#36: Play & Culture
I. Dear Reader
This week, I’m excited about understanding the ttrpg hobby better.
One big part of this is the Retired Adventurer having a new article on the Six Cultures of Play. These are basically: Classic, Trad, LARP, Storygame, OSR, Neo-Trad. This is an article that I read two or three times even though it came out this week because it just had so much going on - these are all such vague terms and giving an overview of them is really hard. Personally, I think it’s slightly rough on storygames and focuses too much on the mistakes of one early proponent (but I’m definitely partial to that culture so I’m biased). Still a fantastic read.
The author makes it clear that the overview isn’t about quizzes or buckets - nobody has to be just one of these things. You can play trad games on tuesday, storygames on wednesday, and OSR games on thursday. It’s more about getting a better sense of the invisible rules that sometimes exist around these games - the play culture that is built up around them that doesn’t make its way into the books. And understanding your preferred play culture helps you have more fun with your favourite games - and helps you have more fun with games outside that play culture as well. Because you know what assumptions to change.
Yours clearly,
Thomas
II. Listen of the Week
The Gauntlet Podcast brought three people together to discuss how to organize an online convention. It’s a good listen if you’ve got plans in that direction.
And some self-promotion here, the RPG Internationale channel took a look at The Spider and the City, my solo game about a criminal mastermind in a rebel city. The review is so generous - has lots of wonderful things to say especially about the writing. It’s a whopping 30 minute video and I think it’s the first “big” review of one of my games. It absolutely made my week.
III. Links of the Week
A great story of how a simple game with high lethality led to a campaign of intrigue and deception: “You want players to be prudent, ambitious, ruthless, calculating, paranoid. You want them to respect their enemies and balance alliances carefully. Above all you want the constant, thrilling tension wrought by a high-stakes duel of wits: a deadly game where a single misstep in a dark alley could end an entire dynasty.”
Vincent Banker has written the 6th part of his series of how to use Apocalypse World to design games: “In Under Hollow Hills, your character isn’t a bundle of vision, self-interest, and survival instincts, armored up and armed to the teeth. Instead, your character is a bundle of what do I want? and what do I have to give?”
PhilGamer begins a series of reading and explaining the new Dune game from Modiphius - there are three parts already out!
The Udan Adan blog has a GMing retrospective where the author goes back through all the major campaigns that they’ve run and what they learned from each.
On the Indie Game Reading Club, a guest post about why (and how) you should play Glitch by Jenna Moran - “a game about retired world-killing void-gods solving mysteries and forgetting to pay the rent.”
How to take better photographs of your tabletop games from Gnomestew.
The almost-full free rules text for Errant is out and free on Ava Islam’s carrd site.
IV. Small Ads
This section contains sponsored links and advertisements.
Visit the all-new, fan-supported Fate-SRD.com. Built to be fast, attractive, and accessible, you'll find rules, downloads, actual plays, and community. Made possible by support from our Patreon.
These ads help keep this newsletter going and I’m very grateful for them! If you’d like to advertise with the newsletter, the submission form with all the guidelines can be found here.
Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. I’m half-man, half-beast, half-journalist, half-game designer.
If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!
Thanks for subscribing and take care out there!