fairy tales – Thoughty

Five or So Questions on Princess World

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Kevin Petker about the game Princess World, which is currently on Kickstarter! The game has some fun beginnings – read all about it in the responses below!

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Tell me a little about Princess World. What excites you about it?

Princess World, “A Game of Girls who Rule” is a Powered by the Apocalypse role-playing game about playing diverse Princesses from varied realms who are trying to work together, despite their differences, to address problems in their world. The most exciting thing about the game is that it was inspired by my daughter, she literally pitched it to me when she was three-and-a-half (She’s six now) and she’s been a great help in generating ideas and concepts for the game. Princess World is designed to be accessible and engaging to new players, particularly younger ones, and deals a lot with the power and meanings of words, and how phrases can be reinterpreted in different ways. Every character in the game is defined by four essential Truths, which are short narrative phrases; when players start to grasp how to use these Truths to expand the narrative power of their characters in the game, using them as springboards for their imagination. Seeing a player’s eyes light up when they think of a new way to use a Truth makes the whole game worthwhile for me.

The character playbooks with their Truths laid out on a table and an assortment of dice, pens, and a crown headband. — The Truths on the character playbooks.

I’m super curious about the Truths! What are the four Truths and how are they presented to players?

Truths are probably my favorite part of Princess World! Truths are the “powers and abilities” of each Princess, like if you’d list four special things a character in a story or book are good at or known for. Each archetype/playbook has a unique list of four Truths that the player must express about their character. Some are extrinsic to the character, like equipment or things and some are intrinsic to the character, like experiences or legacies, and some purposely blur the line, so that the player can decide.

These Truths are narrative statements, not just descriptive, that give the character options and abilities others probably don’t have access to. For example, a Fairy Princess’s player wouldn’t just say, “I have green hair.” There’s not much they can do with that in a story; it’s mainly just description. If, instead, they said, “My hair consists of the intertwined flowers of Spring.”, then we can think about all the various narrative ideas and options we can unpack from that. Maybe they can use the scent of their hair to calm others, or maybe they can cause other plants to thrive, or maybe they can call on powers of growth and renewal. We’d play to find out the creative options the player could come up with, based on that Truth.

Truths are usually written in the character’s favorite color, unless they’ve been deemed to be Unpleasant, in which case, they’re usually written in black. Before a player writes down a Truth, they express it to the table of players first, and the other players judge the Pleasantness or Unpleasantness of that Truth, before the player writes it down. Being Unpleasant, just means that the other players can immediately see how said Truth has the potential to cause problems for the character, though they could be bad or dangerous as well, but the player can still call on them!

If a Truth is judged to be Unpleasant, the player has the option to accept that trouble or to rephrase the Truth in a way to address any concerns. Most players seem to enjoy having potential trouble brewing for their characters as it can lead to interesting stories.

The Truths can be as direct or as flowery as the player desires, but they’re usually a single sentence. For example, there was a Skateboard Princess who expressed this: “I can’t digest normal food, I eat batteries.” and the table of players was astonished and intrigued. The player went on to explain, “I’m a robot!” Now, they could’ve just expressed the Truth as “I’m a robot.”, but the whole “I eat batteries.” was thought of something more in line with what one would read in a story about a robotic Skateboard Princesses!

As a nonbinary creator, I’d be lax if I didn’t think of kiddos like me – is there space for nonbinary or masculine players or characters in this world, or is it strictly about embracing the feminine “girl” power and identity? How are you framing gender identity for the princesses, with this answer in mind? By this I mean, are there princesses with different body types and presentations like in She-Ra?

I think it’s going to be very tough to overcome the assumption that “princess means girl” in Western culture, but that is not an assumption I make in Princess World; we say “Anyone can be a Princess.” I lean more towards my daughter’s interpretation of princess which is “Someone who is capable and competent, and also pretty cool.” Some of the playbooks lean towards the feminine side, for certain values of feminine, such as the Proper or Fairy Princess, but the player of such characters is not bound by that at all! There are self-defining Skateboard Princeses, rough and tumble Warrior Princesses, and characters that are free to blur the lines in any way the players wish, like the Shadow or Pauper Princess. In the actual text I tend to lean towards female (she/her) or gender inclusive (they/them) pronouns unless I’m talking about a specific character or person who has specified their pronouns.

