What is CAPERS Noir, both as a product and as your vision?
CAPERS Noir is the first
supplement for my award-winning CAPERS RPG. It provides new character options
and new GM tools as well as an alternative setting for the game. It takes the
core game setting of the 1920s Prohibition era and moves it forward
twenty years to the WW2 years. This alternative setting shifts from
gangster shoot-em-ups to moody, atmospheric, crime noir stories filled with
mystery and some horror elements. The additional rules and tools help fill out
this noir setting but are also perfectly usable in the core Roaring Twenties
setting.
This supplement is a test case for me, to see if CAPERS has the legs to become a full game line. The early success of the Kickstarter makes me feel it does. The fan base (old and new) have been very enthusiastic, supportive, and looking forward to seeing more. I have plans to publish at least two more supplements, each about the same size as CAPERS Noir. Each will take a similar path of being an alternative historical period/setting/theme while also expanding options for all other versions of the game. My hope is to explore a variety of “cops vs robbers” themes and tropes with these supplements.
What are the Noir rules like and how do they change CAPERS?
The core rules of
CAPERS Noir are still the same (and you need the core book to play). There are
some new powers, and I’ve tried some different things with how you gain
abilities and boosts, flexing the powers system a bit. The first big difference
is that CAPERS Noir includes investigation rules using the core playing card
mechanics. This rule subset allows an investigation to move forward (that is,
clues keep getting found) without shutting down the whole thing over one bad
trait check. Success and failure on the investigation checks instead describes
how you gain additional information or add complications to the story.
Additionally, the horror elements brought to bear in CAPERS Noir provides for the possibility that your character’s soul will be corrupted. Temptation lies around every corner. Committing terrible acts at the wrong time can bring you a bit more power, but at a cost. A “shade track” defines how far your character has fallen to darkness and what benefits and hindrances this causes. You can pull yourself back out in a few different ways, most commonly by paying attention to and pursuing your “beacon,” a person, place, or thing that you hold dear and seek to help and protect.
What have you put
together to flesh out a 1940s setting and explore that complex era?
Noir fiction and film
that developed in the 20s and 30s (and feed forward into the 40s and 50s) are
at the core of CAPERS Noir. The crime noir themes of the alternate setting
explore the darker side of humanity, nihilism, fatalism, cynicism. Things
aren’t what they seem, morally gray characters are everywhere, and the
protagonist doesn’t always “win.” It’s a world of mystery and
darkness, where the good must struggle simply to stay good and the darker
characters are at risk of falling deeper into darkness even more easily. Plus,
lots of characters smoking cigarettes in the rain.
The supplement doesn’t deal directly with World War 2, but the ravages of war and its aftermath certainly are on characters’ minds in the game. (And that’s not to say I won’t ever explore the actual war, with super-powered characters taking part, in some future supplement.)
The following is an essay by John W. Sheldon, someone you may know as the art director for Turn, or as the creator of Roar of Alliance, playtested at Big Bad Con and elsewhere.
The Roar of Alliance playmat, photo by John W. Sheldon.
My name is John W. Sheldon, and I’ve been working on a tabletop game called Roar of Alliance for a few years (I used to call it Armored Reckoning). The game is about crewing an Allied tank in an alt-history World War Two and fighting through waves Nazis to set things right. What could be more anti-fascist than that? Lots of stuff, it turns out. The problem is that Nazis aren’t the only fascists, and my game does some things that potentially support fascist ways of thinking. In the political climate of the United States in 2019, it is especially important that we be aware of these things and work to mitigate them as much as possible. I’m writing about my process here in the hopes that others might find a useful example in the steps I’ve taken, and so that people with more experience can point out ways I can further improve.
What My Game Does Wrong
How does a game about destroying Nazi tanks and blowing up their infantry risk supporting fascist modes of thought? One cornerstone of fascist ideology is that they (the fascists) are oppressed by an enemy that is numerous, pervasive, powerful, and simultaneously inferior (stupid, incompetent, or morally weak). Another cornerstone is that the only appropriate way to deal with that enemy is by force.
The rules of my game do specifically these things:
The enemies you face in Roar of Alliance are numerous (outnumbering the players in just about every engagement), dangerous (their vehicles are often more advanced and better armed), and lack intelligence (their actions are automated by simple if/then statements that they never deviate from). The only way players ever interact with these foes is via deadly force. You will lose the game if you do not destroy their vehicles and disperse their infantry.
So, in these ways at least, my game actually promotes a core set of fascist ideologies. Some of this is hard to avoid, given that the game doesn’t have anyone in a central directorial role to moderate portrayals of the enemy or to restrict player behaviors in direct contact with the enemy outside combat, therefore no character in the game is ever confronted by a Nazi outside the specific circumstance of combat. This is a conscious choice to make sure nobody at the table is ever tasked with portraying a Nazi, and it keeps torture* and certain other types of violent fantasy outside the scope of the game as written. Players also have some leeway in narrating the effects of their actions on the enemy: when enemy infantry are removed from the field, players can choose to narrate the enemy’s retreat or death, and players do the same for surviving crew of disabled enemy vehicles.
Since violence and a portrayal of the enemy as numerous and unintelligent are essential to the way the game functions, and I don’t want to scrap the whole thing and start over, how do I make sure the rest of the game refutes fascism?
Focusing on Diversity
by John W. Sheldon
I start with something nationalists and fascists hate: I make sure that every other aspect of the game supports and emphasizes diversity and demonstrates how it creates strength. This paragraph kicks off the rulebook:
This game is set during the 2nd World War in Europe, a time when even the historical victors were rife with bigoted beliefs and policies. You should not let those real world bigotries limit the characters you choose to portray and accept. People of all races and genders from six continents and countless backgrounds fought against fascism and Nazism in Europe, and your characters should reflect some of that diversity.
Moreover, players are asked to identify their character’s country of origin, to help emphasize the diversity of geographic origin of the people who challenge fascism. Some of these choices are informed at a basic level by the themes of the character archetypes the game offers. In particular, the Partisan archetype was a resident of Nazi-occupied territory and a resistance fighter before joining up with the crew, the Collateral is a member of a population oppressed by the Allies and nevertheless pressed into service against the Nazis (e.g., Black Americans or colonial subjects of the British Empire), and the Duty was someone who volunteered for the fight because they new defeating fascism and Nazism was the right thing to do.
For actually producing the game, I’m doing what I’d never recommend: I’m doing the rules writing, layout, and illustrations all myself. What this does mean is that I can make sure that all of the art upholds my stated dedication to multiple axes of diversity. The art within the rules documents already portrays people of multiple genders, races, and body types as members of the player tank crew. Additional art I’m working on will include crew members with visible disabilities, crew wearing items of non-European traditional dress, and different cultural grooming standards.
by John W. Sheldon
Part of my plan for taking the game to crowdfunding is to offer backers the opportunity to have their portraits included as the card back art for some of the character archetypes, and as the face cards in the crew deck. Since I believe the audience for my game (one about Tanks in World War Two) skews significantly male, white, able-bodied, and cis, simply offering all of these art opportunities on a first-come, first-served basis would further skew the art for my game towards a monolithic default. To maintain my dedication to diversity, I need to give up potential sources of revenue and pre-stack the art with diverse portraits. I’ll won’t be offering backer levels for the Jacks in the Crew Deck, or for half of the character archetypes. Instead, I’ll be creating those portraits before the crowdfunding campaign begins. The portraits for the Jacks will be portraits of non-binary volunteers, and those for the first half of the character archetypes will be of volunteers who are one or more of non-white, queer, or visibly disabled.
