[Game Chef 2011] The Daughters of Verona
Wilper:
The Daughters of Verona is a GM-less RPG of Shakespearean comedy. The central themes are Love, Mistaken identities and Complex plots.
It is pretty diffuse to me right now, but I think I will have Zombie Cinema-like character generation by cards. There will be some mechanism to generate complex and confusing plots and relationships that the players get to untangle during play. And marriages at the end, of course.
As for the chargen and complex plots I might have to resort to preparing a demo playset for the competition, and build it from what I have done when the deadline comes closer. But I hope it will be a full, replayable game by then.
Wilper:
While doing research I have seen many mentions of Shakespeare's "Stock Characters". But I can't find any good list of them, just random mentions of "the fool" and "the lovers" as examples. Which are the others?
Is there any good list online somewhere that I have missed in all my Googling?
Jonathan Walton:
Especially in his Italian comedies, Shakespeare draws heavily on the commedia dell'arte tradition, which you also see in, for example, certain comedic operas (Marriage of Figaro, Cosi Fan Tutte, Barber of Seville, etc.). I'm sure there are some articles on Shakespeare's use of commedia-style stock characters on the internet.
Wilper:
Oh! Thanks, then I'll use those.
My game looks more and more like Montsegur 1244, but happy. I don't mind, I quite like Montsegur 1244. Making all those cards is a chore though. I think I'll recycle the templates from when we translated Love in the Time of Seid to Swedish, that should save some time.
Now I have to come up with thirty or so "events" or "places" that would fit into Shakespearian comedy.
Wilper:
One visit to Project Gutenberg and a little creative use of "grep" and I have a list of locations from the Bard's plays. You'd be surprised how many acts that take place in a palace or another, or on the street. But that is good, I imagine such locations will be found in Verona as well.
Time to make the base for the characters. I haven't decided if I want completely pregen characters like in Montsegur 1244, or more open pregens like in Zombie Cinema. How much replay value do one really need in a Game Chef game? It is rare that a single indie game comes upon my table more than three times.
Montsegur style characters would save time in the "prep" phase of the game, and yield fewer cards that need to be printed before play. Also I can dictate the starting conditions of the story a bit.
Zombie Cinema style characters would take more time to prep before each session, and generate more cards. But it will allow for higher replay value, and a wider array of possible stories.
For both I will require some basic stuff like names, descriptions, relations and wants/desires/goals.
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