Adept Play
Adept Play
Author: noah
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Three Plus Two Musketeers
David, Greg, Rod, Sam and I recently played our eighth session of Lace & Steel, a game we’ve been playing for approximately five months. I want to write about the game, for myself, with an eye toward jump-starting my own critical reflection on roleplaying, which has suffered quite a bit in 2025. Rod, who’s GMing,…
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My Guy(s)
I’ve been enjoying playing multiple PCs across Champions Now, TORG, and (starting soon) Rolemaster. When I encountered this practice first-hand, it was in the GM role and in the context of ‘the crawl,’ playing Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Tunnels & Trolls. In deciding to ask each player to create 2-3 characters for these…
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Issues #1-7
Sam and I sat down last week to record a conversation about a 7-issue run on Villains & Vigilantes we did along with our longtime creative collaborator Robin. Personally, I value how unprogrammed this particular dialog was. We excavated lessons from our play of Villains & Vigilantes that we’re excited to apply to our current…
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Improving as “just players”
At Sam’s suggestion, he and I recorded a conversation about improving as “just players,” not GMs. We have 2+ years of conversation, shared play, and mutual influence between us, and we were able to ground the topic firmly in our experiences of play. The conversation largely speaks for itself. However, I want to highlight a…
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Ierendi
For our second arc of Champions Now, we’ve added a new writer-artist, Sam, and moved the action to the island city-state of Ierendi. As with Karameikos, I’ll leave explanation of the backdrop and lore to Rod, but suffice to say that Singapore has been a strong inspiration, and gaudy phantasmagoria abounds. You can find our…
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Good-bye, Glorantha
Sam, Avid and I embarked on a game of 2nd Edition Runequest. I volunteered to GM, and, inspired by Ron’s run on RQ2, jettisoned Glorantha and determined to use Runequest as a launching-pad for my own Bronze Age fantasy. Still exhausted by the endless course corrections Avid and I had to make during our Runequest:…
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Lead on, specter!
Rod and I played our first session of Champions Now this week, drawing on our favorite chunks of D&D media, and the roleplaying setting of Karameikos in particular, for our inspiration. Rod’s playing lots of NPCs, not the least of which is the city of Specularum itself. I’m playing Suleiman (Sully to his friends), a…
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Sorcerer Atchison
I have played 15 sessions of Sorcerer since April, resolving one set of Kickers with my Runequest buddy David and his brother (another Noah), then a second set with the brothers plus Sam. Inspired by the form of Mansfeld’s posts, I’m going to describe the Sorcerers in our game, their Kickers (for PC Sorcerers) and…
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Slaying the The is harder than it looks
The last three and a half months have been full of funny, heartbreaking and just plain fun roleplaying (D&D 4e, Marvel Super Heroes, S/lay w/Me, and Sorcerer). I regret not having the bandwidth to post about these games in detail at present, because I owe so much of the quality of my recent roleplaying to…