Where I played Darkurthe Legends and Spione (slated for upcoming Actual Play posts), and encountered lots of contact among people I knew and others that I didn’t. My schedule for the rest of the year is looking pretty full!

I also presented a workshop, perhaps playfully titled “Our role-playing, ourselves.” Although it borrows from a couple of the existing courses, I extracted and developed an emphasis on the human context of play. Subtopics, in order, concern the behavior of listening, events (as opposed to merely description) in the medium, and finally the skills and social interactions which turn into playing on purpose.

My core content for this presentation is the new write-up for Cold Soldier, developed by Bret and me. This is not quite ready for general distribution, but I brought some low-tech, rather nice little copies to use for the activities. The first one concerns “maneuvers” (borrownig the term from Spione), specifically, how we apply explicit authorities in open dialogue with no prompts. This is a really big deal. At the risk of upsetting anyone, frankly, I find it deficient among almost eveyone I meet and play with.

After that activity, which brought the Soldier to its first Obstacle, and after some more presentation/reflection about that, the second activity is pure play regarding the obstacles and their resolutions. After that, I moved hard into “system does matter,” including applying infamous system diagrams to Cold Soldier specifically. Here are a couple of examples.

Here’s the complete explanatory file for the relevant system features, which I provided as a take-home following the workshop for anyone who was interested.

The final section of the workshop examined the content each pair of participants had generaed, regarding depth for the fiction and the experience for ourselves. I finished it with a brief attack on critique of hobby culture, concerning its consistent if inadvertent suppression of all these things.

Another piece of good news is that this workshop was much better attended than those at Gothcon, which I’ll interpret as momentum if only to feel optimistic. More practically, I’ll put some thought into pre-event promotion for the upcoming conventions and similar events later this year.

Also: if you’re local – which by my standards means anywhere Nordic or even European! – check out the Local play and activities page, which lists some things I’ll be doing. In fact, it needs an update considering all the things which have shown up recently, so check back in a few days as well. I’m open for more of them, so if you are participating in any kind of role-playing event, and if you think I’d be a useful/fun part of it, please get in touch.