Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

Category: Japan

  • DMing Pathfinder in Japan: Strange Doings at the Steam Mountains 1

    Last night I DMd my first session of Pathfinder in Japanese. It was mostly successful, and I’ll be putting up my thoughts about the DMing in a separate post. This is a brief report of the session. The adventure took place in an Onsen (hot spring) resort in the Steam Mountains. This resort is blessed…

  • ノーム蒸気散弾銃

    Note for my English readers: I’m now using this blog for communication with my Japanese players, just as I did for my English ones, so there will be occasional Japanese posts. In some cases I will also put English with them, in some cases not. My apologies if this causes your browser to render the…

  • DMing Pathfinder in Japanese: Preparatory notes

    I’m DMing a Pathfinder session in Japanese tomorrow night, for 5 people, 3 of whom I’ve previously met and 1 of whom is a raw beginner from my FLGS. I kind of arranged this tentatively before I met the gaming group 2 weeks ago, so I’m in a bit of overload here. It’s a trial…

  • Japanese Pathfinder Report 1: The Frost Giant Slippery Dip

    This being a report of the actual adventure I participated in at Konkon April 2010, Oita, Japan. We were playing 3 4th level PCs developed only from the basic Pathfinder rule book: Philip Blackstone (“Firippu Burakusutonu,” a 4th level Dwarven Fighter), played by me Machiruba, a 4th level Human Cleric, played by Furudera san Kelp…

  • Playing Pathfinder in Japanese

    Yesterday I played my first ever role-playing game in Japanese, at the Oita Evil Spirit club Konkon convention. This convention is held every month in a public hall in Oita, which is near my town, and runs from 10am to 6:30pm. As far as I know not many English-speaking Westerners get to experience Japanese role-playing,…

  • Current reading: Tokyo Real

    This book, Tokyo Real by “Ryu” is something of a milestone for me! It’s the first Japanese book I have read completely, from beginning to end, in Japanese. This isn’t as much of an achievement as some might think, because it’s a “keitai shosetsu” (Mobile phone novel), I think, or at least it might as…

  • Cyberpunk, postmodernism and Orientalism 1: outline

    In my previous post I mentioned stumbling across an analysis of cyberpunk and orientalism, which interests me for a lot of reasons, and I’ve subsequently decided that since I’m living in the shadow of the zaibatsu without a job, maybe it’s time I embarked on a shady criminal information-hacking project, so I’m going to try…

  • The Shock of the New and the Benefits of the Familiar

    I remember playing a few sessions of Talislanta when I was much younger, and feeling confused and underwhelmed for most of it. I think this was largely because the Talislanta setting is so alien and rich with new ideas that unless one has done some kind of pre-development work of some kind it’s impossible to…

  • In place of Japanese Reading, Randomised Block Experiments

    I use a Japanese social networking site called Mixi, that is a kind of blogging/photo uploading/community/facebook style site all rolled into one, minus (mostly) the spam weirdness of facebook, with a lot more privacy settings and slightly more obtrusive advertising. Recently I have been roped into playing a farming game with my friends, called Sunshine…

  • Current viewing: Ichi

    Ichi is a remake of the now-famous Japanese story Zatoichi, about a blind swordsman who wanders about slaughtering people. The last  version of this that I saw was by Beat Takeshi (whose Dolls I quite recommend), and it was okay until it went completely weird at the end. I also saw an excellent version with…