Hey all, today I have an interview with Alex Sprague on MoonPunk, which is currently on Kickstarter! It’s got a lot of awesome stretch goals to hit, so check out what Alex had to say below!
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Tell me a little about MoonPunk. What excites you about it?
MoonPunk is a Powered by the Apocalypse game that is about punks on The Moon. It has a punk zine aesthetic and has praxis and direct action as a focal point for the gameplay. There are 12 Punk playbooks with several mechanics that are fairly new yet simple. We have made a game where when the players see an issue they have total freedom to try to fix it. We give them a few guidelines about how to do so, but I expect to hear about similar problems being dealt with through serious trade negotiations or beating up The Authority.
So MoonPunk is, in essence, a game Jessica Geyer and I made in response to the idea that games shouldn’t be political. Almost everything is political and for many just trying to live has become a political issue. In much the same way I can’t actually slay a dragon, I probably can’t steal a corrupt politicians tea supply and jettison it into space. These stories of political unrest and oppression are stories that people want to talk about. Every fantasy story of a dragon hoarding wealth and eating peasants could be a metaphor for how billionaires act in our current world. So everything excites me about this game, it really feels like a large part of me laid out in game form.
Powered by the Apocalypse games can vary quite widely. How is MoonPunk unique in its design, specifically exploring some of these new mechanics?
Part of the process when making a game for us is trying to find the one element we are hoping it embodies. For our micro-RPGs we were able to really hammer this home. 10 Paces was Western movies, My Mecha has Shark Arms was every Voltron-esk anime, we then did Superheros, Afterschool specials, slang words, road trips, an entire game written as a script for an Action Movie game. For MoonPunk it was taking that core concept, Direct Action, and making it more than a 1-dimensional game. We had the what, then the Where became The Moon and the Who became punks. Each of those came from our own perspective. Our mechanics directly came from that.
Combat is different than other games because even a big guy like me only weighs about 35lbs on The Moon. Low gravity means a punch is going to send both parties just kinda floating backward. So our combat is called Throw Down, and unless you get some leverage, or literally slam someone into something, you aren’t going to do much damage. Our favorite mechanic though is TANSTAAFL (there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch), a term popularized in the book The Moon is a harsh Mistress. This mechanizes the idea of asking favors of others, allowing quest hooks to have a place in the cultural norm of the setting.
Twelve playbooks seems like a lot of variety! How did you find so many opportunities for differences and variety in the playbooks, and what kind of playbooks are there?
The playbooks came along when we were looking for what roles were needed in a revolution. I think the only trope we vetoed was The Spy because it didn’t feel very punk. So our game only has 4 stats, and 3 playbooks embody each stat in a different way. For example, we have the stat Presence: we have Guildy, Politician, and Rocker. Guildy is your hard-working well-liked person around town that just seems to know everyone, you’d have a beer with them. The Politician is your silver-tongued type, they tend to be likable when you are talking to them, but leave a bad taste in your mouth later. The Rocker is a catch-all artist, they might play music and get you riled up, or draw a political cartoon people can rally behind. These different facets of stats and the role they could play in a revolution is how we built most of these playbooks.
When you talk about the punk aesthetic, and about being punks, what does that mean to you and to MoonPunk, in comparison to other potential understandings of the term? How does it affect the experience of play?
The most important part of the punk aesthetic to us is the DIY culture. This is seen a lot within the game but it is also a point we make a lot in our game design. We made a ton of small games live on Twitch to show our process and attempt to show others the act of creation is mostly just starting. Anyone who wants to see a game come to life completely has the ability to get it made. I can basically guarantee even the most diehard D&D fans are homebrewing a little bit, and that little start of tinkering should be embraced; not rules lawyered out of existence.
As far as the idea of being a punk, that is something I have seen plenty of people gatekeep in the past. That is about the only thing I don’t abide, I mean sure people saying “conservatism is the new punk rock” are fucking idiots and wrong, but saying a kid is not punk because they don’t know anything about Milo or why he is going to college is silly. Punk is about individual freedom to me, and I think that comes across in the game.
Tell me a little about the plan of your Kickstarter, including your choice to include an Economic Hardship and a Hardship Supporter level. How has the activist ideal of the game MoonPunk been reflected in your ethical choices with the actual crowdfunding?
The choice to include the economic hardship and hardship supporter tiers came from a few peers in the TTRPG space who had already done it. It’s something we will be doing for all our games if we can, it reflects our attitudes toward gaming more so than our attitude towards activism. We want people to play our games, we want people to take away lessons and truths from these games. The Kickstarter was just about the only way for people without funds to get a game up, and a more diverse group of voices writing and doing art for the game without us having to ask people to work for free. We can work for months on a passion project, and we have, but to ask anyone else to do something for us for free really bothers us.
Tell me a little about The Curse of the House of Rookwood. What excites you about it?
Rookwood is a story game where you play a family with an ancient curse that grants them supernatural powers, but slowly transforms them into inhuman monsters. Since you play as members of a family — parents, children, aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins — the game is packed with relationships that your characters value, but did not choose for themselves. The rules support this part of play by giving you tools to create interesting problems that complicate these relationships, and reward you for exploring them during play. I spent the last year running the game for different groups at conventions, and it is exciting to see the different ways that players interpret “family” as a game/story concept. It can be funny, poignant, and sometimes a little bit intense, but it always seems to ring true because family is a common denominator for pretty much everyone.
How do the rules work to connect and structure the family, and complicate those relationships?
Family is defined in the rules on several levels. First, during character creation, players collaborate to answer questions about their progenitor, their ancestor who brought the curse upon the family. Their answers shape the current standing of the family, as well as what resources the family shares. Second, players define for themselves what family roles they want their characters to fulfill — parent, child, aunt, grandparent, etc. It’s up to the players how their family is structured in terms of age, gender, and identity.
Lastly, each player will choose a Skeleton for their character. Skeletons are complications that strain a character’s relationship with another character. This could be a dark secret that will harm the other character, a past mistake they want to reconcile, or an unequal relationship such as a need for approval or being overprotective. Each Skeleton has “bones” — scenes or events that might happen during play that players are rewarded for pursuing. As a story arc comes to an end, players decide if their Skeletons have been resolved positively, which improves the family’s standing, or negatively, which hurts the family.
Family drama can be difficult for some players! How do you provide support for play to help ensure everyone has a safe experience?
Safety tools are really important, especially with an emotionally charged subject like family relationships. The rules include a section on safety tools, which we introduce upfront. We recommend that players make use of Lines and Veils, as defined by Ron Edwards of Sex and Sorcery fame, as well as an X-card/O-card at the table. References to learn more about these tools are included.
What are the general activities of The Curse of the House of Rookwood – what do player characters encounter in play (such as monsters or situations), and how do they interact with it mechanically?
It depends on the Campaign Concept your group selects. You could be secret agents for the British Crown, employed to contain or eliminate supernatural threats. You might play as high society dilettantes, plying your talents as supernatural communicators and hunters. Or you might even play a traveling troupe of entertainers, looking for your next gig. Regardless what situation you place your family in, the core loop of play is trouble presented by the chronicler — a mystery, an adversary, and outright monstrous threat — and the family’s response to that threat.
Each family member has a finite amount of resources available to them to move the story in the direction they want. They have Traits, which are a pool of six-sided dice, and Assets, which can be spent to gain some immediate guaranteed success, or to gain extra dice when a Trait roll goes wrong. Like many rpgs, the game proceeds as a conversation.
When the outcome of what a player wants to accomplish seems uncertain, the GM and the player work out a list of Risks, things that could go wrong, and Rewards, things that could go right. The player chooses how many dice to roll from their pool — 1, 2, or 3 — and Assets to spend. Any dice that roll 4 or higher count as a success, which are used one-for-one to cancel Risks or buy Rewards.
Where it gets interesting is that the number of dice you roll reflects the amount of effort your character is putting forth in the fiction of the game. One die is normal effort. Two dice is extraordinary effort — if you roll any doubles, the effort is stressful and you lose a die from your pool. Three dice is supernatural effort — you must call forth the gift of your curse. If you roll doubles, not only do you lose a die, you also gain a new Mark of your curse.
