Observations of the Fox

Some of us last for a fraction of a second, making our impact on the world before vanishing into the nothingness from whence we came. Some of us linger for centuries, millennia, epochs...  Few of us remember the moment of our conception, the time when our essence was brought into being... whether that might be in the physical world or one of its shadowy echoes. Some claim that moment isn't important anyway, it's what you do with your time that matters. You might burn out in an explosive instant, or you might slowly impact the universe around you. Anyone connected to the physical plane has a finite time there...what they do with that time is up to them.  We live, we die. Do we live again? Does something else use the energy of life which was formerly ours to fuel its existence? Is it constant? Is there a finite flowing continuum of life in the universe? Life is filled with more questions than answers... ...and the same questions keep repeating. Often the answers are universal co...

If you're reading this when I hope it's been inserted in the timeline, you can watch some TV series that explain quantum causality loops. By this stage in the timeline, there should even be a couple of blockbuster movies with time-travel as major plot points.  Some of them get things right, some get things wildly wrong. But that's what happens when a multi-planar being tries to convey the complexity of timespan to physical beings. It's not my place to tell you the truth. revelations of that nature end up with prophets and religions, and that leads to more fire sprites getting out of control. Fire sprites like destroying things, inflaming emotions across the physical plane, and starting wars... that's not for me. I'm not even going to mention which stories got close to the truth, that's probably something for dreamers, philosophers, and scientists to work out for themselves. My reality is mine, and yours is yours.  I can't talk directly to you, so I'm...

I remember when he was an enthusiastic sprite, I recall when he threatened the universe with his special blend of hubris and hate. I will have seen him at his weakest and his strongest.I will tell planar travellers things that they have only been able to reveal to me in riddles. Maybe I will tell them in riddles to prevent causality paradoxes, maybe they know better. In the grand scheme of things I will have been there at the beginning, and at the end.  To explain things best to you, the physical world is like a rippling pond when viewed from the outside. If you're outside the pond, you can throw a rock into it and watch the ripples spread outward. You can also see the ripples made by other people throwing rocks into the pond. I can't throw metaphysical rocks into reality, that's something I might have already told you about, or it might be something I tell you later, I can never tell how things work when you're stuck in linear time... I'm sure this gets discussed a...

170,000 Views Is that enough? The Bloggie Awards are up... I had no idea there was an annual competition for the best TTRPG blog entries, and since I had a good year here at Observations of the Fox, I figured I'd have a look.  It's always good to see what other folks are writing, and I'll be reading through a few of these, to try and work out where the wider headspace of the TTRPG Community is... then wonder why the 170k views I got this year din't get me nominated. I often comment on social media about how it feels like I'm screaming into the void by writing games and blog posts that don't get any traction, and my gut reaction is to say that this is verification of that. However it's probably just evidence that the various pockets of designers in the TTRPG space are insulated from each other. It's just annoying to be at this for 15 years, and generally running and designing TTRPGs for 30 years now, and still not have much to show for it all...

Thanks to my high school gaming club, I started getting some semi-regular blog posts happening again in 2024. This has led to the year being one of my highest viewed ever here. I'm trying to think of some new ideas to write about this coming year, maybe start a game design contest on itch (like a game jam or something...not sure yet).  The one thing I'd like to get started is the irregular podcast "School of Roll" that I've toyed with over the past couple of years. Like always, there are plans and ideas, but we'll see what the year actually has in store.

  https://200proof.games/manifesto/ This is gold.  I'm not just saying this because it echoes the kind of advice I've been saying for years, or the types if words I try to tell my students in design classes... well actually, that's certainly a part of it. However, there's more to it. This idea echoes back to the gaming ashcan releases in the early 2000s, the 'zine games that have been floating around for decades...and it goes directly against a lot of the gatekeeping I've been seeing in the hobby since I started writing and designing over 30 years ago. So much more I could possibly write here, but perfect is the enemy of good, so I'll just post what I've got now. I might revisit it later.