Observations of the Fox

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. 

I've never been a fan of throwing in too many ingredients, because it just muddies the output. But a single ingredient just isn't enough to get interesting flavour profiles happening. A single season gives a strong vibe, but interesting twists can happen when the seasons are mixed.I touched on this a few times in the last couple of posts, such a Judge Anderson's spring story versus a summer for for Judge Dredd in the Movie Dredd (2012). The aim is to contrast one season versus another, whether that's a characters story in the larger world, or two characters' stories playing off against one another.   Remembering that different characters can be at different stages of their life journey, within the same communal story and setting, these narratives don't have to apply to every character. Contrasting narratives between two different characters can be awesome to highlight different parts of the story, as well as the different attitudes and motives of the characters...

  The stories of winter can be some of the hardest to achieve. With a focus on gloom, despair and ennui, they're basically like playing out a waiting game. Winter comes after the fall of autumn and before the rise of spring. In autumn there is still the struggle to maintain relevance  The only game I can think to have achieved this adequately is " Polaris ", where politics plays out in a cold dark wasteland at the edge of time and space. This happens as immortal elves from a fallen age live in a frozen wasteland of night, awaiting a new dawn that has not come for years/decades/centuries, in the shadows demonic entities threaten the elves, and risk the final fall before a new spring can rejuvenate the land. It's a dark and slow game, highly ritualised. It needs the right group of players to pull off successfully (I've tried it, and even though I thought it had potential, it could have gone better and felt like there were some missteps along the way). The thing abou...

  If a spring story shows a rise, and a summer story shows a time of strength, then an autumn story explores a downfall. A downfall may be a slow drawn out affair, or it may be fairly abrupt and dramatic. The only thing clear about an autumn story is that the glory days of spring and summer have passed, and now it's the time for the inevitable decline before something fresh can take over. In the various games I've been exposed to, I've found the idea of autumn stories best represented in assorted "story games" rather than traditional tabletop forms or OSR products. The traditional and OSR games might have autumnal settings, with dying empires and crumbling decadence, but the stories in them still strive to be heroic. Story games have a tendency to be more atmospheric and less competitive, and therefore more capable of telling stories that are both introspective and atmospheric. This is often a complaint launched at this genre of game, suggesting that they afren...

  Stories of summer are harder to portray than those of spring. This is generally because the period of  rapid growth has reached it's conclusion and now the stories are about the consolidation of power, and the strategic maneuvers that shift power from aggressive and offensive patterns into passive and defensive ones. For this sort of game, I'd probably look toward the ancillae level for Vampire: the Masquerade. The young neonates are going through their spring phase, trying to become accustomed to their new powers and the political machinations around them. The summer stories kick in once the vampire has made a name for themselves (typically after a couple of decades...because earlier than that, and most of the young fresh-blood neonates will probably die before they've got the chance to influence wider vampiric society). These are the stories where the characters start to have children of their own to take on the risky jobs, and where they start to take a step back from ...

  I've mentioned several times here and elsewhere that there are a lot of things D&D doesn't do well. It struggles with character agency, the swingy die results mean that characters are rarely the heroic individuals that players have in their mind's eyes. Recent versions have really dulled the edge, with characters often surviving situations that should seriously leave them dead. There's not a whole lot in the mechanisms of play that that add mood or drama to the session, and that's left firmly in the hands of the Dungeon Master and players. However, credit where it's due... the overall game framework tells a decent spring story. The idea of having limited agency in the world, then working through a chronicle, accumulating experience, new skills and abilities, useful toys, and establishing a reputation. All of that works really well for the characters in D&D, especially low to mid level characters (let's say progressing from levels 2-3 through to lev...

The last post looked at the different parts of the seasonal narrative from the framework of the four European seasons...spring, summer, autumn, winter. However, that's not necessarily the only way to look at it, and by considering a trinity of seasonal energies it might help to add some perspective into what I'm aiming for.  Mage: the Ascension (and closely related for these purposes, Werewolf: the Apocalypse) has a trinity of energies that form a similar cycle to the seasons, and since I'm a big fan of these games I'm naturally going to be influenced by the way they handle things. The general idea of the cycle begins with chaos and raw unbridled potential (wyld), moves to order and unwavering stasis (weaver), and finishes with entropy and decayed corruption (wyrm).    In this image, we might move clockwise around the circle starting at the left side with spring. Where the bottom left corner roughly aligns with the raw unbridled chaotic potential of "the wyld"...