I finished a thing for WayneCon next week, but maybe I think even the folks that don't get to go there might roll this around in the spirit in which it's conceived. WayneCon will be one of those times when pictures will be insufficient to communicate the awesomeness of the brain waves engendered, so I offer the wavelength I'm at at the moment. Payment to the community for just being fun people to interact with, bat things around with, create and explore with. Like a mystical journey, dig?
For my part, I was in contact with some of the folks that will be at WayneCon when I had this game fall out of the sky into my head while I was mowing/thrashing the patches of weeds and roots that symbolized a lawn outside the trailer in the woods in which I lived with my wife and Very Tiny Baby. Doug K.'s taken an interest an' this may suffice to whet our appetites, for a spell. It's late - late means many prepositions and nested ones
That particular mowing, I turned about half way through and I noticed that the Bees were all hovering there, looking at me, as if to say ARE YOU GOING TO MOW THIS PATCH OF GROUND, MAN? And I was struck by their patience and simple Stoicism and my time there was somewhat trying but almost always interesting in that way. The game tumbled out of those bees into my ear and I laughed and I fleshed it out later, and it was better at one point but this is what I have, now.
The fox that attacked me, we had come across each other a couple of times in broad daylight when I was jogging in the woods - I didn't know then that each time we crossed paths it was getting more ominous and unsafe, and I was struck by wonder that an animal like that could be so flagrantly fearless. Not a good sign. And rabbits! So many rabbits. I learned that the woods kind of depends on large numbers of rabbits
NOT making it, or else there would simply be too many rabbits, and hungry, ill, and desperate foxes. Like after the tenth dying baby rabbit, it's not that your heart hardens, but Ants and Buzzards gotta eat same as Rabbits.
Here you go. Simple target numbers, modified maybe by 1 or 2 tops in either direction, 2d6 - you only need one die to signify a success. 2 1's is a critical success, etc. etc. I think doubles of any kind ought to have some magic in it, so there.
Let me know what you think, or not. A premise of the game is that Death comes for critters the same as anybody, and it's okay. Life in the woods goes and goes and they don't tend to complain too much.