The descent into monstrosity could reflect any number of fears in metaphor. How is it represented in the game mechanically and narratively, and what does it mean to the characters?
As alluded to above, every time you use the power granted to you by your curse — calling forth crows to act as spies, wrapping shadows about you to conceal your movement, suffocating a foe with a billowing mist — you risk gaining a Mark of your curse. Marks are outward, physical signs of your curse, but could also have an emotional or psychological element. For instance, if you have the Curse of the Rookery, your Marks could be amber eyes of a crow, black feathers instead of hair, literal crow’s feet, or an uncontrollable urge to steal shiny things. Each character can gain a limited number of Marks.
Mechanically, Marks function as a story timer. The last Mark on your character sheet is always “Lost to the Curse”. Using your power can give you a lot of narrative control over the story, but the more you use it, the closer you come to being completely lost. At that point, the character is gone from the story — transformed into a statue, a hideous bird monster hidden by the family in the attic, or lost in an endless void of shadows.
Characters might struggle with identity as their bodies transform against their will, feel dread about suffering the same fate as a lost ancestor with a similar curse, or leave troubled relationships unresolved when they are lost. It’s tragic stuff. And though a character’s fate might be out of their control, it’s important to note that the player does have control over their story. They choose their Skeleton and their Curse upfront, and they choose how the Marks of their curse manifest.
I have an interview today with Rae Nedjadi on BALIKBAYAN: Returning Home, which is currently available on itch.io! This game sounds so fascinating, and Rae talked about some really deep thoughts with me. Check them out below!
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Tell me a little about BALIKBAYAN! What excites you about it?
BALIKBAYAN: Returning Home is a narrative tabletop role-playing game that gives everyone at the table equal creative opportunities!
Specifically
it’s a story about Elementals, beings of Supernatural Filipino Folklore come to
life. BALIKBAYAN takes place in the far future, in a Cyberpunk setting at the
mercy of The Corp, that has enslaved the elementals through machinery.
Over
the generations these machines have infused with the magic, so BALIKBAYAN is
also about wielding machine-magic and using it to stay on the run, destroy the
Corp, and rebirth Magic.
I’m
excited about so many things about BALIKBAYAN, but I’m most excited about
offering a creative playground for everyone to enjoy. I’ve never understood
this boundary between science fiction and fantasy, technology and ritual,
machine and magic. I wanted to offer people to play with these ideas, while
also offering my own modern reimagining of Filipino folklore.
I’m
really happy with the response, and how excited everyone is to enjoy Filipino
games made by Filipino designers! I’m honestly hoping this will encourage more
people to create their own games so we can have more creative voices in the
community.
Another thing that excites me is the game system. BALIKBAYAN is a Belonging Outside Belonging game, which gives everyone more creative control. It’s different from your typical TTRPG experience, where only the Game Master controls most of the narrative.
Many of my readers will be excited to hear about the Filipino roots of the game! What are some of the elements (themes, history, magic) of BALIKBAYAN that players will see that are very much Filipino?
The strongest and most
apparent Filipino themes are present in the Playbooks themselves. Currently
BALIKBAYAN has six playbooks: Tikbalang, Diwata, Saint, Aswang Santelmo, and
the Duwende. I wanted to unapologetically use the original names for these
beings of myth and legend.
I did this mainly because
I come across a lot of Filipinos who are familiar with the folklore of other
countries (most people who play D&D here know about elves, gnomes, and all
that). But when I run a Filipino inspired game and lean into our roots, most of
the people I know, living here in this country, don’t know much about our own
myths. And often they use a western perspective when approaching these myths,
which breaks my heart.
I will say though that I decided to personally interpretat the essence of
these myths and legends. There are some problematic aspects of our folklore
that reflects the centuries of colonization that still influences the
Philippines to this day.
For example I wanted to take the Tikbalang and break it away from just being
an anthropomorphic horse. Horses aren’t even a natural local animal here, and
to this day they’re associated with the elite and privileged. Instead I wanted
to lean into our shamanic and animism roots. The Tikbalang in BALIKBAYAN can
change into any anthropomorphic animal form, and I wanted that fluidity to be
an important aspect of the playbook. I also wanted to reflect how we often look
to spiritual leaders in our community, and the Tikbalang is true to that.
I think the SAINT is another important one. Religion is a big thing here in
the Philippines, for better and for worse. We have so many beautiful stories
about Saints and the mystical miracles they embodied to protect communities. I
wanted to acknowledge that, but once again honor our pre-colonial roots and
have the SAINT be a playbook that interacts with Small Gods, in a Cyberpunk
setting.
I could just go on and on about each playbook!
In general I wanted to
honor our folklore, but I wanted to respectfully bring it into the present and
reflect our modern values, nuances, and struggles. Because I’m bi-racial,
queer, and non-binary, I think that shows in the design. I put so much of
myself, and my complex love for my country, into this game.
BALIKBAYAN also speaks to
leaving behind our masters and becoming our own masters. I wanted this to reflect
in the premise and creative setting, but also in the mechanics and narrative
prompts.
Becoming our own masters is something I want to happen for Filipinos in
general. We were colonized for centuries, and the scars still show. As a
society, we haven’t done the collective and deeply emotional work to decolonize
our perspectives, approaches, and values. In a way we are still bowing down to
Masters that have long left us to rot, and it shows in our governance and
social value systems.
I have faith that we can do the work. Many artists, teachers, and leaders
are already helping their communities to do so. BALIKBAYAN is my own personal
attempt to help along and honor that decolonization process.
BALIKBAYAN seems like a big step away from what we’ve seen from cyberpunk. How have you altered the standard cyberpunk setting to really make it yours and to do something different?
It’s funny, I really get
this a lot! But to be perfectly honest, BALIKBAYAN simply embodies how I’ve
always seen and engaged with Cyberpunk. For one thing, I’ve always gravitated
more to portrayal of Cyberpunk themes in anime, especially from the 80s and
90s. I’ve always appreciated that lens more, and it really speaks to me.
I did want to make magic a big part of the game. This is again deeply
personal. I believe magic and technology aren’t at odds with each other, and
magic shouldn’t be regulated to fantasies chained to the past either. I was
initially inspired by games like Shadowrun, but I didn’t like how the lore and
system created this great divide between magic and technology. So in BALIKBAYAN
I wanted to make that barrier non-existent.
I think the main issue with Cyberpunk as a genre is that we often see the
aesthetic markers and surface indicators of the genre, but we ignore the important
work that POC and queer creators have done in the space. They’ve given me the
permission to define Cyberpunk on my own terms.
And in turn, I want to do the same for the people who will play BALIKBAYAN.
The game asks you to bring about the rebirth of magic and to create a
Revolution, but what that will actually entail is up to the players and is out
of my hands. I believe Cyberpunk, and the Revolution it inspires, is a deeply
personal experience.
Because I don’t think the world will change from one Revolution. I believe it will change, and has changed, from the series of ongoing neverending Revolutions that we bring to life.
There is a lot of discussion about
decolonizing games and how many major games are from a colonized perspective,
so I really appreciate you talking about that! Does any of this translate to
the actual mechanics you use in the game? What are the mechanics like?
I definitely feel that the
decolonization process can be incredibly personal. For me it was in realizing
that the games I used to love to run and play, namely Dungeons & Dragons
and games like it, focused on violence, possession, taking things through
strength, with a focus on exploring the “alien” and
“exotic” and marveling at how “weird” it all was. This was
reflected in the mechanics of the game too, I feel. As a Filipino, knowing that
my own country was treated this way by its colonizers, it left a really bad
taste in my mouth.
In BALIKBAYAN, the Belonging
Outside of Belonging system favors narrative play that is entirely in the hands
of the players. I also added a few mechanics that center on the decolonization
process. First, each playbook asks the players to choose and build on a
“human form” and a “true form”. Because the Elementals are
on the run, this is basically what forms are “acceptable” versus what
they truly look like. I wanted to leave it up to the players and each story
what this means, how do they navigate this? Next the playbooks ask you to
choose “What you hope for”. While the players are tasked to bring
about the Rebirth of Magic (more on that in a bit), I also wanted to give the
players a personal goal to help drive the story. In a way this reflects how I
feel about the decolonization process: each path is unique, deeply personal.
