Five or So Questions with Steve Wallace on No Country for Old Kobolds

Tell me a little bit about No Country for Old Kobolds. What excites you about it?
No Country For Old Kobolds is Dungeon World hack that focuses on the lives kobolds lead in most rpgs. Basically, they’re constantly being wiped out by first level adventurers and that has to have a negative impact on their day to day lives. The game is built to explore that situation. I’ve modified basic Dungeon World to better model this sort of thing so there are unique components like a shared village character, leveling by dying and mechanics to allow you to continue to affect the game after death.

I’ve started different games and hacks off and on throughout the years and this is the first time I’ve really pushed one through to completion so I’m really excited by that! I’ve also been pretty blown away by the positive feedback I’ve gotten throughout play testing, it’s really humbling to see people enjoy something you’ve created.

I’m really amazed but the themes that players have brought to the game as well. Throughout play testing I’ve had some really great conversations with players about racism, colonialism and poverty and I think if nothing else that’s worth it!

What made you choose Dungeon World as your system for hacking?
I had the idea of running an all kobolds campaign for a while and DW was/is my preferred system for fantasy based games at the moment so it seemed like a natural fit. As brainstorming went on I realized I needed to make some pretty heavy modifications to the system to get it where I wanted so in the initial rule set I used John Harpers World of Dungeons. I think WoD is a great system to start hacking because it’s already so stripped down, as work went on it ended up somewhere in between – or beside – DW and WoD.

You mentioned conversations about racism, colonialism, and poverty – what about this specific content do you think spurs those conversations?

The way the game is built the players create all these external forces that push on the village and kobolds. It’s given that the rest of the world hates you and wants something from you. The players tend to gravitate toward things that are familiar so I often see pressures like ‘they want our land’, ‘they want our resources’, ‘they want us as slaves’ etc. and those naturally bring up these conversations.

What modifications did you make to Dungeon World to make it work for the game?
A lot. Basically I kept the base AW roll mechanic and the DW XP by failure mechanic. I took the skills and some of the abilities from World of Dungeons but I’ve heavily modified just about all of them. Every ability is now basically a move and skills just add +1 to related actions. I added a shared character, your village, which is the thing that actually gets XP and advance moves. All kobolds level by dying so you actually play a few generations of your kobold family during a session – on average players run 4 generations per session. I added in death tokens which allow the players to affect combat after death – because there’s near 100% chance at least 1 player will die every combat. The tokens allow you to put other characters over on their rolls – bump them up to the next tier – or they can be turned in at the end of combat for village XP. The game is also more mission based than normal DW, you have these wants that you have to fulfill for your village or risk losing population – basically it mechanically enforces the fragility of your village. The players also create all the kingdoms that surround the village so the GM doesn’t get involved there, they just extrapolate off what the players provide. I also added in unit combat based on Sage & Adams Inglorious work, I think it makes swarm style combat easier and it really helps to drive home how much more powerful everything in the world is. Throughout the game you can take advance Village moves that will give you new units like homonculi, trolls, wizards and even a dragon.

Once you’re done with No Country for Old Kobolds, where do you think you’ll go next?
I haven’t quite decided but the thing that is interesting most at the moment is a game that would model the in fighting between the great houses in Dune. I really like the idea of an intrigue based role playing game where you – as the leader of your house – have abilities that are more high level than a player character in most rpgs. You can send armies to a planet or hire assassins or the like, basically you set the wheels in motion instead of being the wheels.

Five or So Questions with Matthew McFarland on Chill

This post is remaining live for archival purposes only. Thoughty does not endorse Matthew McFarland as detailed in the Official Statement on Perpetrators of Harm.
Don’t forget to check out the Kickstarter!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/playattentiongames/chill-3rd-edition-a-horror-roleplaying-game

Tell me a little bit about Chill. What excites you about it?
Chill is a horror game in which the players take on the roles of members of SAVE. SAVE (the Eternal Society of the Silver Way) is a secret organization dedicated to protecting people from the Unknown. SAVE members (called “envoys”) aren’t necessarily highly trained, deadly Special Forces types. They’re just people who encountered the Unknown and couldn’t stomach the idea of other people getting hurt.

That, in a nutshell, is what I find exciting about the game. SAVE envoys aren’t well-funded, and most of the time they don’t know what they’re up against. The organization has had a rough time of it (one of the things we’re doing in 3rd Edition is updating the SAVE timeline; it’s been 25 years since 2nd Edition and a lot has happened!), but they soldier on, because the Unknown doesn’t slow down. The Unknown isn’t a directed force – there’s no “big bad” at the head of it all, as much as some SAVE envoys would love to think otherwise – but it’s relentless and it’s hungry. SAVE probably isn’t going to win the war, at least not any time soon. But what they can do is save this neighborhood, banish this ghost, destroy this vampire. It might not turn the tide of the war against the Unknown forever, but it makes a hell of a difference to the people who would have otherwise been drained of their blood in an alley or frightened to death.

What made you decide to pick up Chill for a 3rd edition? What makes this game special?

I played Chill in college. It was my first horror game and it’s what made me fall in love with the horror genre in general. I probably ran 200 sessions of it over the course of my freshman and sophomore years, and it was responsible for me learning how to handle horror as a GM, as well as getting a lot of people who weren’t nominally gamers into roleplaying.

But apart from the nostalgia factor, the humanist angle that I mentioned above is a big part of why it’s special to me. SAVE envoys don’t have superpowers. Some of them have some low-grade psychic ability, but it’s not the kind of thing where they can just roll in and solve everything magically. The game is about investigation, attention to detail, courage in the face of evil, and teamwork. As I’ve been running playtests, one thing I’m hearing consistently is that SAVE groups have to work together and play to each other’s strengths, or the Unknown wins. And that’s exactly what I want.

I love RPGs that encourage cohesive, interactive roleplaying. I want everyone to know everyone else’s characters and their abilities and strengths, so that the group works together. In Chill, you have to work together, or else no one gets out alive.

