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!
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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!
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Thanks so much to Lucian for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Visigoths vs. Mall Goths on Kickstarter today!