Hi All! I have an interview today with Sangjun Park about moonflower, which is on Kickstarter now! Sangjun made a video about how the game works, and I’ll update this post with the Kickstarter link when it’s live! Until then, check out the interview below!
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Tell me a little about Moonflower. What excites you about it?
moonflower is a story game about a journey to the Moon, set in a dreamlike world in which a sweet and alien flower is blooming. The main characters are called the Pilgrims, who are seeking the Gardeners, who live on the Moon, for help that they may or may not be able to provide. moonflower is a simple GM-less game designed exclusively for one-shots, each session taking around 3.5 to 5 hours.
It’s not a game where players have to fight monsters or race against time. The end of every moonflower story is defined before any session starts – the Pilgrims reach the Moon and meet the Gardeners. However, the focus is on the journey itself. As the story goes, the players must sacrifice their inner selves and compromise with their circumstances. It is, by design, impossible for a Pilgrim to achieve their goal without having compromised. Either they will have changed from how they started the journey, or they will have inflicted changes on others.
What excites me about this game is that moonflower places strong emphasis on the process, rather than the result. By rules, every Pilgrim finds success, but that is shaped by the context, which is the decisions and choices the Pilgrim made to get there. The game uses tarot cards to guide the story instead of a single facilitator. Each major arcana card (upright or inverse) has a story hook associated with it and players draw five every Chapter. Three are used as the actual story hooks and players briefly discuss how they interact with each other. And I’ve designed the game so that story hook combinations almost always demand a tough choice.
So even though moonflower is a short game and the end state is always the same (except the potential epilogue, of course), it creates a wide variety of stories.
Another thing, outside the game, is that moonflower is a game produced by a team of Korean artists. It’s also the first Korean TTRPG that is being brought to the English-speaking part of the community. This is an honor, but it is also very frightening!
How does moonflower’s use of tarot cards help players explore the story?
moonflower has its own reading of tarot cards, unique to the game. For example, The Tower being drawn may suggest that a great, physical disaster happens within the story. The Empress, on the other hand, would suggest that the Pilgrims encounter a being of unfathomable wisdom in a hostile setting. For another, there’s The Devil, which suggests that a life-or-death decision must be made urgently. Each individually is just a story hook, but in moonflower, players briefly discuss how they will come together before a major scene starts. So with those three, one of the Pilgrims may have fallen sick and must be treated with a rare medical fruit, but it grows on a fragile and sacred tree. As they climb it, a branch snaps and centuries of growth is lost – and the ancient creature that’s been guarding it comes to question the Pilgrims whether their well-being was so important to risk the sacred tree.
That’s simply one way of interpreting those three cards among many. The main story driver is the 22 major arcana cards. Whether they are drawn upright or inverse matters, so that’s 44 story hooks that can be combined in units of three. I’m not very good at math, but I think that leads to a very big number of potential stories. But the important thing is that the cards’ stories keep driving the characters toward points where they must choose something.
Another thing is that moonflower’s tarot reading is deeply intertwined with the setting. The Tower, which traditionally hints at catastrophic change, is interpreted to mean a literal collapse of a great tree (and trees are a big part of the setting). That’s a literal take at the image. However, players may have decided during the Dreams phase that an elder tree grows from the burial ground of an ancestor, in which case a tree’s fall is more than just literal in the story.
It seems like the idea of change and sacrifice is really vital to the game. Why did you choose to explore these themes?
This is a rather personal issue, but let’s talk about fun bits before we get to that. moonflower initially started as an exercise in rapid game design. I asked people to give me three game design ingredients and forced myself to make a game based on them in 72 hours. The very first version of moonflower is fondly remembered, the way one remembers adolescent years. Since then, I’ve refined the core game idea and experimented with it over six months.
Since it started as an exercise in rapid game design, I did not have the luxury of fine-tuning themes. Though, after the work was done, I looked back and wondered why moonflower seemed to say something. Then I noticed that it’s about change, sacrifice, and – most importantly – compromise. The first version of moonflower was drafted when I had been working for a rather prestigious organization as a translator. Until then, I had been sailing smoothly along that career path, but I hit a wall while working on that project. The stress was intense and the hours I had to put in were unreasonable, but I told myself I had to do it because the pay was beyond acceptable. I had little free time and I was drained of any kind of energy when I got home, but money was good.
It turned out that I had been thinking about compromises without a break back then. Am I doing this for the money? The prestige? The ability to tell my distant relatives that I’m doing something “serious” with my education? What if I went the other way? How would I afford the lifestyle that I was enjoying? And most importantly – is this what I wanted to do when I first decided to work with words?
At the end, I realized that compromising on things is necessary to keep going in life. It’s not failure – it’s just another kind of change.
I read before that any kind of media that says anything at all is propaganda. moonflower is propaganda in the sense that it says refusing to change and compromise may hurt. It’s propaganda aimed at myself. Fun propaganda to play with friends, though!
If that was too personal, I apologize.
Bringing Korean games to English-speaking audiences
Fortunately I had been working as a translator for a long while, so bringing moonflower to English has been somewhat convenient. For one thing, there was no need to clarify with the author about intent or motive. The most challenging part was not actually about the language, but about audiences. The Korean TTRPG community is thriving, but it’s truth that it’s less active on the game design side of things compared to the English-speaking counterpart. moonflower is its own thing – the only game comparable to it available in Korean is Polaris by P.H. Lee – and, at first, I’ve seen rather negative feedback on it, saying it’s “bad Polaris with flowers”. I figured it was because the game was a bad rip-off. But by chance I shared an early version in English and I actually got a praise on that exact point, that it’s like Polaris in many positive ways. Of course, different peoples, different cultures, different tastes, and all that. But it was puzzling to see something like that in first person. Working on this game in both Korean and English, I tried hard not to prioritize one audience over the other. This is quite difficult, actually!
The challenge itself is also the benefit, I think. The bilingual nature of moonflower meant it could attract diverse perspectives. Different experiences lead to different interpretations and they all have contributed to moonflower’s growth as a game. Had I been working on moonflower exclusively in one language, I would not have had half the conversations about it. Then moonflower would only be half as good.
What do you feel is the most valuable part of focusing on the journey in moonflower?
The journey in moonflower is both literal and symbolic – the Pilgrims are walking on a path toward the Moon, which is both a physical and emotional place. This leads to metaphorical stories rather smoothly. In some games, going to the Moon might involve three-stage rocket launches, but more likely it will involve deciding what the trials and crossroads mean.
The journey from the start to the end is always different. The same tarot card may mean radically different things depending on when they come up. This is because the journey up until that point gives each card a different context. But, then again, people who play moonflower again (or read the Voice of the Forest table before) may know what to expect. I think it’s kinda like taking a journey along a known route, in real life. One knows what will be where, but no sight is ever the same. A familiar landmark along the way from home to work might evoke different feelings depending on things like what happened that day or something mundane like weather and time of the day.
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Thanks so much Sangjun for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out moonflower on Kickstarter now!