DaisyNinjaGirl

And All Things Nice (4444 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Peter Pan - J. M. Barrie
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Peter Pan, Wendy Darling, Captain Hook
Additional Tags: Rule 63, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

Girls, you know, are much too clever to fall out of their prams.

An incredibly sophisticated gender bender version of Peter Pan, focusing on the perils and fears and desires of growing up for girls.

A Dream Is a Wish You Make With Your Heart. (Or, Possibly, With Your Mustache.) (7998 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Unusuals
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Casey Shraeger & Jason Walsh, Allison Beaumont & Henry Cole, Leo Banks & Eric Delahoy, Davis Nixon/Casey Shraeger, Allison Beaumont/Jason Walsh
Characters: Casey Shraeger, Jason Walsh, Allison Beaumont, Henry Cole, Eric Delahoy, Leo Banks, Eddie Alvarez
Additional Tags: Fake/Pretend Relationship, Psychic Abilities, Quasi Kid FIc, Crack, Team Dynamics, Case Fic, Wedding Planning, Funerals, POV Multiple, Concussions, Mustaches
Summary:

Casey and Walsh may be doomed to have a fairy tale wedding, whether they like it or not. Meanwhile, Banks has gone missing, and Alvarez’s mustache may or may not have psychic powers.

Lift Me Up (1602 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Strictly Ballroom (1992), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark, Fran/Scott Hastings
Characters: Avengers Team (MCU), Scott Hastings, Fran (Strictly Ballroom)
Additional Tags: Crossover
Summary:

"How, exactly, does the introduction of new steps in some ... Australian dancing competition represent a threat to human civilization as we know it?"

Gets an honourable mention for sheer glittering chutzpah.

Five Pan Pacifics and A Christmas Dinner (3469 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Strictly Ballroom (1992)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Fran/Scott Hastings, Doug Hastings/Shirley Hastings
Characters: Fran (Strictly Ballroom), Scott Hastings, Doug Hastings, Shirley Hastings, Kylie Hastings
Additional Tags: Christmas, Dancing, 5+1 Things, Family
Summary:

The Hastings family over five Pan Pacific Grand Prix Amateur Five Dance Latin American Championships and one Christmas Day celebration.

A very believable 'what might have been after'.

starfall (2208 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Howl Series - Diana Wynne Jones
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Witch of the Waste, Lily Angorian, Original Characters
Additional Tags: Backstory
Summary:

Even the Witch of the Waste had a beginning.

Backstory for the witch of the Waste.

And a special mention for my gift:
Letters from Jane Fairfax (1158 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 2/2
Fandom: Emma - Jane Austen
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Frank Churchill/Jane Fairfax
Characters: Jane Fairfax
Additional Tags: Epistolary
Summary:

Jane Fairfax writes to Frank Churchill.

What the quietest resident of Highbury is thinking...

Since now we're able to own up to what we wrote for the exchange, this was my story:

On Bigness (2828 words) by DaisyNinjaGirl
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 莊子 | Zhuāngzǐ - 莊周 | Zhuāng Zhōu
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Relationships: 莊子 | Zhuāngzǐ & 惠子 | Huìzǐ, 莊子 | Zhuāngzǐ/Original Female Character
Characters: 莊子 | Zhuāngzǐ, 惠子 | Huìzǐ, Original Characters
Additional Tags: Chinese Philosophy, Alternative Interpretations, Yuletide 2013, Chromatic Yuletide
Summary:

In the darkness of the Northern Ocean, Zhuang Zhou muses on bigness...

Basically, around a year ago, I spent a lot of time reading the Zhuangzi/Chuang Tsu as preparation for Fragrant Harbour and got really into it. Plus, I found out in secondary research that the trope of the 'secret martial arts manual' in wuxia novels can indeed be a classic text such as the Zhuangzi - you just have to understand it correctly. (Seriously, it's in one of the Jin Yong novels.) In any case, the book starts with this really compelling image of the great fish Kun which transforms into an even greater bird Peng beating through the air which has always really stuck with me. That got paired with a prompt which asked for the relationship between Master Zhuang and his friend and opposing philosopher Master Hui who turned out to be really interested in distinctions of relative size, and this is what came out the other end.