What kind of research did you have to do for your diverse character backgrounds in the pregens?
Four of the five pregens were taken from Chill 2nd Edition books (BB, Thomas, and Jennifer were in the Chill core and Maria was in Horrors of North America). The plan initially was to take all five from the 2nd Ed material, because it would give people familiar with that edition a point of reference for the changes we made. The diversity spread in 2nd edition pregens isn’t bad; it’s fairly close to even between men and women, and while it’s not as representative of people of color as I’d like, it’s not completely devoid of them, either. It is, however, devoid of any LGBTQA+ characters. Rather, the only characters for whom sexuality is ever mentioned are characters that have spouses, and always the opposite sex. So while nothing says that, for instance, BB is straight, none of the pregens are explicitly referred to as non-straight or non-cis.

I wanted a character in the quickstart that wasn’t straight or cis, and in thinking about how to do that, I came up with Rory. Now, I’m a cis man, and so writing the character was a little outside of my comfort zone, which is why the dynamic with his ailing father is in there; that was something I did understand, and it gave him a point of conflict that wasn’t centered around his father not accepting him – his father does accept Rory. The point of conflict comes from his father’s dementia, and the difficulty he has understanding his child now, post-transition.

Tell me a little about the mechanical system for Chill. What mechanics really show off the game?
Chill 3rd Edition uses a percentile system, much like previous editions. Players make rolls against a target number (T#). Players make two kinds of checks, general checks and specific checks. A general check either succeeds (the roll is lower than or equal to the T#) or fails (the roll is the higher than the T#).

A specific check has five possible results:

  • Botch: The roll is a failure (higher than the T#) and the dice come up doubles. If your T# is 60 and you roll 88, for instance, that’s a botch.
  • Failure: The roll is higher than the T#, but not a botch.
  • Low Success: The roll is equal to or lower than the T#, but higher than half the T#. If your T# is 60, and you roll anything from 60 to 30, it’s a low success.
  • High Success: You roll less than half your T#. If your T# is 60, anything lower than 30 is a high success.
  • Colossal Success: You roll any success and the dice come up doubles. So, if your T# is 60 and you roll 55, 44, 33, 22, or 11, it’s a colossal success!

In addition to the dice mechanic, Chill uses a set of tokens (coins work just fine, as long you can tell one side from the other – one’s “light” and one’s “dark”).

Players can “flip a chip dark” (turning a light chip to the dark facing) to add to their target numbers (before or after a roll!), to sense the Unknown, to use their training in the Art, and, in truly dire straits, to save a character’s life.

Of course, once a chip’s dark facing is showing, the Chill Master can flip the chip light to activate a creature’s Disciplines of the Evil Way, to hinder the characters in minor in-genre ways (“I’m not getting any reception!”), or to add to a NPC’s target number.

Who do you think would like Chill most, and how would you suggest introducing it to a new group?
I think anyone who’s a fan of horror gaming with a personal, immediate feel would enjoy Chill. This isn’t Lovecraftian horror, in which the only “victory” is survival and retaining one’s sanity. In Chill, you can actually defeat the Unknown, it’s just hard. Gamers who enjoy investigate RPGs, and exploring a world that is, at points, hostile and dangerous, should check it out.

The way that I used to pitch Chill to new players back in the day (and I think this still works) is: The world of Chill is much like ours, except that the supernatural is real. It feeds on misery, fear, and death, and at some point, your character saw it. Maybe your character was attacked, maybe they just witnessed something inexplicable, but sometime thereafter, a group of people from an organization called SAVE showed up to ask you about it. You chose to ask them what was really going on, and when they warned you that digging deeper was dangerous to your health and your sanity, you refused to let it go.

Why? What brings your character out into the dark to fight monsters?

Clueless and Teenage Drama

I just finished watching Clueless.

Now, not everyone knows that I was homeschooled, but many people do. I didn’t have a standard high school experience, and I always envied people who did. While I know the likelihood of me surviving standard high school is low, a part of me always feels like I missed out on things that I could have really used – good friends, better education, greater awareness, and some support for my learning disabilities that would have been great.

On top of that, I also really regret not doing high school things when I was in high school. A lot of the stuff – going to parties, dating, etc. – didn’t happen for me until after, and it left me a little unprepared. Hell, I’ve never even actually dated people. I don’t regret being married to John or our long relationship, but had I been in public school, I feel like I’d have at least witnessed other people dating, and been less blind to how romantic relationships are supposed to work, and might not have needed the extensive time reading and researching.

This might all be wishful thinking. A lot of people hated high school, and it was very unkind to a lot of people. It’s still pretty cruel to a lot of people. It’s probably just a grass-is-always-greener thing, but that doesn’t make it go away. I still cling to high school media, like Clueless and Mean Girls and Bring It On. They’re not realistic, but they aren’t supposed to be – they’re the way we wish things could be, or wish we could control them.

Bringing this back around to something people reading this might actually care about…

This is why games like Monsterhearts are my favorites. They take one thing that is deep in the heart of my fantasies: a real high school experience, then add something I love and enjoy: supernatural fantasy, and mix it with fictional control. I can tell a story I want to tell with heartbreaks and falling in love and good grades and worse grades and werewolves and cheerleaders and it’s fucking awesome. And Monsterhearts is not alone (School Days is another good example), but I’d still like to see MORE games like this, with different twists and different systems.

I’ve been quietly working on a teenage superhero game with evolving patterns of skills using a graphic representation hex grid for character growth. It’s a slow moving process, but this kind of thing is key to what I would want to happen in the game. Players acting against each other, twisting narratives, emotional investment, and discovery. I want to see more games do things like I saw the early version of Masks do – make me love and hate a character, want to be them and want to ruin them, make me want to be a hero and a villain, and turn the expected on end. Let people judge me and let me judge them back. Let me fall in love with the wrong person. Let me spurn lovers. Let me do it at a point in life where my emotions are completely out of my control, because for once, teenage hormones are a good excuse for something. Let me cheer. Let me hang out behind the bleachers.

Let me be a teen, in the best way and the worst way. I want to live it in new and different ways every time I hit the table.

I guess this is just kind of a love letter to the teenage drama. I wish for more. There is nothing quite like living a life you’ve never led.

Dread – Suspense and Control

I’m thinking today about the game of Dread by Epidiah Ravachol I played at midnight-to-four-am last night, and how freaking awesome Dread is as a game. I know, tons of people say this, and they say it for a reason. I am sure there are people who don’t like the game, but hell, I really dig it.

Here’s why.

I like scary things. I like suspense. However, I’m also a giant coward. I can’t watch a ton of horror films or read scary stories like I could when I was a kid because I have wild nightmares. So, roleplaying is one of the ways I get my scary fix. Dread is awesome at this.

