Observations of the Fox

I'm going to pivot back away from the coding side of things for the moment, and back to game development concepts, and narrative elements. In a "normal" fantasy roleplaying game, the magic-user is the centre of attention and their familiar is some kind of pet who shares a mystical bond with them. Perhaps the familiar helps channel magical energy a little better, perhaps it provides a benefit to casting die rolls, perhaps (as in Mage: the Ascension) the familiar eats aways the penalty effects that come with existing as a quasi-force of nature in a world of mundane masses. In a game called "Familiar", the concept is naturally going to be flipped. The familiar is the main character, they have agendas of their own, and the magic-user/mystic is their conduit to the world and a source of both stability and narrative potential within the world. The familiar is effectively immortal, but their vessel may change every couple of years (if they're lucky, a mystic may la...

 OK...so I never really explained much about the coding part in the last post.  I know that Ren'Py can handle arrays. If you don't know what an array is, it's basically a list of information components identified as a coherent cluster. A program can withdraw specific elements of data from the array... so it might have 5 elements of data, and you can print out the second one, you can rearrange them by shuffling the data elements, or add another one to the end and turn it into 6 elements of information. There's all sorts of ways that you can modify an array. I'll run the arrays a bit like a relational database that can be modified on the fly, but will always start with a static framework and data. (If anyone out there is reading this and knows about databases, python scripting, or Ren'Py specifically, and if they have any better ways to address these ideas, please let me know.)   The first and most obvious array would be called "deck" (or something simil...

So many games use shorthand and assumption to get their points across. The idea generally seems to be that gamers know certain things intuitively, so they don't need to be clarified in detail. Even when you read through a "What is an RPG?" section in various games there are elements of the experience that are glossed over or left out completely. This is further complicated by the notion that an actual play session of the game may look quite different to the examples written, because the GM/Narrator and the Players are pulling against the intended rules to play a game quite different to the designers intentions. When it comes to writing rules, I'm not immune to this. However, when writing for a computer program, certain elements need to be explicit, and if there are elements of "the fruitful void" existing between rules, then you just have to accept that these elements can't be quantified in the code.  That means I need to be really pedantic about certai...

  I don't write this blog to get hits, or to be a "TTRPG Influencer". If I did, I'd be disappointed that over the last few months I haven't received a single meaningful comment... well actually that does nag me at the back of my mind... bit the point is that I'd just wrote posts for the views, or change my method of writing to focus on D&D or whatever the "flavour of the month indie darling" is. It's always nice, and a bit confusing, when there is a spike of readers, such as the few days in the middle of the month when I was getting thousands of views rather than the usual hundreds. I usually just write these posts to work through ideas I've been having, or so some might eventually click a link from a search engine years after I written something and it might help with a concept they've been struggling with. I'd much rather actually design, rather than write about the process of design, but sometimes it helps to get things out the...

 So, I've started the Ren'Py project. A few new versions to the platform itm have come and gone, and even the Python programming language has seen an update since I was last playing with it.  A useful feature of Ren'Py when developing something like this is the concept of saved games. This still applies, so that means it's possible to make a character generator that saves details, then open the game later to modify a character, or incorporate elements of the character into a dice rolling app. The drawback is that everyone would need a copy of the downloadable game platform because trying to store multiple characters would be equivalent to storing multiple saved game and progressing through each of them separately.  I'm also tossing up the idea whether it's easier to have separate programs for character generation, character development, setting development, gameplay...or whether to bundle them into the same package. One package could get unwieldy, multiple fragm...

Looking back through the blog, I played with Ren'Py and Twine as visual novel generation tools . I also know that I was playing with them about 3 years ago to generate the first interation of the Familiar character generation tool. I've been looking on old hard drives for the working files to see how I built them from the ground up, and what I could do different this time. I'm not sure where those working files are, but have found compiled complete versions of the software, which are glitchy. They definitely need rebuilding. In the time since then, Ren'Py has also seen a number of updates.  The core idea for Familiar is that characters are made using a five card tarot spread Each card provides an attribute bonus, and a range of 3 potential abilities. If a character has the same ability on two cards, it stops being a potential ability, and becomes an actual ability. If they gain the same ability three or four times, they don't get improved versions of the ability but...

