November projects: After action reports

... Wow, you step away for six months due to having a baby, and all this cool stuff happens!!

I was very confusedly following Timothy's posts, as one of his wordpress followers, but had no real idea of the context in which he was writing. If it's not too much trouble, would you other authors who posted regularly in the "November Challenge" post links to your wordpress sites, all in one thread? Perhaps it's already out there, and I have yet to find the thread....

And I'm still looking for the Mythic Maghreb....

Mythic Australia. Why should the Europeans have all the fun?

...because Mythic Aboriginies are too hard to write?

You know how Tom Kenneally said he wouldn't have written The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith if he had his time over again?

As a non-indigenous author, its very difficult to win, when writing about Aboriginies. If you make them too nice, then they aren't real, they are Rousseauean cyphers of the noble savage. If you write about real people, like Bennelong, people think you are using him to typify his race, and he's a muderous thug, arguably, so you can't win there. You get into all these questions about "If you are playing a black woman, is life in the colony safer for you?" which are still highly charged even today. You get the whole "In RPGs we kill people and take their stuff, so should we do the Dispersals and have XP based on the land (treasure) we grab?" thing.

Mythic Australia sucks to write, IMO.

(That being said, yes, I ma working on something about failed colonies. Not as a Ars project, just Indie. I think the British attempts to set up colonies in Ghana are fascinating as a part of precursoral Australian history.)

I know you guys need some rest, Timothy :wink: When is said 'let's not wait for November', i did not mean 'let's start tomorrow!'. Early-mid 2012 is fine with me.
And without some of you who participated in the NaGaDeMon, I'm not sure we will get the same level of quality and innovation in the collab - since not all of us are as used to publishing material as you guys.

I've been working on some colony/slavery stories as well a while back, located in the Danish West Indies (St. Thomas, St. Croix, St. Martin).
But i found it very hard to tell the story convincingly and 'correctly' without insulting anyone.
And each time i reviewed my material, I could tell that I hadn't really nailed the combination of tension, frustration and simple beauty of the actual history on the Islands.
On another note, my old group of players were quite used to acting rather freely within their environment, making it diffcult for them acting the role of a sugar-farmer slave on an isolated island :slight_smile: And that type of story seems to me, at least, to be more suited as a 'one-shot' RPG experience, than something to base a Setting or Saga around.

I'd like stories in a Setting to be varied, so i like the idea of being able to use neighbouring islands to add to the flavour of the whole. Also, whenever you get different cultures or fractions grouped together like that, the stories seem to unfold more easily and become much more dynamic.