Hey, friends, supporters, consumers, and colleagues. this one is a little important.
I hope the best came for you in major holidays for each culture and religion or lack thereof that came before this post, and the same wishes for you in the festivities (or lack thereof!) to come. Please stay safe in the continuance of COVID-19 and the many dangers all marginalized people face, and seek joy in every moment – even if it’s fleeting, it heals more than all the rest.
That being said, this is me. Beau Sheldon.
Me. 2020.
Content warnings for discussion of mental illness, physical disability, financial insecurity, gender identity, gender dysphoria, mention of hallucinations, mention of schizoaffective disorder, mentions of political and social issues in the United States, and details of creative dysfunction.
Thoughty remains! So does Script Change. I still hope to do some interviews, as mentioned, very periodically. I want to talk more about design, and about leadership in games. I want to talk about the things I personally enjoy in games, break them down, see if I can make them make sense. I hope when the worldsuck eases I’ll release more games, though I doubt anything I do solo will be as big and fancy as Turn. I’ll be separately supporting my partners with their projects. Oh yeah, and I’ll still be accepting guest blogs here when I can build up a larger fund for paying creators!
Times do change.
My first interviews were before Thoughty – on my previous and now defunct site that I ported here with Systir Productions & 616, and on Gaming as Women with attendees of a Gamerati game day and then Judy Bauerof all people. I kicked off Thoughty and Five or So Questions in 2014 as a continuation of the original blog, but only the interviews really stuck around.
Me in 2013 at Gen Con with F. Wes Schneider, Paizo’s then Editor-in-Chief, who I had interviewed for GAW.
I have done over three hundred interviews on Thoughty, about 250 of those being Five or So Question interviews. I have only had a few interviews fully fail to be completed due to scheduling, and one pulled by the creator. I’ve interviewed people about not just tabletop but also card, board, and video games, plus lonely solo games, huge collections of tabletop and live action games, their artwork, their design process, their Kickstarters, and more. I have had an exceptional opportunity to pick the brains of the most brilliant designers in tabletop games, from legacy designers like Ron Edwards to genius women designers like Dr. Jessica Hammer and Meguey Baker to groundbreaking modern designers like Jay Dragon and Rae Nedjadi. Many of these people I have grown to consider friends and colleagues, and I’m so grateful for the amazing things I’ve learned from them and shared with you.
I have been supported by my Patreon supporters primarily for these interviews, enough funds to pay for my website and a bill every so often, some busy months enough to help me pay medical expenses. I am incredibly grateful for my supporters, for everyone who has shared an interview, recommended a creator to reach out to, or praised my interviews, regardless of whether they supported me financially!
You may ask, if this is so great, why does the title say you’re ending interviews? What does this mean for Thoughty? Why has the site been so slow recently, anyway? Well, that’s what I’m gonna try to answer here. This is… a bit long. I’m still me, you know.
Hi all! Today I have an interview with the creators of Into the Mother Lands, a new project being performed on and sponsored by Twitch and released on YouTube, developed using the Cortex Prime RPG system. You can keep up to date on the project through their Twitter or Discord, and until then, check out the responses from Tanya DePass (T.D.), B. Dave Walters (B.D.W.), and Gabe Hicks (G.H.) below!
Catch Into the Mother Lands, a Cortex Prime RPG actual play using a new sci-fi IP created by Tanya DePass, leading a team of veteran Black & POC creatives as they build the world and its stories together at twitch.tv/cypheroftyr, Sundays at 4pm Pacific/6pm Central/7pm Eastern/5pm Mountain time.
What an amazing team, and with Tanya at the lead! For our readers who may be new to your work, could each of you introduce yourselves and talk about your experience and specialties that you’re bringing to the Into the Motherlands RPG?
B.D.W.: I say words about things! I have been playing games for about 30 years now. I’m the writer and co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons: A Darkened Wish and DM for the streaming series of the same name. I also have written for Werewolf the Apocalypse 5th Edition and some other unannounced World of Darkness projects.
I have also consulted on increasing diversity and inclusion in a number of well-known gaming properties.
T.D.: I’ve been a diversity & inclusion consultant in RPG’s for the last few years, have writing credits with Green Ronin, Paizo, Monte Cook Games, WotC and have been playing RPG’s since I could hold a D6.
G.H.: Hi, my name is Gabe Hicks! I’m a voice actor, streamer, and designer who works in digital and tabletop. I have written for MOBAs, worked with Paizo, Zweihander, a plethora of other companies and systems and narrative work and taking those experiences and working with different worlds is part of how my design and narrative process have helped me in building this world for Into the Motherlands RPG. It’s learning a little bit from each piece that I’ve done and considering how it all blends in the world together.
There is hype for Into the Motherlands already, but what are you most excited to explore? How does your use of streaming and your varied backgrounds impact your presentation of these exciting elements?
B.D.W.: I am most interested in being able to explore a sci-fi setting that’s not ultimately a bland retelling of the Westward Expansion! We have the privilege of painting an entirely new portrait of a civilization completely free from colonialism, and that has been an incredibly satisfying mental exercise. I can’t wait for you to see it!
TD: I’m excited to tell a story without colonization and slavery as part and parcel of the world’s lore and history. To see where our folks wind up and how their choices become a canon part of our world.
G.H.: I’m really excited to give a core premise for worlds and then see how people build onto them or build their own. There’s a lot here that we have to build up and create more and more, and it’s an opportunity not often given to really have a whole fresh start especially when it comes to world’s imagined specifically by people of color. With the different skill set and experiences of the team as a whole when it comes together it’s beautiful. We’re able to figure out and design a game that plays well in a show format but doesn’t have to be a show to be fun.
That sounds great! So tell me about Into the Motherlands. What is different about it from other sci-fi settings? How are you demonstrating the unique elements?
TD: It’s different in that we’re not going for super grim dark, it’s populated by a variety of cultures and does its best to invert a lot of tropes.
G.H.: We built this system with such a heavy emphasis on storytelling in a sci-fi setting. So many people try to make games that are combat in space without as much emphasis I’d like in story, world building, and creating entirely just new ideas rather than playing off tropes. Not to mention, when we do see these things there is almost never African inspiration tied into them.
What is it like debuting a game on Twitch? Are there unique challenges or benefits that come from this platform as your showcase?
TD: It’s hard because we discovered people will backseat literally anything, including a brand new system and even the production of the show. Benefits are that people can see it done real-time, but also you get to see the weird commentary and other things people are throwing around. For me, it’s hard because all these theories are so incredibly wrong, but you can’t stop playing to address it in chat.
G.H.: I honestly think I’m spoiled now with development. We get a chance to see LIVE what people are interested in, what people want to see more of, what people want to know more about and it honestly makes my job so much more interesting. It’s an opportunity to literally focus on the things people want and then create extra on top. This isn’t a circumstance where we have to wait and see what gets people interested during development. It’s such a fortunate thing.
Where did the inspiration for Into the Motherlands or your work on it come from? How have you workshopped ideas when you’re working to avoid colonialism? Does that come naturally to your team?
TD: We just talked, and decided there would be no colonialism, slavery etc. It’s not that hard and we didn’t need to workshop it. With an all Black & POC writing team, we just opted out off that, simply because Sci fi and fantasy don’t need those to tell a compelling story.
G.H.: It does come pretty naturally. It’s a team effort and that’s so clear when we sit down and work. Like Tanya said it was just a straight up choice, none of it. I’ve literally been reading into the different biomes and environments in Africa, the way flora and fauna interact, and how much variety there is in life. It’s been a never ending supply of inspiration and stuff to share.
