Five or So Questions on Fate of Cthulhu

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Sophie Lagace, PK Sullivan, and Ed Turner about Fate of Cthulhu, which is currently on Kickstarter. I am impressed with some of the changes they’ve made to the Mythos and to Fate for the project, and I hope you do too! Check it out!

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Purple and blue monstrous entities writhing in the background behind the FATE OF CTHULHU title card.

Tell me a little about Fate of Cthulhu. What excites you about it?

Sophie Lagace:  It’s a take on Cthulhu I have not really seen before, where the heroes are seriously out-gunned and out-tentacled, but not hopeless. Maybe you can’t save humanity from an apocalypse, but you can save it from complete extinction, for example. It’s a game about fighting back even when you’re a tiny person against a monstrous evil, giving it all you got and having a chance to make a difference. I can seriously relate, these days.

Also, we acknowledge the glaring flaws in the source material and in H.P. Lovecraft himself, take the good, and reject the bad. I love critical examination of our faves rather than pretending everything is fine

PK Sullivan:  This is the first genuinely hopeful take on the Cthulhu mythos that I’ve seen. That’s something really important to me. Sean Nittner reached out to me in July 2015 asking if I would be the lead designer for this Fate Cthulhu game that Evil Hat wanted to make. My first response was, “Me? Are you sure? I’m not a Cthulhu fan.” Ultimately I think that worked in my favor. Stephen took point on the mythos story while my job was to design a system that reinforced the themes of the mythos. But I need hope in my stories — I made that very clear early on — so Fate of Cthulhu started to lean more toward the good you can do in the timeline

It can still be a pyrrhic victory, or you can still completely screw things up and make the future worse but there’s always the chance, the possibility, the hope that things can be better. And ultimately that’s what you’re trying to achieve as a character: a better future.

Which is surprisingly easy to achieve when the timeline starts as dark as possible.

Ed Turner: Sophie and PK already adequately covered the joys of cosmic horror with a side of hope, so I’m going to be a bit more mechanics-focused: it’s corruption that excites me. As characters deal with phenomena related to the Great Old One, they’ll slowly be corrupted by the sheer wrongness of eldritch forces. Left unchecked, corruption takes the form of horrible mutations. You want claws and tentacles and dripping ichor and other body horror shenanigans? Eat your heart out. Maybe literally… corruption can do weird things.

I love corruption for so many reasons. It’s a way to convey the danger of these alien entities without falling back on tired and problematic notions of “madness.” It’s a way to give players actual hard consequences when things go awry—having a character die is almost never as interesting as having a character’s very humanity get twisted. But more than anything else, it’s a way to empower characters… as bad as corruption is, your new tentacles are also tools in your arsenal, a way you can use the Great Old One’s own malevolence against itself. It ties back to that all-important sense of hope: the worse things get for a character, the better they are able to fight back. As bad as the threat you’re facing is, it contains the seeds of its own destruction.

And of course it means your character can have tentacles. Nothing wrong with more tentacles. The heroes need to even out the tentacle playing-field.

A woman in a wide brimmed hat with long, dark hair in a black and white image.
Sophie Lagace

What is your role in the project, and what did you especially enjoy working on over the course of the project?

SL: I have had three roles. The project stretched on for nearly four years (with almost a year out of that devoted to the playtest rounds), so many things changed along the way. I started on quality control, a sort of sounding board for “Does this thing fit as a Fate game?” Eventually the project management work was rearranged across all Evil Hat products and Sean Nittner asked me to take over project management for this one. And as of almost a year ago, when Lenny Balsera didn’t have time to be Fate Line Developer, I have taken that on as well.

I tremendously enjoyed working (once again!) with top talent, and this will continue with our stretch goal collaborators. On a personal level, I had a flash of elation when, after compiling the mass of data from our beta playtest round, I suddenly realized that we had objective confirmation that we had addressed the problems revealed by the alpha round. We all had a vague, hopeful sense from the comments received that maybe we were on the right track, but it was great to get hard data

PK: I’m the lead designer and I love weird challenges in game design. The first four or five months of design was very collaborative. Sean, Sophie, Stephen, and I (wow, am I the only not-S on the original team?) had a bunch of Skype calls where we hashed out the parameters of the game, both fiction and mechanics. The thing we hit on was that the meat of this game would be in an ever-changing, non-deterministic timeline. Which is hella tricky because we have characters coming from the literal future who know the timeline as a matter of fact.

The first iteration of our timeline mechanisms pretty detached from any role play the characters made. At the conclusion of an event (more or less what we call an adventure) one of the players would get slapped with paradox and suffer terrible visions of the new future they’ve created. This involved a skill check against an epic difficulty that was almost sure to cost resources (Fate points, etc.), followed by rolling four Fate dice with modifiers based on how well that skill check went. If the player had been able to shake off time’s assault just fine, then they got to improve dice. If they blew that defense roll, then one of the dice was guaranteed to be a negative. The dice result became the new rating of the event the players had just completed (more or less how badly it screws humanity) and those dice rippled out to the other events in the timeline. This did two things: it gave the characters valuable information about the new state of the timeline and made sure no one could game the system for the best result.

Playtesters hated it

So I had to go back to the drawing board. I redesigned the timeline mechanisms so that the heroes and the squamous horrors of the void are competing on a track for changes to the timeline. As those rack up, ripples get made across the other events. But! Now it’s up to the GM to interpret what those ripples mean. This was a really clever solution to a problem I didn’t know we had. I was leaning too hard into the action element of the action-horror stories we set out to tell. By making the timeline changes a GM element, while giving them tools and guidance to convey those changes to the players in thematically appropriate ways, the uncertainty that players faced dramatically increased. Uncertainty is key to horror stories. We need to keep the players in a state of imperfect information, even if other Fate games rely on perfect information.

That was the biggest challenge in the game and one I hope goes over well. Fred and some of the early readers have really responded to the condensed, concise Fate Core rules set I’ve put together for the game. The first stretch goal was to put that into the Fate Core SRD so people can build their own Fate games using those 50 pages of rules. That’s very flattering. I really hope people build tons of great games off this chassis I put together. It would be the greatest reward so far in my game design career.

ET: I got pulled into the project relatively late, to help get it ready for the second round of playtests, and after that I was part of the writing team. In practice, most of my energy went into the detail work: example text, spells and rituals, corruption stunts, things of that nature. Whenever you see a list of things, I probably had a hand in it. It’s not easy to pick a favorite part—by the time I started working on the project, the core of it had already come more-or-less together. It meant that I was given a wonderfully ghastly playground to explore.

Perhaps my favorite part was helping to finalize the timelines themselves. Stephen wrote some wonderful apocalypses, which are just an absolute delight to read; my job involved statting up the NPCs and horrible monsters that populate his world. In short, getting them ready for a GM to pick up and throw at their players, while still being as weird and scary as Stephen envisions. It’s a fun challenge.

A dark haired man in a collared shirt on a brown background.
Ed Turner

What are the unique challenges of a timey wimey affected game? You’ve talked about the timelines – what do those mean to the players?

SL: For one thing, it means being able to play some pretty unusual characters, whether by having corruption aspects and stunts, or by confronting temporal paradox. We had playtester groups who reported that some of their members played different versions of the same character, and that seemed to generate a lot of fun moments for them.

