ACTUAL PLAY
This is where we do what we do! We talk about playing table-top role-playing games.
This is not a play-at or streaming site - it's for discussion of what you're already doing. People often include video or audio recordings, but text-only is fine too. You can also attach documents, like maps or character sheets or brief sections of the rules you're using.
I trust you to work out how you want to talk about your games. If you'd like, check out my best-practices manual for suggestions, but it's really flexible.
If you already do a podcast or other actual-play series, live or not, please consider yourself invited to embed a link as a topic.
For games in design, i.e., playtesting - yes, go right ahead, that's welcome too. For consulting sessions with me, which is different, see the Consulting page.
A year has passed and me and my friends decided to pick up our game prep where we left it. The good news: now I’ve got the actual Champions Now manual, in pre-publication form. (In case you don’t follow the Kickstarter, backers have already received a PDF with the rules; it’s not “finished” because there’s still art/comics under development.)
If a city or state were a character how would you express it?
Nothing but crazy talk in this post. For one thing, it's back to that strange little collection of games about religion. I've added their updated forms as attachments if you don't mind never getting back the hour or two of reading them.
I'd been feeling like playing The Clay That Woke for a while, so I took it to Spelens Hus. It's also Nate's fault. I hadn't planned to attend that week, but as it happened, several people showed up hoping I'd be there, so I got a message. I answered back with "traditional or weird?" and Nate said "weird," so this is what I grabbed.
We are seventeen sessions into Legendary Lives. It is at least possible that this is a lifetime record for the game, which received mainly demonstration convention play during its initial promotion and release.
A bit unfairly, this is the last game played during the two-pal pow visit, after Jared had left for home and Simon and I had a bit more time. We'd been talking about French games, as he'd just visited there to investigate the crazy-indie design scene, and he had a bag full of weirdness. One of them seemed just right for the atmosphere at the moment, so here it is, Happy Together by Gaël Sacré.
I invited my old friend Jared Sorensen, a.k.a. Memento Mori Theatrics, over to Sweden for a late-autumn getaway - and also to meet my new friend Simon Pettersson, a.k.a. (part of) Urverk Speldesign. The plan was a few days of unbridled RPG discourse, RPG play, unconstructed conversation, kid-wrangling, and meeting with some local players too. It worked!
I got over a mental block and managed to say "this game's done!" in design terms at least, so it was time to introduce Cosmic Zap to some intrigued people at Spelens Hus.
I've started a conversation with Ron in the comments of a Seminary post and he suggested to bring the subject to its own post.
A small foreword: Ron suggested I use this chance to talk about a game I'm working on (and as, he correctly points out, I can't seem to stop talking about it) but I wanted to start from an example of actual play (from a 2015 D&D4 game) that encapsulates very well a few of the things we touched upon in that discussion.
On Sunday, October 27th, we finally beat my schedule's cruel tactics and were able to play Circle of Hands again.
I have to say that I am finding each return to the Crescent Land with a character to play has very satisfying.