In an attempt to work through my vasty backlog of half-finished blogs. I’m going to be posting up a few little short ones here and there.
It’s wild to me when I stop to think that back in the day, I used to post up blogs at the rate of 2-3 a week, whereas now it’s more usual for me to post one every 2-3 months.
Though to be fair, a lot was different back then. It was before I had two kids, back before I was trying to run a charity (as opposed to sometimes just running a fundraiser, which is a big difference.) Back in the beforetimes of covid…
Anyway, one of the things I regret leaving by the wayside is posting up blogs of stuff I’d done that you could access online. That way even folks who didn’t go to a convention could watch the panels I was on. Or even people who don’t subscribe to it, could hear me guest star onto a podcast, or catch me do a writing Q&A or play D&D or some other sort of game.
I feel like over the last 4-5 years, I haven’t shared more than 10% of the stuff here that’s available online.
Like, (Pat said, doing an expert segue) the time I played Fiasco with the folks over at Polygon.
(I’d be angry about this screencap if I hadn’t made it. As it is, I’m just angry about my face.)
If you’ve never heard of Fiasco before…. boy. I don’t know if this is a good introduction to the game or not. It’s a delightful collaborative storytelling environment to be sure, and I *love* me some worldbuilding as you know. But… it kinda went off the rails.
In a good way, I feel. And it was certainly a ton of fun. And it certainly shows how flexible the game is in terms of what you can play. But, as is often the case when I play a game, I kinda push at things to see what I can get away with narratively and creatively. It’s not that I want to break anything, I just get kind of excited full of ideas, and when you get to play with a group of folks as delightful as this….
Let’s just say it was a wild ride…
Also, I would like to go on the record as saying that I didn’t go into this game with *anything* planned. It all happened organically. My hand to glob.
Polygon posted up an article about the game, titled “Fiasco proves how fun it is to role-play without a DM.”
They even generously subtitled the article, “Patrick Rothfuss joins us for some collaborative storytelling” instead of something more realistic like, “Rothfuss weirds up our game and then drives us off a narrative cliff.”
But yeah. It was a ton of fun.
Extra points anyone who can guess in the comments below as to where I stole the inspiration for the voice and demeanor of my character….
Later space cowboys,
pat
P.S. We’re slightly more than one week into the Kickstarter, and we’re currently at $247,283. (SO close to cracking a quarter million.) We’ve unlocked a lot of stretch goals, most of which center around making the books cooler and better when we go to press, and the team is actively investigating what else we might be able to add if things keep going this strong.
But yeah. It’s been a delightful launch of the first book from Underthing Press. Thanks so much to all of you who have helped by jumping in and spreading the word.