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...which is stupid I know, which is why I'm also working on a smaller project in the same setting.

There was a game I joined the site to create, before swiftly realizing I was too lazy and disorganized and had no idea what I was doing, didn't know how to write or script or do anything but mindlessly browse Netflix every night.

But years have passed, and I'm no longer as disorganized! I'm going to try this again.

I'm in love with the idea of roleplaying through a simulation, I just want to create a big world and give the player a task to complete in their own way. The game I had in mind would have centered on an Olympics level racing event on an alien planet with big reptiles filling in for horses, where you could experience a traditional storygame adventure, or raise the animals, or participate in the randomly scripted challenges of a race in person.

Mizal might remember talking to me about this game, she made a few suggestions and read a Google doc on the setting, or at least was kind enough to pretend. She had suggested at the time that if I didn't want to scale it down it could he a better fit to make with the Skybreak program, but I think I've figured out how to structure some things to be a little saner in a CYOA engine now without compromising the original idea too much.

What I'm doing now is a single short adventure leading to a smaller race, just a little sample slice of what the full project would be like.
(I probably will never REALLY finish the big project so I hope the little one will be fun enough on it's own.)

My next post is going to be the two pages I wrote tonight. Together they're about 1300 words. Any thoughts are appreciated, but keep in mind this is very rough, once set up within the game I might try to spread it around and make the leisurely evening at the tavern more interactive.

I guess the main thing I'm interested in is how well it works as an introduction to the setting. Is there too much information? Too little? I was really resisting the urge to elaborate on a number of terms and details.

The town of Cromby's Mine, more of a village really, is an uninspiring collection of flat roofed, one story buildings clinging to the arable fringe of Locket's Socket.

Both the mines and this side of the Socket were stripped clean of anything of value decades ago, but the thing that kept Cromby's on the map were the displacers installed in the tunnels. The Displacement Network, powered by something called the molecular stream, had been state of the art technology put in by early investors back before the mines went bust. With these, loads of ore and supplies could be transported swiftly from one cargo pad to another all along the rim and interior of the Socket and to the settlements beyond.

Until recently, anyway. Over the last four years, one by one the delicate crystals in the pathing chips had burned themselves out. Since the Separation there's been no way to get replacement crystals, they're too precious for a sleepy little place like Cromby's. The town can still get by on farming, racerbeast ranching, and the little subsidy you all get for being Humans, considered a disadvantaged minority by the Gruundarian Consolate. But there's no reason for anyone else to come out here now, business has dried up and it's only a matter of time until people start moving away.

Your name is Cotte Collins. Born and raised in Cromby, you never minded the backwoods nature of the town, though you always wanted to raise your own racerbeasts. Not the common breeds in the local herds, but something like an Ashy Blue or a Whitedancer, the kind you see in the Grand Races.

You rent racerbeasts from local ranchers to practice your riding, and sometimes help move herds from place to place. Your actual dayjob though had been helping to maintain the displacer network in the area, making the uncomfortable, sometimes risky ride out to the cargo pads on racerback whenever they needed cleaning or repairs to operate.

With very little to do now from one week to the next, you've taken to passing the time playing games of cards and dice in the dumpy little tavern, waiting for your luck to change.



Page 2



It started out a good day in the unoriginally named Cromby's Only Tavern when you and your gaming pals managed to nab the one table that had all four feet sitting firmly on the floor, with no rickety wobbling at your every move. It got even better when half a dozen guys and gals from the writing club arrived to read their stories and essays on the subject of "Who was Mikal Cromby?"

The real Cromby as everyone here unfortunately learned in school, was an offworlder who used a 5 million credit loan from his mother to buy an overwhelming share of the mining rights here, then traded them off a couple of years later in another sterile transaction from light years away. There are only two bland sentences in the database to mark the totality of his interaction with the planet Gert, and that is so astonishingly lame that you and your fellow Crombites have collectively agreed to ignore it. Instead, town tradition is for every creatively inclined member to substitute their own, more exciting reality, tall tales about the founder's increasingly elaborate and improbable adventures spun out in every possible medium.

You listen to an edgy tale of misplaced love and murder, then another about Cromby battling lake monsters during an apocalyptic flood of the bone dry Socket.

Then, for a short time the day gets worse as you lose 40 credits on a bad draw at Asteroid Cracker.

"Getcha anything to drink, hon?" the waitress asks, swooping in on the winner the moment the money is transferred and the holographic board dismissed. The girl obligingly offers to buy you and the other losers a round.

"Tea, please," you say. You never waste money on the alcohol here at Cromby's Only Tavern, yours or anybody else's. In fact, years ago the two Furnir boys you took music theory with had cheekily painted a note in stark black letters under the sign on the side of the building. It now read:

Cromby's Only Tavern
Yes, we water down our ale.
What are you going to do about it, go somewhere else? Hah!

And the tight-fisted old couple who owned the place had been so delightedly unashamed of the God's honest truth, they'd never even tried to paint over it. The tea though, that was from herbs grown out back and always good.

You're on your second steaming cup and the day has ticked back up a notch when your holoviewer chimes with the evening updates. The small, unobtrusive device is an inch long, on a chain around your wrist next to your credit reader and a couple of other necessities, mixed in with decorative charms and a seashell from Earth.

Activating it, the text flashes up at a comfortable distance and you quickly browse the items of interest, out of the corner of your eye seeing others doing the same. There's never much news in Cromby's Mine you don't hear about firsthand before anyone has a chance to write about it, but this is your way of keeping up with the wider world and especially the other towns around Locket's Socket.