People can talk about what their decolonization process is like, but they
cannot dictate to others what it SHOULD be like. Each of us interacts with
different intersections of class, race, background, and so on. What the
decolonization process is like in America is VERY different from what it is
like in the Philippines, and so on. The individual hope reflects that, but it
also asks each player to balance or find common ground with that hope and the
rebirth of magic.
Which brings us to another mechanic
I added. Originally I just liked the idea of having a sort of countdown
mechanic, to give the players some structure or urgency to the story being
told. There are two clocks running. The first clock is you start ON THE RUN,
but can eventually end up CAPTURED by the Corp again. The second clock has you
start at FADING, your magic is weak and dwindling compared to your ancestors,
but you want to reach REBORN, with the magic being your own.
In my mind, decolonization is not
about returning to what was before our colonizers came. That is in the past,
and much of our history has been rewritten by those more powerful than us. When
I think about what we’ve lost, what we could have been, it frustrates me. When
I think of the privilege I enjoy because of my circumstances that are favored
by a colonial mentality, I feel guilty and ill at ease. For example, I speak
English well and that opened a lot of doors for me, when it shouldn’t have. I
strongly feel that the way forward is in acknowledging the past, while building
our own sense of worth and grace outside of our colonial mentality. In the
Philippines we need to acknowledge that much of our systems and infrastructure
are badly compromised by these centuries of colonization. We need to rebuild,
to be reborn, to reclaim our own magic.
I’m nonbinary too, so I’m always
fascinated to see how other nonbinary designers make games. How do you feel
that your queerness, your nonbinary identity, being bi-racial, and these other
personal aspects of yourself have impacted the design and presentation of
BALIKBAYAN and the cyberpunk world within it?
To be honest, I used to really struggle with the idea of queer design, and what that looks like. I have to truly give credit to the community of indie designers who looked at my work and reflected on it, helping me see the queerness and nonbinary nature of my design. In BALIKBAYAN my nonbinary asserts itself by allowing the players to choose how active or passive they wish the story to flow. There are tools available, but I provide many examples that show how each game can be unique and flow completely differently. As a nonbinary, I believe in nuance and push away from the black and white. There are some cool mechanics tied to that (for example, even if you bring about the Rebirth of Magic, you have to answer the question “Which one of us runs away, and helps rebuild the Corp?”). Though I also have to say that also reflects my colonial pain, many of us resort to acting like our colonial masters in the way of rebirth and revolution (those dang intersections, right?).
But yes as a nonbinary designer, I come from a place of nuance and push that towards the forefront. I think that also gave me the sheer confidence to tackle the Cyberpunk genre. I grew up loving it, and like so many people like me (queer, POC, etc) I also felt disappointed by how so much of its core themes of revolution and self-acceptance were rewritten and downplayed. But I refuse to back down, and I’ll continue designing in these spaces and do my work to reclaim it along with other diverse artists.
Tell me a little about Doikayt. What excites you about it?
Doikayt is a Jewish Tabletop Role Playing Game anthology. The word Doikayt itself is Yiddish, and roughly translates to “hereness”. It is this idea that I am most intrigued and excited by, truthfully. Judaism is a religion and a tradition that isn’t monolithic. It’s founded on the principles of conversation and argument, conflict and interpretation. Riley and I were lucky enough to get pitches and submissions from people that claim vastly different backgrounds and experiences, and subsequently have different ideas of what constitutes Judaism.
I can’t wait to see how everyone’s work comes together, how their worlds influence their ideas and words. For me, the moment I’m most looking forward to is seeing the games complete and spending the time thinking about how my Judaism is a product of my upbringing, and how the themes explored by each designer help to paint a picture of them and their Jewishness.
JR Goldberg and Riley Rethal, the project leads.
Awesome! What about tabletop RPGs do you think makes them a good medium for expressing the different experiences and perspectives of Judaism?
There are a few reasons. First and foremost, the Jewish tradition is steeped in things that could be generally classified as a LARP or a TTRPG. A lot of Jewish traditions, especially ones surrounding the holidays, have been gamified in some way. So I think for many Jews, expressing something that speaks to them about Judaism through a game is something that is perhaps not innate, but at the very least is experiential.
Additionally, Judaism is a tradition and religion that isn’t based on dogmatism. Discussion of everything is encouraged, and learning and discussion of the tenets of faith is encouraged with a partner or in a group. Other perspectives are necessary. I think this is helpful and true for design and for play, as well. My best game experiences and memories have been times when the group coalesced and built something together that would have been impossible to do by myself. While I don’t necessarily think that Jews have a monopoly on that sort of thing, I do think that having it be such a part of the culture will make for some interesting angles with regards to play and design.
What are some of the challenges and benefits of running a project like this for a group of people with such different, but still related, stories they want to tell?
Riley and I were lucky in that none of the pitches we gravitated toward felt too similar. I can only think of maybe one instance where we felt as though we had to choose between two games that were too thematically close to both be included. I think that speaks to the amount of stuff that can be covered, and the amount of stuff that people think of when prompted to make a “Jewish Game”. That being said, we did have to be conscious not to just represent one Jewish tradition.
When we realized that the majority of the perspectives that we got through the submissions were Ashkenazi, one of the first things we decided to do as a stretch goal was to add essays that would be representative of the rich histories that Sephardic, Ethiopian and Mizrahi Jewry have completely separate from Ashkenazi Judaism. We felt like getting context from community members themselves would be the best option, as we certainly did not want to be appropriative in any way.
What are some examples of the kind of games, concepts, and artistic presentations we’ll be seeing from Doikayt and its designers?
Gosh, I think we have some really varied and interesting stuff in the anthology. One thing that we did semi-consciously is try and make games that have original systems in some way. Because we anticipated have a readership that may not know exactly what PbtA or BoB is, having a book full of hacks of existing games might’ve been alienating for some, in that there is an inevitable shorthand used that less experienced players would’ve had a hard time with. But beyond that, we have games that run the gamut.
While we have many designers working on the book, we do have one unifying force: all interior art is being done by Never Angeline North. You can see Never’s first piece for Doikayt on the kickstarter page. She is a recent convert to Judaism, and I think that is a super interesting perspective that will be present throughout.
How does a Jewish approach to games and game design differ from the more mainstream work we’re used to seeing, and what do you most want people to take away from this project?
I’m honestly not sure if I can that question at this point in the process! I know, speaking for myself, I don’t think I can help but have my Judaism permeate all my design work, even the stuff that isn’t expressly Jewish. How that manifests exactly is something that I’m not sure I’m introspective enough to really answer. That being said, I think once we have the book in our hands, we will be able to see the start of something.
My hope is that it is something that defies simple classification, but I can already tell from what we have looked at thus far, it will contain the humor, vulnerability and contemplation that is present throughout most Jewish texts. I suppose that is also what I to leave people with: my Jewish experience was probably different from yours because my life was different than yours. You may not even be Jewish, just a fan of TTRPG and a curious soul. But rather than focusing on the differences or setting up hurdles, through these games, we will be able to find human similarities.
I’ve got another great quick interview with Martin Lloyd, this time about the Big Book of Amazing Tales, currently on Kickstarter! It sounds like a great game resource for kids to add to your Amazing Tales collection. Check out Martin’s responses below!
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What is the Big Book of Amazing Tales, both as
a product and as your vision?
Some of the most fun I’ve had with Amazing Tales has been
playing games with the kids while on holiday, that’s when we’ve played out
campaigns, and the idea of the Big Book is to make it easy for other families
to do the same. So in the book I’m including four campaigns, one
for each of the settings in the book. So you’ll get…
A Dream of Trees – for the Deep Dark Wood setting
The Quest for the Dragon Crown – for the Magical Kingdoms setting
Captain Cadava’s Treasure – for the Pirate Seas setting
The Cryptid Conundrum – for the Adventure among the Stars setting
The Big Book of Amazing Tales should be seen as a companion
volume to Amazing Tales. Amazing Tales gives you all the tools you need to make
up amazing adventures with your kid and get them started on role-playing. The
Big Book of Amazing Tales is about providing you with some really great
campaigns that can take things to the next level.
