Sage not realizing that Felix and Rime were together back in the Starsworn makes me wonder just how open they were about their relationship. Now Sage is obtuse. We know that and we love him for it lol, but he’s not a complete idiot. If he fully did not realize they were seeing each other, especially with how lovey we know Felix gets, that makes me think they tried to hide it. And that makes sense! Rime referred Felix in, he didn’t do a trial so it checks out they’d try to be lowkey for a bit so people don't start saying Rime gave his lover a rank just to have him around. But they were Starsworn for a while, wouldn’t they slowly let people in on their relationship? Maybe a captain dating a soldier would be looked down on but while Felix loves the taboo, I get the feeling he would want to be Rime’s Partner eventually, right?
I'm a bit sad about Last Legacy going on hiatus, but I'm going to make some art for my MC and the various characters of LL in the meantime!
I wanted to draw a few good smooches between Killie (my MC) and Felix. Nothing fancy, but it was a good warm up and the first time I've drawn everybody's fave dramatic necromancer.
If you play LL, would you like to see me draw any specific characters in my style?
Sage doesn't remember when he fell but one fateful night spent drunkenly dancing in their shared Starsworn dorm made him realise just how hard he had fallen.
(Headcannon that the Starsworn had two-person dorms. No I don't have this specific headcannon so I can have my 'and they were roommates' moment)
I’m getting faster and better every day! I should really have some self control and not post any pics yet, but I’m just so pleased with this outfit. Crossing my fingers that it will be ready for downloads tomorrow night.
I wanted to share some thoughts in answer to some questions posed by a game designer about the principles that went into Starsworn, my coloring book, choose-your-own-adventure RPG for all ages - up now on Kickstarter with only a day to go!
If you'd prefer audio, you can listen to a podcast interview or watch a presentation on my approach in my classes (game-based, online writing classes for kids on holiday break are up now at Luck Of Legends).
Luck of Legends offers Common Core standard-aligned writing curriculum that sparks joy and wonder through collaborative story-telling games.
Marx interviews Michael Low of Luck of Legends Games about games in the classroom, education in games, and about the choose-your-own-adventu
With that said, here are some of the principles and concepts that have gone into the making of Starsworn, and some of the next steps I'm excited to take in the near future.
If you're interested and have a few minutes, read on!
Q: Who is this intended for? Why?
As a parent and teacher, I’ve been thrilled and amazed at how much kids develop learning with story games; I’ve had individual kids go from a sentence or two to hundred-page novels, and my own son now dashes off stories at a lexile level four grades higher than his own.
But weirdly, most role-playing games are technical texts - unlike video games, where you play to learn, they require you to invest time and energy in understanding how the game works before you have any “fun.” Worse, they require a lot of “invisible” skills - much like a teacher telling a student to “write a paper,” games assume all sorts of story-telling and collaborative knowledge that they don’t teach.
Starsworn is my answer to bridging that gap. It’s designed to help novices - especially teachers, parents, and kids of varying ages - leverage the awesome power of role-playing to create stories together.
Q: What’s your background? How did that contribute to the design of the game?
I’ve been teaching for more than 20 years, and making games for longer. Game design and curriculum design share a lot of common factors - you have to think about your user, how to engage their interest, how to make the unit or game build from simpler to more complex skills. Curriculum design requires you to be very conscious of where your students are; game designers are often creating for people who are already experts, so they sometimes forget to think about people outside their audience.
Running a game and running a lesson share a lot in common, too - both require you to listen, pay attention to the needs and wants of your group, ask questions, invite collaboration, adjust and attend to everyone in the room. In my classes, I use my storytelling skills, adopting voices, describing things dramatically, and engaging everyone in the shared moment. In games, I use my teacher skills, noticing who needs an excuse to engage, echoing and amplifying players who are quieter, checking in with everyone to make sure the story is one we’re all happy with.
I guess the simplest way to put it is that teaching made me a better storyteller, and storytelling games made me a better teacher!
Q: What design considerations did you need to keep in mind with this game?
Starsworn was built for several goals: first, to be a zero prep game. Story-telling - make-believe! - is one the first and most natural games. Kids don’t need to be “taught” to role-play: stick them in a room, and they’ll be dragons and ninjas and superheroes in minutes!