For the player, if the gender of their character is important to them, they can work to include it in the Truths about their character; if it less of a factor in their interest in the character, it can be included in their descriptive details. In actual play, their have been girl, boy, neither, amalgamated, changing, and artificially gendered Princesses. It’s my goal that players can make character that reflect their desires and interests in what is cool or exciting. Variations in age, body shape, gender, orientation, and even species have all occurred in actual play of Princess World. For me, it’s really exciting to see the fantastic directions players take their character creation in, thinking both inside and outside the box of the archetype they’ve picked. The new She-Ra cartoon has definitely been a touch stone.

With all that being said, there is, in very early development, a playbook that is specifically called the Boy Princess; my daughter wanted that included (she generated the seed ideas for fourteen of the sixteen playbooks we’re working on) and I’m excited to see how players will interpret and expand on that concept!

The character name tents and character portraits for the Space Princess, Pirate Princess, and Shadow Princess, beside some tokens, pens, and index cards. — The character portrait is very important!

Awesome! The Boy Princess sounds my style. Speaking of style, I see that you’re using a system Powered by the Apocalypse. What led you to choose this system, and how have you modified it to suit your unique needs?

Well, I really fell in love with Apocalypse World when I was first introduced to it; it really mapped to my style of facilitating games and gave me words and structures to actually explain what I was doing. Also, it allowed for a very low level of pre-game preparation, something I’m really liking as I have less time to game. I feel that the PbtA approach worked really well for being a Weaver, what we call the “game master” in Princess World, as we stress that they are there to help the other players tell a story about their characters, not a story the Weaver makes up to put the princesses through; that collaboration between all the players, collectively creating the fiction of the narrative is what I find most satisfying in playing PbtA games.

For Princess World, I narrowed things down to four basic moves; all of which are ways of dealing with obstacles or problems that the characters face. Essentially: order things to do what you want, try to change their minds, evade things, fight things; they seem to cover all the ground I want for the players to explore when making choices for their characters. There’s a single auxiliary move that is dependent on how connected a Princess is to another Princess, using a currency we call Threads, which are statements about the characters’ relationships, written down on strips of paper and handed out to other players. As well, every Princess has a special knowledge move that reflect their unique perspective on Princess World, though other Princesses can use their Threads to tap into another Princess’s way of looking at things.

Apocalypse World, and many PbtA games, tend to be pretty loose on framing and pacing scenes; I’ve put a little more structure for that in Princess World, specifically using number of scenes to measure the difficulty or challenge of a situation; the more difficult a challenge is, the more scenes will be required to overcome or resolve it. I’m hoping this will make pacing of the story and sharing spotlight time easier for newer players to grasp and use.

There’s no lists of equipment or gear in Princess World, basically, if it makes sense for a Princess to have access to something, the Weaver is encouraged to say “Yes!”, especially if it’s something the player can narratively unpack from one of their Truths! Encouraging creativity and experimenting with ideas is strongly encouraged!

As a parent, being able to create a world for your kids to play in has got to be amazing. I can see some of this in the Truths, but what are the values and principles you’ve considered in design, and the emotional experiences, that you have made an effort to ensure come across in play?

Yes, it’s been amazing both from a design perspective and from a playing one. Sebastian, my son, has already played Princess World; he created the first Dragon Princess and did an amazing job with her, creating a monstrous Princess who was both scary and kind! Freya hasn’t played yet, but has done some basic role-playing with her cousins. All seem to have really enjoyed it and I’m looking forward to more games with them.

One of the core experiences I wanted to have in Princess World was for the players to have to grapple with the question of “What is important to my character?”, with the subtext asking, “What is important to me?” Many moves and options revolve around choosing to help yourself, to help others, or to help the greater world around you and that, often, you won’t have enough to do all three at once so you’ll need to make hard choices. I interviewed a lot of kids, aged 9-13, during the early development process and I wanted the game to reflect what that age group wanted in a game: that their characters had agency, that they could make important choices, and that their choices mattered; I’m really hoping that Princess World will provide that for players, both new and experienced. So far, it seems to be working.

Three children of varying ages and genders playing with the playsheets and associated documents from Princess World on a floral carpet in a small room, drawing characters and filling in character sheets. — Heck yeah playing on the floor!

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Thanks so much to Kevin for the interview and to the Weaver Princess, Freya, for being such an inspiration! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Princess World on Kickstarter today!

