Gaming Tie-Ins Already?

[dr_pretentious]

An old grad school friend and former GM of mine is preparing to start an online Mage: The Awakening campaign based loosely on "Atlantis Cranks Need Not Apply." How weird is that? I'm downright gleeful about it. He's currently calling it "Atlantis Cranks, Unfortunately, In Charge." Go, Steve!

Can I achieve publication? Who the hell knows. But apparently I can inspire spin-offs.

Comments

[newroticgirl.livejournal.com]

That is soooooo cool!

I am so happy.

[jaime-sama.livejournal.com]

This totally makes my day. :)

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

Oh, superb! Hey, it's one way to get word of mouth demand for your work :D

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Admittedly, the people he's likeliest to recruit as players are other old grad school friends, some of whom have already read the ms. The thing that amuses me is that Steve was out there in Texas, thinking to himself, "What campaigns might I run?" and thought of a way to use my work as a springboard. How he's going to make it work exactly, I don't know. I mean, the problem that sets my plot off involves a collision of millenia-old supernatural secrets with global warming, but the story itself is on a very domestic scale. How he'll adapt that to his habitual cataclysmic hack-and-slashery is a mystery to me. (Steve is really very good at cataclysmic hack-and-slashery.) And I've told him I don't want to know the details, because I have other stories in mind for the characters in "Atlantis Cranks."

It just reinforces my sense that I could grow a readership, if I once got the work out there.

[monotreme.livejournal.com]

He's planning to run a different style of campaign in a play-by-post setting. When you play-by-post, lurid descriptions, personal ads, and other stuff can all be a bigger part of it.

[anghara.livejournal.com]

So - if your novel gets oublished AFER the game - would that make the novel the tie-in to the game...? [grin]

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

It's not publication, really. He'll be running the campaign online, but it'll just be himself and a handful of players adapting the premise to an existing gaming system. I'm sure there's a term for this that fanfic writers or more devoted gamers would know. There's nobody for developing a detailed taxonomy like the fanfic community.

[shakti-lemaris.livejournal.com]

That is really cool!

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

YAY! That's fabulous.

[kistha.livejournal.com]

Whee-hee!

And you'd totally have an audience sweetie, I don't think that's what you have to worry about.

Really it's just the luck/work of getting published and then you'll be off like a rocket!

[sppeterson.livejournal.com]

Hey Sarah!

I'm happy you don't mind me riffing on your story. I think the term for what I'm doing is... let me see here... ah, yes, stealing. One nice thing about RPGs is that one can un-self-consciously steal things for their home games -- like entire campaigns set around the X-Men or having a 50th level Darth Vader anti-paladin as the nemesis for your AD&D group.

Atlantis Cranks Need Not Apply is a great title -- the kind of title that I think would get people to pull even a spine out version off a shelf and take a look. And I think the quirky humor coupled to the characters' realistic reactions to finding out the world is rather weird give it a unique flavor, and would bring people back to further stories in the setting. After all, if Atlantis is real, what other legends are real?

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Stealing is a venerable literary tradition. Everyone ought to know how to do it.

When I came up with that title, I cackled with glee off and on for about half an hour. My big projects just have working titles that I wouldn't pine for if the books sold and some production department decided to change them, but I would be really bummed if I couldn't keep calling the novella by what does seem to be its true name.

Some other legends are real in Jane's New Jersey, and some definitely aren't. Neither Jane nor Ria is really right about how the world works. Their New Jersey is weirder than either of them knows.

New England makes sense for your campaign, though. You do steal Lovecraft well.

And here I didn't even know you were on lj.