Monday Musing #10

Wheels keep on Burning, Skyrealms and Warframes.

Good Monday Gamer,

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Burning up a One-Shot

Burning Wheel Con has returned for September 2023 in NY. I'll be attending! At past cons, the deal was all attendees needed to run one game. It quickly became a space where I played some of my most memorable one-shots and made incredible long-term friends. It's been some time since I played any Burning Wheel games. I recently ran a 4-ish session to have content to distill down into a one-session one-shot for the con. It's called 'Polo and the Orcs of Thunder Mountain.' Polo the Dwarf is on the run from Orcs sent to bring him back to the face Orc justice. When I have the time, I like to run a short series of a game and then use that to make my convention one-shots. I don't like the railroadness that one-shots can be, and I find doing it this way provides a small sandbox environment and plenty of hooks for me to extrapolate from instead of riffing whole cloth for a one-shot. I tend to run this one-shot across a few sessions. I like to re-incorporate previous sessions into the current session -like a game of telephone!

The Lifted Tech Stack

ICYMI, I gave a peek into the world of Lifted. This weekend, I did a lot of speculative work to nail down the Lifted Tech Stack. I'm leaning into the tech-aggressive setting angle. The technologies humans are leveraging against humans as well as the Lifted. Behold the holy trinity: Fusion Energy, Anti-Gravity Tech, and newly unbraked Emergent AI, plus a black swan tech event.

Returning to Jorune

The Skyrealms of Jorune roleplaying game pops up regularly in conversations with my friend Brendan. I'm responsible for getting him hooked. The setting is incredibly evocative, but the rules are horrendous. He didn't believe me and bought a copy to look...we're looking at some alternative RPGs to use. I haven't the foggiest. I feel like there's picking something to play a few sessions with, then there's using an RPG toolkit something like Cortex, Fate, GURPs, and playing the longer game. 🤷🏾‍♂️ You will hear more from me soon about Jorune.

TennoCon 2023

I attended my first TennoCon on XBox with my kid. He's a big Warframe fan. I like the lore and the open-world play, but I don't play often enough. I was fascinated by the "Con online via Xbox" concept!

See you next week!