Phew, last month’s been a hectic one!
I went to Helsinki for
Solmukohta (plus some sightseeing), then to
Este-in-Gioco, I role-played even while traveling, made big promises
I failed to keep, and run a 2-days-long playtesting of my major
work-in-progress.
So, Finland… Over the ten days I
spent away, I managed (in no particular order) to have a culture
shock from sky-high food-and-beer prices and another from the easy
availability of vegetarian alternatives
everywhere, to
contemplate the glum shores of the Baltic Sea with no little sense of
beauty and awe, to improve my sauna-fu from kiddie-level to
beginner-level and maybe learn where the green branches come from, to
quickly grow relatively bored of the plainness of Helsinki as a urban
landscape and cross the sea to visit Tallinn (which was a very
pleasant surprise), to meet Eero Tuovinen in person (at last! and he
doesn't even look more bear than man) and play
Fables of Camelot
with him (quite interesting and fun), to see for myself that
heavy-metal is inexplicably tolerated as
not-necessarily-the-antithesis-of-cool in Finnish culture, to try
some delicious blueberry and lingonberry ciders, to grow more and
more used to social nudity (and I’m finding it very liberating), to
come out as weird to random passersby and girls in bars, to eat
mammi (not bad at all, but I much prefer it with no
milk/cream) and get tipsy on
minttu and
salmiakki,
to crash into the most surreal and inanely drunken after-party ever
(featuring a wedding between Claus and a teddy bear), to show off how
I’m
always my own fashion designer, exploit some German
rules, fail at getting into a mask-induced trance, to make some
lovely new friends and to meet some much-missed old ones again. But
first
and last thing, I had to wonder at the majestic,
unforgiving craziness of a land where
it snows in April (It!
Fucking! Snows! In! April!) adding to the already
half-meter-deep cover of unmelted winter snow which still chokes the
ground (and ice-covered lakes!).
As for the Solmukohta/Knutepunkt
proper, it’s always refreshing – rejuvenating even – to step
for a few days into this alternate-reality world where role-playing
is cool. Yes, that sums it. Nordic role-playing apparently
succeeded in allying itself with its more mainstream cousins – arts
and education – rather than quietly accept being marginalized as
niche entertainment for geeky and socially inept people. And it
succeeded at doing this while strengthened, rather than neutered, in
its cultural relevance and political aggressiveness. The KP-going
crowd mirrors those developments, consisting in a dazzling array of
beautiful and enjoyable people who either experienced a personal
growth thanks to role-playing or were attracted to the form while
coming from a different (usually artistic) background and chose to
stay: these people role-play, talk smart, are possessed of powerful
political views, have a sense of dress and love to dance at
parties (thus showing your average foreign attendee that the above
aren’t inherently irreconcilable things). The level of the
conversations one can enjoy, thus, is stunningly high.
The hottest topics this year, as
represented in the convention program: use of larping/role-playing in
education, and the feasibility of organizing larps as a day-job –
both very concrete issues, spearheaded by successful early adopters.
After two years of hogging the spotlight, by the way,
jeepform
appears to be forgotten, or rather
digested, and nobody
mentions it anymore. My personal highlight, program-item-wise:
attending the method demonstration of
Østerskov Efterskole, the
Danish special school where they teach all subjects through games,
preferably larps. I already knew
about them from an article in
LarpZeit,
international issue #1, but now I feel like
I know them,
and it was a great, eye-opening experience. I was recruited to help
out Emily Care Boss & co. with their demonstration of GM-less
tabletop rpgs: I promptly accepted, not realizing the event was
scheduled for 10:00 am on a Saturday morning [
if that sounds
harmless enough to you, then you have no idea of the kind of parties
they throw at night during Solmukohta!], and then chose to demo
Polaris, not realizing I was only to be allotted half an hour
for
that. To my surprise, I think the event – or my
Polaris
demo at least – was actually a success! Too bad that, afterwards,
sleep deprivation exacted its toll from me, so that I failed to
achieve much at all during Alex Fradera’s lovely mask-trance
technique improvisation seminar (after a while I stepped back and
just watched).
Naturally, more than a handful
Solmukohta-goers disseminated the Internet with their own tales or
even detailed diaries of the trip: there’s
Thomas (who spends
honeyed words about me and
even notices my early morning
samue),
Lizzie,
Lizzie again,
you can’t have enough,
Evan,
John,
Rafael, not to forget
the Mike Pohjola… It’s actually a
lot of fun to read them all, the same way it’s intriguing to hear
different players’ stories after a larp: you get a feeling for a
vast multitude of individual narratives that sometimes, just
sometimes touch. Oh, and I haven’t been able to dig into the
Solmukohta book, yet, but I will, word by word – also ’cause I
want to have a hand in disproving Andrea Castellani’s malignant
theory that nobody ever reads the book (and be sure I read the many
books from last two years pretty thoroughly!).
