Five or So Questions on Red Carnations on a Black Grave

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!

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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.

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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!

Quick Shot on Hearts of Magic

Content Warning: There are allegations against Erika Shepherd for abusive behavior. I don’t have any links, but have been notified in private and respect the privacy of those raising the concerns, and I’m making this note as part of my policy against perpetrators of harm.

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Hi all, I have a few quick questions with answers from Erika Shepherd on Hearts of Magic: Threads Entangled! It looks like a really interesting game, I hope you like what Erika has to say!

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What is Hearts of Magic, both as a product and as your vision?

Hearts of Magic is a Firebrands Framework game about fey nobles, arcanist-bureaucrats, and anarchist witches vying for control of a magepunk fantasy city, getting in messy entanglements with eachother amid an undeclared magical war. It’s a story told against a backdrop of imperialism and class struggle, but it’s also a story about individuals finding ways to resist that system, and just maybe finding eachother instead.

It’s intended for one-shot play, with zero prep and an easy-to-learn ruleset you can pick up and play; while it has a set of factions and setting elements built in, it’s easy to adapt to other settings/factions, and flexible about how you portray your faction, without defining a lot of the worldbuilding.

It’s also, not to put too fine a point on it, *gay as hell*. An Oblique Discussion is explicitly and intentionally a game about, not being able to say out loud the thing you want to tell somebody, and As A Lesbian, it was important to me to put down in a game that feeling of, talking around something and hoping your were understood. It’s a game about fighting with your friends and allying with your rivals, but most of all, about falling in love with your enemies, and about how love (or something like it) can overcome the things that keep us apart and the systems that tear up our world.

The Hearts of Magic cover with three people in fancy historical dress are standing around a table reading a spellbook. One person is in a purple and pink dress and looks like an elf with pointy ears. The other two are human-looking, and one is stabbing a knife into the table near melting candles. The text reads "Hearts of Magic: Threads Entangled" by Erika Shepherd.
The cover of Hearts of Magic, illustrated by Finn Carey.

What is the design process for a project like this with the ten games in one design, especially when trying to create these messy entanglements?

I have to give almost all the credit to Vincent and Meg Baker, for the overall design – Hearts of Magic started as a 1:1 reskin of Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands, and much of that design is still part of Hearts of Magic. I did, however, remove a couple of the Firebrands games, and added two of my own – Weaving a Spell and A Wizard’s Battle. With that said, I did have to think about the kinds of entanglements I was looking to create. This game is as much the story of The City as it is a story of the characters themselves, and I wanted to make sure to focus as much on the ways characters interact with The City as the ways characters interact with eachother.

In “A Chase”, for instance, I wanted to make sure to fill out the landscape of the city and the range of setting options, for the players, being sure to include a range of physical locations in the City to expand the range of whats possible, there (Like trains! Can’t have magepunk weird-fantasy without trains!). Another example is how A Wizard’s Battle makes sure to include as much about how a violent confrontation affects the City, potentially devastating the surrounding neighborhood.

With that said, the real core of the game is about the interactions between the player characters; by making Weaving A Spell focus closely on the intimacy of doing magic with another person for instance, by keeping the focus of the games on the relationships between the players and not just their factions, I wanted to make sure that there was more binding the players together than keeping them apart.

A fancily dressed horned person with branch-like legs wearing an outfit with a long train that is being carried by a small bug.
Sketch by Sasha Reneau.

What kinds of characters do we see in Hearts of Magic, and what are they likely to encounter mechanically in the various games?

The three factions of Hearts of Magic are the Lords and Ladies, the fey nobles whose families have controlled The City for generations and who hold their power with the magic of nature, promises, and prophecy; the Order, a bureaucratic empire of scholar-mages who use the might of empire to, supposedly, try and protect the world from the dangers of magic; and the Witches, anarchists trying to free the city from nobility and empire alike and teach Magic to the masses. Each faction has their own set of adjectives to describe the characters with, but aside from the faction description and the adjectives, very little about character creation is dictated by the book – you can explicitly be any kind of person you can imagine, certainly not limited to traditional fantasy archetypes. My favorite character I’ve played as is a noble Lady whose body is a musical instrument of glass, wood, and clockwork, and that’s pretty tame on the scale of what the game allows.

The ten games that make up Hearts of Magic are:

  • Solitaire (what were you doing? what have we heard about you?),
  • A Chase (do you have the nerve to pursue?),
  • A Conversation Over Food (at ease together, or a tense meal?),
  • A Dance (when the music ends, will I see you again?),
  • A Free-for-all (why do we fight, and what are the stakes?),
  • Meeting Sword to Sword (steel meets steel, gaze meets gaze – who will blink?),
  • An Oblique Discussion (how can I tell you the things I can not say?)
  • Stealing Time Together (alone, together, with a gentle “may I?”)
  • Weaving a Spell (how do the two of us make magic greater than either alone?)
  • A Wizard’s Battle (can you resist the full strength of my powers?)