There is suspense like I’ve never felt in a game. I liked Black Stars Rise (Sage LaTorra) because it was creepy as all get out. I like Dread because I hold my breath for at least half of the game. I am on the edge of my seat, but trying desperately not to bump the table. My hands shake for reals instead of just because of medicine. It’s brilliant.

Introducing an element that takes so much control but removes so much control at the same time is really interesting. The Jenga tower is something for people with steady hands and knowledge of physics, so I expect plenty of people can play the game without as much worry about it falling on simple early pulls, but for someone like me, the chance of the tower falling is there from the first pull. It takes all of my brain and physical power to pull out a block, controlling my actions more than I normally do. But it also removes any of my control. I can narrate freely most of the time, but when it comes down to it, I have to give up to a pull to see whether I live or die.

And that’s another interesting part: one failed pull and you’re gone. There aren’t second chances. In many games, I hate character death, but in Dread, I wait for it anxiously, and then end up staring at the tower as the rest of the players go out in a blaze of glory.

Plus, the questionnaires are great. They give the GM just enough information to go on, without taking the players too long to answer questions. It provides elements of curiosity as we watch others write out their answers but can’t see what they’re saying, watching the little smiles or grimaces on their face betraying some of the parts of their story.

This is kind of a short post, but I wanted to chat a little bit about it. I hope you enjoyed the read. Tell me what you think of Dread in the comments!

Five or So Questions with Rob Trimarco on Fortune’s Fool

Check out Rob’s Kickstarter for Fortune’s Fool Ultimate PDF Edition!

Tell me a little about Fortune’s Fool. What excites you about it?

Fortune’s Fool is a tabletop Roleplaying Game set in a fantasy version of the European Renaissance that uses tarot cards instead of dice as it’s main conflict resolution mechanic.

The exciting parts about it are the ways in which players interact with each other, the tarot deck, and the GM. First, the GM never draws a card against a player. The players draw cards to succeed at skill checks or combat actions and then draw to dodge attacks or avoid actions taken against them.

Second, the character creation system is very simple yet robust. It is a life path system that helps players craft a story as they choose the attributes that are notable and special about their characters. Social class, religion, race, birth order, and other factors all contribute to a character’s abilities, skills, and how lucky they are.

Thirdly, the game has within it a “Fate Twist” system which is a completely “meta” mechanic that allows the players themselves to influence the cards being drawn to steer the outcome in their favor. Players can “twist fate” at any point in the game even when it is not their character’s turn.

What made you choose to use tarot cards?

Part of the decision to use tarot cards was the feel of the many decks that are out there to use. Many of them have beautiful art that truly helps to invoke the feeling of the setting and the mood of a game. We have used multiple decks when running it. One I have is very much in the style of old renaissance paintings and it has gold edges. Very useful for when I ran a game dealing with royalty and saving a prince from impending doom! Another we use is a fairy tale themed deck which we used when writing and play testing our Grimm Tales campaign supplement.

Another part of the decision was the multiple ways the deck itself could be used. For those that do not know about the tarot deck structure, The tarot deck is broken up into 2 sections. It has cards called “minor arcana” which consist of 4 suits with 14 cards in each (similar to the standard deck of playing cards we use today) as well as “major arcana” with cards like “The Magician”, “The Hanged Man”, and “Strength” of which there are 22. This variety allows us to use the numbers on the minor arcana cards, the specific suit they are, and the major arcana cards all as ways to express levels of success, failure, damage from attacks, spell effects, etc.

They all work together seamlessly and intuitively with the story being told and with the actions being taken by the player. The minor arcana cards determine success and failures on a basic level by comparing the suit and the number to your character’s skill ratings and to which minor arcana card suits are considered “fortune smiles” or “fortune frowns.” The major arcana cards represent critical successes and critical failures. If you draw a major arcana card and it is circled on your character sheet, the action is considered a “fortune shines”; a critical success of the highest order. If the major arcana drawn is not circled on your character sheet, your character has fumbled an action badly with a critical failure. These “Fortune Shines” and “Fortune Weeps” are determined during the course of character creation.

Tell me a little more about character creation. What do you think is vital to character creation in games?
Depending on how players approach participation in roleplaying games, they may view what’s vital to character creation in different ways. Someone can certainly make choices to give them the best social or weapon skills. Making selections that raise their charm or attack numbers, and generally be amazing at certain aspects of a physical or social conflict. Someone else may think about their character choices as more of a storytelling vehicle and focus their choices on what is most interesting to them in the vein of defining their character’s struggles or most powerful life events. I believe the vital part of the Fortune’s Fool character creation system lies within this diversity and the ability to accommodate many points of view and play styles.

Twisting fate sounds awesome! How do you do it?
At character creation the number of times you can play a fate twist and which specific ones a player has are determined. The luckier a character is the more fate twists their player possesses. There are many different fate twists listed in the book and they all allow a player to affect the deck in many ways. From being able to peek at the top 3 cards of the deck to shuffling in your choice of major arcana into the top 5 cards.

Let’s say, for example, in a scene there is a group of brigands attacking the player characters. The lead brigand has his flintlock pistol out and expresses a deep desire to shoot one of the characters in the face. In order to see if the shot hits, the player must draw a card to dodge. Let’s call the player “Aaron.” Aaron’s draw must be lower than his dodge score or be a major arcana card that is favorable to his character in order for the shot to miss. Guns being very deadly weapons, Aaron decides to use a fate twist. This happens before any cards are drawn to resolve the action at hand. Aaron announces to the other players at the table and to the GM that he will spend a fate point and use his fate twist called “Devil’s Laugh.” This fate twist states that the Major Arcana card “The Devil” needs be shuffled into the top 3 cards of the deck. Since The Devil card is a “Fortune Shines” for Aaron if he draws it, the gunshot will not only miss but it will cause his opponent to fumble, causing the brigand to drop the gun or even have it explode in his hand! The degree of success or failure of a draw determines all of this so picking the right fate twist (or twists – many can be played before a draw occurs) definitely matters in any situation where life or death is on the line!

