Observations of the Fox

Ever since I was first introduced to the concept of perfect being the enemy of good. I've been a fan of it. That doesn't mea that I've been able to internalise it, but I have been able to see it as symbolic of the struggles I've often had.  The two game projects Walkabout and Familiar have definitely been framed by this idea. However, I'm  not sure if this is for the better or the worse. I could have released both of these games years ago, but they would not have been games I'd have been happy with.I probably could have released them months ago, and they'd have been better, but certainly not what I'd had in mind as a "perfect" interpretation of my vision for them. The games are closer now that they've ever been, but I have to wonder if they'd still meet my expectations. Should I just release what I've got?...or should I keep refining?? Will the refinement ever end? Illustration by Erin Gumiho  

 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 ...

I did this about a decade ago for my Walkabout game setting. Not at 90 degrees tilt, but not a lot difference. For my variation, check the Walkabout links up at the top of the page.

School has started back for the year, and tha invariably means that my number of posts starts to slow down. It also doesn't really help that my wife has moved for work to a town that's an hour drive away. So a lot of the time that I might be oorganising and writing blog posts I'm now spending travelling in a car across the rural outback. This is getting me in the mood to complete the Walkabout game, but I've dedicated my immediate future to finalising the Familiar project. It's kind of a tricky choice. One's a game about surviving the post-apocalypse by working together and overcoming many of the issues that brought about societal collapse (without falling into worse situations against monstrous creatures that are the embodiment of hubris and corruption)... the other is a game about restoring magic to a world where it has been captured and crushed by an oligarchy over the course of centuries, and enjoying the little things in a society caught between oppression ...

Both "Bustle in your Hedgerow" and "Walkabout" are games about stories, and about the mythlore underlying reality versus the impact of individuals. Sort of...  ...it's actually a fairly common theme through a lot of my games. So naturally when this came across my feed, it got my attention. The first volume of the Grimms’ “Children’s and Household Tales” was published in December of 1812. It contained 86 stories, including classics like “Rapunzel,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Snow White,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” “Briar Rose,” and “Little Red Riding Hood,” along with extensive footnotes. Critics weren’t sure what to make of a collection of “children’s tales” that came with scholarly addenda and sexual innuendos. For the Grimms, what mattered was to be authentic, not appropriate, and fairy tales, across many literary traditions, weren’t always intended for children. Then, there was the matter of the Grimms’ language—sparse, hectic, visceral, unfiltered. In the preface, the br...

I've finally reached a point where I'm basically happy with the new character sheet for the updated Walkabout. I'm just going to post it as a link to my google drive here on the blog, becuase that way I can see how many people are looking at this page, and get a rough guide about how many people might have clicked through to actually look at the sheet. The basic idea is that it get printed onto an A4 (or equivalent) sheet, and both sides are folded into the middle using a gate fold. The front of the resulting folded card has the surface elements of the character, what other people see, with room to draw a picture. The inside of the card contains all the various elements that a character uses to perform actions within the game, all the numbers and details. The back of the card is a basic rundown of the game rules for performing actions in the game. I've always been a fan of the idea where the core rules are immediately available to the players, and the complicated rule v...

Here's why I'm not using the type of dots traditionally associted with Australian Indigenous artistry in my Walkabout project... When the dots cross the line - Link One of the key aspects of Walkabout is that the knowledge of the past has been lost, and it needs to be rekindled to bring balance to the land. I've discussed this quite a bit in previous posts about the game, but it's nice to see this cross my feed while I'm working on character sheets and play aids for the game. Much Australian Indigenous culture has been whitewashed (yes, this choice of wording is deliberate), and in many cases the remaining Indigenous communities have taken the successful elements of other Indigenous communities and have claimed them as their own. I work in a school with a high Indigenous population, in fact is has one of the highest numbers of Indigenous students at any school in our state, and has been identified as the largest of the " Connected Communities " schools (wh...

I'm really struggling to get this character generator ready, every time I read through it I'm seeing more issues with it. I guess I'm just running into that eternal problem where "perfect is the enemy of good". A character generator needs context, especially when it is designed to create characters who integrate into a specifically established setting. So the question is "How much context do I need?" Things are blowing out, and the character generation system is rapidly becoming a "player's guide". Anyway...school holidays are coming up, I might get more time to work on things then. Tings are going so much slower when I'm painting a bunch of player pictures and trying to keep them consistent (before Photoshopping them into customised page layouts). I'm doubling and even tripling up on usage of the same images for the characters...but even though the whole process is taking a couple of hours for a new batch of illustrations, and more...

It's been over a fortnight since my last post. I'm running into that idea where "perfect is the enemy of good". I've been wanting to reveal the character design system that I've been developing, but getting the finer details just right has been a mammoth task.  At the moment, we follow a life path through stages. Each stage sets up something about the character, and builds their story with a sequence of random events. The base character generation pages are seven pages, the random life events are nine pages. and then we go through a worked set of examples where four players build their characters, and these characters will be used for the play examples through the rest of the rulebook. There's at least another sixteen pages coming (2 pages each for the various cultural groups, including their cultural values and stereotypes within their communities, how they relate to the other cultures, their available starting equipment, and a few other flavour elements)...

