Observations of the Fox

I've experimented with a few release formats over the years, sometimes offering products as PWYW, sometimes offering them free of charge, sometimes just hoping they'll get a bit of exposure toward products I intend to sell at a bit of a profit. I still haven't worked out the best option, but here's my current plan... the current incarnation of Other Strangeness occurs as a series of pocketmods, but it's also foreseeable that the game will be printed on a series of cards and distributed in a small tin of some kind. It's designed to be a simple little pick-up and play game. After the first alpha draft release. there was some feedback from a few sources that the font was a bit hard to read. So here's an amended version of the core rules for the game. Character creation rules are coming shortly, along with a few other necessary components for play. Here's the Core Rules Link

Going through some of my old notes, I found a few things that felt a little problematic at the time, but now seem far more so. In the last round of playtests for the game (which echo back to 2012/2013), I defined a character by a series of template stereotypes in a mix-and-match system. I still like this idea, but it's the nature of those templates that will need to change in the rewrite. Three template fragments were combined in that system. Each template came in a general form, with a specialty that could be used to refine what it means specifically to the character. First were the "people", where these are the culture the character grew up with and those who they consider their family. The people might be considered a "race" in some games, but not quite. I basically categorised the various types of people by the culture and technology they shared rather than any genetic heritage. The "Nomads" were those who roamed the highways in mobile towns...

One of my first live roleplaying experiences was portraying a naive young werewolf. I wouldn't say that my character was led astray by  +Klaus Teufel  but things certainly became a lot more interesting after our two stories became entwined. Lycanthrope stories have always inteested me. Whether the werewolves and Loup Garou of european folklore, the Kitsune of Japanese tales, the shapeshifting coyote trickers found in the legends of many Native American groups, African Spider shifters (Ananasi), the many anthropomorphed animals of Native Australian folklore, and many others found across the Pacific and various other parts of the world. The scope for playing these variant animal types from around the world was one of the things I loved about Werewolf: the Apocalypse, and one of the things that I really thought was missing when White Wolf shifted to Werewolf: the Forsaken . They might have been added in later books for the game, but the first few books that I looked at jus...

I had been thinking about this game from the perspective of street mages, maybe it might be better to play with the concept of familiars to street mages. The reason I've considered this is because I'm not really interested in developing a complex magic system for the game, except as a storytelling effect. Instead I'm thinking that there will be magi who act as conduits reaching from the human side to the mystic energies of the beyond...and there will be familiars who act as conduits from the beyond, reaching toward the mortal realm. Familiars form bonds to magi, each strengthening the link of the other in a symbiotic feedback loop. This helps explain why the characters don't have money, just a limited number of tools and edges. Familiars don't need to improve with experience, but they may gain stronger influence over the world as they establish stronger relationships with the magi, the eternal constants, and other elements of the setting. I'm not sure if t...

I'm not talking about 3d6 in order. For a game about mutant animals and the melange of spiritual systems that occidental observers blend together as "Chinese mysticism", I'm talking about the idea of rolling some dice to determine time and date of birth and how that specific result might feed back into a character according to elemental and other auspicious means.  Character age: 12 years plus d12 (the exact animal year would depend on the year in which the game is set...the year would also determine one of the elemental affinities of the character) Month of birth: roll a d12 Hour of birth: roll a d12 Day of birth is where things get tricky, because this runs vaguely off a 60 day system with five elements cross referenced to the twelve animal signs. A d60 is relatively easy to simulate, d6 for the tens column, d10 for the units.  I'm thinking that these rolls might offer a range of skill choices according to animal and elemental affinities, and if a c...

Character Generation Other strangeness uses two methods to define characters. The first method is static, it defines the flat unchanging physical capacities of the character, such as their mutations and inherent aptitudes. The second method is dynamic, it defines the progress and advancement of a character as they are exposed to new lessons and integrate new knowledge into their understanding of the world.   Start with 6 points in the general progress path. Origin Choose One or Roll 1 Accidental Mutation 6 Mutagen 4 pts in an Ecological Niche path Unstable, +2 points to Psy or Sanctum 2 Alien Race 6 Mutagen 6 pts in a Vocation path Stable, Alone, Exotic 3 Cryptozooid 0 Mutagen 4pts in an Ecological Niche path Stable, Allied 4 Dimensional Variant 6 Mutagen 4 pts in a Vocation path Alone, Exotic ...