The games are all played by taking turns choosing prompts, except for Solitaire, which you play by yourself quietly to establish some context for yourself, and A Conversation Over Food and An Oblique Discussion, which give you the choice between choosing a prompt or engaging in actual improvised conversation. A Chase and Meeting Sword To Sword involve coin-flips to determine the outcome, but all the other games let the players decide the outcomes, and even in the fights, your character’s fate is always in your own hands – only you can decide if your character’s life is on the line, or how badly they are hurt by their opponent’s blows.

A witch with a witch's hat and sparkling coming from their eyes. Their one hand unwraps the other, revealing a bird-like claw.
Sketch by Sasha Reneau.

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Thank you Erika for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Hearts of Magic: Threads Entangled on Kickstarter today – hurry, only a few days left!

Turn is out!

Turn has been released in PDF to backers, and has been officially released to the public at briebeau.itch.io. We hope to have it up on IPR when the print is finished, and further to DriveThruRPG soon! Keep an eye out there.

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Turn is a slice-of-life, rural supernatural tabletop roleplaying game for three to six people. Players are shapeshifters in a small, rural town–able to turn into animals like raccoons, cougars, and bears. They must balance their human lives and habits with their beast lives and instincts, while pursuing acceptance and community with other shifters – and with the mundane humans and beasts that populate the town.

Players and the Town Manager build their town together using a unique town building system, and create the characters who populate it and the wilderness around it. Turn uses the Script Change toolbox to support player comfort and consent, and explores themes of identity, community, self care, and otherness.

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Thank you so, so very much to all of you for the continued and seemingly endless support for the success of this project.

As a reminder, you can submit for a community copy if you’re in need as a marginalized member of the community. We’ll provide PDFs with no issue, and print until we run out.

Two horses on a green hillside in front of some trees.
The horses on the farm where I grew up in a small, small town. <3

Five or So Questions on Sleepaway

Hi y’all, I have an interview with Jay Dragon about Sleepaway, which is currently up on Kickstarter! Jay had some really interesting things to say about Sleepaway. I hope you enjoy the responses below!

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The Sleepaway book cover with a person in a yellow raincoat who has a red tree growing out of their chest and wolves running towards the red blooe on their white tee shirt. One of their eyes is wide open and they have thumbpins in a circle around them, while a forest is in the background. The text "Sleepaway" is in white outlined text.

Tell me about Sleepaway. What excites you about it?

Sleepaway is a Belonging Outside Belonging game about a group of summer camp counselors protecting their children from a nightmarish monster. It is born from both my complex and intense relationship with the summer camp I work at, and my own thoughts and reflections on my childhood. It’s secretly a very autobiographical work, with themes ranging from my own friendships to important places from my teenage years to certain experiences I’ve had with my mental illnesses. I’m also really excited about the design space – it manages to merge the collaborative GM role of Belonging Outside Belonging games with a bizarre structure that resembles a “ghost GM” (as I’ve facetiously referred to it to friends). Horror is a genre with a narrative arc, and building an arc and a “Legacy Games” -esque framework into Belonging Outside Belonging becomes a really fascinating intersection of design space.

A person in a lace and floral top in a car, wearing a floral crown.
Jay Dragon.

That sounds really cool! I remember summer camps being the height of complex emotions as a kid. How do you approach the emotions and excitement of those environments with care?

I think that care and compassion are the most important part of Sleepaway to me. An early and immediate concern is making sure that the campers have narrative weight and independence, that they’re not just extensions of the staff’s emotional journeys. I think it’s really important that the campers get to have their own life paths, and that as a counselor in the game you can support their endeavors but you’re not in a position to fix them and you can’t protect them from everything.

Being a queer summer camp counselor is so complicated because you see kids going through things you’ve been through yourself, and no matter how much you want to help them, you know they’re on a journey of self-discovery that they need to engage in on their own. The game has ways for the kids to go off and engage with each other without the players interacting, and ways to put down the counselor characters and play out the campers interacting in an abstracted, ritualized way.

A campfire scene in sepia and black with kids all around a campfire deep in the woods.

What are the mechanics like in Sleepaway? How do players engage with the fiction?

The beating heart of Sleepaway is the Belonging Outside Belonging system by Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum. Players pick up and pass around setting elements that represent locations and forces within the setting, while building a web of interpersonal relationships. Periodically, players end up invoking the Lindworm, which results in a moment of tension as everyone closes their eyes and a card is picked from a deck, causing horrific events to happen. My favorite mechanical moment in Sleepaway is the Lindworm – there’s a purposeful decision that players never have the chance to roleplay as the Lindworm, and the Lindworm is treated as an outside entity outside the game itself.

As you play the game, you can also end up developing a corkboard of motifs, characters, items, and locations that are tethered together, which at the end of a campaign you unravel in order to defeat the Lindworm. It, along with Rituals (moments when you put the traditional structure of the rules aside to enter into a new fictive space that abstracts a moment of play that wouldn’t normally get space to show up) really show my camp LARP origins! I think bodies are always implicated in all games, and I really love the way a tabletop game can challenge and shift the way that engagement can occur.

