Tag: card games

The Beast, Day 2

I’m playing The Beast on thatlittleitch! Day 2 is now posted!

These posts linking to thatlittleitch are not sponsored posts.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

The Beast, by Aleksandra Sontowska and Kamil Węgrzynowicz Playthrough

Such a fun thing to see in the mail!
Starting tonight I’m going to be doing a (hopefully daily) feature playing the card game, The Beast, by Aleksandra Sontowska and Kamil Węgrzynowicz. The Beast is an unsettling erotic card game that tells a story about you (the player) and your Beast (who you have sex with). 
The first day, you answer a brief questionnaire about your Beast, make a deck of 19 cards, then pull a card each day for days 2 through 20. You write your responses to the events on the card in a diary.
Traditionally, you burn your diary. However, in the spirit of thatlittleitch, my horror erotica blog, I’m going to be sharing my responses on that Tumblr, and then linking them here on Thoughty. I’ll share a picture of the card I pull, and my response. I have no idea what kind of content will come from this.
I played a beta version of The Beast a while ago, and I really enjoyed it, but it certainly touched in some strange places (in more than one interpretation). I am excited to play it again, and want to share the journey with you. Tonight I’m filling out the questionnaire, with the answers on thatlittleitch!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

I AM Mental

A slight diversion from our normal content, here. It’s semi-political, if my mental health is political. 

Content/Trigger Notice: mental health, depression, bipolar, and similar illnesses are all discussed/specific mentions of binge drinking, suicide, and self-destructive behavior. 

I was going to write about Are You Mental? and its Kickstarter when I got home today. I don’t need to, because there’s this excellent post by Kate Bullock, who is wonderful. I’m going to say shit anyway.

I know I do problematic things in relation to mental health and representation, I totally do, but I’m also extremely aware of how my literal crazy is heavily misrepresented by media and fiction crazy. See, here’s the thing. I live my crazy in public. I don’t think there has ever been a day when someone has asked me about my mental health and I’ve denied them an answer. I joke about it, occasionally, but not often. Often, I’m too busy with it. 

For reference, I have bipolar disorder, anxiety (generalized and social), mild obsessive/compulsive behaviors, issues with seasonal depression, a history of emotional abuse, and have many panic attacks.

Somewhere around 2013ish, I’m not sure when, I started a spiral into an incredibly tragic and damaging mixed/manic episode in which I destroyed friendships, professional relationships, had abusive relationships and may have been abusive myself, wasted more money than is reasonable, experienced massive physical health issues in part because of the irresponsible and self-destructive behavior, and I did a lot of wrong things, including some things that other people would never admit to.

If you ask me? I will try to tell you honestly what happened. There are some times I don’t really know. The funny thing about being so crazy is that you don’t always remember the worst things. Or the best things. Like, I remember drinking an entire bottle of vodka after my then-partner screamed and shook the dinner table for half the meal and tried to hit me. That was not my crazy, nope, but there it was, nestled in the situation my crazy put me in. I don’t remember seeing some of my best friends at conventions where I was so manic, so close to breaking, that I didn’t really sleep for almost 72 hours, and barely ate, and talked so fast I don’t even remember how I managed to talk. I crave those moments. Those moments, at a gaming con, as a gamer, where I was crazy.

I am well medicated, doing therapy, and thankfully with access to good healthcare to keep those things. (No worries, potential employers!) Not everyone has that. Even having it doesn’t mean you’re safe. Everyone who watches me on social media sees these ups and downs of my moods, my bleak moments of depression, my hypomania. Lithium is great, but it does not cure me.

If you sit down and play a game, and you play a mad character, a crazy character, oh, it’s so exciting, isn’t it? To be crazy? To be INSANE? You can do whatever you want! No matter what you do, it’s okay, you’re crazy! Hahaha OMG NOT REALLY.

My freelance career is mostly in tatters. I couldn’t do the work. I couldn’t’ focus. I got nothing done. I have some work – thanks to some very, very generous people – but I’m not a professional. I burned that flag to ashes and dust. I was not a nice person. I wasn’t respectful. Hell, I honestly feel like I lost tons of social relationships alone on this, in part because everyone thought I made someone cheat on their wife,* because that’s totally something I want on my resume.

I am very honest about my mental illnesses so that people can see, in reality, what crazy is. It is not laughing enthusiastically because things are so, so funny, it’s laughing because you actually can’t stop and you don’t know what’s wrong and if you stop you might die. It’s not feeling morose and sad, sitting at a windowsill dripping with raindrops, it’s sitting on your kitchen floor crying because you almost killed yourself, again, you might do it again, you might die. It’s not being nervous around new people you’ve never met before, it’s being afraid to go to your best friend’s house and if they see how much of a goddamn mess you are, you might die. Some of these are figurative. Some of them are extremely not.

