Observations of the Fox

 Two nights ago, we had another "Medieval Tavern Night" at The Press Basement Bar .  It's been an erratic night. The first event was meant to be held in February but got pushed back to March, we had about 18 players, with 3 sessions at 6 per session, and another dozen or so Magic players (I think), who were participating in a card tournament. I ran an open exploration game focused on a ruined city that covered an island. It was once the capital of a corrupt and ancient kingdom. The each had goals on the island, it worked fairly well.   The second event was in April but coincided with ANZAC day, and a lot of people figured it would be called off, or simply had other plans. We had two games running, and I think there were some Magic players again. I ran 8 that night, where a bunch of the players had been in my session on the first night. For this session I ran a heist. All the characters were half-animal races, so I pitched it as Oceans 11 meets Zootopia. It was basica...

Walkabout is a game about stories. It's about the things that make a story powerful, and how stories can be an influential positive or negative force in people's lives. There's a few things that reinforce this kind of idea. In the old novels of the Star Wars extended universe, there was an unwritten idea that I heard from a few different sources, but which I can't find now to reference. This idea said that the more words were written about a character, the more chance there is that the character will end up being force sensitive. It's possible to go further back and look at "The One Ring" in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. In The Hobbit, the item is an interesting throwaway item...but as more is written about it, the ring gains massive significance. Further back still is the idea of Baba Yaga in eastern European mythologies. This immortal witch appears in a few different stories, rather than just the one. As such she transcends the power level of a sing...

There are signature items that recur in the stories where they're found. Mad Max's Interceptor Tank Girl's Tank MacGyver's Pocketknife Luke Skywalker's Lightsaber These are all items that transcend their ability to improve someone's chances of completing a task. They are iconic parts of the character they link to, and a character has a relationship to the item that reflects both their ability to use the item in question and the influence that item has on the ongoing storyline.   Relationships are a massive part of Australian Indigenous lore (and law), and therefore they need to be a part of Walkabout. Relationships may be between people, they may be between a person and the land they inhabit, or they may be between a person and something they hold dear.  Many items in Walkabout are the remains of the past, fragment of a civilisation that is lost and exist in a world that is no longer able to maintain them, some items are newer constructions, crafted from natural...

I have no illusions about the fact that certain elements in the Walkabout setting could be perceived as problematic. Removing those elements removes some key thematic concepts from the game and turns it into a vanilla post-apocalyptic game, or maybe a vanilla game with a few veneer elements that make it look like I've just slapped on some colour for a bit of difference. That's never been the intention of the project, the game has never shied away from deeper analysis, because the aim is not for players to become indigenous tourists, it's not a game for "nerdy white boys" to play "blackface Indigenous survivors in a over-the-top Mad Max wasteland" (despite what certain superficial reactionary critics might suggest). These elements are key to the types of stories able to be told. Excluding them would be like trying to tell a World War Two story without mention of Nazism or Japanese Imperialism, or discuss the destabilisation of South American economies wit...

There are a folks concerned about the ethical issues of using generative algorithms to create imagery, so I thought I'd share the general hand drawn imagery that will be used for the majority of the project. Many of these images have been derived from photos provided by game designers from around the world back in the days when the Story Games web forum was going strong. The various photos that form parts of these images are typically ones that I've taken in various parts of the state of NSW, and across Australia. Urban ruins, farmlands, outback...anything that feels right for the setting and adds a degree of authenticity to the project. A few of the images produced as a part of this are photo-montages as well. There's also a few other artists working on the project with a variety of styles and techniques (because I like the idea of this being a community project rather than a single person's vision). That fits the themes of the project more. Here's the type of mono...

For those who are new to this project, some food for thought... this was intended to be a part of the prelude to the game.   Statement The Walkabout project was started on Tharawal Country, roughly 25 kilometres southwest of the site of the Appin Massacre of 1816, the first recorded instance of government ordered “removal” of Indigenous inhabitants from their homes. Colonial soldiers drove men, women, and children to their deaths; whether shot, plunging over cliffs, or driven from their land not to be seen again. The area was considered prime agricultural land for the colony. 10 kilometres further west of this project’s origin, lies the Warragamba catchment area, where the Gundungurra people were removed from their Country to dam a vast valley as a water catchment for the city of Sydney. They were forbidden from returning, and no regard was given for their ancestral sacred sites which were flooded. In the years since the Walkabout project started, work continued in the lands of t...