblematic of the authorial voice. If he says something mean about Some Group Of People, will you think we’re saying something mean about Some Group of People? It’s tricky shit, people.

See, we always try to walk the line between “What’s Funny,” and “What We Can Get Away With.” Cultural sensitivity is a living, breathing thing. Sometimes it’s right. Sometimes it’s off-the-mark (though one could suggest it’s never exactly wrong). The balance is, what’s more important? Cultural sensitivity? Or a good joke? How do you balance the two off each other?

Obviously, you can have a good joke that doesn’t rely on offending anybody, but, to be honest, we like to offend. Not because it’s edgy. Not because we want to be extreme-with-three-X’s and get all up in yo’ face, but because offensive material handled a certain way can be funny.

This leads to a larger discussion of What Is Funny, which we don’t have the time or patience for at this moment. But, in short, funny is a subversion of the normal. Funny comes from a mismatched place, a place of surprise. Alastair Clarke’s theories on this are interesting, and I think he makes some compelling points. Humor as being something based on patterns of surprise is right in line with what I’m saying. Context is everything. Offensive humor therefore operates on this principle and — when serving the proper absurd context — takes you out of your comfort zone and can be jarring in a funny way.

Hopefully.

It can, of course, go the wrong way. Shock for the sake of shock doesn’t work. Shock designed to evoke a humorous response by pairing two unexpected patterns might, and that’s more or less what we try to do.

…

Okay, okay, sometimes we just like to make dick jokes and say words like “vagina,” and we do so without thinking of any grander purpose or theory of What Is Funny. Sue us. (By which I mean, please do not sue us.)

So, Internuts, how we doin’? Too far over the edge? Not far enough? Are we being funny? Do you hate us? Give us a shout. Let us know if we’re tip-toeing the line just right, or all wrong.

Hey, it’s Fri–

Uhh. It’s Thursday.

What am I doing here?

*someone hands over a sheet*

Oh. Yes. The schedule’s all changey. Right, right. Tomorrow is another new chapter of the story. Mm-hmm. Got it.

Don’t worry, I’ll promptly forget this information.

In the meantime, it’s time to talk about (dundundun) Epic Level Characters. We’re looking to create a game where the characters are already at or close to the top of their peak. They’re already heroes. That’s both fun and challenging because… well. Y’know what? I went ahead and did a mind map for this whole heroic bag of tricks as a way to get my head around it. Mind maps continue to please me, because despite the fact that we tell stories in a linear fashion, our brains do not work in a linear fashion. My brain is like a cloud. A treacly, sodden cloud. I reach in and pull out random hunks of ooze and pudding, and I link those clumps of goo together, like one of the towers in World of Goo. (And that is a game you should all play, for it is the bee’s em-effin’ knees.)

And now, the mind map.

Yeah, you can’t read that, can you? Of course not.

Click for epic-size!

(If you’d prefer a PDF, I could wrangle one up.)

Those, I think, are the chiefmost considerations, but I’m willing to bet you guys — the Hive-Mind, the Groupthink, the Crowdsourced, the Army of Thinkmachines — might have things to add. So, if you do, add ‘em. This continues to be the kind of thing we’re feeling for in the dark, so any light shined in shadowy corners is always a good thing.

(Don’t forget that you can catch up on all the previous game-related discussions.)

This is going to be the most exciting post ever. It’s so exciting, you will wet yourself and fill your diaper and roll around on the floor and mutter in tongues and pull out your hair and molest yourself and pee some more.

I’m totally overselling this, aren’t I?

Point is, it’s an administrative post. Stuff is going on, and I’m going to tell you about it. And you’re going to sit there, and you’re going to love it. Mmmm. Mmm.

The Schedule

The schedule here is changing. We’re going to release two chapters of the story per week, starting next Wednesday. The schedule will officially look like:

Monday: Bonus Materials

Tuesday: A Great Sucking Maw Of Nothingness

Wednesday: Chapter (Odds)

Thursday: Process Chatter, Meandering Piffle (like this post)

Friday: Chapter (Evens)

Saturdays and Sundays are for church and hangovers, in whatever order you decree them to be.

