Some sample ‘wax seals’ I’ve thrown together to explore how they might fit into Greg’s game Freebooter.
And what they might look like when applied to the page.
Not quite done, I see a couple of other options that I might like better… but for a quick test I figured this would be enough.
Nice! 231 looks a little off-centre to the left to me, although that could just be my eyes as I got zero sleep last night. Do you have a link to the game in question? A cursory search didn’t turn anything up apart from your post. I have a use for some piracy-related game material as it happens.
This reminded me of an anecdote I heard recently from a GM who was managing a group of PCs trying to bluff their way past a guard/official/something. I misremember the details, see comments above re: sleep, or lack thereof. Anyway, as the PCs were presenting their forged papers (when was the last time you saw PCs with legitimate papers, I ask you) one player whips out an actual paper forgery he’d knocked up before the session, signature and all. You can bet someone got a bonus on his check. :-)
Made me think a little. It is nice to encourage such awesomeness, but on the other hand you can’t overdo it (like expecting the players to do so and taking it into account when setting DCs) and you can’t really decide mechanics for it ahead of time, since it’s inherently a surprise act of creativity. I guess just telling players stories like the above is all that needs done!
The 231 is a little off-center (and was the first one I did, for what that’s worth), I was just throwing these together as a sample.
Greg Christopher is working on a pirate-based game/book, which I see something as something like Fighting Fantasy or Lone Wolf thing. However, while it may be playable in hard copy, I understand the intended emphasis is for electronic play using hyperlinked PDF — no more flipping around the book, you just click on the decision. Combat and other random elements might be handled within the program (I don’t know offhand if that can actually be done using PDFs, to be honest) or handled outside and you just click on the green link (“I succeeded!”) or the black one (“I’m dead :/”).
I actually don’t know much at all about the mechanics of it, I’ve just seen some of the graphics work he’s doing for it.
Oh I see! So these are the page numbers. Interesting!
I’d been thinking recently about single-player RPGs, gamebooks are an obvious place to start research. I found a second-hand (or possibly Nth-hand) copy of Fighting Fantasy 7 (Island of the Lizard King) for 25p the other day, go me!
heh, as soon as I saw “Fighting Fantasy 7” the title jumped into my brain. It was one of the first Fighting Fantasy books I ever played.
I think the page numbers are only of use if you were to print the book out and play it that way. I understand Greg’s planning to do it as a heavily-linked PDF — you just click to move from entry to entry. If that’s the case you could probably safely remove the numbers altogether and make the symbols bigger (which honestly I think looks better, but since he had the page reference in the top left I figured I should make that available as well).