What’s it like working on an inclusive and diverse team that’s got such varied perspectives? Does it feel more freeing to work in this way, and does it help on this specific project to be such a diverse team?
TD: Absolutely it’s more freeing. However, we assembled this talented team of Black & POC creatives not just to be ‘diverse’ but because everyone is super talented and capable. While it’s being pointed out that we’re an all Black & POC team, by us because for me (and maybe others) it’s the first time we’ve had that option. But it’s not the only thing about our group, game and show.
G.H.: It’s freeing. Someone always has a new perspective or an insight. IT’s not just one point of view but it’s like knowing we all have some different experiences in some of our similar views. I feel a bit like I have less to prove of myself, a bit like I can already say “These people get it.”. On this project especially, having a diverse team is huge part of why this game works as well as it does. It’s a testament to diversity being such a boon in creation.
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Thank you so much to all three of those able to respond for this interview! I hope you all enjoyed this interview, and that you’ll check out Into the Mother Lands on Twitch each Sunday!
Catch Into the Mother Lands, a Cortex Prime RPG actual play using a new sci-fi IP created by Tanya DePass, leading a team of veteran Black & POC creatives as they build the world and its stories together at twitch.tv/cypheroftyr, Sundays at 4pm Pacific/6pm Central/7pm Eastern/5pm Mountain time.
The cover for The Map is not The Territory. Love it!
Thanks for joining me for an interview, Chris! I’m excited to hear about your project, The Map is not The Territory. What is your experience like in games that it led you to this project?
I’ve been noodling around the RPG industry in a variety of capacities since the mid-2000s, but I didn’t get serious about freelancing and publishing my own stuff until the tail end of 2014. Since then I’ve published a few things ‘the old-fashioned way’, and run four Kickstarters — three successful, one un. I think what specifically led me to this project though is less of my industry experience and more that running my RPG business as a side gig means I tend to make whatever I feel like making and hope it speaks to people. TMINT itself springs from my love of remixes, remakes and covers — I love the way different people can arrive at such wildly different creations even if you give them the same origin point.
In essence it’s a project motivated by my personal foibles when it comes to running a business and my personal tastes in creative media, to which I am personally contributing very little. The irony feels good.
Coordinating a big team of creators and being part of such a team can create a lot of challenges. What made you uniquely suited for this project and this team?
Like… as I mentioned above, this is a very personal project. It’s a thing I wanted to exist, so I decided to take the steps to make that happen. And in that sense I am the only person who could have originated this project, because it has its roots in things I enjoy and things I appreciate. I’m the only person with this particular combination of perspective, tastes, skills, and reach — therefore, I am uniquely suited to this project and this team because anyone else who did something similar would produce a different project with a different team.
But.
Everybody has a network and a perspective and some tastes. Skills can be learned, or skilled people can be hired. I like to remind people that if I ever do something that looks complex, it’s really just several simple things layered together. If I do something that looks difficult, at base it’s just several smaller, easier things combined into a greater whole. Anything I can do, can be done by someone else. Anybody could create this kind of project, and in that sense there is literally nothing that positions me as uniquely qualified to do so.
Which, I’d like to emphasize, is a good thing. Every human being is unique, and brings a unique perspective to their creations — which, full circle, is the whole point of TMINT. To highlight those unique perspectives by giving them a common origin and seeing how they grow outwards from there.
…of course, if you’re asking ‘do you have any excellent team management skills?’ the answer is ‘lol no I’m making this up as I go along’ — but I like to get the old philosophy degree out for an airing now and then.
The map by Dyson Logos that is at the center of the project.
What is The Map is not The Territory as a project, and what is the vision for the project? What from your prior experience helped you create it?
The Map is not The Territory is a project to show what a single origin point can look like when viewed through as many different lenses as possible. The vision is to bring together authors, game designers, scientists, and poets, and showcase the creativity which each individual brings to the basic concept. I want anyone into RPGs to find something they can use in there, whether it’s a dungeon quest, a whole other game, a world of adventure… something. I want people to flip through it and go ‘ooooh’.
Because I’ve been noodling around the RPG industry for years and running my own publisher for slightly fewer years, I’ve got experience with the practicalities of turning manuscripts into finished pdfs and printed books. I know how to budget and run a Kickstarter because I’ve run three successful ones (and if people want to know more about that, I do a public postmortem after every one). I’ve got all the skills needed to turn a concept into a reality. I, uh… just need the money.
For each of the 24 contributors, what is included in their contribution to the project? How did you determine the scope of the project – how long it should be, what it should cover, etc.?
Each contributor is going to write me 500-1000 words on a subject of their choice, inspired by the map, which will go alongside a customised version of the map. Some versions of the map are going to be almost the same as the original. Some are going to be wild.
I always wanted it to cover as many different interpretations of the map as possible — and to have those interpretations be as far from each other as possible — and I think we’ve hit a really good range. The sheer variety of responses when I asked for pitches was stunning, and I deliberately grabbed a selection each from ‘normal with a twist’, ‘kinda weird’, and ‘left field’ to make sure there was something for everyone.
The scope of the project was defined largely by the tension between two opposing forces: wanting to pay everyone a decent sum for their work on one hand, and what I could expect to sell it for on the other. (Down with capitalism.) I wanted to include as many authors as possible, so I just kept incrementing that number on my budget spreadsheet until I hit the balancing point between ‘will sell for about $15’ and ‘paying all the contributors okay money’.
My basic idea was that every interpretation of the map, plus the custom map, plus some art and/or layout flourishes, would sit on a double-page spread, making for a slim softcover. Once again, I was thinking about how much I could afford to pay each contributor without exploding my budget — you get 300-ish words per page, so 500 words plus a map can fit on one spread. My original idea was for a minimum of 32 pages, but with 24 contributors we’re looking at minimum 48 pages plus a few frontmatter odds and ends. I think some of the pitches I’ve received are going to run somewhat longer than that though, so the page count might go up.
Kickstarter takes a decent amount of risk out of the equation, but at the same time I didn’t put it on Kickstarter to see if it was workable — I put it on there because I already think it’s workable and I want it to succeed.
The map for Samantha Hancox-Li’s “The Luminous Depths.”
This seems like such a cool idea! So how did you find your amazing contributors? What did you look for in their ideas?
I put an open call for pitches out on Twitter and left it open for… two weeks? A month? I forget exactly. Some time. Anyway, I also specifically reached out to some marginalised creators and asked them for pitches directly because I’d heard that marginalised folk tend to self-select out of stuff like this. Once I had a nice Google sheet full of pitches, I extracted all the pitch details without looking at the names so I could do a proper blind pick.
Once I had all the pitches, I divided them into three broad categories: ‘dungeon crawl with a twist’, ‘something unusual’, and ‘highly weird’. Then I grabbed my (more or less) eight favourites in each category and that was the final 24.
I looked for slightly different things in each category. For the weird section I wanted properly out-there stuff — things which used the map in such a way that it was barely recognisable as a dungeon any more. The unusual section consists of things which are recognisable as roleplaying adventures but use the map in an interesting way or have a unique twist. And for the dungeon crawl section I wanted to see fresh elements which you don’t often see in other dungeons. And I got all of those things in spades! The scale of creativity in the pitches was amazing, and if I could make
What made you decide on the particular map that you’re using? What is unique about it?
I originally went to Dyson Logos’ page because I knew he was a very good dungeon cartographer. I was sort of half thinking to hire him, half thinking to consult his designs for inspiration. When I saw he was allowing people to use some of his maps for free, I immediately jumped on that. Quality stuff! For zero dollars! Then it was just a matter of sifting through his extensive back catalogue for just the right map. I eventually settled on the The Lost Temple of Aphosh the Haunted because it’s big enough to have a lot of encounters without being sprawling, and offers a mixture of natural and artificial terrain. I wanted something that people could project their own ideas onto and that had enough conceptual ‘hooks’ to work with without being prescriptive.
