The duck’s alive and quacking

I went a long time without updating this blog, or my Patreon page. The last few months I mostly spent frantically translating Fate Worlds Vol. 1 to Italian for Dreamlord Press: a 300-page monster of an RPG book, and a job which left me with not much idle time on my hands. But finally the time has come to resume my various Platonic Duck Kitchen projects – of which I have many in progress, so many in fact that a new status update was long overdue!

Enter the Avenger (a.k.a. Entra il Vendicatore) has seen a lot of play over the last year. Originally released in the premiere issue of Worlds Without Master, it’s a fair assumption to call it my best known and most successful game. An Italian translation has been up on DriveThruRPG for a while, but hasn’t been selling – probably because of an utter lack of marketing antics on my part. This Italian edition is layed out for printing as a booklet and embellished with some additional artwork by Tazio Bettin. A similar layout for the original English text is in the works and almost done: my plan is to put it up for sale on a variety of digital stores and also to send it to my Patreon backers as a complimentary (free) update.

La casetta di marzapane (tentative English title: The Gingerbread House) has also seen quite a lot of play, though in Italian only. In case you’re reading about it for the first time, this is a short-story-as-a-game about the chance (?) meeting between some children and the ruler of their badly ruined land. My planned effort translating it to English (not as easy a task as I’d hoped) had to be delayed due to more urgent concerns; meanwhile, a number of players came up with suggestions for improving the game, including catching some bugs and textual quirks. Due to extremely tight integration between rules, thematic content and text, no change is trivial to implement – thus, I’m still in the process of sorting through the feedback and pondering the exact fixes to make. While I’m not yet sure whether I’ll release a revised Italian edition first, I want the first English release to be a fully revised one.

The so-called “manhunt game” (working title used to be “Wolf and Deer, Hound and Fox”, but I’m growing less and less enamored with it) is a whole new project I’ve been working on as a distraction in whatever little spare time I’ve had lately. I don’t have much on paper about it except notes, but I’ve been playing it a lot and it does create some kickass fiction! The cards-and-numbers based pacing mechanics still need some tweaking (and, thus, some more playtesting) before I can draft a text. Since the default backdrop for the game is swords & sorcery (as in Enter the Avenger) I’m considering submitting this game to Worlds Without Master, depending on how long the final text will turn out to be.

Awkward/L’imbarazzo is another out-of-the-blue new project! Quickly drafted out for a chamber-larping convention, it turned out to be one of my most successful designs to date, not to mention my first successful attempt at doing comedy. It’s a game to be played with your whole body rather than just with words: a hilarious Jeepform-like scenario (though structurally and mechanically simpler than a game such as Doubt, not to mention shorter) about the difficulties people of different gender experience in having a non-romantic, non-sexual friendship in a heteronormative society, as well as the different expectations younger and older people hold about life. Despite only existing as a bunch of scribbled notes, this scenario has been played multiple times, including with first-time role-players, and people other than myself have run it. I now look forward to writing a concise English-language manual for the game.

Lift Girl – La ragazza dell’ascensore, my (Italian) Game Chef 2013 entry about small & fractured stories crossing at at an elevator in a near-future high-rise shopping center, is one game I haven’t been making any progress with lately, but it’s next to done. It just needs a very minor rules-tweak or three (and a round of playtesting those tweaks) before I go into producing a new release, which I’d like to be either English-language or bilingual.

I haven’t made much of a progress on The Shackled Self, my game about a prince-turned-ascetic striving to achieve sainthood and the power to save humankind. The playtest I ran last year showed that my new dominoes-based mechanics for face-offs between the Prince and Temptation might be working, but overall the game is… way too hard on the players. My plan is to re-formulate all of the rules to fit on a set of well-designed handouts, as a set of “moves” players can perform (to borrow a useful piece of terminology from Apocalypse World). A mechanical overhaul is also required for pacing reasons, to make the game ran satisfactorily within a realistic timeframe. I suspect it will take me a while, though.

