I’m very excited to share this big interview with you today! It’s an interview with the San Jenaro Co-Op about their Short Games Digest, Volume 1, which sold over 100 copies on its first day released! They also have a Kickstarter coming out on June 15, 2019 for the Roleplayer’s Guide to Heists! Today you’ll get to hear from Liam Ginty (L.G.), Ken Rountree (KR), Chris Falco (CF), Olivia Hill (OH), Galen Evans (GE), Magnus Hansen (MH), and Dyer Rose (DR)! Hope you like what they have to say!
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Q: Tell me about Short Games Digest and your role on the project! What excites you about it?
L.G.: I’m a writer and one of the mentors heading up the Short Games Digest. SGD is a collection of shortish TTRPGs made by a variety of designers both new and old that serves as our flagship project for getting new writers published in the industry. I really love the collaborative process of the project – everyone chipping in to create something better than any one of us could, I also really enjoy reading everyone’s games – some first time designers have made some really excellent work and it’s been a joy watching some folx grow so fast and so much over the course of the volume.
KR: I’m a writer for the first two Short Games Digests. Specifically, I wrote “The Gods Play Dice” for the first volume, and am working on something heavily cat related for the second volume. The SGD is my first time writing for roleplaying at all. I’m excited because I feel we are a group of friends with a common goal rather than a traditional roleplaying company. We don’t just care about the games we make individually, we support each other in making each other’s games. The awesome mentoring and editing teams made the impossible into the achievable.
CF: I’m also a writer for it, and personally, I find the lower barrier of entry combined with the community surrounding it to be the best part. Games can be anywhere from short to long, freeform to mechanics-heavy, and it allows for a diverse number of writing styles and experience levels to go into it.
OH: I write and do some layout work for the Short Games Digest. I’m excited to see so many new names moving from repeatedly saying they want to make a game to being able to say, “I’ve made a game.” It’s really great seeing the diverse approaches the various creators have taken to this project, and all the different ways they’ve creatively answered the completely strange questions posed as part of the design process. It’s also amazing seeing creators excited to build something for the collective benefit, and not just a crapshoot of “will my game be the next D&D?” I like the idea of using the act of building games as a method of building community.
GE: I wrote my first game, “Yesterday’s Tomorrow, Today” for Short Games Digest Vol.1 and served as one of the community editors. The idea of a project of so many cool games and settings and mechanics is very exciting and I am proud I am a part of it, but the most exciting bit is being a part of a co-op with such a diverse and talented membership. Getting to collaborate with this group and work to produce really amazing and ethical work in this space is a joy.
Rad! So what kind of content do we see in Short Games Digest, and how did you work together to make this content happen?
GE: You can expect to find over 10 RPGs, all less than 30 pages, with their own unique systems and settings. Do you want a OSR rogue-like game of brutality? Check out “Clerics”. Do you want a expressive dungeon diving game? “The Great Instrument” should be right up your alley, do you want a action packed fast moving space opera? “Yesterday’s Tomorrow, Today!” is a action packed fast moving space opera. Do you just want a expressive game of courtly romantic queer love? Try out Filamina Young’s “Lonely Knights” and have a blast.
As to how we made it come together, Liam Ginty did a lot of the organizing work, and handed out to everyone a prompt to start writing, we all chatted about concepts together, but started work writing a game, Olivia handed out a design doc to help us prepare our work for layout, and we requested Dyer to make art for our games, During the process, myself, and the rest of the editing team would receive works in progress, add comments and offer tweaks and suggestions. It was a very natural process. In many ways, the game was the baby of whomever was authoring it, with the rest of the co-op acting as support and sounding boards.
MH: One of the wonderful things is the vast array of different content you get in the SGD. I made a weird fantasy dungeon crawler unlike anything i’d made before, and when i needed to fill up another page of space for layout reasons, I got to make a short, 1-page larp for two, as well, a game about lying to your friend – two incredibly different games. And there are so many others, like the game about lonely and very queer knights, or a game about competing for a good position in a new dimension you’ve found yourself in. That said, even though we have a wide variety of games, the strangeness of some themes, and the page constraints do mean the games have a tendency towards the experimental, the new, the interesting. And our community is very inclusive, so there’s quite a bit of Queer content in there as well.
