Catch Your Hare

Good morning! I hope you had a nice weekend.

People talk a lot about impro books, so here are some recommendations and warnings.

It’ll save time if I’m direct.

• Impro, by Keith Johnstone, is bloody good and slightly mad. It’s very personal and not everyone will like the style, but the stuff in it is dynamite.
• Impro For Storytellers, by Keith Johnstone, is the follow-up. It’s aimed, I think, at improvisational actors, talking about various improv games and show formats. But there’s much good stuff, too. In my opinion, Keith Johnstone has a better handle on the narrative stuff here than in Impro.
• Truth In Comedy, by Kim Johnson, is a crock of shit. There’s very little of value. Don’t bother. Theoretically, it’s the book about Chicago style improv: really, though, there’s not a decent book about Chicago-style improv and this is the best there is. But it’s still crap. (Which isn’t to say that Chicago-style improv is bad, because it’s not: just that it’s badly explained).
• Improvisation for the Theatre, by Viola Spolin, is very dry, like reading a recipe book. There is good stuff in there, but it’s not great to read.

That’s rather judgemental, of course, but it’s useful to be judgemental about this sort of thing. I wish someone had told me not to bother with Truth In Comedy.

Do recommend any other books you know.

Concrete Cow happened yesterday, in Milton Keynes. It’s a lovely little convention and went well.

In the morning, I ran Fear Itself, which went superbly. The system does one thing very well: mysteries, which the players uncover piece by piece. I’ll review it on RPG.NET and I’m hoping to run it again at Furnace.

In the afternoon, I playtested Graham Spearing’s game-in-development, WordPlay. It’s like HeroQuest, with some interesting tweaks. The setting was Middle Earth, at the time of the Silmarillion: we alternated between speaking in epic voices (”Give us your counsel, O King!”); making fun of our epic voices (”I am desirous of one of your Tic-Tacs”); and using modernisms for silliness. Good fun, although I hope our irreverence wasn’t annoying, and I think it gave Graham using feedback.

I playtested Blackguard, quickly, which went usefully badly. I need to tweak some stuff.

In the evening, we played Stewart Wilson’s Aeternal Legends. It was moderately fun, but I don’t think the scenario showed the system off well: it was a gradually-revealed-mystery scenario, and, in fact, made me realise how well Fear Itself handles these.

(I must admit, I’d had quite a bit of wine by the end of Aeternal Legends, so my memory may be addled).

On the train home, I read The Unremitting Book Of Horror, a companion book to Fear Itself. I’m not easily shaken, but, that night, the darkness of our house was creepy, and I feared mummified Victorian surgeons were hiding in the bathroom.

So, reincorporation deals with how to end a story. This trick tells you how to start one.

First, create a routine.

• We are drinking in a tavern.
• We are hunting in the wilderness.
• I am mending my armour.

Then do something that breaks that routine.

• We are drinking in a tavern…
  • …when a mysterious stranger approaches us.
• We are hunting in the wilderness…
  • …when we hear a roar louder than we have ever heard before.
• I am mending my armour…
  • …when I notice it does not bend when I hit it with the hammer.

There are several ways to break any given routine.

• We are drinking in a tavern:
  • …when a mysterious stranger approaches us.
  • …when an arrow thuds into the wall near us.
  • …when we smell smoke.

You’ll intuitively sense when the routine needs to be broken. As a group, you’ll do something, for a while. Then you’ll think: something needs to happen. And, to do that, you break the routine.

When you break the routine, you can create a new routine, which you then break. And so on.

• We are hunting in the wilderness…
  • …when we hear a roar louder than we have ever heard before.
• We go towards the roar…
  • …but a mysterious force is holding us back.
• We are trying to find a way round the mysterious force…
  • …when a shaman approaches us.
• We are talking to the shaman…
  • …when he begins to transform into something else.

And, with that, we’ve got simple storytelling.

That’s the simple trick. Next, the complex one: platforms and tilts.

Right, I’m bored with the Spontaneity stuff. Let’s move on to Narrative.

Now, as you may know, Keith Johnstone wrote two books: Impro and Impro for Storytellers. In my opinion, he handles narrative skills better in Impro for Storytellers.

So, this coming section will stick less strictly to Impro, and incorporate stuff from Impro for Storytellers. Lots of nice, technique-based stuff, here, and we start right away with Reincorporation.

The other thing about Impro For Storytellers is that there’s a hell of a lot of good stuff about playing gracefully with other players. So I’ll cover that after Narrative.