With great thanks to Petteri, Santiago, and Paul, we enjoyed diving pretty deep into the game, with more to go. Given four briefly-described choices from Petteri for our starting short-story piece, we used From the World of Old, which concerns a dragon who wakes into the developing civilized world (not really historical, but symbolic thereof) and decides to make his way there in human form.

Who could have asked for a better inadvertent experiment in comparative design? Four consulting clients, one specific historical ideal of role-playing experience, similar influences and familiarities with games and ideas, resulting in four non-converging, distinctive games. Directions Storyplay, Tales of Entropy, Be-Movie, and this one, Jeff Slater’s House of Spiders.

Here’s a summary of some of their comparative features.

 Here's the first consulting session with BPG, author of Directions Storyplaying System, of two sessions we've done which includes a pretty detailed amount of "let's play" across two of them. I found working with this system simultaneously with Tales of Entropy to be a little challenging, as they share the rhetorical philosophy of design and play, but fortunately they turn out to be rather different.

The absolutely nascent stage of game design sometimes isn't any different from how you found yourself spinning some feature of some other game you happened to be playing. One may even "know" that hey, wherever I go with this will be something different, even when still thinking so closely to the primary experience that it's pretty much the same as tweaking it at the table.