Category: Archive

Archive of all posts prior to October 2021, including the interviews, reviews, and theory posts about tabletop roleplaying games.

Five or So Questions on Hit the Streets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five or So Questions on Magical Kitties Save the Day!

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do players create their human characters and kitties?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Magical Kitties are for everybody!

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

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

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Friday Hi-Day YouTube Post Live!

Five or So Questions on Red Carnations on a Black Grave

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quick Shot on Hearts of Magic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ten games that make up Hearts of Magic are:

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

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

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

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

Turn is out!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five or So Questions on Sleepaway

Hi y’all, I have an interview with Jay Dragon about Sleepaway, which is currently up on Kickstarter! Jay had some really interesting things to say about Sleepaway. I hope you enjoy the responses below!

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The Sleepaway book cover with a person in a yellow raincoat who has a red tree growing out of their chest and wolves running towards the red blooe on their white tee shirt. One of their eyes is wide open and they have thumbpins in a circle around them, while a forest is in the background. The text "Sleepaway" is in white outlined text.

Tell me about Sleepaway. What excites you about it?

Sleepaway is a Belonging Outside Belonging game about a group of summer camp counselors protecting their children from a nightmarish monster. It is born from both my complex and intense relationship with the summer camp I work at, and my own thoughts and reflections on my childhood. It’s secretly a very autobiographical work, with themes ranging from my own friendships to important places from my teenage years to certain experiences I’ve had with my mental illnesses. I’m also really excited about the design space – it manages to merge the collaborative GM role of Belonging Outside Belonging games with a bizarre structure that resembles a “ghost GM” (as I’ve facetiously referred to it to friends). Horror is a genre with a narrative arc, and building an arc and a “Legacy Games” -esque framework into Belonging Outside Belonging becomes a really fascinating intersection of design space.

A person in a lace and floral top in a car, wearing a floral crown.
Jay Dragon.

That sounds really cool! I remember summer camps being the height of complex emotions as a kid. How do you approach the emotions and excitement of those environments with care?

I think that care and compassion are the most important part of Sleepaway to me. An early and immediate concern is making sure that the campers have narrative weight and independence, that they’re not just extensions of the staff’s emotional journeys. I think it’s really important that the campers get to have their own life paths, and that as a counselor in the game you can support their endeavors but you’re not in a position to fix them and you can’t protect them from everything.

Being a queer summer camp counselor is so complicated because you see kids going through things you’ve been through yourself, and no matter how much you want to help them, you know they’re on a journey of self-discovery that they need to engage in on their own. The game has ways for the kids to go off and engage with each other without the players interacting, and ways to put down the counselor characters and play out the campers interacting in an abstracted, ritualized way.

A campfire scene in sepia and black with kids all around a campfire deep in the woods.

What are the mechanics like in Sleepaway? How do players engage with the fiction?

The beating heart of Sleepaway is the Belonging Outside Belonging system by Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum. Players pick up and pass around setting elements that represent locations and forces within the setting, while building a web of interpersonal relationships. Periodically, players end up invoking the Lindworm, which results in a moment of tension as everyone closes their eyes and a card is picked from a deck, causing horrific events to happen. My favorite mechanical moment in Sleepaway is the Lindworm – there’s a purposeful decision that players never have the chance to roleplay as the Lindworm, and the Lindworm is treated as an outside entity outside the game itself.

As you play the game, you can also end up developing a corkboard of motifs, characters, items, and locations that are tethered together, which at the end of a campaign you unravel in order to defeat the Lindworm. It, along with Rituals (moments when you put the traditional structure of the rules aside to enter into a new fictive space that abstracts a moment of play that wouldn’t normally get space to show up) really show my camp LARP origins! I think bodies are always implicated in all games, and I really love the way a tabletop game can challenge and shift the way that engagement can occur.

A rocky cliffside with trees on the top by a body of water.

The Belonging Outside Belonging system is really intriguing. How does it suit Sleepaway in regards to player interaction? What types of design choices did you have to make with the system to make it suit your vision?