Map chosen, I emailed Dyson juuuust to make sure the plan was ok, he said yes, and here we are.
The mockup for the physical form of The Map is not The Territory.
Thank you very much for joining me to talk about Mnemonic! Before we talk too deeply about the game, I’d like to introduce you to my readers – your debutante, so to speak. What brought you to games? Why do you choose to design?
DP: I’ve been playing games since I was 10, when my friends and I would walk down the halls between class and talk through “roleplaying” stories in the Star Wars universe. We tinkered with the design ideas from video games like Gauntlet Legends and Legend of Zelda to imagine what other stories might look like. Sometimes those stories were capital s Stories; sometimes they were just aesthetic ideas, like “What if a game like Gauntlet but you’re all summoners conjuring big magic beasts?”
It wasn’t until high school that I touched a tabletop roleplaying game with mechanics and character creation. My group of friends played D&D every Friday for four years, because D&D was the game we knew. The Mnemonic setting came out of a play-by-post game twelve years ago, and it’s been growing steadily ever since.
LA: I started formal, written RPGs… sometime in middle or high school? Thereabouts. But I was introduced informally through improvisational dungeon crawling in (ugh) Boy Scouts. I tolerated entirely too many years of that, but at least I got this out of it. Next was, of all things, freeform forum RP in the GameFAQs Metroid Prime social message board. For formal systems, I got started with D&D, as many are, because it was the cultural monolith that people recognized.
I spent a long time reading Vampire: the Masquerade core books and sourcebooks in a bookstore nearby, but never played it because I didn’t have a group for it. D&D was interesting to theorycraft, but I never got a regular group for an extended campaign. Shadowrun was the next game I played seriously and the first I had a real extended campaign of. Shadowrun has a complicated relationship for me, one that I don’t have nearly enough time or space here to address. The much abbreviated explanation is that they made me aware that my TTRPGs could say something, mean something, be something, not just be the aesthetic trappings for a series of ever-escalating violent encounters.
NM: I played my first TTRPG at 14 in highschool – D&D, naturally – and my experience was so bad I didn’t play again until I was 19 or 20! Through Games Club at university I was introduced into Dark Heresy, Deadlands, Vampire: the Masquerade, and Legend of the Five Rings (they also tried hard to get me to give D&D and Pathfinder another chance but I never did, really). But we always ended up house-ruling our games to do the things we wanted them to do that they didn’t. Designing games from the ground up was the next step: something I’ve done for over a decade without ever imagining myself a ‘game designer’ or participating in TTRPG Twitter!
It’s only in the last year or two I’ve really called myself a “game designer” or thought of what I do as design, let alone dreamed I could do it as a job!
PP: I grew up reading more tabletop and wargaming books than “proper” literature: AD&D, L5R, Mechwarrior, Warhammer, and oWoD all introduced me to interesting possibilities that I could make my own rather than stories that were set in stone. This is interesting to me in retrospect, because this was the 80s in Vancouver, and that period was the height of the Satanic Panic. You’d think that my staunchly Catholic Filipino parents would have despised such books as works of the Devil, and would have then barred my older brothers from playing. Turns out that they didn’t mind because tabletop games meant that they got to play with friends. Brown kids in a very white section of town needed friends.
Of course, I was too young to join any of their games. My first forays happened much later in high school, with close knit circles of friends from my school and with my younger brother plus some cousins. There was a long period where I was disillusioned from tabletop because a lot of my peers were cishet, male, and/or sexist – which led me to the new World of Darkness books, and had me making my own campaign on my own terms. Did a copious amount of kitbashing and homebrewing for WoD in particular, and I always got the same comments. “This is such a cool world!” “This doesn’t feel like WoD, but in a good way?” “Why don’t you make your own games?”
It’s been a pretty wild game design journey for me since last year. I don’t think I can answer why I design in so many words, but if I were to try… I think I design to find myself, and make more room for other people like me. There are always stories to be told, and each one of us brings something different to our tables. I like exploring the many things I can offer, both for my own pleasure and for anyone who may read my works and realize they could make their own things from the tools I can give them.
SP: I started playing Tabletop RPGs in 2015, but I’d been curious about it for much earlier, there was just no time. Mid 2014 was the beginning of my thesis year in college and I really wanted to finish college because at that point I was already about 5-6 years in University. When 2015 came, though, I was just about to enroll for my last semester when I was told that some of my units that I took in the University’s constituent campus were apparently not going to be credited. It meant that I’d need to retake some classes before going for my thesis. Funny circumstances, because that’s what gave me the time to actually get into games. I had a boyfriend at the time who had friends that were coming together for a D&D campaign which was how I got invited. They were taking up the same course (Library Sciences), so by majority, we agreed to meet at their college building (which was… the University Library). My college building was across the campus so I was often arriving just when everybody was settling in.
My first campaign was, in a word, chaotic. We were fifteen players, what can you do? But surprisingly, my DM was really good at it. So good, in fact, that I thought this was just… normal. I thought the normal table count was fifteen players and that any less was… just a little lonely. I was very wrong. I think having such a great DM at first also gave me very rose-colored lenses for every DM that I played under afterwards. There were lots of DMs that I experienced afterwards that were… not so great, but I thought “Oh, maybe my first DM is just exceptional.” Unfortunately, this mindset paved the way for me sort of… allowing myself to be thrown around under games and tables that were not so respectful of my boundaries with players and DMs that felt less than safe to be with. Exhausted, I broke away from that and later fell into a game design project that soared for a bit, but eventually also moved away from due to differences in direction and principles. It was here that I think where I really started. I met some great people from the Gamers and Gaming Meets, an organisation that hosts TTRPG events here in Manila. They helped me move towards design and expand my horizons.
I still remember when my friends took me to their place and showed me all sorts of TTRPG books and how the layout was done and how the mechanics were presented. The art, the themes, the dynamics all spoke so deeply to me and I was hooked ever since. I began creating games with ideas and themes that were close to me (plants, haha) and I’m now trying to explore making games that mean a lot to me. I’ll admit that while my first gaming experience wasn’t terrible, the ones that followed for a long time were exhausting and far from ideal. I want to make games that touch on ideas that are important to me, like the struggles of growing up in this country that seems to love making it hard for people like me (queer, non binary, not part of the upper class) to exist. I want to create games that inspire others to also make games so that their voices can also be heard.
Syn: Gaming had always been a thing for me – Mario, Sonic, Tetris, etc. – but tabletop games and design is a bit more recent for me. I started playing tabletop games somewhat seriously around 2016 and started DM’ing after some encouragement in 2017. It was a wild time learning how to handle all of that, but the further I progressed in learning how to DM and looking into the lore of these systems, the more questions I asked about why things were as they were. As I put those thoughts out into the world, the responses that came back were “Have you thought of designing a game?” I hadn’t. I thought I was just asking average questions that someone had surely thought about. They were, but the people who thought those things were, in fact, designers.
I asked about skill checks, dice rolls, worldbuilding, and kobolds and so much so that I ended up here, writing about this friggin’ exciting game.
Illustration by Sinta Posadas.
To follow that, I’d like to ask a little about your background. What are your areas of expertise, your storied histories? What makes you the designer to make Mnemonic and make it the perfect experience it’s meant to be?
