Actual Play Archives

What We Played: The Farm

Posted by Marc

With the new free version of Follow and Caroline’s The Farm quest hot off the presses, I decided to take both for a spin at Story Games Olympia. And it was a blast!

I sat down with four Follow newbies and we dove in. Our first task was to customize our farm setting. How did we all end up here? Turns out there was a magic rock in a field that sort of “called out” to us all, and we just wandered in and decided to make a farm around it. Nice. Next question: what makes our quest to revive our farm difficult? Well, probably all our experimental magical farming techniques. And bad soil. Lots of rocks.

Next we made characters. I held off until last to see what everyone else made and fill in any gaps. We had a cook, a botanist, a poet, a local kid… but no farmer, so I grabbed that one. Our cook Cap’n was all about becoming famous for his cuisine. Local kid Rosemary just wanted everyone to believe she really could talk to rocks. The botanist Coriander wanted to create magical seeds to sell, and our poet Eloise wanted to connect with others. As for me, the farm owner Josie? I wanted to escape my dark past as some kind of evil wizard. Y’know, get back to nature and all that.

Rocks, weeds, and ghosts – oh my!

First challenge: clear the land. We struggled against weeds that put themselves back in the ground when you weren’t looking and an overeager Rosemary who insisted the rocks weren’t happy about us moving them. Finally Coriander suggested we “scare” the weeds away by planting Boo Berries (a Scaregrow was also floated as an option). We planted a ton of bushes, drew our stones, and… failed the challenge. We lost a farmhand (minor character) and tried to figure out how we’d screwed up. “Oh no,” I said, “we planted all these boo berries, and they drove off the weeds… but now our farm is covered with ghosts!”

Sure, the ghosts were cute and chubby. Sure, they only played minor pranks sometimes. But we had a farm to build, and we needed them gone. Challenge two: deal with pests. We hemmed and hawed about maybe making a soothing herb garden or using enchanted crystals… but then Josie went ahead with a dark banishment ritual and roped Coriander and Eloise into helping. We awaited the draw… and succeeded!

Our play time ran out, so we called that the end and did some epilogues. All told, I loved playing the Farm. Caroline managed to capture the “cozy” element quite well. The many roads untraveled in how we set up the farm and the characters made me want to play again right away, just see how it could go differently. Thanks to my players and good work Caroline!

When Worlds Collide

Posted by Marc

I recently had the pleasure of attending Go Play Northwest, our beloved annual story and tabletop game convention in Seattle. Caroline and I have been regular attendees for over a decade now, making us seasoned veterans of the convention space. With that designation comes (in my mind) a solemn duty to run games and show others a good time. To that end, I pitched a game in all but one of the donuts we attended and ended up playing six different titles with seventeen unique players–not bad! I’d like to tell you about two of the games I ran and why they were, in a word, awesome.

World-building meets world-building

I came out swinging with my first pitch of the convention: we’ll play In This World, then we’ll take out our Microscope and explore one of the worlds we made. I wasn’t totally sure how it would all work out, but work out it did. Four intrepid players joined me for the grand experiment.

We started with a list of topics, narrowing down to “tattoos” (I promise I didn’t tip the scales, despite having gotten a new tattoo two days earlier). Following the rest of the game’s steps led to three amazing worlds: World of Resumé Tattoos, where tattoos are designed and mandated by the government; World of Tattoo.gif, where tattoos are made from bioluminescent algae and nanites that can shift and morph based on your body chemistry; and World of Emotional Tattoos, a fantasy setting where strong emotional experiences cause semi-prophetic tattoos to appear on your body. Which one did we decide to Microscope? Vote now on your phones!

