dumping some stuff from abulafia

i used to use this wiki called abulafia what was up at random-generator.com, it was a cool resource because you could write generators sort of in plaintext-ish tables, in the source of a page on the wiki, and if someone went to that page it would generate output, the contents of that page, based on those tables, so it was, for a while, a really cool resource for tabletop rpg dorks. it fell into unusability when mediawiki updated their software one year, but for a while the pages were still up on there and you could still extract the data, but not really anymore

you can still pull the data off of archive.org here as of this writing. but what you get is an xml dump of the whole wiki, which gives you the whole wiki in a big file (like 500meg) and text editors cant really read that real good.

so like, i have a compsci degree, i could probably write a python script to pull apart a xml file, or i could set up a mediawiki and import the data into it, but instead what i did was i downloaded this tool ltfviewer that opens pretty big files ok, so im just reading through the large file that contains the whole wiki, very slowly

anyway, here's some of the data i was trying to find, for the articles Village and People of Dust (which i wrote)

SCAMP and BRAMBLEVALE liner notes

i posted my current homebrew system yesterday, thats available in the post before this one, in two documents, SCAMP which is the combat system, and BRAMBLEVALE which is everything else

i wrote most of scamp a couple months ago and the original scamp document got a bit heavy with design notes that eventually spun out bramblevale, which is a sort of basic fantasy companion rpg for scamp. splitting it up this way means scamp gets to remain a thin combat system and bramblevale can hold the parts of the larger system that aren't spelled out in the scamp doc, and bramblevale is sort of interchangable for other setting docs, which might care about different stuff. but bramblevale can be the template for what kind of stuff they'd have.

anyway in tightening up these two docs for publication i've lopped the old scamp design notes from the earlier draft, but there's good stuff in there, so i've reproduced them below. bramblevale has a cleaned up version of a lot of this stuff in it.

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SCAMP is like LANCER if it was KNAVE

I've been working on a new system for doing combat after playing Lancer with a group locally. I think Lancer is a fine system, I like kitting out those robots, but the combat runs long, because the turns are long, so maybe you get one turn every hour or so, so I wanted a system with FAST TURNS so you get to do more stuff!

So I wrote a scrappy little combat system, that can work as a bag on the side of another game. It could replace the combat in BLADES in THE DARK which (I find) is a bit thin, for example. SCAMP is very general purpose in this way, it doesn't specify the form of the weapons and powers that the players are using, so that it can work for fantasy or scifi or what have you. So here's the current draft, I'd very much like some feedback on it, its shaping up into something that I think I might like to publish.

SCAMP, the game where you do one thing on your turn

SCAMP doesn't really have any opinion about the part of the game what is not combat. But I also wrote a little solo RPG to test it with, which will help if you want to present an adventure for just one player or really with as many as you like, probably. I like the idea of nesting games that work either together or in isolation, so you could run SCAMP on its own or attach different story modules to it.

Anyway here's the other game I've been working on, this one has a lot of chatGPT text, its just a thin client to put some structure around the out of combat parts of the game. but it has good bones I think.

GRIMWORLDR BRAMBLEVALE

I like the ghost bag mechanic that I've presented there, which gives you a fun system for interacting with spirits.

Anyway those are some RPG fragments that I've been working on recently, I hope you can make use of these, they are small but powerful apparatuses and it brings me pleasure to be able to present them here.