#41: Riffing and Weaving

I. Dear Reader,

This week I’m excited about figuring out something I specifically enjoy about games. I’m a big fan of the Manyfold Glossary – I think it was one of the first things I gushed about on this newsletter – but I’m not sure if this *specific* feeling is there. It’s the moment when a detail is improvised at the table and then goes onto take a life of its own. It’s the feeling of taking something that was definitely made up right there on the spot and then weaving it again and again into the story so that it becomes a pillar of the entire game.

I just played a Trophy Gold game where a player wanted to create an illusion of a person who had recently tripped and fell on two crossbow bolts. They asked for a Devil’s Bargain. The GM (Ty) offered that the soul of the recently-deceased person actually gets trapped in the illusion. I offered that the spell miscast – creating the intended illusion but also creating one of the caster …and the soul enters the illusion of the caster. (I did this mainly because I wanted the bargain to not interfere with the intended goal of the roll and felt like the first illusion being sentient would do that.)

Okay, so my bargain was accepted. Suddenly, we had a walking, talking, living (?) illusion of our teammate. Almost, immediately, the illusion begins mirroring our teammate. Repeating the words he said like an annoying child. At this point, it was only funny. Then the illusion points at our teammate and calls him the illusion. This was such a fantastic move by the GM – it suddenly went from being funny to being Very Weird. Because the illusion was now corporeal. It could bleed. So who was the real Elisio? And from there, it only got weirder. Ah, I loved it.

And outside of riffing on jokes with your friends, it’s an experience almost unique to RPGs. So yeah, we got a good thing going on here.

Improvisationally,

Thomas

II. Listen of the Week

Lesson learned! I’m going to start pacing my recommendations for this section. Last week, I had two and this week, I have none!

III. Links of the Week

From the Gauntlet forums, a thread of best practices for GMs.
Ema Acosta, designer of Crescent Moon, writes about how to use Miro, the whiteboard app, to play RPGs.
From reddit, an analysis of bestiaries and monster manuals from various famous RPGs to discover which monsters they all tend to have in common.
On the Conversation, a lovely article on worldbuilding games: “These mechanics encourage players to think about alternate futures and radical possibilities. To effectively build worlds, players must be able to question their assumptions about our world, to consider other perspectives, to think about power, and to contend with the eventuality of their world’s end. Emotionally, they are encouraged to find pleasure and fun in diversity, messiness and confusion.”
On a blog dedicated to the Cypher system, an interesting post about the GM’s role in resolving narrative moments and then moving to the next one.
There is a Fate SRD youtube channel with some videos on how to learn to play and GM Fate.
TTRPGkids is a website dedicated to RPGs that you can play with kids and they have a very extensive list of games.
A playlist of short videos explaining the core mechanics of 30+ games by Paul Stefko.
A couple of other fun RPG-related newsletters I discovered this week:
- Cloven Pine Games have a monthly newsletter where they write about the games they’ve played that month and talk about what they liked and disliked.
- TEETH RPG (yes, the title is in all caps) has a weekly dispatch with play reports and other musings. This week features a nice write-up about CBR+PNK. Paint me jealous of their sessions!

IV. Small Ads

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Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. I’m half-man, half-beast, half-journalist, half-game designer.

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