Last week marked the public unveiling of Karthador, the swashbuckling pulp sci-fi roleplaying game I’ve been developing for Reality Blurs (and mentioned a couple times here on the blog). While saner folks were celebrating Labor Day with cook-outs and general strikes, I was running games at the local game convention.
As you’d expect, I’ve put a lot of thought into the world of Karthador: the geography, the politics, the economy — all those topics that bored me to tears in school are suddenly packed with Thrilling Plot Potential when applied to an exotic alien world full of rayguns and dinosaurs.
While defining these thing has been fun — in its own geeky, “I love creating storyworlds” sort of way — the exercise is pointless until the world is shared. A setting without an audience is an empty place, a hollow shell containing nothing but echoes of it creator’s words.
So I was a little giddy when, in a hotel suite full of strangers, Karthador’s purpose was finally fulfilled. As the characters stepped out of their airship and onto the muddy, rain-spattered streets of a jungle trading town, Karthador was transformed from a thing on my hard drive to a place for adventure.
No longer just an artifact, it’s now a world.
And that’s pretty cool.
