Thoughty

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Dee Pennyway and the Mnemonic team to talk about Mnemonic: A Weaver’s Almanac, which is currently on Kickstarter and sounds fascinating! Included in the interview are:

• Dee Pennyway (they/them) – DP
• Lexi Antoku (they/she) – LA
• Nicholas Masyk (he/him) – NM
• Pam Punzalan (they/she) – PP
• Sinta Posadas (they/them) – SP
• Synxiec (he/him) – Syn

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Thank you very much for joining me to talk about Mnemonic! Before we talk too deeply about the game, I’d like to introduce you to my readers – your debutante, so to speak. What brought you to games? Why do you choose to design?

DP: I’ve been playing games since I was 10, when my friends and I would walk down the halls between class and talk through “roleplaying” stories in the Star Wars universe. We tinkered with the design ideas from video games like Gauntlet Legends and Legend of Zelda to imagine what other stories might look like. Sometimes those stories were capital s Stories; sometimes they were just aesthetic ideas, like “What if a game like Gauntlet but you’re all summoners conjuring big magic beasts?”

It wasn’t until high school that I touched a tabletop roleplaying game with mechanics and character creation. My group of friends played D&D every Friday for four years, because D&D was the game we knew. The Mnemonic setting came out of a play-by-post game twelve years ago, and it’s been growing steadily ever since.

LA: I started formal, written RPGs… sometime in middle or high school? Thereabouts. But I was introduced informally through improvisational dungeon crawling in (ugh) Boy Scouts. I tolerated entirely too many years of that, but at least I got this out of it. Next was, of all things, freeform forum RP in the GameFAQs Metroid Prime social message board. For formal systems, I got started with D&D, as many are, because it was the cultural monolith that people recognized.

I spent a long time reading Vampire: the Masquerade core books and sourcebooks in a bookstore nearby, but never played it because I didn’t have a group for it. D&D was interesting to theorycraft, but I never got a regular group for an extended campaign. Shadowrun was the next game I played seriously and the first I had a real extended campaign of. Shadowrun has a complicated relationship for me, one that I don’t have nearly enough time or space here to address. The much abbreviated explanation is that they made me aware that my TTRPGs could say something, mean something, be something, not just be the aesthetic trappings for a series of ever-escalating violent encounters.

NM: I played my first TTRPG at 14 in highschool – D&D, naturally – and my experience was so bad I didn’t play again until I was 19 or 20! Through Games Club at university I was introduced into Dark Heresy, Deadlands, Vampire: the Masquerade, and Legend of the Five Rings (they also tried hard to get me to give D&D and Pathfinder another chance but I never did, really). But we always ended up house-ruling our games to do the things we wanted them to do that they didn’t. Designing games from the ground up was the next step: something I’ve done for over a decade without ever imagining myself a ‘game designer’ or participating in TTRPG Twitter!

It’s only in the last year or two I’ve really called myself a “game designer” or thought of what I do as design, let alone dreamed I could do it as a job!

PP: I grew up reading more tabletop and wargaming books than “proper” literature: AD&D, L5R, Mechwarrior, Warhammer, and oWoD all introduced me to interesting possibilities that I could make my own rather than stories that were set in stone. This is interesting to me in retrospect, because this was the 80s in Vancouver, and that period was the height of the Satanic Panic. You’d think that my staunchly Catholic Filipino parents would have despised such books as works of the Devil, and would have then barred my older brothers from playing. Turns out that they didn’t mind because tabletop games meant that they got to play with friends. Brown kids in a very white section of town needed friends.

Of course, I was too young to join any of their games. My first forays happened much later in high school, with close knit circles of friends from my school and with my younger brother plus some cousins. There was a long period where I was disillusioned from tabletop because a lot of my peers were cishet, male, and/or sexist – which led me to the new World of Darkness books, and had me making my own campaign on my own terms. Did a copious amount of kitbashing and homebrewing for WoD in particular, and I always got the same comments. “This is such a cool world!” “This doesn’t feel like WoD, but in a good way?” “Why don’t you make your own games?”

