Adept Play
Among several quick-play games or play-materials we brought to Närcon, I made sure to include Zombie Cinema. Different people find different games to ideal for introducing play, and for me, this is among my top three. It uses a board, but you don’t play on it in an ordinary board game sense. It’s a content-device.…
Maybe I’m too much of a pattern-making story-making animal, but the questions this time really built a single coherent body of inquiry for me. I felt like I was addressing a single important topic from multiple angles of attack. I introduce the video with a warning, but I’ll say it briefly here as well: this…
This is Traveller, in one of its early-early publications: 1981, Game Design Workshop, which as far as I can tell is about the same as the original 1977 publication. A quick point: this isn’t anything like Traveller as stamped iconically into gaming culture. There is no setting, no Imperium, no canonical starmaps, no campaign-planning, nothing…
Lorenzo Bertini asked me for some discussion about Lines and Veils, specifically, and the general concept they’ve been folded into. (Context: Lorenzo is Claudio Freda’s partner-in-crime regarding their game in design Inquest; Claudio is present in the video as well for clarity and sometimes translation.) I’d asked Lorenzo first to check out Conversation: Safe spaces…
A lot of things came together last month in a fortuitous way. One of them concerns a social gathering for the local and state branch of the Miljöpartiet (Swedish Green Party; link includes language options), right where I play at Spelens Hus. It wasn’t a promotional event; in fact, it’s useful to understand that a…
I’m a polyfantasist: any degree of fantastic content and any degree of naturalism are both fun. For the moment, I’m focusing on one historical cluster of play-and-design: variously called hedge fantasy, mud-and-shit fantasy, “iron” fantasy, sometimes overlapping with historical fantasy, with games that sought it through the lens of deep culture and realism. It’s played…
Here’s the Darkurthe Legends session from Lincon! Featuring several rather willing & able players, whom I hope to meet with again because they embraced many setting and characterization features, including asking questions, and they were genuinely interested in the formal but savage combat rules. There is one tragedy, which is that the final events of…
The first video is long as I wanted to keep my reply to Mark in a single packet. His question was a comment in the previous Q&A post, regarding my recommendations for myth inquiries & ideas regarding popular culture. I’ve attached an outline which may make it easier to follow. I did not manage actually…
Claudio is working on Inquest, his notion of actually playing an invesigation and maybe, even investigating. A lot of people reading this have sweated over the fundamental contradiction: that the fictional “mystery” is no mystery at all to its author, and therefore how may role-players experience a mystery. So I’m hoping for some real discussion…