I’ve rapidly fallen in love with Belonging Outside Belonging since I started working within it. It’s one of those systems that can transform game design into poetry, just through it’s invitation to play. The move “Ask: Why won’t your character just fuck off?” is both one of my favorite ones to use in play and also one of my favorites to be asked! Belonging Outside Belonging allows for a game that integrates less on the characters and more on their relationships with one another and the land.

I wanted the game to reflect my own experiences roleplaying at The Wayfinder Experience (my LARP Summer Camp) while growing up. This meant the game is really rooted in developing a complex relationship to the land. At The Wayfinder Experience, we always thank the land before engaging in play, and I’ve always missed that sensibility in regards to tabletop. Belonging Outside Belonging games allows me to build a game where the players are all collaboratively representing a world that is just as much a living breathing identity as any individual player, and can in some ways exist outside the players as a sense beyond us.

A mockup of the Sleepaway text with a campfire scene in sepia and black with kids all around a campfire deep in the woods. The text Sleepaway is in white.

What is the Lindworm, and how does it work? How does it interact with the fiction?

The Lindworm is the monster of the summer camp, the thing that hangs in the background of everything. It represents cycles of trauma, abusive people, and the ways in which the outside world can hurt us beyond our control. The Lindworm isn’t a character in the game, nor is it a setting element or anything else that any one player is responsible. The closest you get is that one player secretly channels the Lindworm during the session, but they are never referred to as actually roleplaying as the monster. There’s some things that shouldn’t be roleplayed as or sympathized with.

At the start of each session, both to set the tone and protect the space, you invite the Lindworm to play. I wanted the sense that the Lindworm was an actual creature that hovers over the game itself, but also by inviting it you’re able to ensure the safety of the space, because it’s not actually there. Over the course of the game, the Lindworm’s channeler makes secret decisions for it, playing cards from a deck to determine how everyone (themself included) are in danger.

The Lindworm acts callously, infallibly, and unrelatably – it will casually murder important characters and destroy everything the players have built. The horror of the Lindworm comes from knowing that its actions can happen to anyone, but due to the way Belonging Outside Belonging works as a system, the Lindworm is always invited to act upon the group, and the group as a whole interprets the Lindworm. As a collaborative horror game, the fear comes from a collective desire to be afraid and to build horror together, inviting the Lindworm like a tabletop version of Bloody Mary to play with before putting it back where it began.

A corkboard with tons of playing cards, index cards, and notes on it with string tying the thumbtacks together.

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Awesome! Thank you so much Jay for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Sleepaway on Kickstarter today!

Five or So Questions on Children of the Beast

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Nicholas Kitts on the game Children of the Beast, which is currently on Kickstarter! It’s a game that uses a phone app combined with a beautifully illustrated book to play stories about monster hunting! I loved the art so I had to know more! Check out the interview below.

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Three curved spines leading up to faces, under which there are tons of small faces in bonelike structure.

Tell me a little about Children of the Beast. What excites you about it?

Oh man, such an open-ended question. So, I played rpgs since I played 1st ed D&D with my dad in elementary school. And the thing I miss most about those years is a sense of wonder and exploration, about never being sure what was around the corner. Sure, some of that was just childish naivete, but man there magic in reading crappy black and white drawings of bizarre monsters like the flumph. Now I’ve played and read so many rpgs that I’m gotten pretty jaded, finding myself enjoying narrative rpgs more often if only because they offer something fresh.

So we wanted to focus on that aspect of exploration with Children of the Beast, I really wanted to bring something new to the table that people would have to play to discover. So I’m excited about people discovering things like fleshsmithing body parts, finding out they can speak to sentient slime, and learning that the tunnel they’re in is actually the insides of a giant worm. We actually try to hide a lot of mechanics so people learn as they go!

I’m also just excited about our aesthetic, which I’ve heard described as “grotesque, but oddly beautiful”, which is totally what we’re going for.

A monster pressed up against a tree that is growing around it, with its chest burst open and its ribs sticking out and entrails pouring onto the ground.

