I started a game of The Mountain Witch yesterday. I like this game particularly for being so easy to pick up and start with a moments notice. This actually describes the situation I was in very well: only a few hours before our scheduled gaming time somebody reminded me that I own the game, and they would like to play it. An hour before the game I searched for all my game apparels and read through the game quickly, reminding myself what this game was all about. ...
Last Sunday we played the third game in my series of political games. ‘Political’ does not here mean that they included political action by the characters, but that they had in them political situations reflected from history. Basically, I took historical situations and placed them in a hypothetical future realized in a dystopian cyberpunk-setting. The first two games were about Vietnam 2.0. In these games Vietnam was devastated by war and still collecting itself after Chinese occupation. The UN was trying to keep peace in a situation where part of the country was in Chinese and part in Vietnamese rebel control. We watched parts of Full Metal Jacket and Rambo to get to mood for a sweaty journey through a hostile jungle. The characters in the first game were independent contractors trying to rescue American construction workers that had been in Vietnam to aid in its reconstruction. The construction workers had been captured for ransom by Vietnamese rebels, led - ironically - by an ex-Chinese general. The company they worked for decided that the ransom was not worth it, so workers’ families collected enough money to hire some mercenaries. The game ended with a lot of dead rebels, a wounded general and rescued construction workers. ...
Next weekend I’ll have chance to play Liquid Crystal again. It is a game in which players create and play robots with no personality to start with. The game is set in a utopian (or dystopian) future where most of the humanity is wiped out and the remainder try to build anew, starting with the city of New Olympus. The back story is largely unimportant, as it is not a game about exploration, unless that is defined very specifically to mean the psyche of the robot played. In another words, it is game of building personalities and seeing how they turn out. Very few games start with a blank character sheet that is completed based on the events of the game, and not the other way around. ...
We were sitting in sauna and it was getting late when we decided that it would be a perfect opportunity to play a short game of role-play. Few hours of time, and no idea of what to play. One of us had an idea that we decided to test out: each participating player would decide one element of the game, oblivious of the ideas other players would add. I would then mix them together to form a game. ...
We’ve been playing Nobilis for some time now. It is a campaign, led by me, about the diplomacy between Heaven and Hell. The players have two sets of characters: one working for Heaven and one working for Hell. This being a somewhat typical game of Nobilis the characters are Powers, being bossed around by angels, one of which happens to be fallen. Typically a session has consisted of either the Powers of Heaven or the Powers of Hell running errands for their demanding angel-bosses, in a recurring cycle of trying to gain the upper hand for the negotiations. I designed the first four sessions as a prelude to the actual negotiations, and last week we played the negotiations. ...
A discussion I had with some local rpg-players got me thinking about the history of rpg-theory in Finland. The best known of theories was the one based on the text known as the Turku School Manifesto (it was displayed online not long ago, but I can’t seem to find it anymore). It meant that for a long time, role-play - and especially larp - was viewed through these concepts. For those that don’t know, Turku School ideas were based on the idea of immersion, or the player “becoming” more or less, the character. That idea has been elaborated and criticized since, but for (roughly) a decade, it was the way theory worked (in Finland), at least in practice if not in all discourses of theorists. ...