Hi there! Welcome to Structured Freedom, a forum for the development and play of American structured freeform in the European style, specifically the Nordic Jeepform like The Upgrade! and games like Montsegur 1244, Under My Skin, and A Flower for Mara.
We started this forum because a lot of us are excited about the potential of structured freeform, and see overlaps with stuff from the indie game design ethic, improv and other places. We're aiming to create new games for Dreamation 2010, at which point this forum may close.
Forum Guidelines 1. This forum is for the production, discussion and play of structured freeform games and scenarios. Discussion should generally be for clarification and explanation leading towards play or writing and production of new games. Get your work done now, this forum may go away in a little less than a year! 2. Individually authored scenarios are great, but collaboration between authors is also highly valued. 3. Use the forums as a place to discuss new ideas, and use play as a proving ground to test them. We'll expand our knowledge base using a wiki, by adding new terms and concepts that we develop this way together. 4. Assume we are all friends here and treat others with the respect a friend deserves. 5. Attempt to reach understanding if there is discord. Never assume people approach problems the same way you do. Enjoy diversity. 6. Please post links off-site to successive drafts of your in-development games instead of posting the entire text in the forum after the first presentation. 7. Have fun!
FAQ What Are We Doing Here? The goal of this forum is to help interested authors create, play, publish and promote a new corpus of American structured freeform games for presentation at Dreamation in 2010. Can't go to Dreamation? No problem, as long as you're going to create and play new structured freeform games, you are welcome here.
That 2010 deadline is important. That marks the re-evaluation of the use of the forum, as well as a concrete time to have new works playtested and ready for public play.
What is Structured Freeform? The easiest way to talk about structured freeform is if you have played it. These sorts of games can be played either live form (The Upgrade!) or in a more traditional tabletop mold (Montsegur 1244). It's a little confusing, but a little play will help sort you out.
We highly recommend The Upgrade! as a starting point, but games like A Flower for Mara, Under My Skin, and Montsegur 1244 are also good gateways. Failing that, read a bunch of play reports, as well as some of the scenarios at jeepen.org.
Some of these games are available as PDF scenarios, which contain one or more focused play sets. Again, check out jeepen.org. Under My Skin and A Flower for Mara are available from IPR.
We also have a small glossary of terms and techniques which you can find here.
Why should I do this? This is the beginning of what looks like a very fruitful merging of two traditions (the American indie tradition and European freeform) and we're all very excited and friendly people just waiting to see interesting mutations and cross-pollinations. We are not one-true-way types, and so many approaches to this style are welcome.
I'm ready to get feedback on the game I wrote! What should I do? You should create a thread with the current text of your game in it. Include a link to a Google Doc or PDF where the draft will live from now on. Use Jason M's [News Holes] thread as a template. Please only post the complete text of a game to the forum once. Do not post the complete text of the game to the forum every time you do an edit. Use the offsite draft for revisions and to link to for further discussion. If you have a questions, please whisper a moderator (Remi or emilycare).
If I create a scenario, do I have to publish it? We are taking a page from the Jeep movement, who publish all their completed scenarios on the web as free PDFs. We're operating on the same model. If you complete a scenario that you worked on here, throw up a PDF somewhere that we can link to. We want to play these games as well as write them! "Publication", though, doesn't have to mean a printed book with lots of art. Graphic design isn't a priority, accessibility is.
To be clear, we make no distinction between publishing for sale or for free on the web, the goal is to get more of these games out there.
Our goal in this forum is to foster the growth of a new offshoot of freeform role play (begun in Sweden as friform a form that was "free" of dogma: it could take the form of tabletop, live or other techniques depending on what was needed and desired for the story and play. Jeepform is one branch of this family. Australian New Wave was another. Danish scenario play, yet another.
Those of us from the North American continent working here have been exposed to these techniques and are working on applying them to the styles of play that we love and hold dear. We expect to create something unique to our own cultures of play, and hope to learn from the others already existing, but look forward to taking that same freedom to heart for our play and design.
We welcome here all those who wish to help us in our endeavor, and ask for their open-mindedness as we find our own answers to questions they may have already asked long since.