DP: Mnemonic is the world I play in when I think about stories; it’s the universe of fantasy and magic that exists in my head, and most of the characters I create exist somewhere within that universe.
Mnemonic is a setting where memory has power, both as a life force for the world itself and as a source of magic. A lot of the setting’s ideas come from my own grapples with memory, things I remember from childhood that look a lot different in retrospect. Some things are happy remembrances; others, less happy. But giving people the space to explore that recontextualization is important to me.
I’m also White, which means I have a healthy load of unexamined biases when it comes to what stories can exist and what an imaginary world can look like. Would you believe me if I said I’m not the ideal person to tell stories in this setting? A lot of my design process for this world comes from a place of enabling players to tell stories that are personal to them, with as little White European Colonialist Bullshit as possible. For Mnemonic, this means asking questions to invite the player to bring themselves into the world. But I can’t do that alone.
For my first game in this setting, Cracks in the Mirror, I hired a sensitivity consultant to help me identify the spots where I was stumbling into presumptive or harmful tropes. They were immensely valuable in helping me realize everything in the previous paragraph, too.
For our Weaver’s Almanac, I wanted even more help, and not from people with the same unexamined biases as me. Which is why most of the members of our team are BIPOC.
LA: I’m a high-generation mixed-race Japanese American. The relation between memory and reality in Mnemonic is interesting to me because of a particular story I have about growing up. Whenever I went to visit my grandparents, they would have documentaries about the Japanese internment camps on the TV. I learned a key part of my heritage through passive absorption. They never addressed it directly until I was much older. It was just there, lingering in the background.
Part of the basic premise of Mnemonic as a broader world is that memories, and how they affected people differently, are lingering in the world. They affect it. Their impacts, not just by their objective truth but by how people feel about them and even by how people manipulate when those are looked back on, are real, in a way even more real than the idea of a thing that happened some time ago.
NM: I’m mixed-race Black Canadian. I’m very interested in the shifting negotiations, interpretations and the power of memories, particularly in the way different groups and cultures remember their histories. Worlds where those cultures and their histories come alive through the power of memory and of story – particularly collaborative story – are so compelling to me because they allow us agency in how our histories are told in ways that we so rarely are allowed in reality.
One of the reasons I find Mnemonic so compelling is because of how it leans into tools for telling stories, rather than simply telling them. For me part of designing games is about creating gaps for the players to fill and create their own stories and memories. Players are really the game designers, if you think about it – I can write this and that, but those stories are no longer mine the second someone else picks them up. All I’m doing, hopefully, is opening windows they might not have noticed, and asking “what do you see? And what does it remind you of?”
PP: I’m a queer Filipino woman born in the Philippines. My parents fled from an oppressive regime, full of dreams of a better future for them and their children in Canada. My memories of Canada as a child are beautiful flashes – some I can see, some I can taste, some I can feel, and some I can smell. What’s much sharper is the jarring sense I had with my family’s return to Manila. The past few years have been an intriguing yet at times painful study in turning back towards those feelings I had, and realizing, now, what my past self was wrestling with: displacement, confusion, never fitting in even if I was as “Filipino” as my peers. Then, of course, there are the extra tensions of me being polyamorous (and discovering it late, after years of thinking I was bisexual and had “bad, extra” feelings towards multiple people), me being a woman in a hypermasculine, Catholic society that will take every opportunity to tell you that you and your body are nothing without the approval of men, and me being the only daughter out of six children in a rather traditional Filpino family (thus making me someone both in constant need of protection, and also someone who was expected to put their dreams and ideas aside if they were offensive or improper to her brothers). People will constantly try to rewrite you in the hopes of fitting you into easily digestible parts for themselves. They’ll try to ignore the fact that you have your own stories, and your own desire to write it the way you want to.
And that brings me to why I was happy to join Dee in designing Mnemonic. This was one of the first games that was capable, with every word, of telling me, “Hey. I see you. This is a story for you, that you can make as you like. I am a game that respects you for you.” Memories are things that transform, shift, break apart, come back together, write, and revise themselves as we grow older with them. Bringing that sort of beautiful process into a game is something I’m really into.
SP: I have always viewed Mnemonic with fascination. The dream-like feeling, the exploration of memory – that’s always what has drawn me to it. When I fully read it for the first time, I felt that idea of being able to become something – I don’t know exactly what, but the concept itself, to me, seemed necessary. As someone who often has to be A Certain One Thing in their daily life, it is comforting to have a game that exists that allows you to shift, be different, reform along with the memories that you explore in the game. I haven’t played it but I wish to someday.
As for the art, I wasn’t actually expecting to do the art for the project. I thought I was going to do writing and then suddenly a discussion for artists was happening and… I decided to shoot my shot. And it happened! Before I knew it, I was designing art for the project.
Art has always been a complicated thing for me. I don’t talk about my art a lot because my feelings for my art and my skills are Difficult. I started making art when I was a tiny kid watching Powerpuff Girls in our living room back in my grandparent’s house in the countryside. I really took to it and enjoyed making drawing after drawing, filling one notebook after another. I was a hungry mind stuck in a small child’s body. I wanted to learn to make better art and I kept pushing myself so, so hard to as far as my small hands could possibly take me. Much like many of my peers, my skills were forever unrecognized by my mother (she raised me and my brother on her own) and I was constantly told to wake up and concentrate on more “money-making” pursuits. This constant push and pull made me hate my art but also made me unable to stop. My struggle with this continues to this day. My mother also still hasn’t recognized my skill and I don’t think she ever will. I don’t really want her approval anymore anyway, but I hope she knows she’s wrong. My art is going to be part of a kickstarter that will definitely touch hearts and also, bluntly, make money. I didn’t become a doctor like she wanted, but I’m sure the project will heal others in a different way.
Syn: I’m just a person with questions. Lots of them. So when you mix my innate curiosity about every single thing with my utter fascination with worldbuilding, I guess this was almost destined for me. I remember when I was asked to join the team. It felt surreal; I’m just a guy with questions about the worlds we build and the systems that support them.
When Dee asked me if I would like to build in a world of memory, I was still learning what it was that I wanted to do in the world of tabletop games and the stories I wanted to tell. I read the mechanics and a bit of the lore and it was just… obvious. The stories I want to tell are the kind where you dig into yourself and ask questions and deal with the challenges that come from those answers. Everything in Mnemonic speaks to that need.
An excerpt from The First Gathering written by Dee Pennyway, layout by Dee Pennyway. Click the picture to check out the draft (work in progress!)!
Cool! So, now that we know a little about you, tell me a little about Mnemonic. What excites you about it? What spurred its creation?
DP: Mnemonic emerged from a question I had in a play-by-post game a dozen years ago: If I have to spend Experience Points to use this ability, what do those Experience Points represent, and what does it mean to lose them? I settled into memory as a source of power, which evolved over the years into a world concept where the world itself has memories that exert themselves on occasion. I’ve played around with characters who lost their memories after abusing magic, characters who trapped unpleasant memories inside of powerful relics to try and forget traumatic events, characters who sang songs to resonate their own memories with the memories of others.
I’m pleased with the current version of the world that exists in my mind, which is that memory is inherently fluid, not something that can be spent or saved or stored but something that we engage with and observe on a constant basis. We remember things, we misremember things, we forget things…and the world does too. There’s something really neat to me about a world that remembers the things we do, even if no one else sees us do them. What memories does the world choose to hold onto, like keepsakes? What memories does the world try to forget?
Synxiec and I have talked about what happens when the world wants to forget somebody but can’t. Like a kind of cursed immortality. The story gets a lot heavier when we start exploring trauma as a world event, but it’s a thing my mind drifts to when I think about stories I want to tell in Mnemonic.
