Help me design the coolest Permaculture learning experience ever: GreenDragons, a fantasy RPG!!

Hi everyone!

After posting my questionaire to the Permaculture subreddit, somebody replied that you lot would be really interested in this permaculture role playing game!
My name is Irene, I’m a 4th year Applied Biology student and I’m currently doing my internship at the Aardwerk Academy. I’m working with Leo Bakx on an educational game, called GreenDragons. The objective of the game is to become a permaculture teacher, through the game the player will learn about permaculture, teaching and about life. The game is based on the Dungeons & Dragons gameplay.

For those of you not familiar with Dungeons & Dragons, I will explain it briefly: D&D is a fantasy tabletop roleplaying game. Each player controls a character, these characters embark on imaginary adventures led by another player: the Dungeon Master. The DM is the referee and storyteller and controls the inhabitants of the imaginary world. The characters form a party, and together they solve dilemmas, engage in battles and gather treasure and knowledge. In the process the characters earn experience points to become increasingly powerful over a series of sessions.

GreenDragons works in more or less the same way as Dungeons and Dragons, only it's used as a teaching tool. I’m working on the very beginning of the game: building your character. All the skills, abilities, statistics, powers and equipment are written on a character sheet. I want to create a new character sheet for GreenDragons with skills, abilities, equipment and powers that a permaculture teacher needs to have.

That’s where you come in: by answering some questions you can help me gain insight in the things that make a great permaculture teacher. So, if you could all head over to http://www.thesistools.com/web/?id=421307 and answer my questions I will be very grateful! Comments, ideas, inspiration and general ramblings are also greatly appreciated

- Irene

My wife was just asking me if I missed gaming and I told her permaculture was my replacement obsession.
I will come by to look at what you are doing, I know some game designers who might like to chech It out as well...

Irene Mouthaan : I have just finished watching the Seeds of time Online Premier it was brought you us by a link provided by the Folks

at :::--> http:growyourowngroceries.org hint highlight the Bold part, and right click, it should open in the address window, or as
a Google Search!

The history of the Groups involved in the earliest attempts to create seed banks, and also the stories of the early individuals some of them
real live Indiana Jones types, will practically write themselves as RPG Adventure quests! or re-write some of the historic failures/collapses of
early seed bank centers, with happy endings or cautionary tales, Armageddon aftermaths will of course be popular, after you have made a
few of these there will be room for other less swashbuckling adventures ! For the good of the Craft ! Big AL

Late Note : Wikipedia Has an interesting Article on one of the 1st seed banks, its creator, and their interlinked history through the WW11
Siege of Leningrad and the more recent troubled history, again, natural material for any number of bridging RPGs Adventure/Quests !

The name of the Wikipedia article is Pavlovsk Experimental station A. L.

This is awesome, we should talk. We're building something similar at www.seedsthegame.com

Hi Irene

The website doesn't seem to be working anymore (or maybe it does but I can't read Dutch). Any progress to report on this project?

Thanks

Robert

I've written several RPGs in the past, including being a finalist in last year's Game Chef competition, so might be able to help with ideas. Unfortunately, I too am unable to read the site and even using a translator I was unable to fully read what was written. Is there any chance you could post the questions here and simply gather the answers manually?

Wow! I posted this almost 2 years ago and totally forgot about it, which is why I never replied to the comments... Oops, sorry about that. Nice to hear that there's still an interest in this. My work on GreenDragons the game was a part of an internship for Aardwerk Academy, my internship there ended in 2014 so that's why the questionnaire is no longer available. At the moment I'm writing my thesis (which is also about Permaculture education, but unrelated to GreenDragons). After I graduate from university I will hopefully be able to continue with GreenDragons and other projects, but for now the project is back in the hands of Leo Bakx and a new group of interns.

There's no specific website with the progress on the game unfortunately, but if you guys are seriously interested I can ask if there's a way to make the game available to you. I made a character sheet with permaculture skills and I wrote a few encounters (adventures), I played a few rounds at the European Permaculture Convergence in Bulgaria, it was great fun and the very open roleplaying aspect of D&D worked so well for all the different permies and really gave people a chance to solve the challenges in the encounter in their own way. For example, one of the challenges in the game is an anthill with vicious fireants who destroy your crop. Some players opted to destruct the anthill and battle the ants, but there was one player who stated that it was part of their ethics not to hurt living beings, so he used song and dance to calm the ants down and make peace with them. This was not what I had in mind when I wrote the challenge, so it was fantastic to see the players come up with such creative solutions I would never have thought of. It's by far the most fun project I ever worked on.

Love this idea! I've got animation/video editing experience so if you even want to pursue making it a video game... I'd be interested in participating.

Are you sure you want to make 'teacher' the objective? It seems that 'developer' or 'consultant' or even 'farmer' might provide more interesting gameplay [more closely related to the actual development of the systems.]