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Arisia Panel

I was super excited this morning to see my listing for Arisia 2013: World Building in Role-playing Games. This was one of five panels I applied to, and probably either second or third in terms of my preference (there is a panel on the Future of School with my good friend David Nuremburg that I was angling for but alas as of now it appears to have not happened).

World Building is one of my favorite aspects of role-playing actually, the one the I spend the most time on and the primary reason I don't actually play characters as much. I paint maps, I construct histories, I build languages, I tinker with vanilla RPG rules to accommodate newly made races. I think one of the reasons I consider role-playing fun and writing a craft is with RPG's I'm devoting all my energy on things that I do not consider work at all. Writing, with the messy collisions of characters and plot, is more of a challenge. A good challenge but still...

I will be posting more about the panel, what I'm reading and thinking about, as Arisia approaches but for the moment my thoughts center on the use of indie RPG's like Microscope, Universalis, and Prime Time Adventures to set up worlds that are later fleshed out in crunchier systems (DnD, Burning Wheel, etc.) I realize not everyone plays RPG's for the purpose of creating fictional worlds but that's certainly the perspective I'm going to bring.


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