It’s been a pretty wild game design journey for me since last year. I don’t think I can answer why I design in so many words, but if I were to try… I think I design to find myself, and make more room for other people like me. There are always stories to be told, and each one of us brings something different to our tables. I like exploring the many things I can offer, both for my own pleasure and for anyone who may read my works and realize they could make their own things from the tools I can give them.

SP: I started playing Tabletop RPGs in 2015, but I’d been curious about it for much earlier, there was just no time. Mid 2014 was the beginning of my thesis year in college and I really wanted to finish college because at that point I was already about 5-6 years in University. When 2015 came, though, I was just about to enroll for my last semester when I was told that some of my units that I took in the University’s constituent campus were apparently not going to be credited. It meant that I’d need to retake some classes before going for my thesis. Funny circumstances, because that’s what gave me the time to actually get into games. I had a boyfriend at the time who had friends that were coming together for a D&D campaign which was how I got invited. They were taking up the same course (Library Sciences), so by majority, we agreed to meet at their college building (which was… the University Library). My college building was across the campus so I was often arriving just when everybody was settling in.

My first campaign was, in a word, chaotic. We were fifteen players, what can you do? But surprisingly, my DM was really good at it. So good, in fact, that I thought this was just… normal. I thought the normal table count was fifteen players and that any less was… just a little lonely. I was very wrong. I think having such a great DM at first also gave me very rose-colored lenses for every DM that I played under afterwards. There were lots of DMs that I experienced afterwards that were… not so great, but I thought “Oh, maybe my first DM is just exceptional.”  Unfortunately, this mindset paved the way for me sort of… allowing myself to be thrown around under games and tables that were not so respectful of my boundaries with players and DMs that felt less than safe to be with. Exhausted, I broke away from that and later fell into a game design project that soared for a bit, but eventually also moved away from due to differences in direction and principles. It was here that I think where I really started. I met some great people from the Gamers and Gaming Meets, an organisation that hosts TTRPG events here in Manila. They helped me move towards design and expand my horizons. 

I still remember when my friends took me to their place and showed me all sorts of TTRPG books and how the layout was done and how the mechanics were presented. The art, the themes, the dynamics all spoke so deeply to me and I was hooked ever since. I began creating games with ideas and themes that were close to me (plants, haha) and I’m now trying to explore making games that mean a lot to me. I’ll admit that while my first gaming experience wasn’t terrible, the ones that followed for a long time were exhausting and far from ideal. I want to make games that touch on ideas that are important to me, like the struggles of  growing up in this country that seems to love making it hard for people like me (queer, non binary, not part of the upper class) to exist. I want to create games that inspire others to also make games so that their voices can also be heard. 

Syn: Gaming had always been a thing for me – Mario, Sonic, Tetris, etc. – but tabletop games and design is a bit more recent for me. I started playing tabletop games somewhat seriously around 2016 and started DM’ing after some encouragement in 2017. It was a wild time learning how to handle all of that, but the further I progressed in learning how to DM and looking into the lore of these systems, the more questions I asked about why things were as they were. As I put those thoughts out into the world, the responses that came back were “Have you thought of designing a game?” I hadn’t. I thought I was just asking average questions that someone had surely thought about. They were, but the people who thought those things were, in fact, designers.

I asked about skill checks, dice rolls, worldbuilding, and kobolds and so much so that I ended up here, writing about this friggin’ exciting game.

To follow that, I’d like to ask a little about your background. What are your areas of expertise, your storied histories? What makes you the designer to make Mnemonic and make it the perfect experience it’s meant to be?

DP: Mnemonic is the world I play in when I think about stories; it’s the universe of fantasy and magic that exists in my head, and most of the characters I create exist somewhere within that universe.

