Rambly rambly time. I am just starting to explore the idea of combining Ben Robbin’s game Microscope with Neel Krishnaswami. I am not aiming for a particular target or result beyond seeing if they can work together, so I will be (was, actually; I wrote this sentence after everything below …
I’ve been speaking about demographics lately, and how I think I might be able to get rid of detailed demographic calculations (which pleases me). Yesterday in Imperial Scale to Manorial Scale in Mapping and Rulership I talked about the abstractions that may allow this to be so, including the rules …
Over the last few days I’ve been doing a lot of calculations regarding population and demographics in medieval times, in part because I’m working on rules for Demesne-Level Play. These calculations are mostly to lay groundwork for the rules I’m working on, to ensure they produce credible results. I’m certainly …
A few days ago I talked about Fractal Game Design and mentioned how it relates to Demesne-Level play. Yesterday I dug into Hex Population Density. Today I’m going to try to bring these things together. Definitions I am using a very simple model for the relationships between demesnes. Real feudalism is …
Total cheap shot here, but I’ll take it. I’ve got a real post coming later :) Greg Christopher says this hex image was inspired by reshares of something I posted the other day on Google+. I’d like to know what it was that inspired him, so I can do it …
I was trying to come up with a good post for ‘H’, I’d originally had an idea for one but managed to misplace it, when I stumbled on a post from The Nine and Thirty Kingdoms (incidentally one of the first RPG blogs I started reading, a couple years ago) from …
Part of developing skills involves constantly assessing your abilities. Among my strengths are abstract though and pattern discovery, and other analytical skills. Not so much among my strengths is quickly inventing detail… without tools to prompt me. My brain insists on making things make sense and be sensible, and I …
Ever since I discovered (i.e. “learned about from someone else”, I didn’t invent them or anything) fractals I’ve been mildly fascinated by them. This is not an uncommon thing. A fractal can be defined, in part (I’m not going to go into the full mathematical definition), as a “self-similar pattern”, …
I’ve written this post two or three times now in my head, each time with a different emphasis. Hopefully I’ve chosen a good one. And I’ve just decided to bail on everything I’d written to start over, because I was digging into the differences between sandbox flavors (hex crawl versus …
The primary option for gaining experience points in Seekers of Lore is to discover and recover that which was lost. Knowledge in general and special items are prime candidates for this activity, and easily portable. Not so portable, but may easily be as valuable or more in the long run …