In The Garden Living an RPG Life

No, this isn’t the real PItch Room for the online conference.   I just made the collage as a visual reference.  This is my second year at the conference and my first one as one of the Magnificent Moderators of MUSE.  It’s fun getting ready for the party.  I love being backstage.  Much more than being on stage.

OK.  Just wanted to drop in to let the world know I’m somewhere in the neighborhood and will wander over from time to time.  There is a lot of new stuff going on. So much that I haven’t been able to focus on this blog.  Been moonlighting over on the Speculative Salon with the rest of the Savvy scouts.

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My application to join adventurers on a journey to Journeyman status was approved last month.  It’s taken me a while to get used to the idea that I am finally on a real-life adventure.  Not that my life has not been an adventure so far. It’s just that this one has a community and all kinds of cool stuff.  Plus, I get to write and teach and make stuff up.  The Boss is a long-time adventurer and some-time game master.

To gear up (or down, in this case) for the journey ahead I’ll be clearing out a lot of clutter.  Not that it wasn’t useful or serving my purpose when I added the stuff.  Just that this campaign requires me to shift my attention and focus.

As for the campaign, that is still being discovered.  I get to make it up, define it for myself. I’ve got guidelines but the exact goal and reward is up to me.  All the material I’ve collected here, so far, becomes background, home base, resource.  I’ll be pulling threads from this or that story to pack in the purse I borrowed from Hermione.  Gotta travel small and prepared.

More to come. Look for changes.  Be ready with questions.  Meanwhile, the world is what you think it is… That’s the real Adventure.  What are you going to do with it?

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Playing Dungeons and Dragons or any other role playing game is more about the monsters and traps than it is about the treasure.  Someone might say, “No, it’s about getting all those cool skills and using magic and weapons and stuff.”  Which is only necessary to get past the traps and prepare for the monsters.

So, what does this have to do with that old adage “write what you know?”  We know what our challenges have been.  We know what it took to face and then overcome them. Why not take the simpler path and cast the monsters we know as challenges?  Or is that the other way around?   The writing workshops I’ve been in have focused on asking what the character’s goal is.  The answer is “get the treasure, find the clue, rescue the girl.”  That’s pretty much it. Oh and get back alive.  Then we get asked “What is the character’s personal goal?” Easy, peasy.  Level up. Get the skills, buy the weapons, learn the spells and level up.

So the question I would ask now is, how did I level up? What were the challenges?  What was my favorite monster and what were the coolest traps?  See, I’m coming at it from already done and not what am I trying to do.  So, I am assuming the character has already accomplished their goal and I’m writing–or planning to write–the story from the opposite end, from its success, from the telling of the story by the campfire while the healers work their level 10 magic on us.  Ouch!

We have all kinds of stories about wicked stepmothers and the like. Just realized that the mother that was lost in the first place was not the individual birth mother but The Mother, the earth itself. It’s not a psychological loss but a spiritual one.  When the beginning was limited to The Word and that word became the only deity, that’s when we lost Mother and succumbed to a serial step-mothers.

So, any ideas on how to recover from this loss?  Any stories that tell what we need to do now?

I got reconnected, last week, with the alchemist.  Alchemy is how I got started focusing on magic as a system for living. That was before I found Huna.  This is not alchemy as the parent of chemistry, but alchemy as a defining transformation process.  The place they meet is in the need of the chemist to do the inner personal work to remain focused on waiting for the processes to complete.

A while after I’d gone through my own decisions and searches and settlings on something outside of traditional alchemy, I found the Alchemy website.  I knew it was the right place because of its parent site name: Levity.  Why? Because in my ruminations I had decided that levity was the true Philosopher’s Stone. And Huna?  Yup, it’s in there.   In the brand of Huna I follow one of the seven principles is “Love”.  Is there anything more uplifting than love?  “To love is to be happy with” lightens it even more.  Noticing everything that is good in the world, all the successes no matter how ordinary, lifts the world into a softer light.  Complimenting someone, even if it’s just in our own minds, lifts them up. Lifts us up.  Lifts everyone in our vicinity up.   Everyone is successful as something, has spent a lifetime doing something really well.  Breathing comes to mind.  Blinking.  Sitting.  Falling down.  All this is an accomplishment, things we’ve managed to accomplish from the day we were born.  And we haven’t stopped.  Even dead people are good at being dead!  Excellent at not breathing.  Excellent at lying still. Keep profound silences and stellar secrets.

Complimenting is a way of blessing the good in the world even when we forget there is any.

What does this have to do with being a bard?  That’s what I’m figuring out.  What is the story here?  Is there a legend to put the blessings into? Some tale that reminds us what happens when we don’t?

Good questions and ones for me to consider as I work on building this new character.  Meanwhile, I go to bard school.  Savvy Authors is having an online conference and lots of ideas are being added to the jars.  DigiCon definitely adds another element to the alchemist’s fire.

The name of my game is Prosperity.
What is the something good I am trying to accomplish?  Prosperity.