For another, it means that the heroes will be dealing with high stakes; for example, if you can’t change the timeline, you have not the possibility but the certitude that everyone you ever cared about will suffer a horrible, ah, fate.

Finally, the fact that a group can tackle any of the four key events in a timeline in any order in turn makes each story truly unique to that group. It’s likely that two gaming group taking on the same timeline and Great Old One will have a very different narrative, so replay value should be good.

ET: It means that players and GMs alike will be contending with an interesting juxtaposition of knowledge and uncertainty. The timeline gives players many, though not all, of the essential details about what they’ll encounter during an event, but their actions ripple forward, changing subsequent events. The knowledge they were so sure of at the outset grows less and less helpful as time goes on. And it gives the GM room to really mess with players’ expectations.
Of course, that does also suggest part of the challenge: rationing out that change. PK pointed out earlier that uncertainty is key to horror stories, but uncertainty requires a solid baseline, otherwise things change so rapidly that they stop being unsettlingly wrong and start being pure static. In other words, the GM can’t mess with players’ expectations if things get so chaotic that the players don’t have any expectations anymore. Timelines, and the timeline track, help contain that chaos, so players will always know more-or-less what’s going to happen, but can be shocked by the details.

PK: The biggest challenge was finding a way to have timeline actually matter. We decided early on that a timeline would play a significant role in the game. That’s why the whole structure of Fate of Cthulhu is built around the timeline. When I started mucking about with possible timeline systems, I realized that for it to work it needed to do two contradictory things: the players have to know the timeline and the timeline has to change and shift. From there it was a tightrope to walk of having the changes be unpredictable and Lovecrafting while letting the players feel like they earned the changes to it.

How did you approach making an inclusive game in something that most marginalized consider volatile, the Lovecraftian mythos, both mechanically and in the fiction and in presentation of the game rules?

SL: It was clear from the first moment that to make this a game which Evil Hat could publish, we would have to face the true monsters in the Lovecraft story. It just would not have been compatible with our mission to gloss over racism, ableism, and other -isms.

It may be tacky but I’m going to toot my own horn here regarding the concept of sanity: I was the first to suggest a corruption mechanic and the high cost of facing the horrors being the slow transformation into a monster yourself. I’m very fond of RPGs that ask the question “What are you willing to sacrifice in order to succeed?” instead of just “Will you succeed?” I think it’s central to Fate, a game where PCs have lots of resources to draw on in order to achieve goals.

That said, I’m certain someone else would rapidly have come up with the corruption idea, but I felt good about being the one to pull it out of an evil hat.

ET: I think Sophie really hits the nail on the head: getting rid of the tired and thoughtless treatment of “sanity” pulls a lot of weight. I think it also helps to be absolutely explicit when we call out Lovecraft’s bigotry. It’s so commonly elided over, or dismissed as being a product of its time. And that’s no good… his writings often, and with varying levels of subtlety, other real-world groups, and that’s something we don’t want to lazily perpetuate.

And of course, we can’t forget the contributions of our sensitivity reader, Misha Bushyager. Sensitivity consultation is great idea in general, but on something like this, it’s invaluable.

A bearded man in a cap and black jacket, looking to the side and smiling.
PK Sullivan

How is Fate of Cthulhu different from other experiences in Fate, from your perspective? What do you hope people enjoy in the variation?

SL: I think it puts in doubt whether you will achieve success like no other Fate game we’ve released before. Also, there are not that many role-playing games that provide mechanical support to allow time travel and changing the future, and I don’t know of any other based on the Fate engine. In fact, most time-travel RPGs I know of have a lighter tone: TimeWatch (Pelgrane Press), Doctor Who (FASA, Cubicle 7), Time & Temp (Dig a Thousand Holes Publishing), etc.. On the other hand, Fate of Cthulhu can have funny moments, but it’s not meant to be played for laughs

ET: The timelines give the game a very strong narrative superstructure; there is a very clearly defined end point that you are building to: eventually the moment of the Great Old One’s rise will arrive, and it’s on you to be ready for it. It means there’s a grand finale always on the horizon, which gives the campaign an ongoing sense of pace… the characters might not know what the best next step is, but it’s impossible for them to lose sight of their greater goal. It’s not the very first Fate game to do something like this; Uprising has a built-in narrative arc leading to an end point. But Fate of Cthulhu pushes the concept even further, diving really deep into the short, focused campaign concept. I also hope that people take advantage of the focused, relatively brief campaign by going through multiple apocalypses. Not only by re-trying a timeline, hoping to get a better result with the next iteration, but by trying out the variety of timelines in the book and coming out as stretch goals from the Kickstarter.

PK: Most Fate games have characters change laterally, sometimes gaining in power but only in small doses. Because a given campaign is really just four adventures — four events on the timeline — and a denouement in the form of the final event Rise of the Great Old One, we actually put advancement on the fast track. PCs get a new skill every milestone. But… that’s tempered by the corruption mechanisms. This is the only Fate game I know of where you can end up in a mechanically reinforced spiral of self-destruction. Corruption stunts offer you great power but at the cost of further corruption. Not to mention many of the horrors you’ll face can push you down that path, as well. It’s another interesting dichotomy where characters can get very powerful very fast but also just wind up taking themselves right out of play by getting too dark.

One last question! If you could be in the Fate of Cthulhu world, what would you most want to do and see? What would be the wildest adventure you could want?

PK: Is it a cop out to say I don’t want to go there? We made the worst future! Futures! There are five of them! They’re all completely terrible. War, plague, famine, pestilence, and unending subjugation await anyone who lives long enough to see the future. If I had to be someone in Fate of Cthulhu, I think I’d want to be a modern day mystic. Maybe someone who has visions of the future. Being haunted by nightmarish visions of things yet to be is about the most chill thing you can be in this world.

SL: I’m with PK! But I would want to see success in avoiding a cataclysm, righting things to the point where humanity can build a better future. So, ++++ on the timeline!

ET: Yeah, there’s definitely no great place in the Fate of Cthulhu world. But I dunno, I think the Dagon timeline might be pretty okay? I mean, assuming you survive the horrible transformation into a Deep One. Sure, you’d suffer eternal subservience to a giant paranoid fish-monster at the bottom of the ocean, but you’d get to breathe underwater, and that’s pretty cool. That’s about as good a trade-off as a Great Old One is going to offer.

Old ones encroaching on a city, all tinged in green, passing a billboard that's been vandalized with anarchy symbols, and someone riding past on a motorcycle with a helmet and rifle. The title FATE OF CTHULHU is on the image with the subtitle "The stars are right for Great Cthulhu's Return. It's up to you to make them wrong again."

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Awesome! Thank you so much to Sophie, PK, and Ed for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Fate of Cthulhu on Kickstarter today!

Quick Shot on Deck of Many Names

I have an interview with Jacob Kellogg today about the Deck of Many Names, which is currently on Kickstarter! It looks like a useful table tool! Check out his responses below.

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The Deck of Many Names Kickstarter image with multiple example cards as mockups of what the Kickstarter will deliver.

What is the Deck of Many Names, both as a product and as your vision?

