Observations of the Fox

Honestly, I've just spent five years retraining at University because my previous career was filled with psychopaths, sociopaths, and pressure to succeed at the expense of the wider community. RPG and game design was always my outlet and pressure valve. I hoped it could be a long term career, but I didn't win the fame lottery and I don't have bucketloads of cash to promote a lacklustre product, so that never got anywhere. At the moment, my gaming endeavours are spread between LARP, miniatures, boardgaming, and traditional RPGs. I've tried fusing two or three of these elements together, but every time I'm working on a combo, some other more prominent designer or company does something similar and releases it to wide acclaim as an "innovation in the industry"...and I get demoralised and start something else. I guess that's where a cluster of my hopes and dreams lie. I'd like to ride the zeitgeist and actually get something out there which inspire...

Another EttinCon has come and gone. Every time it is run, it keeps getting bigger, but the rate of expansion seems to be slowing down a bit. I suspect it has now hit its peak size, it might grow or shrink a little next time. Unlike previous occasions, this event was not held in Katoomba, it was instead held further up the Blue Mountains in Blackheath. A bigger more open venue in the Community Centre up there, but whether this was a good thing, I'm undecided. It still felt like the organisers were trying to cram too much in with tightly packed tables, and the noisy echoes of the hall didn't make table-talk easy, especially when I'd normally walk around the table to more easily address players who were focal points of the game at any particular time. Three sessions across one day, I ran in the morning, with a scheduled game of Steve Dee's Relics in the evening, and a free afternoon where I hoped I could slot into an empty spot of whatever caught my eye....

Playtesting elements of a game system at a convention can be a risk. If you run a game with the regular crowd, they know what to expect, they play the way you expect them to play, you facilitate the play experience the way you'd normally facilitate the play experience... it a low risk environment, ot's almost a control group wnere you know how most of the variables will play out before the session has even started.  Running a game at a convention has the added wildcard of random players (or at least players who you don't meet up with very often). Often if there are players you know, there might be a couple of subgroups, and there will be an added dynamic temsion between them. This ramps up the chaos, it's probably not as good for testing the fundamental concepts of a game because if things go wrong, you'll never know if it was the underlying system at fault, explanations of the system, uncooperative players, or simply a nexus of negatives. On the other hand, if ...

The last debrief post started going longer than I expected, so I've decided to break the debrief into three parts for the three sessions of the day. Between Sessions 1 and 2 was lunch, looking at the stalls set up by the local game store " Afternoonified " and a few others who came in for the con...and generally stressing out because I thought I'd left almost everything for my evening session of "The Law" at home. Thankfully, that last bit turned out to be a false alarm. But stressing about that, filled yhe rest of the hour-and-a-half before session 2 began. Session Two: Honey, I shrunk the Heroes! This is the first time I've played +Sage LaTorra  and  +Adam Koebel 's Dungeon World, and the first time I've played rather than GM'd anything for a long time. I played with my wife, in a game run by  +Saul Alexander . Interesting premise that was basically what the title promised. Five stereotypical fantasy adventurers filling the standard ...

The convention I've been working toward for the past couple of weeks has now been and gone. Three sessions: two GMing, and one playing. Here's how it played out for me... Session One: The Ballad of Jericho Julip. This was a session GM'd by me. Running a twisted variant of Paul Tevis's "A Penny for my Thoughts". I actually wasn't sure about the best way to handle this session, I had a vague idea in mind, but couldn't work out the best way to address it.  The premise of this session was a two part story, where each act was formed by characters who had been attacked by "Nether Shadows" who had wiped their memories. It basically played out in two iterations of "Penny". First with the characters in the mountains explaining... What their life was like before the adventure began How they became entangled in the machinations of the mysterious Jericho Julip What strange event happened on the way up the mountafin pass The...

I guess tomorrow is the big day. The game is ready to go, even if the props aren't completely up to a standard I'm happy with. The books have come up pretty well, and hopefully they might generate a few orders for the first proper print run. I might even sell one of the three prototypes I've generated.  The thing that's got me bothered is the scemario map that I started working on a few months ago, but never got around to completing... and now Murphy's law has kicked in, and the 3D printer isn't working for me to make a stand.  So, I might end up making a stand from cardboard. Since I'll be busy all day tomorrow, expect a report on the convention outcome in a couple of days.

The map is almost ready for playing on. Just need to take a few photos of it, then digitally stitch them together in Photoshop... First attempt. Need to try again

More colouring today. I've tried to get more images, and even a couple more videos of the work procss, but my iPad hasn't been charging well, and there have been some glitches, so hopefully these images will suffice. My aim in colouring is to get cooler colours mixed with blues and more whites toward the south pole of the map, and warmer colours with more yellows toward the equatorial regions. There's lots of splotches and blending and varying techniques to give a range of terrain impressions. Darker areas indicating forests and jungles, lighter areas indicating grasslands and plains. K One of the last steps is giving some more definition to the mountain ranges which have started to get a bit lost among the other colours that have now been added.  Almost done.

