What, Where and When

The Broken World is played in weekly turns, each consisting of a live-action session representing a meeting of characters every six months in-game, followed by a written “turnsheet” which describes the actions your character takes in the time following this session.

Sessions are held in the Morley Fletcher Room of Worcester College every Tuesday from about 7:30 to 10:30 pm. To play, simply come along to a session, optionally with any costume you feel is appropriate for your character. If you have already created a character and e-mailed it to the GM team (see Character Generation) that's great, but if not the team will help you to create a new character and get you set up, especially at the first session on October 14th, where character creation will be a priority.

Usually a session will begin with the GM team discussing with players the results of their actions from previous turns and answering related questions they may have, so to allow time for people to be late and to do this the “Time In” call which begins the actual IC play time tends to be at around 8:00 pm. It is still good to try to arrive on time for 7:30, though, so as to get other matters out of the way quicker and not limit everybody's session time.

The main entrance of Worcester College itself is found to the North-West of central Oxford, where Worcester Street and Beaumont Street meet. For more help in finding it, refer to Google Maps. Once through the main entrance, you can find the Morley Fletcher room by heading to the left side of the Main Quad where you will find an archway leading through the wall. Follow this through to the other side and across the path leading alongside the garden, until eventually reaching the buildings on the far side. By then turning right and heading around the back of these buildings the Morley Fletcher Room is eventually reached. Refer to the following map for more guidance:

There are calls and signals which may be encountered in session, described here:

• Time In: This call is made by a GM to indicate that the session is starting or resuming if for some reason stopped. You should act in-character and interact with others accordingly.
• Time Out: This call is made by a GM to indicate that the session is ending, and that you should stop acting in-character.
• Time Freeze: This call is made usually by a GM to indicate that something is happening either too fast or difficult to portray. You should stop in place momentarily as what is happening is described. When a Time In is again called you should act as if whatever was described has just happened.
• Raised hand: When a player or GM has a hand raised with a pair of fingers pointing in the air during Time In, this indicates that they are currently out-of-character or otherwise not visible. If you are in-character, you should act as though they are not there. You can use this signal to talk to people out-of-character, for example to ask a GM a question.

Each week a turnsheet is submitted to say what your character is doing in the time before the next session. This is done online via this site, as a player you will have a user page where you can edit and save your turnsheets for viewing by the GM team. For this you have 8 Action Points (AP), which represent time available to spend on actions. For more information on actions and writing a turnsheet, see Turnsheeting. For an example, see Sample Turnsheet.

Turnsheets can be submitted for the current turn any time after that week's session, but there is a deadline for submission of 11:59 pm of the Friday that week. This means that you have a good few days to communicate with other players and get your thoughts down, and the GM team gets time to look through everybody's turnsheets and take everything into account. If for some reason you can't make this deadline or need to make changes to your turnsheet page after it, we'll try to handle them, although there is no guarantee of anything.

Over the weekend, the GM team will then write up news and responses to turnsheets which will then be posted to the site, generally on the Monday or Tuesday in time to be read for the next session. Your own turnsheet responses will appear at the bottom of your turnsheet page, along with links to any associated group write-ups describing what happened in large actions involving multiple people.