Heroes that Need Help
Most fascism thrives on mythologizing heroes as paragons of strength, capable of facing great hardship alone and without aid. The heroes of fascism also contain within them a paradox: the enemy they face is terrifying, but they never actually feel fear. Roar of Alliance refutes these mythologized ideas of heroism idea on multiple fronts. The very nature of combat in my game requires players to rely on one another at all times (no person can operate a tank single-handedly). The player characters also begin the game by admitting fear: one of the first tasks of the first session is to identify a fear your character has about the fighting to come.
During the game, player characters will take Stress (the game’s unified resource representing both physical toughness and mental resilience). Characters who max out their Stress during an engagement play out a Last Stand for significant effect, then leave the Crew (the player decides whether they have died or simply become unable for whatever reason to continue on as a tank crew member). While the characters have a limited set of resources called Motivations that the players can expend to avoid stress, the only way to actually recover Stress relies on spending time with the other characters between battles. Only by working together, by comforting one another, and by acknowledging their own dependence on others can characters reduce their Stress and gain new Motivations to help them engage in future battles.
by John W. Sheldon.
Every archetype has scene prompts that show them needing help, and the whole game requires players to rely extensively on one another. Even the player’s Crew is supported by a company of non-Crew characters that players will occasionally be called on to portray between battles. No lone strong hero, or even small group of heroes, can accomplish the monumental task the players are facing.
Humanizing the Enemy
Fascism dehumanizes its enemies, making it easier for its adherents to attack, belittle, and eventually exterminate those that oppose it. You can see this in language comparing enemies to animals, assigning them undesirable traits as a group, in racist and anti-Semitic propaganda images that exaggerate enemy features to cartoonish extremes, or even in recent online language where some members of right-leaning web forums call people who oppose them “NPCs” – implying that there is no real individual personhood in those that disagree with their fascist ideology.
In my quest to make the game as hostile as possible to fascist ideologies, I must design the game to humanize the enemies that players face. Everyone should be reminded that the Nazis and members of the Wehrmacht were not inhuman monsters – they were regular people who became willing to commit evil acts because of an abhorrent philosophy. Reminding players of this is important because dehumanizing even Nazis creates an easy defense for modern fascists and authoritarians to mount, in the form of a “but I do these good things over here, I’m not a complete monster” defense. Reminding people that Nazis were regular people, even while they did terrible things, reminds us that we must examine ourselves for the kinds of behavior they exhibited.
Next Steps
Is there more my game can do? Almost certainly. In fact, I’m extremely open to suggestions for additional ways to improve. You can get in touch with me on Twitter, Pluspora, or Mastodon if you want to give me some feedback.
In the meantime, if you’re interested in ways to make your own game hostile to fascist ideologies, check out these twoessays that helped inform my own process.
*Despite everything pop culture tells us, torture does not work. It is immoral and wrong in every circumstance, and this would still be true even if it worked – which it categorically does not.
What is By Aecer’s Light!, both as a product and as your vision?
By Aecer’s Light! is me ‘small scale testing’ a creative project on my ‘someday-maybe’ list of creative projects. I’ve done a few freelancer-for-hire projects and wondered what would a ‘By Mad Jay’ project look like. This Kickstarter is the result of me crafting and running a series of one-shot con sessions using some of the unusual pieces of fantasy, Burning Wheel fantasy in particular. The Roden, which are rat-folk. Wolfen, think fantasy bipedal wolves and a Rakshasi, but jaguar instead of tiger and the absence of a great Elven presence. Wild success for me would be that folks are happy with the zines they backed and find them useful. I break even (at least) and getting to work with fantastic folks like Julia Ellingboe, Kurt Komoda, Johnstone Metzger, Nathan Paoletta and the father of Roden, Peter Tierney.
All of those sound very cool! You talk about your awesome collaborations, but first I want to know, what are you doing in your setting design that is something you see as truly your dream brought to light?
I’m a sucker for outsider stories. The X-Men, Samurai Champloo, Farscape, these are stories about outsider groups. The Roden(Rat folk), Wolfen, the Dark(Spite) Elf, and the Rakshashi are all outsiders. There aren’t many, if any, iconic characters or stories about these fantasy peoples. We’re free to explore and collaboratively make our own.
By Kurt Komoda.
What can backers expect in the By Aecer’s Light! release and what does it bring hope for in the future?
In the By Aecer’s Light! release players will have a starter setting to begin playing in and Roden and Wolfen as playable ‘races’. There will be immediate conflicts ready to go and room for the players to grow, define, make their own outsider stories. Hopefully, the future brings more playable lore in this ‘after the Elves’ setting.
This post was originally posted on G+ by P.H. Lee on August 28, 2017. It was a significant influence on updates to the Script Change RPG toolbox, and is an essential read in regards to addressing safety in the game community and at every game table. Lee has authorized me to post the text here in full since G+ is dying, which I greatly appreciate – it’s super valuable!
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Preamble
I have PTSD. About 6-7 years ago, more or less, various pan-RPG techniques to control triggering[1] content — The Veil and the X-Card, to name two of a vast diversity — became commonplace in the RPG circles that I played in. Around the same time, I stopped participating in role-playing games at meet-ups and conventions, or anywhere else that these techniques were promulgated. These three things (PTSD, X-Card, and my withdrawal from play) are related. I’m writing this essay to discuss the ways that these techniques cut off my access to role-playing games, and introduce know techniques that, I hope, will point to a way forward in terms of accessibility.
Conflicting Access Needs Before I go further, I’d like to reference a term from the disability rights movement: conflicting access needs. Disabled people are extremely diverse and our disabilities are also extremely diverse. While an ideal world would have everyone’s access needs met at all times and in all circumstances, in many circumstances, with many disabilities, that is practically or fundamentally impossible.
An example, which I’m paraphrasing from Autistic blogger Mel Baggs: A group home for Autistic people have some occupants who constantly verbalize, and others who are hypersensitive to noise. The verbalizers have a reasonable access need to be allowed to verbalize. The hypersensitive have a reasonable access need for quiet. Both of these access needs are reasonable, but it is impossible to meet both of them in the same space.
For this essay, the point is that, while I’m describing ways that my (and others) access to role-playing games has been cut off, I want to acknowledge that the techniques in question were developed and promulgated — often by people with similar disabilities to mine — to meet a legitimate access need. That they cut off my (and others) access to role-playing games does not mean that they are inherently wrong, bad, or ableist.
I do not want this to turn into “X-Card (or The Veil, etc, etc) is bad” and, even more so, I do not want it to turn into “the people who propagate these techniques are bad.” That’s not my opinion and, also, it’s wrong. I am hoping that by writing this essay I can move the discussion of accessibility of RPGs for PTSD sufferers from “use this technique” to a conversation which can account for different players, different goals, different communities, and different access needs.
A Note on Personal Narrative
I’m going to use a personal narrative throughout this essay, because it is based on my own experiences of both role-playing games and PTSD. But I want to be clear: I am not speaking solely for myself in this. Simply from personal circumstances, I can attest that the problems I have are problems that are shared by a number of other people with triggered mental illnesses.
Likewise, there are people with triggered mental illnesses who have a very different experience — most importantly, there are people with triggered mental illnesses who find the X-Card, The Veil, etc. to be vital techniques for their access to role-playing games. I do not want to erase these people — they exist, and their experiences also matter.
Please do not take my use of personal narrative as evidence that I speak only for myself. I don’t. Likewise, please don’t take my speaking on this topic as someone with PTSD to assume that I speak for all people with triggered mental illness. I don’t.