Once I finished a script, people commented on it, and helped me turn my ideas into a cohesive whole, and Galen edited it into readability. Not to mention that Dyer Rose provided the (very pretty!) pictures. It means that even though The Great Instrument is my game, it’s not just the wholly-formed child of my mind. There’s a bit of Galen’s editing style there, there’s Dyer’s visual style, and of course, the creativity of whoever gave me the theme “War In Heaven (Celestial Mecha)”
What’s it like being part of a co-op, and how do you do things like dividing responsibilities and sharing creative loads?
GE: It’s a blast! It is like having a group of friends who are all driving towards the same overall goal. We are still figuring out a lot of things as we go, but as one of the “new blood” in the TTRPG publishing scene, it has been great to have mentors like Olivia, Filamina, Magnus, and Liam. as they offer overall strategies, they give us a free hand to execute what needs to be done. Everyone is very respectful and honest about their capabilities, capacity and needs and it makes for a wonderful collaboration environment.
CF: It’s pretty cool, and gives you a lot of opportunity and ability to get yourself some experience that you might not have managed otherwise. The “prompt” system of the SGD itself means you always have a direction to aim for so you’re not just wondering what your next little game should be. Responsibilities are mostly divided into the organizers and then everyone else; the organizers say what needs to be done, and then everyone else claims what duties they want. It might sound a little unorganized, put that way, but it works out pretty well (and in a given project it might be a little more specific than that).
DR: It’s been a real blessing to get involved with these folx and form this co-op, everyone is supportive, kind and understanding (people first!) and everyone has something to offer. We complement one another’s skills well while helping to improve or teach completely new skills to others with interest.
Responsibilities are all completely voluntary, from beginning to end. Even the process of choosing to take the lead and pitch a project. For instance, let’s say someone comes in and is like “Hey! I got this idea I think is really cool! *explains project* Is anyone interested in getting in on that?” and if there is interest at that point you put a call out for people to sign up, you put together a contract that delineates things like share splitting/remuneration and any other important bits. And the people who want to work on the project sign up as a writer, artist, editor, layout, and whatever else the project might need.
At the moment, creative loads have all seemed to be managed by the people on their end, and how much they volunteer to take on. As an artist, I get a few prompts and when I’m getting my way through those, if there is still time, I’ll reach out for anyone else that needs art. Everyone knows I am but one man and can’t necessarily do art for everyone and that’s okay (again: people first.).
KR: Everyone is supportive and filled with awesome beans! We signed up for specific roles in the beginning and generally stick to them, but people step up when something outside of their expertise pops up all the time. There’s a lot of anxiety involved with a lot of newer people creating games when they maybe hadn’t published anything AT ALL before. I think we all have a good instinct on when to give constructive criticism and when somebody is just looking for some validation. As silly as it might sound to a certain type of human, someone saying, “Hey, you’re doing great. You’re going to create a game and it’s going to be cool af,” is valuable.
OH: It’s really nice because this isn’t a primary gig for any of us, so it’s something easy to step into and step out of as the time and energy arise or fall. If you need to step away for a couple of weeks, you can do that. If you’ve got time on your hands and want to pick up some slack, you can do that. It’s like Marx said, from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs. We’re all individuals with different situations. I’ve been in gaming development projects before where one person’s situation got in the way of the whole project moving forward. With this model, those same hurdles happen, but we’re more open to step in and say, “Hey, can I get that for you?” In the end, it makes for a much, much smoother development.
How does being a part of the co-op positively influence projects like the Digest, and how does it complicate it?
