Creating a Space

You create a Space from Your Spaces. When you log into Querki, the Your Spaces page is what shows up first. You can also get to it any time by clicking on the Querki logo in the upper-left corner of every page. It simply lists the Spaces that you own, and the ones that you are a member of:

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Game Night is owned by Martin, so it shows up on the right-hand side; the left is empty, because I don't have any Spaces of my own yet. Time to rectify that! I click on the "Create a new Space" button, and get a screen to enter the name of my new Space:

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My Space is going to be for designing, writing and running a LARP.

Sidebar: What is a LARP?

At this point, some of you are asking, "What's a LARP?". It's short for "Live-Action Roleplaying game".

The variety of LARPs that I write and run are sort of like improv theater. The author comes up with a starting scenario and a bunch of characters, providing biographical sketches for each of the characters, their goals and relationships. Then everyone gets together and plays it out: each Player takes one of the Characters, and tries to act as that Character for the duration of the game. (Usually between a couple of hours and a couple of days.) Game Masters (GMs) are there to answer questions and resolve disputes. Between them, they act out the scenario and figure out where it should go.

I'll admit that it's an esoteric topic, but it's one that is near and dear to my heart (see the next Sidebar for why). And it's actually a great example, because LARPs can be remarkably deep and complex -- the Space for the LARP I ran in early 2015 is by far the most intricate Space yet built, using every single feature built into the system. So we're going to use that as an example for the rest of this book.

Sidebar: The Origins of Querki

Querki actually started out, somewhere around 2003, because of a LARP. I was building a game, and knew that I wanted to do it online -- even then, it was already clear that collaborating with my friends was going to be easier if it was online. I started out trying to do it with a Wiki system, but quickly got frustrated because Wikis don't have much structure -- they're just a bunch of pages. I wanted to be able to define concepts like "Character" and "Plot", relate them to each other, do queries in that data, and so on.

So I took the Wiki system, hacked it for a week or two, and wound up with something I called ProWiki. (Short for "Wiki with Properties".) I used that to build my game, and several more after it, but was never completely happy with it -- while ProWiki worked, it was hard to use, hard to install and just not very stable. And then it turned out that there already was something named ProWiki, and they weren't very happy about my stepping on their name.

So around 2005, I started drafting ideas for what ProWiki should be -- how to make it easier to use, more broadly useful and just plain more interesting. I named that "Querki" -- short for "Queryable Wiki" -- and put it on the back burner until 2012, when I finally decided to take the project seriously. I've been working on Querki full-time since then, and the result is what you're using here.

For our purposes, we're not going to try to build an interesting LARP -- that would mostly just be a distraction. So we're going to build a little ten-minute game about a bunch of people who meet each other on a subway platform. Nothing you'd actually bother playing, but it'll be enough to show how to build a Querki Space, and in the Advanced Topics we'll use this example to illustrate a bunch of Querki's power features.

So -- after typing in the name of my Space, I press the "Create" button, and poof, I have a new Space:

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