What is the core activity of play in Children of the Beast, and what are the characters like? How does the Hunter’s Blood impact the character’s experiences in game?

So your group gets to explore the wilds of the Warrens, it’s like a living landscape that constantly shifts and evolves, like mother nature on steroids. You’re intending to explore it as beast hunters, tracking down creatures that have contracted a mutating plague called the Corruption. However, as you learn more about the world it becomes obvious it’s not just a simple matter of tracking down and killing monsters. It’s a world full of characters and personalities affected by the Corruption and the Warrens, and you figure out how your character would react to all of it and develop. Of course, it can always be just about wanton murder, but it’s still an rpg, you can explore what parts of it you want.

The Hunter’s Blood is sort of a genetic thing that makes your characters immune to the Corruption and actually capable of hunting beasts. The public has a terrified respect of you, like if Cthulhu was your plumber or something. They will trust you to do your job but otherwise they want nothing to do with you, maybe even prefer you were dead. This can cause a lot of juicy interpersonal conflict as what you need to do becomes more complex, which I love, haha.

A slug like creature with a banded back and claws on its front where its short legs are, long spiny claws near its jaw, and an open mouth revealing an iridescent mouth spread wide and revealing multiple sets of teeth.

How did you come up with the various beasts and their designs, and how do you mechanize them in the game?

Man, how do we come up with monsters… It’s honestly a tricky question! I’ve probably come up with over half of the initial ideas, but working with a team means everyone kinda gets to put their little touch on things. Like the artists we work with sometimes just come up with cool ideas I never even thought of once they start sketching. The goblin, which is like this giant bone worm thing with a nest of skulls, is one that I love how it came out, even though in some ways it was quite different than what I initially imagined. A lot of my ideas have been initially seeded by dreams I had, so I don’t know how much that helps people, haha.

Mechanically it depends. We often have mechanical ideas when we create a creature, but game development is a complicated beast, sometimes ideas just don’t work out in playtesting as well as you thought they would. We always try to bring something new to the table with each one, and that can sometimes be quite difficult to do without significantly increasing the scope of the project, haha.

But in general, we try to achieve at least two of three things:

  • Does it have a unique method of attacking?
  • Does it have a unique method of defense or an interesting weakness?
  • Does it have a unique twist, like with its senses or movement that changes how they would approach the creature?

#3 is obviously the trickiest, and can overlap a bit with the other two, but it’s just a guideline for making interesting creatures. Honestly doing a whole bunch of unique things can be terrible for a single creature design, as it loses focus and players will have difficulty understanding what they need to do.

A lizard-like character with tons of spines and spikes all over their body and tail with three weapons overhead as though they're juggling them.

How do you design a game with rich interpersonal narratives and the technological interface you use and still make it a safe place for people to play? What did you have to consider with content and people’s comfort levels, considering the artistic depiction of some of the monsters?

So this is actually something we think about a lot. We’ve been lucky to have a very diverse team over the years, and each one has helped give me a new perspective on things since I’m a pretty standard cis white guy.

We don’t find it necessary to really comment much on gender for example. A lot of “survival of the fittest” type games can often devolve into some pretty reductionist gender roles, but fact of the matter is this is a fantasy game, and we don’t need any of that cruft to make the world feel real. In the app, you can choose from a variety of icons for your gender and boy did we include a lot. Now being inclusionary is more than just saying “look, we included you!”, so we hope people find and enjoy the other ways in which we’ve worked to have a diverse world.

But in the end, we can be pretty gross at times. We just try to stick to more “body horror” type grossness, and we try not to revel in it either. I want you to feel surprised, not sick. The point of the game is to have fun, and if the themes of the game sound interesting to you than we hope you enjoy it. I admit I’m not entirely sure what to do if someone finds something we did objectionable, at least other than try to ignore it and hope it doesn’t play a prominent role. I’ve played in a lot of groups with a “rule of x” or something similar, where a subject or action can be cut out of the narrative, and I can only hope people feel comfortable doing that with our game. The app connects over the internet, but it needs a password for your campaign so we really intend for it only to be played with friends.

