http://animus.chaosdeathfish.com/ 2026-04-14T06:06:26+00:00 http://animus.chaosdeathfish.com/ http://animus.chaosdeathfish.com/_media/favicon.ico text/html 2017-10-01T11:24:53+00:00 http://animus.chaosdeathfish.com/design:a_funny_hat?rev=1506857093&do=diff A Funny Hat A friend asked me: “So, is this game just Memento Mundi in a funny hat?” This is actually a really good question. It goes without saying that Matt and I love Memento Mundi. We go every weekend that we can. I've GMed a half-dozen games and Matt must have run over a good few dozen by now. I've written text/html 2017-12-12T18:47:08+00:00 http://animus.chaosdeathfish.com/design:brainload?rev=1513104428&do=diff Let’s talk brainload. What is Brainload? Unlike in video games, where a computer remembers and enacts the rules, in analogue games, humans are the ones responsible for enforcing rules. In LARP, this means that - you are responsible for remembering a bunch of stuff about your character, their passive abilities, their hits, what kind of weapons they can use, etc, as well as the general rules about the game (what calls do, how healing works, safety rules, social contract, etc.) text/html 2017-11-22T23:42:18+00:00 http://animus.chaosdeathfish.com/design:burn_it_all_down?rev=1511394138&do=diff Burn It All Down I lied. Or rather, I changed my mind. I didn't realise, until the playtest, just how much I enjoyed some of the more radical changes we'd made to the linear formula. Before, I think, I was content with just iterating. And whilst it would be false of me not to acknowledge the influence of other systems, seeing our baby text/html 2018-02-05T08:49:37+00:00 http://animus.chaosdeathfish.com/design:the_end_question_mark?rev=1517820577&do=diff We're now less than a week away from deciding on the next Society LARP, so I thought it would be good to do a quick retrospective, and maybe talk about the changes in the latest (and possibly last) version of the wiki. Mat contacted me way back in July 2017 to talk about working on this project together, and I'm so happy that he did. I still feel that I was incredibly lucky, and that he was exceptionally generous to trust me with co-parenting his baby. What a delightful little scamp they have … text/html 2017-12-07T17:36:47+00:00 http://animus.chaosdeathfish.com/design:threat?rev=1512668207&do=diff Threat In my last blog post, I mentioned that having base damage capped to a silent single poses a challenge when it comes to monster design, because damage is such a great metaphor for strength & the threat that a monster poses to the party. One of other big ways to passively clue threat that exists is the weapon choice given to the monster. A monster wielding a spear and shield represents a different kind of threat than a monster with two daggers, for example, and a monster with no weapons o… text/html 2017-12-17T19:33:51+00:00 http://animus.chaosdeathfish.com/design:unique_calls?rev=1513539231&do=diff Today I wanted to talk about unique calls. As a reply to the post I made about Brainload, Vicky had the following to say: “I think one of the things I have biggest issue remembering is what some of the rarer MM calls actually do... The one that comes to mind is