[Solar System] Communal Vignette Writing

[Eero Tuovinen]

There's a call for help buried several paragraphs down. If you've played The Shadow of Yesterday and don't mind helping me out a bit, then read on: what I'm doing requires a bit of background explanation.

As you might know, I'm writing a new edition of the Solar System, the rules-set inside The Shadow of Yesterday. (I'm collecting the story on a blog page to make following the project easier.) The work seems to be shaping up into a rather cheap booklet - which suits me fine, as then I can just give them away with The Shadow of Yesterday proper later on. As the situation stands, I have most of the game text down at this point - not as much as I'd like for the beginning of June (got some emergency projects slapped onto my plate at the end of the month), but enough that I'm still believing in a Gencon publication date.

Anyway, the structure of the booklet (letter-sized, black and white) involves around a dozen chapters, each dealing with the rules of the game in sensible order, as you might imagine. The rules-text itself is solid crunch with small examples of rules implementation embedded in the text as asides - however, there are no extended, paragraph-long examples as one often sees in rpg books. Instead, what I'm doing is page-long excerpts of a sort of semifictive actual play accounts, each illustrating the particular part of the rules in that chapter. Traditionally these play examples are written in the form of dialogue, but I find that dull and slow - what I want here is actual play narrative in past tense, like you'd write on a forum - explaining both the fiction and the player procedures that go on. No meandering, though; while the excerpt might start in the middle of something and end suddenly, it's actually written specifically to illustrate a rules-point.

Also, having each one-page account include some interesting color and a small, vignette type story is a nice bonus here: a part of why I'm doing things this way is that the Solar System, as an universal/generic system, doesn't really have that much color itself. I don't want to illustrate the game text with an extensive mishmash of posing characters from different genres like they usually do in Hero System, GURPS and other such games - I'll frame the color stuff inside these example vignettes, instead. So while the rules-text by itself is unillustrated and non-specific as regards genre and setting, the examples should be colorful and set into a wide variety of different settings that illustrate the possibilities of the rules-system. I'll also arrange for each example to be illustrated with a small image specific to it to further enchance the idea that while the rules are a bit abstract and all, the actual implementation is not at all formal and colorless.

Now, that plan itself is solid, no problem. Easy to execute and I know what I'm doing. However, I have this extra idea that I'd like to also do, and that's the communal writing part here: The Shadow of Yesterday has been played by a wide range of interesting individuals who have done all kinds of things with it, so what I'd like to do is to ask some of these people to participate in writing this series of example vignettes. I don't particularly need the help as regards getting the project finished, but I'm thinking that doing the example writing in a distributed manner would bring a nice sense of rootedness into the product - The Solar System book is essentially a product of play experiences from last three years, and not just mine, either - what I'm writing strives to capture the wisdom of numberless actual play reports, theoretical discussions and other music generated by the community in play. I think that having these snippets of writing in numerous voices, each with their own personal style, attributed clearly to different people right there on the page, could be a nice way of giving the product a sense of depth. That would clearly transmit the idea that the Solar System booklet is not just a new game, but a game with history and stories behind it.

What I'm doing in practice is, I have this page at my blog set up with a very rough outline of the booklet, with suggested vignette "slots". I'm going to fill that up as I get people to volunteer to write these - I'm hoping to get so many volunteers that I get all or almost all slots filled by different people, but I can also always write some more myself or ask interested folks to write more than one, so that's not much of a problem. I'm also going to ask folks at Story Games, as it seems that some interesting TSoY play is done by people who go there.

Hmm... that's pretty much it. If you're interested in helping out with a vignette, check out the coordination page - I explain the licencing details and coordinate the effort there. I also have an example vignette there, that should make this much clearer.

If you're interested in helping me out with this vignette project, feel free to say so here, in PM or by email at eero.tuovinen {at} arkkikivi.net. If you want to write a vignette about a specific rules-topic or genre, do by all means reserve it before writing - or just write the piece and post it. I'm trying to get all the vignettes at least promised and outlined soon, just so I can get illustrations for them. So if you want to do this, please let me know soon at least what kind of subject matter should illustrate your vignette.