Month: July 2019

Five or So Questions on Loading Ready Run

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Brendan “Beej” Dery from Loading Ready Run about all of the amazing stuff Loading Ready Run does as a comedy troupe that touches on gaming and various geek media. Their community really impresses me, and I wanted to talk to someone in the leadership about the work they do and how they created the space. Check it out!

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An illustration of a man with dark hair in a purple collared shirt.
An illustration of Beej.

For the uninitiated, what is Loading Ready Run (LRR) to you and what is your role within the organization? What makes you excited about LRR?

I’m Brendan “Beej” Dery and I work as the Business Manager for LoadingReadyRun. LoadingReadyRun is a comedy troupe that does all of their work on the Internet, focussing on sketches, streaming, podcasts, and playing video games and tabletop games, including a lot of time playing Magic: the Gathering. Working for LRR is still work, but it’s a lot of fun too.

As Business Manager, I spend my time working on managing our merchandise and taking care of office admin whatnot, but I also get to spend time acting in sketches or streaming games, so there’s more variety to my job than just sitting at a desk. What gets me excited about LRR is meeting people who enjoy what we do and seeing them in Twitch chat or in our Discord (http://discord.gg/lrr/), talking about the stuff we make, but also just interacting with each other in general. The fact that we’ve built – and are still building – such a great, supportive community of people makes me really proud to be a part of something so positive to so many people.

You seem to have a caring focus, ethically. As a group that’s run their shows for so long, how do you work towards maintaining high quality and variety while not burning yourselves to dust?

I think we keep ourselves honest by listening to each other and to our fans. Integrity is one of those things that you can cultivate for a long time, but lose it immediately. So we try to train ourselves to be better people. It’s not about “acting” a certain way, either. It’s easier to write comedy that doesn’t punch down when you have the kind of mindset that doesn’t punch down. That’s not to say we haven’t messed up before, or that we won’t mess up in the future. But I do think we do our best to acknowledge mistakes, listen to each other, and try to learn to be better.

We’ve also been making a ton of content for over fifteen years, so it’s not as if some of us haven’t felt burned out every so often. As the group has gotten bigger and taken on more projects, we’ve also been having regular meetings to plan our production and streaming schedules, to plan editing, and to write upcoming sketches and pre-recorded bits. That’s helped a lot, but we’ve also adopted a new rule – “Get to 80%” – at our last annual “take-stock” meeting. “Getting to 80%” means to limit the amount of projects we do, so that we’re operating at 80% of our maximum capacity. That way, when special projects pop up throughout the year, we’ll be able to do them (as opposed to missing great opportunities to do something fun or lucrative).

Like, Road Quest was a lot of fun, but it was also a lot of work, a lot of time spent, and a lot of money. And with all of the other projects we’re still working on, it’s taken longer to finish Road Quest than I think we’d like, and that’s meant having to do things like temporarily putting me on CheckPoint+ or putting Watch + Play on hiatus. Getting to 80% has helped inform some of our production scheduling and I think it’s going to get better and better for us as time goes on.

Experience and specialization has also helped a lot. Graham and Paul have been doing this for a long time, and over the years, they’ve trained new people to do some of their tasks. And that’s let everyone learn new things in their specialties to improve how we make stuff and entertain people. And as we get more experience, I think we’re getting better – and faster – at our jobs.

For those that make such decisions at LRR, how do you determine who to have on which shows, and how do you handle any problems that you encounter with personality conflicts, ethical concerns, and so on?

A lot of content is driven by the people that are interested in making it in the first place. We don’t assign people to do shows – people volunteer. We’re trying to change up the ensemble shows more and more (like AFK, The Long Game, or Friday Night Paper Fight), because we think the variety helps keep things more entertaining. When it comes to pre-recorded content like Friday Nights or commodoreHustle, that’s driven by the needs of the script or by how simple we need to make the filming process.

Like, we don’t have time to film more than a six-minute commodoreHustle during a LoadingReadyLIVE filming day, so it’s usually solved during the writing meeting that happened weeks before. Who hasn’t had an episode focus on their character yet, how are they getting into trouble, who else should be involved, etc. As far as streaming or other pre-record content goes, it’s like I’ve said previously – if someone wants to do a thing, we see if we can support it. Not all stream ideas will ever make it to air, and not all pre-record ideas are going to get filmed. But if an idea has a champion, it’s going to get a lot further.

We all like working with each other, but that also doesn’t mean there’s no conflict. It’s hard for me to address a question about personality conflicts, because I just straight-up don’t like having them. And I want to keep the focus of LRR on what we produce for people to enjoy. When it comes to solving conflicts between people, it’s down to Graham and Paul, largely, as they’re the co-presidents of the company. Same goes for ethical concerns – most of us in the office will become aware of a problem pretty fast and then we’ll end up talking about how we’re going to address it. We don’t always agree on how to handle things, but again, it’s a business and an organization and everyone wants our decision and our message to be unified, so that no one is confused about our position. We owe that to our audience.

The Loading Ready Run logo, which is three small dots on the left, one large circle on the right, and then an arrow on the right of the arrow with the words LoadingReadyRun in pixelated text.

