Spider Queen

I think we think about adventures and hooks wrong. It struck me recently, when writing about illusionism , that we use hooks all the time in games where they really aren't warranted - we use hooks to disguise the buy in for a game in the narratively-focused style, trying to make it appear as a sandbox. Let me explain. A lot of narrative-focused campaigns (I even want to say "most") start with a quest hook: Someone comes up to you in a bar and gives you a quest, or bandits attack the town, or you get a message saying that the king is dying, would you mind awfully blah blah blah. By "narrative-focused", I mean campaigns where the GM has prepped a plot they want the PCs to follow - not a bad structure in and of itself, as I'll discuss. But these campaign openers annoy the hell out of me, because they're empty scenes: They look like they have some meaningful choice in them, namely the choice to take the quest or not, but there isn't actually a decision h...

Yikes, what a title. Save it for the book, am I right? This is quite a long one, as it takes on quite a few points and blog posts. But there are some insights here, both from others and, I hope, from me. 🕷 Authenticity The Glatisant rolled around again, and fed me a slew of new blog posts. Chasing them down the rabbit hole, I found a discussion of FKR and OSR methods of play that focused on the interesting concept of authenticity. The best way to define authenticity is probably in contrast to its opposite, illusionism. This concept, from Hack and Slash, is exemplified by a technique called  the quantum ogre : The players go left, they face an ogre encounter; the players go right, they face the same ogre encounter, because it's what the GM has prepared. Even if you haven't heard of it in those terms, you'll probably have played at a table where the technique was used. The idea is that the GM has crafted an experience for the players, here involving an ogre encounter, and t...