PP: I mentioned how Mnemonic is a game that spoke to me, and acknowledged me as someone full of stories that I wanted to tell. What excites me most about this project is the fact that by design, the emotions, intent, and player understanding of “memory” will change according to who joins you for a session. My first game had us exploring our gender identities, how we connected with other people, and how we viewed family and love. Being guided through the session with prompts and a constant reminder of “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to; respect the silence” felt magical. The thought of being able to expand upon these experiences for more players, this time as a member of the dev team, really excites me!
The other big thing that I’m looking forward to would be all of the subsystems that the Almanac will have, plus all the gameable lore that our team will be bringing to the table. As a designer who is extremely comfortable with either systems that use dice or systems that are purely narrative, playing around with fascinating card mechanics is uncharted territory. The things we have planned make me feel like I can both contribute well to the Almanac, and challenge myself to design for new things.
Syn: The thing that excites me about the game the most is a hard question. At first, it was the die. Each of them having a distinct purpose. Then as I looked more closely at it, I found what excited me the most: the questions. Did I mention I like asking questions? Because I really enjoy asking questions and Mnemonic’s challenges are unique in that respect. What game asks a question like “What lies do you tell yourself?” as part of character creation? These are the kind of foundational things that build worlds I like to explore and get lost in.
We’re not even going to talk about how every other thing this game gives you has safety built into it. I’ve already thought about the many stories I want to tell in this world of memory, but don’t tell Dee that. It’s a surprise.
Also, the people I get to work with are people I have so much respect for and many of them are people I just enjoy for their own sake. I’m happy to work with them.
NM: Unreliable narration, anti-canon and player-collaborated and -created game history, lore, and content are things I’m particularly invested in. Games are shared storytelling endeavors, after all – it makes it that much more enjoyable when everyone is empowered and able to contribute to communal worldbuilding rather than passively experiencing those worlds.
Mnemonic excites me in the way Dread and Trophy excite me: asking pointed questions of ourselves and others to build a shared world and a shared experience, as it pertains to memory – which is both a very personal thing and a communal one. Any time I’ve ever spent with friends, half the conversation is inevitably “remember that time?” Mnemonic, to me, is an entire game of that, and that excites me.
LA: The anti-canon nature of the setting is particularly cool to me because it more explicitly invites the players to make the world theirs. Most settings are fruitful not just for standing on their own, but for inviting players to be part of it, to participate actively. Mnemonic takes this a step further by saying that the instance the players are in is as true, as valid, as real, maybe even more real, than anything imagined by anyone else, up to and including the creators of the setting. It ties back to a core theme of the setting that the memories of something – the feelings and echoes and the ways they affect people – are more important than a theoretical objective truth. It’s about the experiences, both in-game and for the players.
The Tale of Five Strings lore piece (one of 26) and story arc, draft, by Synxiec with layout by Dee Pennyway.
When dealing with memory, we can encounter some bumps along the road. How is Mnemonic designed to respect player’s agency and consent, and allow them to control content to avoid any triggers, squicks, or undesirable unhappy times?
DP: Agency and consent are two of my biggest guiding targets in game design, and Mnemonic is no different. Everything in this game gives players permission to paint their own picture of the events, and character creation asks each player to name at least one boundary for something they will not include in the story, with some guiding language about how to best take care of not just their character’s needs, but the needs of everyone’s characters, and of every player at the table as well. I’ll drop the excerpt from that section here:
The Boundary
When we tell stories, we inevitably leave some details out, some rooms unexplored, some doors closed. We do this for our own safety and for the safety of those around us. What is a boundary you will not cross in this story? How close to it are you willing to wander before you turn away?
Your boundary can be something your character would want respected, or it can be something you care about personally. For example, Dee has a fear of heights, but their character does not. They might say, “I’d like to set a boundary on detailed descriptions of vertigo or other feelings of being up high. We can go to high places, but I as a player don’t want to experience that feeling in my imagination.”
You can set more than one boundary, and you can add more as the story progresses or as you think of them. If privacy is a concern, you may want to consider some form of anonymization, such as a shared digital document or a trusted facilitator.
Respecting boundaries is about more than just not crossing the line; it’s about knowing when a boundary needs to remain entirely outside the scope of the story, even in reference. If your character has a pet and you want to set a boundary around that pet’s safety, you may want to establish that as a convention of play: that this pet will never come to harm, and will never even be perceived to be in any danger, no matter the stakes of the scene.
Mnemonic doesn’t directly present players with descriptive content; instead, we ask questions that guide the players to the kinds of themes we want them to explore, in their own space and at their own comfort level. We also include language that makes it explicit that players are allowed to change any aspect of the story, whether it’s something that’s happening in the current scene or something that happened three sessions ago. I don’t want anyone to feel like they have to commit to a traumatic consequence of a piece of fiction they established before they recognized it would be a problem.
I take a lot of inspiration from Script Change on that, actually. The idea of being able to Rewind a scene to take a different approach was incredibly influential for me. I hope that players are able to build that kind of agency into their play groups when they play Mnemonic.
The other thing we do that I’m quietly excited about is how we handle “A thing happened in the mechanics that you don’t like.” If it’s something that happened because of the dice, you can…just reroll them. Dice are an abstraction, a story generator. There’s a ritual quality to rolling a die, but I want players to know that if the Fire Die says you set fire to the entire world, you can opt out of that outcome and roll again until you get you send up a bright signal to let your friends know where you are.
Your character also can’t be removed from the story without your consent, which seems like a small thing but so many of the biggest games out there have some form of “Game Over” scenario where my character can be taken away from me by a cruel GM, or fickle dice. In Mnemonic, the only way your character can die is if you make the decision for them to leave the story. We have mechanics for it. It’s a big deal. You can do it. No one else can do it for you.
That’s a lot of words to dance around the fact that at the end of the day, we can’t completely protect players, we can just offer tools and guidance. If you’re a player who experiences bleed in a significant way (where the events of the story affect you on a personal level in a way that lingers after the story ends), I’d encourage you to check in with yourself regularly; don’t feel like you have to choose the “heavy” answer to every question. This advice appears in just about every game I write now, so I’m gonna put it here too: Take care of yourself. Take care of each other.
Illustration by Sinta Posadas. (I love this one!)
It’s clear you’ve dug deeply into the world and what the action and reaction mean. What made you elect to use the mediums you do – cards, the particular art style, etc. – to represent the world to people and to have them interact with? How does the medium give meaning to the art?
DP: I want Mnemonic to be…hm, accessibility has its own connotations, and I have goals on that front as well but when it comes to the use of cards, what I’m aiming for is, “Can a person play this game with the things they already have”. And my family never played roleplaying games, but we did always have a deck of poker cards ready to go. And I know that a lot of general-purpose stores have decks available for less than $5, which means that if you don’t happen to have a deck at your home, you can probably find one even if you don’t have a “gaming store” near you. That was pretty important to me early on. That’s also why our dice are six-sided; I love polyhedral dice sets, but until very recently you couldn’t just go to Target and pick up a set.
The artwork is important here too, but for me it’s more about conveying the sense of “this is something that someone might have drawn or painted directly into their notebook while traveling.” Sin’s illustrations are wonderful and intimate, full of…I hesitate to tell people what they should be feeling when they look at these pieces, but I know that when I look at them I get a strong sense of “the person who painted this cares a lot about the subject.” And I hope that comes through.
We care a lot about the stories we’re telling. And I want players to care, too. About their stories, and about each other sitting around the table.
The Rain Die draft written by Dee Pennyway, layout by Dee Pennyway, illustration by Sinta Posadas.
