RoBoTNiK

Synopsis of our DramaSystem game about a hellbound 70s rock band, Part 2 of 3. (Here's Part 1, here's Part 3, and here's the podcast where we jawed about it.)

Southern Rock Opera : Act Two

Don’t sing with a fake British accent / don’t act like your family’s a joke

( Episode 4: Hotel California )

( Episode 5: I Wanna Be Sedated )

( Episode 6: To Beat the Devil / Angels and Fuselage )

( Interlude: Gimme Shelter )

(This is the Producer's Commentary for this, my most recent game session recap.)

So the thing about using Primetime Adventures for a supers game is ( Read more... )

Sheesh, this one is looooong. That's a great thing about PTA--a lot can happen in one session. But I need to be less prolix. And to stop using words like "prolix." As we say in academia, "I would have written something shorter, but I didn't have time."

(The Pitch) (Episode 1)

( T.H.E.M.? More like T.L.; D.R., am I right? )

( You can skip to the Producer's Commentary if you like. )

Next Time: Who's the fly guy from Dimension Y, the mind-controlling roach that don't fly coach? Klaatu Dalek is in the spotlight in episode 3, "Take Us To Your Leader." Will it be "klaatu barada nikto" or "exterminate"? Tune in and see, 3-dimensional meat puppets!

This is the Primetime Adventures game I’m running. It's called T.H.E.M. We’re coming back Friday night after a long hiatus (assuming I get my shit together), so I promised the players some detailed session recaps. This first post provides context for those of you watching at home.

( The Pitch )

( The Cast )

( Producer's Commentary )

Next: Episode 1.1, "Won't Get Foiled Again!"

First, I need to apologize to those of you reading this LiveJournal for my wordy and shall we say remedial series of blog posts this week on Playful Historical Thinking. I'm writing those a) to figure out for myself what is worth saying about the topic and b) to find the language to talk about play with an audience whose playing muscles are a little more atrophied. But the people reading this LiveJournal, I'm pretty sure, already get the idea of playing with history without a whole lot of wordy hand holding. Several of you are black belt playful historical thinkers if not world masters.

Which is why I could use your input.

So I know that many of you are familiar with that thing that happens, that pattern recognition / apophenia / confirmation bias thing, when you're doing playful historical research, especially for an RPG you're playing or running or planning to run. You start flipping through books, and Google and Wikipedia, concocting some deranged historical theory, and then suddenly you start finding facts and evidence that are too perfect, that seem to confirm the very goofball theory you just yourself made up! princeofcairo  has written a bunch of "how to" columns on the subject, Umberto Eco built a whole novel around it, and mgrasso  seems to have it happen about once every three days.

What I'm trying to do is to concoct some kind of game, activity, or demonstration exercise for a group of, say, 6-12 academics that would in the space of 30 minutes or so let them have this experience themselves. Basically I want to turn sober professional historians into paranoid conspiracy theorists. Temporarily.

I thought about giving them a bunch of interesting and allusive historical sources and asking the group to come up with a theory connecting all of them, but I worry that if I choose the sources in advance it will seem like I'm stacking the deck, and they won't get that uncanny "nobody planned this and yet clearly somebody planned this" feeling. At the other extreme, I thought about hitting the Random Page link on Wikipedia a few times and asking them to connect all the things that come up--but the random pages on Wikipedia can be extremely random and farflung and it's quite possible they could not be connected. I also wonder if it would help to frame the exercise inside a mini-roleplaying game, but that's a level of artificiality that my audience just might not go for. Maybe I should just run a session of InSpectres?

Anyway, that's my current conundrum. And I know your playful historical kung fu is extremely advanced. Any ideas, suggestions, warnings, conjectures?

Can't you hear that singing, sounds like gold
Maybe I can only hear it in my head
Five years ago, we owned that road
Now it's rolling over us instead
Waylon Beulay is dead

Five years ago tonight (same day of the week, too) was the final session of Unknown USA. I hope to post something longer to mark this little anniversary in the next few days, but I am packing the car just now for (appropriately enough) a long drive. Much love to my old and often missed road-tripping companions. Pancakes are on me.

"Whoa, sounds like somebody's living in the past. Contemporize, man!"

P.S. I'm aware there's something sorta kinda sad about posting pages of text on a five year old roleplay campaign. Of course, I do live in the past, in more ways than one. But in the spirit of living in the now, I should note that I am still playing in that ridonkulous 30-year OD&D campaign I mentioned before and I've also hooked up with a promising bunch of local gamers whose style might be closer to what we had in Boston. I'm hoping to run a 4-5 session Cold City or PTA game with them. The beast, as always, is scheduling.

I opened up my LiveJournal client to write about something else this afternoon and found this mostly finished post from a year ago, I think. I'm so out of practice on these Games I'd Like To-style posts anyway, rather than delete it or let it languish until such time as I get around to cleaning it up, I'mo just pull the trigger and post as is:

(Post title is, as is so often the case, an inside joke amusing only to me and maybe my older sister.)

( Five half-baked settings for kooky indie games! Or vice versa... )

This is mostly directed to bryant, though maybe somebody else has answers also:

themoniker's post today, in which Umberto Eco weighs in on the great game between zeppelins and bicycles (!), inspires me to ask: are all the various wikis & lexicons lost when innocence.com exploded gone for good? Are recovery efforts truly "in progress"?

I know Unknown USA was retrieved and hermetically sealed and I'm grateful for that. But I don't have any other copy of my For Want Of A Nail contributions or any of the Dungeon Majesty wiki, and that makes me sad. Even if you don't want to repost/rehost all that stuff (and I can totally understand if you don't feel like weeding the spam off five-year-old wikis until the end of time) is it in any retrievable form that you could send to me? What I'd really like in the short term is "Gernsblack," but the other stuff would be nice to have too.

Will gladly repay with some kind of old-style nostalgic gaming post: an episode guide for the first season of that 1970s Warren Zevon inspired Buffy game you once proposed? five unknown deleted scenes from Unknown USA? my requisite Lost rip-off (nb: cannot guarantee it involves miniaturization)?

I can't tell you how long I've been waiting for Lions on the Precipice, foreign_devilry's notional Dogs in the Vineyard expansion. I'm still waiting, but in the meantime, this emo snippet of alterna-reverse Dogs occurred to me. I started out by thinking about that gloriously stupid bit of early D&D laser-sharking, the Anti-Paladin. Then I found myself actually sympathizing with these guys. (Oh, but if you've heard me mumbling about my "Dogs heartbreaker" lately, this isn't it.)

( A Land of Thorns and Vice )