Observations of the Fox

Have I mentioned Mana Crusade?  I'm sure I did.  If not, it's getting a second playtest sequence next next. The whole game was developed by Erin Gumiho, a friend I was introduced to a few years ago, even though she had moved in a few of the same circles as me for years. I've bounced ideas back and forward with her, but Mana Crusade is her baby. A private Discord saw a few of the team from Beneath the Glass and Steel throw some support and input into the game.  The idea is that the core rules are on a tri-fold which also serves as the character sheet. The complete rules are no more than another tri-fold. I guess you'd basically describe it as a single character narrative war-game for several players to play concurrently. It draws a bit from the old Inquisitor game from the Warhammer 40k Universe, and maybe a bit from the old Braunstein games that started off the whole RPG hobby.  Everything else in the game is written on cards that get attached to the character sheet...

 We're reaching the home stretch for 2024, and it's actually been a decent run for the blog, after a few years of letting things slide.  Earlier this year, the blog had it's best month ever. There have been a couple of decent sequences of posts, including writing an RPG, some analysis of RPGs, and a serialized set of posts about how to run a game.  I've been able to share links from the blog on assorted social media. Especially when people have "come up with a new idea", and I've been able to point to a post from 10-15 years ago and say "hey, I was saying that same thing way back then...and people didn't listen to me then either." I'm getting a bit of a Cassandra-complex... but anyway... One of the things I've noticed (and one of the things pointed out by a new generation of readers), is that many of the old posts aren't archived well. So I might spent a bit of time sorting them and adding them to the "other tutorials" t...

Sometimes you find a file for a game that you thought was really cool at the time, but it never really got anywhere. Presenting The Boddhisatva's Smile I really liked this game, but I couldn't find anyone will to give it a try. One day...

Here's the Narrator's guide I've been working on... Download Link ...but it probably doesn't make much sense without the other 'zines. So here's the player's guide And the sample cards I'm actually starting to get some interesting feedback on these... just not here on the blog. While I'm at it... here's the two new versions of the Vulpinoid Studios logo

  Just finished the Narrator's Guide to  "Bustle in your Hedgerow". I'll sleep on it, and take another look over it tomorrow before making a final round of edits (unless I'm happy enough that I release it as is)... I still want to write up a setting booklet as an example of the kind of location where scarecrow stories might take place. However, we'll see how that goes. 

I'm more than halfway through the Narrator's Guide, and it's tough culling what I want from what I want to put in because I think it's cool.  I'm still on track to finish this bit of the prject by the end of NaGaDeMon 2024, and might even manage to get another booklet sorted out. If so, I'll manage to get a full starter kit ready for the game... something that will be print and play, with everything necessary for a session beyond the deck of cards, pencils and tokens. It's also nice to see my Bluesky account has picked up a bit in recent days with an influx of new members on the X-odus from other platforms. If you're interested in following me there, I'm at  https://bsky.app/profile/vulpinoid.bsky.social

Both "Bustle in your Hedgerow" and "Walkabout" are games about stories, and about the mythlore underlying reality versus the impact of individuals. Sort of...  ...it's actually a fairly common theme through a lot of my games. So naturally when this came across my feed, it got my attention. The first volume of the Grimms’ “Children’s and Household Tales” was published in December of 1812. It contained 86 stories, including classics like “Rapunzel,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Snow White,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” “Briar Rose,” and “Little Red Riding Hood,” along with extensive footnotes. Critics weren’t sure what to make of a collection of “children’s tales” that came with scholarly addenda and sexual innuendos. For the Grimms, what mattered was to be authentic, not appropriate, and fairy tales, across many literary traditions, weren’t always intended for children. Then, there was the matter of the Grimms’ language—sparse, hectic, visceral, unfiltered. In the preface, the br...

 I'm a rambler... I struggle with condensing words and limiting text to a page count. I clarify with extra words, extra pictures, more examples, richer context. This whole idea of a Narrator's Guide is spilling into a guide for facilitating play, an antagonists guide, a setting booklet... more to write... and then maybe alternate guides for different settings and booklets to define them. On another side, real life work is getting in the way again.

