Beau Jágr Sheldon

Five or So Questions on Piece of Work

I interviewed John LeBoeuf-Little, Kit La Touche, and Austin Bookheimer from Transneptune Games about their current project, Piece of Work. Piece of Work is a cybernoir game, blending the grit and grim of noir themes with the high-tech punch of cyberpunk.

Tell me a little bit about your current project. What should I be excited about?

(JOHN) So, Piece of Work is set in the near future dystopia, with cyberware and megacorporations. You’ve been pushed out of society by an unjust system where citizenship is predicated on having a job. Now you have a grab-bag of personal problems and almost certainly a grudge against the people who’ve done you wrong. It’s quiet tension punctuated by staccato action. We call it cybernoir.

But enough with the pitch. The game has a ton of things I’m really excited about. We’ve spent an amazing amount of time trying to get the tone just right – cybernoir is surprisingly fragile to maintain, so every mechanic we have is tuned to keep attention on the parts that matter. It’s a pretty sweet mix.

I love the die mechanic particularly. We ask questions at the table about why your character is doing whatever they’re doing. Based on how you’re doing it, for whom you’re doing it, and why you’re doing it, you get better or worse dice. Each game I’ve played, there’s been this wonderful moment when someone picks up the dice and thinks about what’s about to happen and you can basically eat it with a fork because they say “No, damnit, this is about revenge” and everyone gasps. It happens all the time and I love it.

Give me a little more about cybernoir. What kind of play will I find in this genre?

(KIT) So, we start with the familiar near-future dystopia: corporations have become the de-facto powers of the world, everything and everyone is ground under them and their profit motive. (Of course, “near-future” is perhaps a bit optimistic; we keep coming across things we thought we made up for this in the news.) But instead of the usual “they supplant governments”, we decided that governments are a useful tool for them—privatize profit, socialize loss, right? So, that’s where the System comes in: citizenship, and all the benefits and rights that comes with, is contingent on employment, but there’s a cost to having non-citizens around, so a system alarmingly like debt-bondage comes up, where the unemployed are given employment and limited citizenship benefits, but without real choice in what they do.

So that’s the world, right? You are people who’ve fallen off the corporate ladder, and are dangling above the precipice of the System. You’re probably doomed, like Deckard in Blade Runner, to be unable to make the world you want, but maybe you can help get someone else to safety, to salvation, to justice, and in the process, get yourself part-way to redemption.

There’s a kind of beautiful hopelessness baked in—I’ve mentioned Blade Runner, but perhaps it’s worth also comparing it to neo-noir cinema like Chinatown or Romeo is Bleeding. Everyone knows the end of Chinatown, right? “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.” You’re almost certainly gonna be dragged down into the mud and gutter, but you stand a chance of doing something selfless and good before that. You’re in too deep to save yourself.

(JOHN) So all the things Kit mentioned are completely correct, but I thought I’d add that cybernoir is a complex of two other genres – noir and cyberpunk.

Much of old film noir is about proper ‘society’ and with the protagonists not really fitting that mold. Often, something has changed them to make them outsiders – they were falsely accused of a crime, or got mixed up with the wrong crowd, or they couldn’t let something go. They’re filled with iconic personalities, and everything is connected somehow.

In cyberpunk, there’s the disaffected oppressed, striving in spite of a massive, uncaring, inhuman world that sees humanity as a product to be commoditized.

In cybernoir, you get an interesting blend of these two – the characters are people who no longer fit into society because of these very noir reasons who are then exploited by the system for the benefit of those in power. They have very noir sensibilities – for them, everything is personal. But they also have very futuristic abilities – cybernetics and other advanced technologies.

What went into designing the die mechanic? How does it work?

(JOHN) Oi. We’ve been tweaking the die mechanic for a long time. It started out as a cool mechanical toy – roll three dice and take the best two. Each die was always intended to be scaled up or down independently, using any of the standard sizes (up to d12). Each of the dice represents a different thing – your character’s motive, what gear you’re using, and for whom you’re acting. But it didn’t used to be so cleanly delineated.

I forget who first suggested that there be a die for your character’s Motive, but it fit perfectly. You get a better die for motives that are more noir. If you’re doing it for money, you only get a d4. If you’re just in a hard spot and you have to roll anyway, that’s a d6. If you’re acting to get respect, that’s a d8. If you’re doing it out of passion – love or hate – you get a d10. And finally, there’s a motive that particularly drives your character based on its perspective, so you might get d12 when you’re trying to find out The Truth or you might get it when you’re trying to Clear Your Name.

In our earlier playtests, the other two dice were Gear and Cyberware. But it was pretty clunky. We tried a bunch of things – rules for gear breaking, ways of making cyberware more distinct from gear… what we finally came up with was that two dice dedicated to Things was a die too many. This was kind of a frustrating time for PoW; I’m pretty sure this was after Kit had returned from Metatopia, and at the time, the game kind of looked like a cyberpunk heartbreaker with a vaguely interesting die-mechanic. It was a misguided mess.

We had one of our famous kitchen conversations where it came out that I really wanted three specific stories for Piece of Work – noir and cyberpunk, but with an undercurrent of hope. I wanted players to eventually get charged about the world and to at least try to do something to make it better. And that wasn’t being reflected at all in the dice. That galvanized the third die as a kind of activism die – we call it Scope in the game. You get better dice for acting on a bigger scale – if you’re acting just for yourself that’s just a d6, but if you’re helping a friend that’s a d8. If you’re helping someone who’s innocent, that’s a d10. If you’re trying to save the downtrodden in general, that’s a d12.

Oh, and I guess I should talk about the other side of the roll – where you compare your result to something. We’ve had a few false starts with that as well; originally it was entirely set by the GM, then it was set by the GM but depending on circumstances might be increased or decreased, and sometimes if you had gear it might go up or down… anyway. What we have now is that you ask yourself questions about the situation and based on the answers, the target goes up or down in fixed amounts. Questions are a design theme that permeate through most of the game. In this case, it’s questions like “Is it dangerous?” or “Do you have back-up?”

The result of all this is when you want to break into a file cabinet for records about where the corporation moved your family after they fired you and you have a kick-ass lock pick set you scored while growing up, you get to roll better dice than if you just want to boost some intel in order to sell it for cash. And if it’s immediately dangerous or requires a light touch, then you need those better dice.

What’s your favorite scene you’ve played out in playtest, and how do you think it’s unique to Piece of Work?

(JOHN) There’s a bunch of really good ones. I think there was a great moment where our ex-assassin clone ended up wanting to get some information out of her friend’s father, but her Professions were shaped pretty narrowly – she was mostly a killer. So to get the information required her to beat up this old man, because she didn’t know how to be any other way. It was a very emotionally charged scene.

Another one that was really good was a scene at the end of a session mid-way through one of our playtests. The previous session the heroes had done a raid on a corporate research facility. They’d found out some uncomfortable truths and spent the whole session trying to damage control fallout from crises, but it didn’t really work out. The last scene was them in a safe house, staring at a pile of cash they’d ‘liberated’, drinking scotch, and saying nothing to each other, because things had just gotten that messy.

What’s up next after Piece of Work?

(KIT) OK, so I am really excited here. First, “Transneptune Games” is really a loose collective, so we’re all working on things at the same time—John’s spearheading Piece of Work, while Austin’s working on a few different things, including his own take on cybernoir, where everyone plays facets of the main character’s memory of an event, and you reconstruct things, in a world where memory is editable and pluggable.

But what I’m working on is maybe our next most far along thing. It’s called Et in Aradia Ego, and it’s a game about young people carving a space for themselves in the manner-bound world of Jane Austen, in a game of manners, madness, and magic. You’re not perfect demur well-mannered people, and you’ve caught the attention of a fairy who wants to help you get what it thinks you want, all to its own ends.

