Dark Omen Games -NEWS

This review is in German. Thankfully, Google does an automated translation of German, so here’s the Mangled English version of the review.

…then you can read this review of Dirty Secrets. The author has indicated that it’s a positive review, so I pass it along.

Sam Chupp interviewed Chris Chinn for his podcast The Bear’s Grove on the issue of race and RPGs. Dirty Secrets was mentioned positively during the interview. This is a good thing. Crystal put a lot of effort into selecting a racially diverse group of photographs. She knew that, since we were addressing the issue of race with the game, we would need to be especially mindful of this aspect of the game. Glad to see that it was received well!

When we playtested my latest project, A Flower for Mara, last month, we videotaped the whole thing. I’m still working on assembling footage, but these are approximately the first half of the game:

A Flower for Mara Opening

A Flower for Mara Funeral Dinner Part 1

A Flower for Mara Funeral Dinner Part 2

A Flower for Mara Spring Scenes part 1

A Flower for Mara Spring Scenes part 2: this clip illustrates the use of “phone call” techniques to have two characters talking to each other on the phone. In our game, we ended up turning this conversation into two spotlight scenes, one for each side of the conversation.

A Flower for Mara Spring Scenes part 3: This clip illustrates the use of off-stage characters. Also shows the general mood of the evening, which was happy and not at all bleak. This is an important point, actually. We enjoyed playing the game. Sure, a lot of it was catharsis, but we enjoyed doing this thing together. Finally, you can see the feedback from the “audience” to the developing storyline. Cast members are perfectly free to make comments during the game, and there was a lot of talking in between scenes. This is a Good Thing; it showed me that everyone was engaged in what was going on.

A Flower for Mara Spring Scenes part 4: The exchange beginning around 2:10 shows an excellent example of Endowment in play by Whitney (portraying Ruth). (Endowment is giving another character or object an attribute of some kind.) It was fairly subtle, too. It took me a little bit to realize that, according to Whitney’s statement, Mara had stolen Ruth’s boyfriend and then married him. This wasn’t part of anything preplanned, and it is an excellent example of what makes this game work.

A Flower for Mara Easter Dinner Part 1: I was particularly pleased with a shocking explosion from Jana (starting around 8:00), set up by Jennifer as a result of the preceding soliloquy. This is a good example of how one player can use soliloquy information to help set up another player’s actions. In addition, Jennifer’s statement that that pizza was for dinner was another excellent use of Endowment.

A Flower for Mara Easter Dinner Part 2

Watching these has been pretty neat, since it reminds me of playing the game that night. Ever have a game that was especially meaningful to you? This was one of those games. Thanks again to everyone who was a part of it.

Anyways! Hopefully seeing this footage gives you an idea of how A Flower for Mara will play. I need to playtest a couple more times (and some external playtesting would be great), but I think that I will soon be ready to write this sucker.

Over on Story Games, someone put together the “Play This with That” roleplaying challenge. You choose your rules system and get blindly assigned a setting. You must then go play a game combining those rules with that setting. Some rules hacking was allowed, but only as much as necessary to make the two fit.

Well, Jesse just weighed in with his report of Grey Ranks played with the Dirty Secrets system. As I’m playing Grey Ranks right now, this is doubly cool.

Dirty Secrets gets a mention on the latest Voice of the Revolution. Brennan Taylor of Indie Press Revolution briefly reports on his play experience, starting at 35:41.

“In films murders are always very clean. I show how difficult it is and what a messy thing it is to kill a man.”–Alfred Hitchcock

I was interviewed at GenCon by the guys from Canon Puncture about setting creation. This has finally become available on the Net here. The conversation starts around 15:53. I really appreciated the opportunity to be able to talk to Chris and Rich. Plus they bought the pizza, which was amazingly cool of them.

So, thanks guys!

(Once again, I think that I’m talking too quickly.)

Dirty Secrets makes Fred Hicks’ Top 5 RPGs of 2007 list. Thanks, Fred!