Passeggeri ("Passengers") is another project I made very little progress on. I'm aiming for a role-playing game playable anywhere, anytime, by as little as two people but also by larger groups, without carrying any books or other items around: as such, it requires *extreme* rules minimalism. What little work I've done on it was in the form of short playstorming sessions. The resource I most need, here, is lots of time I can afford to spend in testing, as I'm walking into mostly uncharted territory (figuratively as well).

No progress on Cast Down from Eden/I reietti di Eden, either. Much like the struggle it depicts, this urban-fantasy game of fallen angels and occult superheroes fighting against enemies almighty proved to be a really ambitious project. There’s something deeply personal to me to this game-idea, a deeper layer of meaning which, despite so many in-house iterations and playtests, still has a hard time emerging from the multiple layers of mechanical complexity and colorful action-y fiction. I’m currently happier with what I get out of my tighter, smaller-scope, more focused projects, while Cast Down from Eden now feels like an elusive, hard-to-win fight I can only make a comeback to after I get some more practice.

Then there’s a bunch of collaborative projects!

To Hunt Down the End begun as a swords & sorcery themed re-skin of Giovanni Micolucci’s Nomadic Hunter I wrote in English based on the Italian-language draft he showed me early this year. We meant to release it as a Vas Quas/Platonic Duck joint production, and I commissioned some artwork from artist Mik (who created the original title banner for Platonic Duck Kitchen, which also served as concept art for the logo), which turned out just as awesome as I hoped for. Unfortunately, I lagged behind in production schedule; meanwhile, Giovanni has made significant improvements to the original Nomadic Hunter, leading to a new and better prototype (again, in Italian). The exact fate of To Hunt Down the End, then, is yet to be determined: it would take me some more work to port some or all of the latest NH improvements into THDtE through translating and re-skinning, and more graphic design work is needed to produce a finished, playable game. But it can be done, indeed. Just like Nomadic Hunter, To Hunt Down the End is a hybrid board-game/role-playing game of wilderness crawling and monster-slaying which you can also play solo.

The Behemoth is a character playbook for  Vincent Baker’s ApocalypseWorld created by Tazio Bettin. I helped Tazio fine-tune his design and we’re most likely going to release it through Platonic Duck Kitchen, with gorgeous art by Tazio himself. I just need to do some editing of the text before we proceed to its final layout.

La casa sulla roccia (roughly, “The house built on stone”) is a wonderful, profound and moving “chamber” larp scenario by Barbara Fini: a day in the life of the inmates and staff of a facility for the mentally ill, deep in rural Southern Italy. By “chamber” larp I mean a small, self-contained live-action RPG scenario that can be set up and run with minimal costuming and props and very little prep, in a perfectly mundane location. This game currently exists as a set of Italian-language character sheets Barbara wrote, plus the oral wisdom I collected over a number of extremely successful runs – I’d like to eventually piece together an actual “manual” for hosting and running the scenario. What I’m now wondering is whether making an English translation of it would also be possible, or too much of the setting and general tone would be lost in translation on a non-Italian audience.

Settembre poi ci troverà (roughly, “September will come and find us”) is another “chamber” larp/Jeepform-like scenario, co-created by Barbara and me. Fresh out of our pen and yet to be playtested (it’s scheduled to premier at a chamber larping convention roughly a month from now), it combines features from both Barbara’s La casa sulla roccia and my own Awkward to tell a cross-generational story about short-lived summertime loves.

All of the above are “half-done” games: games for which either a significant body of text already exists, some playtesting already happened, or both. Releasing them all is only a matter of having enough spare time available – which ultimately boils down to having money on my hands: sponsor me by becoming my patron and make all of those role-playing games happen! “Board of advisors” level patrons also get a say in which ones ought to be finished first.

