August 23, 2006
Privateers and Merchant Adventurers
I want to play a game of piracy, but not bad evil pirates who kill people and take their stuff to get rich, but patriotic sailors attacking and harrying the shipping of the country with whom their nation is at war . I’m bored with games where the morality of killing is unexamined, for example, where I need to invent a reason for my character to kill things because killing things is what all characters must do for the game to work, and then that reason is largely left unexamined through the rest of the game. I want that reason to matter, and change, and be wrong sometimes, and sometimes to not have a reason and not kill.
And maybe tie into that some age of exploration stuff, with explorers risking getting caught breaking treaties in an attempt to secure new trading links, schemes to discover new navigable routes based on very sketchy data and an ocean of wild speculation wrapped up to sound like rationality.
I’m thinking The Shadow of Yesterday might work as the system, but I don’t know if that’s just because I want to play that game anyway, or because it would fit especially well.
Game Salon: HeroQuest Dark Ages
This game is about to end, and I’m sad. But the final session is Friday and I can’t wait!
We’ve done cool stuff, and it rocked. Bits didn’t rock. I learnt from them.
And I’ve realised that there are issues in the group that I need to talk about. However, doing so just before I’m about to take a few sessions off to get married is probably a bad idea.
Things to think about: How to encourage reflection that doesn’t turn into a massive theory-fest with chest beating and so on? I want to talk about the game in a manner that values the opinions of those who know nothing about roleplaying theory as much as those who think they understand it. And I include myself in the last category.
