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Some folks piggybacked suggestions on top of others. Where possible I’ve separated them out into separate ideas. Occasionally I’ve consolidated them. In a major departure from the “yes and” principle, I’m going to discourage this additional riffing in future. The risk is that the first idea gets shot down only because the additional spin on it provided by the piggybacker proves unpopular, which is unfair to the first proposer. I’m also going to impose a word count on future suggestions, as some of them became a series of interwoven ideas instead of one simple concept.

I’m unsure whether to, in later installments, combine votes on one set of cities with a call for ideas for the next set. This may be too much input to require at one time. On the other hand, stringing them out might be too slow moving a process.

But for this first week I wanted respondents to see what polls well before moving onto suggestions for the next set of cities.

Korad will be preempted next week for my annual TIFF coverage.

Speaking of inspirational material for a certain action movie roleplaying game, The Good the Bad the Weird, recently arrived on DVD, is the most Feng Shui western ever made.

A good Killer, an evil Thief and a weaselly Everyman, Korean expats all, wreak havoc across Japanese-occupied Manchuria in pursuit of a mysterious treasure map. Director Kim Ji-Woon pays his homage to Sergio Leone by way of Tsui Hark. (He has a new film at this year’s TIFF: I Saw the Devil, in which a secret agent pursues the serial killer who murdered his wife.)

The crowd in its wisdom has decided to moderate the emphasis placed on waterstones. Just under 50% of poll respondents decided that waterstones were important in the past, but aren’t in the present. This compares to 27% for very important waterstones (“he who has the waterstones, has the power”) and 23% who wanted to downgrade them to a footnote or curiosity.
The idea that waterstones once were used to build the canals that connect the southeastern rivers is by this result proven correct—and probably the most noteworthy thing about them.

We also tackled the philosophical question of whether magic is an alternate physics subject to logical extrapolation, or is instead poetic, mythic and unpredictable. The usual resistance to sharp distinctions reared its head in the comments, including ash1977law’s assertion that the waterstones themselves aren’t magical at all. I’d argue that if it does fantastic stuff and doesn’t exist in our world, it’s magic, at least for the purposes of this discussion. At any rate, the mythic won out over alternate physics, 64% to 35%.

Idea riffing continued in the comments, much of which jumps ahead of the topic at hand quite a bit. Although you’re welcome to spitball away as whim demands, I’m going to try to keep the effort a bit more focused as we go forward. If we keep following the unlimited challenge and assertion method, we’ll be forever chasing our tails refining ideas from the following week, to diminishing results. For future posts, including this one, I’ll be seeking more specific input, and requiring participants to carefully husband an alloted supply of responses. This will help equalize the influence of the super-motivated with that of more casual readers. While I may revive ideas that appear in tangential riffing sessions later, you’ll probably have the best chance of getting your oar in by hoarding your ideas on topics like culture, mythology, metaphysics and the like until I call for them. My guess is that they’ll seem fresher and more appealing that way.

Now it’s time to learn about the major settlements of our crowd-sourced fantasy setting. I’ve taken the liberty of marking the empire’s twenty-four largest cities and towns on the map. Later they’ll get names that evoke their notable qualities, as we establish them. Now we’ll work out what that local detail consists of.

Here’s how it’s going to work. First, I’ll make some obvious points about the cities, based on what we’ve already established about the physical geography of the various regions. Then, each commenter may make up to three assertions about any of the numbered cities. You can make all of your assertions about a single city, or split them up in any combination you desire. I’ll start threads for each of the cities, for ease of organization.

Keep your assertions local. Avoid details that force us to infer facts that extend beyond a single city. For example, if you say that a city is the capital of the empire, I’ll have to rule that out of bounds, as it impacts the entire setting.

I may adjust or disregard assertions that touch on politics and ideology. These areas form the centerpiece of the eventual play-by-blog game. We’ll deal with them later in the process. I’ll also adjust or disregard assertions that contradict what we’ve already worked out: we know that city 16 is on the edge of a marsh, so suggestions that it’s completely arid will prove problematic. Clever attempts to bootstrap other subject areas into our city discussion will also be watched with a gimlet eye.

If, as of Monday evening, a city has three or fewer assertions made about it, those assertions will all be considered true—unless they contradict one another, in which case the competing ideas will face a polling run-off.