So the GM now picks up the deck and searches it for the card and when it is found he or she then shuffles it into the top 3 cards of the deck. Aaron now has a one in 3 chance of drawing a card that is really good for him so the tension of the draw is high! It’s very exciting to see happen during play! Will the brigand’s shot completely miss Aaron? Will Aaron’s face be shot?Oh boy!

Will we be seeing more from you soon, and if so, what will it be?

We are currently running a Kickstarter project to enhance our PDFs. If it funds it will allow us to do the following: layer the art in the book to allow it to be viewed in “text only” mode so it speeds up loading and allows for slower devices to read the file easily, resizing the files for optimal viewing on a phone, tablet, PC, or other PDF capable device, linking the rules internally to different sections to facilitate looking up different rules and definitions we use in the book, and adding more original artwork from our favorite artists.

We also have a new supplement in the works called “Tales from the Ganges” that will detail the region of India! It will allow players and GMs to expand their game into the region with new races, skills, religions, spells, and a myriad of other fun bits.Did you ever want your character to ride a huge, demon possessed bull elephant into combat with your enemies? Well now you finally can! This supplement will breathe new life into a current game or bring inspiration to start a new one. It is currently part of our Kickstarter’s stretch goals but even if we don’t meet the goal this supplement will still be released just on a different time table.

Five or So Questions with Joshua Unruh

Check out this interview with Joshua Unruh on his new Patreon project! With this post, we’re having a contest! If you become a Patron of Joshua on Patreon, then comment on this post, you’ll be entered to win a copy of his book TEEN Agents in The Plundered Parent Protocol. Leave a means of contacting you in the comment so we can let you know if you’ve won!


Tell me a little bit about your project. What excites you about it?
The short explanation of the project is monthly, serialized bursts of superhero prose. Faster and cheaper than full comics, I’ll get to tell exciting stories about people in colorful costumes punching their way to justice without needing a huge production team.

Two things excite me most about this project. First is the opportunity to tell superhero stories about heroes of my own creation that are different. I don’t mean to say that I plan to reinvent the wheel with my superhero fiction. In fact, I hope to give the same thrilled feeling I had as a kid of following larger-than-life heroes through their serialized adventures. I stand on the shoulders of giants from Jack Kirby and Curt Swan through Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction, and they all reinvented things a bit as they went. But I do mean the heroes will be different. Different colors, different genders, different walks of life.

The second reason I’m excited about this project is how I expect it will stretch me as a writer. I’ve got outlines and have done some writing ahead, but not a ton. I want to see what happens when I’m under a deadline for a story and not even the sky is the limit. That, I feel, is one of the stronger things the superhero genre has going for it. Tight deadlines and no locks on “the rules” meant that the superhero genre has some delightfully weird tropes. Sometimes that resulted in crazy stories where Superman had the head of a lion. Sometimes it resulted in entire cities of super-intelligent gorillas or teenage super clubs from the future.

Weird, ridiculous, or amazing, these ideas literally couldn’t have been created in any other situation. And I can’t wait to see what a similar situation pushes me to create.

Talk to me a little about your three goals for your superhero fiction. What are they and why are they important?
The three goals for my superhero fiction are 1. Make it all ages, 2. make it fun, 3. make it diverse.

All ages is an important concept to me because, as an adult, I’ve realized just how much learning I did reading comics that didn’t talk down to me. All ages doesn’t mean “for kids.” And even if it did, “for kids” too often means “talks to kids like they’re stupid.” I don’t want that. I want to be entertaining to a broad swathe of ages. The all in all ages overpromises, but it’s still a goal I want to aim for. Kinda like Pixar, they make the effort to entertain both the kids and adults in their audience on different levels.

This has been a thing superhero stories have lost. By and large, they aren’t all ages anymore. Every Free Comic Book Day, I struggle to find something my seven year old son can enjoy. And let me assure you, at this point, if you name a popular superhero book that was either all ages or for kids, we’ve read it a hundred times. There just isn’t new stuff churned out for him. And I want there to be. So I’m being the change I want to see.

As for making it fun, that’s just what I want from my superhero fiction these days. There are absolutely places where superhero comics can be grim and serious affairs. Watchmen is the quintessential example. But one reason Watchmen works is because there’s all this fun stuff that it can be an opposing reaction to. I’ve just sort of grown past the point where I need superheroes to be taken seriously. Especially when “serious” means drab colors and compromising of heroic ideals rather than living them out in technicolor. I want superheroes to be a roller coaster ride again, and I think kids do as well even if they can’t articulate it yet.

Make it diverse is just something that’s close to my heart. My wife and I were foster parents after our son came along. We wanted to add to our family and thought that would be a great way to find the little girl that belonged with us. That got me thinking about how the stuff my son and I enjoyed just didn’t have enough action heroes that would look like her. We fostered an African American boy and I couldn’t shake the same thought for him. I know I’m not alone in wanting more diverse heroes, but once again, all I can do is try to be that change with my own work.

What kind of characters can we expect to see?

You can expect to see heroes! Selfless people who want to make the world a better place! It just so happens that they want to do it while wearing masks and capes! Other than that, I’m just asking myself how I can make my character base more diverse. Of the first five characters I have in mind, four of them are girls or women, two of them are mixed race, and one of them is Greek (like, ancient Greek). But they’re all still multi-faceted, detailed, completely realized characters.

On the villainous side, you’re going to see a similar approach to characterization and diversity, but maybe a bit less diverse than the heroes. I mean, the fact that a lot of evil people in the real world are old white guys with a lot of money will filter into my superhero work.

Maybe some examples will help. Catfight and Hell Kitten are from a recently broken home. Their mother is African American, their father is white, and they’re moving in with their maternal grandfather (who just happens to have been a mystery man in the 30s and 40s). Think of these girls as the Spider-Man type. Broken home, struggling with money, but they still aspire to heroism. Catfight and Hell Kitten are my coming of age story, so they’ll face villains that represent everyday troubles.

My second character (should I get that many patrons) is The Gray Angel. She’s what happens if Buffy the Vampire Slayer decides to become Batman. She works in Pilgrim City. The Grim is controlled by supernatural evil and criminals…who are also usually supernaturally evil. Gray Angel is where I’ll tell the horror and crime stories.

The last character I’ll mention is Andromeda. She’s the Andromeda from Greek myth, except she’s no wilting princess. That’s just the Zeus-fueled PR machine at work. When Perseus failed to show up and fight the Kraken, she yanked the chains from the cliff, dove into the Aegean, and killed it herself. She’s adventured all over the place, including to the peak of Mt. Olympus where she got these stunning little strappy sandals with wings. Later, she punched Nazis and even become a warrior queen in another star system.

