Observations of the Fox

Revising Darkhive for the "SNAFU SRD and Cookbook" has been like putting on a comfortable old pair of sneakers, or a favourite old band t-shirt. I know how it works, it's familiar, and it's nice to see some progress on a project that was basically abandoned a decade ago.  It's interesting to see how some of my game design ideas have changed in that time, and how they've stayed fairly consistent. Now the thing is trying to fill in gaps, and convert a world into a game. That's where the art comes in. Anyone can make a world, then say "Compatible with 5e", or whatevere the current incarnation of D&D is... a plethora of mediocre gaming products do that. They might even throw in a bunch of new weapons and equipment, a couple of new monsters, a new race or a new character class so that they can use this as a selling point. It's a whole lot rarer to see a game adapted in such a way to tell different types of stories rather than dungeon bashes, q...

For the back of the SNAFU SRD and Cookbook, I'm remixing the ideas in Darkhive. I'm sure I mentioned this, but then again, I think that I've mentioned a lot of things overthe yerars and when I try to find them they just aren't there. I'm getting an old collaborator to throw together some images based on what I had written for Darkhive (or have a look at the second set of worldbuilding tutorials here ) all those years ago.  Lots of pictures of Giger-esque backgrounds and ladies straddling the line between dream and nightmare.   I'm trying to make sure there is at least one picture for each of the signature cultures and bloodlines of the setting. However, since most of our characters are hybrids, then these are generally idea prompts.    Then there's to bit where we make sure a few of the monsters and strange creatures of the setting are adequately depicted.   I was hoping for something a bit dreamy and ethereal, but verging of nightmarish and dark, and I thi...

 I've resumed work on the "SNAFU SRD and Cookbook". This has involved fleshing out some pages, creating some new pages layout and incorporating a few new elements. The idea of this book is to be a recipe book that allows designers and game Narrators to pic and choose from an array of options, then show them how these options can work together to provide a specific narrative experience. SNAFU was never intended to be a "generic" system, but it has been intended as a toolkit to facilitate certain genres of storytelling.  Hopefully I'll be able to release the next iteration soon.

We're getting closer.  I bought a clay roller from an online craft supply store a few months ago, specifically with the intention of using it in this project. However, I misplaced it and only found it again the other day. I also bought some air-drying clay so that I could use it with the roller, but without the roller there wasn't much point opening it up and doing that part of the model.  The aim was to create cobblestone sectors for the inner courtyard, divided along segments that would centre on the temple, or whatever this particular tulou's centrepiece was.    On rolling out the clay, different plans emerged. I figured that it might be more fun to make a shattered courtyard, something looking more like a place that was regularly subjected to warfare. I had this idea because the clay crumbled and shattered a bit, so it wasn't the original clean flooring that I had hoped...and I didn't want to waste the bits that I had made. The plan still works, and now...

  They're here. I've been so busy with other stiff, while building the Tulou and Fortress on the side, that I didn't even realise that the Cathayan Miniatures have already dropped.  Now it's just a case of gathering together some funds, buying a battalion box, and a sky lantern box, and a shugenja riding a dragon, and... this is going to get expensive. Then finish the tulou before they get here.  

  So, while exploring an internet rabbithole, I've just found "The Housebooks of Nuremburg or the Twelve Brethren Books". On a project that bears some resemblance to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying, I was searching for a fairly comprehensive list of the types of occupations regular people might have had during the middle ages, and these books came up. In 1388, the wealthy merchant Konrad Mendel had an old people's home built to provide accommodation and meals for twelve needy old Nuremberg craftsmen and had it endowed with capital for permanent management. From around 1425/26, each ‘Mendel brother’ was portrayed with a full-page portrait in Mendel's Housebook. By the end of the imperial city period, it had grown to a total of 857 illustrated pages with 765 portraits of craftsmen in folio format.   The website for a project focused on digitising the work can be found at https://online-service.nuernberg.de/viewer/hausbuecher/ , and elements of it can be found at...

In my last cycle of LARPing, ending about 7 years ago, I was finding a whole heap of new "live action gaming experiences" popping up all over the place. I was finishing uni, without enough time to focus on the games I was running, let alone head to other games to check them out. They all seemed to offer a basic variation on standard boffer stuff, and I'd been in and out of that scene for a while. I started teaching, mostly away from the crowds that this sort of game requires. Then Covid hit, and many of the games ate themselves. I hadn't really looked back at the LARPing sphere until recently.  So now I'm doing LARP research again. Looking at which ones are worth getting involved with...and which ones are toxic as hell.

So I went to the regular gaming night at the local club again last night. It was the first time in 18 months that I haven't had a table of players.  The first few times the event ran, we had 30 odd players, three or more tables of games, I had regulars who would go out of their way to play the games I ran. I had enthusiasm for the whole thing, and I wanted to push the envelop with interesting ideas. With the right players this worked, but the numbers dwindled. We had some issues on some months, and the momentum was lost. It was still a case that every night that we ran, a couple of tables ran, but many of those nights had my number of players drop from the point where I had too many and had to turn them away, to the point where I struggled to get enough players to get a decent session. I started running games with 7 or 8 players, and more recently had a game with 3. This was the first night where there were only enough players showing up to run a single game.  There were two o...