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.
I’ll lay this out the way I see it and have tried to present it over the past few years. I think the role of textual setting content is clear: it explicitly drives into playing situations, or it doesn’t. (So-called “scenario seeds” typically don’t.) However, one simply cannot tell by reading. Sometimes it seems overly…
At the Happening, I was determined to play a little bit of Harnmaster and Dangerous Journeys, both of which I’ve been poking at for many years. David brought Boot Hill too, and as it happened, the three make a nice set for discussion. Also, we were intrigued enough to play a second session of Harnmaster,…
I am merely typical in dreaming about play in the world of the Dark Sun, as presented as an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition product in 1991. I am aware that it’s been developed by who-knows-who in God-knows-what media, and that all sorts of fandom wikis and whatnot have bloomed in the internet since…
This year I’m in “look, I have some things” mode, so I scheduled games of my own design and even brought printed copies for sale. Low-tech and totally pamphlet mode, but nicely printed for sure. I gave out a free copy of Cold Soldier with any purchase and handed out promo for The Happening all…
(in person, my house)— 1 GM (rotating) 3 players. When I first moved to Tucson 3 years ago, I knew I needed a role-playing group in order to make the town truly feel like home. I went to RINCON, our local gaming convention, and found two GMs that I really enjoyed from one-shots or things…
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…
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…
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…
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…