Notebook 2a - Circa late 1990s

This is one of my oldest surviving notebooks, and it's so packed with ideas that I'll split the overview into 2 parts...

It begins with an idea I had called "New Hope City", I can also see some old geocities web addresses written inside the front cover, so that's the first piece of evidence I'm using to pick my date of late 1990s for this notebook (I wonder if those links still work at any level).

"New Hope City" is an idea I've revisited a few times over the years, but it's never managed to get anywhere beyond a short campaign, and a couple of visits during various plane hopping and dimension jumping stories.

We can start to see ideas that will be common through this notebook, where I had an absolute fascination with tying the Kabbalistic Tree of Life into a game system. This goes on for almost twenty pages, and there is a gradual shift from the "New Hope City" setting to the ethereal "Floating World" setting that I developed with my collaborator at the time, Dave Chandraratnam. (I wonder what happened to Dave, I might try to track him down again some time).

The first time I tried to run this setting, it was at a convention, using a bunch of characters archetypes from Palladium's Rifts, but a really stripped back version of the system. The idea was to have these characters explore a mysterious alien city, gradually allowing them to add their own ideas to flesh out concepts we might not have though about. This was once of my first attempts at collaborative worldbuilding, and at a convention we were running about 10 sessions in quick succession over a 3 day period. I remember that we had fairly free access to a ten story building for that game, with an elevator (on the campus of the University of NSW). So we set up a different part of the city on each level. The first game we had 6 players, the second session we had much the same, but over the course of the convention, more players wanted to take part, and some of the players from previous sessions wanted to play again... so at the end we had up to 20 players, spread between 2 GMs.

Here is where we started really quantifying the setting based on those sessions...

Then we get to the magic of the setting, which was clearly an idea that has stuck in my head ever since then. We have a bunch of magical types, and a bunch of factions, each of which has associated magical words that get mixed and matched into magical effects. Basically the same sort of thing that I'm still doing with the game "Familiar".

Next, we find a page where I try to get some cross cultural influences in the game. I'd forgotten about this, but when looking at the page, I remember sitting at a desk in the Fisher Library at the University of Sydney with translating dictionaries trying to find appropriate words in Japanese and Tibetan which could be used to flavour certain effects in the game... then researching further into the traditions these words were associated with in the other languages compared to their associations in English. I didn't get miuch fiurther, thinking that the cultural connections were deeper than my surface veneer was giving them credit for...and a lot of these ideas were abandoned. However, it was the late 90s and I was trying...

This page gets into the new system I was developing for that setting, It lays the groundwork for a lot of the ideas that have stuck in many of my games over the years, including the four attributes of Physical/Social/Mental/Spiritual, and the idea of backgrounds that tie characters into their world (Yes, it was a blatant appropriation of White Wolf's Storyteller system...but that was what I was predominantly playing at the time).

In typical 1990s style, there came the lists of powers... completing lists like this can be tedious, and I clearly thought so back then, because many lists like this in the notebook are incomplete. My game design theory moved from prescriptive to descriptive, rather than forcing characters to choose from defined lists of powers, I shifted to the idea that players should be able to create abilities of their own within a defined framework.

...and the we move to the idea I discovered around that time, where the 22 Major Arcana of the tarot link to the paths between the sephirot of the Tree of Life. So I created storylines for that setting linked to the cards.

...and then numerology came into it...

A lot of these notebooks were used to archive events that were unfolding during the big live actions campaigns I was a part of, and several of the names I'm seeing here confirm the placement of the notebook in the late 90s.

These names don't particularly mean much any more, I'm sure the players behind them remember fragments of the events, I'm sure that if there are other notebooks like this around we could piece together quite an elaborate tale. Actually, one of the fun parts of those games was talking to the game storytellers and co-ordinators after the event and finding out what they had managed uncover as characters interacted with one another is a vast amorphous collective that couldn't be reasonably controlled by a single person. It was even more fun when I became one of those game organisers later... but these notes date back to the time when I was a player, first exposed to games with 200+ players.