Adept Play
Adept Play
Category: Horror
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.
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The hearts
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…
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A night out on the town
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…
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Death and secrets in the dark
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…
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The Hunger, Unresolved Trauma, Cold as Ice
I’m playing Monsterhearts, due to a series of coincidences that fell together just right, so here you can see three undead teens try to be normal at a privileged, sequestered, high-pressure school. I have some kind of big topics to get into, but first a couple of details. We’ve played three sessions so far, of…
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Harmony and human wreckage
The Kickers are concluded, and the story is done. To my knowledge, this is the only game of Sorcerer that I’ve been in which is now visible start to finish on record (OK, granted, one session is a verbal account). I’d certainly love to learn what an observer thinks of it. One sorcerer ending with…
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The road to Green Rock
This is when something really complex develops and expands right within my grasp, while I’m learning just what it is we’re making only at the last possible moment, and knowing I’m not quite good enough to do it justice at the moving margins. Now I know that the area is called The Haven by its…
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Fearshock, decapitation, village insurrection, gaining a fetch
Thinking about what-next per session is pretty hard for this sort of naturalistic play, especially when circumstances don’t lend themselves to substantial cuts. I’d have to think for a while to understand why that’s not a problem in playing Sorcerer, for example. (It doesn’t have explicit scene-type mechanics either.) In this case, I put some…
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The way we roll
Kickers aren’t confined merely to their initiating events. They’re what those events become, measured in human costs. Alain found his bid for tenure challenged by his mentor’s bitterness. Maxine’s band landed a sweet record contract. Michael’s criminal enterprises brought danger to his family for the first time. Nothing anyone armed with demonic forces couldn’t handle…
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How to feel bad for killing a really unlikeable jerk
The post title refers to one of the casualties in the session, which also included one player-character catching on fire and getting stabbed in the face. But all told, our first knock-down savage RuneQuest combat went rather well for our heroes. It’s strange to be building a fantasy setting by little bits, knowing certain images…