Before I started writing I set myself some goals. One of
them was to include elements in the games that would bring the games alive in
the real world as well as the player’s imagination. So in the Quest for the
Dragon Crown there is a crown for the players to cut out, colour in and put
together when they find it. It doesn’t look like a conventional crown, but its
form is a clue to what it really does so having it right there in the players’
hands is important. One of the other goals is to include ‘moments of awesome’
for the players, to make sure they have those moments where their characters
get to do something amazing. You really will save the kingdom, slay the dragon,
stop the alien invasion and so on.
It’s also a chance for me to answer two of the questions
I’ve been asked most frequently since launching Amazing Tales. Namely – ‘How do
you use this game in a classroom?’, and ‘Can I use this game to help my kid
with some kind of problem?’. Although to be honest I won’t be the one doing the
answering. Baz Stevens, who is both a teacher and a game designer will be
answering the first question, and Lilly Smith who is a child therapist will be
answering the second.
As an ongoing product, how do you keep coming up for ideas for
Amazing Tales, and keep them fresh?
It really helps that Amazing Tales doesn’t have a fixed setting. So I’m not stuck trying to come up with five different fantasy adventures, or a new twist on space pirates or whatever. If I’m writing a pirate adventure I can make it the most piratey pirate adventure imaginable, a kind of Pirates of the Carribean in RPG form, and try and cram it full of as many pirate ideas as I can. I don’t need to worry about having used all the good stuff and then having to write another pirate campaign next week. * Once a month I publish a set of story seeds in the Amazing Tales newsletter, and those are always a good chance to really interrogate an idea. I pick a simple concept like ‘Temples’ and then try and come up with a set of ideas that do something interesting with that idea – stretching it in different directions. It’s a good practice.
And then there are the games I hear about people playing
with their kids. Often there will be a couple of sentences on Facebook that
sound brilliant, but that’s all there is. So it becomes a jumping off point for
new ideas. Someone posted the other day about an adventure involving a lost
circus in a forest. That’s about all I know, but it’s a great starting point.
An adventure about a lost circus in a forest, it almost doesn’t matter what
genre or system you’re playing – that’s a great place to start.
What
are some of your favorite things in the Big Book and what are they like for
players?
I’m really looking forward to some of the special extras. So in the Cryptid Conundrum, where the heroes need to crack the alien codes, there’ll be a decoder ring for the players to cut out and make. Now a lot of kids will probably make something like that at some point while growing up, but how many of them will get to use it to rescue the victims of an alien kidnapping? In a similar way that bit of research about kids being better at identifying logos than trees really bothers me. So A Dream of Trees will definitely include puzzles that require learning about trees, leaves, nuts and the like. Hopefully that will be enough to make kids a bit more excited by being outdoors, because playing outside is almost as important as role-playing 🙂
* Thinking about it, this is probably one of the reasons the Pirates of the Carribean sequels ended up the way they did…
I recently attended Big Bad Con 2019 at the grace of many generous purchasers of a bundle that funded my attendance. Big Bad Con is my favorite con, and I’ve talked about it in the past on Thoughty with a lot of passion and enthusiasm, as well as interviewed the staff. It is a con that I truly feel has a caring ethic to their design, and I love being there a lot.
The Big Bad Con welcome pamplet’s Community Standards.
A brief personal note
This year I was traveling in the midst of some personal crises – at home, I found out mid-con my kitchen was mildly flooding, and the following week, I had a mild-but-anxiety-inducing medical procedure that had basically blocked my mind from functioning. On my flight in, I sustained a mild back injury that made my participation in the con limited. It was really frustrating, stressful, and I feel like I let a lot of people down by letting stress get to me and by not being able to keep my body going.
I am super grateful to everyone who supported me by helping me get medication and supplies to get through the pain I was in (shout out especially to Jeremy Tidwell, Lucian Kahn, and Vivian Paul!). I apologize that this con report isn’t Super Exciting and Full of Games! I was simply limited by my own realities, and it is a dreadful thing, to be sure.
Also big thanks to Anders Smith who managed to get me a gift when he wasn’t even here.
What I did
I arrived a day early on Wednesday and spent most of that day meeting new people and getting into my accommodations. We initially feared a power outage, which sent me into a tizzy, but it never happened. I still tried to be prepared, and in doing so, I spent a lot of time around the lobby keeping an ear out and seeing who arrived.
Some of the amazing people I had the chance to meet were Sangjun Park, creator of moonflower; Luke Wildwood; Sidney Icarus (who I hope to someday have guest write on Thoughty for approachable theory!); and after that it starts to get real busy. See, Big Bad Con this year did some amazing things – one of the biggest things is that, combining scholarships and the very vital Babble On Equity Project, they had guests from all around the world, including Australia, Korea, and Malaysia, and even had a guest from Trinidad, Brandon O’Brien, who I got to meet later that day. Brandon said some very kind things about Turn, especially about A.J.’s poetry. It made me so glad!
Later in the week, Big Bad Con also hosted the PoC (People of Color) dinner and meet & greet, focusing on supporting and connecting people of color in the gaming community. It was really awesome to see! I was lucky enough to meet a lot of amazing designers of color from outside of the U.S. and from inside the U.S. too. It was incredible to see such a presence at the con, to see so many people there who deserve to be heard and given opportunities, as well as allowed space to show the amazing work they do!
EVERYONE who got a scholarship, attended the PoC events as a person of color, or was supported by the Babble On Equity Project at Big Bad Con is rad as hell and their work is worth investing in.
HELP THEM THRIVE. Do not fail this whole class of designers and creators by dismissing them or ignoring them. Look them up, research them, hire them, pay them, buy their games and art, interview them, promote them, and when you do those things? Respect their identity and their backgrounds with care and generosity and do NOT let them down.
On Thursday, I co-hosted the Soda Pop Social with Meguey Baker and it was a great success! We had a really good turnout and lots of people were super enthusiastic for the sodas we’d selected. I again had a lot of comments from people grateful for a welcoming space for non-alcoholic networking that was still fun and had recognizable people to meet and get to know, so that was great! I love the social, even though it keeps me moving for a couple hours without significant breaks, because I get to kind of be one of the first faces to welcome people and to share something fun and lighthearted with them!
So many sodas! This wasn’t even the ones in the fridge!
I also did my first Ranger shift! I volunteered at the con this year to cover my badge and my shifts were both at the Tell Me About Your Character Booth, which is really cool! I got to listen to people talk about their cool characters they’ve played and see the resident artist at the booth draw a portrait for the guest, and donations for the booth went to Doctors without Borders! It was really great. I did provide feedback to the con about improving the accessibility for those of us who have to be seated for our shifts, and for guests who need to sit. We worked out some more comfortable arrangements on my shift the next day, too, so it was good overall! I’m hoping if I volunteer again I get to do the booth and, if I’m lucky, do the booth with one of my artist partners so I can listen and they can draw!
Friday, I did the Terror in Design panel with Meguey Baker, Whitney “Strix” Beltrán, Misha Bushyager, and James Mendez Hodes, moderated by Rachel Bell. It was a fantastic panel, and some notes were taken by a guest and can be found here. We discussed a lot of things, especially consent, boundaries, how consent and boundaries can make horror more interesting, creating ambiance through design, where we find horror, and so so much more. It was a really interesting panel!
I actually really dig horror and I don’t talk about it as much as I’d like to because I’m also incredibly picky about horror, and have a lot of triggers, squicks, and general issues to watch out for. For example, on the flight home I watched the Hulu In The Dark film New Year, New You and got through the film with few issues because it’s altogether not too trauma-heavy for me, except for the references to suicide. But I watched In The Tall Grass on Netflix tonight and had to look away or distract myself multiple times because there was a pregnancy as a major focus of the fiction and horror. As I have tokophobia, that’s a no-no. It’s tricky, that lizard brain.
