Enter the Capturing Fantasy Launch Contest

We’ve been working hard the past few weeks, building not one but two brand new sites geared towards creative writers, role-players, gamers and people who just need an escape from reality.

To celebrate our hard work and the launch, we’ve put together a great contest just for you.

Enter our Launch Contest!

To celebrate the launch of our two fantastic sites, Capturing Fantasy and Escaping Reality, we’re holding a contest that you won’t want to miss. Check out our great prizes:

First prize – a prize package worth more than $125

• The World of Darkness Rulebook
• Vampire: The Requiem
• The Blood: The Player’s Guide to the Requiem
• Werewolf: The Forsaken
• Blood of the Wolf: The Player’s Guide to the Forsaken

Second prize – a prize package valued at $75

• The World of Darkness Rulebook
• Vampire: The Requiem
• Werewolf: The Forsaken

Third prize – a prize valued over $50

• The World of Darkness Rulebook
• Winner’s choice of Vampire: The Requiem or Werewolf: The Forsaken

We’ll pay the shipping and applicable taxes. The contest is open to anyone located in Canada or the U.S. No refunds or returns available. Winners who already own copies of the books may request an exchange of equal or lesser value.

All you have to do to enter is drop a comment in the comment section. The contest closes June 20, and winners will be chosen via random winner generator.

We welcome sponsored prizes to make this an even bigger event. Anyone wishing to donate additional prizes should get in touch with James via our contact form.

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Description: Accuracy or Creativity?

When you write alone, it’s easy to be descriptive and set up the scene for your characters. You tell readers what you see in your mind’s eye, and you do so from the beginning of your novel to the end.

Your description remains consistent throughout the novel. Each chapter reinforces what you visualize in your mind, and the only people affected by what you see are the characters that you create and control.

In a multi-author situation, though, description takes on a substantially different form – because what you see isn’t what other people see.

We each visualize in unique ways. A tree may be in a slightly different location from two people’s perspective, or the hole might be a little smaller for you than the other person.

Accurate description with attention to detail becomes important. There’s nothing more jarring to a player whose character has just tried to open a door than hearing another player say, “Hey, you can’t do that… The wall is there! The door is ten feet over.”

Really? If the player couldn’t see that in his imagination, then the door could almost be in two places at once.

As Accurate as Mud

Have you ever played the child’s game of having to guide a blindfolded person around an obstacle course without touching them? It’s challenging, and so is writing description for other players.

Turning into a construction engineer that whips out a measuring tape is one of the worst solutions.

“Forty feet ahead, there’s a door measuring three feet by 6 feet… the framing is two inches thick… oh, and there’s a gold handle… not a round one, though, it’s a flat handle with a keyhole…

I shouldn’t say gold. I mean gold-plated. Right. Now. Twenty-two inches to the left and exactly 57 and three-quarter inches up the wall…”

Ugh.

You would surely give an accurate description of room size and exact measurements involved, but the magic of the moment is completely lost.

Painting a Picture for the Blind

When you write description that affects others but at the same time, you write to contribute to a story, you have to walk the fine line between accuracy and creativity.

You have a mind. Use it.

The door stood before him, the distance enough to cover in a few good strides. The keyhole in the cheap gold handle was easily visible, a black scar on the long bar of metal.

He approached the door, examining its plainness. The thick frame that surrounded it spoke of importance, though… but what caught his eye was the small hole in the wall, an arm-span to the left of where he stood.

The hole was high enough that if he stood on the balls of his feet, he could look in… but what made him shiver was the flash of thought that ran through his mind. Maybe he didn’t want to see what might be tucked inside.

Are there exact measurements missing? Yes, of course. But are measurements there, enough to give an accurate visual description of what’s important? Absolutely. Everyone can stretch out an arm and know the distance. Anyone can take a few strides and figure it out.

One of the best techniques in painting is providing just enough detail that the eye and mind capture the portrait. The imagination easily fills in the rest and more accurate than we might believe.

When It Really Matters

Most of the time, exactitude doesn’t matter and players don’t have to get down to millimeters to describe items or distances. But there comes a time when something is very important, and in those moments, it’s all in the details.

She hesitated, and then slowly handed him the small box. Her reluctance to let it go showed how much she cared for the wooden artifact, and he was gentle with both her and with it.

It was a small box, perhaps six inches long and half as wide. Big enough for mementos but small enough to slip into a pocket. The wood was smooth and unmarked, the grain of it polished to a burnished shine. The edges were smoothed as well and the corners rounded by some craftsman’s tool.

The box seemed well loved, old and passed down through the ages. The small hinges were still gold, though, with no trace of rust or wear. They’d been rubbed with a soft cloth many a time, maintained and tended with affection.

When he opened the box, the lid rose and presented a crimson interior. Red padded velvet lined box, and it was soft to his fingertip’s touch. There was enough space to hold a few pieces of jewelry, or perhaps a love note or two, and the tokens would be cradled carefully.

“You cared for him very much,” he said softly, then looked up at the girl as he closed the box in his hand and handed it back to her. “You should keep it.”