Quick Shot on Thistle and Hearth

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

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

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

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

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

A bearded Thistlefolk illustrated in black linework and colored in blue-grey. — *A Thistlefolk by Mahar Mangahas.*

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

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

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

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

A ghost with long hair and wispy petal-like layers surrounding them, accented by shafts of wheat. — *A ghost by Mahar Mangahas.*

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

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

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

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

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

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

A barb-like flower that looks almost like a dragon with swirling petal or leaf-like wings. — *The Woods by Mahar Mangahas.*

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

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

A detailed header of ornate floral and leaf-like detail with a braided centerpiece going through a wreath over black and white text reading Thistle and Hearth. Below this, a curling and carefully detailed bundle of thistles makes up the footer. — *Such a lovely title treatment! By Mahar Mangahas.*

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

(edited to add second interviewee, my bad)

Five or So Questions on Under Hollow Hills

I generally try not to be so under the wire, but life has been hectic lately! Here’s an interview.

Today I have an interview with Meguey and Vincent Baker about Under Hollow Hills, which is currently on Kickstarter! It’s a game about traveling performers and explores a new realm of Powered by the Apocalypse design. Check out what Vincent and Meguey had to say!

All art by Vincent, after Rackham.

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Tell me a little about Under Hollow Hills. What excites you about it?

Meg: Traveling together as a group, seeking audiences, dealing with a stuck wagon or a friend in trouble, showing up at birthday parties to just utterly dazzle a human child and leave them with a touch more wonder than before – that’s all real neat to me. What excites me most though, perhaps, is the core ethic of this game, of paying attention to how we are together when times are good and when times are bad. Fairies often get portrayed as either all sweetness and light or all threat and magical terror, and I’m excited to see MORE than that. We’re drawing on a lot of different fairy stories, and I look forward to the new stories that come from this.

VB: In Under Hollow Hills you play the performers and crew of a circus that travels through Fairyland and through the human world, through good times, bad times, and dangerous times. I’m excited about the tour of Fairyland that the game offers – but it’s like a working tour, not a tourist tour. You’re behind the scenes, you see what goes on in the Wolf King’s Court, you perform for audiences who think they’ve commanded you, but really you’re playing them. You see through the glamor to the mystery, if that makes sense!

I’m also excited by how much the game loves words. Metaphor, poetry, wordplay, puns, it’s a game that loves and plays with language.

The silhouettes of two smaller people carrying paper lanterns and packs.

There are a lot of fairy tales that people might be familiar with. Where are you pulling influence from, and what are some examples of the things you’re spinning of your own?

VB: Yeah! Meg’s history with fairies is older than mine. I think I started, these decades ago, with Alan Lee and Brian Froud’s book Faeries. For me my main sources have been Yeats’ Fairy Tales of Ireland, Sikes’ British Goblins, and Kirk & Lang’s The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies. These all mix collected stories and folklore with the speculations of their authors / editors, much in the mode of a bestiary or field guide. This is where the idea of fairy kinds comes from, I think, these marvelous old collections.

I’m also influenced by Shakespeare, by Norse myths, and by more contemporary fairy tales and fairy tellers like Francesca Lia Block, Tanith Lee, John Crowley, Jane Yolen, and even Jack Vance per Lyonesse.

That said, we’ve tried to keep our interpretations fresh and playful. In the playbooks, for instance, we always try to mix and cross influences, not narrow down. The Chieftain Mouse has elements of Reepicheep and Despereaux, and also of Rob Roy. The Crooked Wand harks back to the three old women who share an eye, and to Odin, and then to Yubaba from Spirited Away and Nora Cloud from Little, Big.

Meg: I had a beloved storytelling teacher in 4th grade, Janet Glantz, who gave me Nancy Arrowsmith’s 1977 Field Guide to the Little People, which leads off with “In high summer meadows, nestled in the moors, near old castles, or behind the kitchen stove—these are the places where the Little People may be found.”. If I had to point to one clear influence alone, it would be this book and this line. The earliest fairy-tales I remember are the ones in Olive Beaupre Miller’s 1928 edition of My Bookhouse books, particularly volume two, which has fairy tales from around the world, and the first book I remember reading for myself is Midsummer Night’s Dream, when I was about 6.

The Muppet Show, of course, and Labyrinth. I saw the 1962 movie Gypsy a surprising number of times as a kid, so the backstage parts of a traveling show were there, and when I was learning to walk and talk, my parents were crew in a Shakespearean diner theater company, which was of course FULL of fairies and actors and stage effects. I spent 8 years in the 1990s doing hair design and costuming for our local Hampshire County Shakespeare Company, too. Apples and trees, you know. Decades of thinking about the natural world in a way that invites the possibility of fairies also fit into the game design, and noticing the playfulness of bees, the enthusiasm of the berry bramble, or the determination of a stream. Then blending all of that so that there are layers on layers of influence, so players can bring their own influences to their unique portrayal of fairyland.

