Playing with adults in Antwerp

 So on the 2nd of April there was a little gaming day organized in Antwerp. Antwerp is close by enough that I could easily come for one of the games. For the shift that I was in, there would be three games that would be played, an 1st Edition AD&D game, a home-brew game and Starfinder. I had signed up for Starfinder. The day before I heard that Starfinder was cancelled as the GM had contracted Covid. I said that there was no problem, I would come and either join one of the other games or quickly do some kind of improv game.

I arrived, barely on time on Saturday, with some options in my backpack, which turned out to be nice, because of all the people that had said they would come, only four people were there, including the organizer. The guy running first edition needed 6 people for his game, so that was a no go, and the guy with the home-brew was more interested in what I brought to the table, so I showed them some options.

I introduces Lady Blackbird and I read out some of the Michael Prescott adventure seeds for his locations and one page dungeons type things. We ended up going for The Full Dark Stone, of which the rumors read like this:

• Skull-headed knights have been seen gathering herbs along the river.

• Mournful piping has been heard echoing for miles, its source unknown.

• It’s said that upriver, the fish fly.

• The river folk sell chips of black stone that stay warm to the touch.

 I decided to use my trusty RISUS as a system, which none of them seemed familiar with, which caused for some misunderstandings, but all in all was easy to grasp.

Some things I learned:

Playing with adults is different from playing with kids. These guys came up with character backgrounds, asked about the setting, and wanted to understand the system. 

I learned that, at least for games at a convention or for one shots, I should prepare some more lore about the world or the setting, or that I should make some pre-gens with some lore built in. 

I also learned that translating on the fly is harder than I thought, and that even though all the info was on two pages, it didn't necessarily make things very easy/fast to find. 

I really liked roleplaying in Dutch though. I'm surprised how much that mattered to me. It made the childlike wonder feel more real, playing in the language that I heard my bedtime stories in. It made describing things feel more real, it conjured more local images of swamps and rivers etc.

I learned that playing three hours straight, with translating on the fly and trying to find my way in a document that has the info spread out made me quite a bit more tired than I thought I'd be.

I learned that I liked this a lot. I've been running around buzzing with excitement for a few days now. It was a lot of fun.