Posts tagged with keywords "LH"
There is currently such a change in the Fudge community. After the FudgeList shut down I was expecting a period of quiet and apathy before something started off. I couldn’t be more wrong.
Looks like we may finally shake off that “Drudge” misconception! Ann Dupius of Grey Ghosts setup this yahoo community: fudgecommunity and it’s been busy ever since. A lot of Fudge projects came out of the wood work and I even end up revealing some of my “secret project” LH, which is cool because I’m planning to get it out there in a free-ish format soon anyway. There is certainly a lot more openiness and sharing and I do hope it lasts. One of the best things though was that Ann spent several days online in the “official” chat and it connected a lot of the members, made the list a lot more personable.
If this is what killing off the FudgeList did to the community, then I wish they had done it earlier! 
phoenyx.net are finally closing it down. Unlike the last time I said the Fudge is dead, this time it’s official. The FudgeList will be gone by August 26 (archives will still be available). I think perhaps in the long term this will be a good thing (for many reasons that I’m uncomfortable saying in public). I do hope in the short term, perhaps, that this might consolidate the remains of the community around something new or alternative, such as fudgeforum (though I’ve barely used it myself), but I suspect it’ll just disappear for a while, subsumed by the Fate community (which isn’t a bad “fate” I guess).
I still have Reboot, though I should kick Brad about where its at. Also my “secret” project L___ H_____ was a Fudge-based roleplaying game, that I’m quietly working my way through to putting it online, in some form of free (though originally I had planned to try and get it published). I’ve even already put some of it online on here (here and here) and even had Chris of Seraphim Guard interested in buying the rights for the Story Hooks bit. But I admit that I was beginning to feel that the FudgeList wasn’t going to be the place to announce it. In short, I’m not stopping being a fan of Fudge.
In the meantime, I plan to setup a small website that generates a monster FudgeRPG feed pulling in the known FudgeRPG feeds out there since the phoneyx.net one disappeared quite a while ago.
BTW for those reading from the Fudge community, you can see just my Fudge posts using this tag (or even better Fudge and Roleplaying posts using this link). There is even unique RSS feeds, so you don’t have to read about Fringlish or TDOMF updates.
See ya all on the other side I guess, where ever that might be.
(Hopefully I’ve manage to lick that thumbnail cropping issue). Anyway, I did some more drawings over the weekend. I re-did the design of one of the ones I did for this post, so that it’s not so phallic:
I also did some new ones, continuing to base them on my “secret” project L___ H_____:
I also pulled out my charcoal and pencil again, concentrating on contrast, making sure my pencil lines are right (kind of taking my tips from my ink work). I like what I produced, though I feel should have placed it in a background. I’m also getting a bit annoyed about the scanning process, it always seems to take from my pencil work. I should really look into improving it.
Also on holidays, I played more with ink, even bought more pens. (Wordpress is still cropping my thumbnails, so click on the images to see them in full)
The first was a design I had been doodling for while, an icon for this website in fact, I like it so it may be appearing soon as a part of this website design!
This second one, was something more of a experiment with shapes and I liked what emerged. It’s very, em, primordial I guess.
I then decided to try and do an Icon for my L___ H_____ RPG project:
I really like it. It might even work on the front cover of a book, maybe. So I ended up trying to do a few for the different types of Gods in L___ H_____ RPG:
I had done a third one, but the lines came out wrong so I plan to redo it. The second one here also is unintentionally phallic so I think a redesign is in order. The first one works though and it’s quite cool too because you can turn it upside down and it still works!
I’ll probably do more, it’s sort of enjoyable way of design and drawing: methodical, creative and surprising. However, seeing them on the computer screen does change them a bit. If you like them, drop me a comment!
Continuing on from Story Hooks, this is the second part of item 8 of the L___ H_____ system.
Update #1: 
Fudge Passions by Mark Cunningham is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Fudge Passions v2.0
Fudge Passions was originally conceived as a way to link a character’s emotional state to other parts of the system (like Gifts or Powers). It is built as an addition to the Fudge RPG system but also replaces Fudge Points (Passion Points replace Fudge Points). It was designed and tested in parallel with my Story Hooks system but both can be used independently.
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Part 1 of to do item: number 8. Part 2, Fudge Passions, will be online soon.
Update #1: Story Hooks by Mark Cunningham is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Story Hooks v2.0
Story Hooks is a system I created to replace the creation and management of players’ characters’ histories (see here for more). The first version, which I designed and wrote-up for L___ H_____, was very basic and involved a lot of hand-wavy “use as you see fit”. It consisted of the “Back-Story” and a non-delimited list of “Story Hooks”, which were practically Story/Adventures Seeds.
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… would you think they look good, assuming of course they are theme appropriate? (Click on them to see in higher resolution).
I was trying to figure out if I could do, myself, good or high quality images or at least create something that looks like it is good or high quality. I think I hit on the right technique. (Some more images after the cut).
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Check item #7! (“Do some further work on TDO Mini-Forms”) Of course I could continue at full steam with it but I decided to slow down. Work will continue, just not as time-consuming.
