Yudhishthira’s Dice

Push Volume 1 is now on sale.

For those of you living under a rock, Push is the new journal of RPG esoterica, design, and theory that was put together by Jonathan Walton. The first volume has essays by the inimitable Emily Care Boss, Eero Tuovinen, and the badass John Kim, as well as games by Jonathan and Shreyas Sampat. It also has guest commentary by the cool kids: Moyra Turkington, Jessica Hammer, Annie Rush, Paul Tevis, and Victor “I’ll kill your gazebo” Gijsbers.

Oh, and me. But don’t let that stop you from checking it out.

(And you have no idea when writing “RPG esoterica” how badly I wanted to write “RPG erotica.”)

Right now Thomas is interviewing Mo over on his blog, Musings and Mental Meanderings. It’s quite an interesting read for those of you who may not have heard Mo’s gaming history.

I’d like to call special attention to her second reply where she talks about her experience with “soap” play live on stage — and the way that their blocked scenes resemble and do not resemble scene framing, scene targets, and that odd and illusive form of authorship in which people still create both character and story despite not being in directory control nor having final say over the shape of the story. It seems, to me, to point to a divide between authoring your character and authoring the story that has been under explored to this point. I know that it would explain a lot of why I can’t be comfortable playing in trad games while I can GM them with no problem — I am not a good author of character, only a good author of story. So when I can’t author the story in a moderately direct way, I choke. Mo, otoh, has a perfect background for authorship of character as primary and is used to indirectly pulling the story through character focus — which may be why she has a harder time GMing.

Anyway, my blathering speculations aside, it’s interesting stuff. Check it.