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.
“Demon pets,” I told them, and “Ancient cities.” After this meeting, we’re starting up with one sorcerer maximizing the first and the other maximizing the second, and with a fine mix of the components in this post’s title. This is Sorcerer, with me, Pedro, and Aybars. There is an almost physical impression of commitment among…
It’s our fifth session of Monsterhearts! With only two more to finish editing to get current. This game took a hit between playtesting and summer family obligations, so the last session we played was about two months ago. I’d like to get back to it soon, so if you want to help with that, comment…
It’s a dark dark game, so I guess that it’s … artistic? for me to have borked the video and arrived an an all-black-void recording. I hope it can be fun listening anyway, but I really regret losing the explicit attention we were paying throughout this session. The player-characters did not interact at all, so…
It is crazy how common and how widely-developed craziness is, in role-playing. As much as world-building, as much as combat options, as much as magic systems, this is a definite feature of the hobby with its own schools and aims. It is clearly a primary path toward characterization, character development, player agency (through its managed…
There was one thing left to discover: what happened with Karva, priestess of Oome, devotee of Qar, and Jynathon, who is simultaneously the greatest threat to her power and its best immediate shot at restoring it – perhaps re-making it. After all, the first few minutes of our game brought these two characters face to…
This is an excerpt from my conversation with Ken Oswald, who contacted me regarding a bunch of role-playing topics. He was especially interested in the references he’d run across about Sean Demory’s 2002 game le mon mouri, so here is the bit where we went through its system diagram and talked about its content. This…
One heart is an anatomical feature, available for, among other things, the draining of blood, the rough dissection, and the raw consumption by a depraved other person; by contrast, the symbolic repository of hopes, dreams, desires, and self. Concerning both, I direct your attention to the path-in-play of Naomi, arguably the hero of her own…
Into our second session and into the troubled, almost psychologically spastic efforts of our characters to be … well, just to be, I guess, at all. I had joked during the initial prep that I didn’t want to play this game after all, after we talked about getting conditions laid upon us and other all…
Here’s our final session of RuneQuest (“RQ2,” 1980) which presents and invents my sketchy setting-notions through play. It’s also a personal experience for all of us in diving into the system and text of that time. I’d love to keep developing this setting idea and enjoying the game. The coming-of-age, weird-grit fantasy has been remarkably…