The Deck of Many Names is a 120-card deck designed to help flesh out minor NPCs on the fly during a game of Dungeons & Dragons (or similar fantasy games). Each card has a name, fantasy species, gender, rough age category, and quick roleplay tidbit. When players engage an NPC who was originally a faceless bit of background, you can just draw a card and immediately have enough information to handle that unexpected bit of conversation. The deck is big enough that you could generate two such NPCs every week for over two years before repeating anybody.

I’ve seen big names like Matt Mercer suggest having a list of names prepped for the same purpose, but I thought the solution could be better. After all, with a prepared list of names (or online name generator), you’re still left having to decide details like gender on the fly. In addition to that being a bit of work, I’ve seen too many games where every such NPC turns out to be a human man. With the Deck of Many Names, you can skip some of those decisions while also ensuring that your array of NPCs includes a spectrum of genders, fantasy species, and age ranges. Basically, it’s a project meant to make D&D games both easier and more inclusive.

What kind of information about the characters are on the cards so you can easily reference it?

Each card includes a name (given name only), gender (depicted on a spectrum), an age category (young, middle, old), fantasy species, and a short bit of text offering a quirk or other roleplaying cue.

The information is not extensive, because things like combat stats or personal history/occupation are likely to either not come up or already be established by the time you draw a card. For example, you may have just finished a combat against a group of bandits but your players surprised you by taking one captive to interrogate. You already know they’re a bandit and you’re done with their stats, but now you need to be able to play out a dialogue. Just draw a card and you’ve got their name and other relevant details. Or maybe you thought your players would just stop into the shop and get what they needed, but instead they try to start a relationship with the shopkeeper. You already know they’re a shopkeeper, but now you need those personal details that will enable a conversation; that’s what you get by drawing a card.

Of course, you can use these cards other times besides on the fly. Are you planning a campaign about an evil necromancer and don’t know how to decide their name, gender, etc? Draw a card. Do you need a starting point for creating your next PC? Draw a card and go from there. It really helps with a lot of things!

What kind of NPCs will we see in the deck, in background, ability, etc.?

You might draw a card and discover that the NPC in question is a younger human man named Abdul, or an older nonbinary gnome named Umpen, or a medium-aged tiefling named Osah. Each would also include a minor roleplay hook, like “can’t stop moving their hands when they talk,” or “uses verbal fillers a lot”. There are all sorts of combinations!

The Deck of Many Names mockup of what the Kickstarter will deliver.

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Thanks so much to Jacob for the interview! I hope you enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Deck of Many Names on Kickstarter!

Quick Shot on Goblinville

Hi All! I have a quick shot today with Michael Dunn-O’Connor about Goblinville, which is available on PDF and in print! Check out what it’s about below!

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A collection of small books on a table next to a ruler. The books are in an off-white with black and labelled "Goblinville Gazette #1" with illustrations of towns on them.

What is Goblinville, both as a product and as your vision?

Goblinville is a character-driven dungeon crawler that works for short, punchy sessions and long campaigns. The town itself is the key source of adventure and improving it is a core part of character advancement. The requirement that all player characters are goblins has shifted the tone of play (compared to other fantasy adventure rpgs). All the characters are from the same community, so there is an assumed shared interest. And the community is in peril, in a way reinforced by the procedures of play. The resulting spirit of underdog collaboration makes it stand out from other games in an often fraught genre.

Finally, the element of fantasy adventure games that I most take issue with is the portrayal of heroic player characters killing and stealing from subhuman, monstrous enemies. Goblinville subverts this by casting the goblins as protagonists, with cares and motivations and a distinct society. It doesn’t guarantee thoughtful dissection of the genre, but it intentionally avoids reasserting the worst of its cliches.

What are the basic mechanics like in Goblinville and how do they support the character-driven focus?

The character-driven focus of Goblinville starts during Goblin creation, the first step of a new game.  When each player is creating their goblin, the rules tell them to choose or roll for a few aspects of your character.  These aspects give a lot of texture to the character (rather than being a set of numbers): your job, your boss, a formative experience, and a notable physical trait and personality trait.

Then, all the players pause.  In turn, they introduce their Goblin to the table.  The other players ask questions and discuss.  Then they agree on a Title for that goblin: a unique moniker that sets them apart from the rest of the town while affirming their place in it.  They also decide on an ‘Esteem Trait’ for that goblin.  How do they fit into the adventuring group, what sets them apart from the other goblins at this table?

These Titles and Traits are the most important part of a character, because they are the only (limited) source of bonus dice for a roll.  Rolls in Goblinville are always full of compromise; getting to add a die for a relevant Trait or Title (and drop your lowest result) lets you mitigate those compromises.

At the end of a session, every player shares their goblin’s defining moment. This could be a notable accomplishment, a new insight, or a significant struggle.  The other players at the table grant them a new Title based on their actions.  Traits can change over time in a similar way.

The result of these design choices is that advancement (gaining and changing Titles/ Traits) is linked to what is important to your character in the fiction, and to your character’s dynamic with the rest of the group.  Every session ends with: how did you (as players) see my character change?  And the answer matters, because it’s tied to the dice mechanics that come up every time the goblins take a risky action.

A game table with dice and sheets strewn about and copies of the Goblinville Gazette on the table.

What is one of the most important ways you show goblins to be different than the standard portrayal, beyond their role as protagonists?

The humanizing details of being a goblin in Goblinville seep in through play.   The first things that become clear are the character aspects in goblin creation.  You have a job and a boss.  You have traits that goblins notice about you and a reputation (for good or ill).  You are part of a community.  At the beginning of a session, you also commit to an outlook and a goal.  You have motivations that are distinct from the other goblins.  The prompts don’t push you toward creating a stereotypical goblin, every prompt suggests that your character has an inner life and relationships.

Some players still initially play up greedy or bloodthirsty goblins.  And this is maybe a style of play that folks are looking for.  Where this tends to become more nuanced is related to the improvement of Goblinville itself.  Character specific advancement is fairly limited.  You can only have three Traits and three Titles at a time.  You can advance in rank a few times, but the added benefits are marginal.  The most meaningful advancement over time comes from ‘unlocking’ new locations in town.  To do this you need to find missing goblins, or convince goblins with a particular expertise to join your community.  You need to repair broken equipment or go adventuring to find alternatives.  The game repeatedly rewards you for caring about and investing in the town where you live.  There is no reward for being greedy, selfish, or “evil”.

A closeup on the inside of the Goblinville Gazette with the text You, Goblins! as a header.

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Thank you so much Michael for the interview! I hope you all liked it and you’ll check Goblinville out in print and PDF!

Five or So Questions on Sundown

I have an interview today with L A Wilga and James Lader on the new roleplaying game Sundown, which is currently on Kickstarter! It sounds like a really interesting new game and I’m excited for it. Check out the interview below, and the Kickstarter too!

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Illustration of a hillside with cloudy skies in the background. On it, bird-like creatures with four limbs climb over rocks and rear back on their back feet, while two people dressed in tabards and cloaks over pants wield swords. One of the people has bright pink hair, the other has darker skin and dark hair.
Sundown’s cover art by Mayara Sampaio.