This time period and topic are really interesting to me. It’s easy and tempting and wrong for modern readers to see it as a very proper and laced-up period, but it was in so many ways acutely modern: you’ve got Romanticism and Byron, proto-free-love utopians like William Blake seeing ecstatic visions of magical beings, awesome feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft, and the birth of modern scifi from her daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. On top of this, the King is mad (and, worse, German!), and mumblings about Republicanism rear their head. That’s without even getting into the fact that the country is at war with Bonaparte, but, just like recent US wars, doing its utmost to ignore that on the homefront.

So, there are a number of things I like about this period—it’s really unstable, uncertain which way to grow, torn between the poles of the Enlightenment and Romanticism—and adding in a “helpful” fairy who’s really trying to abduct you for its own amusement just heightens it.

The game focuses heavily on relationships, and asks you to make a lot of judgment calls about how interactions went, while building up dice from every interaction towards a moment-of-truth roll. At least, that’s how it is now—it’s been through many incarnations, and might take some more before it’s ready.

Thanks to John, Kit, and Austin for a great interview!

Five or So Questions with Jessica Hammer

DO YOU WANT TO LEARN FROM THE HAMMER? Well, I did, so here’s an interview.

Tell me about your current projects. What’s got you excited?

As a professor of game design, I wear a lot of hats. I’m a game designer, a game scholar, a game researcher, and a game educator. So I’ll tell you about the project I’m most excited about in each of those areas. Of course, they also overlap and relate.

As a game designer, I’m most excited about the space horror larp I’m writing with my long-term creative (and life!) partner, Chris Hall. We’re exploring how constraining communication can produce both intimacy and conflict between players. Specifically, we’re looking at creating rules around when people are allowed to speak, and how they can speak differently in different situations. Outer space is the perfect narrative backdrop – in space no one can hear you scream! Plus, designing a space story integrates one of our other goals, which is innovating with technology in larp. Since I’m in a computer science department, I’ve got access to some really interesting technical resources that will help us achieve our creative goals. We’re still in the early design phase, but it’s already looking super interesting!

As a game scholar, I’m most excited about a book chapter I’m writing on technologically-mediated role-playing games. Playing online makes some things harder, and some things easier – and different technologies create different opportunities and challenges. I’m covering everything from old-school MUDs to Hangout play; I’m hoping this will be the definitive reference on the state of online role-playing, and a challenge to game researchers to take this subfield more seriously.

As a game researcher, I’m excited about collecting data on how larpers are already using technology. I’m looking at how players, larp writers, and game organizers use digital tools to be more successful in their various roles. Right now I’m just collecting a broad swath of data to get a sense of what practices are out there, but in the long run I think this information can tell us something about, for example, what kinds of creative and pragmatic problems larpers are trying to solve.

Finally, as a game educator, I’m very excited about a series of workshops I’m developing on playtesting. Playtesting is an important skill for any game designer, but there aren’t a lot of great ways to learn it. I’ve broken playtesting down into a series of core skills, and I’m creating exercises that designers can use to practice each skill individually. I’m also working with new game designers to see what kinds of materials and supports help them playtest most effectively. Right now the workshops are just for my students at CMU, but eventually I’ll be sharing them with a larger audience – hopefully as soon as this fall. I think they’ll be helpful to a lot of people in the game design community.

Playtesting is a really big deal! What suggestions do you have for people new to playtesting?

The number one thing I tell my students is “Step back and shut up.” It’s incredibly hard to watch people play your game without intervening. As a designer, you know the kind of fun that you want them to have! You can show them exactly what to do! But you don’t come in the game box, so your job is to act like you’re not there. Unfortunately, if players know you’re there, they’ll often ask for your input or otherwise tempt you to get involved. One thing you can do is practice a canned response to players trying to interact with you. I like phrases like, “That’s a great question. I’ll make a note of it.” It lets them know you’ve heard their concern, but it encourages them to focus on the game rather than on you.

The other important lesson for people new to playtesting is to be careful about your data. Your own observations are only moderately trustworthy; it’s easy to see what you’re looking for instead of what’s there. If you can videotape the session and watch it a couple of days later, that will often help you get some critical distance. You can also make a checklist or other worksheet for yourself. If you have to write it down, you’re less likely to fool yourself! As for player feedback, asking people for their opinion is surprisingly tricky. Many people will tell you what they think you want to hear. Others will try to solve the game’s problems without being able to articulate those problems effectively. You want to develop the skill of deep listening. Deep listening lets you understand what prompted the player to say what they did. That way you can respond to their in-game experience without letting yourself be overly influenced by specific design suggestions (which are often not that helpful).

Of course, in a few months my suggestions will be “Learn about playtesting from my workshops and materials!”

What do you think technology can do for us in tabletop and LARP that it isn’t already doing?

That’s a great question, but it’s one I’m quite deliberately not going to answer. I don’t think we understand what technology is already doing for tabletop and larp particularly well, so I don’t think we can effectively see the possibilities. That’s part of why I’m gathering the data I’m gathering.

That said, I’m especially interested in ways technology can make it easier for people to learn new games. Reading game rules is an ineffective way to learn for most people. For example, what if your phone prompted you with relevant portions of the rules as they came up during play? Making games more learnable is going to be a huge part of broadening the audience for role-playing games, so I think this is both an interesting and important question.

As a professor, do you think that the game design industry is growing and developing? For either yes or no, why?
In my first two months on the job, I’ve already had the chance to work with some brilliant, visionary students whose ideas could reshape the face of games. The question is whether they’ll get the community and institutional support they’ll need to have a larger impact. I hope they do – and I’m providing it where I can.

What is your biggest goal right now for games?

I want to democratize game-making, especially for people who don’t think of themselves as “gamers” per se. I think there are lots of voices and perspectives that don’t get respected in the game world. The more people we include, the richer the language of games becomes – and that’s something I very much want to see.

What’s up next for you after these exciting projects?

Right now I’m working on putting together my research agenda for the next five years. It looks like I’ll be examining how games can change the relationships between players, both in terms of strengthening close ties and giving people access to different social networks. Figuring out some interesting questions in that space is really fun – I love playing with ideas! I’ll be teaching a game design class in the fall, which I’m very much looking forward to. And I’m hoping to start working with my first graduate students in September, which I expect to be both inspiring and fun. I have a lot to look forward to!

Thanks Jessica! For those interested, Jessica also has a Patreon for her book reviews, which are top-notch!

Five or So Questions with Matt Weber on Gemstones and More

I interviewed Matt Weber on his work for his new project, Gemstones, and about his thoughts on gaming and music.

As well as being a gamer and all-around cool guy, turns out you’re also musically talented! Tell me about your current musical projects. What’s up next?

I have two current composition projects.

I was hired last year by the talented writer, comedian, and ventriloquist April Brucker to turn her hilarious autobiography into a musical. We’re about a half-dozen songs in, with roughly as many to go. This project is an opportunity for me to flex my jazz and pop muscles. We’re not aiming to score for a full orchestra, for a variety of practical as well as artistic reasons; rather, we are using a small jazz ensemble of piano, bass (either electric or upright depending on the song), drums, and a multi-instrumentalist wind player who can rotate between flute, clarinet, and all four types of saxophone. One of the actors will also play acoustic and electric guitar, since that character, the main love interest in the story, is a budding rockstar. I’ve been working the guitar into the ensemble for the songs that are “in fiction.”

I’m also working on a piece for Version Excursion Dance ensemble in Seattle. The director and choreographer of that ensemble, Erin Boyt, contacted me about an upcoming project of hers and asked me to write a new piece for it. This one is genre fiction related, as it is a dance adaptation of the famous early science fiction film Voyage Dans La Lune. The music I am writing alternates between a pounding, movie-soundtrack style and slower, more meditative and chromatic sections. One of the most exciting aspects of this work for me is that I am learning how to write for an instrument that is new to me, the accordion. (The full ensemble is piano, accordion, trumpet, and classical percussion.) Also, because it is so very different than the musical, it doesn’t really occupy the same brain space and so I can switch between them with little difficulty—the one functions as a break from the other.