The X-Card, the Veil, and all that
The X-Card, the Veil, and similar techniques have their roots in a section of Sex and Sorcery, a supplement for Sorcerer by Ron Edwards, where he (roughly paraphrasing) suggests a technique dealing with difficult sexual content in the game by “drawing a veil over it,” basically, describing it in loose terms and then moving on with play, rather than playing it out. This is included together with several other techniques, including actually playing it out and fading to black. From there, like many things from the Sorcerer supplements, it developed on the Forge forums as a more generalized technique that could be applicable to all games.
I first encountered The Veil as a universally applicable technique in the context of public play in the Pacific Northwest — I believe it comes out of the Go Play NW convention, but I could be mistaken. By the time it reached this form, it had mutated considerably — it was something that was invoked by a particular player, rather than a general technique for play, and it generally had the effect of erasing the content of play [2], rather than playing it out in a vague sense and then moving on. It became a widespread meta-technique[3], adopted at a lot of public play events.
Simultaneously [4], in the New York City play scene, John Stavropoulos developed the X-Card as a meta-technique. With the X-Card, the system is formalized. By “throwing the X-Card” (either a physical card marked with an X or just an invocation), a player stops play, and the offending material is erased, and play continues as if it had never happened.
The X-Card grew in popularity and was adopted throughout the indie-games public play culture. By the time that I had largely retreated from public play (~2013), it was fairly universal. Although I have not been in touch with public play culture since, it does not seem (from my outsider perspective) to have become any less widespread.
My Experience
My first reaction to The Veil as a meta-technique was simply “well, I don’t want to do that.” At the time, it was not generally regarded as a universal meta-rule, so that was the end of my encounter with it. However, as it grew in popularity, I began to be increasingly averse to it. I remember a particular event — I think it was at Indie Hurricane, although I could not guess at the year — where it was introduced as a generic rule for all pick-up games. I got a horrified, sinking feeling, my eyes started to flutter and my stomach twisted — familiar signs of a triggering [1] event. I cannot remember whether I then said to my players “I’d like not to use that for our game” or not — I cannot even remember if I ran my planned game or left the scene immediately. Poor memory often accompanies being exposed to triggers.
I tried playing a few games with the rule in place, thinking I could maybe get used to it. Even though, to my recollection, it was never invoked, those games left me an anxious wreck afterward.
I stopped going to convention events as often. I started going to local public play groups, but shortly thereafter the meta-rule spread there as well, and I stopped attending those as well.
I did not at the time understand why this was triggering to me. I’m not entirely sure I was conscious that I was being triggered — it seems obvious in retrospect but I think that at the time I was not able to recognize exactly what was going on.
I made several attempts to communicate my distress — I remember talking on separate occasions with John Stavropoulos and Avery Alder about it — but because I didn’t understand what was going on, I could not clearly explain my problems, let alone propose solutions. Obviously, my attempts at communication were unsuccessful [5].
The Veil was replaced by the X-Card, and the technique continued to spread. I continued to retreat from Indie RPG circles, although I continued to play with personal groups and in non Indie RPG spaces such as AmberCon NW.
As an aside, I should say that this inaccessibility was far from the sole reason I retreated from Indie RPG circles and that, also, I do not regret having done so. My retreat has allowed me to spend more time on fiction writing, on personal friends, and on campaign play of RPGs. All of these have benefitted me both personally and professionally.
The problem
Both the X-Card and The Veil (as practiced in the PNW at that time) have as their core concept that the correct default way to handle triggering material in a role-playing game is to excise the material from the fictional timeline and thereafter to continue play. This is a commonplace understanding of how triggers work — remove the trigger, problem now solved.
This is, for me, a disaster, because it replicates the environment of denial and powerlessness that caused my PTSD in the first place.
Fundamentally, any approach to triggering material that contains any element of “pretend it never happened” is emotionally disastrous for me, because it recapitulates the environment of denial and dismissal around my traumatic experiences. This is not limited to excising the material from play — it also includes attempts to dismiss, deny, or minimize it.
No technique that centers this approach can possibly be functional as an accommodation; furthermore, any game or community that uses a technique that centers this approach is necessarily inaccessible to me, because an environment that centers denial as a coping strategy for triggering material, is in and of itself, a traumatic trigger.
Centering status quo vs centering healing
Fundamentally, these meta-techniques center the status quo — the goal is to “deal with” the triggering event, or the triggered person, and then return to regular play as if the interruption had never happened. I submit that, due the nature of PTSD, this approach is fundamentally flawed.
Once I have been triggered, I am in a traumatic experience. No amount of care or concern or comfort or accommodation can untrigger me. The question is not “how do we return Lee to the status quo?” or “how can we stop Lee from having a traumatic experience?” because those goals are impossible. The question is “what kind of traumatic experience is Lee going to have?” It can either be a damaging experience — one that reinforces the trigger and my PTSD — or it can be a healing experience — one that lets me recontextualize the trigger and its part of the trauma into my normal psyche.
Denial and social pressure to “return to normal” are damaging experiences.
Acknowledgement, empowerment, and story-building are healing experiences.
I believe that, in principle, good techniques for dealing with PTSD in role-playing games will avoid damaging experiences and center healing experiences.
The Luxton Technique
I didn’t post about my problems with X-Card, The Veil, etc for a long time because, among other factors, I did not have a proposed solution or alternative technique. All I could do was say “I’d rather have nothing than this,” but “no technique” is not particularly good rallying cry and it was not really a meaningful solution, just an attempt to get back to the somewhat-more-accessible-but-not-great status quo.
Until last year, I truly believed that there was no technique that would improve access to RPGs for some PTSD sufferers without also excluding PTSD sufferers like myself. But, last year, I played in a role-playing game at AmberCon NW that was specifically focused on traumatic experience and, particularly, centering the trauma of the players in the story we made. In that game, we used a particular technique — which I’d like to call the Luxton Technique after the GM of the game — which I found to be empowering, healing, and accessible to me.
It’s difficult for me to summarize all the parts of this that worked, but, roughly, the Luxton Technique includes:
* An honest discussion of potential traumatic triggers prior to play, in a supportive environment, with the understanding that there is no possible way to identify or discuss every conceivable trigger or trauma, and with no social pressure to disclose particulars of individual trauma.
* When, in play, a player encounters triggering material, they can, if they choose, talk about that to the other players. When they do this, the other players listen.
* As part of talking about it — and possibly the only thing that they need say — the player is given absolute fiat power over that material, expressed as a want or a need. For instance “I’d like to play [character name] for this scene” or “I need this to have a happy ending” or “I want this character to not be hurt right now” or “I need this character to not get away with this” or “By the end of play, this should not be a secret” or “I need to stop play and get a drink of water” or “I don’t have a specific request, I just wanted you to know.”
* A player does not need to use their traumatic experience to justify any requests or demands. We just do it.
* A player does not need to be the one to speak first. We keep an eye on each other and we are watchful for people who seem withdrawn or unfocused or upset. If we are worried about someone, we ask.
* We play towards accommodating that player’s requests.
It’s hard to overstate how much the Luxton Technique (or, really, set of techniques) helped us approach extremely difficult, extremely person material, both for the trauma survivors at the table and for the non-survivors. Rather than having our traumatic experiences — already a disjoint with reality — cause a disjoint in play, we were able to integrate them into play and tell a story about or, at least, at an angle to, our traumatic experiences, real and pretend.
Healing and RPGs
I am well aware that it sounds both pretentious and terrifying to talk about RPG play as a process by which one might legitimately heal from trauma. But I’d like to elaborate on that a little, because I think it’s important.
