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.

Monthly Wrap-up: a report of July 2012 EtrusCon

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Last month, as my gaming staple most of the time, I kept playing two-players, long-form Remember Tomorrow in weird places, outdoors and while traveling. Then, on the last weekend of July, I went to EtrusCon. Sooner or later I’m going to write in detail about Remember Tomorrow and the pros and cons of playing it the way we’re playing it – this time, however, I’m going to concern myself with writing a convention report instead.

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I held very high expectations for this summer-edition EtrusCon, both because last year’s summer edition had been capital-A-awesome and because the winter edition was instead considerably underwhelming. What I got was in fact a mixed bag, partly because of a decline in attendance (compared to last summer).

Since EtrusCon is a classic hotel-convention with a very hands-off organization paradigm (what the one organizer, Simone, actually does is just to negotiate a discount hotel rate and reserve rooms for attendees, and that’s it), the obvious upside to it is a no-time-wasted, play-all-the-time attitude, the implied downside being that you need to set yourself up for it beforehand, though, because there is little support provided for organizing tables on the fly (no “front desk”, no call-to-arms, not even a local, off-line master copy of the schedule). I was only half-successful with organizing myself in advance, though, part because of untimeliness and/or risk-taking on my part (reserving a less-than-ideal timeslot for a given game in order to be able to play with a given person, say, plus experimenting with multiple shorter games per time-slot, being late in the morning as is usual for me, etc.) and part because of some players being delayed by traffic, or tired early in the evening, etc. – this resulting in some waste of time re-organizing tables and, ultimately, a high percentage of aborted games. It’s good to hear that this was just my own subjective blight, though (contrary to the last winter edition, when exceedingly low attendance made this the general norm), while the general ratio of finished games people had at the convention was high.

An additional drawback of a hotel-convention is, in the event of lower-than-ideal attendance (i.e. the hotel being not sold-out), having to share spaces with other random people. And, well, the EtrusCon hotel, as it happens, is large enough that it would take 100+ stay-in attendees to sell it out, making this a near-impossible proposition for the time being: AFAIK, the largest attendancies to hotel-based role-playing conventions in Italy were recorded by last year’s summer EtrusCon and some editions of InterNosCon, and barely exceeded 50 people.

But enough with the organizer-oriented gibberish! Let’s talk about the games I played, instead. Asterisks mark games I scheduled and ran/facilitated myself. I was also supposed to run a game of MegueyBaker’s Psi*Run, but we had to cancel it because of half the interested players not making it to the hotel in time.

Fables of Camelot* — this is a little, surprisingly well-crafted game by Sami Koponen with Eero Tuovinen, whose existence I discovered by sheer happenstance as Eero ran it for me and a random bunch of Solmukohta-goers in Helsinki, a few months ago. It’s touted as an introductory role-playing game, good for a convention environment and also suitable for children – and it’s exactly because I plan on using it with children that I decided to train myself in running it. Thus I took it to EtrusCon as a perennial, persistent and weekend-spanning, multi-installment off-slot filler game that multiple groups of players could dip into for a round or more.

While I didn’t get to play all the way to the fall of Camelot (the system-mandated ending), it was good enough to play three full quests, with parties ranging in size from six down to three knights. I think I learned a lot about Fables of Camelot in the process. Fully confirmed were all of its immediately apparent pros: explaining the rules is indeed effortless and takes very little time, heraldic animals are a greatly effective characterization device, drawing one’s own coat of arms is great fun, consequential decisions with no predetermined good or bad choice (think Dogs in the Vineyard) are both an absolute focus of the game and a transparent process (in that you don’t usually have to point them out, out-of-character), dice-rolls are both infrequent and tense (and they take very little time to execute, while channeling a great deal of attention). I think I learned how to plan “adventures” and frame scenes appropriately, and I’m pretty sure by now that should one have access to the full text, with its long lists of example quests and travel-scenes to pick from, then running the game would be truly effortless – unfortunately, the book’s only available in Finnish.

What I didn’t expect, though, was that the game could grow to such a quiet solemnity as we experienced in the Grail quest: I’m deeply impressed. Sure, should I look for a shortcoming to point out, this is not a game of very nuanced and complex characters – but is its reference literature? It’s all about broad strokes and large-picture plots, and emerging commentary which satisfies from a metaplay vantage point, not about the psychological finesse of fictional characters in the resulting fiction. Now I’m thinking I’ll reserve a full time-slot for Fables of Camelot at some upcoming convention, possibly GnoccoCon, to play all the way to the endgame: it should be feasible enough a feat.