After a break, we picked Tattoo.gif as our setting. All of us said we could’ve done any of the three, but this one drew us in because of its cyberpunk aesthetic and the fact that one of our world-building statements referred to history already (we stipulated that tattoos of the past were made from the algae alone, and the nanites came later). We put the world description to one side for reference and started the Microscope procedure.

play materials from the nanite-tattoos in this world/microscope game

Did it work? Oh yeah. Having the world built for us put a lot of flavor into the timeline before we even started and gave us some easy targets for periods, but as soon as we got to the palette, we expanded the world in ways none of us expected beforehand. Our world gained another sentient race, ocean-dwelling people who first shared knowledge of the algae with humanity but later cut ties when we started developing nanotech. The key was letting the original world-build serve as a starting point, rather than a prophecy (don’t want to Farnsworth it, after all); we stayed flexible as we created periods and events rather than feeling locked to precisely what we’d said during In This World. We played a few rounds and had a blast. I declare the experiment a resounding success!

I choose you!

We sat down to play Grasping Nettles and started discussing the setting we wanted to create. The table was silent for a beat–everyone runs a little slow on Sunday morning. Then Caroline spoke up: “When in doubt, play Pokémon.” With these wise words, she kicked off a delightful session of the unique world-building experience Grasping Nettles brings, if you’ll pardon the pun, to the table.

We set our Pokémon-esque story on an archipelago of islands with inexplicably diverse climates (“You’re looking for the beach island? It’s right over there, between the arctic island and the red rock badlands island!”). After picking a setting, the game asks you to create three factions, so we invented: Team Riptide, a group of washouts and thugs who couldn’t hack it in the official Pokémon tournaments; Island University and Hospital, a joint research and treatment operation where professors and doctors work together; and the Puddle League, an organization of scrappy kids headed out on their first Pokémon adventures and their counselors, who are students at the University.

pokemon-inspired grasping nettles game materials

The unique world-building mechanic of Grasping Nettles is the wheel. Each faction has a pawn on the wheel, and on your turn you pick a faction, roll 1d6, and move clockwise around the wheel to determine which action you take. Only one of the actions is a Scene; everything else is world-building, from making a single character, to introducing an issue, to starting a project. It’s perfect for convention play because it allows you to essentially choose your level of engagement (making a location is much less involved than creating a new faction, for example), and every little move adds up so your contributions are constantly important to the fun.

Tabula rasa

I’ve highlighted these two games because they share a commonality: both required or were focused on world-building. There’s something uniquely magical about starting with a blank slate and creating an entire world from scratch. I’m drawn toward games that utilize a collaborative creative process to help players create something complex, individualized, and far more unique than what they’d come up with on their own or have come up with before. The moment when players’ minds click and start humming in harmony is what I’m always seeking–and much to my delight, I found those moments again and again at Go Play this year.

The fun of boring worlds

Posted by Caroline.

Lately I’ve found myself craving a certain kind of experience when I’m playing In This World. In addition to making at least one “thanks, I hate it” world together, I’ve been really enjoying creating pretty normal worlds.

I think it all started last summer with our cozy game about furniture. We made some pretty strange worlds (teeny-tiny chairs, folding rooms, etc) that were totally delightful. Then for our last world, Ben steered it into mundane drama territory (family feuds over Granny’s armchair, Sackville-Bagginses vibes). As we added details about inheritance and knock-off portraits, a little lightbulb went off: as much as I like creating brand new worlds, I also love exploring things that are just a little removed from reality.

For the furniture game, it went from, “Here are these interesting worlds that are visually and theoretically cool and strange, it would totally suck to live in an apartment where your only furniture was re-configurable cubes,” to “This doesn’t feel like a totally new world, it feels mostly normal. It reminds me of how my grandmother and her sisters fell out over their inheritance, and how they would feel that very little of what led to their estrangement matters to their descendants. I wish those objects hadn’t mattered so much to them. I wonder why they did…” Heavy stuff from a lighthearted, normal-ish world!

I’ve only had a few of these types of more mundane worlds pop up in recent games. The two that come to mind are:

A world of sustainable fashion. What would a society that values recycled and sustainable materials do about clothes? What would slow fashion look like in a modern context? Could I be more intentional about resisting consumer culture?
A world where we use dreams as therapeutic tools. What could we gain as a society by everyone giving themselves a period of reflection every day? Nothing magical, just a little extra thinking time. What can I learn about myself from this dream? Could I set an intention for my sleep in a productive way (so far – no, lol I sleep like garbage)?

