labcats | R-maps and Spreadsheets and Larps, Oh My

Crunch time for the larps we're running, and the Spreadsheet is Your Friend.

So,

ebartley asked about working on a larp of her own. Now, you might think that this should wait until after the larps for Intercon are done, but she figured to get a jump start by tricking her subconscious into working on the one she wants to write by telling it that it is really goofing off from the other larps.

So, I go to tactic R-map. An R-map is a relationship map. I ask for a story or movie or something with a plot, but she's not sure. So, I suggest Harry Potter. We start with the first one, and add in elements from the others as seems cool. Y'know, Harry and Draco, their families and coteries, their teachers, and so on.

Next step: Change it. So, I ask what ebartley's preferred genre is, and it's quite different from the source. Excellent. And from there, she's up and running. The first day, it's all relationships, and maybe one and a half plots.

Now, I think she's up to 2, maybe 3 plots.

R-map is a term I got from Ron Edwards. Now, as far as I can tell, he is really really down on White Wolf games, more so than I am. But, the ironic thing is, the first place I can think of where I saw R-maps was WW's 1st edition Chicago by Night, the good one. Oh, it's not flawless, far from it. I gather it doesn't do the city justice, but I didn't care about that. I cared that I had a fascinating group of NPCs that could interact in interesting ways with the PCs, and that every group was diagrammed to show what each member thought of the others. And, I liked that there were a hundred adventure ideas.

When I ran Cthulhupunk, I took some of the relationships from there, and nothing more. And, I made a bunch of family trees as the game went on, though the source of inspiration for these was more likely Tolkien than WW.

Over the last couple of days, I've been reviewing what my NPCs in my Sorcerer game think of various other NPCs and of PCs. Relationship map, naturally. And, I started diagramming it for me, which made me remember the WW connection.

But, as I did the diagram, I realized that my best bet might be the larp tool that

crash_mccormick taught me to use: Spreadsheets. A spreadsheet is a Relationship Map.

Maybe it's obvious and only seems cool because my brain's tired after much larp prep.