Are You Mental? may be super fun and exciting and make a lot of people very happy. All I can say is that I am, actually, mental, and games like that make me feel like I should fucking die.

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Small addendum: 1) I am not asking for this to be paid via Patreon. That feels weird. 2) I did do consulting on the essays for mental health representation in the Lovecraftesque game by Becky Annison and Joshua Fox, and I’m available to do that for other games. Just comment and tag me and we’ll go from there.

*I literally have no desire to deal with people’s defenses of this or justifications. Just leave it alone, it’s better off dead.

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Five or So Questions with David Schirduan

Hi all! I have an interview today with David Schirduan about his games Mythic Mortals and Maroon Corps! He had some cool stuff to say about his projects, so check it out!
Tell me about your project. What excites you about it?

I’ve got two big projects right now, one is just wrapping up, and the other is just beginning.

Mythic Mortals was my first “real” project. Kickstarted last year, I just released the third expansion, which finishes off the content promised in the Kickstarter. In Mythic Mortals, you play as yourself suddenly granted incredible powers. The game uses cards and dice to provide quick, action-packed fights. I designed Mythic Mortals from the ground up to be perfect for one-shots and pick-up games. The thing that excites me most is how easily new players jump into the game. I play almost exclusively with new players, and Mythic Mortals was a unique opportunity to tailor a game specifically for those people.

  • Playing as yourself in your hometown makes it easy to jump into a game.
  • Combat is easy to understand, and easy to engage with.
  • The card mechanics FEEL good. They are very tactile and approachable, so much so that playing online is difficult, and required a bunch of special roll20 guides and assets.
I’m excited to see more games explore the design space for one-shots and introductory gaming.

As for my other project, Maroon Corps began as a sci-fi themed dungeon crawler; my attempt to understand the OSR movement (which is still mystifying to me). Over time it morphed into a board/card game, and then back into an rpg. Maroon Corps replaced skill rolls and resolution mechanics with a resource management, push-your-luck system. Dice are used to track resources, and are rarely rolled at all. There is some randomness, but most of the fun comes from exploration of “What’s in the next room?” rather than “Can I avoid the trap?”. Major inspirations are Into the Odd, One Deck Dungeon, and Paranoia.

Maroon Corps is exciting because it’s my first major dive into dungeon crawlers. I love reading through old modules, looking up maps, and thinking about interesting traps or puzzles. It’s something I haven’t done before. The mechanics themselves play more like a board game than a traditional role-playing game. I’m excited to explore how to blend the two, keeping the best from both mediums:

  • Preserve the straightforward rules and engaging mechanics of board games
  • While still allowing for story-telling and GM-centered world flexibility. 
With Mythic Mortals, you created the game to make it easier to accommodate new players and have short sessions. What did you consider with the design to ensure these things worked?
There are a few things about Mythic Mortals that make it easier for new players:

Simple Rules, Complex Classes. The core rules of Mythic Mortals are boringly simple, and can be explained in about 2 minutes. The complexity and the fun comes from the classes. Player’s only need to know about their own 16 abilities, only 4 of which are active at any given time. They don’t need to know about any other rules, or any of the enemy rules. As it turns out, it takes most players about an hour to figure out and grow comfortable with their class, and another hour or two to master their class completely. This is the sweet spot, and by the end of a session, players have fully explored and enjoyed their class.

  • No Advancement Requirements. Everything is available from the start, albeit with a little luck required. I always hated starting a new game and seeing a really cool level 20 ability that I know I’ll never get to use. Instead, Mythic Mortals uses shifting abilities/weapons/bonuses to provide variety, rather than locking content behind leveling walls.
  • Familiar Setting/Tone. Playing as yourself defending your hometown from monsters makes it very easy to jump into a game. Players can fight at their favorite restaurant, or school. The GM doesn’t need to explain the epic backstory behind this brand new town; everyone already knows the location and the culture.
  • Tactile and Tactical. The cards and the dice are fun to use, and feel really good to manipulate. No pencils or complex math needed! Some players are intimidated by character sheets full of numbers and text boxes, but everyone is familiar with cards and dice. It looks more like a board game, and feels like a card game.
  • Combat is easy and fun. I don’t know about you, but in my first few role-playing games, I clung to combat like a drowned rat. Role-playing, funny accents, dramatic dialogue, or clever planning were alien to me at first. But combat had very clear rules and created constraints for me to work around. “How do you kill it” is easier to engage with than, “What do you say to the king?”. Combat is a great place for new players to engage with the game.
  • Simple to GM. The GM doesn’t have a lot of work to do; enemies are simple, and plots are even simpler. The game includes a handful of adventures, and making your own scenarios is extremely simple. This means Mythic Mortals can be run off the cuff by a GM who just finished the core book.