A rocky cliffside with trees on the top by a body of water.

The Belonging Outside Belonging system is really intriguing. How does it suit Sleepaway in regards to player interaction? What types of design choices did you have to make with the system to make it suit your vision?

I’ve rapidly fallen in love with Belonging Outside Belonging since I started working within it. It’s one of those systems that can transform game design into poetry, just through it’s invitation to play. The move “Ask: Why won’t your character just fuck off?” is both one of my favorite ones to use in play and also one of my favorites to be asked! Belonging Outside Belonging allows for a game that integrates less on the characters and more on their relationships with one another and the land.

I wanted the game to reflect my own experiences roleplaying at The Wayfinder Experience (my LARP Summer Camp) while growing up. This meant the game is really rooted in developing a complex relationship to the land. At The Wayfinder Experience, we always thank the land before engaging in play, and I’ve always missed that sensibility in regards to tabletop. Belonging Outside Belonging games allows me to build a game where the players are all collaboratively representing a world that is just as much a living breathing identity as any individual player, and can in some ways exist outside the players as a sense beyond us.

A mockup of the Sleepaway text with a campfire scene in sepia and black with kids all around a campfire deep in the woods. The text Sleepaway is in white.

What is the Lindworm, and how does it work? How does it interact with the fiction?

The Lindworm is the monster of the summer camp, the thing that hangs in the background of everything. It represents cycles of trauma, abusive people, and the ways in which the outside world can hurt us beyond our control. The Lindworm isn’t a character in the game, nor is it a setting element or anything else that any one player is responsible. The closest you get is that one player secretly channels the Lindworm during the session, but they are never referred to as actually roleplaying as the monster. There’s some things that shouldn’t be roleplayed as or sympathized with.

At the start of each session, both to set the tone and protect the space, you invite the Lindworm to play. I wanted the sense that the Lindworm was an actual creature that hovers over the game itself, but also by inviting it you’re able to ensure the safety of the space, because it’s not actually there. Over the course of the game, the Lindworm’s channeler makes secret decisions for it, playing cards from a deck to determine how everyone (themself included) are in danger.

The Lindworm acts callously, infallibly, and unrelatably – it will casually murder important characters and destroy everything the players have built. The horror of the Lindworm comes from knowing that its actions can happen to anyone, but due to the way Belonging Outside Belonging works as a system, the Lindworm is always invited to act upon the group, and the group as a whole interprets the Lindworm. As a collaborative horror game, the fear comes from a collective desire to be afraid and to build horror together, inviting the Lindworm like a tabletop version of Bloody Mary to play with before putting it back where it began.

A corkboard with tons of playing cards, index cards, and notes on it with string tying the thumbtacks together.

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Awesome! Thank you so much Jay for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Sleepaway on Kickstarter today!

Five or So Questions on Children of the Beast

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Nicholas Kitts on the game Children of the Beast, which is currently on Kickstarter! It’s a game that uses a phone app combined with a beautifully illustrated book to play stories about monster hunting! I loved the art so I had to know more! Check out the interview below.

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Three curved spines leading up to faces, under which there are tons of small faces in bonelike structure.

Tell me a little about Children of the Beast. What excites you about it?

Oh man, such an open-ended question. So, I played rpgs since I played 1st ed D&D with my dad in elementary school. And the thing I miss most about those years is a sense of wonder and exploration, about never being sure what was around the corner. Sure, some of that was just childish naivete, but man there magic in reading crappy black and white drawings of bizarre monsters like the flumph. Now I’ve played and read so many rpgs that I’m gotten pretty jaded, finding myself enjoying narrative rpgs more often if only because they offer something fresh.

So we wanted to focus on that aspect of exploration with Children of the Beast, I really wanted to bring something new to the table that people would have to play to discover. So I’m excited about people discovering things like fleshsmithing body parts, finding out they can speak to sentient slime, and learning that the tunnel they’re in is actually the insides of a giant worm. We actually try to hide a lot of mechanics so people learn as they go!

I’m also just excited about our aesthetic, which I’ve heard described as “grotesque, but oddly beautiful”, which is totally what we’re going for.

A monster pressed up against a tree that is growing around it, with its chest burst open and its ribs sticking out and entrails pouring onto the ground.

What is the core activity of play in Children of the Beast, and what are the characters like? How does the Hunter’s Blood impact the character’s experiences in game?

So your group gets to explore the wilds of the Warrens, it’s like a living landscape that constantly shifts and evolves, like mother nature on steroids. You’re intending to explore it as beast hunters, tracking down creatures that have contracted a mutating plague called the Corruption. However, as you learn more about the world it becomes obvious it’s not just a simple matter of tracking down and killing monsters. It’s a world full of characters and personalities affected by the Corruption and the Warrens, and you figure out how your character would react to all of it and develop. Of course, it can always be just about wanton murder, but it’s still an rpg, you can explore what parts of it you want.