SeaDracula — it’s really odd how I’ve been having the handbook for this game in my possession since it still sported a (1$) price-tag, but had never tried it out before! I remember thinking, at the time, that something about the text didn’t “click” for me and I’d rather look up somebody who could teach me how to play by example. Well, how changed I am since then, for now the text speaks so clearly to me! Know that the game was great fun, ran shorter than I expected it to (which is a plus!) and is totally appropriate for parties – almost a party-game, yeah, though maybe a tad too complex in the setup for a “casual gamer” audience. I’m gonna play this again, soon and often. ♥

Tactical Ops (playtest) — having left one time-slot open in my schedule, I found myself with a random party of six people (my old friend Alfredo being in the mix), among them my friend Patrick who rather enthusiastically pitched a playtest session of Tactical Ops, a design-in-progress by Alessandro “Hasimir” Piroddi (who wasn’t there). While I wasn’t particularly grabbed by the premise of the game, some were, and being a curious fellow I tagged along. Small-squad tactics for dangerous missions is, if we read it to mean military/commando operations, the single most overdone thing in the history of role-playing games (I’m of course conflating most flavors of D&D into this) – but, on the other hand, I thought the description could also apply to caper/heist movies (a vague itch I still have to scratch). In fact, the playtest document Patrick had with him came (as far and I can tell) with absolutely no example situation, mission or backdrop included besides the core premise. We soon enough agreed on a twenty-minutes-into-the-future prison break scenario, then proceeded to create our characters: a much lengthier process than was immediately apparent by glancing at the character sheets. I didn’t keep track of the time, really, but I figure we spent a minimum of two hours doing pre-play setup.

So, here’s my shout out to Alessandro, the designer: while not a faulty design choice per se (one can sure invest a much longer time preparing for a multi-session campaign), such a long setup process is unacceptable in a convention environment! If you want to have your game playtested at public events (or, well, out-of-house playtested at all, I might add), may I suggest you release a fast-play package, consisting of one or more example missions with pre-made characters? If I were you, I’d make it my first priority at the moment.

During the prep phase, our motley group seemed to easily agree on things – everybody generally cheered at ideas being thrown around, making the brainstorming/pitch a breeze. But! I think the character creation process – with its attributes and skill groups and skills and specialties to rate, plus advantages and motivational links to “buy” – looked deceptively familiar to all of us, which either got us to pay attention to the wrong things or to not pay attention at all. We should have been paying attention to what each other player was picking out of the available choices! In hindsight, that’s pretty obvious, but in the heat of the moment we just self-tagged with role-definitions (“hacker”, “doctor”, “gearhead”, “muscles”, “face”, “infiltrator”) and hurried up to each fill up one’s own character sheet, in isolation. Had I payed attention, I would have noticed that the “infiltrator” was duplicating part of the “face”-guy’s and (IIRC) “muscles”-guy’s skillsets, not maxing up the athletics/movement skills I incorrectly assumed he were (a skillset nobody focused on at all); that while I was hyper-specializing my hacker guy to be exactly that, some others were spreading their skillpoints wider, for example to be ready for violence in case of a major shit-up; that the “gearhead” was a specialist in jury-rigging veichles which no character was good at operating anyway, and so on. It is thus my humble opinion that as a “team” we were already fucked, whatever the mission. Not that we were going to find out, anyway…

Having gone through all of the preparations, and of course some more necessary rules-briefing as well, we went then into the first actual scene of the game knowing we weren’t going to play the mission to its end anyway, because of our real-life time constraints. This being not what we had been assuming initially (before prep) I daresay we were now in maybe the worst possible collective mood for role-playing: the noncommittal, half-assed one. And that’s when our group’s collective ability to agree on things – this basic foundation of role-playing – began to falter. Having framed a first scene, we started dabbling in the game’s central authority/credibility system of stating “facts”, but I don’t believe we had fully understood it, let alone grasped its subtleties, as we launched into a conflict. Of the conflict, we played a single round at most, struggling with the fact that – in our lack of experience with the system – we had not properly set the parameters of it to match the developing fiction, nor had we picked mechanical categories for our actions that significantly reflected our combinations of fictional intents while giving us a chance to hit the difficulty treshold, no. Very quickly, our game devolved into a debriefing session of the sort which consists in micro-analyzing small bits of the game without having seen the full picture – which was absolutely pointless, the designer not being there and nobody being apparently committed to write a playtest report.