Mythic Mortals is the kind of game I wanted to play when I started exploring rpgs. It won’t replace huge, multi-session games like DnD, Burning Wheel, or Numenera; but you’ll never find a better game for new players or one-shots.

Since sometimes dungeon crawls can get repetitive, how do you keep people engaged when playing Maroon Corps?

Oohh, great question! Many dungeon crawls live and die based on the quality of the dungeon, rather than the game. Some old-school dungeon modules are played again and again, while others are purposefully forgotten and ignored; even though the both are the same game! Maroon Corps uses a few tricks to get around this problem:

  • Death is Celebrated. A lot of Dungeon Crawlers try to create a tense, dangerous atmosphere where only clever planning and luck will save you. By contrast, Maroon Corps creates a funhouse of sawblades, spiky monsters, and dump traps. Players have 5 backup clones to replace their character when they die. Not only does this minimize death as punishment, but we encourage it by using Lockers.
  • Lockers. When a new clone is revived, they are randomly assigned a locker filled with goodies. Each locker could contain special weapons, one-use items, or strange little oddities. Whenever a trooper dies, it’s like opening a present on Christmas morning. This also means that dungeons don’t need to contain much loot, since most characters will get several lockers worth of goodies.
  • Quirks. A recent addition to the rules, new clones are also assigned a random Quirk which will change how they play the game. Some quirks are mechanical, some are more role-playing focused, but they are all funny and absurd., some are harmful, but most of them are weird or absurd. My favorite quirk so far is: “Clumsy – You cannot use your hands to manipulate your dice. No one may help you.” 
  • Maroon Corps is fast. The mechanics are stripped down and streamlined to provide an almost board-game like experience. Players can move through rooms very quickly, stopping where they want, and speeding through the things that don’t interest them. Players are never bogged down by checking or traps at each room, or slowly touching everything with a 10-ft pole.

Maroon corps provides danger and death, like all good dungeon crawls. But Death is an exciting event, rather than something to be dreaded and avoided.

Mythic Mortals has some interesting card mechanics. Can you talk about how they work and why you put them in place?

I’ve always been a “Mechanics First” kind of designer. Mythic Mortals start out as a small project with one goal: design a role-playing game where your cards are your stats. My original game had about 8 different card slot players needed to fill. With a setup like that, players don’t make decisions; they just keep drawing and placing cards, keeping the best ones, and getting rid of the worst. It wasn’t until I came up with the idea of cards constantly shifting that the game really came together.

I think this is the primary appeal of Mythic Mortals. Every few turns, players get to completely re-build their characters, allowing them to adapt to new situations. It also means that every few turns players get to try out new powers, weapons, or character flaws. Each card presents a tough decision.

Every card has two components: the value, and the suit. Higher values are ALWAYS better, so those cards should be placed with care. There are 4 slots:

  • Mythos: Roll under this slot to use your special abilities.
  • Accuracy: Roll under this slot to use your weapon.
  • Defense: Roll under this slot to dodge attacks.
  • Damage: This is how much damage your attacks deal.

So if you’re surrounded by enemies, and waiting for backup, put your highest card in Defense. On the other hand, if the boss is almost dead, and you need to finish it off, put your highest card in Damage. However, you must also take into account, the Suit of the card. Each Slot has 4 options that can be enabled by the suit of the card in that slot. For example:

You draw a 10 of Hearts, and a 3 of Spades. Normally, you would put the 10 in the slot, simple as that. But the weapon unlocked with Hearts is not very helpful to you right now. The spades weapon, however, is VERY useful. Which one should you put in that slot? It is choices like these that keep Mythic Mortals interesting, forcing you to make tough decisions every few turns.

Could you talk about how you track resources with dice in Maroon Corps?


In Maroon Corps you have two main resources: Suit Charges and Blaster Charges. The Blaster charges are tracked with a 6-sided die showing the current charges. The Suit charges are tracked with a 10-sided die. As you use charges and gain charges, you rotate the die to show the current charges. The core of the game is focused around managing and spending your charges wisely. A few examples:

  • In combat, you can fire your Blaster at an enemy. It deals damage equal to its current charges, and then loses one charge. For example: Your blaster has 4 charges. You fire, dealing 4 damage. Your blaster now has 3 charges.
  • When you take damage, your suit charges are reduced, one for one. For example: You have 5 suit charges. You take 3 damage. You have 2 suit charges remaining. You can also spend suit charges to overcome obstacles: open doors, translate information, detect lifeforms, etc. 
  • When either your suit or your blaster charges get low, you can try charging up. I won’t go into the full rules, but the higher your blaster charges, the more dangerous it is to try and re-charge your suit. Not only does this mean you can accidentally die while trying to charge up, but it also encourages you to shoot as many things as possible.
One of the core themes of the game is that the dice are rarely, if ever, rolled. There is still a little bit of luck and randomness, but the emphasis is on resource management rather than random die rolls. Any tension comes from the mystery of “what’s in the next room” rather than, “Can I roll above a 7?” Players almost never feel cheated by the dice in Maroon Corps.

