RPGs designed for language learning
kksimons:
Hey there, I've been working on it and it's still pretty rough. I'm planning on having video tutorials for each lesson and especially for pronunciation because I don't really see it working so well any other way (unless a group has a fluent GM to teach them of course)
It didn't seem like people were interested in it so I actually took it down. It's back up if you'd like to take a look at it though! I would very much appreciate any help or constructive criticism.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/vqjqby9s45ydrae/Magicians%20RPG.pdf
JasonT:
Still looking through that PDF, but my initial reaction is that I'm way more excited about a language-learning RPG than playing in the setting introduced in The Magicians, and using Korean as the language of magic in that setting feels a bit dissonant for me. This is in part because the only actual incantations I recall seeing script for in either of those books happened to be in Hebrew, IIRC, but also in part because those books felt something like a smiling poke in the eye to fantasy fan expectations. (It felt like they were saying, "Magic is exciting! No, just kidding, the world is awful. Grow up.") I have a hard time reconciling that theme and tone with the goal of playing out adventures and learning a new language along the way (even if there are mechanical benefits to heartbreak in an attempt to preserve the books' emotional focus).
As I said, though, that's just first impressions, and I want to take a closer look. Curious to hear what others who have read Grossman's books might think on blending educational goals with roleplaying in this setting.
kksimons:
It actually turns out that I won't get be getting the IP rights anyway as there's still a TV show in the works for the books. Like you said though, I'm actually a lot more comfortable not using an expressed setting. I did like the themes and emotional attributes fueling magic though. While I still want to use similar themes and still have it about being a kid and balancing growing up and high school/college life with being able to do magic I won't be sticking to the "canon" of the books so no worries there. It's been fun for the groups I played with to play as teenagers in the "real world" with normally meta knowledge like lord of the rings and Narnia, etc coming into in-game play.
It's been a lot of fun to play and my group has come a long way but they're much more invested since they live in Korea and they already have a lot of intrinsic motivation to learn Korean. When talking to other gamers in other countries though a lot of their reactions was "please do this for Japanese" so I'm not sure how much people will be able to get into learning Korean but I hope they do. The fact that it is so different, unique and completely foreign made me think it could be a language of magic and it's such a cool language to learn. Plus I'm only fluent in Korean and French, so there's that.
For setting I'm not sure if providing a detailed one is even necessary - I think people would have a lot of fun doing group setting creation under the caveats that they study in school of magic. I was thinking more of just providing questions that the players can use to flesh out the school, decide if the school is generally pretty normal except for it teaching magic or if it's got dungeons, mazes or forests with magical creatures on the periphery, etc. With each new group I've playtested with that's what we've done and it's worked well.
I look forward to hearing what people think about it though, especially the core mechanics! Thanks a lot for the interest.
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