How do I define that?  How am I going to measure it?
One measure is happiness.  Am I happy?  Yes.  I am happier now than I was before I started playing.

How do I equate being happier than before?  I am less worried about money.  What does that mean?  How did I know I was worried about money?  My reaction to feeling anxious about not having enough money has been to spend more.  I get restless. I want to be out and not at home.  I want to be distracted by new things.  I chase after events and things that I think will help me do better so I’m not feeling so anxious.  These are the behaviors that have changed since I started playing Prosperity.

So, the first rule in the game is defining what part of Prosperity I am addressing.
Am I less worried about money? Yes. How do I measure that?

I don’t spend money randomly.  i don’t just go out and buy stuff, go to coffee.  I am more content supplying stuff for myself.  I don’t feel the call of coffee and eating out. I actually feel excited by how little money I am spending.  I kept gaining “points” by making coffee at home, taking lunch to work, buying as little as possible with cash I had on hand, making a point of knowing what I had at home.
I am happy and spending money AND don’t feel tension around it.  I also don’t feel guilt or anxiety when I spend money on something that isn’t absolutely necessary.  Like a book.  I buy books because I learn things from them. They are part of my “dice bag”. Part of the system that answers questions when I’m not sure of the question.  This time around though, the “saving throw” was high.  The content of the books I bought filled my need better.  Were more saturated with material than books I bought out of anxiety.

When I went through the list of available writing workshops none of them felt attractive.  i didn’t feel compelled to pay for a class I signed up for.  I didn’t commit to it until I knew for certain that it would add to my skills.  Help me level up as a Bard.
So, I’ve defined my focus in Prosperity, recognized my improvements.  I still want to define the process better, build the actual game.  Since i work backwards in everything, I make the game from its effects.  Twenty-twenty hindsight.

A major key to playing Prosperity is changing thinking.  There are a lot of way to change thinking and I’ve used a lot of them.  The one that seems to have worked most immediately has been: What if it doesn’t?  What if the the bad thing I’m thinking will happen, doesn’t happen?  What if something else happened instead, something positive? What would be the result of that positive action?  An action that helped me a lot was breaking down tasks into parts so small they could be done without any resistance. And then i had to give myself a reward for accomplishing that task.  The result was reducing my anxiety about getting tasks done that I didn’t want to do.  Figuring out rewards was the hard part.  Turned out that getting the work done WAS the reward. The peace I felt at having it done.  And sometimes the task itself was so pleasant that it gave me good feelings over and above its accomplishment.

So, a couple more rules played by: Change my thinking, and Make small tasks with rewards.

The set up for the game was a workshop with Serge King.  In it we went through the seven principles as they applied to Prosperity and did some exercises to recondition our minds and bodies.  I would define that step as: Defining the character, filling in the character sheet.

For the bigger game of Living An RPG Life I will define the Character Sheet better.  Meanwhile, I am going to let this simmer a bit and get back to it later.

Happy.  Definitely happy.

i’m still refining the game but this is a start.

I will come back tomorrow and read this to see how I need to refine all these statements.

Living an RPG life means what?  What do i put into it?  How do i know when I’ve moved forward?  How do i build an adventuring party?  What is important from the format that works for me in real life?

These questions are not quite articulate but it’s a beginning.  I stumbled on a TED speaker, Jane McGonigal.  The path started with a ukelele player and then Jane, a game designer.  It was the game designer that got my attention.

(There is a time restraint for what I’m doing and since I work better under pressure from outside, when it’s timely, I am sketching this out.)

This.

What is “this”? I started the shape of the blog as reflecting how I wanted to live, to live my life as a role playing game, but at the time I didn’t really know what that might be.  My conative type?  Quick start.  I jump with both feet into a concept, rock with it for a bit, then put it down.  Whatever the new thing is looks abandoned but then something falls into place and the whole thing comes together.

Gameful is that something.  It’s the call to change the world by playing a game.  Or to make a game that can be played and by playing make the world a better place.  This is the goal of a shaman.  This is what I learned from one of my mentors, Serge Kahili King.
The current challenge is to create a game that changes something that can be measured.
I just got another piece.  Story: the role of story in making deliberate and beneficial change.  This is an idea that I’ve been thinking about for a few months.  How can I make that function more explicit?

Role playing games are, for a lot of us, just a way to make a story come to life.  So, why not take the elements of story seriously? Meaning what?
Well, the point of a story is that the ‘hero’ is called to a task, to reach a goal. Along the way she faces obstacles until either she succeeds or fails.  So, what are we called to every day?  What is our goal for the day, for the week, for the year?  Do we even recognize that we are these goals?  we do it unconsciously.  What if we worked better at making them?  Knew what we were doing and, instead of working at it, played at it?

That is my game.  Setting a goal, meeting the obstacles and achieving the result.  The challenge or adventure of the game is the obstacle part.  Where are they?  What kind of obstacle really gets in the way?

There.

Finally.

Now I know what the game space is.  I don’t yet know what the play rules are, if they are still within the shape of D&D?  But i don’t need to use that structure exactly. What if I just use achieving the goal, or meeting the obstacle successfully as the achievement and get points for it?

