Day Fifteen: By The Author Of Lady Windermere's Fan

 “Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.” - Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan.

By The Author of Lady Windermere's Fan is a charming little indy RPG by Lara Turner. In it, you play a group of actors who, through an appalling lack of communication, are forced to improvise a play by Oscar Wilde. Fortunately, all Oscar Wilde plays follow a formula: as long as you're all a bunch of charming but deceitful idiots who say a lot of superficially clever things and live happily ever, no one will ever notice! My wife and I used to do a lot of community theatre, and she gave terrific performances as Mrs. Erlynne in Lady Windermere's Fan and Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, so this was right up my alley.

This is a very freeform game. You start by secretly listing theatre sets which you can recycle for your faux-Wilde, and then sharing and putting them together to make a setting. So you might wind up with the beach from South Pacific, the Yellow Brick Road from Oz and the town of Salem from The Crucible, and now must figure out a narrative linking these three. Everyone then creates their characters. All these characters are primarily defined by their lie, a small deceit which they will double down on for comic effect throughout the story. Over a series of acts, players take turns acting out scenes where their character has the spotlight. There's a meta-currency for audience applause, which players earn by being witty and lose by freezing up. Once it's all done, you find a contrived way to give everyone a happy ending, and the play is over! There are also optional rules to give each player an acting archetype, with a theatrical goal, like having lots of costume changes or a dramatic death scene or a lot of silly voices, if you want to make it even more chaotic. The rest of the book is a series of playbills if you want to use a pre-generated setting instead, ranging from pirate hunters to Renaissance Florence to outer space.

Character Creation: This is very simple; you just answer a few questions. The first step I couldn't actually do properly, which is have each player pick one set that you have available for your play. Instead, I went on Wikipedia and went to three random articles! I got a rock band from Melbourne, Australia; a castle; and a tiny settlement in the desert in Arizona, USA. This made me think about 19th century Australia, the gold rush, bush rangers, and the nouveau riche from the gold fields - a ripe topic for pseudo-Wildean parody! 

I decided that my character would be Phineas Throckmorton, who's struck it rich and is now trying to impress the upper crust. He's built a castle near Melbourne. I have to choose an iconic costume, and I decided he'd be in a tail-coat and top hat, but all a bit too big and a bit too gaudy. His vice (or virtue, it's the same thing for Oscar Wilde) is tobacco. His tragic history is that he's a poor orphan who was transported to Australia after being caught stealing in London (with a possible eye to secretly being related to someone or another). My lie is "I did not find all my money on the goldfields" since that's not a respectable way to make a fortune - I'm passing myself off as someone with old money who's just arrived. Shades of Gatsby? Except I get to pick a happy ending, which is 'to be accepted by high society.' 

The other part of character creation is to define your relationship to the characters to your left and right. I decided to sketch the sort of characters I think might appear - Agatha Pembleton, a gently born heiress that I'm courting, and 'Oz' Oswald Figgins, a bushranger who knows me from my past. 

And that's it for 'Phineas Throckmorton.' We can imagine him getting up to hijinks as his lies unravel around him and he desperately keeps lying even further to try and cover for it. Plus what are Agatha and Oz lying about, and any other characters who might be involved? It's sure to be frivolous yet satirical, just the way Oscar Wilde would like it.

Final Thoughts: This is a funny little game, and I think with the right people it would be a hoot. I'm not really in community theatre any more, so I don't know if I know the right crowd any more, but it's a cool little game and I hope someone reads this and then checks it out. Find it here: https://glaiveguisarme.itch.io/by-the-author-of-lady-windermeres-fan