Documenting one mage's journey to follow his dream and die trying
I don’t know that it got as much traction as it probably deserved, but Sam Seer asked us to talk about three games that were important to us, and I thought. Yes. Yes I think I will.
I am not physically capable of being reasonable about A Tale in the Desert. This is my ur-game. This is the game that I literally cannot be allowed to play, because it would consume me whole.
For those of you who were at PAX Unplugged you may have encountered the Line Entertainment team. And if you found us at night, you may have been presented with the opportunity to participate in the Grand Campaign - a distributed adventure narrative told over the course of the weekend.
As each story beat progressed attendees were presented with the current situation and a variety of options, each with a custom Difficulty Check (DC) attached. Rolling on the giant inflatable d20 and passing the DC added a vote to the attendee’s preferred narrative path. The accumulation of votes determined the path the story took.
“It sounds like you might be playing the ghost of a better game that lives inside this one.” – Claude Sonnet 4
Previously: Waking Up to Dune Awakening
Okay, so. Uh. I’m still playing Dune: Awakening.
Yeah, I also think that’s weird.
I’ve never spent so many words explaining why I don’t recommend something only to go on and keep engaging with it. Usually I’d call it good and walk away. But there’s something here in the dark heart of Arakkis that keeps me engaged, and now I’m going to spend the next however many thousand words trying to find it.
I’m not going to bury the lede. You probably shouldn’t play Dune: Awakening. The rest of this article is going to be an attempt to explain why, despite my own anti-recommendation, I’m still playing it.
You should know that Dune: Awakening is mean as hell. Up to a point that meanness is clearly intentional. It’s a Dune Simulator, and Dune’s world is mean as hell. Within the first hour it establishes that you’ll need to find water to drink, you’ll need to hide from the sun, and there’s some worms around (you might have heard of them,) what’ll eat all your tasty giblets.