Mnemonic is a setting where memory has power, both as a life force for the world itself and as a source of magic. A lot of the setting’s ideas come from my own grapples with memory, things I remember from childhood that look a lot different in retrospect. Some things are happy remembrances; others, less happy. But giving people the space to explore that recontextualization is important to me.

I’m also White, which means I have a healthy load of unexamined biases when it comes to what stories can exist and what an imaginary world can look like. Would you believe me if I said I’m not the ideal person to tell stories in this setting? A lot of my design process for this world comes from a place of enabling players to tell stories that are personal to them, with as little White European Colonialist Bullshit as possible. For Mnemonic, this means asking questions to invite the player to bring themselves into the world. But I can’t do that alone.

For my first game in this setting, Cracks in the Mirror, I hired a sensitivity consultant to help me identify the spots where I was stumbling into presumptive or harmful tropes. They were immensely valuable in helping me realize everything in the previous paragraph, too.

For our Weaver’s Almanac, I wanted even more help, and not from people with the same unexamined biases as me. Which is why most of the members of our team are BIPOC. 

LA: I’m a high-generation mixed-race Japanese American. The relation between memory and reality in Mnemonic is interesting to me because of a particular story I have about growing up. Whenever I went to visit my grandparents, they would have documentaries about the Japanese internment camps on the TV. I learned a key part of my heritage through passive absorption. They never addressed it directly until I was much older. It was just there, lingering in the background.

Part of the basic premise of Mnemonic as a broader world is that memories, and how they affected people differently, are lingering in the world. They affect it. Their impacts, not just by their objective truth but by how people feel about them and even by how people manipulate when those are looked back on, are real, in a way even more real than the idea of a thing that happened some time ago.

NM: I’m mixed-race Black Canadian. I’m very interested in the shifting negotiations, interpretations and the power of memories, particularly in the way different groups and cultures remember their histories. Worlds where those cultures and their histories come alive through the power of memory and of story – particularly collaborative story – are so compelling to me because they allow us agency in how our histories are told in ways that we so rarely are allowed in reality.

One of the reasons I find Mnemonic so compelling is because of how it leans into tools for telling stories, rather than simply telling them. For me part of designing games is about creating gaps for the players to fill and create their own stories and memories. Players are really the game designers, if you think about it – I can write this and that, but those stories are no longer mine the second someone else picks them up. All I’m doing, hopefully, is opening windows they might not have noticed, and asking “what do you see? And what does it remind you of?”

PP: I’m a queer Filipino woman born in the Philippines. My parents fled from an oppressive regime, full of dreams of a better future for them and their children in Canada. My memories of Canada as a child are beautiful flashes – some I can see, some I can taste, some I can feel, and some I can smell. What’s much sharper is the jarring sense I had with my family’s return to Manila. The past few years have been an intriguing yet at times painful study in turning back towards those feelings I had, and realizing, now, what my past self was wrestling with: displacement, confusion, never fitting in even if I was as “Filipino” as my peers. Then, of course, there are the extra tensions of me being polyamorous (and discovering it late, after years of thinking I was bisexual and had “bad, extra” feelings towards multiple people), me being a woman in a hypermasculine, Catholic society that will take every opportunity to tell you that you and your body are nothing without the approval of men, and me being the only daughter out of six children in a rather traditional Filpino family (thus making me someone both in constant need of protection, and also someone who was expected to put their dreams and ideas aside if they were offensive or improper to her brothers). People will constantly try to rewrite you in the hopes of fitting you into easily digestible parts for themselves. They’ll try to ignore the fact that you have your own stories, and your own desire to write it the way you want to.

And that brings me to why I was happy to join Dee in designing Mnemonic. This was one of the first games that was capable, with every word, of telling me, “Hey. I see you. This is a story for you, that you can make as you like. I am a game that respects you for you.” Memories are things that transform, shift, break apart, come back together, write, and revise themselves as we grow older with them. Bringing that sort of beautiful process into a game is something I’m really into.

