What is the Deck of Many Names, both as a product and as your vision?
The
Deck of Many Names is a 120-card deck designed to help flesh out minor NPCs on
the fly during a game of Dungeons & Dragons (or similar fantasy games).
Each card has a name, fantasy species, gender, rough age category, and quick
roleplay tidbit. When players engage an NPC who was originally a faceless bit
of background, you can just draw a card and immediately have enough information
to handle that unexpected bit of conversation. The deck is big enough that you
could generate two such NPCs every week for over two years before repeating
anybody.
I’ve seen big names like Matt Mercer suggest having a list of names prepped for the same purpose, but I thought the solution could be better. After all, with a prepared list of names (or online name generator), you’re still left having to decide details like gender on the fly. In addition to that being a bit of work, I’ve seen too many games where every such NPC turns out to be a human man. With the Deck of Many Names, you can skip some of those decisions while also ensuring that your array of NPCs includes a spectrum of genders, fantasy species, and age ranges. Basically, it’s a project meant to make D&D games both easier and more inclusive.
What kind of information about the characters are on the cards so you can easily reference it?
Each
card includes a name (given name only), gender (depicted on a spectrum), an age
category (young, middle, old), fantasy species, and a short bit of text
offering a quirk or other roleplaying cue.
The information is not extensive, because things like combat stats or personal history/occupation are likely to either not come up or already be established by the time you draw a card. For example, you may have just finished a combat against a group of bandits but your players surprised you by taking one captive to interrogate. You already know they’re a bandit and you’re done with their stats, but now you need to be able to play out a dialogue. Just draw a card and you’ve got their name and other relevant details. Or maybe you thought your players would just stop into the shop and get what they needed, but instead they try to start a relationship with the shopkeeper. You already know they’re a shopkeeper, but now you need those personal details that will enable a conversation; that’s what you get by drawing a card.
Of course, you can use these cards other times besides on the fly. Are you planning a campaign about an evil necromancer and don’t know how to decide their name, gender, etc? Draw a card. Do you need a starting point for creating your next PC? Draw a card and go from there. It really helps with a lot of things!
What kind of NPCs will we see in the deck, in background, ability, etc.?
You might draw a card and discover that the NPC in question is a younger human man named Abdul, or an older nonbinary gnome named Umpen, or a medium-aged tiefling named Osah. Each would also include a minor roleplay hook, like “can’t stop moving their hands when they talk,” or “uses verbal fillers a lot”. There are all sorts of combinations!
Hi All! I havea quick shot today with Michael Dunn-O’Connor about Goblinville, which isavailableonPDFand in print! Check out what it’s about below!
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What is Goblinville, both as a product and as your vision?
Goblinville is a character-driven dungeon crawler that works for short, punchy sessions and long campaigns. The town itself is the key source of adventure and improving it is a core part of character advancement. The requirement that all player characters are goblins has shifted the tone of play (compared to other fantasy adventure rpgs). All the characters are from the same community, so there is an assumed shared interest. And the community is in peril, in a way reinforced by the procedures of play. The resulting spirit of underdog collaboration makes it stand out from other games in an often fraught genre.
Finally, the element of fantasy adventure games that I most take issue with is the portrayal of heroic player characters killing and stealing from subhuman, monstrous enemies. Goblinville subverts this by casting the goblins as protagonists, with cares and motivations and a distinct society. It doesn’t guarantee thoughtful dissection of the genre, but it intentionally avoids reasserting the worst of its cliches.
What are the basic mechanics like in Goblinville and how do they support the character-driven focus?
The character-driven focus of Goblinville starts during Goblin creation, the first step of a new game. When each player is creating their goblin, the rules tell them to choose or roll for a few aspects of your character. These aspects give a lot of texture to the character (rather than being a set of numbers): your job, your boss, a formative experience, and a notable physical trait and personality trait.
Then, all the players pause. In turn, they introduce
their Goblin to the table. The other players ask questions and
discuss. Then they agree on a Title for that goblin: a unique moniker
that sets them apart from the rest of the town while affirming their place in
it. They also decide on an ‘Esteem Trait’ for that goblin. How do
they fit into the adventuring group, what sets them apart from the other
goblins at this table?
These Titles and Traits are the most important part of a
character, because they are the only (limited) source of bonus dice for a
roll. Rolls in Goblinville are always full of compromise; getting to add
a die for a relevant Trait or Title (and drop your lowest result) lets you
mitigate those compromises.
At the end of a session, every player shares their goblin’s
defining moment. This could be a notable accomplishment, a new insight, or a
significant struggle. The other players at the table grant them a new
Title based on their actions. Traits can change over time in a similar
way.
The result of these design choices is that advancement
(gaining and changing Titles/ Traits) is linked to what is important to your
character in the fiction, and to your character’s dynamic with the rest of the
group. Every session ends with: how did you (as players) see my
character change? And the answer matters, because it’s tied to the dice
mechanics that come up every time the goblins take a risky action.
What is one of the most important ways you show goblins to be different than the standard portrayal, beyond their role as protagonists?