What kind of inspirations do you have for your villains?

I think the best villains are the opposite number of the hero. And if you have a truly great character, like Batman, you can have several opposite numbers that are nothing alike. Coming in right after that are villains that represent a problem the hero is facing or a problem from their past. The Lizard is, for Spider-Man, a mentor and father figure he couldn’t save, especially from his own inner demons. And then there are villains that are just cool concepts or a twist on cool concepts. Solaris the Tyrant Sun is just epic and scary while Klarion the Witchboy is weird and scary.

So I have plans for Helena Handbasket who is, in some ways, the shadowy reflection of Catfight and Hell Kitten. She’s new in town, also comes from a broken home, and has found unexpected power. But she’s going to use it for her own ends instead of to help others. What will the girls do when they realize that, except for a few blessings, they could have been her?

Over in Pilgrim City, you’ll meet Chilly Graves. He’s a mobster who crossed the wrong guys, found himself thrown in a freezer to die, and then got dumped into unholy ground. When he awakens, he’s a zombie fueled by cold. He’s the “what happens when the problems you bury arise?” kind of villain (and also a twist on some favorite Batman bad guys of mine).

I don’t want to give away too much, but you can see how my inspirations come through those two characters I hope.

Who do you think this project will appeal to most?

I sincerely hope it appeals to everyone who wants to read some superhero action! I mean, let’s be honest. I have some ideological axes to grind that are influencing some of my creative decisions. But I don’t expect these to be seen as “superheroes for girls” or “the diverse universe.” I just want them to be fun, exciting, and full of wonder in the way that Spider-Man and Legion of Super-Heroes were for me when I was a kid. If along the way I get to reflect a readership that isn’t being served as well as it could be, then I am totally okay with that!

Really, I just love superheroes and have for most of my life. My wife and I were discussing how she can’t even imagine who I’d be without superheroes. I want to appeal most to the person that might become a lifelong fan of this incredible genre like I did. It would be one of my greatest joys as an artist if my stories were the portal through which even one person became a true believing superhero fan.

Five or So Questions with Justin Bow on Of Gods and Heroes

Justin Bow is from Green Fairy Games!

What’s exciting about Of Gods & Heroes?
I talked about this in the Kickstarter description, but I can’t say it enough – the game plays like an action movie. It’s traditional game mechanics designed to promote creativity and strong character-centered stories with the over-the-top feel of mythology. I think one of the most important aspects of the game are Legend Points/Legendary Feats.

A lot of games have rules that let you reroll a failure, gain a one-shot bonus, or otherwise boost your chances for success. Legend Points let you do all those things, but they also let you perform Legendary Feat. Legendary Feats are myth-level abilities that each player will, on average, get to bust out once per adventure. If they’re not an attack against an opponent, they automatically succeed. So you can simply hand over a Legend Point as a Fast Hero and say “I run across the water, because I’m FAST.” A Tough Hero could go without food for a month or a Strong Hero could row a ship fast enough to escape a tidal wave.

Legendary Feats are also important because they’re where players get to interact directly with the plot – it’s a way to completely throw things off the rails in the coolest way possible. A good example from a beta playtest a few years ago had some Viking Heroes chasing another ship, which had just burned their village to the ground. They weren’t making much headway (and the enemy ship was supposed to get away), until the Strong Hero said “You know what, I’m really strong. Forget this. I’m jumping over to the other ship.”

And he did. Ultimately, both ships ended up sinking when one of the other players decided to ram the ships together, but that’s neither here nor there…

What mythology most inspired your game?
This kind of feels like you’re asking ‘which is your favorite child.’ OGH is pan-mythic, so it discusses a whole range of mythologies, from Aztec to Japanese to Norse and Greek. The basis for the game, though, is sea-faring mythology – your Heroes are assumed to be from a sea-faring culture and a lot of the game is about the crazy things that are beyond the Horizon. If you look at mythology, there’s often this idea that, sure, there’s magic and gods and stuff in day-to-day life, but the really crazy stuff is over the Horizon. Islands of dog-headed people, rocs guarding valleys full of diamonds, women who try to lure you out of your boat by singing, the edge of the world, that sort of thing.

So that’s a strong theme. I’m pretty familiar with a wide range of mythology and folklore, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I’m most familiar with Greco-Roman and Viking mythology, so a lot of the random example names come from those myth cycles. Both the sample adventure list and the opponents draw pretty widely from a lot of different mythological inspirations – there’s even a monster from Australian mythology in there (the bunyip).

I should also mention that there are guidelines for running non-sea-faring games in the Chronicler (GM) chapter. These are essentially just little tweaks that exchange the ocean for a different geographic barrier – whether that’s jungle, desert, mountains or whatever. The sense that the wide world is dangerous and you’re safer at home wasn’t exactly rare in iron-age societies.

Tell me a little more about the basic mechanics of the game. What is the system like?
OGH uses a d6 dice pool mechanic where 5’s and 6’s are successes.

There are no attributes – only skills and Prowess. Prowess is, essentially, what makes your Hero a Hero. Classically, Heroes are exemplary in every way, but are far more than human in a single area – as Hercules is known for being strong and Odysseus for being cunning, every Hero has a defining capability and this is Prowess. Prowess allows a Hero to stand proudly before the gods and sometimes defy fate itself.

Most dice pools are made up of a Skill + an appropriate Prowess. Both skills and Prowesses max out at 6. Starting characters max out with 5 dice in their areas of focus.

I suggest using two visually distinct types of dice for skills and Prowess because Prowess dice explode if they come up 6 – that is, you can bank the success, reroll the die and get another success or keep rolling 6’s, building successes.

The overall goal of the mechanics design was to keep things streamlined – so dice pool modifiers are only for important elements and there aren’t many of them. We’ve found that even with people who’ve never played an RPG before that the system – from character creation on – is intuitive and easy to learn.

In addition to common things like social conflict, combat, and magic, there are a number of subsystems for warfare, speechifying to crowds, and ritual combat. These are kept modular so that unless you’re actually, you know, going to war, you don’t need to worry about those rules – but at the same time, their structure is the same as the core game systems, so you’re not suddenly getting jumped by a much more complicated ruleset just because you wanted to introduce one of these story elements.

