Bay 12 Games Forum

Report for Day Three:
About a week ago I had the masochistic idea of participating in National Novel Writing Month (why November? Why not June? where here in New Orleans nothing is gone on!), writing it as a grand solo adventure to commemorate solo gaming appreciation month and trying to design an oracle based solo engine called the Oracular for Nagademon (national game design month). Oh so much room for abuse!

It has been three days, and all I can say is I feel like a philanthropist gone completely mad! Without being judgmental and squashing the creativity, here is what I have.

Eight thousand pages where my mind has wandered to places that my fingers dread to go. I have hundreds of words of a first person Victorian letter-writing with a little steampunk helping, all thanks to the circles of perdition rpg called De Profundis. I have an oracle based RPG taken from the burned ashes of Oculus. Upon which I follow absolutely no rules and just grab the nearest tarot card, rpg, cubes, dice or random pet I could find and write about the nearest world I can think of. All in all, I’m not even sure if I am playing or writing, doing it for Nanowrimo, or solo gaming or thinking about dice mechanics (well, not that, because there aren’t any).

No matter what I try or what I do, I keep coming back to that mythical world I created in my head, sent in a (rejected) short story; cranked out a draft, and have played in my head ever since- The Barony of Rivermoon. For like its inspiration, New Orleans, I will always return to that place. It is my literary/RPG home.

I have garbage, I have a mess, I have a ball of yarn made out of words and phrases, tangled mess of ejaculate that can hardly be called creativity.

And I have never been happier.

 Plus I got three hundred more words for that Nano, don’t I- don’t I?

I say combine the two.

I went off, surprisingly. I started by thinking about doing an oracle writing, pick a symbol and write, but it has exploded to fictionalizing the whole creative and oracle process into a letter from a (mad)man to his brother.

I am planning to write as an oculus observer. Oculus being a solo rpg story engine that allows you to see into myriad worlds of the imagination.

It can be found here... https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByVeZxlFO74FWTZTQkJrUUNtZW8/edit?hl=en-GB&forcehl=1

I find the community over at Nanowrimo to be to one directed. So is anyone doing National Novel Writing Month this year? I am thinking of doing it with a solo rpg/writing element, but dorf fortificationing is also an option on some days.

Baffler, where do you see the year. In fact there are quite a few numbers on my screen that I have no idea what they are for. Like the ones in the lower right hand screen or across from the name in the saved game list.

Weekend so insanely blissfuily crazy that I had no time for my dorfs. Tis a shame, lonely in that old hole, I hope this evening I can get to them.

So glad I could provide the space for such sentimental value