Big Bad Con actually has Script Change as one of their recommended safety tools!
I also did a second shift at the Tell Me About Your Character Booth on Friday, a little more successful this time around. 🙂
By the time Saturday ran around, I was 100% burnt out. I’d been dealing with a lot of emotional stress, so after a lot of weaseling around I elected to drop out of two games I’d been dying to play – Lucian Kahn’s Visigoths vs Mall Goths and Kieron Gillan’s DIE. But, I was in no state to play. So I just visited people most of the day, getting to hang out with a ton of people and talk about games and the industry!
The only actual game I played over the course of the weekend was a portion of a game in progress by LiteralSoup, who is great. It’s a mech game, and gave me the mech name of Challenging Hope, which sounds about right! I thought it was super cool, and I really enjoyed hearing of other people’s mech names – if you played Soup’s game, please tell me your mech name! I want to know! We need to cancel the apocalypse together! <3
All throughout the weekend people were stopping to have me sign Turn or Script Change for them, which was amazing! I loved that so much – I loved being able to sign books for the first time really and it meant so so much to me. I really appreciated everyone’s enthusiasm for the book and for Script Change! I’ve worked hard on my projects and it means a lot to see people show love for them. <3
Did I mention I got a copy of Undying from Paul Riddle and DIDN’T have him sign it? *headdesk*
Late in the night I went to the Big Queer Dance Party hosted by Jackson Tegu, which was super fantastic! While I don’t dance much anymore, I really enjoy attending the dance party and listening to music. I was hugely impressed by the workshopping on consent, communication, and care that Jackson (assisted by Anne Ratchat) provided to help people ask each other to dance, accept rejection, provide rejection, and be comfortable in the space. It was so amazing, and I love that Big Bad Con allows space for events like these!
Many people who attend USian gaming conventions might not have had the kind of access to places to dance and be comfortable in their body that people from other subcultures or even just cultures in general might have had, and there’s also a huge number of queer people at the con who are given a space to express themselves. I wouldn’t be surprised if a number of games or mechanics were thought up just in those flashing lights on the dance floor as we all listened to music. Goodness knows I thought of some!
I stayed up ungodly late talking to a fantastic person (Soup) then got up earlier than I wanted and flew home on Sunday.
Not before I grabbed a copy of Vivian Paul’s Elder Song…and also forgot to have her sign it.
Some thoughts
I’ve been reflecting on Twitter about a lot of things since then, including a thread about how I learned to “hold court” at cons and how it keeps me from spending the whole con sitting by myself. I really enjoyed the con, but as I told many people there, I have a lot of challenges with conventions. They’re quite expensive, it’s hard for me to travel alone, if I get injured or ill it’s a whole mess, and I struggle to keep up with everything – plus I often feel out of place or alone.
I’m putting these facts out to the world because I want to be honest, and also so others don’t feel alone if they feel the same way. These things we do as professionals or as hobbyists to be connected with our community and our industry can be very challenging for us in a lot of ways, and flying thousands of miles to feel left out and discouraged and not good enough is hard. It’s scary and makes you feel like the world is ending. And like, there’s no real good fix for it!
I keep trying to remember the good moments of the con, like this, even though my finishing move makes no sense because I don’t know grammar terms apparently.
I want to say something that fixes it. I want to say that I will wake up in a few hours (as it’s already 4am) and feel refreshed, and like going to Big Bad Con was a wonderful, flawless experience. But it wasn’t. There’s weird industry baggage – I’ve been working long enough to have that. There’s annoying health stuff – I’m old enough and disabled enough to have that. There’s stressful home stuff – I’m old enough and low class enough to have that. There were challenges at the con with accessibility (some solved, some not), and challenges with travel with accessibility.
There were so many things I loved about the con! But I do wish I had gotten to play more games so I had more to report to you, my readers, and I wish I had more to say to you than this: there are so many amazing games on the horizon and already HERE that I can’t even handle it, and I also do not know what my capacity truly is for the situation I am in. I want to be bring you the interviews and theory you want, I want to design you games you enjoy. But I may not always be as speedy as I once was, and Big Bad Con this year showed me that.
You could say, really, that… this con hit me a little differently.
I generally try not to be so under the wire, but life has been hectic lately! Here’s an interview.
Today I have an interview with Meguey and Vincent Baker about Under Hollow Hills, which is currently on Kickstarter! It’s a game about traveling performers and explores a new realm of Powered by the Apocalypse design. Check out what Vincent and Meguey had to say!
All art by Vincent, after Rackham.
—
Tell me a little about Under Hollow Hills. What excites you about it?
Meg: Traveling together as a group, seeking audiences, dealing with a stuck wagon or a friend in trouble, showing up at birthday parties to just utterly dazzle a human child and leave them with a touch more wonder than before – that’s all real neat to me. What excites me most though, perhaps, is the core ethic of this game, of paying attention to how we are together when times are good and when times are bad. Fairies often get portrayed as either all sweetness and light or all threat and magical terror, and I’m excited to see MORE than that. We’re drawing on a lot of different fairy stories, and I look forward to the new stories that come from this.
VB: In Under Hollow Hills you play the performers and crew of a circus that travels through Fairyland and through the human world, through good times, bad times, and dangerous times. I’m excited about the tour of Fairyland that the game offers – but it’s like a working tour, not a tourist tour. You’re behind the scenes, you see what goes on in the Wolf King’s Court, you perform for audiences who think they’ve commanded you, but really you’re playing them. You see through the glamor to the mystery, if that makes sense!
I’m also excited by how much the game loves words. Metaphor, poetry, wordplay, puns, it’s a game that loves and plays with language.
There are a lot of fairy tales that people might be familiar with. Where are you pulling influence from, and what are some examples of the things you’re spinning of your own?
VB: Yeah! Meg’s history with fairies is older than mine. I think I started, these decades ago, with Alan Lee and Brian Froud’s book Faeries. For me my main sources have been Yeats’ Fairy Tales of Ireland, Sikes’ British Goblins, and Kirk & Lang’s The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies. These all mix collected stories and folklore with the speculations of their authors / editors, much in the mode of a bestiary or field guide. This is where the idea of fairy kinds comes from, I think, these marvelous old collections.
I’m also influenced by Shakespeare, by Norse myths, and by
more contemporary fairy tales and fairy tellers like Francesca Lia Block,
Tanith Lee, John Crowley, Jane Yolen, and even Jack Vance per Lyonesse.
That said, we’ve tried to keep our interpretations fresh and
playful. In the playbooks, for instance, we always try to mix and cross
influences, not narrow down. The Chieftain Mouse has elements of Reepicheep and
Despereaux, and also of Rob Roy. The Crooked Wand harks back to the three old
women who share an eye, and to Odin, and then to Yubaba from Spirited Away and Nora Cloud from Little, Big.
Meg: I had a beloved storytelling teacher in 4th grade, Janet Glantz, who gave me Nancy Arrowsmith’s 1977 Field Guide to the Little People, which leads off with “In high summer meadows, nestled in the moors, near old castles, or behind the kitchen stove—these are the places where the Little People may be found.”. If I had to point to one clear influence alone, it would be this book and this line. The earliest fairy-tales I remember are the ones in Olive Beaupre Miller’s 1928 edition of My Bookhouse books, particularly volume two, which has fairy tales from around the world, and the first book I remember reading for myself is Midsummer Night’s Dream, when I was about 6.
The Muppet Show, of course, and Labyrinth. I saw the 1962
movie Gypsy a surprising number of times as a kid, so the backstage parts of a
traveling show were there, and when I was learning to walk and talk, my parents
were crew in a Shakespearean diner theater company, which was of course FULL of
fairies and actors and stage effects. I spent 8 years in the 1990s doing hair
design and costuming for our local Hampshire County Shakespeare Company, too.
Apples and trees, you know. Decades of thinking about the natural world in a
way that invites the possibility of fairies also fit into the game design, and
noticing the playfulness of bees, the enthusiasm of the berry bramble, or the
determination of a stream. Then blending all of that so that there are layers
on layers of influence, so players can bring their own influences to their
unique portrayal of fairyland.
