Echoes of Magic

A lot of my thoughts about the SNAFU magic system can be traced back to the work I did back in NaGaDeMon 2019 when I worked on SNAFU and the Familiar games concepts initially.

I can see posts that go back to the earlier versions of the word system, posts that already seem to address some of the conduit issues that I'm having, even the bit where I pulled Connection/Conduit/Capacity from the Ukiyo Zoshi work of the 1990s.

I've been stomping in this space for a while, and I guess this is half the reason why I keep this blog going. Sure, I'm getting thousands of views every day, and I don't think all of them can be bots (even if I rarely get comments), but having an archive of twenty years of game design ideas, theories and observations I can look back on has been really useful at times. 

My quick scans over these old posts (they don't feel old, but after 7 years they certainly don't count as recent posts any more) shows that I've had some changes in thought regarding the systems in place, and at the time I feel like I was still linking abilities to attributes and using them to increase results rather than building up an ability die.  That basically means that certain ideas that solved issue back under the old systems don't necessarily work for now, but they do give ideas for how to address the issues in a new context.

Things evolve in the background, and any of my released games, like FUBAR, The Law, or Tooth and Claw serve as archival snapshots of the evolution in progress. It's nice to have those public facing facades, but having a record of what's been happening behind the scenes is perhaps more useful. It's the same kind of reasoning behind my searches through old hard drives to find fragments of games, stories that were never told, or elements of worldbuilding and campaigns that didn't quite reach the light of day. 

https://annejanzer.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/scribedepositphotocoloradjust.jpg 

It almost feels like my old days at uni when I'd do research on a topic, only to find my own papers on that topic... then I'd need to reference myself in my papers.

 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Guide to Geomorphs (Part 7)

Image
A working computer and scanner...that means it is time to get back to work on the geomorph sequence. A lot of the discussion in this set of tutorials has been focused around square geomorphs. They're the easiest for most people to wrap their heads around.  But my preferred form of geomorph is based around the hexagon, these tend to produce more organic and interesting shapes. This is true for natural environments, but it's no less true for urban environments. The example set of geomorphs above as a simple two-phase system. One edge type is plain, the other edge type has a road piercing the centre. There could be dozens of combinations and permutations for each of the two phases around the hexagonal edges, but a quick look at the variety of buildings and road shapes shows that there could literally be hundreds of possible options when drawing these map fragments. But you certainly don't need to create hundreds of designs for the system to be effective. Usin...
Read more

A Guide to Geomorphs (Part 1)

Image
After numerous requests to get back to map tutorials, it's time to start our new series. This time focusing on the concept of geomorphs, modular map fragments that can be mixed and matched. We'll start with a couple of theoretical tutorials before sinking into a few more practical posts. I'm predicting a dozen or so posts in this sequence, but let's see how long it lasts.
Read more