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Showing posts from January, 2015

The Deep Forest

The Dark Forest is a re-imagining of Quiet Year to try and remove perceived colonialism from the game and to focus on humanising the other. I'm not sure that what definition of colonisation is being used here and there is definitely some confused thinking in the author notes about the destruction of the Native Americans and decolonisation. There are some fascinating games to be made about this latter topic but this one doesn't deal with the issue from my understanding of the issue. Essentially this is a skin of the Quiet Year with the community being a collection of monsters who have lived through an occupation by humans. The humans have left or been forced out and now the community has a quiet year to build a new society for themselves and deal with the fallout of the occupation. I liked the Quiet Year and the new perspective seems more interesting than the old game with the addition of a difficult legacy at the start of the game rather than a struggle for survival. The no

The Hood and Inverse World

Apocalypse World hacks are kind of hard to read since the bulk of the content are the playsets and its really hard to understand what the game will be like just by reading through them. I also kind of wish that the playsets were broken out of the main game text since you need to copy or print them out anyway to play and they don't really intersect with the principles of play that guide the MC. The Hood is a hack that adapts AW to the world of crime. The players take on the roles of minor criminals (neither petty criminals nor involved in major organised crime). Rather than lurching towards the apocalypse the characters are trying to walk the line between crime gangs and the law. Each failure dragging their friends and family into danger and reprisals. It seems fine in principal but I don't really get what the emotional heart of the game is. Inverse World on the other hand is more of a skin of DungeonWorld that tries to strip away the D&D conventions from the original game