As someone who has personally struggled with memory loss but also finds beauty in the ephemeral and has things they’d like to forget, I am genuinely curious how a session of Mnemonic plays out. What are an example or two of your experiences with the game and what did you take away – or leave behind?
DP: Mnemonic usually feels…weighted? I sometimes describe it as the feeling of holding your breath in anticipation, of choosing your words carefully in a space that allows you to do so.
We’ve been playing on the Actual Play twitch channel the past few weeks, and there are some things that I’ll hold onto forever, and at least one thing I wish I could take back (and probably would, if we were playing a longer-running series).
One thing I cherish is how readily everyone at the table takes ownership of the group’s well-being. Sean introduced his character, Warren, as a habitat for a community of rabbits, and after what was probably about a minute but what felt like only an instant, Synxiec announced that we were now, us, the storytellers, the players on stream, committed protectors of the bunnies. And like…yes, of course! Mnemonic, the game, is about being careful storytellers and recognizing when it’s your job as a player to look after the characters in your own story.
A thing I would change is that Misha introduced a piece of local folklore around a dragon living nearby, and it was super interesting–but then when I tied our first session together with my character’s closing scene, I used my own character’s backstory as a vehicle instead of connecting it to hers. It would have been a much more compelling story beat, and more personal to the entire group, and more meaningful to the town we were in, to make that moment about something someone else had introduced.
It was one of those things that I didn’t even think about until the next day, when it was already too late to go back and change. And the nice thing about Mnemonic is that if something like that happens in your home game, you can just…change it. You can go in next week with your group and say “Hey, this happened last time but I kinda want to retcon it to something else if that’s okay?” and then work out how the change might affect everybody, and the story you’re telling together.
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Thank you so much to the whole team for the interview, including those unable to participate because of life – see you next time! I hope all you readers enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Mnemonic: A Weaver’s Almanac on Kickstarter today!
Note: Today seems pretty packed with pics because this particular style of design and art appeals to me a lot, so please excuse this indulgence.
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Tell me a little about yourself and your work. What’s your background like and how has it led you to Dissident Whispers?
My name is Jeremy and I did the layout for ‘Hopebringer’ and ‘Rhemati’s Spring’ for DW. I’ve been tabletop gaming for around 6-7 years and creating stuff for around 3 years. I am a Warden (moderator) on the Mothership discord and active in a few others. One day “Silver Goat” posted up a request seeking volunteers for a BLM project, as a mixed race man (black and white if it matters) who lives in a rural area I had been struggling to find my place in the protests, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to get involved.
The interior of Dissident Whispers, on the pages for Hopebringer, showing a diagram of an arena.
What other projects have you worked on that you’ve brought forward knowledge to working on Dissident Whispers?
I have been working on writing and laying out a Mothership Hack called Gordinaak for way to long, and recently released a very dumb nega tower called ‘Why is there a Wizards Tower in this Dump?’ on Itch with my writing partner.
Tell me about Dissident Whispers. What kicked off such a project concept and how did it come together? What’s the pitch?
Dissident Whispers is a collaborative compilation of adventures for various systems. For me, it all started when I saw a message on Exalted Funeral’s Discord looking for volunteers to do various pieces for a project. As we were talking about logistics the projects founder, Silver Goat, mentioned posting on the Mothership Discord. It just so happened that I warden there (moderate) so I reached out to Sean Mccoy about it and then it just kinda took off. As far as a pitch goes I’m pretty terrible at that so I guess it’s a book with a bunch of dungeons and adventures so anyone who plays games needs it.
The interior of Dissident Whispers showing the Mirstone Manor adventure – on one page, a detailed map, and on the other, an unusual pink creature.
How is planning the content of such a project impacted by the increased focus on inclusivity and a specific message?
I think for everyone involved it was different, some people made things that were topical while others did stuff that was standard adventure fare. For instance one of the adventure’s I did layout for, Hopebringer, was very stick it to the man and defeat the oppressors.
What are some examples of the adventures in Dissident Whispers that players will have to dig into?
There are soooooo many, I did the layout for Hopebringer, and Rhemati’s Spring, both very different, both system agnostic. There are some really interesting ones for Mork Borg, and I actually played one for Mothership called Ghost Ship, on the night we finished everything, which was amazing.
The interior of Dissident Whispers, focusing on the College of Acoustic Ministration, showing alien creatures and men with lobster hands.
What were some of the best parts of working on this project and putting together the collection for players to experience?
My favorite part was probably watching a flood of talented people get involved, one day it was a few people then the next the discord exploded. It was just amazing watching everything develop and how cohesive everyone was moving as a unit. I’m still in awe of what was accomplished.
The interior of Dissident Whispers showing the Snake Temple Abduction adventure, with a beautiful illustration on the right page in blue and white and a simple but useful map in blue and white on the left, along with the guiding text.
The images for the book are by Janna Heidersdorf (Illustration) and Jen McCleary (Layout). (update 7/37/202)
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Sharang Biswas, for the Medici Group.
I appreciate you taking time for the interview, Sharang! Would you share with me a little about you and your experience? How did you end up in games doing the kind of work that you’re enthusiastic about?
I’m a game designer, interactive artist, and writer currently based in NYC. I started formally learning game design under Mary Flanagan at Dartmouth (though I studied engineering), and then went to ITP at Tisch School of the Arts at NYU to get a Masters in Interactive Design. Since then I’ve made numerous games, won an IndieCade, 2 IGDN, and a Golden Cobra Award, exhibited my games at galleries and art museums, mounted interactive theatre productions at various venues, and given a bunch of talks at conferences and universities. I’m also currently on the faculty at both Fordham University and Bard College.
I’m actually pretty enthusiastic about many different kinds of work, so I try and keep myself being by doing different stuff all the time. My major project right now is co-editing Honey & Hot Wax: An Anthology of Erotic Art Games with Lucian Kahn. I’ve been into the idea of procedure and process for a while, and about how mundane actions, when placed in a game context, can convey artistic meaning. I explored this in my games Feast & Verdure, and out of that line of inquiry came the thought: “Can games use sex acts as game mechanics, where the acts themselves are not the sole goal of the game?”. From that arose the idea of the book, though Lucian & I expanded the scope to also include games that discuss sex, sexuality, and related topics, without the use of sex acts between players or characters.
Lucian and I were very keen to make this project come to life in a way that uplifts artists and game designers, and so we decided to apply for a grant from the Effing Foundation for Sex-Positivity. We received two consecutive grants, and are basically using all the money to pay the creators involved!
That’s so fantastic to hear! Honey & Hot Wax sounds really brilliant, and also like a unique challenge. One curiosity I have is how you handled ensuring that the games in the collection use consent and are responsible, considering how sex can be. What was your approach to safety and boundaries?
It is my firm belief that art can and should discuss difficult topics–art is one of the ways people, both as individuals and as societies, make sense of the world. However, such art needs to be practiced with care and sensitivity, and as such, Lucian and I were very concerned about issues of consent and safety in the games included in the anthology. To begin with, when we were soliciting proposals, we took a very broad definition of what sex is, and relied on the Effing Foundation’s definitions of “sex-positivity” and “inclusivity” (which you can read here). This was to ensure that everyone was on the same page regarding the goals of our project, and what sorts of depictions of sexuality we would be considering.
Once the finalists were selected, we commissioned Maury Brown for an entirely separate chapter on consent and safety in LARP and TTRPG, to act as a general set of guidelines when playing any of the games in the collection (or indeed, any roleplaying game at all). In the rules for their games, each game designer also included their own sections regarding safety and consent practices, to uniquely address the idiosyncrasies of the experience they were creating.