What kind of content do you most enjoy bringing to streaming, whether it’s games or sketches or larger things like Road Quest, and how do you make the decision for what’s “good for TV,” so to speak?

I like making stuff that focuses on our strengths as entertainers – we’re funny, we’re positive, we’re doing our best. Road Quest was amazing but it’s not the kind of thing we can make all the time. Logistically, it requires a ton of planning and effort and funding just to get to Day 0, and then we have to start making the thing. And after that, there’s a lot of post-production, and that involves even more people. And the impact that a large project like Road Quest has on the rest of the production team is easy to see – reorganizing streams, allocating editing resources, etc. But I think it’s exactly the kind of content we want to bring to our fans. Road trip shows have been done before, but I think us doing the road trip show brings that kind of “surprise and delight” that we hope keeps everyone entertained.

Overall, I’m happy that we’ve been able to split our production into a wider variety of things. In the early days – when I was just an actor coming in on weekends – I wasn’t sure how all-year streaming was going to benefit us, but looking at it now, it’s clear that providing the variety has allowed us to attract more people to work with LRR and let us have a lot more immediate fun with our audience. And I think that’s what helps us decide what’s good for TV: is this going to be interesting or fun for us to make, and do we think that the majority of our fans are going to respond positively to it. And then after that, can we afford the money to make this, and can we afford the man-hours to make it. We’re still a business and we still want our employees to be able to make rent every month.

You may be best known for your charity event, Desert Bus for Hope, which is an annual playthrough of the Desert Bus video game for the Child’s Play charity. It seems like a real logistical challenge! What has kept you coming back to this event every year, and what does the planning entail for each of you? How do you keep safety in mind?

In order to answer this question properly, I’d have to go into a ton of detail about different departments and the number of planning meetings we have and managing a project that’s grown to involve fifty people on-site, as well as multiple people from around the world making contributions in other less visible ways.

So instead, forgive me for answering it purely from my perspective and involvement. I started doing Desert Bus for Hope during DBfH 5, and I showed up because I knew LRR and I wanted to be up there, performing for people and having fun. The charity aspect didn’t enter my mind. These days, I’m the de facto Zeta Shift producer, meaning that I take my job of getting Desert Bus from midnight to 06:00 very seriously – and I do that by trying to not to care too deeply about it. There’s a “screw-it-let’s-do-it-live” aspect to DBfH that I’ve always loved and if we ever lost that, I’d probably be done. So I try to bring that sense to the Zeta Shift by prepping only a few things, but mostly just seeing where it goes. It’s fun to come in at the start of the week and see “$0.00” and then see “$700,000” at the end of the week and just marvel that so many people came together to raise that money in exchange for a week of sleepless broadcasting. That’s pretty amazing.

Everyone else has different feelings about DBfH and I’m glad they do. It means that everyone found a piece of the show that they love and want to preserve, and I think it means that the bus is always going to keep running.

As for safety? There’s enough people on-site that safety is critical. We tape our cables to the floor, we leave as much room as we can to move around the equipment, we have food volunteers that do their best to adhere to FoodSafe guidelines. We also try to look for volunteers who have first aid training or better – we’ve even had off-duty paramedics on-staff before. While we mess around on camera, the audience doesn’t want to see any of us choke or break a bone. So it’s very important for us to be as safe as possible.

What are the tools and decision-making you consider essential as a streamer and a performing professional in games that you would recommend others ensure they have before starting streaming on their own?

The most important tools are also good life advice:

Grow a thicker skin.

Get a good emotional support system.

Breathe.

Your time may not be worth that e-mail in your inbox.

We lucked out when we started because we had already built a good community from our sketch comedy videos and from Desert Bus for Hope. So don’t tie your hopes and dreams of streaming fame to what we did – we had to make videos for over ten years and also engage with our audience in our forum and try to build things that would keep that relationship growing. Unless you have done some amazing stuff already, you are not going to step into an instant audience.

But when you are getting started, you will have to hustle. You’ll probably need a day job, or a partner with a day job. You’ll need to project integrity and confidence – and that doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to change your mind about things, but you’ll need to show your audience that you’re trying to do the right thing and that you’ll willing to admit when you’re wrong. And that might also mean not taking every opportunity that comes into your inbox because it’s a quick $200. Or maybe it’ll mean that you need to take it to make rent, and you let your audience know what’s up about that.

Being a streamer or influencer or social media whatever is a rough gig these days. Not everyone can do it. And it’s not an easy ride. But whatever you do, be honest to yourself about what you want to do and why you want to do it. Play the games you want, host the streams you want, talk about the subjects you want. Don’t pander to your audience, but don’t ignore them either. Be willing to put in the work to push your career forward, but also – and this is really hard – be ready to recognize if it’s not working out. Maybe you can pivot to a different kind of stream. Maybe you’ll need to find partners to stream with. Maybe you’ll need to stop altogether.

The illustrated Loading Ready Run cast posing dramatically in front of the logo.

