Adept Play
These posts include any socio-political content, regardless of how fantastically or realistically presented, however direct or indirect, which factors directly into the events and experiences of play. Disclosure: I do not credit any claim to “non-political” content.
I recently took some time to play the 2020 version of Supervillain You, which has had several newer versions, the most recent one dating to May 2023. (I discussed whether the 2023 version was an RPG or not with the designer, and I agree with him that it isn’t.) The process of playing this game,…
I played Amerika (Story Now in the Radical U.S.A.) in a seminar class about environmental communication. The answer to fracking appeared to these students to be money and lawyers.
Cold Soldier post-play thoughts In the audio file above I talk for a half an hour or so about the Cold Soldier game we played, going over the principal events of play and my thoughts on them. Early on there are some annoying artifacts as a result of me recording on my phone (buzzes from…
Vigil is now available! About a year and a half ago, I played two intensive games which first seemed to me as if they shut down the whole endeavor, but then served as the real swerve into finishing the game. I GM’d one of them with Pedro, featuring the Agony and set in Helsinki. Given…
A lot of things came together last month in a fortuitous way. One of them concerns a social gathering for the local and state branch of the Miljöpartiet (Swedish Green Party; link includes language options), right where I play at Spelens Hus. It wasn’t a promotional event; in fact, it’s useful to understand that a…
Lately, I’ve been reevaluating role-playing games a lot for two players after trying out S\lay W\Me. This time it’s Mars Colony by Tim C. Koppang. I played two games, once as the Governor and once as the Savior. I’ll report the first one here, which I consider one of the best games I’ve played this…
I did not title this post “When in Rome.” Please credit this on my karmic record. Near the end of 2022, I received an invitation from Marco Mengoli to visit and teach at the Instituto di Itruzione Superiore “Roselli,” in Aprilia, a suburb of Rome. Several faculty at this school including Marco study and teach…
Sam, Avid and I embarked on a game of 2nd Edition Runequest. I volunteered to GM, and, inspired by Ron’s run on RQ2, jettisoned Glorantha and determined to use Runequest as a launching-pad for my own Bronze Age fantasy. Still exhausted by the endless course corrections Avid and I had to make during our Runequest:…
I took the most recent iteration of the People and Play course, and as that came to an end, my partner and I decided that we’d about reached a natural endpoint for our game and for the characters’ stories. So this is a retrospective, especially in terms of- political content and where it comes from.…