1 - Front Cover 2 - Table of Contents, Credits, and Legal Stuff 3-4 - Further context to the intended game setting with explanations for who the characters are, why they've been awakened, and what they need to do in the world.  5-7 - The process of following the four act structure of Scarecrow stories, what should generally happen at what times, how things ramp up, how things can go awry, and how to get things back on track.    8-9 - This is the "centre-spread" of the zine. This will basically be the narrator's play-mat indicating where to put tokens, and how the tracking of these tokens reflects the events of the night and the flow of the narrative. 10-13 - Creating spirits, hunters, and variant antagonists for the scarecrows. 14-15 - Rituals and variant powers that might be used by scarecrows or ther antagonsists to help drive the story. 16 - Back Cover 

  Today's first of our two guides for running the game is the Vampire Storyteller's Handbook, it's similar to the Werewolf one from yesterday. However, the stories told in Vampire aren't a struggle of horror against the end of the world, they're stories of horror against the monster you will inevitably become. It starts with an introduction which generally explains what the book is about and an overview of the design teams intentions with regard to vampires in the setting. Chapter One gives us an overview of how vampires are different to mortals and what their stories are intended to be like in light of this. It does this through a series of questions and answers over the course of 8 pages or so. Chatpter Two tries to get into the heads of the different clans of vampires, presents a few mysterious bloodlines that may (or may not) exist in your stories, and gives a few new backgrounds and powers that might makee antagonsists a little more unpredictable, maybe a bit m...

I often like doing a bit of research because I launch into something. So, when developing a new Narrator's Guide, I'm going to have a look over a few books in a similar vein that have influenced the way I run games. Starting at the top left and moving clockwise, we get the Werewolf and Vampire Storyteller's Guides, the Chill Companion, and finally the D&D 3rd Ed Dungeonmaster's Guide. 3 out of 4 are for horror games, so that fits where we are heading.  The main bit of this analysis is looking at the types of things that might be important in this type of book, then considering that the whole thing is going to get compressed down to 16 pages (let's say 14 once the front cover and table of contents have been added). I'll look at two of the guides in this post, and two in the next one.  Let's start by looking at the Werewolf Storyteller's Handbook. We've got an opening story, like a lot of books in the World of Darkness lines.  Then an introduction ...

  NaGaDeMon is here... again. I haven't been happy with the flow of the Narrator's Guide for Bustle in your Hedgerow. I was planning to release a part of the game every couple of days, and the first two parts are certainly out there (at the time of writing, the post about the core players guide has had 85 views, and the post about the cards necessary for play has had 29 views. The narrator's guide was due to be released today, and that would have fomre the complete starting pack for play. I gave myself a couple of weeks of lead time to get the writing and formatting of everything sorted out (with the whole " playtesting again ", and " coming soon " posts), but I just can't get the Narrator's Guide ready to a level I'm happy with. It's probably about halfway there, and I'll spend this month refining it further and maybe add a quickstart setting and characters (based on my playtest sessions). Hopefully other activities don't bog m...

Part B of Bustle in Your Hedgerow can be found uploaded to the Vulpinoid Studios google drive. It is here . As I write this, almost a day has passed... over 60 people have looked at the "Part A" post, but no one has commented yet. Maybe it's taking people a bit of time to read what they've downloaded...maybe it's the usual thing where someone might get back to me in 10 years and ask me "Whatever happened to that scarecrow game?"

Here's the first 16-page zine. Not sure how long it'll be here. If you read it and have thoughts, please comment.

 Almost ready.

One of the key aspects of design is playtesting. Knowing how a game shoudl work, and comparing it to how it does work at the table atre often two different things.  I wanted to give my game "Bustle in your Hedgerow" a run at the semi-regular gaming night at The Press (I've mentioned this a few times one the blog so far... an example is  here ). Out of the five nights we've had at The Press this year, I've got a group who have participated in three of the games I've run. When they show up, they do so an hour early to make sure they get my table (which is nice). I basically try to run these sessions the way I'd run a convention game, they pay money to play, they're here for a good time. So I collaboratively tell a fun story with them. They might succeed, they might fail, but either way they'll contribute actively to a story that they'll remember. I expected to have them again last Thursday night when I ran "Bustle" as a part of the Horr...

