Observations of the Fox

One of the things I've struggled with in the SNAFU system has been the balance... This might be a balance between restricting character choices along specific narrative or mechanical paths (much like " Powered by the Apocalypse " games do), or offering complete freedom of choice to players (like " Freeform Universal " games do). It might be a balance between complex rules (like " Rolemaster "), or simple ones (like " Honey Heist "). Knowing a variety of games and how they handle things can be a mixed blessing. It's really good to see how different designers have handled situation that they see their players getting involved in... it's just as important to see the gaps they've left and whether these gaps are deliberate elements of " fruitful void " or whether they just haven't been noticed because they didn't consider that players might be doing these within within narratives driven by their systems.   Within this...

As I sat in a hospital last week, intravenous drip in my arm, I had a whole heap of revelations and moments of satori. Now that I'm in a state to write about them, do you think I can remember them? I remember that there was stuff about the direction I wanted to take the "SNAFU SRD and Cookbook", including the idea of writing up a basic 'zine that covered the core rules and only the core rules. That's basically what most SRDs are anyway, and I've started thinking about the layout on that part of the project. The aim this time is to include avoid forgetting any of the important bits, while making sure I trim away anything superfluous. That's tough. At this stage I've tried to trim it down to 16 pages, but it's more realistically looking like 20. There's also some vague recollections about those augmented reality games like Pokemon Go, and a few others that I've played over the years. I was imagining these from the perspective of a modern urba...

I've been trying to tell people for decades that D&D hasn't been good for the wider community of independent RPGs, and RPG designers. However it's really felt like a lot of people couldn't understand this... so it's interesting to see when other people have the same ideas, especially when those ideas seem to come from different perspectives. I'd generally considered the problems of D&D to come from it's ludo-narrative dissonance (the way the game claims to be about one thing, while its systems of play don't support, and actually hinder, the kinds of experience it claims to offer) . I hadn't considered these ideas...     ... I hadn't considered the "trickle-down economics" factor (or lack thereof), but it makes a lot of sense based on what I've been seeing over the years. The whole thing has been really stifling as a designer. I don't know if I want to write any more at the moment, but I wanted to get this thread saved fo...

Sceletus has had its soft release. There's still things that need to be changed about it. Included in that are needing to add in a few more images and finish off the book about the political groups that exist in the setting and how they can be used to manipulate stories in the game. Here's the page for the Game Jam that it's been submitted to. and Here's the page for the game itself. I'll probably put it up on DrivethruRPG soon as a paid version, so get the free edition while you can.  

Halloween is almost here. The game about skeletons that I've been working with Erin on is almost done. I'm going to have the make sure enough of it is finished for a soft release.             There's another book in the starting sequence, but that's not going to be ready by Friday. Hopefully the next post will tell you that the game is now available. 

I've never been a fan of throwing in too many ingredients, because it just muddies the output. But a single ingredient just isn't enough to get interesting flavour profiles happening. A single season gives a strong vibe, but interesting twists can happen when the seasons are mixed.I touched on this a few times in the last couple of posts, such a Judge Anderson's spring story versus a summer for for Judge Dredd in the Movie Dredd (2012). The aim is to contrast one season versus another, whether that's a characters story in the larger world, or two characters' stories playing off against one another.   Remembering that different characters can be at different stages of their life journey, within the same communal story and setting, these narratives don't have to apply to every character. Contrasting narratives between two different characters can be awesome to highlight different parts of the story, as well as the different attitudes and motives of the characters...

  The stories of winter can be some of the hardest to achieve. With a focus on gloom, despair and ennui, they're basically like playing out a waiting game. Winter comes after the fall of autumn and before the rise of spring. In autumn there is still the struggle to maintain relevance  The only game I can think to have achieved this adequately is " Polaris ", where politics plays out in a cold dark wasteland at the edge of time and space. This happens as immortal elves from a fallen age live in a frozen wasteland of night, awaiting a new dawn that has not come for years/decades/centuries, in the shadows demonic entities threaten the elves, and risk the final fall before a new spring can rejuvenate the land. It's a dark and slow game, highly ritualised. It needs the right group of players to pull off successfully (I've tried it, and even though I thought it had potential, it could have gone better and felt like there were some missteps along the way). The thing abou...

