Observations of the Fox

I've been reading through a few Judge Dredd comics... some of the classics... some more recent stuff... the "Judgement on Gotham" Batman crossovers... the "America" story arc... ...in light of current politics (and given that a lot of these stories were written over 20 years ago), the satire is viciously delicious. Given that I've been reading these comics for detail research regarding my "Arcology Tower" project, almost everything fits in with what I've done and my memories of the overall structure have generally reflected the oeuvre. A few things I'm finding interesting are the finer points... certain character calling knives "stanleys", even to the point of having "laser stanleys" that might be used for cutting into flesh for scarification purposes...the strange cults and gangs who often have names that allude to groups in our world... mysterious relics and arcne technologies that might link this world to other un...

Over the years I've had a few fragmentary game ideas that never really went anywhere. Sometimes I come back to them and polish them up enough to present to the outside world. Here's one of those ideas. It's a game called Tales. It's pretty open in this incarnation, designed for a group to collaboratively tell stories together, and when you put it that way it sounds like standard RPG fare. The point of difference here is that instead of an arbitrary randomiser to determine whether a character succeeds in their action, or a direct comparison of skills levels to difficulty degree, a players companions determine whether a character succeeds by playing a card from a hand that is replenished randomly through the course of play. So a player is prompted to create dramatic moments and appeal to the players around them for the chance to gain maximum success potential (of course there's always the chance that those other players won't be able to provide a successful ...

How do people feel about "odd" book sizes? I'm starting the process of compiling my arcology tower maps into a single book (which will probably be 160 pages or so). There will be two versions of this book, one of which will be fully statted out and ready to run as a sandbox game environment, the other will be fully illustrated, but designed to be used as a game prop that is filled in as the tower is explored by the characters (with an optional booklet describing random location/npc generation, and how to tie these random ideas together into a coherent ecosystem/economy). I'm looking at the DrivethruRPG book sizes, and I'm really tempted to go with 8.5"x8.5", with the optional random generator booklet at 8.5"x5.5". But I can find it annoying to have a row of uniform books on my shelf, with one or two odd ones. Just wondering about other people's thoughts before I go ahead with this.

#365 Day 14 - A fun game of FUBAR at #EttinCon Summer 2017, #Katoomba #rpg #gaming #tabletop A photo posted by Michael Wenman (@vulpinoid) on Jan 14, 2017 at 4:10am PST I've finally managed to get to another EttinCon. I was at the first one in Winter 2015, missed the Summer and Winter ones in 2016, but managed to reach the Summer 2017 edition. Both times I have attended, I've wanted to participate in some indie gaming goodness, whether that might be of the "storygames", the "OSR", or some other flavour. Both times I've run FUBAR to an enthusiastic group who picked up the game pretty quickly, but didn't get the chance to play anyone else's offerings... actually, at that first EttinCon, I played a few boardgames, but no other RPGs. It was the first EttinCon I've managed to get Leah along to, and the first game convention I've brought her too since GenCon Oz back in 2009. For a game session I had in the back of my mind f...

Late last year I was developing a concept for an online game, where a character is defined by an encoded string of alphanumeric digits. I've been thinking about it again, and have been working through the necessary components to go through an online character generation process. Just in case you've been wondering what I've been up to for the last couple of days... ...well, that and getting ready for EttinCon.