But there’s even more brewing! Game ideas which are still in a fluid state, but might gel into something playtest-able anytime soon. One is a game about witches as disgraced goddesses, and the weird process by which a majority or 50% segment of a populace is persecuted into effective minority status. Another one is the game of aggressive revenge against the powerful and its house-of-cards-like consequences on society I’ve briefly blogged about a long time ago – working title: “The Taller They Stand”. “Changing Speed” is instead my working title for a self-contained scenario in which I plan to exploit the tropes of 70s and 80s’ Japanese super-robot TV shows to do some hopelessly grim, as-angsty-as-you-can-get teen drama (and I might or might not work some Italian pop music into the mechanics).
Tree of Worlds, my tentative Everway remake, also belongs in this category because, well, I didn’t do much work on it yet. One design goal is I want to be able to employ the original Everway components, but I want those to be entirely optional too; one huge roadblock is that playtesting (or, heaven forbid, playstorming!) a long-form role-playing game is a logistical nightmare. Meanwhile, a friend requested a dungeon-crawling game out of me with some very specific features, and a design is slowly gelling around a quirky setting idea of mine: armed Illuminists standing against the literal forces of darkness in a nightmare city. The main challenge here is not to get sucked into making it “just” a tactical skirmish board-game.
Then there’s this hitch I need to scratch, to make something which might fit in with the OSR movement – something based on the “core technology” of 1970s-to-80s D&D. And, after spending six-months knee-deep in Fate Core, I guess I’ll need to do something with that as well (I love it that they made it open source).

Stay tuned and hear the duck quack!

Apre la mia pagina Patreon

[This is an Italian translation of yesterday's English post.]

Ho appena aperto al pubblico una pagina su Patreon (un nuovo sito di autofinanziamento per "artisti" d'ogni sorta). Servirà da punto locale per un tentativo di monetizzare il tempo sempre crescente che dedico al game-design. Qui una traduzione italiana del testo della pagina. Il vostro patrocinio (un dollaro ogni tanto) mi permetterebbe di procedere più speditamente in progetti come questi:

Enter the Avenger (Arriva il vendicatore): il mio semplice e lineare gioco di ruolo "swords & sorcery" di incertezza, bluff e tremenda vendetta, scritto per la nuova rivista elettronica di Epidiah Ravachol. Stato del progetto: la versione inglese è pronta e uscirà sul primo numero di Worlds Without Master. In futuro troverò altri modi per distribuirla, creerò almeno un supplemento e, naturalmente, una traduzione italiana. Col feedback dai giocatori di tutto il mondo mi aspetto di poter realizzare in seguito anche una seconda edizione riveduta e migliorata.

La casetta di marzapane: un breve ma intenso gioco di ruolo "giocabile alla prima lettura", adatto tanto ai principianti assoluti quanto agli scafati veterani. In un paese ridotto alla disperazione dalle mancanze dei suoi governanti, dei bambini si avventurano in un bosco e là, per caso, incontrano il responsabile: l'adulto che ha rovinato il loro mondo. Stato del progetto: disponibile una versione italiana preliminare (versione 0). Con i risultati dei primi playtest, la sto riscrivendo per perfezionarla; questa nuova versione verrà ulteriormente testata ed eventualmente tradotta anche in inglese.

The Shackled Self (I vincoli dell'io): il Principe, fattosi eremita, cammina verso la santità su una via erta e perigliosa, tra le richieste inarrivabili che gli pone la Montagna e il volto fin troppo umano della Tentazione. Un gioco di ruolo per tre giocatori. Stato del progetto: la versione "0" in inglese è disponibile da tempo, ma contiene almeno due fondamentali buchi di design, giustamente evidenziati da Ron Edwards nella sua recensione. Ho riprogettato quelle parti del gioco e sto or ora cominciando a collaudarle: se questo primo playtest darà esiti soddisfacenti, pubblicherò immediatamente una bozza corretta finalizzata al playtest esterno.

Lift Girl - La ragazza dell'ascensore: un gioco di ruolo sulla vita quotidiana, in cui le storie di perfetti sconosciuti si toccano, per un fugace attimo, dentro il ventre oblungo della società dei consumi globalizzata. Stato del progetto: disponibile la versione in italiano scritta per il Game Chef 2013, ma dai playtest sono emerse piccole modifiche che la rendono già superata. Presto un'edizione riveduta e corretta in italiano, a cui seguirà una traduzione in inglese.