What is Under Hollow Hills like mechanically? It seems like it might function a little differently because of the types of stories you’re telling!

VB: It does!

The structure of the game is, you travel through fairyland and the human world, and everywhere you go, you put on a show. On the GM’s side, this means that between sessions, you prep up where the circus is going next. You don’t prep what’ll happen – there’s no way you could guess! – but just what the place is like, and who’s there. There’s a quick system for this, rules you follow in prep that help you decide who the audience is, what they want from the circus, and what they have to give the circus in return.

In play, then, you arrive at this new place, and you know that you’ll be performing here, but before you do, you want to get the lay of the land. As much as your audience here wants something from you, you want something from them too. So you introduce yourselves, enjoy your hosts’ hospitality, get people’s stories out of them, and meddle as you see fit. When you’re satisfied, then you plan your show and perform.

Planning and performing your show are distinct phases in the game, and they give you a lot of power. In your performance you can change the season of the place – “season” here includes mood, fortunes, history, even who rules and who’s ruled over. You can win from the audience what they have in plenty, or win from them what they hold most dear. You can also change the circus, switching up the performers’ jobs, welcoming new performers or bidding old ones goodbye, and opening the way forward from one world to the other.

Now this is the large view, the overall structure. Your character has cycles and structures of their own. Your capabilities include, yes, ways to get the lay of the land, and ways to plan a show and perform in it, but they also include your own angle on things. Ways to get what YOU want, whether you line up with the circus or not.

Meg: A lot of game mechanics are designed in terms of a linear progression, from point to point to future point. Under Hollow Hills mechanics cycle and spin, as we spiral through the seasons and through our own emotions and the characters’ emotional relationships with each other. Players may come back to things that feel familiar several times in the course of play, but from a different angle each time.

I’m intrigued by the implicit theme of transience in these stories because of the traveling nature of the troupe and the temporary nature of performance. How does Under Hollow Hills address the concept and experience of transience by the characters, and naturally, players?

Meg: Playing with time and space is part of fairyland, as well as of stagecraft and performance. The magical thinking of childhood when summer never ends, and how it takes forever for a special event to arrive, and the way time moves oddly when you are fully engrossed in the current moment even as an adult, are all part of the game. All those can be tiny windows into fairyland, that may open only for a fleeting moment. We all change over time, in myriad ways. Major ways that come to mind are gender fluidity and variance and how that permeates Under Hollow Hills in reflection of the actual world we live in, and seasonal cycles as they affect all life on the planet. There’s a third, of course, which is mortality, and the questions around death that come up from the fay viewing it as a game and the mortals knowing that for them it is the biggest and most permanent change. Shifting through these moments smoothly takes practice.

As characters pass from moment to moment, in terms of Under Hollow Hills game design specifically, we built in ways to shift your character’s expression fluidly across their summer aspect and their winter aspect, and we recognize the impact people have on places (and vice versa) in the way that the Circus can move the place they perform towards different seasons. Illustrating the pinwheel of the seasons, choosing as a group how you move the circus and spaces through the pinwheel, helps convey the transient but also the cyclical nature of the game, and therefore of life. Movement is a basic part of the game.

Building a game where travel is intrinsically part of the story helps address some fictional issues in storytelling as well. Have you ever encountered a detective series you like, set in “a small country town” where there’s multiple mysteries and murders in each book? For heaven’s sake, get out of that town! It’s a hell-mouth! Making the circus mobile, building an interconnected group that is traveling together, with the inherent community needs and relationship complications that arise when people come to rely on each other, and when they are constantly encountering new groups of people wherever they go, allows for very different stories than having the characters in a fixed location.

Another topic that interests me is the diversity found in traveling troupes in history, and the prejudice with which they’ve been treated. A hard topic, I know, but have you addressed it at all in Under Hollow Hills, and why or why not?

VB: Not so hard a topic! Historically, traveling people, especially traveling performers, have been treated all different ways – with horrifying violence and racism, with glory and celebrity, with suspicion, with reverence – all different ways. Right now in the US, for instance, a lot of carnival workers are seasonal migrant workers, vulnerable to the US’ racist anti-immigrant policies and sentiments.

