Additional Actual Plays

In my first post about other bloggers' actual play reports, I asked my readers to nominate any play reports they knew about that I might have missed. I also put up the call on Google+ and MeWe. I've also kept my eyes open for people talking about play reports, and I've watched for new blogs posting play reports. This exercise also jogged my memory about a few that I knew about but had forgotten. The links below are in the order I received, found, or remembered them.
 
 
FM Geist recommended the sex, drug, and ultraviolence-filled urban adventures over at Last Gasp.
 

 
 
Jack Shear recommended the Blades in the Dark play reports over at Fictive Fantasies. That link should take you to a campaign overview page, where you can first find links to all the worldbuilding done in support of the campaigns, and then links to play reports from six separate campaigns set in the same world.
 
 
David Wilke recommended the session reports over on his own Anxiety Wizard blog. It looks like he's sent his players through a variety of LotFP adventures, including World of the Lost, Deep Carbon Observatory, and Red and Pleasant Land.
 
 
Michael Bacon suggested the play reports collected in the Thursdays in Thracia campaign over on the Bad Wrong Fun blog. Unsurprisingly, this is a campaign exploring Jenelle Jaquays' Caverns of Thracia megadungeon, apparently using Necrotic Gnomes' B/X Essentials rulebooks at the table.
 

   
 
Doug M recommended his own Smouldering Wizard play reports. That link goes to a master list of campaigns, each with their own set of reports: exploring the Endless Tunnels of Elandin using Holmes' Basic, visiting Larm using Labyrinth Lord, a campaign in the Ruined Hamlet of Blixter using Mutant Future, and OD&D campaign on a Quest for the Dwarven Mine, and another OD&D campaign collecting the Chronicles of Nolenor, a one-shot Witches of the Dark Moon game using Swords & Wizardry, and another Swords & Wizardry game set in Ravendale.
 

   
   
Andreas Habicher recommended Papier und Spiele, where he led a four-part play-by-poll game exploring The Spider Pit, using Maze Rats rules. Unfortunately, these posts aren't tagged, but Papier und Spiele is a new blog, so these are the only reports on there right now.
 
 
Seeing that play-by-poll campaign reminded me of some other things I'd forgotten before. I mentioned Blog of Holding last time, but I forgot to mention the Mearls campaign widget he has in his sidebar. Hereticwerks also used reader surveys as the basis of their long-running Bujili campaign. In addition, Hereticwerks has a few other actual play reports that I forgot completely when I was writing my first list.
 

 
 
John recommended his own Wandering Gamist play reports for his Adventurer Conqueror King campaign. John's reports put a statistical overview of the session right up front. These have traditional categories like XP and treasure, but also how long he spent playing the session and prepping beforehand, and exactly how much within-game time elapsed inside the dungeon. More traditional narrative summaries, anecdotes, and post-mortem thoughts follow after all this.
 
 
Bryan recommended Olde School Wizardry which ran a Dwimmermount campaign. Of special note is that many sessions in this campaign (which have their own tag!) were run with middle-schoolers as the players.
 
 
Aos has restarted his Metal Earth blog after a bit of a hiatus, and he's posted reports about session 2 and session 3 of a B/X campaign set on Mars. Currently these aren't tagged. If you like his art, you can also check out his Cosmic Tales comic. Tales of the Grotesque & Dungeonesque also has a few reports of from his time playing in Aos' Mars campaign.
 

 
 
The impending demise of Google+ has encouraged people to resume blogging after a hiatus, post more on their blogs, and even start new blogs. For the record, I think all this is great, but it probably can't take the place of a centralized location for aggregating commentary on blog posts, gaming discussion, and friendly non-gaming conversations among the small number of people who have gaming blogs and the much, much larger number of people who read them. That said, you can find a list of OSR blogs here, a list of non-OSR gaming blogs here, and Ramanan S of Save vs Total Party Kill has put together a file that you can load into an RSS reader for an instant OSR blog feed. (I don't know who started the OSR one, Jack Shear started the non-OSR list.)
 
Anyway, as a result of all this activity, I noticed or took a second look at some blogs I either didn't know about last time, or didn't realize were posting play reports.
 
 
Weird & Wonderful Worlds ran a Shieldbreaker campaign. He also has a few reports from his time as a player in Throne of Salt's Danscape games.
 
 
I don't know where I first saw everyone on this list, but I do know where I first saw Underground Adventures. Wizard Lizard was posting play reports directly into MeWe's Into the Odd community, and I suggested he should start a blog, and he did. He's using Into the Odd's rules to run his players through the Barrowmaze.
   

 
 
Tales of the Rambling Bumblers has an old Elves & Espers campaign that seems to be set in a fantasy Victorian city using Savage Worlds rules. You also have to love anyone who uses old Lego mini-figures both as miniatures and as the photo for the blog header.
 
