Observations of the Fox

Part B of Bustle in Your Hedgerow can be found uploaded to the Vulpinoid Studios google drive. It is here . As I write this, almost a day has passed... over 60 people have looked at the "Part A" post, but no one has commented yet. Maybe it's taking people a bit of time to read what they've downloaded...maybe it's the usual thing where someone might get back to me in 10 years and ask me "Whatever happened to that scarecrow game?"

Here's the first 16-page zine. Not sure how long it'll be here. If you read it and have thoughts, please comment.

 Almost ready.

One of the key aspects of design is playtesting. Knowing how a game shoudl work, and comparing it to how it does work at the table atre often two different things.  I wanted to give my game "Bustle in your Hedgerow" a run at the semi-regular gaming night at The Press (I've mentioned this a few times one the blog so far... an example is  here ). Out of the five nights we've had at The Press this year, I've got a group who have participated in three of the games I've run. When they show up, they do so an hour early to make sure they get my table (which is nice). I basically try to run these sessions the way I'd run a convention game, they pay money to play, they're here for a good time. So I collaboratively tell a fun story with them. They might succeed, they might fail, but either way they'll contribute actively to a story that they'll remember. I expected to have them again last Thursday night when I ran "Bustle" as a part of the Horr...

I've finally reached a point where I'm basically happy with the new character sheet for the updated Walkabout. I'm just going to post it as a link to my google drive here on the blog, becuase that way I can see how many people are looking at this page, and get a rough guide about how many people might have clicked through to actually look at the sheet. The basic idea is that it get printed onto an A4 (or equivalent) sheet, and both sides are folded into the middle using a gate fold. The front of the resulting folded card has the surface elements of the character, what other people see, with room to draw a picture. The inside of the card contains all the various elements that a character uses to perform actions within the game, all the numbers and details. The back of the card is a basic rundown of the game rules for performing actions in the game. I've always been a fan of the idea where the core rules are immediately available to the players, and the complicated rule v...

Here's why I'm not using the type of dots traditionally associted with Australian Indigenous artistry in my Walkabout project... When the dots cross the line - Link One of the key aspects of Walkabout is that the knowledge of the past has been lost, and it needs to be rekindled to bring balance to the land. I've discussed this quite a bit in previous posts about the game, but it's nice to see this cross my feed while I'm working on character sheets and play aids for the game. Much Australian Indigenous culture has been whitewashed (yes, this choice of wording is deliberate), and in many cases the remaining Indigenous communities have taken the successful elements of other Indigenous communities and have claimed them as their own. I work in a school with a high Indigenous population, in fact is has one of the highest numbers of Indigenous students at any school in our state, and has been identified as the largest of the " Connected Communities " schools (wh...