And a gift for me, from the lovely Lizimajig - lets have a big old Muppet cheer for Gwen Stacey! Yaaaaaaay!!!

You Will Always Be In Front of Me, Even As I Disappear From View (7090 words) by lizimajig
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: Peter Parker & Gwen Stacy
Characters: Peter Parker, Helen Stacy, Gwen Stacy, Cletus Kasady, Carnage, May Parker (Spider-Man)
Additional Tags: POV Female Character, Drama, Blood, Fights, Canon-Typical Violence
Summary:

It's not the best plan in the world, but she dives under Dr. Kasady's desk, and closes her eyes, wishing she had thought to grab something to improvise as a weapon. The flamethrower had worked really well last time. "Just stay with me as long as you can," she whispers, her stomach in knots.


"I will, I promise, long as I can."

 

 

Gwen is not the damsel in distress. She is the hero of her own story and doesn't need to be protected.

Thank you! I'm really looking forward to the story you're going to write, and I hope you have a good time with Yuletide. (Also, my AO3 handle is DaisyNinjaGirl. :-) )

General Stuff About Me
I'm relatively recent to the world of fan fiction (about two years, I guess?), although I've been enjoying myself wading through various archives (my AO3 handle is DaisyNinjaGirl). Some things I've noticed about myself is that I tend to enjoy more stories that are reasonably consistent with the original canon - so sequels and prequels and inbetween scenes, and I love it when a minor character gets their story expanded or someone does a nifty bit of world building on some little detail and makes it all make sense. AUs and crossovers are less my thing, although there have been some definite exceptions that really blew me away, so please take this paragraph as an 'optional details are optional' section and write the story that will make you happy. The prompts I've given are also optional, please have fun with what you choose to write. Also, stories that pass the Bechdel Test Are Love!

( Squicks )

( Territory - Emma Bull )

( Dan in Real Life (2007) )

( The Pirates' Mixed-Up Voyage - Margaret Mahy )

( The Amazing Spider-Man )

Thanks again, I hope you have a great time with the exchange.

Stephanie

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true/wonderful/awesome Yuletide authors gave to me...

Two awesome stories, one backstory for the Phouka in th War for the Oaks universe (true to Emma Bull's style - bright as a broken stained glass window, but it cuts) and a lovely, wonderful story about St Margaret of Antioch.

The Life of Saint Margaret of Antioch (The Hundred Thousand Maidens Remix) (1723 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Life of Saint Margaret of Antioch (Medieval Saint's Life)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warning: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Saint Margaret of Antioch, various cameos
Summary:

Her name is Margaret. She tells a story.

(Note on warnings: if it happens in the original canon, it happens here.)

Bookmarker's Notes:

A glorious story about St Margaret of Antioch.

In Kind (3459 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: War for the Oaks - Emma Bull
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: Major Character Death
Characters: Phouka (War for the Oaks), Original Female Character, Original Male Character
Summary:

Jazz Age prequel for War for the Oaks. Ruby Kind comes to Saint Paul looking to get away from life in Hibbing. She finds the Wabasha Street Speakeasy, Miss Winter, and Mr. Pook.

Dear Daisy Ninja Girl,

I dithered mightily about giving you this present. I dithered. But you said you appreciated that quality of Ms. Bull's works, in that they soar while they cut you. So. It's winter in Minnesota as I write this. It's beautiful. It also kills people.

(Heart-felt thanks to St. Aurafina, Lilacsigil, and Likeadeuce for assistance, hand-holding, and beta-reading.)

Honourable mention to a story written for my sister, Eddie Alvarez has a problem on his Christmas shopping trip, and the team step up for him.

The Precinct Gave To Me (1430 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Unusuals
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warning: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Eddie Alvarez/Nicole Brandt
Characters: Eddie Alvarez, Nicole Brandt, Leo Banks, Eric Delahoy, Jason Walsh, Casey Shraeger, Allison Beaumont, Henry Cole, Harvey Brown
Summary:

It's the night before Christmas and, all through the Second Precinct, there's drama, bad puns and the case of the stolen Christmas shopping.

Thank you again!

So, just over a week ago, my sister and I ran a fairy tale larp that was trying to mess around with the form. And our players. But in a good way!