When can we expect to see more on Maroon Corps?

I have no idea. After running the Kickstarter, I’ve become all too wary of how much pressure sits on a game with an announcement date 🙂 So for now, Maroon Corps is in a casual beta. If anyone wants to peek at the rules, just shoot me an email. I’d be glad to hear some feedback and get some playtesting in.

Thanks so much to David for the interview! I’m looking forward to seeing more about Maroon Corps and I hope everyone enjoys checking out Mythic Mortals!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Five or So Questions with Christian Griffin on Meridian

Today I have an interview with Christian Griffen on Meridian! Meridian is hitting Kickstarter and I’m excited to see how it goes. I’ll let Christian tell you about Meridian in the answers below, and you can check out an actual play as well!

Tell me a little about Meridian. What excites you about it?

Ever since I was little and The Neverending Story came into my life, I’ve been daydreaming of journeys to amazing worlds of the imagination. Occasionally works like Labyrinth or Mirrormask tapped into that same vein and reminded me of how profoundly touching these stories are to me. I’ve always wanted to have that kind of experience with a roleplaying game, but the Hero’s Journey that we get from most adventure RPGs are quite a different thing. It’s only now, after 26 years of playing and 11 years of designing and publishing RPGs that I’ve developed the techniques to bring this dream to life.

What excites me about Meridian is that it provides evocative places, characters, and moments for anyone to go on a fantastical journey, while leaving enough to the group’s imagination to make each experience unique. Of course it’s not exactly the same journey as Atreyu’s in Fantasia or Alice’s in Wonderland, because Meridian is its own place and follows its own laws. It’s my unique addition to the wondrous journey genre, and the games I’ve played with others have been nothing short of magical.


What are the most important elements of the wondrous journey genre that you wanted to bring forth in Meridian?

There is a special sense of fantastical exploration in these stories. Usually the worlds have a dreamlike quality and provide a wonderful canvas for the imagination. We get to experience wonder together with the protagonist, like when Sarah meets a talking fox riding on a sheepdog, or when Alice grows and shrinks because of the foods she ingests in Wonderland.

Though these worlds are dreamlike, they follow their own internal rules. This is true for Meridian as well: every Locale that you visit has three laws, which are generally unbreakable. They also invite imaginative play. For example, in the Midnight Conservatory, anything that’s planted in the soil sprouts and grows into some sort of flower or tree. Players have a lot of playful exploration with this as they figure out what would grow from the various things that the Journeyer has on hand. And most of the time, they’ll find that their subconscious will come up with things that fit, thematically, with the kind of journey they’re on.

What kind of mechanics do you use in Meridian to resolve conflicts and involve story elements?

These journeys are not about conflicts, which sets Meridian apart from most other RPGs. Instead, the mechanics in Meridian focus on changing those who travel through it. Each Journeyer also has an important final decision at the end that’s influenced by the choices made along the way.

Providing story elements is where Meridian really shines. Each Locale has a list of sensory impressions, details, and characters with titles like Helea of the Abandoned Heart or Morok the Shadowmonger. The players use these in conjunction with Cadence cards, which are short, evocative statements such as “a tiny creature, mumbling, eagerly gathering for its collection” or “gauzy walls of gossamer with shadows moving on the other side.” By adding their own dash of imagination, players have a lot of fodder for truly unique characters and moments.

How do you define the different roles in the game – the Journeyer, Guide, Touches, and Companions?

One player controls the Journeyer who explores Locales, interacts with other characters, and goes through changes and choices. Another player, the Guide, is in charge of the Locales and of transitioning the Journeyer among them. The other players start as Touches, who introduce additional characters that interact with the Journeyer. These characters usually remain at their Locales, but a Touch can claim one of them and become a Companion, who will then travel alongside the Journeyer for the rest of the game. There are several kinds of Companions with different roles and options, ranging from a possible romantic connection to a dark aspect of the character’s personality stalking them through Meridian.

Role cards for each player lay out their part in the game and any special rules that apply to them, so players don’t need to pass around the rulebook. It’s a very important design principle for me that players can just focus on their shared imagined journey through Meridian and don’t need much out-of-character talk once they begin.

