Adept Play
Adept Play
Category: Settings
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.
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Dead quiet, piercing wind, cloudburst, gravelike cold
This is the big Mörk Borg game I’ve been playing for months at Spelens Hus. It began with a bit during Augustifesten, then we rebooted and expanded it to the regular group, with four players, and two more joined us along the way. These players are all about fifteen; without commenting further, they are thoroughly…
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First verse
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…
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Dialing down the fantasy
I’m a polyfantasist: any degree of fantastic content and any degree of naturalism are both fun. For the moment, I’m focusing on one historical cluster of play-and-design: variously called hedge fantasy, mud-and-shit fantasy, “iron” fantasy, sometimes overlapping with historical fantasy, with games that sought it through the lens of deep culture and realism. It’s played…
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When “dark” was excellent
Here’s the Darkurthe Legends session from Lincon! Featuring several rather willing & able players, whom I hope to meet with again because they embraced many setting and characterization features, including asking questions, and they were genuinely interested in the formal but savage combat rules. There is one tragedy, which is that the final events of…
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I’m Tolkien Situation Here
A brief overview of my thoughts on The One Ring rpg.
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Intersection of thoughts
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…
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A Personal Tolkien
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…
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“Here and Now”: A Flashback
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…
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Liking the setting so much you can’t stop talking about it
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…