Alcyone for the rest of the semester

Alcyone is established as a character and in contact with the MAPI group now. She could stand to comment more on the other blogs. Later on I will be recording audio posts for her, possibly some interaction with Fachtna as well. I can't be her face, but I can give her a voice with a similar accent to the one she would have. Her parents will be locating her blog soon and hounding the MAPI members for information, as well as accusing them of being a satanic cult that has kidnapped her, telling her that they will take her home and heal her of her "demon possession." She will continue her meetings with other MAPI members, hoping to gain a support network in her new home and using her sensitivity to spirit presences in a manner to help others. I need to do some more posts that would highlight her new found happiness and freedom in Morgantown versus her troubled home life in Pikeville. She should probably take some photos of supposedly haunted places and things she's encountered on her own as well as with the MAPI members. I will need to create email accounts for her parents to harass the MAPI members by posting on their blogs, and I see obnoxious angel referencing screen names and yahoo addresses.
I hope that our CAC associates could work some with some graphic elements to add to her upcoming voice posts. Some artwork of her and Fachtna would be a good thing to add to her blog. Some of Alcyone's medical documents regarding her condition and maybe some props like her family's old Bible with notes scrawled in it, her own religious items like her pentacle. Given the opportunity for another public event, I'd love to have a couple ghostly scares around to get people interested in paranormal activity around Morgantown and the concept of MAPI, maybe some haunting like projections in some key spots where ghosts might be. If focusing on Alcyone's portion of the story, I'd like to have poltergeist activity occurring around an actress portraying her.

Hite's essay on campaign world design

Hite's essay on the design of campaign worlds raises a number of concerns regarding the practical issues of creating a world for your players and readers to enjoy. While it discusses the driving force of a campaign is the story surrounding the players' characters, the overarching story of the world is key in how the players can affect the world around them. What the essay doesn't discuss is that one of the major appeals of pen and dice games is the ability to have a genuine impact on the world your characters inhabit as opposed the the static world you can never change in an online multiplayer game. Additionally, while a World of Warcraft game is always the same given the setting, no two campaigns are the same given the same source material in a table top game since the information and scenarios are simply tools for the storyteller and players to adapt to their own purposes. One major consideration when creating a campaign is the scope of the work. How big do you want to go? Do you want a single world where multiple campaigns can be conducted with diverse geographic areas like Ebberron? Do you want a single setting for a particular genre like Ravenloft or Boot Hill? Is your set of tools a book of advice for a type of game like the highly adaptable GURPS sets for fantasy, space settings, and so on? Will your campaign be large in scale with travel of geographic regions or even time, or will it be within a single place or era?
While the essay notes the contrast of concerns for designers, publishers, and players, the distinction between designers and players isn't so great. The designer's concern is primarily artistic while the storyteller's is practical in its use, but designers are players of these games and storytellers will adapt the rules and information to suit the needs of their own campaign. Publishers concerns are regarding the marketability of a setting and advise against quirky settings. I highly disagree with this suggestion, as the more avante garde settings have yielded some of the most enjoyable games I have participated in. Given the malleability of table top games their use by the end audience, what constitutes a quirky or hard to market campaign is debatable. With the self-publishing resources available, why limit yourself to safe bets in artistic expression?
The five major things to take into account mentioned were as follows:
Fantasy: The ability to indulge the players in the sort of narrative they would want to play out.
Friends: While social interaction is available within an online game, table top games must allow for groups of characters around the same level of power to go on quests and the like together. The essay doesn't remark on how a table top game is a group selected amongst themselves rather than whomever might be online. In my experience this produces a much more enjoyable experience.
Familiarity: The world should have some understandable rules. They don't necessarily have to be the same rules as the real world, but should have their own consistent internal logic. For example, many settings incorporate magic, but how magic works can be handled in a number of ways.
Freedom: You aren't on rails on a tabletop game.  You can roam and the world around you without the constraints placed by a world, while goals may be part of the campaign's story, you don't need to take any particular plot hooks or paths. The actions of the characters have a genuine impact on their surroundings. Actions are not limited to a set of options, to the point of leaving the scope of the original material.
Fuzziness: There should be the ability to fudge some aspect of the world for story based purposes. A character could use their psychic powers or magic to take an action that advances the plot.
While the essay remarks on the scaling of a campaign for characters growth outpacing the setting. It doesn't really take into account that when this happens, the storyteller and players move to outside material to get more resources. You can adapt a Rifts character to a Dark Sun campaign and take it into space opera if you want as the limitations of a preprogrammed world are not in place. This is the freedom of a table top game mentioned in the 5 F's, as well as the modularity of any setting, even if the original designers had not intended for it.