When Dark Sun came out, it did something radical for the time. It started every chaacter at level 3 because characters of lower levels just weren;t togh enough to survive in the mystical post-apocalyptic desert of the setting. I thought it was cool that everyone was tougher, but didn't think much more of it at the time. In retrospect, it didn;t really matter that the character's were tougher and more proficient, because everyone was tougher and more proficient. Unless you were doing some kind of Spelljammer or Planescape campaign where characters would interact with "weaker" characters from other settings then everyone just scaled up accordingly and the enemies you faced were still rougly pound-for-pound just as difficult as enemies you'd face elsewhere. But third level also meant that the numbers averaged out a bit. Instead of a wild mix of hit point possibilities induced by a flat die roll at level 1 (I don't know of anyone playing with the "Level...

In "Other Strangeness", the core of the system is the verbs that characters engage to perform tasks in the world, then the adverbs that give them automatic successes to their actions, and finally any quirky twists that result from the expenditure of accumulated advantage/disadvantage points. Since that's the order of importance, that's the way experience should be focused. Many "point buy" games suffer from the issue that a careful (or system abusive) player can focus on the minutiae that fiddles with the rules to get an awesome combo that might work once in a while, but otherwise they are functionally useless within the game. I'm trying to think of way to limit that idea, while still keeping things logiclly consistent within the "mutant animal comic"-genre, and generally common-sensical. The previous post still holds true. But now I'm delving into a few more details of the advancement system. First with the specific paths that charac...

I've been thinking about problems in System 4, and that has led to a major revision in my thinking. New version of System 4 All characters are made up of 6 stances, each of which has a range of verbs associated with them. Characters have a number in the 6 stances, an assortment of verbs that they are practiced at using, a short list of adverbs that might be used to enhance those verbs, and a short list of adjectives (some of which they may have an affinity to and some of which they may have an aversion to). Pick a number of d6s equal to your character's stance. These dice are rolled through the turn as you declare you character's actions.  If you declare an action based on your stance, you roll the d6. If you have an advantage appropriate to the situation or a verb you've mastered, roll a d8 (if you have both, roll a d10). If you choose to perform a verb action not associated with your stance or have a disadvantage, roll a d4 (if both, you just can't...

I've changed my mind a bit on a certain subject within the realm of game design. I've always liked the idea of a single coherent system that can be applied across everything in a game. But in a lot of game designs I've admired for this streamlining, the single system at the core is good, but it isn't necessarily great for everything. Trying to shoehorn the same system into all aspects of a game may work for a lot of the situations encountered, but might be a very bad fot in other parts of the game. I'm not saying that you need a seperate subsystem for every element of play, and I know many games that have taken this approach... i'm just saying that I've come to the conclusion that two or three complementary systems that cover a wider range of situations effectively might be more user friendly than a single system that once one thing brilliantly and a bunch of other things adequately. A combat system doesn't need to look like a lock picking mechanis...

35 posts...this project has stronger legs than I thought, but I think we're getting to the end of the run. November is almost upon us, and that means it's the time of year for NaGaDeMon. NaGaDeMon is the time of year to stop theorizing and start designing, it's also the time of year when university study winds down. So I'll probably take a bit of time away from the blog (maybe posting every two or three days rather than daily). I really want to get stuck into the "Other Strangeness" game I was considering earlier in the year, but I also really want to get a finalised version of this LARP system happening while I'm motivated on it. Let's see where things head. But for the moment, let's pick up where I left off in the last Boffer LARP post...Maps. I've played in  few live action campaigns where maps have played a focal role. Most have been based on the city of Sydney (which has led me to draw up a 1.5m x 1.5m scale map of the city and...

