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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Three characters in Greyhawk
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.…
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Why Cyberpunk, yo?
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…
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Our Xar
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…
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The headwaters at the continental divide
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…
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Chaos Marches (D&D 5E) A Little Backdrop
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…
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Ethnicity in Glorantha
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…
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The far east! which means what?
Sean Hillman and I met to talk about his game, or proto-game, just notes really, Empire of the Dragon Lotus. For me it’s a callback to about … fifteen years ago, into the hothouse of the Forge and Sean’s participation there. I think his original notes on the game from back then are in one…
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Presentation: Why Glorantha (and its games)
I’ve finally realized how regularly people ask me to explain RuneQuest, HeroQuest, the Chaosium, and Glorantha, specifically because they’ve bounced hard off the apparently extensive setting and apprently impenetrably insider-oriented fanbase. It’s usually private, and they often present the question as if it’s their last fatigued try at finding out what “there” is there. After…
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Expanding a setting
We’re two more sessions into the RuneQuest game since the last time, and as I’d feared, the material is demanding a further effort to live up to its tantalizing hints. I find myself creating things, especially cult writeups. One of them was completed for session 6, for the Cult of the Buried Dead, so it’s…