When cities get more than three assertions, they’ll all be put up to a vote. The three most popular assertions are deemed true. If two assertions conflict, the one that gets the highest vote tally is considered true, and the less popular one is disregarded. In this case, an unrelated assertion that comes in at fourth or lesser place may still be deemed true.

Once we’ve defined our cities, we’ll divide our urban population between them with yet another poll. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves…

To keep this manageable, this week we’ll tackle cities one through five, in or near the breadbasket region.

What else do we know about them?

I got into roleplaying because I don’t like competition or anything that smacks of confrontation. Hence I don’t like a GM that puts me in dramatic situations. It’s part of being depressive, every second of my life I have a knife to my throat, demanding answers, so when I play I basically like everything I do to be the right thing.

As you’ll see by looking at the above-linked posts, Steve sees this clash as flowing from a distinction between diagesis and exegesis.

I’d point out an additional versus, that of the dramatic and the iconic hero. Many roleplaying games seem to take place within the tradition of escapist genre fiction—that is, the territory of the iconic hero. Yet the iconic hero, though popular, is seen as unworthy of literary analysis. Because of this we lack the vocabulary to discuss, evaluate and improve stories created in this mode. Principles derived from the more respectable dramatic stories get pressed into service. They are applied to iconic hero stories, often with unfortunate results.

Iconic heroes, if you look at the source material, aren’t necessarily under constant emotional pressure or internal conflict. Something interesting is always happening to them, but typically it occurs in the procedural arena of external challenges and jeopardies. They are allowed to maintain their emotional dominance, and to change the world through that dominance. Dr. No, as analyzed in Hamlet’s Hit Points, reinforces that point monomaniacally. Bond is, in more contemporary screenwriter parlance “protected” as a hero, to preserve the escapist thrill of our identification with him. In their installment of the Creative Screenwriting Magazine podcast the writers of the recent Star Trek revival discuss their need to protect both Spock and Kirk, even though the plot of the reboot movie puts them at odds with one another.

Both dramatic and iconic stories can make for engaging roleplaying. Unexamined expectations about which set of rules is in play may however lead to a surprise triggering of the boundary issues Steve describes.

This e-version of the book comes as a bundle of files formatted for different reading experiences. One is the layout as it appears in print, with beat diagrams appearing as a ribbon across each two-page spread. Another is presented for the page at a time reading most PDF users will be doing on a tablet or laptop screen, with the diagram for each beat appearing alongside its explanatory paragraph. Also part of the bundle is an extended spread that shows you the whole diagram of each of the three analyzed narratives (Hamlet, the movie version of Dr. No, and Casablanca.) This map appears only in the electronic versions.

Gameplaywright hopes to produce e-versions for other popular formats, like the Kindle and EPUB, and is exploring options in that regard. I’ll keep you apprised on that front.

Anyhow, I’m glad I did. Overall attendance seemed completely insane, especially on the Saturday, to the point of straining the limits of the facility. The Toronto convention centre (that’s how we spell it up here) is a vast monstrosity capable of running two events simultaneously. This time, due to a loading conflict with a urologist convention, FanExpo was slated for the smaller southern part of the complex. That chunk is poorly designed to cycle through huge crowds. For example, the exhibit hall is on a second floor and is only accessible via escalator. In future the show may have to take over both halves of the hall, even though the prospect of this shoots stabbing logistical chills through Justin’s bone marrow.

After years of effort Justin has now shepherded into existence a cozy little mini gaming con and fused it to the slouching pop culture leviathan that is FanExpo. The well-used game rooms were sensibly placed in connected meeting rooms.

Perhaps as a consequence of the tsunami-like attendance, the two panels I participated in were well packed. The obvious crowd pleaser, the classic DMing troubleshooting event, was full to bursting on Saturday. Along with fellow panelists Ed Greenwood and Philippe-Antoine Menard, we tackled the questions I expect at a regional event like this. In other words, many were variations on “how do I reign in the guy in my group who wants to do X?” You may recognize this as the question that animates Robin’s Laws of Good GameMastering. If so, you know that the answer usually starts with, “Find a mutually fun way to let him do X.”

