Adept Play
A medieval Japan game by Paul Hume and Bob Charette, originally published by Tyr Games in 1979 and reprinted by other companies.
Rod, Sean, and I have been playing Bushido for a little bit now: I think we’re at five sessions, each about 2-hours in length. I’m GMing, though a notable feature of our game is that a lot of “typical GM duties” have been shared out. For one, Rod suggested the historical/geographical background material that informed…
[This post is adapted from activity at the Patreon.] It would be nice to consider rapier fighting. If by “nice” you mean skilled murder with horrible, terrible instruments uniquely designed for exactly that. I’m thinking mainly about civilian violence and including off-hand instruments including other weapons, bucklers, and improvised defenses. Seriously, these things are nightmarish.…
It was good to play out the consequences of actions that the players had initiated in the previous session. And to step back from crowding out player decisions with a blast of content from myself. There were two religious deeds: Gin the Gakusho won the attention of a Kami but did not attempt to Placate…
Now we’ve entered the “adventure” for our Bushido game. I think you’ll see a definite influence of Circle of Hands on all the players’ concept of what a fantasy adventure even is, and how characters relate to the society and to local communities. I think this perspective is very well-suited to this game in terms…
I first encountered mention of Bushido during the late 1970s, in an unsympathetic review in some gaming magazine. This and similar reviews led, at least in my experience, to a widespread perception that the game was impossibly detailed, demanding, and finicky, in both setting and mechanics. However, if I’d managed ever actually to see a…
I think we have created a solid mini-curriculum about some critical features of play. The first part is Movement and maps, the second is Horses on squares, and here’s my next part. I definitely include the comments to the prior posts as part of it. If you find any other posts or sets of comments…
Follow-up to this post, June 30, 2020 I am fully OK with politics as a topic and as a context for other topics, right out here, in front of everyone. Today it matters for this post. First, the details include that Edward James Bluddworth contacted me for an interview, as anyone can do, as invited…
The one thing I regret is not making up twenty characters across seven game titles and launching into fervent play right away. This was so much fun. There was a Renaissance, and no one noticed. Or only in scattered experience, in the insistence upon the recognition of this or that title (for me, The Fantasy…