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

L A: So, Sundown is a rules light tabletop roleplaying game. It’s set in a pre-industrial frontier where, instead of magic, we have “science.” Science is the intersection of two things. Wonders: inventions that just make everyone’s life easier, and changing: the art of taking someone and reshaping their flesh. In fewer words, engineering and biology

There are two main facets to the game: surviving the wild, with fauna just as changed and dangerous as the folk, and surviving the politics, with a power struggle in every town and a populace that needs you but doesn’t want you.

I certainly get excited to face down giant winged frogs and angry murderbirds, my pink undershave flowing in the wind, but I find catharsis in the politics. You have to navigate finding work, getting paid, finding a place to stay, making friends, and avoiding the authorities as someone disdained by most of society. It’s an experience I think most in our queer rpg community will recognize.

It’s kind of like a cyberpunk game with the punk aesthetic, the politics, and the transhumanism, but if you took away its technology and sent it to the West Marches.

J L: I’m really excited about how much control you have over your body in Sundown. Changes are probably my favorite part of our game, because as a trans man, being able to reshape your body on a whim is the ultimate fantasy. And I’m sure other people think that’s super cool too.

The other thing I’m excited about is intentionally including politics in the premise. Social strife is the lifeblood of this game, where more of the people are monsters than the fiends. I really like that the direction of your career can be toppling the ruling class in Cragsmouth, or becoming a thief-assassin who saves themselves at all costs. You make your way through Sundown by surviving how best you can, and it really mirrors to me how to navigate a world where a lot of the power isn’t yours.

A blonde person with a snapchat filter on to show them with a heart for a nose and pink fuzzy ears.

You talk about the Changing. How does Changing work, and are there any special benefits or consequences from it?

L A: This is a good question, because people tend to assume that you just drink a potion and seconds later you have claws or something.

Changes are made by a scientist specialized in changing, and in a laboratory devoted to changing. You get stuffed into an egg-like pod with the changing agents and a medium called lungwater that keeps you alive for the weeks or months your changes take. Breaking down flesh and building it back up takes a lot of time and energy. When you break out of your egg, you’re ravenously hungry, everything is too bright, and you just want to go back to sleep.

Changing agents are derived from plants and animals out in the wild that have already been observed to do… something to people. Indigoji turns your skin purple, for instance. Modern changes were discovered by blending random assortments together and logging the resulting effect on humans, not all of them consenting test subjects.

J L: Changing is arduous. It really does mirror the transition process in the real world, but it’s less limited. It’s expensive to get access to changes. Special equipment and making sure you don’t die in stasis isn’t cheap. The time cost, too, matters. And some changes can stress your body. It’s not a perfect science, and you can end up with additional things that identify you as a changeling, like black nails when you asked for super strength.

We also did name the pods where Changes happen eggs. That’s not a very subtle metaphor I think. If people know you’re a changeling, too, they’ll treat you very different. The best reaction you can expect in most of Sundown is mild disdain, which is very real. So if people know you’re a changeling, that alone is a consequence.

Illustration in which a horned frog with dragon wings lurks in a pond.
This was labeled frogbeast, which I think is such a fun name!

How do your identities as queer and trans (or queer/trans identities in general) reflect in the broader world beyond the Changing? Do they relate to Wonders, or even to the politics?

L A: We didn’t really use wonders to say anything about queerness or transness, they’re kinda just neat things, like goggles that let you see at night. We definitely do intend, though, for guns to be a symbol of the class war. Did we mention there’s guns? They’re more like railguns than gunpowder guns. They use a fictional material called floatstone.

There is this wonder called pitch, though. It’s a black syrup thing that’s injected, and it knits your body back together after some nasty injuries. The catch, though, is if you use too much, you run the risk of becoming a pitchblood. Basically, your blood is replaced with pitch. You lose twenty years off your life, but you’re near invincible. I think some folk can sympathize with that sort of deal-with-the-devil transformation?

Beau’s Note: This specific one reminds me of my own experiences with lithium as someone with bipolar disorder, to be honest.

L A, continued: The politics is really where our queerness comes through. For one, if you have any sort of visible change, which includes things like colored hair, over half of the people in Sundown won’t really want anything to do with you. Not to mention you’re already othered because of your profession. The isolationists of Sundown really don’t like outsiders doing their work for them. Too bad they need drifters like you for things like translation, bounty hunting, and trailblazing.

J L: Definitely. The otherism experienced in Sundown based on being a drifter is pretty much a direct metaphor for how it feels to be disdained and desired. Very much as a queer person it’s easy to feel consumed and discarded at the earliest opportunity, and since you’re a travelling contractor, it’s even more direct.

I think, honestly, the other parts of the system also show some of the good parts of being queer, too. When you create your character, for example, your character is rooted in the people at your table. One of the traits that embodies who you are is defined by your relationship to another character at the table. Drifters often are building an intentional community, a network of people who know where the good work is, who you should work with on what jobs, where it’s safe to travel, and sharing stories of your best exploits. I think that really reflects how queer and trans folx band together to keep each other safe and loved in a world that is otherwise hostile to them.

A person with dark curly hair wearing a floral and lace patterned top.
James Lader.

How are things like changing and wonders, and those politics you discuss, mechanized or formalized in the game?

J L: So all of these things involve infamy, which is the currency we use in Sundown. Infamy isn’t coin, though, it’s a representation of your influence in the area, and how well people know you. The more infamy you have garnered, the more leverage you have. Political action that earns infamy takes place during heats, the jobs drifters take on every month. You might slay fiends, debate a public official, steal from a guild, or lead an uprising.

Getting wonders and changes requires you to spend your infamy to obtain them. Some wonders are special and rare enough to use your downtime between heats as well as your infamy to obtain them. Changes always take downtime, and usually cost infamy.

One of the neat things about infamy is that you only have so much influence you can gain, and once you use that leverage, it’s gone. You have to think carefully about what you want to achieve and use that influence wisely.

L A: Ok so James mentioned heats. That’s basically an adventure, and downtime is the time between them. We intend for downtime to be played kind of like play-by-post between sessions

When you make improvements to your character that involve big investments of time, like learning a new skill or rebuilding your fleshy prison, you do that during your downtime. Spending your infamy on changes is just one of the things you can spend your downtime on.

J L:Downtime is when most of your character improvements can happen, so you have to choose really carefully what you want to spend your time on between jobs. Sundown is a hard place to be and choosing to better your traits or gain cat ears can be life or death. It’s really tricky because you can also only get so many things before not having any more infamy to gain.

What have you done with the game to support players in exploring these relatively serious subjects, including consent and safety mechanics and other aspects of your design?

J L: One of the first sections of the book is a consent tool we developed based on our stress mechanic. Stress is sort of a measure of your character’s health, and it worked really well to measure how safe a topic was for the players.

We also reinforce throughout the book to be mindful of others at the table, to use additional safety and consent tools you might be more familiar with, and to check in with your fellow players.

These are really hard topics and not everyone wants certain themes in the game, and we went out of our way to remind people to check in, and check often.

L A: Regarding serious subjects, I wrote from my own experience as a poor queer person, and I think the queerphobia and classism and Sundown really reflect that

For the experiences I haven’t lived, we took on two non-white sensitivity editors. Their input was invaluable for fleshing out the cultures that have made their way to Sundown in a respectful manner.

