Observations of the Fox

 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. 

Here's the Narrator's guide I've been working on... Download Link ...but it probably doesn't make much sense without the other 'zines. So here's the player's guide And the sample cards I'm actually starting to get some interesting feedback on these... just not here on the blog. While I'm at it... here's the two new versions of the Vulpinoid Studios logo

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.

Here's seven more responses to this year's RPGaDay labyrinth... 8. Obscure Roleplaying isn't a mainstream hobby. Yes, it's gaining popularity, but in comparison to sports, music, or movies, it's not a common hobby at all. The major players in the roleplaying "industry" are Wizards of the Coast with "Dungeons and Dragons", then maybe Paizo with "Pathfinder", and Chaosium with "Call of Cthulhu" or Fantasy Flight Games with their assorted licensed products. There are a few other big companies, but in the grand scheme of things, these companies would be considered no bigger than small businesses in most industries. When the larger elements of our hobby are tiny compared to the juggernauts of consumerism, it's hardly surprising that the rest of us wallow in obscurity.  Of course, obscurity isn't entirely a bad thing. On the positive side, creativity can flourish outside of the public eye... a hundred designers ...

I've been meaning to get to this, but it just hasn't happened. Life has been too busy...but here goes, the first seven. I'm going to approach these prompts from the direction of my game design work with Vulpinoid Studios... 1. First Like most game designers, my first attempts were modifications of the systems I loved to play. I hacked, I cobbled together bits and pieces from different systems, and I threw away the bits I didn't like. I thought they were awesome, but they were probaby awful. They were basically a shiny mix of dazzling surface, with no decent solid core.  The first game I designed from scratch was called Platinum Storm, it was also the first game I sold copies of at conventions. It ran off a percentile system, becase I thought they were great at the time. It was based on a pseudo-Japanese Empire, because I loved samurai and ninja. Of course, as a typical white guy in the early 1990s, most of my understanding of Japanese culture came from elus...

For those who are interested, I've put together a formal sheet of my commission prices for illustration or cartography. Here's the sheet. As I post this up, I can see a couple of grammatical errors, so it might change again soon, but it's basically the same prices I've been quoting to people for the past few years.

Why write my own, when this post by Dan Maruschak already says almost everything I would want to say on the topic? Why get frustrated that my work generally doesn't get out there, when a number of people have commented that their own work wouldn't have gotten out there if it weren't for face-to-face networking at conventions in North America or the UK? Or just lucky breaks? For the last 10 years, I've been involved in several initiatives to get Australian game designers recognised. In most cases, one or two designers have been raised above the rabble, while everyone else either continues to struggle along in obscurity, or has their profile marginally lifted. In the past six years, I've been studying and my game design has been a backburner project. I'm not actively getting my stuff out there, instead I'm just refining what I do, and getting the rest of my life on track. Most of my stuff can be found on RPGNow/DrivethruRPG , print stuff on Lulu , ...

In one way, this question is a reframing of day four's "Describe your work", in another it's all about your presence as a designer and how your stuff gets presented to the outside world. The second option leads into tomorrow's question, so that's how I'll go with answering this one. I think I was about 12 when I first came up with a fox-like creature that I called a Vulpinoid. I knew that dogs were "canines", cats were "felines", wolves were "lupines", but I was curious about foxes and found out that they were "vulpines"... I figured that if something resembled a human, it was humanoid, and therefore if something resembled a fox it must therefore be "vulpinoid". I came up with a little symbol on the flag the creature was holding, and for the past 30 years the symbol and the name "vulpinoid" have kind of stuck. Refinements have been made to the symbol, but the essence has remained with a t...

In redesigning the Vulpinoid Studios website, I started working on the page for RPGs that I've produced. At this stage there are nine full RPGs that I've written, plus almost two dozen supplements and a few works in progress. That's a lot of games that are hardly being played by anyone. http://vulpinoid.com/rpgs.html I've narrowed the assortment down to six games, two of which are works in progress. These are the games that I think have the most potential for expansion in the future. The games that I'd like to see played by a wider variety of people.

The first stages of the new Vulpinoid Studios website are online. Finally. Now to connect up all the pretty bits to my various online stores, and maybe build a central online store for the Studio. Have a look, tell me what you think.

Now I remember why I haven't bothered to update the website for a while. Firstly, I haven't looked at the site for a while, and that means certain parts of the free hosting service have gone into stasis on me (theoretically, taking 24 hours to awaken). It's now been more than 24 hours and they haven't been activated. I've looked at a couple of other places to host the website and they just seem to lead round in circles without providing the necessary details for actually getting a site online (being evasive about where to redirect DNS paths and other annoyances). But enough of my rant, I'll get back to game related stuff shortly.

It's been a while but I'm finally getting the change to work on the website again...We might actually have a nice looking site in a couple of days rather than just a placeholder with a funky gimmick. There's a web store in the background which is basically ready to go, but I've created quite a few new products since the online store was populated with products. So that will need reworking as well before I hook it up.

Time to get back to some things that I've been putting off for too long before the rush starts again. I'll be sending off the Free RPGs for those people who got in contact with me last week, and I'll be starting some work on the long overdue redesign of the company website. It's so tempting to start designing another game, but the last thing I need is yet another unfinished project.

Towards the end of December 2012, I indicated that I'd be playing with the promotional tools on RPGNow.  The aim was to release a game (or two), then spend some of my accumulated "publisher promotion points" to highlight these games on the websites where they were available for sale. I also intended to get a bit of promotion out of Google plus, various Facebook groups and the assorted web forums I belong to. I'm not going to get into specific statistical details, but I'll provide a general overview of the results. First a baseline. For the last year or two I've been sitting in the long tail end of publishers on the OneBookShelf websites, typically in the bottom 80% percentile. It probably doesn't help that I haven't really released a new product for quite some time (nor does it help that I've only been charging small amounts for the products that I have released). In the past, every time I have released a new product, I've climbed above t...

I just decided to do some work to update the Vulpinoid Studios website...only to find that it isn't there. I don't know how long this has been an issue, but I might be holding off on game design work for a while until I get the new and improved website up and running (with new a Vulpinoid Studios web store where Goblin Tarot decks, physical books and downloadable pdfs will be available).

After encountering a mysterious glitch that stopped most of my pages from rendering on any web-browser other than Firefox 2, it now seem that new updated version of the Vulpinoid Studios website now works. As for some of the questions about why the website is currently designated version 2.2.0, that's pretty simple, but it goes back a while. To cut a long story short, I had a previous website in the late 1990's and early 2000's, I even had a domain name registered for it. The various iterations of that website fall under the category of the 1.X.X series of version numbers. You can probably still find copies of it on the wayback machine , or by googling Ukiyo Zoshi, which was one of my earlier game concepts that was run by a few German groups in the early 2000's and still seems to be used as a object of modification by some game designers. The 2.X.X series of version numbers represents my second serious web presence. Where versions 2.1.0 through to 2.1.6 were different i...