Observations of the Fox

A lot of my thoughts about the SNAFU magic system can be traced back to the work I did back in NaGaDeMon 2019 when I worked on SNAFU and the Familiar games concepts initially. I can see posts that go back to the earlier versions of the word system , posts that already seem to address some of the conduit issues that I'm having , even the bit where I pulled Connection/Conduit/Capacity from the Ukiyo Zoshi work of the 1990s. I've been stomping in this space for a while, and I guess this is half the reason why I keep this blog going. Sure, I'm getting thousands of views every day, and I don't think all of them can be bots (even if I rarely get comments), but having an archive of twenty years of game design ideas, theories and observations I can look back on has been really useful at times.  My quick scans over these old posts (they don't feel old, but after 7 years they certainly don't count as recent posts any more) shows that I've had some changes in thought ...

I've been thinking about that last post.  What if a mystic had the words "destroy" and "light", and they accumulated enough energy to magnify their effect to cover the orbital distance to the moon (radius of effect - 10), plus the energy to get their effect centred on the sun (distance to centre of effect - 7), made it an effect that lasted centuries or longer (duration 6+), and applied a few levels of success to the number of penalty traits applied (let's say 4 or 5)? We know that this would be feasible for a mystic with a minimum capacity score of 3, because they could feasibly generate 36 energy over the course of 3 rounds, so 28 is certainly within the realms of possibility. But what would this look like? Would they extinguish the sun? Would they cause a collapse in the sun's energy output that would cause it to become a supernova? Would the darkness effect actually cause the sun to collapse into a black hole?  I think that one of the key things to c...

So here's how it works. A mystic decides that the want to transform the world in a predetermined way.  To do this, they instinctively follow a procedure that involves a few steps. They decide what changes they are aiming for. They invoke the energy that will manifest changes in the world. They filter the gathered energy through their intentions. The world changes in some way. The first and last steps are fairly narrative in nature, while the middle steps are where the mechanisms of play manipulate the flow of events.  They decide what changes they are aiming for. The effect is described in the terms of a simple sentence with one or more metaphysical terms thrown into it. The simplest form of the magical sentence is a metaphysical verb combined with a metaphysical noun. The verb is what you're doing, and the noun is what you're doing it to. "[Create] [Fire]", "[Purify] [Water]", "[Grow] [Plants]", "[Corrupt] [Data]"...the words can be ...

I did a bit of a binge of the recent Predator Movies... Prey, Predator: Killer of Killers, and Predator:  Badlands... over the weekend.  I have to say, that each of these movies is fun, and there's some awesome worldbuilding in them. What makes them greater than the sum of their parts is the way they are interconnected. And on top of that, the way they establish a wider context of worldbuilding across the other movies in the franchise. We get the flintlock pistol from Predator 2 appearing in various movies, we get the post credits scenes in "Killer of Killers" with throwbacks to old characters, yet each movie works well as a standalone. The same can generally be said of the other movies in the franchise, but some of them have been a bit hit-and-miss in their execution.    I love that each of the movies is different and has a different feel, orbiting around the combinations of ideas where sci-fi, action, and horror overlap. I love that the diversity of the main charac...

 It's always interesting to read other people's perspectives. Here's a review of GNS theory after a generation of games have been and gone, and have been influenced by it in different ways. I generally agree with a lot of what the post is saying. A lot of the premise with GNS indicated that the three styles of gaming were mutually incompatible, and any any to reconcile two of them (or heaven forbid all three) was incoherent, and implicitly doomed to failure. However this article recognises that there is overlap between the concepts, and having two goals doesn't necessarily make for a diluted session experience, but just combines flavours for a different experience.  I've posted a few times about the theory (I think most of those posts have " The Forge " as a tag), and have designed with it in mind for decades now, trying my hand at different focal objectives (to varying degrees of success). It's interesting how influential it's been in the hobby, ...

The last post covered the predominantly random part of the character generation system. This post works on completing the characters with a phase that allows a lot more agency from the players.  The previous step got us to... Six total attribute points (we need two more) Four total ability points (we need eight more) One advantage (we need one more) We don't have any aegises, relationships or equipment (but they can come). I'm thinking that we'll be looking at a range of templates that function like apprenticeships what will push characters in certain directions. A template for each bloodline, a template for each culture, and a few generic templates that anyone can choose (rural community, street rat, sailor, trader, crafter, heavy).    Each of these templates will boost a pair of attributes associated with the types of task that this group is known for. It will also grant four automatic abilities, an extra advantage, a pair of relationships, and a pair of basic equipment...