Fables of Camelot – Beta

Fables of Camelot is a roleplaying game I wrote with Sami Koponen this last summer; Sami had been thinking of the problem of introducing roleplaying to new people in a convention environment, so when he came to visit me for a week we put our heads together and cooked up a game to fulfill his spec. I’m really happy with the result, although somewhat chargrined as well: I’ve been hitting my head against my own newbie-project Eleanor’s Dream for a while now, and it’s just not cohering, while this particular game was essentially made in five hours of planning with Sami.

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Olranthi Crunch Landscape for Solar System

As discussed earlier, I started a Gloranthan Solar System campaign recently, which obviously means that I needed to put together at least a preliminary crunch landscape for the thing. This is actually massively indimidating job – Glorantha is a deep setting, and better minds have spent a lot of time figuring out how to represent it in a roleplaying game. It’s not really very likely that I’ll be happy with whatever we cobble together initially, but luckily SS as a game system is very retcon-friendly; we’ll just put together enough at a time to play the game, and then expand and revise as necessary, thus hopefully approaching something good.

What My Father Taught Me #2

We played a second session of the new Gloranthan Solar System campaign last Saturday with Sipi, Tero and Esa. The place was “Living Room” in Iisalmi once more; a nice restaurant, although I’m detecting a hint of newness there – time will tell how their atmosphere starts developing as the mainstream crowd finds the place. The actual session was relatively laid back in terms of drama, but the style and atmosphere were fine, and I would expect the events to gain in speed later on.

My new Solar System campaign

Last weekend we started a new roleplaying game campaign with some friends from Iisalmi (a nearby town from where I live, that). The idea for me was pretty much to get out of the house and play something with low stakes and no immediate game design concerns; bonus points if the game would endure a bit, at least half a dozen sessions. My roleplaying gaming has been pretty shallow and sparse for the last six months or so due to people moving about and me being too harassed by other stuff to work for it; luckily we’ll get a chance now, the next session has already been scheduled for this weekend and the intent is to play weekly or at least regularly for as long as the campaign takes.

Going to Spiel Essen 2010

As I just wrote at the Forge, I’ve decided to take a booth at Spiel Essen for Arkenstone and other interested indie rpg designers. The booth reservation deadline is next week, and I’ll likely go for the smallest booth size to keep the expenses down. Forge games (of which I’ll have a good selection available, I imagine) are a destination shopping thing for the core of the audience, after all, so the size of the booth shouldn’t have a big effect here.

About the pdf version of the World of Near

People have been asking about this, so I might as well inform everybody at once.

The pitfalls of narrative technique in rpg play

This is going to rpg be theory stuff, just so you know.

A thing I’ve noticed lately specifically at Story Games, but also on other gaming fora, is the increased acceptance and advocation of narration authority sharing between players in a roleplaying game. It’s a nice technique, but I also find that it is being recommended and utilized in ways that might have unexpected consequences that need to be considered in depth. I’ll write a short treatise about the topic here – I don’t particularly want to piss in anybody’s cereals if they find that unrestrained sharing of narrative authority brings them happiness, but it’s not correct to call it the universal panacea of roleplaying, either – there are solid reasons for refusing to introduce this technique into every single game you might ever wish to play.

Glorantha in Solar System

Related to the reading I’ve been doing, here are some notes on a Solar System implementation for Gloranthan gaming. I’m mostly going by the 2nd edition Heroquest book here, particularly its tripartite cosmology and emphasis on the social role of heroes. The idea is to give some mechanical backbone to the whole idea of three separate Otherworlds, as outlined in my earlier post on the cosmology.

2nd edition Heroquest Metaphysics

I’ll continue on the matter of Heroquest a bit more, I still have a bit to say. This one’s about the metaphysics of Glorantha in Heroquest. In fact, it’s a sort of an extended question I’m going to ask of my Gloranthan sage friend at some point – writing this post should help me verbalize the thing that’s been bugging me for a long time.

Thoughts on 2nd and 3rd edition Heroquest

I’ve been re-reading the second and third editions of Heroquest lately. I’m sort of a little bit of a fan for Greg Stafford’s things, so this is mostly me warming up for the new Sartar book which I’m going to get whenever somebody brings it to me from the coastal trade towns. I have historically almost never played roleplaying games in Glorantha, but it’s still one of my favourite fantasy worlds. Now I feel like commenting upon these texts a bit.