Once Upon a Strand...

My second least favorite part of the process of making a game is the History. Sometimes I feel like a man of the present. I look towards tomorrow instead of dwelling on yesterday. But in order for other people to understand why I am making WindBorne Riding a skill or why the Tarantulas are ruling over the cities of man, I need some written history to show what I've been thinking.

The History of a role-playing game should reflect the overall feel of the game. The tone of the writing is reflective of the atmosphere. If you use a lot of puns in your history of the game, it will come off as being a joke. If you use nothing but serious speech then, it becomes a mission. Dark cynicisms written into the history may create the feeling of "humor is the only thing we've got in this dark and dismal world". So how you write your history is just as important and what you put in it.

What does one say about the history of a world? One of my favorite descriptions on how to build a new role-playing world is "What don't you want in it?" That is to say a world is as much defined by what you want in it as what you do not want in it. Let's take a good look at Arachnia.

Arachnia is a game about being a spider in both versions. The Storyteller system version of the game I want to have the same kind of atmosphere as Vampire. With this in mind I am gong to write a history that has a lot of political intrigue among the eight legged fiends. Each tribe is going to have its favorites and least favorites from among its brethern. I won't need to go too much into the past because survival in the present is more important. Going back a few years at most might be all we need to talk about. List out the who hates who, and the who has pacts with who. And that's about as far as it needs to go in relation to the spiders to spiders.

In this version however I will want to include Humans because they are the best adversaries to our tiny beasties. They will not be an ever present problem, but they will be a continual fear. Humans could exist in relatively low numbers and since technology is not really an issue to the spiders, this could be placed in any time period past, present, future.

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