In all of these games, we worked together to create something new and interesting. We each contributed things to make unique worlds that we wouldn’t have thought of on our own. Each world is a testament to the magic of putting a bunch of people with different ideas together. That alone is cool as hell. But there is also this residual, solo reflection that can happen afterwards, particularly with a more normal world.

I’ve been calling these “boring worlds” in my head (while also feeling a little sheepish when I feel like I’m contributing boring stuff to a game), but I think that attitude does them a disservice.

“Boring worlds” give me a way to try to understand the world I’m in and a way to envision how to get to a world I want to be in. I’m curious about what a world one step closer toward a gentler, more humane world would be. I’m curious about understanding something about the world that I’m in by exploring something just one step to the side. Maybe I’m trying to answer “why are we like this” and “how can things be better?”

Boring worlds for exploring big questions.

Mommy, Let’s Play Dungeons and Dragons

Posted by Caroline aka Mom

I didn’t expect to play any sort of Dungeons and Dragons with our kid, ever, much less when he was only five years old. Heck, the last time I played any real DnD was like twenty years ago and I have zero interest in playing it myself. Yet here I am: a dungeon mommy. Let me weave you the tale of how it began… but without good voices because I am not a Real Dungeon Master.

We were cleaning out his room trying to make a donate pile of toys that he doesn’t play with anymore. A big plush d20 that someone gifted us a million years ago came into consideration. Marc suggested donating it, and I foolishly said aloud, “Well… maybe he’ll want to play Dungeons and Dragons someday.” To which the Hobblet immediately attached ignorant but strong desire.

I moved on to organizing puzzles, but his attention was secure. “Is that Dungeons and Dragons?” he asked as I sorted an alphabet puzzle (not DnD) from a Paddington Bear puzzle (… could we make a Paddington DnD??!) . “Can I play Dungeons and Dragons? I want to play Dungeons and Dragons. Mommy let’s play Dungeons and Dragons.” And if you’ve ever heard a five year old say “Dungeons and Dragons” over and over again in his irresistibly cute voice you can understand that I was powerless to say no. And so our DnD campaign began.

His first character was a human rogue named “I Squished Your Cake.” Over the course of an afternoon he fought a bunch of dragons (by which I mean he narrated doing something, rolled the plush d20, and was given results by me, the worst dungeon master of all time) and then moved on to the next activity.

A few days later, we were making a new character — an elf warrior named “I chopped down your house”, which transformed to “Chop Housedown” and finally landed on the lovable “Chop Downhouse.”

Of course we aren’t really playing Dungeons and Dragons as written. We don’t have character sheets and I certainly haven’t read any books. We use a d20 (or rock-paper-scissors if we are out and about) for success/fail conflict resolution (of course something interesting always happens on failure, I’m a modern parent). We aren’t keeping track of abilities or levels or any of that, just doing some fighty-make-believe.

At this point in our campaign, Chop Downhouse has lost his axe (he kept throwing it at monsters and finally a dragon just flew off with it), and so has his first real mission. He’s following a Sand Dragon’s tunnel to some promised treasure with his friend, the enemy wizard lizard turned friend, Quake.

Some children are very interested in world-building. Right now, our child is excited about throwing his axe and getting sweet treas’. (So far the treasure has been a magical apple that never runs out, a magical cheese that never runs out, and magical bread that never runs out. These are all good things.) Beyond the battling and the treasure, we will sometimes have a very nice conversation between his character and an NPC (again, with no voices because I don’t really DM).

All in all, I have been pleasantly surprised at how much fun I’m having playing our version of “Dungeons and Dragons” together. We share our creativity at the level that we can, inhabiting made-up worlds that we imagine in our own ways. We call it Dungeons and Dragons, but like all DnD, it’s something else that only exists within the experience of the players – a goofy little kid and his proud mama.

…

I live in terror of the day he learns to read and discovers that there are actual rules and maths.

