[Wonderful Imaginary] First play

[Tony Irwin]

I had a lot of fun playing Wonderful Imaginary on Monday night. Delisha had noticed it lying out in my living room and we ran through the world creation and then a few scenes. It all went really well. World creation is really about defining some of the conflicts that take place in the world and then brainstorming character attributes appropriate to them. Delisha wanted a modern day setting where angels were real, mulitudinous, and unseen. We both really enjoyed figuring out the personal, social, and envirnomental conflicts that characters would face in that kind of setting. Most of the conflicts and attributes we came up with were angled towards inner experience: people struggling with emotions, feelings, beliefs, or indoctrination. Also we homed in on the gulf between humans and angels, their distrust and differences even when humans are aware of them. Some sample attributes we came up with: Faith, Eternal Spark, Friendly, Strong Willed, Spiritually Aware, Movie Buff, Medical Training.

We kicked off with Delisha's suggestion that her character, Gemma, was anticipating bad exam results. I placed her in the first scene, standing at the door looking at the brown envelope on the door mat. Delisha has Gemma open the envelope and read her results. Serious fails - I start to describe the waves of bleakness that wash across Gemma's thoughts. Delisha picks up the dice to use Gemma's Faith for two outcomes: to overcome the oppresion and force herself to ring the University to arrange resits.

We only squeezed in a few more scenes after this, maybe 20 minutes of play. Gemma's super successful big brother comes by and asks about the results, Gemma is terrified to glimpse another face in the mirror and goes to watch a movie to try and calm down her nerves (that's where the Movie Buff trait came into play).

We talked about how we could develop it if we picked it up another night - Gemma had a medical background so possibly an angel would offer her a cure for a high profile disease, on the condition that she tell everyone she received it from an angel. That would bring up lots of nice societal conflict, having finally convinced herself angels are real she now has to convince everyone else.

We didn't play for long so we didn't get to see a lot of the system in action, but we both loved the world creation part of it, really getting inside how people in the setting think and feel, what are the problems that they face. I didn't opt for a Universalis style pay-as-you-go method for this part of the game, and Delisha commented that the phrase in the rule sheets "Work with the other players to create a setting that interests you all" seems a little glib, but hey it worked for us (this time). As I often do now in Unversalis, I took a back seat in this part encouraging Delisha to have the stuff she wanted.

One thing that the world creation part of the game regretfully doesn't insist on, is "What do they do?" I realised that one of the great joys of GMing My Life With Master is that that question is already answered by the time play begins. I've already got a few "mission" ideas for the minions by then, and more missions follow easily.

Anyway, we had a great time and finished up really jazzed by it all. There was a real imaginative intensity to it as we dreamt up all the possible conflicts and wrote them down, and then it was wonderful seeing Delisha's character bring some of the attributes we'd created into play. Even just with the few scenes we had we could see our "way in" to the world we'd created, Gemma was miserable and vulnerable, just the right time for an angelic visitation. The face glimpsed in the mirror was just the start of things. When talking about the game we buzzed excitedly, hopefully we'll pick this one up and play some more with it.