Fundamentally, a traumatic experience is an experience that is at a disjoint with the narrative of one’s life. Having PTSD means that your trauma exists out of time, out of place, and always in the present tense. A big part of recovering from PTSD, inasmuch as it is possible, is not about excising the trauma or your continued experience of it. Rather, it’s about integrating the trauma into normal memory and a normal narrative of your life.
A big part of that is story-telling, because a story is about incorporating disparate elements into a coherent narrative. And, for me, a big part of that story-telling has been role-playing games. In this essay, I present the choice as a binary — either a game can harm, or it can heal. That’s a lot of pressure to put on something as casual as a role-playing game! But, also, story-telling helps, and the story itself doesn’t need to be traumatic. Any story-telling experience can contribute, constructively, to healing, because PTSD sufferers need to be able to tell our own stories to the world and, more importantly, to ourselves. As an accessible storytelling medium, RPGs can’t be beat. They have been, and continue to be, a great help to me. In introducing these techniques, I am hoping that they can continue to be a help to others as well.
This is not limited to “heavy intense” sorts of stories that directly reference trauma. Ordinary RPGs can be stories about friends sticking together, or triumphing over evil, or just being clever and solving traps and puzzles, all of which have the potential to be healing narratives. Don’t think that I’m limiting the healing potential of RPGs to “serious” games or “serious” stories. I’m not.
It’s a reasonable reaction to say “I don’t want to do anything that heavy in my RPG!” or “I can’t be responsible for this!” And, obviously, don’t play in circumstances that you’re uncomfortable. But RPGs, and the people I’ve played them with, have given me so much healing. It’s wrong for me to dismiss, deny, or belittle that simply because games are a recreational activity. I hope that, in looking at problems of accessibility of RPGs, we can look to their potential to heal as much, if not more, than their potential to harm.
My hope (edited addition)
My hope is that this essay will start / continue a conversation where we look critically at our tools and techniques for RPG play. I hope that we can get to a place, as a community, where we understand that they are not one-size-fits-all and that we are able to take a look at what that means in terms of accessibility. I’d like for us to be able to make better-informed choices about accessibility and our RPG play, and the trade-offs that entails.
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[1] Because I have no alternative vocabulary, I’m going to use “triggering” in this essay to describe images, words, or ideas that trigger traumatic flashbacks, panic attacks, or other PTSD symptoms. I’m aware of the popular usage of “triggering” as a derisive term for an emotional reaction. I am not using it in that respect. Please, also, refrain from doing so in responses. Thanks.
[2] I’m not sure exactly when the pivot from “veil as not playing out blow-by-blow” to “veil as erasing the content from play” occurred. It might have been after this.
[3] I use the term “meta-technique” to mean “a role-playing game rule intended to be used with any game.” In some cases, it is “a role-playing game rule intended to be used with every game.”
[4] I am not sure about the historical relationship between the X-Card and the Veil. It’s possible that there was some inspiration. It’s also possible it was a parallel development.
[5] I do not want to cast any aspersions on John or Avery for our failure to communicate. Both of them listened as well as they could have to my concerns, even though I was unable to communicate them clearly. The failure was definitely on my end, and I want to thank both of them for their patience in waiting this long to hear my thoughts more clearly expressed.
Hey all! Today I’ve got five or so questions with Michael Bacon about the game Dangerous Times, which is currently on Kickstarter! Hope that you like hearing about this game of journalism in the 1920s!
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Tell me about Dangerous Times. What excites you about it?
Dangerous Times is a small role-playing game for two or
more players, published in zine form, with a focus on storytelling. It’s about
reporters who risk their lives to expose corruption, crime and injustice, all
in a version of 1920’s New York that’s just learned stage magic is real. So now
magic is everywhere: children play with fire and levitation in the streets,
wall street moguls consult soothsayers before making investments, crooks turn
hypnotism and escape-artistry to devious purposes… and of course those who
seek power are messing with things best left alone.
One of the aspects I’m most excited about is the history
involved.
New York of the jazz age is a surprisingly modern time.
Broadway is decorated with neon lights, cars fill the streets and the subway
rumbles below. There’s even a budding intercontinental network of wires and
radio waves used to share photographs and news around the world.
It’s not just the technology that makes the twenties
modern, though: so many familiar social issues are present and cultural shifts
are happening, often in ways that resonate with the current time.
I’d love it if players were able to engage with all this history, and find ways to incorporate it into their play. I’ve tried to encourage that in the design. So even though the problems they bump into involve the supernatural, I’ve attempted to make those plotlines echo historic reality. It turned out to be… not easy (I’m still not sure I’ve got it right), but at least surprisingly straight-forward. This makes sense, though, because this is the culture that produced so many of those genre-defining fantasy, horror and mystery stories; they couldn’t help but bring reality into the fantastical.
The 1920s were a complex time in New York! I know that many Black Americans and queer people were among those living in the city. What kind of research are you doing to ensure that you have appropriate representation of the history and the people of the era?
I’m glad you brought this up, because how people treated
each other during this era has been a major focal point of my research.
I’ve been lucky enough to lean on the work of historians
who’ve spent their entire careers studying aspects of this, exploring how
specific conceptions of race, gender, sexuality and nationality influenced and
were influenced by society at large. There’s even a page at the end of the zine
dedicated to resources and references, so that players interested in learning
more can know where to start.
Going into this I’d only known the broadest shapes of the
era, and I was very excited to learn about ways society seemed to be expressing
interest in diversity— this romantic idea that New Yorkers at large were going
out to speakeasies, immigrant neighborhoods, jazz clubs, queer dances, and
encountering all sorts of other lifestyles and backgrounds— but when I started
doing the reading it turns out that these interactions served to reify existing
hierarchies as much as they transgressed against them.
And then the years rush ahead through the Great
Depression, WWII, and McCarthyism, all of which exacerbate expressions of
social backlash and undermine tentative steps made towards civil progress.
All this is to say that the past is a different place,
not a kinder one.
I have, however, made a serious effort to research and represent all the people living in the city, not just the ones in most easy reach. What this directly translates to is mention and often discussion of things like the black press, targeted enforcement of new immigration laws, police raids on cross-racial or queer dances, and so forth throughout the zine… though it’s difficult to fit all the nuance required within just 40 pages, especially when those pages also have to convey the core game mechanics and process of play.
One thing that drove me to set the game in the 1920s was
this article talking about Harlem’s Hamilton Lodge Ball, where hundred of queer
men and women annually danced in joyful defiance of prevailing gender and
sexual norms. These events became a sensation, with thousands from all over the
city showing up to observe and sometimes take part; notables in attendance
include Nora Holt and Wallace Thurman, even the Vanderbilts and Astors. The
newspapers at the time treat this with a range between shock and fascination,
but I can’t help but smile when I picture it— twirling on the dance floor,
fancy suits and gowns, and people from all over the city celebrating.
I’ve tried to make the game as much about players
encountering and protecting this positive parts of life in the city, as it is
about mystery, magic, and the dangers that are encroaching.
What kind of mechanics do you use in Dangerous Time for things like investigation, violence, and other things that might come up?
This is actually the area that’s seeing the most change, as I continue to playtest and refine what I’ve developed.
The setting and the mechanics are meant to reinforce
each-other, but I’ve also tried to keep them out of the way of the real point,
which is telling stories. So there’s some simple outcome randomization using
six-sided die, but there’s also a mechanic in place that lets players spend
this resource— credibility— to ignore the dice.
