Hi all! Today I’ve got an interview with Elizabeth Chaipraditkul about Afterlife, which is currently on Kickstarter! It sounds really fascinating, so check out what Liz has to say below!
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Tell me a little about Afterlife. What excites you about it?
So, here’s the elevator pitch taken right from our Kickstarter page:
Afterlife: Wandering Souls is a macabre fantasy game set in surreal plane known as the Tenebris. You take on the role of a Wanderer—someone who died, but didn’t end up in Heaven, Hell, or any other traditional afterlife. Devoid of any memories of your life on earth, you find yourself in an endless desert filled with gateways. Search different planes of existence for clues of your former life – or a semblance of one. Along the way you’ll encounter strange inhabitants, alien cultures, and other humans who’ve lost all hope and are bent on destroying you.
Afterlife is Alice in Wonderland meets What Dreams May Come set in a world inspired by the works of Guillermo del Torro, Hayao Miyazaki, and surrealist artists. *A few things really excite me about Afterlife: Wandering Souls (AWS) first, the concept of exploring forgotten memories has always called to me in rpgs. My favourite part of running games for people is having those poignant moments with players delving into their personal stories.Whatever type of game your playing – a sprawling adventure, a strange mystery, or a political nightmare – play is always heightened for me when characters have their own personal stories going on. In AWS you travel through strange worlds and get to experience a look into your character’s past. I love that!
On a more personal note I’m excited about this project, because it’s the work (for my company) that I am most proud of to date. I’ve learned a lot through my years of freelancing and I feel it’s culminated to this. One of the most important things I’ve learned is that you need a great team around you – and this project has the biggest team to date! When you have so many talented people working towards one goal – that excites me!
How does Afterlife work mechanically, just the basics, to demonstrate this surreal plane and the way you interact with it?
The basics of Afterlife’s mechanics are rolling a pool of d6’s and getting the number of successes required by the Challenge set by your GM. Around those base mechanics we’ve built in a lot of cool systems that help reflect the setting you’re playing in. For example, each Wanderer has an Approach which is a martial item that can warp and shape based on their personality. The more players define what their Approach does the more unique it becomes – but also mechanically it gives them a bonus to their checks. We also have something called Death Marks – which are tattoo-like markings on a Wanderer’s skin. Each Death Mark is linked to a memory the player helped develop during character creation and each gives a special mechanical benefit. Throughout the game people unlock their Death Marks by interacting with their memories.
What do you do to support players with the potentially difficult subjects that come up in game, considering the references like What Dreams May Come?
We encourage GMs to have an open and honest conversation about what player’s expectations are of the game before they start, along with going over themes that the players aren’t comfortable with. For public games where you might not know each other well or convention spaces we suggest GMs use safety tools like the X-card which can be easier for players to interact with when they don’t know everyone well. Afterlife is all about strange exploration and (OC) enjoying all the drama that comes with experiencing past memories and bringing them into play. To paraphrase what we’ve written in the corebook – Afterlife is a game where you play a dead planar traveler with magical powers searching through alien worlds for memories – arguing someone should re-live traumatic memories they’re not comfortable with because it is realistic is just obtuse.
Memories seem really important in Afterlife! How do players interact with their memories mechanically and in the story itself?
Within the game we have a mechanics called ‘naming a fragment’ whereby you as a player see something that you’d like to have relate back to your past life and denote its importance to your GM. When this happens you GM uses that person, place, or thing you named to create a small side scene for you known as a Break. During a Break your character goes into a catatonic-like state and they re-live a memory of their past life. When your Wanderer comes to, they have a better idea of who they once were and what their memories mean to them. Aside from getting some awesome play out of naming a fragment, it also has mechanical benefits. One of the best ones is unlocking a Death Mark, which gives you a cool power and also means you’re one step closer to the end of your Wanderer’s journey.
What are the alien worlds like and what influence do characters have on the world around them?
In Afterlife: Wandering Souls the alien worlds are known as Limbos. Each is strange and often macabre. For example, we have a Limbo in the book known as the Drowned Lands filled with shipwrecks, ghosts of the dead, and strange sea creatures. In another Limbo we have is a giant wall of roses under a rolling grey sky – daring to look into one of the roses could spell doom for your Wanderer as they contain memories of the living world.
Characters are encouraged to be active participants in the Limbos they visit. Without interacting with the world around them, they are unable to find memories of their past lives and therefore risk falling into Stagnation (a loss of hope). To put it in the simplest terms – Wanderers are encouraged to be the stereotypical adventurers getting embroiled in plots, going on adventures, and interacting with NPCs. The amount of influence a Wanderer wields is based on how they interact with the Limbo itself – if people like them, if they are helpful, if they can do something of us.
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Awesome! Thanks so much Liz for the interview! I hope you all liked it and that you’ll check out Afterlife on Kickstarter today!