Above: Role-Playing Game Design student Ren speaks to other group members about an aspect of the game they're creating (working title: The Church of Holy Chaos)
There's always something exciting happening in the Blue Room. Functioning both as our Board Game Studio as well as a classroom space for courses and electives, you never quite know what you'll find going on in there. You might stumble across a group of students around the ping-pong table during an especially intense ping-pong match, a bunch of first-time Catan players learning the rules of the game, or a massive line of Chess boards getting set up for an upcoming tournament. If you stop by during a course period, you'll find the creative and ambitious students of Role-Playing Game Design.
Students in Role-Playing Game Design are given the exciting and complex task of creating a game set in a realm of their own invention, which they'll then test out with each other at the end of the week. This morning, during just their second-course meeting, you could already see how immersed students are in the worlds they're building. Four students in the course — Gable, Noah, Peter, and Ren — provided further insight into this fascinating course and described the inventive worlds that they've been dreaming up.
What made you decide to take Role-Playing Game Design?
Ren: I always liked playing D&D (Dungeons & Dragons). I like the way it's improvised, and you just get to say things and create random monsters and build worlds — it's really fun. And I like writing a lot — I like getting to be creative.
Gable: I've seen these types of games been played before, but I've never actually done it before, and it seemed very fun.
Noah: I've been interested in D&D for a little while, but I haven't really had a lot of opportunities to play. I was excited to have a better understanding of how we could create a campaign for a role-playing game.
Peter: I'm similar — I was interested in the idea, and I thought it'd be cool to try it out because I've never really done anything like this.
Can you talk a little about the game you're currently creating?
Ren: We were given the task to create a role-playing game campaign, and I decided to get super into it and do a horror-based campaign about cults. Basically, there's a cult called The Church of Holy Chaos that worships these two gods named Zeryndiphorus and Xyrindiphorus. The basis of the campaign is that your friend goes missing at this nightclub. So, you're looking around the nightclub, and you discover this set of stairs in a back room that you weren't supposed to find. And the stairs keep leading down, and leading down, and leading down into this huge temple. And then the campaign continues from there. It's a "Choose Your Own Adventure" game, so there are a bunch of different endings. There's an ending where you get sacrificed, there's an ending where you find your friend and escape, there's an ending where your friend turns out to be a member of the cult... There's so much opportunity for world-building — it's really fun.
Gable: Our group chose Western and Fantasy as the two genres for our campaign. So, the climax of our campaign is that there'll be a train heist, and the characters fight on the train and try to get this certain object as a weapon. The whole setting of our campaign is a desert, but the town itself is more of a fantasy town, so instead of wood, the buildings are made out of stone covered in moss.
Peter: And we also have this idea for the guns the characters use to have potions as ammunition.
Gable: So then, our idea is that at the beginning of the campaign, there'll be two players. They start off in jail, and their first mission is to break out. And then they hear about the train, so that's their goal for the rest of the game.
Is there anything else you'd like to share about your experience in this course so far?
Gable: I'd say this course has been the highlight of my first two days here. I really liked what we did in our first meeting and what we're doing right now.
Ren: I like how I get to do world-building and write campaigns and just sit and be creative for an hour and a half. It's great, and Casey (the instructor) is awesome — I'd definitely recommend it.
Above: Gable, Noah, and Peter hard at work on their game (working title: Tumbletown)