Observations of the Fox

Influenza, bronchitis, man-flu, not sure what it is... but I'm off sick at the moment, so that gives me time to finish off the run. 29. Labour The first phrase to come to mind here is a "labour of love", and in 30 years of designing games that's what it's always been for me. The number of hours I've spent discussing game design, running games of differet types as research, sharing my games with the world, writing this blog, and organising my shopfronts on various game-trading websites over the years has easily been in the months if they were combined together (24hrs a day, 7 days a week, ≂4⅓ weeks per month... 728 hours for a solid month, so yeah, I've easily done this. It'd be fair to say that I've spent thousands of hours on the hobby.) In that time I've probably spent about $10,000-$12,000 on RPGs, and have probably earned $12,000-15,000 from the products I've sold. At worst, it's been a self-sustaining hobby, at best I've earned...

  Vampire for 5.5e Why? Well, I can understand why... I saw a recent post on the TTRPG Designers group I moderate on Facebook. A designer shared their experience selling games on various platforms in recent years... here's a snippet The numbers — in broad strokes: DTRPG is my primary revenue engine. Since I went all-in on 5E-compatible content in mid-2024, my monthly revenue there is up roughly 10x from where it was before. Not 10% — 10 times. Launch months are spikes, but the floor has risen every quarter. - Malcolm Harris Between the article and the Facebook post, it's kind of sad. I get the feeling that if a designers wants to get games recognised and seen by a wider gaming community, they just gave to bite the bullet, sacrifice their integrity, compromise their art, and make a D&D supplement. It's been like this for years, certainly for as long as this blog has been running.  On the positive side, this weekend is Free-RPG Day... and I've thrown some stuff into b...

I just saw this, and it's really linked into a lot of the posts I've been making lately.   It seems to be an advertising point for D&D-adjacent products that you don't need literacy , and you can use tools to do the heavy lifting for you. I don't know if this is an AI product, but it does seem to be a package that combines the features of a virtual tabletop and a rapidly accessible database of the rules. It's a tool, it might be a good tool, it might not....but like every tool it probably needs a degree of expertise in it's use and in the environment where it's to be used. It could be right in certain circumstances, it could be wrong in others. A player wouldn't know unless they had read the rules. It's a shortcut that offloads the burden of literacy onto something else and then says "trust us".   I know I'm not the target audience for this, because I see TTRPGs as having the infinite scope of artistic potential, while this reduces ...

I'd heard about RPG Trader starting up a few months ago, and was definitely interested in getting on board.  Here's my profile page. I've just started to put a few products up. A pair so far, The Law and Sceletus, both have had decent downloads, one is old and one is new. I'll be putting a few more products up over the next week or two. We'll see how this platform goes.

So, I've mentioned Sceletus a few times. It's not doing too badly, but not surprosingly, interest has dropped off now that Erin and I are charging for supplements. So now it's a case of making sure those supplements are cool and interesting. It's been my previous experience that each supplement for a game gets a bit of interest, then adds a residual kick to the previous games in the line, and this might overflow to other games on my shopfront. Which lead me to two of the current booklets I'm aiming for.  A map of the setting.  A guide of arms and armour. The first booklet is pretty easy. I've got plenty of maps that I haven't used over the years, including a bunch of maps for a mysterious ruined city that could easily be substituted into the Necropolis. All that really needs is a couple of random exploration tables to show some of the interesting things that might be found there (Erin's offered to help populate these tables). The second book will take a ...

I've managed to get the back end of DriveThruRPG working again, so I've just put up the first 4 books for Sceletus, both individually and as the  Sceletus Starter Bundle . This has included generating up a banner to get some more traction and a bit more attention for the product.   Let's see how things go. The last time I thought I had a game this good, it was Shattered Heroes (and I'm still not sure if we're legally allowed to talk about that).  

Back in October I posted this ... It was the "soft launch" of Sceletus.  In the time since then, the little game that Erin and I designed has seen over 400 downloads. So that's a good sign. Like FUBAR, which has always bee free and has seen almost 10,000 downloads in the 15 years it's been available, I've discussed the idea with Erin, and we'll release a few paid supplements to expand the game in different ways. I don't know if these will sell, or if it's just the novelty of a free game that's drawing attention. But it will be a useful experiment to see if this is a worthwhile game to keep developing. I'm probably going to redevelop some ideas I've been finding in my notebooks recently, and offering them to Erin as a part of the ongoing development of this project. There's so many ideas there, and Sceletus is a big void waiting to be filled with wonder and nastiness.     

Have I mentioned Mana Crusade?  I'm sure I did.  If not, it's getting a second playtest sequence next next. The whole game was developed by Erin Gumiho, a friend I was introduced to a few years ago, even though she had moved in a few of the same circles as me for years. I've bounced ideas back and forward with her, but Mana Crusade is her baby. A private Discord saw a few of the team from Beneath the Glass and Steel throw some support and input into the game.  The idea is that the core rules are on a tri-fold which also serves as the character sheet. The complete rules are no more than another tri-fold. I guess you'd basically describe it as a single character narrative war-game for several players to play concurrently. It draws a bit from the old Inquisitor game from the Warhammer 40k Universe, and maybe a bit from the old Braunstein games that started off the whole RPG hobby.  Everything else in the game is written on cards that get attached to the character sheet...