If you were able to tell a story through Meridian that really captured the essence of the game, what would happen to the Journeyer, and what would you want to have players carry forward?

This is a tough one, because a major part of the design is that every journey is different. I’ve played several journeys through Meridian, both with close friends and with new people at conventions, that have really touched me. In one of them, a Journeyer came to Meridian because, after losing his wife to cancer, he was searching for a way to give his heart away so that he would no longer feel the pain. He thought he would never get better, that his own life was at an end.

As he journeyed through Meridian, he gathered a couple of Companions around him. One was a singer of mournful hymns he met at the Mausoleum of Mirrors. At one of the Locales, she used her progression to sacrifice her own heart to help the Journeyer with his pursuit. They finally arrived at the Midnight Conservatory, where the Journeyer shared the Mournful Gardener’s sorrow and asked him why he was so sad, surrounded by all those beautiful plants. As their tears watered the ground, he realized: “Without sadness there can be no growth.”

So the Journeyer planted his own heart in the soil, and in accordance with the Midnight Conservatory’s laws, a new plant sprung up with fresh hearts growing on it. He took one for himself and gave one to his Companion. He realized now that he had to feel the pain in order to grow, to really live. At the end of that journey, we had tears in our eyes. And we carried something forward from that, something I will always remember as if I’d lived through it myself.

I would love for players to carry their own such insights forward from each of their journeys. But even when a theme didn’t emerge so strongly, we always had moments of beauty, of quirky wonder, of strange but fantastical interactions. And those are always worth the trip.

Thanks so much to Christian for answering my questions! You can check out Meridian on Kickstarter, and see more on Berengad Games’ website.

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Five or So Questions with Alek­san­dra Son­towska and Kamil Wegrzynow­icz on The Beast


Today I have an interview with Alek­san­dra Son­towska and Kamil Wegrzynow­icz on their game, The Beast, a single player, long-play, narrative game. I played The Beast in an early playtest, and it was fascinating – an experience I could never repeat, but certainly a game I’d try again to see something new! See their answers to my questions below.

Note: The Beast is targeted for adults, and the game and this interview both contain sexual content.

What excites you about The Beast?
Kamil: For me it’s about body horror and physiology. It was about breaking boundaries about what I can do with my body and how can I perceive it. There’s a lot of tension and excitement with breaking, rearranging the body, the way it works, experimenting with it.

On the other hand there are feelings involved. What do I feel about sexuality, how do I approach my physiology. How can I deal with all the things that turn me on. So, yeah, these are all the things I found in Barker and Cronenberg and was fascinated by them and I wanted to put in the game.

Aleksandra: One of the things that excites me most about Beast are secrets. The Beast is a secret. You can remember that when I was organizing playtests, the playtesters reveal sparingly what happened with their Beasts, what they looked like, what they wrote in their diaries. People told me what cards didn’t work and why, but without details. They pointed which cards were triggering, but not why. Even now, when there are 2 or 3 actual plays online, I feel there’s so much more, hidden behind what was said or written.

I know, too, that the fact that the game explicitly says to burn or hide the diary makes people uneasy. There’ll be a reason for them to do it.

And I too won’t tell what happened with my Beast. I too shivered with desire and disgust of vivid imagery that came to me.

When you were designing The Beast, what sources did you use for inspiration?

Kamil: I was this brooding and rebellious art geek for a long time, so it was my hobby to find transgressive and weird media. Right now I’ve mellowed but there’s counterculture guy still inside – besides the most important here and mentioned before – Clive Barker and David Cronenberg there was JG Ballard, Kathe Koja, Dusan Makajevev’s Sweet Movie, cinema of transgression, Coum Transmissions’ art and so on. Not always obvious and not always mentioned, we didn’t have enough space, but I guess I owe them a lot.

Also, we were thinking about and designing games about sex and sexuality before. This is what you get when two game designers become a couple. For my part it was a follow up to our earlier game project – Mistress and Sexbot – and the thought that we couldn’t finish this game was nagging me. The Beast first appeared from this design frustration.

But most important and inspiring thing for me here was Aleksandra’s input – her emotions, ideas, and sources she found. They really pushed The Beast forward.

Aleksandra: My sources were more personal . I suddenly discovered pleasure of sex, and then I was reading everything I could find. Mostly these were articles about sex and interviews with people into BDSM and kink. Kvinden der drømte om en mand was an important movie for me, showing a woman sexually obsessed with a man – who was an asshole, really, but it didn’t matter for her. Not often can you find a movie showing sex from woman’s perspective.

What about The Beast do you think causes players to dig so deep into their dark fantasies?

