Observations of the Fox

Just when I thought I was getting momentum, life gets in the way again. I've spent most of the last few days in hospital with my wife, or taking her to medical appointments.   I've had some ideas in recent months about the way lower classes are forced to struggle so they don't have time to tell their stories, and how it's only the elite who have the privilege of time to share their narrative, and the social capital to spread that narrative to reinforce the cultural norms, even though the wider experience of life doesn't necessary reflect the stories that are constantly pumped out. It's something that fits into Familiar, and ironically it's the very lack of time to work on Familiar, and the lack of social capital to get it noticed that has kept the stories within it from being completed. It's a game about social systems and rebelling against them, while those very social systems are keeping it down, and it's going to take an act of rebellion to get it...

Is there anything else we need to know about characters within SNAFU, and within the context of this pirate setting?  At the simplest level yes, and the first one that comes to mind is one of the thing that SNAFU is all about.  Relationships. In the worldbuilding posts, I made some characters and linked them to places, so that feels like a cool thing to make sure stays in the game and can really help tie the rules to the setting, as well as tying the characters into the potential stories.  It was also a part of the worldbuilding posts that characters might end up as a blend of cultural backgrounds. With 13 consistent elements to each culture (each has a language, a clothing style, some common virtues they aspire to, some common vices they try to avoid, etc.) Each character would pick two or three cultures that had influenced their upbringing, and with a deck of cards they'd choose a suit of each card rank. It might be a case that a characters starting abilities from each ...

We've got our general abilities sorted. Now to distribute them into starting clusters. A starting cluster in SNAFU is a culture, occupation, calling, or some other element that forms the basis of a character. The types of clusters in the game guide the types of stories that it tells. Walkabout uses cultures, occupations, and a single calling which all characters follow. The cultures describe the type of people they grew up around, and what sorts of tasks and values these people are known for. Every character in Walkabout begins their story by working out what their parents cultures were, then choosing on of those cultures to follow. They might be from a farming community, a group of travelling nomads, a scavenger enclave on the radioactive edges of an ancient city, a neo-tribal group, a formerly wealthy elite who hid in a fallout shelter, or something else. Each has a range of associated skills, talents, and knowledges that are passed down and valued. The occupations describe how s...

SNAFU is a system about relationships and connections. If we think about relationships as strings connecting different elements of play, then the first thing we need to do is establish a framework to attach those strings to. I've done the math in the background, I've done some playtesting through "The Law" and other one off games, and I've generally worked out how the degrees of success obtained by characters will reflect upon their agency in the narrative. Generally, this has led to a few different "base levels" of character...   In the "Familiar" game, most characters are based at "street level" with the benefits provided by the familiars pushing them toward "veteran" level. On average, the numbers mean that players generally have a better than average chance of succeeding at their task attempts, but there will quite often be some kind of fallout (with better success or less fallout when attempting tasks in their specialty...

12 years ago, I did a worldbuilding sequence of posts. It started here , then continued on for almost 30 posts. I'd never really got the chance to run games in this setting, because it wasn't long after this that I really began focusing on my studies to become a teacher.  The setting was a late renaissance/steampunk/pirate affair. You could go back and read the posts, I still think they're kind of cool, otherwise I wouldn't be revisiting them. However, I'll be referencing them while I write this current series.  The point to this series is seeing whether it's feasible to adapt my SNAFU system to this setting. I've been working on the SNAFU Cookbook, and a part of that includes showing how the system can be adapted to different types of settings, so this is a trial run.  The system requires a few cultures, a few occupations, and a few other methods that can used to both differentiate characters and link them into the kinds of potential storylines we envision ...

So, I've mentioned Sceletus a few times. It's not doing too badly, but not surprosingly, interest has dropped off now that Erin and I are charging for supplements. So now it's a case of making sure those supplements are cool and interesting. It's been my previous experience that each supplement for a game gets a bit of interest, then adds a residual kick to the previous games in the line, and this might overflow to other games on my shopfront. Which lead me to two of the current booklets I'm aiming for.  A map of the setting.  A guide of arms and armour. The first booklet is pretty easy. I've got plenty of maps that I haven't used over the years, including a bunch of maps for a mysterious ruined city that could easily be substituted into the Necropolis. All that really needs is a couple of random exploration tables to show some of the interesting things that might be found there (Erin's offered to help populate these tables). The second book will take a ...