Apostolos Koutsokalis

This will be a series of articles in which I will be presenting my personal experiences and derived conclusions while playing a “Greek mass augmented reality tabletop and browser role-playing game”.

While it is true that the game never tried to promote itself exactly as such, it is in my opinion the best cross of descriptions that were used to promote and describe it. What follows is my attempt at a full yet brief presentation of the game’s concepts, setting, mechanics, creator’s choices, etc so that the future parts can focus on individual aspects (will be in italic font) but only after a general idea on how the game was conceived developed and played has been established.

The concept was fairly simple yet quite interesting and engaging. Take a very simple RPG system and have it played throughout the country. Players all over the country playing by the same rules, same setting (good old September of 2011 a.d.) while role-playing themselves. It was a goal the developers had from the very beginning, something that anyone could pick up and play. Just a few rules, so few that in fact, back in September of 2011 all that was needed to play was two to five minutes of explaining a couple of things to a new player before one could start playing his or hers first session.

As with the players the game masters (GM) were all over the country. The game’s creator being the only one that knew the scenario was the one to be contacting each GM in order to provide them with the necessary info for the session to be played on any given day. After giving each GM the basis of a session, ranging from non-player characters (NPC), riddles, hidden artifacts, appearing enemies, location secrets etc etc it was the GM’s job to combine all that info while adding some of his own flavor to fill in the gaps.

At that time we all knew we were playing a game supposedly in alpha stage. Even if we weren’t told it was apparent to anyone with little experience and/or few brain cells. Lack of specific rules, let alone guide for either the players or the GMs. The developer’s plan was for us to keep playing while he released more content, rules, mechanics and support for character tracking through a web-based application. After the first three months when the rules and guides and web application would be finished we would be moving to the beta stage until the mid summer of 2012 and come September 2012 the game would be ready for the public and anyone to play and be actively promoted by the owner and not just be spread through friends and rpg enthusiasts.

A panhellenic community of players was soon formed. We communicated mostly through facebook and had specific groups made and moderated by the owner and trusted players. Players were forced to join one of six separate guilds so there was a facebook group for each one, an available to all group with in-game (IG) character and even player-location (cities) groups. Through those we planned our session days and times, role-played with other players without even needing a GM to overlook us and organized to overcome the other 5 guilds. We not only had tabletop sessions but skype sessions too and even some scarce live events (mostly treasure hunting ones).

That’s what “Greek mass augmented reality tabletop and browser role-playing game” looks like in 5 paragraphs. And that was just the beginning cause two and a half years later many things mentioned above have changed, many stayed the same and lots more were introduced. This is going to be a long one. And I like it because even though one could draw parallels to similar cases or games I don’t think anyone has such a fantastic source material, both in quantity and quality.

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