Aleksandra: Is it so? I think important part of this experience is that we’re upfront what the game is about. And when I say: “in this game you’re fucking the monster in your basement” most people will know in a second whether they’re excited or disgusted by the idea (or both). If they’re excited, we’re just helping them.

Kamil: First, long term play. You get used to the beast, and even if question you get is triggering or uncomfortable, you have whole day to deal with your emotions. And long term play makes The Beast part of your daily routine.

Second, questions. Every question had to:

  • be presupposing and provocative, and,
  • involve one or more of four categories: sexual, physiological, personal, social.

This way almost every question should push story forward and affect the player even though the player doesn’t have to answer them. And with all the categories, some questions will hit the player hard and make them think and feel.

With the secretive nature that Aleksandra mentioned, how did you encourage players to both share and keep secrets, using the game’s mechanics and language?
Aleksandra: And why haven’t you shared your Diary widely? ‘Hide or burn’ is for a reason. The Beast is obviously skewed toward keeping silence about what happened during those 21 days, mostly because in the game you’re playing yourself or someone similar to you. It’s the reason the game feels personal – and why players don’t go around talking about it.

Kamil: As of both sharing and keeping secrets – it’s a funny thing. When players are in “honeymoon phase” of the gameplay, by which I mean the moment they bought it and later on the first five or six questions, they are really eager to show off their game and enthusiasm. But later when they’re become invested in the fiction and the game hits them hard they go silent. And even when someone plays The Beast in public it’s visible for me there’s a lot more than what they show to the world.

Most of the instructions and the way it was written is Aleksandra’s work. She really tried to take care of the player and make them feel safe. I think this part is important here. It guides the feel of the gameplay.

What is the most intense experience you have had (that you are willing to share!) with The Beast on your own?
Kamil: For me it was realization how mean and cold I could be in a relationship. I perfectly knew the game tricks me to feel this way but I was still caught off guard when it happened. And even now I’m writing “this happened” instead of ”I thought and decided in the game”.

Second thing in the same gameplay was also realization how my fantasies were growing in unexpected direction. At first I wasn’t sure of my beast, it’s not really my kink, I thought, but let’s see what happens. Later in the game I started to like it and experiment with it. It was scary.

Aleksandra: Excerpt from my Diary:

“Someone knows about the Beast, why aren’t they talking about it?

I panic.

‘I’ll give you a blowjob, just don’t tell anyone about it’.

Kneeling, I clench my mouth on his dick. I’m doing it like the Beast is with my whole body. I swallow his penis, I’m choking, I’m swallowing it again, I’m vomiting his penis and full dinner.

He runs off.

He won’t tell anybody.”

—

Wow! Thank you to Aleksandra and Kamil both for their answers, for sharing their experiences, and for this brilliant look into The Beast. Make sure to check The Beast out on DriveThruCards!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Five or So Questions with Eric Vogel on the Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game

Hi Everyone! Today I have an interview with Eric Vogel, the lead designer on the Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game, a new product coming from Evil Hat via Kickstarter! The game caught my eye because it’s a cooperative game, which (I may have previously mentioned) is my preference, but is hard to find! I love coop games but card games make me hesitant, so I wanted to know more about the design and the motivation behind the product. Check out Eric’s answers below, and check out the Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game on Kickstarter!

Tell me a little about the Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game. What excites you about it?

DFCO is a true cooperative game, with all players working as a team to defeat the game itself. There is no traitor mechanic, etc. The players take on the roles of Harry Dresden, the wizard PI, and a group of his friends & allies trying to solve mysteries and defeat the different villains from the novels. A single game lets you play through 1 novel of the series, although the game also includes a random scenario generator for variety. The players share a common pool of action points, that they alternately spend and contribute to. The game typically comes down to a “showdown” phase in which the players get a series of final die rolls to try to solve the outstanding cases, and defeat the outstanding foes. If they have solved more cases than there are surviving foes left on the board, they win. Otherwise, they lose.

I think what was most exciting for me during the design process was getting to represent the Dresden Files characters and events in game form. Its an incredibly rich world – which is a great resource and really challenging at the same time. I really enjoy the books, and I want to embody them well in the game. At the same time, I wasn’t trying to make a 6 hour game with tons of chrome, and excruciating amounts of detail that only a handful of hardcore gamers who were also hardcore Dresden fans would ever want to play. It was an exciting game challenge to hit the right level of abstraction to achieve thematic feel while making a game that was accessible to all the Dresden constituencies: board gamers, RPG players, and just fans of the novels.

Now its super exciting to see how excited the Dresden fans are getting about DFCO. Its really taking the buzz to a new level. We got a lot of attention at GAMA. Did that answer your question?