One of the reasons I love roleplaying games is the ability to get into different headspaces. Forget different races, different cultures are more interesting, different forms of morality that underpin the actions of a character. This is one of the reasons why I like the Sabbat in Vampire: the Masquerade. They don't bother pretending to be human anymore, so they adopt new methods to transcend their humanity and the beast that gnaws at their soul. For this reason I'm thinking of including a crude morality system in the mutant game "Other Strangeness", something that mechanically makes players think in a non-human way. These characters aren't human, and many players I've encountered in conventions (and ongoing LARP chronicles) over the years don't really understand the way to get into an inhuman mindset...but mechanical prompts help a bit. Such mechanical prompts may seem a bit forced at times, but they do their job. I've been trying to think of good...

In FUBAR, one of the problems I've constantly faced is the way the traits kick in only once the basic challenge has been resolved. It feels like two separate challenges associated with each task, one to determine if you succeed (and whether you have to give up anything in the process), followed by a second challenge to determine how well you've succeeded (or how much you've had to give up in the attempt). (Note: If anything in this post isn't making sense, head over to RPGNow and download a copy of the FUBAR Director's Cut, it's free) . It's a bit distracting, and detracts from the otherwise freewheeling nature and open-ended nature of proceedings. I've played with a few ways to modify it, and sometimes dropped it completely in favour of simply following the story. Since this mutant animal game is going to essentially be "Powered by FUBAR", it's an opportunity to revisit the system. I'm not sure I'm completely ready to go forw...

Here's a few inspiration images... I've been playing with the concepts of the mutant animal game a bit more, but this month's been a hard one around Vulpinoid Studios...car crash, wife in hospital, university exams, general sickness...that's generally the reason why things haven't been updated around here. We did run a birthday sale that managed to net a grand total of about $20, not really enough to do much of anything. So that means it's time to actually finish a game design, or one of the open ended commissions that I've been putting off (due to more pressing matters that have now subsided). To everyone who has offered encouragement and support...Thankyou.  

Maybe I need to rethink the whole notion of skills as verbs. It made sense at first...describe your characters action with the verb they are using in the world. "Jack will run to the car." "Molly will sneak up on the guard." "Lou will repair the generator." It's simple, it's direct. A subject applies a verb to an object . But once I actually try to break it down and apply the fundamental concepts to play situations it gets tricky. "Daniel will occult the room" "Daniel will occult the prisoner" "Daniel will occult the situation" Is he appraising his target object from an occult perspective? Is he influencing it in an occult manner? These two would be better described as... "Daniel will appraise the room" "Daniel will enchant the room" But even now, the concept of what Daniel is trying to achieve needs to be clarified. In his appraisal of the room, is he looking for somet...

I mentioned recently that I was switching the basic FUBAR system to be something more gramatically correct. This has been an issue from a lot of perspectives, it's actually something that has been long entrenched in roleplaying games...probably because at their root they were concieved by mathematicians, statisticians and people interested in mechanical gameplay rather than grammatically correct storytelling. The recent generations of story based games have inhereted a lot of the baggage from the past, and generally haven't known, or haven't cared that this is an issue. Someone on G+ pointed out recently that the "Divergent" movie (and books it's based on) divide people into factions with names that might be nouns or verbs, with no consistency in the naming scheme. That got me thinking about the skill listing that I generally apply to most of my game designs. The core list has about 40 skills in it, many derived from White Wolf's WoD, some drawn from D...

There are a few things that never seemed to sit right with TMNT and other Strangeness . One of those things was the idea of characters having independent sliding scales defining their hands, the degree of bipedal stance, and their human appearance. The signature characters, the Ninja Turtles clearly have full hands (because they have no trouble manipulating tools and weapons), full bipedal stance (because they clearly walk around with no problems), and full speech, but no human appearance (they look like turtles, and there's no way someone could mistake them for human). But in the Palladium game, these aspects are completely independent...theoretically you could have a character with full human looks, but no hands, and no bipedal stance. This could simply mean they look like a regular person who only ever walks around on all fours and is incapable of using their normal looking hands from doing anything with tools...they couldn't even learn to walk upright or use tools, ...