Adept Play
Adept Play
Category: Character death
Death is a common event in fiction but has a difficult history in roleplaying. This section concerns the procedures and the experiences of characters dying, and how the event relates to continuing to play.
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Death and blasphemy in ancient Hellás
A few months ago, I asked participants at the Patreon to focus some play-time toward Cold Soldier, preferably played in person. I’d hoped to see more posting about it here as well. I think I may still see that hope fulfilled, because I know there was a lot of play. In fact, Noah asked me […]
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We’re keeping this crown
2022 really brought a Tunnels & Trolls workout here at Adept Play, me included. The post Or we’ll sic the fairy on you is primarily about another T&T game, played with a larger group, which continued into a notable second adventure which I’ll post about as well. In the video there, I mentioned some events […]
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Devil Ex Machina
This is an actual play of a Sorcerer campaign called Devil Ex Machina. It is set in San Francisco in 2023 and I wanted the demons to have the vibes of malevolent, conscious artificial intelligence. Sorcery in our game is characterized by an obsession with programming, extensive use of IT, and getting lost in the […]
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Last Breath – Dying in The Pool
I ran this 3-session game of The Pool with some friends while taking the Adept Play course Playing with The Pool. It was everybody’s first time with this system. I’m going to talk about our experiences with The Pool, particularly the perceived death spiral, and how players used Monologues of Victory (MOVs). My start file […]
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A very Gygaxian TPK
It has been a while since we had a proper TPK in the online Coup campaign. Maybe this is the first? We have had deaths, sure. The campaign has split into two online branches; the main branch adventures in the Gnarley woods under one game master, and when they are unavailable, we have been playing […]
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Galactic Peace: the Hive
We move on to the third and last species-specific story (or sequence or whatever you want to call it) for the Galactic Peace game, now concerning the Hive/Hivers. Jerry is of course revisiting his character from the initial story set during the peace conference, Hiver, and Helma is playing her new character Hiver, and Renee […]
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Keizoku wa chikara nari
I first encountered mention of Bushido during the late 1970s, in an unsympathetic review in some gaming magazine. This and similar reviews led, at least in my experience, to a widespread perception that the game was impossibly detailed, demanding, and finicky, in both setting and mechanics. However, if I’d managed ever actually to see a […]
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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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Dead protagonists, fleeting memories
Psychopomp is another of the many initial/proto game designs that Justin is musing over and playtesting, and he wanted to make sure it got into the scorching too. I had to think pretty hard about how to go into it, because it fits so strongly into a particular aesthetic and an existing set of variables, […]