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The Hair-Carpet Weavers Q6: Implications of all this for Gaming?
What's good here for you gaming use? How does this compare to your own gaming, in either setting or scenario design? Can you think of a game system that might capture the important elements of this novel?
Comments
I'll be interested to see what scale people talk about here - the rather hand-to-mouth existence on the carpet-producing planets, or the high-tech spaceship crews, or the political empire vs rebels drama. Is it at all possible to cover more than one of these in the same game?
I could see Microscope working for this: it has the scale to address the whole thing, while still looking at the individual stories within it. Shock might work as well, if you want to create a story in one of the vignettes in the book.
I actually think this idea could work really well in a game, and sort of gets used already. The stories that begin in a little village, only for the scope of the crisis to expand as the game goes on - fairly standard. I think it would potentially be very cool to start players off in a standard low tech, non-magic world - maybe stock fantasy ish, and then as they progress through the story it turns out there are entire levels of tech that go beyond their own world. How would the smithy's daughter cope with finding out that their entire world is just a conveyor belt of output for a massive galactic fued, particularly if they don't even know that the iodea of "galactic" doesn't even exist. As a player that would be a lot of fun to explore.
Yes, starting small is a great way to integrate characters into a setting. Or having them be 'outsiders'. That way, nobody needs to learn the setting up front - it can be revealed to the players by widening their horizon one session at a time.
This scaling is also used in fantasy and SF novels - probably any secondary world setting. It's used in both the Hobbit and LOTR, and The Sword of Shanarra. It's used in The Belgariad. It's used in generation ship stories like Aldiss' Non-Stop and Heinlein's Universe. It's pretty engaging because the reader experiences the widening horizon along with the characters. In Carpet Weavers, though, the reader doesn't so much go along with the characters. The characters themselves remain rather in the same place and don't get the revelations the reader gets. The reader has more of a bird's eye view.
Oh, and about the death of the emperor, I actually had the impression that the Archivist, (what was his name? Emparad, something like that?) was actually the Emperor, just now hiding in a different role. This wasn't explicit or confirmed in the text, but that was the feeling I got. That the immortal emperor wasn't actually dead, but maybe wanted change.