I've finally reached a point where I'm basically happy with the new character sheet for the updated Walkabout. I'm just going to post it as a link to my google drive here on the blog, becuase that way I can see how many people are looking at this page, and get a rough guide about how many people might have clicked through to actually look at the sheet. The basic idea is that it get printed onto an A4 (or equivalent) sheet, and both sides are folded into the middle using a gate fold. The front of the resulting folded card has the surface elements of the character, what other people see, with room to draw a picture. The inside of the card contains all the various elements that a character uses to perform actions within the game, all the numbers and details. The back of the card is a basic rundown of the game rules for performing actions in the game. I've always been a fan of the idea where the core rules are immediately available to the players, and the complicated rule v...

Here's why I'm not using the type of dots traditionally associted with Australian Indigenous artistry in my Walkabout project... When the dots cross the line - Link One of the key aspects of Walkabout is that the knowledge of the past has been lost, and it needs to be rekindled to bring balance to the land. I've discussed this quite a bit in previous posts about the game, but it's nice to see this cross my feed while I'm working on character sheets and play aids for the game. Much Australian Indigenous culture has been whitewashed (yes, this choice of wording is deliberate), and in many cases the remaining Indigenous communities have taken the successful elements of other Indigenous communities and have claimed them as their own. I work in a school with a high Indigenous population, in fact is has one of the highest numbers of Indigenous students at any school in our state, and has been identified as the largest of the " Connected Communities " schools (wh...

I'm really struggling to get this character generator ready, every time I read through it I'm seeing more issues with it. I guess I'm just running into that eternal problem where "perfect is the enemy of good". A character generator needs context, especially when it is designed to create characters who integrate into a specifically established setting. So the question is "How much context do I need?" Things are blowing out, and the character generation system is rapidly becoming a "player's guide". Anyway...school holidays are coming up, I might get more time to work on things then. Tings are going so much slower when I'm painting a bunch of player pictures and trying to keep them consistent (before Photoshopping them into customised page layouts). I'm doubling and even tripling up on usage of the same images for the characters...but even though the whole process is taking a couple of hours for a new batch of illustrations, and more...

It's been over a fortnight since my last post. I'm running into that idea where "perfect is the enemy of good". I've been wanting to reveal the character design system that I've been developing, but getting the finer details just right has been a mammoth task.  At the moment, we follow a life path through stages. Each stage sets up something about the character, and builds their story with a sequence of random events. The base character generation pages are seven pages, the random life events are nine pages. and then we go through a worked set of examples where four players build their characters, and these characters will be used for the play examples through the rest of the rulebook. There's at least another sixteen pages coming (2 pages each for the various cultural groups, including their cultural values and stereotypes within their communities, how they relate to the other cultures, their available starting equipment, and a few other flavour elements)...

Three to finish off with...  Day 29 - Awesome App Nope. Most apps I've played with have been distracting at the table, or have simply made an overly complex game, slightly less complex. So with this in mind, I can see that a lot of players like them for D&D because they reduce the labyrinthine systems to something vaguely manageable, or make the custom dice in FFG games more available. However, for most of the games that I've tended to play apps just limit the immersion. Maybe I'm just old school like that. Day 30 - Person you'd like to game with I'd love to game with one of the many celebrity gamers who claim that D&D is a great game. Vin Diesel, Hellen Mirren, Terry Crews, Joe Manganiello (my wife would want to be on that table too), Stephen Colbert, Deborah Ann Woll, Dame Judy Dench... I'd love to play something else with them to show that there are games so much better and more interesting out there. Day 31 - Game or Gamer you miss One of the first p...

Day 27 - Marvelous Miniature Oooh...this is a tough one. I've got a few hundred miniatures (maybe a few thousand if you count the unpainted ones). Back in the day, I loved the miniatures produced by Rackham.  Even though they all had character and a distinctive look to them, this lady was one of my favourites. So annoyed they went bankrupt, but if you look hard enough you can still find some of them around . I'll need to dig through my boxes to see if I can find the copy of her that I painted. Day 28 - Great Gamer Gadget I love the idea of an initiative tower... I've been meaning to use one to see how good they are in practice. ...for games that use initiative that is.

