I’ll lay this out the way I see it and have tried to present it over the past few years.
- We play situations, as a feature of the activity
- A situation is all the actionable content during play, by whomever; “scenes” are the points of focus within a situation
- Backdrop is purported content which does not enter into play even potentially or indirectly, during this situation
- Trying to “play a setting” typically distracts from playing situations, as the person with the main authorities for doing so is trying instead to present and explain a much vaster body of content, most of it irrelevant
- I think many of us are familiar with a variety of broken attemps to make people get into the setting and to appreciate it in some way
- Notably, when more than one person at the table shares this interest, right when you’d think such confluence would help, it typically turns into a struggle for who’s “really” doing it
- This point applies no matter where the purported setting comes from: a text, a person’s private work, a group-creation process, or as a work in progress during play
- Playing at least one situation well, and certainly upon more than one, almost effortlessly establishes a played setting, “real” as opposed to promised or purported, and validates backdrop material as potential situations, as well as often inspiring or exciting interest in more of it
- This is observable as a mutual, shared, group interest, rather than one person shoveling things at the others
I think the role of textual setting content is clear: it explicitly drives into playing situations, or it doesn’t. (So-called “scenario seeds” typically don’t.) However, one simply cannot tell by reading. Sometimes it seems overly stuffed, or uselessly sketchy, but turns out to be strikingly good for play. Other times it seems great, “cool, I feel it, let’s jump in,” but something about it is like hitting a tar pit as soon as anything practical about play begins.
I’ve really struggled with Dark Sun in exactly that latter way. Given the right trippy naked arid science fiction fantasy perspective, it should be excellent, but I’ve stalled on trying to start it more than once. This time has been more successful, using most of the original text, sections of the 4E version, and bits and pieces of other auxiliary material, and using The Pool as our system, as discussed in Dark + Sun + Pool, It always goes to the arena, and Hot passions, hot place.

I’ll take this opportunity to mention what one would think to be a useful reference for our game set in and around Nibenay, the AD&D 2nd edition Marauders of Nibenay, which turns out to be one of the single worst and most useless RPG texts I have ever seen.
Anyway, unfortunately, by last week, I had concluded that we’ve achieved beta at best and diminishing, and that I’m wearing out. Some recent play has suggested that my specific issue is failing to focus on gritty day-to-day aspects of characters’ lives, or at least presented as a feature, as discussed in Dialing down the fantasy and Grit and focus. Doing this has been a big aspect of enjoying our EABA game, with another group, presented in Apoc western and Radioactive grit.
Other issues are social, first, the varying availability of people for play which, in causing delays, has generally messed up the shared understanding and momentum of events; and second, the table interactions which have tended to minimize at least one player. So I was thinking it was time to finish out the current combat as of the end of session 8, and then simply to stop. I collected and updated all the content so far to make sure I would maintain some integrity.
People who are familiar with the setting via role-playing or digital gaming will notice that I have lifted many names from my Dark Sun publications at hand, with no interest at all in whoever they’re supposed to be in those texts, repurposing whoever and whatever just because I liked the sound of this or that example.
Then … we played session 9, and now I feel completely differently. The events of play, great character play, more sense of place and presence than I’d thought, everyone fully up to speed with their notes and drives … most notably, clarification of content which I hadn’t understood fully: that Christian’s character Hans had faked his alleged relationship to the deceased Trixie, which makes a ton of difference. Less visibly, I’d talked with Christian when I found he couldn’t join us, but that was actually encouraging too, as he was also more up to speed on content than I was, and ready for play next time. It’s like all the players are totally fine, and I’m realizing there isn’t a problem.
Here are the maps you can see us discussing and using, both approximate and tuned to the specific features of the place and moment.


Now I’m totally “cured!” We’re continuing to play next week, with the full complement of players, and I’m quite motivated to see what happens with Hans, Sharukh, Temnya, and House Shom.
One response to “Hands-on content”
The session 10 showdown
Here’s the direct link to the recorded session inside the playlist.
My notes are brief and to the point: the defiler Temnya attacks Sharukh, as a chosen start to the stepwise process of killing all of Ashathra’s gladiators, then armed with who knows what mystic badness from this act, going on to challenge her even as she and Nibenay are doing who-knows-what sorcerous madness in the palace.
However, I did not want to stage-manage what was pre-determined to be a final encounter without some discussion and room for players actually to play, so you can see how the session began with me asking for orientation from them.
Some of the logic was worked out visibly in the recording, but some of it was more intuitive or at least I didn’t want to explain every last thing. For example, Temnya arrived exactly there because he was tracking Hans, so it wasn’t merely an absurd coincidence.
During editing, I realized that I could have established that Xurto was indeed present, if he and Sharukh had been discussing the “sweat” deal, which would also provide more direct opportunity for Hans toward Sharukh . I probably didn’t consider it because I was aversive to contriving some way for everyone to be present, but it wasn’t actually unreasonable, in retrospect.
And a bit of in-play refinement, which made surprising sense, far more than I would have expected, as I’d feared the risk of contriving cool justifications.
Before recording, I mentioned that our game has been successful mainly in teaching me how I’d like to play Dark Sun, meaning, the kind of lesson in which one does rather poorly, but sets up for doing well later. And although that’s true, the final session showed me that we (as opposed to myself alone) did not do poorly at all.