Adept Play
These concern procedures and interactions before play begins, or, by contrast, when they are distinctively absent.
Rod, Sean, and I have been playing Bushido for a little bit now: I think we’re at five sessions, each about 2-hours in length. I’m GMing, though a notable feature of our game is that a lot of “typical GM duties” have been shared out. For one, Rod suggested the historical/geographical background material that informed…
I’m writing here about a single session for a group that met last August, playing Mörk Borg just once. That sounds simple, but it’s the beginning of my intensive and complicated play-history with the game which continues through today. Briefly, I have been playing the hell out of it ever since across a variety of…
Last August, Alan Barclay visited us during his tour of several nordic regions, and we found time to play some things, including Electric Bastionland. This was played before Kristoffer proceeded to get the full version of the game and play it with others, as we discussed in the conversation posted as Sewer madness. Despite the…
Back in July, I played a “movie” of Extreme Vengeance with Denica and Nathan, in three sessions. This game is from 1997, with a discussable publishing history, and I later met and talked with its author, Tony Lee. As with a couple of similar games from around this time, the concept is that you play…
[This post is adapted from a Patreon post a couple of months ago. It’s relevant to the March Q&A so I’ve made it public here.] I’ve been thinking about a practical aspect of preparation which feeds into qualities of play. It boils down to a simple question: does whoever’s making up important aspects of the…
After having played Primetime Adventures (the 2nd edition, the one with the blue cover) a while ago … looking up when that was … wait now, that’s two and a half years ago? Anyway, here is the link to the old stuff if you want it … okay, let’s restart this:Ever since I’ve been a…
The classic Traveller game I started on Roll20 during the height of the pandemic morphed by degrees into something different, a kind of counter-Traveller, a funhouse-mirror Traveller that takes as its point of departure the same basic premise–you’ve spent your life so far in service to some galactic guild or other, gotten yourself to the…
We played a full game of My Life with Master at Spelens Hus for two sessions, across the end of last September and the beginning of October. The first two videos for session 1 show the preparation, excepting the nuts and bolts of making the characters. Given a very brief “stereotypical Balkan mountains, decayed nobility…
A Viricorne Guide is a game where adventurers or other travelers arrive in Viricorne, the Reborn City, and are guided around it. It is a city of judgment, and people come there to be judged (and do other things). The text, as inspiration, has a dreamy, smooth quality to it, like a digital painting with…