Thursday, February 27, 2014

After the End

Sharpen your pitchforks and march in an orderly mob to the castle: we're ALIIIIVE again! Turns out I'm better at generally de-crappifying my life than I anticipated. Either that, or I'm prone to melodramatic fits of depression. Maybe both!


Regardless, now that the SUE files story is largely finished, I need something new to type about; the remaining bits of Marty's sage GMing advice and what of his backstory survives are all rather tepid. He's only really vile in practice. In theory, sane people parse some of his ideas as reasonable, even enjoyable, but I think we can go back one more step. The ideas he thought he had are even cooler.


If we remove his obsession with stealing the canon of better authors, the basis of his meta-narrative becomes a lot more intriguing; in demanding that everything his avatar did be "real", he discarded a lot of opportunities to play around with the concept of a variably real world or collection of worlds. I'd like to exploit those, so let's make a setting, shall we? Marty's already provided us with a superb B-list villain for it.


That's the plan, for however many posts it takes: rather than building an excuse to steal canons, I'm going to semi-seriously try to construct a setting around Marty's original idea of worlds being dreams, or something. Less canon-Borging, more Psychonauts with (effective) deicide. Along the way, I'll mention his advice on writing, especially RPG writing, whenever (discarding) it would be relevant, and in the end we'll have something free and funny and maybe even playable.


As far as system is concerned: For the moment, I'm thinking it's going to be easiest to integrate everything via HERO 6. I know M&M 6th has fanfolks: at some point I'll convert it over, assuming we last that long, but I'm more used to HERO's math.


Unfortunately, I'm stuck flying around the country on graduate interviews for the next few weeks, so posting will be slow, but once it gets going, I would really appreciate criticism. Of the setting, at least.