labcats | Blue Rose, Hogwarts, 1st Quest

A comment on Blue Rose in Alarums & Excursions has got me going through it, trying to get together a hybrid of review, analysis, and how I'd do it.

What I'd wanted Blue Rose to be is a sort of generic "How to Do This Genre From the Ground Up". What I got was a specific setting -- but one flawed enough in concept that I actually can use it to identify the tropes of the genre. But, like many things which are flawed in interesting ways, I want to keep picking at the world of Aldea and figure out how I'd tweak it.

I'm also realizing that there are more sources of Romantic Fantasy than the authors listed, including some that explain some of the odder tropes of Blue Rose. Once one realizes that Patricia C. Wrede's book are in that genre, the existence of the Vata and the Sea Folk make more sense.

I read Shadow Magic for the first time.

mnemex had recently re-read it. And we both agreed on what the key moment of the book was, an utterly corny, utterly wonderful moment. In both his edition and mine, by coincidence or design, one has to turn the page right before the key line of dialogue is uttered. It's beautiful.

Then, I read Daughter of Witches, which is clearly set after Shadow Magic. Wow. It's not ground breaking, but it's a solid, good read. And, rereading Blue Rose, I see that it is possible to use the tropes of "good, egalitarian, magic using country" and "bad, oppressive, magic distrusting country" and pull it off so that I don't have a problem with the book.

Meanwhile,

brianrogers's Hufflepuff & Ravenclaw game has started a bunch of us thinking of a short term Hogwarts game, running the houses the way we think Rowling should have done them.

For both of these, the rules I'd like to use are still under construction. I'd like to use

judd_sonofbert's 1st Quest system, which is his modification of Clinton Nixon's The Shadows of Yesterday. 1st Quest is designed for what I want to do with Hogwarts and Aldea. It is there to create the world, via player consensus, and to design stat pools, abilities, and other perks the same way. This is what I've been wanting for the Romantic Fantasy genre without realizing it.

Romantic Fantasy, as defined by the authors of Blue Rose is a subgenre of YA fantasy fiction. Hogwarts? YA, start to finish. And, in both cases, the kind of game I'd run -- or that any of my friends might run -- would involve a lot of group consensus. 1st Quest should have the right combination of set up coolness and system crunch -- not too much to make my eyes glaze over, not so little that I'd need to graft another system on -- for me.

I could, of course, be wrong. But, I can't wait to test the theory.