Hey y’all, today I have an interview with Liam Ginty at Sandy Pug Games about the Ghibli-inspired Monster Care Squad, a tabletop adventure of healing Monsters and solving local problems in the gentle, unique world of Ald-Amura! Check out the responses below.
All art by Leafie.
CW for animal harm in the illustrations, it’s tastefully done (and not done by the Monster Care Squad), and done to demonstrate the nature of the Monster Care Squad in the game.
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Thanks for agreeing to the interview! It’s exciting to see you on a new project, but for those new to your work, how did you come into games and design?
Of course! Always love to chat with y’all. I’ve been making games for about 6 or 7 years now in some shape or form – I started out making print and play board games and trying to sell them at conventions and such. That didn’t quite work out, and so I pivoted to making TTRPGs, primarily supplements for games like Fate or Apocalypse World. About 2 years ago me and a friend had a sort of funny idea for a game called Orc Stabr, this one page game where you played as a gang of orcs hunting a wild and powerful Beast. The campaign had a $20 goal and raised 17,500% of that by the end, which I think might be a KS record? Anyway, that success kinda allowed me to build Sandy Pug Games to what it is today – still very small, but big enough that I can pull a lot of people into bigger and more complicated projects.
What have you learned in previous projects that you think you’re bringing forward to Monster Care Squad?
Definitely the no.1 thing is my experience with crowdfunders and co-op working. The Roleplayer’s Guide To Heists was a project we ran last year with the San Jenaro Co-Op that was kind of the first experiment into co-op based games development, and it was such a huge success that it’s laid the foundations for everything I’ll be doing moving forward. Making games is just so much more fun when you’re doing it with a crowd of great people, and there’s really nothing like having a discord full of talented and creative artists all building something together. It’s a real joy.
Tell me a little about Monster Care Squad. What excites you about it?
It has to be designing a game that allows for those big epic showdowns you have at the end of a session, but without the violence and blood that usually comes with that. The game is designed so that every session should build up to this glorious crescendo where you face down against this wounded, massive Monster, and make it better again. The kind of storytelling you can do within that structure just makes me so excited to see what people come up with. There’s also the artwork, I think basically everybody is thinking the same thing, right? Leafie, our illustrator, is just a wizard, she’s unstoppable. I can’t wait to see what she does with the world.
Considering tabletop RPG history, what brought you to the choice of focusing on caring for monsters?
Well, I think you hit the nail on the head right there. Games are always about killin’ stuff! I’m not judging that, particularly. I think action, combat, violence, all of these are tools and narratively powerful ones that work as effective shorthand for other, deeper, conflicts, and TTRPGs can do a great job at letting you tell those stories, but an oversaturation of those stories does kinda make the scene a little bland, at least in my opinion. Healing specifically was looked at cause when you get down to it, there’s very little mechanical difference between dealing damage and healing, the numbers are just flipped! It gets a lil more complicated than that when you expand the philosophy past the pure numbers, but once that clicked for me, Healing as the players’ main verb suddenly blossomed into all these possibilities.
What sort of monsters will players see in the game, and what challenges do they face upon encountering them?
Ald-Amura is a big place, and we say Monsters can really be anything – some of them are massive, city-sized behemoths that blot out the sun with gargantuan wings made of the wind and the clouds themselves. Some are like little fairies, barely visible unless you know where to look. Variety is the real key to a game like this, where every session revolves around building up a Monster and its capabilities and its needs, so we’re casting a pretty wide net. I’m sure a lot of people can see some of our obvious influences – Shadow of the Colossus, Monster Hunter, Studio Ghibli – but some of our writers are also calling from legends and myths from their own cultures, and I’ve been such a big fan of strange monsters in media and history, we have a kind of bottomless well to work with.
First and foremost we want every Monster to be beautiful, powerful, and awe-inspiring. From the smallest to the largest, from the wisest to the wildest, each of these beings should immediately scream “Important, Precious, Ancient”. We want you to wonder what this Monster can do, what it has seen, what it would be like to live alongside it for generations. We also kinda want you to fall in love with them and wanna heal them, so cute is often a word we throw in the pot. Leafie also has her own instincts when it comes to creating Monsters that I think I’d struggle to put into words, but I think anyone who sees the art knows what I mean. They all have a certain Leafie-ness that I think makes the world super unique.
I know you always have something more up your sleeve. What’s this I hear about a grant for other creatives? Tell me all about it!
Yes! The Ald-Amura Historical Society Grant is a big, big deal for us at SPG. The 101 is that we’ve put aside a percent of our KS funds to a grant we’re awarding people looking to make fan works, or hacks, or art that’s inspired by Monster Care Squad (yes, you don’t even have to set your work *in* Ald-Amura). We have a label for these works (“Legends Of Ald-Amura”) and an official looking stamp plus some art asset sharing, but there’s no requirement to use those if you don’t want to. You can sell your creation, share it, or keep it private. People can request up to $300 for their project, no (or, well, very few anyway) strings attached. It’s maybe one of the most exciting things we’ve ever gotten to do at SPG.
When we announced Monster Care Squad, I’d say a half dozen people DM’d me asking me for details, asking if they could work on the game, asking if they could make fan games or telling me about similar projects they have that they were thinking of porting to the setting. It was kind of overwhelming! This is the first time anyone has responded to a project SPG has done like this, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that community is all we have these days, and fostering that community is never a mistake. I wanted to give back a little of the endless support I’ve gotten from the TTRPG industry (and the wider art world in general), and anyone that knows me, knows how important I feel financial support is to a community.
Thus, the grant was born. I guess you could see it as a reaction to things like the DMsGuild taking 50% of creatives’ money from them – that just seems backwards to me. There needs to be a more equitable paradigm between publishers and people making content for their worlds and settings, and this seems like one small thing we can do to try and shift that balance. It’s an experiment, turning the theory and discussions the community have been having for a while now into praxis.
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Thanks so much, Liam, for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll make sure to check Monster Care Squad out in its last few days on Kickstarter. It’s doing well, but every dollar makes the product do more and be more, so don’t hesitate to back!