The humanizing details of being a goblin in Goblinville seep
in through play. The first things that become clear are the
character aspects in goblin creation. You have a job and a boss.
You have traits that goblins notice about you and a reputation (for good or
ill). You are part of a community. At the beginning of a session,
you also commit to an outlook and a goal. You have motivations that are
distinct from the other goblins. The prompts don’t push you toward
creating a stereotypical goblin, every prompt suggests that your character has
an inner life and relationships.
Some players still initially play up greedy or bloodthirsty goblins. And this is maybe a style of play that folks are looking for. Where this tends to become more nuanced is related to the improvement of Goblinville itself. Character specific advancement is fairly limited. You can only have three Traits and three Titles at a time. You can advance in rank a few times, but the added benefits are marginal. The most meaningful advancement over time comes from ‘unlocking’ new locations in town. To do this you need to find missing goblins, or convince goblins with a particular expertise to join your community. You need to repair broken equipment or go adventuring to find alternatives. The game repeatedly rewards you for caring about and investing in the town where you live. There is no reward for being greedy, selfish, or “evil”.
I have an interview today with L A Wilga and James Lader on the new roleplaying game Sundown, which is currently on Kickstarter! It sounds like a really interesting new game and I’m excited for it. Check out the interview below, and the Kickstarter too!
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Sundown’s cover art by Mayara Sampaio.
Tell me a little about Sundown. What excites you about it?
L A: So, Sundown is a rules light tabletop roleplaying game. It’s set in a pre-industrial frontier where, instead of magic, we have “science.” Science is the intersection of two things. Wonders: inventions that just make everyone’s life easier, and changing: the art of taking someone and reshaping their flesh. In fewer words, engineering and biology
There are two main facets to the game: surviving the wild, with fauna just as changed and dangerous as the folk, and surviving the politics, with a power struggle in every town and a populace that needs you but doesn’t want you.
I certainly get excited to face down giant winged frogs and angry murderbirds, my pink undershave flowing in the wind, but I find catharsis in the politics. You have to navigate finding work, getting paid, finding a place to stay, making friends, and avoiding the authorities as someone disdained by most of society. It’s an experience I think most in our queer rpg community will recognize.
It’s kind of like a cyberpunk game with the punk aesthetic, the politics, and the transhumanism, but if you took away its technology and sent it to the West Marches.
J L: I’m really excited about how much control you have over your body in Sundown. Changes are probably my favorite part of our game, because as a trans man, being able to reshape your body on a whim is the ultimate fantasy. And I’m sure other people think that’s super cool too.
The other thing I’m excited about is intentionally including politics in the premise. Social strife is the lifeblood of this game, where more of the people are monsters than the fiends. I really like that the direction of your career can be toppling the ruling class in Cragsmouth, or becoming a thief-assassin who saves themselves at all costs. You make your way through Sundown by surviving how best you can, and it really mirrors to me how to navigate a world where a lot of the power isn’t yours.
You talk about the Changing. How does Changing work, and are there any special benefits or consequences from it?
L A: This is a good question, because people tend to assume that you just drink a potion and seconds later you have claws or something.
Changes are made by a scientist specialized in changing, and in a laboratory devoted to changing. You get stuffed into an egg-like pod with the changing agents and a medium called lungwater that keeps you alive for the weeks or months your changes take. Breaking down flesh and building it back up takes a lot of time and energy. When you break out of your egg, you’re ravenously hungry, everything is too bright, and you just want to go back to sleep.
Changing agents are derived from plants and animals out in the wild that have already been observed to do… something to people. Indigoji turns your skin purple, for instance. Modern changes were discovered by blending random assortments together and logging the resulting effect on humans, not all of them consenting test subjects.
J L: Changing is arduous. It really does mirror the transition process in the real world, but it’s less limited. It’s expensive to get access to changes. Special equipment and making sure you don’t die in stasis isn’t cheap. The time cost, too, matters. And some changes can stress your body. It’s not a perfect science, and you can end up with additional things that identify you as a changeling, like black nails when you asked for super strength.
We also did name the pods where Changes happen eggs. That’s not a very subtle metaphor I think. If people know you’re a changeling, too, they’ll treat you very different. The best reaction you can expect in most of Sundown is mild disdain, which is very real. So if people know you’re a changeling, that alone is a consequence.
This was labeled frogbeast, which I think is such a fun name!
How do your identities as queer and trans (or queer/trans identities in general) reflect in the broader world beyond the Changing? Do they relate to Wonders, or even to the politics?
L A: We didn’t really use wonders to say anything about queerness or transness, they’re kinda just neat things, like goggles that let you see at night. We definitely do intend, though, for guns to be a symbol of the class war. Did we mention there’s guns? They’re more like railguns than gunpowder guns. They use a fictional material called floatstone.
There is this wonder called pitch, though. It’s a black syrup thing that’s injected, and it knits your body back together after some nasty injuries. The catch, though, is if you use too much, you run the risk of becoming a pitchblood. Basically, your blood is replaced with pitch. You lose twenty years off your life, but you’re near invincible. I think some folk can sympathize with that sort of deal-with-the-devil transformation?
