Observations of the Fox

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).  

Sceletus was initially meant to be released with 4 books. The first was the core rules for the players, the second was the supplemental rules for someone who was running a game. Two extra booklets were intended to be released with those first two. Now Erin and I have finally completed them to a point where we are happy with the results, and they've finally been completed and are available for sale over on Itch. Orders of the Bones The Grey and the Green The "Orders of the Bones" booklet provides details on some factions that might provide help or hindrance to the players as their tell the stories of their animated dead characters. The booklet entitled "The Grey and the Green" is all about a mysterious fungal hive-mind entity that threatens to wipe out everything the characters know.     These additional booklets haven't seen any sales yet. I thought about putting them up for sale on the Vulpinoid Studios shopfront at DrivethruRPG in addition to Erin's It...

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.     

It's the end of school year, and that means our school does some interesting activities to keep students engaged. I've discussed that in previous years (end of 2024, here and here )... (I thought I'd written about previous years, but digging through the blog, it looks like I haven't ). So I figured that I'd run my Chrono-Labyrinth for the students. I know that particular dungeon really well because I've run it many times, so it seemed a good test to see how the game system works in contrast the the other systems I've used for that dungeon in the past. So I ran Sceletus .  I felt like it was going to be an easy system, elements of it just make sense. However I've really wanted to see how it actually works with a range of gamers, both experienced and brand new. Instead of thinking it works, I now know it does. There's also some interesting emergent properties of the game, that I hadn't considered. The way stress works in the game varies depending...

Sceletus has had its soft release. There's still things that need to be changed about it. Included in that are needing to add in a few more images and finish off the book about the political groups that exist in the setting and how they can be used to manipulate stories in the game. Here's the page for the Game Jam that it's been submitted to. and Here's the page for the game itself. I'll probably put it up on DrivethruRPG soon as a paid version, so get the free edition while you can.  

Halloween is almost here. The game about skeletons that I've been working with Erin on is almost done. I'm going to have the make sure enough of it is finished for a soft release.             There's another book in the starting sequence, but that's not going to be ready by Friday. Hopefully the next post will tell you that the game is now available. 

  So I'm gathering together a bunch of ideas for the new game that I've been developing with Erin. Both of us have been looking at different games across Itch, and plenty of the ideas that we're scavenging have come from all over the place (including plenty of inspirations from the old " Game Mechani(sm) of the Week " series, stuff that was discussed in the " How to Run a Game " sequence, and assorted stuff we've found on Itch over recent weeks). This project is intended for the DURF Jam 2025 , which opens tomorrow. However, even though there are lots of things we like about the way DURF approaches things, there's a few key elements that we don't like, including the core game mechanism or rolling d20 plus a low variable ability factor versus a difficulty. I like the idea of adding or subtracting another die result (a bit like inspiration adding to a roll in 5e D&D), so I tried to integrated this a bit more naturally into the system rather...