I’ve got another great quick interview with Martin Lloyd, this time about the Big Book of Amazing Tales, currently on Kickstarter! It sounds like a great game resource for kids to add to your Amazing Tales collection. Check out Martin’s responses below!
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What is the Big Book of Amazing Tales, both as a product and as your vision?
Some of the most fun I’ve had with Amazing Tales has been playing games with the kids while on holiday, that’s when we’ve played out campaigns, and the idea of the Big Book is to make it easy for other families to do the same. So in the book I’m including four campaigns, one for each of the settings in the book. So you’ll get…
- A Dream of Trees – for the Deep Dark Wood setting
- The Quest for the Dragon Crown – for the Magical Kingdoms setting
- Captain Cadava’s Treasure – for the Pirate Seas setting
- The Cryptid Conundrum – for the Adventure among the Stars setting
The Big Book of Amazing Tales should be seen as a companion volume to Amazing Tales. Amazing Tales gives you all the tools you need to make up amazing adventures with your kid and get them started on role-playing. The Big Book of Amazing Tales is about providing you with some really great campaigns that can take things to the next level.
Before I started writing I set myself some goals. One of them was to include elements in the games that would bring the games alive in the real world as well as the player’s imagination. So in the Quest for the Dragon Crown there is a crown for the players to cut out, colour in and put together when they find it. It doesn’t look like a conventional crown, but its form is a clue to what it really does so having it right there in the players’ hands is important. One of the other goals is to include ‘moments of awesome’ for the players, to make sure they have those moments where their characters get to do something amazing. You really will save the kingdom, slay the dragon, stop the alien invasion and so on.
It’s also a chance for me to answer two of the questions I’ve been asked most frequently since launching Amazing Tales. Namely – ‘How do you use this game in a classroom?’, and ‘Can I use this game to help my kid with some kind of problem?’. Although to be honest I won’t be the one doing the answering. Baz Stevens, who is both a teacher and a game designer will be answering the first question, and Lilly Smith who is a child therapist will be answering the second.
As an ongoing product, how do you keep coming up for ideas for Amazing Tales, and keep them fresh?
It really helps that Amazing Tales doesn’t have a fixed setting. So I’m not stuck trying to come up with five different fantasy adventures, or a new twist on space pirates or whatever. If I’m writing a pirate adventure I can make it the most piratey pirate adventure imaginable, a kind of Pirates of the Carribean in RPG form, and try and cram it full of as many pirate ideas as I can. I don’t need to worry about having used all the good stuff and then having to write another pirate campaign next week. * Once a month I publish a set of story seeds in the Amazing Tales newsletter, and those are always a good chance to really interrogate an idea. I pick a simple concept like ‘Temples’ and then try and come up with a set of ideas that do something interesting with that idea – stretching it in different directions. It’s a good practice.
And then there are the games I hear about people playing with their kids. Often there will be a couple of sentences on Facebook that sound brilliant, but that’s all there is. So it becomes a jumping off point for new ideas. Someone posted the other day about an adventure involving a lost circus in a forest. That’s about all I know, but it’s a great starting point. An adventure about a lost circus in a forest, it almost doesn’t matter what genre or system you’re playing – that’s a great place to start.
What are some of your favorite things in the Big Book and what are they like for players?
I’m really looking forward to some of the special extras. So in the Cryptid Conundrum, where the heroes need to crack the alien codes, there’ll be a decoder ring for the players to cut out and make. Now a lot of kids will probably make something like that at some point while growing up, but how many of them will get to use it to rescue the victims of an alien kidnapping? In a similar way that bit of research about kids being better at identifying logos than trees really bothers me. So A Dream of Trees will definitely include puzzles that require learning about trees, leaves, nuts and the like. Hopefully that will be enough to make kids a bit more excited by being outdoors, because playing outside is almost as important as role-playing 🙂
* Thinking about it, this is probably one of the reasons the Pirates of the Carribean sequels ended up the way they did…
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Thank you so much Martin for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out the Big Book of Amazing Tales on Kickstarter today!