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.
“Mustering Out Blues” is an homage to classic Traveller I made by hacking the Pool, James V. West’s decades-old rules system (today we’d call it a “game engine,” I suppose). I’ve run a bunch of one-shots with it, but today I ran the second session of a campaign game, and I don’t want to brag…
Checking in to share some notes about an ongoing game of The Pool which I started with a few local friends (though we play it over Discord) after taking Ron’s “Playing the Pool” course. I started out by offering the players a few evocative images from the covers of the Planet Stories pulp magazine, and…
Nils had a request for play for our Spelens Hus group, and it was highly specific. You’ll probably spot the influences: post-apocalyptic wasteland, retro Wild West, harsh, gritty, moody, occasional ancient tech (which is pretty much our own real-world tech), grotesque or offbeat elements which are treated in the fiction as naturalistic. He mostly knows…
Hi all! I’m more of a discord person but to please Ron I decided to post it here (it will be my first post on AP). For last two months I run 8 sessions (plus session zero) of Ben Lehman’s “Bliss Stage” from 2007. We played online using discord plus roll20 as our UI. I…
Meet Cosmarina the Space Girl, Brutalina the Barbarian Girl, and Stacey X the Alien Girl, whom I brought as these pictures and character sheets to a public-meet-the-gamers event here in town, at a center for filmmaking and viewing called Cnema. Here is what I do. First, I set out the Space Rat play-materials in an…
We had a couple of open sessions at Spelens Hus, which were filled by Space Rat, by Nathan Russell. The nominal franchise stars Jack Cosmos, the heroic Galactic Agent, but its many-texts content is either so satiric or so bad that no one can miss the fact that his arm-candy female companions actually do all…
We’ve been playing 3:16 for a while at Spelens Hus, meaning, the group of young people who’ve previously played Tunnels & Trolls, Villains & Vigilantes, and Mörk Borg among others. The membership has shifted around a little throughout its 18-month history but has always been characterized by enthusiasm and intellectual connections. Those latter features led…
I had been wanting to run a Blade Runner-inspired sci-fi noir game for sometime when Free League released an actual Blade Runner RPG. I typically don’t go in for “official” tie-in games but I had the opportunity to pick the game up on sale. When I took a look at it, I found I was…