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Well, I just received and read SORCERER AND SWORD, and I've got to say it arrived with perfect timing! I'm a teacher in a primary school and run a roleplaying club for 10-11 year olds. And this term I wanted to try something new and ambitious. No-more elaborate campaigns and clever scenarios, no more pre-generated characters! On my mind was octaNe's resolution mechanic, and EVERWAY's character generation system. I'd ordered S&S on a whim because I thought I might want to try pulp fantasy with the kids. When I read S&S I couldn't believe my luck. It was absolutely chock full of advice on giving your  players lots of collaborative opportunities. This was great, because I'd decided to try and maximise my player's creative input more than in any game I'd run in 20 years of gaming. Let me explain why the advice in S&S was so timely:

With this group I'm going to let them build the lot (and keep my fingers crossed at the same time!). In this order, they (or we) are going to:

1) Create the Fantasy Setting
2) Create the Villain and his cohorts
3) Create the bones of plot that will be rooted in the Setting
4) Create characters for THAT plot
5) Run the game semi-conventionally with me as GM, but using Jared Sorensen's dice mechanic from octaNe where by results are not success/fail; but player describes/GM describes.

With the first session of world building over I'm impressed! I gave them a big list of keywords and made them select 5 from that list. Then they just wove these words together. I'm very impressed - they're only 10-11. The bare bones of their fantasy world is down, they even identified a role and a historical origin for the villiain and next week we'll add more colour, use EVERYWAY cards to put pictures to setting elements, and give names to places and people. I've never been so excited at the prospect of gaming with children - and I've got the least input!
I gave them two sheets of keywords, and they chose the 5. I read the following out to them: 'What is the setting of this story like? Is it full of rich cities and greedy merchants? Perhaps it is torn by war, armies marching across the land, towns are burnt, people flee for their lives. Maybe it is a little kingdom surrounded by terrifying wild lands. Or it may be a vast empire, like Rome, with millions of people all ruled by one great city. Perhaps there are mammoths, or dinosaurs, or dragons. There may be dark and scary forests just like the fairy tales, or dry deserts home to genii and camels. Are there mountains? Who lives there? Is there a big river? Where does it go? Are there cities? Who lives there? Who is in charge? Lots of kings or nobles, or just one emperor? What happened in the past? How did the world you are creating come to be?'

'Look at the KEYWORDS sheets. Pick out 5 words that might reflect what your setting is about. A setting is not just a place but also a mood and a feeling. Transylvania is a dark and gloomy place. Hogworts is full of mystery and magic. The Roman Empire is strict and efficient. Discuss and decide.'

'THE KEYWORDS

DESERTS, STARVING, LOST CITIES, INVASION,
DARK FORESTS, SCARY, ARABIAN, SAILING SHIPS, MOUNTAINS, FAIRY TALES, EXOTIC, ROMAN EMPIRE, BARBARIANS, DINOSAURS, WILD, ANCIENT CURSE, END OF THE WORLD! CHARIOTS, SILK, GREAT CITIES, EGYPTIAN, KNIGHTS, SORCERERS, MIDDLE AGES'


'Draw a MAP. Write all your ideas on one BIG SHEET.'

My five 10 year old players chose: Dark Forests, Barbarians, Knights, End of the World and Lost Cities. Someone mentioned Rome, too, so that might colour some of the later detailing. Thet created a hint of a map, with barbarians in the magical Dark Forest, bound in by a ditch, bank and palisaded wall built by the knights and king outside. A few villages live on the thinner edges of the forest and take firewood and timber to the villages and city. Some of the trees come alive, and kidnap villagers in revenge for their 'brothers and sisters' being cut down. Oh, and the barbarians all look identical, and can control some of the woodland animals, like bears.

The villain is plotting the End of the World. 1,000 years ago he lived in the Lost City, and the knights and king attacked and destroyed it. He survives and wants revenge. His followers include the barbarians.

I was impressed by that. The only cajoling I gave them was the info on Rome in Germany, the destruction of Varus' legions and the ditch/palisade frontier put in place thereafter. They picked that up and used it. A bright bunch. I'm sure this is going to go somewhere cool...

As I said, I'm looking forward to this. Sorcerer and Sword put into words ideas I wanted to do, defining them and giving me a working blueprint. Fantastic  (and I don't even own a copy of SORCERER - shouldn't have said that. should I!)

[BTW, some parts of this I previously posted to RPG.NET...]

I run an after-school program and have been trying to get some of the kids in my program to game more.  I am going to use this method.  It is awesome.

Thanks and keep us up to date on how the world-building goes.