While I've been redeveloping the character generation system for Walkabout, I did some research through the old posts here on the blog... Birth Circumstances Infancy Childhood Adolescence Maturity Joining the Wayfarers ...looking through those old posts, I've noticed what looks to be fragments of a fun system for creating characters in the 2019 development run of the game. However, even though a lot of the ideas look like they're still compatible with the concepts currently underlying the system, I've decided this time round that developing a character should generally follow the game system that is used during play. It should generally be an introduction to how the game systems work. That's basically the bit that I'm struggling with.  I could scrap everything I'm currently working on, and go back to the system from those days (but I'll need to find the old computer files that I alluded to. I could ignore everything from back then, even though it looked ...

Some page layout ideas... ...these will be for the character life-path generation pages.

I've had this idea since the beginning of Walkabout where players can make temporary changes to their character sheets by writing on them in pencil (which can be erased later), or make permanent changes to their character sheets by writing on them in pen (which can't be erased). The main idea here was when characters have spirit markings applied to their bodies, they can choose to draw pencil markings on their character sheets to reflect the ochre that they'd usually adorn themselves during ritualistic communion with the entities of the Dreaming, or they draw permanent markings with pen to represent a deeper level of connections forged through the permanent tattooing of the skin. It works there, but I'd been wondering how much deeper that idea could go. So my next idea on those lines is to link it to the ability aspects. It's not really appropriate for equipment, because that's the kind of thing that regularly comes and goes...in fact equipment might even be bet...

 If you're linked to me on various social media platforms, you've probably seen these. They're some of the preliminary page layouts I've been working on over the past couple of weeks. If you had read through the How to Run a Game series that I did back in February, or if you've purchased a copy of The Law , you'll probably recognise a few elements found in these page layouts. I'm basically trying to up the ante on those ideas for the Walkabout project. There's also a bit of overlap with the Walkabout blog that I was writing a decade ago, because I still really want to write the whole game in the form of a graphic novel, or at least a format that is more graphically than textually oriented. I might keep the old character's names, but now the red-headed member of the group is the narrator/GM/oracle, while there are four players (two male and two female). We'll follow through a few key elements of game play as we follow players making a few differ...

   

Australian Indigenous initiation rites have always been mysterious to outsiders. Even this academic paper written in 1899 where the writer met with aboriginal people still conducting the ceremony had trouble ascertaining details of the event. (As an interesting aside, the rituals indicated in this paper occurred only a couple of hours drive away from where I currently live, so it's tempting to visit the sites referred to). Varying initiation rites have been recorded , but for the most part there has been over a century of elders being killed before knowledge could be passed from one generation to the next, children being stolen and indoctrinated into the ways of a new culture without the opportunity to learn the traditions of their people, and "complications" from government agencies if physical signs of initiation (such as lost teeth, missing finger joints, piercings, or scarification) were detected. Without the physical signs of initiation and dedication, or the passin...

Here's where things get delicate. The fine line ensuring things are sensitive rather than a caricature is always going to be in a different place for different people. However, based on my discussions with various members of Indigenous communities over the years, a lot of this can be mitigated by ensuring everyone understands the way the game works, the narrative structure, and the way it attempts to development a liminal space in which communal storytelling occurs. That's a heavy start to a post, but if you've read through my How to Run a Game series it should make sense.  We're not trying to co-opt or appropriate the stories of the past, but to create new stories that reflect current issues and cultural morality standards. Walkabout doesn't critique the Indigenous culture, but draws inspiration from it, as well as considering the complexity of situations and how they might be impacted by a hypothetical situation. Our hypothetical situation is a blend of science, ...

One of the things about post-apocalyptic stories is that you don't know what will be valuable, or what might drive the narrative. However, there are a few key things to consider when deciding what types of items might become more valuable. I've already mentioned the idea that useful items will probably play a significant role in the story, but quite often in post-apocalyptic stories the key items that have sentimental value. In Walkabout, one of the key ideas I had from the beginning was that trade only tends to occur on a local scale. Most settlements are generally self-sufficient, scavenging what they need from if they can't make it. However this limits available options. If a car needs tyres, and there's no more tyres of the right size, someone will need to modify the car to fit the tyres that are available. If someone wants a cup of coffee, and there's no more coffee around, there aren't many coffee plantations in Australia, and imports are no longer common....

  In Walkabout, I'm suggesting that a really nice stick might count as a piece of equipment, but so might a nomadic convoy rig filled with everything you need to survive weeks away from civilization. There is no way that these two pieces of equipment could be considered equivalent in power. What are the advantages of the stick...? You can poke someone with it. You can reach further with it. You can attach it to some string or line to make a trap or fishing line. You can use it to mix ingredients. What are the advantages of the nomadic convoy rig? You can shelter within it during inhospitable weather. You can get places more quickly. You can gather with several allies in relative safety. You are protected from gunfire while in it. You can grow crops in a hydroponics bay You have storage areas for other pieces of equipment  If might have a built in med-bay, or workshop. It may have it's own story and reputation. Those last few  in bold  are probably the important ones....

The core concept of Walkabout is "Mad Max meets Tank Girl, via the Aboriginal Dreaming". However different people will be getting different ideas from the notions of "Mad Max", "Tank Girl" and "Aboriginal Dreaming". The three concepts get us into a ball park, and the general ball park is where any of the two circles overlap, while the specifics is where all three overlap... Mad Max + Tank Girl A world where the technology of the past is decaying but still dangerous in the right hands. A world where a few people still hold most of the power by using a combination of charisma, fear-mongering, and lackeys who don't know better. Vast deserts, ecological disaster. Vehicles play an important and defining role in characters lives.  Tank Girl + Aboriginal Dreaming Talking animals (although in Tank Girl it's mostly the rippers). Things are rarely what they seem at the surface at first glance. There's a funny side to the events, and it's of...