Bemvindo Ricardo! Iām curious, how did you find this place?
I think I saw it linked on mastodon.
2 Appreciations
Hi! Iām Lorenzo (he/him) but I mostly go as The Kernel in Yellow in RPG spaces because my name is really common and people mix me up with other people with the same name.
Iāve known @Froggy for a long time and weāve had our good share of disagreements on RPGs, but we started realizing the similarities of our play philosophies in recent years. Iām another user of the Locanda (as most of the Italian contingent here).
I started playing D&D when I found my fatherās old Basic (in the Italian edition) and totally misunderstood the rules. Itās been a fun experience of which Iād like to do some analysis now that I have more experience, but it was also nearly 20 years ago so I only remember a few moments. After that I moved to D&D 3.5 as it was being published in Italy. Then Iāve tried more games than I can remember, but Vampire: Dark Ages has always had a special place in my heart (it was also my longest campaign as a player, 9 whole years).
A little before the pandemic I fell in love with OSR games and their mix of weirdness and simple rules. Theyāre currently my most played games and I often bring them to conventions near me.
Iām also an admin of an OSR-oriented forum, the OSR Pit, and I sometimes translate open licensed stuff along with @zeruhur and @LordPersi. Iāve helped both of the already-mentioned Italian cons TPK and Froggycon.
As for my favorite games (Iām doing a list because doing the grid on mobile is hard):
- Maze Rats (which Iāve translated in Italian)
- Cairn
- Hell4Leather
- On Mighty Thews
- Vampire: The Dark Ages
- Changeling: The Lost
Recently, Iāve mostly played Cairn and Maze Rats.
5 Appreciations
Hi everyone!
My name is Johann and I started playing in the late 80s with a buddyās homebrew system. It broke down pretty soon, but I was already hooked and have been into DIY ever since.
In the 90s, I played a ton of Germanyās RPG juggernaut, Das Schwarze Auge, as well as the usual suspects (Cyberpunk, MERP, Vampire: the Masquerade etc.) and a few evenings of (A)D&D, which I dismissed back then.
After several long campaigns with D&D 3e/4e, I was swept up in the OSR and radically and systematically changed the way my core group played ā via DCC and its wonderful character funnels (which helped me to stop pulling punches) & unpredictable spells (which helped with lingering tendencies to railroad). I blogged about my quest to become a āKiller DMā for a while.
I also like reflecting upon our hobby and improving my play and was active at rec.games.frp.advocacy, the Forge, Story-Games and the OSR blogosphere, though not always under the name of Johann. Iāve played quite a few smaller games (e.g. Primetime Adventures, Ten Candles, The Pool) but not nearly enough!
Iāve designed lots of stuff for myself and my friends, as when I unsuccessfully tried to make the Rolemaster critical hit tables usable for Shadowrun etc. or tailored a swashbuckling game for my best friendās (proudly nerdy) bachelor party.
Iām currently developing my first game for publication, In the Realm of the Nibelungs (or Im Reich der Nibelungen, as itās called in my native German). You can check it out here.
Due to various real life responsibilities, I suspect I will mostly be lurking, but I like what I am seeing here!
Thank you, @Froggy, for setting up and maintaining this space!
9 Appreciations
Hi,
Iām Per, Danish oldtimer, expat since 2002, but was heavily involved in the Danish RPG scene in the 80s and 90s. I have written a bunch of convention scenarios, mostly for Fastaval. My early RPG history goes D&D, CoC, Shadowrun 1st, Ars Magica, Kult, etc. Tonnes of systems, lots of dissatisfaction.
Then I discovered The Forge via the game Sorcerer. I was very active there and later on Story-Games.
These days I mostly play solo or online due to lack of FTF options. I do have a group of noobs I run some games for, lately Legacy and Mothership (yes, Iām also trying to play around with that OSR thing).
I have a now more or less defunct blog (https://darkplaces.wordpress.com/) with some of my games, and recently started a substack writing about solo play (https://perfischer.substack.com/), feel free to peruse both.
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Welcome, @Johann and @perfischer!
Per, itās been many years since weāve played together (we met back in 200X and played Polaris as well as Land of Nodd, a game I was developing - I tried to find the online report about that, but I canāt Google it, it seems). If youād ever like to play a game again, perhaps we could something online - it would be a pleasure.
Johann, your Old School Trinity is one of my favourite series of posts about old-school play, and one of my first recommendations for people interested in that playstyle (along with my own guide to the Fellowship of the Bling, which I posted here on this forum recently).
