Getting Started With Authoring

Despite what the title of this devlog might imply, I have in no way figured out the best way to author a Multiverse in Scribarchy. I am very much still learning as I go. I have made several attempts (a couple of which are on-going) to figure out how to flesh out a Multiverse, which I will go through here.

Now the first thing to keep in mind is there is quirk in Scribarchy's design that makes fleshing out a Multiverse perhaps a different experience than one might expect. While anyone with a Person anywhere in a Multiverse can create Places, Things, or Roles, a Choice can only be created in the Place where one of your Person's is located. So like a worm burrowing through an apple, you can create a Choice where your Person is, then use that Choice to move to another Place, then create another Choice to move to another Place, and so on.

So to write something like a plot or story in a Multiverse, a Person has to create it on the go as it were, and the story, if you can call it that, is what is left behind, because almost everything in a Scribarchy Multiverse is permanent and persistent. This is similar to what happens in a solo tabletop role-playing game, where you are creating your experience on the fly (using oracles or tables or what not) and creating a journal of what happened where. In Scribarchy's case all those experiences are saved and become part of a shared world.

The problem with any blank canvas though is where to start. A new Multiverse is empty, and filling it has felt like a challenge (at least for me).

First, it is okay to use aids. My first Multiverse was set in Lovecraft's Dreamlands (alas, it has been scrubbed since and is no longer available). For inspiration I took random characters from Gnome Stew's Masks book and paired them with random plots from Gnome Stew's Eureka book and then set off on various Lovecraftian adventures. My second Multiverse attempt (also since scrubbed) was inspired by Starforged: Ironsworn and had a single character in a hard sci-fi setting trying to escape from the drudgery of a generation ship.

Second, you don't have to fill the entire Multiverse all at once and on your own. My third Multiverse was inspired by the newest addition of Twilight 2000, and I created several life-paths for Persons to take in a world where Twilight 2000 had a baby with Stephen King's "The Mist" (that fledgling Multiverse is available as "The Fog Of War").

For my fourth Multiverse I am using the solo rules for Lovecraftesque to write a story set in the Victorian Era about terror trees in the Gobi (another fledgling Multiverse called "The Century of The Serpent").

Neither of these Multiverse's is "finished" by any stretch of the imagination, and I continue to work on them, and I am hopeful that others will contribute as well.