The SNAFU system (the evolution of the FUBAR game which can be found here ) works well. As an engine for storytelling it does what it needs to  and dozens of playtests with about 20 different people have shown some consistency in it's outcomes. Of course that's where the 3-way tension in my TTRPG theory suggests something problematic. If the three things pulling on a narrative are the GM/Narrator, the Players, and the Rules, then every time I've tested the system, there have been 2-out-of-3 consistent elements in the testing process, and only the players have changed. It seem that what I'm really testing is the only variable in the sequence... the players. If I'm planning to sell a game, I'm not selling myself as a part of the package, so I really need to make sure it all still works with different Players AND different GMs/Narrators. Blind playtesting is key.  Part of the SNAFU system takes the idea of character occupations and flips it upside down. Indtead of...

 So, I've had a few more ideas, which have been percolating over the last two weeks or so.  It's generally revolving around an interpretation of the "Familiar" game concept, but pulling it more into line with the ideas I developed for Walkabout during 2024. The catch is making sure things don't turn into a simple sequence of tropes and stereotypes. I want to ensure characters are meaningful, their relationships add to the story (rather than just being mechanical elements that are only invoked to get a bonus every now and again), and the magic is the heart of everything. This goes back to my "Storifying Mage" posts a few years back, my attempts to create a game reflecting the incredibly open mystical potential of Mage: the Ascension, while focusing on specific types of stories within that type of world. I'll do a few posts over the next couple of days explaining the bits and pieces...

When I was a kid, this part of town was busy. Trucks coming and going, factories running 24/7. Dad worked here then, night-shift at a company that imported pet food from whatever part of the world was selling it cheap this month. He'd rip open bags of pet food and du, mp it in a big hopper and on to a conveyor belt. By the time it hit the end of the production line, it proudly proclaimed "locally packaged". Consumers didn't look past that...they only really noticed when it wasn't just the manufacturing, but also the packaging and all the jobs that went overseas. The pet food was cheap to import, the labour even cheaper. The consumers in other parts of town said they cared, but their spending habits indicated that they were happier saving 50 cents a bag on their dog food.  It was a similar story for most of the factories around here. Half the factories closed in the financial crisis of 2007-08, only one or two came back. The lights were off across much of the indut...

Scene: A sprawling marketplace in Tangiers. The noise of hundreds of local merchants and thousands of tourists blends into a cacophonous relentless din. The smells of spices and street foods fill the air. It's warm in the shade, but feels like it would be a scorching inferno out in the sun.  One of the tourists picks up a small copper lamp from a stall, he looks to his friend and goes to make a comment...probably something about Alladin like all the tourists do.  Tourist : Dude, I got this deja vu.  He turns to his friend, who is frozen still.  *Record scratch sound effect as time slows down to a standstill* In the middle of the frozen crowd, one of the vendors looks up from the table of spices in front of her. She's been working this stall for centuries; she's seen Nazis, the French, the vassal legions of the Ottomans. She'd sold to them all, the herbal concoctions that created subtle shifts in perception. Every couple of years, a mystic and occultist would come to ...

The thing about a non-descript book is the fact that it's easily overlooked. For a temporal leverage agent, that can mean that a lot of people don't notice it and therefore it's easy to steal because people don't even realise that it's gone; on the other hand, it's hard to ask people if they've seen it because it might have been in plain view and people just didn't give it a second glance.  Most non-descript books fit the description because they just aren't very interesting. A single sappy romance novel from a publisher that produces a dozen similar sappy books every month. Number eleven in a series of mathematics textbooks, where the interesting topics have already been covered, while this one is the third book of revision notes. One of the many self-published books of poetry by an author who couldn't get the notice of any publishers (but who believed in the quality of their work, and sank their life savings into a run of books that only sold a...

