Friday Mad Science: Sex & Danger Edition

I mentioned yesterday that my first story was a spy-piece that featured a seduction at gun-point.  Well, after I finished drafting yesterday’s Storyteller’s Playbook, I went searching back through my archives and managed to find a version of that story that I’d re-written as a 3-page comic teaser.  A friend of mine then drew the pages and inked them, leaving me with a cool little comic short that’s perhaps a bit confusing without its dialogue.  Still, it’s an example of a couple of principles that are often at work in gaming, and so I’d like to share it with you. 

First, as we discussed yesterday, this piece works as an opening even though we as readers have only hints of what’s going on in the larger plot.  The hints are enough, and the fact that they leave us wondering is actually a good thing. 

Second, my favorite thing about writing comics is that it’s a collaborative process.  As a novelist or short story-teller, you work in a vacuum.  But comic writers, screenwriters, playwrights, and yes, even game masters all tell stories collaboratively.  In all of these media, the story can’t come alive until someone else experiences your vision and adds to it, often in ways that are completely unpredictable.  And sure, you can cut down on the amount of unpredictability in the final product by writing very detailed, proscriptive scripts—or by railroading your players with a very narrow set of choices in order to keep them strictly on track—but any experienced comic writer, screenwriter, or even game master will tell you that this is not the way to get your best, most valuable input from your creative collaborators.  You create a more predictable product at the cost of lessening the others’ creativity.  That is rarely a wise trade-off.

Folks wonder why I’m not writing comics anymore and why I switched to writing for gaming.  One of the main reasons is that the storytelling process is very similar but writing for gaming requires a lot less overhead to see your vision turn into some kind of storytelling reality.

Writing Exercise: 3-Pages of Sex and Danger

Set-Up: Below you’ll find the link to an original 3-page comic script that was adapted from that first short story, the one I described yesterday, along with links for the actual sequential art pages based on that script.   

Exercise: Read the script and then look at the pages.  Notice how the artist changed the storytelling.  Then decide for yourself what you would have done differently, either as an artist or as a writer adapting dialogue to the finished art.  How would you have used your creativity to add to the story without changing the total intent?

Script, Page 1, Page 2, Page 3

If you get a chance, I’d appreciate some comments below.  We haven’t had any comments yet, and I’d like to change that, especially since I removed the login requirement that the Comments Section previously required.