[GAMING] Warcraft: Kenanyah Petroglyph

[jordangreywolf]

One "perk" of being stuck in airports and on the plane a lot for work is that ... well ... I have nothing better to do than to read a book or draw some doodles, and I'm fresh out of books to read, so ... DOODLES!

For Gwendel's online RP group, I get the sense that a lot of the "drama" issues I hinted at earlier have been at least semi-resolved. The people who seemed to have been giving Gwendel the most grief seem to have had a habit of giving other people grief, too (imagine that!) and eventually seem to have moved on to bigger and better things to waste their time on. At least for now.

Anyway, I confess that it has been some fun to finally get a tour of areas in so many expansions I missed. Pandaria is gorgeous, Northrend is more than just snow, and I especially liked the building style of Gilneas. Both my primary characters (Kenanyah and Raynelle) are up high enough level that they can fly around everywhere, and can even visit Pandaria ... but there are still issues due to "phasing." That is, in the weirdness of Warcraft, what *level* you're at impacts at what point you are in the "storyline" of the adventures. Gwendel herself ran afoul of that when she made some in-character comments about visiting "Darnassus," when in the "present" (for level-120 characters, at least), that giant tree-city is now just a big smoldering ruin. (Oh, sure, you can still visit the pre-destroyed Darnassus, since there are golden dragons more than happy to let you break the laws of time and space to go finish up all your old quests, but I consider it only reasonable that for role-playing purposes, most folks aren't going to assume that time travel is such a casual thing.)

Kenanyah Petroglyph (Stonecarving), Priest and Cartographer


My primary character, as stated before, is Kenanyah (formerly spelled "Kenaniah" but ... "that name is not available"). He would introduce himself as Kenanyah Petroglyph, but the more common translation into the common tongue for his Dwarven surname would be "Stonecarving." By class, he's a priest, but his primary role is that of a surveyor and cartographer, traveling the lands of Azeroth and visiting those areas most disrupted by the land-churning effects of the Cataclysm. Even though that's been 5-10 years (depending upon which standard you use to measure the passage of time in the MMO) ago, there's still quite a lot of work to be done, to update all those old charts and maps.



In the course of his exploration, he has sometimes come across ancient Titan ruins or other relics of interest -- all of which is reported back to the League of Explorers. He really has no business poking around in ancient ruins like that on his own, and should he run across such a thing, he's more likely to call upon more experienced adventurers to investigate, on behalf of the League. (In other words, I'm considering this as a possible "hook" for future online RP opportunities, with Kenanyah acting as "questgiver" and my on-the-spot "GM avatar." Or something like that. I'm still just in "observer status" as far as Gwendel's online RP guild is concerned, and trying to get a feel for how they do these things.)



Trying to "GM" something in an MMO is something of a challenge. On a completely text-based environment such as Sinai, it would all be "theater of the mind," and it's up to me to come up with detailed descriptions that I *hope* would set the scene. For a tabletop game we'd be using terrain and minis -- or, again, I could go "theater of the mind" as needed, maybe even have a few handouts. For VTT (virtual tabletop -- Fantasy Grounds, etc.), I could either run it much like Sinai and rely on the chat window for text, rely on Teamspeak for around-the-table narrative, and/or use the built-in windows for sharing a map with "pogs" for characters, and illustrations to show characters and locations and maps and puzzles and such.

On Warcraft? We all travel to Arathi Highlands or Dun Morogh or wherever to serve as the setting, we use our character "avatars" to play parts (and we need to level them up to even be able to VISIT the location we're using as a setting), and we might play "day for night" or IMAGINE that the low-level mobs who keep popping up and occasionally "aggro'ing" and attacking us aren't "really" there ... but we still have a very limited toybox of props to work with, and a lot of assumptions get made based on what we see in-game versus what was in the chatbox narrative.

I've been trying to figure out how to best work in such an environment. I'm reminded of my LARP days, when we'd go out to the park and use some outdoor picnic-table-strewn shelter and PRETEND that it's a castle, and THIS PART (drag some tables around to form a "wall") is the antechamber, and THIS PART over here is the dragon's lair, and this big wooden jewelry box is the treasure chest, and those two guys with the silly foam mask and foam-and-cloth "wings" are the dragon, and ... you get the idea. The game isn't really designed to be a "sandboxy" plaything for our virtual imaginings, so we run into all sorts of arbitrary constraints. I'm not sure I could really do a "dungeon" RPG in the conventional sense. But what I *can* do is doodle, and I can scan the doodles, and post them somewhere and link to them, so maybe I can at least have a few "handouts" to help paint the picture of various relics and maps and other details the PCs encounter.

The above picture is a "relic" I dreamed up (actual purpose unknown, but probably a relic of the "Titans"), partially inspired by an old wooden "brain-teaser" 3D puzzle-toy from when I was a kid. Maybe I could use things like this as "props" for some sort of little mystery-puzzle-focused adventure (and steer AWAY from things like combat as much as possible, and leave that to other "GMs" to bother with). I can't really give the players "treasure" as a result of their efforts, but perhaps I can entertain them through interesting descriptions and doodles to look at?

I guess we'll see.

Comments

[tuftears]

Great pics! I always enjoyed following Brann around when he did the archaeology thing.

[rowyn]

Good luck with RP in WoW! I never did much RP in MMOs because so much about the game mechanics interfered with any sense of story for me. Koogrr was really good at it, I think because he'd make the RP be about the character interaction and development more than about any particular quest or goal.