Quick Shot on Thistle and Hearth

Hi all! I’m excited for this interview with Aven Elia McConnaughey and Natalie the Knife about Thistle and Hearth, which is on Kickstarter for Zine Quest 2! Check out the responses below!

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What is Thistle and Hearth, both as a product and as your vision?

Thistle and Hearth is a game of belonging outside belonging that combines a dark fairytale aesthetic with the experience of growing up as a Lutheran in Minnesota. Inconvenient spirits, punishing winter, and mercurial fae challenge the community. True Names, vows, and acts of creation bring them comfort.

To be honest, the idea for Thistle and Hearth literally came to me in a dream. It was some sort of high-action romp, but the things that stuck with me were the aesthetic notes of deep forest, deep winter, and elk riders. These aesthetic notes weren’t really enough to turn into a game until I shared them with my co-designer, Natalie (@rpgnatalie). The most exciting thing about designing this game has to do with genre – a thing I love playing with in games and game design.

To me, a lot of the indie game space for the past decade has been in pursuit of genre. Apocalypse World gave an approachable toolkit for replicating specific fictional genres in games, leading to countless hacks. Dream Askew//Dream Apart followed a number of years later, using similar tools to subvert existing genres, rather than just replicating them. What Natalie and I have done with Thistle and Hearth is create a genre that exists nowhere else by making playbooks and motifs that assume archetypes for this genre-that-doesn’t-exist. People expect playbooks to rely on tropes, but we’ve created playbooks without the tropes, and it turns out that creates a really unique play experience.

It sounds like you’re bringing forward a very specific experience. How does the life of a Lutheran in Minnesota connect to dark fairytale aesthetic, and what are some examples of how players will experience this?

So the game is influenced by Aven’s experience growing up in a Lutheran community and Natalie’s experience in community with people who were part of the church. The way the church manifested was heavily influenced by the local climate – months of winter where it was too cold to go outside, with too little sunlight, where the climate becomes a thing you have to guard against in certain ways. The game has five motifs that determine the themes and forces that will be at play in your game, and each one reflects a different aspect of our experiences.

This is represented in the game very literally with the Winter motif, which brings scarcity to the community, and asks how do you make do with less than you need? This can also lead to tension between playbooks. For example, the Forged and the Morning Frost respectively represent a tension between repurposing what we have in order to get what we need, and making things that bring joy or beauty but may be a frivolous use of resources.

The church also often had an insular narrative – we didn’t necessarily think things that were outside of our community were bad, but we didn’t understand them, and there was a prominent narrative that we did not belong out there – in the cold, in the wider world, or, in Thistle and Hearth, in the Woods. A part of this was coping with the fact that we lived in a place where living is hard and grueling most of the time – by making the unfamiliar undesirable, we made the familiar desirable.

The Thistlefolk, our name for the fae, represent how power works sometimes in communities of faith. There are often people who you know little to nothing about but who either you as an individual or the wider community are beholden to – they hold power over you and their rules must be followed. Both the Thistlefolk and Family motifs explore questions over how power is distributed, and how it affects someone who is part of the community in ways that are not explicitly violent or economic.

Lutheran communities often build their identity around shared histories, but these are not always true to what actually happened. In Thistle and Hearth, the dead can come back to speak their truths, and that may complicate the things that the community hold as sacred, or it can be used to reinforce this shared history. They can also function metaphorically as a representation of people who have left the community but still have a connection to it, and can demystify the unknown in ways that breaks down the in-group/out-group narrative.

Exploring genre, or the surpassing of genre, is something that fascinates me. How did you use the Belonging-Outside-Belonging system to develop this new genre and how does it influence play?

PbtA games use move-like-mechanics to establish what people do in the world, and the fictional consequences of acting in those ways. This is used to reinforce genre by recreating the paradigms of action found in therein. Belonging Outside Belonging games go a step further by codifying what kinds of action makes characters vulnerable, and what kinds of action allow them to advance their agenda.

In Thistle and Hearth we included moves and grouped them in ways that either subvert existing genre influences, or else completely ignore them in favor of something new. For example, one of the Forged’s weak moves is “lash out in anger.” In other genres, this would probably be a strong or regular move for a physical-strength oriented playbook like the Forged. In this game, and this genre, it is something that they do to show their vulnerability.

If moves and their categorization makeup one part of the genre of the game, another important mechanical aspect of genre is the motifs. Motifs (which might be called “situations” or “setting elements” in other BoB games) establish fictional powers in the world, and the players together control them and influence how they are used in play. The group’s collective experiences, while perhaps based on their existing cultural knowledge, create a new genre when combined together.

Without shared control of the motifs, it would be up to individuals in the group to understand, synthesize, and then reproduce for everyone else. That would be much, much harder, and it would be more likely for the player’s existing cultural knowledge to leak into their creation of the genre. The motifs may be familiar to players individually, but the game leads to play that explores how they connect to each other to define a fictional world. The space between the different motifs has a somewhat defined shape, but it is only through play that a group can discovers what fills the empty space.

In contrast to Dream Askew, the lists that players pick from to define motifs are quite broad in Thistle and Hearth. There is a tendency towards higher variation between the motifs from game to game. The genre that the players explore together can have a vastly different texture depending on the options they choose. In one playtest, the Thistlefolk hoarded secrets, so much so that they sent a member of their brethren into the community to steal a particularly juicy secret. In another, the Thistlefolk craved music and violence; we elaborated on them as extravagant party-throwers who could appear at the drop of a hat and stay for days, leaving little time for sleep or solitude.

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Thank you SO much to Aven and Natalie for this interview!! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Thistle and Hearth on Kickstarter today!

(edited to add second interviewee, my bad)