Over the past few weeks, we’ve developed Empire of Venom & Silk, a fun fantasy storyworld full of grim heroics and giant spiders. That’s cool, but it’s also pointless.
A storyworld exists so that we can tell stories within it. Those stories can take many different forms: short fiction, long novels, video games, interactive trading card apps, holiday movies on the Hallmark channel… the list is endless. But if we never actually tell any of those stories, the storyworld doesn’t matter. It’s just a bare, lonely canvas without a stroke of paint on it.
So while I continue to refine the details of our web-covered land, I’m mulling over what stories we can tell in it, and what form those stories will take. Fiction seems an obvious choice (rumor has it novelist James Shade has a few idea for such an endeavor). And yes, I’m fully intending to do a tabletop RPG, since that’s exactly the sort of thing I do.
But over the weekend, I had an idea for another story. Another game. Specifically, a cooperative board game in which the players work together to defeat the spider menace.
It’s little more than series of notes at the moment, but I’ll be fleshing it out here on the blog, where I’ll be answering questions, collecting suggestions, and generally demonstrating the process (not unlike what I’ve been doing with Doomed Colony). Will it be any good? Come back on Wednesday and we’ll start finding out together.
