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2006-08-22 : Finding our games by Meguey
1001 Nights is for sale through my game company, Night Sky Games.

Breaking the Ice and Shooting the Moon are for sale through Emily's game company, Black and Green Games.

2006-02-05 : Initials and Handshake by Emily
Hi there,

Welcome to Fair Game! What's your name and what initials do you use for marginalia comments? Anything else you might like to share?

2006-05-13 : Movie list by Meguey
Here's where I want to jot down movies I want to see. Comments and *short* reviews, no spoliers please, are welcome. Feel free to reccomend movies, too, with your review.

2010-07-31 : Dread House
posted by Emily
Dread House is done! We started working on this last Fall and ran it at a JiffyCon and over Solstice evening. It's a game for kids and adults, inspired by Dread (the one with Jenga!).



You play kids exploring a haunted house--the Dread House--and pull from the Tower to see if you get scared out before dawn. It's fun to watch kids scare each other as their characters run around the haunted house--and even more fun to watch the kids spook out the adults!

Dread House will be available at GenCon, at Design Matters Booth #2100.

2010-07-21 : RPGirl Zine 2010
posted by Emily
The RPGirl Zine 2010 is coming! It will be at the IPR booth at GenCon, and is available now for pre-order.



This project has brought together women players, designers, writers and illustrators from all walks of the hobby, from distant corners of the globe. We hope you enjoy the fruits of our labors!

2010-06-21 : Thresholds
posted by Emily


It's summer solstice today. Summer bonfires are burning. People dance through the longest day, the light lasting longer and longer as you head north, until the day never ends.

This day is symbolized by the rune Dagaz, also Daeg or Day. From the rune poem: "Day, the glorious light...it is beloved of men, a source of hope and happiness to rich and poor, and of service to all." In our fields, the strawberries are ripening. The flavor of Summer Solstice is sweet and delicious.



The Rune also symbolizes a doorway, the turning point in the year. The shape is like an hour glass on its side, tilted once the sands have run out. The year changes here. The lengthening light begins to shorten. It's a time of change, as we move from sowing to reaping in the harvest, and for celebrating bounty.

Solstice brings great change to me this year. Today I head down to NYC to help Eppy pack up the remainder of his things. For now New York will be a beloved destination, with our home base in Massachusetts. On Thursday, Thor's day, we head back north together, following the light and new sweetness together. On Friday, Friga's day, we begin.

2010-04-27 : Outrunning the big guys
posted by Emily
Apparently we know some things that mainstream publishers are now racing to figure out.

The New Yorker ran a piece yesterday on the impact of the Ipad and Kindle on book publishing. It describes the dance of market cornering and pushback that's going on right now between the traditional paper press, and online distributors like Amazon over electronic books. The costs are neglible, but what price is the consumer willing to pay?

Amazon with its giant market share of online book sales wants to cut the standard price of $9.99 down to $2.99 by going directly to authors. The Kindle give them direct access to readers without the messy intervention of printing presses. Now the Ipad offers publishers a similar opportunity to go straight to the consumer, allowing them to offer ebooks to all without the use of a proprietory product like the Kindle or Nook. This brings up questions for them all:

Tim O’Reilly, the founder and C.E.O. of O’Reilly Media, which publishes about two hundred e-books per year, thinks that the old publishers’ model is fundamentally flawed. “They think their customer is the bookstore,” he says. “Publishers never built the infrastructure to respond to customers.” Without bookstores, it would take years for publishers to learn how to sell books directly to consumers. They do no market research, have little data on their customers, and have no experience in direct retailing. With the possible exception of Harlequin Romance and Penguin paperbacks, readers have no particular association with any given publisher; in books, the author is the brand name. To attract consumers, publishers would have to build a single, collaborative Web site to sell e-books, an idea that Jason Epstein, the former editorial director of Random House, pushed for years without success.
From "Publish or Perish" by Ken Auletta.

2010-04-20 : Kicked in the Dicebags
posted by Emily
Chris and Jonathan were kind enough to invite me to come have a conversation with them and their artist, banzeus. We had a wideranging conversation that covered some of the rather off-color, explicit territory they specialize in. And watch out for the spoilers!

Episode 56: Spoilers

2010-03-31 : Geek Girls Rule! Interview
posted by Emily
Winding the clock back a bit, last summer before GenCon I got to speak with Mickey from Geek Girls Rule! We talked about RPGirl, the work of some of my local women game designers and did some reflecting on our experiences. The interview is up now. Check it out, and other shows with neat folks like Mikki Kendal, founder of Verb Noire and an all star review in Attack of the Girl Gaming Podcasters 1 and 2.

Geek Girls Rule! Podcast #14:
http://sirriamnicast.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=599210

2010-03-16 : Dreamation 2010 Games
posted by Emily
Time for some Con updates. I got to go to Dreamation this year. Back in that lovely hotel, for another good time. I've never made it there on Thursday before. It seemed so empty of people I know. It took until Saturday to feel like the chock-ful-o indie gamerness that I'm so used to from Dreamation. But it was quite fun throughout.