Day 25 - Desirable Dice For a few years I had a thing for buying new dice sets for each game, and often new dice sets for specific characters. However, lately the clicky-clacky math-rocks haven't really done much for me. I think it was the moving house seven times in four years that did it.  Day 26 - Superb Screen I don't use screens. I prefer to keep my rolls in the open, and most of my working notes are in my head, because I tend to walk around the table and keep on my feet when I'm running a session. That said, I'm a woodwork teacher. A couple of years back I helped a student build a modular GM screen with a spot for dice, a clipped area to hold notes, and some small draws and storage areas for miniatures, pens, pencils, erasers, etc. Even helped him woodburn some designs on it. Here's the kind of thing we were going for... (from Elderwood Academy )

Day 23 - Peerless Player During the late 1990s, there were a particular group of players at game conventions in Sydney (and who regularly played at a variety of conventions across South Eastern Australia). I think I've mentioned them before on the blog, or at least alluded to them. They were generally known as "Big Name Gamers" (BNGs).  It seemed like everyone wanted to become a BNG, or at least get in the same social circles as the BNGs so that they could influence the local gaming scene, maybe work in one of the local gaming stores, maybe just set themselves up in the local network of favours and influence the led to work in the entertainment industry, theatre, or even political networks... there was a big black market in favours then, real world favours that were a deep iceberg, and the roleplaying community seemed to be one of the odd locations where the deep network protruded into the real world.  But were they actually good players? Not in my experience they weren...

A quick trip to hospital, and some extra paperwork and bureaucracy at work have prevented me from keeping up with the regular posts...but that's just life... let's get back to our regularly scheduled programming. Day 21 - Classic Campaign Even though I've previously stated that I don't often used pre-published materials, one of my formative gaming experiences back in the early 1990s was playing "The Enemy Within" campaign for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying. It was dark, broody, atmospheric. It told a story, and it was so different to the chaos of almost every D&D set of adventures I had encountered at the time. One day I've love to revisit it. Just to see if the nostalgia is playing a bigger role in my memory, or if the campaign really was that good.  Day 22 - Notable Non-Player Character For many years I had an npc who was an old artificer with no legs. He would appear in various games no matter what system we were playing, or what setting it was. He w...

Wow....just wow. Hopefully I'll get the time to elaborate soon.

Day 19 - Sensational Session In 30-odd years of tabletop gaming, I've had some phenomenal sessions, and some absolute horrors. Let's try to dig back a bit, to one of the first RPG conventions I attended. It was the Macquarie University RPG convention back in 1997, at least I think that's when it was. The 90s are a bit of a blur for me, but I do distinctly remember this session. It was a Shadowrun game, there was a massive map in the middle of the room, it was called "Does it hurt when I do this?"... so yeah, peak 90s. The idea behind the game was that we were playing a trauma team, moving across that giant map in the centre of the room. There were at least 2 GMs that we knew of. the game was in a lecture hall, and there ws an antechamber behind the room that we couldn't see into. The GM who was in our room wore a headset, and as the game moved on, they started communicating with someone else, who was that second GM in the antechamber... it was about halfway th...

Day 17 - An Engaging RPG Community Back in the day, "The Forge" had some great discussion and theorising, and that shifted across to "Story Games". However, those two forums had a lot of insularity, and very much an "in-crowd" mentality that included a bunch of inner-circle high profile designers, and a horde of outer designers who often felt like watchers while the cool kids did their thing. It was often a case that the hot new project might be the flavour of the month just released by one of those inner circle designers, who riddled their books with the favoured terminology, and regardless of how good their games actually were everyone praised them in the hope of getting the courtier's favour and becoming the next inner circle member... ...jaded, yes. But that's how I felt at the time, and after a while a lot of other folks started seeing it too. Now, in recent months, I have become an admin for the TTRPG Design Community on Facebook. As one of ...

Day 15 - Great Character Gear By my first method of doing these posts, I love the old Chromebooks for Cyberpunk 2020. the gear in them tells a story... the books work as diegetic/in-game artifacts of the setting. The cyberware and other items found in these supplements really help to flesh out the setting rather than just being modifiers to the various skills and abilities of the characters. By my second method of doing these posts, I've been struggling with the idea of what makes great character gear in my Walkabout project. I think that what I'm aiming for is very much the kind of thing that I've just mentioned about the Chromebooks ( here and here ). I think great character gear is stuff that helps to tell the story, it reveals things about the world and the characters, it makes sense in the setting and fills in gaps. In games like D&D, much of the equipment does the exact opposite of this, it creates loopholes in physics, it disrupts and circumvents story factors, ...

