CryoLilly
Witch in the Ice
Very specific, I know, but bear with me... This post got longer than I meant it to.
In Short: I'm looking to get together with a small group of people who are interested in political intrigue. Specifically in a relatively low fantasy or urban fantasy setting. I'd love to include some magic or supernatural elements but I'm quite flexible on how much we'd want to have. I'd love this to be a collaborative venture in world building, political intrigue, courts and kingdoms, and long lasting story arcs. If any of that sparks your interest, please read on. Now... what the hell do I mean by all of that?
What do I mean by...
Note: These might well be obvious but I want to go into this stuff anyway to start off on the same page.
Collaborative World Building: I love to world build. But more than that, I love to talk about worlds, and build them through that. So the idea would be to have a group discussion about things we want to see in the world, and the way those elements interplay. One big part of this will be trying to keep a sort of "Yes, and" mentality, to steal a phrase from improv. I know as well as anybody that it can be super easy to get an idea in your head about what you want out of a world and try to stick to it, but because it's a group developed world, I'm going to resist ever saying outright 'no' to something, and I'll hope anybody involved joins me in that.
Political Intrigue: Well, first off I want to make sure nobody thinks I'm talking about IRL politics here. While politics has a play in everything we do, that is very much not the focus of this stuff. No, instead I want to write about things like the maneuvering of different players in royal courts. It's a little obvious of an example, but think of some of the plot elements of Game of Thrones. A noblewoman gathering support by spreading carefully crafted lies, or maybe even truths, about the royal advisor who opposed her suggestion before the royal family. Courts are usually the most obvious example, but I'm also interested in more modern and urban fantasy settings for building social power. Think Vampire the Masquerade if you're familiar.
How will this work?
One of the biggest and most obvious challenges to a collaborative story like this, especially one focused on intrigue is how to keep things secret from one another. Especially in political intrigue. If the story is built around the idea of deals wrought in shadow and secrecy, but we all know what is happening in the world and decide together on how the NPCs behave, how does that work? Well the simple answer is probably trust. Trusting people not to metagame too hard on this stuff, and trying to be conscious of the fact that we are not our characters. But we can also do a few things to help with that, for one things, PMs can help to keep communication between two characters quiet, though for the benefit of everyone involved, it might be worthwhile mentioning if two characters are having those private, In Character conversations. I'm sure there are lots of other ways we can handle this and I'm very open to suggestions.
Now onto the meat of things. First of all OOC communication will probably be the bread and butter of this stuff, and absolutely crucial to get it to work well. This means that before we start, talking about what the world is like, figuring out some major players, and then developing characters to slot into that. In terms of NPCs and how they behave, they'll probably be controlled by everyone involved, but the person to first conceptualize them should have some weight in deciding things about that character. We'll probably have to come up with some amount of history for them, private motivations and goals, but how deep we go into that probably depends on how much we want to do about it, and how big a part that character plays, it's not like we need to make Jimmy the stable hand a complex and well developed character when for the most part he's really just set dressing.
The Setting
So I've dropped a couple hints as to what my inclination for the setting would be, but it's also going to be up to us as a group to figure it out. Personally I'm torn.
My first thought is of a sort of low fantasy setting, with some amount of magic, set in the royal court of a king or queen, involving the influence of neighbouring nations, and the interests of nobility holding land. We'd probably be playing some mid level characters trying to expand our influence and manipulate those above and below us, for our own interests, or even altruistic ones.
The second thought would be something more along the lines of a Vampire the Masquerade like setting, urban fantasy with supernatural elements forming the stage on which to play out similar things to the above concept. In this case, I imagine it might be more fun to play characters a little newer onto the scene trying to build power and break into the structures in place that until recently were veiled from their awareness.
In either case we'll have to figure out the rules of the setting, what kind of magic and supernatural elements we want, and what the power structures are. As a note I'm not particularly motivated to angle this towards romance from the get go, but that doesn't mean it's not a possible story beat for any of our characters, it's probably another one of those things to talk about.
----------------
And that's about all I got for now. If any of the above ideas interest you guys, or if you have your own that reading this sparked, let me know! I just have this loose concept for now and I'd love to play around with it and come up with something more solid that we can use for our setting. Thanks for getting this far!