The Hunter’s Blood is sort of a genetic thing that makes your characters immune to the Corruption and actually capable of hunting beasts. The public has a terrified respect of you, like if Cthulhu was your plumber or something. They will trust you to do your job but otherwise they want nothing to do with you, maybe even prefer you were dead. This can cause a lot of juicy interpersonal conflict as what you need to do becomes more complex, which I love, haha.

A slug like creature with a banded back and claws on its front where its short legs are, long spiny claws near its jaw, and an open mouth revealing an iridescent mouth spread wide and revealing multiple sets of teeth.

How did you come up with the various beasts and their designs, and how do you mechanize them in the game?

Man, how do we come up with monsters… It’s honestly a tricky question! I’ve probably come up with over half of the initial ideas, but working with a team means everyone kinda gets to put their little touch on things. Like the artists we work with sometimes just come up with cool ideas I never even thought of once they start sketching. The goblin, which is like this giant bone worm thing with a nest of skulls, is one that I love how it came out, even though in some ways it was quite different than what I initially imagined. A lot of my ideas have been initially seeded by dreams I had, so I don’t know how much that helps people, haha.

Mechanically it depends. We often have mechanical ideas when we create a creature, but game development is a complicated beast, sometimes ideas just don’t work out in playtesting as well as you thought they would. We always try to bring something new to the table with each one, and that can sometimes be quite difficult to do without significantly increasing the scope of the project, haha.

But in general, we try to achieve at least two of three things:

  • Does it have a unique method of attacking?
  • Does it have a unique method of defense or an interesting weakness?
  • Does it have a unique twist, like with its senses or movement that changes how they would approach the creature?

#3 is obviously the trickiest, and can overlap a bit with the other two, but it’s just a guideline for making interesting creatures. Honestly doing a whole bunch of unique things can be terrible for a single creature design, as it loses focus and players will have difficulty understanding what they need to do.

A lizard-like character with tons of spines and spikes all over their body and tail with three weapons overhead as though they're juggling them.

How do you design a game with rich interpersonal narratives and the technological interface you use and still make it a safe place for people to play? What did you have to consider with content and people’s comfort levels, considering the artistic depiction of some of the monsters?

So this is actually something we think about a lot. We’ve been lucky to have a very diverse team over the years, and each one has helped give me a new perspective on things since I’m a pretty standard cis white guy.

We don’t find it necessary to really comment much on gender for example. A lot of “survival of the fittest” type games can often devolve into some pretty reductionist gender roles, but fact of the matter is this is a fantasy game, and we don’t need any of that cruft to make the world feel real. In the app, you can choose from a variety of icons for your gender and boy did we include a lot. Now being inclusionary is more than just saying “look, we included you!”, so we hope people find and enjoy the other ways in which we’ve worked to have a diverse world.

But in the end, we can be pretty gross at times. We just try to stick to more “body horror” type grossness, and we try not to revel in it either. I want you to feel surprised, not sick. The point of the game is to have fun, and if the themes of the game sound interesting to you than we hope you enjoy it. I admit I’m not entirely sure what to do if someone finds something we did objectionable, at least other than try to ignore it and hope it doesn’t play a prominent role. I’ve played in a lot of groups with a “rule of x” or something similar, where a subject or action can be cut out of the narrative, and I can only hope people feel comfortable doing that with our game. The app connects over the internet, but it needs a password for your campaign so we really intend for it only to be played with friends.

How does the game work using the phone app interface? How did that open your options with mechanics and design?

Designing a game with an app is like working with an angel and a demon.

On one hand, there have been many mechanics we cut or changed because they would have been incredibly awkward to use in the app. It’s actually because of this that we’ve been trying to have our tools be as flexible as possible, where the app doesn’t have to “know” everything for you to use something in game.

But having a sort of forced editor like that, where clean mechanics result in less work the programmers have to do, is something I’ve really appreciated over the years. Because many of the mechanics we did cut were in fact just awkward to begin with. The app also allows more advanced mechanics, like our wound system, to become possible. You gotta be careful though. If a mechanic is unplayable by hand it’s not really playable, especially for our game that doesn’t require the companion app. So for us, an “advanced mechanic” the app can help with is one that has a lot of simple steps, steps that can be reduced to only a few decisions when using the app. We’re actually still trying to streamline certain aspects of the wound system, as I’d like it to still be easier to play by hand.

A sunset landscape with a massive monster's beak-like face emerging from the ground.

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Awesome, thanks Nicholas! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Children of the Beast on Kickstarter!

We Say Fuck You, Pay Me

The title sounds angry, but like. Readers, you know it’s time we had this conversation.

