The Wyrd Lands

 What happens if you take non-adventurers and send them to a dungeon. In this post I am going to send four foodies on a fact-finding mission to The Keep on the Borderlnds and the Caves of Chaos. They might drink an Ogre's wine and sample Hobgoblin hors d'oeuvre.  This comes out of my last post where I decided that my problem with dungeons is that actually I don't like playing as adventurers. It also comes out of discussions on the FKR server about where do you find dungeon-like adventures that are not "grimdark".  I felt that if you take a different perspective on a dungeon you can find them to be far less miserable than they at first seem.  This is a semi-tongue-in-cheek experiment and is in no way an attack on Keep on the Borderlands (though there are a couple of funny things in this module).  Why the Keep on the Borderlands? In my last post I talked about the idea that dungeons are coloured by the assumption that the people going into them are adventurers. T...

I might be wrong, but I think I design FKR games. I'm going to talk here about how I have tried to do this in my game  Revealed Wrists.  I'm going to begin in this post by considering by what I mean by an FKR game.  Revealed Wrists is a game about noble women in medieval Japan. I call it a game of 'aesthetic intrigue' as your characters will scheme for the expresses' reputation using knowledge of taste and, well, aesthetics.  It doesn't specify any kind of system, nor does it specify if it is a solo/group game. In some respects, it doesn't look overly like what are normally thought of as FKR games. People might assume its a story game, but it also has no moves or tokens or any meta tools at all.  What makes this an FKR game in my-mind is that it tries to embody the 'Free' element of Free War-play (FKR). What does "free" play mean? Around the birth of the FKR discords, I wrote something in the ' The Neverending Drachenschwanz ' which...

Can we map where a thing is or its dimensions when playing RPGs? I'm not sure we can.  There's been a certain amount of discussion recently about the idea of conceptual mapping in RPGs, mostly inspired by the comments in this video on Video Game design . The general idea is about applying a version of our understanding on how we form cognitive maps in our minds (imagine how you know the way to your nearest shop or back to your hometown).  Taking that and applying it to designing levels in computer games. Raccoon Medicine has started an excellent series on thinking about the same ideas in terms of designing and running RPGs. I am not going to do the same because they are doing it better than I and you should head over and read them. For this post, I looked at some actual plays (using the same as I used in this post on narrators ) to see if I could identify evidence of this kind of mapping when players were moving characters. In short, I didn't really find it, and I am now no...

Do you like charts? Cos, baby, I got charts! RPG charts!  Last time I tried applying a literary theory to an extract from an actual play of Into the Odd . This led me to pick out the idea that the language of RPG play seems to move between four levels of perspective when players speak.  I decided to try and track these levels of perspective within through multiple games. I decided to take a similar moment between them alla similar moment in multiple games. This moment was action or event resolution and the games range from Into the Odd, through 5e and Night Witches. I'll start with sharing the chart and the data it's based on for Into the Odd, then show the other charts and then write a little about what they mean to me (and maybe a bonus chart or two!). Into the Odd (Tuesday Knight Games) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D46WpD9wSB0 (24:52 - 27:08) GM [1.5]You probably could take a shot at them now, if that’s what you wanted to do.  P1 [1.5]Yeah, let’s light em up. P2 [1...

Do we know is really happening when playing an RPG? One particularly thorny part is figuring out who is actually speaking at any one moment. This blog tries to think about this using a bit of literary theory.  Yeah, you aren’t proficient with glaives, unfortunately. This is a quote from a bit of Critical Role where the GM is telling a player that they can't use an item. In this quote, who is speaking and being spoken to?  If the 'you' is the player (Laura Bailey), it makes little sense why Matthew Mercer would be telling her she can't use glaives. Is the 'you' the character Jester? It seems unlikely given that Matthew Mercer is talking as himself to a fictional character sitting at the table who doesn't know themselves if they can use a glaive well. These may seem like flippant questions which we can intuitively answer, even if that might be hard to articulate. However, I think that trying to articulate an answer helps us to reflect on RPGs. In particular, I...

I was chatting recently with The Revenant's Quill  who has written a post about the "unspoken mechanic" of most RPGs: creating and manging the shared model wherein the game takes place.  His post, and some of the resulting chat on Discord, interestingly matches a lot with the ideas from a theory I read as a literature student: text-world theory . Of all the theory I have ever read, this one captured in Joanna Gavin's book, is perhaps best placed to describe RPGs.  The feeling of being so immersed in a text-world as almost to lose sense of who and where we are is familiar to just about anyone who has ever read a novel [or played any RPG]. We can populate our text-worlds with living, breathing, thinking characters, carrying out complex physical and mental activities, in authentic material surroundings. I'm going to briefly describe it in this post as a prelude in other posts to thinking about how it applies to RPGs.  Let's start with a simple sentence from Oz B...