The Doug Alone

On the Nature of Calendars and the Geographic Location of an Insignificant City Growing in Power Imagine, if you will, we are floating a mile or so over a relatively insignificant place, geographically speaking. Below us, there is a decently sized island at least a week of sea travel from the various centers of Allansia's society.  By Allansia's calendar, it is the Month of Reaping of the year 288 AC. Earthsday to be precise. Night time shadows the Forest Ick.  It is a time where across the ocean, great heroes have overthrown mighty villains like Zagor and the Lizard King while others then go on to let loose ancient stone giants to ravage the lands east of Blacksand. However, where we currently are, floating over the Island of Phillia, the War of the Wizards had only the slightest of impacts. There was no "Chaos" for there to be a "After".  The Bad King Phillic and his rebel kingdom was for sale and no one bought it. At least his inability to gather dark fo...

In my previous post, I shared a possible first/quick session to learn about the basic core concepts of Mythic Gamemaster Emulator 2nd Edition . However, by the nature of the beast, that ends up being a lot of words and might not be the easiest document for people who like things more at a glance.  Thinking about that, I've created a companion document (thanks, Canva) that generalizes it more, uses fewer words, and formats things so the key words pop out harder: Doug's 7 Steps to Mythic in PDF It takes the same seven steps with essentially the same advice but there are fewer words for each. I am releasing it CC-BY but really most of the core content is taken from Tana Pigeon's original advice and flow (I did alter the order in which certain concepts show up).  A Rough Gameplay Loop As part of that document, I included a page at the end that you can get in the PDF but it is meant to show how I use Mythic  in a gameplay loop to generate my scenes and content. Eventually I'...

After posting this, I ended up making a shorter, more visual version of this post and shared it as a pdf at:  The Seven Steps in a More Visual Format + Gameplay Loop . You might want to glance there afterward or even first and then come back to this one. The Problem of (Solo Play) Freedom I see regular posts with people asking some variation of the question: "I have Mythic , now what?" By extension, the question can be read, "How do I roleplay by myself?," but that's a broader a trickier topic.  A slight glitch towards answering the second question is that there is not one answer. If you ever read the strange web-comic of some years back,  A Softer World, post 391 asked the question "What can you do with a drunken sailor?" and then answered with, "Man, what can't you do with a drunken sailor?"  And, that, in a nutshell, shows one of the central problems with communicating the core of solo roleplay. You can play roughly whatever you want ...

"L'aurore et la nuit (Dawn and Night)" by Henri Fantin-Latour Previously... While trying to solve the mystery of The Returners, Guardian Arden Ulet met Vyryon Marel. Marel said his family were searching for a place of power and its distinctive obelisk that once belonged to the Marel family. Arden agreed to help. Scholar Izzia Kor and Probationary Guardian Natalia Wilson have located the obelisk and learned it has been broken and sold to merchants up north. Before they track it down, Arden wants to find the place of power itself. After a few delays, Arden is joined by Jalmar Dax—Arcane Order Beastmaster—and Izzia and Natalia and head south into the Shallow Plains. About The Bloody Hands The once great Khelia Empire has crumbled due to a long war between mages (The Troubles). After five generations (roughly a century and a half) a new technology has been developed: The Veil. Its anti-magical properties allow the remnants of the empire to rebuild without the...

tl;dr version Over the months of adapting my playstyle to the blog, some of the "Dougness" of my playing got increasingly lost. This post talks about trying to reclaim that and establishes the four baseline techniques I use to communicate my sessions to folks through this blog: Play it in my normal style and then write up a recap (the original flavor) Try to play it in-line with each session being an hour-ish spent playing and writing a blog at the same time A fiction-first style of play where the mechanics are minimized and the focus is more on presentation and development of "chapters" A style of play that embraces different modes (Gamemaster, Player, Lore, Commentary) to give the different elements each a fair shake to build up mental gaps In this post, I will look at those different elements and talk a bit why a return to #1 while retaining #4 (and some #3) is likely the best options for me.  It also has a longish example of the kind of roleplaying mistakes I li...