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.
Here’s a game I consider under-served. I would say “criminally” so except for the poor joke it entails, which is too bad, because yes, it’s criminal. Matt Gwinn’s The Hour Between Dog and Wolf is an excellent detective vs. serial killer role-playing game, and here I speak as someone who was heartily sick of the…
After the opening of Christmas presents, my daughter (home from college) and I sat down to play our first trial run of Cold Soldier. Not your typical holiday fare, but the mulled wine in my glass helped to keep me in the holiday spirit during play. Given that this was our first stab at Cold…
I’ve moved into playtesting for Levied Souls, with the help of friends at Spelens Hus. It’s a long-term project with plans for multiple sessions, and so this first session was for character creation. By player request, it’s also audio only, athough I have set it up as a video for helpful captioning and occasional textual…
There’s an enthusiastic bunch at Spelens Hus here! They were even up for a late-night Zombie Cinema game, sight unseen, “Ron has it in his bag? Sure, let’s try it.” The game is maxed at six players and I was turning people away. The result was an extremely energetic session, occasionally shouty, with vivid characters…
Here’s one of my favorite things: consulting with someone I didn’t know about a project I didn’t know about. Jeff McNeil has been working on his game Levied Souls for some time, and it’s beaten into pretty much manuscript phase, just shy of actual layout. I’ve learned that this is not my favorite phase to…
It is pure pleasure both to play with and to converse with Simon Pettersson, with the added benefit of his help & guidance during my first visit to Lincon last month. Patrons already got to read about my adventures with sleeping quarters there, so if you want anecdotes and details, that’s the way. When I…
There’s a little story behind this one, in that I’d prepared for a session of that weird RuneQuest setting I keep working on at Gothcon. The planners noted some interest had arisen, including the Glorantha Etcetera panel, and suggested I do another session later that day (Saturday). I said yes, and then discovered that meant…
Whew! Convention pile-up has me sucking wind on getting posts finished. This one’s about playing Svart av Kval, Vit av Lust, by Simon Pettersson. He’s a one-man Forge here in Sweden, and now that I think of it, reminds me of my good pal Jared Sorensen. When I visited Indierummet at Gothcon, I noticed several…
My goal at Gothcon was to be, basically, not weird. I didn’t want to show up as representative of some sector of hobby identity, but as fellow role-player. I’ve been playing a lot of Sorcerer lately and felt like resting it a bit. I knew that the founding Swedish RPG was originally a RuneQuest hack…