What is Under Hollow Hills like mechanically? It seems like it might function a little differently because of the types of stories you’re telling!
VB: It does!
The structure of the game is, you travel through fairyland
and the human world, and everywhere you go, you put on a show. On the GM’s
side, this means that between sessions, you prep up where the circus is going
next. You don’t prep what’ll happen – there’s no way you could guess! – but
just what the place is like, and who’s there. There’s a quick system for this,
rules you follow in prep that help you decide who the audience is, what they
want from the circus, and what they have to give the circus in return.
In play, then, you arrive at this new place, and you know
that you’ll be performing here, but before you do, you want to get the lay of
the land. As much as your audience here wants something from you, you want
something from them too. So you introduce yourselves, enjoy your hosts’
hospitality, get people’s stories out of them, and meddle as you see fit. When
you’re satisfied, then you plan your show and perform.
Planning and performing your show are distinct phases in the
game, and they give you a lot of power. In your performance you can change the
season of the place – “season” here includes mood, fortunes, history,
even who rules and who’s ruled over. You can win from the audience what they
have in plenty, or win from them what they hold most dear. You can also change
the circus, switching up the performers’ jobs, welcoming new performers or
bidding old ones goodbye, and opening the way forward from one world to the
other.
Now this is the large view, the overall structure. Your
character has cycles and structures of their own. Your capabilities include,
yes, ways to get the lay of the land, and ways to plan a show and perform in
it, but they also include your own angle on things. Ways to get what YOU want,
whether you line up with the circus or not.
Meg: A lot of game mechanics are designed in terms of a linear progression, from point to point to future point. Under Hollow Hills mechanics cycle and spin, as we spiral through the seasons and through our own emotions and the characters’ emotional relationships with each other. Players may come back to things that feel familiar several times in the course of play, but from a different angle each time.
I’m intrigued by the implicit theme of transience in these stories because of the traveling nature of the troupe and the temporary nature of performance. How does Under Hollow Hills address the concept and experience of transience by the characters, and naturally, players?
Meg: Playing with time and space is part of fairyland, as well as of stagecraft and performance. The magical thinking of childhood when summer never ends, and how it takes forever for a special event to arrive, and the way time moves oddly when you are fully engrossed in the current moment even as an adult, are all part of the game. All those can be tiny windows into fairyland, that may open only for a fleeting moment. We all change over time, in myriad ways. Major ways that come to mind are gender fluidity and variance and how that permeates Under Hollow Hills in reflection of the actual world we live in, and seasonal cycles as they affect all life on the planet. There’s a third, of course, which is mortality, and the questions around death that come up from the fay viewing it as a game and the mortals knowing that for them it is the biggest and most permanent change. Shifting through these moments smoothly takes practice.
As characters pass from moment to
moment, in terms of Under Hollow Hills game design specifically, we built in
ways to shift your character’s expression fluidly across their summer aspect
and their winter aspect, and we recognize the impact people have on places (and
vice versa) in the way that the Circus can move the place they perform towards
different seasons. Illustrating the pinwheel of the seasons, choosing as a
group how you move the circus and spaces through the pinwheel, helps convey the
transient but also the cyclical nature of the game, and therefore of life.
Movement is a basic part of the game.
Building a game where travel is
intrinsically part of the story helps address some fictional issues in
storytelling as well. Have you ever encountered a detective series you like,
set in “a small country town” where there’s multiple mysteries and
murders in each book? For heaven’s sake, get out of that town! It’s a
hell-mouth! Making the circus mobile, building an interconnected group that is
traveling together, with the inherent community needs and relationship
complications that arise when people come to rely on each other, and when they
are constantly encountering new groups of people wherever they go, allows for
very different stories than having the characters in a fixed location.
Another topic that interests me is the diversity found in traveling troupes in history, and the prejudice with which they’ve been treated. A hard topic, I know, but have you addressed it at all in Under Hollow Hills, and why or why not?
VB: Not so hard a topic! Historically, traveling people, especially traveling performers, have been treated all different ways – with horrifying violence and racism, with glory and celebrity, with suspicion, with reverence – all different ways. Right now in the US, for instance, a lot of carnival workers are seasonal migrant workers, vulnerable to the US’ racist anti-immigrant policies and sentiments.
In Under Hollow Hills, we’re
definitely presenting a romantic version of the traveling circus. When the
circus travels, it’s usually easy. Where it arrives, it’s usually welcome. When
you come into conflict with your audience, usually it’s a personal matter, a
disagreement or personal animosity. It’s possible in the game for you to come
into town to find a racist hate mob waiting for you with knives and clubs, but
the way violence works in the game, it disarms even this kind of situation.
Our goal isn’t to examine real-world racism and violence, or even just the real-world difficulties of taking a show on the road. Those are different games, and ones we’d love to play!
—
Thank you to Meg and Vincent both for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Under Hollow Hills on Kickstarter today!
Hi all! I’ve got an awesome interview with Lucian Kahn today about Visigoths vs. Mall Goths, which is currently on Kickstarter! It sounds super cool and I’m personally looking forward to playing it at Big Bad Con. Check out Lucian’s responses below!
—
Tell
me a little about Visigoths vs. Mall Goths. What excites you about it?
Visigoths vs. Mall Goths is a tabletop
roleplaying game and dating sim about the conflicts and romances among the
warriors who sacked ancient Rome and 20th century spooky teens, set
in a shopping mall in a Los Angeles suburb in 1996. There are a lot of bisexuals.
The plot structure of Visigoths vs. Mall
Goths resembles an open-world videogame RPG. Designed for either one-shot or
campaign play, each adventure episode offers several quests that you may choose
to pursue (or ignore), and the mall setting is packed with many strange retro
marvels to discover. Or you can just replay the game over and over to kiss all
the kissable clerks.
Imagine a surreal combo of The Craft, Empire Records, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and Clueless. In addition to all that, I’m thrilled to be working with an incredible array of artists and writers on this project. The famous, talented, and extremely nice Robin Eisenberg has done an incredible job on the cover. We’ve got illustrations by Lluis Abadias Garcia, who did all the art for the Retroverse D&D 5e expansion. Vee Hendro, the graphic designer for Good Society, is doing the graphic design. We’ve got guest adventure modules by a very cool bunch of game designers, including Liz Gorinsky from Goth Court, and Maja Bäckvall who was the runes expert on Civilization VI and God of War. I could go on. The artists on this project rule.
What are some of the challenges and more exciting aspects of combining ancient Visigoths and 90s mall goths?
The only real design challenge I faced in the
goth-on-goth arena was figuring out exactly how disoriented I wanted to make
these time-traveling Visigoths. This could have gone very Encino Man,
but I didn’t really want the game to be about ancient warriors staring in awe
at escalators, so it took some work to get the narrative framing right, where
the Visigoths are historically displaced but we’re assuming they’ve somehow
learned English and know what a computer is. Fortunately, this game is
completely surreal and absurd anyway, so this extremely fast learning process
doesn’t have to be plausible to buy into the premise and have fun.
Part of what’s exciting for me about throwing
together these 2 types of goths is that they’re both outsiders. The Visigoths
are outsiders for 2 reasons: first and most obviously because they’ve been
displaced from their original historical context and dumped into a ‘90s mall,
but they were also oppressed outsiders in Roman culture before the time travel.
The Mall Goths are also outsiders in 2 directions: they’re too weird to fit
into mainstream teen culture, but they’re also both too young to get into goth
clubs and too commercial to be accepted by the avant garde. So the scenario
I’ve set up pits these 2 groups against each other, but both groups are
outsiders within the context of the mall and the suburbs. This makes for a
weird and fascinating array of potential social dynamics that the players can
mess around with.
It’s weird to think of it, but a 90s game is now a period piece! What’s it like writing a near-history piece and how did you make the game feel totally 90s?