I really felt having that flexibility was important because players are going to see those rules and say “holy crap, I can start a riot!” Because the rules exist, people are more likely to put those elements in their games and tell crazier, more exciting stories.

You mentioned Tough Heroes and Strong Heroes. What’s the difference? Are there other types of heroes?
I mentioned before that there are no traditional attributes in Of Gods & Heroes and talked a little bit about Prowesses. Tough and Strong are two of the 12 or so different Prowesses. A Tough Hero would be someone like Achilles whose super-mortal abilities are focused on being resistant to damage – they’re also berserkers, so the more they get hurt, the better at melee combat they are. Tough Heroes mostly handle defensive roles in a group of Heroes, making sure that opponents focus on them rather than their squishier friends. Strong Heroes are pretty much what it says on the tin – strong. Think Hercules or Thor. Their job is to punch things really hard and lift heavy objects.

Some of the other Prowesses are: Cunning (liars, tricksters, geniuses – like Odysseus or Coyote), Eloquent (smooth-talkers and beautiful people, like Helen of Troy or Orpheus), Dextrous (people with exceptional agility, famous archers – like Monkey or Artemis), Wise (sages, mages, the guys who speak the language of creation – like Taliesin the Bard), or Beloved of Death (literally the child of the god/goddess of death).

Each one of these “styles” of Hero has an important role to play in an epic. Personally, I like to run/play in games with around 4-5 players, but I’ve had sessions where we’ve done a whole adventure with just an Eloquent Hero and a Strong Hero and it worked very well because they were able to cover each others’ backs. I think you could successfully run a full epic with just one combat-capable character and an Eloquent, Wise or Cunning Hero.

What do you hope players get out of the game?
First, I hope that Of Gods & Heroes lets people make new myths. As a GM, I am constantly surprised by the stories this game creates. There’s real agency given to players through the Legend Points mechanic without making the game about who gets to tell the story. Every game session I walk away from the table feeling like we (myself and the players) created an interesting, exciting story. One time, I had to just end the session with “… and that’s why, to this day, all the snakes on Crete can talk.” It’s a really fun, collaborative process to get to that point. A process that involves punching a lot of things in the face.

I also hope that OGH encourages people to take another look at mythology, whether they read myths as a kid or last week. Mythology is public domain, which means there are plenty of websites that have comprehensive collections of various cultures’ myth cycles. Combined with Wikipedia, ‘researching’ a campaign setting or finding new material to inspire adventures is insanely easy. And I just think it’s cool to see how different cultures all tell similar stories and then to realize that we’re still telling those stories today, just modified to fit our culture.

Five or So Questions with Shannon Appelcline on Designers & Dragons

Tell me a little bit about Designers & Dragons. What excites you about it?

Designers & Dragons is a history of the roleplaying industry told one company at a time. It starts with TSR and runs through Posthuman Studios and along the way it provides complete histories for over 80 other roleplaying publishers. Each history focuses on the roleplaying production of one company, but also charts out all of its highs and lows, so you can learn about TSR’s lawsuits, Palladium’s Crisis of Treachery, the few times that Chaosium teetered on the edge, and much more.

This all excites me because it’s the backstory of the industry. It’s the tales of people who are remembered, the ones who were forgotten, and the great games they created — most of which are no longer on the shelves. It’s about the companies that prospered (often in unexpected ways) and the companies that failed (usually in equally unexpected ways).

I started writing Designers & Dragons because I wanted to know what had happened to these companies of the past — where they’d disappeared to and what their stories were. I found that uncovering this knowledge was fascinating, and it appears that readers do as well!

What do you think are highlights of the 00s that new designers should really be aware of?
First, designers should look at the indie movement. Some of the early indie ideas like resource management and freeform attributes have already hit the bigger time in releases from larger publishers. However, indie games also contain lots of other interesting design like unconventional narratives, distributed authority, scene framing, and stake setting. Not all of it’s appropriate for every game, but a designer should be aware of the entered toolbox, and that toolbox has been expanded a lot since the mid ’90s.

Second, designers should look at the OSR movement. I’m not necessarily talking about the retroclones, but the newer games that have melded together modern design aesthetics with old-school design tropes. I think that Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG (2012) is the game that’s probably done the best job of managing this merged landscape.

If you know what made the industry appealing in its early days and if you know the newest ideas about how to develop roleplaying games, then you’ve probably got a pretty good handle on interesting design.

What is your favorite thing to talk about in RPG history?
I love the scope of history: the fact that the RPG industry has been around for forty years and that it traces its origins back even further; the fact that its created parallel industries like modern miniatures games, CCGs, and computer RPGs. I love how you can often trace a designer’s production through multiple companies, to see where they started and where they went. I love the scope within an individual company, as you see how it rises (and sometimes falls).

However, I find it just as intriguing to talk about the reasons behind all this history: why a person started a company and why they decided to create an RPG on a specific topic. I love discussing why an abrupt change occurred at a company: why an old RPG line went away or why a certain type of product was discontinued,

So I’d say those two things: the big picture and the little reasons that underlie it.

Who do you think will benefit the most from the books, and why?
My first reaction is to say that old-time gamers will benefit from Designers & Dragons the most, because the books talk about all the old companies that they remember and the old game systems they still play. Equally, the books reveal the secrets of the smaller presses that old-time gamers might have heard of, but never investigated. However, I think that newer gamers will benefit from the books too, because they’re full of everything that’s gone before — the companies and games that are the foundation that modern gaming is built upon.

So I’d have to say anyone who wants to learn more about the gaming industry, the companies that made it up, and the games they’ve produced over the last four decades.

What do you suggest people do, aside from reading Designers & Dragons, to learn more about RPGs and the industry?
I love the old gaming magazines for what they reveal about the industry. Wizards of the Coast’s Dragon Magazine Archive is awesome for the fact that it lays out 25 years of industry growth, and you can get it on eBay for about $100. The generalist magazines were also good because they tended to be full of news, interviews, and game design notes from a wide variety of companies. I’d particularly recommend The Space Gamer, Different Worlds, White Wolf, and Shadis — which together form a nice chronology from the late ’70s through the ’90s.