Sunday’s panel was that other perennial, State of the Gaming Industry. It was about two-thirds full. Jonathan Lavallee, Malcolm Sheppard, and Louis Philip Corbel-Guiard and I talked changing business models, social networking as the new hobby’s new infrastructure, and the coming impact of mobile apps on tabletop RPGs. Surprisingly for the topic, none of the questioners were looking for the latest skinny on particular publishers. Instead the questions were broad and philosophical.

Most heartening was the demographic make-up of the panel audiences. Not unexpectedly, the DMing panel skewed a little younger than the other. Generally though both groups were full of twenty-somethings—the cohort that supposedly never got into RPGs because they’re too busy playing video games and tramping on our lawns.

Each week the Korad post includes a vote, one or more participants object to the choices the polls extend to them. Remember, if you want to influence the options given the group during polling, you can’t wait until the poll goes up. That’s already too late. Instead, take part in the discussion that leads to the creation of the choices.

Often, faced with a choice between X or Y, commenters voice a preference for X and Y. Note that I am in many instances crafting the polls to force a strong, stark choice. Occasionally I’ll offer a combo version, when an asserted possibility has something going for it that makes it additionally compelling. For example, in the plant-apes vs. ents poll, the person who suggested that both exist also added an element: they sometimes fight each other. That presented a vivid choice, rather than two competing ideas that diffused and undercut one another.

There’s a tendency in RPG background writing to create material that’s so open-ended and contradictory that it becomes wishy-washy. Occasionally you will want to make a setting detail contradictory or nuanced, perhaps for purposes of realism. Most of the time, though, this “on the other hand” style of writing takes a clear, simple idea and mushes it into paste. On the grounds that one strong, clear idea is more memorable and distinctive than several, I’ll continue to frame the polls to force tough choices.

Inveterate all-of-the-abovers can outplay me on this one by a) taking part in pre-polling discussion and b) suggesting ways to fuse two competing ideas into a single compelling idea that is more striking, and will earn more votes, than either on its own.

Let’s look at last week’s poll results, in roughly ascending order of controversy. As always, these tallies are as of Monday evening.

Unsurprisingly, the “all-of-the-above-with-a-cherry-on-top” suggestion that both plant-apes and ents exist on the floating plant islands, and that they make war on the rare occasions when their islands drift together, decisively took its poll, with a 68% majority. Plant-apes alone, at 19%, were somewhat more popular than classic ents, who took 13% of the vote.

64% of respondents wanted the haunted Wronglands to have explanatory legends, albeit ones that adults won’t speak of, as opposed to the 36% who wanted no explanation at all.

And now, to the waterstones and their burgeoning mythology.

In last week’s discussion, the small but passionate band of folks who are deeply stoked by the concept of waterstones and want to further hone it once more grabbed that ball and ran with it as hard as they could. On one hand, I dig this explosion of spontaneous creation. On the other, I see an activist bias at work, where the power in this exercise could disproportionately devolve to a few very devoted collaborators. In future I’ll be setting the parameters of discussion to blunt this effect. In the meantime we need to decide how much the broader collective shares the entusiasms of the waterstone crew.

The crew has effectively played the rules of participation I’ve supplied so far, bootstrapping what was meant to be a discussion of terrain and topology into an in-depth disquisition into magic and how it works in Korad. Do we want to validate their initiative in roaring ahead of the question at hand, or reign them in?

By a 74% to 26% margin, the collective has decreed that waterstones are only found in one place, the cyclopean ruins to the south of the big lake, rather than being mined or smelted. This might express a desire to contain the overall importance of the waterstones; we’ll know for sure after this week’s polls are voted on. At any rate, we know that they’re now rare artifacts, rather than the commonplace output of industrial production.

The more technical issue, though one of great import to waterstone scholars, concerns how waterstones work. 55% of voters decided that they function by repelling water, establishing that point as fact.

This leaves us with two broader philosophical points to resolve regarding waterstones.

One: how important are they to our setting? Our first poll asks you decide if they’re a minor curiosity, if they were a force in the past but are relevant no longer, or if the possession of waterstones is still a key factor in Koradian life and politics.

Two, a schism has opened between members of the waterstone academy. One faction wants them to follow the laws of physics, from which their workings can be logically extrapolated, as you’d do in a speculative fiction setting. Others want magic to be less rational and more poetic and mystical.

Based on the answers to these questions, I’ll then decide how to channel future inquiry into the waterstones issue.