Observations of the Fox

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

I'm really struggling to get this character generator ready, every time I read through it I'm seeing more issues with it. I guess I'm just running into that eternal problem where "perfect is the enemy of good". A character generator needs context, especially when it is designed to create characters who integrate into a specifically established setting. So the question is "How much context do I need?" Things are blowing out, and the character generation system is rapidly becoming a "player's guide". Anyway...school holidays are coming up, I might get more time to work on things then. Tings are going so much slower when I'm painting a bunch of player pictures and trying to keep them consistent (before Photoshopping them into customised page layouts). I'm doubling and even tripling up on usage of the same images for the characters...but even though the whole process is taking a couple of hours for a new batch of illustrations, and more

It's been over a fortnight since my last post. I'm running into that idea where "perfect is the enemy of good". I've been wanting to reveal the character design system that I've been developing, but getting the finer details just right has been a mammoth task.  At the moment, we follow a life path through stages. Each stage sets up something about the character, and builds their story with a sequence of random events. The base character generation pages are seven pages, the random life events are nine pages. and then we go through a worked set of examples where four players build their characters, and these characters will be used for the play examples through the rest of the rulebook. There's at least another sixteen pages coming (2 pages each for the various cultural groups, including their cultural values and stereotypes within their communities, how they relate to the other cultures, their available starting equipment, and a few other flavour elements)

Three to finish off with...  Day 29 - Awesome App Nope. Most apps I've played with have been distracting at the table, or have simply made an overly complex game, slightly less complex. So with this in mind, I can see that a lot of players like them for D&D because they reduce the labyrinthine systems to something vaguely manageable, or make the custom dice in FFG games more available. However, for most of the games that I've tended to play apps just limit the immersion. Maybe I'm just old school like that. Day 30 - Person you'd like to game with I'd love to game with one of the many celebrity gamers who claim that D&D is a great game. Vin Diesel, Hellen Mirren, Terry Crews, Joe Manganiello (my wife would want to be on that table too), Stephen Colbert, Deborah Ann Woll, Dame Judy Dench... I'd love to play something else with them to show that there are games so much better and more interesting out there. Day 31 - Game or Gamer you miss One of the first p

Day 27 - Marvelous Miniature Oooh...this is a tough one. I've got a few hundred miniatures (maybe a few thousand if you count the unpainted ones). Back in the day, I loved the miniatures produced by Rackham.  Even though they all had character and a distinctive look to them, this lady was one of my favourites. So annoyed they went bankrupt, but if you look hard enough you can still find some of them around . I'll need to dig through my boxes to see if I can find the copy of her that I painted. Day 28 - Great Gamer Gadget I love the idea of an initiative tower... I've been meaning to use one to see how good they are in practice. ...for games that use initiative that is.