Observations of the Fox

 My two flagship games for the SNAFU system are Walkabout (a game about post-apocalyptic investigators and troubleshooters trying to bring balance back to a world that has been devastated by the return of Spirits of the Dreaming who've had enough of humanity's disrespect for the planet) and Familiar (a game about magical spirits who take the form of animals, who empower the dispossessed and disenfranchised to become heroes in a world of stagnation and corruption). Both games overlap their themes in a lot of ways, both are more about the relationships people have to each other and the world around them, rather than fighting and conquest. It was the fighting and conquest that led to the problems in each of the settings.  Both games have characters made in very different ways, but both character generation systems make roughly equivalent starting characters through a blend of randomness and choice, with characters gaining agency in their worlds as their stories are told. Looking ...

 We're running a little sale over on the online store...  DrivethruRPG Vulpinoid Studios  

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

Let's say I have a plan for a story over a couple of sessions. Think of this like a story arc that goes over a couple of episodes in a TV series. Each session has a "context" act to establish it's events, a "complication" act to build up its tension, a "climax" act to face the issues at hand, and finally a "conclusion" act to resolve the story and pull things back into line. Four vignettes scattered across the episodes can help tie sessions that otherwise seem disconnected into a coherent whole. If we're going with the four act story structure, there are a few ways we can build a long form narrative while allowing a generally freeform approach to the choices made by characters.    Story Act Episode Event Notes E01 Act 1 Context: Let the players explore No predefined vignette E01 Act 2 Complication: Introduce the immediate story Optional Acceleration vignette to prompt na...

It might be the fact that my blog is currently on a similar topic, but Google has started sending me links about things that people can do to improve their TTRPG experience... like this one . Let's consider the points it raises in the context I've described so far. 10. Run a session zero: the right way I've already indicated that communication between the players and the narrator is a key to success in any RPG session or campaign. For a single session game, this usually comes in the form of letting players know what they're in for as a part of the one-shot, but for campaigns (the typical mode of play for D&D) then a session zero is something that's a relatively recent phenomenon. This can really make or break a game.   If we consider the three way tension between narrator, players and rules, a session zero gets everyone on board with how the rules will pull on the story, this happens through the narrator explaining the system or any house rules they might have m...

 As a part of the worldbuilding process, I asked our students to draw some points on a globe, and indicate the direct that these points would move if we were simulating continental drift. I'll go through the developmentof the landmasses as soon as I get my other computer up and running...hopefully over the next few days.

One of the first exercises for our high school gaming club was developing a shared collaborative world. I figured this would be more interesting and more engaging for everyone than simply playing pre-written modules. I wanted to create a setting with the students, something that they'll be proud to be a part of. But how do you worldbuild wth kids? The first part of the process was a simple questionnaire, getting a range of established outlines for a series of nations. Some students chose to work alone, some worked in pairs to establish their nations, others worked in groups of 3 or 4. With twenty-five partcipants, we ended up with a dozen nations. Some of these were standard fantasy fare, others not so much. The worldbuilding questionnaire was deliberately written to lead students toward thinking in certain ways, but I was happy that there was some deviation in the final thought patterns. First, the demographcs of the land.  What race(s) are common?  Humans Elves Dwarves Orcs ...

 I pledged to the Altered Carbon RPG Kickstarter when it was going. It was meant to have been shipped in August 2020, but I guess COVID has stuffed up a lot of things this year. I have finally managed to have a look at the second version of the backer review copy of the game.   It looks alright. But as I read through it, I'm seeing lots of fiddly systems and subsystems. The core system looks interesting and fairly sturdy, with a system that's going to be a bit counter-intuitive to most gamers of mainstream systems. It's a roll under system, where characters start with a big die (a d12) as a crude level of skill/potential, and gradually get their die lower as they train and improve. Easy tasks have a high target number, while hard tasks have lower target numbers. Certain effects like having specialised equipment or training, seem to let you roll multiple dice (then pick the best result), while other effects modify the target number.  There's a few variations depending...