I was a bisexual grunge-rock teen in Los Angeles in the 90s and started goth clubbing as soon as I turned 18, so the aesthetics of this game are very close to my heart and my personal experience. Honestly, this entire design process has been extremely heartwarming, partially because I’ve gotten to indulge my nostalgia, but also because the past year of playtesting at cons and stuff has brought me into so many cute conversations with other people who still carry a torch for 90s counterculture. People who were there at the time will find a lot of Easter Eggs that refer to real stuff that was going on back then, and at the same time, I’ve made the world vivid enough that it’s still fun for younger players or people who weren’t in the USA at the time, etc. I don’t want to give too many spoilers, but the mall has a salon for humans and pets called Gerbil Essences.
Gerbil Essences is
amazing! It sounds like you had a lot of fun with the project. What was it like
in playtesting – how did the design choices you made come to fruition with
different diverse groups?
I playtested this game for over a
year, which is a long time for me, and it definitely evolved a lot over that
time. One constantly recurring theme was the balance between structure and
freedom in the game rules. I wanted this game to accommodate the needs of some
very different types of players, from Dungeons & Dragons fans, to indie
storygamers, to LARPers, to total newcomers. Based on player feedback in the
past few months, I think I’ve struck a fun balance that lets a lot of different
people enjoy the game.
How are the Visigoths and Mall Goths
represented mechanically in the game, and how do their mechanics interact with
each other?
There are 3 types of Visigoths
(Conqueror, Charlatan, and Runecaster) and 3 types of Mall Goths (Theatre Tech,
Witch, and Cyber Pet). Each character type comes with 3 skills that get bonuses
on dice rolls. For example, the Theatre Tech has bonuses to costumes,
pyrotechnics, and rappelling. They also each have a special skill they can use
once per day without rolling dice. For example, the Cyber Pet can put on cute
animal ears for a half-price discount at any store.
But the most important mechanic is
probably Embarrassing Traits. Each character has 1 or 2 of these, and the
options are different for Visigoths and Mall Goths. For example, one Visigoth
embarrassing trait option is “Fear of Animals,” which gets especially dicey if
you’re a Conqueror with the “control animals” skill, and another is “Allergic
to Metal,” which sucks if you’re wearing chainmail. The way these work is that
you can embarrass yourself to make your friend look cool in comparison or draw attention
away from them, giving one of your fellow Visigoths or Mall Goths a bonus to
their roll.
Finally, while most games only track physical damage, Visigoths vs Mall Goths only tracks emotional damage. That’s right, physical combat only has emo outcomes — and if you get too emotionally overwhelmed, you can’t fight anymore until you talk about your feelings with a friend!
I have a big life thing coming up soon – specifically, my partner Thomas and I will be exchanging rings near Halloween to make our relationship “official.” While looking at rings and thinking a lot about love and relationships, I realized there’s just not a lot of support for polyamorous people who want to have a formal aspect to their relationship, and especially when you’re not religious in any way, it can be difficult to have a way to mark your relationship.
Someday Thomas and I want to have a more formal commitment ceremony, when things are more secure, but for now, we’re just gonna have a quiet exchange of rings. I decided to write a little game about love, polyamory, self love, consent, and commitment – and give people like us a ritual to mark their love, too. I tried to be inclusive – I hope it is inclusive to you! If you like it, consider picking it up at https://briebeau.itch.io/whats-in-a-ring and leaving a donation to help us pay for a celebratory dinner. 🙂
Love to all <3
What’s in a Ring? by Brie Beau Sheldon, dedicated to Thomas Novosel.
Today I have an interview with Kieron Gillen about his new game, DIE! It’s based on his popular comic of the same name. This game has layers – layers! It sounds really cool so I hope you’ll check it out. See what Kieron has to say below.
—
Tell me a little about DIE RPG. What excites you about it?
I’m
going to circle around this before pouncing, as I’m terrible. Sorry.
In my day job, I write comics. My latest book can be basically paraphrased as “Goth Jumanji”. It’s a portal fantasy where kids who got dragged into a fantasy game as teenagers get dragged back as middle aged adults, and so acts as a device to compare teenage dreams with adult realities, explore the purposes of fantasy and do a warped conspiracy-addled history of the development of the RPG. As part of its typically over-researched development, I decided I wanted to do an RPG, in some form. The first arc is called “Fantasy Heartbreaker” which is my mea culpa about the whole endeavour.
As such, the first thing excites me about the DIE RPG is
that it’s not my day job. I am a puppy, running through long grass, on a summer
day.
In a previous life, I used to be a game critic – mainly
videogames, but I see all games as part of the same form. In terms of adaptations,
I tend to believe the most interesting allow you to replay the underlying
structure of a narrative. The 1980s Alien spectrum game was about hunting down
the alien aboard the ship, but it randomised which individual actually carried
the chestburster. As such, it was interested in the possibilities inside the
scenario of the movie rather than the specific example of the scenario played
out in the movie. Re-enact the dramatic arc, sure, but find a way to make it
your own – that’s how you make it live. I wanted to do something like that. I
mean, I had a handful of other design goals, but that was my top line goal –
create a structure which allows people to create their own personal version of
the structure of the first arc of DIE.
A comic page from the DIE comic.
First the players get together and generate a social group of messy, flawed people. Who liked who? Who hated who? How has their life gone horribly awry? Each player makes one of these Persona. “Player” includes the GM. This is a pure piece of conceptual story game.
Secondly, when it’s decided this is an interesting group of people, everyone steps away from the table. When they step back to the table, they’re all in character as the Persona they generated. After the proper level of social chit-chat, the GM’s persona lobs a RPG on the table, and everyone starts playing, generating a character. Yes, you play someone playing an RPG.
Thirdly, after that’s done, everyone around the table gets
dragged into a fantasy world. They go through a psychodrama fantasy adventure
based on all the Persona’s faults, dreams and issues. After overcoming them
they then go home. Or not. That’s kind of the point.
So, yes, it’s a meta game, and how it moves between modes of modern play is key – the three levels are clearly inspired by the story game tradition, the nordic larp and something more traditional (though, really, a bit trindie). That’s the most obvious bit of flash, but the core of the game for me is that it how the game changes depending what persona you throw into the situation. There’s a lot of flexibility, but with sufficient scaffolding to head towards a conclusion with the details entirely up in the air. In the current Beta, that’s designed to be in 1-4 sessions. That I’ve been playtesting it for so many games, and being delighted how it works with radically different persona, remains exciting. I’m running it, and I really don’t have a clue how it’ll end up.
I think you’re one of the first designers I’ve interviewed who has talked about meta with enthusiasm and I love it! What did you do while you were designing to bring out that meta – how could an experienced player or designer see the key lines, so to speak? – without making it hard to approach?
Now, I warn you. There’s a line which I think I got
from the wonderful Natasha’s Dance, with a quote about the difference between
19th century German and Russian writers, which I’ll badly paraphrase. The
former will work out a theory in advance, and then try and put it into
practice, and the latter will write what they want, and then, almost as a game,
work out a theory which fits what they’ve done. I can come across as a German,
but I suspect I’m very much a Russian. So much of DIE’s core design was done by
instinct, and then analysed to death, so now it tends to sound I had a grand
plan.
So much just came from looking at the nature of DIE. This is
a game about messy people who get dragged into an RPG and transformed into
fantasy heroes. They travel a world which is a warped version of their
fantasies and fears. They have to all agree to go home to go home. Can they
come to an agreement? And if so, at what cost?
Logically, you need…
1) A way to generate a group of messy people.
2) A fantasy world which speaks to the specific nature of
those messy people
3) A set of core dramatic in-world rules which gather whatever
group of messy people you create towards a satisfactory (or at least,
interesting) conclusion.
From the DIE comic.
That you’re making a group of players instantly makes it
Meta, and there’s just no turning back from it, and I lean into it as hard as I
can. There’s a frisson and delight there. You’re people pretending to be people
playing a role playing game. That just amuses me, and I tend to pursue it in
the games I run. My standard con game of DIE has all the Persona playing people
at the con they’re actually at, for example. Seeing what other people approach
the idea is the best thing about actually releasing it – if someone had told me
how much fun it was to see what people do with a structure you’ve created, I’d
have done this years ago.