The next part of game development is making up a character sheet and a system of rewards…
OH! That’s what it is! That’s what Martha adds to the piece.  Martha and Serge are the mentors of the piece for now.  Need to add the writing.  And that’s Pat.  So three mentors, three guides.

So, what is my current game!  (That feels nice to say)

My current game is to change the way I think about prosperity.  that’s waht I’ve been working on since the workshop. That’s Serge’s part.  He is the person who called me into play.  He fits the role of the Call.  I still need to sort all this out, all the details of how things map onto the RPG format.  Not even for the game but for my life.

So, here is more about how the game works, how I lived it into being.
I needed help and I found myself falling back on Martha.  She’s available all the time  and through the blog I found Finding Your North Star.

And since I had not canceled my subscription, I bought the book on Audible, listened to it, found the tools I needed.

Which can define the random roll (”roll a d20″). Like watching TV and getting information that i need without knowing I needed it or that it would be there.
Coffee.  TV.  Work.  Internet searches.  Friends.  Each of these lets me discover something. This is the content of my dice bag.
There is a TV show I catch from time to time.  I have regular routine of coming in and sitting down and turning on the TV.  That is the roll.  I don’t use a TV guide.  Don’t remember what’s on when or where.  Not sure if I want to watch something I’ve seen already or not.  Not even sure i want to go to bed and sleep, yet.

I could define this as a Saving Throw: a routine event that gives me tools or answers a question I don’t even know to ask.
This is me defining my life as a Role Playing Game.  Next, I need to define a game that qualifies for acceptance by Gameful.  Shifting my attention to the task of defining my actions in game terms made this happen.  Made the RPG aspect of my life come together.
So, how do I put this into game terms for Gameful?

That’s the next post.

Yeah.  Beginning to add blog practice to being a writer.  Meanwhile, I’m spending a lot of wordly time on 750words.com.  It’s been a good thing.  Buster has set up a space where we can practice being artists.  He has put Julia Cameron’s artist’s pages into an online setting with all kinds of cool bells and whistles and very tasty carrots.  I’m currently working towards my 100 days carrot.  Got the 100,000 word carrot easily.  We get badges!  Who needs badges?  I do!

Still looking for a new theme for the blog.  New beginning deserves a new theme, don’t you think?  Was just looking at Jillian Tamaki’s sketchblog.  It’s all white.  Only her own images on the site.  So uncluttered, very clean.  Can I stand to have something so naked?

Will look at writer’s blogs, too.  Started drawing more and writing a lot more so there needs to be a way to balance it all.  Thinking also of making recordings of some of my writing just because i like to hear things being read.

And about that RPG thing.  Alchemist Bard.  That’s what it’s all about.  Writing as a means of transformation. Telling stories, histories, songs so that something changes profoundly.  Keeping in tune with the earth so that the song is familiar in ways that only being connected to the earth makes sensible.

It’s been how long?

Ok.  I know what happened. I just stopped blogging.  Stopped knowing what to say, what I thought anyone else wanted to hear.

And why am I back now?  Because I’m out of hibernation.  Happens sometimes.  I seem to need to retreat into the cave of oblivion and then, one day, I’m out again.  One of the nicer features of this system is that I can post-post.

Huh?

I can back date posts.  That just means that I can fill in what I’ve been up to on particular days to make it look like I’ve been blogging all along.  I’ll do that eventually.  Not to be deceptive or anything.  Just to keep the record straight.  Like finishing another nanowrimo.  Or getting published.  Or finding friends on Facebook and taking more classes and workshops. Some of those things matter, their timing in my life matters.  Won’t be backfilling every day.  That would both defeat the purpose of making a record of what matters and be unnecessary.

Meanwhile, I still need to change the theme of this blog.  Changing the theme, updating Wordpress, as well as shifting the focus appropriately have all been behind leaving it fallow.

Because I have been focusing my actions on writing I feel that the RPG element has been lost.  Kinda like sitting in front of the TV and forgetting there is a library around the corner.  Or my iPod.  Just how my attention gets absorbed by the topic of the moment.  It is all related still.  The role playing game aspect is still the unifier in my life.  What I’ve come to realize is that I have just not defined or named the game!  I can tell you the main elements.  Won’t but I could.  And because I can, I know what the new theme needs to allow me to do.

OK. Leaving you with a new beginning for the new-ish year.

It’s time to re-plant the Garden.  Lots has been going on and I have let things run a bit wild.  Thank goodness for borders.  The good news is that I’ve been investigating lots of new and interesting “plants” and have new ideas.  The biggest change will come from learning about Steampunk as a writing genre.  Just doing casual research has got my creative juices flowing.  I’m still looking for a new design for the blog.

Meanwhile, I have a lot of catching up to do and organizing of materials.  I’ve made new writing acquaintances, finished Holly Lisle’s course (more on that later), and discovered the healing power of poetry.  I’ve also got a more substantial plan for my comickazes blog, and might even get commakaze going.