I'm quite pleased to share that my friends and I have begun a new TTRPG campaign together. We're playing through Tangled Blessings, with a few familiar faces from our previous Butterfly Court. I have a strong preference for GM-less, roleplay heavy, mechanics light settings, and love to jump right into a scene and riff off of the rules and scenarios more as loose inspiration: Tangled Blessings has been a perfect match in that regard.
We've taken it in a little bit of an unusual direction, with the older members of our cast being placed as Heads of the houses and/or professors within the cursed academy, as sort of secondary characters within the story. At the moment, I'm mostly writing Blythe Ward and Aurora Daddano-Raskolnikov, though we've already seen some appearances from Father Joel Ryder, Professor Andrey Daddano-Raskolnikov, and the ever adorable Winnie (Rory's kid sister.) Zeke is, as ever, by Rory's side, and as equally eager for cat treats as he is bloodlust.
The first session was riffing off of one of the potion making scenes- and Penelope (Manon's character) has befriended Aurora and Cassius, setting the stage for Cassius to go with Professor Esme Odile to tag along with him for a visit to the Celestial House and Penelope: where Joel is busy baking cookies. Just some preliminary stuff of working through character introductions and establishing the groundwork for future dynamics.
Jinx and I were talking about a possible plot point involving our characters: Imogen being cast as a ghost in denial of her own death, leeching off of Aurora's stray magical potential to maintain a corporeal form: much more strongly realistic and solid than other ghosts due to the prodigal quality to Rory's floodlight effect of magic.
In this AU, Andrey places repressing sigils to try to tamp down the obvious tell of her magical signature: to keep her safe from envious eyes, or explosive magic gone terribly out of hand. What happens when Parlan, Matteo's best friend, does not want his sister to die again- but Imogen's manifestation is taking a toll on his girlfriend? The dead are meant to lay sleeping: only, Imogen is doggedly determined to sit by the far side of the hill, and share cake and sweets with a brother desperate to turn back the clock...
Manon, Jinx and I have also decided it would be fun to turn the events of our campaign into a work of interactive fiction, since I've already got plans to archive the sessions, and we play in a play-by-post style, with some light editing and re-writing here and there to flesh things out, it could work out to be a fairly substantial work- Jinx and I have clocked in more writing than the King James Bible together. Good motivation for us all to keep on track with sessions, too, which I'm quite pleased about.
I pitched the idea of using a format similar to my recent release, stomping grounds, which had been a gift to Dan- where each day could represent a different scene, and players would be free to explore instances/events over the four years the campaign is meant to span, as a sort of very light gloss of interactivity.
It's a delicate balance between effort expended and scope knifing the project to pieces- and I think it's a good compromise: a nice UI, some revision to improve on spontaneous writing, and it all coheres into an interesting artifact from our campaign to explore and piece together, as we always interweave multiple threads going on at once.
It'll be nice to have that larger work simmering in the background, and built progressively- as we play once a week, for about four hours together. We're hemmed in by Manon's bedtime, which is frankly a good limitation for all of us, since otherwise it's all too easy for me and Jinx to get terribly sucked into writing into the very small hours of morning together, and we both have fallen asleep at our devices on accident. It shouldn't impede on my other projects and releases, as the energy and time I set aside for roleplaying has always been distinct from solo writing adventures.