So for example this lets me keep reporters very squishy,
only distinguishing between “healthy”, “injured”, and “dead”, because the
transition between these states is almost always intentional.
The idea is that reporters sometimes exaggerate how
dramatic a situation is for the sake of selling more papers, so when you spend
credibility to succeed at something it actually means somebody, somewhere in
this article that your building, was lying.
And of course credibility is important when figuring out
the outcome of an adventure, because you might survive the big encounter only
to find nobody believes what you’re printing, and then the world gets worse
instead of better. Maybe dying for your ideals was the smarter choice.
Then there’s the investigation, which is where I’ve been
doing a lot of iteration lately. I’ve been toying with different ways to have
players encounter and build stories, but one piece I think I’ve finally got
down is the start of everything— the staff meeting.
The latest version has the editor (the player who runs
the game) stating a fact about the world and then questioning the other players
about it.
So you open the meeting with “Rats and pigeons have been
dying”, “Strange sounds drift through the air”, “Discarded bits of clothing
keep turning up” and then start asking questions. Why are the rats dying?
Where are they finding the clothing? When are the sounds
being heard?
Who told you about this? What does this other group say
about it? Make it weirder! Do they contradict each-other?
These become the rumors players investigate, and with a little bit of work by the editor they get incorporated into and reshape the various archetypal plots written in the zine.
What are the kinds of experiences and actions players can have in Dangerous Times? What do they do, and what do they feel?
Mechanically and thematically, Dangerous Times is a game
about determining truth, and working out how a bunch of truths all fit together
into a narrative.
Players start the game by generating rumors and leads,
then tell stories about how their reporters follow up on those leads. Dice
rolling is used to give guidance during this process, letting players know when
a scene should provide answers or raise more questions. They also make
decisions about who pursues what leads, when to use magic or break laws during
the investigation, when to split up and investigate more leads, or to focus on
one lead together, reducing danger and increasing the chance it’ll pan out.
All the while players are accruing trouble, which
eventually comes calling, and they’ll use their dice, skills, and other
resources to get out of it— or they go out in a blaze of glory, getting one
last epic moment before they fall.
Finally publication starts, and players have to take all
these facts and rumors and fit them together into articles, coming up with
witty headlines for bonus points. The paper’s credibility, circulation, and
debts come together to influence decisions about what gets printed, and then
the impacts of the publication on the world and the newspaper’s future are
discussed.
Ideally players start out with interest and confusion,
and as the story progresses they get that slow, awesome sense of the facts
coming together. They feel pressure brewing as trouble builds up, and they make
decisions about which risks are worth taking. When the trouble finally happens,
they feel excitement and danger, but also in control— players are the ultimate
arbiter over their character’s fate, and they’ll have to weigh when sacrifices
are worthwhile. During publication they get to look back on the adventure,
recapping all those feelings mixed together with hope, satisfaction, or regret.
Finally, in a game called Dangerous Times, I have to wonder, how do you plan to encourage safe and respectful play at the table?
The way tabletop gamers have thought critically on player
safety, developing tools and methods to encourage everyone has a good time, is
one of the things I like best about this hobby. Coming from video games, where
the discussion really isn’t there yet, it’s like a breath of fresh air. So of
course I’m happy to reference things like Lines & Veils and the X-card, so
players new to the hobby or unfamiliar with these concepts can play with a
safety net.
As to the design itself, well. Dangerous Times opens with
a staff meeting, and there’s a note in the zine about using starting that off
with a quick conversation about the things players do and don’t want to see.
It’s my hope that this becomes a natural place to establish boundaries, proffer
ideas, and flavor the tone of upcoming play. If someone mentions they find
baseball boring but love ghost stories, the group can keep that in mind as they
start building rumors and playing the game. With luck this normalizes the times
when people need to draw boundaries, whether that’s to avoid deep-seated trauma
or just because they’ve had a shitty day.
Addressing the other part of your question, one of the
things I’ve been very careful with the plotlines inside the booklet is to keep
them (hopefully, respectfully) adjacent to reality— players encounter history
and fix fantasy. So there’s no rushing in and suddenly solving real-world
injustices that persist into the present, at least in the booklet as written. I
think it’s fine if players want to play that way, but it’s not the game I
wanted to write. Instead I’ve provided supernatural and imaginary plots, noted
parallels to real history, and tasked editors with “making the real
unreal”— drawing inspiration from the real world, but making it into
something everyone can feel comfortable playing with.
I’d be happy if the experience of playing can be informative and challenging, but first and foremost it has to be enjoyable. It’s my hope that the game can support both hard-hitting encounters with history as well as light-hearted escapism. Groups can and should play at their own comfort levels— the twenties were a terrible, dangerous time, but also one that could have promised a better future. If nothing else, playing in that space should be fun.
Today I’m so excited to share that I have an interview with Dr. Jessica Hammer and Moyra Turkington on their game Rosenstrasse, which is currently on Kickstarter! I hope you enjoy hearing what these amazing women have to say about this project – check it out below!
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Tell me a little about Rosenstrasse. What excites you about it?
JH: The Rosenstrasse story is an incredible story of non-violent protest and resistance to unjust authority. The game puts you inside marriages between Jewish and “Aryan” Germans. You play out what I like to call “ten years of marriage in three hours”; then, at the end of the game, the female characters have the chance to protest the roundup of the Jewish men in their lives. The historical protest we’re exploring was spontaneous, women-led, non-violent – and successful. That’s something we want to remember. At the same time, we remember that even these women, who were willing to stand up to the Reich, didn’t do so until their own families were on the line. We can honor their courage and still aspire to do better next time.
MT: A lot of things! Jess has the first thing that comes to mind – it is history that belies the story we’re told about our effective potential to affect oppressive regimes and that makes it an urgently important story to me in our current political climate. But I’ll also pick one that I don’t often mention – that it’s designed to be very procedurally easy to run! Unlike many games that require GM skill sets that experienced gamers take for granted (world building, scene framing, narrative positioning, mechanical management) Rosenstrasse takes care of the lion’s share of that work for you. In this game, the primary GM skill is emotional calibration – listening to a scene until it has reached an emotional place of fulfillment, asking questions to reveal how characters are processing the events in their lives, and checking in to make sure players are coping with the material. Because these are core emotional intelligence skills rather than specialized GM skills, this makes the game accessible to folks who have historically found GMing daunting – and as a result we’re seeing better representation among facilitators.
What inspired you to create the game specifically as a live action experience?
MT: Rosenstrasse is actually a hybrid larp & tabletop game so groups can play it as a live or tabletop experience. Because most of the gameplay involves the emotional negotiation between two people, the delineation between tabletop and larp start to naturally blur anyway; a scene where a husband and wife have a difficult conversation at a kitchen table looks and feels very similar in either game mode. When I run the game, I tend to do so in larp mode because I find that embodied roleplay is a powerful conduit to adopting the headspace and heartspace of the character, especially when there are strong relationship ties. I think that the emotion follows the body and vice versa.
JH: In contrast to Mo, I tend to run Rosenstrasse closer to a tabletop. Players still get to have meaningful in-character conversations where they embody their characters verbally and physically, but adopt a very different relationship to the game materials. For example, players in this mode often describe experiencing the card deck as a ticking clock, counting down to new horrors. This sense of dread is palpable at the table and very powerful for play.
What is the game like in play – what emotions do players normally experience, and what do they physically do?
JH: The game comes with eight pre-generated characters, and more than eighty scenes for them to encounter. In a typical scene, players get the description of a situation – for example, maybe two of the characters are going to work on the morning after Kristallnacht – and then a prompt for role-play. Prompts typically ask the characters to have a conversation, react to the situation being described, or show how their marriage changes.
