Observations of the Fox

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...