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.
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…
IN SHORT… INS / MV was a bit of an iconic game for me. I “missed” it in the 90s when I started playing and was largely consumed by other games. I recently discovered that a 5th edition, with a lighter setting and ruleset than prior editions, had been published in 2015. I decided to…
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…
I have played 15 sessions of Sorcerer since April, resolving one set of Kickers with my Runequest buddy David and his brother (another Noah), then a second set with the brothers plus Sam. Inspired by the form of Mansfeld’s posts, I’m going to describe the Sorcerers in our game, their Kickers (for PC Sorcerers) and…
painting by Jozzi but the moment Ron mentioned he had started a game of Lacuna with a couple of new people that showed up after Augustifesten and Kulturnatten (both weekend long cultural festivals that give the opportunity for all clubs at Spelens Hus to reach out to new people) I got itchy. He had introduced…