I believe firmly in leading in place and skills transfer, and it seems like LRR does too! How do you each act as leaders in your own roles at LRR, and how do you handle skills transfer with the team?

This is kind of a difficult question, actually. With hiring so many people, we’ve been trying to provide training and also write documentation so that we can have processes and procedures to refer back to, if employees have questions about e.g. running tech on a podcast, or what style guidelines we use for our videos.

This is new territory for us, because LoadingReadyRun hasn’t had to do this before. With the amount of work we’re already doing, finding time to document what we do is really hard. BUT! We have recognized that it’s important and we’re trying to find ways to do it.

We’ve also established more people in specific roles. Graham and Paul are both co-Presidents of Bionic Trousers Media Inc – our operating company. James acts as our scheduler and producer for the bulk of our shows. Kathleen is our Managing Editor and also performs the vast majority of our writing. And I’m the business manager, meaning my eye is on the bottom line (and also on merchandise development).

Everyone is trying to involve team members with more projects and teach them more skills, but given the nature of our office and how we do business, we don’t do things like seminars or group teaching. The most instruction you would get was by working on-the-job – here’s how you hold a boom correctly, here’s how you operate the camera, here’s how we use J-cuts when editing, etc. I’m hoping that developing some documentation will help make training easier for both the trainers and the employees.

We absolutely have a long way to go, but I’m optimistic that we’ll get there – especially if we can get to 80% first.

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Thanks so much to Beej for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out all that LoadingReadyRun has to offer!

Five or So Questions on Hit the Streets

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Rich Rogers about Hit the Streets: Defend the Block, which is currently on Kickstarter! Rich had a lot of nifty stuff to say about the game, so check it out below!

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Tell me a little about Hit the Streets: Defend the Block. What excites you about it?

Hit the Streets: Defend the Block (HtS:DtB) is a tabletop RPG about street-level supers. A game series of Hts:DtB will have the entire group working together to make up their team of Super-Powered Beings, drawing out a simple map of the neighborhood where they live and work, and dreaming up their rivals and threats to their neighborhood.

What excites me about HtS:DtB is how well it plays at the table, allowing players to exist in the space of shows like Luke Cage and Daredevil, or to tell stories like you might read in Spiderman or Spider Gwen comics. I also love how the game pushes characters to expend or lose their Spark, a resource similar to Hit Points that represents their will to struggle and fight the good fight. That loss of Spark then sets up scenes where those characters have to regain that resource by doing positive things for the community or forging tighter bonds with their team. It has such a nice flow of emotional scenes to action and conflict and back again.

A person with a ponytail and a red mask in a red and black superhero costume and scarf who is drawing a purple-handled weapon from over their shoulder.

Nice! How did you find the right vibe for the game, considering how widely superheroes are interpreted in different mediums and styles? What is the right style for Hit the Streets?

Hit the Streets: Defend the Block came from a need for something that would fit in a new living campaign that I began with Lowell Francis and Jim Crocker this year called Gauntlet Comics, which is for the Gauntlet community (https://www.gauntlet-rpg.com/ )  as you’d suspect. See, I pitched them the concept of a shared GM setting called New Gauntlet City where each of us, and other GMs who wanted to join in, would run games set in this comic book universe. We have a city map with only a few neighborhoods defined, and we’ve been adding neighborhoods and characters to the map and wiki as we play. New GMs have jumped in, like Alexi Sargeant and Chris Newton, it’s been a real blast to see the world evolve, to create new characters and see different players’ spin on them. 

Of course, there’s lots of Masks: A New Generation happening in Gauntlet Comics and I’ve loved those games, but I like to run a different RPG system each month for this series. Last October as I prepared for Gauntlet Comics, I sat down and pored over the hundreds of Supers RPGs that I have on PDF and created a list of “Want to GM” games. When I looked over the games on my list, I didn’t see anything that would work in a single neighborhood, that would deal with smaller scope problems that I saw on shows like Luke Cage‘s Harlem or Daredevil’s Hell’s Kitchen on Netflix, or Black Lightning‘s Freeland on the CW. I’d tried out the RPG Icons, which had most of what I wanted, but it was a bit heavy of a system for my tastes.

I’d been running an RPG: 1%er – The Outlaw Biker Game, from Creepy Doll Studios (a.k.a. Robert Nolan) for a couple of years for the Gauntlet and loved the sessions we’d had. I even hacked it for Star Wars and called it 1%er Swoop Gang (Kark yeah!) and it was so thrilling and fun to run and play. There was this yummy mix of thrilling action and connection between the characters and their community that I enjoyed. I started wondering if this simple but clever d6-based system would be the right chassis for a street-level supers game.

I started calling it 1%er Supers and put it on the Gauntlet calendar. Playtested an early version in November and December of last year, and it was solid. It needed some more bits, like a neighborhood-creation system as well as a few rules tweaks, but the vibe was spot on. Eventually, I renamed 1%er Supers to Hit the Streets: Defend the Block (hat tips to Patrick Knowles and Alex Prinz for that name) That vibe, to finally answer your question, is a bare knuckles game where the Super-Powered Beings (I don’t call them superheroes) have day jobs, they have connections to people in their neighborhood, and they have to fight to keep the people they love safe.