I talk to marginalized designers in games all the time, and to like just straight cis white guys like a lot, too. There’s a common theme of not being paid well – paid fairly even – that I’m seeing, I’ve been seeing, but like we don’t really write it down in a place and say it to the point sometimes. With the way social media has become our method of communicating, it’s rare that we put it down in a blog post or something linkable. SO I thought heyyy, why not Thoughty?

Note: A large number of the accounts in this article are anonymous. This is because the industry itself can be so vindictive and brutal that people don’t feel safe talking about pay and bad experiences, even if their complaints are fully justified. All of the quotes within are used with permission, and remained anonymous unless otherwise permitted.

ETA: I did reach out to some artists for their perspective, but wasn’t able to gather sufficient information. I intend to have a followup article by artists to address artist pay.

THANK YOU to all of my contributors for this article, named and anonymous.

Speaking of social media, there have been article-length Twitter threads about how to make your own rates for freelancing, including this one by @XCK3D which includes a lot of things we don’t typically think to calculate. Like having an asshole rate, for when you have to work for that person who is an asshole but you need the money.

One place it has been written down is in a specific call for fair pay for people of color in games, headed up by DungeonCommandr on Twitter and hosted here in a Google Doc. It is a really great document that shows a lot of valuable work! Here are the rates they request.

Base Rates Suggested

Consulting: $30.00 USD/hour.
Per-Word Work: $0.10 USD/word.
Player Streaming, 4-hours: $80.00 USD flat rate.
Facilitator Streaming, 4 hours: $160.00 USD flat rate.
Panels, Speaking, Facilitating Events: $200.00 USD flat rate, and the inclusion of room, board, and travel assistance.

We could also use rates for hourly design work that includes playtesting and for project management, something we don’t often address. My base suggestions are below, based on what I’ve been paid for design work with playtesting and prorated upwards for a fair wage and looking at some national salary data for project management.

Design Work: $40.00 USD/hour.
Project Management: $60.00 USD/hour.

The document didn’t mention editing, but as an editor I’ve done some research. The EFA rates are pretty fair, though, and are available here. The rates I suggest are:

Proofreading: $0.01 USD – $0.02 USD/word.
Basic Copyediting: $0.02 USD/word – $0.03 USD.
Heavy Copyediting/Line Editing: $0.04 USD/word – $0.05 USD.
Translated/Non-Native Language Charge: $0.01 USD/word.

When I read the document, my first thought was “hell yes!” My second thought: How do we make this the norm?

That’s a pretty hard question in the industry we have today. Every time I bring up fair pay for everybody, I run into the same brick wall: people not knowing why it matters to pay fairly, or not knowing why it matters to charge fairly. We all fear not being able to make our dream come true, and capitalism is a freaking stale bagel supreme. So where the hell do we even start?

Let’s dig in.

Continue reading “We Say Fuck You, Pay Me”

First Friday Hi-Day Video!

Five or So Questions on Critical Core

I have an interview today with AdamD from Game to Grow about Critical Core, which is currently in preorder! It sounded like such a fascinating project focused on helping autistic gamers! Check out Adam’s responses below!

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The Critical Core box with a black cover that features a hexagon filled with beautiful art of characters and settings.

Tell me about Critical Core. What excites you about it?

Critical Core is a starter set for therapeutic tabletop role-playing games. We’ve been using games to help kids and teens build social skills for around 8 years now, and have always wanted to reach a larger audience of people than we can reach directly in the greater Seattle Area. At Game to Grow we’ve been saying for years that we think the world would be a better place if everyone played more games together. This is our opportunity to get a game into more homes, hospitals, schools, clinics and libraries around the world.

A warrior who appears Japanese stands with a young child in braids on a backdrop of a large tower and castle and mountains. The text reads Critical Core: Better reality through fantasy.

What are the backgrounds like for the various people working on Game To Grow? What motivated you to apply it to games?

Adam Johns is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. I (Adam Davis) have a masters in education with a specialization in Drama Therapy. We met in grad school at Antioch University Seattle and started working together running drop in groups using Dungeons and Dragons with socially isolated youth. As we ran the groups we realized the potential that the game has as an intentional intervention for building social competence. We created Wheelhouse Workshop, a for-profit company, in 2013 dedicated to using RPGs to build social skills. After several years of running groups and serving the local community, they formed Game to Grow in 2017 to continue to expand on the use of games to help people learn, grow, and change.

Game to Grow was formed as a nonprofit to reach a larger audience to help with a wider range of challenges.  Another member of the development team is Virginia Spielmann, who is a British-trained Occupational Therapist with more than 20 years experience working in pediatrics. Virginia is a specialist in the DIR Floortime™ framework of developmental intervention. Virginia approached us with the Critical Core project as a collaboration with the ad agency Mcgarrybowen Hong Kong, who sought to use their creative talent in design and project management to serve the autistic community in Hong Kong with an innovative idea. Critical Core was born from this international collaboration.

The whole Critical Core box and its interior, showing dice, cards, a grid map, character sheets, and setting guides.

How does the starter kit work and what is included in it?