Beau’s Note: This specific one reminds me of my own experiences with lithium as someone with bipolar disorder, to be honest.
L A, continued: The politics is really where our queerness comes through. For one, if you have any sort of visible change, which includes things like colored hair, over half of the people in Sundown won’t really want anything to do with you. Not to mention you’re already othered because of your profession. The isolationists of Sundown really don’t like outsiders doing their work for them. Too bad they need drifters like you for things like translation, bounty hunting, and trailblazing.
J L: Definitely. The otherism experienced in Sundown based on being a drifter is pretty much a direct metaphor for how it feels to be disdained and desired. Very much as a queer person it’s easy to feel consumed and discarded at the earliest opportunity, and since you’re a travelling contractor, it’s even more direct.
I think, honestly, the other parts of the system also show some of the good parts of being queer, too. When you create your character, for example, your character is rooted in the people at your table. One of the traits that embodies who you are is defined by your relationship to another character at the table. Drifters often are building an intentional community, a network of people who know where the good work is, who you should work with on what jobs, where it’s safe to travel, and sharing stories of your best exploits. I think that really reflects how queer and trans folx band together to keep each other safe and loved in a world that is otherwise hostile to them.
James Lader.
How are things like changing and wonders, and those politics you discuss, mechanized or formalized in the game?
J L: So all of these things involve infamy, which is the currency we use in Sundown. Infamy isn’t coin, though, it’s a representation of your influence in the area, and how well people know you. The more infamy you have garnered, the more leverage you have. Political action that earns infamy takes place during heats, the jobs drifters take on every month. You might slay fiends, debate a public official, steal from a guild, or lead an uprising.
Getting wonders and changes requires you to spend your infamy to obtain them. Some wonders are special and rare enough to use your downtime between heats as well as your infamy to obtain them. Changes always take downtime, and usually cost infamy.
One of the neat things about infamy is that you only have so much influence you can gain, and once you use that leverage, it’s gone. You have to think carefully about what you want to achieve and use that influence wisely.
L A: Ok so James mentioned heats. That’s basically an adventure, and downtime is the time between them. We intend for downtime to be played kind of like play-by-post between sessions
When you make improvements to your character that involve big investments of time, like learning a new skill or rebuilding your fleshy prison, you do that during your downtime. Spending your infamy on changes is just one of the things you can spend your downtime on.
J L:Downtime is when most of your character improvements can happen, so you have to choose really carefully what you want to spend your time on between jobs. Sundown is a hard place to be and choosing to better your traits or gain cat ears can be life or death. It’s really tricky because you can also only get so many things before not having any more infamy to gain.
What have you done with the game to support players in exploring these relatively serious subjects, including consent and safety mechanics and other aspects of your design?
J L: One of the first sections of the book is a consent tool we developed based on our stress mechanic. Stress is sort of a measure of your character’s health, and it worked really well to measure how safe a topic was for the players.
We also reinforce throughout the book to be mindful of others at the table, to use additional safety and consent tools you might be more familiar with, and to check in with your fellow players.
These are really hard topics and not everyone wants certain themes in the game, and we went out of our way to remind people to check in, and check often.
L A: Regarding serious subjects, I wrote from my own experience as a poor queer person, and I think the queerphobia and classism and Sundown really reflect that
For the experiences I haven’t lived, we took on two non-white sensitivity editors. Their input was invaluable for fleshing out the cultures that have made their way to Sundown in a respectful manner.
Even though I’m disabled too, James has far more lived experience in that regard. The section on disabled drifters in the intro section is entirely his doing.
Every time there’s a “make sure you check in with your fellow players” regarding a marginalized identity, all four of us had a hand in it.
Content Warning: Since this article was posted, multiple individuals have come forward with statements credibly addressing Swordsfall a.k.a. Brandon Dixon’s abuse of power and violation of consent. With respect to their shared experiences, I am putting a note on this article to ensure that their voices are heard and future readers are aware. Many statements are not public so I’ve only linked to the public statement. Please do not direct any harassment to the survivors who have raised these concerns.
What is Swordsfall’s Tikor, both as a product and as your vision?
Swordsfall is almost like a platform. It encompasses the setting book, “Welcome to Tikor”, a RPG, a comic book and even novels. So it’s truly a world that I can use to do all sorts of creative projects with. As fans start to find favorite characters and place, I want to be able to go to those things and do EVEN more. The setting book is my way of opening the door to that world.
How do you consider Swordsfall and Tikor to be special in their content and design?
Well, no one else is
really doing Afrofuturism like I am. It’s why I’m saying its part of the
Afropunk sub-genre. It has it’s own style. That punk style. But instead of
being anti-capitalism, it’s anti-colonialism. Or really, a world re-imagined
where that was never a factor. Then you have the art. T’umo Mere has a style of
his own. His art is bold, striking and dripping in real African lore. He’s from
Botswana so he’s been happy to dig into his own culture and the ones around him
for source material.
What were some choices you made in the art and presentation of Swordsfall and Tikor to show the values and style of the setting?