MT: The game is meant to feel like an elegy – a thoughtful observance of the loss of security, dignity, freedom, and selfhood incurred under an oppressive regime. But it’s also a game about resilience and resistance – players through their characters struggle to hold on – or sometimes to let go. They discover that in an active genocide, that the minutiae of living and thinking and loving are themselves, resistance. The game play is often quiet, somber and serious – one where everyone shares a deep breath before the next scene because the story just keeps on getting harder. But there’s also moments of lightness, bright love, and true courage that also make it bearable.
What kind of research did you need to do to create Rosenstrasse?
MT: Research for historical games about people in marginalized situations can be hard. And it becomes harder still when you try to uncover their stories from a time where oppressive regimes have a stronghold on the narrative in which even documentation of your own story can be prosecuted as a treasonous crime against the state. You can double this down once more in a locus of war (Berlin) where victors literally displace the regime and with it wrest control of the story to broadcast their own victory. Stories get lost, they get distorted, they get overwritten – the stories of victims get defined by their victimhood in service to the vilification of the enemy and the righteousness of the victor.
For Rosenstrasse we got very lucky in that an academic named Nathan Stoltzfus found the thread of the Rosenstrasse protests early enough to locate people who were actually impacted, and to collect their first hand accounts of the events. Those first-hand accounts became the heart of our research and our design. And since that work, many other academics have focused on the story and it has become a locus of debate in Resistance Studies – so for research we situated ourselves in the lives of people who told their story and followed as many threads as we could find outward until we felt we could create a palpable feel of what it was like to live in that time.
JH: While Mo focused on the historical research, I spent a lot of time looking into the challenges of Holocaust education. I have a lot of experience designing and studying educational games – that’s actually part of my day job as a professor at CMU – but Holocaust education has some pretty specific challenges that we needed to understand. For example, Holocaust games can backfire if they make the player feel that they could have done a better job in the circumstances. That can lead them to have contempt, not empathy, for the targets of Nazi persecution. So, we did research to identify these challenges, looked at what’s been done before, and specifically targeted our design to address them. Our research with the game so far, and our observations of playtesting, suggest that we’re succeeding!
Dr. Jessica Hammer, one of the creators of Rosenstrasse.
How is Rosenstrasse important to you as a creator, and as a person?
JH: I’ve been making transformational games for nearly twenty years, and I’ve rarely seen a game that has this kind of power. It’s humbling and a bit frightening to know that you’ve made a game that deeply impacts players. But, I’ve brought everything that’s in me to the table – my work with transformational games, my commitment to activism, my expertise in psychology and instructional design, my family history, my love of role-playing games – and I think that creates a special kind of alchemy.
I’m particularly grateful that Mo agreed to dedicate the game to my grandmother, Helen Hammer. She survived five different camps, including Auschwitz, and went on to live a life of intellectual commitment, grace, and dignity. I was particularly close to her growing up. She pushed me to read bigger, think bigger, adventure bigger; she wanted me to have a vision of the world as it could be, not just of the world as it was. She died when I was still in college, so I hope this game stands as a testament to her memory.
MT: Rosenstrasse has a harmony that’s critically important to me. Its historical focus, its design, the story it tells, the player experience, the impact of play, my personal goals as a creative activist, and the design relationship Jess and I have built are all aligned with a harmony that’s incredibly satisfying. I will forever be grateful that Jess agreed to do this work with me – it has been a uniquely fulfilling and powerful experience, and I am humbled by her trust and her courage.
Bite Me! is a game about the emotional life of a werewolf pack. So it has mechanics for superhuman action and also mechanics for emotional connection and dealing with the fall out of the violence in your life.
I love games that dive deep into a mess of pressure cooker relationships. A werewolf pack is my perfect setting for that. It has 4 essential elements:
the fear of losing control of the monster inside,
the created family who share something that sets them apart,
the threat of a violent end, and
people closer to their emotional states and less able to hide how they feel.
Bite Me! uses those elements to keep the drama and tension high whilst doing the work for you to make the characters and the players feel like they are part of a pack. I’ve taken some of my learning on organisational culture from my MBA and baked it into the game to really make that a powerful part of the experience.
It is also a Powered by the Apocalypse game and that excites me a lot for two reasons: first because PbtA is a powerful engine for creating this cascade of action which gets out of control fast, and control is a huge theme in the werewolf genre. But secondly because the playbooks and moves allow you to design a very precise gaming experience for a given setting or genre. So, this is absolutely a game with a big theme of control, but the moves and skins in Bite Me! allow a group to also explore sharing emotions, having heartfelt conversations and having relationships in the centre of a storm of violence.
Most of all this game excites me because it is absolutely the game I’d want someone to run for me.
Tell me more about using your MBA! What did you bring forward, and how did you apply it to the game?
In my MBA I did a lot of work on how a culture can define an organisation even to the extent of eclipsing some pretty important things like strategy. I came to realise that culture is a powerful tool, but more than that – it already exists. It sits at the gaming table with us. And that got me thinking, if we have such a powerful thing sitting alongside us then shouldn’t we be using it? Shouldn’t we be designed games for it – to make sure that the culture doesn’t eat our carefully designed settings and systems.
I’ve designed this game with culture in mind. Deliberately using and establishing culture both in and out of character to replicate that sense of camaraderie that exists both in Packs and close gaming groups. Character advancement (in part) is tied to expressing and sharing culture as a Pack and every in-joke you share should make the game feel that much more gripping and heartfelt. One of my favourite things it when you experience a genuine moment of camaraderie at the gaming table. A moment that lights up your heart in a way that is shared with everyone else in your gaming group. I wanted to make a game that acknowledged and even facilitated that experience.
With such an emotional environment, considering the elements of family, struggle, and relationships, how do you handle safety and consent in the game?
I think that safety and consent is one of the hardest and most important conversations in our hobby right now. I recommend for Bite Me! a set of three different tools to help everyone at the gaming table take care of each other.
I like to start all my games by establishing a list of topics we agree not to bring into the game, a ‘Banned List’. This can be done anonymously or not as the needs of the players require and everyone including the MC is encouraged to use the opportunity to define what they want to keep out of the game. This allows players to veto things in advance. But of course you don’t always know in advance what stuff is going to come up in a game, and gaming is on ongoing exercise in consent. So we need tools to use during the game as well as before we start. In Bite Me! I recommend that groups investigate the X-card and your own Script Change techniques and I talk about how they might use one or both of those in a game. I think that the X-card is good for when someone who gets in real trouble and needs to shut down a piece of play quickly with no questions asked, and it can be used very effectively to remind people of the Banned List if someone forgets and accidentally references something on that list in the heat of the moment. Script Change is particularly amazing for when something needs to be adjusted in a game but everyone is either comfortable with more discussion or actively needs to discuss it and it gives better clarity over what the problematic element is and how best to deal with it.
When I started role-playing there were no discussions around safety techniques or any widely known tools. I don’t think we are at the end of figuring out safety because it always must be calibrated to the needs of the players in the game at the time and it is and should be an ongoing conversation. But I’m really glad we are having those conversations now and I’m always looking to see what the next advances in the discussion will be. But these are just tools. It would be great if we could roll them out like an encumbrance table or a bunch of Moves and have it all work like a smooth set of mechanics should do. Ultimately though games are conversations between real, warm human beings with all our messy emotions and culture and relationships. The tools are great – but they won’t work if we don’t prioritise the safety and comfort of our people at the gaming table, even over the fun of others.
