On a quest to retrieve the lost cat of a playful god, a warrior vampire, a human-sized fairy, and an animated wizard skeleton explore a dark dungeon - following a seemingly broken compass. Entering a damp chamber, filled with bioluminescent fungi, the party unwittingly finds themselves beset by carnivorous vines and angry many-limbed mushroom creatures, upset to be disturbed from their slumber. In the ensuing battle, our characters are plunged into darkness, as the network of bioluminescence switches off. The fairy uses their magic staff as a torch - the skeleton summons a fireball to its fingers to light the way.. the vampire turns to them with bright cat-light eyes and says “My kind excel in the darkness!”
No, this isn’t a short story or a Saturday morning cartoon; this is a description of an encounter created and run by one of our Junior Creatives in our online roleplaying game and cultural exchange program - Trickster’s Net.
For those unfamiliar with traditional role-playing games (RPGs), it's an activity that mixes creative storytelling and rules-based gameplay. Traditionally played around a tabletop with pen and paper, dice, maps, or even miniatures, it initially reached prominence in the 1980s. It has seen a resurgence in popularity in modern times, with huge sales for the big names like Dungeon and Dragons, but also a thriving ‘Indie’ RPG scene that is innovative and exciting. In recent years (and especially over lockdown) the hobby has moved online, audiences watching RPGs on popular streaming sites and people playing using remote video, text chat, and even sometimes virtual tabletop.
Born from the minds of two game facilitators (Barnaby Dicker and Tom Burmeister) working in different countries, Trickster’s Net aims to bring young people from different countries together to be instrumental in the creation of a rules-light indie RPG. Using remote video technology, we’ve been able to run up to 4 game sessions a week with groups composed of a mix of German and Welsh participants. We hold fortnightly round-table design and world-building discussions to develop various areas of the game, and we’ve had our first Professional Panel, with visiting luminaries from the RPG scene giving our Junior Creatives sage advice. The final aim is to produce a free RPG product online on the gaming platform Itch.io in all three languages English, German, and Welsh. Being able to run such a project with support from Wales Arts International and part of Wales in Germany 2021 is an honour and we hope to be an example of how to make international activities using remote technology a success.
Set in a fantasy multiverse that has been torn apart and put back together by the eponymous Trickster, the game is designed to allow the ‘GM’ (Games Master: the person in charge of running the session and essentially playing the world and narrator) to use anything they like in their game, and the other player’s characters can be drawn from equally diverse backgrounds. Heavily reliant on narrative improvisation and rolling on random tables (imagine a spreadsheet with dice results down one side), the system is designed to encourage streamlined GMing with potentially little to no preparation. This is built into the structure of the project, where now each group is being GMed by a different Junior Creative each session, building upon the last GM's ideas or sometimes teleporting the players into a completely new world of their own design - and everything in between. Core to the project as been 2 motivations - to pass authorship of this project to the young people so they can bring in new mechanics and build out the fiction of the game, and to encourage cross-cultural communication, whether that's through a shared zeitgeist of modern youth culture or through shared ancient European mythology and it's archetypes.
We’ve had Welsh lovespoons, Gwyllgi, and Seigfried the Dragonslayer turn up in stories so far, and we’ll no doubt get some exciting cultural additions in the coming weeks. After a brief break for summer, we’re having our artist Max Hartley lead a discussion on his illustrations for the project, with the hope to incorporate some of our Junior Creatives' wonderful characters and stories. Almost exactly halfway through the project, we’re looking forward to how the game world and design develops.
The Trickster’s Net project received support from the International Opportunities Fund 2021-22, A2:Criw Celf, and was additionally funded by Stadt Kempten Culture Fund, working in partnership with Stadtjugendring Kempten.