A couple of big things we’re focusing on are color and patterns. African cultures have almost used color to tell a story. You’re never going to a picture where everyone is draped in black. Those colors and what they mean are important, and we’re making sure they’re in Swordsfall. The other big thing in African cultures are patterns. Different cultures had their own symbols and patterns, but almost all had them. And they meant something. It could be mundane, it could be a call to a spirit. But the combination of colors and patterns often told a story. And Tikor will have that as well.
Full disclosure: I was given a free review copy and I think James is pretty rad.
Photos in this review are by Brie Beau Sheldon.
The book itself, The Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide, by James D’Amato.
I approached the review in a weird fashion, to try to get a full perspective. The book itself is basically a tool to help you build the background of your character for RPG play. Some elements of it seem to trend towards games with levels, but I think this could be used for most roleplaying. It uses die rolls for randomizers at times, but also a lot of it is pick lists and freewriting to flesh out the character.
The way I approached this was to have three separate sessions of exercises (there are so many included in the book)! with three different people, and each of them had their own individual characters, while I kept the same character through the whole test. Each of the character had varying levels of previous information – mine, for example, was made up on the spot! I also spent a fair amount of time looking at the book
The book itself has a fun orange, black, and greenish color scheme and is relatively well organized. I will note there are a few spaces where the text contrast is not as comfortable for me to read, but aside from that, the book is pretty clear to follow and read.
The biggest comment I’d have about this book? The questions were often wonderfully open. I am not good with constraints on my creativity – I like a lot of free space to wonder along. There is guidance for a lot of the questions, plus the random rolls, but enough of the questions allowed me to explore where I wanted to go.
I really appreciate James’s thoughtfulness in providing subjects that range from death to relationships to magical objects and places – it feels like there’d be something here for basically everybody! Special love for the “Damn Merlinials” exercise, too. The exercises vary in complexity, with some including random rolls resulting in skipping forward sections, and others just simple fill-in-the-blanks, and some even have a combination of methods to answer all of the questions.
Overall, I think that it’s really useful tool for someone who wants to create deep, complex characters with a lot of history, flavor, and support for their perspectives and beliefs.
A note on pronouns: One thing that I didn’t like in the book is that all of it uses he or she pronouns, even when it’s quite clunky. This was also noted by all three of the other players I tested with. I do know, however, that James didn’t want this in the book and he even consulted with me on how to address it, and I wrote a statement to his publisher. I appreciate James’s intent a lot and wish his publisher had followed it. I bring this up because I know I have many nonbinary readers and the use of binary pronouns from one of our own can feel a little jarring, and I want you to know that James had the best intentions, but couldn’t push it through. That’s basically the only major issue I ran into with this book though!
I’m including the full text of the responses to the prompts I played through, but they only include the answers to the questions – for those you’ll need to get your own copy of the Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide by James D’Amato on Amazon or at Barnes & Noble!
My products are temporarily on reverse sale to gear up for tax time I’ve increased the prices by a very nice percentage – hopefully to help me get through this year’s taxes! Buy all of the products for a cool nice $69 – yes, that’s more expensive. Just like taxes!
My goal for the sale is $420. I will not use it for blazing it, just to give a boost to my funds to pay taxes owed. It runs until 4/1/19!
We recently posted an update about Turn’s progress, and it’s going pretty well! We may soon be closing pre-orders (which are still open here!) if all goes well with layout, and we are pushing on thru with the
stretch goals. I wanted to talk a little about Turn in playtesting, and a
big thing that happened recently in our longest-run playtest.
Just a picture of a cat to start us off right.
Some people may have heard me talk on Twitter about my character Beau Taggart, who is a professional hunter, the game’s Late Bloomer, a Cougar, and super gay. In his early character background during character generation, we established that Beau had turned for the first time only recently, about six months ago (as required for the Late Bloomer role). When he turned for the first time, he his truck had just been hit by a drunk driver while he was driving down a winding back road.
He got out of the car to check on the driver, but the driver was behaving aggressively, and tried to punch him. Beau knew something felt wrong, but he was scared and panicked, and responded by hitting the guy back. He didn’t know that his body had started to turn, that his super strength had grown. The hit was so hard it broke the guy’s neck, and while Beau was realizing with horror he’d killed a man, he also turned into a cougar for the first time.
This gif is not an accurate representation of Beau. It’s just funny!
His animal instincts kicked in – he hid the body, and ate some of it, leaving his claw and teeth marks on it, desperately hungry in light of the force turn. In his panic, he was found by Camellia, a fellow shapeshifter (Overachiever, Bison) who helped him get back to human form, and over time, he learned better how to calm down. He didn’t tell Camellia, or anyone else, about the drunk driver, harboring his accidental crime as yet another secret.
Not many Turn characters have super tragic backstories, and this one isn’t even all that bad (sometimes people accidentally kill people, and those are small town secrets I’ve heard), but I knew there was a risk of it being an element when people played so I built a character with a high risk background to see how fast we could ramp up to exposure. It still took over a year at our slow playing pace – which is ideal. If we were playing weekly, it would happen more quickly, but it paces out well.