Even though I’m disabled too, James has far more lived experience in that regard. The section on disabled drifters in the intro section is entirely his doing.

Every time there’s a “make sure you check in with your fellow players” regarding a marginalized identity, all four of us had a hand in it.

A half-globe shape in which an ocean surrounds a towering, asymmetrical mountain with buildings stacked on it along the way, the one at the top pouring off smoke. Ships approach in the blue water, headed towards the mountain.

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Awesome! Thank you to L A and James for the interview! I hope that you enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Sundown on Kickstarter today!

Quick Shot on Tikor & Swordsfall

Content Warning: Since this article was posted, multiple individuals have come forward with statements credibly addressing Swordsfall a.k.a. Brandon Dixon’s abuse of power and violation of consent. With respect to their shared experiences, I am putting a note on this article to ensure that their voices are heard and future readers are aware. Many statements are not public so I’ve only linked to the public statement. Please do not direct any harassment to the survivors who have raised these concerns.

I have a few questions today with Brandon Dixon about Tikor, the Swordsfall RPG Setting book, which has a couple days remaining on Kickstarter! Check out the Kickstarter and the responses below!

The Tikor Kickstarter image with a black warrior person in patterned armor with a large metal weapon on their back. There are two books displayed with world maps on them.

What is Swordsfall’s Tikor, both as a product and as your vision?

Swordsfall is almost like a platform. It encompasses the setting book, “Welcome to Tikor”, a RPG, a comic book and even novels. So it’s truly a world that I can use to do all sorts of creative projects with. As fans start to find favorite characters and place, I want to be able to go to those things and do EVEN more. The setting book is my way of opening the door to that world.

A black warrior person in patterned armor with a large metal weapon on their back. With them is a cheetah with glowing green eyes. At the bottom of the illustration, the Swordsfall logo is in dark purple.

How do you consider Swordsfall and Tikor to be special in their content and design?

Well, no one else is really doing Afrofuturism like I am. It’s why I’m saying its part of the Afropunk sub-genre. It has it’s own style. That punk style. But instead of being anti-capitalism, it’s anti-colonialism. Or really, a world re-imagined where that was never a factor. Then you have the art. T’umo Mere has a style of his own. His art is bold, striking and dripping in real African lore. He’s from Botswana so he’s been happy to dig into his own culture and the ones around him for source material.

A black woman with short hair, makeup, cyberware on her jaw and ear, and antennae is framed like a bust in rich colors.

What were some choices you made in the art and presentation of Swordsfall and Tikor to show the values and style of the setting?

A couple of big things we’re focusing on are color and patterns. African cultures have almost used color to tell a story. You’re never going to a picture where everyone is draped in black. Those colors and what they mean are important, and we’re making sure they’re in Swordsfall. The other big thing in African cultures are patterns. Different cultures had their own symbols and patterns, but almost all had them. And they meant something. It could be mundane, it could be a call to a spirit. But the combination of colors and patterns often told a story. And Tikor will have that as well.

The Tikor Kickstarter image with a black warrior person in patterned armor with a large metal weapon on their back. The Swordsfall logo is prominently displayed.

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Thanks so much to Brandon for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll head over to Tikor’s Kickstarter to check it out today!

Behold, Products! The Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide

P.S. Sorry for the borked links earlier, I still haven’t mastered WordPress.

I recently had the pleasure to read and review James D’Amato’s Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide, which is currently available online for purchase! James contacted me for the interview, but in true Beau fashion I took forever to review it (sorry!).

Full disclosure: I was given a free review copy and I think James is pretty rad.

Photos in this review are by Brie Beau Sheldon.

A book with a black cover and orange and pale green text that says The Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide.
The book itself, The Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide, by James D’Amato.

I approached the review in a weird fashion, to try to get a full perspective. The book itself is basically a tool to help you build the background of your character for RPG play. Some elements of it seem to trend towards games with levels, but I think this could be used for most roleplaying. It uses die rolls for randomizers at times, but also a lot of it is pick lists and freewriting to flesh out the character.

The way I approached this was to have three separate sessions of exercises (there are so many included in the book)! with three different people, and each of them had their own individual characters, while I kept the same character through the whole test. Each of the character had varying levels of previous information – mine, for example, was made up on the spot! I also spent a fair amount of time looking at the book

The interior of a book, on a section titled Old Haunts.

The book itself has a fun orange, black, and greenish color scheme and is relatively well organized. I will note there are a few spaces where the text contrast is not as comfortable for me to read, but aside from that, the book is pretty clear to follow and read.

The biggest comment I’d have about this book? The questions were often wonderfully open. I am not good with constraints on my creativity – I like a lot of free space to wonder along. There is guidance for a lot of the questions, plus the random rolls, but enough of the questions allowed me to explore where I wanted to go.

The inside of a book with the section title Pocket Dimension.

I really appreciate James’s thoughtfulness in providing subjects that range from death to relationships to magical objects and places – it feels like there’d be something here for basically everybody! Special love for the “Damn Merlinials” exercise, too. The exercises vary in complexity, with some including random rolls resulting in skipping forward sections, and others just simple fill-in-the-blanks, and some even have a combination of methods to answer all of the questions.

Overall, I think that it’s really useful tool for someone who wants to create deep, complex characters with a lot of history, flavor, and support for their perspectives and beliefs.

The inside of a book with the section title Magic Mirrors.

A note on pronouns: One thing that I didn’t like in the book is that all of it uses he or she pronouns, even when it’s quite clunky. This was also noted by all three of the other players I tested with. I do know, however, that James didn’t want this in the book and he even consulted with me on how to address it, and I wrote a statement to his publisher. I appreciate James’s intent a lot and wish his publisher had followed it. I bring this up because I know I have many nonbinary readers and the use of binary pronouns from one of our own can feel a little jarring, and I want you to know that James had the best intentions, but couldn’t push it through. That’s basically the only major issue I ran into with this book though!

I’m including the full text of the responses to the prompts I played through, but they only include the answers to the questions – for those you’ll need to get your own copy of the Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide by James D’Amato on Amazon or at Barnes & Noble!

Continue reading “Behold, Products! The Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide”

Tax Time Tuesday-to-Tuesday Reverse Sale!

My products are temporarily on reverse sale to gear up for tax time I’ve increased the prices by a very nice percentage – hopefully to help me get through this year’s taxes! Buy all of the products for a cool nice $69 – yes, that’s more expensive. Just like taxes!

My goal for the sale is $420. I will not use it for blazing it, just to give a boost to my funds to pay taxes owed. It runs until 4/1/19!

Thank you for any and all support!

https://itch.io/s/17275/tax-time-tuesday-to-tuesday-sale

Revealed in Turn

We recently posted an update about Turn’s progress, and it’s going pretty well! We may soon be closing pre-orders (which are still open here!) if all goes well with layout, and we are pushing on thru with the stretch goals. I wanted to talk a little about Turn in playtesting, and a big thing that happened recently in our longest-run playtest.

A buff colored kitten on a soft bed, with its toes in focus.
Just a picture of a cat to start us off right.

