I just finished the second video of the Fall of Magic actual play series that I am editing. Fall of Magic is a game written by my friend Ross Cowman that's on Kickstarter right now. And it's doing really well! The whole game is screen printed on a 5 foot scroll, so it's a piece of art in addition to being a game. I'll also be writing one of the lost islands for the game if it gets to that stretch goal.

The video is similar in style to the Life on Mars actual play video I made for Ross. My goal with these videos is too keep them watchable and entertaining while still giving an honest portrayal of the actual experience of sitting at the table. I try to edit out any lulls in the conversation or narration, or any parts where the camera is a bit too shaky, without removing any of the content of what people were saying. Unlike the Life on Mars video which I filmed and edited, the Fall of Magic videos were actually shot by Ross and I think he did an awesome job.

I also filmed another game of Fall of Magic which Ross is editing, and the way we are trading off on roles makes it feel like this cool collaborative project. I'm excited to see those videos too when they come out. I've been thinking about starting a Patreon for making actual play videos like this for other people's games, in addition to more promotional stuff like the video I made for Second Skins or the one I made for The Quiet Year, so if you would be interested in having me make a video like that for you, let me know.

I had this dream last night where I was at a story gaming convention at a hotel. An ex was there (one who in real life never played story games). A friend of hers comes over and it's someone I know, a girl who maybe I saw once a year at conventions. She was familiar in the way that I knew we had hung out before but at the same time I had no firm memories of her. She seemed to remember me better than I remembered her which made me feel a little guilty.

We all go out for dinner and... at some point she turns into a cat. I could tell in the dream that she just had decided she wanted to be a cat so she became one. A little black house cat. There was nothing strange or silly about it.

Fall of Magic Actual Play part 1

I'm currently working with Ross Cowman on a series of videos of a game of Fall of Magic played by some good friends. The game is currently being kickstarted here, and is also an awesome work of art in itself, printed on a 5 foot long scroll. The next part should be out sometime in less than a week. Check it out!

Broken Picture Telephone at ECCC 2015

Last Year at ECCC I was having trouble interacting interacting with the artists and I had the idea to play a game with them. It worked, I ended up meeting and talking to a bunch people and it was a lot of fun. So this year I did it again.

Picture Telephone is a game that has been around for a long time, no idea how long. It's been known by many names, Drawception, Telestrations, Exquisite Corpse, and Eat Poop You Cat are just the ones I know, there may be more names I've never heard. The way you play is one person starts by writing a description (you can start with a drawing too, if you like, it works the same way.) It could be a description of anything, doesn't matter what. Then the next player reads the description and makes a drawing of it. The player after that only sees the drawing, and writes a description of it. Play continues like that, with each player only seeing the work of the player who went before them. At the end the whole game is revealed to all the players and it's usually pretty hilarious.

There are two websites that I know about where you can play this game online, one is broken picture telephone.com and the other is drawception.com. There is also a boxed version I've never played called Telestrations, but you can easily play it yourself with some scraps of paper and pencils and a decent sized group of people.

Most of the people who played this year were people in the artist alley, and I brought back a couple artists who played before but most of them were people who hadn't played last year. Aaron Diaz started it off and I had Jeph Jacques (who started last year's game) draw the extra last panel for the game that started with a drawing. I ran two games simultaneously so each artist could draw for one game and describe for the other one.  It took me over 6 hours to get all the drawings finished. I planned to do 20 artists but the hall was closing after I got 18, so I ran off to get Jeph to finish it.

A big thanks to all the artists who played, I just do this for a fun, as a way to meet the artists, and my hope is that they have fun and feel like they made a connection with the other artists they played with, even if just in a small way. Everyone who played this year and even the people I talked to who didn't want to play or couldn't were wonderful to talk to and made it a blast for me.

So anyways, here's the games! This time I posted them in multiple versions so people could more easily view them on different devices. The first is a composite image of all the turns from each game in one big image, best for viewing on a computer. There are high res and lower res versions of each, but even the low res version is pretty big. The high res versions are mostly there in case someone wanted to print one out as a poster or something crazy like that.

The other galleries have all the turns as separate images, so you can download them individually or scroll through them more easily on a phone or other device with a small screen, instead of dragging around on the big image. Cool right? Also that way the artists or anyone else can download copies of their own drawings or just their favorites. I always hope someone gets a tattoo of one of these... If you don't like those galleries it's also embedded below the break, but the link versions are much bigger and nicer. Anyways, here's the links!

Big Composite images  

Separate Images Game 1   ------   Separate Images Game 2