New this month...

I didn't mean to employ the "monthly digest/play journal" format for this blog anymore, but sometimes I'm bound to fall back to it when life-shit kicks in, apparently. Since last post I was pretty busy dealing with a metric ton of non-game-related things, but now that's hopefully over.
11/30~12/2 I attended both the Larp Symposium and arCONate — half of each, actually, since these were two unrelated events happening over the same weekend within a short distance from each other. The former was quite an awesome convention, in the non-gamer sense of the word: people with experience and interest in the field gathering at some place to talk about it! "The field" being larp and all of its cousins, with quite an awesome detour about "urban games" this year, which I used to know very little about. This being its third year, the Larp Symposium is finally beginning to come into its own, maybe deviating from its starting concept a little but with really exciting outcomes as the payback.
ArCONate is instead the now-classic format for a friendly and relaxed tabletop role-playing convention as increasingly seen in Northern Italy of late: the organizing staff is practically the same as Coyote Press, a majority of the attendees is from the GenteCheGioca forum, and the beer is great. There I experienced a new and very interesting chamber larp by Susi Ansaloni and Oscar Biffi — whose poetics of late is mostly to employ rarefied Tolkien-esque fantasy atmospheres as the backdrop for pretty intimate, personal explorations, while mixing in a number of Jeepform-like techniques with a traditional British-freeform like, "here's your character background" basic structure. I also played a very drunk session of The Questing Beast, and I feel a bit sorry for the one player I met there for the first time (I hope you were able to have fun despite me, Michela!). But… did I mention that Doktor Rafu's Achievement Unlocked Party is ongoing? And it won't stop!
Also, yesterday I was finally able to run a playtest of Ben Robbins's Kingdom with the current draft of the rules, even if it was cut pretty short by time constraints — a blight which sadly insists on plaguing my home games of late. Now I've gotta write a report, which is due by 12/20.