I had two main things driving the design. One of them was a reaction to the intense emotionally charged psychodrama games that often get called Nordic larp. There are a lot of really powerful techniques being used, but a lot of the time they seem to revolve around making people feel miserable - I wanted to see if I could engineer a situation that would have the opposite effect. The other one was a video game called The Path. This came out a few years ago, and it just really stuck with me. The basic scenario is that you're a version of Red Riding Hood walking through the woods to your grandmother's house, and the gameplay is that you choose to walk, or stop for a little and encounter some object that's sitting in the woods, or if you're feeling lost and lonely you can wait for a guide character to come and give you a hug and take you back to the path. Or you can encounter the Wolf, which is devastating, and the only way to find out what will happen is go through with the encounter. And eventually you end up at your grandmother's house and there's some stuff that happens that depends on what you did in the woods. It's atmospheric as hell, and totally awesome. So I ended up with a game where the premise was that a group of lost 'children' (some of the characters were adolescents or adults) had each, once upon a time, fled from their own personal Wolf and become lost in the woods. Their goal, which they weren't explicitly told, was to find some sort of resolution with their wolf.

Game Design Stuff
First off, I'm going to thank my co-writer Catherine a huge amount - the original idea was from me, but if she hadn't been letting me bounce ideas off her, and helping me work out the mechanics - and writing some key characters that got me through writer's block, the game just wouldn't have happened. Plus, she really came through with the creepy doll. ;-)

For a lot of things in the game, there was often more than one reason why it was like that. The first one was the movement rules - the lost children had to keep moving, had to stay in the company of someone with a black headband (actually the GMs, the backstage helper 'wood sprites' and the wolves), and there was an OOC call "push-me-pull-you" to trigger them moving if they'd stopped. Partly this was to stop the game clogging up, which is something I've seen in other forest games - there's a huge play area, but 'something interesting' is happening at a particular site, so everybody stops and clusters around it, and ignores all the other interesting things going on. Another one, was that it was a way to make people tired. I wanted them to feel physically challenged but not in real danger, so that when they got to stop walking, that was a relief, and hopefully that would affect their emotional state. And the third reason - the be with someone with a headband rule - was to control the game and make sure that we could keep the lost children circulating around the different wolves, and so that no one was stuck by themselves for too long.

The area of the game was a set of interlinked tracks at a scout camp that I knew pretty well from previous larp events. We had a small fenced off area in the middle of the forest with benches and a single entrance (the scout camp's chapel) that we used as a base camp during the game, the mid game break area, and the final destination for the end game. There were also some buildings close to the game area with toilets and hot water facilities - we advised the players that while IC they were stuck with the group, OOC they could take a break at any time and wait at the chapel to catch up with the rest of the players. I don't think anyone used this, but it was important to me, because I figured that anything that we could do to increase people's physical feeling of real life safety would help them relax and enjoy the game content. We also scheduled a ten minute break for everyone about an hour into the game. This was originally for strictly practical reasons - to get some water and hot drinks, and food, into people in what could have been any kind of weather (Auckland in spring can be really hot and sunny, or cold and miserable, and no way to know in advance), but as we were working through the game design, it made sense to turn this into the emotional turning point of the game.

We cast people by questionnaire - a lot of this was the standard stuff, like do you have any health problems, do you want to be a lost child or a wolf, is there anyone you do or don't want to be paired with. We also got people to fill in tag clouds, a grid of key words related to fairy tales which we asked people to decorate with word art, colours, bold, stuff like that to give me an idea of what they were interested in. We also put in a brief description of the Lines and Veils rule and asked people what squicked them out so we could cast them away from any problems.

We used the technique which I've seen in some other games of giving people the skeleton of the character, and then asking them a series of leading questions about themselves. Partly this was to help them buy into the characters, but we also staged this so that the lost children answered their questions first, then gave that information to the wolves so that they had a lot of information about their paired lost child, along with the lost child's tag cloud. We also set up an IC roleplaying forum a couple of weeks before the game with the intent of having each pair roleplay out their first encounter in which the child ran away from the wolf, so that we could set up some shared experiences pregame, and hopefully jump start the warm up period that I've often seen in larps where it takes a bit of time for people to feel comfortable with each other.