Passeggeri: un gioco di ruolo minimale, ridotto all'essenziale, così da poterlo giocare letteralmente ovunque e in qualsiasi momento insieme ai propri amici e ai propri cari. Sono storie di persone che intraprendono un viaggio fantastico, verso mete spesso metaforiche, a bordo di un veicolo di cui non hanno il pieno controllo: ogni fermata può portare a un'avventura, ma la domanda è se ciascuno dei viaggiatori riuscirà a trovare un luogo dove, finalmente, fermarsi per davvero. Stato del progetto: al momento ho solo degli appunti, da cui mi accingo a mettere insieme un documento di playtest.

I reietti di Eden: è sempre lui, il mio gioco di ruolo occultpunk di azione sopra le righe e dramma esasperato su sfondo metropolitano, che per protagonisti ha angeli caduti ed eroici eretici presi in uno scontro apocalittico contro le legioni celesti. Stato del progetto: la versione 0.2 italiana è ancora disponibile, ma del tutto antiquata; in seguito a vari passaggi di playtest ho ormai ridisegnato il gioco quasi completamente, e la "versione attuale" esiste solo nella forma di appunti sparsi e frammenti di componentistica. La situazione, insomma, è fluida. Il mio piano è di playtestare ancora entro quest'anno e, solo se sarò soddisfatto di quel che ho per le mani, realizzare di conseguenza un documento da far circolare per il playtesting esterno.

Anche se non volete o non potete promettermi denaro, potete comunque darmi un grosso aiuto semplicemente passandone parola ai vostri amici e condividendo il link: www.patreon.com/rafu

Logo creato da Michele Manzo

Patreon page launched

[Questo post ha anche una traduzione italiana.]

I just launched a Patreon page, as the new central point for attempting to crowd-fund my game-design efforts and turn them into a self-sustaining side-activity. Your patronage (every single dollar counts) translates to time I can spend working on such projects as:

Enter the Avenger: my uncomplicated swords-and-sorcery role-playing game of uncertainty, double-bluffs and vengeance, written for Epidiah Ravachol’s shiny new e-magazine Worlds Without Master. Status: English version 1 released in Worlds Without Master issue #1. The future will bring additional modes of distribution, supplementary materials and of course an Italian translation. Then, after receiving feedback from more players around the world, I will most likely compile a revised edition.

La casetta di marzapane (The Little Candy House): a short but intense play-on-first-read role-playing game, suitable for complete beginners as well as experienced players. In a country ruined beyond hope by the failings of its leaders, one or more children venture into the woods and there, by chance, encounter the grownup politician who broke their world. Status: preliminary Italian draft available (version 0). Based on playtest feedback, I’m currently rewriting it to perfect the form factor: this release candidate is to be playtested again and, in case of positive feedback, I will translate it to English.

The Shackled Self: a 3-players role-playing game about the ascesis of a prince-turned-hermit, treading the narrow path between the inhumane Mountain (representing the steep requirements of sainthood) and the all-too-human face of Temptation. Status: a preliminary English draft (version 0) has been available for a while, but contains obvious design faults, as correctly detected by Ron Edwards. I’ve redesigned those subsystems and I’m now beginning a first round of in-house playtesting. I expect to release the corrected English draft text within the year, to allow for external playtesting.

Lift Girl – La ragazza dell’ascensore: a slice-of-life role-playing game about the stories of perfect strangers touching, for a brief moment, in the elongated belly of our globalized consumerist society. Sometimes heart-warming, sometimes unsettling. Status: preliminary Italian draft (version 0, written for Game Chef 2013) available, but playtesting brought small changes which make it slightly outdated. A revised Italian text (version 1) is pending, followed closely by an English translation.

Passeggeri (Passengers): a stripped-down-to-the-essentials role-playing game you can play anywhere, anytime with your friends and loved ones. It’s about people going on a journey to fantastic, often metaphorical places, carried by a vehicle they cannot directly control. With each stop comes a potential adventure, but will each traveler finally find a place to settle down? Status: I only have notes for this jotted down, but I’m planning to finalize a preliminary playtest document ASAP.

