Observations of the Fox

Day 27 - Marvelous Miniature Oooh...this is a tough one. I've got a few hundred miniatures (maybe a few thousand if you count the unpainted ones). Back in the day, I loved the miniatures produced by Rackham.  Even though they all had character and a distinctive look to them, this lady was one of my favourites. So annoyed they went bankrupt, but if you look hard enough you can still find some of them around . I'll need to dig through my boxes to see if I can find the copy of her that I painted. Day 28 - Great Gamer Gadget I love the idea of an initiative tower... I've been meaning to use one to see how good they are in practice. ...for games that use initiative that is.

Day 25 - Desirable Dice For a few years I had a thing for buying new dice sets for each game, and often new dice sets for specific characters. However, lately the clicky-clacky math-rocks haven't really done much for me. I think it was the moving house seven times in four years that did it.  Day 26 - Superb Screen I don't use screens. I prefer to keep my rolls in the open, and most of my working notes are in my head, because I tend to walk around the table and keep on my feet when I'm running a session. That said, I'm a woodwork teacher. A couple of years back I helped a student build a modular GM screen with a spot for dice, a clipped area to hold notes, and some small draws and storage areas for miniatures, pens, pencils, erasers, etc. Even helped him woodburn some designs on it. Here's the kind of thing we were going for... (from Elderwood Academy )

Day 23 - Peerless Player During the late 1990s, there were a particular group of players at game conventions in Sydney (and who regularly played at a variety of conventions across South Eastern Australia). I think I've mentioned them before on the blog, or at least alluded to them. They were generally known as "Big Name Gamers" (BNGs).  It seemed like everyone wanted to become a BNG, or at least get in the same social circles as the BNGs so that they could influence the local gaming scene, maybe work in one of the local gaming stores, maybe just set themselves up in the local network of favours and influence the led to work in the entertainment industry, theatre, or even political networks... there was a big black market in favours then, real world favours that were a deep iceberg, and the roleplaying community seemed to be one of the odd locations where the deep network protruded into the real world.  But were they actually good players? Not in my experience they weren...

A quick trip to hospital, and some extra paperwork and bureaucracy at work have prevented me from keeping up with the regular posts...but that's just life... let's get back to our regularly scheduled programming. Day 21 - Classic Campaign Even though I've previously stated that I don't often used pre-published materials, one of my formative gaming experiences back in the early 1990s was playing "The Enemy Within" campaign for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying. It was dark, broody, atmospheric. It told a story, and it was so different to the chaos of almost every D&D set of adventures I had encountered at the time. One day I've love to revisit it. Just to see if the nostalgia is playing a bigger role in my memory, or if the campaign really was that good.  Day 22 - Notable Non-Player Character For many years I had an npc who was an old artificer with no legs. He would appear in various games no matter what system we were playing, or what setting it was. He w...

Wow....just wow. Hopefully I'll get the time to elaborate soon.

Day 19 - Sensational Session In 30-odd years of tabletop gaming, I've had some phenomenal sessions, and some absolute horrors. Let's try to dig back a bit, to one of the first RPG conventions I attended. It was the Macquarie University RPG convention back in 1997, at least I think that's when it was. The 90s are a bit of a blur for me, but I do distinctly remember this session. It was a Shadowrun game, there was a massive map in the middle of the room, it was called "Does it hurt when I do this?"... so yeah, peak 90s. The idea behind the game was that we were playing a trauma team, moving across that giant map in the centre of the room. There were at least 2 GMs that we knew of. the game was in a lecture hall, and there ws an antechamber behind the room that we couldn't see into. The GM who was in our room wore a headset, and as the game moved on, they started communicating with someone else, who was that second GM in the antechamber... it was about halfway th...

Day 17 - An Engaging RPG Community Back in the day, "The Forge" had some great discussion and theorising, and that shifted across to "Story Games". However, those two forums had a lot of insularity, and very much an "in-crowd" mentality that included a bunch of inner-circle high profile designers, and a horde of outer designers who often felt like watchers while the cool kids did their thing. It was often a case that the hot new project might be the flavour of the month just released by one of those inner circle designers, who riddled their books with the favoured terminology, and regardless of how good their games actually were everyone praised them in the hope of getting the courtier's favour and becoming the next inner circle member... ...jaded, yes. But that's how I felt at the time, and after a while a lot of other folks started seeing it too. Now, in recent months, I have become an admin for the TTRPG Design Community on Facebook. As one of ...