Additionally, each game was thoroughly vetted by Lucian, myself, Cat Tobin from Pelgrane Press, and Kit Stubbs from the Effing Foundation, a diverse set of eyes to ensure that the games all represented the values we wanted to promote, and that consent language was clear. As director of the Effing Foundation, Kit, in particular, offered valuable insights concerning such matters!
Finally, we were very serious about the playtesting requirement for each of our accepted games; holes and gaps in rules are hard to predict without playtesting. Running my own game with a trusted friend, for example, showed me places where I could clarify language about safety!
Of course, and unfortunately, no safety mechanics can handle every eventuality, or account for bad actors. It is in the nature of participatory, non-linear stories to defy our expectations and predictions, so to all the players of our games, we ask you to exercise judgment and pay attention to your own boundaries!
The Honey & Hot Wax cover.
Is this the first game you’ve applied for grants for? It sounds like you’re pretty great at it! What did that process entail and how do you think it’s impacted how the games are designed?
Grants, like most sorts of applications in this world, are partially about luck, so “being great at it” doesn’t mean as much as one might think! But this isn’t the first grant I’ve received to make game-like work, and hopefully won’t be the last!
When Lucian and I sent in our proposal to the Effing Foundation, we were very clear about what the grant-funding would be used for: paying the folks involved in the project a fair amount. This was paramount. All our funding went to the writers and designers involved in the book.
The creation of any kind of art requires time and space. Time and space are luxuries reserved for those with money. Good art is impossible to make (consistently, at least) if an artist is forever worried about where their next rent check is coming from. As such, Lucian and I were hoping to do our small part in supporting and uplifting indie designers. At the very least, we’ve managed to create a space where artists who might otherwise not be able to make games about risque topics, have the ability to do so, and in a way that’s financially viable!
It might be good to note here that in addition to support from the grant, each designer is also receiving royalties, and a portion of sales is also going towards charitable causes that promote sex-positivity and sex-education!
The Sleepover by Julia Ellingboe and Kat Jones.
It is great to hear that everyone is being well-paid and that you and Lucian are working to support charitable works! What do you enjoy about working on larger projects like this with lots of collaborators? How does it contrast with how you enjoy working on individual projects, and how that affects your design? (note: please feel free to give examples of your specific projects!)
I really enjoy working on group projects. Most of the work I’m proudest of is in collaboration with others. However, I wouldn’t call this a “group project” per se. Lucian and I were editors and curators of other people’s work. It was their designs…we just helped them. Granted Lucian and I have games in the book as well, but each of those was an individual work (albeit, with help from others). The book wasn’t really a group project in the same was as some of my bigger, interactive theatre pieces, for example.
For example, when Nick O’Leary and I made the Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance LARP for the Museum of the Moving Image, it truly was collaborative, both with each other and the museum education department. We went back and forth with each other for ideas, to refine mechanics, to flesh out bits and to write content. None of that really for H&HW.
Feeding Lucy, written by Jonaya Kemper.
What are some lessons you’ve learned through design over time that you think your particular path is the only way you would have learned them – as in, if I hadn’t done x, I would never have learned y?
Lol, I feel that’s a weird line of thinking. Who knows what I would or would not have learned under different circumstances or different decisions? Besides, I think looking at other people’s paths is at best an exercise in inspiration. Stories of paths taken ALWAYS leave out some aspect of luck or privilege, and few can ever emulate the advice given in these sorts of tellings.
Maybe the only truth that I can say that has a high probability of working for others is 1) constantly making stuff and pushing yourself to try things you haven’t done before is how you learn and improve; and 2) being kind to people is not only the nice thing to do but more advantageous for you in the long run!
What are some of your favorite projects you’ve worked on in games and what makes them stand out amongst the rest? How were you able to put your unique experiences into play while designing them?
Hmm… this is a fun question because it made me look back on my work, and turns out, I’ve made a fair amount of stuff!
I wrote an interactive fiction piece for Sub-Q magazine called “The Book of Chroma“. That I’m quite proud of. The concept–gay priests– was actually my first idea for my submission to Honey & Hot Wax, but I couldn’t get a LARP version to work…glad it worked ut here though. It’s also my first IF piece with a significant puzzle component! I also added a sort of Indic feel to the fantasy religion I made up, because many such religions tend towards a Christian feel…
I was just nominated for an IGDN award for my short game “An Elegy From the Hive Witches“, making it the third time in a row I’ve been nominated for the Most Innovative category (hopefully it’ll also be my third win!) Looking back on the game, I really did enjoy it. It’s vaguely anti-colonial, uses words and language as game mechanics, stuff I’m really interested in!
Pass the Sugar, Please, written by Clio Yun-su Davis.
In Honey & Hot Wax, what are some of the specific pieces that you’re particularly looking forward to seeing people talk about and seeing the impact on the design landscape from? Were there any you learned from?
I mean, Clio Davis’ “Pas the Sugar, Please” has already generated conversations, after it got picked up by Intramersive Productions as an interactive theatre piece, so that’s great. Otherwise, I thinkLucian and I curated a decent selection of game, each of which has something new and interesting to offer to the gaming landscape. Lol, obviously, I’d love it if people talk about my game and how (queer) sex can be more normalized in culture!
You can now find the Script Change RPG Toolbox translated into Korean at this link, which is so exciting! I’ve also added some new language to the Script Change page to help with anyone else interested in using Script Change in their game or in translating the text!
I am very lucky to have been able to interview Brandon O’Brien, fighting past the pandemic delays, about his amazing writing and game design work! While I am a few days delayed past his birthday, here’s the interview below talking about Brandon’s cool creations!
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Brandon O’Brien.
Hi Brandon and thank you for the interview! Tell me a little about yourself and your experience. What is your work like and where did you start your journey into games and writing?
Hi! I’m grateful for the opportunity to talk about my work!
My journey into games started fairly recently, when one of my writing colleagues mentioned Avery Alder’s Emerging Designers Mentorship to me in early 2018. At that point, I didn’t even really think that I wanted to make a game. It was just that I saw the link, and it made me think of a thing that I could make, and I was prepared to just put it in the back of my mind. But as time passed, the idea started looking more and more like a really interesting game, so at that point I wanted to make it, so I signed up. Since then, the tabletop game design community just kind of opened up a little bit. I started getting to know other creators, reading and playing their games and getting to know them, and it started to feel more welcoming, and that made me want to experiment more.
As for my writing, that’s a far longer story. I’ve been writing in some form since I was much younger, especially poetry, which eventually led me to performance poetry, and then I met other Caribbean science fiction and fantasy writers, like Karen Lord and Tobias Buckell, and I realised that this was something I could actually do, and other people wanted to read it. And since that point, I’ve been committed to creating all of these things, and I’ve found that they complement each other very well–good verse becomes a good game, a good science fiction or fantasy premise becomes a good game, a good mode of play can potentially become an interesting way to hold an audience’s attention. So experimenting with them all has been a lot of fun!
Tell me about a couple of your favorite works, both games and writing, and about your process for making those works into fully realized projects. What were the exciting parts of those processes? What was more challenging? Did your level of experience or background at the time help or hinder?
In terms of games, I’ve been eagerly working on a project called Soundclash, a Forged in the Dark game about making music in a world where music has been touched by magic and the music industry has changed as a result. I’m still on my way to finishing it, but the work is always really inspiring. I’ve enjoyed retooling parts of the system to fit music and musical performance, and the idea of a world where singing is your ‘combat’. I don’t think it’s perfect so far, and I have so much more to learn and ask, I think, but the process of learning and asking has been refreshing. That’s what excites me, to be honest. Funnily enough, I feel like it’s a small part of why I haven’t finished yet, combined with whatever level of fear is still there about making a whole big game. I’m intrigued to get closer to a sense of making the stakes of just performing a song the same as breaking into a stronghold or winning a fight.
