Some organisations will be above board and respected such as the Silver Balance Union. Their members will be upright members of the community. Other, organisations, like the Wizards Guild, will be legitimate but more feared than respected. ….

The twin thieves guilds of the Cloak and Dagger are well known, some of their members openly flaunt their membership, and yet they are illegal. …

Much smaller groups exist, often on the fringes of the law. No one knows how large the vigilante group The Sword Brigade is or even what its real aims are. Whispers of secret meetings by arcanists suggest that the Wizard’s guild is not entirely united or in control of magic. How many secret brotherhoods and cabals exist in the city?

To take part in #Twitterville. all you need is a Twitter account and an imagination. Full details on the Twitterville.org web site.

This week’s challenge is magic. In a fantasy city in a fantasy world, magic is going to play a significant role in the life of the inhabitants but can you create plot hooks and background material on the subject in just a 140 characters?

The heads of most players I know are full of ideas for cool magic items, creatures or abandon wizard’s towers where the owner has mysteriously vanished. Distilling these ideas down into Twitter sized messages is difficult but is a great way to keep the creative brain working. I find most of my ideas are improved by the process because it forces you to focus on what is important.

If you fancy stretching your creative muscles, have a look at Week 8: Magic! (and a few minor #Twitterville Changes)

#Twitterville is created from individual tweets sent by anyone who wants to take part. They brought together and organised into a coherent setting over on Twitterville.org. To take part, all you need to do is:

• 1. Join Twitter if you haven’t already
• 2. Follow 6d6 Fireball on Twitter
• 3. Check out the latest challenge
• 4. Start tweeting, remembering to include the #Twitterville tag in the tweet.

It is great way of exercising your creative muscles and building a truly unique fantasy setting. All the content is under the Creative Commons so you can use and adapt any of it for your own campaigns and adventures.

This week’s challenge is too give #Twitterville some history. This could be back history from before the city was built, recent political intrigue or the history of a person or place. As long as it happened in the past, it doesn’t matter.

For more on last week’s challenge see Week 6 Round-Up: Now with Added Titles and for this week’s challenge, go to Week 7: History – Ancient & Modern.

The basic idea of #Twitterville is simple. Each week I set a challenge or topic for people to Twitter about. Such as describe an NPC or a street found in the city. All the tweets are collected and threaded together to make a coherent campaign setting. Despite the different writers and different styles, out of all the tweets a distinctive world is taking shape. Already we have a map of the city and of the surrounding areas.

#Twitterville started here on 6d6 but I’ve spun it out into a separate domain, Twitterville.org. This has allowed me to automate the harvesting of tweets and to organise them into ways that are useful for GMs of any game system.

Threads are collections of individual tweets that all have a common theme or location. Each thread is then linked to one or more locations and is tagged by some keywords. Each tweet is also allocated a knowledge level, ranging from Common Knowledge to Secret Knowledge. Combined, these features allow a GM to look up a keyword, such as Muggers and see what information may be available to the players. The same idea applies if the players want to know more about a specific location, such as the South River .

The first challenge of the new look #Twitterville will be tomorrow (Tuesday) and a new challenge will be issued each week. Full details will be on the Twitterville site but I will post reminders here as well. If you want to take part, you need to be following 6d6 Fireball. The Tweets page lets you see all the tweets as they come and there is a newly formed email group to discuss future developments.

Starting on the 1st of July, 6d6 Fireball are hosting the Bloggers carnival. I’ve already got some articles lined up and as the subject is one that is close to people’s heart so I’m looking forward to some lively debate.

As soon as I can manage it (i.e. I’m already running late) the PDF for the June winners of the Adventure Writing Competition will be published. This will be followed by details of our open-playtest. As the month draws to the close, I will be deciding on the July winner of the competition. I already have two strong candidates and it is not too late to get started. Or you could take a bit more time and aim to be our August or September winner. Whatever your plan. the first step is to drop me an email – Competition (at) 6d6Fireball (dot) com – with an outline of your ideas.

Finally, July should see the relaunch of Twitterville. Our exercise in collaborative writing. This will be taking a major step forward in to something much more ambitious so watch out for news of that.

I will see you all in a week’s time.

#Twitterville differs from other settings in two ways. Firstly, all its entries are limited to 140 characters so there are no long essays on the background or politics of the city. Secondly, it is being created by a range of people with different ideas about what a fantasy city should look like. As the editor and mapper I have some control over this but differences in styles and, in places, contradictory content poses unique challengers.

City of 1000 Rumours

The solution to both these problems is not be like other fantasy settings and use #Twitterville’s unique format to its advantages.

Each entry in #Twitterville is not a factoid about the city, but instead a rumour, gossip or hearsay. Some of these are self-evidently true, the city does sit by the side of a lake and it is at the end of the spice road. Other are less obviously true and will be left to the GM to decide their reliability.

To help guide the GM, each rumour needs a Scarcity Level, from 0 (public knowledge / self-evident ) to 5 (only know to a few people and only true if the GM wants it to be). GM’s can use the Scarcity to assess how successful Gather Information rolls or similar player investigations revels.