In Under Hollow Hills, we’re definitely presenting a romantic version of the traveling circus. When the circus travels, it’s usually easy. Where it arrives, it’s usually welcome. When you come into conflict with your audience, usually it’s a personal matter, a disagreement or personal animosity. It’s possible in the game for you to come into town to find a racist hate mob waiting for you with knives and clubs, but the way violence works in the game, it disarms even this kind of situation.

Our goal isn’t to examine real-world racism and violence, or even just the real-world difficulties of taking a show on the road. Those are different games, and ones we’d love to play!

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Thank you to Meg and Vincent both for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Under Hollow Hills on Kickstarter today!

Quick Shot on Hearts of Magic

Content Warning: There are allegations against Erika Shepherd for abusive behavior. I don’t have any links, but have been notified in private and respect the privacy of those raising the concerns, and I’m making this note as part of my policy against perpetrators of harm.

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Hi all, I have a few quick questions with answers from Erika Shepherd on Hearts of Magic: Threads Entangled! It looks like a really interesting game, I hope you like what Erika has to say!

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What is Hearts of Magic, both as a product and as your vision?

Hearts of Magic is a Firebrands Framework game about fey nobles, arcanist-bureaucrats, and anarchist witches vying for control of a magepunk fantasy city, getting in messy entanglements with eachother amid an undeclared magical war. It’s a story told against a backdrop of imperialism and class struggle, but it’s also a story about individuals finding ways to resist that system, and just maybe finding eachother instead.

It’s intended for one-shot play, with zero prep and an easy-to-learn ruleset you can pick up and play; while it has a set of factions and setting elements built in, it’s easy to adapt to other settings/factions, and flexible about how you portray your faction, without defining a lot of the worldbuilding.

It’s also, not to put too fine a point on it, *gay as hell*. An Oblique Discussion is explicitly and intentionally a game about, not being able to say out loud the thing you want to tell somebody, and As A Lesbian, it was important to me to put down in a game that feeling of, talking around something and hoping your were understood. It’s a game about fighting with your friends and allying with your rivals, but most of all, about falling in love with your enemies, and about how love (or something like it) can overcome the things that keep us apart and the systems that tear up our world.

The Hearts of Magic cover with three people in fancy historical dress are standing around a table reading a spellbook. One person is in a purple and pink dress and looks like an elf with pointy ears. The other two are human-looking, and one is stabbing a knife into the table near melting candles. The text reads "Hearts of Magic: Threads Entangled" by Erika Shepherd. — The cover of Hearts of Magic, illustrated by Finn Carey.

What is the design process for a project like this with the ten games in one design, especially when trying to create these messy entanglements?

I have to give almost all the credit to Vincent and Meg Baker, for the overall design – Hearts of Magic started as a 1:1 reskin of Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands, and much of that design is still part of Hearts of Magic. I did, however, remove a couple of the Firebrands games, and added two of my own – Weaving a Spell and A Wizard’s Battle. With that said, I did have to think about the kinds of entanglements I was looking to create. This game is as much the story of The City as it is a story of the characters themselves, and I wanted to make sure to focus as much on the ways characters interact with The City as the ways characters interact with eachother.

In “A Chase”, for instance, I wanted to make sure to fill out the landscape of the city and the range of setting options, for the players, being sure to include a range of physical locations in the City to expand the range of whats possible, there (Like trains! Can’t have magepunk weird-fantasy without trains!). Another example is how A Wizard’s Battle makes sure to include as much about how a violent confrontation affects the City, potentially devastating the surrounding neighborhood.

With that said, the real core of the game is about the interactions between the player characters; by making Weaving A Spell focus closely on the intimacy of doing magic with another person for instance, by keeping the focus of the games on the relationships between the players and not just their factions, I wanted to make sure that there was more binding the players together than keeping them apart.

A fancily dressed horned person with branch-like legs wearing an outfit with a long train that is being carried by a small bug. — Sketch by Sasha Reneau.

What kinds of characters do we see in Hearts of Magic, and what are they likely to encounter mechanically in the various games?

The three factions of Hearts of Magic are the Lords and Ladies, the fey nobles whose families have controlled The City for generations and who hold their power with the magic of nature, promises, and prophecy; the Order, a bureaucratic empire of scholar-mages who use the might of empire to, supposedly, try and protect the world from the dangers of magic; and the Witches, anarchists trying to free the city from nobility and empire alike and teach Magic to the masses. Each faction has their own set of adjectives to describe the characters with, but aside from the faction description and the adjectives, very little about character creation is dictated by the book – you can explicitly be any kind of person you can imagine, certainly not limited to traditional fantasy archetypes. My favorite character I’ve played as is a noble Lady whose body is a musical instrument of glass, wood, and clockwork, and that’s pretty tame on the scale of what the game allows.