How did I plan this out? Well, I knew the number of exposure marks for towns and town characters, I knew the average number of scenes per session (5-8), how many of those typically risk exposure (4-7), and how many sessions each character is generally in (3-6). I knew that having a higher risk background meant that I would end up on the higher range of everything, and that Beau was starting with a generally positive reputation as a Late Bloomer.
That doesn’t mean I was ready for the exposure to hit max!
Turn has ten marks on the exposure track for the town. You can get positive or negative marks, based on the type of interaction that causes them. You take the marks when you’ve done something that might cause someone to suspect your shifter identity – it can be behavioral, it can be physical, etc. Something like slipping up and saying you spent all night in the woods, or maybe your eyes shine oddly in a photograph.
Beau’s track grew and grew over time, including his town character (TC) tracks, which are separate. One TC of his was Diego, his best friend who knew everything but this secret. Early on in the campaign, I played Beau to slowly reveal his identity as a shifter to Diego, purposefully planning positive encounters. He managed to do so successfully, which was good, because Beau was truly in love with Diego. They later became partners, but it was still pretty quiet, because the town was relatively conservative in that regard. Their own professional hunter in love with his buddy? Beau wasn’t sure they could handle it.
There are three results you can get when you become fully exposed to a TC or the town itself: reviled, which is the lowest result, and results either in a toxic and risky relationship with the TC or you getting run out of town or dealing with violence; revealed, which is the middling result and means you may risk comforts, safety, or gossip but you’ll be able to stay in town; and known, which is the best result, and means you’re accepted in the town or by the TC.
With Diego, Beau got known, so he was able to get together with Diego, stay friends and more, and not have any risk increased from it. Over time Beau had some more positive and some more negative interactions with people in the town, just like you do – simple things that cause conflict last longer in people’s minds than we thing. It was pretty balanced. But, rumors arose when a body was found in the woods that it turned out matched the drunk driver, whose car was found, too.
This combined with Beau acting out of sorts because he found out who his birth mother was and it led to a spectacular new ability – the ability to turn into a Raven, as well! These events combined led to an exposure roll, which is 2d6 plus the exposure track, added up based on the +’s and -‘s on the track, and a + for any known TCs. I rolled poorly, but had enough based on the roll, the track, and Diego, I got the middling result – revealed. That meant no immediate danger, but it meant time had come to face facts.
The rumors spread faster than Beau could do anything for, and before he could even come clean to his closest friends (Camellia and Iris, his cousin and coworker), the cops were at Camellia’s door looking for Beau. He managed to tell Diego what happened, and Diego supported him, but he was going to have to deal with the police at some point. He decided to turn himself in. Meanwhile, on the in-fiction Facebook, his fellow townspeople were spreading memes of the Cougar Killer, claiming he’d murdered the man and mutilated the bodies. This is something that would eventually die out without the police arresting him, but in the moment it was challenging!
A little bit of coordination led to him having enough time to sneak past the deputy posted at Camellia’s (where his truck was*) to tell Camellia and Iris what was going on, then turn himself in with some legal support obtained by Camellia. He confessed to fighting with the guy, but stopped short of admitting to murder. The cops didn’t have enough evidence to keep him. In the end, Beau will still live in Cauldron Springs, unable to leave easily because of the ties that hold him there, and hopefully happy with Diego (because that cat’s outta the bag).
This cat, specifically. a Cougar, by Cecilia Ferri
But, once you’re brought in for something this serious, it’s hard for people to drop their suspicions. Combining it with Beau becoming obviously out as queer since Diego went with him to the police station, Beau’s once stellar social standing is pretty decreased. He’ll be able to survive, but he’s not who he once was to these townspeople – many of them will go on believing he actually murdered someone, others will simply struggle with his identity especially when tied with the stigma of being questioned for murder.
So basically it all worked out? Like this is exactly how this sort of result should be narratively. Maybe some people might choose to have the shifter identity be the forefront and have it be more fantastical, some people might want to diminish the fantasy even further, and either is okay – just keeping in mind that people rarely want to believe the most fantastical things, even though they’ll often use fantastical things as metaphor or illusion for the reality.
The pacing for the exposure to max out worked perfectly, the narrative surrounding it hit all the right notes, and all I did was start with some trouble baked in, like so many characters do. It meant a lot to me to play this character** and have it play out so true to what I designed. The game works, it works really good, and it tells the stories I want to be told.
I can’t ask for more, honestly.
I’m curious, what have you worked on in games that you played out in playtesting or just when you released the game that made you have that, like, damn, I did it! moment? A moment with the math lining up just right, or the narrative tone hitting the right button? Share it in the comments, and please share this on social media to talk about those moments of design success!
*Beau constantly forgot his truck at Camellia’s, where he often went to have tea to calm down and to hang out, then turned into a cougar to hit the woods. It actually became a feature on the map! Oops.
**Who some might have guessed was a test run for my chosen name
Tell me a little about Mysthea: Legends From the Borderlands. What excites you about it?