To those who asked my opinion on Tactical Ops as a design, the only honest anwer I could give was: I’ve seen too little of it to form any opinion whatsoever, sorry.

The City of Fire and Coin (Swords Without Master)* — here’s another game which went quite poorly, but not for any defect of design. I had assembled a team of people I love and I know are in love with the (pulp/fantasy) genre – Ariele, Lapo & Tazio – and they took to the game with all of the glee I expected; still, everybody was apparently exhausted by the too much play they’d already had (or maybe with too much food and drink?) and soon my friends’ focus waned. Thus to my great displeasure we had to call it quits, having only played out the first Perilous Phase.

This was to be considered a playtest, not of the game-design, but of the technique of exposition (the way of “teaching” the game) embodied in The City of Fire and Coin, a learn-while-you-play tutorial written in a hybrid rulebook/gamebook style somewhat comparable to the “red box” Basic D&D set of the Eighties. While appearing well-devised on first sight, such tutorial proved way too verbose to read – and translate to Italian on the fly – while playing: sitting through the long passages of read-aloud instructions encouraged Rogue players, as a reaction, to hog the spotlight longer and go for longer talking times in the first Perilous Phase, which proved to be an interest-killer in the end, as the scene (as framed by a read-aloud box in the text itself) consisted of a street brawl with little context or emotional attachment to it. I suspect, despite an apparent interest the players showed in depicting action stunts, that had they made short work of that first Storm instead we would therefore have retained interest in the game well into the following phases.

All things considered, I walked away with a strong commitment to try again as soon as possible – which in fact happened already as of the time I’m writing this report! I won’t discuss my second game here, though, as it will become material for a follow-up post.

Ganakagok* — I’ve been in love with Ganakagok at least since the one full game of it I had a couple years ago. I’m well aware of the polemics surrounding the game’s subject-matter (Bill White was exeedingly naïve in his exotical treatment of elements from living cultures, and consequent blatant misuse of the word “Inuit”, which is something he himself later acknowledged) and my own ambivalence about the affair means I’ve had to develop my own language for explaining the game’s world as fantasy and only referencing real-world cultures in what I’m convinced (as a culture historian) to be a completely respectful way – but that’s part and parcel of dealing with fantasy fiction as a genre, anyway, and come on: instances of fantasy fiction which break out of too oft-repeated, paradigmatic, stupid molds are as needed and welcome as they can be (in gaming especially)! My love of Ganakagok, anyway, is first and foremost a love of its mechanics: suggestive card-reading coupled with some moderately complex resource management (and resource-tracking, which makes actions full of consequences, some of them unintended): it is by far the one title which had greater influence on my own design-in-progress, I reietti di Eden.

The game I ran at EtrusCon wasn’t stellar, maybe, but I felt it was good enough. We couldn’t play it to a proper ending, sadly, but we were so close. I was, in fact, disappointed to learn that what had been a half-full glass to me was instead a half-empty one to my fellow players (my dear Barbara and Daniele Lostia of Piombo fame). I’m not sure, of course, whether it is at all possible, or recommended, to play a game of Ganakagok with only two non-GM players present: maybe we had set ourselves up for a failure since the very onset?

One critique from Daniele which I think is especially poignant is that we had prepped so many elements in the immediate pre-game setup (world/village creation) which didn’t actually get reincorporated. In the moment I couldn’t but agree, but now, with a clearer head, I see the glass as half-full again: sure, we had more prepped elements available than we actually needed to use, as a side-effect of prep being a very organic process, but we did use some of those elements, and built and expanded on the ones we picked (also an organic process, as we focused on the ones we most needed in the moment), which obviously constrained and strongly directed our play – while on the other hand all those unused elements, while never incorporated in the actual scenes, still existed as a backdrop which informed play, and we never forgot nor invalidated them. Prep, in other words, always informs play, even when pieces of prepped content don’t actively come out during it.

