The Collaborative Storytelling Experiment

Back in September, I stumbled across Spirit of the Century and the Fate system. I became an instant fanboi.

All my roleplaying life I had been looking for a system like Fate. Something that encouraged character development and immersive role playing. Something that had simple rules that applied to many situations. Something that encouraged the development of a story. It's a complete bonus that it also completely tosses the "you're all sitting in a bar" introduction trope by getting the players to work out how their characters already know one another. Oh, and Aspects. Aspects are way cool.

So, spured on by this—and the, perhaps too ambitious, thought that we might be able to apply to playtest the next Fate game, the Dresden Files RPG—I set out to pull together my old gaming group for a Spirit of the Century adventure.

I had originally thought I`d just cobble together a simple plot from the history of a sci fi setting that has lived in my head for almost two decades. I sent out the invite and the character ideas came back. It was then I realized that I had a problem. None of my players were seeing the world in the same way I was. It was probably my fault, ``Late 19th Century British Empire`` is a little vague.

I had been reading about experiments in setting creation, like:

• Leo Balsera`s talk about the Fate fractal on Master Plan
  
• Bill Burdock`s Universalis + Fate + PDQ mash up
• Zero Sum Fate
• Lexicon RPG

These are very cool notions which got me thinking about how a gaming group could select a setting collaboratively that would incorporate elements that all the players would enjoy.

I`d say that it was Bill Burdock`s mash-up that had the biggest influence. The only problems were, I didn`t own Universalis and I didn`t want to force feed tenets to the players.

So I came up with the Setting Game. You can see Bill`s influence in the token economy. It hasn`t been playtested yet, and I intend to report on the experience after we try it out in mid-January.

My plan is to take the output of the Setting Game session and tweak the Spirit of the Century skill list, drop some inappropriate stunts and fiddle the character generation rules in prepration for a character generation setting the following week. We`ll begin play after that.

I believe that the excellent advice on running pulp games that is in the Spirit of the Century rulebook will allow me to deploy a fun adventure for the third time we meet.