So! Mysthea: Legends From the Borderlands is a game of post-war rebuilding and divided loyalties in a geomantic fantasy world. It’s set in a city that’s in territory contested by two major powers, and now those powers are at war. The war front has passed over this city and is now a distant rumble, and the city is free again – though much worse for wear. Each player creates a faction active in the city, whether they’re an ancient order, a new organisation dedicated to refugee support, or sent by one of the great powers to rebuild the city and pursue their patron’s agenda. You’ll make a viewpoint character from your faction, dive into the politics and struggles of the wounded city, and see how it changes from flashpoint to flashpoint.
I’m excited about:
Telling a zoomed-in story: your group will find out how a single city grows and how its people change over the span of a few decades. You’ll craft this city and get to know its districts, its politics, its festivals.
A dive into weird fantasy: Mysthea is a world defined by the crystals scattered over it by a prehistoric impact. These crystals warp the environment and its creatures, but also resonate with human thought. What does a society look like where everyone has limited telekinesis, and can use these crystals to build, fight, control beasts, craft prosthetics, etc? I’m interested in finding out!
A game of empire and liberation. At least some of the player factions will be coming into the city as liberators, having ousted the previous occupiers. But the ousting wasn’t clean, and the faction’s patrons aren’t altruists. As you play you’ll deal with what happens after liberation, as each faction must reckon with their obligations to their patrons, the city, and each other. We’re hoping the fantasy setting will provide the needed distance to really dig into this thorny topics, and have hired cultural consultants to try and ensure we do so respectfully.
I like this zoomed in look, and I’m curious about the
flashpoints! What does it feel like in play to go from moment to moment in this
world, and how is that represented in the game?
A flashpoint starts with
you defining its core issue: why have we decided to pick up this city’s story
here? Maybe a battalion of soldiers has arrived at the city and demanded
supplies? Perhaps a shower of crystal meteors have hit the city, causing destruction
and warped the area? Or maybe one of the player factions has decided they’ve
had enough, and is going to try and seize control of the city?
So – you’ve set up this
flashpoint. To play through it, you’ll jump between the actions of Houses
(slow, ponderous, and vast) and Heroes – agile and dynamic, but with their own
priorities. We’ve designed the two layers to feel very different in play. House
actions add new elements to the map and reshape the city’s balance of power,
but use up a limited pool of Decrees. The hero phase feels more like standard
PbtA, something like Monster of the Week. Your group of characters have a
mission to deal with, and as you play out the moment-to-moment drama of that
conflict you’ll test your bonds with your fellows and discover new truths about
the world. The two phases flow into each other. Your Houses’ actions set up
threats and opportunities for your Heroes to deal with, while your Heroes’
on-the-ground experience of this city and its people can completely change your
Houses’ priorities and goals.
How do you approach the
idea of consent and agency in a world where people can control things with
their mind, able to break rules with a thought?
One of the interesting things about magic in Mysthea is that it adds agency, and its most powerful effects need close friends working together on a common goal. It’s a link between the mental and the material and has been used in-setting to craft crystal prostheses amputees can telekinetically control, and literally give agency to constructed beings of stone and crystal.
There’s the other element
too – consent and agency. One person acting on their own can only perform a few
tricks with crystal shards and boost their normal actions – to do more, you
need to work together. By calling on the aid of those who have strong bonds
with you you add their wisdom to yours, letting you work together to go beyond
human limits, evoke world-warping auras and more.
The fact that magical
potency comes from close bonds and common goals instead of years of arcane
research and expensive components is really interesting! What sort of society
does that lead to? How does that change how minority groups organise and lobby
for their rights? How do autocrats maintain their power, knowing what power
lies in their subject’s hands if they work together? I’m interested to find
out!
I didn’t ask questions about the monsters but this thing is RAD.
I was just asking people
about making games that happen after the liberation! What do you think are the
challenges in designing a game with this focus, and what’s exciting about them?
One challenge is definitely
the messy complexity of these situations. You can’t turn back the clock – the
occupation happened, and it and your ‘liberation’ left scars on this place.
Among the city’s citizens you’ll have those who want to restore the old ways,
and those who suffered under that regime and want to keep moving forward. Among
the liberators, you’ll have isolationists wanting to minimise investment and
occupiers trying to claim this city permanently.
That’s a really interesting
social situation to drop players into, but it’s vital to keep the difference
between dogma and the true situation clear. Part of our solution is to make
sure the game prioritises humanity over ideology. We want to humanise all
parties involved, though that definitely doesn’t mean presenting all positions
as valid.
Finally, we’re aware of the
limits of our own perspectives, and have hired consultants to make sure we
treat sensitive matters with the appropriate degree of tact and care.
What are some of the more
complex aspects of designing a game focused on a whole city, rather than just a
few characters?
First, you have to treat
the city as a character in its own right, and give it a presence at the table.
The map of the city is central to the game: you begin by placing down its
districts and landmarks, and as you play you’ll introduce factors to it
representing people, places and events crucial to the current flashpoint.
It’s also important to
maintain the link between people and their community – to the extent that one
of the GM’s principles is ‘name everyone, and know who backs them’. There’s no
lone wolves in Legends From the Borderlands, and no faceless mooks – everyone
has their own identity, and their own place in the city’s cultural fabric.