Over the past ten years, I’ve become increasingly frustrated by my compositional ability outstripping my performing skills. I do sing and play the piano, but not nearly as well as I compose. To remedy this gap I’ve just begun taking piano lessons again, for the first time in far too long. I found a great teacher who can help me with all genres of music and who is willing to work thoughtfully to accommodate my small hands. I’m still getting in the swing of a regular practice schedule again, but it feels really great to be doing it. In about six months to a year I’d like to begin performing my pop and musical songs in front of live audiences.

Finally, I have a live performance of one of my pieces coming up. The work that is premiering was actually finished in 2012 but I haven’t had a chance to get it performed until now. It’s called Gemstones. It’s for string quartet (a very traditional ensemble consisting of two violins, a viola, and a cello) and you can hear a pretty good MIDI simulation of it here. Stylistically it’s a fusion of Chopin (mid-19th century, very traditional Romantic), Ravel (early 20th-century, on the border between traditional tonality and modernity), and my own metric twists. It’s going to premiere on April 22nd at 8 PM as part of a concert of the New York Composers Circle. (St. Peter’s Church, 54th St. and Lexington Ave.) I hope to have a studio recording available soon after.

What was it like to work with a dance ensemble and with a new instrument, both at the same time?

I’m fortunate to have some great support with the “Voyage 2014” project. Erin, of course, will be doing all the choreographing, and she has been extremely clear and professional in terms of what she wants from me. We mapped out the scenes, I sent her some early sound-sketches and proposals for how I would expand those ideas as the plot unfolds, and now, with her blessing, I am working on fleshing out those plans. In a few weeks I’ll send her a MIDI version of the full score, so she can begin working on the choreography, with the proviso that the rhythms won’t be completely the same as what human players will do. She may also ask for any necessary revisions. In the meantime she’ll begin gathering players to make a studio recording.

I’ve consulted with various online sources to figure out the scoring of the accordion, as well as talking to a friend of a friend who plays. One huge advantage of being a composer today is the vast number of free scores and guides available on the Internet. It turns out accordion is pretty similar to the piano in a lot of ways, so figuring out the interplay between those two instruments is one of the major challenges of this piece. Having them “double” (play the same material in parallel) is possible for some of the time, but not something you want to over-use. I’m definitely going to check in with the guy who actually plays again before I send the score to Erin. I also may need to make some revisions once we find our actual player, since accordions can be somewhat idiosyncratic in terms of their exact highest and lowest notes.

What is your favorite method of enjoying music as a consumer?

Great question. Ideally, it’s going to concerts. Especially for jazz, I find the energy of the live ensemble to be unrivaled. Lately I haven’t really had the time or money to go. (I used to write reviews foricareifyoulisten.com, an awesome site for new music founded by my former classmate Thomas Deneuville. That work got me free tickets and CDs, but I haven’t had the time for awhile to really do the kind of quality writing that site deserves.) I’ve made some changes in my life recently as far as how I handle work and finances, and once that stabilizes a bit more I’m hoping to be able to go back to hearing concerts at least once or twice a month on weekends.

In the meantime, I use Pandora frequently. I curate my stations pretty aggressively. I have one for rock, one for softer folk rock (that’s actually my favorite), jazz, modern classical, soundtracks, Broadway, and a few others. I’m listening to my rock station as I’m typing this. 🙂

There’s another thing I’m hoping to carve out more time for as my life continues re-stabilizing after recent upheavals, and that is score study. That’s when you really delve into a piece, listening to it multiple times while looking at the printed score. It’s a great way to get into the nitty-gritty of how to orchestrate certain sounds and take a piece apart, but it’s pretty time intensive. Also, despite the wealth of material available online, I prefer to have printed scores so I can mark them up. They’re expensive but I have a backlog of ones I still need to work on sitting on the shelf (much like with other types of books!).

What do you think are good examples of commonalities and relationships between gaming and music that you are familiar with?

I’m pretty much obsessed with the idea of emotional clarity in narrative, as explained brilliantly by Film Critic Hulk.

I look at the rise of folk, rock, and pop in the 1950’s as a response to the increasing rarefication and inaccessibility of classical music at that time, as exemplified by composers like Stockhausen and Schoenberg. To some extent jazz was experiencing a similar audience disconnect, with the rise of the bebop style throughout the 40’s. Bebop can get very dense and complex to the point of being off-putting, despite the virtuosity of the players. (The 50’s is when the famous and influential “Kind of Blue” jazz album was written, with its very simple, modal harmonies, so within the jazz community, as well, there was a dialogue surrounding this problem.) Pop musicians plugged into what was going on at that cultural moment—the rise of youth culture, the civil rights movement, later on Vietnam—and helped people both to understand and to feel understood. Whether or not that’s a good thing is beside the point, it’s just how art works.

When I craft a piece, I always aim to make the emotional arc as clear as possible to the listener. With songs, this can be somewhat easier, since you have actual words to fall back on to get your point across, but it’s no less important in instrumental pieces. An instrumental piece is absolutely an emotional journey just like a love song, a novel, a movie, or, yes, a roleplaying game (I’m getting there, I swear!). There are tons of examples but one that I find absolutely stunning is *Brahms’ First Symphony. He was living with the pressure of insanely high expectations, including frequent comparisons to the antecedent genius of Beethoven, and it actually took him fourteen years to complete the symphony. It is full of doubt and tension but then, finally, after endless struggle and backsliding, ultimate triumph. It thus represents its own compositional process, the emotional journey of the composer, which in turn becomes that of the audience. Amusingly, Brahms’ hard work paid off so well that the First Symphony is nicknamed “Beethoven’s Tenth.”

By the way, tonality definitely isn’t necessary for a work to have emotional resonance. I’ve both heard and written some post-tonal pieces that I thought were very moving, but in that case the composer has to find some way of connecting with the audience other than through a traditional chord progression. (Good examples include Short Ride In a Fast Machine, Different Trains,Concerto For Orchestra, Ligeti’s Requiem, and Threnody For the Victims of Hiroshima. Also, most people seem to like my Sequence No. 1.) Tonality is simply a very easy way of connecting with listeners’ emotions because it has such a long history and there is so much ingrained, completely unconscious ritualization of our reactions to tonal music. But a lot of contemporary instrumental music doesn’t give listeners much of anything to latch on to. Highly educated audience members may appreciate certain technical nuances of the playing, but they are no substitute for a melody, a rhythmic pattern, or even a recurring tone “color” that can give us some reason, any reason, to just care about the piece.

Now, at long last, let’s talk about gaming. What is the bare minimum requirement for a roleplaying experience to be enjoyable? For me, and I suspect for most players, it boils down to a reasonable frequency of chances to make impactful decisions within the narrative. The exact definitions of “impact” and “narrative” can be enormously varied! For instance in jeepform games there may not be many opportunities to actually influence the outcome of the “plot,” such as it is, but players have many chances to show how the unfolding events impact the characters’ emotions. Whereas in an old-school dungeon-crawl the characters’ emotions may be less important, but players have unimpeded freedom to approach the challenges of the dungeon in whatever crazy ways they can dream up. But every successful game I’ve either played in or run has one thing in common: the players are all on board with a single, central premise.

A recent example: at Dreamation I co-ran a Mouse Guard LongCon campaign with Mark Diaz Truman, Marissa Kelly, and Brendan Conway. Even though there were three to four tables of mouse PCs at any one time, with quite a few individual issues to deal with, part of the reason the game worked so well is because we started from a very basic premise: Pebblebrook, the westernmost mouse town, has suffered from an earthquake. Literally every single problem the guardmice faced, from labor disputes to possible weasel invasion, either stemmed from that initial situation or were a complication to it. So, throughout the campaign, everyone in all their diverse quests kept focused on the big question of the ultimate fate of Pebblebrook and the rest of the mouse territories. That unity not only helped everyone to invest emotionally, but also made it relatively easy for PCs to move between tables and quickly figure out ways to help each other. The PCs’ actions felt weighty because they fully understood the stakes.

