Just. Play.

In which I relax, already.

So, it’s been about 5 weeks since my last newsletter. This is in part because the Holiday season is mutating as rapidly as the virus itself. I deliberately scaled back on games in November and December, running a single game in November and nothing in December. I’d been feeling pretty burnt out, like GMing has required real effort for a good portion of the year in a way it hasn’t, especially organizing online games.

Paradoxically, this freedom from the responsibility of filling the calendar meant that when opportunities for short-notice and one-shot games arose, I could actually do them. It’s been a huge change of pace from my usual packed calendar of pre-arranged sessions, and it’s really recharged my batteries. I talk a lot about what I Just Played, as in, played recently. But the joy of December so far is that I’ve just played. As in, I’ve not run anything, I’ve not worried about how to sell things, I’ve been ‘merely’ a player. So I’m going to devote this week to an extended version of my usual ‘Just Played’. Next week: year-end wrap-up, to the extent time has any meaning any more.

JUST PLAYED:

Plutonian Shards on The Gauntlet. It’s an SF-adventure riff on classic Star Wars with a little more mercenary (Firefly, Cowboy Bebop, classic Traveller) play cycle. It’s a quite straightforward PBTA-driven setup, with playbooks that nmap easily to Luke, Leia, the Droids, and (in my case) Obi-Wan, with an interesting Trust/Tension system that drives mechanical cooperation and advancement. It’s by Alexi Sargent, and I signed up for it with no particular love of Star Wars, but mainly to play some with Alexi. It’s been surprisingly fun! I’m playing the Fallen, this game’s not-Jedi. Alexi’s done a great job of making sure the playbooks and Moves drive us towards play that feels like classic Star Wars while explicitly remixing the roles and relationships that it feels refreshingly new. We’ve done a runaway mining droid, a space pirate attack, and a high stakes heist at a royal gala thus far. I’m looking forward to our final session next week. Check here for video of our sessions if you’re curious.

Masks: Dream Warriors on The Gauntlet. Teenage supers in a grittier street-level game set in our shared Gauntlet Comics universe. Scheduling stuff has impacted how much of this game we’ve managed to play, but it’s been a nice low-key teen soap opera thus far. My Scion has a Kingpin-style criminal boss mother who hasn’t thus far massively impacted the game, but I suspect that’s a matter of timing more than anything else. My hero name is Pandora, so that’s essentially an engraved invitation to our GM to drop the other shoe at some point. I’m quite looking forward to our final session next week, where we’ll see not whether my attempts to recruit stray, untested super-teens into our little gang backfire, but exactly how they backfire.

My continuing ‘home’ game that you’ve heard a lot about already is Stonetop. It’s a really cool ‘iron age community fantasy’ game that’s in what I’d think of as ‘early release’ if it were a Steam video game. Like, it’s not achieved its final form yet, but it’s definitely way more robust than what we’d think of as a ‘beta’. I play this with a group of longtime gamer friends and our campaign is coming up on the six month mark or so at this point, I think. It’s interesting because we tend to swap out campaigns after a quarter or so, and this is by far the longest ongoing series we’ve engaged in since our marathon Champions days of years ago. 

It’s a nice place to visit AND you’d want to live here.

An interesting thing happened for me in December with this game. It’s something I can probably do a whole newsletter about (and may) but I’ll go into it in brief here: it had gone from new and fascinating to ongoing and familiar, but has hit that point where it;s not suddenly ongoing and fascinating again. When we first started, we were all learning the system, and everything about our characters was new and revelatory. After a few months, we started settling in, finding the routines and cliches and running jokes about our respective PCs, and got into what felt like a bit of a rut. But in the last few weeks, we’ve started to dig deeper into the life of the village, and have become familiar enough with each others’ habits and tropes that we know enough to start reinforcing and/or subverting them in a manner that suddenly resonates in ways it simply couldn’t before. It’s been fascinating to experience, and I’ve really only noticed it in retrospect. But it’s very much reminded me that I really do love ongoing campaigns, and that maybe one of the things that felt like burnout over the last couple of years was a lack of that depth that only comes from an ongoing narrative that becomes so familiar that you can start riffing on it.

In-game, we’ve spent the last several sessions in Stonetop proper, to the extent it’s fully bloomed into a living place for all of us. We elected a new Mayor who promptly died in the following harsh winter, we’ve revealed life-changing details about PC backstory, we’ve introduced enough pets that one of us wants to GM an all-animals one-shot using an alternate system. My Blessed druid-adjacent maybe-half-elf has somehow slowly become a favorite character. It’s lovely, and more than anything else, a powerful example of how much fun I can have when I don’t feel burdened to do anything besides hang out with my friends and have fun.

The rest of my December this far has been taken up with largely-serendipitous one-shots and fill-ins. This is the paradox I talked about made very much manifest: because I had so little on my schedule, I could play more.