The starter kit contains three main components: the rules and materials for a simplified  and easy-to-play role-playing game, a facilitator’s guide with the best-practices we have developed over the near decade of experience we have running groups and using this method to help clients, and adventure modules in which the in-game scenarios are targeted developmentally to real-world areas of social growth.  

The goal is for new game masters to be able to pick up the starter set and learn a simple game they can use to help and connect with their family, students, clients, or community. They can use the modules and facilitator’s guide to improve the outcomes of their game and provide some support for kids, whether they’re on the autism spectrum or not.  Experienced game masters will be able to apply the wisdom in the facilitator’s guide and adventure modules to other game systems and use the games they already know and love to help their community. Trained therapists, educators, and other community support will have a new tool in their repertoire to help their community in a way that is, fun, safe, and enriching.

A man waves blue clouds with his hand while dressed in green fantasy-style clothing and grey hair with pointy ears stands behind a young boy in a green tracksuit in a forest with glowing spheres on the ground and other figures in the background. The text reads Critical Core: Better reality through fantasy.

How do you approach accessibility for those with disabilities like blindness, or who have mobility issues?

Our approach to accessibility is that, as our colleague Mike Fields said during a presentation: ”An impairment is only a disability when there is no accommodation.”

We also recognize that every individual is different and may need a different level of modification or accommodation for them to fully participate. The key element  to accessibility is open dialogue around what a participant needs and how we can help.  There are obvious ways we can improve accessibility, i.e., by making sure paths are clear for wheelchairs and walkers, or by providing braille dice, though it is impossible to be 100% prepared for everything so we must be open to conversation about how we can make sure our table has a place for everyone. 

The cards from the Critical Core box featuring the Orcs.

How do these starter kits work for people who aren’t experienced professionals, based on your testing?

We’re still developing the kit to make it the best it can be to professionals with less experience using RPGs to help.  Our “official” beta-testing with Critical Core kits hasn’t begun, though in the trainings we’ve conducted over the years using the wisdom and best practices that will go into the facilitators guide, we’ve seen the largest area of growth is making sure that the professionals new to facilitating RPGs for growth remember that they are also a player, and that SO MUCH of the power in the work comes from relationships and play.   So we’ll make sure that the kits have a clear outline of the game structure, but also explain in depth how to use the game to maximum impact.  Not just the what, but the why and the how.  Much of that will be in the facilitator’s guide included in the Critical Core box. 

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Thank you so much to Adam for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Critical Core and consider preordering if it is a good suit for you!

Five or So Questions on Dust Wardens

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Nora Blake on Dust Wardens, which is currently on Kickstarter! It sounds awesome and promotes a lot of values I appreciate, so I hope you like the responses below!

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Tell me a little about Dust Wardens. What excites you about it?

This is a game I’ve been working on in one form or another for almost two years; it’s technically a hack of a game that doesn’t exist (anymore). I think the most pressing influence is Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle and the way it talks about bonds between people and places and things (words like karass, wampeter, and granfalloon do not appear in this book, but honestly they might as well!). Those themes have stuck with me for a long time and are really important to me, especially as someone with almost no ties to, for example, blood family. It’s nice to think about my connections to the world and which connections are really mine.

The Dust Wardens Kickstarter image that has brown lettering overrun with various plants, skeletal remains, and bugs saying Dust Wardens.

The game focuses a lot on relationships, and this is mechanized in Vows. How do Vows work and what do they mean to the players?

Essentially, Vows are promises; specifically, they should be “I will” statements that drive you toward action. I’ve seen them end up as anything from things like “when the time comes I will give you my moonlight” to “I’ll always hold the pieces together when you feel broken”. They help to define your relationships through a lens of action and devotion, which are very important to me. I’m the type of girl to make big romantic promises with an inside context only the two of us know.

Polyamory and queerness feature heavily in Dust Wardens. I’d really love to hear more about this! How did you prioritize including it, and how do these elements affect the gameplay?

I talk at length about polyamory and queerness in the text itself, and how pivotal these things are to it. The world of dust wardens is a dangerous one, and humanity exists on the fringes of life on the planet. There is no bastion of “civilization” or state controlling their lives or coming to save them. On a more somber note this is how it can feel sometimes to be a queer trans person in the world doing my best to build my own pockets of community in a wider, more dangerous world. I won’t call it a metaphor, but it’s an applicable framework.

Why did you elect not to use playbooks, and how does this enrich the game for players of different backgrounds?

To be honest I thought about using playbooks a few times in the course of development but I never found any that really felt right. I have no idea how I would sort dust wardens into categories. It’s something I might revisit someday, but as it stands I like that things are more freeform. All I’ve ever wanted is for you to be able to make yourself in this game and play the game with someone on a date.

The Dust Wardens cover art by Anna Landin that shows three people, two darker skinned with red and brown hair and one paler with blonde hair, dressed in mostly utilitarian clothing with tattoos and simple jewelry, standing beside a car that's well-worn and has plants growing on it. The ground and asphalt below them is broken and cracked.
Dust Wardens cover art by Anna Landin.