SP: I have always viewed Mnemonic with fascination. The dream-like feeling, the exploration of memory – that’s always what has drawn me to it. When I fully read it for the first time, I felt that idea of being able to become something – I don’t know exactly what, but the concept itself, to me, seemed necessary. As someone who often has to be A Certain One Thing in their daily life, it is comforting to have a game that exists that allows you to shift, be different, reform along with the memories that you explore in the game. I haven’t played it but I wish to someday. 

As for the art, I wasn’t actually expecting to do the art for the project. I thought I was going to do writing and then suddenly a discussion for artists was happening and… I decided to shoot my shot. And it happened! Before I knew it, I was designing art for the project.

Art has always been a complicated thing for me. I don’t talk about my art a lot because my feelings for my art and my skills are Difficult. I started making art when I was a tiny kid watching Powerpuff Girls in our living room back in my grandparent’s house in the countryside. I really took to it and enjoyed making drawing after drawing, filling one notebook after another. I was a hungry mind stuck in a small child’s body. I wanted to learn to make better art and I kept pushing myself so, so hard to as far as my small hands could possibly take me. Much like many of my peers, my skills were forever unrecognized by my mother (she raised me and my brother on her own) and I was constantly told to wake up and concentrate on more “money-making” pursuits. This constant push and pull made me hate my art but also made me unable to stop. My struggle with this continues to this day. My mother also still hasn’t recognized my skill and I don’t think she ever will. I don’t really want her approval anymore anyway, but I hope she knows she’s wrong. My art is going to be part of a kickstarter that will definitely touch hearts and also, bluntly,  make money. I didn’t become a doctor like she wanted, but I’m sure the project will heal others in a different way. 

Syn: I’m just a person with questions. Lots of them. So when you mix my innate curiosity about every single thing with my utter fascination with worldbuilding, I guess this was almost destined for me. I remember when I was asked to join the team. It felt surreal; I’m just a guy with questions about the worlds we build and the systems that support them. 

When Dee asked me if I would like to build in a world of memory, I was still learning what it was that I wanted to do in the world of tabletop games and the stories I wanted to tell. I read the mechanics and a bit of the lore and it was just… obvious. The stories I want to tell are the kind where you dig into yourself and ask questions and deal with the challenges that come from those answers. Everything in Mnemonic speaks to that need.  

Cool! So, now that we know a little about you, tell me a little about Mnemonic. What excites you about it? What spurred its creation?

DP: Mnemonic emerged from a question I had in a play-by-post game a dozen years ago: If I have to spend Experience Points to use this ability, what do those Experience Points represent, and what does it mean to lose them? I settled into memory as a source of power, which evolved over the years into a world concept where the world itself has memories that exert themselves on occasion. I’ve played around with characters who lost their memories after abusing magic, characters who trapped unpleasant memories inside of powerful relics to try and forget traumatic events, characters who sang songs to resonate their own memories with the memories of others.

I’m pleased with the current version of the world that exists in my mind, which is that memory is inherently fluid, not something that can be spent or saved or stored but something that we engage with and observe on a constant basis. We remember things, we misremember things, we forget things…and the world does too. There’s something really neat to me about a world that remembers the things we do, even if no one else sees us do them. What memories does the world choose to hold onto, like keepsakes? What memories does the world try to forget?

Synxiec and I have talked about what happens when the world wants to forget somebody but can’t. Like a kind of cursed immortality. The story gets a lot heavier when we start exploring trauma as a world event, but it’s a thing my mind drifts to when I think about stories I want to tell in Mnemonic.

PP: I mentioned how Mnemonic is a game that spoke to me, and acknowledged me as someone full of stories that I wanted to tell. What excites me most about this project is the fact that by design, the emotions, intent, and player understanding of “memory” will change according to who joins you for a session. My first game had us exploring our gender identities, how we connected with other people, and how we viewed family and love. Being guided through the session with prompts and a constant reminder of “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to; respect the silence” felt magical. The thought of being able to expand upon these experiences for more players, this time as a member of the dev team, really excites me!

