Adept Play
Adept Play
Category: Gender and sexuality
This applies in two ways: when play includes these topics as relevant fiction in the events, as expressed in procedures or stated actions; and when their presence among the participants informs play. More than most topics, these posts require clarity and the mutual understanding that we are not conducting debate.
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Demon Sex
I’m six sessions into running a Sorcerer game with an interesting social context. There’s my partner Tracey, her friend from college Dawn, Dawn’s husband Jeff and their (adult) son Storm. We play online because Tracey and I are in Southern California and they’re in Northern California. Context The game is set in the Greater Los…
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Studying in Super-Villainy
I recently took some time to play the 2020 version of Supervillain You, which has had several newer versions, the most recent one dating to May 2023. (I discussed whether the 2023 version was an RPG or not with the designer, and I agree with him that it isn’t.) The process of playing this game,…
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Jack Cosmos and the Desolation of Smug
We had a couple of open sessions at Spelens Hus, which were filled by Space Rat, by Nathan Russell. The nominal franchise stars Jack Cosmos, the heroic Galactic Agent, but its many-texts content is either so satiric or so bad that no one can miss the fact that his arm-candy female companions actually do all…
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Swapping all the Places
Recently, my partner and I finished out the ongoing game-that’s-hard-to-describe we’ve been playing, which they call “Harmony Campaign”, set in Glorantha. It lasted about two and a half years, with a long gap near the end where active play was rare. In that time, a number of changes in both our lives occurred, directly correlated…
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Totally apolitical fantasy
I took the most recent iteration of the People and Play course, and as that came to an end, my partner and I decided that we’d about reached a natural endpoint for our game and for the characters’ stories. So this is a retrospective, especially in terms of- political content and where it comes from.…
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Cross-Gender Trouble and Play
There is a question that people tend to avoid asking in roleplaying game discussion, in my experience, even as they spend a fair amount of time articulating answers and implicitly presenting them. This question is along the lines of “How much am I allowed to deviate from my social positionality and my lived experiences in…
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Unsuccesful Runequesting leads to successful play
This is my first post at Adept Play, so a little bit of background context may be in order. I’ve been exposed to roleplaying games since elementary school, made several tentative attempts to play them, ended up developing my understanding of how to play them slowly, starting in university and continuing to this day. I…
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Undead dolls with a soul
I was at a con and I had a chance to play the early version of the italian translation of Nechronica (a game designed by Ryo Kamiya, previously the designer of Golden Sky Stories, Maid RPG, and Zettai Reido) . We were not in the best place to play a game like this, but the…
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Some thoughts on silly bards in 5e D&D
Ron and I were talking on Discord about D&D play culture, especially the contemporary play culture among younger people (people for whom 5e is their first experience really playing and for whom 3.5e would be considered old). Ron suggested that I post about it. For a bit more context, we were talking about the origins…