Seeds of Fire in Dream

(Repost from Story Games because I’m at work and can’t re-write it yet)

So I have been try­ing for three Sun­days in a row to get a group together to play Spirit of the Cen­tury in Sec­ond Life, and just this Sun­day I suc­ceeded. We had a group of three: myself, and two oth­ers, and we got to play with some of our Sec­ond Life coded object toys to help assist play. 

We used Sec­ond Life voice and some in-world dice that actu­ally “roll” — they bounce against each other using the Havok III Physics Engine and come up with some pretty good ran­dom­ness as a result and we had some coded Fate Chips that could be “spent.” 

It was a lit­tle annoy­ing get­ting all the lit­tle bits together– took about an hour to make every­thing work with each other. But once that was done, we were off and running. 

The scene we had went well, and it bodes well for the next time we’re going to play. At one point Sec­ond Life had a bit of a prob­lem with its code data­base and so we couldn’t quite use the fate chips, but that’s OK — I just kept track of what had or hadn’t been spent separately. 

Now, I was try­ing to keep it sim­ple at first, but SL offers a few things that don’t appear on other shared gam­ing spaces: I can pipe music to my game through Shout­cast, I can bring up a web page and dis­play it on the mas­sive video screen, I can use in-world graphics. 

As a visual aid I had the FATE Lad­der on a “sign” that was easy for the play­ers to see. 

Two of us dressed in Pulp-style cos­tume, which was fun but not required. 

I still think table­top via SL is viable, but I would *love* to see how it does as a vir­tual LARP. 

If you’d like to know more about this game, stay tuned for how you might participate!