Story, Flavor & Continuity: the other side of design

[Rando]

This project has been underway for quite some time now.  If we wish to complete it within, say, the next 2 years, then there are topics that need to be discussed and descisions that need to be made.

Though I seem to come and go at odd intervals and fail to visit the boards for long streches of time, I really do care about this project.  Otherwise, I would not keep coming back.  This is obviously the best, most well thought-out and serious of Homemade Card forums I've seen.  The cards posted here in our Master List are very tangible.  It does not take much imagination to envision them as real, printed cards.  Most other Homemade card forums are filled with over-powered, under-priced crap that are mostly just geeky wet-dreams.  What we have here seems much more real, to me.

The first set under construction is a hodge-podge of ideas and story elements.  I think that is fine.  It really does not differ much from Alpha/Beta in that it leaves a lot to the players imagination to fill in gaps and speculate on stories that the characters and places we've created could be involved.

However, and I think that most agree on this, the other 2+ sets should have more of a definitive plot.  The first set sets the stage, the following sets play out the story.  This will take a great deal of work.  

I think the first thing that needs to be done is for the Master list to scoured for the characters and place names that we ourselves have created.  This info should then be compiled and a concrete millux created, complete with a map of the world this will be set in and a bit of what little history and events are hinted at in our flavor texts.  A World Book of sorts should be created that all designers here could reference for the sake of clarity and continuity.

Second, I think that people should be asigned the roles of story editor, flavor text editor, rules editor and continuity editor.  Because this is a hobby and none of us are paid to do this (and thus will not always be able and willing to work on it regularly), it may be best for a head editor and co-editor be asigned to each of the above jobs.  

At any rate, it just seems to me that if this set and other sets are going to happen any time soon then very real work needs to begin in these departments.

[Matt]

Well, our first set is almost done. Blue turned out to suck way more than we thought, so that's delaying it, but Ephraim's doing a lot of good work on getting that color up to speed (even as I personally have been slacking off a bit), much as I did for red about a year ago. Had blue been keeping pace with the others, we'd probably be in beta-testing for limited right now. We could feasibly have our first draft complete by Thanksgiving, and that's because we took the "hodgepodge" approach to flavor.

It's also an approach I enjoy a lot when Wizards does it - Beta had it, Legends had it in spades. Mirrodin had a taste of it (it felt more like exploring a new world than telling a story), and so did Arabian Nights. Not just a shortcut, it's a respectable choice.

[Jacob Orlove]

If we really want to do a complete story, I'd prefer one with:

1. Cool characters that appear only in flavor text--not as actual legends (eg Jaya Ballard, Zur the Enchanter)

2. Much less of a plot focus, and more of a cohesive world exploration (like Fallen Empires, sort of)

3. flavor text that ties things together without being dumb (Fallen Empires 4L)

4. None of this "The map has five zones, and each zone has one color, and each color has one creature group" nonsense. We can do better than that. Admittedly, there was some of this in IA and FE, but Mirage managed to avoid a lot of it.

I think the three story based sets that I'd most like to imitate are Fallen Empires, Ice Age, and Mirage. I'd be fine with having a set that drew inspiration from them. However, I didn't really like the flavor for Alliances or Visions quite as much. I'm not sure we'd want the second set to be some kind of plot resolution.

I do like our current Legends-esque approach a lot, though.