I reietti di Eden (Cast Down from Eden): my urban fantasy occult-punk role-playing game of high-drama and high-action, starring fallen angels and heretic heroes in their apocalyptic struggle against the legions of heaven. Status: Italian version 0.2, though still available for download, is long outdated: after the first rounds of playtesting, I radically redesigned most of the game. The current version only exists as a bunch of hand-scribbled notes and disposable play-aids. My plan is to resume in-house playtests within the current year; if satisfied with those, I will soon after compile a new draft text for external playtesting.

If you can't or don't want to give me money, you can still give me a huge boost by telling your friends about this! Just spread this link around: www.patreon.com/rafu

Platonic Duck Kitchen logo created by Michele Manzo

A telegraphic wrap-up for August and, well, most of Semptember

I’m experiencing one of those too-busy-to-even-update-my-blog phases – so much for the regular monthly wrap-up posts! I’m still having a gaming life, though. Thus I’m going to concisely, telegraphically go through the last games I played, as a place-holder and summary, while fully intentioned to write in-depth reports of the most interesting ones sometime in the near future. In case you’re interested in hearing about something in particular, ask: I’ll try to oblige requests as soon as possible before writing about any other games.

— § —

As I mentioned already, early in August I was able to play a full game of Swords Without Masters – City of Fire and Coin. It was a three-players game (as opposed to the recommended four) played over two sessions in a private house, and I’m much obliged to Epidiah “Eppy” Ravachol for providing me with the necessary rule variants in the first place. In fact, I should probably be writing an AP report for Eppy’s benefit right now, as long as I can remember a thing, rather than be blogging like this. Let’s just say that I’m going to grab the finished book as fast as I can as soon as it’s out, but also that one of the reasons I want the book so badly is that I’m looking for those game-teaching methods other than City of Fire and Coin it’s supposed to include.

— § —

Other August games included a single playtesting/playstorming session for I reietti di Eden (which confirmed it can’t currently be played as a single-session game), a short but juicy game of Ben Lehman’s The Drifter’s Escape (boasting an unusual combination of features: it was both a demonstration of a sort, to a new player with very little previous role-playing experience, and a sequel from an old game with a much-beloved main character), and, unusually, just a few scenes of two-players Remember Tomorrow (to finish off an episode).

— § —

On September 1st and 2nd I attended GnoccoCon in Reggio Emilia. It was as good a convention as always, a few minor quibbles with food logistics nonwithstanding: the record attendance this installment achieved (75 people or more!) obviously taxed the existing structures and routines past their limit, but hopefully the organizers are going to pay this a thought and bring a measure of change to next year’s edition (which I’m anticipating already).

I ran a game of Meguey Baker’s Psi*Run (which proved very convention-friendly, as expected), a round of Ben Lehman’s Clover (as cute as expected, more bittersweet than expected) and the one-full-length-timeslot Fables of Camelot mini-campaign I was hoping for (though we didn’t actually make it to endgame in time), plus I was finally able to try out Daniel Solis’s Dō: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple (lots of potential). It was a good two days indeed.

— § —

There was, then, a bit of a role-playing hiatus. But last weekend me and Barbara got back to Remember Tomorrow again to start a new episode, which already expanded our fictional world with some totally unexpected content while reincorporating favorite characters of old.

Monthly wrap-up: April snow & playstorming

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).

Secret mind-link discovered, part II: Sympathy for the Devil

Follows from here, quite intuitively.