They can’t just topple an alien invasion and walk away from the wreckage. They’d have to LIVE in the wreckage. Hit the Streets: Defend the Block characters have to make choices about how to deal with threats to their neighborhood, and punching it isn’t always the best answer. Of course, it’s comics, so punching is the best answer sometimes. Usually once per game session. But the fights in HtS:DtB are super quick, often one or two die rolls, then it’s dealing with the aftermath.

A person with long dark hair stares deeply at the viewer while stretching out their arms, which turn into black, sharpened points. They are wearing a purple jumpsuit with knee pads and heavy boots. There are some of the dark spikes poking out of the ground.

Tell me more about Spark and how it interacts with other mechanical bits. What are the core mechanics of the game like? Do different players use it differently?

Spark is the “killer app” of Hit the Streets: Defend the Block. It’s a reskin of a mechanic in 1%er – The Outlaw Biker Game. Your Spark represents your character’s will to fight. It’s the strength of their body as well as their mental resolve. You can spend Spark to add dice to an important roll. You can throw a Spark to another player to help them on a roll of their own. But you have to keep a close eye on that Spark because in big conflicts, the hits that your character takes reduce your Spark.

When you run out, your character is “out of the crime-fighting game”. Maybe they’re in the hospital. They might be locked up in jail. Perhaps, they’re dead (that’s up to the player). They aren’t out of the game if the player wants to bring them back in, but you have to regain their Spark somehow.

How do you do it? Help to rebuild your community with works of charity or help to fight crime as a regular everyday citizen. Or you can call upon your team, the other player characters, and bond with them, share what’s important, ask for their help, or tell them how they’re important and how they make the world better, worth fighting for. Once you regain some Spark, you can don the mask and get out there again!

How do you support players in engaging with things that could be difficult to address like threats to home and family and trauma?

When I started writing Hit the Streets: Defend the Block, I made a decision to have it reflect the ways I most enjoy gaming, which is with an engaged and safe group of friends. To that end, the book starts with an excellent discussion of the X Card safety tool written by my late friend Paul Edson who was also my developmental editor. The game stresses that the safety tool is only part of the process, that each participant needs to look out for their fellow players, check in, and proceed with best intentions while remaining aware that we are here to have fun.

The GM section covers Roses and Thorns, my feedback tool of choice. This is another powerful tool to ensure safety, giving voice to players after a session on areas of the game that may have been sketchy. Of course, my preference is the use of the X Card up front, but a Thorn that mentions the content is a nice fail-safe.

One important factor to Hts:DtB is that it isn’t supposed to be a grind of a game. There are lighter moments in the game with Refresh scenes where the player characters take the opportunity to perform charity work to improve their neighborhood and help out their neighbors. Also, there are bonding scenes where player characters strengthen their connection to one another to lift themselves up to continue the fight.

What are some of the threats these superpowered characters encounter in their experiences, and how does it go down mechanically with some different threats?

During the first session, the playgroup works together to not only draw out their neighborhood, but they talk about the threats to their home, whether it’s financial, corruption, or otherwise. Then, they create a group of Rivals, these are GM-played characters (GMCs) who are opposed to the player characters. They aren’t black and white villains, they are rivals. Sometimes they seem villainous to the players, but the GM should ensure they have a motivation. Also, the rivalry is messy. At least one player character has a personal relationship of some kind with a member of the rival team, the rivals have something the PCs lack, and the PCs have some way to thwart their rivals when they need it. That sets up a nice opposition between the team and the world.

Mechanically, your characters will face down threats and conflicts by declaring their intention, then they look through their character’s details to pull from different areas, like the mode of their approach, the stat they’re leaning on, if they’re fulfilling their team role, what powers, if any, are in play, then adding in Spark from their own pool or from anyone who’s trying to help. That builds their die pool of six-sided dice that they roll against a GM declared difficulty. In most conflicts, it’s a single roll to bring things to a resolution. The system is quick and has a nice bite when things are on the line.

Along with the regular approach to a challenge, the GM has some neat little tools to play with that difficulty to amp up conflicts. They can set two difficulties for a challenge. The first is a lower, “get it done” target number. The second is a higher difficulty with an even more comprehensive victory or with adding benefits (something as simple as “you’ll look awesome doing it” or something more tangible like “and they won’t be able to fix their security system any time soon”). That gives the player a bit of a tactical risk-reward decision to make as they build their die pool. It’s really fun to see folks consider how much to push towards the big win. 

Last, but not least, is the Big Threat or Big Bad. This how HtS:DtB models a conflict with a major foe or an extended stressful conflict (like a large fire burning down the block, a torrential rainstorm, open warfare between gangs on the streets, whatever is most interesting to the group). The GM sets a Total Threat Difficulty, a very high target number. Any player who decides to have their character tackle the threat can slowly winnow it down, but as long as that threat still has muscle (the total number of successes needed hasn’t been met or exceeded), each attempt is at best a mixed success and things will continue to escalate. The Total Threat Difficulty often ends up with player characters in dire straights, hurt, and paying the price for their victories, which then leads to Refresh scenes where they work back up their Spark. It’s a lovely cycle of play.