The choice of using cards as a mechanic is really cool! How do the card mechanics differ from traditional PbtA type mechanics, and how do they better support Dust Wardens as a game?

The tools we use in play have an immense impact on tone and impression. I think about the Quiet Year a lot and how the map is such an integral piece of its tone. Originally this game used playing cards, and had a much stronger Americana theming, but as time went on I began to want something better than America. I’m sure part of that is from thinking about hope a lot more these days. A better tomorrow is out there, even if it’s on the other side of an apocalypse. The world of dust wardens isn’t there yet, but it’s on its way.

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Thank you so much Nora for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Dust Wardens on Kickstarter today!

Five or So Questions on Grimmerspace

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Rone Barton on Grimmerspace, which is currently on Kickstarter! It sounds pretty cool so I hope you enjoy Rone’s responses below!

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Tell me a little about Grimmerspace. What excites you about it?

Grimmerspace is a Starfinder compatible sci-fi horror setting. It allows you to game through a gritty brand of sci-fi wherein the concepts are mind-bending and terror is outright palpable. I’m darkly zealous for the chance to raise the bar on these two genres that Brundlefly together so harmoniously.

While success in all genres hinges on achieving certain desired instant reactions from an audience, such as romcoms that always end with one lover leaving the other for good but it all gets turned around because of an impassioned and revealing speech that leaves us misty and full of hope for a more positive tomorrow, or a tearjerker that absolutely requires our investment in the story’s characters enough that we genuinely find it sad when the crops die and the family bloodhound contracts dropsy, the horror genre is actually more like the humor genre in that there is a binary pass-fail with no shades of gray between. You somehow conjure a primal fright or a laugh or you do not. And there is the expectation to create that effect many times in a row, which is demanding. But if you fail to deliver memorable terror or a symphony of giggles, it just wasn’t that good, was it?

Grimmerspace is a chance to pull upon ten thousand threads of speculative wonderment and dread from films, books, TV shows, graphic novels, daydreams, and true life experiences from my past leading all the way back to childhood and then tangle them together to form a web that traps your imagination. It’s an artistic holy mission to create something next level for gamers. That’s ambitious sounding, but that’s who I’ve always been. If brass rings were five feet off the ground we wouldn’t ever mention them.

In a dark office, a creature with a rounded head, large eyes and nose, and sharp small teeth in a large mouth sits with blood dripping down its chest.
The MinoThunk from the Abattoir 8 adventure, available from DriveThruRPG for free.

What does horror mean in Grimmerspace? What do players encounter that can shake them to the core, giving them memories turned to nightmares?

Horror is as widely sourced in our science fiction setting as it is in any Earth-based fiction. While you could play a game that’s entirely along tonal lines of say, Alien or Event Horizon, those films merely scratch the surface of the dread storytelling possibilities we left in the GM’s toolbox.

Grimmerspace horror is like any horror fiction that ever shook you, regardless of where it was originally set. We’ve excised the quivering heart of such tales and placed them on distant worlds and in the cold and deadly space between them, and woven science fiction inextricably throughout them.

Lou Agresta and I identified fifteen subgenres of horror we’re working with in Grimmerspace, and when Iron GM Games designs an adventure we look at which subgenres were present and then label them according right up front so GMs will know what they’re in for, be it any particular combination of the following horror subgenres: Apocalyptic, Body, Comedy, Cosmic, Crime, Dark Fantasy, Erotic, Gothic, Occult/Religious, Psychological, Rural, Splatter, Surreal, Survival, and War.

You don’t find horror merely in having beasts and monsters, and the darkest natures of people on display. It’s in how you frame a scene. That’s where the terror comes from. An excerpt from my essay About Horror in Grimmerspace (which is what I hand out to our writers to orient themselves in my idea of storytelling) goes like this:

A vampire skulking around a gloomy castle in D&D can provide fun at the gaming table, sure. But do you find that vampire inherently scary? In D&D, a vampire is usually just viewed as a potential level drainer and you already have a pretty good idea of how to kill the thing (if not, you’ve really got to step out of the sensory deprivation tank). However, if a GM had a flair for inspiring dread or put in a solid amount of work, they could make that vampire the most chilling encounter the players ever experienced. That same GM could also spend that very same effort to make Keep on the Borderlands scary, right? But that’s a lot to ask from a GM. Grimmerspace is there to make it easy by offering the recipe for effective horror right there on the page, so just follow our suggested directions.

Let’s get back to that vampire (not that there are traditional vampires in Grimmerspace). What if we wanted to make a vampire that was actually scary? How about one that, once surrounded by a party, spins growling to face each of the PCs one by one in preternaturally quick jerks that cause one NPC ally’s dead lover – dangling by his/her neck in the vampire’s maw – to sway like a broken mouse? The vampire isn’t all that scary on its own. But the dominance of its prowess certainly is. The loss of a loved one is. The NPC couldn’t save the lover… the person who just before had so much light in their eyes is now but a sad, limp prop who only moves when their devourer makes them move, and in a horrid way you’ve never before imagined. Humans are supposed to be exalted beings but clearly, we are animal prey just like any other beast of the field. Ta-da. Genuine discomfort!

