Observations of the Fox

I'm hoping that one of my themes for this year will be to complete unfinished works...I've certainly got enough of them. Walkabout is definitely on the agenda, and I've got a deadline in place for that one. Hell on Eight Wheels should be available in prototype form very shortly. Ghost City Raiders is complete, but will be an ongoing process as new supplemental characters and scenarios are released over the course of the year. Tooth and Claw will be getting more love as well. Two of the other projects I've been meaning to get back to are... First Quincunx , the game of supernatural hunters on a reality TV show, each sponsored by shadowy corporate conspiracies. This has seen evolution between RPG, board game, card game and numerous other forms. It seems the nature of that project is flux...it seems like trying to nail down jelly ("jello" to those Americans who might be reading). Once something seems right, I try to swing the hammer to nail it i...

It's always nice when someone comes up with an idea incredibly close to one of your own ideas, especially when they've drawn inspiration from one of your ideas which was in turn based on the idea that they've approximately simulated. Confused yet? I came up with an idea a few years ago, it was posted here on the blog. You can link to it here. (and further here) I played with the character matrix multiple times around this period, but just couldn't find a way for it to elegantly work when mixed with other game mechanisms. Yet over the years it has informed a number of game ideas I've had, from early incarnations of FUBAR (which in turn inspired Walkabout, and followed on to partially morph into Ghost City Raiders), through to a variety of card games I've toyed with (some of which have also led toward Ghost City Raiders). So I was quite intrigued when someone's thought processes led them to reverse engineer the concept somewhat with the following...

I'm so relieved, after years of working on it, my graphic novel is finally coming together. I've now completed a beta draft of the first issue...and here are the first few pages. If you're interested in reading it (before I send it off for submission to various pubishers), I'll try to send across a pdf of the first issue. Anyway, here's the first few pages...

I just spent a fascinating week away from the outside world. Separating my thought patterns from previous cycles, discovering new thought patterns, illustrating my long standing comic project, reassessing priorities, gathering insights. One day I might share a bit more about my experiences, once I get the chance to process them properly.

I've just about finished my "Little Game Chef" entry, those who are familiar with my work will be able to pick it instantly. Then it's a break from my own games. Avalon seems to be fairly professional in their dealings with freelancers. I've submitted an outline for my booklet "How to make a GREAT dungeon", and they seem happy enough with it that they're already interested in offering me some more work. But for my own stuff, it's back to my Quincunx graphic novel, the source of inspiration driving the RPG I've been working on for the past few years. I've had the outline of my story for quite some time, there are notes going back to 2006, and a preliminary version dating back to meeting David Mack during his visit to Sydney Supanova in 2002 (Quincunx began as a homage to Kabuki, a story within that world focusing on one of the other operatives...but then I decided to take the story for my own and introduce some of the other elements I wa...

Traditionally, a character sheet has a range of skills on it. Each of those skills has a value to indicate how good a character is when undertaking a task with the marked skill. It seems simple enough, but it often leads to complications. Some games (like D&D 3rd Ed and RIFTS) create synergies between skills. If you possess skill "X", you gain a bonus to skill "Y" because there is an overlap in their spheres of use. You often need to cross reference a couple of books to get the full range of synergies and bonuses. Some games (like White Wolf's Storyteller System) use general abilities/skills, then provide specialties, or secondary abilities that fill specific niches that the main skills don't cover. Again, those players with access to a wide range of splat-books have an advantage here...and if the GM says that only stuff in the main book is allowed, you end up with play situations where the GM has to make an ad hoc call, or simply say..."Sorry, you ...

I'm hastily trying to get a decent revision of my current Quincunx thoughts together for Go Play Brisbane. There have been some significant changes since Gencon Oz 2009. I know that the core of the system works, because I've used it successfully for two dozen games of Guerrilla Television, and for almost a dozen games of Quincunx. But if the core of the system is a skeleton, I'm having trouble attaching the meat and the organs. Guerrilla Television is designed to be a fun and light-hearted look at extravagant violence in the vein of Battle Royale , Gamer , The Running Man , and even real world concepts like Survivor or Big Brother. If you understand the tropes, you understand the game. There is little story, there is just carnage until one person is left standing...some people might try to escape, but it's so hard to do this that most would-be escapees die in the process. It's just a cathartic excuse to let out some narrative angst with a board and dice. I've wa...

Special thanks at this point have to go to Peter Blake. I'm still enthusiastic about the potential for the Quincunx project, but I've run into a couple of obstacles about where I really want the game to go. But with Go Play Brisbane on it's way, and Peter promising to run a scenario of the game for me during the con, I've really got to pull my finger out and consolidate some of the ideas I've had for improving the game. The good news is that I've got time to work on the game over the next week or so. I'm impressed that this little project is getting a bit of airplay beyond my own play sessions.

I've been letting things slide a bit on the Blog over the last couple of weeks, but fear not...I haven't been idly frittering away my time. Instead I've been honing the Rajah Spiny Rat rules set into something that more closely resembles the final product I had in mind. (Maybe I've been frittering away a bit of my time....but mostly it's been writing, crafting, 3d rendering and compiling. Much to the annoyance of my ever-suffering wife.) So without any further rant, I give you... Quincunx Alpha Tell me what you think. (Even if you think it's crap).