On the day things - the very first part of the briefing was that everyone had to shake hands and introduce themselves to everyone else, regardless of whether they'd met before or not. I nicked this idea off someone on Story Games (can't remember who, sorry) and it's awesome. It's a straight out jump start to get people from silently staring at you to giggling and slightly embarrassed in a "we're all in this together" way. I've also read a couple of articles out on the interwebs on the role that touch has on bonding - you get a small spike of a hormone called oxytocin, which is related to feelings of well being and attachment. Apart from this, we defined the touching rules as people's faces, arms and hands only, to keep things in a relatively neutral frame. The fighting rules were none - you weren't allowed to fight at all. You could talk it out or run away. This idea was robbed from a video game I can't remember the name of, where they'd found that if they gave players the ability to fight the monsters, people would try to do that even if it was difficult and a doomed effort, then complain that the fighting mechanics were clunky; whereas actually the game designers wanted to emulate the narrative of a horror movie where it's mostly about fear and hiding and survival. So they removed the ability and found they got better emotional responses.

We turned the mid game tea party into a 'tilt' event - we asked the wolves at this point to offer some food or drink to their lost child, and to change the tone of their roleplaying, from scary and messing with them as they'd been at the beginning, to more vulnerable. (I think the line my partner quoted from me on Twitter was: "Try to manipulate her into realising that you have no power over her." So, um, yeah. Like that.) After the tea party, we also encouraged them to split up the group more - reminding people that they could go off with any wolf or wood sprite, if they wanted. We also asked the wolves to try to push the storyline to a resolution - perhaps the lost child overcame their fear of the wolf and was willing to walk alone with them, or could finally stand up to them, or had found a way to let them go. Once they'd reached a point where the wolf felt the story was resolved, they were asked to bring their lost child back to the base camp chapel, where everyone who was there had been asked to give them a big cheer (because everyone, at least once in their life, should get a cheer. It's a rule.) The final debrief was the reverse of the opening, asking people to split up into pairs, shake hands, and tell each other something they liked about each other.

***

Right, I'm totally planning on writing up an Actual Play account, but it's late and I'm tired, so it'll be in a day or two. But I have pictures for you...

[originally posted on the Gametime LJ community: http://gametime.livejournal.com/86143.html]

And now all the anonymity has been removed, and we're OK to talk about who wrote what.

Mine were:
The Affair on Strigoi Street (3785 words) by DaisyNinjaGirl
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Ivan Vorpatril, Ethan Urquhart, Terrence Cee, Gregor Vorbarra, Byerly Vorrutyer
Summary:

In which Ivan goes to Athos, and furthers the course of True Love.Allusions to pornography, but nothing explicit. One character has minor problems with homophobia that he has to confront, and there’s canon misogyny. Mostly about Ivan, but Gregor, Byerly, Ethan Urquhart and Terrence Cee appear as minor characters.

This one was my assigned story. I got really lucky with the prompt - the recipient wanted a story about Ivan Vorpatril (because he's awesome), was happy with any kind of content, and made a side comment about the Ethan of Athos novel and how it would be fun if the major characters from that got to meet up again, and it all just gelled in my head. I was originally going to have a much more serious side story, but then Cat wanted Byerly to turn up and I couldn't think of anything snarky for him to say, but figured that videos 'of a certain type' would be By's idea of a good farewell present. And Cat made some suggestions for movie titles, and the rant about fire fighting and plot in Lance Goes Logging II, and then suddenly Bernard, Reggie and Ron were in my head and the rest just happened.

Five Endings, Five Beginnings (1883 words) by DaisyNinjaGirl
Fandom: Princess of Flames - Ru Emerson
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Elfrid/Baldyron, Rolend/Juseppa, Fialla/Gespry
Characters: Elfrid, Fialla, Gespry, Baldyron, The Reader, Juseppa, Sigurdy, Rolend
Summary:

Some things that might have happened after, in The Princess of Flames. Note to people who haven’t read the novel – this story is pretty spoilerific. But you should totally go read the book, it’s awesome.

The Princess of Flames is one of those books where you know someone has read it because it comes up in conversation and someone says: "but I loved that story!" And other than that, it's quite rare. This was written as a treat for someone else with Princess of Flames love.

Letting Go (1062 words) by DaisyNinjaGirl
Fandom: Never Let Me Go (2010)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Original Characters
Summary:

Near Hailsham School, a woman is arrested for theft.