In the written game text all I can do is encourage people to prioritise caring for each other and give them some tools. At my own gaming table I use these tools but I watch and listen, I check in with my players before, during and after tough scenes and I make it clear in the culture of my table that the people I sit with matter more than the game. I don’t get it perfect – messy human feelings will always be a work in progress. But we need to keep working on it.
What are the important differences and similarities between werewolf media and Bite Me! as a game? What might players be excited to find in Bite Me! that they might not find elsewhere?
I consume quite a lot of werewolf media (unsurprisingly) and I love it. But as a gamer, every time I find a film or book that I love I’m always thinking – ‘what is it I’m really excited about here, and how can I put that into a game!’ The cool thing about gaming is getting to experience stories as an active participant, instead of a passive consumer. I’ve put a lot of what I love about Werewolves (and my interpretation of them) into this game. The mechanics get you experiencing the closeness of pack life, the knife edge of control and the temptation to become violent or dominant to get the job done. But the one thing I’m hoping all players will get is that flash of genuine and heartfelt camaraderie both in and out of character; in the moment when the pack puts its differences aside, when the pack member you hate saves you because you are pack, when the Alpha sacrifices their life for the good of the group. Those are the things I hope that gamers will get to feel instead of observe. In terms of werewolf lore e.g. the full moon’s influence, being bitten or born a werewolf, the effects of silver or wolfsbane etc – all these things are for the players to decide on at the table. There is so much wolf mythology out there and I’d like the players to pick and choose their favourite bits to play with. There is no ‘Becky’s Definitive Guide to Werewolves’ because what I love about the stories maybe very different to someone else and the core of the system is the story of the pack anything else should feed that dynamic.
Tell me about building a pack, and how you create that culture. How does this play out at the table? What are some fun results you’ve had in playtesting?
The pack has a playbook of its own which includes powerful Pack Moves. But you only get access to those Moves when you have accumulated enough Pack Pool, using the emotion-sharing Moves. The pack playbook is also where the players will agree and record their Culture and Traditions. Culture is the outward signifiers revealing who is in the pack and who is not. You might choose a certain style of clothing, slang wordsor rituals around food to show belonging. Displaying culture in scenes does two things, firstly it will make you feel more like a pack.
Secondly it will tick off your boxes to get you advancements for your character. Culture always emerges in social groups – in the ttrpg world we have our own cultural touchstones like D&D (even if we don’t all play it), we have our shared language and slang which often comes from the games. Bite Me! leverages the fact we do that anyway and channels it into the pack experience. If our gaming group is going to come up with some slang, then let’s do it in the game as well and make it feel like we are a pack. When I MC I make sure I’m using that slang in and out of character and addressing my players as my packmates even when I’m doing the admin around arranging sessions. In game play I usually find that one or two of the created words really stick and when people start using those words in and out of character you’ve hit the jackpot – completing the culture of cycle into and out from the game.
Tradition are also another aspect of pack culture but they are more like the laws of the pack, things that would incur a serious punishment if breached. They should be thorny, throw up moral dilemmas and create unstable situations. Examples might be ‘Never reveal yourself as a Wolf to a human’, ‘Never eat a human’, ‘Only Alpha’s may create Wolves’. Once the players have agreed what the rules are I then tell the MC to ask one more question ‘Which PC has broken a tradition and which PC is keeping their secret (for now)?’ This gives a couple of players the chance to start with an extra tense situation which will strongly inform their relationship.
One of the best examples I’ve seen of that is the pack who had the Tradition that ‘All relationships with humans must be disposable’, at the start of the game one of the characters had just married their human boyfriend and the youngest member of the Pack had seen an incriminating text message. Setting that up changed the entire trajectory of the relationship between them and it was very powerful as the younger packmate wrestled with the conflict of loyalty that it created
Tell
me about Comrades. What excites you about it?
Comrades
is a new RPG about life in the revolutionary underground. I’ve been working on
it off and on since 2017 and I am just in love with it. I created
it because I wanted to give people who fall anywhere on the left of the
political spectrum a chance to engage with their history and remember how it
feels to fight, body and soul, for a cause.
The game is based on the Apocalypse World engine, which I love both because it’s so perfectly designed for depicting the dynamics of tightly-knit groups of adventurers and because it’s jaw-droppingly easy to teach. I designed this game for hardcore gamers and novices alike, and the Apocalypse World system is the best I’ve found for welcoming new players to the table.
How
have you altered the AW engine to suit Comrades as a system?
I
tinkered with a lot of different changes to the AW engine, and found during
playtesting that the simpler I kept things, the better the game played. There
are a few basic moves deliberately crafted to evoke the revolutionary
atmosphere of Comrades—”Start Something,” for instance, which gives
players a way to incite a crowd to riot, protest, or strike. Any other changes
I made were designed to make the system easier to teach and understand.
I’ve
also created an optional system for structuring the campaign, Pathways to
Revolution, which allows parties to advance along one or more of five tracks,
each of which represents a different approach to making a revolution. Each
level offers advantages, culminating in an opportunity to seize power in the
method best suited to the group.
What
gave you the idea for Comrades, and what are some steps you’ve taken in design
to make it happen?
I’ve been obsessed with leftist history since I was in high school. The Russian Revoluton, the Spanish Civil War, the guerrilla movements of the ’60s and ’70s… I am fascinated by the way that the ideals of those on the left collide with reality, and the endless tragedies that result when their dreams are destroyed by infighting, cynicism, or simple bad luck. I wanted to make a game that dramatized the infighting and quixotic daring common to revolutionary movements throughout history, and to give players the chance to express their own frustrations with modern politics in a fun, constructive way. Because of its emphasis on the dynamics of tightly-knit groups, the AW engine was a natural fit.
Tell
me more about Pathways to Revolution. It sounds fascinating! What sort of
experiences do players have in these tracks, and what kinds of tracks are
there?
There
are five tracks: Force, Organization, Zealotry, Mayhem, and Fellowship. Each
one correlates to one of the game’s five stats, and each is designed to give
players the opportunity to make a revolution in their own way.
If
the party is interested in forging a legitimate path to power, they may pursue
Organization, which provides logistical bonuses while making the party more
acceptable to the mainstream. At the fifth rank of that Pathway, they can call
for elections and attempt to win power democratically. If they prefer to rely
on the support of the mob, they’ll rise through Zealotry, which eventually
gives them the opportunity to win power via a series of massive, wild
demonstrations. In most campaigns, of course, different factions within each
party will want to pursue different pathways—creating the tensions inherent in
any revolutionary movement.
I
designed these both to reflect the wide variety of real-life revolutions, and
to give players more than one way to “win” the game. Because there
are bloodless ways to gain power, players who choose to pursue a more violent
Pathway—like Force or Mayhem—must reckon with the consequences of that choice.
How have you elected to handle and
frame violence as a part of the game, and what do you feel is important about
that?
Violence is a part of Comrades,
just as it is for nearly every roleplaying game. Because this game takes place
in a more realistic setting than most RPGs, it was intensely important to me
that it be presented in a responsible way. Players are free to do whatever
think necessary to achieve their goals, but the GM is instructed to make this
“a game of consequences, in which violence solves little and no death—even
that of a villain—goes unmourned.”
I believe that all violence is
abhorrent and all life is sacred, and while I think it’s okay to act out
violent situations in gameplay, it has to be done with thought and care. I hope
that the rules I’ve written will empower GM and players to do just that.
