Adept Play
Adept Play
Category: Lines and Veils
Lines refer to content which a person, or group, does not want to include in the current fiction of play. Veils refer to content which is acceptable but which a person, or group, does not to be described explicitly.
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Why things are the way they are
Mark Wallace contacted me for conversation about role-playing mechanics and emotions or the resulting content, among many other people. He’s written and published a lot about creative developments just outside or underneath the acknowledged media; see The Mark Wallace Experience for examples and enjoyment. He began the conversation with a bigger, relevant question: why role-playing…
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Excess and excitement
At the Happening, I played several games which share some features: characters at extreme risk and at least some are not expected to survive, circumstances which pit them against or with another as players decide, formal shifts in immediate content or theme, a lot of backstory content created during play, and a lot of inspiration…
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Once again with feeling
Lorenzo Bertini asked me for some discussion about Lines and Veils, specifically, and the general concept they’ve been folded into. (Context: Lorenzo is Claudio Freda’s partner-in-crime regarding their game in design Inquest; Claudio is present in the video as well for clarity and sometimes translation.) I’d asked Lorenzo first to check out Conversation: Safe spaces…
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Romance, Drugs & Loud Fun
Two weeks ago I set up a one-session game of CY_BORG in my local gaming cafe in Helsinki, with mostly inexperienced players. This is a game of cyberpunk jobbers based on Mörk Borg. My opinion is that CY_BORG is mostly style over substance, its biggest quality being its coffee-table-worthy presentation, but I chose it because…
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Are You Tingling? at Multiversecon
Quick Note: As some folks have asked questions about uploading images, I put together a PDF and attached it of how I did this image for this post. If you have questions, you can always message me on Discord. This past October (2022) I was at Multiversecon. I am the PLAY track director for MVC…
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I don’t like horror
painting by Jozzi but the moment Ron mentioned he had started a game of Lacuna with a couple of new people that showed up after Augustifesten and Kulturnatten (both weekend long cultural festivals that give the opportunity for all clubs at Spelens Hus to reach out to new people) I got itchy. He had introduced…
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Some thoughts on silly bards in 5e D&D
Ron and I were talking on Discord about D&D play culture, especially the contemporary play culture among younger people (people for whom 5e is their first experience really playing and for whom 3.5e would be considered old). Ron suggested that I post about it. For a bit more context, we were talking about the origins…
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Let it bleed
Bleed as a term has arisen in and around the safety-techniques discussion of the past decade; I’m not sure who coined it or in what context. It concerns strong and possibly aversive or uncontrollable emotions that well up during play. If I’m not mistaken, at least sometimes it’s identified as undesirable or unsafe. Edoardo Cremaschi,…
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Scantily clad under our furs
Nothing but crazy talk in this post. For one thing, it’s back to that strange little collection of games about religion. I’ve added their updated forms as attachments if you don’t mind never getting back the hour or two of reading them. For another, the particular game is Daemon Lover which is overflowing with unconstructed…