Quote from: PakaI run an after-school program

Hi Paka, I found that my other previous games were received differently. One group of 11 year olds I had were incredibly mature and sophisticated - fantastic players and a joy to game with. My other group from the same class riduculed and lampooned the very same games, and reduced everything to giggles and jokes. In desperation I turned up to this last group and got them to create a SETTING, VILLAIN and (SUPER) HEROES on the spot and then improvised a game. The success of that (they had created it all - and didn't want to tear it down nearly so much!!!) inspired me to do the same writ large.

Another inspiration was EA Games' Harry POtter and the Chamber of SEcret's computer game. My wife has just finished playing this, and to be honest, if I were 11 I would prefer to play that than the 'Harry Potter RPG'. It made me question RPGs and my approach to them, espcially in regard to movies and especially CRPGs.

I thought: what can't you do in a CRPG? Create the world? Create the character? Create the plot!! Create the villain? 'Moving your characer around as an avatar' doesn't seem like so much of a cool idea when you can already do that with most computer games. I figure the RPG has to offer either a f**king cool setting, or so way cool player participation - creation.

Paul,

Damnation, man, document each and every step of these projects and activities. This work is suitable for serious publication.

Best,
Ron

Just to interject some Paul Elliot-related coolness...

Check out TOTEM.
http://www.geocities.com/zozergames/totem1.html

Take note of the craft projects (click the Appendix link on the main page) -- really cool game-related artifacts that can be used in-play!

Thanks for the link, there Jared. In play I have noticed that the combat mechanic is a bit inelegant, something easily smoothed out, though.

Collaborative roleplaying is new (in practice) to me, but I guess here on the Forge its something that you've been doing for a long long time. Sorcer, octaNe, Donjon and others all incorporate that shared authorship theme, don't they.

Taken to its logical extreme there is no GM - and I read an eye-opening article at www.collaborativeroleplay.org which proposes a player only shared game experience. I considered doing this with the children, but since the entire hobby is new to them they need a strong guide. So I took as much as I could from that concept, but retained the strong role of GM, mellowing it slightly with shared authorship in-play.

Does anyone know who started breaking down the walls of gaming like this? Was it the famous, but rarely seen Theatrix?

Wow.  Could I go back in time and have you be my teacher?

Hi Paul,

Couple things ... Sorcerer really doesn't belong in the shared-narration category. The rules are absolutely silent on who gets to narrate. It's big on shared authorship, though, via the Kickers, the rules for defining and Binding demons, and the necessity for a shared value-system at the table for purposes of Humanity rolls.

I think distinguishing between story-generating authorship and narration-distribution is a very important issue.

In terms of the former, I think that this mode of play has been around as long as role-playing itself. Game designs favoring shared authorship to some extent go back as far as early TFT, early Champions, and others; game designs centered on it probably start with Prince Valiant (1989).

In terms of the latter, narration-distribution ... h'm. In play, again, I think that people have traded narration informally around the table for a long time, but in terms of text, that the habit was discouraged by most games published after 1990 or so. My claim is that The Pool, InSpectres, and Elfs are the games that broke this mold, but I wouldn't be surprised to find some earlier exceptions.

And that takes us to Theatrix. Which is it? To some extent, it permits players to create stuff "into play," which in Forge terms is Director stance + a bit of author power. However, oddly, Theatrix comes down solidly into the GM-says-so side of things when we talk about resolving conflicts, which sounds extremely illusionist to me and not at all oriented toward player-authoring power.

Best,
Ron

The second session has proven just as successful as the first. Everyone brought back something they'd been working on, and it all proved to be very valuable, altering the group's perceptions of the setting and taking the world in new directions. The contributions were:

1 - A portrait of the villain – Red Eye Scorpion, with some notes that he is a disembodied head in a tank. Also that he has psychic powers which reach out to control his minions (including the barbarians). Cool. His age was noted in bold: 1031 years old!

2 – A brief write-up of our Dark Forest. In it the player described how the trees come alive at night, and that they are guarding an artifact that they stole from the king.  

3 – The third contribution was a detailed pencil sketch of a view into the lost city.

4 – The fourth contribution was a list of keywords describing the barbarians and their typical  equipment.