The other big thing that I’m looking forward to would be all of the subsystems that the Almanac will have, plus all the gameable lore that our team will be bringing to the table. As a designer who is extremely comfortable with either systems that use dice or systems that are purely narrative, playing around with fascinating card mechanics is uncharted territory. The things we have planned make me feel like I can both contribute well to the Almanac, and challenge myself to design for new things.

Syn: The thing that excites me about the game the most is a hard question. At first, it was the die. Each of them having a distinct purpose. Then as I looked more closely at it, I found what excited me the most: the questions. Did I mention I like asking questions? Because I really enjoy asking questions and Mnemonic’s challenges are unique in that respect. What game asks a question like “What lies do you tell yourself?” as part of character creation? These are the kind of foundational things that build worlds I like to explore and get lost in.

We’re not even going to talk about how every other thing this game gives you has safety built into it. I’ve already thought about the many stories I want to tell in this world of memory, but don’t tell Dee that. It’s a surprise.

Also, the people I get to work with are people I have so much respect for and many of them are people I just enjoy for their own sake. I’m happy to work with them.

NM: Unreliable narration, anti-canon and player-collaborated and -created game history, lore, and content are things I’m particularly invested in. Games are shared storytelling endeavors, after all – it makes it that much more enjoyable when everyone is empowered and able to contribute to communal worldbuilding rather than passively experiencing those worlds. 

Mnemonic excites me in the way Dread and Trophy excite me: asking pointed questions of ourselves and others to build a shared world and a shared experience, as it pertains to memory – which is both a very personal thing and a communal one. Any time I’ve ever spent with friends, half the conversation is inevitably “remember that time?” Mnemonic, to me, is an entire game of that, and that excites me.

LA: The anti-canon nature of the setting is particularly cool to me because it more explicitly invites the players to make the world theirs. Most settings are fruitful not just for standing on their own, but for inviting players to be part of it, to participate actively. Mnemonic takes this a step further by saying that the instance the players are in is as true, as valid, as real, maybe even more real, than anything imagined by anyone else, up to and including the creators of the setting. It ties back to a core theme of the setting that the memories of something – the feelings and echoes and the ways they affect people – are more important than a theoretical objective truth. It’s about the experiences, both in-game and for the players.

When dealing with memory, we can encounter some bumps along the road. How is Mnemonic designed to respect player’s agency and consent, and allow them to control content to avoid any triggers, squicks, or undesirable unhappy times?

DP: Agency and consent are two of my biggest guiding targets in game design, and Mnemonic is no different. Everything in this game gives players permission to paint their own picture of the events, and character creation asks each player to name at least one boundary for something they will not include in the story, with some guiding language about how to best take care of not just their character’s needs, but the needs of everyone’s characters, and of every player at the table as well. I’ll drop the excerpt from that section here:

Mnemonic doesn’t directly present players with descriptive content; instead, we ask questions that guide the players to the kinds of themes we want them to explore, in their own space and at their own comfort level. We also include language that makes it explicit that players are allowed to change any aspect of the story, whether it’s something that’s happening in the current scene or something that happened three sessions ago. I don’t want anyone to feel like they have to commit to a traumatic consequence of a piece of fiction they established before they recognized it would be a problem.

I take a lot of inspiration from Script Change on that, actually. The idea of being able to Rewind a scene to take a different approach was incredibly influential for me. I hope that players are able to build that kind of agency into their play groups when they play Mnemonic.

The other thing we do that I’m quietly excited about is how we handle “A thing happened in the mechanics that you don’t like.” If it’s something that happened because of the dice, you can…just reroll them. Dice are an abstraction, a story generator. There’s a ritual quality to rolling a die, but I want players to know that if the Fire Die says you set fire to the entire world, you can opt out of that outcome and roll again until you get you send up a bright signal to let your friends know where you are.

