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.
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…
A few weeks ago, the Carbon 2185 crew decided they had enough of the Cyber & The Punk for a bit. We will be switching to Forbidden Lands soon, but in the meantime the players wanted to give WFRP 4th edition a look. To save time I grabbed the pre-generated characters and let them choose.…
A group of us has been carrying on a Sorcerer and Sword game for 5 months. This has taken our characters through two sets of kickers, and at the conclusion, we decided to sit down for a conversation to reflect on the game and our experiences. Rod was the GM, with Greg and me playing…
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…
I’ve watched dozen of the Runequest Spelenhus games and took a great pleasure to see people enjoying roleplaying. A few things I liked, the cult approach to society, and building the settings through play, according needs arising from play. After a few exchanges in the comments, I chose to hold off on Runequest 2nd, and…
For anyone who’s wondered what happened to the Spelens Hus RuneQuest game, I’m here at last to tell you that we have played our fourteenth session, which means five more for you to see. We shifted to screen play for safety purposes, and the editing is pretty hard core, so I’ll be adding episodes to…
Setting / Backdrop has come up in some recent discussions as well, regarding a game in design and situations. How much is too much or too little? I think that depends on your taste. A game like Symbaroum is heavy setting. Glorantha is heavy setting as well and it changes depending on the system you…