Playtest: Dream Askew

Yesterday I got a chance to play Avery Alder’s Dream Askew (Buried Without Ceremony) for the first time. We tried a playtest of the new edition for which a Kickstarter funding campaign was ending today (you can still pre-order through the page afterwards.) The book is going to contain two takes on the system:

• Dream Askew proper, where you play members of a queer enclave in a post-apocalypse setting (written by Avery);
• Dream Apart, where you play inhabitants of a Jewish shtetl in a fantastical-historical Eastern Europe (written by Benjamin Rosenbaum).

Both make me want to play, and I hope to have a chance to try Dream Apart soon. The art looks wonderful for both settings, and amazing contributors have been added through stretch goals. I expect the final result to be a delight.

Preparation

In addition to the playtest materials available on her website, Avery was also kind enough to share a draft of the “How to Play” chapter for our playtest. I love how caring, generous and thoughtful Avery’s writing is. The chapter provides advice for the play environment and behaviours, not just the mechanical aspects. 

My oldest character sheet

While going through our possessions (the great trash/sell/store/keep purge), I found the binder that contained some of my oldest character sheets.

So today I present to you Keridwen, my elf fighter/magic user (I wanted to be a bard, Cú Chulainn-style) for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the first character I ever made. Keridwen was created, rolled stats and all, back in the fall of 1984 at the gaming club of Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal, called Polyèdre (Polyhedron). This makes her character sheet 32 years old—older than many people I play with these days.

In addition to the four-page character sheet (in French), there are lists of spells she was eligible to or barred from, psionic abilities she acquired, and a bad photocopy of a portrait I drew.

The choice item, though, is the last page—the will. Club members had an unwritten agreement that you could only pass a deceased character’s possessions to another of your character if the will had been drawn up. So Keridwen left everything to her half-sister Olwen with the caveat that her cash should be used to avenge her if she had been murdered…

I found my first charter sheet, from 1984!