In this example, the item carries importance and great attention went into the description of its exterior, interior, size and shape. Still, the measurements, appearance and accurate details were written in a storytelling fashion and avoided plain imagery completely.

Something more? The emotion in the words, the sense of love and caring of the moment described - and yet, it’s just a box.

There may always be slight differences of imagery and visualizations between multiple authors, minor shifts in perspective. So be prepared: If the tree is a little to the left of where you’d pictured it and someone pointed the error out to you, no big deal. Have your character bump into a branch for some impromptu humor.

Or just adjust and carry on, glossing over the faux-pas.

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Moving Characters: Mind Your Manners

When you play board games with your family and friends, you manage your own game pieces. You count your own money. You take your own decisions based on the layout of the board. You can’t reach over and move another player’s pieces or take money from their pot – you’d get your hand slapped.

In a collaborative fiction writing environment, the theory is very similar. There are rules of conduct and etiquette involved.

You are responsible for your character and his actions. Just as with family board games, you cannot reach out and “move” another player’s character. You cannot create action or speech for anyone else’s character but your own. You cannot assume reactions. You can only manipulate your character.

Here’s an example:

Your character is angry and ranting at another character. While writing your character’s reaction, you mention that the other character’s reaction to the outburst is shock and fear.

This reaction is an assumption. The other character may be completely blasé about the whole situation. He might find the ranting humorous. It may make him sad.

The player’s character reaction to the actions of your character is not for you to decide. Inserting what you assume to be the reaction can land you in hot water with moderators.

So how do you effectively write your segment without causing offense? Very simply. Write only what is yours to control: your character’s thoughts, actions and speech.

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Cross Dressing: Playing a Different Gender

When creating a character for a role-playing game, don’t feel that you’re limited to the same gender of character that you belong to. Choosing to play a character of either gender, regardless of your own, is perfectly acceptable.

In fact, many players can create characters of the opposite sex and play them extremely well. Some players can play characters of the opposite sex so well that it’s difficult to tell the player’s true gender.

There is one problem with playing a character of a gender not your own: you aren’t intimately familiar with that gender.

Men may struggle with how much feminism to inject in a female character or writing on specific issues women face. Women may have a hard time describing male actions appropriately, because they are unfamiliar with size and breadth of a man’s body.

Research. Find out how much a man can lift. Learn about pregnancy. Become familiar with the process of shaving a beard. Read about the female sense of scent. The more you know about the opposite sex, the better you can believably play a character of that gender.

And if you do see a player giving another gender the old college try, be forgiving.

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How to Take Turns In Collaborative Settings

When a scene involves more than two people, it’s very easy to become caught up in the drama of the scene. Fingers twitch, hearts race , and it’s all you can do to stop yourself from posting.

So you post. Another player posts, you post in return, and soon, the situation is one of a back-and-forth battle of speed. Actions and reactions fly faster than a jet plane, and the scene is one great big natural high.

Congratulations – you’ve just cut a character out of a scene.

No matter how intense the scene, always be aware that you are playing in a group. Taking turns is just good manners. By taking turns, you allow other players the chance to be involved in a scene and aid in its progression.

Hogging a scene isn’t nice. It shuts people out and makes them feel unwanted. Even worse, those players may not want to be involved with you in a subsequent scene. You get pegged an attention sucker, and soon end up alone.

One way of making sure everyone gets a turn is to play round robin. Players post in turn predictably – player A, player B, player C. When they have posted, their turn is over and game play moves to the next player. When all players have had their turn, game play returns to the first player for the cycle to start again.

Another way of dealing with round-robin posting is allowing each player two turns to post per round. Player A may post, player B may reply and player A may post again before his turn is over. Player B has one more chance to post, and Player C has two chances to step in.

This method works well when there are three characters in a scene, but when there are four or more characters in a scene, a single turn per player per round cuts down on confusion.

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Starting With Your Questions

The entire purpose of role-playing at Escaping Reality is to write an infinite interactive story by collaborating with other players. There is no finish, and there is no winner. There is no Holy Grail quest, nor great mystery to solve, nor one uber-antagonist to take down.

There is no end. This is a never-ending novel.

A storyteller sets the stage and choreographs the story. Your character is an actor with its part to play. Other players have their character, and each has his or her part to play. It’s much like a collaborative novel, with each person adding a section to the book.

To participate, you take on the personae of a character you create. You write his reactions, actions, thoughts and speech for all the situations your character faces based on what storytellers and other characters have created.

It’s completely impromptu and spontaneous – no one knows what’ll happen next, not even the storytellers moderating the scenes. A game couldn’t be any more exciting than that.

We have great posts lined up in the coming weeks, but we also want to hear from you. What do you want to learn? Do you have questions? Are there creative writing techniques you’d like to explore? Do you want more information on role-playing or using rpg as a creative writing class?

Or maybe you have an experience to share about collaborative novels, group author environments, forum boards with never-ending stories or other text-based play-by-post rpg games. We’d love to hear them, and this is the place to share!

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