Latest Projects

I am having fun with several projects this week.

Rob Grassi and I are working with his Levity roleplaying system, which is intended to be a basic system for educational role plays. He works in Italy, and I spent last week editing the English-language version of the rules for clarity. It is a wonderful game with lots of possibilities. There are several great ideas for gaming with groups of students, ranging from collectively running a single character to mixing separate stories back and forth. Rob has already written a scenario, "Pharsalus - Night Mission," in which the players perform a mission for Caesar. Rob's plan and mine is to develop a series of single-sheet educational scenarios. If you'd like to be part of this, let us know!

Secondly, this past week I wrote an educator's review of Adventures in Oz by F. Douglas Wall. If all goes well, the review should soon be up at the Escapist's Reading, Writing, and Roleplaying web site. The game also has a fine blog, interesting both for the game itself and for following the development of such a game. Kids have really enjoyed playing the game, and I look forward to incorporating it as an activity to help students develop writing ideas.

Finally, the big game in my own life this coming week is Tut, a historical LARP I run with my class every time that we study ancient Egypt. It runs all year on Friday afternoons, and my students portray the thirty most powerful people in and around the court of Tutankamun, the Boy King. It's a costume soap opera with lots of plotting and drama, and it pulls them into all of the other activities we do. School has been in session for several weeks now, and we spent much of the last week camping as a class in the Carolina mountains. I know them well enough as individuals and as a group to cast them in their parts, and that was my task during the trip. While they hiked, climbed, and rode the zip lines, I sorted them by interests, abilities, and personalities into various roles as priests, nobles, generals, and bureaucrats. I run a game like this every school year, so kids arrive in my class knowing that it's coming, and they are excited. Many are counting down the hours until they get their character packets, each loaded with details, goals, and secrets.

We start up the game this coming Friday, so I'm sure I'll have more to write after that!

Have fun!