Sweet AgathaTabletop Tuesday: Narrative Improvisation | Submitted by costik on Tue, 02/23/2010 - 13:51. |
Sweet Agatha is an ambitious product in many ways. It's a two-player, limited scope, narrativist RPG; it's a literarily ambitious attempt to marry themes of love and loss to an interactive product; it's a beautifully designed (from a graphic perspective) product that gets destroyed in play.
Grey RanksTabletop Tuesdays: Child Partisans in Warsaw, 1944 | Submitted by costik on Tue, 04/14/2009 - 00:01. |
Grey Ranks is an indie, limited duration, narrativist tabletop RPG set during the Warsaw uprising of 1944 against the Nazis.
To recap the history: the Polish resistance, which owed allegiance to the British-supported Polish government in exile, rose in 1944 as Soviet troops invested eastern Poland and advanced toward Warsaw. Soviet troops halted their advance scant kilometers from Warsaw, and waited until the Nazis had utterly destroyed the uprising, advancing only afterward, ultimately installing their own puppet Communist regime. The British and Americans asked Stalin permission to use airstrips behind Soviet lines to airdrop supplies to the Poles, and were refused. Stalin thus gained twice; the resistance injured the Germans, and the Germans wiped out any possibility of organized Polish resistance to the establishment of a Soviet-controlled regime in Poland.
As a mile high wall of dust and moldering flame devours mountains behind me, frenzied stamped stumbling at my feet, meteors knocking out a stegosaurus, boulders crushing eggs and trees, I take the instant to thrash the neck of a small lizard, consuming it whole, and gallop toward the distant call of salvation. The meteor has hit. I have a window of seconds, no mistakes. I am a velociraptor, an agile predator. As I attempt to beat Dino Run on Insane difficulty I'm listening to footage from the latest World Economic Forum, discussing the role of private equity and hedge funds. The irony is not lost.