In this Camp

Posted by Caroline

When we go camping but forget to pack any paper, does that keep us from gaming? No way!

Once again In This World helps us unlock our creative powers!

Introducing four new ways to camp:

World 1: World of Crab Camp, where we are crab creatures from the far future. We camp in the semi-flooded ruins of humanity and sleep in *shudders* sliming bags.

World 2: World of Dream Pod Ships, where we sleep away the long voyage to new planets to escape a dying Earth. We dream of camping so that we can develop the skills we will need once we reach our new homes.

World 3: World of the Great Camp Off, where we camp competitively. Best camper for World President!

World 4: World of the Ghost Mammoth, where we are ancient peoples, leaving our caves to camp out in the wilderness. You come of age when you discover something new, but beware the Ghost Mammoth, a mysterious monster in these days where we believe our scary camp stories and begin to weave mythology. Ghost mammoth – he’ll getcha!

Big thanks to Marc, Kelly, and Fina for making the magic happen!

In This World by Ben Robbins is on Kickstarter until June 20.

In This World

Posted by Caroline

One of the nicest things that I’ve been doing this year is getting a coffee at a very quiet cafe with Marc and playing a story game together. We are able to snag an auntie or grandparent maybe once a month to make this happen, and it’s always delightful. I’ve always been a big fan of the morning con slot, so the coffee games are a special treat.

Far and away my favorite game of the year has been In This World, the new gem from our dear friend Ben Robbins. I think I’ve played it at least 6 times in as many months. In In This World, you choose a topic, describe facts about the topic in the real world, and then make various imaginary worlds by changing and remixing those facts. It’s creative candy to someone who likes world-building as much as I do.

This weekend Marc and I were big cute dorks and took it to the meta level — In This World: Story Games.

World 1: World of Endless Role-Play

We started by changing “Story games aren’t about winning,” to “well, actually they are, and the way you win is by being the last to break character.” Starting a game was a big deal, because once you started being Eldrock the Elf, you couldn’t stop or you would lose. Started a game of Monsterhearts? Sorry, but every time you see Helen at yoga, you both have to pretend to have teen monster problems.

World 2: World of Worldcraft

This was my favorite of the worlds just for being cozy and a world I might actually enjoy. We started by changing “Players play characters” to “Players create worlds.” Story games were all only world-building games, and they always ended before a story began. Instead of playing out the story, a player might take the setting and use it to write a novel. Good vibes.

World 3: World of Bleed

And now for some yikes, in this world, players don’t play characters, they play themselves, and everything is a metaphor for real life. If I want to break up with you, my elf will break up with your elf in the game. And if you aren’t playing? I’ll record my elf playing with an NPC and send it to you. Yikes yikes yikes.

At that point our babysitting time was quickly running out, so we ended the game there, and went for a walk around the lake. But like all games of In This World, you can’t really stop thinking about it, so we made a bonus world on the move (no index cards babyyyyy we’re wild).

World 4: World of Jumanj-ish

In this world, what happens in the game happens in the real world. And designers don’t make games, they were unearthed from ancient tablets. But what happens in the game doesn’t happen to you, it happens to strangers. The players know it’s happening, they just don’t know to whom. But the godlike power is cursed, and the circle of who your game affects shrinks over time, first strangers, then friends, then finally, on your final game, yourself. oooOOOOOooo!

It was about an hour and a half of total play, for four very different and interesting worlds.

In This World, like all of Ben’s games, is expertly designed to get us exploring big ideas. But what I most appreciate about In This World is how it makes me feel that the magic of each and every game is us — people getting together and sharing our unique perspectives to make something new.

In this world, story games are joy.

In This World is on Kickstarter till June 20th, and is 1000% worth backing. Do yourself a solid and check it out!

In This Christmas

Posted by Caroline

#WhatWePlayed

In a game of “In This World” by Ben Robbins, you take the world you know and remake it, focusing on a central topic. We kicked off 2023 with a delightful quick game, and to celebrate the season we created 4 alternate versions of Christmas. Did things get a little spooky? …. Yes. And awesome.

