Observations of the Fox

I've made it to Silver on one of my products at DrivethruRPG , which is nice. I've got a decent range of games sitting at Bronze level too. Maybe this whole game design thing is working after all. In unrelated news, there will be a few less posts on the blog over the new years period as I move house again. I've just finished up a year as a woodwork/metalwork teacher on the border of NSW and Victoria, and am now heading a few hours northeast to a little town near Griffith ( here's a map for those unfamiliar with the area ). I'm still going to be working away on the Familiar project when I get the chance, but the updates won't be coming through every day or two like they have been.

One of my early thoughts with this game was that the human mystics would be able to affiliate themselves with a variety of groups to tailor their magical mathodologies. One character might see themseves as a fusion of Chinese Taoist principles and technological artificing, another might draw on Pagan dogma as they refine their herbalist approaches to the craft of reality weaving. But looking at all of the factions I've created, I can see that they're all pretty mysterious, insular, and generally work at cross purposes to one another. A character belonging to two (or more) factions under this kind of political structuring would be a bit of an anomaly, and would be severely distrusted by both groups, if not ostracised (or even hunted) by them. This makes a good setting for shadowy intrigue, but there needs to be something that binds the disparate groups together. A unifying organisation that allows members of these groups to work together against a greater outside threat... w...

With G+ closing down, an online friend (Kit La Touche) has come up with a way to track people in their various social media homes. I thought it was a great idea and have decided to share it with you all. https://wheretofind.me/@Vulpinoid

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...

"Hey look at me! I'm edgy and causing controversy!" ... "Oh, oops, I went too far? Who would have thought that being controversial might lead to trouble...people are saying bad things about me... no, no, I didn't mean it... yes I like that guy you think is an arse, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't like me." Yep. I called it. I don't necessarily like calling it, but I feel it's a moral obligation to call out people who are causing problems. Some folks are leaving the LotFP banner. ...and the fearless leader really isn't apologising over it, he's just sorry that his creative partners are leaving. Quite a few of us have been pointing out for a long time that the shock-and-awe model of publicity really wasn't doing much to endear that pillar of the OSR community to the wider gaming world, but it's a bittersweet situation to see things unfold the way they have. I'm hoping this will be the end of it, that pe...

Well, it's happening. Google Plus is clising down in under a year, but the pricess of winding down has begun. I get a lot of traffic here at the blog from G+ because my posts automatically get reposted there as a part of the wider Google ecosystem. That means I expect traffic here at the blog to drop off a bit, unless I can find a way to repost blog entries to somewhere new. This news hit me about 6 hours ago, and in that time, a few hundred G+ members have engaged in the great G+ exodus. This move has shifted a decent chunk of my game related community to the MeWe platform. I've already set up an Artists Group over there, and a few members have already joined. I've also established a group for Australian Game Designers (or those interested in them). If you're interested this is me ... I think it'll take a while to build back up to the 3700 followers I had on G+ (especially when there's a cap of 50 new contacts per day). There are some great advantages...

I've got this nasty habit of overanalysing things. I come up with a concept, then I tinker with it... I add bits to it... I work out how those new bits have modified the core... then modify them or add new bits until the whole thing is a Frakenstein mess that ends up getting stripped back to a raw foundation again. Sometimes the new iteration is back at the starting point, and sometimes it's a very different beast... at which point I analyse the differences to see what fulfils my goals better. It's an ongoing cycle. I shared my intention for a Dark Places character generation system, with 3 fragments determined by rolling a bunch of dice then allocating the results between different columns of a table. I've been working on this concept within the context of generating characters who would use the same system and be vaguely comparable in power to the Agents in The Law . This basically means attributes with an average starting score of d6, four defenses, four to se...

I've managed to compile my basic thoughts into a generally coherent set of rules. They can be found here. If anyone wants to have a look, provide critique, add suggestions, or anything else, feel free. The idea was to generally provide a set of rules capable of working within the Pocketmod format, rules that provided the basic procedure of play while allowing players to bring anything else they wanted to the experience. Now it's time to go back to images and layout.

Looking back over the die mechanisms I'd developed for Familiar, there was something that just didn't feel right. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but there was just a niggling doubt in the back of my mind that the numbers just weren't working at some level. So I've tried to consolidate some thoughts in the system. Everything basically now comes down to even numbers. If a character's die misses the difficulty by 2 or more, the attempt fails completely. Otherwise it has varying degrees of success. Thus, there is always a chance of failing completely (however remote that chance might be). Similarly under most circumstances, there is always a chance at success. Now, when a character draws on a metaphysical legacy, inherent skill/power, or item (mundane or supernatural) they simply add two points to their die roll. When advantages are at play, difficulty dice are decreased by a step (d12 to d10, d10 to d8, etc.) ...conversely, when disadvantages are at...

30 players... 20 players... 15 players... 7 players... 4. At what time do you say a game is in need of CPR, at what stage do you call it dead? I'm annoyed that recent politics have seen the death of the game I've taken over. It hasn't helped that a bunch of old players have broken away to found their own games because they were disgruntled by one or two minor aspects of play, or because they didn't like some person or another. The LARP that I've taken over has also suffered because one of the other organisers basically railroads plots, focuses on a specific geoup of their friends to the detriment of the other players involved, and showboats his way through the sessions he runs ('Look at me, I have funky clothes on', 'Listen to me, I have a funny accent', 'No, don't do that, I didn't plan for that...and if you wander off in that direction you'll be going away from ym carefully planned storyline, and you'll have to make up...

Over the past few months I've been working on a system for making "limited run" custom foam weaponry for LARPs. You may have seen a few posts from me in various places, indicating my progress, both successes and exercises in learning how not to do things. For the past two days I've been getting very close to my final production system. The moulded weapons are getting close to what I want to produce, not quite there, but good enough to start combat testing with. This particularly piece is a throwing dagger with a leaf pattern running up the side.  Now I just hope that next pay day will allow me to budget in some liquid latex, this will be mixed with paint to produce flexible but detailed colouring. In related news, I've just finished watching the web series "LARPs". It's not like any LARP I've been involved in. Most of the LARPs I've played have involved dozens of players and often multiple GMs, not just a small group of play...

What will this be?

I wanted to write Voidstone Chronicles in the Pocketmod format; 8 pages of concise game rules. But it just isn't working for me. So, I'm amending my plans. I'm now tossing up whether to use a full book, or a series of pocketmods to cover various aspects of the system (one for character generation, one for adventuring, one for combat, one for magic, etc). It probably doesn't help that I've also produced 20 pages of illustrations for the setting so far.

For those who are interested in the world of Aussie RPG design, there is a Facebook group dedicated to designers down under. Australian Game Designers (Facebook) For those who din't have Facebook accounts, I've set up a companion group on Google Plus. Australian Game Designer (Google+) If you're not an Aussie, feel free to join anyway. Maybe we can show you some interesting techniques that have been developing down here over the past few decades.

It cam as some surprise that half of the Walkabout page was missing. There must have been some issues during the last update. Maybe the server got disconnected halfway through the process. As a result of this, the Walkabout Page on the Vulpinoid Studios Website has now been updated. It can be found here.

I've just added Naked FUBAR to my site. A microlite version of FUBAR on two sides of an A4 page. I'll be generating a better pdf for it shortly as I seem to have lost my good pdf conversion tool with the decent compression rate. Here's the link.