Adept Play
A science fiction game by Marc Miller, first published by Game Designers’ Workshop (GDW) in 1977. It has been revised in many forms by many authors.
“Mustering Out Blues” is an homage to classic Traveller I made by hacking the Pool, James V. West’s decades-old rules system (today we’d call it a “game engine,” I suppose). I’ve run a bunch of one-shots with it, but today I ran the second session of a campaign game, and I don’t want to brag…
On Sunday, Jan. 21, I ran an enjoyable 1-shot of a role playing game set in the universe of Fantasy Flight’s space-operatic war game Twilight Imperium. Embers of the Imperium uses the Genesys “Narrative Dice” system, a re-working of the system that was employed in Fantasy Flight’s Star Wars roleplaying game, that system employing the…
Back in June, I played more sessions of original or nigh-original Traveller with Johan and Nathan. It has been one of the most pleasantly educational experiences of play that I can remember. We have really learned that most principles about “how it’s done” don’t apply to this early text and, I assume, to how the…
This is Traveller, in one of its early-early publications: 1981, Game Design Workshop, which as far as I can tell is about the same as the original 1977 publication. A quick point: this isn’t anything like Traveller as stamped iconically into gaming culture. There is no setting, no Imperium, no canonical starmaps, no campaign-planning, nothing…
At the end of February, I ran a game for Games on Demand Online I call Mustering Out Blues. It’s a Traveller hack that came from a couple-three different places: (1) the classic Traveller campaign I started at the height of the pandemic that evolved into Galactic Adventures, the game I described in a previous…
The classic Traveller game I started on Roll20 during the height of the pandemic morphed by degrees into something different, a kind of counter-Traveller, a funhouse-mirror Traveller that takes as its point of departure the same basic premise–you’ve spent your life so far in service to some galactic guild or other, gotten yourself to the…
For the last few months, I’ve invited patrons to ask me things, which I grapple with and collect as a presentation at the beginning of each month.. I can’t say I really answer them in an Ask Advice fashion, although you’ll certainly learn what I think. Sometimes it’s “I don’t know.” The embedded link goes…
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…
What does that phrase mean? I lifted it from the famous phrase about “stupid,” but movies and memes may have spoiled the original phrase’s meaning, so I’ll (probably) waste your time for a moment explaining myself. The point is that it’s not what people call you or judge you, or conversely, what you think or…