Adept Play
Adept Play
Author: Jon Hastings
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Ripping Off Tolkien and Other Secrets of My Success
Sean, Erik, and I have just finished up playing some Dungeons & Dragons using the 1977 Holmes Basic Set rulebook. We started playing at the beginning of December 2023, and played 19 sessions (about 2 a month). We played over Discord, for about 2 hours per session, using no extra technology: I drew maps and…
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Rethinking some of my habits
Rod, Sean, and I have been playing Bushido for a little bit now: I think we’re at five sessions, each about 2-hours in length. I’m GMing, though a notable feature of our game is that a lot of “typical GM duties” have been shared out. For one, Rod suggested the historical/geographical background material that informed…
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Stuck in the Dunes
I’ve been DMing a game of Moldvay/Cook B/X Dungeons & Dragons with Robbie and Sean using the module Slumbering Ursine Dunes by Chris Kutalik. We’re 10 sessions in: the main party has just walked into an ambush, and so the next session may prove critical in answering the question of how much longer we’ll be…
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Climbing out of the Pool after 18 sessions
We finished our game of the Pool set in an alternate magical/fantasy Napoleonic era India/Afghanistan. We played 18 sessions. The final confrontation saw Brigadier General Jean-Jacqyes d’Espoir defy his superior (Lord Lumley, Albion’s Governor General of their Mountain Kingdom colony; also the husband of Espoir’s unrequited love interest) and attack Shah Durani, a diabolist and…
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Some vague memories of player Amber Diceless Roleplaying
Amber was mentioned on the Discord today. I played a lot of Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game (1991) right after it was released. It was our favorite and most played game for two years, and even after that we would look back to those sessions as the high points of our gaming from this era (our…
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Intent in The Pool
The exchange between me and Ron about stakes setting has been on my mind, and perhaps because of that I have been extra attentive to the presence or absence of setting explicit intentions and stakes in my current play. I’ve been playing a game of the Pool with two players (George, from my Legendary Lives game,…
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Necromancer 1, Party 0
We had our first player character death in Tunnels & Trolls last night. This was the fourth session of playing T&T, though the campaign began using the minimalist Tunnel Goons rules. We switched over to T&T after 7 sessions due to my feeling that TG required too much additional design work to make it “go”…
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Arbitrary Advancement and an example of a GM lost in the murk
Our Forge: Out of Chaos game continues. We decided to wave a magic wand and advance the characters to what seems like a reasonable “next tier” of effectiveness, giving Robbie’s magic-using character Cyir Level 3 with his Magic skill and Sean’s roguish/scoutish Wrosk improvement throughout his repertoire of skills. We made this decision after coming…
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Back to the Temple of Necros
We’ve played a number of sessions of Forge: Out of Chaos since our last update, here, and Robbie has started to record the sessions. The video below is from a few sessions back (we’ve had two since then – those recordings are on the way). Since this video starts with the PCs and their allies…