#26: Le Jeu d'Aventure 🎴
Good day, readers! I’m writing this on Friday because I’ll be spending all of Saturday at Session Zero Con, an online convention organized from the Philippines. The con will be the debut of a small murder mystery game. And in between running those games, I’ll be trying to work up the courage to talk to people.
In other news, my sweet not-a-real-dungeon, The True Dungeon is the Friends You Made Along the Way, was one of the winning entries of the One Page Dungeon contest. I’ll clean it up and put it up on itch.io soon.
Hope you have a good weekend as the first month of 2021 ends already!
- Thomas
I. Media of the Week
I’ve been finding more and more interesting Youtube content this week - not sure what it says about my data privacy but hey, good for this newsletter! I stumbled across Really Dicey who have a lot of D&D content but along with 7th Sea, Cyberpunk Red, and other games. This was a nice video listicle that got me quite interested in reading 7th Sea. (Before this, the thing that most interested me about the game was James Mendez Hodes talking about how they built on existing history.)
As February begins, Kickstarter is going to explode with zines and indie RPGs as a part of their Zine Quest programme. The PlusOneExp Youtube channel publishes a round-up of their most anticipated games that are going to be crowdfunded next year.
II. Links of the Week
“The more RPGs lean heavily into the Visible Rules, the more adventure design begins to operate according to Porn Logic. Because visible-leaning play places high importance on things the system can define and resolve, the adventure's problems tend to shape themselves into the game's pre-defined mechanistic loops, which works out because, in such games, the Player Characters are in large part defined by their choices and contributions within those loops.” On his Rolltop Indigo blog, S John Ross uses the term ‘porn logic’ to explore game design that specifically limits how problems solved.
“Le Jeu d’Aventure was played in the evenings at court beginning in the late 13th century. Players would roll dice to determine what role they would take, a kind of early random character generation. The roles were written out as short poems, and the players would each pretend to be the person described in their poem. The fun of it was in being witty and jointly creating a story, often filled with innuendo and playful courtly intrigue.” The AI Dungeon blog explores an alternate history of RPGs inspired by courtly games from the Renaissance era.
Speaking about AI Dungeon, people have been playing around with it. Here’s someone feeding it stuff from Ultra Violet Grasslands.
Jared Rascher does a round-up of all their reviews from 2020 on GnomeStew.
I’ve never played Burning Wheel but I found this article walking through the character burning process on the Take on Rules blog a good read.
Media
On the GMS Magazine podcast, the hosts (one who is Jewish and one who is Roma) discuss representation of their cultures in RPGs on Holocaust Memorial Day.
On the +1 Forward podcast, the hosts speak to the designers of Moonpunk, a PbtA game of punks on the moon that sounds like good fun.
Misc
After public backlash against unilateral changes by Patreon, there was a rush of support for Comradery, a Patreon-like service that will be cooperatively owned by creators.
The Tabletop Mentorship Program that I linked in past editions published some statistics around their application process. There were double the amount of mentees than mentors available! And more than half were board game design focused.
III. Small Ads
This section contains sponsored links and advertisements.
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Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. I’m half-man, half-beast, half-journalist, half-game designer.
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