Not quite as much in the RPG in the Beta stage, but there’s
a lot of the other kind of meta in DIE as well – the world itself is made up of
elements that all went into the making of the RPG, from German Kriegspeil to
Tolkien WW1 horror and more. It’s all about our fantasies, why we get lost in
them and so on. A lot of that works its way into the game as well.
How do Personas work? I love this idea of layers of play, and I wonder how the mechanics here function! What really drives a Persona, and how does that punch through the layers of game?
The Persona’s are absolutely the thing which makes the game
interesting, for me. It’s deliberately the rules-lite approach. It’s just a
series of formalised (or less formalised questions) spinning off a given
context.
In the Beta, I’ve narrowed it slightly to “You are
friends who played an RPG as teenagers, and now have got back together years
down the line to play a game.” That narrowing of a certain shared
history makes it easier to give a reliable “This will definitely
work” for the later stages in the Beta, but I’ve ran it with completely
different set ups too.
There’s a bunch of suggestions for useful angles of
questions – “how did the group form? Was it around a shared social
interest?” “Was it at school? What kind of school was it?” –
which lead to more questions, about the specific nature of individuals
(“What did you play in the RPG?” “How did you do in
class?”) and their interactions (“Did you fancy any of the
persona?” “Are any of you siblings?”). You then work out the gap
– “How many years is it since you used to play?” “Why are you
getting together to play a game now?” The Gamesmaster is also making a
Persona at this stage, and the players are encouraged to ask questions to each
other as well.
There’s guidance in terms of whether to ask soft questions,
hard questions or extremely hard framed questions depending on the tone and
level of inter-group personal messiness you’re looking for. “Do you hate
your brother” versus “Why do you hate your brother?” for
example.
While this is happening, the Gamesmaster is noting all the
information that’s relevant. Some of this is absolutely surface stuff (“He
really like Harry Potter!”). Some of it is more deeply personal (“He
has a really strained relationship with his husband.”) Some of it what I
call the character’s core drive – the thing which they’re missing in their real
life, and they’re looking for (“I always wanted to be an artist, and have
never, ever pursued it.”) The latter is generally approached tangentially,
but in a real way, it’s what the game is about – finding out how a group of
people respond to being offered their desire… and then discovering what they
may have to do to get it.
The players have huge freedom to invent whatever they want
about the people’s real lives – this actually continues into the more
traditional fantasy adventure. The Master asking the player about details of
their persona’s life is a constant. Those details, and all the previous ones
are then warped into the fantasy.
Part of the dichotomy of the game is that everything at the
Persona level is almost entirely freeform and without classical RPG rules.
Conversely, everything in the game is deliberately mechanistically neutral,
with all characters being treated equally by the system, and all the persona’s
character’s edges coming from in-world reasons. It’s a bit odd that I’ve come
back to a hard (if light) simulationist core from a hefty narrativist
tradition, but I figured in a game which is about the nature of reality (“Is
this place real?”), if the rules already give you the answer (“No,
it’s not real – only we get to roll the dice.”), it’s somewhat pointless.
Basically it’s kind of a Cartesian thing – the Persona level
is very much mind and the character is the body, and the lack of a true
connection between the two is interesting. The game’s more obviously meta in
other ways (the “why are these people playing the game?” of it all)
but I think this is the stuff which really interests me. A lot just is my love
song to the RPG, in lots of different ways.
One of my current things is trying to find ways to write
something akin to a Scenario – there’s an early take that we’ll be releasing in
the back matter of DIE. It’s basically a more structured set of questions, so
rather than being entirely freeform, you can create a social dynamic just by
asking the questions. It’s a formalised version of my standard Con game –
basically all the group are people who work in the comic industry. So one
person is the publisher, another a creator, another a fan and so on. By hard
framing questions, you generate a dynamic that gives a lot of space for player
expression, but still can be meaningfully prepared for. It’s been fun. The
question I most like basically goes like..
“Fan – you want to work in the industry. What job do you want to do?”
“I’d love to be a writer.”
“Writer – does the fan have any talent at all?”
That’s very much DIE at its hard-framing most, I stress. That whole scenario is wicked, but I want to do some other set approaches. I’m hoping the structure gives people enough to write their own, if they want.
One of the things that comes to mind while reading your responses is the subject of nostalgia – if I were playing a game with old friends, a game we’d played before, I’d expect to have some of that. Does nostalgia show up as a theme in the game? Is it something that was relevant for you as a designer?
Well, designer and a writer both. The first series I did as
a comic writer was called Phonogram: Rue Britannia, this urban fantasy about
magicians who use pop music (Phonomancers). It was used as an inspiration for
the excellent LARP My Jam recently, which was a delight. Anyway – that first
series was about – I quote – “Nostalgia, memory and history”. It’s
how those things tangle together, and get in each other’s way. So it’s
always been there, and it’s certainly there in the DIE RPG.
What’s more there is a certain critique of nostalgia – it’s
like how nostalgia can sicken. It’s not that time any more – what has changed
with you? Worse, what hasn’t changed? How much have you failed to
escape the person you were there, and the desires you had? I normally describe
the comic as comparing these teenage dreams with adult realities, but
transformed into an RPG it becomes about the two periods in the persona’s life.
They were there. Now they are here. How has their live gone awry?
What are they going to do about it?
Nostalgia turned creepy is certainly the another element.
There’s one optional element in the design we call the Box Of Crap, which the
GM drops on the table at the start of the Persona section of the game, claiming
it’s the actual game that a bunch of kids were playing when they disappeared
back in the 1990s. The box contains anything the GM collects – I suggest old
RPG supplements, and the game dice as a useful minimum, but we cram in anything
in there. I’ve included some of my own teenage RPG maps I drew, and character
sheets, for example. If a group is okay with it, putting stuff from their own
real life games in there is also a move, and very much fourth-wall blurring (as
in, putting player nostalgia in the mix, as well as persona nostalgia). There’s
not much with the box in the current beta rules, but in terms of stuff in the
Arcana (i.e. what I’ll be releasing as optional weird rules) it’s basically
used as a tarot deck during play as a device for inspiration.
I’m fascinated by the deeper fantasy world, since it reflects the Personas and the characters themselves. This is something that’s rarely codified, even if it’s alluded to in games. What is this like for the Master and the players to experience? What does it end up looking like to play in?
In terms of what it’s like to experience, what I’m trying to
evoke is the experience of being listened to.
What happens in the world riffs off what this persona a
player has invented. Rather than a lot of games where narrative creation is
direct (i.e. a player gets to define a world directly) DIE tends to primarily
works as a once remove (a player invents and the GM twists and gives it back).
The magical thing is that it’s both the big things the player are aware of (for
example, if a player’s persona spends some time talking about how they’re
closeted and are scared to come out, that may as well be an explicit ask for that
to be a theme in the game) but also what they’re saying without being aware of
(for example, a player’s persona making a joke about a random TV show they’ve
binged watched, having elements of that show pop up in conjunction with their
main theme). One of DIE’s core bits of GM advice is taking one of those big
things the players want included and adding an element which the players may
not actually have ever expected to be integrated. One core thing, and a twist,
both of which show they were being listened to. It’s like being given a
present, even when it’s horrific. Sometimes it’s really subtle, with just grace
notes. Sometimes it’s just incredibly obvious – in a playtest where all the
persona were people who met on a Buffy fanforum back in the day, I just
downloaded the map of Sunnydale and went from there.
It’s always a way to externalise a persona’s problems and
have them deal with it. It’s how DIE the comic works, and trying to get that
explicitly in a game, and codify ways for players to make that work easily at
the table was absolutely what I was aiming for. An early playtester noted that
the DIE RPG is kind of a manual and mechanisation of how to create a Kieron
Gillen Style Story, which made me nod in recognition. Trying to nail down
specifically what the story does, so it can either be turned into mechanics or
play guidelines was very much what I was trying to do.
It’s been lots of fun. I wish my designer friends had told me how much fun it was to see someone take a structure you’ve created and go and do awesome things with it, as I’d have done it years ago.
—
Thanks so much Kieron for the awesome interview! I hope you all liked it and that you’ll check out DIE today!
