Sebastian's Game Thread
Sebastian K. Hickey:
One idea is to use “skin” (as in a tanned hide) to chronicle a war, in which the main character is the war itself, shaped by the recorded actions of its members. That game asks players to tell the story of the war and to make a mural (on the character sheet) using a fixed set of thematic glyphs. As players tell stories about the peoples on both sides of the war, one side begins to do more cruelty than the other, and in the end, that faction is rendered the loser. The theme of the game is “History is written by the victors.” It uses the components Skin, City, Edge. Every game will function to create a hieroglyphic drawing—a representation of the history as written by the victor.
The second idea is Skinning the Rope, stemming from the idea of a criminal who survives a hanging by climbing the rope after he is hung. The game is about the people affected by a crime, and their encounter with the perpetrator after his supposed death. We look at a few characters, each on the verge of some mental collapse, or some social collapse. Through their actions and scenes, the crimes of the hanged man are told, and the collapse is brought closer to completion. With the appearance of the hanged man, the characters have a chance to solve their dilemmas or to be swallowed by them. I’m toying with a kind of Hangman resolution system (you know the game where you guess things and if you’re wrong, the other person draws part of the image of the hanged man?).
I can’t choose which yet, so I’m going to develop the first and, if I have time, move onto the second after.
Sebastian K. Hickey:
So, here's the intro blurb...
Chronicles of Skin
War of the Seriph
Chronicles of Skin is a storytelling game for three or more players. Each player contributes to the depiction of a bitter civil war, collaborating to render the peoples on both sides as victims in a grand and unfair struggle. Through a series of atrocities, players build a picture of the war as told by the victors, and record it with drawings, called Glyphs, on a hieroglyphic mural called the Skin.
Jason Pitre:
I absolutely adore both ideas, but I do think that the Chronicles of Skin is a more compelling concept to work off. My concern would be exactly how the necessary diversity of war stories and anecdotes could be tracked by a limited number of glyphs. I don't know if you do art or design in a professional capacity, but that logistical element would be daunting for me personally.
Look forward to hearing more!
masqueradeball:
You could make sort of pictograph composed of a number of interlocking smaller elements that need to be interpreted. There could be rules about what elements could fit into what places. This allows for some lose-ish interpretations, you'd just have to work all of the elements of the pictograph into the narrative. So there could be like a Spear glyph and an Outnumbered glyph and a Hero glyph and they'd all lock together to make a single symbol that would then correspond to a scene... idk, just an idea.
Sebastian K. Hickey:
The thing about a week long contest for me is that it means nearly 100% of my connectivity time goes into tippity-tapping at my submission. Therefore, though I'm totally turned-on by the idea of maintaining a diary of my progress, I'm shamefully addicted to the process of creation. This is me peeping out of the hole I'm in to say hi and "thanks!"
Jason, your comment interested me, because it got me thinking about how the system was going to function. It spurred me on, along with the comment by masqueradeball, to think about war and the situations within war. In the end, rather than try to mimic the components of war, I decided to think about the components of stories (using the backdrop of war as a means to put pressure on those stories).
As a result, I came up with the following structure (see next post). It is the story creation process, where, collectively, the players build the cultures involved in the war. This is a direct snip from the working text. Sorry if it's a bit long. I'll follow it up with more stuff tomorrow.
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