Yesterday I went to a London RPG Meetup and played a session of Archipelago, a game whose name I'd heard but which wasn't familiar to me. It was pitched as a tale for telling Earthsea; style stories - a collaborative world-building tool with a story back-end. From the game introduction:
Archipelago is a story/role-playing game where each player ( Read more... )

Is anarchy the alternative to order? If we reject, implicitly, explicitly, accidentally, the imposition of either source of structure, what will actually happen at the table? If we are not playing Iconic characters, or if we are not engaging in a formulaic story, is there not a risk of becoming lost in the sea of non-genre melodrama, flailing about ( Read more... )

My new group in Oxford is at the start of an Apocalypse World campaign. The first couple of sessions of Apocalypse World are a collaborative world-building exercise and we’ve populated the world we built with some notable PCs, and now we’re poised at launching into the game proper. In the zero-session, the game follows the daily lives of the ( Read more... )

When Morgue began ruminating about the GMIS, the concept was along the lines that the GM is essentially like a modelling platform - the entire world fits inside their mind, and so they are the arbiter of what is and what is not. This is complicated in many indie games by the conscious de-powering of the GM so that they do not have unilateral fiat ( Read more... )

Last night I ran a game of D&D 3.5, for a revived group of way-back D&Ders. As always, it gave me much food for thought, technique-wise. There's one aspect that I'm now turning into a post, in hopes it helps me make sense of it ( Read more... )

As I was walking to university today, my brain was turning on the GMIS stuff that I raised with enthusiasm last year, before it all got bulldozed by being incredibly busy all the time. (Short version: in traditional games, the GM has a model of the gameworld going on in his head that includes stuff players don’t know about, like the assassin hiding ( Read more... )

Before I say anything else, let me extend warm congratulations to Debz and Matz on the birth of their first son, Dominic. I'm not sure if he already has a character sheet and plush D20.

So, on to the matter at hand:

About two KapCons ago, a young and brash lad called steve_hix took out the Best Game award for a session of his Lucky Joneses. Controversy ( Read more... )

Just completed the second (and final) part of our old-skool D&D extravaganza, using the Moldvay-era ruleset. ( I wrote about the first part here.This excursion was marked by the characters moving through some sparsely-populated areas of the dungeon environment, engaging in one exciting battle in a giant-fungus forest, and eventually launching an ( Read more... )

I ran a session of 1981 Moldvay Basic D&D for Malc, Kieran, Doug and Alana tonight. I was trying to approach it in a very straight-up way, trying to deliver a pure 1981 experience in fact for a bunch of people that had never been part of it. Along the way I was thinking about the GMIS implications of things. How does the imagined space in my head ( Read more... )

I was having a chat to a couple of others about the challenges and difficulties of running games at roleplaying conventions, such as at KapCon. Basically, there are a lot of campaign GMs that don't feel like they've got a good handle on how to run a very short game, such as a CON game. Intrigued, I started to probe a little to see where the area of ( Read more... )