The ten games that make up Hearts of Magic are:

Solitaire (what were you doing? what have we heard about you?),
A Chase (do you have the nerve to pursue?),
A Conversation Over Food (at ease together, or a tense meal?),
A Dance (when the music ends, will I see you again?),
A Free-for-all (why do we fight, and what are the stakes?),
Meeting Sword to Sword (steel meets steel, gaze meets gaze – who will blink?),
An Oblique Discussion (how can I tell you the things I can not say?)
Stealing Time Together (alone, together, with a gentle “may I?”)
Weaving a Spell (how do the two of us make magic greater than either alone?)
A Wizard’s Battle (can you resist the full strength of my powers?)

The games are all played by taking turns choosing prompts, except for Solitaire, which you play by yourself quietly to establish some context for yourself, and A Conversation Over Food and An Oblique Discussion, which give you the choice between choosing a prompt or engaging in actual improvised conversation. A Chase and Meeting Sword To Sword involve coin-flips to determine the outcome, but all the other games let the players decide the outcomes, and even in the fights, your character’s fate is always in your own hands – only you can decide if your character’s life is on the line, or how badly they are hurt by their opponent’s blows.

A witch with a witch's hat and sparkling coming from their eyes. Their one hand unwraps the other, revealing a bird-like claw. — Sketch by Sasha Reneau.

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Thank you Erika for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Hearts of Magic: Threads Entangled on Kickstarter today – hurry, only a few days left!

Bestiary: Hillside Phimf

The people living in those flatlands, they don’t know true horror. They’ve never heard its sound. They’ve never had to run, run downhill to the flats and hope there ain’t just another hill to come, hearing the growls, hearing the scream, the baaaaaaah it roars, the sound of its four feet pounding unevenly behind you. In the hills, we know. The hills don’t have eyes. They have the phimf.
Tarnin Covalesky, woodsman

The Phimf is a large - some would say gargantuan - beast that has four cloven hooves like a goat, two short on the right and two long on the left, that make it easy for them to travel over hillsides, with a stout torso that’s heavily muscled and four gorilla arms and hands, as well as a ape-like face that’s long in the snout like a goat, and four pointed horns - perhaps the creature’s only point of pride. — This blessed image is of the Hillside Phimf by Thomas Novosel.

Background

The Hillside Phimf is a cryptid. The most elusive kind, that is, until you’re on a hillside at night. Then it’s just nearer than near, its hot breath just bristling your hair and its rage tenable, just behind you. It’s a perilous beast, and like none you’ve ever heard of. There are some who try to compare it to a sidehill gouger, but those beasts are sweet creatures in comparison to the giant Phimf.

It might sound the opposite of terrifying when it’s stuck to hillsides, but you’ll only think that until you spend some days in a region where there’s more sideways than straight. The creature walks on two short legs and two long ones, gripping the hillside, and reaching out with four arms to capture anyone caught unawares on the slope. It rarely goes hungry, and only ranges where dips and valleys make their home.

The screaming roar it makes seems to echo through the hillsides, but is never heard inside the thick-walled homes. The trees buffer its baahhhhing, its cry to the wind. The Phimf is said to be half gorilla, some sort of ape, with large grasping hands and fearful teeth, and half goat, with clopping hooves that find even steep cliffs no trouble at all. Where it comes from, no one knows, but we do know where it goes – ’round the hills, soon as dusk falls, and not stopping until its growls turn into satisfied grumbles from a good meal. If there’s no folk around to have a bite, it’s not afraid of partial cannibalism, eating everything from other goats to spare possums trying to find their way home in the night. All along it stalks the hills.

The Phimf has their weird goat eyes, rectangular pupils and wide, with a legendary ability to see in the dark. Bright lights shy them away, but if they’re hungry they’ll just eat the light. Goat gut’ll digest anything, so they say. They might yell while they do it, truth be told. Their bleating yells reveal squat, square teeth that crush more than shear. They batter on their chest with apelike hands that have long reach and strong grip.

The way to get at them, supposedly, is a crew with strong stomachs who can round it up onto the flat. Its strengths become weaknesses then as it’ll topple to the side, struggling between its short and long legs. It’s still grabby as all get out, but it’ll eat anything you put in front of it – even if that snack happens to be sleep-inducing or worse. No one knows for sure whether it’ll work, but someone had better do something to protect these hills.

