Adept Play
A setting is best conceived as a much broader scope than the situations in play, whether conceptual or geographic or cosmic. This section concerns how they are experienced in play, as opposed to direct textual references.
A brief overview of my thoughts on The One Ring rpg.
Hans began quite a conversation at Discord, which I think deserves to be imported here and continued. It goes like this! HANS: So I’m reading the first adventure in the Starter set for Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha (the latest RQ rules published by Chaosium). The target audience is new GMs and players. The first situation […]
The topic of playing in Big Settings has been on my mind. I decided to dig up some 10 year old notes from my favorite Burning Wheel game, which was set in Middle Earth. When we decided to play in Middle Earth, I knew I had to narrow down what sources I was using. I […]
While reading the Annotated Sorcerer rulebook this evening, I came across the phrase “here and now” again: the default “setting” for Sorcerer. And I had a sudden flashback. It is the summer of 1998, and I am GMing an ongoing GURPS game for some close friends and a rotating cast of friends-of-friends who want to […]
This is a follow-up to my post Ashen worlds and liking the scenario. We had another session of Fantasy World today, and enjoyed ourselves a lot. A cool thing happened: the dynamic that I was describing where I, as a person and not in my role as the World, highly disagree with the protagonists' philosophy and […]
On Monday, we played session 51 of the game I wrote about here (and also here). The game feels like it’s reaching a conclusion, and I’m looking forward to wrapping it up by session 60. For the sake of convenience, I call each sequence of 10 sessions a “season” as in seasons of a TV series. […]
Ranrance was a Praedor character I played once when I had moved abroad and had no gaming group yet. A short-grown river bandit, whose main feature was owning a river ship. Why not convert them to the highly customized BECMI rules variant in use here, since I would otherwise never play him? So I did. […]
I have long been a fan of the aesthetic and idioms associated with the cyberpunk “genre”. Even though I am more Adam Smith than Karl Marx, I find the commentary on extreme corporate ascendency and the radical notions of bringing it down fit my tastes. I enjoy the social compression, where different kinds of people […]
As part of my recent swim-about in the internets of Glorantha and its associated games, my friend Nick Brooke and I had the chance to mix it up a little! It’s regarding the long-standing interpretations of human ethnicities in Glorantha, including those which made it into published form One of the setting’s claims to fame […]