Saturday 6 April 2013

Golden College Days

Another random idea for a game for grown-ups (sort of), is the epistolary campaign, although they can be tough to organise and keep going. I was in one once that sort of fell apart, in my case because the resources of Camberley public library were simply insufficient for the rigorous academic research involved. The advantages are that there is no need to get anyone together, the group can be theoretically any size and there is no need for a fixed time slot. In addition, plenty of folks really jam on serious letter writing.

Some possibilities:

1) De Profundis. Easiest, in many ways, as it requires no GM and no central organisation, but does require serious commitment from the player group.

2) Mail Call of Cthulhu. More structured than DP, this would require a GM to provide the backing plot. The two main variations would be investigator and cult focused, and it might be fun to run two games simultaneously, with one troupe playing a disparate group of investigators and the other the leaders of a set of cells in the Cthulhu cult.

Hmm...

3) Golden College Days. The concept which prompted this post: A WFRP epistolary campaign with a group of former buddies from the colleges of Altdorf stumbling on the disparate arms of an Empire-spanning conspiracy.

4) Postcards from the Hedge. A Changeling: the Lost campaign, focusing on letters and dreams, with the scattered members of a motley investigating the manifestations of their erstwhile Keeper. It would be a slightly CoCish game of Lost, but then that style suits the epistolary format, given that mythos fiction is rooted in it and takes much of its form from its constraints.

The written letter form of this concept would be rooted in a fear of electronic communication (They can intercept celphones in the Hedge, so why not elsewhere? Why not email?), and perhaps a sense of tradition drawing on the strange and feudal nature of Lost society. You could do something similar with the Invictus, of course, but most of the people I know who would jam on that already do so as a sub-game of the IoD national Requiem chronicle.

5) Munchausen by Proxy. Easily my most tasteless pun of the year to date, this would be a variation on the 'live action' Adventures of Baron Munchausen, played by mail, with the players - again, without a GM - competing in tale-telling by mail. The exact structure might need some work for this one.

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