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Overture to Skye |
| 2021-07-07 |
Overture to Skye
Let me translate the opening section of Trip to Skye, a recent french game by Romaric Briand, the main proponent behind the ttrpg podcast La Cellule.
I have read Romaric's book Le Maelstrom, his 2006-2014 article compilation and I think this opening to Trip to Skye is a summary of the core article, The Maelstrom. I wanted to share it, so here is my translation.
One could say it's "food for thought", but, eventually, how could I translate that to French? "carburant pour l'esprit"?
Words fly away, writings remain. Skye is the world shaped by the union of those that flew away, and those that remain.
Trip to Skye is a role-playing game.
Trip to Skye is a tabletop game in the tradition of role-playing games. The first two books Trip to Skye and Secrets of Skye form the basis of the game. They contain all the necessary rules to set up a game of Trip to Skye for two, three, four or five participants.
During a game, the participants, sitting around a table, progressively build up a maelstrom, a collective reflection organized with the goal to create, together, the fictional content of Trip to Skye.
Within this maelstrom, each participant is brainstorming. They must constantly imagine possible situations. When a participant thinks they have come up with a situation that is relevant to the game, they propose it to the others.
When someone makes a proposal, it can be accepted or refused by the other participants. If the proposal seems validated, even tacitly, it joins the sum of imaginary situations held as true within the game.
(...)
The two books aim to guide the Trip to Skye maelstroms by showing proposals that are relevant to the game. By using various descriptions, literary references, and references from computer games and movies, the books deliver the game setting, the first stones for the fictional content of Trip to Skye. Those two books also contain the rules necessary for the curation of proposals during the game.
As long as the fictional content is malleable and it presents interesting situations within the game, the maelstrom goes on and the Trip to Skye is thrilling. The game ends when one of the participants wishes it.
At the end of a session, each participant heads home with a different story, because, and here lies all the magic of role-playing games, two participants, even if they had access to the same fictional content, do not have access to the same fiction. Each participant, in their own specific story, will have been both the performer of characters and the author of the story.