GE: It democratizes the work and makes it far easier to create the hype train. Also it works as an incentive to do work, As a new TTRPG designer, I’m not sure when i would have gotten off of my butt to make my game if it was not for the Digest and the timeline, and even if I had gotten off of my butt and made my game, I still don’t know layout, or how to best market an indie RPG, I would just be yet another person out there with their own system, instead thanks to the help of the co-op I can say that I am a published game designer 🙂 because of the hard work of everyone else, I am able to live my dream, and all it costs me is helping others live theirs. Where it does become complicated is in project management, we have a huge and diverse group of collaborators and there is a bit of a wrangling cats issue, however, because we have so many people it is often easy to distribute needed work to someone else if things fall through.
DR: Positively influencing projects? Man, honestly I have to say how does it not? Okay that’s your second question, and I have one of those, but seriously… It’s just absolutely amazing. You have so many kind and creative people that are all trying to not only succeed, but help you succeed, they are always there if you need a second, third, fourth set of eyes on a project, they are there to fill in gaps and knowledge, and teach you those skills if you want. And they are there to encourage you, having a constant hype train around your lil project, your lil 4 page game or your illustration is such an awesome driving force to keep going. It’s infectious, everyone is so excited, not just for themselves, but everyone else. As for the issues, Galen kinda touched on that above me here, but the main issue I notice is something we are looking into at the moment, where currently are tasks are all kind of spread across some discord rooms and Google Sheets, and it can be a bit chaotic at time. But we haven’t run into any real complications with that, currently have someone designing some work flow stuff on trello, so i expect that chaos to be toned down a lot before we get to a point where its a problem.
KR: When I first started in the Co-Op, I missed the deadline for my game due to life circumstances. I was so used to the normal boss based business model that knots formed in my stomach. I apologized seventy three point five times, and said some very self-deprecating things. But everyone was supportive and understanding. I was so used to people screaming at me over minor things from places I had worked, and here everyone was being super cool and supportive. I worked harder and came out with what I consider a high quality game. If I was working in a traditional model, I may have been fired or worse. But not only did I finish the first game, I’m completing a second as well as a microgame for volume 2.
CF: The Co-op model is honestly perfect for something like the games digest, since it allows so many different people to all just write in their own style without trying to blend everything together. If someone has a problem, it’s easy to say “No big deal, put it in the next volume” and still have plenty of games in it so we don’t need to worry about it. As others already mentioned, everyone’s really friendly and supportive, which helps people get comfortable in writing their games in the first place, too.
What is something in the Digest that you just cannot wait for people to see, whether it’s because of the work you or someone else did or just because it’s cool?
GE: Aside from all of Dyer’s amazing art you mean? It’s really hard to pick just one thing, there are so many cool things packed into this digest and I know there is something in it for everyone, so I guess I will talk about my own game, “Yesterday’s Tomorrow, Today” the thing i am really excited for people to see and try out is the game plotting mechanic I call “That Cosmic Swing” which endeavors to keep action going and keep the pace of game frenetic and fun by removing any delineation between narrative and structured time that many games have. When I run games I often have an issue of getting things moving while wrangling players, and I have come up with hacks and ideas to keep things moving and get the story going and I took those ideas and formalized them as one of the key components of the game, and to be honest, I think its super slick…
DR: Oh man. I honestly have to say, just like every last game in that book. It’s bringing in so many unique voices and design philosophies, so many unique systems that each one is its own unique treasure in its own way. Just seeing the WIPs and Write Ups in discord has left me hungering to get a copy of this into my hands, and I’ve already seen most everything in it!! I will say I think the thing I’m most excited about, to narrow that down abit more, is the number of people in this book that will be able to say for the first time “I have a published game” that’s SO COOL, especially for someone that had NO IDEA they’d be able to have that happen 3 months ago.
KR: Doogans and Dogans. That’s all I’ll say for myself. The Tony Hawk inspired RPG by CF fills me with joy just by it existing.
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Thank you so much to the San Jenaro Co-Op for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Short Games Digest Volume 1 today! Watch out for the Roleplayer’s Guide to Heists Kickstarter mid-June!