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 techniques discussion of the Sorcerer character diagrams, which is a spiky topic in the case of this game. I didn’t realize the physical separation among us would be this significant, and I’m worried enough to reflect here. First, a detailed look at how the damn things work: Now let’s apply this to play,…
It’s the adolescence. Creepy rural fantasy aside, which is working well too, playing the characters as mid-teens is working wonders. This is the second session following RuneQuest 1980: brambly hick coming-of-age fantasy. I’ve attached the file I sent to them before the session, updating my scribbled notes into complete sentences concerning the general cosmology, with…
Briefly, Cults of Terror is a not merely a landmark in role-playing history, it’s a giant. Coupled with the rules it was written to support, RuneQuest 1980, and the supplement that immediately preceded it, Cults of Prax, it established a new-and-different bar for play which defined “I play RuneQuest” into almost its own sector and…
This game is pure gut-punch Sorcerer, but there’s a little history underlying it.Almost three years ago, a determined person contacted me with a bevy of questions about whatever on earth I must be thinking about role-playing. That led to what ended up as 120 single-spaced pages of dialogue, and also to the presentation you can…
My recent games of Cold Soldier – with Zac, Santiago, Ángel, and Moreno – make a powerful comparison.The first, in real time, is the session I played with Zac about a year ago, when I visited him and his wife Jann in Washington DC. I mention her as well because she was supposed to be…
Moreno and I have been meaning to do this for a long time, and finally got around to it: Cold Soldier, knives out.[see the attached file for the rules we’re using; rewritten but mechanically unaltered. This is the third instance of recent play I’m posting as a rapid-fire experiential bath in the game.] Riffing between…
Hey, more Cold Soldier in action! This time with Ángel, for a slightly less intercontinental session – Sweden and the U.K. But also, like the session with Santiago, placed in reference to a Spanish-speaking setting, based on Angel’s home city of Madrid. Our starting context used genius scientist and the past, specifically early 19th-century Spain.…
A couple of months ago, I invited patrons to play Bret Gillan’s game Cold Soldier with me, using my slight re-write of the text (no rules revision; see attached), and to talk about it. Santiago and I did so shortly afterward, via Skype between Sweden and Argentina. The question at hand, based on the points…