It did! What motivated you, from fiction and audience, to make this a cooperative game, considering the popularity of competitive games?

When Evil Hat commissioned the game from me, they specified that they wanted a cooperative game from me – so it was not a choice I made. I’ll be honest, that was not initially something I was happy about. I had not designed a cooperative game previously, and I was not a big fan of them at that time. I had done some game development work on someone else’s cooperative, and I felt like I had given them most of the lingering ideas I had for how to do a cooperative game. So I ended up starting from zero, doing a lot of playing co-ops as research, and making a lot of false starts before I finally came up with the core mechanics of DFCO. You may get to glimpse some of those false starts when I publish the prototype history for DFCO in a Kickstarter Bulletin – something that has become kind of a tradition for me and EHP now. Anyway, in the process I discovered that there are several co-ops I really enjoy, and I figured out what it is I don’t like about some co-ops. I had previously believed that I had a fundamental objection to the lack of competition, but it was really more the lack of the ability to make an individual contribution to the success or failure of a challenging task, in an interactional context. So I made sure DFCO had that in spades. So now I have a whole new genre of game that I enjoy playing! that was a nice side benefit. I don’t know if I will design any more co-ops after this one or not. If DFCO is a hit, I will probably encounter demand for them. However, I really don’t like repeating myself, so I would need an idea for a co-op that was fundamentally mechanically different from DFCO.

DFCO uses the Fate system elements, which is really cool. What have you done with the game to meld the Fate system tools into a card game?

It probably mirrors or represents those elements more that it literally uses them. I am not an RPG player, and I am not terribly knowledgeable about RPG mechanics. However, the “ah-ha” moment of the DFCO design came out of me reading the Fate Accelerated rules (which I found a lot more accessible than most RPG rules) and seeing a way to represent the Fate mechanics in card game mechanics, starting with the basic actions of Fate Accelerated: Attack, Overcome, etc. There are also mechanics in DFCO derived loosely from troubles and stunts. I experimented with reflecting the Fate system at a more nuanced level,using concepts like approaches, but I found that was too high a level of detail for the design I wanted to execute. There was even a phase in which I was trying to create a kind of generic Fate System cooperative card game, but I soon moved away from that and refocused on making the game reflect the specifics of the Dresden Files. Still, the game has action types that will be mostly familiar to Fate RPG players, it uses Fate Dice, and players both spend and generate Fate points. 

What kind of challenges did you encounter with applying the fiction of Dresden Files to a Fate and card game format, without losing the feel of the novels and characters?

In my day job as a professor of clinical psychology, one of my specialty areas is qualitative research. When you do qualitative analysis, the key challenge is to find the right level of abstraction. If you abstract too much, you lose the key meanings in the raw data. If you abstract too little, your analysis is convoluted, muddled, and doesn’t provide clear understanding. It is a similar task when you need to represent a series of novels with a card game. Too much abstraction, and the game doesn’t feel like the source material anymore. Too little abstraction, and it isn’t a very accessible game – its the kind of game only certain gamers want to play. The Dresden Files novels appeal to a wide audience, so I thought the game should too. You can never strike the perfect balance for everyone, but hopefully I struck the best balance for the widest audience. Time will tell.


During playtesting and from player feedback, what were the pieces of positive feedback that made you have an “I’ve got this!” feeling?

I don’t think the game really came together until I added the “talent” mechanic, which is a character specific-power that players get to use whenever they discard a card to generate Fate Points for the team. That made all the turns fun, and added a key decision point that gave the individual players more responsibility for the team’s strategy. Once that was in place, what I observed was a change in the character of the discussions players were having during the game. In my least favorite co-ops, one player tends to act as leader and dictate a course of action to everyone else; its natural enough that happens, its an inherent aspect of group dynamics. But I found that the players in DFCO were having a much more interactional discussion about how to play; they weren’t just acting independently, and they were not just deferring to the judgement of one player. That was when I knew I was onto something.


Awesome! Thanks Eric, so much, for answering my questions about the Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game! I’m excited to see another coop game on the market, and it sounds like a lot of people will have a great time with this one. Check out the new game on Kickstarter!




This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

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!

Brie Sheldon Interviews Julio Matos and Igor Toscano


This was such a fun interview! +Julio Matos and +Igor Toscano were fantastic to talk to, even though I butchered their names when I introduced them. 

The Brazilian scene is fascinating, and I’m looking forward to seeing more in the future!

Five or So Questions with Ryan Macklin on Backstory Cards

Backstory Cards are currently Kickstarting!

Tell me a little about Backstory Cards. What excites you about them?