I played two one-shots at Pax Unplugged in the evenings when I wasn’t vending.

The first was Rebel Scum, a game of anti-fascist space opera from 9th Level Games using the same Polymorph system that powers Mazes and The Excellents. It was a scheduled demo, but when no one else arrived, I was lucky enough to play it as a duet with my gamer friend Whitney, designer of the wonderful Prism RPG of queer mermaids. We played a 2-hour-ish one-shot of a former custodial droid who had learned to dance while scrubbing dance floors, and with the aid of his princess friend used a dance party on a penal colony to defy the Empire. It managed to perfectly triangulate A New Hope, Dirty Dancing, and Footloose, and it was a lovely break from the hubbub of Pax sales.

Try a Hope That Is New.

The second was a Games on Demand session of Monsterhearts 2. I’ve played a ton of it, and this was an introductory session for new players, so we mostly just did homeroom and a bit of leadup to a big dance, but just sitting in on a character-building and world creation session was a tone of fun, as I got remind why I love the Pax shows, and Unplugged in particular, so much: I was with 4 people for whom Monsterhearts, a decade-plus old, was new and vital and fascinating. 

When you spend a lot of time in the orbit of any sort of ‘lifestyle’ hobbyist, it can be easy to become fixated exclusively on the newest, latest thing. The inner circle of indie game nerds I know all adore Monsterhearts, but have mostly played it out and moved on years ago. But at Pax, it’s new to those board gamers and D&D players who come across it at GoD or the IPR booth for the first time. It’s a particular joy to see folks discovering Monsterhearts and Fiasco and Ryuutama and Blades in the Dark right alongside what I think of as new: Wanderhome, Thirsty Sword Lesbians, Fight Run Item. So I played a Hollow, loyal assistant to our Tracy Flick-adjacent Witch, and helped build and populate our PA steel town, and Turn People On, and Shut Them Down, and gaze Into the Abyss, and it was an equally fun and calming break from my day of commerce.

“The Messy Lives of Teenage Monsters!”

I found my way into several other December one-shots post-Pax:

A Hallmark Christmas game where our stats were Sweaters, Cocoa, and Cheer. My ‘Cool Single Parent’ was a coach and PE teacher at our little VT high school, who eventually found himself under the mistletoe with the divorced Home Ec teacher, thanks to intervention by a Christmas spirit and his precocious 12 year-old daughter. The stakes were as low as it’s possible to get, and it was delightful.

An old-school OSR romp through The Halls of the Blood King. We used The Back Hack 2e to whip up characters and schemed and snuck our way into the Castlevania-inspired mansion to find and rescue the long-lost sister of our patron. We never met the eponymous Blood King, but that’s what made it so old school-perfect: we got what we needed, cleverly used our inventory and skills, and GOT THE HECK OUT. Mission accomplished! OSR doesn’t always click with me, but this was a good group, our GM moved things along, and TBH is a pretty great system. 

A one-shot of Star Trek Adventures. I spent a whole newsletter talking about my complicated feelings about this game, but up until now I’ve only run it and never played. I got to be an Andorian Security Chief, and the role-playing and plot parts of it were gloriously Star Trek and I had a blast. But the Modiphius 2d20 system remains somewhere around 20% TOO MUCH of just… everything. Too many currencies, too many character bits, too many modifiers and multiple rolls (just about every task required THREE SEPARATE ROLLS to resolve! THREE!). Our adventure, investigating attempts to introduce the Neural Parasites of Season One TNG into Klingons, was cool and interesting when we weren’t face-planting into the mechanics. I am eager for a second session despite this, partly from sheer love of Star Trek, and partly, perhaps, out of sheer stubborn determination to wrestle the system into submission so it facilitates, rather than obscures, the utter joy that should be every moment of a Star Trek RPG session.

All in all, a lot of gaming in a month where I felt weird that I ‘wasn’t gaming that much’ because I was just playing. I’m going to consciously explore this approach in the new year: I only have one game scheduled to GM in January, and nothing after that (except for a Con session in February) thus far. The Year of Just Playing. I’ll keep you posted.

Have the best Holiday you can, and I’ll drop in next week to look back over the year and reflect.

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You’ll find my game writing in the pages of Codex magazine and other Gauntlet publishing works, including the upcoming Trophy RPG. The recently-released issue of Codex, Void 2, has a Spelljammer-inspired Trophy Gold adventure I wrote called The Void Archipelago.

You can fund a large library of actual play videos of various RPGs at my YouTube channel.

My podcast, Just Played, is currently on hiatus, but the archives are available. Each episode features an in-depth recap of an RPG session I participated in as a GM or player.

I’m always looking for topics, so if there’s a tabletop RPG-related subject you’re curious about, let me know, and I’ll do my best to take a run at it. Comments responded to as I’m able and amenable.

But now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go play another game!