With the sketch and the canvas taped up to the window, I can trace the basic shape and maintain the generalities of the form. The specific details of the map sketch certainly don't match the intended scale, so thankfully I've got some leeway here. The first thing I'll do is break up the coastline a bit. Here and there I add islands, and provide hints toward river deltas opening out onto the sea.  The mountain ranges provide hints of where streams start, and the jagged coastlines provide ideas for where the riverways end. I've also been given a few rivers to work with, so it's now a case of using a rudimentary understanding of geography to piece these components together. I'm going to use a system where rivers are noted in two distinct types on the map. Wide waterways capable of being navigated by barges and ship-borne traders will be indicated with a double thickness, while smaller rivers and streams will be marked with a single thickness line....

This map is pretty loose, it's for a blank slate world that will be defined as we go. But it's nice to have some hooks for players to latch onto, and for GMs to base adventures around. I've been given a rough framework (as indicated in the last post), but pretty free reign with specifics. Here's the working sketch. Or, more accurately, here are the pages on which the rough sketch has been printed, scaled up to be more impressive.  Due to the printing on A4 pages, I need to guillotine the edges... Then tape the fragments together... ...gradually building the complete map. I've discussed fractal hexes before , in my geomorph series a few years ago. So it's nice to see a map given to me where this system is in place. Four of the smallest hexes across make one of the mid hexes, four of the mid hexes across make one of the large hexes, four of the large hexes make one of the largest hexes.  This works as a fairly convenient...

I started work on the  +Ettin Con  Mega-Map a couple of days ago, but this is the first time I've had the chance to post about it.  The basic concept is a map for a massive collaborative campaign setting where multiple GMs will develop elements of the world with their players during convention sessions, gradually fleshing out the world over the course of years. But it all needs to start somewhere. The whole thing is a continental landmass stretching from an equator to an Antarctic circle. Usually when I start a map of this size, I might begin with plate tectonics to work out where natural mountain ranges might form. Otherwise I'll start with wide regions, and then move to plate tectonics to consider how those regions interface with one another. Then, I'd consider how those regions might actually form based on climate patterns, and linked geographical structures. In this case though, I've been given a preliminary sketch, and now I need to make it look li...

#365 Day 14 - A fun game of FUBAR at #EttinCon Summer 2017, #Katoomba #rpg #gaming #tabletop A photo posted by Michael Wenman (@vulpinoid) on Jan 14, 2017 at 4:10am PST I've finally managed to get to another EttinCon. I was at the first one in Winter 2015, missed the Summer and Winter ones in 2016, but managed to reach the Summer 2017 edition. Both times I have attended, I've wanted to participate in some indie gaming goodness, whether that might be of the "storygames", the "OSR", or some other flavour. Both times I've run FUBAR to an enthusiastic group who picked up the game pretty quickly, but didn't get the chance to play anyone else's offerings... actually, at that first EttinCon, I played a few boardgames, but no other RPGs. It was the first EttinCon I've managed to get Leah along to, and the first game convention I've brought her too since GenCon Oz back in 2009. For a game session I had in the back of my mind f...

By the time I'm writing this, I've done my workshop at OzComicCon describing props and weapons for Cosplay and LARP. I was pretty nervous in front of a crowd of people I didn't know (except for 3 people in a group of maybe sixty), I asked for questions but few came, so I basically talked for half an hour using a bunch of demo props which were handed around the audience...then I kind of ran out of things to say. But people seemed to enjoy that half hour... Not many people left in the middle of it. Anyway, here's the final piece with a bit of shading. I'm using a flexible metallic acrylic paint on the piece to coat the whole thing, then I added some black ink to the paint for the purposes of really bringing out the "etchings" in the hammer head. I've got two colours of this metallic paint, one silver and one bronze, so I decided to make the knotwork bronze so that it would really stand out. The problem is that the bronze paint is duller and da...

I've been making LARP and Cosplay props for years, some of them have survived over time. Others have degraded, been consumed into new projects, lost, stolen,or just broken through use. It's time to start making some new props because I'll need some examples of how it is done for OzComicCon at the end of the month. I'm thinking it might be a good idea to go through the process with a series of tutorials here on the blog if anyone is interested.    

I'm running a workshop on the manufacture of Cosplay and LARP props as a part of a major comic and pop culture expo at the end of this month. I've been asked to design a promotional graphic for the workshop. Here's what I've come up with...

So, I've just returned from the inaugural EttinCon. This convention was basically what I imagine a lot of those independent conventions in the US, like the GoPlay ones, are like... or at least how they started. Groups of friends gathering in a venue to play one another's games, and the new stuff from around the world. (Photo by +Jez Gordon , I hope he doesn't mind) My table is the one in the back corner near the organ. FUBAR has reached a new audience of players and has piqued interest in others who either heard what happened or saw the game in progress. I think we've reached a good balance point with traits and how they interact with the system. The game was quick to pick up by players who had never seen it before, the relationships worked as traits that prompt action as well. (This photo mine, focused on three of the players from my session) I also got the opportunity to playtest another round of "Bug Hunt", with a couple of very intere...