Today I’ve got an interview with Toby Strauss on the new game Jinkies! Jinkies! is currently on Kickstarter and is very Scooby-inspired, so I’m excited! I hope you like what Toby has to say below.
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Tell me a little about Jinkies! What excites you about it?
First
off, I was beside myself with happiness when you spelled Jinkies! with the
exclamation point. During my research, I was amused that the original
1969 “Scooby Doo, Where are You!” used an exclamation point, and not a question
mark, on the title card. Isn’t that odd? But I love it.
There’s a certain energy to the (incorrect) punctuation that I find kitschy and
charming. I couldn’t not use it for the game.
Jinkies!
is a powered by the apocalypse adventure game based on the Hannah-Barbara
cartoons from around 50 years ago. If you’ve ever seen Scooby
Doo, Josie and the Pussycats, Jabberjaw, or Dune Buggy, you’re on the
right track. Like Monsterhearts or Dungeon World, the players can choose
from playbooks based on the archetypes from the shows. These characters
go on adventures, unmasking bad guys and ne’er do wells pretending to be
nefarious monsters.
One
of the things that I’m especially excited about is how Jinkies! handles
clues. Visual clues and puzzles are really hard to do right in tabletop
RPGs. Most of the time, the GM drops the “path critical” clues
in the laps of the players just to move things along. I really puzzled
over how to handle clues until I realized something important: Hannah Barbara
cartoons aren’t about the mystery. The mystery is just a setting.
The cartoons are really about the adventure, the creepy suspect, and the wacky
gang. Jinkies! approaches clues with the mindset that it is the
adventure, not the clue, that’s important. This means that the bad guy
for a given module can change from playthrough to playthrough, but I think
that’s ok. This is why I used PbtA for my mechanics. Players and
GMs in Jinkies! are just playing to find out.
Another thing that I love about Jinkies! is that there is no combat in the game. Interestingly, combat was in the very first draft of the game . . . and it was a disaster. The playtesters overwhelmingly rejected it; the genre is nonviolent by design and combat just didn’t feel right. Instead of swords and hitpoints, Jinkies! turns on scares and “fear” points. Its a great system that makes the world feel scary and dangerous without misplaced violence. I’m proud of how it turned out!
How do the mechanics work to result in scares and fear points, and what do those do?
If you watch one of the old
Hannah-Barbara mystery cartoons, you’ll notice that no one gets hurt.
Instead, there’s a sort of asymmetrical nonviolence between the protagonists
and the antagonist. The protagonists act through ensnarement and logic–capture
the bad guy and explain the crime. The antagonist acts through fear–if
the kids are scared enough, they’ll run away and let the bad guy finish his
misdeeds.
I tried to mirror this in
Jinkies! The player characters “assault” the bad guy by 1)
finding clues, and 2) setting and triggering a trap for the bad guy. They
cannot inflict fear points on the bad guy, but the bad guy can inflict fear on
the player characters.
Fear works a lot like HP, but it is
only inflicted by the bad guy, and it leads to fainting from fear, not physical
harm. So let’s say the ghost pirate flies right through Joe the Leader.
That’s pretty scary! Joe takes a point of fear.
There are a number of ways that
fear can be mitigated. Several playbooks have the ability to avoid taking
earned fear points (“Joe, using his inner strength, shrugs off the ghostly
attack!”). The “weird one” playbook (think Shaggy from
Scooby Doo) not only gets fear mitigation, he can use fear to fuel unique
abilities. The weird one in these shows is always afraid–I
couldn’t help but give him fear fueled powers!
When it all comes together, its a surprisingly seamless experience. No one seems to miss combat and the asymmetrical nature of the game is almost invisible when the game is played.
Purple Pandalot, the mascot for Jinkies! by Lil Chan.
What was playtesting like for this game, with the elements of it being so cartoonish?
A lot of my inspirations are
obscure and probably unknown to many of my players–but almost everyone has
seen something with Scooby Doo in it. The original cartoon aired way back
in 1969 and there have been dozens of spin-offs, movies, and sequels–not to
mention the lasting power of syndication. That ubiquity has made Jinkies!
accessible to almost everyone who has played the game. The vast majority
of my play testers have very naturally leaned into the cartoony roots of
Jinkies! with little prompting.
I can only think of a single play test where the game didn’t feel like a cartoon. The players decided play the game really straight. They even decided that their animal mascot was not magical and could not talk! It felt like Dragnet, or maybe a Nancy Drew mystery. It wasn’t a bad experience, but it also wasn’t a funny one.
That play test was early in my process and I did a bit of soul searching to try and figure out how to “fix” what had gone wrong. It just didn’t feel right. In the end, though, I didn’t change very much. Most people who sign up to play Jinkies! are looking for a light-hearted, cartoony mystery adventure. My game isn’t going to be all things to all people, and that’s ok. Better to focus on making it the best at what it is!
How are you changing PbtA fundamentals to suit the different tone and themes, like rewriting basic moves and so on?
Interesting
questions!
If
a player came to Jinkies! from another PbtA game they would find the mechanics
familiar. Jinkies! is still very much a “play to find out”
game. There are basic moves, playbook moves, and animator moves.
Jinkies! uses 2D6 for its randomizer. Very PbtA in the fundamentals.
I
diverge pretty heavily in the moves themselves. PbtA was developed for a
very blood-thirsty setting, after all–and Jinkies! is based on a
family-friendly cartoon! I excised ALL combat moves and added heavily to
the investigative moves. I also changed the Animator moves, hewing closer
to the genre than Apocalypse World moves could.
I also break with most PbtA on principles. One of the guiding principles of Dungeon World, for example, is “think dangerously.” The world of Jinkies! is sometimes scary, but it is never dangerous. I’ve rewritten the principle as “think comedically.” Another principle I changed is saying your moves out loud. This is a big no-no in most PbtA games but I actively encourage it. The Hannah-Barbara formula practically requires naming your moves. When Velma tosses Scooby a treat, she doesn’t just give him a knowing nod, she inquires “will you do the task for a Scooby Snack?” Scooby snack, in this case, is TOTALLY a move, and the verbal component is a very important (and cartoony) part of creating the feel the game is after.
What are you doing in regards to guiding table content safety, since there’s a lot of ways this could go a little gonzo or maybe just hit an unseen button of discomfort?
To the safety question: every RPG carries risks (bleed, content and trauma triggers, etc). Jinkies! is no different. In fact, I would argue that the risks of things going sideways are greater in Jinkies! than in D&D. First, it’s a comedy game. Comedy is, by definition, transgressive–and those transgressions can cut in surprisingly deep ways. Second, there is a certain subtext to the “teenagers with a wacky sidekick solving mysteries” genre that is off-color. The “Shaggy Busted” episode of “Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law” does a great job of poking fun at this subtext, if any of your readers are curious. Its fun and its funny, but it is also emotionally dangerous waters.
I’ve
attempted to have my cake and eat it too by baking in two presets for content
control, “normal” and “Behind the Music.” I certainly
don’t object to sex or drugs being in the game–so long as everyone at the
table is comfortable with it. This way the players must actively choose
the “blue” version of the game, and it prompts a lines and veils-type
conversation.
Second, I recommend the use of an X card system. Even in a game where boundaries have been drawn ahead of time, things can get messy fast. I find that X cards are indispensable safety tools. Finally, I explicitly instruct against gameplay that I find to be irredeemably offensive, like racism or misogyny. For example, a common trope in 1970s Hannah Barbara cartoons is the villain kidnapping a woman. This is lazy storytelling, its sexist, and it makes the game suck for the player who has been removed from gameplay. Bigotry has no place at my table or in my game.