A white-haired, white-skinned person with a green snake tattoo wrapped around their wrist is playing a purple and translucent guitar giving off waves of energy. They are wearing a skeleton long-sleeved tee, dark pants, and brown shoes.

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Thanks so much to Rich for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Hit the Streets: Defend the Block on Kickstarter today!

Five or So Questions on Magical Kitties Save the Day!

Hi All! Today I have an interview with Justin Alexander from Atlas Games on Magical Kitties Save the Day, which launches today on Kickstarter! It seems like a fun game for players of all ages, so check out Justin’s responses below!

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A Siamese cat riding on a horned blue and green dragon.

Tell me about Magical Kitties Saves the Day. What excites you about it?

What has me truly excited about Magical Kitties Save the Day is how much fun everyone has during our playtests. People are enthusiastic about trying the game. People are even more enthusiastic to try it again. As a game master, that kind of enthusiasm is infectious. And the world of Magical Kitties, based around just a few core principles, so endlessly varied and effortlessly rewarding to create in: Your magical kitties can be in your hometown. Or in the Old West. Or fighting aliens. Or living in a Martian colony. Or, really, anywhere.

Let me back up. In Magical Kitties everybody plays a kitty with a unique supernatural power. Every kitty has human. (Some humans believe that they own the kitties, but that’s clearly ridiculous.) Every human has a Problem. The kitties need to use their powers to solve their humans’ problems and save the day! On top of that, every hometown has Troubles. Troubles can be almost anything: Witches. Aliens. Hyper-intelligent raccoons. To run an adventure, all the GM has to do is take a Trouble and point it at a Problem. As the Trouble makes the Problem worse, the kitties have to fly into action! (Often literally.)

A grey cat with unusual markings with a blanket over its head and a stick with a feather on a string in front of it. Behind it, there are runes in the air.

How do players create their human characters and kitties?

You can either very deliberately craft your kitty or you can use the random character generators to discover your kitty. Either way, character creation is very fast, so it’s more about whether you have a specific vision or if you want to be surprised and challenged. You can also mix-and-match the approaches: Maybe you care a lot about what your kitty’s Magical Power is, but want to randomly generate your kitty’s Talent and Flaw and then figure out what your kitty’s personality is from that. You can do that!

Kitty’s attributes: They are Cute, Cunning, and Fierce. They also have Talents and Flaws, describing what they are particularly good at (being a talented actor or a keen sense of hearing) and also what gets them into trouble (like having a big mouth or being a scaredy cat). And, of course, they also each have a cool Magical Power — invisibility, telekinesis, technopathy, frost breath.

When it comes to humans, the most important thing is their Problem. Again, players are empowered to customize their own Problems. But we also include a generator that combines an emotion — like sad, angry, scared — with a source, things like money, illness, family, friends, work/school, and so forth. This is ultimately a creative seed, and so you need to make it specific to your human (and your kitty).

So if a human is scared about money, for example, that might mean they’ve fallen behind on their mortgage payments and they don’t know what to do. Or maybe they owe money to dangerous monsters. If they’re angry about money, on the other hand, then maybe someone has stolen something from them and they’re furious about it.

A robot with purple lighting in its head and clamp arms, plus two tentacle robot limbs coming out of its chest.

What’s the mechanical structure of Magical Kitties Save the Day, especially in regards to dealing with Troubles and Problems?

The core mechanic of Magical Kitties is a streamlined dice pool system that effortlessly creates degrees of success:

  • Failure
  • Success, but…
  • Success
  • Success, and…
  • Super success!

Each degree has some generic structure to outcomes. For example, on a Success, but… the kitty will succeed, but also:

  • A foe uses its reaction.
  • You suffer an Owie.
  • You get into a sticky situation.
  • You are unable to act for some time.
  • You have one fewer die in your next pool.
  • The GM forces your flaw.
  • Something else that’s creative.

By moving beyond a simply binary of success and failure, the game inherently encourages both game masters and players to engage deeply with the outcome of any action resolution. Young players, in particular, get really engaged by the results.

Problems have a Severity and Troubles have an Intensity. Both measure how difficulty it is to solve or overcome them. As Problems and Troubles are resolved, the story of your magical kitties will slowly come to an end… or you can have new Trouble come to town.

This sounds like a really lighthearted game, but I admit some of the Problems you mentioned hit nerves for me as a player. How are you supporting players in encountering topics that might be a little bit, uh, Problematic?

One of the reasons we’ve embraced the Source + Emotion method of generating problems is that it isn’t providing specific problems. That specific problem is still coming from the player. If you ask a six-year-old what “money + sad” or “friends + angry” means, you won’t get the same kinds of problems you will if you ask a twelve-year-old or twenty-four-year old that question.And since we’re not pushing a specific problem into the playing space, the players generally self-control for what they’re comfortable exploring through play without even really thinking about it.

Three cats clamber on trees and look down into a clearing in which there is a crashed ship of some kind.

