Adept Play
A fantasy game by Steve Perrin and Ray Turney, first published by The Chaosium in 1978; includes the slightly edited version published in 1979.
There was one thing left to discover: what happened with Karva, priestess of Oome, devotee of Qar, and Jynathon, who is simultaneously the greatest threat to her power and its best immediate shot at restoring it – perhaps re-making it. After all, the first few minutes of our game brought these two characters face to…
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…
Here’s our final session of RuneQuest (“RQ2,” 1980) which presents and invents my sketchy setting-notions through play. It’s also a personal experience for all of us in diving into the system and text of that time. I’d love to keep developing this setting idea and enjoying the game. The coming-of-age, weird-grit fantasy has been remarkably…
This is when something really complex develops and expands right within my grasp, while I’m learning just what it is we’re making only at the last possible moment, and knowing I’m not quite good enough to do it justice at the moving margins. Now I know that the area is called The Haven by its…
Thinking about what-next per session is pretty hard for this sort of naturalistic play, especially when circumstances don’t lend themselves to substantial cuts. I’d have to think for a while to understand why that’s not a problem in playing Sorcerer, for example. (It doesn’t have explicit scene-type mechanics either.) In this case, I put some…
Here’s part 1 of my series “Finding D&D,” or rather, my first pass at working it up into a formal presentation. I’m looking forward to a fair piece of response for it. There’s some history, based on several discussions at my old Adept forum, and a lot of private correspondence since then across a number…
The post title refers to one of the casualties in the session, which also included one player-character catching on fire and getting stabbed in the face. But all told, our first knock-down savage RuneQuest combat went rather well for our heroes. It’s strange to be building a fantasy setting by little bits, knowing certain images…
It’s the adolescence. Creepy rural fantasy aside, which is working well too, playing the characters as mid-teens is working wonders. This is the second session following RuneQuest 1980: brambly hick coming-of-age fantasy. I’ve attached the file I sent to them before the session, updating my scribbled notes into complete sentences concerning the general cosmology, with…
Briefly, Cults of Terror is a not merely a landmark in role-playing history, it’s a giant. Coupled with the rules it was written to support, RuneQuest 1980, and the supplement that immediately preceded it, Cults of Prax, it established a new-and-different bar for play which defined “I play RuneQuest” into almost its own sector and…