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“Game Night” by Jonny Nexus
It’s said that the gods play games with the lives of mortals, but it’s never really specified what games they play. Turns out it’s a high-fantasy tabletop rpg.
The All-Father makes a very good long-suffering GM, but the question rises of why he’d get this group together in the first place. (And smacks of the first game he’s ever actually run.) The Warrior is a whiny, kill-em-all powergamer who doesn’t fit with the rest of the group; the Lady and the Dealer seem to actually be into their characters and advancing the plot; and the Jester obviously makes some wacky choices for his own amusement, but he’s also clearly interested in being in-character. (And the Sleeper is even more useless than Marc the Red.) 90% of the disagreements are between the Warrior and the rest of the party. I suspect if he’d run the game with three of those players and, perhaps, the Actress, Mistress of Man’s Drama, he’d have had a much closer experience to what he wanted.
Nexus has an issue with running jokes into the ground; the party’s tendency to bicker and the lack of time in the Celestial Plane being among them. I suspect that a bit of judicious editing to trim down the repetitive bits and throw in a few more wordplay and wit (or even to build out the characters a little more beyond their stereotypes, given the length of the book) would have made this much stronger.
I’m also vaguely considering stealing the setting for a Numenera game—a world split in half by an impassable mountain range, bordered by infinite ocean on each side, with an impassable desert in the north and a frozen tundra to the south; but with a perfectly good explanation for exactly why. The entire creation—well, okay, there are a few important questions left unanswered—is explored throughout the book, and clearly this setting was something Nexus cared deeply about.
Overall: This isn’t bad. It has some clever bits, but it suffers the same problem that The Gamers: Dorkness Rising did, in that it’s three times too long for the concentration of jokes in it.
The All-Father makes a very good long-suffering GM, but the question rises of why he’d get this group together in the first place. (And smacks of the first game he’s ever actually run.) The Warrior is a whiny, kill-em-all powergamer who doesn’t fit with the rest of the group; the Lady and the Dealer seem to actually be into their characters and advancing the plot; and the Jester obviously makes some wacky choices for his own amusement, but he’s also clearly interested in being in-character. (And the Sleeper is even more useless than Marc the Red.) 90% of the disagreements are between the Warrior and the rest of the party. I suspect if he’d run the game with three of those players and, perhaps, the Actress, Mistress of Man’s Drama, he’d have had a much closer experience to what he wanted.
Nexus has an issue with running jokes into the ground; the party’s tendency to bicker and the lack of time in the Celestial Plane being among them. I suspect that a bit of judicious editing to trim down the repetitive bits and throw in a few more wordplay and wit (or even to build out the characters a little more beyond their stereotypes, given the length of the book) would have made this much stronger.
I’m also vaguely considering stealing the setting for a Numenera game—a world split in half by an impassable mountain range, bordered by infinite ocean on each side, with an impassable desert in the north and a frozen tundra to the south; but with a perfectly good explanation for exactly why. The entire creation—well, okay, there are a few important questions left unanswered—is explored throughout the book, and clearly this setting was something Nexus cared deeply about.
Overall: This isn’t bad. It has some clever bits, but it suffers the same problem that The Gamers: Dorkness Rising did, in that it’s three times too long for the concentration of jokes in it.