The Shapeshifter's Duel

I recently had the privilege to take part in an in-person playtest session of The Seven-Part Pact, the upcoming game by Jay Dragon.

The Seven-Part Pact is a game for seven players, each one taking the role of a grand archwizard with phenomenal cosmic powers, sharing a sacred responsibility to hold together the fabric of reality. It exists at the intersection of RPGs, parlor LARP, and board gaming. It has no GM, instead distributing authority and responsibility between everyone. It's simultaneously cooperative and competitive. And it is so massive in scope that no one participant could ever hope to perceive the whole.

I genuinely cannot provide a sufficient play report, and I know that's not something most people read anyway. Instead, I'd like to share just a small slice of my experience playing it.

Look Before You Leap

Credit: Alan Lee

This is a post about a very subtle facet of spotlight management. I consider it to be one of the most important techniques a GM needs to master, and is very often one of the primary differences between the GMs I've enjoyed playing with and the GMs who I haven't. Yet I also never really see anyone talk about it, perhaps because they don't even realize that they're using (or not using) this technique.

So, what's the big secret I'm here to expose?

R&L: A Sporting Fight

This is a post about our wuxia game that's currently in development. You can check it out here.

Pertinent to this post, I've also released the beta version of the Catalogue of Friends and Foes, which is this game's bestiary. It's now available to download on the itch.io page through that link. Today I want to talk about how we aimed to calibrate combat difficulty, and the challenges that came with that.

R&L: Character Sheet and Cheat Sheet

This is a post about our wuxia game that's currently in development. You can check it out here.

Every player needs a character sheet and a copy of the cheat sheet. Click those links to download them for free. These are, as with everything else in the beta, currently unfinished.

This one was all me. It was the single biggest roadblock of development. I refused to even attempt a playtest until I had a decent draft of the character sheet and cheat sheet to offer my players, which I didn't end up accomplishing until several years after we began the project. I certainly ought to have prioritized these tasks, but maybe if we had worked on this game like it was a full time job (rather than a side project we pick up every few months) then I could have gotten these done sooner.

Piece of advice: just make a character sheet using Excel or Google Sheets for now. You can always make a proper document later, but a sloppy spreadsheet will make playtesting way easier. Wish I had thought of that sooner. Oops.