Adept Play
Adept Play
Tag: Lace & Steel
Lace & Steel is a swashbuckling fantasy game by Pauli Kidd, originally published by the Australian Games Group (TAGG) in 1989.
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Lace & Steel, Continued
Noah recently posted about our Lace & Steel game, and my response was to summon everyone for a video. We have me, Noah, Sam and David, but unfortunately Greg was sick and couldn’t participate — hopefully we can schedule some time to chat later, since his perspective is valuable and I fear we weren’t able…
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Three Plus Two Musketeers
David, Greg, Rod, Sam and I recently played our eighth session of Lace & Steel, a game we’ve been playing for approximately five months. I want to write about the game, for myself, with an eye toward jump-starting my own critical reflection on roleplaying, which has suffered quite a bit in 2025. Rod, who’s GMing,…
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Yikes
[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.…
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Design Curriculum 7: How, how, how, how, how?!
Justin gave me a list of questions or topics for this session, and I realized they made most sense in nested form. So I grouped IIEE and relationship mechanics into the larger category of Bounce and system diagrams (specifically their feedback or activity loops), then put the whole into the biggest category of design processes…
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Design Curriculum 1: Re-inspiration
I’ve been working up a Design curriculum for role-playing for a long while, so when Justin Nichols approached me for a game design discussion that leaned toward mentoring, I accepted without reservation. At the beginning of this episode, we considered our options for the initial approach, and Justin preferred the “lab” version in which we…
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![Monday Lab: [AA]IIEE[EE]!](https://adeptplay.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/beating-heart.jpg)
Monday Lab: [AA]IIEE[EE]!
Intent, Initiation, Execution, Effect – fictional things, probably the single most direct fictional content to be interfaced with real-people speaking and using rules, in the hobby. In a recent dialogue with Zac Porcu, he called it “the beating heart of role-playing.” Briefly: design zone 1 is to establish a linear order and then to carry…