As with past years, my particpation at this convention was tied to Spelens Hus, and now also allied with MiFF, the equivalent organization with our local SiN, with a Spelens Hus of their own in Göteborg (Gothenburg). Based on last year, I concentrated on workshops, offering two sessions of “Understanding Role-playing” and one of “No, Not Blackleaf!”

Understanding Role-playing

It’s taken a long time to whip some kind of “welcome to role-playing, what is it” workshop into shape. I’ve tried a variety of exercises and pedagogical structures. This time was definitely the best so far. It begins with some with solid play of Mörk Borg for about fifteen or twenty minutes, using these:

Then, everything discussed after that refers to what really happened at the table. For example, we went through the process of generating a new situation, using the instructions in the text (and which I consider to be quite excellent if you jettison any OSR blithering in your head and actually pay attention to content).

One of the slides concerns the wide variety of changes which may occur, and at that point we applied these rules to the characters:

It’s important to understand that “experience” in Mörk Borg is not the typical exponential improvement (whether inflected positive or negative), but after a short improvement phase, it becomes a wiggle around a flat plateau.

Each session ended with a fair amount of enthusiasm about bringing principles of reincorporation and systemic change back to people’s tables, so that’s good.

No, Not Blackleaf!

This is particularly strong, probably my best short-form workshop. It’s predicated on the concept of defeat as opposed to character death, for which I also credit this wonderful image by someone named Nesby and which I can’t manage to source.

The first third or half of the session is about the basic contradiction of “my guy dies” vs. “I can’t play,” and various dishonest means of squaring that circle which also incidentally obviate the basic acts of play. But most of it is about the many different ways to conceive death/play differently, crediting a lot of older games which had blazed the trail for breaking open the topic in the mid-2000s.

Activities include a perfect contrast between Space Rat, in which characters are immune to dying, and Trollbabe, in which they are very much able to do so.

In the former case, the point is for three people to play the characters individually, using a similar but brief setup to the event at Cnema earlier this year (Setting it out there). It’s very easy to see the competition for stars interfacing positively with appreciating one another’s characters … and therefore, why death is simply not involved.

(my sheet for Brutalina is missing; it probably left with her player after the workshop)

Whereas for the Trollbabe exercise, three people each play Thra in exactly the same situation, separately. This way they can see how each different person relates differently to defeat and death, especially since the game explicitly trades off between the two.

Presenting The Mountain Witch in the session (as it happens, comparing it with its unexpected similarities to Albedo) also turned out to be a real attention-getter; everyone wanted to know all about it.

Among all the positive aspects, this also clarified something I’d been thinking about. Someone in a class or workshop or play regarding this game always gets obsessed with the in-fiction justification of the dead character’s presence. I can say over and over that it doesn’t matter, any group can arrive at any fictional version they feel like, so let’s concentrate on the rules … and they are simply convinced that the real and only critical issue is whether there is an actual ghost in play or not. It was especially evident here because I said exactly this as part of my presentation … and the person in question did not hear a single word of it, and asked all these familiar questions as if they had not already been addressed. Therefore I’ve come to think of this phenomenon as more than a distraction, rather, as an active (if non-self-aware) deflection. What I’m really saying is simply too scary and the mind retreats into something that gamers know they can go ’round and ’round about.

Fantasy for Real

Real-world logistics were horrible for me at this convention. They placed Spelens Hus so far from MiFF that we could not coordinate activities between the two; the Spelens Hus placement itself was absurdly inappropriate; the convention app listed my workshop location at the entrance of a building instead of a room number; and furthermore, it listed the workshops as a single hour instead of two. Given that they were extremely well-attended, I can only say that if the support and context had been even barely adequate, I might have seen phenomenal participation and follow-up activity.

As it was, the only real follow-up benefit was a rollicking episode of Fantasy for Real. Here are the notes I scribbled for the scenario, concerning a beer festival – set not in Rackriver Port, contra the note at the top, but at Ashley’s Ford, also in the Crystal Shore, but in a more bucolic and relaxed setting. (Until, of course, the assassin shows up with the mind-bending lizard who amplifies resentments into murderous intent.)

I think the players must have walked off with their character sheets, but special credit goes to the entitled princess-type from Ambor who managed to cause more trouble than the con artist and the overly-helpful goblin put together.