The Silent Majority
When I reflect on this blog and what my projects under the name of Runeslinger are, it is inescapable to conclude that in the beginning, these endeavors were rooted in an effort to maintain a conversation with the dead.
A Spectrum of Character in RPGs
In a significant percentage of roleplaying games, playing a character is a core activity. From the start of the hobby, this has been one of those things we expect to find in an RPG. Once the hobby began to broaden with more titles and with more approaches to play, that notion of character and how one actually goes about playing one have broadened as well. What it means to play a character is a question that can be answered very differently now than in 1974, 1984, 1994, 2004, 2014, and so on. Sadly, although our ability to observe and communicate what goes on across the hobby as a whole has improved, our ability to describe it and so further share and discover it has not commensurately grown.
Returning to Pendragon… again
What is Pendragon, really? Can we come to terms with it without first finding and naming our Arthur as King?
Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying
…BRP hits a precise point where it makes a clear and resonant kind of sense. It is grounded in the experience of being human and the underpinning logic of the imaginative worlds we create. It surges with brutal magic and the even more brutal harm people can inflict upon each other – and receive in turn. It finds ways to make risk easy to run yet pleasantly agonizing to choose. It has a lot to say about who the characters we play are, yet has the room to listen to our ideas as well. It is incredibly responsive to the ongoing events of play… It has a boldness about how it limits characters to a human mold, yet expects better of them. Anyone can be a hero, the pages of BRP whisper, they just have to act…
Lucifer’s Lexicon: On RPG Concepts and Terms~
No Ambrose Bierces were harmed in the making of this post.
The bones of this post actually date back to the launch of this blog in May of 2010 though the content is much older. I had a few conflicting ideas about the blog in those days as it was inspired by the loss of my friend Tom (a genius) and the sense of dismay it sparked to know that there would be no more talks about games, life, or onion soup with him, and to know that a person like that was gone from the world. Worse, all the conversations we had had about gaming were now only the version in my memory – and of the two of us, he liked and got along with people much better than I do.
Casting Shadows 