On an unrelated note: next time I play Ganakagok, I’m considering dropping the Body/Face/Mind/Soul section of the character sheets entirely, using instead a fixed value of “3” in lieu of those scores for all purposes. Besides scores of “2” being a bit too punishing to be fun, my point is that your average player-character is only expected to be in the spotlight once or twice. Having four different “arenas of conflict” with different (and hugely important) ratings attached, then, needlessly punishes a player for open-mindedness, as the obvious optimal strategy would be to set one of your arenas at “4” and maneveur so that your own spotlight scene(s) focus on that: a boring exercise in predictability, rather than in storytelling. Gifts and Burdens should fully suffice to make characters distinct in competence, instead, especially as character Identity is also a trait with mechanical usefulness attached.

Overall, EtrusCon was an extremely diversity-rich environment, with happy and satisfied people enthusiastically playing things as diverse as OD&D/Lamentations of the Flame Princess and abstract board-games, Joe Mcdaldno’s Monsterhearts (which is an Apocalypse World-based rpg about the coming of age of metaphorically-monstrous teenagers) and Paolo Guccione’s homebrew game of tabletop battles between Go Nagai’s giant robots which is an adaptation of old Chaosium Basic Role-Playing (!). Tazio Bettin, Iacopo Frigerio, Davide Losito, Matteo Turini, Marco Valtriani all ran playtest sessions of their own designs besides the numerous foreign games played.

Some games, of course, struck me as more interesting than others; some I heartfeltly avoided, and when invited to play I declined. In the light of which, I can’t help but turn and look back over my own shoulder, realizing that an 18-years-old me – for example – would have merrily sat down at the BRP Mecha table (calling dibs on Getter Robot, probably) while not even paying a thought to the Lamentations table which these days, instead, I was very much tempted to join. And the reasons I didn’t choose to play LotFP in the end, those are the complete opposite of why I wouldn’t have joined an OD&D table if you asked me when I was, say, 25. All of the above is part due to how changed the landscape of role-playing is since previous times, sure, and part because of how changed I am myself.

Thus, the single most important thing I got from EtrusCon is not merely an appreciation of diversity within a small but fluid scene: it’s an enhanced understanding of my own tastes concerning role-playing games – of what I like and dislike and what I really look for and what I’m actually in it for – and of how mutable those preferences are.

Monthly wrap-up for May

I’m being sort-of-busy, but I want to keep posting monthly updates about my role-playing experiences. Here you are, then: May 2012.

Long live the Kingdom

My biggest thing last month, in terms of effort and learning, was playtesting Kingdom, an interesting game in development by Ben Robbins (of Microscope fame). I played two one-shot, three-people sessions, one with Barbara and Alessio and the other with Barbara and Simone. I don’t really feel like describing the game at length, in the current stage, but I do recommend you join in for the next round of playtesting – whenever it might be – if you’re even remotely interested in politics as a topic for role-playing games. It’s a clever, novel design, using only the most basic of tried-and-tested building blocks, never trying to fit its in little-explored subject-matter through ill-fitting holes shaped like familiar techniques but rather carefully thinking its approach from the ground up. Reading the text got me pretty excited. In pratice, it didn’t play as smooth as I hoped it would: some subsystems are prone to cause stumbling or player fatigue, but those have been clearly identified are being redesigned – thus, my expectations for this game are very high.

As for the fictional milieu of our playtest sessions, for some reason we went twice for XIX Century settings: Carbonari in the 1820s and then railroad construction in the Wild West. While the Italian setting was the most intriguing one at first, I noticed that the western one made for more successful play, probably because we were significantly less concerned with historical accuracy, while having a huge background of previous fiction to work from (vis-a-vis a seriously underrepresented subject). I don’t think the issue is related to any particular feature of Kingdom, in other words: it would have been the same with almost any role-playing game.

A personal-level consequence of playtesting Kingdom, and then discussing aspects of it with Barbara, were some important realizations about the rules and practices of scene-framing, its toll on players and its relationship with protagonism and antagonism: I feel like I’m now getting to properly articulate some very fundamental issues I’ve been struggling with in play and tackling, somewhat unconsciously, with design (the newest and yet unreleased draft of Eden especially).