The Story

Our story, The Infi-Net Revolution, continues apace. You see that we’re up to Chapter 10, now. That’s a lie. We’re up to Chapter 41. You just can’t see ‘em yet. But the story takes some crazy turns as the Henley and the Wendig bat the tale back and forth like a cat with a ball of yarn. Or like Pillow Cat with your soul. Or something.

This seems a good time to ask:

Are you enjoying the story? Are you reading the story? Do you fondle yourself when you read the story? Do you even know how you got here? What year is it? Who’s the President? Don’t go into the light!

The Game

Game-chatter continues. Expect more salient gametalk next week. Next Thursday, to be precise.

The Numbers

As mentioned, we intend to be frank about our experiences here on this website. This is an experiment for us, so it’s an experiment for you, too.

The numbers suggest that very few people are actually… reading our story.

The numbers suggest, on the other side, that a phenomenal number of people are interested in our contests and are checking out our game-chatter.

Obviously, this is a good-news/bad-news sit-chee-ay-shun. Good because you’re here for some reason. Less good because you’re not checking out the initial purpose behind this site’s existence, which is an experimental back-and-forth collaborative sci-fantasy fiction process with a Space Vomit design scheme. Good because the contest attracts an explosion of attention. Less good because I don’t know that the attention is lingering after the contest completes.

Can we do more to nudge-nudge you into reading the story? Elbow-elbow? Do you plan on getting caught up once more of the story is revealed? Do you think it’s crap? Do you think it’s awesome but the site gives you eyestrain? Do you hate us? Do we smell? Do you smell? Something smells. Space isn’t supposed to have a smell, but damn if it doesn’t smell like garbage. That’s the problem with space. People think it’s endless, so they just pitch their litter out into the wide open gulf. Fine. Be that way. But that smell isn’t going to unsmell itself, you know.

Where was I?

Oh, right, numbers.

The numbers are overall good. We’ve doubled our numbers every month, but again, that’s attributable to the game talk and contest stuff, and less so to the fiction itself.

The Input

Once more, we open the forum to You, the Constant Reader.

Tell us how we’re doing. Tell us any thoughts you have. Your hopes, your dreams. Your soft-core porn fantasies, like a gauzy French film from the late 80s playing back on Cinemax. Anything at all. We’ll listen. Just come over here and sit on our laps. Warm, and cozy. Like with Santa Claus, but smelling of schnapps.

Mmm. Schnapps.

(No, seriously, give us your input. Don’t make us beg.)

Dun dun dun! Crack of thunder! Shadow of meat cleaver just before it falls!

Or something.

Character Creation

Donnie: Okay, here we go. I want my character to be really strong, so I write down –

Gamemaster Tom: No, no, wait, don’t write anything down. I didn’t tell you to write anything down.

Donnie: I just figured –

Gamemaster Tom: Don’t figure. Wait for my cues. You have to wait for my cues! This is a new game, you can’t just… run off willy-nilly, writing all kinds of things on all kinds of pages. We have rules. Rules are what separate us from otters and carp.

Donnie: Otters and carp?

Sylvia: I hate rules.

Gamemaster Tom: Well, rules hate you, Sylvia. They do. They told me so in a text message. Now, are you two jizzbags ready to hear how this character creation thing plays out, or not?

Sylvia: Jizzbags is very hostile. And gross, because it implies a bag — like, a grocery bag — bulging with jizz.

Donnie: Yes. We’re ready.

Sylvia: All that sloshing.

Gamemaster Tom: Only thing you write on that sheet is your character’s name, then your name, and then your character’s concept. That’s it. Don’t worry about the five stats, yet. You determine your own stats in-game as it unfolds. Through conflict resolution, your characters are revealed.

Sylvia: Gay.

Gamemaster Tom: Using “gay” as a pejorative is…

Sylvia: Gay?

Donnie: Retarded?

Gamemaster Tom: No! It’s wrong. Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean it is equal to a man having sex with another man — which for some is a, a, a totally beautiful act. Jesus. Donnie, tell me your character’s name and concept, please?

Donnie: Okay. Here goes. His name is Snakeface Wizinski. He’s a Reptilian Lawyer. As in, a lawyer who is a reptile.

Gamemaster Tom: Fair enough. Sylvia?

