Adept Play
Roleplaying emerged from a historical meeting-point among wargaming, literary enthusiasts, and counterculture in the 1970s, and it has interacted strangely with pop culture and commerce.
Andy Goodman’s Expedition to the Grizzly Peaks podcast is a worthy artifact – essentially, this guy missed all the ins & outs of the role-playing scene for about twenty years, mid-80s to mid-00s, and now he’s looking at today’s scene in mingled love, curiosity, and understandable bemusement. Evidently, my name appeared during his investigations, so…
I’ve finally realized how regularly people ask me to explain RuneQuest, HeroQuest, the Chaosium, and Glorantha, specifically because they’ve bounced hard off the apparently extensive setting and apprently impenetrably insider-oriented fanbase. It’s usually private, and they often present the question as if it’s their last fatigued try at finding out what “there” is there. After…
Fabien Hildwein is one of the enthusiastic participants in the francophone sector of role-playing discourse and design. The thread back to me is probably Christoph Boeckle, who dropped a lot of time and buckets of posts at the Forge, and at some point along the way prompted a similar site (SilentDrift) and scene among French…
This is the very kind interview with Lucas Falk, including Peter Malmberg as fellow guest. Late in the evening during Lincon, Lucas found a corridor which seemed quiet, pulled some interesting high-backed, well-padded chairs into a curiously intimate small circle, and commenced to interview there. We did not expect that most of Linköping would then…
This was a remarkable opportunity and experience. Adding my old-book RuneQuest game session to the Gothcon schedule caught some attention, as the Swedish version of the new edition has been organized, and its publisher and authors asked if we could add a panel for some conversation. I swallowed hard. I would be sitting with Gunilla…
Some comments showed up at Facebook about the two Fantasy Heartbreaker essays, and I’m a little tired of facepalming. It’s been a long road of experiencing and reflecting upon what became of fantasy during my lifetime, and the original essays are a blink of a moment during that process. Let’s see what the long view…
Evidently my Reflections by request video from Febuary 14 wasn’t too badly done, as I’ve received a lot of inquiries about continuing the discussion, especially the topics raised at the end. John Stephens contributed a lot of thoughts and attention to the development of role-playing, during what some think of as the strongest period of…
Dustin isn’t a naive game designer, having produced Synthicide and generally navigated modern publishing. He asked me how to promote a game which did not fit neatly into “trad or indie,” “OSR or story game,” or any other dichotomy which people presented to him. Which is a perfect opportunity for me to stomp upon those…
I’ve been working up a Design curriculum for role-playing for a long while, so when Justin Nichols approached me for a game design discussion that leaned toward mentoring, I accepted without reservation. At the beginning of this episode, we considered our options for the initial approach, and Justin preferred the “lab” version in which we…