3 Appreciations
Hi everyone! Finally, I overcame some personal struggles and found the time and space to join this new space!
Iām Matteo - passionate about RPG, cats, and so many other stuff. Iām a (video)game designer by day and ever-GM by night. I really like to talk about rules, systems, and the way to convey a feeling or an image with them, playing around the table. So, a couple of years ago, I started to publish some small games (like many of you, I wrote games for my entire life, but now I like to share them with players worldwide).
The games of my youngest era
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The last games I played and enjoyed
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Welcome, Matteo, itās great to have you here as well.
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Hello everyone!
My name is Andres Nicolas āNicoā Zarta, and Iām really happy to be here. I have been playing role-playing games for the past 18 years, and have enjoyed a wide variety of different experiences and styles of roleplaying. Iām originally from Bogota, Colombia but I have been living in New York State/City, USA for the past few years.
I was invited by my friend @Paul_T, who for the past 5 or so years has been kind of a mentor figure when it comes to exploring different roleplaying paradigms outside of the more traditional systems. In my exploration of āstory gamingā, which is the paradigm I adhere to the most lately, I have come to fall in love with PbtA games, particularly those that follow closely the model of implicit conflict that AW outlines.
Lately I have also been exploring the OSR scene and its been really fun! Iām happy to live in an age where different RPG cultures can be appreciated and enjoyed for their differences.
Iām really passionate about the theory of RPGs and a voracious reader of all things The Forge, AdeptPlay and Lumpley Games. I will probably engage in conversations that address any topics that are closely related to those āschoolsā of thinking.
I have lately played Apocalypse World, Old School D&D, Ironsworn Starforged, Avatar Legends, The Wolf Kingās Son and Root RPG. I have also been getting into journaling games and I really enjoyed reading @PaulCzege 's āThe Ink that Bleedsā.
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What a kind introduction! <3 Welcome, Nico. Really nice to see you here!
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Sorry for being late to thisāmuch to do! But Iām really glad youāre here, @Ouroboros-Binary02. Your history sounds really interesting and I hope you find it easy to share your experiences.
Hi, My game alias is DeReel. I enjoy games like ForTheQueen, Svart av kvalā¦ and Venture and I write one page storygames that I publish on itch, where you can find my storygamer life story and artgames where I express my relationship to writing games.
I also spend too much time skimming new games to find new ideas, and talking RPGs on discord 
Iām glad to see a community with people with the same specific interests as me 
5 Appreciations
Hi, gang! Iām Canyon, aka PigDog. They/them pronouns. Just last week I moved to Columbus, Ohio, in the US, so if you know anyone who games in the area, please tell me!
I started playing rpgs when I was 12, just in time for the release of d&d 4e. I started by running it for my father, who couldnāt be bothered to learn most of the rules and always tried to ābreakā encounters. He had no experience playing rpgs but he was fascinated by their limitless potential. When I first played in a ārealā session, run by somebody else, I was pretty disappointed at the rigid structure and lack of creativity I saw. After that I ran games for my friends, sort of following the rules but mostly doing our own thing. This lead me to game design, and by the time I was in my mid-late teens I was writing my own games, only ever having played one āproperā session of d&d. (Thatās how I saw it at the time, anyway.)
I found out about the community called the OSR sometime around 2015; somehow the first I heard about it was when I had Fire on the Velvet Horizon recommended to me. Iāve mostly played challenge-focused d&d knock-offs since then. Just finished running (and still a player in) a Wolves Upon the Coast campaign. Currently also running a very low-key campaign for close friends and family which has morphed from OD&D to AD&D 1e over the course of about a year. In the near future I hope to run a very loose campaign with āoral tradition onlyā rules: just the procedures āwe all knowā, no specific edition, any character from any system welcome.
I have had a great time playing Monsterhearts, though itās been a while since Iāve played it and Iām not sure how Iād feel about pretending to be a horny teen nowadays. My best session of all time was a horror one-shot in Donāt Walk in Winter Wood. And Iāve enjoyed the few sessions of Mothership Iāve played as well.
As far as current projects: Iād really like to get into a phd program in philosophy this year. Iām writing a zine about wolves upon the coast with my co-gm. And Iām workshopping a two-player game about a vampire and their prey.
Finally, I help run Old School Table-Time, a discord server dedicated to open-table play.
6 Appreciations
Oh, and Iād also like to get some more experience playing ānarrativeā games, preferably with someone more experienced than me who can offer live, constructive feedback.