Big in the Alps

Last month as well wasn’t without a gaming convention. I was at GiocaTrento (in Trento, duh!) where – with Patrick, Erik and Jessica – I was basically in charge of the “indie RPGs” corner. I got there with a huge bag full of rpg books, which I pooled with the ones my local friends brought so that we were able to set up a table covered in indie-game-stuff: alluring covers, rough and curiosity- arousing home-bound booklets, assorted items (including a sheathed dagger for playing Mist-Robed Gate). The purpose being, of course, to make our games visible (despite the games themselves being actually intangible) and to have people ask us about them. Turns out we had it easy…

On Saturday afternoon, a chap named Alan, with whom I’d played a game of Fiasco at another meet-up months ago, voiced such an enthusiastic excitement about that game that in a second he gathered three more friends and we played 5-players Fiasco. It was a good Fiasco session, to boot! Somehow we ended up playing the wedding playset from the The Fiasco Companion using the standard Tilt and Aftermath tables (as opposed to the “soft” tables from that same book) and we got some pretty good, if crazily over-the-top, dark comedy out of it – with a healthy amount of sexy to boot. Good thing we were playing outdoors, or we’d have laughed the convention hall down! Thanks Arte, Riccardo, Vincenzo and of course Alan – I hope I got all of your names right.

On Sunday afternoon, Gaia, a girl from the convention crew, came to me holding my own It’s Complicated booklet and demanded we play that game – on the reception desk with another crew-member friend of hers, since they were both on duty. She wouldn’t take no for an answer. By pitching it to some more friends old and new, we assembled a huge seven people party to play the game. Thanks Gaia, Francesca, Gabriele the Incompetent Diplomat, Jackvice & his lovely lady and – what was your name, cute Polish girl? Seven-players It’s Complicated, yes. It would have worked, even, if not for the large number of interruptions due to, you know, playing this game at the reception table (in the end, we had to give up and cut the game short, sadly). We aimed for surreal situation-comedy, got some really crazy, cheesy over-the-top surreal comedy, and it wasn’t half bad. The bottom line, though, is that It’s Complicated really is a difficult game, in terms of – as my friend Carlo Rebagliati would probably say it – “keeping the fiction together” (la tenuta della storia, is something he’s always talking about), and that I’m now aching for a chance to play a really low-key game of it at last, with everybody really focused on exploring plausible human relationships and avoiding blatant absurdities. It will probably have to be a 3 or 4-players game (like my most successful ones to date actually have been).

In the mornings and the evenings (thanks to Patrick & Jessica, who hosted the night games at their place) I had the chance to try out a few new games myself. Boardgames aside (not usually my thing, but the ones we picked were “light” enough for me to enjoy and I had a good time), I played Vincent Baker’s Murderous Ghosts (in both roles) and Ben Robbins’s Microscope – two rpgs I had only heard about, and are now on my “must buy the books ASAP” list. I especially liked the potential for quick and fast play (though Microscope could also go on indefinitely if desired, of course).

Big heartfelt thanks go to Erik and his family, who hosted me.

A desert death-god was slain on the road to the City of Salt

This should be filed under June, actually, but what the fuck. I kicked off the month by playing Simon Carryer’s On Mighty Thews. My friend Tazio having had a sudden resurgence of excitation about that game, I offered to host a session, and was elected “GM” as a default; our friend Mario joined us in the game (and Paolo aka “Serenello” wished he could, but larger and meaner happenstances held him back).

Now, I’ve been playtesting – or, rather, successfully playing – On Mighty Thews since its first public alpha draft years ago, trying all iterations of it since then (I am, in other words, an OMT grognard who frequently confuses current rules with the ones from previous editions), and I still learn fine lessons from it. Or at least about it. I had, for example, the confirmation that three (GM +2 PCs) is the best number of players for this game – I’m now wary to ever do a foursome again, and curious to try a 1-vs-1 for a change.

The newest addition, I believe, to OMT are the Lore Roll rules. Man! In this run (the best one I’ve had using the “final” OMT rules) we really played the hell out of those, and did they pay off! By this, I don’t mean we overused them, either: au contraire, we learned that it’s moderation which brings the highest payouts – picking your Lore Roll targets carefully and sparingly, focusing on those things which really captivate you, maybe 1-2 per scene. Kudos to Mario for, basically, pacing Lore Rolls, and also for volunteering to take notes: he really showed me how Lore is OMT’s killer app! Tazio, otoh, very effectively used one such roll to make the adventure relevant to his own character, and not in the most obvious way. Good stuff.

