• Bro just came back from Blighty. It’s starting to feel like Chrimbo. Hopefully there’ll be boardgames and eating and good family-ness.
• I’ve started watching Firefly. It’s another one of those things that I didn’t believe was as good as people told me. Oops.
• “Insomnia is an indigestion of the soul”

Myself and my bro were talking games last night, as a gaming family should, and we tried pushing around the Way of the Agent rules to accommodate magic.

Ping! Way of the Mage was formed.

We’re going free form. Conjuring works great like that. The Paths from Way of the Agent will be transmogrified into Schools, and the four grades of each will indicate bonuses to the use of an Art for magicky purposes. E.g. School of Illusion gives a bonus to the Art of Deception.

Coupled with that, every character will gain a Wizardly Trait when they gain a grade in a particular school. That could mean a “Beard” at grade 1 in the School of Enlightenment, to a “Maniacal Laugh” at grade 2 in the School of Necromancy, to a “Talking Animal” at grade 4 in the School of Conjuration.

Every character will start off with an Ego of 0, which will grow as the character does his wizardry, and so on. This will be his downfall, of course, if the game mechanics have anything to do with it. There’ll be ways for you to reduce your Ego, by helping folk and acting humble.

I’m hoping for a tongue-in-cheek, dysfunctional game that looks at the path to power, and the mistakes along the way. I’d like it to be a game about people who are able to use magic, not about magic users who are like people. So if you start with a guy who likes to sing a lot and visit different cultures, you’ll still be that guy, even after you learn to break open castle walls and turn yourself into a jaguar.

That’s my fun idea for the season. See you next year!

• If each person posts 4 tweets an hour, and you have 150 followers, that’s 600 tweets an hour. How do you read anything else?
• Life Ambition: Warm fuzziness.
• Christmas shopping COMPLETE. Wrapping COMPLETE. Now all I have to do is exercise the walls of my stomach… streeeeetchhhhhhhh!

It’s over!

Thanks for your entries guys! Your input has really helped me to figure out what I want from the First Game chapter.

Congratulations goes to Jason Morningstar. Well done! Your entry was not only solid and on-message, but opened up a whole new language of interpretation for me. Nice work.

Your prize: A Cobweb Games T-Shirt and a PDF copy of the release version of HfL.

Sebastian.