Magical Kitties is framed as an all-ages game. What have you done to make the game approachable for people of different ages, backgrounds, and abilities?

In working on Magical Kitties I’ve personally done a lot of research into age-appropriate cognition. The results are frequently surprising! For example, character creation uses d6-as-percentile tables. I initially thought that might be a difficult concept for our target age range and was looking at alternatives, but it turns out that specific exercise if used in Grade 2 curriculums.

Our creative team for Magical Kitties is already diverse, and making it even more diverse as we bring more creators onboard is a priority for me. Bringing all of these different viewpoints into the Magical Kitties universe is making that universe bigger and more exciting in every way possible. If there’s one thing we’ve discovered, it’s that the love of kitties is about as universal as you can get! Kitties and the people who love them can be found everywhere.

I also believe that Magical Kitties can be an opportunity for people who have never played a roleplaying game before to discover a whole new hobby. We think reaching out to all-new audiences is really important in terms of making sure that all voices get to be part of our conversation. To that end, Magical Kitties includes a lot of tools for new players: There’ll be a solo play scenario, for example, so that within literally moments of cracking open the box you can start playing the game for the first time. And there’ll be a My First Adventure book for first-time GMs, taking them step-by-step through running their first scenario.

Magical Kitties are for everybody!

A light colored kitten plays inside a protective bubble while a dark red kitty climbs on top of it playfully, with green foliage in the background.

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Thanks so much to Justin for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Magical Kitties Save the Day on Kickstarter today!

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Friday Hi-Day YouTube Post Live!

Five or So Questions on Red Carnations on a Black Grave

Today I’ve got questions for Catherine Ramen about Red Carnations on a Black Grave, a historical RPG currently on Kickstarter! Check out the interview below!

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Tell me a little about Red Carnations on a Black Grave. What excites you about it?

Red Carnations on a Black Grave is a freeform rpg about the Paris Commune, a brief but intense socialist revolution in 1871. For ten weeks radicals, socialists, and the working class controlled the greatest capital in Europe–until the French army arrived and brutally put down the “rebellion.”

The game explores the lives of 12 characters caught up in this intense moment in history, exploring their personal lives and relationships against a backdrop of a doomed resistance.

I came accidentally to this moment in history and then became fascinated by it. The Paris Commune is not well known, and I’m delighted to bring this crucial moment in the history of revolutionary struggle to more prominence. As a designer, it succeeds pretty well in capturing the kind of drama-infused and emotional play that I love to bring to the table.

A red headed woman at Square Louise-Michel in Paris in front of an iron fence in a black top, black cardigan, and striped pants.
The creator, Catherine Ramen.

What kind of research did you have to do to write the game and capture this experience?

It started when I picked up, more or less by chance, a copy of Mary and Bryan Talbot’s graphic novel The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia which is about the socialist and anarchist activist Louise Michel (who is a playable character in the game). I’d never learned much about the Paris Commune before this time, but I had been looking at maybe doing some kind of French Revolutionary-themed game. The Commune is much later than the original revolution, but it quickly became a source of deep interest to me.

I read several works in English (John Merriman’s Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune is an excellent overview and introduction), mostly on the academic side of things, with a focus on the experience of women in the Commune, but also some primary sources written by the participants in the Commune. My French isn’t terrible, so I was also able to read some of the primary accounts of the Commune in French–this was the only place I could find anything in depth about Joséphine Marchais, for example, even though I mostly left that information off of her card in the game. 

The one thing I think that really helped was to look at some of the many, many posters the Commune government issued during its brief life. I used those as a source for the Inspiration cards in the game–these are cards that contain a historical event or situation and some sense impressions; it’s a good way to get some historical information into the game without overwhelming the players. About 90% of those cards are based on actual posters I found. 

Who are the people in this story? How do you think modern players can relate to them?

Right now there are twelve base characters in the game, plus a thirteenth optional character we were able to add thanks to hitting a stretch goal; we’re also going to have some more optional characters become available if we hit other funding goals.

The characters are a mix of historical people and plausibly historical characters. There’s Louise Michel, who was a badass (and a pain in the ass) all her long public life; Joséphine Marchais, one of three women to be sentenced to death for arson after the fall of the Commune (the sentence was commuted). There are two families, the Marchandons with a former political prisoner and a young widow among them, and the family of Amanda Mercier a single mother and sex worker. She is in an explicitly queer relationship with Lodoïska Caweska, another historical figure who was often described as an “Amazon” and wore a uniform and carried pistols; in the game she’s a veteran of the failed Polish revolution of 1864. I wanted to make sure that the community of Montmartre (where the game is set) was vibrant and diverse–as it was in reality; plus I wanted to make sure there was representation from France’s imperialist ventures: so we have Dominique Rousseau, a physician from Martinique who got her MD in the United States, and Tariq Tannoudji, an Algerian light cavalryman who stayed in France after the war against the Prussians. (Algeria went into revolt during the period of the Commune, and was repressed pretty brutally as well.)