  If a spring story shows a rise, and a summer story shows a time of strength, then an autumn story explores a downfall. A downfall may be a slow drawn out affair, or it may be fairly abrupt and dramatic. The only thing clear about an autumn story is that the glory days of spring and summer have passed, and now it's the time for the inevitable decline before something fresh can take over. In the various games I've been exposed to, I've found the idea of autumn stories best represented in assorted "story games" rather than traditional tabletop forms or OSR products. The traditional and OSR games might have autumnal settings, with dying empires and crumbling decadence, but the stories in them still strive to be heroic. Story games have a tendency to be more atmospheric and less competitive, and therefore more capable of telling stories that are both introspective and atmospheric. This is often a complaint launched at this genre of game, suggesting that they afren...

  Stories of summer are harder to portray than those of spring. This is generally because the period of  rapid growth has reached it's conclusion and now the stories are about the consolidation of power, and the strategic maneuvers that shift power from aggressive and offensive patterns into passive and defensive ones. For this sort of game, I'd probably look toward the ancillae level for Vampire: the Masquerade. The young neonates are going through their spring phase, trying to become accustomed to their new powers and the political machinations around them. The summer stories kick in once the vampire has made a name for themselves (typically after a couple of decades...because earlier than that, and most of the young fresh-blood neonates will probably die before they've got the chance to influence wider vampiric society). These are the stories where the characters start to have children of their own to take on the risky jobs, and where they start to take a step back from ...

  I've mentioned several times here and elsewhere that there are a lot of things D&D doesn't do well. It struggles with character agency, the swingy die results mean that characters are rarely the heroic individuals that players have in their mind's eyes. Recent versions have really dulled the edge, with characters often surviving situations that should seriously leave them dead. There's not a whole lot in the mechanisms of play that that add mood or drama to the session, and that's left firmly in the hands of the Dungeon Master and players. However, credit where it's due... the overall game framework tells a decent spring story. The idea of having limited agency in the world, then working through a chronicle, accumulating experience, new skills and abilities, useful toys, and establishing a reputation. All of that works really well for the characters in D&D, especially low to mid level characters (let's say progressing from levels 2-3 through to lev...

The last post looked at the different parts of the seasonal narrative from the framework of the four European seasons...spring, summer, autumn, winter. However, that's not necessarily the only way to look at it, and by considering a trinity of seasonal energies it might help to add some perspective into what I'm aiming for.  Mage: the Ascension (and closely related for these purposes, Werewolf: the Apocalypse) has a trinity of energies that form a similar cycle to the seasons, and since I'm a big fan of these games I'm naturally going to be influenced by the way they handle things. The general idea of the cycle begins with chaos and raw unbridled potential (wyld), moves to order and unwavering stasis (weaver), and finishes with entropy and decayed corruption (wyrm).    In this image, we might move clockwise around the circle starting at the left side with spring. Where the bottom left corner roughly aligns with the raw unbridled chaotic potential of "the wyld"...

 I helped found a ferret rescue group a few years ago, and recent chats about that group and the way it has developed over the years have fed my thought patterns regarding the rise and fall of organisations and how this can fit into different types of storytelling. Other things that have been building up the structure of those thoughts are a binge watch of the current three seasons of the " Foundation " TV series, my regular readings of the book " Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ", the recent electoral landslide against the conservative party in Australia (also see here ), an outsiders perspective of what is happening in the USA at the moment ( here , here and here )... the Portland frog might have something to do with it too. (I know that with the ever changing political landscape and the constant rotations of the news cycle, a lot of these links may no longer be valid in a few weeks/months/years, but that's happened many times over the years here ...

  So I'm gathering together a bunch of ideas for the new game that I've been developing with Erin. Both of us have been looking at different games across Itch, and plenty of the ideas that we're scavenging have come from all over the place (including plenty of inspirations from the old " Game Mechani(sm) of the Week " series, stuff that was discussed in the " How to Run a Game " sequence, and assorted stuff we've found on Itch over recent weeks). This project is intended for the DURF Jam 2025 , which opens tomorrow. However, even though there are lots of things we like about the way DURF approaches things, there's a few key elements that we don't like, including the core game mechanism or rolling d20 plus a low variable ability factor versus a difficulty. I like the idea of adding or subtracting another die result (a bit like inspiration adding to a roll in 5e D&D), so I tried to integrated this a bit more naturally into the system rather...

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been looking through itch.io  to see what sorts of interesting things have been developed by folks in parts of the gaming sphere that I haven't necessarily been exposed to. It has actually been an interesting activity, especially downloading some of the cheap stuff and free stuff that people have uploaded, and doing some careful reads of what has been released. I've found it curious that a lot of the games are exploring different ways to do things, but often fall back on the same basic patterns. It's also been notable that plenty of games have indicated inspiration from games that I had considered "just another OSR red-book clone" but the mechanisms of these games have been quite different, and something I would have completely overlooked due to prejudice. As an example, I just looked at "Stirrup" by Kyler Korbo Mills , which even goes so far as to call itself an OSR product, however I'm seeing far more in comm...