To talk more broadly for a moment, a great deal of the development in RPG design in the new millennium can be seen as a backlash against increasing convolution throughout the 90’s. So many games from that era, such as Vampire: The Masquerade or Earthdawn, not to mention much of the material for 2nd Ed. D&D, had incredibly interesting premises, but didn’t give gamers clear, concrete instructions about how to actually turn those broad ideas into specific campaign frames. Often the mechanics contradicted the intended themes of play. The worst game texts actually encouraged deliberate obfuscation, not just of specific NPC actions, but of entire plotlines! It’s very hard as a player to buy into a game where it’s clear there are many Important Things afoot but you have no access to or understanding of those Things.

Contrast those games, with their huge worlds and endless possibilities, with indie classics like Dogs in the Vineyard or Don’t Rest Your Head. Both of those RPGs, and many others besides, are strong precisely because they are very limited. Some people may be turned off by the very idea of, for example, Mormon paladin gunslingers, and that’s fine, but for those who do try it out, the game delivers exactly what it promises. Once again the value of simplicity is clear. Games of Dogs can get very complicated, of course, but those complications arise organically from a straightforward (albeit nuanced) premise that you have to buy into to even get started playing.

So that’s how gaming and music are tied together, for me. It’s not about writing songs from my character’s point of view, or instrumental music to represent some piece of gaming fiction, though I’ve done both of those things and hope to do more in the future. It’s about the importance of simplicity, and the inherent need for all successful narratives to have an emotional center.

What’s up next for you, beyond Gemstones?

Well, Gemstones is essentially done, though I need to make arrangements to have a studio recording made. But once I’m done with that and the musical and the dance project, I’d like to put out an album of piano music. I’m looking at Kickstarter or a similar crowdfunding site for it. (I have ethical concerns about KS because of its links to Amazon.) I want to start with a relatively small, manageable project, which is why I’m aiming to make an album of music for just piano. The most important thing is for it to be very professional, in terms of the video, the look of the project site, and so on—all things that I’d really need to outsource to do them justice. So I’m going to take it slow, and aim to be the tortoise rather than the hare.

I’ve seen some pretty convincing arguments that crowdfunding is actually not such a great way to grow your audience; rather, it’s a way of getting money from people who already know you. In all honesty, even if that’s true I’m not sure if I care that much. I am working on other ways of expanding my name recognition, but in the meantime, my true goal as a musician is simply to be able to hear my own music as I intended for it to sound. If all I manage to do is get recording expenses covered, that’s fine. Of course, some larger-scale (i.e. orchestral) projects require more formal, institutionalized support, but I figure that sort of thing will come in due course if I just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Five or So Questions with John Harper

I got to interview John Harper about his current projects, including Blades in the Dark!

What are you currently working on? What projects have you excited?

I’m working on a game about criminals in a fantasy city called Blades in the Dark. It’s set in the same universe as my previous mini-game, Ghost Lines — vengeful spirits, weird electroplasmic tech, lost magic, strange cults, etc. I expect Blades will be a larger product (by my standards, anyway), maybe a 32 page booklet or something along those lines. Like a lot of game designers, I’m very inspired by the Thief video games and this is my stab at a game in that vein.

(Two other current game projects in a similar style are Dagger & Shadow by Matt Snyder and Project: Dark by Will Hindmarch. We’re all playing in that shadowy sandbox and it’s inspiring to see what they’re doing as I work on my thing.)

Blades is currently in closed playtest, but will open up for public playtesting in a few months.

I’m very excited about a few projects my friends are working on. Undying, by Paul Riddle will hit Kickstarter this year. It’s a beautifully designed diceless game (hacked from the bones of Apocalypse World) about the deadly predator vs. predator world of vampires. It’s my favorite take on vampires I’ve seen yet. One of the most fun mechanics allows you to actually play out centuries of existence for the vamps, with each game session representing an important night in their immense lives, with decades passing between each. Our playtest game was set in Paris in 1899, 1920, 1944, and would continue on to 2010, 2065, and possibly beyond. So cool.

Sage LaTorra is working on a modern day game of weirdness, somewhat like The Twilight Zone or True Detective, called Black Stars Rise. It’s about ordinary people who are confronted with something totally inexplicable and how they deal with it. They don’t solve a mystery or anything, they just try to cope with it and survive. You play different people in different places over the course of a series, seeing the weirdness manifest in different ways and gradually building up a picture of some larger horror. It’s in playtest now and we’re having a lot of fun with it.

And off course Dagger & Shadow and Project: Dark, which I already mentioned. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many exciting indie games in the pipeline I could fill this whole interview talking about them. 🙂

Blades in the Dark sounds interesting. Can you tell me a little more about it?

It’s a type of game I’ve tinkered with a lot. Most of the games I run tend to be about a team of freelance criminal types operating in a sandbox of some kind: Our long-running Stars Without Number game, the prohibition-era Bootleggers game (another RPG project of mine), the original World of Dungeons series… even all the way back to old Talislanta campaigns. So it’s something I enjoy doing and have a lot of experience with. I’m trying to incorporate some of that experience and the lessons learned into the design and procedures of Blades.

For example, I’ve found that I like to have a flexible central mechanic that can suit a wide variety of situations. But most generic mechanics are pretty bland and the GM has to do all the heavy lifting to convey the tone of the game (gritty, in this case). So I designed a set of three core rolls, representing a spectrum of fictional positions, from worst to best: A desperate gamble, a risky maneuver, and a display of skill. The results of these rolls are primed to spark outcomes that suit the tone and style of the game, so the GM can focus on assessing the fictional situation and choosing the right roll for the moment.

Because the selection of the roll is a judgment call, though, the GM and the players use that decision point to craft their own unique instance of the game. When your blade-master fights three thugs in a dark alley, is that a desperate gamble, a risky maneuver, or a display of skill? The game provides a procedure to determine this, but it’s dependent on which particular details of the situation the group values most and gives the most weight in the assessment. So (hopefully), you end up with a mechanic that’s consistent, reliable, and responds to fictional details, but is nevertheless a unique construction refined and ratified through the process of play by a given game group.

I’m pretty excited about it! There’s lots of other stuff too, like managing your criminal enterprise and dealing with your character’s vice and lifestyle considerations. It’s been a long process of weekly playtesting and refinement, but it’s really fun and the game is starting to come together.

What do you think is inspiring the interest in stealth games recently?

If I had to guess, I’d say it’s the impending release of the new Thief video game. We’ve all been following it through its development for years, and it’s influenced our thinking, surely. Also I have to acknowledge Dishonored, as well. The style and feel of that game is incredibly cool and has taken up permanent residence in my brain.

What is the motivation for releasing so many products for free, and what benefit do you see from it?

Most of the games on my site have been created for play by my local game groups. Lady Blackbird was originally made in an afternoon so it could be run later that night for someone new to RPGs. I released them for free because I had already done the work of making the materials, so why not just post the PDF for anyone else who wanted it?

In the case of something like Agon (which I charge money for), the situation was slightly different. It was also born out of play, but the actual product involved writing and publishing a book, which was additional work that I wanted to be compensated for. I have some loose plans to do some work on Patreon, for this reason. There are several projects which I’ve never committed time to finishing, since the materials I made for local play are not very useable by others. With some patrons, I’ll invest the extra time to make them more polished and complete.

The main benefit I see with free games is exposure. Free games reach lots and lots of people They’re easy to share. Lady Blackbird has been played by thousands and has been translated into over a dozen languages. I want my games to be played, first and foremost. More play equals more success. So in that sense, giving the games away has helped them become more successful. Not that it’s entirely altruistic, of course: that extra exposure helps draw people to my other games that I sell for money. So it’s a marketing strategy, too.

(Quick aside: Lady Blackbird is also shared and talked about online for another reason, having to do with its specific construction: it’s an adventure module with pregen characters and situation but it has absolutely no spoilers, so everyone can freely talk about everything that happened when they played it, without worrying about ruining it for other people. In fact, it’s extra fun to compare your particular game of LB to other people’s.)

Years ago, my friend Clinton Nixon made a game called The Shadow of Yesterday, and decided to give the entire text away online, in addition to selling the printed book. People thought this was nuts at the time, but of course it totally worked. Dungeon World has followed in his footsteps by releasing their game text under a Creative Commons license.

