Notes from a Materialist Game Session

This is a report on a recent adventure I played in run by Panic Pillow, based on an empire toolkit The 2nd Age we created together. I’m calling it a “materialist session” of the dialectical sort, where social processes drive a lot of what happens in the game. I can’t vouch that Panic Pillow would label it similarly, but I can speak for having this type of thing in mind when designing The 2nd Age.

Panic Pillow ran the game on a HUDless basis, meaning players don’t have access to stats or dice rolls (you can read more about it in Panic Pillow’s write up here). The 2nd Age document is also very light on rules, mainly consisting of some institutional “classes” and qualitative abilities. I’ve not been part of a session with so few explicit mechanics, and was interested to learn from the experience.

Central to The 2nd Age is the idea of character advancement being tied up with the agendas of institutions, and ultimately that of an empire. Social processes operating through the empire, such as expansionism, come to have a direct bearing on the characters. That’s the theory anyway, but I was keen to see how it worked in practice.