Adept Play
A very broad topic with many subsets or nuances including terror, monsters, crime, psychology, or surrealism, and with different compositions of fictional and participant experience.
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.…
Sam and me just finished a game of The Hour of Dog and Wolf and reflected on our experience. This is a discussion about the themes/shared experiences, and the use of plot points. Sam played Angelo Scabo, a disorganized killer with visions of Saint Barbara in the small ex-industrial town of Charleroi, in Belgium. It…
IN SHORT… Tristan Lhomme is a well-known RPG name in France from the 80s and 90s. He massively contributed to the popularity of RPGs in the country by publishing excellent reviews, scenarios, supplements. We played one of the CoC scenarios that he wrote, “A quiet village”, and it really was a blast. # # #…
A couple of friends wanted to play the Pool, and picked a Lovecraftian scenario. So I updated my Cthulhu version of the Pool (available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xAJJUfMEksHb8TTC7pRdn_Hlh6fDyCbU/view?usp=drivesdk) and the players made one character each. They wanted a period piece, so we went with 1920s Seattle. The first thing I did in my prep was read about…
I generally play D&D (O or A 1e, if you’re curious), mostly focusing on creating and overcoming challenges for myself and other players. But after spending a few weeks watching lots of vampire movies, I thought I might play a game that would help me explore characters, situations, and emotions common to the genre. I…
I scheduled a Circle of Hands session last month at Gothcon, deliberately choosing a monster time-slot at five hours. Four people arrived to play, the maximum I’d permitted, many of whom I did not know. Special mention goes to the exception, Johan, who actually played in the first serious revision of Gray Magick back in…
We played a full game of My Life with Master at Spelens Hus for two sessions, across the end of last September and the beginning of October. The first two videos for session 1 show the preparation, excepting the nuts and bolts of making the characters. Given a very brief “stereotypical Balkan mountains, decayed nobility…
There seems to be an unending stream of games that assume the players are a team that runs missions. Sometimes the characters are presumed to be freelancers who take on contract work and other times they have some kind of formal employment or indentured servitude or shared cause arrangement with an individual or organization. Either…
We played 1 hour of Cold Soldier with my friend Benoit. Benoit was playing the Cold Soldier, I was playing the Dark Master. I was facilitating the rules that Ben had not read. Cold Soldier formalizes a lot the distribution of authorities. Backstory authority is shared between the players. In our game, we decided together…