Do you have any suggestions for people wanting to layout their smaller games?

Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Find layouts that you like and studiously reproduce them. I don’t mean steal the actual art, of course. I mean, measure the text boxes, page proportions, type sizes, etc. and use them yourself. Page layout is a craft, like building a bookcase. Study the canons and classic methods and copy the masters, like an apprentice carpenter. Also, be very suspicious of any typeface less than 50 years old. There are lots of good modern ones, but the glut of crappy internet fonts has lead more than one novice designer astray. When in doubt, stick with the classics.

Graphic design and layout are deep, complex art forms. They’re worth learning, for sure, but don’t expect to pick them up quickly or easily. Whenever I see someone online ask “How can I learn to do layout and design for my game?” I translate it to “How can I learn to compose a symphony?” It’s just as vast a question, with no simple answers, just hard work.

What’s next for you after Blades in the Dark?

I’m not sure! There are several projects on the back burner that will come back around again, especially Danger Patrol. I’ve been tinkering with some board game designs too, which is a new thing for me and quite fun. But there’s really no way to tell. I just follow wherever my inspiration leads me.

Five or So Questions with Rafael Chandler on Lusus Naturae

I interviewed Rafael Chandler about Lusus Naturae! (warning: image heavy post)

Tell me a little about Lusus Naturae. What’s there to make people’s skin crawl?

Lusus Naturae is a collection of monsters for old-school tabletop RPGs. It uses the Lamentations of the Flame Princess system, so people who enjoy other retroclones (or older versions of D&D) will be able to use these monsters right out of the book.

Lusus Naturae (Latin for “freaks of nature”) is currently crowdfunding here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rafaelchandler/lusus-naturae-a-gruesome-old-school-bestiary We’ve hit our initial goal, so the project is funded. Over the next 23 days, we’re hoping to reach our stretch goal so that we can go full-color.

As for what makes people’s skin crawl… I’m hoping that gamers will enjoy the monsters the way I do! I adore horror of all kinds: cosmic horror, splatterpunk, body horror, and so on. This bestiary will feature all of the above.

Without divulging any spoilers (I don’t like it when people ruin surprises), I will say that many of these entities are driven by peculiar compulsions, or attracted to human vice. They feed on hatred, fear, wickedness, and innocence. They commit — or coerce others into committing — ritual murders and other horrid crimes. They establish violent religions, lurk in lightless depths, and build citadels from the corpses of children.

Where do you get your inspiration for monsters?

Typically, I try to get into the right mindset by listening to metal — Ulcerate, Enslaved, Altar of Plagues, Goatwhore, that sort of thing — and thinking about cruelty. I always ask myself, “What’s the worst thing one could do in this situation?”

I watch a lot of horror, though I’m not sure if it inspires me, per se. Perhaps? It’s hard to know if it’s merely a comfortable experience that satisfies, or if it’s somehow gotten some fluids percolating in the back of my mind. Anyhow, I’m quite fond of the New French Extremity, especially Inside, Martyrs, and Frontier(s). I’m also a fan of torture porn, including the Saw and Hostel series.

What makes Lusus Naturae different from your other projects?

Last year, I released a bestiary called Teratic Tome; it featured new versions of classic monsters, such as orcs, dragons, and demons. By contrast, Lusus Naturae will primarily consist of all-new entities. In addition, some of the monsters in this book will be drawn from the myths of my Peruvian ancestors; I’ve never really delved into that subject matter before, and it’s quite enjoyable.

For example, Ai Apaec is the chief god in the Mochica culture; he’s typically depicted as a spider-human hybrid with a knife and/or severed head in his hand. He’s known as the Decapitator, and his worshipers believed that he would reward violent and painful human sacrifice with abundant crops. As a rule, I’m not interested in history or authenticity, but this is the sort of thing that I love.

There’s one other thing that makes Lusus Naturae different: instead of selling it through print-on-demand via Lulu, I’m working with a printer. This book will feature glossy paper and a sewn binding, and perhaps even full-color interior artwork. I want to create a quality book, and crowdfunding makes it possible to produce something beautiful and durable.

How do you decide what artists to hire for your projects, especially ones with so much variety like this?

I like my artists the way I like players at my table: ready to bring the gore and brutality. I’ve been lucky to work with a number of very talented people!

Gennifer Bone and I have worked together many times; she illustrated all of ViewScream, and contributed artwork to Pandemonio, Teratic Tome, and Bad Myrmidon.

Last year, she suggested that we work on a major project, something significant. I had been mulling over the idea of a new bestiary, but had planned to work with several artists. But I wondered if it might not be better to have a single person tackle all of the artwork for the book. Genn hits her deadlines, and she’s fun to work with. So I said yeah, let’s do this.

What’s up next? Can we expect more gore from you sometime soon?

I’m working on Obscene Serpent Religion, a sourcebook for LotFP which features face-melting artwork by Sandy Jacobs-Tolle, Sarah Richardson, and Wayne Snyder. This book’s look and feel (square, dark, and vile) are meant to evoke the vinyl album produced by a black metal band. We’ll see if that works.

Beyond that, I’m working on a sourcebook called Exhumed Errata, which is my take on epic fantasy. No gore, just strange magic, wondrous weapons, and a new character class. Natalie Bennett and Quinn Murphy are my co-writers on this one.

My second novel is nearly finished; it’s called The Astounding Antagonists, and it’s about a group of supervillains gearing up for one last heist. It’s fun, frantic, and action-packed! Features a wraparound cover by the incredibly talented Claudia Cangini.

And, of course, there’s my day job (story designer and scriptwriter in the video game industry). I’ve got a new game coming out soon, but I’m not allowed to talk about it until later in the year!

Thanks, Brianna!

And thank you, Rafael! Looking forward to all of your projects!

Five or So Questions with Adam Koebel

Content Warning: There have been multiple statements against Adam Koebel for violation of consent , abuse, and abuse of power. In accordance with my policy on perpetrators of harm, I am putting this notice to raise awareness of the statements of the victims and ensure future readers are aware.

I got to interview Adam Koebel about his current projects and his photography. It was super fun!

Tell me what you’re currently working on. What’s new and big in the world of Adam?

Right now the big thing on my plate is working on what’s we’re tentatively calling Inglorious – which is the Dungeon World “mass combat” or “war” or “large scale conflict” supplement. Whatever your preferred method of describing big messy battles with lots of craziness going on. Sage and I have been hammering away pretty hard at that, and it’s in the hands of playtesters right now. So we’re kind of in that harrowing phase of wondering if we’ve made something as cool as we think we have or if we’re just embarrassing ourselves with something crap. There’s always that to wonder about when you’re in the process of unleashing new stuff on the world. I think it’ll turn out okay, though. We’ve been really inspired to make it particularly old-school in the sense of it being inspired by pre-D&D war-games with a referee. Blame Jon Peterson for teaching us what a kriegspiel is.

Other than that, working on some miscellaneous little projects. Helping Sage polish up Black Stars Rise (his minimalist creepy horror game) and poking away in fits and starts at my unnamed space-opera-future-romance-game-based-on-an-IP-I-would-never-be-able-to-afford-in-a-billion-years project. Taking photos of myself and posting them on G+. Getting in heated debates about design. Making new friends on Twitter. Business as usual!

Inglorious sounds interesting! What kind of mechanics are you messing with for mass combat?

What we’re trying to do with Inglorious is port the core concepts of Dungeon World out of the dungeon and onto the battlefield. The idea that narrative is paramount – that what really matters at the table is the stuff that the players’ characters are actually seeing and doing – is something I don’t think we’ve seen in many mass combat systems before. So we’re playing around with the idea of units designed much like monsters, with their own stats but also their own agenda and foibles. Players who want to lead an army will have to rely on messengers or magic to carry their orders to their troops who, depending on the way the dice fall, will interpret those orders according to their tags. So, it’s going to have all the potential for chaos and craziness that you’d see in a more tightly-focused dungeon-based adventure. We’re really being influenced by what came before – by Chainmail and older games in the genre. Though, there’s definitely some impact on the mechanisms coming from some more modern war-games we’ve been playing lately; astute readers will see some similarities to Sekigahara or Commands & Colors when they bring Inglorious to the table. Influences aside, our big goal was making sure that Inglorious felt like a Dungeon World game. That drove our designs more than anything.

