It’s remarkable what can be created from so little. It’s all the more remarkable for the number of times I’ve told myself I cannot create something because I don’t have time. In only two-and-a-half hours at the weekend, I helped create a world from scratch and played a one-off campaign in it. To be ultra clear: was prepared beforehand. In fact, the only real rule in the game was you prepare beforehand. Otherwise, in You Awaken in a Strange Place, a pen-and-paper RPG, everything is created on the spot.
You establish the entire game world and rules, collaboratively, at the beginning. Individually, the game-master asks you questions that will shape the world. One person thinks of a genre, one person thinks of a place, and one person thinks of an adjective about that place. We think up “a steamy steampunk library” – you can see how on-the-spot it is.
Then we individually make statements about the world, which become the rules and reality of it. The library is underwater, we say, trains can fly, and then, unexpectedly, the library is also alive. Then we briefly join the dots. Maybe the library is inside a leviathan. Maybe you need the trains to travel across the sea to find it. But how do you get in? Whirlpools! That’s how you find it and how you jump in.
Then we make our characters. “Bertie, who are you?” That’s how long you get to think. “Um, I’m a skeleton and I wear a skin cloak and pretend to be human. I’m very old but I have a bad memory so I carry a journal to remind me what to do. And I’m called Fiddles, um, Clanky.” With me are a half-octopus engineer called Kruk, and a professor of metaphysics with a laser eye and a mechanical arm, called Rowan. There’s no limit here but your imagination.