I sit here tonight, at the computer... ready to write a post, because I had a great idea for a post this afternoon but I was was too busy to sit down and type it then...  ...and now I've drawn a blank.  

The last time I mentioned the traffic here at the blog was in early September , and I was getting a bit more traffic than expected. However, at the end of September the spike in traffic just kept going up.     It has basically skewed the entire data for the history of the blog. In early years, I'd had a few months peaking above 20k, in the last 2 years a couple of months even peaked above 30k, but last month managed to beat 180k.  Today, as of 6am Australian Eastern Standard Time....it looks like everything has gone back to it's previous rate of traffic. Instead of hundreds of views every hour, we're back to a dozen or so. I've had previous anomalies where a one-off hour might have had a few hundred a few hundred views, but getting that level of traffic for over a month was just weird. Anyway...seems to be over now.

I shared this on my assorted social media feeds... "bluesky", "threads", "facebook", etc... "Does anyone know of any good #Inktober variants going around this year? I'm in the mood to make art, but I'm not sure how the whole issue with Jake Parker has unfolded since the controversy a few years back." It wasn't long ago, so I haven't had responses at the time of writing, but I've gone searching and found a few viable options. I'm starting a day late, so we'll see what happens. I might do the thing where I combine prompts from two lists to get my images.

 My two flagship games for the SNAFU system are Walkabout (a game about post-apocalyptic investigators and troubleshooters trying to bring balance back to a world that has been devastated by the return of Spirits of the Dreaming who've had enough of humanity's disrespect for the planet) and Familiar (a game about magical spirits who take the form of animals, who empower the dispossessed and disenfranchised to become heroes in a world of stagnation and corruption). Both games overlap their themes in a lot of ways, both are more about the relationships people have to each other and the world around them, rather than fighting and conquest. It was the fighting and conquest that led to the problems in each of the settings.  Both games have characters made in very different ways, but both character generation systems make roughly equivalent starting characters through a blend of randomness and choice, with characters gaining agency in their worlds as their stories are told. Looking ...

    A few weeks ago, it might even be months now, I was looking at a range of SRDs with Erin. We've both been trying to see what else is out there in the way of gaming, what ways people might be innovating, what patterns might be common in the current gaming scene. It's led to some interesting discussions. She's been participating in Game Jams over on Itch , and I've been watching the stuff that she's been producing and occasionally giving a little advice here and there. She's been making a few different games based on those SRDs when she gets inspired, and I've thought about doing the same because it feels like a good way to expand design skills by refining the output to something that works within someone else's framework. A game jam for the little game DURF has arisen, and we've decided to collaborate on an idea that's been percolating for a while. The entries for the jam won't be posted until October, so that gives a fortnight to conside...

 I saw an interesting post on one of the many RPG related Facebook groups I'm a part of...   ...it really made me think about the three-way tension that forms the basis of my understanding of the hobby.  It basically states that this sort of things is full of red flags and there IS going to be tension forming as a result of the choices made before the game even begins.  For those who aren't familiar with the concept, it basically works like this.   The session, in the middle, has three types of tension on it. The GM/Narrator influences the session, so do the players, and so do the rules. As soon as one of these sides exerts too much influence on the flow at the heart of the session, there is the potential for things to go awry. (A couple of fairly comprehensive posts on the concept can be found here and here ) Where do I see the red flags... The homebrew....  ...no.  The high fantasy...  ...that says heartbreaker to me in combination with homebr...

  So the last post discussed the idea of diegetic things existing within the story, this post looks at the other side of the equation.  The clearest and easiest option I can think of as I start this post is the idea of "Classes" and "Levels". These are explicitly a shorthand to get a character's progress understood by the players as they try to visualise the imagined diegetic space in which the characters exist.  Johan the Swift is a level 6 rogue.  Mariana Vorlani is a level 4 sorceror (sorceress?). Kalani Soulseeker is a level 10 paladin. We instantly get an idea of what these characters might be capable of (and what their stereotypical weaknesses or quirks might be) with a pair of broad brushstrokes. Then, as they ascend ranks and gain levels, we get an idea of what specific powers they might have acquire along the way, because we might have read the rulebook. It's part of the reason why I didn't like the "streamlining" (A.K.A. dumbing down)...