When I found out about Camwhores and compared it with my own never developed idea for a game to be called "Amateur", I still wasn't sure that Elizabeth Shoemaker Sampat and I shared a secret mind-link or maybe deep soul-link across the Atlantic Ocean, no. Certainty struck me later, as I went through the games submitted to the two previous rounds of the Ronnies earlier this year — hyper-excited as I am currently about the contest — and discovered that in February she conceived They Became Flesh.
Holy cow shit!
My (3-4?) Italian readers are, I guess, already "in" on this: that Fallen Angels are a hot topic for me. For my (0-2?) non-Italian readers: a small-ish Game Chef-like contest was run last year on Italian gaming forum Gente Che Gioca and I entered a game called I reietti di Eden (roughly: The Outcasts from Eden, proper English title still to be determined though), which has since become my main "thing", the one "big project" I plan to devote lots of energy to. Preliminary playtests exposed large holes in the mechanics and now a major revision (probably in English, or also in English) is upcoming, any time soon — one of which I'm really proud of. Well, I reietti di Eden is about heroic people sorely resenting their ancestors' casting out of Paradise, counting Lucifer the Bringer of Light (aka Prometheus) and the proud Fallen as their best friends and preparing to finally strike back in retaliation against God and the Heavenly Host, so to set wrongs right at last and — maybe even — regain a liberated Eden and Heavens for themselves. In my game, both Mortals and Fallen Angels are available as playable character types and there are mechanics to determine if and when the Fallen, overwhelmed by their melancholic longing for those Heavens they cannot forget, withdraw from the Mortals' side of the fight.
They Became Flesh is about the Fallen wandering a young world, not long after a stern and unforgiving God cast them down from Heavens because they sided with sinful Adam and Eve and questioned Him: they fell from grace for daring to doubt. It's about them trying to fit in with humankind or finding a place of their own on Earth — or maybe having their former heavenly status restored. Unfinished as it is, please go read the most current draft available!
While mine is obviously a very different game from Elizabeth's, I can't help but feel a strong kinship with her vision. My focus may be on the heroes of a "rightful" war, on the End of Times rather than on a still young Earth, but still the Fallen Angels of They Became Flesh are very much the same as mine: melancholic and tragic, torn between their love for humankind and their memories of Heavens. Lucifer is depicted much the same way, as a tragic idealist and a sympathetic character (true is that Elizabeth's Lucifer is very emphatically not the Snake of Eden/Prometheus, contrary to mine, but I don't feel this to be overwhelmingly important). Sure, there are hugely important literary predecessors to such a vision, etc., but that's absolutely not the point.
I look at the two games and see that they complement each other like they were a pair, deeply personally felt facets to the same subject-matter. Both aren't "done" yet, but I now like to think that sooner or later they will be, and maybe - dare I immodestly hope - that mutual knowledge will make both of them considerably better.

P.S. readers who are not yet familiar with Elizabeth's major works (It's Complicated, Blowback) please check them out on her website.

Che la ribellione abbia inizio!

Ho completato la prima bozza (presumibilmente) giocabile de I reietti di Eden per il CinquePerDue. Se qualcuno fosse curioso, mi contatti e gli invierò il file — e magari potrà farci una partita di playtesting e raccontarmi per sommi capi com'è andata (il gioco è pensato per one-shot).

Lilith through Naamah!

Se I reietti di Eden fosse un progetto serio, sarebbe il genere di progetto che ha tanto di illustratori e a questo punto dello sviluppo pubblicherei una gallery di concept art. Ora dunque mi immedesimerò nell'autore di un "progetto serio" e simulerò di fare lo stesso, mettendovi qui una filza di immagini rubacchiate in giro per Internet che non avrei comunque l'autorizzazione (o lo spazio) di includere nel minuscolo - eh! - manuale.

Parole chiave: Wuxiapian metropolitano, teotecnologia, tamarraggine emo-punk, potenza di fuoco allegorica & piercing metafisici, neo-barocco, gotico postmoderno, Sentiero della Mano Sinistra.

Due dipinti di Jean Delville:

Le legioni degli Angeli del Signore, ovverosia il nemico, me le vedo basate su opere quali Bayonetta e Bastard!!:

I reietti di Eden

Sto buttando giù la mia entry per questa simpatica "mini-competizione". Uhm, a dire il vero in [molto meno di] un giorno ho già integralmente scritto la prima bozza di regole: ora occorre un po' di "testo di colore" e poco altro, e auspicabilmente una prova su strada.
È qualcosa di tamarrissimo, o almeno, di molto più tamarro di quanto mi aspettavo da me stesso di questi tempi... E, come direbbe il Castellani, "è fantasy". Ma in casi del genere "la prima idea dev'essere quella buona", no? Altrimenti, che senso avrebbe partecipare a questo genere di competizioni? Al momento rammendo lo strappo nella mia coscienza col ripetermi che mi è uscito tutto di getto e che di certo non dedicherò molto tempo o sforzo a questo progettino, che è "una sciocchezzuola". Vedremo.