Also item #6 (“Try again to get a gaming group together”) occurred without any prompting from me. I was doing some work on our roleplaying group website (moving it to a different address) and the players started to trying to figure out when they can all play next. However, it might not be until July! 
Must bug them again.
As for item #5 (“Move Hosts for thedeadone.net”) will occur when I make enough money from donations for TDO Mini Forms. I’m already half way there for a 1 year hosting planning…
Item #9 (“Upgrade and package the current thedeadone.net theme”) won’t happen. It’s been a maybe, but I just can’t muster the energy to do it. I think it really depends on finding a new host for thedeadone.net and getting all that up and running. Then I can think of getting a new theme and closing off the current one.
Which nicely leaves me with only one item left: item #8 (“Write-up and make available some RPG rules I created a long time back: Story Hooks and Passions”). While I think the two systems; Story Hooks and Passion, have since been done much better by Fate’s Aspects, Riddle of Steel’s Spirit Attributes and Shadow of Yesterday’s Keys, I think it’s still worth while closing them off. I did create and use them before I discovered these other systems and they are different and I hope to actually use them in my LH project. They certainly won’t be as long as TDO Fudge Combat v0.1 (short version available here) but they will probably garner about the same level of interest (which is about zero or so).
- Upgrade and add some features to TDO-Forum for WP2.5
- Test and Upgrade the Theme I’m currently using for WP2.5
- Create a merge of TDO-Forum and my current custom Theme (for the forums) (maybe)
- Update thedeadone.net to Wordpress 2.5
- Move Hosts for thedeadone.net (maybe)
Try again to get a gaming group togetherDo some further work on TDO Mini-Forms (AJAX, Form Hacker, find some way to get rid of the dependency on $_SESSION - I’m a little tired trying to sort out people’s host problems, there is only so much I can do, etc)- Write-up and make available some RPG rules I created a long time back: Story Hooks and Passions
- Upgrade and package the current thedeadone.net theme (maybe)
I was re-reading my notes that I had jotted down for the upcoming work on LH and I came across this:
Why Roll?
- Part of the hobby
- A character can “do” what a player can’t
- Resolve a conflict of interest
- Because it’s fun
I wondering how much truth are in those four reasons. What do you think?
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In one of my recent posts, I was talking about a Fudge RPG project I’ve been silently working on and said:
Some thoughts about it though have pushed me to consider releasing it as an indie or even free project.
I foresaw two major problems to producing a decent quality RPG:
- Lack of decent tool for layout (I don’t have thousands to spend on some Adobe product)
- Artwork
First I find Scribus; an open-source Desktop Publishing Tool. Quite complicated and a bit of learning curve, but free. Along with OpenOffice and the Gimp, all the software is there.
For the second, while I can draw, I can’t draw to a professional or high quality level. But then I came across a blog post on design and found numerous photo and illustration sites, where you can buy artwork for use in your projects: sotck.xchng, istockphoto and veer.com (and there is always flickr). Just a quick browse I found pieces I could use. They aren’t on point but would do. If I add my own skill I’m sure I could generate some pieces based on what I found.
So yea it’s actually doable, I mused. (There is actually another issue but I’ll talk about those at the end.)
Then I catch this post from Fred Hicks in my newsreader about actually not publishing and doing your RPG for free. Did Fred Hicks read my mind? Probably not I thought but his advice hit the point. I had considered putting aside a small budget for the project, just enough that I don’t care about making any back. I also read the posts/blogs he linked to in that post. Both were completely relevant to my train of thinking. For me, getting something published was more about a personal milestone or goal than gaining audience or making money (both would be nice but not crucial).
I’m still not convinced but it’s not that important. I still have to do the new version of LH first before I actually need to decide. The content comes first before all that fancy stuff.
I’m certainly not averse to doing it for free. Just take a look at TDOMF my plugin for Wordpress. I’m making a small amount of money on it, not enough to write home about, but it’s a nice feedback. I get bug reports and feature requests every week and I try to respond to all. But that leads me to my last issue that turn me off giving an RPG away for free. With TDOMF, I’m releasing into an existing community who will use it. I have, therefore, an extended “play-testing” user-base that will tell me concisely what’s wrong with it how it works. They are also willing to download upgrades and keep up to date. Releasing a free RPG, there is no community there to release to. It’s a discussion that’s floated around the Irish gaming community for a while. Releasing into a vacuum is the same as copying a file to /dev/null. It goes nowhere and is pointless. Of course, maybe I’m just ignorant of a community out there that would be interested (please inform me!). I’m also acutely aware of the “pluggers”, people who register and logon to forums expecting people to be interested in your project but have no “credibility”. This is something I don’t want to do. I did it for the Irish Gaming Wiki and got slammed down many times. I don’t want to spend time promoting myself and playing the “status game” either. I mentioned in my previous post my “narrow creative bandwidth” and part of that would have to be spent on doing that and everything else would suffer. I’m also aware that the success of free media (RPG being a specific type of media) is dependant on luck and popularity.
Maybe I’ve gotta wait till the Internet starts shouting at me, before I really listen…
