Cults and Gaming -- suggestions?

[John Kim]

What you describe sounds not unlike the "Living Greyhawk" thing that some D&D people do.  Is that accurate?  If so, you're right: you have to have a huge established fan-base and name recognition in place, and large-scale organization.  But it's an interesting point, even for something obviously very much on the opposite end (such as Shadows in the Fog), since it seems to spread and maintain itself almost entirely through word-of-mouth connections and such, which is not dissimilar.  Interesting....  

I don't see that this is required.  For example, my friends Josh and Russell coordinate similarly to run games in the same universe which they jointly created.  Surely there is a smooth progression up from here to the sort of DSA / Living Greyhawk level.  The more people you have contributing, the more organizational effort is required.  But I don't see that it isn't workable on the small scale.  It's just less formalized because it doesn't need to be.  

Another example from my own experience was the GURPS Davenford games.  These were a series of games run at L.A. area conventions, with four GMs.  Mike DeSanto wrote an RPGnet column on his experience with this, at http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/campaigning31oct02.html

I suspect many small RPGs have a related process.  Gaming groups write up parts of their individual campaigns which they submit to their friends the creators, which then get published and become "official".  

My own impression is that the tendency of gamer toward individualism is true, particularly in the indie crowd local to here.  Consider this: you talk about how you would like it if "Shadows in the Fog" had a bunch of people writing up cool stuff for it.  Would you or have you done any such work for someone else's game?  My experience is that most people prefer to work on their own campaign world, homebrew, or system rather than supporting what is out there.

[clehrich]

My own impression is that the tendency of gamer toward individualism is true, particularly in the indie crowd local to here.  Consider this: you talk about how you would like it if "Shadows in the Fog" had a bunch of people writing up cool stuff for it.  Would you or have you done any such work for someone else's game?  My experience is that most people prefer to work on their own campaign world, homebrew, or system rather than supporting what is out there.

Yes, I think that's true.  I do think that what I'm envisioning is a little different.

The way I currently imagine this, it's a wiki that I put a bunch of stuff on, starting with the rules and a certain amount of material I know about.  There's an emphasis also on useful or peculiar links.  I also put up a bunch of commentary on certain texts or kinds of material, more or less how I see that stuff (by others, please note, like novels and websites) with respect to what I think Shadows in the Fog is about.

The wiki is (if this is possible) set up such that nobody can delete things; they can only add, although they can add things that say "he's totally wrong about this, here's why".

Then I try to encourage certain sorts of crazy friends of mine to post the same sort of material.

The rules explicitly encourage people to post writeups of game sessions, interesting bits people have found during their researches, wild speculations, and the like.  I ask, politely, that people try to "grade" the historical accuracy of what they post, and that whenever possible references be given for historical claims.

Then I simply do not, ever, delete or "rule on" anything.  Any moderation is done like a very silent Ron: it just goes, mysteriously, without warning or explanation or trace.  And what goes is:

complete insanity (I mean as in apparently clinical)
political tracts
unbridled venom
spam
advertisements for other games
etc.[/list:u]If it's relevant, "true" doesn't come into it.

That's it.

Once a few people are using it, and there's a good bit of self-graded material available, I use my connections in the Ripperology world to invite people to join in on the conspiracy madness.  Ditto for the occult-history loonies (I mean that in a good way -- I'm an occult-history loony).  And so on.

What never, ever happens is an "official statement" of any kind.  Or an "official publication," apart from things like rule errata and so on.  There's a section for the rules and errata.  There's a section for things like adventure ideas.  There's a section for things like "how to get started."  But everything else is full-bore whatever-the-hell.

I think this will go a LONG way toward solving the problem you mention, to which I am very sympathetic, because if all goes well it would make the wiki a useful springboard for game research -- and potentially a useful springboard for non-game research as well.

See, I'd like to see

Shadows in the Fog players getting involved in the big Ripperology discussion forums and such.  In 10 years or so, what I'd love to see (though it won't happen) is the phrase "Shadows in the Fog" known to some Ripperologists and web-surfers as a signal: a little strange, but fairly serious all things considered.

Something like that, anyway.

[Mike Holmes]

What's cool about this is that, since it's not official, other sites could start as other nodes, with whatever restrictions they like on what goes up. And, again it will be local as to what gets into what game.

I keep envisioning a distributed model that grows on it's own, and therefore does not need the maintenance of the "Living" model. Call it "viral" world creation.

Mike