Tam Lin
Julia and I brought our new jeep/larp hybrid game What to do about Tam Lin?. (Have to update the preview sometime soon.)Tam Lin and Janet, characters from traditional ballads, come to the Court of the Faery Queen, where charcters from other ballads have taken eachother to court over their misdeeds, to plead for Tam Lin's freedom. It is a monster of a game: 100 pages plus. More on the theatre larp side right now. We'd like to write a true jeep version. But it has lots of murder, betrayal and unsavory love, so it is true to the ballads we based it on. Play went well. We were missing several characters due to our player count, so we dropped one of the cases. The timing however was just right that way, so we will likely keep it that way in the final version. We had a lot of fun! Especially due to an amazing Great Selkie portrayal. "In the world of the Selkie, everything is...different!"

Flower for Mara
I ran Seth Ben Ezra's Flower for Mara for the first time. I played at GenCon two years ago, and loved the game. Very difficult topic: Mara has died, and the game deals with the grieving of the family members left behind. The story deals with scenes at family dinners over the seasons of a year (the funeral dinner, Easter dinner, Mara's birthday in the summer, Christmas), and in between we have focus scenes on each of the characters to see how they are dealing. However, in these scenes Mara can appear, as a ghost or memory. A tangible reminder. Julia played Mara, and was a "nice Mara". (I was a "mean Mara"). Major issues revolved around the alcoholism of Mara's husband, played by Frederik, and the attempts by her parents (Jason Morningstar and Marev) to protect Zoe, Mara's daughter (played by Anna) from him. The players jumped in with further flashback sequences, such as when Jason's father character had Frederik's character in the emergency room early in his relationship with Mara, lecturing him on how he was heading down a self-destructive path. Unfortunately, I missed some rules: we didn't do flower monologues, where each character says goodbye to Mara. And the personal griefs of the players that were attached to the eponymous flowers were present, but not everyone knew that you were supposed to share them. But overall, a good, powerful time.

Pinkwater!
One of two tabletop freeform playtests I was in. Remi is working on a game based on some young adult novels of Daniel Pinkwater. Stories in which a young nebbish of a character gets involved with some mysterious adventure, then learns to rely more on his/her own self with the help of some friends. A very promising playtest, which went about half-way through the game. The first part was structured well, and flowed even for people for whom the whole style of play was new and unusual.

Each player has a role that may encompass different characters that they will play (except for the player of the hero), and as you shift characters amongst you, the flavor you bring to play of that character reflects the type of role you take. For example, Michele and I took the "Friend" role. So over the course of things, we played fellow students, teachers, parents, etc. But our take was to have these characters help the Hero. Another player played the establishment, and so when she played the parents, their role was to block the Hero and to give him hurdles to jump. Our game had a young boy new to an urban school try to be cool and fit in. He found a friend in a young city girl who ventured with him to a mysterious tea shop, where they indulged in teas that expanded their consciousness.

This game ended up having a confrontation between the kids and the Hero's parents about the nature of the relationship between him and his friend, but it seems like we veered a bit from the desired path for the game, which is to go into another dimension or mysterious world. Remi got lots of good experience and feedback, which I am sure will help him finish out this excellent game.

Prehistoric Ties
The other tabletop freeform playtest. Dave Cleaver is working on a game he wrote during a Game Chef Contest that uses illustrations drawn by Vincent Baker. They are cute little drawings of cave people! The game is about a cave family, trying to take care of their cave baby who takes off on crazy chases into danger. It's very silly and fun, but also has intercut scenes where the family deals with their issues with one another. In our game, Jason, Rachel and I were the mother, older sister and father respectively. Jason's character had an issue like "My mate is not too bright" and that framed the family conflicts. Mother gained sister's admiration from me (which I'd had at the start) by doing amazing rescues using her noggin, and I eventually grew to respect her smarts. One issue that came up was that during the family scenes it was hard to focus on the child, so I think Dave may begin the game with a chase scene. This will put more emphasis on the madcap nature of the game too, which seems like a good thing. I look forward to seeing this finished too! It seems quite close.

Previous Occupants Another terrifying jeep game from Frederik Berg Ostergard and Tobias Wrigstad. But in this one all you have to do is play out murder and mayhem, rather than risk your heart, so it's quite accessible. ;) A ghost story, dealing with two couples who happen to stay overnight at the same hotel room, at two different points in time: one in the 80s, one in the 50s or 60s. The earlier couple's stay ends in murder, and then these two characters "come forward" in time and possess the later couple. This is accomplished by a simple technique where the player of the older couple can "tap in" and take the role of one of the other characters. When they do so, they bring in paranoia and anger into the sweet new love of the others. Terry and Julia took the roles of the older couple, and brought new horror to the realms of marriage. Courtny and Will played the younger couple, a pair of to be engaged born again Christians who fall prey to temptation and have sex out of wedlock. It was gripping. We even had an audience, who came in a bit late, but who made it there before the end of act 1 and who got to enjoy the ride. They shared that their terror was enhanced (perhaps) by the fear of being asked to jump in and take part in playing! Hmm.. have to keep that in mind.

All in all a great con. Though sign ups were a bit odd at first though--all three of the games I ran had too few players signed up at the start. And it's only by the divine intervention of Robert Bohl that I ended up getting players after all for the first one. After that there was momentum and we got enough folks to play. Though we unfortunately had to merge two jeep crews, and Frederik only got to run Previous Occupants once. I heard about other games that had similar issues. I guess everyone wanted to try to play Fiasco and Swords with out Master. :) Thankfully it all worked out.