An Invitation to My New Game

“Great party, Shane,” you say as you grab your coat, “by the way, how did you meet the little person, and while we talked for some time, I can’t remember his name.”

“I must have look over him, but all jokes aside, I didn’t see him, so I can’t help you. Must have been a friend of someone else,” Shane says finishing off his glass of wine.

“Huh. I would have thought the perfectly quaffed Vandyke and the blue-tinged hair on an older gentlemen would be pretty noticeable.” As you stumble home, you remember the ticket. Ah yeah, you have it, one entry ticket to Wyldwood Bar.

Even the description he gave you to get to this bar sounded wild. From the Gladstone city park, follow the red bandannas under the hawthorn trees…

Sorry, I guess I’m still in memoir-writing-mode, but I have an idea for a casual, role-play heavy RPG for us I call, Sitting on Moss and Jumping in Puddles where we play as either Fey denizens of this Otherworld or more normal fantasy characters, who tripped and landed in the middle of a faery circle, and now finds themselves outside time, caught at a tavern in a Feywild™ domain. Since I sent you this (or some brilliant person forwarded it to you), this might interest you.

Keep in mind that my idea is different.

The goal (at least, at the beginning) of this game is “just role play”, or maybe I should say, “not funny improv”? I mean, you make your character interesting and entertaining to everyone and do a “yes, and” to the characters other players puppet.

You won’t know any character’s name (necessarily) and with the online interface I’ve made, you won’t even know which player is playing which character, and in fact, until a player actually introduces themselves, you may only know them as “blond-braided elf”. My interface is sort of like two chat channels: one for the players and one for the characters.

The game is ultra casual, so you can drop in (and leave) any time you wish.

Does this sound fun? If so, start thinking of an interesting character you can use to entertain us all. You can log in any time you want to get a feel for the interface, and create a character (and you can create more than one character, so don’t fear commitment). You can change anything about your character (so again, don’t fear commitment).

After logging in, you can wander around the Land of Wyldwood, but the portal to the Bar (where we will all gather for the “adventure”), opens from 7 to 9pm PST on Tuesdays (once you are in the bar, you can stay as long as you want).

Let me clarify my choice of using the word “adventure” in the previous paragraph. As a GM, I will be bringing interesting NPCs and events to this “Bar,” that you, as a character, can “address,” but my vision focuses on the player’s characters. Perhaps you can think of the first few sesssions, as an extended Session Zero. After a bit (if we find it fun), I will start to add exploration, puzzles, and maybe combat. If you have questions about this, reach out.

While I am still planning on a bi-weekly game at my place, we’ll play this game online weekly on Tuesday evenings starting on Tuesday the 27th of May.

I am basing the underlying rules on Knave (an overly simple OSR RPG), but the interface that I’ve created will gloss over that, so nothing really to learn there. The interface I’ve programmed has an online help system and a tutorial to walk you through how to play, but what follows is a one page summary of how to use this game interface:

First, log in via https://www.howardabrams.com/cozy and click the Enter button (if you would rather not use a web browser, you can install any MUD application, and connect to howardabrams.com at port 4000). Next, create an account by typing: 

create username password

And just use your name for the username and swap out a more interesting password. You will then log into the system each time, by typing: 

connect username password

The first time you log in, you enter the character creator, a text-base wizard interface, where you can type back and next to answer prompts answering questions about your character. You will need to answer the following:

  1. Short Description, like beardless dwarf or tall, blond elf, etc.
  2. Set Gender for pronouns: male, female, neutral or ambiguous.
  3. Character’s “Pose”, like smoking a pipe, or just smiling. You will change this often, but if anyone looks around the area, they will see something like: beardless dwarf smoking a pipe
  4. Long Description is a full description that if anyone looks particularly at your character, this is what they see.
  5. Character’s Name is mostly for you to keep track of your characters.

That’s it for making a character. I mentioned this before, but I’ll say it again, during the game, you can change everything about your character, so if you aren’t sure, start with anything.

To play, you basically type commands. Again, the game has a tutorial for new characters to walk you through this process, but the key ones we will use for role playing include:

say

Type say and a phrase to say something so that everyone in the area can hear that. Because we use this command so much, and we want to make the text to read more interesting, it has a number of aliases, including:

  • ask, so that it may read: 

    Beardless dwarf asks, “How are you?”

  • reply, so it may read: 

    Tall, blond elf replies, “Well, and you?”
  • respond, yell, and scream, are similar.

  • " and ' are shortcuts allowing you to type: "Greetings to have it read: 

    Beardless dwarfless says, “Greetings”

whisper

Allows you to say someone to a character that no one else will hear. So typing: 

whisper gnome = Hey there, wake up!

Will only send the message to the character matching the short description, gnome.

emote

This command allows you to state anything else, you want. Essentially turning the chat channel into a bit of a novel. For instance: 

emote grins

Will simply show: 

Beardless dwarf grins

However, entering: 

From the corner of the room, /me walks over to /elf.

Would read: 

From the corner of the room, beardless dwarf walks over to tall, blonde elf.

Hrm. Maybe I should automatically add some articles.

Why use the /me and /elf? See the next command…

recog

This command allows you to sort-of rename someone. For instance, if you knew the elf’s name was Shasta, you could type 

recog elf = Shasta

and now the previous example would read: 

From the corner of the room, beardless dwarf walks over to Shasta.

But this would be a label for a character only for you. Others may have the Elf labeled only as That bitch elf.

pub

Use this command to send a message to the out-of-character public channel. All logged in users receive these OOC messages, prefixed by your username, not your character.

Typing something like: 

pub Is anyone here yet?

Might show a transcript like: 

[Public] howard: Is anyone here yet?
[Public] rick: Yeah. I just got here.

Yes, for most client apps (including my web version), the in-character and out-of-character messages are interlaced. Not ideal, and I’m going to see if I can do something about that.

I have more commands for getting and drinking Fey cocktails, and exhibiting their effects, but that should give you an idea of how this game will be played. Nope, no audio and no visuals, so feel free to put on your favorite Fey-inspired music and ambiance and casually role play with us.

page (or tell)

Like the pub command above, this allows you to talk to another player directly. I expect we will use this primarily for talking to the GM during the game session. For instance: 

tell howard I am here.

And you might see: 

You paged howard with: 'I am here.'.
Account howard pages: Great.

While both commands do the same thing, page sounds like the user gets a notification even if they aren’t logged in. That’s not how it goes.

Perhaps you should probably create an account with your actual name, so I can keep track of who’s who. 😏