These are characters mostly living on the edge of society and of poverty, with a political system that is unresponsive to their needs and wants and voices that are not heard over the shouts of the rich. This is unfortunately probably relatable to a lot of people right now! Certainly as a queer designer I often find my anxieties about my future and my place in society are a pathway into these characters’ lives.

But also: one of the things I do when facilitating the game is to remind the players that while the game is often intensely political, those politics will emerge from the situation and the various historical inputs into the game. The best games of Red Carnations on a Black Grave in my experience have been the games when people focus first on their relationships, rivalries, hopes, and fears, and let those flow into the situation formed by the historical events. I mean, I don’t know how to play a revolutionary socialist in 19th century France, and I actually did the research! But I do have some thoughts on how to play a queer person caught up in a tangled love triangle, or an artist afraid of never having her voice heard, or someone trying to figure out how to keep food on the table. In that way I think most players can find a way to understand and relate to their characters.

The Kickstarter image for Red Carnations on a Black Grave with three people dressed in red bandanas and period clothing for 19th century France surrounded by buildings with columns, storefronts, and trees. The tagline is "a story game of resistance."

What decisions did you have to make in design to encourage the complicated relationships and drama you want to see?

I have a story about that! When I first started designing the game, I knew the characters were going to be the most important part of the game so all my early work was concentrated on trying to come up with plausible candidates and thinking about how they related. I knew I wanted Louise Michel; I found references to Lodoiska Caweska in several sources and she seemed too interesting to pass up, as was Josephine Marchais. Beyond them I had plans for a physician, a priest, etc. Around October of 2017 I thought I had my final cut ready.

Then I went and saw Peter Watkins’ film La Commune (1871). It’s an amazing and powerful movie, five and half hours long and in French, filmed on a soundstage with over 200 actors, most of whom weren’t professionals; I highly recommend it even with its eccentricities (for example, there’s ahistorical television stations broadcasting from both Versailles and the Commune) and after I got home at 2 AM I realized I had to tear up a lot of what i had started and ground all the characters in the working class.

The other main change came after the early playtests. I originally had several questions for each character printed on their cards; but I quickly realized this was too limiting. One of the earliest rules changes was to create a small deck of questions that the players would randomly draw. These are pretty provocative and leading questions, and answering them fills out the deliberately skeletal relationships between the characters. It also really increases replayability as the setup will change every time the game is run–and there are a lot of ways to answer the questions and use them. At one recent game at Dexcon, one of the players leaned so hard into Marie having been a police informant that she remained a spy for the Versailles government, challenging her father’s beliefs and causing havoc to everyone around her. I’d never seen that in a game before!

How do you support players emotionally and safely in such an intense emotional environment that also deals with difficult political issues?

There are safety tools mandated in the game; right now these are the XCard, Open Door, and Lines and Veils, but I’m exploring the incorporation of other tools. I’ve also asked Jonaya Kemper to help create some exercises to deal with traumas that emerge from the game and do de-roleing after it ends.

This goes back to asking players not to concentrate on the politics of the game when framing scenes–the game is suffused with political content and doesn’t paint the Commune with utopian colors (although the game is of course very sympathetic to its cause). This helps I think ground players and distance them a little bit from the grinding, mechanistic tragedy that will overwhelm their characters.

This is an area that is going to continue to be worked on as we finish development on the game; I’ve had games of Red Carnations that were extremely cathartic and games that were extremely emotionally draining. I’m very invested in making sure that this experience is emotionally deep but also safe for everyone to enjoy as much as possible.

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Thanks so much Catherine for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Red Carnations on a Black Grave on Kickstarter today!

Quick Shot on Hearts of Magic

Content Warning: There are allegations against Erika Shepherd for abusive behavior. I don’t have any links, but have been notified in private and respect the privacy of those raising the concerns, and I’m making this note as part of my policy against perpetrators of harm.

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Hi all, I have a few quick questions with answers from Erika Shepherd on Hearts of Magic: Threads Entangled! It looks like a really interesting game, I hope you like what Erika has to say!

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What is Hearts of Magic, both as a product and as your vision?

Hearts of Magic is a Firebrands Framework game about fey nobles, arcanist-bureaucrats, and anarchist witches vying for control of a magepunk fantasy city, getting in messy entanglements with eachother amid an undeclared magical war. It’s a story told against a backdrop of imperialism and class struggle, but it’s also a story about individuals finding ways to resist that system, and just maybe finding eachother instead.

It’s intended for one-shot play, with zero prep and an easy-to-learn ruleset you can pick up and play; while it has a set of factions and setting elements built in, it’s easy to adapt to other settings/factions, and flexible about how you portray your faction, without defining a lot of the worldbuilding.

It’s also, not to put too fine a point on it, *gay as hell*. An Oblique Discussion is explicitly and intentionally a game about, not being able to say out loud the thing you want to tell somebody, and As A Lesbian, it was important to me to put down in a game that feeling of, talking around something and hoping your were understood. It’s a game about fighting with your friends and allying with your rivals, but most of all, about falling in love with your enemies, and about how love (or something like it) can overcome the things that keep us apart and the systems that tear up our world.

