Adept Play
Adept Play
Author: Bill White
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Avant-Garde Retrogame
Back in early 1980s, when I was in high school, I was the Dungeon Master for a campaign of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons with my friends. That is of course when the bug bit me; been chasing that dragon ever since. Last summer, I tried to run AD&D again, but of course even before I…
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Time to Take a Stand
I had a great time running Mustering Out Blues last weekend, a two-hour session with four players, three “regulars” and one guest: Adept Play poster “Johann” took me up on my offer to get a little Traveller experience via the Pool, and created a character who would fit right in: ex-Fleet pilot Rory Cunningham, with…
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Laser Duel on Dreni
“Mustering Out Blues” is what I call Traveller using the Pool, slightly hacked so that how many you credits you want to spend and how many you can get as payout is part of the action. I’ve been running it with three players in two-hour-long sessions online via Roll20 about once a week since the…
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Arenas of the Old City
Last year sometime, I took the “Ronnies” course, which involved reading game texts, watching play, and thinking about the connections between them. There was even homework! The capstone of the course was designing a game around a theme (“Red Meat”) in 24 hours and getting it to play. The idea that came to me was…
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Alien War and Ouija Board GMing
A few years ago, my brother wrote up some rules and ran a one-shot for a tabletop version of X-Com, the videogame franchise about fighting off an alien invasion on Earth, with a vibe like UFO (the 1970s TV series by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson about a secret alien-fighting organization) meets Squad Leader (the Avalon…
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More Mustering Out Blues
“Mustering Out Blues” is an homage to classic Traveller I made by hacking the Pool, James V. West’s decades-old rules system (today we’d call it a “game engine,” I suppose). I’ve run a bunch of one-shots with it, but today I ran the second session of a campaign game, and I don’t want to brag…
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Fracking, Penn$ylvania: An Amerika Scenario
I played Amerika (Story Now in the Radical U.S.A.) in a seminar class about environmental communication. The answer to fracking appeared to these students to be money and lawyers.
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Common Hour “D&D”
We play hour-long sessions of a rules-light homage to D&D that uses oracular game mechanics based on the Deck of Many Things.
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Mustering Out Blues
At the end of February, I ran a game for Games on Demand Online I call Mustering Out Blues. It’s a Traveller hack that came from a couple-three different places: (1) the classic Traveller campaign I started at the height of the pandemic that evolved into Galactic Adventures, the game I described in a previous…