I’m in a similar experiment with How To Unmake It In Anglia, a weird mystery story about finding a missing person in a world where every word you say or write instantly comes true. Narratively, a lot of it is a big experiment, asking a question about the world that changes the way that people speak in it and respond to words in it, and that has an effect on how I write their relationship to those words, too. But it’s also serial, so I’m trying to tell a long story but also make each part accessible and interesting and engaging, which is a slightly different state of mind than a whole novel.
I consider myself lucky, though. When you’re writing a story or a novel, you have an editor, someone who looks at your work and wants to help you get better at it. In my mentorship, Avery has been instrumental in a very similar role, helping me recalibrate how I even think about play. I consider that editing, in a way, and I’m really thankful to have people I can trust to see me through those stumbling blocks, especially on the gaming front.
Both with your writing and your design, what are some themes and ideas you have been exploring that you don’t see as much in the standard American fare? What are the things that you bring from your unique experience that you most love to share through these mediums?
If I’m being honest, I don’t think I’m doing much that isn’t in the space already. From my experience, science fiction writers and indie designers are asking some of the most interesting questions, and so many of them are important to the present. I think my work is really focused on the question of what people use to create the context in their world, especially when it’s art. In my writing, I’ve been confronting a lot of very specific things that seem distinct, but I feel like they fit really well. I only recently noticed that Soundclash has a lot in common with some of my stories, when it comes to asking the question of what art does and who it serves. Sometimes it’s also music, or sometimes it’s a robot, or sometimes it’s the very bodies and identities of a community’s artists, but my characters ask a lot what it means to make something in a world where the thing you make, or the person who makes it, can become a commodity, and that’s what Soundclash is trying to ask as well: when you just wanted to make music, how do you navigate a world where you have become a tool, a weapon, for the industry to exploit?
I’m also really interested in how we make things to heal within each other, which is also in that same idea-space. I wrote a small game last year called TheRefraction, which is played by writing poetry to each other. You can’t move from one stage of play to another unless you’ve shared your work and been shared with in turn. It’s also what influenced some of my Belonging Outside Belonging games, like Evokers’ Pact, where there are new moves that specifically emphasise how conflict and reconciliation between two or three people can impact entire groups, because at the time when I wrote them I was really thinking about how conflict isn’t often about one person making trouble, but about how two or three people misunderstand each other or talk over each other’s desires, and I wanted to find a way to ask players to think about what those misunderstandings are as part of play, and possibly challenge them to think about those things as they leave play, too.
The description of Evokers’ Pact by Brandon O’Brien.
When you get an idea, how do you decide whether to make it into a piece of fiction or poetry, or a game?
Very rarely, things materialise one way in my brain, and I will get fixated on the notion that it has to exist in the medium I imagined it. A few games are like that. The Refraction was always going to be a game, because I wanted to make a poetry game, and once I knew what this one was, I didn’t want to give up on that. And that happens a little more often with fiction or poetry, too. I’ve spoken to other writers who agree that sometimes, when we decide to write a story, it’s actually because the idea in our head is something we would really like to read. That it’s kind of a craving for something, that we’re hungry for a certain kind of story, and we get fixated on finding it and consuming it because that’s what we’re in the mood for. And then a part of our brain goes, “well, you’ll have to write it yourself”. Like it’s a literal craving, but you can’t order it from a fast food place, so you make up your mind that you have to cook. That’s what a story feels like sometimes–It’s in this medium because I made up my mind that I want to read this, and want other people to find it like this.
But more often I have notes about a thing and have no idea what I want it to be. I have loads of notes on things that could be stories, but they could also be comic books, and the only reason they aren’t yet is because I can’t draw! Or there are nuggets of things that would make fascinating game mechanics, but I don’t have something meaningful to do with them yet, so they’re just waiting in a notepad app for me to find a way to make it important. Ideas are free. I have too many of them to use. So I try to be less rigid about them whenever possible, and consider how they can find value in another format if I’m struggling.
A lot of the RPG world can seem dominated by homogenous cultures and perspectives. What are some projects of yours where you’ve really had the opportunity to express your own culture and perspective, and how did you work through that creative process?
Culture is a difficult thing to try to parse in any medium, especially when you’re a Black diaspora creator working with cultural objects that may seem foreign to many other people. But I like exploring the cultural objects that I know because they’re the lens through which I make sense of the world and my place in it.
For instance, I’ve been really focused on a particular character in Trinidad and Tobago folklore called a lagahoo–a creature cursed to transform into a monstrous shape, but also to have a coffin chained to them, to drag it with them wherever they go. I’ve been fascinated by that image for a while now: why is this person so cursed? What could be in the coffin? And as I was processing certain parts of my work, my relationship to my culture, and even some of my own personal experiences, I began reevaluating the lagahoo, viewing it as an image of rage, of frustration, of righteous anger, someone for whom this curse is actually a kind of dark mission. That understanding shows up in my fiction and my poetry, but I struggled for a while to put that in game form.
So I put out a game, coincidentally called Lagahoo, which is a slight adaptation of the party game Werewolf with that added flavour, because that felt more interesting and more real to me. It (hopefully!) turns the game into a world where you know there are monsters lurking in the dark, preying on your community, but they’re not the things that turn into beasts with fangs and claws, they’re the ordinary people who hide their cruelty and their viciousness under cover of night. And the game doesn’t really care if you can tell. You just have to keep your community safe.
I want to experiment more with those perspectives. Folklore opens a really interesting window for us to reevaluate the modern world, not always through the mechanics of most fantasy stuff–like, it doesn’t always have to be violence or conflict, or the threat of loss. It can also be an opportunity to reconnect with history, or ask questions about what we think we know or trust. And Caribbean folklore is rich like that, so I want to play more with those characters and what they could teach us, while also using that opportunity to share that part of my culture with others.
With The Refraction, how did you integrate games and poetry to make a synthesis of the two? How have players responded, and what makes the game exciting to you?
I just really wanted to tinker with a game where playing was writing. I wanted to use play to hopefully make a safe space for folks who probably don’t write as often, or have never attempted writing a poem or may think that it’s hard or needs to exist a certain way, to be free to share among themselves and not feel like they need to do any one thing to write a poem. But I also wanted to use those fantasy tropes, of the downtrodden villagers who obviously have a lot to say and no force of power to speak out, as a prompt for those poems. I actually want to do much more with The Refraction, to create more of those play-spaces soon and give people more worlds and characters to inhabit and write from.
I believe people really like it! It’s one of my Itch games that people ask about and talk about the most. I wish folks would be willing to share their poems with me! But I won’t force it! I’m just grateful to make space for folks to write, and I hope it helps people discover something through writing the way poetry does for me. I really like poetry’s capacity to use space and brevity to tell a story, and how we communally attach personal depth to it because of its format. I can only hope that it’s encouraging people to tinker more with the form and maybe write their own things. And I want to make more opportunities just like it–where telling the story is not just making the world, but is about discovering how you feel and what you want to do about it, and gaining power from telling people. I mean, at its core, what is a roleplaying game but telling people that you’ve been moved to do something? And I’m beyond hype that I get to make room to do that, but they get to toy with writing among friends, without feeling judged.
Brandon O’Brien.
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Thank you so much to Brandon for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed this interview and that you’ll check out Brandon’s website and itchio!