On face value the contributions didn't seem to add a great deal, I think I was expecting longer write-ups (and probably expecting too much!). But, all of the contributions raised questions that needed answers. What was this artifact? A gem? The villain wanted it (someone said). Why? Because he wants to restore the Lost City with it, someone else added. I suggested it was part the city's crown that he had in his possession. If the trees stole the gem from the King of the land, why did they now have it? Because the trees want it for themselves (came the answer).  Looking at the sketch of the Lost City, I noted that the player had added some spear-weilding walking trees as guardians. Last session we had agreed the Lost City lay far far away. Here the pupil had set it in the Dark Forest. I suggested this be the case. Then one of the players declared: 'the trees used to be people. That's why they want the gem.' Fantastic! I suggested that they were the inhabitants of the Lost City – turned into trees whewn it was destroyed. Now they form the Dark Forest that hides it. I knew this would shape up nicely. The creation of the setting might have been aphazard, confused, linear – but it has been sophisticated, cogent and bursting with potential, plotlines left dangling. Superb!

I told the group that the setting was detailed enough and that we should wrap up the process ready for hero creation next week. All we needed was names. A couple of the boys ran down to the library and returned with a couple of atlases, I'd told they that an atlas was a great starting point for the creation of new names. Quickly, and without fuss they flicked hrough the atlases and began throwing names at me, most with minor changes or accidental mispronunciations. I just wrote them all down. When we had twenty or so good sounding names, we looked over our sketch map for locations and went about choosing a name from the list. We got the River Chantan, the Hedge of Messa, Gotland Mountains, Panava Sea, the Graz barbarians, King Basor of the realm called Mortarania, King Santan (Red Eye Scorpion's ancient title), the Lost City of Mindara, the Dark Forest of Andaman and the Royal City of Rosherdamm.  All the spare names I kept for other locations I would invent when I created the plot for the game.  

The children pestered me foe information on the heroes they would be playing, and I told them that they would be selecting character images from the Everway art cards they'd just been looking at. Most had already noticed one or two realkly nice characters and voiced the opinion that they wanted 'this' or 'that' character. On the spur of the moment I handed out those cards and asked them to bring them back next week with a 50 word write up of that character. I quickly improvised such a write-up verbally to give them a rough idea of what I wanted from them. I think they got the idea. I'm hoping to do a Hero Wars or The Pool-style 'dilute stats from description' trick!

Afterwards I thought - hell! I didn't want to do characters next week! I planned to create the villain, and the week after a tetative plot and the week after that the characters. But in hindsight it didn't really matter. The group had already given me the villain, and by creating this big epic plot about the crystal, the living trees and lost city I think I had my plot. Why drag things out when everyone is itching to play?

Next week then, we discuss characters, create a gameplan for getting them bound together as comrades-in-arms and I will afterwards go away and write the initial plot concept based on their write-ups.  

Unfortunately I still haven't quite settled on a game system that will serve. I need something with minimal rolling of dice and a heavy narrativist slant. Some re-write of octaNe looks likely, or a quick-roll homebrew effort. I've got a week ...

Please, sir, could we have some more?

The third session has proven as productive as the rest. This was character creation. One of the five players couldn't make it today, but the four that could brought keywords or rough drafts of their character write-ups to me. I asked them to leave out physical descriptions (we had the EVERWAY art cards to work from after all), but to concentrate on what their hero had been doing, what they do now, and what special abilities they had. Maybe I've gotten really lucky, but they responded very well and were quite eager to write six or seven lines of text about their character. And it was all stuff that I could review, and pull out good, solid skills from.

One of the art cards, for example, depicted a tiger-warrior with a sword and clad in armour. The player who'd chosen this decided that this was Tigona, Lord of Beasts who once lived in the Dark Forest of Andaman, but had been thrown out.  His description is as follows:

"Solid bronze sword and armour, comes from the Forest of Andaman because the barbarians turned the animals of the forest against him. Good jumper, can see in the dark as good as at day, can smell things from 50m away. A good swordsman and good puncher".

From this write-up I looked for skills (about 5 or 6) that I could pass back to the player. I came up with:

Forest Skills, Jumping, Dark See, Sense of Smell, Swordsman and Unarmed Combat. Each player was then given 10 points to divide up amongst his skills. Tigona's skills ended up as: Forest Skills 2, Jumping 1, Dark See 1, Sense of Smell 1, Swordsman 3 and Unarmed Combat 2.

Finally we looked at the art-card once again, tried to identify and weapons or equipment the character might be carrying, then think of anything else they might reasonably be expected to carry.  No-one wanted to overload their characters with a ton of superfluous gear - thank heaven!

Our four characters, then, are:

Tigona - Lord of Beasts, exiled from the Forest of Andaman by the evil Graz tribesmen

Tyana - Graz barbarian female, but a thief who tried to steal the crystal, and was exiled by the Graz

Robyn - Horsewoman from the East who is a 'horse-whisperer' and skilled rider, show-jumper and trainer.

Barbados - Shark hunter and fisherman from an island far to the south with a magic harpoon.

