Adept Play
This topic is vague and unbounded, loosely referring to the presence of technology, scientific concepts, or certain spheres of speculation in the fiction, for which this presence carries a distinct meaning, relevance, or implications for the pepole playing.
This is Traveller, in one of its early-early publications: 1981, Game Design Workshop, which as far as I can tell is about the same as the original 1977 publication. A quick point: this isn’t anything like Traveller as stamped iconically into gaming culture. There is no setting, no Imperium, no canonical starmaps, no campaign-planning, nothing…
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 scheduled a session of Khaotic at Gothcon, but I didn’t expect a full sign-up + one. Fortunately I’d brought six characters. Having played it before with five was a handful, and six was wild: the more the merrier, as far as this particular fiction is involved, but it’s no joke maintaining the separate perceptions…
It seems that in this last period I can’t help but look back to the distant past and re-examine some gaming experiences never exactly explored. In particular, I have realized that I have never properly put in writing what I consider to be the best experience with a twosie I have ever had, a fantastic…
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…
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…
Rod, Robbie, and I sat down on Discord to talk about giant robots, the influences and the games we have (or have not) played. It was a good discussion, and I will just hit a few of the highlights to open up the discussion here. Apologies for not recording it, none of us felt strongly…
That was the pitch, but alas, I was far too ambitious, and ended up chickening out! Brief comments on the system, the play experience, and a few campaign design problems we encountered. The Group: me (GM) with Fano, Tazio, and Luke. Fano and I are friends in real life; this was my first time playing with…