After participating in this G+ video conversation about play-by-post I checked out the Storium kickstarter, backed it and promptly started playing, then started narrating a few games, then started looking at worlds that I was never sure what to do with and putting them into Storium’s terms and narrating those games.

It has been fun.

I’m narrating 3 games:

• Trauma in the NE Sprawl, which is my way of using an old blog post’s cyberpunk setting, and giving the game a first-go.

New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington D.C., Albany, and Baltimore all reached out and became a single, cyclopean urban tumor.

There is always someone out there somewhere bleeding in the NE Sprawl.

Maybe you are a trauma crew EMT or maybe you perpetrate the trauma. Perhaps the light of the armored ambo’s lights flash against your apartment wall while you figure out how to eek out a living in the sprawl.

Characters will be an ensemble whose lives will cross and intersect over the course of play.

• The Looking Glass, the Cyclone, the Wardrobe and the Second Star to the Right, which is my way of using a different old blog post’s setting idea and trying a finite game with a set structure and definite end-point.

You came back from that other world no longer a child, changed, not a grown-up but certainly changed and no longer innocent. No one believed you. When you returned from your epic journey, people at best treated your life-changing adventure like a flight of fancy and at worse like a mental illness.

Fuck that – you never forgot.

Once you get to one otherworld, it isn’t too hard to gain access to others. Your childhood was wondrous strange, curiouser and curiouser.

Now you are trying to grow up back in the Real, figuring out playground rules the way you did the rules to other worlds.

NARRATOR’S NOTE: I’d like to experiment with finite games. So, here’s the deal. We are going to have 3 scenes. 1 as kids at school, 1 as teens at prom and another as middle aged adults at the reunion. Then we’ll be done.

I’m going to take the first 3 characters I dig and start it up. My hope is that we’ll be done inside of two to three weeks.

• $pace, my way of getting together with old friends and playing by pbp with folks who are spread hither and yon but used to get together regularly at the table.

In which we make money in space via odd jobs, bounty hunting and spaceship repossession.

I’m playing in 4 games and they are all moving along pretty slowly. Rather than tell you about my character, I’ll just post my character pics blow, from top to bottom, they are Goat, Old Dog, Seelah and Stubborn Mule 5.6:

I’m enjoying Storium so far. I’m fascinated with the fast card-based chargen and the way Narrators can make up 2 or 3 dozen cards and have a playable world to start rocking out in. The way the cards allow us to attach art makes the game visual in a fun way and have me thinking more and more about open content art.

I like the way conflicts are divvied up into Strong and Weak outcomes and the players kind of choose which one occurs by which cards they play on which conflicts. Some conflicts aren’t winnable by one lone character, forcing folks to work together and interact with the same fictional bits and bobs. Some conflicts aren’t able to be won in a clean fashion at all, forcing Weak, dramatic conflicts that remind me of a 7-9 result in Apocalypse World.

I’m curious to see where it all goes:

• how much fiddly control narrators will have over the Storium implied system as the game evolves with time
• the worlds designed by the published writers as stretch goals
• how publishing one’s own world via Storium will shake out

I’d like to be able to:

• have multiple scenes going at the same time
• have more ways to interact with games I’m not playing in
• have more ways to applaud a cool thing
• have more ways to make it easier to tweet a cool 140 character moment

I’m there and I’m playing. If the glacial pace of play-by-post is your thing, c’mon over and give it a shot.