Observations of the Fox

It was my finding of this notebook that prompted this series of posts.   When I found it again during my art studio clean up at the end of 2025 I remembered the notebook, but I couldn't remember when I was writing in it. I've seen it in my notebook piles for years and every now and then I've cracked it open to see if "past me" could give "current me" some inspiration. Like a lot of my notebooks, there's artistic practice and drawing exercises scattered through them. This was obviously in one of my "stippling" phases, which I've gone through a couple of times after a few conversations with artists I've met of the years. When artists I respected like Keith Parkinson told me that they'd never been able to get the hang of stippling, it was probably a combination of hubris and spite that got me to practice the technique. Other pages are sequences of worldbuilding ideas... this instance is the start of an idea about a sci-fi setting b...

Yesterday's post  got a bit of feedback, and that's great. It's also interesting to see parallel discussions emerging on various Facebook groups today. I don't know whether it's my superpower of "Tapping the Zeitgeist" at work again, or if those people starting the discussions were prompted by reading my blog. Either way, there's some good thoughts out there and I'd love to engage the area more deeply. One of the great points raised, came from Joseph Teller... " The questions in design you need to ask yourself is, does Age=Experience or does Activity=Experience? " It's an awesome question that isn't really addressed in a lot of games. I'll address it with some instances I've seen over the years. It was probably about four years ago when I joined up with the fledgling Clans of Elgardt LARP. During tbe first couple of months there were teething problems, including a "gold = XP" system akin to the early d...

Back in the early 2000s, White Wolf were doing some really interesting things with their World of Darkness lines. Then they went and crashed the whole line to start something new, and I left because I thought it was both a stupid business decision, a great way to alienate existing fans, and generally a step that felt weird. I can understand why they did it, but it just wasn't for me any more. But back to the good days before the crash. The thing I'm interested at this point is the way the sourcebooks specifically integrated two versions of the rules in them. The background text was exactly the same, but the books provided a way to handle powers from a tabletop perspective, then a separate paragraph (or two...sometimes in a text box) that described how the power should function in their live format "Minds Eye Theatre". The tabletop and live games functioned so differently that there was a distinct need to explain the powers within the structure of each set of rules, ...

Hmm... I've spent three quarters of my roleplaying experience as a GM, so the moments I recall most readily are those where I've established scenes for my players to interact with (often built on the events previously assembled collaboratively through the actions of player characters and the preloaded triggers built for the sandbox environment), then I throw in a twist by pulling a concept that had generally been forgotten from a previous session... ...then watch the chaos. I haven't found many tabletop GMs over the years who run stories in similar ways. Mostly just the types of GM who get a pre-written module (either published, or pre-written by themselves) then lead the players through and don't have a lot of scope for changes to their plans. So there haven't been many opportunities for player characters to shine. My style of play follows my style of GMing, I plant the seeds, I spend a few sessions nurturing the plants, and by the time the fruit is ripeni...