Building towards Live Dogs - Opening the Parlour

[Levi Kornelsen]

Okay.  So, my current playgroup is quite interested in taking the game Live-Action...   However.

Actually, a whole lot of "however".  The biggest two are that out model for play will be quite a lot different than the generic "everyone on the floor" style, and we need a strong consensus on the world and how things in general operate - a strong group culture of looking at the game and setting - before we can do so.

So, for now, our tabletop game will continue, and we'll be keeping notes there on things we've decided in that game in future; continuity notes, really.

And, in addition, to work on that second thing - to get a large number of people involved in developing a single, larger vision of the setting that we're all happy with - I'm opening up something called "the Parlour".  This will be a series of individual events, with about eight players at each, rotating slowly through however many interested people we have (with a total limit of twenty-four).

Each Parlour event will be composed of three short games - the same three each night.

First, Initiation.  This is character creation and initiation for one or two player's eventual Live-Action Dogs, with assistance from everyone else - the whole rest of the group will set up their initiation scenes and the conflict coming out of it.  Largely, this will be done on the fly, 'dry-running' the group through standard Dogs rules and through the Live rules I'm still working on, as they develop, to test them.

Second, Parables.  We're pretty sure we want to go over some of the stories and moral lessons that characters will know.  So we'll make them up, together.  After some looking for a system, I finally found one I think they'll run with - Once Upon A Time, from Atlas Games.  All that's needed here it to run over the archetypes of the setting and build a deck for it.

And Third, Town Hall, a way of looking at the setting itself and the kinds of things that happen around a town in general terms.  This game will be an almost-direct adaptation of Executive Decision, by Greg Stolze and many others, adapted to the structure of a Faithful town council, with specifically-created scenarios.  Each such game will be a single run of a town in crisis.

The idea here is to rotate players in and through the Parlour, building our total consensus together in that way, always through play, having fun at every stage.

How does that sound?  Make sense?