Observations of the Fox

Satori (悟り) is a  Japanese Buddhist  term for awakening, "comprehension; understanding" . It is derived from the Japanese verb satoru. In the Zen Buddhist tradition, satori refers to a deep experience of  kenshō , "seeing into one's true nature". Ken means "seeing," shō means "nature" or "essence". It was in the shower, but then again a lot of satori seems to involve running water such as rivers, waterfalls, rainstorms, or sitting on the toilet...so I guess the shower is a fairly predictable place for the inspiration to hit.  I've got this design problem, an idiosyncrasy if you will. It's something I do in many of my designs. But at least I know about it, snd I can see when I'm doing it. If I take some of my last few game designs into consideration, I can see where I've been doing it. Yet it's only in retrospect that I recognise that I've been following the same problematic path. Designing anything is like pl...

  If you've been a reader of this blog in the past, you'll be aware that I've regularly got a few backburner projects. Over the years, these projects have included cartography, mutiple games, illustration series, physically creative endeavours.  In the time since I started this blog, I've moved house several times... Riverwood (Start of blog ➡ October 2010) Buxton  (October 2010 ➡ January 2019) Barham  (January 2019 ➡ April 2019) Barham  (April 2019 ➡ January 2019) Coleambally  (January 2020 ➡ December 2020) Oxley Vale  (December 2020 ➡ May 2021) West Tamworth  (May 2021 ➡ July 2022) East Tamworth  (July 2022 ➡ August 2023) South Tamworth  (August 2023 ➡ Current) The last move should the be last one for a while, if not the last one altogether, since my wife and I have bought the house we've moved into. During this time I've worked a number of jobs and studied at various levels... Padstow TAFE College [Certificate 4 in Web Design]  (...

We've gone live As a part of the current 'Zine Quest campaign on Kickstarter, I've decided to offer the first few issues of Beneath the Glass and Steel, and hopefully get a bit more momentum for the next few issues. Life over the past couple of weeks has been pretty chaotic, with the moving of house, the settling in to a new job, and assorted other stuff happening. Between life, work, and getting this Kickstarter ready, Familiar has taken a back seat... but I'm hoping to get back to that shortly.

One of the things I really like about the Malifaux RPG " Through the Breach " is the way characters are generated using a modified five-card tarot spread with poker cards. There was something similar implied in Mage: the Ascension, with sourcebooks gradually adding elements to a more complicated spread, but this was never properly explored in the mechanisms of the game (to my knowledge). My idea for generating supporting characters in this game about urban magic uses a similar idea, but utilising a full tarot deck for the process. The five card spread is easiest to use here, and with a full tarot deck at our disposal creates a possible variety of ‭2,533,330,800‬ possible combinations (before modifications for characterisation and integration in the story are applied). Here's the basic idea...    I could similarly go back to the concept of the " Hold 'Em NPC Generator ", and there will probably be elements of that system in this process becau...

When I develop my ideas, I start by considering the structure of existing roleplaying books. This way I can think about what needs to go into the game, and what general order they need to be presented in. I did a general readthrough of a variety of games a few years ago includng AD&D, AD&D 2nd Ed, D&D 3.0Ed, Call of Cthulhu (I can't remember what edition), the various White Wolf World of Darkness games, Palladium's offerings, Cyberpunk 2020, Shadowrun, Tunnels and Trolls, Paranoia, Chill (2nd Edition), and a scattering of indie products. There's a fairly consistent layout and presentation order, but the way they vary from one another often provides insight into what the author (or lead designer) feels is most important to the game.  I vary my presentation order depending on the specific nature of the game I'm designing, and this is always subjet to change as the game evolves in my head. I then tend to generate a word document with a series of headi...

In Walkabout, I have a variety of occupations that characters might pick up as they meet people and explore the world. The specific occupations were designed to give some flavour to the world, to identify how certain people might service the communities around them, and what benefits they might gain from engaging in the tasks associated with those roles. The idea was inspired by the careers in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying, but with the twist that players didn't need to choose an existing occupation, they could just exist as drifters forging their own path if they wanted to. In The Law, I have a single occupation for all characters, but I've been working on a similar system where a character might have a variety of abilities, and a set of minimum attriutes that allows them to open up training as a specialist in a specific field. As an example, a character with a good "social" attribute and skills in speaking and subterfuge might be worthy of training as an "und...

I still want to do work on The Law and Walkabout, but I have this nasty habit of changing my plans mid-stream. Often not delierately, often it's just an evolutionary offshoot fro one direction to something a bit tangential, then a slightly new course correction that seems unrelated to the original plan unless you're able to see the flow of logic in my head. The thing about this new BG&S 'zine is that its directly meant to provide a source of in-world data for players in a game of The Law... but I want it to be more useful that just a supplement for my own game. There are a range of great 'zines and sources for the OSR movement, but they have the advantage that they're all basically clones of the same basic concepts. A single stat block might be appropriate for a dozen (or more) different games. In trying to generate the same sort of concept for assorted cyberpunk games, there needs to be a minimal connection to specific game mechanisms of play. That basically ...

At the time of writing this post, it's been less than 24 hours since I've uploaded the guide to Beneath the Glass and Steel, 40 people have downloaded it from DrivethruRPG, and I've had a few positive comments on various forms of social media. I've also had 29 hits on the previous post here at the blog, where I talked about the product. So I'm figuring that there are probably 80 to 100 people who are aware of the ideas, maybe a quarter of them have actually read through the guidebook. Maybe half of those are actually considering writing something. That still gives about 10 people who haven't yet got in contact with me. It's still early days, and maybe there might be a bit more interest once I get the first issue or two out there. I guess it just means that I'm going to have to write those first few issues myself. We'll see what happens.