Sylvia: I’m playing a Priest of Heracles named Ioioius. He’s a hunky stud who preaches the awesomeness of Heracles through the perfection of his hunky stud body. Boom.

Gamemaster Tom: Sure. Whatever. Okay. So, you guys are in transit to a place called the Cosmic Paisley Wormhole McHappy’s. It’s a fast food restaurant in the center of a wormhole, so located as everyone can get to it from all the distant corners of the Storyverse. You have in hand your coupons, each allowing for one free sundae. To get there, you’ve had to use public transportation, and you’re crammed onto a Space Bus –

Sylvia: Am I there?

Gamemaster Tom: I’m not talking only to Donnie. I’m looking at you when I speak.

Sylvia: Well, I don’t know how you roll. You know what they say about making assumptions

Donnie: It makes an ass out of u and… uhh. Mmmmpshun.

Gamemaster Tom: Yes, you’re both there, for Chrissakes. The Space Bus is crowded, and –

Sylvia: I think Ioioius really hungers for that sundae, and would like to speed up these proceedings, maybe get this Space Bus moving a little faster. I take off my shirt.

Donnie: I’m always confused about this. You speak about Ioioius doing something, but then you say, I take off my shirt, which sounds like you, Sylvia, are going to take off your shirt. Is there protocol for this? Can we decide?

Gamemaster Tom: There’s no protocol, it’ s just — it’s like how some actors refer to their characters, while others refer to themselves as the character, I don’t think it’s –

Donnie: It’s confusing is what it is.

Sylvia: You get confused by zippers, you fucking lackwit.

Donnie: Well, at least I’m not a monkey-faced whore!

Gamemaster Tom: Stop yelling! Sylvia! Your character, Ioioious, takes off his shirt, which will help us determine his first trait!

Sylvia: … okay. Fine. But I don’t know what that means.

Gamemaster Tom: Your character’s first action helps determine his first trait. His second action determines his second trait. And so on, and so forth, until you reach five. Why does Ioioious take off his shirt? What does he hope will happen?

Sylvia: I, or he, is too sexy to be contained. He wants to use his sexy bod to convince the Space Bus driver to speed this bitch up and get us to those sundaes faster.

Gamemaster Tom: Okay. So, how do you want to translate into a trait? We need a noun, but no adjective yet — those are earned later. You could go with something simple, like “appearance,” but the game seems to recommend you get a little more specific, if only for descriptive fun. Could go with “muscles,” or even, “pecs.”

Sylvia: “Narcissism.”

Gamemaster Tom: Excuse me?

Sylvia: It’s not that he’s sexy. It’s that he possesses a deep-seated narcissism that convinces him of his power. So, my noun is narcissism.

Donnie: Figures.

Sylvia: Shut up, Donnie.

Gamemaster Tom: No, no, Narcissism works as your first trait. Very cool. Okay, you spend your first trait, Narcissism, for the effect of –

Sylvia: Wait, I spent it already?

Gamemaster Tom: Yes, you spend it. In character creation, that demands that your next act of conflict resolution gives us a second trait. In the game, it works toward a strategic “resource management” component –

Sylvia: I’m sorry. I fade in and out. I don’t actually care. Go on.

Gamemaster Tom: In spending your Narcissism trait, you achieve success, and as this is the character creation portion, success is automatic and no chits need to be spent.

Donnie: No shits need to be spent?

Sylvia: Chits, you mule-kicked mongoloid. Chits.

Gamemaster Tom: Yes. Chits. Since we’re in character creation, success is guaranteed — conflict resolution gets a bit more complicated once the traits are determined and the game really gets going. For now, you succeed: the Space Bus driver, who is a grizzled dude with a hog’s nose and greasy hair, is bedazzled by your own deep-seated self-love. He’s only half-paying attention to the vehicle, now, and he leans forward, accidentally punching the accelerator as he ogles you, drooling.

Sylvia: I think you mean dazzled, not bedazzled, but whatever. Sweet. I like to think that my Narcissism trait is almost… communicable. Like a disease.

