Category: The Gauntlet: Our Community

Here are the pics from Sunday’s game of BXB. I love this game! It is perfectly delightful. 

In BXB, one player is Koichi, a “shy, little brother type” who is a brand-new freshman at Atarashi High School. The other three players are the older boys trying to win his heart by taking him on fun dates. The older characters include the star basketball player, a rich teen model, and a teacher in his early twenties (which, apparently, is neither against the law nor creepy in Japan). 

Thanks to Jessica Scott and Aaron Scott for running the games and to everyone else for coming out: Jeff Burke Russell Benner David LaFreniere , Jaime and Belinda!

I love In a Wicked Age. I know I’ve said it a dozen times before, but it’s true: the first session is always a little rough, but the second session (and each subsequent session) is amazing.

Last night was our second session in this three-session run, and it was a blast. The players were clearly past the learning curve of the first session, and really getting into the mechanics and how they can be leveraged to create a good story. 

At its core, In a Wicked Age requires you to embrace a hard divide between what your characters are doing in the fiction and what you, as a player, are doing to advance their Best Interests. You use the conflict resolution system to push toward negotiations and compromises between the players  (not the characters) to arrive at what will be the best story outcomes. It’s a fascinating system, because what you get in the end is a truly PvP roleplaying game (many games have a PvP orientation, but their rules don’t create actual, mechanical, winners and losers like IaWA does). 

Thanks to everyone who came out: Daniel Fowler David LaFreniere Kristen D Scott Owen Russell Benner and Kyle McCauley. 

Some pics from Story Game Sunday. We played Shock: Social Science Fiction. It has a very interesting mechanic, which I am led to believe is a streamlined version of the system found in Polaris. We told some cool stories (a couple of which were surprisingly intimate and “small” given the sci-fi setting), although it was commented that they felt too disconnected from each other. It was like a book of short stories in the same world rather than a novel. All-in-all, I liked it and would definitely play again, although perhaps with less people. It dragged on a bit at times with the number we had.

Thanks to Russell Benner for facilitating and to everyone else for coming out: Daniel Lewis Jeff Burke David LaFreniere Aaron Scott and Cheryl.

Last night for the Friday Anthology, we kicked-off our three-session run of In a Wicked Age. Like all first sessions of In a Wicked Age, there was a bit of a learning curve, but all in all it was a lot of fun. We had some very memorable characters, that’s for sure. The stand-outs for me were a priestess of Gemekaa, the fertility goddess, whose body was a cornucopia that produced “nectar,” and was an altar for her followers’ orgiastic excesses; and her nemesis, a cruel, self-flagellating prophet and his inquisitorial followers (Rob Ferguson would have loved everything about this session).

Thanks to everyone who came out: Scott Owen Daniel Fowler Kristen D Russell Benner Marcus Centurian and David LaFreniere.

For Wednesday One-Shots this week, we played Dungeon World. David ran the main table and I ran a smaller table. My adventure took place in our Anthology world, in the magnificent city of Alizar, which is also the location of our In a Wicked Age games. 

Thanks to David LaFreniere for running a game, and to everyone else who came out: Daniel Lewis Kristen D Scott Owen Gary Wilson Russell Benner and James Melott.

Some pics from Story Game Sunday. We played Avery Mcdaldno ‘s The Quiet Year. It was the second time we have played it in the last year or so, and it was great. This was the first time we had played with the custom card deck and it was a much better experience, since we didn’t have to look at a reference sheet every turn (the cards are very pretty, too). 

For more info on The Quiet Year, go here: http://buriedwithoutceremony.com/the-quiet-year/

Thanks to everyone who played: Jessica Scott Daniel Lewis Ferrell Riley Jeff Burke (and Cheryl!).