Welcome to the
Saga:
KaJarsiV
dia PuroV
Welcome to the Covenant of Stoiciwmenh
Phgh (Haunted Springs). This an Online-Saga named
KaJarsiV
dia
PuroV
(Purification through fire) played by Email and online in a MUSH. Our ASG Scott wrote this introduction:
Well, this is our covenant. It's a Spring Covenant, set in 1204 (the fall
of Constantinople to the Latin Crusaders) in the tiny mountain prncipality
of the Goths (yes, just like the Goths who stormed through Rome) in the
Crimean Peninsula. It's an interesting area in which a number of different
cultures--Greeks, Goths, Cumans, Russians, and soon the Italians--all come
together in a very small place. We plan on using the new trade links
between this area and Italy to trade vis to the "civilized" Italian
covenants for books (gosh, isn't _that_ a novel idea?). We haven't decided
yet whether it's in the Tribunal of Novgorod or Thebes; the PC's will
probably have to decide this, since there are no other covenants nearby,
and so it's not entirely clear where the boundary line should lie.
This isn't a normal saga, but something of an experiment: we're conducting
the whole thing online, using both PBEM (play by email) and a MUSH
(Multiple User Shared Hallucination--sort of a chat room in which the
players can make their own rooms and objects and program them). We have
participants in the U.S., Canada, and Germany, and for a while in the U.K.
and France as well (the Frenchman left because of time constraints, while
the Englishmen left out of frustration with the way the saga was
progressing, or more accurately not progressing). The play is
troupe-style, with an Alpha SG (that would be me, Scott Orr),
a Beta (the maintainer of this very webpage),
and a new Beta that we've dubbed our "Gamma".
At the moment the Alpha handles most of the stories, as well as the
operations of the covenant itself, while the first Beta handles faerie
stories (mostly because the Alpha's maga is a boringly stereotypical
Merinita), though he does have a few other schemes he's cooking up. The
Gamma is still mulling what he wants to do.
Our plan has been to handle paperwork through the slow channel of PBEM, and
to do some role-playing there: we figured anything that was basically
discussion between players (like, say, council meetings), rather than
intense action, would work well by email, and conserve our real-time
sessions for adventures that involve a lot of spell-casting and combat
(especially since time online is somewhat expensive for our German troupe
members).
Things haven't always worked--but then, I did say this was an experiment,
right? Therefore, some tips out there for those of you who might be
considering something similar (more later as we figure out how to make this
work):
1. It's much easier to ignore a request in email than a request online.
Therefore, the most important job of the SG is to convince players that
it's important to keep up with what's going on. At the same time...
2. Don't expect things to happen immediately in PBEM. When part of your
play is over email rather than at a weekly (or whatever) session in
someone's living room, sometimes things will come to a halt for a few days
when one of the players involved in an ongoing plot goes or vacation or has
a lot to do or suffers an email server meltdown. If this happens, relax,
it's not the Manhatten Project. If it happens for too long or too often,
then you have to...
3. At the very start make it a rule that if a player is out of action for
some reason, the SG will take over his or her character, or assign the
character to another player temporarily, and make sure that character is
played as faithfully as possible (perhaps with the condition that the
player gets a veto later over particularly critical decisions). The mere
threat that this is going to happen could help convince a player to get
caught up with the action.
There are also other ways you can move things along, like by forcibly tying
up minor loose ends that the players aren't interested in dealing with, and
so on. Of course, some players may still get bored while other players are
out of action. To handle this, remember that...
4. Solo adventures work _great_ by PBEM, and those with only two players
involved don't work so bad either. Since you only have to rely on two (or
three) people, the chances of progress being stopped by one person's
vacation of heavy workload are proportionally smaller; in addition, you
never have the problem of one player putting off doing something in the
hope that another player will take care of it. And if things take an
interesting turn, it's always possible that a solo story can turn into a
story for whole troupe either PBEM or in real-time sessions....
Well, that's basically it. Feel free to look around, and please drop us a
note if you have any questions or comments.
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