Some people may have heard me talk on Twitter about my character Beau Taggart, who is a professional hunter, the game’s Late Bloomer, a Cougar, and super gay. In his early character background during character generation, we established that Beau had turned for the first time only recently, about six months ago (as required for the Late Bloomer role). When he turned for the first time, he his truck had just been hit by a drunk driver while he was driving down a winding back road.

He got out of the car to check on the driver, but the driver was behaving aggressively, and tried to punch him. Beau knew something felt wrong, but he was scared and panicked, and responded by hitting the guy back. He didn’t know that his body had started to turn, that his super strength had grown. The hit was so hard it broke the guy’s neck, and while Beau was realizing with horror he’d killed a man, he also turned into a cougar for the first time.

Jake Peralta from Brooklyn 99 saying "Now that I have the taste for blood, I can't stop murdering!"
This gif is not an accurate representation of Beau. It’s just funny!

His animal instincts kicked in – he hid the body, and ate some of it, leaving his claw and teeth marks on it, desperately hungry in light of the force turn. In his panic, he was found by Camellia, a fellow shapeshifter (Overachiever, Bison) who helped him get back to human form, and over time, he learned better how to calm down. He didn’t tell Camellia, or anyone else, about the drunk driver, harboring his accidental crime as yet another secret.

Not many Turn characters have super tragic backstories, and this one isn’t even all that bad (sometimes people accidentally kill people, and those are small town secrets I’ve heard), but I knew there was a risk of it being an element when people played so I built a character with a high risk background to see how fast we could ramp up to exposure. It still took over a year at our slow playing pace – which is ideal. If we were playing weekly, it would happen more quickly, but it paces out well.

How did I plan this out? Well, I knew the number of exposure marks for towns and town characters, I knew the average number of scenes per session (5-8), how many of those typically risk exposure (4-7), and how many sessions each character is generally in (3-6). I knew that having a higher risk background meant that I would end up on the higher range of everything, and that Beau was starting with a generally positive reputation as a Late Bloomer.

That doesn’t mean I was ready for the exposure to hit max!

Jake Peralta from Brooklyn 99 being asked "Are you crying?" and responding "No. That's eyeball sweat."

Turn has ten marks on the exposure track for the town. You can get positive or negative marks, based on the type of interaction that causes them. You take the marks when you’ve done something that might cause someone to suspect your shifter identity – it can be behavioral, it can be physical, etc. Something like slipping up and saying you spent all night in the woods, or maybe your eyes shine oddly in a photograph.

Beau’s track grew and grew over time, including his town character (TC) tracks, which are separate. One TC of his was Diego, his best friend who knew everything but this secret. Early on in the campaign, I played Beau to slowly reveal his identity as a shifter to Diego, purposefully planning positive encounters. He managed to do so successfully, which was good, because Beau was truly in love with Diego. They later became partners, but it was still pretty quiet, because the town was relatively conservative in that regard. Their own professional hunter in love with his buddy? Beau wasn’t sure they could handle it.

Jack Nicholson saying "You can't handle the truth!"

There are three results you can get when you become fully exposed to a TC or the town itself: reviled, which is the lowest result, and results either in a toxic and risky relationship with the TC or you getting run out of town or dealing with violence; revealed, which is the middling result and means you may risk comforts, safety, or gossip but you’ll be able to stay in town; and known, which is the best result, and means you’re accepted in the town or by the TC.

With Diego, Beau got known, so he was able to get together with Diego, stay friends and more, and not have any risk increased from it. Over time Beau had some more positive and some more negative interactions with people in the town, just like you do – simple things that cause conflict last longer in people’s minds than we thing. It was pretty balanced. But, rumors arose when a body was found in the woods that it turned out matched the drunk driver, whose car was found, too.

This combined with Beau acting out of sorts because he found out who his birth mother was and it led to a spectacular new ability – the ability to turn into a Raven, as well! These events combined led to an exposure roll, which is 2d6 plus the exposure track, added up based on the +’s and -‘s on the track, and a + for any known TCs. I rolled poorly, but had enough based on the roll, the track, and Diego, I got the middling result – revealed. That meant no immediate danger, but it meant time had come to face facts.

Griffin McElroy saying "And let's just have a full blown panic attack together!"

The rumors spread faster than Beau could do anything for, and before he could even come clean to his closest friends (Camellia and Iris, his cousin and coworker), the cops were at Camellia’s door looking for Beau. He managed to tell Diego what happened, and Diego supported him, but he was going to have to deal with the police at some point. He decided to turn himself in. Meanwhile, on the in-fiction Facebook, his fellow townspeople were spreading memes of the Cougar Killer, claiming he’d murdered the man and mutilated the bodies. This is something that would eventually die out without the police arresting him, but in the moment it was challenging!

A little bit of coordination led to him having enough time to sneak past the deputy posted at Camellia’s (where his truck was*) to tell Camellia and Iris what was going on, then turn himself in with some legal support obtained by Camellia. He confessed to fighting with the guy, but stopped short of admitting to murder. The cops didn’t have enough evidence to keep him. In the end, Beau will still live in Cauldron Springs, unable to leave easily because of the ties that hold him there, and hopefully happy with Diego (because that cat’s outta the bag).

a Cougar, by Cecilia Ferri
This cat, specifically. a Cougar, by Cecilia Ferri

But, once you’re brought in for something this serious, it’s hard for people to drop their suspicions. Combining it with Beau becoming obviously out as queer since Diego went with him to the police station, Beau’s once stellar social standing is pretty decreased. He’ll be able to survive, but he’s not who he once was to these townspeople – many of them will go on believing he actually murdered someone, others will simply struggle with his identity especially when tied with the stigma of being questioned for murder.

So basically it all worked out? Like this is exactly how this sort of result should be narratively. Maybe some people might choose to have the shifter identity be the forefront and have it be more fantastical, some people might want to diminish the fantasy even further, and either is okay – just keeping in mind that people rarely want to believe the most fantastical things, even though they’ll often use fantastical things as metaphor or illusion for the reality.

The pacing for the exposure to max out worked perfectly, the narrative surrounding it hit all the right notes, and all I did was start with some trouble baked in, like so many characters do. It meant a lot to me to play this character** and have it play out so true to what I designed. The game works, it works really good, and it tells the stories I want to be told.

I can’t ask for more, honestly.

I’m curious, what have you worked on in games that you played out in playtesting or just when you released the game that made you have that, like, damn, I did it! moment? A moment with the math lining up just right, or the narrative tone hitting the right button? Share it in the comments, and please share this on social media to talk about those moments of design success!

*Beau constantly forgot his truck at Camellia’s, where he often went to have tea to calm down and to hang out, then turned into a cougar to hit the woods. It actually became a feature on the map! Oops.

**Who some might have guessed was a test run for my chosen name

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Five or So Questions on Mysthea

Today I have an interview with Jay Iles on Mysthea: Legends From the Borderlands, which is currently on Kickstarter! It plays into some of the thoughts I’ve been having about what happens after rebellion.

Art for Mysthea is by Travis Anderson.

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The Mysthea cover with a red crystalline feature like a castle in the background with a cliff in the foreground. The cliff has trees winding around and framing the image, and on the right near a group of trees, a person wearing a cape and holding a red and gold scepter or staff of some kind in the shape of a half-sun stands, looking out toward the red crystalline structure.

