Observations of the Fox

 To "Grok" something basically means to understand something fully. grok verb INFORMAL • US understand (something)  intuitively  or by  empathy . "corporate leaders seemed to grok this concept fairly quickly" establish a  rapport . "nestling earth couple would like to find water brothers to  grok with  in peace" There's a psychological concept that crosses through many hobbies and pastimes called "flow", it can kind of be considered a relative to the concept of "grokking". flow theory —referring to a state of being in which people become so immersed in the joy of their work or activity “that nothing else seems to matter.”  To be in a state of flow requires one to fully grok the activity they are engaged in. That often means having a set of rules that intuitively makes sense, which takes a supportive back seat when the storytelling is progressing easily, but is caoable of providing a helpful nudge now and again when the storytelling ...

Not everything in FUBAR is a threat. This game is the same. Most things in FUBAR are just interesting elements in the world until actions taken by the characters trn them into potential benefits or penalties, allies or enemies... I did a couple of fairly comprehensive sequences on worldbuilding here o the blog a few years back, and most of my ideas are generally the same now as they were then. The Darkhive worldbuildng sequence was fun ( it begins here ) and the Worldbuiding 101 sequence played with a bottom-up style of worldbuilding that is more typical of the way I develop settings ( it starts here ). However,  "Bustle in your Hedgerow" is less about designing a new world from scratch, and more about adding some spices to our exising world, and setting some broad boundaries to work within... boundaries inpired by the heavy folk-rock and blues or a legendary band. Much of the worldbuilding in this type of game is inspired by the choices and actions of the players as they gui...

This whole game is meant to be inspired by the lyrics of Led Zeppelin, but aside of our game's name, and the lyric quotes that inspire the powers, we're startig to deviate a but from that core premise. A quickandeasy way to remedy that is to create a few antagonists and scene types that draw on the ouevre of zeppelin lyrics. These include the kinds of characters that are deicted in one or more songs. Like the way we'll be using the mysterious "Dullahan Corporation", these probably work best if they aren't applied to every game, especiallu not multiple threats from this list during the one game. Anyway, here's my first batch of threats directly inspired by Led Zeppelin lyrics...many of them occur in two-parts,with a pair of scenes resolving their story. When the Levee Breaks (Monstrous, 2-part) part one "if it keeps on raining" (4 tokens) A storm sets in over the town, threatening the farmlands that the scarecrows reside on. Like the song, this is...

When I run games, I often have a vague understanding of the various forces in play and how they will react when certain things might occur. I like the agency to be in the hands of my players, and like to make sure a lot of the events in the world happen as reactions to their choices (or to their lack of choices). The FUBAR system faciliates this sort of play. We don't necessarily know whre the story will end up. Instead it is divided ito four acts: context, complication, climax and conclusion.  The context phase allows exploration of the world, and once enough trigers have been activated (or once adequate worldbuilding has been established for the session) play moves to the complication phase of the game. During the context phase, there isn't a lot of token movement, one or two minor threats might come into play, but they don't really seem to have a lot of impact on the deeper story for the session. This isn't entirely true, the minor threats probably work best as hints...

Dullahan is another name for headless horseman. It is an Irish spirit often considered one of the unseelie fey, as well as being malicious and fierce. This might work well as the source of power behind the mysterious corporation. It will probably also work well as the name of the corporation. Given scarecrows are a generally associated with British folklore, the idea might be to have a group of seelie fey who bring the scarecrows to life, while the Dullahan Corporation is driven by the Unseelie. However, a bit of research indicates that scarecrows have actually been in use since the time of the ancient Egyptians. This begs the question of whether we push the shadowy backstory of the Scarecrows back further, all the way to Egypt, or whether the first scarecrows to be animated were in fields in the British Islands. Do we really need this much shadow history in the game, especially if it isn't going to directly influence play? In this setting, maybe the Arabian folk tales of djinn rel...

One of the closest analogues I can think of or this game is "Werewolf: the Apocalypse", where primal warriors with cultural lineages fight against a global environmental meltdown driven by an evil global corporation called Pentex, and dark sinister forces from the spirit world are fueling the fight to destroy the world as we know it. I'm thinking there needs to be some kind of global antagonist for the setting, a shadowy conspiracy that either knows the truth about the Scarecrows, or has enough evidence that it will piece things together soon. This adds a degree of threat to the stories, and such an organisation in the game helps to serve as a measure to prevent players from giving their characters too high a profile.   This isn't the type of group that can be confronted head on...but it shouldn't be a no-win scenario forthe scarecrows either. I'm thinking that this mysterious corporation is a bit like an "Umbrella Corporation" from Resident Evil, th...

 According to the stories (and I've been in online conversation with Mark Rein*Hagen to confirm this), the seed of an idea for Vampire: the Masquerade occurred on a cross country road trip, as it passed through the decaying urban environment of Gary, Indiana on the way to a gaming convention. The first writings for the game were done during the nights of that convention.    The idea of a world forgotten, of darkness and neglect, of anger at inequality, all seethed under the surface.  It' a world we're familiar with, but by picking and choosing key elements of it, we can set the tone. We don't need to detail everything, just the changes between the game setting and the real world, the world known by the characters and the world known by the players. This game is inspired by the rural communities I've lived in over the past few years.  It is inspired by the lyrics of Led Zeppelin, with references to British folk-lore, Tolkein, a fantasy America that exists only i...

Yeah, it didn't take me long, here's the night mode version of the sheet. This is the bit of game design that I really like, the bit where yu make things look atmospheric and appropriate to the themes you're trying to convey to your players (and maybe a bit pretty as well).  I've also generated up the trait cards, some of which will be prewritten and ready to go, wile others will be left like this so they can be filled in with concepts appropriate to the story as it unfolds. The bottom of the trait card has space for a player to place a paperclip. This can be slid along the edge to indicate how long the trait will remain in play. I've also included a circle in the lower right corner of the trait card, where I'm thinking of adding some symbols that might add some extra complexity to the game system for those who prefer a bit more crunch to their games. I'm still thinking about the best way to do this, but I've got a few ideas in mind. Some of the gifts in...

What do we need on it? This game doesn't have attributes, it doesn't need them. It kind of has skills, in the form of core traits. Let's go throgh what we do have in the game, and start to sort out the varyingdegrees of importance and how those game elements are used. Name Every character needs a name, ths is typically one of their key factors. A name says a lot about a person, often explaining something about the person who chose the name (within the context of the story setting) and what they may have intended from the character. This could be just as true for parents choosing the name for their child, farmers givig a name to the scarecrow they've just built, or a person who as chosen their own name as a part of a change in their life direction. A name should be in a prominent location on the sheet, maybe the first thing your eye is drawn to at the centre or in the top-left.  Stuffing We do't have a lot of visually defining features for our scarecrows, and this is...

Early on in this series of posts I looked a a few games to get a grounding of where I want to go with the design. I've always thought that's a great idea, because it's hard to make the perfect sushi if the only thing your ever had to eat is pizza. If you've got no concept of the various optins out there, you're just going to fall into the same patterns as the things you're familiar with. We've got a decent framework in place, but what do we need to know about our characters for these stories to work? Let's look at a few other game systems and see how they define characters. Maybe we can use some of their ideas, maybe some of their ideas won't work for what we're trying to achieve... and maybe their ideas are just rubbish. Storyteller System Here's a plain, elegant, direct character sheet, it is basically unchanged since it first appeared in the 1990s. This is the latest version of the sheet, for the current incarnation of the game but follows...