Adept Play
Adept Play
Category: The Forge
The Forge was a website co-founded by me and others to discover and promote creatively owned (independent) publishing for roleplaying games. It included an extensive forum and many articles. I was the primary founder and moderator, as well as the organizer for the associated booth at GenCon. The site lasted from its original version in 1999 through 2012. It is still available for viewing at indie-rpgs.com/archive (2000-2008) and indie-rpgs.com/forge (2008-2012), as well as a brief successor forum at indie-rpgs.com/adept (2012-2016).
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Why things are the way they are
Mark Wallace contacted me for conversation about role-playing mechanics and emotions or the resulting content, among many other people. He’s written and published a lot about creative developments just outside or underneath the acknowledged media; see The Mark Wallace Experience for examples and enjoyment. He began the conversation with a bigger, relevant question: why role-playing…
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Historical technique
I’d like to start some group effort toward institutional memory of the historical role-playing activity. Here’s the D&D diagram I’ve been using for years, which I absolutely insist must be used rigorously by anyone who wants to use those syllables in a conversation. It helps to keep the title from bearing every imaginable generalization, along…
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June 2023 Q&A
Maybe I’m too much of a pattern-making story-making animal, but the questions this time really built a single coherent body of inquiry for me. I felt like I was addressing a single important topic from multiple angles of attack. I introduce the video with a warning, but I’ll say it briefly here as well: this…
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December Q&A
This set of questions spans a wide range: some Forge and Story Games history, using traits or rules involving “Destiny” without railroading toward a specific thing, and plenty of resolution-type topics regarding how characters fight. Here’s the file summarizing our discussion at the Patreon. As always, I’m hoping for continuance and more development here.
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Pizza Games interview: what and why in Sweden
Remember all those interviews a couple of months ago! This was another in the same time-batch, and believe me, especially since the Thirteenth Floor interview from the previous year was released then as well, I was getting very boggled about who asked what and what I’d said in each. With any luck, you can forgive…
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A People’s History, or at least a person’s
A lot of interviews showed up recently. For this one, I was contacted by Nune, who is studying entrepeneurship in Rotterdam. (rhymes with “rune,” one syllable) His questions included what does it mean to be a role-playing publisher, what do you have to contend with, what should you consider, and especially, the term he used,…
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Interview: Meeting a community
I’ve been in interview madness for a couple of weeks. The first was with The Thirteenth Floor podcast, which hasn’t been posted yet. Then I was contacted by Pawel from the role-playing play, design, and discourse community in Poland, who have had the dubious luck to dig into my essays at the Forge and have…
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Sparks flying still
Here’s one of those days when I feel like “it” (and what other “it” could I be talking about) was worth it. When people actually play and actually design, and put some thought into what others may have thought or done. When they care more about those things than about new hotness or hordes of…
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Conversation: There and back again
Andy Goodman’s Expedition to the Grizzly Peaks podcast is a worthy artifact – essentially, this guy missed all the ins & outs of the role-playing scene for about twenty years, mid-80s to mid-00s, and now he’s looking at today’s scene in mingled love, curiosity, and understandable bemusement. Evidently, my name appeared during his investigations, so…