Observations of the Fox

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.     

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. 

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been looking through itch.io  to see what sorts of interesting things have been developed by folks in parts of the gaming sphere that I haven't necessarily been exposed to. It has actually been an interesting activity, especially downloading some of the cheap stuff and free stuff that people have uploaded, and doing some careful reads of what has been released. I've found it curious that a lot of the games are exploring different ways to do things, but often fall back on the same basic patterns. It's also been notable that plenty of games have indicated inspiration from games that I had considered "just another OSR red-book clone" but the mechanisms of these games have been quite different, and something I would have completely overlooked due to prejudice. As an example, I just looked at "Stirrup" by Kyler Korbo Mills , which even goes so far as to call itself an OSR product, however I'm seeing far more in comm...

    A few weeks ago, it might even be months now, I was looking at a range of SRDs with Erin. We've both been trying to see what else is out there in the way of gaming, what ways people might be innovating, what patterns might be common in the current gaming scene. It's led to some interesting discussions. She's been participating in Game Jams over on Itch , and I've been watching the stuff that she's been producing and occasionally giving a little advice here and there. She's been making a few different games based on those SRDs when she gets inspired, and I've thought about doing the same because it feels like a good way to expand design skills by refining the output to something that works within someone else's framework. A game jam for the little game DURF has arisen, and we've decided to collaborate on an idea that's been percolating for a while. The entries for the jam won't be posted until October, so that gives a fortnight to conside...

    (Click Here) So I've been working on a single resource document for Walkabout and Familiar, and a bunch of those little side projects I've been working on. It was only meant to be a basic thing, maybe 16-pages, a zine. But it's kind of blown out a bit because I've tied in a lot of those old cookbook ideas, and really want people to understand what the game system is about, including knowledge about how the bits work and why they were designed to work that way.  Yeah, I've covered a lot of that stuff here on the blog over the years, but I'd like a coherent piece of documentation that ties it all together. I'm not there yet, but if I don't get something up now, I'll miss the TTRPG Game Manifesto Jam, and then it'll just end up as yet another unfinished backburner project. Hopefully I'll get the chance to update it a bit over the next few days.   

  I love the idea of Game Jams. I haven't really had much opportunity to participate in them over the years, but I'm trying to get back involved in design communities, and this seems to be where a lot of the action seems to be good enough.  One of the fun ones I'm thinking of joining is the TTRPG Manifesto Jam . It looks like a good way to consolidate some idea about how I design games, and more specifically why I design them, and why I design them in the way I do. Maybe a couple of pages, maybe do it graphically... especially since that's a big part of my process.  I'm also really thinking of getting into the Build a Better World Jam , because I've got a bunch of game ideas that aim toward this direction anyway, and it might be nice to refine these ideas publicly, and even just get the ideas out there like I do for NaGaDeMon. I'm starting easy, but once I've dipped my toes in the water, I'll either try to do a few more...or run screaming.

 Just letting folks know that my friend Erin has started writing a bunch of min-games on tri-folds.   Her aim is to make one of these a month, for the rest of the year, and maybe make a few extras to catch up on earlier months, then release an annual pack of 12 games at the close of 2025. They're being released on itch.io . All of these games are free, but she'll be doing some work with me on the Walkabout and Familiar games when she gets a chance as well (she's been generating some fun " glitch art " lately that'll probably be incorporated into at least one of the Vulpinoid Studios products that sit in the pipeline.  I know that there aren't many folks who go to links from this blog (there certainly aren't a lot of people who've visited my itch.io page), but if you could take a look, and maybe download a free game, it'll help a new designer who's still trying to find her feet. 

 We're reaching the home stretch for 2024, and it's actually been a decent run for the blog, after a few years of letting things slide.  Earlier this year, the blog had it's best month ever. There have been a couple of decent sequences of posts, including writing an RPG, some analysis of RPGs, and a serialized set of posts about how to run a game.  I've been able to share links from the blog on assorted social media. Especially when people have "come up with a new idea", and I've been able to point to a post from 10-15 years ago and say "hey, I was saying that same thing way back then...and people didn't listen to me then either." I'm getting a bit of a Cassandra-complex... but anyway... One of the things I've noticed (and one of the things pointed out by a new generation of readers), is that many of the old posts aren't archived well. So I might spent a bit of time sorting them and adding them to the "other tutorials" t...

I've just added an itch.io shopfront for Vulpinoid Studios products... Let's see how this experiment plays out. The shopfront can be can be found here