Muse:Musette Playtest 1:Story Content

Step 4: Determine Player Goals

Paul, if it's ok with you, I can just randomly determine goals for everyone. I'll email you the results and we can keep them offline so as not to ruin the game. Does that sound good? Or do you have an alternate suggestion?

--Jonathan

Yeah, sounds good! We won't be able to make it a fully competitive game, anyway, since we can see each other's hands, and the "hidden" cards in the Desires (unless you have an idea for handling this, like some kind of code and key system).

Just make sure you follow something like the actual procedure, as opposed to just assigning goals randomly, which could turn into everyone having the same goal for a particular desire or something similar.

--Paul

Step 3: Filling Out the Story Outline Sheet

This is underway on here: Muse:Musette Playtest 1:Story Outline Sheet

Step 2: Generate the Story Outline

We decided on 3 players

Brainstorming for story elements: Muse:Musette_Playtest_1:Brainstorm_Sheet

Step 1: Decide on Genre and Tone

How about a film noir spy story set in modern Georgia?

--Jonathan

OK. I don't know much about Georgia, though. Is a vague fictionalized Georgia OK?

Also, "film noir" and "spy film/story" are two very different things to me. Can you give a two or three-sentence kind of "snapshot" of what the genre you're envisioning is like? And you can go right ahead into the next step after that.

--Paul

To me film noir evokes the movie Casablanca--it's black & white, has lots of close-ups, it's crime drama, people smoke, it's set in or around the Great Depression era, it features moral ambiguity and sexual motivation. Try reading the plot of Casablanca for a little bit of inspiration: [[1]]

A spy story involves governments or other organizations (e.g. multinational corporations) spying on each other using agents, satellites, by intercepting communications, etc. It could be low-key (no crazy gadgets) or over-the-top or some mix of both.

Hence a film noir spy story would be a black & white story of smokers, with close-ups and moral ambiguity, incolving organizations spying on each other. I just picked Georgia because it's become a battleground between super-powers (the US and Russia). I don't know if this is the real story, but from what I've heard it seems that Georgia was encouraged by the US (probably with money and/or military equipment and/or the promise of political aid) to raid its independant pro-Russian provinces. The US wanted to test Russia's strength, while Georgia wanted its provinces back. Russia responded very decisively by crushing Georgia's military and showing without doubt that it could have taken over Georgia if it had wanted to. The US was not able to intervene directly because that would reveal its involvement in the affair. There's a lot of room here for spy stories of various kinds (heck, you could probably have a whole campaign).

Note: I know next to nothing about Georgia, so a vague fictionalized Georgia is fine with me!

Does that sound fine for you? If this seems too politically charged or kind of hard for you to get into, please feel free to suggest other options. This is really just the first thing I thought about... Anyway, I've added some brainstormed story elements in Muse:Musette Playtest 1:Brainstorm Sheet

--Jonathan

Although I'm having trouble seeing how a film noir can fit in a middle Asian setting like this. But let's just do it! (Hmmm, maybe I need to watch Casablanca again...)

--Paul