Yesterday, I played a second session of Trollbabe with Erik and Michiel, even more delightful than the first. ( Trollbabe . I dislike the title of the game, to be frank, but it's the only thing about it to dislike. Let me stress that the whole point of the game is that you're playing strong, independent women. With horns.) To give you an impression of the context, let me say that both Erik and Michiel are very good friends of mine, and that we've done a fair amount of roleplaying before, though mostly D&D. In fact, the two of them have played various editions of D&D almost exclusively, and neither had any previous GMing experience. That was about to change. In the first session, I GMed their characters Rolda (Michiel) and Vekir (Erik), who were together in a single adventure -- something that is not a given in Trollbabe . This time, we were going to do the same thing, but in addition I would also get to play a character, one adventuring at a different location. Mi
Looking forward to the text version. I've watched both this and the previous video and profited much from them. (I've played 9:05 before, and some of your games as well.) I'm not to keen on videos in general and very much prefer reading.
ReplyDeleteIt has been ages since I've read Tolkien, especially the Silmarillion. As this is a mix of mythology and history, might there be any conflicting versions of event in it? That could be a kind of compromise - not worldbuilding, but historybuilding. While there is a definite number of hairs on your head, is that also true for Alexander the Great's head (at a specific point in time)?
I agree that questions of what really happened (i.e. canonicity) are somehow naive. There is no "really", there is only the text. On the other hand, returning to you Poirot example: aren't mysteries exactly about what really happened? Traditional mysteries present an obvious story, suggested by the facts, and the "real" story, discovered by the detective. I think that's why there are so many mystery pastiches and rewritings of other fiction as mysteries - it wasn't really Macbeth, nor his wife (they were suspecting, and protecting, each other), but Banquo instead, who wasn't dead after all (hence his "ghost" appearance).
I recently reread Jane Austen's Emma and found out that there are is a theory, possibly bordering on fan fiction and not particulary well received by Austen scholarship, that the child delivered near the end of the novel, and about which remarkably little is said in the book, isn't really the apparent mother's, but of some other character. When exactly did Emma find out that her best friend was pregnant? Again a question of what really happened, or at least when. I think it *is* playing the game trying to come up with a good answer - as long as you accept that there is nothing that is not in the text and any discovered reality isn't really real.
I'm sorry, got carried away while watching, had to pause the video and add to my comment here. Maybe videos are better sometimes than text versions.