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.
I want to talk a bit about a play test session for a game I am designing. The game is called Citadel of Time and it goes something like this:
Trapped in the Citadel, you pursue missions to retrieve graels for the Castellan's Great Project. Moving to different points in time, your success or failure hinges on overcoming your own issues and the obstacles of the time you find yourself in.
Here’s a game I consider under-served. I would say “criminally” so except for the poor joke it entails, which is too bad, because yes, it’s criminal. Matt Gwinn’s The Hour Between Dog and Wolf is an excellent detective vs.
We're two more sessions into the RuneQuest game since the last time, and as I'd feared, the material is demanding a further effort to live up to its tantalizing hints. I find myself creating things, especially cult writeups. One of them was completed for session 6, for the Cult of the Buried Dead, so it's attached.
Pre-Post
I've mentioned that I'm not skilled in bringing role-playing to kids. I've done it a fair amount - for instance, all the way back in 1986, with Mentzer's D&D, when I was working at a neighborhood center. But I don't have any special techniques or insights about it as a specific task, and as a father, I don't think I've done a very good job of "bringing them up role-playing" as I've seen many do, or at least present themselves as doing on social media.
Session 2
Location: Western Tamaryon, toward the river at the edge of the map.
This portion of the region has been called Falkebrook. Rumors of a massacre make their way to the Circle Knights and the first character shuffle occurs. Only one familiar face in this one, Wulf the fisherman now with a wonderful charm score of... three.
Prep Notes
Session 1: Northern Rolke, a traveling Merchant's endeavors. Next component, an enchanted Amboriyon sword in the cliffside crypts, tended to by a priest losing his grip on reality.
We begin with Wulf (Fisherman Wizard), Bern (L. Entertainer), Lutz (Priest), and another who regrettably had to leave the session early. They travel a bit north of the Circle's citadel following rumors of a merchant from Spurr stirring up things in a small farming community.
I've found myself diving back into Circle of Hands with a group of friends I had been playing D&D with.
My style of artistic preferences leads to a lot of my work looking dark and spooky (although I would argue it's serene in its own way in some cases).
Please enjoy and I'll be sure to post more portraits and illustrations of the Circle's ventures. Provided they don't all die tonight, haha!
I've got most of the illustrations up on my artstation: https://www.artstation.com/caramelcharcoal
Session 4 of our RuneQuest game! I wrote up a summary handout for them this time – see attached. It was fun to write, and also to feel as if I’d nailed down “this is what we’re playing” in some ways.
Ok, so I had the pleasure of introducing my 13 year old niece and her stepsister to rpgs this Christmas, and wanted to describe what I did, with an eye to better understanding things like intuitive continuity and also how to do things like this better in the future.