Here's the Narrator's guide I've been working on... Download Link ...but it probably doesn't make much sense without the other 'zines. So here's the player's guide And the sample cards I'm actually starting to get some interesting feedback on these... just not here on the blog. While I'm at it... here's the two new versions of the Vulpinoid Studios logo

  Just finished the Narrator's Guide to  "Bustle in your Hedgerow". I'll sleep on it, and take another look over it tomorrow before making a final round of edits (unless I'm happy enough that I release it as is)... I still want to write up a setting booklet as an example of the kind of location where scarecrow stories might take place. However, we'll see how that goes. 

I'm more than halfway through the Narrator's Guide, and it's tough culling what I want from what I want to put in because I think it's cool.  I'm still on track to finish this bit of the prject by the end of NaGaDeMon 2024, and might even manage to get another booklet sorted out. If so, I'll manage to get a full starter kit ready for the game... something that will be print and play, with everything necessary for a session beyond the deck of cards, pencils and tokens. It's also nice to see my Bluesky account has picked up a bit in recent days with an influx of new members on the X-odus from other platforms. If you're interested in following me there, I'm at  https://bsky.app/profile/vulpinoid.bsky.social

 I'm a rambler... I struggle with condensing words and limiting text to a page count. I clarify with extra words, extra pictures, more examples, richer context. This whole idea of a Narrator's Guide is spilling into a guide for facilitating play, an antagonists guide, a setting booklet... more to write... and then maybe alternate guides for different settings and booklets to define them. On another side, real life work is getting in the way again.

1 - Front Cover 2 - Table of Contents, Credits, and Legal Stuff 3-4 - Further context to the intended game setting with explanations for who the characters are, why they've been awakened, and what they need to do in the world.  5-7 - The process of following the four act structure of Scarecrow stories, what should generally happen at what times, how things ramp up, how things can go awry, and how to get things back on track.    8-9 - This is the "centre-spread" of the zine. This will basically be the narrator's play-mat indicating where to put tokens, and how the tracking of these tokens reflects the events of the night and the flow of the narrative. 10-13 - Creating spirits, hunters, and variant antagonists for the scarecrows. 14-15 - Rituals and variant powers that might be used by scarecrows or ther antagonsists to help drive the story. 16 - Back Cover 

  Today's first of our two guides for running the game is the Vampire Storyteller's Handbook, it's similar to the Werewolf one from yesterday. However, the stories told in Vampire aren't a struggle of horror against the end of the world, they're stories of horror against the monster you will inevitably become. It starts with an introduction which generally explains what the book is about and an overview of the design teams intentions with regard to vampires in the setting. Chapter One gives us an overview of how vampires are different to mortals and what their stories are intended to be like in light of this. It does this through a series of questions and answers over the course of 8 pages or so. Chatpter Two tries to get into the heads of the different clans of vampires, presents a few mysterious bloodlines that may (or may not) exist in your stories, and gives a few new backgrounds and powers that might makee antagonsists a little more unpredictable, maybe a bit m...

  NaGaDeMon is here... again. I haven't been happy with the flow of the Narrator's Guide for Bustle in your Hedgerow. I was planning to release a part of the game every couple of days, and the first two parts are certainly out there (at the time of writing, the post about the core players guide has had 85 views, and the post about the cards necessary for play has had 29 views. The narrator's guide was due to be released today, and that would have fomre the complete starting pack for play. I gave myself a couple of weeks of lead time to get the writing and formatting of everything sorted out (with the whole " playtesting again ", and " coming soon " posts), but I just can't get the Narrator's Guide ready to a level I'm happy with. It's probably about halfway there, and I'll spend this month refining it further and maybe add a quickstart setting and characters (based on my playtest sessions). Hopefully other activities don't bog m...

Part B of Bustle in Your Hedgerow can be found uploaded to the Vulpinoid Studios google drive. It is here . As I write this, almost a day has passed... over 60 people have looked at the "Part A" post, but no one has commented yet. Maybe it's taking people a bit of time to read what they've downloaded...maybe it's the usual thing where someone might get back to me in 10 years and ask me "Whatever happened to that scarecrow game?"

Here's the first 16-page zine. Not sure how long it'll be here. If you read it and have thoughts, please comment.

 Almost ready.

I've finally reached a point where I'm basically happy with the new character sheet for the updated Walkabout. I'm just going to post it as a link to my google drive here on the blog, becuase that way I can see how many people are looking at this page, and get a rough guide about how many people might have clicked through to actually look at the sheet. The basic idea is that it get printed onto an A4 (or equivalent) sheet, and both sides are folded into the middle using a gate fold. The front of the resulting folded card has the surface elements of the character, what other people see, with room to draw a picture. The inside of the card contains all the various elements that a character uses to perform actions within the game, all the numbers and details. The back of the card is a basic rundown of the game rules for performing actions in the game. I've always been a fan of the idea where the core rules are immediately available to the players, and the complicated rule v...

I'm finally using the tower, and that means I'm finally getting the chance to put together the next three issues of Beneath the Glass and Steel. I'm putting 3 potential story hooks on every floor of the Bronzewing Tower complex, which means the first 34 stories will have the potential for 102 stories. More possible stories if you combine them with one another, but shorter possible campaigns if you do this. The whole thing about the tower is that I could add more detail to each floor, but this reduces the possibility for someone to use this as a game resource and add their own details to the setting. Still a lot more work to do on this, but on target to get the next three issues out on schedule for the Kickstarter.