My fifth player selected an art-card with a barbarian on it, and I'm pretty sure he too will be an exiled Graz barbarian. That's OK by me!

My next problem is coming up with a plot. My instinct is to whip out an old copy of White Dwarf magazine and use a couple of 'easy-conversion' scenarios set in the Dark Wood. But deep down, my instincts tell me to keep up the creative kick, and begin the session with minimal prep, just a handful of key scenario concepts and an intro from which the players can take their cue. If I can stay on my toes and improvise away, I can try to keep up the creative momentum, and hopefully hand them the game their way. The difficulty lies in trying to establish exactly what these key scenario concepts might be. Obviously I want to produce a series of linked encounters drawing the heroes to the crystal that is lodged within a secret tree in the heart of the wood - a search that is also a race against Red Scorpion. I need to begin that race, but not present them with the goal too early. Then again, perhaps all of the real interesting stuff happens after the gem is discovered? Wasn't Lord of the Rings more interesting than The Hobbit?

I've sorted out my rules-set too, by writing a nifty and rules-lite narrative system somewhat inspired by octaNe (with due deference given to Jared ...). More at the weekend following my first play session ...

Fantastic stuff--when you mentioned a Sorcerer product and 10-11 year old children in the same sentence, I thought, "Bridlington will never be the same again," and resolved to wait for the airmail letter from my Aunt Ros explaining that Something Terrible rose out of the ocean off Flamborough Head and that's why Grandma isn't around any more.

But obviously, I've much to learn from those youngsters--they created better stuff than I usually do. Kudos on your approach.

Dave

I'm really impressed with this as a pedagogical tool as well as a gaming thing.  You're teaching these kids not only to create, but to create coherently and responsibly, and in the process inherently guiding them a bit in things like human nature and a bit of history (the palisades thing caught my eye).  Couple of questions, for whoever's out there:

Could this be used, do you think, with slightly older students perhaps, as a way to get them into a bit of historical research?  I mean, suppose this group kept working on the same world, and you nudged them toward more and more history of Rome and Germania.  Or would that just stop being fun for them?  I always found roleplaying exercises in school quite nauseating and patronizing, but this is far cooler than anything anyone ever did with me.

Might it be useful, over time, to cycle the GM role around?  This might potentially also teach something about social roles and cooperation, again rather less horribly than the usual "let's all cooperate and clean up, children" sort of trash.

Oh --- and I'm with Ron.  When (sad to say) this club folds or the campaign ends or whatever, I really hope you'll try to write up your experiences as a detailed article for the Forge.  With limited exceptions, I think there is very little here about gaming with children, and it's important for a lot of reasons.

Amazing.  When I was in school we got ridiculed and accused of Satanism for playing D&D.  If a teacher had tried to start a project involving role playing (especially using a Sorcerer book as a source, although I notice you steered clear of the Demon angle, good thinking), they would have been blackballed out of town.

I'm glad to see things have changed!  Can I be a kid again??

I appreciate the responses! Unfortunately the opening promise of the club has not been fulfilled. Fantastic creative juices were unleashed. But then we began to play.

My system of choice was an 'octaNe-style' game, where the die type you use (d6, d8 or d10) depends on the level of description you include. This didn't translate well. These kids had never roleplayed before. I wanted to give them something 'above' the usual CRPG standard, an epitome of creation, imagination and freedom.And I crashed and burned!! No-one played up to the descriptive angle. The two girls clammed up and I was afraid one would drop out completely. In one session she did not say one woRd to me or anyone else... scary. I think my 'gentle' pressure of descriptive input scared the shit out of the girls. And the boys just wanted to kill stuff. Anything. Just use those swords. It was like playing D&D with ... errrm ... 10 year olds .... (!!??!!).

Last couple of weeks I tried recruiting more players - only guys came forward. Today I ran 5 boys and 2 girls, and it was a 10-year old testosterone-fuelled kill-fest. My ultimate nightmare. Death, maim, kill, slaughter. It's all they wanted to do. Luckily one of the lads and the girls sneaked off to actually DO something, but the guys just wanted to fight - and didn't care if they were hurt because of it. Just seemed to be a 'who's harder competition'.  Shit.

After half-term holiday I told them I'm back to 2 girls, 4 boys and NO VIOLENCE. Christ knows what I'll do. The girls looked overjoyed but the boys didn't seem keen.  But that's it. I'm running the game in a school and am not pandering to their violent instincts.

Any ideas??? One thing I tried before was children in an escape pod who have crashed onto an alien world and who must co-operate to survive. Might use that ...

Depressed!!!!!!!!