And this was a last minute story, written as a treat for someone who wanted some fixit fic for Never Let Me Go. I saw this movie quite recently and found that it made me feel quite dreadful about the passivity and acceptance of their fate from the donors. So this was hoping to write in a tiny bit of hope into their story.

All up, this was lots of fun! Thanks fellow Yuletiders.

Dear Yuletide Goat,

Thank you very much for offering to write a story for me.  This is my first time in the exchange, and I'm looking forward to it.  I'm posting here, because the exchange is based on LiveJournal, but most of my actual blogging is over here.  (It's pretty political right now, because we have a General Election coming up, but there's more random burbling earlier on.)

I think that overall I'd love a light and fluffy story (did I mention that there's an election coming?).  I'm fine with any pairings that you may like, either friendship or relationships.  I'm also fine with implied erotica, but I blush easily, so writing in the Gen/Teenages rating would probably work better than more explicit material.  I'm really not fine with non-consensual, violent, underage, or incestuous relationships (or anything that's illegal in most jurisdictions, I guess?)  BDSM is something that... I'm happy for my friends who find it makes them happy, but it's not something I really grok at an emotional or erotic level.

Of the Fandoms I asked for, some possible prompts:
Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer is a bit of an elusive figure in the Tales and his other works.  He'll write himself in, but at a very self-deprecating level, and gets insulted and told to shut up by the other characters a lot.  It might be nice if one of the characters he's writing about manages to corner him and gets some plain speaking and honesty from the man.

Derkholm - At the end of The Year of the Griffin, Blade and Flury decide that they're quite keen on Claudia and Elda, but that the girls are too young to be approached.  It would be nice to find out what happens when Claudia and Elda are old enough, and find that they have their own opinions on the matter, thank you very much.  Preferably with lots of running around and shouting, because it's Claudia and Elda, and they're both strong willed and spreaders of chaos.

A Little Princess - it always struck me as unfair that Becky, who is just as deserving as Sara, is always treated as a tagalong in the gifts from the Ill Neighbour Next Door, and all because she didn't have the good fortune to speak Hindi and have elegant habits and diction.  It would be nice if there were someone who thought she were the most important girl, just for once.

But, of course, these are just prompts.  If there's something else that you're keen on writing, please go ahead, and I'm sure it will be wonderful.

Thank you!

Stephanie

A light-hearted theatre-style larp for 15 players, published by Peaky Games. It was loosely inspired by the tv series Father Ted, Nuns on the Run and similarly daft movies about religion. Set in the diocese of Peaky-in-the-Sea (consisting of Rocky Island, Stony Island and Pebbly Island), An Ecumenical Matter is an irreverent religious themed game involving priests, nuns and a geographically dislocated archbishop.

A word of warning... An Ecumenical Matter is not for the easily offended. It contains drinking, comedy satanists, unfaithful priests, references to unchaste activities, and horrendously bad accents.

Gender mix is 9 male to 6 female, but cross dressing is strongly encouraged.
When: 16 July
Where: Turnbull House
Where: NZLarps members $10, everyone else $12
Contact:Me!

More details: http://nzlarps.org/games/anecumenicalmatter/

So in some recent behind the scenes chatter, a comment was made that Gametime is currently "the lethargic zombie of NZ roleplaying discussion." Alas for Mash, there will be no zombies in this post. But then, that's kind of the point of it.

I've been on a larp writing jag for the last couple of years, working in the genre of domestic realism. I kind of drifted into it via a game about a wake, Sitting Shiva, which I talked about in an earlier post. The thing is, what I liked about that game wasn't the magic, it was the realism, and in fact I found that removing one of the 'magical' game mechanics in the second run made the game stronger.

I also think that if you ask people what are the basic ingredients that go into a larp, or any kind of roleplaying game, you'll often get a bunch of opinions back about how what you really need is conflict. You might also get some comments about how it's essentially an escapist form. These NZRag conversations are examples, but I don't think it's that unusual a view. But I want to challenge that view a bit - in the second conversation I linked to, I made a comment that what you really need is a reason for every character to be there, and something for every character to do. (1) But if you do remove conflict as a game element, what are you going to put in its place? What are people going to do? And does roleplaying have to be escapist, anyway? Isn't one of the cool things that people can get out of a game a heightened emotional experience? Don't we have heightened experiences in real life, all the time?