 
Michael (who recommended "Thursday with Thracia") didn't recommend his own blog, Buildings are People, but I did notice that he's running a Formalhaut campaign using Gabor Lux's Echoes from Formalhaut zine.
 

 
 
I noticed that Fallen Empires is running a campaign that visited the Maze of the Blue Medusa and the Gardens of Ynn. (Ynn seems to be a pretty popular destination these days!) Isaak is using a list-of-accomplishments format similar to the Wandering Gamist. I'll confess it can be a little difficult for me to tell what actually happened in most of these sessions.
 
Carapace King has a couple campaigns worth of reports. Dikes Fall Everyone Dies takes place in a horrible, Hieronymus Bosch-ian Holland, while his new Ben-Dagra campaign sounds reminiscent of Yoon-Suin.
 
 
How on earth did I forget Judge James' Living 4 Crits blog? He doesn't tag his posts, but almost the entire blog is play reports, most of them using Dungeon Crawl Classics. James also does a great job linking to the previous reports in each series at the beginning of each post and to reports from other campaigns at the end of each one.
 
 
I also remembered that Superhero Necromancer a couple of campaigns in his own Rainy City setting. The Rainy City exists at the end of the world, where it's always raining because the wall separating the Prime Material Plane from the Elemental Plane of Water has sprung a leak, and so the world is slowly flooding. Literally every spell, monster, and magic item that exists is unique, and in the first campaign, the players are wizard thieves trying to get the good stuff while the getting's good. In the second campaign, the players are all parliamentarians in some kind of wizard's parliament.
 
 
Dennis Laffey from What a Horrible Night to Have a Curse both runs his own games and blogs about being a player. He's running his own campaign based on Ars Ludi's West Marches ideal. He's also played for several years in another GM's Vaults of Ur campaign (where he plays a Sleestak, no less!)
 
 
In retrospect, it should have been obvious to me why it's mostly Game Masters who post play reports online - it's because it's mostly Game Masters who keep blogs. Chris P is actually a rare counter-example (I think) because as far as I know, he only plays in online games, never runs them, but he does keep a blog where he sometimes talks about it. I've actually played alongside Chris is like three different open-table games; he's a very canny player who, to me, exemplifies what people are talking about when they write paeans to the wily players of yesteryear. In one memorable session, his character wore a treasure chest as a backpack - and eventually revealed that it was a cursed or magically trapped chest, which he opened to unleash the curse on an attacking monster. The chest had some kind of treasure in it which he had never recovered, because it was more valuable to him as a magic beam weapon. Among the play reports, you can also find a link to a lengthy Google Doc that describes his sessions exploring the Colossal Wastes of Zahar.
 
 
Chris Wilson of Journey into the Weird ran a game that ended in a (near) TPK, and wrote about it. So far this is his only play report, there could be more to come.
 
 
Roger suggested his own blog, A Life Full of Adventure. He's mostly been running Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, but appears to have recently started a 5e game.
 
 
Beloch Shrike is back! You may recall that my previous post started with me being inspired by Beloch posting some play reports. Unfortunately, almost immediately after that, the Papers & Pencils blog went away for awhile because it got hacked. Fortunately, it's back, and Beloch has continued his series of posts looking back at his old Dungeon Moon campaign. He's also written a post-mortem for his just-retired Fuck the King of Space campaign. I find his insights about what worked well and what he would do differently in the future very valuable.
 
 
Nate Treme from Highland Paranormal Society has a couple play reports and player art associated his own In the Light of a Ghost Star campaign.
 

 
 
My friend Peter posted about a game of John Stater's Tales of the Space Princess he ran for his family. So far, I think this is the only play report on his blog, but it sounds like it was fun.
 
 
Finally, and most recently, Kyrinn S Eis found the Dragon's Breakfast blog, which turns out to have play reports for a hundred-session-long nautical campaign set in his own Far Isles setting. It looks like he's also gearing up to start a Classic Traveller campaign, which certainly has enough material to go a hundred more.
 
 
I'm sure there are more blogs out there that host play reports, but I'm willing to call an end to my part in this little experiment. It was fun hearing from so many people about actual plays that they like, and interesting to rediscover parts of my own sidebar that I'd forgotten.
 
I recently had a friend start playing D&D 5e with an apparently terrible GM and she nearly quit the game after a few sessions of torture. I shared some of my favorite 5e play reports with her, some imaginative, weird, artistic games, and the next time I talked to her, she said she was quitting her GM but not quitting the game. She wants to play good D&D more than ever.
 
I'll leave off with a call-to-arms from Ben L of Mazarin's Garden (another one I forgot last time), who wants us all to remember the games we played on Google Plus and Google Hangouts:
 
"For the love of God, if you have a community on G+ for your game, even if that game ended long ago, please export the community so some record will remain of your shared play. So many worlds are about to be extinguished, and along with them the memories recorded in countless session reports, downtime threads, scheming plans, posted maps, ephemera, funeral threads celebrating dead PCs. Don’t let it just disappear into the void."