Halfling Caravan Games has done something that I've found to be really interesting. As a part of their Betamaxx system, they've developed a Cthulhu inspired setting and have gathered together a range of authors and artists to contribute to a monthly magazine of weird tales. I've been working on something similar for The Law, and generally any cyberpunk roleplaying game. In order to get everyone on the same page regarding this project, I've developed a guidebook in the same general style that the 'zine will take. Beneath the Glass and Steel - Guide In addition to this, I've created a Discord channel for participants to discuss the project and work together as they submit their ideas to the 'zine. https://discord.gg/ZHvD2HR Like a lot of things that I do under the "Vulpinoid Studios" imprint this is an experiment that may or may not work, but we'll never know if we don't try.

I love  this party crasher post . It's the kind of style I'd love to see a whole game written in. Whenever I suggest this, or try to present something this way, I invariably get a bunch of people telling me how hard it is to read the text, how bad it is for cognition, and how generally unprofessional it looks. I certainly pushed in this direction for The Law, and might go further in the sourcebooks for that game... but we'll see how things go.

Today I shared The Law at the Echuca Game Store as our little part of Free RPG Day. Nothing official, just running a free game and distributing some pdf copies of it to those who were interested. In most previous sessions I've run for people, I've created pre-generated characters. This time I had a little longer to work with, so I spent half an hour or so creating characters with the players (using prompt sheets and images) then running through a two and a half hour introductory session. Like most games of The Law, the early stages of the game were met with a bit of confusion as the game unusual dice dynamic was adjusted to, but by the end of the session everything was feeling good. Good enough that players who had barely extended themselves beyond D&D were interested in playing again. I certainly count that as a win. Another good bit of news is that I've got my display board working again. We'll see how things go from here.

This whole process is taking a while. It's that tedious part of the process where tables have been drawn up, and now the data is being populated into them. This means the whole project isn't ready for public consumption yet, but it feels like it's getting closer. I'm looking at four phases of character generation, with each phase lasting six years of the character's life. 0-5 infancy, 6-11 childhood, 12-17 adolescence, 18-23 maturity... characters may start at an age of 24+. Because each phase is 6 years, six dice are rolled to determine what connections and relationships the character has made during their life... each spreading the potential range of relationships; genetic, family, community, abstract concepts... if a player rolls doubles, triples, or other combos for their character, they gain access to special life events. Since we're rolling six dice, doubles are fairly common (providing quirky stuff), triples not so much (so these provide ...

One of the fundamental things that has become integrated into the way I see the Walkabout RPG is the idea of "The Calling". This has come from both my work with indigenous communities in the last few years, and my development of the alternate game "The Law". But what is "The Calling"? Let's give the easy description first... In "The Law", characters are given a rating in their Rank. The Rank is symbolic of how competent they are and how others view their degree of competency. When players can quickly reference the source material that inspired the game (Judge Dredd, Robocop, Ghost in the Shell, etc.) They can see specific examples of characters at different levels of competence and gain an understanding of how their character fits into the scale. Rank is designed to be something that increases gradually, perhaps a single increase at the end of a multi-session story arc. The ultimate embodiment of the law in Megacity One is Judge Dredd, ...

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...

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 ...

Special thanks to Jeremy Smith for reviewing The Law. He'll be doing a series of reviews for various games in a dedicated group over on MeWe , so I figured that I'd get in early before he was inundated with other games to review. I've included a copy of the review here for those who aren't on MeWe, or who aren't intending to join due to the political views of the site's owner. Here is the audio file for the review Based on this response from Jeremy, I might finally get around to offering my games to other reviewers.

One of the things that bugs me about many traditional RPGs is the front loading of story, that may never be used. Copious detail is added to characters, which may never have the opportunity to be revealed in play, either because the syory doesn't go in a direction conducive to revealing those facts, or simply because the character gets killed before the truth can become known. This goes for worldbuilding and the work of the GM as well, and there are plenty of anecdotes about GMs spending days detailing a part of the world, rich with mystery and adventure, only for the players to take the right hand fork in the road rather than the left. There are two instant ways to overcome this... You can detail every part of the world. This is the method used by many high profile games in the 80s and 90s ( D&D, Rifts, Shadowrun, Cyberpunk, MERP, GURPS, World of Darkness ), inundating players and GMs with so much information that everything could be found written up somewhere... of cour...

One of the things that I embedded into The Law was the idea that a character's level automatically adjusted the difficulty of their stories, and while the level was linked to the character's ability to succeed in actions, it was only a part of the overall ability. This means that a player who rushes ahead with their character's level will find that bigger antagonists face off against them, but they just don't have the skills and relevant backup from other stats. Another player who takes the "long game" approach, gradually building their character's other stats and then increasing level only once everything else is finely tuned and optimised will find things easier... bit it will be a much slower game for them. This isn't highlighted in the rules, but it was deliberate. When I worked in the corporate world, I saw too many people who were elevated beyond their abilities to function effectively. They made a big show, they attracted big clients, but they...

Two train trips this week meant two false starts on a new project. I start things to keep my mind active, because grinding down on existing projects is often monotonous, and frustrating. The problem here is that I realise, once I get a bit into the "new" project that it isn't really new at all. Quite often I'm just retreading the same ground, or fusing together elements of two old projects. It's like taking a massive journey, walking a few hundred metres from home, going back to the house and then starting another journey the next day. Even if you set out in different directions every day, you don't really get anywherr, but you do develop intimate knowledge of the local area around your house. I feel like I've developed that intimate knowledge in a specific field of game design, but it doesn't feel like an area that many other people want to play in. It's adjacent to a few different more popular areas, and occasionally another designer will...