Welcome to the Court of the Star Chamber https://www.britannica.com/topic/Court-of-Star-Chamber, or what was the Court of the Star Chamber.

So what is this discussion, this is a discussion of a concept of how to run a game in the setting of the Court of the Star Chamber. I’ve thought about this over the years, firstly an invite game to be held in a suitable location, but how would you secure a suitable location? How do you not socially bully a participant but ensure the players that attend are who or the type you want? I have a discussion on invite only events to write, but lets quickly say I don’t like them, but I also don’t know how to ensure quality of play with out them deterministically. Then I wrote http://redcirclegames.co.uk/2017/11/10/play-by-mail.html where I considered how to distill Tales from the Loop down into a Play by Mail game.

The idea of running Court of the Star Chamber as a PbM brought me into interesting places, especially once I had set up a Facebook group for Loop Mail (i’ll write that article later, this one is in my head now). With a Facebook group to support the game, I can invite people to participate, the use of PbM means that as with Loop Mail I can provide a unifying voice to the game (I need to write a post about that mechanic too) This means any one can participate, the GMs and Admins deal with the varying content, participation and quality, leveling the output for all. The location, cost and participation become streamlined.

In my head the game takes look and feel from Guy Ritchies inspired Sherlock Holmes, in fact the Star Chamber even features in those films, with a feel I would like, evolved from it’s real history to a shadowy organisation that manipulates and affects the world at large. The idea would be to invite players to research the period and take the role of actual characters of the time who could have been involved in the evolution of the Court of the Star Chamber, equally they can introduce characters to the game.

The game system takes a very open form based on what I’ve started to develop for Loop Mail. A freeform game where the player characters suggest actions their own and those of the central organisation Its 1913, I am going to Italy to investigate a tomb at the Vatican, can the Court send operatives to look at the engineering work in Serbia, and what do they know of one Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Player information takes the form of the London and European press, papers drawn up by the GM team to develop story, expose plot hooks and fill in pure background and flavour (This is how the unifying voice works in Loop Mail, again I need to write up the detail). This invites the players to set and interact with set scenes, mysteries and troubles very much like the Tales from the Loop system.

Props for the game are light, the write paper for printing and envelopes for flavour, a hand full of props that can be posted, and also pictured for the press. If you have not seen the Mysterious Package Company and their Curious Conundrums a lot of this media and interactive concepts are based on this. The players would receive the regular papers, personal letters from NPCs and items of interest or at least aged photos of props. One mechanic is the idea of players writing also to each other, but I feel this would have to be some how relayed so to ensure that you have control and over site within the bounds of the game and story.

So there it is One Night in the Star Chamber, an interactive play by mail game. Players ask to join and are invited to play as members of turn of the century nobility and upper classes. They progress through the alternative history of the world at the turn of the century Europe, affecting the future as the world roles towards the mundane first world war, and what of the none mundane? Those things that are on the edge of our consciousness, and provide something out of the ordinary to consider. But that’s a discussion for another time.