Five or So Questions on Red Carnations on a Black Grave

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."

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!

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.

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!