Dungeon World was a huge success. What’s your takeaway from the success and aftermath?

It’s crazy, right? I think that we had some idea that the game would be popular. To be completely honest, we kind of hit the right audience at exactly the right time with a product I think that people were already looking for. Most of that was blind luck – I’m sure that if D&D Next had released a year or two earlier, we wouldn’t have seen as much of a big jump in not-quite-D&D games and their popularity. We’re lucky to belong to this weird little outcaste set that’s are filling that “waiting for D&D” void – 13th Age, Torchbearer and Numenera particularly. Rob Donoghue said some really smart stuff about the D&D Offramp, as he calls it, over at The Walking Mind a while back (http://walkingmind.evilhat.com/2013/09/16/d20-and-the-dd-off-ramp/).

I think the takeaway has been that dungeon crawling as a genre still really represents what “roleplaying” is for a lot of people. We were surprised because I think at first our intent was to make a D&D for the Apocalypse World crowd but we ended up making an Apocalypse World game for the D&D crowd. Some of our most ardent supporters are folks with little to no experience in the hobby outside of Good Old D&D (whether that was actually a TSR, Wizards of the Coast or Paizo “version” of D&D…) who discovered Dungeon World looking for something with a different focus, but that felt familiar. What I’ve really loved, though, is seeing how people are taking it and making their own. I’d like to think we set a positive precedent by making the game creative commons licensed and offering The Planarch’s Codex as a “launch title” for the game. I like the idea of DW as a platform rather than just a game in and of itself. There are some amazing supplements for it that we had literally nothing to do with. It’s a great feeling!

What I really hope, in the long run, is that DW is a comfortable start for folks who want to expand and try new stuff. A Dungeon World fan who’ll give Sagas of the Icelanders a try because the system feels familiar or who’ll pick up a copy of Dogs in the Vineyard because it’s connected to DW by way of Apocalypse World. I think everyone should try every game there is – an informed gamer is a happy gamer.

Tell me your secrets about this unnamed space-opera-future-romance-game. What are the mechanics? What does it feel like? (No need to name the IP.)
It’s okay! It’s fairly easy knowledge to come by that I’m working on adapting some of Dungeon World’s mechanics to a Mass Effect game. It’s an amazingly deep canon with great setting and characterization but what really drew me to Mass Effect is the humanism of the stories it tells. That’s not to say I don’t love transhuman sci-fi, Freemarket and Eclipse Phase are both favourites of mine. What I love about it is that it is, ultimately, about being human. Not transcending your humanity, not becoming part of the galactic melting pot but really embracing your humanity and staking a claim on the galaxy. On top of that, I love what Bioware is starting to do with game-character romance? They have this cavalier attitude, barring a few missteps, wherein your protagonist can love who you want, regardless of their sex or gender or even species. I want to make that a core part of a tabletop game, because I think the venue of face-to-face roleplaying can create an experience that video games aren’t able to, yet.

It’s an ambitious adaptation, but I’m trying to bend the apocalypse engine to my will by stealing liberally from all the other games published using it and putting in some weird twists. It’s a little like DW was to D&D – I want the game to feel like a proper tabletop RPG and leverage all the cool, intense personal stuff you can experience in that venue but also, I really want to make it feel like a Mass Effect game. I want players to make Renegade and Paragon choices. I want shield timers and ammo types but I also want big messy interspecies poly love. I’m smiling just writing about it, which must mean I’m onto something.

Your photos are great! What kind of camera do you use? What do you like most about photography?

Thanks! I’ve been taking photos longer than I’ve been designing games, though I mostly do it for fun, these days. I picked up a Sony RX1 from a camera shop in Akihabara this past June and it’s really fired up my love of photography. Right now, I’m really into taking convention shots – some of my favourite photos in the last year have been folks at GenCon or GoPlay Northwest just hanging out and playing games. It’s such an intense experience, certainly as intense as sports or theatre, but so intimate and subtle. It’s really great being able to capture someone in a passionate moment at the table. I don’t think anyone is really taking convention photos like that right now.

Thanks so much to Adam for the interview! You can catch him on Twitter @skinnyghost and read more about Dungeon World here.

Five or So Questions with Nathan Paoletta on World Wide Wrestling

I got to talk with Nathan Paoletta about his new project, World Wide Wrestling!

Tell me a little bit about your project. What is exciting about it?

The project is a professional wrestling RPG built on the Apocalypse World engine, called World Wide Wrestling. I’m a big wrestling fan, and started the game just as an exercise in modeling the kind of wrestling I really enjoy watching the most – character-driven, consequential, with the in-ring action feeding into the development of the characters over time and vice versa. As it turns out, the game really delivers on that experience, and playing it is super fun! The AW engine is a really good chassis for representing the world of wrestling with it’s iconic archetypes, ever-evolving storylines and abrupt changes of fortune. I’m running a long-term playtest game right now, and I haven’t looked forward to each weeks session so much in a long time. And, best of all, it’s making some of my RPG friends more interested in wrestling, and bringing some of my wrestling friends more into the world of RPGs, which is super-great!

What kind of players, aside from wrestling fans, do you think would dig World Wide Wrestling?

I think anyone who’s interested in over-the-top action and melodrama can find something to dig. Wrestling is basically the combination of universal storytelling tropes with superhero personae, so there’s a lot of potential avenues to get into the right mindset for it. If you have vague memories of being a kid and watching Hulk Hogan and Macho Man bodyslam each other and how awesome that seemed at the time, you have enough context to play the game, I think. I’ve had a lot of playtesters tell me “I’m not a wrestling fan, but I want to check it out now since I played this game,” which is great and tells me that it’s “working” on some level. I don’t really want to convert anyone or anything silly like that, but there’s a lot to love in wrestling and if the game can open up someone’s horizons to the good parts, that’s a win for me. And it’s definitely a low-investment, pick-up and one-shot friendly beer-and-pretzels style game, so it’s easy to check out and see if it’s really your thing or not.

Did you alter the *World mechanics much for the game? If so, how?

They’re pretty significantly altered! It’ll be familiar to people who have played other *World games, but I ended up spindling and mutilating a lot of the basics. Some stuff that’s the same is the core rolling +Stat and picking results from a list mechanic, having playbooks (“Gimmicks”), and gaining Advances to improve your character. On the player side, the mechanics and Moves are all about gaining Heat (roughly analogous to Hx) with the other wrestlers in order to gain Audience (kind of an inverted Harm track, actually). You’re not in physical danger (though you can get injured relatively easily if you have bad rolls), but your popularity is always at risk! On the MC side, a lot has changed. Creative (the GM role) literally books play like a wrestling booker, deciding ahead of time who’s going to win what match in order to advance the storylines. Players have the agency you’d expect in any other RPG, though, so they’ll throw wrenches into the plans all the time, and there’s a structure in place to help Creative make it look like they had it planned that way all along. I’d say that there’s actually more similarity on the surface than there is under the hood, so to speak. It’s been a really fun process to work through!

Who is your favorite wrestler? You can pick more than one!

Oh man, the hardest question! Well, not really, it’s more like the answer is always changing. But my favorite pre-modern era wrestler is definitely Macho Man Randy Savage, may he rest in peace. I will also always love The Undertaker, who is technically still wrestling (once a year at Wrestlemania!). There’s an amazing tier of young talent in the WWE right now that I am really, really enjoying watching. Roman Reigns is a warrior prince who deserves all of your tribute, Antonio Cesaro is probably the guy I most love to purely watch wrestle, and Bray Wyatt is the greatest, creepiest character the WWE has had since I’ve been watching wrestling. On the indy circuit, there’s a pretty well known dude named Jimmy Jacobs who I think is great. El Generico was my favorite indy wrestler until he retired to go work with orphans in Mexico, but there’s a guy on WWE’s developmental show NXT named Sami Zayn who has a lot of the same moves, and I think has a bright future in wrestling.