One article immediately catches your eye: one of the twenty worldwide qualifiers for the Grand Race will be held in exactly two month's time at the Weltering Shelter, which is just about directly across the Socket from here, as the keerag flies, and then another ten miles across the salt flats. On racerback it's about a week's ride if conditions are good, you've made the trip before.

That alone would have gotten your attention, you'd love to attend a qualifier in person. Especially in the first round when anyone can enter, they can be full of surprises. But it's when delving deeper into the details that you see it.

The prizes are unusually lavish for this phase of the Race. You suspect the Mayor of Weltering had something to do with that, trying to attract higher profile racers to their side of the Socket. The big prizes the winner gets first pick from include a massive pile of credits, a vacation to a lunar resort....but there's another that suddenly rivets you to reality and sends your day flying up over the moons at the same time.

Sitting there in that dingy tavern, surrounded by the companionable chatter of people you've known all your life, feeling a flush of sudden warmth and a buzzing in your head that can have nothing to do with the watered down ale you never even drank, you realize you're reading a salvage list from a pre-Separation ship. Not as glitzy as the rest, but the materials are even more valuable to someone that knows what to do with them. And right there written in letters of light you see three large sheets of pathing crystal wafers. Enough to make hundreds of the chips the Displacement Network needs and power the molecular stream for a century or more, even expand it.

For the next few days, that's all you can think about. It seems both a complete fantasy to even hope to take the prize, and at the same time like it's destiny.

You do know one thing though: there's no way to win unless you try. So that's why today you have an appointment with Leonine Triggs. A retired star pilot who now lives on a ranch with his wife, an hour outside of Cromby's Mine. You've done some work for them, and you know that Mr. Triggs is the only one out here who raises REAL racers, thoroughbreds with papers. You've of course come out here with a proposal for him.

Sounds pretty cool. Cromby give me Nostrilia vibes, did you read that? I love "Racerbeast" it's a name that sounds awsome and a the same time is close enough to "Wildebeest, Hartebeest, ..." to sound plausible.

Regarding the writing, try to cut the slack a little: "the thing that kept Cromby's on the map" -> "What kept Comby's on the map", "something called molecular steam" -> "molecular steam" (you can put it in quotation marks if you want to emphasize that the narrator doesn't really know what it is), maybe even "stripped clean of anything valuable" -> "stripped clean", etc.

Minor issue: the first line doesn't quite work for me. In principle, the "more of a ..." is cool and adds a lot of flavor. But since the place is called "Cromby's Mine" it comes right after Mine so I read "Cromby's Mine, more of a village really." That gave me a pause (of course it's a village not a mine). If you don't want to confuse distracted people like me you have to do something to move "town" directly in front of that comma. "Cromby's mine, is hardly a town, more of a village really..."

*Norstrilia

"Nostrilia" sounds like an Australian nasal spray!

I'd never heard of those books, but they look interesting, I'll add them to my reading list!

I will definitely be tweaking the opening a little still, thank you for the suggestions.

Only one book, the other is a nasal spray ;)

Oh, it's two shorter stories in one book, I see. But it looks like it's part of a bigger universe.

Cordwainer Smith is an interesting character himself. Adviser to JFK, CIA agent, psychological warfare expert, and political analyst, and his godfather was Sun Yat-sen.

That should be "too much information" but now I've locked myself out. No idea how that happened, it's too much infuriating graaaah!

I have fixed the infuriating autocorrect. If you are a fellow Android swipe typer, trust me I know your pain

I am a little drunk if I'm not making a lot of sense, but I wasn't while I was writing.

Ah yes I remember those days, back when I read things.

I deadass just looked at your registration date and went to myself, "wow, that was really only three years ago?" And here I don't even have drunk to excuse my brain. I'm obviously in no condition to critique any writing right now, but what you have is nice in places, a little meandering in others. But that's not a bad thing if I'm reading the tone you're going for right. Spreading these and other setting details around among actual actions you can choose may help, although I also didn't feel overwhelmed with info at any point. You've cut down the distracting fantasy language words a lot from the other thing I saw iirc.

Now that I'm more awake, I really am glad you're excited about working on a game again. The actual writing even as a rough draft, if I saw this as the first two pages of a storygame I'd be intrigued enough to continue. There's always room for improvement, but I don't think your actual writing ability is anything you need to be too worried about, I'd just focus on putting the game together and going back to edit later.

Thank you Mizal, the plan is to just forge ahead to get the basic framework down, then go back in and fill in details and polish. Ultimately even for this smaller game I'd like to have a lot of optional content and rewards for trying different things, but I know how bad I an at finishing things so I'm trying not to go too crazy with the ideas right now.

I did play Skybreak fwiw and I think you were right that that engine would make more sense for what I had in mind. But you were right about the downsides too, and in the end if I'm putting a ton of work into a project I'd want it to be sure it could be played by this community.

Can you find our old PM chain on this and respond to it by the way? I imagine you would've have a much clicking to go back that far as I would.

This does sound pretty interesting, particularly some of the world building aspects. Particularly the hints at the general tech level without just info dumping is well handled. It would be difficult to simplify the coding needed to support the various systems you are suggesting, so I will be interested to see how you work those out. I hope you post some code snippets as you develop them.

I'm glad you noticed the technology, I've put a lot of thought into it and the reasons for keeping what's available to the player pretty uneven. Just like in real life, just because technology exists doesn't mean that everyone can access it, and sometimes it seems backwards. There are people with cell phones who don't have reliable access to clean water.

The actual racing portion of the game may rely a lot on random events, which I relied on articles for, but if I figure out any interesting shortcuts I may mention them here.

But what happened to Nugget????

In the end the whole town had to join the search party, but he is okay!

Trying to figure out a sane compromise on variables is where I'm at right now.