Of course, the easiest way to make something feel alive is to have it change. The timeskips between flashpoints are here to establish that, letting the city grow physically and culturally – each time you jump ahead, you’ll describe ways the city’s appearance has changed, and a new festival that’s sprung up to remember the previous flashpoint.
Tell me a little about vs. KICKSTARTER. What excites you about it?
vs.
KICKSTARTER began as three small roleplaying games based on Phil Reed’s vs.
Monsters. More accurately, they are inspired by his vs. Outlaws, a
pared-down Wild West-themed version of his original game. That game was
produced on both sides of a multi-panel screen that folds down to a 5-1/2″
square.
A
bit over a decade ago, Phil opened the vsM Engine up for others to use. At that
time, I had worked a bit on three games based on vsM, but I wound up focusing
on completing a BFA and plans for development were pushed back. A few months
ago, there was a discussion on twitter about one of the settings I had
developed as a vsM-powered game. I looked back at the old files and while that
particular game needed a lot of work, I saw that vs. MARS was nearly done. So
much so, that a bit of trimming and it would fit on that folded screen
template. From there, the other two initial games featured in the campaign
followed.
vs.
MARS is a game about an alien invasion in a small town. I’ve always been a fan
of survival fiction — things like zombie movies where the focus and threat is about
the other survivors but there is some external threat pressuring the survivors.
vs. MARS really slots into that role. The unlocked expansion opens the game up
to leading a resistance on occupied Earth.
vs.
MIRRORSHADES is a fast-playing cyberpunk game. I love the cyberpunk genre and
my hope is this game falls a bit more into the social change/punk part of
cyberpunk rather than the chrome fetishization side. An unlocked two-panel
expansion to this adds fantasy races and magic to the MegaCity — it’s the
most-requested addition to any cyberpunk game.
vs.
PIRATES is a game in the golden age of piracy from our childhood memories. The
already-unlocked expansion came first: I’ve always wanted to play a game that
was a mashup of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and The Pirates of the
Caribbean. Without the expansion, you’re playing more of a Treasure
Island or Black Sails game. With the expansion, you’ve got undead
pirates, the kraken, and cursed treasure.
We’ve
recently unlocked vs. EMPIRE, a game that isn’t so much “Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off” as it is “Star Wars with
the serial numbers filled in Play-Doh”.
Initially, I thought the campaign would need $400 to fund and would probably top out at $600 or about 40 or 45 backers. I am excited about the response to the campaign so far! As I write this, the campaign is 500% funded and we are nearing 100 backers — that’s twice the number of backers and nearly twice the amount pledged past a point in my initial spreadsheet where I wrote “we’re probably dreaming at this point”. That these small games are inspiring people I don’t even know to come on board and help make them a reality is just something that surprised me — it really impressed me.
Great!
What about this particular mechanical system appealed to you to use in such a
variety of settings, and what have you changed to suit them?
When
I started designing my initial vs. game, I was interested in survival fiction.
Rather than being the proactive monster hunters of vs. Monsters where
your characters decide to hunt down monsters, having a setting where you are
forced to take on that role appealed to me. You’re a regular person and then
something happens: how do you react to that?
I
had two different main games I was developing which had the same underlying
elements: normality is interrupted by an invasion; you are simultaneously being
hunted and take on the role of the hunters. One game was somewhat campy, the
other somewhat serious. They combined and the theme of vs. MARS wound up
engulfing the other.
Since
my initial designs, my preferred game style has changed from one where we’re
just players reacting to the twists and turns of the GM’s story to more of a
style where there is player collaboration in they way the story is shaped. In
vs. MARS, there are rules for scene framing where a player answers two
questions: “What is this scene about?” and “Where does it take
place?” Adding an element like this helps to emulate the type of fiction
vs. MARS emulates — in a setting like an alien invasion, one major element is
isolation or separation. By adding scene framing, our protagonists don’t have
to be in a small clump of adventuring heroes all the time.
When
there is damage involved, conflict resolution now incorporates the suits of
cards drawn to speed up determining damage taken. The cyberpunk game, vs.
MIRRORSHADES, has a Metal stat that is used whenever cyberware augmentations
are used. To reflect the setting’s concept that cyberware is an improvement,
using Metal makes the highest card revealed a suit that trumps all others. It
effectively guarantees that you’re going to have some effect on the scene if
you use these augments.
You know I love small towns, so I’m curious, what do you do to make the town small and still feel worth being in for vs. MARS?
During
character creation, one of the things you would choose for your survivor is
their concept: something about what they did before the invasion and what they
want. This desire is something that should tie them into the town. The current
example character is Tabitha Masters, a French major at ETU who wants to get
home to make sure her family is safe.
Stock
locations are listed for a few things found in and around the town that convey
the theme of isolation.
What have you done to make fantasy character types exciting and respectful for cyberpunk, mechanically or setting-wise?
To
get to that, I have to work through the constraints of the project. Whenever I
see a new game come out the first question I always see asked is: “Can I
play Star Wars with it?” (Which is where vs. EMPIRE comes from.)
