Observations of the Fox

As I write this, I'm sitting on 2501069 views for the blog, and I've been getting a steady average of 2000 to 3000 views per day. The numbers have really skyrocketed this year, however I'm not sure if this is people actually reading, or if it's AI trawlers digging through my pages for data.  There was a weird anomaly month in September last year, and I thought things would generally drop back to the regular schedule after that point, but things have actually been improving. I don't know if I should read more in to this. But it's nice to think that regardless of whether it's humans or bots, my writings are going to have an influence out there in the world.

I've had a couple of these batches of NPCs where I've just instantly thought of a game that would work. However for a few of them (like today's), I just couldn't think of games where there are distinct character archetypes that could be tweaked into the prompts. SO I guess I'm going to have to go with a few open systems, and see how they might work for the sequence. Today we're going with the alternate hidden history game of " Cold City ", where the Allied forces are cleaning up the mess left by Nazi occult experiments at the tail end of World War 2. The couple of times I've played it have been fun, but I do admit that I tweaked the system somewhat dramatically the second time I ran it. ( Maps ) Everything in Cold City revolves around how characters relate to one another, so today's prompts of "Associates" works well. Batch 6 (Cold City) Associates – Composure – Full of Woe Here I'm thinking of a member of the French resistance ...

I've raised this idea a few times, but this seemed a really succinct description and something I can work with. I've played both Ars Magica and Amber, and I love both the games. They can both generate really immersive experiences but they both do so in very different ways.  From this perspective, Ars Magica is very non-diegetic in way it describes the world. It functions in the traditional style of a series of procedural manuals and pseudo-historical textbooks. It gives an idea of what happened in the past and what can happen in your games, but not necessarily how to make if feel. Arguably, this is very "facts over feelings"... there are a whole lot of regimented ways that things work, and this fits the rigour and research of the magi at the heart of the game, while providing a lot of ideas about how things can be expanded to include the other characters who live their lives around the magi. Amber on the other hand could be described as a lot more diegetic. By reading...

A lot of the games I tend to play avoid the whole notion of character classes, instead working off point buy systems or open concepts where the players are able to develop their own ideas.  I don't have a whole lot of "OSR-type" games which would probably work for it... so, I'm picking through the options that I've got to make this sequence of posts work.   Today's batch... one of the PbtA games that I've tolerated enough to run a couple of times... Monsterhearts. Batch 5 (Monsterhearts) With today's prompts including a lot of the term "Associates", it felt appropriate to pick a game about social interaction and how that plays out in tense situations. One of the problems here is that the interesting characters are expected to be the player characters, and it gets tricky to have the antagonists and support characters picking "player character moves". Perhaps the fact that I'm leaving these NPC write-ups fairly vague and am  I...

I'm trying to make sure each of my batches of characters for this sequence are using different games, and while I'm running a couple of days late for this particular post, I really wanted to make sure I delved into the past of my gaming life for today's entry. It just took me a couple of days to find my "Heroes Unlimited" 2nd Edition book from the 1990s.   Batch 4 (Heroes Unlimited) The range of character types in this game aren't necessarily "classes" but more the origins of the characters and the types of powers they have access to. Note also, that unlike a lot of games I'm referencing here, I love the idea of characters having weaknesses (Superman with his kryptonite, Batman with his code of honour), but Heroes Unlimited really never did that, so I'm going to be adding something interesting that I feel reflects the character and adds depth to them here. Intellect – Secret – Far to Go (Alien) The idea of an alien who is hiding among the c...