The Hearts of Magic cover with three people in fancy historical dress are standing around a table reading a spellbook. One person is in a purple and pink dress and looks like an elf with pointy ears. The other two are human-looking, and one is stabbing a knife into the table near melting candles. The text reads "Hearts of Magic: Threads Entangled" by Erika Shepherd.
The cover of Hearts of Magic, illustrated by Finn Carey.

What is the design process for a project like this with the ten games in one design, especially when trying to create these messy entanglements?

I have to give almost all the credit to Vincent and Meg Baker, for the overall design – Hearts of Magic started as a 1:1 reskin of Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands, and much of that design is still part of Hearts of Magic. I did, however, remove a couple of the Firebrands games, and added two of my own – Weaving a Spell and A Wizard’s Battle. With that said, I did have to think about the kinds of entanglements I was looking to create. This game is as much the story of The City as it is a story of the characters themselves, and I wanted to make sure to focus as much on the ways characters interact with The City as the ways characters interact with eachother.

In “A Chase”, for instance, I wanted to make sure to fill out the landscape of the city and the range of setting options, for the players, being sure to include a range of physical locations in the City to expand the range of whats possible, there (Like trains! Can’t have magepunk weird-fantasy without trains!). Another example is how A Wizard’s Battle makes sure to include as much about how a violent confrontation affects the City, potentially devastating the surrounding neighborhood.

With that said, the real core of the game is about the interactions between the player characters; by making Weaving A Spell focus closely on the intimacy of doing magic with another person for instance, by keeping the focus of the games on the relationships between the players and not just their factions, I wanted to make sure that there was more binding the players together than keeping them apart.

A fancily dressed horned person with branch-like legs wearing an outfit with a long train that is being carried by a small bug.
Sketch by Sasha Reneau.

What kinds of characters do we see in Hearts of Magic, and what are they likely to encounter mechanically in the various games?

The three factions of Hearts of Magic are the Lords and Ladies, the fey nobles whose families have controlled The City for generations and who hold their power with the magic of nature, promises, and prophecy; the Order, a bureaucratic empire of scholar-mages who use the might of empire to, supposedly, try and protect the world from the dangers of magic; and the Witches, anarchists trying to free the city from nobility and empire alike and teach Magic to the masses. Each faction has their own set of adjectives to describe the characters with, but aside from the faction description and the adjectives, very little about character creation is dictated by the book – you can explicitly be any kind of person you can imagine, certainly not limited to traditional fantasy archetypes. My favorite character I’ve played as is a noble Lady whose body is a musical instrument of glass, wood, and clockwork, and that’s pretty tame on the scale of what the game allows.

The ten games that make up Hearts of Magic are:

  • Solitaire (what were you doing? what have we heard about you?),
  • A Chase (do you have the nerve to pursue?),
  • A Conversation Over Food (at ease together, or a tense meal?),
  • A Dance (when the music ends, will I see you again?),
  • A Free-for-all (why do we fight, and what are the stakes?),
  • Meeting Sword to Sword (steel meets steel, gaze meets gaze – who will blink?),
  • An Oblique Discussion (how can I tell you the things I can not say?)
  • Stealing Time Together (alone, together, with a gentle “may I?”)
  • Weaving a Spell (how do the two of us make magic greater than either alone?)
  • A Wizard’s Battle (can you resist the full strength of my powers?)

The games are all played by taking turns choosing prompts, except for Solitaire, which you play by yourself quietly to establish some context for yourself, and A Conversation Over Food and An Oblique Discussion, which give you the choice between choosing a prompt or engaging in actual improvised conversation. A Chase and Meeting Sword To Sword involve coin-flips to determine the outcome, but all the other games let the players decide the outcomes, and even in the fights, your character’s fate is always in your own hands – only you can decide if your character’s life is on the line, or how badly they are hurt by their opponent’s blows.

A witch with a witch's hat and sparkling coming from their eyes. Their one hand unwraps the other, revealing a bird-like claw.
Sketch by Sasha Reneau.

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Thank you Erika for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Hearts of Magic: Threads Entangled on Kickstarter today – hurry, only a few days left!

Turn is out!

Turn has been released in PDF to backers, and has been officially released to the public at briebeau.itch.io. We hope to have it up on IPR when the print is finished, and further to DriveThruRPG soon! Keep an eye out there.

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Turn is a slice-of-life, rural supernatural tabletop roleplaying game for three to six people. Players are shapeshifters in a small, rural town–able to turn into animals like raccoons, cougars, and bears. They must balance their human lives and habits with their beast lives and instincts, while pursuing acceptance and community with other shifters – and with the mundane humans and beasts that populate the town.

Players and the Town Manager build their town together using a unique town building system, and create the characters who populate it and the wilderness around it. Turn uses the Script Change toolbox to support player comfort and consent, and explores themes of identity, community, self care, and otherness.

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Thank you so, so very much to all of you for the continued and seemingly endless support for the success of this project.

As a reminder, you can submit for a community copy if you’re in need as a marginalized member of the community. We’ll provide PDFs with no issue, and print until we run out.

Two horses on a green hillside in front of some trees.
The horses on the farm where I grew up in a small, small town. <3