This was the second time I'd found the book. The last time was almost fifty years ago in a private collection. I wasn't looking for it then either. The first time I saw the book, it was on an old bookshelf filled with occult tomes bound in burgundy leather or black. Those sombre tomes were lettered with gold leaf and were titled deeply esoteric names like "An Unabridged Discourse on the Origins of Theosophical Mystery, volume 47" or "De Vermis Mysteriis". These were heavy tomes, and reading them required both physical and mental effort. However, this book was a small thing; maybe 6 inches by 9, about the size of an A5 page, and just under half an inch thick (perhaps thicker than a centimetre). Unlike the other books, it had no title, and was bound in leather dyed a colour between blue and green. It's cover adorned with a stylised dragonfly in a circle. It was an unremarkable book, and easily overlooked. Yet once noticed, it was incredibly distinct.  I ha...

Some of us last for a fraction of a second, making our impact on the world before vanishing into the nothingness from whence we came. Some of us linger for centuries, millennia, epochs...  Few of us remember the moment of our conception, the time when our essence was brought into being... whether that might be in the physical world or one of its shadowy echoes. Some claim that moment isn't important anyway, it's what you do with your time that matters. You might burn out in an explosive instant, or you might slowly impact the universe around you. Anyone connected to the physical plane has a finite time there...what they do with that time is up to them.  We live, we die. Do we live again? Does something else use the energy of life which was formerly ours to fuel its existence? Is it constant? Is there a finite flowing continuum of life in the universe? Life is filled with more questions than answers... ...and the same questions keep repeating. Often the answers are universal co...

If you're reading this when I hope it's been inserted in the timeline, you can watch some TV series that explain quantum causality loops. By this stage in the timeline, there should even be a couple of blockbuster movies with time-travel as major plot points.  Some of them get things right, some get things wildly wrong. But that's what happens when a multi-planar being tries to convey the complexity of timespan to physical beings. It's not my place to tell you the truth. revelations of that nature end up with prophets and religions, and that leads to more fire sprites getting out of control. Fire sprites like destroying things, inflaming emotions across the physical plane, and starting wars... that's not for me. I'm not even going to mention which stories got close to the truth, that's probably something for dreamers, philosophers, and scientists to work out for themselves. My reality is mine, and yours is yours.  I can't talk directly to you, so I'm...

I remember when he was an enthusiastic sprite, I recall when he threatened the universe with his special blend of hubris and hate. I will have seen him at his weakest and his strongest.I will tell planar travellers things that they have only been able to reveal to me in riddles. Maybe I will tell them in riddles to prevent causality paradoxes, maybe they know better. In the grand scheme of things I will have been there at the beginning, and at the end.  To explain things best to you, the physical world is like a rippling pond when viewed from the outside. If you're outside the pond, you can throw a rock into it and watch the ripples spread outward. You can also see the ripples made by other people throwing rocks into the pond. I can't throw metaphysical rocks into reality, that's something I might have already told you about, or it might be something I tell you later, I can never tell how things work when you're stuck in linear time... I'm sure this gets discussed a...

170,000 Views Is that enough? The Bloggie Awards are up... I had no idea there was an annual competition for the best TTRPG blog entries, and since I had a good year here at Observations of the Fox, I figured I'd have a look.  It's always good to see what other folks are writing, and I'll be reading through a few of these, to try and work out where the wider headspace of the TTRPG Community is... then wonder why the 170k views I got this year din't get me nominated. I often comment on social media about how it feels like I'm screaming into the void by writing games and blog posts that don't get any traction, and my gut reaction is to say that this is verification of that. However it's probably just evidence that the various pockets of designers in the TTRPG space are insulated from each other. It's just annoying to be at this for 15 years, and generally running and designing TTRPGs for 30 years now, and still not have much to show for it all...

Thanks to my high school gaming club, I started getting some semi-regular blog posts happening again in 2024. This has led to the year being one of my highest viewed ever here. I'm trying to think of some new ideas to write about this coming year, maybe start a game design contest on itch (like a game jam or something...not sure yet).  The one thing I'd like to get started is the irregular podcast "School of Roll" that I've toyed with over the past couple of years. Like always, there are plans and ideas, but we'll see what the year actually has in store.