Observations of the Fox

Roleplaying Game? Story Game? Collaborative Narrative System? Whatever you call your product, it's going to say something about the way you view it and the way you intend others to view it. This links in with beliefs, stereotypes and relationships as much as anything else in the product. If you call it a "roleplaying game" it sets the product as fairly conservative. It fits in with the dozens of other products on the shelves, and thousands of games online that also call themselves roleplaying games. People who are familiar with this type of product know what to expect from it. A GM, a bunch of players a system for resolving actions and conflict, a way to set up scenarios. The game may have points of difference with the others (and hopefully it does, because otherwise there is no point in a consumer buying it or wasting their time on it). If you call it a "story game", you start to enter a nebulous territory where different people will believe your game...

Just a few more images from the ongoing work in progress.

Sometimes you just know someone is different, they haven't spoken yet, they have barely encountered the outer limits of your personal space...but you get the feeling. Let's assume that this isn't a skin colour thing, and the clothing they wear doesn't have anything specifically "different" about it. Maybe it's something about the way they hold themselves, perhaps they are a bit more curious in their observation around them, perhaps their actions are slightly defensive and guarded...not enough to really alert you that something is wrong, and when you look again that moment might be gone. But there are enough half-caught glimpses, that you notice something. I don't know if other people see this in the world around them. I don't know if it's just an instinctive things that has been picked up through decades of work in customer service, and therefore dealing with hundreds of thousands of people over the course of my daily life. I saw it again...

I've been asked to create an manga style avatar of myself. This is probably because my profile picture on every form of social media is an image of my dog, Okami. I hardly ever post pictures of myself, and most images of me on the web have been taken and tagged by other people. So, even though it's not an exact replication of me...here's my manga avatar. (If there were more options available on the site, I would have drawn a manga avatar of my dog) Enough of that...back to game and design stuff.

This might be a useful tool for quick character portraits Face Your Manga I've used it to create a few alternate face illustrations for the Walkabout explanatory comic. They don't quite match the characters as currently drawn, but I might be able to poke fun at this as a part of the comic (Ed says "Hey that doesn't look like me"...Alice reponds "I could only find a picture of your old haircut, I had to do the same for myself"). Alice Ben Carl Diana Ed ...and because I was in the mood for playing around, I developed an avatar for one of my LARP characters from a few years back....Yukiko (she was fun to play).

A lot of the walkabout explanatory comic will be drawn from actual events that have occurred during playtest sessions or convention session. But the whole sequence will be an amalgam of various incidents that help illustrate the specific rulings that need to be illustrated. Since different people were present in different games (and to protect the innocent), the five characters in the comic will be given new names. I like the idea of sequential starting letters for names, it makes things easier when illustrating things...Alex, Bill, Charlie, Daniel, Eric; these can be quickly rendered as A,B,C,D and E in images such as relational diagrams or showing how two players interact with one another. But these are all male names, and pretty western/European (that's not to say there aren't asians, aboriginals or members of other ethnicities with these names, it's just stating that the names have fairly european origins) . For the comic, I'm looking at bringing a few cultu...

It seems there are quite a few people interested in the work being done on the Walkabout comic; so that gives me the motivation to do more work on it. In theory, I could repeat the same images over and over when different characters are talking to one another give them some different backgrounds and modify the scale to make the repetition not so obvious. But since I've had a few hundred looks at the post in the last 24 hours, that tells me it's worthwhile doing a bit more work on it. So maybe a few more poses of each character, some varied expressions (for when things go well or when things go badly), and a few more illustrations of how the mechanisms of the game work. So I'll knock out another two dozen pages, and that's about it for the out-of-character stuff and the meta-details that explain the game. It just needs some refinements to the story so that it highlights the various rules that need to be explained to readers, and once this is done it needs to be forma...