Backstory Cards is a tool I made to create surprising, dynamic backstory between characters in an RPG. The cards have prompts on them and methods for randomly tying together PCs, events, NPCs, and locations in the world. Some are cooperative in nature (“When push came to shove at event, PC displayed something you weren’t expecting. What was it, and how did you react?”), dramatic (“You, PC, and individual were caught up in a love triangle or other complicated romantic entanglement. Who came out the better? At what cost?”), or even adversarial (“Place is important to [you/PC], and the other one harmed or threatened to harm it. What happened, and how did [you/they] get away with it?”) Everyone answers around two prompts each, and you have some interwoven history with immediately usable hooks.

You know those moments of surprise in games, when someone comes up with something that seems out of the blue, but also seems like exactly the right thing to say at that time? I live for those moments in RPGs, as a GM and as a player. And I love character setups that ask pointed questions, which I’ve been doing at convention games for years (after learning how to do it from Paul Tevis and Brian Isikoff). But the two never quite meshed together for me, because either I was asking the leading questions myself or the game was providing a host of questions to choose from. Don’t get me wrong, I love that stuff! But there’s something special about being asked a pointed question you weren’t expecting, and then coming up with an inspired answer that makes everyone else at the table excited to play.

I love asking good questions! How did you come up with these questions for the cards?
I’ve been using this technique for years at convention games with partially pre-generated characters. When I would make the pregens, I would have some likely relationships between the characters in mind, but leave the question of “why” out of it. I did that with heroic moments, with love triangles, with complicated pasts. I would create interesting NPCs and ask them all questions to pump up that NPC, and then start the game at the NPC’s funeral; I called this technique “the Xavier method” because for a year I kept naming that character Xavier.

Years of doing that, and then becoming more improvisational about it, gave me the basis for the first couple dozen questions. I’ve also played in a lot of convention games with amazing question-asking GMs like Paul Tevis and Brian Isikoff, who are significant influences in Backstory Cards. All of those experiences have worked out my improvisational Socratic muscles into lean fighting form.

What sort of games do you think these cards would be most effective for?
I tell people that Backstory Cards are good for pretty much any RPG where characters are interconnected at the start of the game. Obvious systems would be for Fate, Cortex+ Drama, and Dungeon World, where relationships can or are put on the character sheet in some form. But I’ve also used this method (or seen this used) in GURPS, Heroquest, GUMSHOE, Don’t Rest Your Head, various dungeon crawl games, and so on.

But it’s particularly effective when what you as a group emphatically want to riff on character history as part of the game, whether it’s a plot motivator or just as banter. If you need something superficial, it might be a waste of time (but might also create player buy-in). I’m also super-curious to try it as a Fiasco hack, but I’m betting more likely than not that it’ll result in a weaker Fiasco game.

How do you think we can, as gamers, use good questions more in games?
My take on questions in games, whether in character creation or in play, is to take to heart one strong idea: answers are agency. Whether that’s asking you about minor scene elements, character backstory, or major plot points, by asking questions you’re promising agency. Respecting that promise at the table is important. You know those moments when you are specifically offered input, and after you answers someone response with “You know what would be even cooler?” That’s not respecting the promise of agency. (That doesn’t mean every answer is equally valid — agency comes with it responsibility. But that gets into answers as negotiation rather than wholesale negation.)

The *World games show how to use questions in play in a brilliant manner — I have always appreciated how Vincent crafted questions as currency.

There’s a tendency to eschew the yes/no question because it can frequently lead to nowhere, in favor of open questions. Most of the time, that’s true, but there can be power in the yes/no questions. I recall one time when Josh Roby ran Full Light, Full Steam at a Nerdly Beach Party. The party was on a giant gondola and I wanted to shoot at some people below us who were looking to do the same thing. Josh ask me if I thought the windows slid or otherwise easily opened, and my gut was to say “of course” because saying no felt like a stop. Then I thought about it and say “Of course they’re solid glass! That makes it more awesome because I have to shoot through it.”

A lot of time, the yes/no question is too simplistic, but look for opportunities to turn that on its ear.

What’s up next for you?
I always have games and other projects cooking. The biggest one that I’m slowly chipping at is called the Emerging Threats Unit — an action-investigation horror game that asks “What if the secret agency fighting supernatural threats wasn’t in the FBI, but in the CDC?” I’m slowly creating it in the open, writing about pieces here and there on my blog. (Here’s a detailed bit about the premise.)

More importantly, I have a wedding coming up with Lillian Cohen-Moore. That’s my big upcoming project, and I have three conventions between now to also eat my time and mental bandwidth. Perhaps when that’s behind me, I’ll make a worker placement game that’s about getting ready for a wedding — a cooperative game where you play the couple, the best human, human of honor, wedding planner, and officiant. After all, They say write what you know, and right now this is my life.