#id highly recommend playing it especially if you love competitive team building

[jojolimons]

augh i cant believe it took two months, but im finally at the end of the current build of rejuvenation

[mindstormpress]

Illusory Sensorium ran a game of Barkeep and their writeup is one of the clearest signs that the hard work we put in was worth it.

Here's the recap. I genuinely was laughing out loud a few times. Highly recommend: https://illusorysensorium.com/b1-wand-of-embiggening/

If you want to delve into the design theory of Barkeep, keep reading! ⬇️

When we were working on the book, we came up with a sort of mantra for the encounters: Is it sticky? Is it toyetic? Do the NPCs have means, motive, and opportunity? Is there information, choice, and impact?

That's a lot of jargon, and it's been synthesized from across multiple sources. Prismatic Wasteland summed it all up here:

Sticky means that the encounter isn't something the characters can avoid. It sticks to them.

Toyetic came from false machine as well, but also from a post now lost to time from Rebecca Chenier. Basically—will the players and GM want to pick up and play with the encounter?

MMO is just a way to conceptualize NPCs in a simple, understandable form.

ICI is from Bastionland. We can't make informed decisions without information, and there's no point to making decisions if our choices don't matter.

Building the encounters meant looking at each of them carefully and considering those foundational elements. Not EVERY encounter needed every single thing. In fact, with the way WFS wanted to write the book, each encounter had to be relatively short and packing a punch.

A really really sticky encounter didn't need to be as toyetic, and a really fun and interesting encounter that the players would NEED to investigate didn't need to be all that sticky. Everything is a gear of a different size that turns the whole engine.

Illusory Sensorium thinks that they ran the game "wrong" and I disagree. They used the tools provided by the book and had fun! Mission Accomplished!

But one thing they point out very early on is how they "trusted" the encounters in the book as written. The very first one they got is quite simple: 54 skeletons in a conga line, labeled like playing cards.

Incredibly toyetic, not sticky. But the players immediately joined in!

They could have moved on, but that situation was too tantalizing to skip. The rest of the game unfolded from that first encounter, and was filled with shenanigans. The work we put in—hand crafted encounters—worked out!

I'm incredibly proud of the work everyone on the team put into Barkeep, from the writers, artists, and fellow editors. I'm especially proud that people are playing the adventure and having fun. People playing the stuff you've worked on and made is the best feeling as a creator.

Thanks for reading. There's a lot of links in this thread, because I love tracing the history of things. It's no surprise that blogs are the home for so many of these ideas—word of mouth and common practice are easily lost forever when not documented!

The bloggies, a celebration of rpg blogs, are happening now! I've got a post in the running, and I'd love it if you voted for it. My competition is FIERCE (and I recommend all the nominated posts as reading material!)

Vote for RANSACKING THE ROOM today!