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.
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…