The second question is: “Can I play Shadowrun with it?” When
developing the cyberpunk vs. game, it seemed that a straight cyberpunk game
with an option to add on the fantasy elements would fit the limited space I had
available.
With
vs. MAGICSHADES, a player chooses their character’s heritage, which adds a
simple one-use bonus to the character. Some implied setting material, such as
the elf nation of Tir nAill claiming all elves as citizens, start to bring in
some classic tropes of pseudo-Shadowrun.
How are your pirates and their world different from and the same as those we most commonly see in media?
The
tagline for vs. PIRATES says the setting is based on the way we remember tales
of pirates from our childhood. I feel it is more cartoonish than serious. Even
though you could play something straight like the Black Sails television
show, I anticipate the default play style would be more like The Pirates of
the Caribbean if one stripped out all the supernatural aspects.
The
way vs. PIRATES works is we establish the approach one will take to a
situation. Our stats in the game are Swashbuckling and Parley. Basically if
you’re fighting, your approach uses Swashbuckling. If you’re not, it’s Parley.
An antagonist also has approaches, but they are based on their role. So a
pirate antagonist would be drawing more cards if they were doing something
piratey and fewer if they were doing something outside their role.
Going
back to that default play style, adding in the vs. DAVY JONES expansion bumps
the game towards that Buffy + Pirates of the Caribbean game, so
we can add some more supernatural elements to the antagonists and their goals.
What more do you have in store both for those already-achieved stretch goals and anything else to come?
I
really don’t want to overextend myself on this, which is the first Kickstarter
campaign I’ve handling myself. While I have been collaborating and working on
over a dozen others, I’ve seen a few easy ways how a successful campaign can be
twisted into become a financial nightmare.
I’ve
spoken to a few other campaign creators when it looked like we were close to
unlocking the vs. EMPIRE stretch goal. Nearly every one told me to not add
anything else that I don’t feel comfortable with. At this point, the project is
funded and will be delivered — with the planning I’ve done for the campaign,
it’s all good. I don’t want to take on additional costs that could disrupt
fulfillment of the project.
So
right now, the last stretch goal was “I’ll add a second topping to a
celebratory pizza when this is all over.”
However, I have plans for further developing some of those earlier vsM games into this format, including one game designed to be a 1-on-1 one-shot. I’ll see how fulfillment goes for this campaign first!
What is CAPERS Noir, both as a product and as your vision?
CAPERS Noir is the first
supplement for my award-winning CAPERS RPG. It provides new character options
and new GM tools as well as an alternative setting for the game. It takes the
core game setting of the 1920s Prohibition era and moves it forward
twenty years to the WW2 years. This alternative setting shifts from
gangster shoot-em-ups to moody, atmospheric, crime noir stories filled with
mystery and some horror elements. The additional rules and tools help fill out
this noir setting but are also perfectly usable in the core Roaring Twenties
setting.
This supplement is a test case for me, to see if CAPERS has the legs to become a full game line. The early success of the Kickstarter makes me feel it does. The fan base (old and new) have been very enthusiastic, supportive, and looking forward to seeing more. I have plans to publish at least two more supplements, each about the same size as CAPERS Noir. Each will take a similar path of being an alternative historical period/setting/theme while also expanding options for all other versions of the game. My hope is to explore a variety of “cops vs robbers” themes and tropes with these supplements.
What are the Noir rules like and how do they change CAPERS?
The core rules of
CAPERS Noir are still the same (and you need the core book to play). There are
some new powers, and I’ve tried some different things with how you gain
abilities and boosts, flexing the powers system a bit. The first big difference
is that CAPERS Noir includes investigation rules using the core playing card
mechanics. This rule subset allows an investigation to move forward (that is,
clues keep getting found) without shutting down the whole thing over one bad
trait check. Success and failure on the investigation checks instead describes
how you gain additional information or add complications to the story.
Additionally, the horror elements brought to bear in CAPERS Noir provides for the possibility that your character’s soul will be corrupted. Temptation lies around every corner. Committing terrible acts at the wrong time can bring you a bit more power, but at a cost. A “shade track” defines how far your character has fallen to darkness and what benefits and hindrances this causes. You can pull yourself back out in a few different ways, most commonly by paying attention to and pursuing your “beacon,” a person, place, or thing that you hold dear and seek to help and protect.
What have you put
together to flesh out a 1940s setting and explore that complex era?
Noir fiction and film
that developed in the 20s and 30s (and feed forward into the 40s and 50s) are
at the core of CAPERS Noir. The crime noir themes of the alternate setting
explore the darker side of humanity, nihilism, fatalism, cynicism. Things
aren’t what they seem, morally gray characters are everywhere, and the
protagonist doesn’t always “win.” It’s a world of mystery and
darkness, where the good must struggle simply to stay good and the darker
characters are at risk of falling deeper into darkness even more easily. Plus,
lots of characters smoking cigarettes in the rain.
The supplement doesn’t deal directly with World War 2, but the ravages of war and its aftermath certainly are on characters’ minds in the game. (And that’s not to say I won’t ever explore the actual war, with super-powered characters taking part, in some future supplement.)
