Golden Sky Stories is taking even longer than the overly long time it had been taking, mainly on account of Real Life being difficult for us. I’m hoping to finally launch the Kickstarter in early 2013. The layout is now just about done barring a couple of tiny corrections, and we’re close to getting the math lined up for the Kickstarter. In the meantime I’ve got a little treat for anyone who’s been interested in learning more about the game.

“The Broken Window” is a Golden Sky Stories replay made from a recording of a game session I ran for some friends a few years back. I put it together in order to give readers some idea of what a typical session is like, though GSS is quite unlike a typical RPG in many ways. The PDF has original art by Sue-chan, layout by Clay Gardner, and copious footnotes to help you understand what’s going on. The story is about how a broken window ultimately led to new friendships.

Download “The Broken Window” (PDF)

An Aside on Writing Replays
This was the first time I typed up a replay. I don’t know that I’ll make a habit of making them (if nothing else in subsequent attempts to record game sessions I started feeling like having a recorder was kind of a jinx or something), but it was an interesting experience all the same. It wasn’t as painstaking and irritating as the transcriptions I did for a linguistics class that one time, but it really exposed the differences between spoken and written language. In face-to-face role-playing we really do use inflection and gesture a lot, things that are hard to capture in writing. This was that much more of a problem because I was trying to transcribe a 2-year-old audio recording. There were times when one of my friends would say something like, “And then I go boop!” and me from 2 years ago totally understood, but in the present I had to guess. It may be our Northern California dialect, but we also say “okay” and “like” a whole lot, and it’s only really obvious when I’m trying to transcribe stuff and every line seems to start with “Okay,” and include an unnecessary “like.” It was a lot of work to type up, but not too bad, especially since the entire recording was only 90 minutes. After doing this, I think I’d like to see more replays in general, because they force you to engage role-playing in a different way, especially if you’re the one doing the writing.