There have been two great new essays on roleplaying published this week.

Ron Edwards talks about a process for playing games in highly detailed settings such as Glorantha, or the worlds of Earthdawn, Wraith: The Oblivion, and Tribe 8. He recommends choosing a location inside the setting that's rife with problematic situations, then making characters ( Read more... )

Found this great paragraph in "The Fantasy Role-Playing Game: A New Performing Art" (Daniel MacKay, 2001). It neatly hits some points that I've been thinking about for a dozen years or more.

"That the roles of performer and audience are played by a single group at different times rather than by distinct groups at the same time does not jeopardize ( Read more... )

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A couple of days ago, my (straight male) GM seduced one of my (straight male and married) co-players.  In-character, of course.  It was a very entertaining scene: a walk on a beach, and stars, that boggling moment when one character got sick of hinting and made an unmistakeable proposition and the other character had a brain freeze and gave the ( Read more... )

I've signed up to play in Ivan's Elizabethan SF game. The pitch:The plan is for an Elizabethan-era science fiction game based around the comet of 1572. To quote Benjamin Woolley's biography of John Dee, "[The appearance of a new star] went to the heart of the cosmological, and ... by implication political and theological, order, and did so at a ( Read more... )