More than anything, the new Tomb Raider game makes me enthusiastic for another game in the series that takes the best from this new vision and jettisons the game’s meanest elements. The result might be a step back toward the franchise’s earlier swagger combined with the scale, detail, and humanity of this year’s installment. Call it gritty without being gruesome.

I’ll do my best to avoid spoilers for the 2013 Tomb Raider here, but be aware that I’ll be making some direct references to that game as I proceed.

Here, then, is what would go into my Tomb Raider sequel.

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If you’d asked me before, I would’ve been skeptical. Another gritty reboot, this time of Lara Croft, a character whose confidence and poise under pressure was part of the hook? I know people who hated the twists on Bond in Skyfall.

It’s not that I would’ve doubted whether there’s a great idea for a character-driven, narrative-driven adventure game in there, it’s that I’d doubt whether the realities of modern big-budget video-game production would be able to pull it off in the face of demographic data and audience testing and brand protection.

(I’m not just talking about the much-publicized controversial and problematic elements of the game’s promotion and production. In fact, I’m not talking about those elements in this review at all — I’m reviewing the game as it was during actual play for me, for whatever that’s worth.)

Making this game required facing some tough hurdles, like making a bad-ass character into a human character without undermining the badassery, if you will. The cunning within the new game’s approach, in my opinion, was that it didn’t really try to leap the more general hurdles. It focuses the game on a specific story, following a popular character through a particular arc, and pays attention to the needs of that story. I can’t say that this Tomb Raider damned every torpedo but I feel like it aimed to stay true to the story it wanted to tell. It’s a shame that story is so grueling and cruel.

Tomb Raider humanizes Lara Croft in a way that could be seen to undermine her bad-ass nature if you think of bad-asses as being necessarily or completely superhuman. So, it seems to me, the developers at Crystal Dynamics didn’t quite aim to clear those hurdles. Instead, they pursued a different path and aimed for a different game with a different voice and style. They bet that an audience exists for this game, this story, this experience.

I hope that bet pays off and I hope Crystal Dynamics learns the right lesson if it does. Here’s why…

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This weekend I ran the first session of an ongoing campaign-in-miniature set in Middle-earth, using the game rules from Francesco Nepitello’s The One Ring (TOR).

In the parlance of play, I’m hacking and drifting this game in bits and bobs to get a certain kind of play out of it. Some of the adjustments I’ve made come from ideas cooked up back when I was a playtester on the game. Other tweaks come from Nepitello’s own ongoing development of the game, including rules incorporated in later official supplements like Tales From Wilderland (written by the under-sung hero, Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan). For example, we used the revised journey rules Nepitello’s been exploring on his blog (and talking about online) rather than those published in the official game rules.

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It’s been a while, Gameplaywriters, and I apologize for that. New high-stress job, move to a new city, and all that. But LinkedIn just reminded me of something that I wanted to drop in and memorialize: Gameplaywright is five years old this month.

Stick around, if you will. Interesting things ahead.

Just a quick update for those of you who have noticed that Gameplaywright’s blog has left fallow for months: Things are afoot here at GPW but we’ve shifted from a short-term view to a long-term view for a while. We’re brewing up new books, for that long run, and the time for such thoughts and plans have come out of the time we might otherwise have to blog. We miss you all.

You have numerous outlets for games news, actual play, theory, and discussion, don’t you? Given the time we’re spending on projects for publication—both electronically and in print—we hope so, because it’ll be a while until we can blog here in any great capacity. It’s not that we’re not still thinking about games, stories, and the work. It’s that we’re pouring all of that into our work directly, lately. Stay tuned for announcements of new Gameplaywright Press books, down the line. I’m excited by the prospects but these things move slowly, these days.

In the meantime, I want to hear from you—you!—about where you are getting your news of games and stories. At what crossroads have you been standing, reading the postings put up by fellow travelers? In what ale houses are you trading tales of your games and the stories you’ve wrought? Who are you reading? What should we—all of us—be reading on these subjects?

Also, what have you been playing and what stories emerge from that play? Do tell.