Tower - Epilogue

 Tower - Epilogue

It has been a wild week.

To recap, this week I did a bizarre little TTRPG experiment where I ran players through a new setting I've been devising. Every night, for 6 nights, we've been playing one on one oneshot sessions of a similar but not quite the same isekai scenario. Characters created in the modern era, being seemingly stolen into waking up in a different reality and era, struggling to understand and comprehend their new existence.

My players made characters, but otherwise had no idea what they were walking in to. Some vaguelly knew that they were going to be isekai'd, but without knowing if they were going into a fantasy, or a sci-fi, into feudal Japan, or anything. Absolutely open and ready to 'yes and', they came with dice and absolutely ready to take it all in. 

Not only that, but as a test, we both recorded each session, and broadcast it live. The broadcasting was because I wished to see a little about how players would engage in their own settings (after playing a session), with each other. What parts of the plot or character would they grab onto, what questions would they have? What pieces of story would resonate, what elements would recur for each session. Not only for my own players, but for people who might not have played in my games over the years, or who were interested in just supporting the weird format of storytelling we were embarking on.

The game, The Tower Beneath this Broken Sky has been an incredible success. We had friends out of the woodwork come from all areas to support us. Messages from all over about how interesting it was, or comparing and contrasting the different paths. 3 days in, Twitch gave us affiliate (it's not actually that hard, but does take a bit of dedication and support of a community to get over the hurdle). Suz even came out and gave my first subscription!

Through it all, this has been a reminder of two major things.

First, that I am afflicted by a peculiar kind of madness when it comes to my creative endeavours. 6 days straight of 3-4 hour live sessions, compounded with preparations, warmup, designing, last minute changes, small notations and alterations to story beats and voice testing. I was popping lozenges every night just to take care of my throat. It's 4 hours of being in a weird improv two hander where the other person doesn't have the script and is flying by the seat of their pants, and I am trying to coax them with word and dice through every scene. Glorious. Also I'm utterly INSANE.

Second, that it truly does take a supportive community to raise up any creative endeavour. It couldn't have happened without Jae being there to take on a lot of the technical workload, creating from scratch a character sheet, updating, running and maintaining the stream chat and community, as well as quite literally writing pages and pages of detailed lore notes live during each session for the players. Each of the six players, for having a lot of trust, and enthusiasm, and willingness to just jump in without knowing much of anything. They told me they were anxious, horrified, excited, nervous, amazed and a hundred more adjectives. Without Lise, Ben, Hojo, Emry, Geoff and Jarrett, there would've quite literally been no story. They brought a care and skill, a full throated endorsement of gaming, an excitement to the table every night. And our many friends who came to support us, Jo, Keltie, Werd, David, Suz, and so very many more who might've lurked and hopefully had a good time.

I really want to hear how people received it, how they found the format, the story, the experiment as a whole. All of our sessions are archived on YouTube, a playlist I'll link below.

Thanks to everyone who reached out while I was going through this curious week of creative madness. I'm now going to fall over sideways and sleep for a few days straight.

Love you all.