So anyway, that's where I ended up - games that aren't exoticised at all, that could pretty much happen to anyone and that my player pool would have a good set of referents for (2), but would also meet the criteria of 'heightened'. I was also looking for non-standard ways (for theatre-style larps) to deal with what people were going to do during the games; and I wanted game mechanics to be as invisible as possible. Three of these games ended up as very quiet, semi-larps that involved a group of people who knew each other well sitting around a table, talking: Sitting Shiva, The Book Club (pretty self explanatory from the title), and A Stiff One (an evening in a bar after everyone has had a horrible week.) The other two were much more chaotic: But Nobody Loses An Eye!, about a child's birthday party; and its notional sequel Super Sparkle Action Princess GX!, about filming an episode of a kiddie tv show - the one that the children were a fan of in BNLAE. (Credit where it's due - BNLAE, SSAPGX and A Stiff One had my sister Catherine as co-writer, and the idea for A Stiff One came from Vaughan Staples. Thanks guys! (3)) Looking back on the set, there have been some common features that turned up, that I'd like to talk about.

Structure
I gave up a lot of traditional control over the pacing of the games: no formal goals, no NPCs appearing with information, few timed or staged events (BNLAE was an exception to an extent), no contingency envelopes etc. These games were all set up so that players got their character sheets, walked into the playing area and started roleplaying until they stopped and walked out. In the three quiet games, I got to influence things a little by being another 'character' in the room and getting to contribute using the same mechanisms as the other players - by asking questions, or stating my point of view, but I tried to keep that to a minimum, mostly just nudging things if the game got quiet and sitting back when the players were talking. In A Stiff One, I also gave people the ability to call a couple of mutual friends (ie me via two cellphones), but in those phone conversations I tried to act as a mirror to the discussion that was going on in the game, picking up details from what they'd talked about and adapting what was happening with the friends to what was happening with the player characters. In the chaotic games, I had more of an NPC role by acting as an authority figure (the birthday boy's Mum in one, and the Producer's EA in the other) but again tried to keep in the background unless specifically called on.

Inside that formlessness, though, the basic structure of the games was activity focused. Everyone always knew exactly what they were there to do: talk about a specific topic, or do birthday party stuff, or run around filming, and their characterisation emerged around that skeleton. This was a deliberate design choice - I didn't want anyone in the games sitting in a corner wondering what they ought to be doing and feeling lost. Whatever else was going on, they always had the core activity to fall back on. I think they worked well enough to demonstrate that you can run an effective game without having to use some of the theatre-style design standards of puzzles, mysteries, political deals and object quests. I still had some romance plotlines in some games, because I like romance, but they weren't necessarily of the "there's someone you like, go out and win their heart" either.

The three quiet games seemed to have a natural runtime of around 1.5-2 hours, which is consistent with another 'talky' game I've played in, A Serpent of Ash by J. Tuomas Harviainen. At every run of BNLAE, it's tapped out at 2 hours (that's when people exhaust themselves). The first run of SSAPGX had a hard time limit of 2 1/2 hours excluding briefing/debriefing because of the event it was run at, but I think I wouldn't want to extend it's runtime to more than 3 hours (part of its shtick was that the players were racing against the clock).

The Shared Fictive Space
I also want to invent a new term here, Shared Fictive Space, because I feel like it, and because it riffs of some of the material that other Gametime writers have put up about Shared Imagined Spaces and GM Imagined Spaces. All of these games had an added layer of intertextuality, an awareness of an explicitly fictional element that they could manipulate directly in character, instead of having to negotiate in an OOC or game mechanics sense. In Sitting Shiva, this was our relationship with the Ghost (the conceit of the game was that the player characters are slightly alternate universe versions of themselves, in which they all have a relationship with another player who has just 'died'), which was built up as a cooperative conversation and storytelling throughout the game. In The Book Club, the shared fictive element was The Book, which in the game space was highly important to each player character, but in real life never existed. For that game, everyone was given a written essay describing their opinion about The Book with some details to back it up, and the goal of the game was to build up a group consensus about it. (4) In A Stiff One, the players were given information about something that had happened to them independently, but also shared information about some mutual friends and were encouraged to expand on that relationsip. In BNLAE, they were given a brief burble about a television programme they all liked, with enough space in the description that they could invent details - except for the one character who was an outsider to the group. And in SSAPGX, the shared fictive space was the point of the game - the group was assembled to produce an episode, but they all had different creative goals that they could push for in the course of the game.