To start the game, you choose a topic and make a list of facts about it, describing the real world as the launching point: Santa lives at the north pole, Christmas is about goodwill, Christmas is highly commercialized, etc.

But what if things were different?

In this world (1), Santa takes toys from children and puts them in the woods for unhappy children to find.

In this world (2), Santa walks among us (sus). He’s a quantum being present in all communities, always. And, uh, he eats one person a year. Better leave out your tribute…

In this world (3), it’s always Christmas, and Santa isn’t real so you’d better be ready for presents and carols every day. The Christmas magic keeps it fun and capitalism crumbles (yay!).

In this world (4) we hang the bones of our loved ones on the great Christmas tree and celebrate with ritual and tradition, singing carols to guide the souls of our dead back home.

Four very different worlds all coming from the same ingredients, just changed and remixed in interesting ways.

I obviously love world-building games, and “In This World” delivers quick, collaborative world-building that leaves you thinking about the worlds that you make long after the game is done. It doesn’t hurt that it’s very simple to play and runs very quickly.

It was a great game to start the new year off with, and although “In This World” is still in playtest, I’m looking forward to it being one of my go-to games of 2023!

The Big Bad

Posted by Marc

“Big Bad Con. A convention that never sleeps, especially when the fire alarm goes off at one in the morning. Backroom deals on RPGs, on-demand gaming, and the eyes of the titular wolf watching over it all. Nobody makes a move without the Big Bad getting a sniff. If you’re smart and savvy you can make a name for yourself, but one misstep and you’ll find out what sharp teeth he has.”

I had the pleasure of attending Big Bad Con a while back (October 27th-30th, 2022), and as part of my time I got to play two back-to-back Fedora Noir games with people I’d never met. I’ll admit I felt rusty–I hadn’t run a pickup game in person with strangers since… what, 2019? But I didn’t need to worry: Fedora Noir was ready to guide me.

The game handles like a dream. I literally opened the box, pulled the top instructional card, and was playing instantly. No struggle whatsoever. And did I mention the fun? We had fun. Lots of fun. There were laughs, dramatic moments, tense encounters, and everything else I love about story gaming. My players enjoyed the Hat/Detective banter and the way the Partner and Flame push the Detective in different directions. The first session–a classic New Hudson frame job–ended with the Detective utterly failing to exonerate anyone, including themselves. And in the second game, we played Atlantea City. Fish puns ahoy! My favorite moment was the evil monologue delivered by crime boss Maura Fishsimmons. Like any good villain, she revealed her true plans as she stroked the ~~fluffy cat~~ giant crab in her lap.

I knew going in that Fedora Noir was a brilliantly engineered experience, but now I know it packs a lot of fun into a short window. Our games clocked in at just over an hour and a half from start to finish. Perfect for a two-hour convention slot.

Thank you to all the players who gamed with me: Kat, Richie, Shervyn, Charles, Jill, and Maria. You brought the heat that fueled the fire, and with a game as combustible as Fedora Noir, it’s no wonder we had an awesome time. Grab a copy for yourself and find out what I mean!

There’s always another Kingdom

(Written by Caroline)

I don’t have the numbers — I’m not the spreadsheet guy in this game. Actually there are two spreadsheet guys (Marc and Ben, although I’m going to give the gold to Ben on spreadsheets), a sparkle who wears different cool glasses each week (Al), and a person (me) who apparently frames scenes with the fewest people in them, according to an aforementioned spreadsheet guy (2 is the right number of people for a scene folks. No questions).

So I’m not totally sure what number of sessions we’ve done (60 maybe?), or how many kingdoms we’ve created so far (8? I really could go count those now, but I won’t). But we decided to take a little break from our Kingdom 2nd Edition game to try out some things that had been on our to-play list.

