2007.01.28
Once Upon a Time
Last night, Jason, Chris and I played two games of Once Upon a Time.
Once Upon a Time is a story-telling game that is a lot of fun with the right group. Each player has a hand of story element cards – for instance, you might have the following cards in your hand: Queen, Castle, At Sea, Night, and Happy. The idea is to tell a story that incorporates those elements, allowing you to play those cards. In addition to this being a lot more difficult than you would think, there are two major roadblocks you have to overcome:
- Other players are trying to interrupt your story and take over the storytelling themselves. This means that when you’re telling the story, you have to keep things consistent with what the other players have already incorporated into the narrative.
- In addition to the story element cards, each player has an Ending card. This ending might be something like “And the curse was lifted as had been foretold.” Each player is trying to bring the story to a conclusion where they can read their ending card as the final sentence of the tale.
So, if you’re holding the particular ending card which was mentioned earlier, you had better try to work a curse into the story in such a way that the other players can’t simply ignore it.
For the non-master storytellers among us (which certainly includes me), this is a lot harder than you would think. Still, it’s quite a fun and rewarding game with the right group of people.
Observations
Before getting into specifics about the games as we played them, I have a couple of observations about it that bear mention:
- I wish we had recorded the games.
- We need to set a time limit where a player is compelled to pass if he hasn’t played a card.
- When deciding to do a non-fairy-tale style story, we should all do our best to make it work within the game. The cards lend themselves most easily to fantastical fairy tales, though it is possible to use them in other types of speculative fiction if the players are willing. Because of this added difficulty, though, the players should all agree beforehand on a genre.
- We should agree on a title for the story after the story is completed, to make it easier to reference them.
Without further ado, here is a synopsis of each of the games.
Story 1
Jason started the first game off with an interesting twist. He chose an “Arabian nights” sort of theme, and the story began with a death. After revealing the death, and without much explanation, Jason moved backwards in time to a time before the death, and thus our task was to tell the story of the events leading up to the death of this lady named Bernadette (don’t ask).
It was revealed that Bernadette’s husband, a man of some import, was often away fighting wars to defend the land, and thus she was lonely and began a somewhat secretive relationship with a guard named Alim. Their relationship became strained, and Bernadette sent Alim away on a quest.
From here things became somewhat interesting. Alim encountered mirages in the desert that were not fully explained at the time, and which would come back to be re-used later on in the narrative. Alim also had a very crazy quest that turned out to be impossible, but which was a delight to discover as the three of us fleshed it out.
I was gunning for Alim to be reunited with family at the story’s conclusion, so I spent some time telling a bit about Alim’s past and working it into the fabric of the story in a consistent fashion. Of course, I got interrupted, but eventually regained control of the narrative.
And so Alim was about to return home, when I realized that I still hadn’t killed off Bernadette. Because of the way the story began, Bernadette’s death had to happen and she had to die with some significance to the story.
Luckily, we were playing a variant where each player had two endings to choose from, which makes things a little easier (and less strained at the end). So I had to switch gears and start planning for my other ending.
At this point, the story was clearly drawing to a close, and Chris managed to finish it with a well-told double suicide.
After we finished, Jason and I each revealed our intentions for the ending. In my ending, Bernadette was going to be killed by her husband in a fit of rage, and then the husband was going to turn on Alim, though they were going to agree to be peaceful after a battle. Jason’s ending centred around murder, and I believe he was going to have Alim murder Bernadette.
Story 2
For me, at least, story two was much more compelling. There were numerous points where I was drawn into the story and really wanted to find out where it was going and how it would end. It was a lot more work and took a bit longer, but it was worth it.
Chris opened the story with a bit of action. Salina, the protagonist, awakens to the sound of explosions that turn out to be suicide car bombers trying to kill her. She’s a scientist of some sort, working on a cure to a pandemic that is presently escalating in severity. As it turns out, Salina has this theory that the pandemic is somehow linked to werewolves, and the three of us found ourselves re-gearing to tell the tale of Salina as an urban fantasy.
Once I gained control of the story, I spent a lot of time tying together some of the disjoint pieces of Chris’ narrative into a more cohesive whole, while also establishing a number of loose threads I would be able to pick up on later. My major plot contribution was Salina discovering a rather unusual book at the University library, titled Vampires, Werewolves, and Witches: an American History 1843 – 1943. One of the essays inside the book is a somewhat chilling tale of a man named Ethan who lives in New York in the mid 1800s. Ethan becomes a werewolf, and there is some detail about a particular ring that Ethan comes to possess without remembering how he came by it. Chillingly, this narrative is written in the first person, as though Ethan himself had written it. Salina wasn’t sure at this point whether it was fact or fiction.
This ring sparks a lunch date wherein Salina meets up with a friend (who happens to be a Linguistics professor) to discuss the ring. This friend also happens to be named Ethan (not coincidentally, it would turn out). Salina later realizes that her friend Ethan is actually in possession of the ring that was in Ethan’s story.
With the beginnings of the fantasy starting to gel into Salina’s world, things get more interesting. She discovers a second book that describes the ancient history of humans and wolves as distinct races, long before dogs were domesticated as pets. There was a primordial contest once per generation between the humans and wolves, and at each contest, the victor would gain some sort of concession over the other race.
This was used in our narrative to explain the domestication of dogs (each time the humans won, they would get concessions resulting ultimately in domestication). The wolves only ever won the contest once, but the concession they were granted would prove to be the origins of werewolves.
Salina never fully discovers whether this new volume is allegory or actual fact or some mix of the two, but she eventually finds herself, along with her estranged mother, at the centre of one of these generational conflicts.
Chris was gunning for what would have been a really nice ending to the story if I hadn’t interrupted him at the last moment. Unfortunately for me, his telling had allowed the humans to win this generation’s conflict, and my ending worked a lot better if the wolves won. I had a bit of spinning to do, and my ending felt a little clumsy to me (Salina, along with all of the wolves, dies in a fire deliberately set by her mother), but I managed to win the game.
The construction of the werewolf mythos in the second game and the way in which we managed to work it throughout the story turned out to be very compelling. Part of what made it work was our willingness to build on each others’ work in the same fashion as improv actors do.
As a particularly good example, the Ethan in the book and Salina’s friend Ethan turned out to be the same person, and he was a somewhat pivotal character. Jason and I both hinted at the possibility that the two Ethans were the same without ever actually saying so until late into the story. We found that keeping the possibilities consistent without actually closing them makes the story easier to tell (since there were different possibilities that were never ruled out until later), and it also has the effect of making the story more intriguing.
I think we’ll likely get better at the game as we play it more often.
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