Secrets, Lies and Maguffins
There weren't many. A few times there were some objects in the game that had plot relevance, but they weren't 'secret' and they weren't really hidden either - the closest we got was that in one case, there was a hidden object that one character was keen on that they'd 'lost' but they were pretty sure that another character had something to do with it. At a later point in the game the object turned up in a package for Pass the Parcel, allowing the players to guess the prize and try to manipulate who got the final present. The other objects in these games were designed to be revealed by their owners (either they wanted to show them to someone, or they were just highly visible), and things that would trigger an emotional reaction in the other players. There weren't many secrets, either. In some cases, people had information on their character sheets that wasn't well known but not plot-criticial, and this didn't really come out in the game; otherwise people had information about something that they cared about that they could choose to introduce into the game. Overall, I'm pleased with how these object plotlines worked - for me, anyway, questing for an object or secret in a game can often feel very mechanical and meta-game driven - but from my observer's view, it felt quite natural how the players used the hidden information or not, and interacted with the objects or not, as they cared about it.

The Emotional Game
We did put a lot of effort into character's emotional relationships with each other and the game material. In Sitting Shiva, this included a brief workshop at the beginning of the game where we all talked about how we knew each other, and inventing plausible connections where there weren't any real ones. And, well, that game had a lot to do with creating a safe space for emotionally sensitive topics. A Stiff One was written with the idea of emotionally processing a difficult situation - sometimes you need to talk something out before you've worked out how you feel about it, and the character sheets highlighted emotional dilemmas for the characters. The other games with prewritten characters were generally designed by thinking about the relationship map between characters and building them up from that. We put in romantic plotlines to several of the games, although we found that a typical "you fancy someone, go get them" plot didn't always activate in the games, and didn't seem to engage players as much as the alternative, which were the existing relationships. We wrote in several where the basic theme was "You have this person, but can you keep them? Do you want to? What about your mates' relationship?" These were great. The players involved were massively invested, the outcome was never possible to predict, and it made a good link to the other players because it's very easy to have an opinion. We also had some prewritten characters who had their own private unhappinesses, which were sometimes shared, and sometimes not. For these latter ones, I'm interested in hearing from the players of those characters - did they add to the game experience, or did they feel more like a nasty trick from an unkind GM?

All up, I'm glad I put the work into these games, I think I got a chance to try out some ideas that I'll keep with me for further work, and there've been some crazy awesome moments that were great to feel part of. I did find that writing this post has been surprisingly hard, involving a lot of poking at it for over a week trying to get my scattered thoughts into a semblance of order, and rereading it before I post it still feels very disjointed. I'm glad I did that, too, because it's a way of telling myself that these games are a set, that fit together, and that they're done now. And they are a set, for all it was a very organic process I went through to write them, and they do fit together, and I think that it's time for me to move on and do something else now.

(OK, when I started writing this post, Gametime was pretty quiet. It feels much less so now.)

(1) In hindsight I think it's a bit pat as a statement, but I think it's still true, with an additional rider that you need to give every character a reason to not just walk out early in the game.
(2) Yeah, just put in some corollaries about my accessible player pool being products of middle class Western society. So am I - there's been a really strong element of writing what I know, here.
(3) Seriously, Cat is the Best. Co-writer. Ever. She was astonishingly good about being bailed up for a weekend to brainstorm, and kept on throwing a big sparkly ideas ball back at me, and just came up with these amazing left field ideas that really made the games she helped with.
(4) At the time I wrote the game, I was spending a lot of time in Honours level English Lit seminars, and there were more than a few days where it felt like the conversation was less about getting on the same page as the author and more about asserting a point of view and finding enough evidence to make it stick. It really felt like a performance art - it wasn't just the book + author's intentions, it was book + author + the people in that particular room on that particular day as a transitory moment in time. I find the postmodern school of literary criticism to be extremely abstract and pretentious, but that my Big Critique of postmodernism is itself a postmodern work is not lost on me.

[This was originally posted on the Gametime LJ community: http://gametime.livejournal.com/83313.html]