There have also been a couple of great books. Heroic Worlds, a catalog of the games of the ’70s and ’80s, and Playing at the World, a dense investigation of the origins of roleplaying, are particularly interesting.

Finally, there are a number of OSR blogs which do a good job of looking at the history of the industry. Grognardia was my favorite until it fizzled out, but it’s still got interesting things in its archives.

Five or So Questions with Jão Pedro on Love Gift Cards

You can check out Jão’s Patreon here: http://www.patreon.com/jptrrs 


Tell me a little about your Game Chef winning game, Love Gift Card. What excites you about it?
First and foremost, It’s been peoples’ reaction to it! The game’s premise is a little far-fetched, and to me it really was a game design exercise, just as the competition calls for. I didn’t think it would score, but people get excited with the idea, even folks outside hobby circles! So there’s that, and I’m still a little baffled.
But what’s really nice is that people get the game’s goal: to expand autonomously driven by the human desire to do good, and to foment that very desire by doing so. It’s a cycle they seem to recognize as something which could be, as something viable. That people can so easily correlate the game’s mechanism to what goes on in real life, even when the game isn’t really playable yet, makes me really proud of it.

I’m interested in bleed in RPGs, when boundaries between players and character worlds get blurred. I think that’s when this games acquire the potential to produce the same kind of reaction as good art does: touching emotional layers, offering new perspectives about the world we live in. The Love Gift Card Game is an attempt to to get people, specially geeks like myself, wondering about their roles in real life, and their real-life behaviour and real-life communities. That sort of thing, I think, should be what game designers should be dealing with.

What were your inspirations for the game?
The whole idea derived from the contest’s theme, There is no book. I was talking to Encho (last year’s Game Chef World champion) about it, we were both trying to stretch it to “there are no game instructions” and figuring out how could a game like this be, and I said it would be cool if people had little pieces of the game that only made sense when they met and put them together. It would be a decentralized game, forever ongoing, and I thought it would be even cooler if carrying around little “pieces” of the game were some fashionable thing, so the game could expand carried out by this fad and “happen” in the events of two carriers bumping to each other. I thought this went well to the ingredients Absorb and Wild. Then I reminded of this annoying thing called The Game, a one-rule game that you “play” only by knowing it exists and you “lose” every time you remember it (by the way, I just lost it!). The only element of this game is a meme, that propagates by itself. It doesn’t even need players to decide to play it! And I just recently played a larp called White Death, which impressed me by how deep a game could get using just a set of simple instructions for the players to perform, so I figured what I needed was some simple trigger-action combination people could apply to their everyday lives.

That’s when I got to the “hug game” idea. I don’t know, there’s a cant here to describe friendly social events as love-something, like “new year’s eve party of love”, or “RPG tuesdays of love”, so I decided to do a proper “game of love”. To me, it sounded like something that could be relevant as a message to the real world, and I liked it. So I probed our local Indie RPG facebook group with a mockup card, got some positive feedback, and here we are!

Tell me a little bit about the mechanics. What makes the game work?
Actually I don’t really know if it will work! It depends on how people face the instructions. I suppose that if people receiving cards find it too silly, it won’t work at all. It really depends a lot on the social structure in which it is seeded.

But the idea is this: you get a card (buy it or receive it from someone else) and it presents you with a slightly socially-awkward challenge, but that is really a good deed you’re tasked to do. And it also informs you that if you can accomplish that you kinda become part of some secret group, which members you could recognize by their actions, and that you should pass along the card, helping the “game” to expand. It’s an appeal for you to take part in a sort of benign wave, to willingly become a link in a chain reaction designed to make the world a better place. Hell, if it doesn’t make people scratch the itch, then humanity is indeed doomed! 🙂
Technically, it should work as a challenge type of game. But, as I said, It was designed as an theoretical exercise of game design. I’m expecting critics if it even qualifies as a game at all! God knows what could happen if it is materialized.
Art-wise, though, I expect it to instigate reflections on relationships (or the absence of them). If this occurs, even if it doesn’t function as a real game, I’ll be satisfied.

Talk a little about bleed. What do you think is so interesting about it?
We tend to see games as entertainment solely, as something you do to escape from a harsh reality. That’s a very narrow perspective. Games can be a media as fruitful as any other, they can be as powerful as the cinema or literature, or even more, since it engages you on another level. Dungeons & Dragons can be about cooperation. Horror RPGs can be tools to explore the human condition. Why not? The other day I learned Monopoly was originally designed to warn people about the trouble with abuses of private property, and if you think this through, its a hell of a demonstration! When we, humans, need to cope with unsettling issues we play: we create music, pictures, tales. Games are just another way of playing out this issues, and we should use them. So I’m all for the nordic school of larp: do touch, seek the points of convergence between fiction and reality, and use the opportunity to learn about yourself and others.

I talked about White Death previously. I’m new to larping so I might be overreacting, but that game touched me deeply. The game itself is very simple, but the music, the constraints… it forces you to contemplate your helpless imperfection as a human being, the caos that emerges inevitably from human interaction, and death. It printed really strong images in my brain. It made me cry. How could this be just a game?

What’s up next for you now that you’ve won the contest?
On The Love Gift Card Game front, I’m talking publishing it with Kobold’s. I don’t know yet how this will play out, since the game follows no known business model, but we’re studying the best way to bring the idea to life.

Also, I’ve got a bunch of unfinished projects, including another game which was finalist in a contest and is (was?) due to publication, the Massa Critica RPG, and I just couldn’t make time to work on them. So I’m taking this Game Chef prize as an incentive and finally setting up a page on Patreon to concentrate some effort on those projects (I’ll send you the final link shortly so you can include it here, ok?). Who knows? Maybe I can squeeze out some more good ideas!

Five or So Questions with Avonelle Wing on Convention Organizing

Tell me a little about what you do as a convention coordinator. What’s exciting about it?

