Every couple of years I dip my toes back into some collaborative RPG “design” online space or other, and quickly realize that this is not really working for me.
I do not trust these spaces. In a quite specific way: Experience (mine at least) shows that most of them collapse – not necessarily community collapse, though that can play into it, I mean technical collapse. They vanish, go offline. For any number of reasons, some understandable, some less so, but in any case beyond my own control.
Every time I experiment with joining one or more of them, I come to the realization that this makes them close to worthless to me. What I want most out of these spaces is … documentation. The theoretical beauty of them over simply having a conversation in any other format is that they over a (more or less) structured record of the ideas developed. It is that record I am after. More than just the record, I am after long-term (permanent, even) accessibilty of the record. I want to be able to come back to it, re-examine it, pick it up again. As reality shows that the spaces lack stability (permanence), this core functionality is not met. If I want permament access, I need a personal archive … if I have a personal archive anyway, maintaining the record on a communal space becomes redundant (and not in a risk mitigation way, but in an inefficiency way).
But then … there is Tarua Katoc.
Perhaps my perfect storm. At least something, that draws me back in – again and again – after more than 20(!) years.
To disenchant this a bit: The space those 20 years ago really did only one thing – it facilitated Waldviech, his initial idea, and myself crossing paths. What we did afterwards could have been done anywhere, in any format and was only partially collaborative in any case. But as we happened to have met in a communal space we continued to work there.
To disenchant this a bit more: Tarua Katoc was not really finalised. In some way it was, in others not.
And yet, this is the entchament: The persisting scratch, the call for mother-of-pearl. The spellbinding vision of the last cut and polish needed to make it complete.
Tarua Katoc is – amongst other things – a pulp tradition Sword & Sorcery-Tradition game. It is – amongst other things – a game sketching out the rise and fall of civilisatiosn – you could perhaps say that it is not a game of Howard’s Conan stories, but a game of Howard’s writings on the Hyborian Age itself, a game of (cyclic) history.
It is there that this last … incompleteness is to be found, that keeps me returning to Tarua Katoc and the rules I wrote decades ago. There are some seemingly simple approaches to resolve it (the simplest: implement strict episode- and generation-based play, every adventure a time jump and a change of characters), but none really, fully managed to fill the hole, to scratch the itch.
Again back to the drawing board. (Starting from material kept in a personal archive.)
Currently Listening: Princess Chelsea, Monkey Eats Bananas