Adaptation instead of Originality

It's been a little while since I wrote here, largely because June and July have been really busy. But also because the monthly LARP project went on the back burner for a little while, what with Origins and Amber running the June game and such.

Regardless, I'm now at work on the July one. And what may be the August one at the same time, though that's a collaborative work that will be done whenever it gets done. July, though, is shaping up as an interesting project to write, because it feels different from other stuff I've done.

See, the previous games I wrote wholesale, whereas this one is being based off of a tabletop game written by Jason Morningstar. You might think that this would be easier, but it provides its own set of challenges. The analogy I told Amber was that if you write a novel from scratch, that has its own problems to overcome and issues to work ou: coming up with characters and plotting the thing and such. Now if you are hired to write a novel based off of a movie (or whatever), the characters and plot are already figured out for you. But that doesn't mean you're not writing a novel: it still requires you do a lot of work, just in solving different issues, such as how to translate from screen to text, how to make two hours of film last two hundred pages, and a lot of other decisions on how to adapt it into a new medium.

So for this game, I'm taking a game that lets the characters range all across 18th century Pennsylvania and constraining it down to a specific time and location. And I have to clarify the situation enough that players understand everything that they need to know just by reading their character sheet. And I need to research the actual historical events covered in the game, as the scenario by Morningstar doesn't quite explain what you need to know. I think that Jason assumed others had his level of historical knowledge, so I'm constantly having to learn more to really understand what's built into the game. And of course I need to simplify the characters mechanically, and come up with a LARP appropriate system to use.

So it presents a different set of challenges from previous games. I don't actually know how much those differences will translate into differences from a players perspective, though. On one level the game is still about different characters with secrets and conflicting motives stuck in a limited space until their conflicts escalate and resolve, like most other games I run. But we'll see if a couple innovations take hold, such as this being a (largely) non-fiction game, and a stronger emphasis on player/character separation.