Our adventures can’t be horror just because maybe you saw a corpse or spines removed from bodies. Not that these gruesome sights don’t help establish horror. They most certainly do. But horror also has to be baked into the plot itself, not superimposed ala “Well… maybe this could be scary if we made the monsters gooier.”  

About Horror in Grimmerspace by Rone Barton
A humanoid large creature stands on a metal structure in an industrial environment. They have a metal-looking vest with wiring and red light and for arms, the lower halves are each a pair of circular saws.
The Butcher from the Abbatoir 8 adventure, available on DriveThruRPG for free.

Very cool! When you talk about a horror sandbox, just how big is that box? If someone’s hanging by the tether of their spacesuit, what are some examples of horrors they might witness before they feel the sudden jerk of the limit?

That sandbox is as wide as a galaxy and then some, and rife with locales that each engender particular blends of horror subgenre. This particular question offers a serious challenge to my desire to be pithy because you have me wanting to essay here. Worry not, I’ve been court ordered not to.

There are remote planets all around the less explored edge of the G-Rim, and each of them has individual characteristics that make it unforgettable and unique. The ineffable locha trees of Paravesh that exude chaos itself. That which lies dormant under the sands of Tarmire but will come alive with your sweat. That which beckons to and changes you on the ocean world of Sensica V. The City of Morn promises the chance to speak to the dead, but Grimmerspace is a ravenous place that often takes more in return than is deserved.

And while unthinkable threats in remote zones are solid choices, we’re not limited to them. For instance, the planet of Attien Prime is studded in eight mega-arcologies, each reaching from the ground to well past the clouds and each huge enough to house a billion person nation. That set-up precludes certain types of horror tales because a blade-wielding maniac with the Friday the 13th ch-ch-ch-ah-ah-ah soundtrack playing behind him would be taken down in a heartbeat by a law enforcement drone. But there are horror stories that ideally pop off in overcrowded places. In a tightly contained realm full of rich and poor, segregated into separate cities and work areas, you can imagine how any outbreak or revolt could turn into something quite ugly. All those people packed in with no way out. All of that bubbling resentment or screaming panic. So while you won’t see the lone and wordless slaughter lovin’ maniac in the woods who proves so effective in rural horror, you might witness a swarm of mayhem gush across a city like a tsunami wave of blood ala World War Z. One minute of that might have you wishing you were taking your chances back at Camp Hockey Mask.

Now, what horrors might you find in the killing space between the stars of the G-Rim? Well, we’ve made space less empty than most would like. There are things that can get you out there. Things outside your ship. Things within it. Thing is, Grimmerspace offers heroism in the face of all of that horror. Our heroes have been through too much to let the monsters win, and they battle on even if it costs them their sanity or their life. Same goes for the villains. One example, there’s a predator that floats through interstellar space on cosmic wind, waiting to feed upon the energy of the passing ships it ensnares. However, the Shung Corsairium, a deeply evil and dangerous pirate organization, capture and weaponize these creatures, using them to immobilize other ships in electro-absorptive netting.

All of this to say that when you first experience things that go bump in the night or that scratch at the ship’s hull, it ought to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. But like Ash and the Evil Dead, eventually, you’ll been pushed past the edge and you resign yourself to fight back until you’re strong enough to overpower your monsters. Our setting is grim, to be sure. And horror can certainly be disempowering. But in Grimmerspace you can and likely will become the very thing that makes the boogeyman lose sleep at night. Fear is something to be confronted. It asks you questions that you can answer if you try hard enough. Fear can be beaten.

Finally, how does Grimmerspace work within, or defy, the confines of the Starfinder mechanical structure? How might players who like Starfinder be drawn in, and how might they be pleasantly surprised by new elements?

Horror gaming is often best served with a narrative touch, and so our challenge at Iron GM Games is to gently add that touch to Starfinder which is an inherently crunchy system.

We offer tips throughout our adventures for how to convey and maximize the effect of horror. How NPCs are developed and used is a major part of this. Foreshadowing. Explaining the nature of why things frighten us and why we want them to. An optional sanity system that is ideal for the cosmic horror subgenre (or any other subgenre in my opinion). There are so many more tricks up our sleeves than what I’m alluding to, but when the book release, you will see what we’ve done. You will see and despair. The darkness will come for you and you will become the darkness. But hey, in a FUN way!

A cast of characters with various degrees of alien or technological advancements on their bodies with purple lightning in the background and the text "Grimmerspace" and "Funded" emblazoned on the piece.

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Thank you to Rone for the great interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Grimmerspace on Kickstarter today!