In Short: I'm looking to get together with a small group of people who are interested in political intrigue. Specifically in a relatively low fantasy or urban fantasy setting. I'd love to include some magic or supernatural elements but I'm quite flexible on how much we'd want to have. I'd love this to be a collaborative venture in world building, political intrigue, courts and kingdoms, and long lasting story arcs. If any of that sparks your interest, please read on. Now... what the hell do I mean by all of that?
What do I mean by...
Note: These might well be obvious but I want to go into this stuff anyway to start off on the same page.
Collaborative World Building: I love to world build. But more than that, I love to talk about worlds, and build them through that. So the idea would be to have a group discussion about things we want to see in the world, and the way those elements interplay. One big part of this will be trying to keep a sort of "Yes, and" mentality, to steal a phrase from improv. I know as well as anybody that it can be super easy to get an idea in your head about what you want out of a world and try to stick to it, but because it's a group developed world, I'm going to resist ever saying outright 'no' to something, and I'll hope anybody involved joins me in that.
Political Intrigue: Well, first off I want to make sure nobody thinks I'm talking about IRL politics here. While politics has a play in everything we do, that is very much not the focus of this stuff. No, instead I want to write about things like the maneuvering of different players in royal courts. It's a little obvious of an example, but think of some of the plot elements of Game of Thrones. A noblewoman gathering support by spreading carefully crafted lies, or maybe even truths, about the royal advisor who opposed her suggestion before the royal family. Courts are usually the most obvious example, but I'm also interested in more modern and urban fantasy settings for building social power. Think Vampire the Masquerade if you're familiar.
How will this work?
One of the biggest and most obvious challenges to a collaborative story like this, especially one focused on intrigue is how to keep things secret from one another. Especially in political intrigue. If the story is built around the idea of deals wrought in shadow and secrecy, but we all know what is happening in the world and decide together on how the NPCs behave, how does that work? Well the simple answer is probably trust. Trusting people not to metagame too hard on this stuff, and trying to be conscious of the fact that we are not our characters. But we can also do a few things to help with that, for one things, PMs can help to keep communication between two characters quiet, though for the benefit of everyone involved, it might be worthwhile mentioning if two characters are having those private, In Character conversations. I'm sure there are lots of other ways we can handle this and I'm very open to suggestions.
Now onto the meat of things. First of all OOC communication will probably be the bread and butter of this stuff, and absolutely crucial to get it to work well. This means that before we start, talking about what the world is like, figuring out some major players, and then developing characters to slot into that. In terms of NPCs and how they behave, they'll probably be controlled by everyone involved, but the person to first conceptualize them should have some weight in deciding things about that character. We'll probably have to come up with some amount of history for them, private motivations and goals, but how deep we go into that probably depends on how much we want to do about it, and how big a part that character plays, it's not like we need to make Jimmy the stable hand a complex and well developed character when for the most part he's really just set dressing.
The Setting
So I've dropped a couple hints as to what my inclination for the setting would be, but it's also going to be up to us as a group to figure it out. Personally I'm torn.
My first thought is of a sort of low fantasy setting, with some amount of magic, set in the royal court of a king or queen, involving the influence of neighbouring nations, and the interests of nobility holding land. We'd probably be playing some mid level characters trying to expand our influence and manipulate those above and below us, for our own interests, or even altruistic ones.
The second thought would be something more along the lines of a Vampire the Masquerade like setting, urban fantasy with supernatural elements forming the stage on which to play out similar things to the above concept. In this case, I imagine it might be more fun to play characters a little newer onto the scene trying to build power and break into the structures in place that until recently were veiled from their awareness.
In either case we'll have to figure out the rules of the setting, what kind of magic and supernatural elements we want, and what the power structures are. As a note I'm not particularly motivated to angle this towards romance from the get go, but that doesn't mean it's not a possible story beat for any of our characters, it's probably another one of those things to talk about.
----------------
And that's about all I got for now. If any of the above ideas interest you guys, or if you have your own that reading this sparked, let me know! I just have this loose concept for now and I'd love to play around with it and come up with something more solid that we can use for our setting. Thanks for getting this far!
To help build a world setting and to get to make new friends 