(I thought I'd posted this pair a few days ago... then life got in the way again. I guess I'll need to do a few posts in quick succession to catch up.) Day 13 - Evocative Environments I can't go past Planescape for this one. The writing, the imagery, the first time perusing the books of the setting when it was first released in the 1990s still stick with me. The artwork was so different to other products available at the time... ...but it was more than that. It was written with lots of fragments, an abundance of places to visit, but every one of those places felt different. It wasn't just a string of medieval cookie cutter towns with the same mysterious hills behind them, and similar dungeons. Day 14 - Compelling Characters Here's the bit where I think my method of answering questions by giving games has basically reached it's end. I've been wondering whether I should approach this question from the perspective of which game system creates the most compellin...

Day 11 - RPG with well supported one-shots I really don't want to say D&D for either of the questions on today's post. However, honestly D&D has such a massive fan base and a huge range of players, dungeon masters, homebrewers, and modders that it's pretty ludicrous to completely ignore what's happening in that part of gaming. I'm generally a bigger fan of indie games, and in a lot of cases games like that are the passion project of a single designer or a small group, and there often isn't enough energy to keep supporting games like that after they've been released. If I pick a mid level game, I love some of the stuff that has been produced for Call of Cthulhu over the years. Again, it's the kind of game that has a massive heritage with decades of play behind it, so it's an easy pick to say there are good support systems for it's play.  I've done a few one-shots with it over the years, but have never managed to get a campaign going wi...

Day 9 - An accessory you'd like to see In the last few years there have been so many good gaming accessories that I haven't really been able to keep up with them. So there are probably a whole heap of options that I'd like to see, which already exist. I've seen dice apps for various games, I've seen dice trays, customisable figures with magnetic limbs that can mix-and-match they appearances and equipment. I've seen character diaries and journals to immerse yourself in the world of the game, sound mixing programs that add background noises to an adventure session, I've seen props of significant items from D&D appear in my local gaming and pop-culture stores (a replica "Hand of Vecna" for example). The accessories I'd like to see are the kinds of things that have been bombarding us from Hasbro as advertisements for D&D, but shifted to the indie games.   But generally, this whole hobby is a combination of improv, theatre of the mind, and c...

Day 7 - RPG with "Good Form" What constitutes an RPG with good form? This is probably something everyone is struggling with. Different people will have their own definitions for this.   My definition of this is basically a game that does what it says on the cover, and it does that thing well. It's not the kind of game where you ignore half of the rules, or a game where you have to make up a bunch of your own rules to make it playable. For the epic feel of sci-fi war against overwhelming odds, with a political backstory explaining why the homeworld uses and abuses you (in the vein of "Aliens" or "Starship Troopers") I love 3:16. It doesn't do much, but what it does is done well. It's simple, strips back all the stuff that these stories don't really touch on, and if focuses on killing things...lots of things. As long as I've had players in the right frame of mind, I've never had a bad game with this.  Day 8 - An accessory you apprecia...

Day 5 - RPG with great writing I remember first being blown away by the writing of Castle Falkenstein . The idea of a game as an in setting artifact describing the world was really cool. However, as I'm writing this, the first time I remember encountering this sort of thing was in the supplements for the game Chill .   Chronica Feudalis was one of the games that really took this to a new level. I'm not sure I've seen a game do this idea better since. Day 6 - RPG that is easy to use One of the easiest games I've ever used was Peril Planet's Freeform Universal , and it's little wonder the game has such a fanatical following. Boiling everything down to a simply positive or negative modifier makes the game streamlined and intuitive. It also means that the game can have complexity added to it once players are used to how the system works. I've done a couple of games over the years which are basically hacks of this system, and they've all run pretty smoothly....

The complete list of daily questions can be found in the first post of this series. Day 3 - Most often played RPG I'd probably have to go with Vampire the Masquerade on this one. I've had a few campaigns of this over the years, both as intimate sessions with a few players, though to mutli-form extravaganzas with over a hundred players in them.  On the whole though, I tend to try as many different games as I can. A few sessions here and there, with the intention to identify what makes them tick, where their strengths and weakness lie, and what I can forage from them to put into my own designs. Honourable mentions for most played games would probably have to go to Legend of the Five Rings, and inevitably D&D (because sometimes that's the only game in town.   Day 4 - RPG with Great Art HoL This was the first "hand written" RPG I encountered. The whole book is a piece of art, though it can be argued whether it counts as a roleplaying game, or just a parody of role...