Gamemaster Tom: Because we’re in character creation, though, each success is mitigated by a consequence. So, yes, you succeed in speeding up the Space Bus. That also causes the other passengers to spill their drinks, or get motion sickness, or jostle into one another. Anger ensues. A riot erupts right here on the Space Bus. Donnie, Snakeface Wizinski is right in the middle of it. He’s about to be overwhelmed by rioting Space Bus passengers. What does Snakeface do, as a Reptilian Lawyer?

Donnie: He starts fucking biting people, that’s what he does.

Gamemaster Tom: His first impulse as a lawyer is to bite people?

Donnie: That’s how the people of his world engage in and enforce jurisprudence. They don’t win cases by who has the most convincing argument. They win cases by seeing who can bite more jurors. I just made that shit up. Right here.

Gamemaster Tom: Great. So, Snakeface’s first trait is…?

Donnie: I guess… teeth. Or, rather, fangs.

Gamemaster Tom: Sounds good. He starts chowing down on the other passengers, left and right, getting all bitey…

To Be Continued!

Conclusions

Right off the bat, I can tell you that these people in my head are very surly. I should endeavor to find a new group to make-believe playtest next time.

Still. They’re what we’ve got for now.

The primary design goal supported here is fast and loose. Some games, appropriately so, require one or two sessions of character creation before ever actually playing the game. Problem is, for our group, we meet so super-rarely that if character creation takes that long, we’re seriously cutting into our actual playtime. No good.

So, having a game that allows us — and you — to pick it up and jump right in is ideal. No messing around. It’s not dissimilar to how some video games handle it, these days. The Bethesda RPGs (Elder Scrolls, Fallout 3) help you determine your traits through the course of the game’s opening act, and having that here is useful.

Plus, it also represents how we write Shadowstories. We do so by the seat of our pants. We introduce characters that sound funny or interesting, and we make them up as we go. That’s not a recommended way to write most fiction, but Shadowstories isn’t most fiction — it’s a collaborative experiment in sci-fantasy amusement. By having character creation married to those initial steps into conflict resolution, it allows the players a modicum of, “Fuck it, let’s play.”

Next fake session, our group will hopefully tackle conflict resolution, and the complexities (or, lack of complexities) contained therein.

Okay.

Questions.

1. Dice, cards, random chance. Do you need that to feel satisfied in a roleplaying game?
2. So, if we do conflict resolution that involves you pitting traits against other traits, nouns against nouns, modified by adjectives, and made active by verbs, is that just too fucking weird? I’m a fan of non-traditional, but by reaching too far outside the traditional, is there a chance of alienating readers and players?
3. Is there anything wrong with alienating people? By which I mean, is there anything wrong with limiting your audience provided you know you’re doing it? Is that just dumb? Are we dumb? Are you calling us dumb? Hey, you shut up! You wanna throw down? I got Jack Johnson and Tom O’ Leary right here! I love scotch. Scotchy scotchy scotch.
4. I’m less and less satisfied with character progression in gaming. The slow grow, the experience points, the experience costs, the ZZZzzz. In Shadowstories, we’re less concerned about character growth — and yet, we still want to invoke change, we want there to be an arc. Not just in the character’s stories, but in some cool way where the player feels like he’s gaining something session after session. What goes beyond stats? Options include a way to modify traits (adjectives added to your nouns), temporary traits, or cool equipment. Any other options? Do those options suck? Why are you looking at me that way? You’re a cannibal. A goddamn cannibal. I knew it.
5. Why don’t you like Space Blob Cowboys? How did your parents raise you?
6. We like this idea of adding adjectives to the nouns/traits. Question is — how to use them? What currency do the adjectives bring to the table? Obviously, any adjective’s function is a sentence is decorative, but still has to have substance to counter the style — Bone-Cracking Fists are… well, they’re fists that do more than just punch, they crack motherfuckin’ bones! The question is, how does that play at the table? Can I “spend” my adjective for a bonus move? A special trick?  A riskier, high-chit gamble?
7. Do you demand a single gamemaster? Tell me about experiences with games where you’ve had a rotating gamemaster, or in games where no gamemaster is necessary or present.
8. Is existence just a sucking void into which we’re ineluctably drawn, hopelessly spun downward into the giant drain of the universe before being once more ejected out of God’s Mighty Asshole?