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 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3835049 So I write a CYOA by the name of Blake Island School of Magic. It's a game done in Shadowrun fifth edition. As much as I love Shadowrun, it's abandoned part of what made it cyberpunk while keeping the aesthetics. I'm going back to cyberpunk's roots by taking on politics, specifically fascism, racism, class, poverty, corruption and also adding in the themes of community and nature into the mix. This is a story with these themes, but I don't moralize directly at you like some sci-fi book from the 1960's or 1970's. Instead, I look at all of these themes through the eyes of young people, hence the name Blake Island School of Magic. The story started because I grew incredibly, incredibly ill and wanted to polish my old skillset as a professional writer. I wasn't Chaucer by any means or on the NY Times best seller list, but I filled my fridge with groceries and paid my rent for a time as a writer. And I wanted to take a stab at something outside of the big moneymaker genre that I used to write (romance). I expected to write something that's maybe 20k words. A novelette basically. The story has ballooned into five books and within the next few weeks I'll be starting book six. These are not pulp novels either. I'm someone who knows his way around a story writing seriously about politics, power, race, oppression, all that jazz, which were my fields of study in college and for a while I worked in politics as well as the equivalent of a foot soldier, so I got to see how the sausage was made. Blake Island is my passion project. If I were working for CGL they would not let me make this or allow me to make the changes that I do. A lot of these are aesthetic. But the main problem as to why I wouldn't get a green light from editors is because this story in the Shadowrun universe is not about shadowrunners. It is about young people dealing with a world which is at times hostile and indifferent to them. They come from harsh backgrounds and I've thrust them into a school that teaches magic (specifically shamanism) to the children of the corporate elite, because you don't really get to pick your magical affinity. And the friction between them and the elite boils over at times. I wrote this starting in 2017 as a way of processing my feelings of Trump being elected as I write a lot about fascism. The world suddenly stopped making sense and was run by people for whom cruelty was the point. So I went back to the last time that this was a serious problem and this was the 1980's. The days of Reagan. Cyberpunk emerged from this time and Shadowrun was part of this. Often silly, often violent, often over the top like a show from the 1980's, I decided to explore the themes that are present in Shadowrun instead of merely hosing them down in bullets and calling it a day without actually needing to think about them too hard. Plus at most tabletop groups you're going to have someone, possibly multiple someones who are flat out not going to want to explore these themes because they conflict with their own political ideologies or they just want to play an ork with a samurai sword. To each their own, but because I'm writing it I get to do what I like. What did we learn? How to be a better writer Over the last year and a half I've sunk probably ten-thousand hours into the project. I'm an obsessive storyboarder and for every thousand words you see (which takes me about an hour) there is probably about five-hundred words of storyboard or rolling. So most of the chapters are extremely tightly scripted and have a polish that makes me proud. And because I'm running this in Shadowrun fifth edition with characters sheets and everything, I'm able to do a full simulation. Shadowrun is a mess of a system, but it has rules and splatbooks for just about everything. So I will run social and the occasional combat encounter pulling no punches. Success and failure are not chosen by me beforehand nor does the thread have full control either. I'll get to this down below. But because I roll dice for just about every social encounter with stakes, it takes a lot of the load off me narratively and I respond to the dice and thread decisions. It means that instead of focusong on what everyone is going to do, I roll dice and puzzle out an interesting story. The social guy is going to be smooth and talk people into stuff. The slightly awkward huntress with the reputation that overshadows her by far won't have much of a chance in talking to Joe Average, but where she's known people treat her with respect. And the nerdy spellcaster sucks at talking to pretty much everyone. And I mention social stuff because about 75-85% of rolls are social. They don't shoot their way through life. Etiquette is perhaps the most used skill, though when the knives need to come out, those combat skills are super important. In any case, I've just become a better writer by sinking in the time. I enjoy writing this and want to continue, but also want to start my own books once again. I'm think fantasy and I'm probably going to continue a CYOA series of mine that is on hiatus. Audience Participation So unlike most CYOA's, I don't normally give a discreet list of decisions to choose from. The rails (usually) don't exist. There is a direction that I want the story to go, but if people want to take a detour, I go that direction. So for example in the book I'm currently writing (book five) the thread wanted to have a reprisal raid on a human supremacist stronghold as they were targeting another character for what happened all the way back in book one. That was not my plan. Instead of saying no and digging in my heels I worked with it and pushed a different shadowrun (basically a mercenary job) to a different book. Also in that same book when people responded to who I thought was going to maybe be a third string character, I upgraded her to secondary character, of main character adjacent because she was so well liked. I'm responsive to the thread and I take direction from them because they often genuinely have better ideas than I do or offer nuggets or interesting facts or wisdom that I don't personally possess. Priorities change Part of writing teens and being invested in them is that the thread's priorities change. Problems are not solved by murdering people, though beating the hell out of people is a solid, go to tactic. It turns out that murdering people for regular people (if powerful) as a problem solving technique is a big deal. To date, none of the characters have killed anyone through a choice of the thread despite that probably being the easy choice in the short term in a game and genre where life is considered cheap, if not often worthless. One of the most interesting choices that happened early on was getting the character educated where she was illiterate and uneducated before. Solving one of these would have been necessary, but the thread threw themselves at the problem of the character not being educated. In a normal game of Shadowrun, those experience points buying off those bad qualities probably would have been dumped into stats. In this story or game, what have you, she learns not only how to read, but is excited about educating herself. And there have been times where educating herself has been critical to the survival of herself and others. What do I wish I did differently? At the beginning I lifted two concepts from other people. One was a named character, though just the name and a distinctive phrase from Eclipse Phase. These things bother me. In my defense I wasn't taking it seriously at the time and I don't do that anymore. I was also constantly dizzy for about two weeks straight at the beginning and I blame that partially on my bad decision making, though not all of it. Mea Culpa. Also, and I realized this about a month into writing, people could make distinctions between Harry Potter and my story because it's about a magic school. I am kicking myself for this, but also enjoying it to an extent at the same time because it means that there is a built in interest. So instead of having wizards wave around wands and shout nonsense, stop learning core classes like math, science and English at grade six, I actually have them do that. Also I know a thing or two about shamanism and shamanic practice and I play that straight. I don't straight up lift the religious practices of other people because I find that offensive, but many nature worshipping religions share commonalities and I've built a rough ideology based around isolation and understanding ones' place in the food chain. Not religious, but primal. They haven't delved too deeply into that yet as they're still learning the basics, but they'll start delving into that come book six and seven. Also I'm still crap at editing. I wish I was a better editor.
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Jan 24, 2019 23:04
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 22:27 |
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