Hillside Phimf for D&D 5e

Large cryptid, chaotic neutral

Armor Class
16

Hit Points
84(8d10+ 40)

Speed
40 ft.

All Posts

STR 14|+2

DEX 16|+3

CON 20|+5

INT 8|-1

WIS 10|0

CHA 7|-2

Proficiency Bonus
+4

Skills
Intimidation +8, Perception +2

Senses

Darkvision 120 ft., Passive Perception 10

Languages
None

Challenge
8 (3900 XP)

All Arms. The Phimf has four arms and is always counted as having reach in all directions, and cannot be flanked.

Actions

Multiattack.The Phimf makes two attacks: one with its bite and one with its hands. It can make both attacks against the same target.

Bite. Melee Weapon Attack: +10 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 33 (4d12 + 7) bludgeoning damage. If the target is a Medium or smaller creature, it is grappled (escape DC 17). Until this grapple ends, the target is restrained, and the Phimf can’t bite another target.

Grasping Hands. Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit: 11 (2d6 + 4) bludgeoning damage. If the target is a Medium or smaller creature, it is grappled (escape DC 17). Until this grapple ends, the target is restrained, and the Phimf can’t grab another target.

Disgusting Roar. The Hillside Phimf has eaten ungodly things and its stomach works hard to digest it. When the Phimf roars to frighten its prey, anyone caught in the 20ft. cone must make a DC 10 Constitution save or suffer nausea and dizziness for 1d4 rounds (Temporary Constitution & Dexterity Penalty of -2).

Facilitator Notes

Drives

Driven by unending hunger.
Driven to find the tastiest food the most easily.
Doggedly pursues anything that smells like food regardless of when it last ate.

Interactions & Reactions

The Phimf is almost never seen during the day, seeking caves, shadowed cliffsides, and abandoned houses or barns to hide in when the sun is out.
If attacked, the Phimf will only try to fight back or resist. It will never try to run away. At most, it will seek cover when the sun is rising.
The Phimf is always hungry, and has no restrictions on its diet.
The Phimf is a large – some would say gargantuan – beast that has four cloven hooves like a goat, two short on the right and two long on the left, that make it easy for them to travel over hillsides, with a stout torso that’s heavily muscled and four gorilla arms and hands, as well as a ape-like face that’s long in the snout like a goat, and four pointed horns – perhaps the creature’s only point of pride.

Other System Notes

The Hillside Phimf has 8 hit dice.
Grasping Hands equivalent damage: Maul or Heavy Two-Handed Weapon.
Bite equivalent damage: Greataxe – three attacks for each bite.

Hillside Phimf for Monster of the Week

Monster: Devourer (motivation: to eat everything tasty)

Powers

All Arms: The Phimf has four arms and is always counted as having reach in all directions, and cannot be flanked.

Disgusting Roar: The Hillside Phimf has eaten ungodly things and its stomach works hard to digest it. When the Phimf roars to frighten its prey, anyone caught in the blast takes 1-harm close messy.

Teeth and Hands Attacks: Bite: 3-harm hand; Grasping Hands: 4-harm hand close.

Armor

Tough Skin: 1-armor.

Harm Capacity

12.

Weakness

Hunger & daylight: If the Phimf is tricked into eating something that could harm it, it takes harm more easily (no armor against ingestion). It also is weakened in daylight, but mostly in that it will cower and try to hide.

Five or So Questions on Tales of the Warrior Princesses

Today I have an interview with Brennan Taylor and John Carimando from Galileo Games on the new setting and adventures, Tales of the Warrior Princesses, which is currently on Kickstarter! Brennan and John are on top of the project, so I’ve asked them about the game and what they’re bringing together to make it happen.

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Tell me a little about Tales of the Warrior Princesses. What excites you about it?

Brennan: Tales of the Warrior Princesses is a Kickstarter for a setting and adventures taking fairy tale princesses and turning them into the active heroes of their own stories. We’re funding two books, Warrior Princesses in the Realm of Everafter, a setting book that includes character sheets for all the princesses and details their world, and Tales of the Warrior Princesses, a book of 11 adventures, each focusing on one of the princesses as the star of an adventure going up against the enemies in her realm.