Adults, however, need to re-learn, and the best games help both those who struggle with make-believe AND those who want to tell better stories. Everyone knows how intimidating a blank page can be; I wanted a game that helped people get started and keep their momentum without any need for planning, pre-reading, or prep.
To that end, I used familiar game elements - coloring books and choose-your-own-adventure stories - to introduce mechanics that help make collective narratives flow and teach players to work together on engaging story arcs. The goal was each page would be simple, clear, and help you play.
Game elements are introduced gradually, working from easier, more intuitive steps like describing a character using descriptive lines, like in a story, to using those lines to form a dice pool, to more complex mechanics that help build drama and create story outlines, like Scene structure or Drama Clocks.
I always try to build for what I call “emergent complexity”; a well-built game should be easy to learn, but have depth that you are able to explore as you continue to play. A favorite example (and the best designed game I can think of!) is LEGO: the way the parts fit is intuitive, but the ways in which you can use them are almost limitless!
A final - but crucial! - design element has been provided by the cast of Stories Podcast, the largest and longest-running kid’s story pod on the web: Starsworn has its own episodes, where the cast of the pod plays through a game and plotline that runs parallel to the book! This lets kids and parents hear how a game works - how to ask and answer questions, come up with ideas, and collaborate on how to tell stories together.
Q: Why an educational RPG? What design elements make it different from hobbyist RPGs?
I like to draw a distinction between games that are “used” to teach, and games that are “designed” to teach. Any game CAN teach, but using a game to teach takes time, effort, and deep understanding. A game designed to teach, instead of having skill-building elements implied or “added” afterward, has them built into the basic mechanics, requiring less mastery of the players and supporting them in learning as they play.
In Starsworn, there are several elements of design that help build specific skills that develop story-telling, writing, and literacy.
First, character design. Characters are defined by sentences, but each tied to an element that has narrative importance: their Goal - something that motivates them or that they’re searching for, Skills that they can use to deal with problems, a Flaw that they struggle with. By thinking of characters in terms of what makes them interesting and how they might interact in a scene, players develop a sense that - according to not just students, but educators I’ve worked with like Karyn Keene, head of Ready, Study, Go academic enrichment programs - transfers to analysis. Kids who’ve had class with me are able to define book characters using these traits - identify what someone's Traits are, or their Quirks. The focus isn’t on “power,” but on what makes a character narratively interesting: what makes us want to read a story about them.
Scene structure introduces a basic approach to outlining. Scenes start with a read-aloud that “hooks” the audience - something that describes a setting and provides some drama to spark curiosity. Next, it provides a list of questions to help people “explore the scene” - anything from “who’s upset by this?” to “what’s wrong here?” The goal is to give a quick set of prompts to help people start collaborating on adding detail and drama to the story together.
When someone decides their character wants to change what’s happening with a risky act, there’s a list of ideas for Moves they can make - anything from “calm the crowd” to “climb up to rescue the kid,” for example. They can, of course, come up with any idea they like - there’s no rigid definition of how a problem can be solved. The outcomes are Triumphs and Troubles - again, a sample list with an invitation to discuss and collaborate to decide the outcome.
These Scenes eventually give way to draft sheets and invitations to players to create their own, using the hook, setting up questions for exploring the scene, Moves to make, and Triumphs and Troubles that might result. The goal is to get players used to thinking like authors - figuring out how to introduce a scene, develop it by thinking about what questions need answers, increasing drama with risky actions from characters, and resolving it by thinking through troubling and triumphant outcomes.
As the game progresses, it introduces more complex tools, and there are multiple points where players, once they’ve mastered the basics, are invited to go “off road” - to create their own tales. The goal, as with all learning, is to help build them up into independent learners - people who can use the structure provided or create their own to keep playing and writing together!
Q: Is there anything you would like readers to know concerning this game, its future, and its release?
We have a LOT of ideas for how to continue the adventures and build out the game, and this Kickstarter is part of building the momentum for those expansions. Not only are we working on a new chapter, we’re beginning a dedicated podcast for StoriesRPG, where I’ll be running games for Daniel Hinds and the cast of Stories Podcast to give families another way to listen, learn, and fall in love with the story-telling experience of role-playing. These podcasts will, just like Starsworn, have play-at-home adventures for a parallel plotline, so listeners can create their own tales in the same world - or build their own!
I'm also hoping to release video courses to help educators, parents, and anyone who wants to use games to help people learn to write - it's not just a craft, but an art, and a lot of it requires practice.
