Recently I returned to Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) after quite a bit of time away. It was the release of the Mac client for the game that brought me back—I’ve been hoping LOTRO would come to the Mac for a long time. Now that it’s here, I’m finding it fun and easy to dip back into the game now and again. (I’m not even high-enough level for the new Rohan content, yet, but I’m getting there.)

Back when I was last diligently playing LOTRO, or perhaps the time before that, I founded a kinship (like a guild) as a means of getting a private chat channel for me and my friends. I stewed and fretted over what to call the damn thing, though. I went back through quite a bit of Tolkien’s lore for Middle-earth, the expanded lore of the game, and thought about all the joke names for kinships that I’d seen come and go on my server. I ultimately decided that I wanted to be able to play with the lore a bit while also paying playful homage to LOTRO’s writing and quest design. I chose to call us the Boars of Evendim. (If you get the reference, please don’t spoil it here.)

I founded the Boars kinship years ago and many of its members have since scattered to the four winds of gaming. Even I tend to return to LOTRO in bursts, playing for weeks or months at a time, devouring content new and old, and then drifting away for a time. LOTRO doesn’t feel like homework or a time sink to me — I play it when I want to, taking to it like I might binge on a television series. Works for me.

When friends of mine came to the game, at least for a while now that the Mac client exists, I immediately invited them to join the Boars of Evendim. I wanted us to have a common chat channel. I also wanted a chance to experiment with more in-game roleplaying and try putting my backstory for the kinship into words. A few of these friends of mine are role-players with experience from both tabletop play and WoW. I wanted to get a better sense of how RP worked in the MMORPG environment… and I wanted to write a bit about Middle-earth. Instead of telling some of my friends the out-of-character reason for the Boars name, I promised to tell them the in-character reason for the name.

Then I promised again. And again. Then it felt like I’d need to actually tell a tale to live up to the promises I had made in-character in Middle-earth.

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“Whenever the true objects of action appear, they are to be heartily sought. Enthusiasm is the height of man; it is the passing from the human to the divine.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson in “The Superlative” in The Century (February 1882) (via)

This is a follow-up to an earlier post here, “To Do What, Do What?” In that post, I looked at some of what made Vincent Baker’s Apocalypse World (AW) a difficult text for me. I’d intended to write this post, looking at some of what makes Baker’s game exciting and attractive to me, much sooner, to share it as a counterpart to dispel some smoke and, toward fairness, draw some circles around some of what makes AW compelling and shiny to me.

Doing that briefly proved difficult.

The only reason this isn’t at Gameplaywright is that the first part was posted here, ’cause it was about me as much as it was about AW. So it goes.

I’ve taken the tack, here, of singling out just a couple of things I enjoy, for the sake of time, both yours and mine. By now I presume you, dear reader, care about AW to the extent necessary to read this stuff. If not, get thee to Google or wait for the next post. It’s coming along shortly.

So. What is it that I dig about AW so much that its mad elegance drives me crazy with envy? What is it that I wish I’d developed for games that I’m working on? I’ll pick just two examples: moves and principles.

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It occurs to me that I’d probably me remiss if I didn’t mention this here: My first bit of work for the Dragon Age RPG went live to today in a free PDF piece called Faces of Thedas: Tallis. This contains my interview with writer/actor/gamer Felicia Day, creator and star of the web series, Dragon Age: Redemption. The main character of the series, the Qunari/elf assassin called Tallis, gets complete game stats in this debut installment of Faces of Thedas, in fact. In addition to working on the third boxed set for the game, I’m working on more content like this—but I shan’t say much more than that.

As I said on the Green Ronin blog:

As a gamer who’s played a lot of RPGs adapted from TV, movies, and games, I always want to ask actors and writers about the characters they portray so their perspective can inform roleplaying at my game table. When I heard that I’d be the new shepherd of the Dragon Age RPG, just as Redemption and Mark of the Assassin were about to debut, I figured I had to pursue the chance to get Felicia Day’s insight on Tallis, a character she created. As a writer, actor, and a gamer, Day is a rare expert on how those roles overlap–and how they differ. [via]

So, there you go.