What else are you working on? What’s next for you?

Once WWW is out in the wild, I’m going to be bouncing back to my other game-I’ve-been-working-on-forever, which is a monster hunting game set in the gothic world of Edgar Allen Poe called The Imp of the Perverse. The mechanics are pretty solid, but I have some period research to finish and a bunch of writing to do for it. That will be in playtest for awhile yet, and it’s probably going to be my next big thing after WWW. I’m also working on a second edition of my Vietnam war drama game carry, mostly to update the physical book but also doing a full edit and revision of the text. I have a 2-player fantasy struggle-between-good-and-evil-for-the-fate-of-the-world game that I’d like to get back to soon. There’s a couple concepts I have for microgames, and who knows when one of those gels and demands to be finished. And I want to maintain releasing cool stuff supported by my Patreon backers, so I’ll have little things coming out every couple months through that venue, hopefully. Lots of stuff, I guess!

Thanks to Nathan for the great interview! You can check out Nathan’s Patreon and his website to keep up on his current work!

Five or So Questions with Shoshana Kessock and Abigail Corfman on Smoke and Glass

I interviewed Shoshana Kessock and Abigail Corfman on their new project, Smoke and Glass, launching soon on Kickstarter!

Tell me a little bit about Smoke and Glass. What’s the game about?
(SHOSHANA) The book, Smoke and Glass, is a Dickensian-steampunk Fate Core world set in the magical world of Meridia, a world modernizing after hundreds of years of magical war. It’s a game about the haves and have nots in a world trying to come out of their own dark age, caught between those that have power and folks who have to choose to step outside of the law just to survive. The book is written by new author and designer Abigail Corfman, edited by John Adamus, and laid out by Tiara Lynn Agresta, with beautiful art by the talented Nicole Cardiff and Jonathan Wyke.

What about the setting really intrigues you?

(SHOSHANA) I’ve always been intrigued by worlds that take a left turn at genre conventions. You have certain expectations of fantasy worlds, of steampunk, and worlds that have magic. Any time you can push outside of those expectations, you have the potential to create a new take on what’s already been done. So when Abigail spoke to me about a world where the haves and have-nots fight for hold on a city that is at a crossroads between magic and steampunk-style technology? You have my attention. Then you add in the social questions this game brings up about gender politics, economic inequality, and what one is willing to do for (magic) power, and you have my attention. That’s why I’m really excited Phoenix Outlaw is getting the chance to develop this game.

What motivated your team to design in Fate Core?

(ABIGAIL) I love the elegance of the system. I like that it’s simple, and that it’s easy to make things happen. I’ve always seen roleplaying as an extension of children playing pretend in a garden, and the closer the system can bring me to the flexibility of “Okay, now I’m a dragon!” the happier I am with it. In other settings I’ve played I’d have to stat out the dragon. In Fate, I can just write the words “Giant Fire Breathing Dragon” on a note card, and I’m good to go.

Also, the philosophy of Fate Core resonates with me. It treats roleplaying as a collaborative storytelling enterprise, and that approach is baked into the mechanics, instead of just stated. The character creation process and aspect-creation options give the players a crazy amount of power to shape the world, and the fate point system means players are encouraged to make trouble for their characters in exchange for more awesome later. It’s an economy dedicated to creating exciting stories, and that encourages players to own their own fascinating misfortune, instead of having it thrust on them by the storyteller. Its very nature discourages the playing to win, dungeon master-versus-players mentality. So I like it.

Also it was really easy to adapt Fare Core to my world. Because it’s really easy to adapt Fate Core to most things. I’m not getting paid to say any of this.

What do you think magic adds to steampunk?

(ABIGAIL) Steampunk is hugely about technology. Awesome, smoke-belching, gear-spinning, clinkity-clanking technology. Technology is a way of interacting with the world by way of mastery and perfect understanding. You need to study and experiment and know how every facet of how your steam-powered invention works for it to work. And once it’s working, you’ll know why it works, and that if it breaks, it’s for a reason you’ll be able to comprehend and touch.

Magic is a way of interacting with the world that involves acknowledging the limits of our understanding. The word magic itself implies a force that we have no real explanation for, a system of light and energy that can be examined and mapped, but only to a certain extent. Magic is always fundamentally a black box. The incantations we pour into one side of the black box come out the other side as rabbits, silk scarves, and lightening bolts. And they only real justification as to why that’s the case boils down to: “It’s magic.”

I think putting magic in a steampunk, or any technology heavy setting adds a delightful tension between the world of concrete technology, and the incomprehensible realm of magic. In Smoke & Glass, the people of Kroy are simultaneously covetous, and terrified of magic, and try to use technology to control it. Since magic is literally in the blood of certain people, they become the focus of this balance of fear and desire. On the other side of things, inventors have developed a substance called saltglass that’s very effective in repelling and controlling magic and magic users, but producing it takes a heavy toll in labor and human lives.

What do you hope people get out of the game when they play?

(ABIGAIL) I hope they get to run a heist game with magic in it. Because that’s pretty much my favorite thing in the universe to do.

In addition, one of the things that was important to me while building this world was to play with societal norms. There are ingrained beliefs in American society that influence everything we do that are so basic it’s hard to even remember they’re there. Like the idea that being masculine means you’re tough and should never cry, and being feminine means you’re pretty and delicate. Assumptions that are often accurate, very limiting, and self-perpetuating. It’s hard to make a fantasy setting that changes these basic ideas because they inform so much of how we think and what we’re used to, and have been pervasive throughout English history–the era and location we most like borrowing from for our fantasy.

In Smoke and Glass, I tried to play with gender roles. What is life like in a society where masculine means magical and feminine means deadly? What are the problems that arise from THOSE stereotypes? Smoke and Glass isn’t a utopia. It isn’t better than our society: they just have a different set of societal norms that people make assumptions based on and are pressured to conform to. Slaughtering animals is women’s work, and the other girls make fun of little Daisy because she doesn’t like blood. No one cares if Roger cries about it, but they expect him to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a priest, because otherwise he’s getting drafted by the army and milked for his magical blood until he’s fifty.

So I hope people can use Smoke and Glass to explore a world with some different social conventions. They can also, if they like, use it to explore some very familiar economic ones, like exploitation of workers and class warfare, which is fought on the front lines by by an order of masked Robin Hoods and a legions of angry urchins in Kroy. The distance of a fantasy world can let us look at issues we’re too close to think about clearly in real life. The divide between rich and poor is a contentious issue right now, and I hope that examining it through a fictional lens of magical Dickensian England might be interesting and helpful. Or at least cathartic.

What else can we look forward to from Phoenix Outlaw Productions?

(SHOSHANA) We’ve got a number of other projects on the horizon, both in tabletop RPGs and in live action roleplaying games. Josh Harrison, co-founder of the company with me, is writing a brilliant game called Dreamdiver, which is cyberpunk-meets-Inception. That’s also going to be a Fate Core game that people can look for more announcements about around August. After that, I am developing a tabletop RPG as well called Wanderlust, which is about humans and faeries traveling through space looking for a new planet to call home. That book is slated to come out after Dreamdiver and there should be announcements about it come Metatopia in November this year. In the LARP world, we’re working on developing a collection of freeform games for release next year.

Five or So Questions with Stras Acimovic on Playtesting

I got to interview Stras Acimovic, Ace Playtester, and get some great suggestions on playtesting as a designer and a player!

Tell me a little about your tabletop background. What got you into gaming?

I think it was the old Milton Bradley copy of Hero Quest. Hero Quest is an old 1980s board game, played on a board representing rooms divided up into a dungeon, with one player acting as the GM and the rest playing barbarians, elves, dwarves and wizards. We played through all the adventures, and since everyone was still psyched, I just kept making up more. I spent many evenings getting grumbled at by parents who had no idea why we were cooped up playing a board game instead of ‘being outside’.