Tell me a little about Mysthea: Legends From the Borderlands. What excites you about it?

So! Mysthea: Legends From the Borderlands is a game of post-war rebuilding and divided loyalties in a geomantic fantasy world. It’s set in a city that’s in territory contested by two major powers, and now those powers are at war. The war front has passed over this city and is now a distant rumble, and the city is free again – though much worse for wear. Each player creates a faction active in the city, whether they’re an ancient order, a new organisation dedicated to refugee support, or sent by one of the great powers to rebuild the city and pursue their patron’s agenda. You’ll make a viewpoint character from your faction, dive into the politics and struggles of the wounded city, and see how it changes from flashpoint to flashpoint.

I’m excited about:

  • Telling a zoomed-in story: your group will find out how a single city grows and how its people change over the span of a few decades. You’ll craft this city and get to know its districts, its politics, its festivals.
  • A dive into weird fantasy: Mysthea is a world defined by the crystals scattered over it by a prehistoric impact. These crystals warp the environment and its creatures, but also resonate with human thought. What does a society look like where everyone has limited telekinesis, and can use these crystals to build, fight, control beasts, craft prosthetics, etc? I’m interested in finding out!
  • A game of empire and liberation. At least some of the player factions will be coming into the city as liberators, having ousted the previous occupiers. But the ousting wasn’t clean, and the faction’s patrons aren’t altruists. As you play you’ll deal with what happens after liberation, as each faction must reckon with their obligations to their patrons, the city, and each other. We’re hoping the fantasy setting will provide the needed distance to really dig into this thorny topics, and have hired cultural consultants to try and ensure we do so respectfully.
A group of people of various types who have crylstalline features look up through a city towards a shop in the sky that is emitting lighting. One individual raises their sword toward it in the foreground.

I like this zoomed in look, and I’m curious about the flashpoints! What does it feel like in play to go from moment to moment in this world, and how is that represented in the game?

A flashpoint starts with you defining its core issue: why have we decided to pick up this city’s story here? Maybe a battalion of soldiers has arrived at the city and demanded supplies? Perhaps a shower of crystal meteors have hit the city, causing destruction and warped the area? Or maybe one of the player factions has decided they’ve had enough, and is going to try and seize control of the city?

So – you’ve set up this flashpoint. To play through it, you’ll jump between the actions of Houses (slow, ponderous, and vast) and Heroes – agile and dynamic, but with their own priorities. We’ve designed the two layers to feel very different in play. House actions add new elements to the map and reshape the city’s balance of power, but use up a limited pool of Decrees. The hero phase feels more like standard PbtA, something like Monster of the Week. Your group of characters have a mission to deal with, and as you play out the moment-to-moment drama of that conflict you’ll test your bonds with your fellows and discover new truths about the world. The two phases flow into each other. Your Houses’ actions set up threats and opportunities for your Heroes to deal with, while your Heroes’ on-the-ground experience of this city and its people can completely change your Houses’ priorities and goals.

In a copse of trees, two of which are growing together with a golden orb shining between them, a small turtle-crab creature, a speckled black bird, a tall deer-like creature with spines on its back, and a long-legged lizard creature gather around a glowing book on a pedastal.

How do you approach the idea of consent and agency in a world where people can control things with their mind, able to break rules with a thought?

One of the interesting things about magic in Mysthea is that it adds agency, and its most powerful effects need close friends working together on a common goal. It’s a link between the mental and the material and has been used in-setting to craft crystal prostheses amputees can telekinetically control, and literally give agency to constructed beings of stone and crystal.

There’s the other element too – consent and agency. One person acting on their own can only perform a few tricks with crystal shards and boost their normal actions – to do more, you need to work together. By calling on the aid of those who have strong bonds with you you add their wisdom to yours, letting you work together to go beyond human limits, evoke world-warping auras and more.

The fact that magical potency comes from close bonds and common goals instead of years of arcane research and expensive components is really interesting! What sort of society does that lead to? How does that change how minority groups organise and lobby for their rights? How do autocrats maintain their power, knowing what power lies in their subject’s hands if they work together? I’m interested to find out!

A large muscular monster stands with other monsters, and the monster is green and reddish pink with large thick legs and shorter arms, a massive head with multiple horns, spider-like eyes, and a huge mouth with big chunky teeth that are fully bared.
I didn’t ask questions about the monsters but this thing is RAD.

I was just asking people about making games that happen after the liberation! What do you think are the challenges in designing a game with this focus, and what’s exciting about them?

One challenge is definitely the messy complexity of these situations. You can’t turn back the clock – the occupation happened, and it and your ‘liberation’ left scars on this place. Among the city’s citizens you’ll have those who want to restore the old ways, and those who suffered under that regime and want to keep moving forward. Among the liberators, you’ll have isolationists wanting to minimise investment and occupiers trying to claim this city permanently.

That’s a really interesting social situation to drop players into, but it’s vital to keep the difference between dogma and the true situation clear. Part of our solution is to make sure the game prioritises humanity over ideology. We want to humanise all parties involved, though that definitely doesn’t mean presenting all positions as valid.

Finally, we’re aware of the limits of our own perspectives, and have hired consultants to make sure we treat sensitive matters with the appropriate degree of tact and care.

A woman with wildly waving short hair in strappy, torn clothing that has gens in the leg straps growing down into stilts that are part of her feet. She holds large geometric golden blades in a defensive stance while a diamond shaped, golden item floats behind her head, emitting a bright light and three long, red tentacles.

What are some of the more complex aspects of designing a game focused on a whole city, rather than just a few characters?

First, you have to treat the city as a character in its own right, and give it a presence at the table. The map of the city is central to the game: you begin by placing down its districts and landmarks, and as you play you’ll introduce factors to it representing people, places and events crucial to the current flashpoint.

It’s also important to maintain the link between people and their community – to the extent that one of the GM’s principles is ‘name everyone, and know who backs them’. There’s no lone wolves in Legends From the Borderlands, and no faceless mooks – everyone has their own identity, and their own place in the city’s cultural fabric.

Of course, the easiest way to make something feel alive is to have it change. The timeskips between flashpoints are here to establish that, letting the city grow physically and culturally – each time you jump ahead, you’ll describe ways the city’s appearance has changed, and a new festival that’s sprung up to remember the previous flashpoint.

An illustration of large crystalline creatures with crystal weapons leaping and running towards the viewer.

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Thank you to Jay for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Mysthea: Legends From the Borderlands on Kickstarter today!

Five or So Questions on vs. KICKSTARTER

Today I have five-or-so questions with Thomas Deeny on the vs. KICKSTARTER, a collection of three games that’s currently on Kickstarter! Check out what Thomas had to say below.

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A promotional image showing vs. MIRRORSHADES, vs. MARS, and vs. PIRATES, three games based on the vs. MONSTERS system by Philip Reed.

Tell me a little about vs. KICKSTARTER. What excites you about it?

vs. KICKSTARTER began as three small roleplaying games based on Phil Reed’s vs. Monsters. More accurately, they are inspired by his vs. Outlaws, a pared-down Wild West-themed version of his original game. That game was produced on both sides of a multi-panel screen that folds down to a 5-1/2″ square. 

