Lucrécia

Do we lose something when we disregard "trad" or "pop" game design?

Is there some potential in those approaches, some appeal, that we could use artistically but is kept captive and wasted by corpos?

Could we even do that or something like that, when only corpos seem to be able to publish games with those characteristics?

"Era of Silence" is a game that takes a lot from pop games, examines their assumptions , discards what it finds useless and takes their own spin in the rest. Skirmishing tabletop games may be something our framework struggles with, but hey, let's try to do this.

First Part of our critical analysis of Era of Silence here: https://t.co/8S3gdodp8X

We are used to the idea of utopia as an imagined place. It’s often a community located in an alternative, fictional reality; on earth, or in another universe. A made-up world, where the plot twist is often that although this place seems like paradise, it is really built on lies and horror. The stories we tell ourselves are full of cautionary tales that not only is building paradise an impossibility – even attempting to build it is dangerous and hubristic. Aim high, and you will fall further.

If it’s not a projection into a made-up world, utopia is an idealised vision of the future, a manifestation of a political or religious project, a blueprint for how we should all live our lives – and one day, if you would only join the party, or the church, perhaps we all will. These, like the literary utopias, are usually abstract intellectual exercises, rather than concrete attempts to forge a new community. But what if you actually tried to build utopia? How do you go from a fevered dream, an aspirational blueprint, to concrete reality?

The Village Against The World

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Reader, Issue 7 of 197X is here! In Raia we venture into the isolated lands of a dying people, trapped between the borders of two empires and forgotten as the world moves on. What is there left to do for a people that are lingering dead? What do you do after the revolution is not going to work and has moved past you? What can you accomplish before becoming a footnote in the histories written by those responsible for your genocide?

Part I starts with one of the members of System 4 gone missing while operating in Spain. This is a very tense and delicate operation, as Spain is both NATO supreme command and a "de-fascisting" fascist country allegedly transitioning into a constitutional monarchy deeply hostile to everything the cybernetic socialists stand for. Still, the call has been made and our heroes answer, ending up in a quite unexpected place...

Get your copy of that issue here!: https://cgapodcast.com/main-feed/71-raia-i

I revisited the original articles on the power fantasies of necropolitics in roleplaying games, touching on some topics that despite their importance, would make the original article too long, confusing and dilute its message.

I go through queer necropolitics and how it manifests in roleplaying and the formation and nenewel of the Imperial identities through the Other in less obvious ways of death and camp-form.

More complex and confusing from the hegemonic culture, is how fascism is a confusing Other and takes over necropolitics in liberal necropolitical subjects.

Finally, we confront war-machines and how when all your existence is war, you can reclaim some measure of personhood through violence against the systemic violence enforced on you.

This in depth at: https://open.substack.com/pub/splitparty/p/power-fantasies-part-2-extra-fantasy?r=28eyi&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

In this off-week, I found myself thinking about the machines that are Franchises, what they make, how they operate, how they consume. After finding they operate in a Franchise Logic that is reproduced in other topics we have been digesting for a while at Split/Party, I think about the machine and once I get an idea of it think about our artform.

How do franchises interact with tabletop roleplaying? What do we need from Franchises? What Franchises wants from us? How different is the machine when harvesting from us?

These musings and more at: