Observations of the Fox

In my last post, I mentioned that I've started a tabletop gaming club at my school. I've thought about doing it at the last two schools I was posted at, and decided this time I'd just do it. There was nothing much here for those students who aren't sport inclined, so the take-up was instant. 25 kids wanting to game... all wanting to play D&D. A third of whom are girls, and probably half of whom are on the spectrum to some level (where a quarter have issues complex enough that require them being in special education classes). I've run games wth 6 to 8 players no problems, I've done 10 to 12 at a pinch, often with sub-GMs... but 25 newbies. Nope. I don't want to give them the wrong impression of what gaming can be. At first I was thinking that we should play boardgames, and run single sessions with an RPG of some type. However, a half hour lunchbreak isn't enough time to really get much of anything happening. So I'm working on a few new odeas, one ...

I look at games like Risus , or like the work I've just done with The Fen , or even looking back at earlier work I've tinkered with ( Catacomb Quest comes to mind). There are plenty of other games that also don't use attributes at all, so it seems a bit odd to simply be including attributes because it's tradition to do so. I've been looking over the work for The Fen, and one of the first things that came to mind was applying a system of races, cultures and occupations to it. Then I thought I should apply an attribute system... and that's when it hit me. Do we really need atttributes? The ideas that led to this were an attempt to tie the basic system to the Other Strangeness project that I abandoned a while ago. I initially thought that I needed the stereotypical races... human, elf, dwarf... because these make an easy point of entry for players who are used to the standard fantasy paradigm, but humans tend to be the vanilla, which gets flavoured more stro...

I guess it's not really a failure, I definitely spent a bit of time doing game design work during this month, but I've had so many other things happening that I really haven't managed to complete any of my intended game design projects. The Quartermasters Files which functions as the basic equipment guide for The Law saw a bit of progress, so did the Most Wanted  NPC guide. The Fen went from a vague nebulous concept to an almost workable game that won't take too much effort to reach a playtestable state. There was also a decent amount of drawing done for various projects. 

One of the things about my design cycle is that I'm always shooting off on tangents, then I try to pull those tangents back into other projects. This recent Fen project has had an idea that I've pulled from certain LARPs. It relates to the way weapon and armour works. In those LARPs, there are simp,y some types of armour that are too protective for lesser weapons to penetrate. Instead of giving extra hit points or adding toughness, these armours simply say that if you aren't using a high enough level of weapon, you don't do a thing. So heroic knights wade through throngs of poorly equipped peasants and cut bloody paths of destruction through the masses... it's the wet dream of many libertarians and supremacists (as long as they're the ones in the armour). The version in The Fen is slightly more nuanced. Basically, you get certain thresholds of power level. Let's say 'unarmed fists' counts as offence level zero and 'bare skin' cou...

I'm certainly not going to get this project finished this month, but it's going in the right direction.  I still haven't completely decided what a lot of the monstrous creatures in the Fen actually look like, so I'll focus on a few more of these reference images. I also haven't particularly determined what the survivor characters actually are. The original concept was to simply have them as humans, and this is certainly the easiest option, but it crossed my mind that the swamp-bound survivors could be goblins or kobolds, or something else entirely. I also considered the idea that the survivors could be left deliberately vague, something for players to decide.  

I mentioned in a previous post that this project was going to be done white on black, to accentuate the darkness of the Fen. That means the illustrations will also follow the white on black theme. I'm not necessarily going to run with anything too realistic for this project, instead opting to draw the illustration in my "comic" style. The whole rules for the project will also be written in the font that I generated out of my handwriting a few months back.

The Fen is designed to be played without a GM, because it's more of a co-operative survival game than a roleplaying game. As a result it draws a little from the idea of Fighting Fantasy books, by having a procedural set of rules to define how opponents will confront the characters. I've tried to develop a few 'opposition AIs' in the past, and they always start getting a bit fiddly because I often try to incorporate too much into the decision trees defining how the system reacts to player activities. If anyone has good suggestions of how other games handle this sort of thing, I'd love to hear them. At the moment though, I'm trying to get the feeling where different types of adversaries confront the characters in different ways. This is handled by giving the various opponent types a specific attack output, and a few key points indicating how they work strategically. Some opponents prefer to use ranged attacks, some hunt in packs, some prefer a straight up f...

The survivors in the Fen have a few objectives. Primarily, they aim to survive as long as possible, hoping that one of the games victory conditions or escape clauses activates. Other objectives basically just support this in one way or another... Explore to find new resources to gather Gather resources to make tools, equipment, weapons, and armour. Make tools and equipment to improve survivability, and make hunger/thirst/injuries easier to address Make weapons and armour to hunt, or to avoid the worst when being hunted. Increase knowledge about the Fen, to know where new safe areas might be found if the encampment is destroyed Increase knowledge of the self, improving the ability to engage all those other objectives with a greater chance of success. It's that last one I'm thinking about. The general setup of the game gives every player one or more "aware" survivors. 1 player = 3 aware survivors 2 players = 2 aware survivors each (for a total of 4) 3 ...

I've been working on an item listing for The Fen. Basically the aim here is to provide a range of things that will help characters survive, not necessarily provide a list of anything and everything that characters in the fen could make. I was thinking of adding metal items to the lists, but decided that this ended up detracting from the potential game with too many choices. FOUND COMPONENTS [these may be found by anyone] Blackblood, Carapace, Fat, Flint, Fungus, Herbs, Leather, Meat, Obsidian Shard, Spider Silk, Resin, Tar, Teeth, Weaving Fibres, Water, Wood MANUFACTURED COMPONENTS [a character must have the ‘crafter’ trait to make these] Charcoal [wood]  Cloth [weaving fibres] Point [crude] [obsidian shard or flint] Point [good] [obsidian shard] Silk Cloth [spider silk] Spikes [carapace, teeth, or wood] FOOD [a character must have the ‘cook’ trait to make these] Clean Water [water, carapace pot] – [anyone may make this] unless water ...

Abberations, Undead, Planar entities, Dire creatures... D&D has all manner of categories for the entities that players may face in their travels. Each has expected traits and common abilities, even they do cover a wide range of options within those categories. I'm thinking of doing something similar with The Fen, where I'm already up to about 40 different creatures that might be encountered, but these are generally categorised into Blackblood - these creatures are infused with a parasitic black fluid  that mutates and transforms them in unnatural ways. They take extra damage from  weapons coated in a specific blend of fungus. Fen - these are natural creatures of the fen, they may not be typical creatures on Earth (such as Fen Shamblers), but there's nothing particularly supernatural about them.  Shadow - these are empowered by the perpetual darkness enshrouding the Fen, such creatures would effectively live forever if they weren't killed by violent means...

There is always going to be confrontation and conflict in the perpetually darkened swamp-lands of the fen.   I'm open to feedback here. I'd like feedback here.  Basically our characters are defined by a range of skills that either give them a new way to roll dice that other characters don't possess [such as healing, crafting, or fishing], advantages to standard actions [such as being better at combat or scavenging], or some quirky one off ability [which might ignore certain penalties, or provide advantages when certain situations arise]. The amnesiac characters get one skill, while aware characters get a name, 3 skills, and a memory fragment that provides some special bonus while revealing something about their past.  Ranged If there are characters at ranged distance with ranged weapons, ranged attacks are launched in descending order of initiative. Roll each ranged attack [roll a single d6 unless either combatant has an effect that says otherwi...

No, this isn't a post about racial hate crimes. It's about page layout and developing mood in a text.    In a game where the characters awaken in a swampland locked in eternal darkness and threatened by creatures of the murky shadows, it makes sense to me to have thed rules be as dark as possible. OneBookShelf has trouble with printing black text onto a gradient, or even onto greyscale (because the greys come out either over or under exposed, and the mood is instantly ruined). So I'm thinking of running with white text and line art on a black background.    I'm not going to keep writing this post that way, because the formatting is just bugging me here on the blog. This idea isn't particularly innovative, I remember the Lasombra Clanbook doing it quite some time ago. I do think the idea is still uncommon enough that it makes a nice novelty and quirky feature for this particular game. Generally, things seem to be falling into place for the game. I ...

To keep things simple in this game, I'm going with 4 basic types of actions, and two starting types of survivor. The survivors are either Amnesiacs (who can do basic things and assist other characters in their tasks), or Aware (who have enough self-awareness that they can engage in more specific tasks). Each player gains control over one or more Aware survivors, while the Amnesiacs are basically a pool of assistants. As they perform deeds and gain experience, Amnesiacs may become Aware. 2 Actions anyone can do, regardless of whether they are Amnesiac or Aware.... Tending the Fire (successfully keeping the fire alive efficiently) Recuperating (resting, eating and drinking ) 2 Actions are initially limited to Aware survivors. Exploring the Swamp (each hour a new part of the swamp may be explored, trudging across a previously explored part of the swamp takes half an hour) Collecting Components (taking the time to specifically scavenge an area for a variable number of fir...

We know our survivors are in a swamp trapped in endless night, but what does the swamp look like? I'm thinking of a procedural system here where every game will generate a new piece of swampland. We'll generally start with a blank hex grid. But ee know that the characters are in a relatively safe part of the swamp at the beginning of play, so we'll add some positive modifiers to the central territories. We also know that they start in a wooded area, to give them an easier time to collect dry wood at the start of play. Going any further requires exploration, which not only uncovers other parts of the swamp, but also finds potential risks and rewards. I'm thinking of a few basic types of swampy terrain... waterlogged copses of trees, long grass, boggy marsh, and wasteland. I haven't fully worked out thd symbols for these, or how many there will be... maybe 5, and if you roll a 6 on the die the new terrain is the same as the last terrain the exp...

If you've been a regular reader of the blog over the years, or even if you've just read a bunch of the posts about game design that I've made in that time, you'll note that I strive for elegance in systems. That doesn't mean striving to make simplistic rule sets, but it also certainly doesn't mean introducing complexity for the sake of it. I like sturdy, multifunctional rules that apply a common method of resolution to a variety of situations while feeling natural in those situations. I like the idea of a simple (6 and under)/(7-9)/(10 and over) mechanism like the one found in Apocalypse World, and for some tasks it feels natural, but in my experience it finds it's limits quickly. This is especially true when it comes to the variant difficulties of tasks, or the variant skill levels of characters. The way that people tack new sub-rules onto the base to accomodate these issues indicates to me that the core rules were never meant to work in certain ways, and...

The Fen isn't designed to be a completely open ended roleplaying game, but it has roleplaying elements. It's a game where there always need to be risk, but that risk needs to creep up.  To make sure this works, the game needs to start with the players at a relative degree of safety with a buffer zone between them and the creeping (but gradually accelerating) difficulty. Here's how I see it... If the players screw around, or don't successfully perform actions on a regular basis, they'll find that the difficulty factor bring a potential end of game after about 50 turns, and if we assume roughly 2 minute turns that means the game could end in under 2 hours... of course the early turns don't have a lot of options or complexity to them, while the later turns involve more strategic decision making, so this is really a rough estimate. If players do perform well, they might get enough ahead of the curve that they can last 75-80 turns, and if we note th...