How does the game work using the phone app interface? How did that open your options with mechanics and design?

Designing a game with an app is like working with an angel and a demon.

On one hand, there have been many mechanics we cut or changed because they would have been incredibly awkward to use in the app. It’s actually because of this that we’ve been trying to have our tools be as flexible as possible, where the app doesn’t have to “know” everything for you to use something in game.

But having a sort of forced editor like that, where clean mechanics result in less work the programmers have to do, is something I’ve really appreciated over the years. Because many of the mechanics we did cut were in fact just awkward to begin with. The app also allows more advanced mechanics, like our wound system, to become possible. You gotta be careful though. If a mechanic is unplayable by hand it’s not really playable, especially for our game that doesn’t require the companion app. So for us, an “advanced mechanic” the app can help with is one that has a lot of simple steps, steps that can be reduced to only a few decisions when using the app. We’re actually still trying to streamline certain aspects of the wound system, as I’d like it to still be easier to play by hand.

A sunset landscape with a massive monster's beak-like face emerging from the ground.

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Awesome, thanks Nicholas! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Children of the Beast on Kickstarter!

We Say Fuck You, Pay Me

The title sounds angry, but like. Readers, you know it’s time we had this conversation.

I talk to marginalized designers in games all the time, and to like just straight cis white guys like a lot, too. There’s a common theme of not being paid well – paid fairly even – that I’m seeing, I’ve been seeing, but like we don’t really write it down in a place and say it to the point sometimes. With the way social media has become our method of communicating, it’s rare that we put it down in a blog post or something linkable. SO I thought heyyy, why not Thoughty?

Note: A large number of the accounts in this article are anonymous. This is because the industry itself can be so vindictive and brutal that people don’t feel safe talking about pay and bad experiences, even if their complaints are fully justified. All of the quotes within are used with permission, and remained anonymous unless otherwise permitted.

ETA: I did reach out to some artists for their perspective, but wasn’t able to gather sufficient information. I intend to have a followup article by artists to address artist pay.

THANK YOU to all of my contributors for this article, named and anonymous.

Speaking of social media, there have been article-length Twitter threads about how to make your own rates for freelancing, including this one by @XCK3D which includes a lot of things we don’t typically think to calculate. Like having an asshole rate, for when you have to work for that person who is an asshole but you need the money.

One place it has been written down is in a specific call for fair pay for people of color in games, headed up by DungeonCommandr on Twitter and hosted here in a Google Doc. It is a really great document that shows a lot of valuable work! Here are the rates they request.

Base Rates Suggested

Consulting: $30.00 USD/hour.
Per-Word Work: $0.10 USD/word.
Player Streaming, 4-hours: $80.00 USD flat rate.
Facilitator Streaming, 4 hours: $160.00 USD flat rate.
Panels, Speaking, Facilitating Events: $200.00 USD flat rate, and the inclusion of room, board, and travel assistance.

We could also use rates for hourly design work that includes playtesting and for project management, something we don’t often address. My base suggestions are below, based on what I’ve been paid for design work with playtesting and prorated upwards for a fair wage and looking at some national salary data for project management.

Design Work: $40.00 USD/hour.
Project Management: $60.00 USD/hour.

The document didn’t mention editing, but as an editor I’ve done some research. The EFA rates are pretty fair, though, and are available here. The rates I suggest are:

Proofreading: $0.01 USD – $0.02 USD/word.
Basic Copyediting: $0.02 USD/word – $0.03 USD.
Heavy Copyediting/Line Editing: $0.04 USD/word – $0.05 USD.
Translated/Non-Native Language Charge: $0.01 USD/word.

When I read the document, my first thought was “hell yes!” My second thought: How do we make this the norm?

That’s a pretty hard question in the industry we have today. Every time I bring up fair pay for everybody, I run into the same brick wall: people not knowing why it matters to pay fairly, or not knowing why it matters to charge fairly. We all fear not being able to make our dream come true, and capitalism is a freaking stale bagel supreme. So where the hell do we even start?

Let’s dig in.

Continue reading “We Say Fuck You, Pay Me”

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