Observations of the Fox

  I really wish I knew what happened to the files mentioned in this blog post . It sounds like it could have been really useful for something I'm currently working on. The current project still uses the 102 level Bronzewing building, because I've found the three booklets that have the raw maps in them... I've printed put one of the booklet sets and have started handwriting in it. Interesting places, evocative names, no real stories unfolding in the tower at the moment, but some prompts that might initiate some ideas when play unfolds. To add to this, I've generated a couple of random tables...but I was wondering if there was anything useful from my past attempts to use the Bronzewing maps...and I saw that post. Anyway... the whole idea at the moment is to use it in a Cyberpunk 2020/Red campaign. That's left me with a bunch of tables where I roll 2d10 and add a fifth of the floor level to the result. This basically means certain types of place and encounter are more ...

Erin has just released a game called Heresy of the Obsidian Orchid . It's a bit weird, a bit experimental, and definitely not quite what I was expecting when she said she was working on a monster hunting game.    Basically, the character's are cyborgs, or more accurately robotic bodies with human consciousness uploaded into them. They have memories of their former lives, and emotional moralities that keep them basically "human" within their robot shells. It's an interesting idea, and I might throw together some things for characters to hunt in the game. Reading through what she's offered, it could easily work with the "Beneath the Glass and Steel" 'zine series I ran a few years ago, I've even been partly inspired to maybe add a few more 'zines to that collection. Maybe adding some interesting new ideas to the sequence.      Much of the concept is pretty open, and it leaves a lot to the players and GM to describe, but as I'm reading it...

No one game is essential to my design. I've voiced my disdain for hacks time and again, and I certainly don't make my game design life focused on redesigning the one game over and over. Anything I make might be a blend of components from three or four games, with an idea or two of my own thrown in for good measure. Yet, despite this, I do admit that there are a few games that contribute their components more often than not. Mage: the Ascension Completely divorced from the clunky core mechanisms of the Storyteller system, the magic system of Mage is brilliant, but then again the game is called Mage , so it would want to be. Actually, there are a few great game ideas that set the tone for the various games in the World of Darkness once you strip them away from the core system. Those are the elements that give me inspiration. Warhammer Fantasy Role-playing The career system in WFRP has been a strong influence in many of my designs. The low magic grim fantasy has al...

I've got a couple of hundred regular readers here, based on my daily viewer stats, even if I assume a percentage of them are just bots that trawl through pages and hit the pageview counter. The vast majority of you are silent, but a few of you provide 'likes' and '+1s', and some offer me interesting ideas or queries in comments and reshares. To those people, I'm grateful. Today though, a bit more about my generic version of The Law (the project with the working title of SNAFU ). There are quite a few ideas that didn't make it into the core rules for The Law, and a few design decisions under the surface which led to after effects and surface elements tbat might require a bit of unpacking. Benj Davis has brought up the concept of converting the Rank die to a generic format. Because I've been working with the background concepts so deeply over recent years, I didn't realise how strongly it appeared intertwined with the heirarchical structure of the...

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...

When I posted my RPGaDay2017 #31 post yesterday, I didn't think much controversial about it. I'm looking forward to the new Cyberpunk 2077 computer game, because I enjoyed The Witcher, which was produced by the same studio, and Cyberpunk 2020 is one of my all time favourite RPGs... ...then, because I like having a picture show up on my posts when they get shared, I added one of the first pictures to come up on a google search for the game. It seemed pretty stereotypical for the cyberpunk genre. But it's a problematic picture, and if I'd thought about it more carefully, I probably would have picked another. So it wasn't a deliberate attempt to be controversial, and it's probably one of those issues where as a white-cis-male who grew up in the 80s saw images like this plastered all over the computer games and RPGs he grew up with...but it's no longer the 80s, and culturally we've all evolved since then. It's generally a part of the two pronged ap...

What do you anticipate most for gaming in 2018? What I anticipate most next year isn't a tabletop game, but a computer game based on a classic tabletop game... Cyberpunk 2077 ...unless further delays hit it. I'm curious to see what next year brings for the Classic World of Darkness... not particularly anticipating it, but curious. On a more personal level though, in 2018, I anticipate not living the life of a student anymore, and actually being able to afford a few new games from my friends who design and publish things.