The Culture: A Domain Demonstrated

Friend of the Retreat Jon Mollison put down a new video on his Solo Play series this past weekend.

Over the course of this series, as Jon points out, we saw what "taming a Domain" means in practice.

I recommend that everyone review this series with the rulebooks at hand and follow along. Replicate what Jon does with paper, pencil, and dice; do it analog.

You'll see by doing how this can, and does, intersect with Braunstein play and how the dynamic of Diversion and Convergence all come together to create that emergent property of a living world. You will also see that you don't need entire planets, or continents, or massive regions thereof, to have a campaign that hooks and keeps players' attention and thus the engagement of their mans.

Look at what Jon did. About 12 miles from the nearest city as the crow flies, and yet that was untamed wilderness that needed regular effort by a leadership cadre with a warband at their back over several months; yes, if he used higher-level characters he could have tamed this stretch of territory faster, but mid-level characters are capable of doing this so that means a low-level character can look forward to doing this sooner than later- albeit by slowly building up that capacity piece by piece.

I'll get into this more when I revisit this for the Clubhouse, but for now consider this: we are now figuring out how each of the subsets of play link together to make a living world come into being, each part open to player agency as a means to shape events and environments as players want them to be, and the intersection of which is the means by which the promises Gary & Dave made all those years ago come to pass.