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.
Not with me, but rather it’s me interviewing Kristoffer about his alleged one-session, now multi-session game of Electric Bastionland. The context begins with a bit of prior play with me GMing, using only the free version, then the subject of this interview, which is his GMing from scratch with another group, using the entire text.…
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…
At the end of February, I ran a game for Games on Demand Online I call Mustering Out Blues. It’s a Traveller hack that came from a couple-three different places: (1) the classic Traveller campaign I started at the height of the pandemic that evolved into Galactic Adventures, the game I described in a previous…
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…
Here begins my effort to recover the past six months of role-playing into some Actual Play posting. It might go on for a while. This particular event was played last October (2022), consisting of two two-player games played side by side, Showdown by Seth Ben Ezra and Cold Soldier by Bret Gillan. Most of what…
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…