Al is responsible for all this art. Blame them for how cute Flutterbutter looks as a Parish. (There are 131 entries in our Kingdodex. I think we have a problem)

After a very long 2 month hiatus (which included a spin-off fashion show game, see above), it was finally time to jump back into our Kingdom legacy game, Kingdomon. It’s Pokemon themed and it’s unsurprisingly amazing. You can read Ben’s write ups on it over at Ars Ludi and see some pretty cute fan art too. (We are the only fans of Kingdomon, despite how many times we’ve tried to make our friends and family listen to us ramble about this week’s Tappycat drama).

But we’d already made everything! There was no new Kingdom to create! Or so we feared. But the beauty of Kingdom Legacy is there’s always something new right around the corner. You can Microscope-it-up (as we say in the industry) and create big ideas across wide amounts of time, as everything else gets re-contextualized and made all-the-cooler.

So yeah, we found another angle to explore what it means to be in a community with Kingdomon (Kingdomon = Pokemon, keep up). We’d already done classic battle stuff, living in harmony with them, sports, middle-school scouts, Team Trouble, Starter Town, voyaging across the sea, and a hyper-neon cyber dystopia (with digital Kingdo!).

As Al and Ben and Marc goofed off about pretzels or olives or something, I raised my little hand. Boom! My idea: Kingdomon as religion. That’s right! We’re busting out the ancient temples to the Kingdo-gods! No one tell us they are just adorable animals because we are about to take this way too seriously.

And when we’re done with this kingdom? I’m not worried we won’t have another idea. There’s always another Kingdom.

Sunset in Santa Teresa

The air hums with energy as the sun sets the sky afire with pink and red. Classic 80’s tunes blast from the stereo of a passing convertible. The waves lap the sand in a steady rhythm. But all is not well in the beachside town of Santa Teresa, and the task of uncovering the truth falls on our Detective Pasquale (played by Morgan), his Partner Billy (Fred), his Flame Esperanza (Caroline), and of course his Hat (me, Marc).

fedora noir susnset in santa teresa

It’s a classic game of Fedora Noir, quick, fun, and full of betrayal. Not to mention some great Hat one-liners.

Our game opened (and would later close) with Pasquale alone on an empty street, looking out at the ocean and thinking deep thoughts. We then cut to a case in progress, where we learned that Billy was an intern (Partner: “Will I be getting paid for this?” Detective: “Of course.” Hat: “Absolutely not.”) and the actual go-getter of the operation, while Pasquale was a lazy layabout who let other people do his work for him. They actually made a great team, and when a new threat arose in town, they were on the case. Of course, Pasquale also had to contend with his former lover Esperanza, who wanted to get back together. Her past betrayals had hurt him too much to allow that to happen. Then someone went missing and the case landed in Pasquale’s lap. After a lot of following people around, getting accosted by drug dealers, and roughing up thugs, the climactic finale saw Pasquale and Billy sneak aboard a huge yacht and discover Esperanza at the heart of the crime ring. They got to leave with their lives, but not much else: Pasquale had to drop the case and walk away, tail between his legs.

There are many things that make Fedora Noir work well. First is the dynamic between the Detective and the Hat. Playing these characters is a joy because it’s basically tag-team storytelling. During this game, I’d suggest something the Detective should do, and Morgan would immediately and deliberately not do that thing. It created a lot of hilarious moments, but it can also make some serious dramatic tension when the Detective knows something but isn’t saying it aloud.

Second is the pacing. The game is set up in a number of chapters, and each one is carefully crafted to move the story forward just enough to keep things going, but not so fast that we don’t have time to learn about our characters — who are, in fact, the true focus of the story. In our game, every act fed into the next, and by the end we’d told a cohesive story almost effortlessly.

Third is the characters. As I mentioned, the dynamic between the Detective and Hat is good stuff, but the conflicted relationships with the Partner and Flame also add a lot of drama. In our game, the Partner was optimistic, competent, and big source of comic relief, while the Flame was very much the femme fatale, offering the Detective a chance to make it big if he’d only compromise his morals.

Fedora Noir is on Kickstarter for one more week. It’s easy to play online (like we did in this game) and perfect for a short, one-shot gaming session. I hope you’ll check it out!

Posted by Marc