- § -
As soon as I was back to Italy, I
embarked in the pretty short trip to Este in Gioco, a gaming
convention in the Padua area (in case you’re wondering how I manage
to move around so much while being unemployed/broke: this time I was fully
reliant on friends for driving me there, hosting me for the night,
etc., so it cost me very little money to go). I’ve been attending
Este in Gioco almost every year since a good while, and I was thrilled
when I heard that the convention had finally moved into the very
scenic town center of Este proper, in the park enclosed by the castle
walls. It was then a bit of a disappointment, upon arrival, to
realize that the whole convention was confined within a single pavilion and enjoyed very little visibility from the outside –
even the posters advertising it were few, far between and
small-sized. With the town being very lively on a sunny Saturday
afternoon, I had hoped we were going to visibly invade public spaces
and hook in random passersby to try out games! Nothing like that
happened but, on the other hand, I wasn’t really prepared for that
either – no easy, “introductory” games in my bag, nor colorful
devices to show people I’m there. Board-games and the like have it
easy: visible game components act as their own advertisement or, at
least, as a token of existence; role-playing games, on the other
hand, tend to be mostly immaterial, which also means they’re
nigh-invisible. It’s telling that, as I and friends were attempting
to gather players for an excellent mini-larp by Oscar Biffi, our
attempts only turned successful after Oscar produced a bunch of
wooden swords (which are, mind you, only employed as a costume prop
in the larp, not actually used for fighting): now we had a visible,
obvious cue that something was happening, and that we could leverage
to break into people’s mind-space and ask them into the game.
Anyway, a bunch of
the usual suspects were there and I
had a good time with them. There was a pretty sweet game of
Mist-Robed Gate (how’s that for something visible which
could be played in a public space to get some attention, by the way?)
and much playtesting of friends’ work-in-progress designs:
Dawn
of a New Tomorrow by Davide Losito is turning out a very solid
game, in fact, and I feel like through my vampire character I only
played for a couple hour I was able to channel so much more angst and
negative energy than I ever could express as a teenager – well
done! And, you know, maybe next year we’ll be able to make the most
from the convention’s new location and make role-playing games
visible to the general populace (probably through specially designed
events, or at least strong visual cues).
Also this last month, I’ve been
playing lots of
Remember Tomorrow – as a two-players game.
It is indeed true that it works this way, almost as well as with
three or more players, as its only feature which is directly hampered
by the two-players setup is the (in my experience) very uncommon
3-way conflict; the game mostly plays as a string of 1-vs-1 face-offs
(interspersed with monologues) anyway, even in a larger group. Since
I and my sweetheart share a fondness for the subject-matter,
Remember
Tomorrow has become our default go-to pastime whenever we’ve
got some time to kill: we played it in German international airports,
onboard Baltic ferry-boats and while sunbathing on Italian beaches*
(one just has to remember to pack the little bundle of playsheets and
8d10; small-change coins work well enough for Edge tokens). I feel
like I’m now experienced enough with the game that I begin to
notice its probable limits, but still I think it’s extremely good
for a regular, you’re-not-sure-how-long-it’s-going-to-last game,
and completing an “episode” (it took longer than we expected)
left us hungry to start another one almost immediately (which we
did).
* On the topic of sunbathing: yes, this
is Italy, and in April we go to the beach. Sorry, Finland!
Finally, speaking of actual play in
April, we summoned a bunch of friends to the usual place for what we
call “a home convention” on 30
th and May 1
st.
The original plan was to playtest Ben Robbin’s
Kingdom, but
as one of the players wasn’t jazzed with my synopsis of the game
(too bad, since I’m extremely excited about it!) we went for Plan B: we set down to playtest my own
I reietti di Eden — the first ever playtest for the severe rule changes I’ve been cooking up since version 0.2 crashed like a train-wreck. What actually happened over two pretty intense afternoons could better be termed a “playstorming”: new rules were made up on the fly to patch holes, and the whole thing barely held together, though the players unanimously reported having had fun. It’s crystal clear that some balancing still needs to be done before a playtest draft can be let out in the wild, but that’s the least of the discoveries made, and was almost expected. More critically, I have to give up on the idea that this can be a quick, convention-friendly one-shot game: it took us some 10 hours of play before we triggered the endgame, and most startling is that
I liked it that way, since the rhythm of play was feeling perfectly right or at times even too fast; while I
could theoretically re-design everything from the ground up, that would necessarily involve cutting away large chunks of play I actually have fun with. Better to quit my insistence on a one-shot game, then, and focus on the emergent strengths of the design, even if doing so will mean far less opportunities for playtests and, consequently, a slower development. Also, game setup methods (or lack thereof) came under some heavy fire, with “blank page syndrome” denounced as a universal issue: this proved fortunate, as it immediately generated ideas for a more structured setup phase, which I’m going to test out as soon as possible.
Besides, do you remember how
I was supposed to translate the Italian finalists of the Game Chef? Well, while the feeling of being a “staff member” to the contest was great for me (and helped me cope with the disappointment for not being able to participate, the actual contest period overlapping almost exactly with my journey to Helsinki), I had no idea about the deadlines. Deadlines which actually came up when I was either off-line or
presumed to be off-line (whether rightfully or not) by Giulia and Mario — the result being that it was Giulia, and not me, who did the job. To be fair, I suspect her to-English translations are vastly better than I could hope to achieve (I know she’s way more experienced than me there).
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