Reconsidering the Familiar

 My two flagship games for the SNAFU system are Walkabout (a game about post-apocalyptic investigators and troubleshooters trying to bring balance back to a world that has been devastated by the return of Spirits of the Dreaming who've had enough of humanity's disrespect for the planet) and Familiar (a game about magical spirits who take the form of animals, who empower the dispossessed and disenfranchised to become heroes in a world of stagnation and corruption). Both games overlap their themes in a lot of ways, both are more about the relationships people have to each other and the world around them, rather than fighting and conquest. It was the fighting and conquest that led to the problems in each of the settings. 

Both games have characters made in very different ways, but both character generation systems make roughly equivalent starting characters through a blend of randomness and choice, with characters gaining agency in their worlds as their stories are told.

Looking at DURF, as I'm considering how to move forward on the Game Jam that's starting soon, I can really see more about how I want these games to be more personal experiences, more meaningful and with more depth. DURF follows the "old school" idea that characters are pretty much expendable, and a new character should be generated quickly when an old one dies tragically.

I'm still thinking of recreating the Ren'Py version of the character generator for Familiar, but might also do the same for Walkabout, especially if physical products will continue to see tariffs when heading into the world's biggest RPG market.  

Oh, I've also been taking a bunch of photos of urban decay for both of these projects...

...I'm sure there will some digital editing done to many of these images, and I might get some of the regular crew to work their Photoshop magic on the a few of them. Just letting folks know that plans are still in motion.