#play diary

Every other week, I set up a table at my friendly local game store with a game, pre-written character sheets, and a one-shot adventure. Then, I play that game with anyone who wants to join! My goal is to provide an entrance into the hobby that isn't D&D, and to introduce players of all experience levels to games they might not have tried.

This week, we played TROIKA! Numinous Edition, from the Melsonian Arts Council.

I have to be honest - I don't know if I have the disposition for games like TROIKA!. Not to say that I don't enjoy the game as a text! On the contrary, I was really excited to play it! The pitch - a zany multiverse of adventure operating on a loose interpretation of classical cosmology - is right up my alley.

It's the lineage of design of which TROIKA is a part that I chafe against. Built in the Fighting Fantasy engine, TROIKA! is neck-deep in the early days of tabletop roleplaying, and all the random tables, encounters built entirely from prose, and impossible-to-solve "puzzles" that act more like pranks on one's players than anything else.

I don't want to rag on this culture of play - there are plenty who love it, and it clearly has a lot of value. This is an issue not of quality, but of taste; my preference lies in more contemporary systems and styles, and I found running a game like this stressful.

Thankfully, this week's table reported having a great time with TROIKA!, for which I'm grateful. And there was still a lot to like; the surreal and comical tone of the text came through marvelously in play, and we were all enchanted by the color palette of the whole thing.

The element of surprise. (Tried to land on its head with the paraglider. Bad idea.)

Fire arrows, when you only have five of them

Bombs, round or square. Unless there’s another upgrade I don’t know about.

Lizal Spear

Even an enhanced one

Crawling underneath it to get it to shoot itself

Throwing rocks

Hiding behind rocks

Tree branch

Taunting it in hopes that it will become enraged and make a mistake.

Every other week, I set up a table at my friendly local game store with a game, pre-written character sheets, and a one-shot adventure. Then, I play that game with anyone who wants to join! My goal is to provide an entrance into the hobby that isn't D&D, and to introduce players of all experience levels to games they might not have tried.

This week, we played the four-page cyberpunk 199X: SHUTDOWN by Thursday Garreau.

This game was plagued by two factors, the first being my own burnout - I've been doing this game night for several months now, and even on nights when nobody shows, I still go to the work of preparing a new game. Which in the long term means I have a backlog of some games that I won't have to prep when they come up again, but in the short term means I've been pushing myself, and I didn't bring an adventure up to my usual standards this week.

The second factor is that SHUTDOWN, despites its abundance of tables providing NPCs, locations, and even adventure hooks, didn't actually provide me with the things I needed to play an adventure built from the text itself, and I had to do a lot of legwork to tape together the half a dozen or so randomly rolled prompts into something that felt coherent.

The problem is very specific: That the tables provided weren't focused on the things the GM needs to prepare a game. For example, there is a random NPC table which, while theoretically saving a GM a lot of time, ends up actually requiring more work on their part to justify why, say, a goth barista might be hanging out in a crashed alien spaceship.

199X had a lot of potential, and I think if you're willing to ignore a lot of its GM-facing tools, you'll have a lot of fun with it. Unfortunately, trying to play from the PDF proved just a bit too frictive.

Every other week for the duration of 2025, I'm going to a local art space with a game, pre-fab character sheets, and a one-shot adventure, if the game calls for it. Then, I'll play with any group of 3-5 that wants to. My goal is to give people an entrance into tabletop games that isn't D&D, and to introduce gamers of all levels of experience to games they might not have heard of.

This Week I played M. E. Smith's Worlds In-Between - here's how it went.

I'll disclose upfront that Smith and I know each other well and are on very good terms, and I even gave my input on this game while it was being written. That said, I can confidently say that it's one of my favorite games, bar none.

This week, the table was almost entirely people from my private life, with one exception, a complete newcomer to the hobby. As with last time, this is expected. It'll be a while before I have new players with any frequency, but I'll always report regardless.

Worlds In-Between has been described to me as "a sandbox," and I think that's an accurate description. While its prose and flavor are very clear on their inspirations - those being "small child in a big magic otherworld" stories like The Wizard of Oz and Over the Garden Wall, the book is actually completely silent on how it expects to be played. I decided to approach it in the way I felt best for the venue and event, which was as a bare-bones old-school adventure. But honestly, you could take the rules present and mold them to just about any style; journaling, GM-less, or a more new-school writers'-room kind of play.

I think it's the nature of quick, zero-preamble games like the one I run to err on the side of goofy. Which I'm not at all opposed to! I love the opportunity to go out for an evening and have a good, rowdy time with good people. This time around, I find that I'm a tiny bit disappointed that the mysterious tone of the game's prose didn't persist in that environment. That's my fondness for more serious & somber play sessions, though. It's not a knock against the game or my players - I still had a grand time.

