Hi all! Today I have an interview with Nicholas Kitts on the game Children of the Beast, which is currently on Kickstarter! It’s a game that uses a phone app combined with a beautifully illustrated book to play stories about monster hunting! I loved the art so I had to know more! Check out the interview below.
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Tell me a little about Children of the Beast. What excites you about it?
Oh man, such an open-ended question. So, I played rpgs since I played 1st ed D&D with my dad in elementary school. And the thing I miss most about those years is a sense of wonder and exploration, about never being sure what was around the corner. Sure, some of that was just childish naivete, but man there magic in reading crappy black and white drawings of bizarre monsters like the flumph. Now I’ve played and read so many rpgs that I’m gotten pretty jaded, finding myself enjoying narrative rpgs more often if only because they offer something fresh.
So we wanted to focus on that aspect of exploration with Children of the Beast, I really wanted to bring something new to the table that people would have to play to discover. So I’m excited about people discovering things like fleshsmithing body parts, finding out they can speak to sentient slime, and learning that the tunnel they’re in is actually the insides of a giant worm. We actually try to hide a lot of mechanics so people learn as they go!
I’m also just excited about our aesthetic, which I’ve heard described as “grotesque, but oddly beautiful”, which is totally what we’re going for.
What is the core activity of play in Children of the Beast, and what are the characters like? How does the Hunter’s Blood impact the character’s experiences in game?
So your group gets to explore the wilds of the Warrens, it’s like a living landscape that constantly shifts and evolves, like mother nature on steroids. You’re intending to explore it as beast hunters, tracking down creatures that have contracted a mutating plague called the Corruption. However, as you learn more about the world it becomes obvious it’s not just a simple matter of tracking down and killing monsters. It’s a world full of characters and personalities affected by the Corruption and the Warrens, and you figure out how your character would react to all of it and develop. Of course, it can always be just about wanton murder, but it’s still an rpg, you can explore what parts of it you want.
The Hunter’s Blood is sort of a genetic thing that makes your characters immune to the Corruption and actually capable of hunting beasts. The public has a terrified respect of you, like if Cthulhu was your plumber or something. They will trust you to do your job but otherwise they want nothing to do with you, maybe even prefer you were dead. This can cause a lot of juicy interpersonal conflict as what you need to do becomes more complex, which I love, haha.
How did you come up with the various beasts and their designs, and how do you mechanize them in the game?
Man, how do we come up with monsters… It’s honestly a tricky question! I’ve probably come up with over half of the initial ideas, but working with a team means everyone kinda gets to put their little touch on things. Like the artists we work with sometimes just come up with cool ideas I never even thought of once they start sketching. The goblin, which is like this giant bone worm thing with a nest of skulls, is one that I love how it came out, even though in some ways it was quite different than what I initially imagined. A lot of my ideas have been initially seeded by dreams I had, so I don’t know how much that helps people, haha.
Mechanically it depends. We often have mechanical ideas when we create a creature, but game development is a complicated beast, sometimes ideas just don’t work out in playtesting as well as you thought they would. We always try to bring something new to the table with each one, and that can sometimes be quite difficult to do without significantly increasing the scope of the project, haha.
But in general, we try to achieve at least two of three things:
- Does it have a unique method of attacking?
- Does it have a unique method of defense or an interesting weakness?
- Does it have a unique twist, like with its senses or movement that changes how they would approach the creature?
#3 is obviously the trickiest, and can overlap a bit with the other two, but it’s just a guideline for making interesting creatures. Honestly doing a whole bunch of unique things can be terrible for a single creature design, as it loses focus and players will have difficulty understanding what they need to do.
How do you design a game with rich interpersonal narratives and the technological interface you use and still make it a safe place for people to play? What did you have to consider with content and people’s comfort levels, considering the artistic depiction of some of the monsters?
So this is actually something we think about a lot. We’ve been lucky to have a very diverse team over the years, and each one has helped give me a new perspective on things since I’m a pretty standard cis white guy.
We don’t find it necessary to really comment much on gender for example. A lot of “survival of the fittest” type games can often devolve into some pretty reductionist gender roles, but fact of the matter is this is a fantasy game, and we don’t need any of that cruft to make the world feel real. In the app, you can choose from a variety of icons for your gender and boy did we include a lot. Now being inclusionary is more than just saying “look, we included you!”, so we hope people find and enjoy the other ways in which we’ve worked to have a diverse world.
But in the end, we can be pretty gross at times. We just try to stick to more “body horror” type grossness, and we try not to revel in it either. I want you to feel surprised, not sick. The point of the game is to have fun, and if the themes of the game sound interesting to you than we hope you enjoy it. I admit I’m not entirely sure what to do if someone finds something we did objectionable, at least other than try to ignore it and hope it doesn’t play a prominent role. I’ve played in a lot of groups with a “rule of x” or something similar, where a subject or action can be cut out of the narrative, and I can only hope people feel comfortable doing that with our game. The app connects over the internet, but it needs a password for your campaign so we really intend for it only to be played with friends.
How does the game work using the phone app interface? How did that open your options with mechanics and design?
Designing a game with an app is like working with an angel and a demon.
On one hand, there have been many mechanics we cut or changed because they would have been incredibly awkward to use in the app. It’s actually because of this that we’ve been trying to have our tools be as flexible as possible, where the app doesn’t have to “know” everything for you to use something in game.
But having a sort of forced editor like that, where clean mechanics result in less work the programmers have to do, is something I’ve really appreciated over the years. Because many of the mechanics we did cut were in fact just awkward to begin with. The app also allows more advanced mechanics, like our wound system, to become possible. You gotta be careful though. If a mechanic is unplayable by hand it’s not really playable, especially for our game that doesn’t require the companion app. So for us, an “advanced mechanic” the app can help with is one that has a lot of simple steps, steps that can be reduced to only a few decisions when using the app. We’re actually still trying to streamline certain aspects of the wound system, as I’d like it to still be easier to play by hand.
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Awesome, thanks Nicholas! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Children of the Beast on Kickstarter!
