Observations of the Fox

 I've been looking at some of the posts that have done well recently... Like this post from the beginning of 2024, which gave an overview of life since the blog had started and alluded to some ideas that had been intended at the time.   Or, curiously,  this old post from 2012 about LARP, which basically predates my involvement in a few LARP groups, that I helped to run and then started to run on my own.  Or the evergreens like this post about my favourite game Mage the Ascension, or this post which started off the map drawing tutorials that I ran through almost a decade ago. Another surprising one that's seen a bit of traction lately is this one which describes some of my earlier thoughts about making a more modern and story driven game based on Mage: the Ascension. It's kind of weird that the post from the series that's getting the views is halfway through the sequence... however, it is one of the early stages of thought that has led to the SNAFU system th...

Frank Zappa once proclaimed that “without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible”. This has basically been a part of my game design ethos ever since I've been writing. The other part comes from Robert M. Pirsig (I can't remember whether it was in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" or "Lila") where there is a concept that progress requires a combination of static and dynamic forms. This is also a big part of Mage the Ascension, which is heavily influence by those two books. The notion states that periods of stasis allow structure to form, and that structure gives strength to a concept or culture, but too much stasis brings stagnation and an inability to keep moving forward. Periods of dynamism allow mutation and growth, which could be positive or negative, but too much dynamism leaves structure behind and brings an insecure and precarious state. Healthy progress requires both. If a period of change brings beneficial improvements to the str...

It's the end of school year, and that means our school does some interesting activities to keep students engaged. I've discussed that in previous years (end of 2024, here and here )... (I thought I'd written about previous years, but digging through the blog, it looks like I haven't ). So I figured that I'd run my Chrono-Labyrinth for the students. I know that particular dungeon really well because I've run it many times, so it seemed a good test to see how the game system works in contrast the the other systems I've used for that dungeon in the past. So I ran Sceletus .  I felt like it was going to be an easy system, elements of it just make sense. However I've really wanted to see how it actually works with a range of gamers, both experienced and brand new. Instead of thinking it works, I now know it does. There's also some interesting emergent properties of the game, that I hadn't considered. The way stress works in the game varies depending...

    With the new symbols, and some slight modifications to how the system operates, I've needed to change the layout of the graphic that describes the games mechanisms. However, one of the main reasons for this was the fact that I could only find the flattened version , and couldn't modify it... so it was easier to start again. Another issue here is that I wanted to fit this SRD into a 16 page zine format. I'd tightly managed to fit everything that I thought I needed for the document, but that tight fit meant that a lot of the layout was problematic. I'd rather give the words a bit of room to breath, and throw a few more images into the mix. I'm still planning to do a "printer-friendly"/"image-free" version of the SRD, but we'll get to that once I'm happy with this version. More updates to come. 

  Getting back to work on the SNAFU SRD, I've been reworking the assorted glyphs that give a visual interpretation of the rules. I'm trying to make sure these glyphs are easy to grok, make sense in context, and are visually distinct. Most of the symbols I've needed are already established in images I produced months (maybe years) ago, but I've noticed a few gaps as I've refined the rules and the way they work.  I've got to stop doing this, it's just making more work for me.  A fairly universal symbol for the positive output of an action A fairly universal symbol for the negative output of an action A symbol to cover the catch-all category of "advantages" which covers mastered skills/abilities, equipment, and supernatural powers.    Aegises are defensive traits, but I hadn't really developed a symbol for them. I figured we needed one.   A symbol to differentiate super-human and supernatural powers compared to standard mundane things that anyone ...

One of the key things about playtesting is seeing people do things that you hadn't necessarily expected, and seeing how those actions might impact the systems that have been put in place. Over the last week, I've seen a few of these types of actions... One of the characters who was infected by the zombie toxin was killed. They started trying to spread the infection, but the first couple of bites infected the same people that the original zombie had already infected. It didn't really make a disruption to the systems in place, but it was something I hadn't necessarily accounted for in the timing of the game. I had just assumed that a second zombie would double the rate of infection, but this chance of re-infecting someone who was already infected actually means that the acceleration isn't quite that extreme. A few of the players still just don't get it. I've explained that all they really need to do to remain active in the game is to write a name on their turn...