Glam Rock, Part 1 (Patreon)

It's the 50th episode! And welcome to it, because it's the "Oh, god, I've made this terribly complicated" arc!

The game it was based on failed. Not spectacularly. It failed in a boring way, with the players seeming to almost run out the clock until events happened to them that moved things along. Afterward, I had to ask myself why, and I realized it was a "low concept" game idea. That is, it sounded like there was an exciting atmosphere, but the whole game revolved around the characters and the politics of a small town, in its way, and I hadn't established any background history for the players.

The players also didn't ask any really probing questions about the history or the people in it. I realized as I sat there with a blank page looking back at me, preparing to write the script for the podcast, where I'd gone wrong and what I'd do differently. And now we have an entire episode of "We Will Not Play DnD" simply explaining the premise of the game while establishing character histories - I hope it's engaging! If it were a book, I'd try to do this naturally, but in this case it's about exploring how such a game would even be played because it is all improv and everyone has to know the details.

These sorts of stories are sometimes something an author will write because they want to be artsy. If you can judge by the "pants are banned, you mine this asteroid with a keytar" stuff: that was not my intent. I've stumbled into this challenging form of story through sheer, absolute negligence.