What do I do? that’s a very complicated question, because I wear many hats, and the list of things I do could read like a resume.
From the practical and very concrete perspective, my job is to make sure the resources are available for the convention staff to provide the most satisfying convention experience possible to the broadest segment of our population. Among the things I do are:
  • Remembering to buy the right envelopes (peel and stick, #10), card stock, poster board, tape, packing tape, duct tape, and knowing which brand and why.
  • Keeping track of ridiculous things, like remotes, wires, plugs, components – making sure everything gets packed to and from every con, and I know where each important piece is. all the time. 
  • Refreshing our extension cord supply. 
  • Counting bed spots accurately so senior staff and guests all have a place to sleep.
  • Soliciting and tracking prize support and library copies of games.
  • Keeping track of special guests and making sure they have satisfying experiences at the con. 
  • Maintaining a social media presence so the conventions are people, not faceless corporate entities to attendees. 
My brain holds a million vital little details that mean we don’t ahve to reinvent the wheel. and we never have to deal with the experience of buying the wrong duct tape again. (the whole Big Board system fell off the walls at DEXCON. Within hours of putting it up. It’s my job to remember that horror and to make sure we avoid it in the future. 1,000 events on the ballroom floor. oi.)

I talk to game masters. I help piece the schedule together (my husband does the lion’s share of the scheduling and I still get a little swoony when I look at the sheer magnitude of the task he takes on every convention.). I coordinate staff.

On a more ephemeral level, I get to be part of the magic of our community. I am the welcome wagon – I notice when somebody is looking a little lost and I loop them into something exciting. I forge connections, solve problems. When somebody is in the middle of a devastating breakup and needs to hide, they end up in my room, because that’s a safe place to hide and I always feed you after I scrape your sobbing self up off a hallway floor. Our conventions are described by lots of people in our community as “giant family reunions” and I get to make that magic happen. It’s akin to being the eccentric aunt who rents the pavilion, hires the magicians and buys 100lbs of charcoal. The difference is that our community has chosen to be here. and I love them for that.

I get to facilitate our evolution. When somebody comes to me and says “freeform. it’s a thing. we need more of it” I get to say “ok! fill out the form and let’s do it!”

When somebody says “gender. It matters in gaming and we need to talk about it.” I get to say “OK! space, exposure, attention. let’s go.”
18 months later, somebody said the same thing about race. “Great. Let’s talk. Let’s talk long and loud and let’s get angry and let’s do positive things to change our world. Let’s go!”
We hear “old school roleplayers feel lost. we want a home too!” and we launch a convention within a convention to serve them too.
Our job is to be responsive and supportive and encouraging. and I think we do a decent job of it. It’s exciting to me to hear somebody say “I want to…” and to be able to say “and I can help make that happen. I’m excited! let’s go!”

I am often humbled, watching our community support each other. and I get to know that they’ve come together because I’ve given them the venue and the opportunity and the reason to do so.

What is the biggest challenge to hosting a con?
The biggest challenges of any convention lie in the unknowns – will the air conditioning be able to keep up? how many bottles of soda will we blow through this year? The system and process stuff? We’ve got that down, and it’s entirely on us. Once you set the machine in motion, you become dependent on other people to see things through, and on the universe to cooperate.

I drove all the convention badges, the printer and all the other registration materials to a convention once through a storm system that spawned tornadoes. As I drove down the highway, I watched trees falling behind me – it felt cinematic and not as terrifying as it should have been. Those things, you can’t plan for. You just have to keep your head screwed on straight and keep moving.

What do you think is the most valuable advice you could give someone starting their own event?
Talk to other local events. Make sure you’re not crashing their party. Ask them about venues – sometimes there’s a reason an event moved suddenly. Schedule so you’re not stepping on anybody’s toes. Ask for help – Double Exposure is always happy to help a small even negotiate for space and sometimes we even help staff for your first couple of years.

Figure out a reasonable budget and double it.

Carry the best insurance you can possibly afford. Wait. what? insurance? Yes, insurance. Trust me, it’s worth it.

Don’t run by committee. Take personal responsibility for things that go wrong and be generous in sharing the credit for things that go right.

What are your goals with Maelstrom and DEXCON, which are two wildly different cons?

Maelstrom is an experiment, and I’m still sorting out my goals. I need to go back to my brain trust and discuss what worked and what didn’t, and to set community-guided goals.

DEXCON’s goal is, always, to provide the most action-packed, diverse, intense, intimate five days of gaming anywhere. We’ve got the excitement of one of the mega-cons with the comfort and friendliness of a local con.

What’s big for the next year for Double Exposure?
Big… I’m not sure we are ready for much bigger than 2014! We’re up to four conventions a year of our own, plus we’re doing the First Exposure Playtest Hall at Gen Con.

I’m just getting my feet under me when it comes to talking about the importance of social justice – of advocacy and representation. That has become a bigger part of Double Exposure’s program over the last several years, as I’ve realized that we were above the curve, but had more we could be doing. the rest of 2014 and likely most of 2015 is going to be continuing to present the best possible product to our community while refining and advancing our approach to outreach, education and representation. I have so much to learn, and so many brilliant people to learn it from.

I have a still-flickering hope that we will be able to do a larp-oriented project in 2015, but that won’t be decided until we’ve gotten home from Gen Con, at the soonest.

Why do you run these conventions?
Riding home from Gen Con last year, I found myself pondering the fact that these conventions – even with their stress, financial exposure, physical toll, worry and effort – are as close to worship as I come. We create a thing that is ephemeral. It’s temporary, like a play, and when we’re done, we strike the set and we go home. But while they exist, we create something that is as close to a Divine act as possible.

Conventions connect people in a very tangible way. We step outside of our daily lives and enter a space outside of time. We storytell – one of the most human and most sacred of acts. We trade pieces of ourselves. We laugh. we cry. We see friends we only see a couple of times a year, and we pick back up right where we left off. There’s an emotional resonance to conventions that is unlike anything else I’ve experienced.

Also, it’s safe place to be a nerd – to love My Little Ponies. to know the dialogue to every Star Trek movie. to remember every model number of every Terminator to show up on screen, ever. There’s very little fear of mockery or disdain. As somebody who was vexed for being a reader, for being a nerd, for having a grown-up vocabulary, sometimes it moves me to tears to watch folks (often younger folks) come in – a little awkward, a little wound up, a little too much – and to see them unwind, slow down, find their own unique pace. We create a space where we protect each others’ weirdnesses, and share them. It gives folks who find themselves on the fringe at school, at work, in their daily life, a chance to be in the middle of the puppy pile – to be respected, to acknowledged and seen and known.

It’s a calling, and I’ve known that since I first walked into a Double Exposure convention in 1997. I welcome each new face like a companion on this path to carve out a spot of acceptance, creation and joy every few months.