Many apologies for my hiatus. But I’m still around and thinking about games! In a rare occurrence I also recently finished one! The game is Broken Age by the amazing Double Fine. I think Double Fine’s strength is their writing, so an adventure game like Monkey Island or their own work Grim Fandango seems like a perfect fit.
Ok, so I was planning to post a piece today on game-system flavors, but then I just kept writing and writing. It turns out that that piece is going to be a bit longer than I’d anticipated. Instead, I’ll give you an easy one: Cordelia’s Honor, by Lois McMaster Bujold. Ostensibly the first set of stories in the long Vorkosigan series, I came to this book only after I’d already read a number of the other stories. I feel that I benefited from the prior experience, and would recommend that you start elsewhere as well. Not because the stories in Cordelia’s Honor are in any way bad, but because some parts of them are harder to engage with when you don’t already know and like some of the characters. I feel like I had a deeper understanding and appreciation for the characters that I met because it wasn’t the first time that I’d met them, even though the events that I read about were obviously happening long before anything else that I already knew about.
My quick opinion before I get deeper into talking about the book? Read it. In fact, read all the Vorkosigan books. They are very hard to put down once you start, but at least they come in manageable, more or less bite-sized chunks.
I hear you like adventures. How about books that come complete with steam, airships, weird science, and doomsday devices? Frank Chadwick’s new book The Forever Engine delivers action and adventure with all of those things, and good characters too. Even better, the story follows an active style very similar to what I’ve come to expect from John Ringo, but without the moments that make you want to yell “Oh John Ringo, no!” The main characters are competent, sometimes preposterously so, but they generally feel like whole people in a way that happens less often in action/adventure stories. Already sold? Go read the book! If you’re not quite convinced, try reading a little more…
Happy New Year!
Here’s an abbreviated dungeon-starter for Dungeon World, building somewhat on the material that I came up with for The Duke’s Men. Agenda, Goals, and Dungeon Moves are at the top as per usual. This is mostly focused on cultists and such, as the game itself was, but the basic storyline offered in my previous post could easily be altered to deal with any number of different kinds of threats.
A few days ago, I ran a game of DungeonWorld for two of my friends. It went so well, and ended up feeling so much like a classic Dungeons & Dragons adventure, that I thought I would share the basics of the game with you. It’s somewhere between an actual play and a scenario description. I’ll put up an honest-to-goodness Dungeon-starter soon, and with a little creativity you should have an easy time converting it into your own single- or double-episode game.
We didn’t look too closely at the backstories of our heroes, but please allow me to introduce you to the adventures of Kate the thief and Jonah the ranger (and Jonah’s wolfhound, Erasmus), the loyal representatives of Duke Blackforest. What follows should allow you to live out their adventures for yourself, or change things slightly and experience the adventure anew with other people.
Fistful of Wits 