Actual Play

We recently finished a campaign of Night’s Black Agents, after playing it for 1.5-years and 29-sessions, making it one of the longest campaigns I’ve played. Night’s Black Agents is a role-playing game where – to put it like the designer does – Jason Bourne meets Dracula. Drawing from the paranoid world of spy fiction and the classic vampire tale, it reveals the terrible truth about the supernatural to a group of international spies and criminals, leaving them with just one choice: take out the vampire conspiracy before they take you out. Zalozhniy Quartet is a four-adventure campaign for Night’s Black Agents, which we dove into right after the introductory adventure in the main book. ...

This is the second post about PanoptiCorp. The first was about personal experiences, so it actually makes more sense to read this first to get some context for the first one. PanoptiCorp was a larp about a dystopian marketing company with all the worst parts of capitalism. Everything and everyone was on the line of not being good enough, everyone’s performance was constantly evaluated and the company ran under a spirit of constant competition. Deadlines were usually very soon and the office worked more or less around the clock. ...

Warning: this is long, rambly, and has no context. I will write a part 2 with more context, when I’ve had some time to process what I experienced. My flight left Denmark before I had time for a proper debrief, so this is also me pouring out my thoughts on my character. I noticed afterwards how much I could’ve used the debrief: the game was very present in my mind afterwards. Note on the person used in this text: I deliberately create a difference between myself and my character by referring to him in third person, as per debrief-instructions given after the game. ...

A couple of years back I ran a game of Dungeons & Discourse. It’s based on the brilliant web comic, Dresden Codak. It ran very smoothly, but mostly thanks to good luck and excellent players, not because of any brilliant design on my part. I used Donjon as the rules, and that worked surprisingly well. Donjon is designed for that kind of off-the-top-of-your-head kind of wild speculation Dungeons & Discourse seems to call for. ...

I’ve had a play report on a Dungeons & Discourse game we played last year lying around on my computer for over an year now. I thought I might finally post it online. Unfortunately, it is in Finnish. More info after the cut. Luolia ja Diskursseja Dungeons & Discourse esiintyy nettisarjakuva Dresden Kodakissa. Siinä filosofian ja tieteen teorialla varustetut sankarit seikkailevat korkealentoisissa ympäristöissä, joissa lohikäärmeet korvataan p-zombeilla, solipsisteilla ja neoluddiiteilla. Tarina kuvaa roolipeliä, mutta ei perustu mihinkään todelliseen peliin. Ropecon 2010 tarjosi tilaisuuden kääntää tilanne toisin päin ja pelata roolipeliä luolien ja diskurssien maailmassa. Peliin käytettiin Donjonin systeemiä, jotta kaikki pelaajien villit ajatukset pääsisivät oikeuksiinsa: Donjonissa pelaajat saavat varsin paljon kerrontavaltaa. ...

Recently, a two-year long campaign ended. With 53 evenings spent playing, it is the longest game I’ve been involved in. We played Heimot, a Finnish science fiction game (it would be ‘Tribes’ in English, but that name is already taken). With a strong game master influence and a narrative focus it is a traditional game in many senses. Even the rules used in Heimot tend towards the old-school. They are also contradictory and unsatisfying in many cases, so we made some adjustments and hand-waving as we played. ...