Observations of the Fox

Depressingly, no game this week. Does that mean the experiment isn't as engaging as I hoped it was? Or am I just falling prey to the regular stereotypical situation where it's hard for a game-master to get regular players for a game? Not sure, but it's annoying regardless. Thankfully, it's given me some extra time to get everything in order.  I'll share some of the pages I've generated as player handouts shortly, along with the ways and reasons I've reskinned the game in the ways that I have. For the purposes of consolidating the game, I'm thinking of getting Erin to put the "hack" up on her itch page ( https://erin-gumiho.itch.io/ ) as a Sceletus spin-off... besides, her page is getting more traction than mine lately.  

Starting tomorrow, for Halloween, Erin has reduced the cost of all the paid supplements for Sceletus. Hopefully a few more people will take advantage of this opportunity. https://itch.io/s/209598/halloween-sale-2026 If we get a few more sales over this period, it might motivate us to finish off a few more of the supplement ideas we've been considering for the project.. and we might do similar sales again in future.

I've said any times that I love the idea of one-on-one GM-to-Player sessions, but the only game that I've really read through which is specifically built to facilitate this sort of play is the Ghost Dog RPG... I know that there are other "duet" games out there, but I haven't really had much chance to play with them.    Tonight's session of the unnamed "Warhammer 40K/Sceletus" remix gave me the chance to see if this game would work in that format, and it actually worked pretty well. However, I had actually been told that there would be more players for tonight's session, so running a solo game wasn't expected.  The last week has seen me researching the various WH40K Tabletop games further, ad I did find something which I thought was interesting in the various games. So I adapted it. I'm pretty sure it's the Cubicle 7 games that build characters using a combination of their planetary homeworld, their cultural upbringing, and their role ...

So, I'm running a series of games at the local gaming store. A string of mini-campaigns, each 5 sessions long. Each session 2 hours. Each string of games will be a different system and setting.  The first  mini-campaign was Cyberpunk 2020/Red, and the setting was the Bronzewing tower complex, just over 100 stories tall, 50000 people living in the tower.  This time I offered to run a Warhammer 40K experience, and told the players it would be an investigation by the Inquisition. I like running with systems that promote the type of story being told, and really thought something like Gumshoe (2009-2013) or Cthulhu Dark  (2023) would serve the purposes I needed...then I looked at the various games that were focused on the Warhammer 40k Inquisition. I generally hated them. For theae purposes anyway. Every system seems to be filled with fiddly details and multiple systems that worked to cross purposes, or which sruggled to maintain elements of the tabletop battlegame, but ...

 I always try to print out a physical copy of any new game as a round of editing. This way I can get a red oen and mark what needs changing where things just look wrong on a page... while the screen gives a different vibe.  This system reference document (SRD) shifted from 16 to 24, then 32 pages. The core mechanics of the game fit on a double sided A4 sheet of paper, everything else is character creation, the ways the basics can mutate to account for a fairly free-form magic system, and ways that the person co-ordinating a session can travel together a tale.  This SRD will be incorporated into the next phase of the project, a "cookbook" showing how to adapt the systems to account for different genres of storytelling and styles of play. It's been a long and winding path, but it's getting somewhere. The specific next stage is to make sure final edits are completed before Microsoft Publisher goes offline forever, and make sure everything is converted to PDF pages which ...

Kind of a follow-up to my last post. I can see why a lot of comedy games fall flat, in much the same way that I've seen a lot of horror games fall flat.   (no pun intended)  Every time I've seen an interpretation of Discworld for a tabletop RPG it has been a thin veneer of the people and places from the setting thrown over an existing rule set which has been designed for a very different style of storytelling. D&D is not a good fit for Discworld, the core mechanisms of play are too serious, too self important...I guess that makes it ripe for violation, but with the rules lawyers I've encountered over the years there's a really good chance that any violation won't be considered benign. Sure you could house rule ideas into the system and establish them as canon in a session zero, but that starts drifting away from the rules as written. It's not quite as bad as the " D&D/Green Lantern " post I made a few days ago, but the same kind of compromises ...