Worlds In-Between's greatest strength is its atmosphere. Smith has a remarkable skill with infusing every word of text with a palpable flavor that resolves into a clear fiction, even with little to know concrete worldbuilding in the actual text.

Every other week, I set up a table at my friendly local game store with a game, pre-written character sheets, and a one-shot adventure. Then, I play that game with anyone who wants to join! My goal is to provide an entrance into the hobby that isn't D&D, and to introduce players of all experience levels to games they might not have tried.

This week, we stole from the rich and gave to the poor with Bad Guys, by me!

Bad Guys is my love letter to the cult classic TV show Leverage, and to its currently out-of-print official tabletop RPG adaptation.

I think it might also be my best work yet. I've played it a few times, and each time has been an absolute blast. The Heat/Cool/Control economies contribute to a natural pacing that, in my opinion, recreates the structure of an episode of TV in a really fun way, and Quirks are a great way to get the whole table involved in the heist.

It's also great to play as a GM specifically; the emphasis on taking writers' stance and building a heist in phases with specific characters and elements makes both prep and play smooth and fun, and I never felt at a loss for what made sense for a scene or encounter.

Every other week for the duration of 2025, I'm going to a local art space with a game, pre-fab character sheets, and a one-shot adventure, if the game calls for it. Then, I'll play with any group of 3-5 that wants to. My goal is to give people an entrance into tabletop games that isn't D&D, and to introduce gamers of all levels of experience to games they might not have heard of.

This week, I played Coolway Ink's Forgotten Ballad - here's how it went.

Firstly, a confession: I had never drawn, notated, or crawled a dungeon before this game. I got my start in RPGs via the 2010's narrative & storytelling game boom, and that's still firmly where my tastes lie.

That said, this was a blast! It was a small group this week; just myself and two of my partners. One of my regulars was out-of-state, and nobody else decided they wanted to play this week. That's alright, though - I never mind more intimate & tight-knit table spaces.

Forgotten Ballad aims to recreate the aesthetic & game-feel of the Legend of Zelda (a goal which we share), and to that end I think it succeeds shockingly well. The standards the game provides regarding structure & dungeon completion lent my final prep the sensation of not just an old-school 2D Zelda temple, but the more interconnected, puzzle-box-like design characteristic of the later 3D titles. And it did so without, in my extremely limited experience, detracting from the distinctly old-school sensation of players solving problems naturalistically using the logic of the fiction first and referring to their character sheets second.

We found that in the limited-time setting of this fortnightly game, neither player present felt much of a desire to develop their character's appearance or personality. Within our constraints, they served more as vessels for exploring the environment and solving the presented challenges. This, I think, gave me a bit of insight into the appeal of older-school styles of play, and while I still think I prefer a post-Baker school of design & play, I also think I'll be giving more time & attention to dungeons, puzzles, and loot tables as a part of this project.

Surprisingly, the standout feature of Forgotten Ballad is its speed! While actually preparing the temple took me the better part of 4 hours over the course of two nights, all that work paid off in a scenario that was quick to set up once we got to the table, and which provided ready answers to any questions the players threw my way, requiring almost no improvisation on my part to present a cohesive and consistent fiction.

Every other week for the duration of 2025, I'm going to a local art space with a game, pre-fab character sheets, and a one-shot adventure, if the game calls for it. Then, I'll play with any group of 3-5 that wants to. My goal is to give people an entrance into tabletop games that isn't D&D, and to introduce gamers of all levels of experience to games they might not have heard of.

This week, I played John Harper's Lasers & Feelings - here's how it went.

My group this time was largely made up of friends of mine, which is to be expected - I anticipate I'll pick up new players as time goes on. But there was one newcomer, someone who was tipped off about my table and had the time and inclination to come.

To the surprise of absolutely no-one, Lasers & Feelings is an absolute blast. It's tailor-made to put you into the headspace of those old TOS episodes. The sillier ones, most often; in our game, we faced off against a rogue ship's captain who wanted to power-up an old decommissioned weapon of mass destruction. Which makes it all sound very political - our adventure was kicked off when the newcomer decided that the thing his intrepid explorer needed most was a pet monkey. As a result, they ended up chasing an abducted wildlife preserve (not just its proprieters, nor just the animals - the whole preserve, land and all) through space in pursuit of their dual goal.

With limited time and the light atmosphere, things got zany pretty quickly, and L&F kept up without issue. By the end, there was a robot with the face of a war criminal, working to rehabilitate the reputation of the late original; the original explorer vaporized in space; and the entire population of Ireland building hospitals on a small, remote moon.

The greatest compliment I can pay to Lasers & Feelings is its excellent use of space; with a single compound d6 table, I was able to roll the concept of an adventure at the table 10 minutes before play, and I never once felt unprepared.