Another relatively new addition (dating back, I think, to the last pre-final draft maybe?) is the use of a collectively drawn map. I love it because it’s fun on its own merit and it also ties in nicely with the Lore, providing a backdrop against which to hang those tidbits of information, acting as a springboard for ideas or, in retrospect, foreshadowing elements which may be (re-)incorporated. The downside is that since there are maps my OMT sessions have been lasting much longer, on average! While one could, theoretically, still do very short and to-the-point games confined in a single location, having a map on the table (no matter that how small an area it portrays) is a disincentive to that, and an incentive instead to go see some more views. Unfortunately, it’s not a good thing for an OMT game to drag out for too long: the rules are not designed for slow buildup towards a climax, but rather for abrupt, unconventional cuts, af befits their primary source materials. Draw as intricate a map as you wish, thus, but then exercise some restraint and try to keep your game confined to a couple locations, using the other ones as Lore backdrop only.

I also have a feeling that Lore and maps conspire to make long-term play an interesting possibility! To do so, I propose, one would aim for the episodic, for loosely connected short-stories woven against the common ground of an ever expanding, but never complete, tapestry – a method reminiscent of In a Wicked Age and Remember Tomorrow. I propose that to achieve this one could:

• keep notes aplenty, especially all of the Lore items;
• have everybody take turns at being the GM for a session;
• vary the cast of PCs and, ideally, the number of players from session to session;
• sometimes re-use a character exactly as s/he was, sometimes rewrite an existing character sheet from scratch;
• explore unused locations from old maps or make new maps at whim;
• assume anything could happen during “downtime”; do not assume chapters happen in chronological order.

Finally, I was reminded of why being the GM in OMT is both hard and weird: you can’t plan. And I don’t mean, like, plan one scene ahead. You can’t fucking plan anything. You know how little an Apocalypse World MC has to plan ahead? Well, that’d be way, way too much.

The Ivory Lioness, god-slayer.
Character and art by Tazio Bettin.

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.

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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).

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).

First playtesting! OMG!

Yesterday evening I run the first ever playtest game of Intrigue onboard the Fleur-de-lis (link to alpha draft). Thanks to my uber-awesome friends Nicola Ferrari (who also volunteered to host the game, at a very short notice - "very short" as in: less than 2 hrs) and Lorenzo Marcheselli (who also drove me to Nicola's place).

The good:

• Both Nicola and Lorenzo said they enjoyed the game.
• The fundamental concept of the game is indeed viable.
• The basic structure of it appears to hold water (ah-ah!).
• The game sort of automatically generates actual play reports. I didn't think of it, so kudos to Nicola for pointing this out.
• Intelligent apes with jedi swords. No kidding. And ancient table forks.

The bad:

• Too long! I was aiming for 3 hrs or less, but hadn't we improptu cut it short by arbitrarily removing a round of Charts from Open Sea mid-game, it would have lasted 4 hrs or more.
• Too exhausting! My brain still haches from the effort of keeping all the pieces of information together. Two hours and a half into the game, I had an expression of pain on my face and was longing for it to end... I was almost crying for sweet, sweet release! (Luckily, my friends disagree with me, or so they say. Is this a game for murder mistery enthusiasts, maybe?)
• My math sucks! All of the dice rolls were piece-of-cake, with base numbers no lower than twice the target numbers. Not a single player marked any Xs on his character sheet in the whole game.
• Too much writing, and too much time spent writing. The worst is, I still can't think of a workaround.
• There are a few grey areas in the mechanics, in dire need of clarification or - you know - to actually be designed. No big deal: this is what playtesting is for.

Things I'm probably going to change in the next playtest run (and I suggest you consider in case you do attempt to play the game):

• Each player only prepares 3 "Charts" (one per type, period). You still discard one per type before starting the game, so you're going to have a total of 6 in play (instead of 9).
• The Tangle Rating only increases by 1 per 4 scenes played (as opposed to 3). It does not further increase with Acts concluding (which was a mess anyway): just count scenes.

Also, a very special and heartfelt thank goes to the overwhelmingly awesome Dan Maruschak, who took the time to wade through the linguistic horror of my draft and provide precious editing suggestions. A native-English-speaker editor! I still can hardly believe so much kindness exists in the world, but here's proof it does.

I will integrate Dan's corrections in the next draft (be it an Alpha.2 or a Beta version), together with any substantial changes emerging from playtests.

Thanks again, Nicola, Lorenzo and Dan!