Location, Location, Location

A random table of 1000 rumours is not much use to a GM when the players are specifically trying to find rumours about the graveyard. To make #Twitterville useable by the GM, the entires need to be grouped by location. This is also the best way to generally browse through #Twitterville. Looking at the map and reading the associated entries for each area. I had a first attempt at doing this for the area around the city with last week’s PDF.

Locations are not the only things players like to investigate. They may want to know about people, or certain types of monsters, or be on the look out for a trader with a shade reputation. For #Twitterville to work as a setting, GMs need to be able quickly find the rumours relevant to the players inquiries quickly and easily. The obvious solution to this is to tag each entry with keywords and then have a index of all the keywords and the rumours they relate to.

We Have The Technology

Adding the Scarcity Level, the location and tags to each #Twitterville entry is not a major piece of work. There are only about 180 tweets at the moment so it isn’t very demanding. However I want the city and setting to keep growing and a 1000 rumours seems like an achievable target. I also want to be produce nicely formatted, up-to-date PDF each week but the tweets and relationship between them may change so I need to keep everything in a suitable format.

Of course I need a #Twitterville database that allows the easy adding of new tweets, the assigning of Scarcity Levels, locations and tags to each tweet and the data has to be exportable in a format I can use to generate PDFs without re-typesetting everything each week. Technically, this is nothing and I have all the skills I need to do this. I hope to even be able to grab the tweet direct from Twitter itself.

Time

What I don’t have is time. Right now I have the Adventure Writing Competition to oversee and the normal day-to-day activity of a small games company plus I’m working on the code needed to run our soon to be launched affiliate scheme. The eagled-eyed of you will have noticed that there has been no bucket of links this week.

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been splitting my time between #Twitterville and the affiliate code but the next step for #Twitterville is too large for me to do as a side project. So there will be no #Twitterville update this week whilst I use the time to complete the bulk of the affiliate system. Then I will dedicate an entire week to the technology of #Twtterville so that it can grow into a useful and distinctive campaign setting.

Click for a larger and more complete map.

This week’s creative writing exercise is to name the streets and give them character. What sort of people live and work on them? Are the long or short? What is the history behind the names? The aim is to flesh out the city. To make it a real, living place. I will take all the entires and work out how they fit together and start filling in the map.

Remember this is a living, working city. Everyday people do everyday jobs everyday. We need streets where players can find bakers, candlestick makers, tanners, chimney sweeps, blacksmiths, builders, carpenters and all the other mundane trades. Some streets will be a mixture of people and trades, others will be almost exclusive one trade or another. Most occupants are human (or at least appear human). Non-human populations will tend to gather on particular streets, as will humans from other cultures or who worship a particular god.

• In Summer, Reek Lane is the smelliest street #Twitterville. The caravans from The Steppe pass down it leaving a thick layer layer of dung.
• Castle Way leads up to the keep. High on the hill, it is home to the rich of #Twitterville. Beggars and undesirables are not welcome here.

Taking part is easy. Write a tweet on Twitter and make sure you include the hash-tag #Twitterville in it. Using Twitter’s search function I can track them all. #Twitterville is in the creative commons project so all entries fall under this license (more details).

Download the complete #Twitterville in this PDF. It is a very rough first draft but it does contain everything so far. The goal is to create a new one each week, updated with all the latest entries.

It is extremely rough and needs much more work but it does contain a map and all the #Twitterville entries (apart from one I had to take out for copyright reasons). Take a look at it and let me know what you think of the direction I’m going in. If you spot any spelling mistakes and other howlers, please point those out as well.

For next Tuesday’s #Twitterville, we will be focusing back on the city itself and I hope to have an outline map of the city itself by then. Towards the end of next week I publish a new PDF containing the latest updates.

It is very easy to focus on exciting things like ruined castles or dark woods but remember that mundane things have to happen. Towns need a water supply, a food supply and places to trade with. Though mundane, these can often be great sources of adventures. What a happens if bandits cut the main trade route or raiding kobolds are digging the crops out of the ground at night?

The tweets below give a starting point for the geography and basic reason for the towns existence.

• Hundreds of miles from other major settlements, #Twittervillle is the link between the strange Eastern lands and the empire of the west.
• East of #Twitterville, the spice road climbs on to the barren, hostile area of The Steppe and heads to the distant lands of Al-Pak-Bar
• West and north of #Twitterville, the land rises steeply into the foothills an immense, unmapped mountain range.
• Lake Twitter lies between the mountains and The Steppe. Its clear mountain water teems with life and on its south side sits #Twitterville.
• The river flows south through the plains. Fleets of small boats ply the slowly moving river carrying spices south and trade goods north.

The rules are as normal. Try to come up with as many ideas, plot hooks and details and send them via Twitter tagged with #Twitterville. I will try and compile all the entries on Thursday.

Please note than all entires to Twitterville are under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. See #Twitterville – Ideas, Copyright and Beyond for more details.