Observations of the Fox

 He wasn't a close friend, he was an acquaintance I knew who shared a passion for game design. He was someone I shared meals and drinks with, and who I talked gaming and game design with... ...and now he's gone. Steve's last public work was a blog post with a link to an unfinished game . Curiously, there's a bit of overlap with my last post with topics of Dunning-Kruger in it, and it generally touches on a lot of the ideas that arose in discussions I had with him. There's lots of mediocre stuff out there and mediocre people who have only managed to get public attention because they've got confidence more than refined skill or natural talent. The catch is that you need to actually do things, and not be discouraged by the mediocre crap that's getting more attention. Like Steve, this has been a long term struggle for me, and I know plenty of other talented designers who feel a similar way.  Steve was generally a friendly and genial person (at least that's w...

It's a heavy start to 2026, but here goes...   I saw this news article a couple of days ago, and was really conflicted in the thoughts I had about it. The title of this post basically sums things up, yet I really need to deconstruct the ideas embedded here. I just need to get those ideas out of my head, because they've been festering. It also goes back to the earliest posts I wrote on the blog when I started it. ( Here 's where it all started, but I really got to the point in the second and third posts)  In the second post I referred to an idea that I called "Corporate Chromatography" at the time, and a lot of my thoughts at the time hold true almost 18 years later (wow, 18 years, has it really been that long) . The point behind that post was the idea that those at the top of the corporate world love to say that "the cream rises to the top", however in my experience "pond scum rises to the top". Those with the lowest amount of ethics to weigh...

 I've been looking at some of the posts that have done well recently... Like this post from the beginning of 2024, which gave an overview of life since the blog had started and alluded to some ideas that had been intended at the time.   Or, curiously,  this old post from 2012 about LARP, which basically predates my involvement in a few LARP groups, that I helped to run and then started to run on my own.  Or the evergreens like this post about my favourite game Mage the Ascension, or this post which started off the map drawing tutorials that I ran through almost a decade ago. Another surprising one that's seen a bit of traction lately is this one which describes some of my earlier thoughts about making a more modern and story driven game based on Mage: the Ascension. It's kind of weird that the post from the series that's getting the views is halfway through the sequence... however, it is one of the early stages of thought that has led to the SNAFU system th...

Frank Zappa once proclaimed that “without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible”. This has basically been a part of my game design ethos ever since I've been writing. The other part comes from Robert M. Pirsig (I can't remember whether it was in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" or "Lila") where there is a concept that progress requires a combination of static and dynamic forms. This is also a big part of Mage the Ascension, which is heavily influence by those two books. The notion states that periods of stasis allow structure to form, and that structure gives strength to a concept or culture, but too much stasis brings stagnation and an inability to keep moving forward. Periods of dynamism allow mutation and growth, which could be positive or negative, but too much dynamism leaves structure behind and brings an insecure and precarious state. Healthy progress requires both. If a period of change brings beneficial improvements to the str...

It's the end of school year, and that means our school does some interesting activities to keep students engaged. I've discussed that in previous years (end of 2024, here and here )... (I thought I'd written about previous years, but digging through the blog, it looks like I haven't ). So I figured that I'd run my Chrono-Labyrinth for the students. I know that particular dungeon really well because I've run it many times, so it seemed a good test to see how the game system works in contrast the the other systems I've used for that dungeon in the past. So I ran Sceletus .  I felt like it was going to be an easy system, elements of it just make sense. However I've really wanted to see how it actually works with a range of gamers, both experienced and brand new. Instead of thinking it works, I now know it does. There's also some interesting emergent properties of the game, that I hadn't considered. The way stress works in the game varies depending...

    With the new symbols, and some slight modifications to how the system operates, I've needed to change the layout of the graphic that describes the games mechanisms. However, one of the main reasons for this was the fact that I could only find the flattened version , and couldn't modify it... so it was easier to start again. Another issue here is that I wanted to fit this SRD into a 16 page zine format. I'd tightly managed to fit everything that I thought I needed for the document, but that tight fit meant that a lot of the layout was problematic. I'd rather give the words a bit of room to breath, and throw a few more images into the mix. I'm still planning to do a "printer-friendly"/"image-free" version of the SRD, but we'll get to that once I'm happy with this version. More updates to come.