Your character also can’t be removed from the story without your consent, which seems like a small thing but so many of the biggest games out there have some form of “Game Over” scenario where my character can be taken away from me by a cruel GM, or fickle dice. In Mnemonic, the only way your character can die is if you make the decision for them to leave the story. We have mechanics for it. It’s a big deal. You can do it. No one else can do it for you.

That’s a lot of words to dance around the fact that at the end of the day, we can’t completely protect players, we can just offer tools and guidance. If you’re a player who experiences bleed in a significant way (where the events of the story affect you on a personal level in a way that lingers after the story ends), I’d encourage you to check in with yourself regularly; don’t feel like you have to choose the “heavy” answer to every question. This advice appears in just about every game I write now, so I’m gonna put it here too: Take care of yourself. Take care of each other.

It’s clear you’ve dug deeply into the world and what the action and reaction mean. What made you elect to use the mediums you do – cards, the particular art style, etc. – to represent the world to people and to have them interact with? How does the medium give meaning to the art? 

DP: I want Mnemonic to be…hm, accessibility has its own connotations, and I have goals on that front as well but when it comes to the use of cards, what I’m aiming for is, “Can a person play this game with the things they already have”. And my family never played roleplaying games, but we did always have a deck of poker cards ready to go. And I know that a lot of general-purpose stores have decks available for less than $5, which means that if you don’t happen to have a deck at your home, you can probably find one even if you don’t have a “gaming store” near you. That was pretty important to me early on. That’s also why our dice are six-sided; I love polyhedral dice sets, but until very recently you couldn’t just go to Target and pick up a set.

The artwork is important here too, but for me it’s more about conveying the sense of “this is something that someone might have drawn or painted directly into their notebook while traveling.” Sin’s illustrations are wonderful and intimate, full of…I hesitate to tell people what they should be feeling when they look at these pieces, but I know that when I look at them I get a strong sense of “the person who painted this cares a lot about the subject.” And I hope that comes through.

We care a lot about the stories we’re telling. And I want players to care, too. About their stories, and about each other sitting around the table.

As someone who has personally struggled with memory loss but also finds beauty in the ephemeral and has things they’d like to forget, I am genuinely curious how a session of Mnemonic plays out. What are an example or two of your experiences with the game and what did you take away – or leave behind?

DP: Mnemonic usually feels…weighted? I sometimes describe it as the feeling of holding your breath in anticipation, of choosing your words carefully in a space that allows you to do so.

We’ve been playing on the Actual Play twitch channel the past few weeks, and there are some things that I’ll hold onto forever, and at least one thing I wish I could take back (and probably would, if we were playing a longer-running series).

One thing I cherish is how readily everyone at the table takes ownership of the group’s well-being. Sean introduced his character, Warren, as a habitat for a community of rabbits, and after what was probably about a minute but what felt like only an instant, Synxiec announced that we were now, us, the storytellers, the players on stream, committed protectors of the bunnies. And like…yes, of course! Mnemonic, the game, is about being careful storytellers and recognizing when it’s your job as a player to look after the characters in your own story.

A thing I would change is that Misha introduced a piece of local folklore around a dragon living nearby, and it was super interesting–but then when I tied our first session together with my character’s closing scene, I used my own character’s backstory as a vehicle instead of connecting it to hers. It would have been a much more compelling story beat, and more personal to the entire group, and more meaningful to the town we were in, to make that moment about something someone else had introduced.

It was one of those things that I didn’t even think about until the next day, when it was already too late to go back and change. And the nice thing about Mnemonic is that if something like that happens in your home game, you can just…change it. You can go in next week with your group and say “Hey, this happened last time but I kinda want to retcon it to something else if that’s okay?” and then work out how the change might affect everybody, and the story you’re telling together.

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Thank you so much to the whole team for the interview, including those unable to participate because of life – see you next time! I hope all you readers enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Mnemonic: A Weaver’s Almanac on Kickstarter today!