A bit over a decade ago, Phil opened the vsM Engine up for others to use. At that time, I had worked a bit on three games based on vsM, but I wound up focusing on completing a BFA and plans for development were pushed back. A few months ago, there was a discussion on twitter about one of the settings I had developed as a vsM-powered game. I looked back at the old files and while that particular game needed a lot of work, I saw that vs. MARS was nearly done. So much so, that a bit of trimming and it would fit on that folded screen template. From there, the other two initial games featured in the campaign followed.

vs. MARS is a game about an alien invasion in a small town. I’ve always been a fan of survival fiction — things like zombie movies where the focus and threat is about the other survivors but there is some external threat pressuring the survivors. vs. MARS really slots into that role. The unlocked expansion opens the game up to leading a resistance on occupied Earth.

vs. MIRRORSHADES is a fast-playing cyberpunk game. I love the cyberpunk genre and my hope is this game falls a bit more into the social change/punk part of cyberpunk rather than the chrome fetishization side. An unlocked two-panel expansion to this adds fantasy races and magic to the MegaCity — it’s the most-requested addition to any cyberpunk game.

vs. PIRATES is a game in the golden age of piracy from our childhood memories. The already-unlocked expansion came first: I’ve always wanted to play a game that was a mashup of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and The Pirates of the Caribbean. Without the expansion, you’re playing more of a Treasure Island or Black Sails game. With the expansion, you’ve got undead pirates, the kraken, and cursed treasure.

We’ve recently unlocked vs. EMPIRE, a game that isn’t so much “Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off” as it is “Star Wars with the serial numbers filled in Play-Doh”.

Initially, I thought the campaign would need $400 to fund and would probably top out at $600 or about 40 or 45 backers. I am excited about the response to the campaign so far! As I write this, the campaign is 500% funded and we are nearing 100 backers — that’s twice the number of backers and nearly twice the amount pledged past a point in my initial spreadsheet where I wrote “we’re probably dreaming at this point”. That these small games are inspiring people I don’t even know to come on board and help make them a reality is just something that surprised me — it really impressed me.

A promotional image showing vs. MIRRORSHADES, vs. MARS, and vs. PIRATES

Great! What about this particular mechanical system appealed to you to use in such a variety of settings, and what have you changed to suit them?

When I started designing my initial vs. game, I was interested in survival fiction. Rather than being the proactive monster hunters of vs. Monsters where your characters decide to hunt down monsters, having a setting where you are forced to take on that role appealed to me. You’re a regular person and then something happens: how do you react to that? 

I had two different main games I was developing which had the same underlying elements: normality is interrupted by an invasion; you are simultaneously being hunted and take on the role of the hunters. One game was somewhat campy, the other somewhat serious. They combined and the theme of vs. MARS wound up engulfing the other. 

Since my initial designs, my preferred game style has changed from one where we’re just players reacting to the twists and turns of the GM’s story to more of a style where there is player collaboration in they way the story is shaped. In vs. MARS, there are rules for scene framing where a player answers two questions: “What is this scene about?” and “Where does it take place?” Adding an element like this helps to emulate the type of fiction vs. MARS emulates — in a setting like an alien invasion, one major element is isolation or separation. By adding scene framing, our protagonists don’t have to be in a small clump of adventuring heroes all the time. 

When there is damage involved, conflict resolution now incorporates the suits of cards drawn to speed up determining damage taken. The cyberpunk game, vs. MIRRORSHADES, has a Metal stat that is used whenever cyberware augmentations are used. To reflect the setting’s concept that cyberware is an improvement, using Metal makes the highest card revealed a suit that trumps all others. It effectively guarantees that you’re going to have some effect on the scene if you use these augments.

The vs. MARS cover showing the planet Mars in space, taking up a third of the image, red and hovering.

You know I love small towns, so I’m curious, what do you do to make the town small and still feel worth being in for vs. MARS?

During character creation, one of the things you would choose for your survivor is their concept: something about what they did before the invasion and what they want. This desire is something that should tie them into the town. The current example character is Tabitha Masters, a French major at ETU who wants to get home to make sure her family is safe.

Stock locations are listed for a few things found in and around the town that convey the theme of isolation.

The cover of vs. MIRRORSHADES, showing a room filled with monitors and wires, colored in pink, blue, green, and yellow, with orange bits.

What have you done to make fantasy character types exciting and respectful for cyberpunk, mechanically or setting-wise?

To get to that, I have to work through the constraints of the project. Whenever I see a new game come out the first question I always see asked is: “Can I play Star Wars with it?” (Which is where vs. EMPIRE comes from.) The second question is: “Can I play Shadowrun with it?” When developing the cyberpunk vs. game, it seemed that a straight cyberpunk game with an option to add on the fantasy elements would fit the limited space I had available. 

With vs. MAGICSHADES, a player chooses their character’s heritage, which adds a simple one-use bonus to the character. Some implied setting material, such as the elf nation of Tir nAill claiming all elves as citizens, start to bring in some classic tropes of pseudo-Shadowrun.

The cover of vs. PIRATES showing a pirate ship with a mermaid figurehead on the seas.

How are your pirates and their world different from and the same as those we most commonly see in media?

The tagline for vs. PIRATES says the setting is based on the way we remember tales of pirates from our childhood. I feel it is more cartoonish than serious. Even though you could play something straight like the Black Sails television show, I anticipate the default play style would be more like The Pirates of the Caribbean if one stripped out all the supernatural aspects. 

The way vs. PIRATES works is we establish the approach one will take to a situation. Our stats in the game are Swashbuckling and Parley. Basically if you’re fighting, your approach uses Swashbuckling. If you’re not, it’s Parley. An antagonist also has approaches, but they are based on their role. So a pirate antagonist would be drawing more cards if they were doing something piratey and fewer if they were doing something outside their role.

Going back to that default play style, adding in the vs. DAVY JONES expansion bumps the game towards that Buffy + Pirates of the Caribbean game, so we can add some more supernatural elements to the antagonists and their goals.

The vs. MIRRORSHADES plus vs. MAGICSHADES expansion covers.

What more do you have in store both for those already-achieved stretch goals and anything else to come?

I really don’t want to overextend myself on this, which is the first Kickstarter campaign I’ve handling myself. While I have been collaborating and working on over a dozen others, I’ve seen a few easy ways how a successful campaign can be twisted into become a financial nightmare.

I’ve spoken to a few other campaign creators when it looked like we were close to unlocking the vs. EMPIRE stretch goal. Nearly every one told me to not add anything else that I don’t feel comfortable with. At this point, the project is funded and will be delivered — with the planning I’ve done for the campaign, it’s all good. I don’t want to take on additional costs that could disrupt fulfillment of the project. 

So right now, the last stretch goal was “I’ll add a second topping to a celebratory pizza when this is all over.”

However, I have plans for further developing some of those earlier vsM games into this format, including one game designed to be a 1-on-1 one-shot. I’ll see how fulfillment goes for this campaign first!

A promotional image showing vs. MIRRORSHADES, vs. MARS, and vs. PIRATES.

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Thanks so much to Thomas for the interview! I hope you enjoyed it and that you check out the vs. KICKSTARTER on Kickstarter today!