Where to Find Me

With G+ closing down, an online friend (Kit La Touche) has come up with a way to track people in their various social media homes. I thought it was a great idea and have decided to share it with you all.

https://wheretofind.me/@Vulpinoid

Other Strangeness Character Guide

After reading bits and pieces of the 500 odd pages comprising the two starter books for the new FFG edition of Legend of the Five Rings, I'm looking at the pocketmod books that form the basis of my Other Strangeness game. I'm undecided...

...a lot of that 500 pages is providing context and background information for the setting, or explaining how elements of play tie into that setting. Since Other Strangeness is generally designed to use the real world as a basis for it's play environment, then modifies it according to the collaborative choices of the game's players, it doesn't really need this.

The actual rules of the FFG game are a bit convoluted, and feel a bit counterintuitive at times, they're partly explained multiple times in a way that builds up the concepts from various perspectives. The way these fundamental rules are explained could fill multiple pocketmods, each of which doesn't actually explain the rules... as an example, I've had to page flip between half a dozen different parts of the rules to get a gist of how combat is supposed to work in the game. 

I'm not saying one extreme is right, or one extreme is wrong. FFG is making a bucketload of money, while my game writing often scrapes together barely enough to make a trip to the cinema once a month. They're obviously doing sonething right with their hefty tomes. Some people just prefer a minimalist set of rules that get right to the point, and other prefer carefully, legally constructed sets of rules that back up their explanations with multiple examples to cover every possibility that might arise in play.

Anyway, enough editorial, here's the character generation rules. 

City Trip

The big move is coming, so I took one last trip into Sydney with my wife to make sure I spent my store credit at Games Paradise, and do those things in the city that just won't be possible living a few hundred kilometres from any kind of metropolis.

A few urban referenced shots were taken, comic shops were visited, Chinese baked goods were consumed, as was sushi, quirky stationary stores were explored...

...these are things I'll miss about living in Sydney, particularly the way certain parts of it look just like they belong in a cyberpunk setting, and other parts look no different than I've remembered them for decades.

I particularly went in to get myself a copy of Blades in the Dark, but the store was out of stock, so Leah ended up getting Sushi Go Party Edition...

...and I got the starter books for Fantasy Flight's incarnation of Legend of the Five Rings.

I'm digging through these now, and might have a bit of a review shortly. But the way house packing and moving is going, that might get delayed until the end of the month. We'll see how things go.

Current List of Potential Animals to Mutate

One of the things that always bugged me about the Palladium game "TMNT and Other Strangeness" was the fact that most of the animals available were mammals, with a lesser number of birds and reptiles... I think there might have been a couple of amphibians in the mix, but certainly no fish, and the only insects or invertebrates in the game appeared much later in the "Mutants in Orbit" supplement as monstrous NPCs.

One of the things about the TMNT comic is that it had anything and everything among the characters in its pages.

So, with that in mind, I've been deliberately creating a list of character options that cover all those other non-mammalian critters, and have aimed to focus on drawing a lot of those mutants to explore potential options that many players might not consider as immediately fun.

Here's the current listing, which isn't comprehensive at all, but tries to cover a wide variety of different animal types. I'll probably narrow down the listing to two dozen common starting character types (the types of animals most likely to be studied in genetic research), and then if there's enough interest in the game I'll start writing up a few of the other animals in themed groupings.

Mammals

Eutheria (Placental)

Aardvark

Dugong

Rabbit

Mouse

Squirrel

Beaver

Gorilla

Chimpanzee

Orang-Utan

Lemur

Mole

Whale

Dolphin

Bat

Dog

Cat

Bear

Sloth

Horse

Seal

Cow

Deer

Camel

Pig

Rhinoceros

Armadillo

Fox

Metatheria (Marsupial)

Opossum

Thylacine

Numbat

Quoll

Tasmanian Devil

Bilby

Bandicoot

Koala

Wombat

Possum

Cuscus

Sugar Glider

Tree Kangaroo

Kangaroo

Wallaby

Quokka

Prototheria (Monotreme)

Echidna

Platypus

Birds

Palaeognathae

Ostrich

Emu

Cassowary

Kiwi-

Galloanserae

Chicken

Duck

Lyrebird

Peafowl

Neoaves

Hummingbird

Pigeon

Crane

Flamingo

Albatross

Penguin

Pelican

Vulture

Hawk

Owl

Kingfisher

Falcon

Parrot

Reptiles and Amphibians

Lizard

Snake

Sea Snake

Boa

Viper

Python

Cobra

Turtle

Crocodile

Frogs and Toads

Axolotls

Fish

              Sharks and Rays

             

Crustaceans and Arthropods

Crab

Lobster

Woodlouse

Prawn

Spider

Scorpion

Centipede/Millipede

Insects

Fly

Beetle

Ant

Grasshopper

Dragonfly

Wasp

Cockroach

Butterfly

Mantis

Moth

Cephalopods

Octopus

Squid

Cuttlefish

Nautilus

Other Invertebrates

Slug

Snail

Jellyfish

Tardigrade

Leech

Velvet Worm

Worm

Other Strangeness GM Guide

Here's the second part of the updated rules for Other Strangeness. In this case it's the guide to the player who facilitates the flow of the story. Note that this is not the player who provides the story, because like in the other games generally produced by Vulpinoid Studios, the story is a collective endeavour that unfolds organically as the characters engage with the world around them.

Here's the link to the pocketmod. 

There will probably be additional hints about running things scattered through the other pocketmods in the system, but this should be enough to get a group started.

The next booklet will be the guide for players to create characters, then a guide to create locations that might function as characters hideouts or places of interest, and then a guide to creating items. after that I'll present a few sample characters, places, items, and story hooks, before finally offering the various animals, cultures, and occupations that allow players to make a diverse range of strange characters and mutants to focus their stories on.

By that stage, I should have started work at my new job, so we'll see what happens from there.

Other Strangeness Core Rules

I've experimented with a few release formats over the years, sometimes offering products as PWYW, sometimes offering them free of charge, sometimes just hoping they'll get a bit of exposure toward products I intend to sell at a bit of a profit. I still haven't worked out the best option, but here's my current plan... the current incarnation of Other Strangeness occurs as a series of pocketmods, but it's also foreseeable that the game will be printed on a series of cards and distributed in a small tin of some kind. It's designed to be a simple little pick-up and play game.

After the first alpha draft release. there was some feedback from a few sources that the font was a bit hard to read. So here's an amended version of the core rules for the game. Character creation rules are coming shortly, along with a few other necessary components for play.

Here's the Core Rules Link

RPGs in the Classroom

I've been interested in the idea of using RPGs in an educational context for a while. So when I was alerted to this article about using D&D in a STEM setting, it got my interest.

This is something I'm going to try working on this year, as I head out to a rural community to teach practical crafting and artistic skills, and whatever else I end up teaching. I'm hoping to find a few more scholarly articles, to back up my plans, and justify the ideas if I'm queried.

I've often found people in my gaming groups have an overwhelming desire to learn quirky facts to inject them into games at critical moments, or use obscure knowledge to justify actions attempted during a game, so the aim would be to instill this curiosity in a group of students... getting them to want to learn, so that they might gain advantage in whatever game I run.

Similarly, if I choose to run domethong crunchy, then the addition multiplication and modification of numbers becomes a mathematical exercise, and we can analyse probabilities in the game, and optimal strategies that might normally link to meta-gaming, power-gaming, and munchkinism...

...or maybe we can just focus on social interplay, and sociological studies during the roleplaying games, while delving into mathematical concepts through a miniatures game (with crafting and art handled by miniature painting and terrain building).

There are so many options here.