Slobbovia: a rich fantasy world created through a play-by-mail game
On Play This Thing, Greg Costikyan reviews Slobbovia, a collaborative writing exercise disguised as a game:
To call Slobbovia a Diplomacy variant is, however, misleading; the game purposefully had no victory conditions, and the formal game itself served as little more than a framework for structuring a written roleplaying game. The postal Diplomacy hobby has a tradition of "press," whereby a player may, each turn, include a written statement that is published with the turn's results (e.g., "The Office of the Kaiser today announced..."). In Slobbovia, press was the focus of the game, rather than a minor adjunct.SlobboviaIn other words, it was a form of collaborative story-telling in written form; each player had a single "main" character, but could also introduce subsidiary characters. An tacit rule prohibited killing off another player without his permission, and it was considered polite to get a player's input and permission if you intended to include one of his characters in a scene. Events in the ongoing story would certainly cause players to change their behavior in the underlying game, and vice versa, but no one seriously tried to play the game in a min-max, win or die kind of way.
A typical issue of the Slobinpolit Zhurnal, the fanzine that carried the game, would have more thsn 100 pages of prose, and perhaps 3 pages of game results.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_Slobbovia
"this world-building eventually produced so rococo an artifact that joining and participating became daunting to prospective players."
A faimiliar experience in many world-building RPGs...
I've played in a Aria/Fudge variant Interactive History / world-building game (yes, it is a bit hard to categorise!) for about ten years called Celandra (http://wiki.phoenyx.net/wiki/bin/view/Celandra/), with its own fascinating theologies, cosmologies, sociologies that scores of several generations of players have developed and written about, layer upon layer. Enjoyable stuff - and always fascinating to see how ideas of often very different origins interact/mesh...
Um, yeah. Welcome to the world of PBEMs. They can be amazingly fun and satisfying.
Here's one I have yet to try, but it looks wonderfully fun! Stick Figure Fantasy is a game where you collaboratively draw a story, panel by panel, decide on the "official" panels and end up with a completely drawn story in the style of a standard fantasy RPG (see, for example, Order of the Stick).
Now that I think about it, PBEM might be a great way to run a Stick Figure Fantasy game. Just need to find a halfway decent online drawing program.
Hey Slobbovia Upper and Lower were invented in the early 1980's as battle grounds for our 15mm Napoleonic miniature battles (really not making this up ask the Boyces!)!!! Wheres our money? You better not dare to use the Polish fishing village in Switzerland scenario Or there will be hell to Pay!!!!
Some long time friends of mine were early participants in Slobbovia, but by the time I learned of it it had already become too complex to get into, though I much enjoyed their hand-me-down copies of the fanzine-like journals. I seem to vaguely recall a particularly peculiar plot line concerning the explorations of a bottomless pit via zeppelin that ran on for some time. As for these old friends, one went on to become a professor of French history in Ontario and the other a theater director in Finland. I got lost in New Jersey... a different sort of bottomless pit...