Spotten On A Whole New Level

Ever play Credo, the card game from Chaosium where you play out the Council of Nicea and determine the future path of Christian orthodoxy, assembling a creed in the process?

That’s small potatoes compared to The Last Supper, an entry in the Iron Game Chef 2005 competition.

The Last Supper must be played in a single session and incorporates a potluck supper. Each participant should bring one or more dishes, and they are encouraged to coordinate for a satisfying meal. The GM will provide the beverage.

One participant – the GM – takes the role of Christ. The remaining participants – the players – each play one of the twelve Apostles. Of these Apostles, some – the evangelists – will go on to write the Bible. Others – the proselytes – will travel unto the corners of the world and spread Christianity to the masses. And one – the traitor – will betray Christ to the Romans and initiate the crucifixion. Without a traitor, all other efforts will fail.

The story of the “real” Last Supper should be considered simply one example of how the game might turn out, just as our world should be considered an example of how the world might be shaped by Christianity over the millennia which follow this event. There is no guarantee that Judas Iscariot will be the traitor, nor that any other disciple will follow the destiny we see for him in our world. Ultimately, the point of the game is to interpolate the doctrine of the church which will form around Christ, and to simultaneously extrapolate the effects of this doctrine on the world to come.

Credo was really cool. Sounds like this would be too.

(“Spotten,” [thanks to Jonathan and James for spelling correction in the comments], is an admonitory word older Reformed people of Dutch extraction in West Michigan sometimes use to describe speech that threatens to go over the line, or actually falls over the line, into blasphemy. “Hey, that’s spotten’.”)

UPDATE: Hours after I write this I happen to see a post on the author’s blog, describing a playtest of the game — and noting that the final rankings for the game chef contest are out — and the Last Supper was one of the two runners up! Neat.

There are far more cool ideas and designs on the Iron Game Chef entry list than made it into even the finalists. To enter that contest, and make a serious effort, is in a real sense to win.

Fictional Language Created for Xbox Game

Tho Fan, via James. Cool article, giving the whole history of the language and its creator.

I used to dabble in conlanging for roleplaying game cultures. What killed me as a conlanger was getting stuck in the idea that I needed to know everything about how real languages work to do it “right.” I ended up endlessly studying real-world linguistics, and never actually creating anything.

I would advise anyone starting a creative project to learn as little as possible about the field before diving into it. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing — too much knowledge is lethal.

Haroog! Ey, Woimy’s back

Haroog! Ey, Woimy’s back — if you read Dragon magazine back in the late 70s or early 80s, you may have seen a strangely wonderful fantasy comic about dragons, imps, and ogres with New Jersey accents, and a hillbilly cyclops.

This site collects (low-quality but still readable) scans of dozens of Wormy pages. I remember as a 13 year old child being fascinated and befuddled by this one… completely out of context, it was the only issue of Dragon I owned for a long time… Look at that last page! LOOK at it! THAT is fantasy art!

The creator of Wormy, and a lot of the best art in the original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons books, David A. Trampier, disappeared in 1988. There was apparently considerable doubt in the gaming community as to whether he was even alive or had met some sudden end, though most commentary on the issue I see on the web holds to the notion that he is in fact alive and just rendered himself unfindable and uncontactable by anyone who knew him through gaming. One of those weird mysteries of roleplaying games.

Anyway, I’m gonna have to browse through all these and find out exactly what was going on with Wormy…