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Welcome, @pigdog! I was really impressed by your ability to handle hard personal topics on Discord, so Iām really glad to see you here.
Regarding ānarrativeā games, Iāll fish an answer @Hans gave you on your Adept Play post where you said the same thing:
The more I play across a variety of games the more I think received categories that get used on the internet as if everyone knows what they meanālike ānarrative gameāāare worse than meaningless. They actively obscure and damage meaningful discourse.
I say that not to chide or correct you but just to say that I think we need to be on better footing regarding what weāre actually talking about. Rather, we can safely dump discussion of ānarrativeā play and mechanisms and just talk about the actual things and how they operate.
Generally Iām in agreement and I donāt see any point in taxonomising roleplaying like that.
However, all of that aside, I think what you mean is that youāre looking to find people to play games outside of your comfort zone, and youāll likely find them here. I myself am available to play anything youād like, time allowing.
1 Appreciation
Yo! @Froggy, this place is great. I suppose nowās a good time to introduce myself.
Iām Hans. Had my first roleplaying experience in 2007, GMing a published Eberron adventure in 3.5 D&D for some high-schoolers I was working with at the time. Very shortly after this I discovered Dogs in the Vineyard and a range of other games, self-published and not. The fact that there were non-genre games really piqued my interest, as I read a ton growing up, but not much in āgenre fictionā. I dove in and had a ton of middling experiences with a few mountaintop highs, thinking that maybe thereās something to this roleplaying thing, I want there to be something to it, but Iām not sureā¦that was sort of the vibe. All mixed up with anxiety as I was just coming out of fairly hardline religion and was taught growing up that D&D was satanic.
I continued diving in pretty hard. I played a ton of games, helped host and run weekly one-shots at local gamestores, helped organize tracks at conventions, spent a lot of time on Story Games, a little time on the Forge near its end, and then some time on the short-lived Adept Press forums post-Forge. Favorites around this time were: Freemarket, 3:16, Silver & White, Polaris, InSpectres, Burning Wheel. The auteur model of the game designer was attractive to me, and me and my friends were always working on games. The social status of being a good designer was pretty high in these circles. I published a game about Eminemāstill proud of it, actually. I thought design was the real art.
I mostly took a break from play or even paying attention to what was āgoing onā in roleplaying (if we can say keeping tabs on Kickstarters and new games is what is āgoing onā, which it definitely isnāt) from about 2014 to 2017. The last few years Iāve been getting back into it in a big way, and Adept Play has been a huge part of that. Along the lines of what @sam_1234 said, I find it contains the only consistently cogent orientation toward and discussion of roleplaying on the internet. Ronās course āPeople & Playā is highly recommended to anyone who is engaged in this activity we call roleplaying.
Game design as a discrete activity no longer really interests me; I want to play, play a lot, and get better at play. Like Claudio I view design as artisanship. It is wonderful to create tools but the point is their use and their use should be centered. Play is the activity; design is auxiliary.
Iām 100% allergic to knowledge-destroying nonsense labels like traditional and indie and story game and narrative game &etc&etc&etc&etc. Same goes for taking seriously the notion that a group of consumers or fans is a ācommunityā. Iām not saying this place canāt be a community, to be clear.
Iām from the U.S. and have lived my adult life on the west coast. In late 2022 I escaped to Germany and am currently in intensive language courses. I really look forward to seeing what the English- and German-speaking roleplaying scenes are like here. I suppose at some point I will have to play Das Schwarze Auge. 
Most recent things Iāve been playing (tried to use pics but it didnāt work):
- Sorcerer
- Burning Wheel
- The Pool
- A Viricorne Guide
- Worlds Without Number
On my mind:
- The Pool: Generation Ship/Retrofuturism
- Gamma World 7e
- Beast Hunters & BH: Bloodcarved Edition. I have both of these and plan to do a deep read and comparison of them, and then decide which one Iād like to use.
- My Life With Master
- 4e
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Very interesting, Hans! Iāve read Silver & White with some fascination, and would love to learn more about it or play it sometime (if you have some experience with it, I invite you to start a thread!). Welcome!
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I hear that, Canyon!
Iām not allergic to such terms, and I know what you likely mean. I enjoy sharing tools and techniques for this kind of play goal; perhaps at some point we could chat and/or attempt some experiments. For instance, @Ouroboros-Binary02 and I were just reviewing a lengthy chat we had on the topic some years back - I think it can be really fruitful (and fun!) to look at various tools we have each developed to make this kind of thing work, and the resulting play tends to exciting as well as educational.
3 Appreciations