Continuing my little experiment in reviewing little-known RPGs, past and present, I'd like to go in a direction directly opposite of my
last review. In that I introduced a game that was in all ways completely different from most RPGs that people in the hobby are familiar with. Intead it is, as I put it in a comment, "RPG meets collaborative fiction with a dash of improv".
Today's game is nothing of the sort. It is three perfectly ordinary things:
1. It is a free game and almost militantly so.
2. It is a joke game, or, at least, it started that way.
3. It is a so-called "Old School Rennaisance" game (and arguably the first actual such!).
So why am I reviewing a game so ordinary? Because, naturally, it is in no way ordinary!
The game (and indeed, to a degree, entire game line) that I am reviewing today is the game
Mazes & Minotaurs (
M&M) written by Olivier Legrande. If you've compulsively followed the link provided you got a taste of the rabbit's warren that is the secret world of
M&M. If you didn't, let me give you a quick history so you can understand the joyful, wonderful madness you're about to face.
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This is an experiment. I'd like to start reviewing little-known RPGs, past and present, as a way of introducing concepts and ideas that are not known at all in the mainstream of our hobby and are often barely known even among the more … shall we say "obsessive"? … elements.
(Yes, I include myself among the obsessives.)
The first game I'd like to review is a came by a
small-press Canadian publisher called
Spark
Spark is a decidedly non-traditional role-playing game. Because of this I cannot work from assumptions that most would share. Instead I will be using a form of critique I first saw in Goethe's writings when critiquing theatre. In brief, I will be answering three questions:
1. What was Jason Pitre, the author of
Spark, trying to accomplish?
2. How well does he accomplish this?
3. Was this a goal worth accomplishing?
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