My first actual tabletop RPG was a 1st edition copy of Warhammer Fantasy RPG (in French of all things) that the brother of a friend of mine at the time had and ran for us. We were thrilled the ‘big kids’ would play with us.

As for my background, I’ve been gaming over two decades doing everything from crunchy traditional games, war games, more recent story games, and larps (boffer, rock-paper-scissors, parlor, nordic). I love trying out new things, and one of my favorite things is bringing back interesting, little-known games to share with my gaming groups at home.

What is the most important thing to remember when playtesting games?

Be generous and play to the spirit of the game! Knowing you’re in a playtest means being willing to go with the flow and make up some mechanics to tide you over on-the-fly. Often I see people try to break a system to ‘test it’ or simply play straight, without looking for ways to engage with the direction of the game. Playtests often only have the skeleton of a system in place. It’s not fully fleshed out, with all the bits polished. Seeing what the whole thing is supposed to look like is sometimes difficult, but do the best you can to try and get to where the game purports to take you, and then see which bits chafe, get in the way, or help you get there and make note of all three for feedback.

Also shorthanding notes during game can be an important playtesting skill to acquire. You’d be surprised how much you forget if you don’t jot down a phrase or word to remember it by.

How can playtesters give the best feedback to designers? What sort of feedback is most useful?

How you feel about something is valid and important. If mechanics frustrate you, or confuse things, this is important to note and often useful to designers in my experience. Similarly important is noting what worked well. Many people forget this step (or don’t notice it because it’s ‘working well’).

Writing down context for rules you have to house-rule-on-the-fly can also be important – not just what you encountered, but what was available as tools, and what you decided to go with and why.

A lot of designers can’t be present at your table so well organized and detailed AP reports are some of the only ways they can get feedback. I wish that there was a culture of ‘replays’ outside of japan. In japan many folks record the audio of their game, and transcribe it into a record called a ‘replay’ usually with some commentary. Sometimes what’s reported on in an AP report is summarized and specific details that a designer might catch watching a playtest are overlooked or edited out. Replays tend to be a bit more robust as a medium for communicating such things.

As a designer: remember to include questionnaires with your playtests.

What games have you enjoyed playtesting recently, and why?

I played a number of excellent ones recently, picking just a few is tough. There have been a number of thieving and scoundrel-themed games my groups have been enjoying.

I’ve really been digging Will Hindmarch’s amazing Project: Dark. It’s a Thief (as in The Dark Project) style game that makes characters using a deck-building mechanic with regular decks of playing cards. I’ve always loved playing thieves and scoundrels in RPGs and I’m a huge fan of first-person sneaker games like Dishonored, Thief, Mark of the Ninja and the like. This game really delivers on the tactical plays and stealth action. I got to try it as a player a couple times, and just ran a beta at CONLorado as a GM for the first time. Will’s flair for adding little NPC dialogues (called ‘eavesdrops’) is absolutely awesome, and I’m really excited about the KS for it.

Another game my groups have been excited about is a project by John Harper called Blades in the Dark. Interestingly enough it’s also a thief/roguish game, but this one focuses on building Thieves Guilds and organizations and lifting your group of ne’er-do-wells up the shadowy ladder of criminal prestige in the city while negotiating the dangerous seedy underbelly. It’s been undergoing some heavy revisions lately, but promises to be pretty exciting.

What is the biggest difference between playtesting as a player and playtesting as a designer?

As a player you, of course, hope to have fun despite any Beta-bumps, and provide useful feedback. So you hope for a smooth, fun game that works.

As a designer, a playtest that goes ‘well’ and has no bumps is sometimes the least helpful. Recently I was in a game that had all sorts of problems, but was very helpful to the designer because each issue reinforced a mechanic that was removed or changed recently, and showed exactly what made the game sing when put in place, and crash when removed.

Also, as a designer, sometimes the most useful playtests are the ones where you can just hand your stuff to someone who hasn’t played with you and casually kibitz and listen to how they interpret rules and read the game without inheriting all the shorthands and assumptions you teach when running the game that can get passed on.

Thanks for the questions!

—

Thanks to Stras for the interview! You can check out some of his actual play reports and game design musings at Platonic Solids.

Clash Playtests at Dreamation

(scheduled post – wrote this late last night. Sorry for the delay!)

I playtested Clash twice at Dreamation!

It was so scary, honestly. I am still learning, slowly, how to playtest and how to facilitate games. This was a huge step for me to run Clash in an environment like this and take feedback.

The first playtest was, I think, successful. I give you my confusing notes!

The story:
Two factions who fight each other lorded over by one occupying power called the Alliance. Players lived in a city that was once two cities, but is now one. There was a freedom fighter, an honest day laborer, a cheesemonger, a transport driver, a bodyguard, and a rogue cop. We had this awesome super mundane conversation between the cheesemonger (me) and the day laborer about how the laborer was working too much and not spending time with family. We also had an interrogation of the driver by the bodyguard. The freedom fighter blew up a bunch of outposts, one side hid a bomb in my cheese, and it was altogether pretty great.

Feedback included:
+ Unique stories.
+ World questions and character questions are effective.
+ Enough NPCs/components that it is clear but not overwhelming.
+ Visual presentation is great.
+ The mundane is possible.
+ Relationships on both sides.
+ Teams are great.
+ Signatures, stakes, and locations interacting is great.
+ Had scenes with this game that player didn’t think would happen in other games.

– Starting scenes (team scenes) are a little weak.
– Scenes sometimes feel disconnected from the World/not enough World interaction.
– High cognitive load at start of session.
– This is a long term game so may need adjustment for cons.
– Compromise is penalizing.
– One player in particular didn’t like the Avoidance mechanic.

A few notes:

Compromise is supposed to be penalizing. You can compromise, which gives you a narrative win, but there is a mechanical penalty because the World doesn’t want peace.
I definitely intend to make adjustments for con vs. long play.
I need to rework the starting scenes or offer better guidelines.
I need to formalize the visual presentation.

The second playtest also went well! More confusing notes to follow.

The story:
The Technocrats party and the Libraritarians (yes, I spelled it right) were preparing for an election. We had a young upstart politician, an agendered honorable representative, two older and kind of crotchety politicians, and two young interns – the eager beaver and the reluctant resume-filler. We had the old politicians agree to run a clean campaign, but then both sides went behind their back and tried to do it dirty. One politician managed to dodge with Avoidance to keep another player from finding incriminating evidence against them, and another won over the media. The eager beaver got hit by a car after a date with the reluctant resume-filler, but the final scene was an adorkable awkward kiss between the two interns.

Feedback included:
+ Very different game from session to session. (One player observed session 1, but played session 2.)
+ Clear and simple, but not predictable.
+ Avoidance is really great. (Called “innovative” and “hot” – made my day.)
+ Compromise is really good.
+ Questions work well.
+ Script Change mechanic (Rewind, Fast Forward) is excellent.
+ Ritual of structure/physical layout is great.
+ World creation went smoothly with no GM or facilitator interference.

– Very quick movement through scenes (we had some really aggressive scene framers, which was both good and bad).
– Not sure what niche is filled with the game.
– Factions have no stats.
– NPCs are sometimes tangential – need more interaction.
– World is not pushing hard enough.

A few notes:

The factions do not have stats, and I don’t think that will change. I do think that Stakes need to come into play more, which they didn’t in this session at all.
In the text, NPCs are tied to players. In this session, I tried not having them tied to players. This was a mistake.
For con games, based on both playtests, I think the format should be two scenes, World table, one scene, epilogue/vignettes. I need to try this out.
I want to look at the World and see if there is something I can do to make it bite more – maybe have it rolled more often.
One problem that came up was how people were handling personal goals. I need to make it clear in the text that personal goals can be solved either player to player, or in narrative scenes where you pay the World, no other methods.
This session reminded me very sharply of why Avoidance is staying a mechanic and why I originally wrote it. It was used brilliantly and to great effect.

Overall I’m pretty happy with the sessions. I think I have some tweaking to do but I think the game is strong, and I got a lot of great feedback.

Yay!

Author: Beau Jágr Sheldon

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