Posted by Steve on January 3rd, 2012 — in News
The entire Bully Pulpit team (yes, both of us!) will be taking the corporate jet to Oakland this month for a pair of great Fiasco events at the world-famous Endgame.
On Saturday, January 14 we’ll be helping to run Improv for Gamers with Mia Blankensop, Karen Twelves, Matthew Klein and Sean Nittner. We’ll be using Fiasco as a way to demonstrate how to use improv techniques to improve role-playing games, and just based on the attendees it looks like a lot of fun.
Then on Sunday, January 15th, Endgame is hosting a FiascoCon, and you’re invited! The event will run in two sessions from 11am to 6:30pm and there are just a few spaces left across both sessions. If you’re anywhere nearby and like fun, go to the Endgame website and sign up! We hope to see you there.
Posted by Steve on January 2nd, 2012 — in News
Kicking off our 2012 Playset of the Month series for January is De’ Medici, a bit of classy Italian comedy written by Giulia Barbano and Renato Ramonda of the Janus Design collective.
Florence, 1559: a city of opportunities for men who have the guts to pursue them. Here, struggling artists find rich patrons, visionary architects create their dreams, ruthless mercenaries get lucrative contracts, and shrewd merchants become as powerful as kings.
Ever since the times of Cosimo the Elder, the bankers, the Medici, have ruled this city. Sure, way back then it was still called a democracy, but the art, the armies and the votes were all paid with Medici money. The words of the heretic monk Savonarola shook the consciences for a brief time, bringing back a glimpse of the Republic; but the Emperor and the Pope put the Medici back in charge, with Duke Alessandro.
Upon the Duke’s assassination twenty-two years ago, the merchants and lords of the city enthusiastically welcomed young Cosimo, the barely seventeen years old son of the mercenary warlord Giovanni delle Bande Nere, who had never lived in Florence. The nobles saw him as inexperienced, weak, and an easy puppet to manipulate.
They couldn’t have been more wrong.