What excites me about this project is taking these characters and turning them into role-playing game heroes. The person who conceived the project, John Carimando, is really passionate and excited about this, and he is committed to making sure that the Tales and any future projects are written by women. He’s been very generous with his concept, putting it out there for other writers to take and really make their own. I love seeing these new stories come in and the great creativity that’s being applied. I think this project is going to create something great for parents with kids looking to get them into role-playing, and because we are using 5th edition, it’s got a broad appeal to people in the hobby that I usually don’t reach with my very indie-focused games.

Sorry to ramble a bit, but there are a lot of things I’m excited about on this project.

Where did Tales of the Warrior Princesses come from? What are the inspirations and motivations for the adventures and settings?

John Carimando: I drew a picture of the Little Mermaid as a ranger. That inspired me to run a set of adventures for Nerdnyc’s Gotham Gaming Group using some of the Disney’s versions of Snow White, Cinderella, and Ariel. The players liked the idea and playing the characters. I want to make beautiful things, this gave me an opportunity to draw, paint, and design great artwork. Also, I like the idea of flipping the gender paradigm for protagonists and who they rescue. The majority of heroes of legend are women, they are sought out for their insight, and save a prince or two.

How does Tales… interact with the 5th ed. mechanics and structure?
John: Each Warrior Princess is a different D&D class. When you combine popular media (cartoons and movies), their original stories (Grimm, myth, etc.), and their archetypal depiction in the game, the class and character choice makes more sense. Mechanically, playing with the different WPs keeps from too much ability overlap. We also created new backgrounds, class archetypes, and feats to add to a DM’s collection. I am also trying to design a little outside the established norms for D&D.

Who have you brought on for the project, and what kind of themes and fun bits of story do you think they’re really bringing to the forefront?

John: The overarching themes are sorority, friendship, and adventure. The Warrior Princesses are depicted more as freedom-fighters than royalty (even though, some have noble backgrounds). The island they live on is called Avalon, and hold council at a round table under a silver dome, obvious references to Knights of the Round Table.

The writers get to expand the game universe and get to showcase their style of adventure. The consistent structural each Tale is different content wise and in presentation.

Brennan: We have a team of really talented writers working on all the new material for the Kickstarter. It’s a real dream-team for this project. We brought in an author for each princess so that each one has a special perspective and feel. As we continue to develop adventures and other material for the world we want to keep working with these same creators.

Danielle Ackley-McPhail: Snow White
Jacqueline Bryk: Scheherazade
Elsa S. Henry: Moira
James Mendez Hodes: Hua Mulan
Betsy Isaacson: Cinderella
Kira Magrann: Briar Rose
Darcy Ross & Rebekah McFarland: Josephine
Willow Palecek: Rapunzel
Ishki Ricard: Yokopa
Beth Rimmels: Belle
Monica Speca: Thalassa

D&D Fifth ed. has some complexity, and it can be difficult to keep kids on rails. How are you making the game appealing for kids?

Brennan: The themes and language in the writing is not just for adults. The appeal of Warrior Princesses pretty well crosses age ranges. Setting up the stories so that the princesses are active and engaged heroes in their stories, fighting storybook monsters, captures a timeless feeling for the books. For parents who want to play with their kids, we recommend ages twelve and up, but parents running games for younger kids could easily scale back imagery that they feel could be troublesome, like undead.

—

Thanks so much to Brennan and John for answering my questions! Since I only found out about the Kickstarter right before it ends (go back now if you’re excited!), I didn’t get to talk to all of the creators. Here’s to hoping we can hear from them soon! Check out Tales of the Warrior Princesses on Kickstarter here!

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Five or So Questions with Marissa Kelly on Bluebeard’s Bride

Today I have a brief interview with Marissa Kelly on the Bluebeard’s Bride RPG, currently on Kickstarter. I played an early version of Bluebeard’s Bride, and a second session as well, and really enjoyed it, so I hope you all enjoy reading about it and check out the Kickstarter.

From the Kickstarter:

Bluebeard’s Bride is an investigatory horror tabletop roleplaying game for 3-5 players, written and designed by Whitney “Strix” Beltrán, Marissa Kelly, and Sarah Richardson, and based on the Bluebeard fairy tale.

In this game you and your friends explore Bluebeard’s home as the Bride, creating your own beautifully tragic version of the dark fairy tale. Investigate rooms, discover the truth of what happened, experience the nightmarish phantasmagoria of this broken place, and decide whether or not you are a faithful or disloyal bride.

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The story of Bluebeard is not commonly known in modern fairy tales, and is definitely not a media favorite. What inspired you to use this specific fairy tale to make a game?

The idea came from Sarah and Strix at the Hacking as Women event. As their coach, I was excited to hear that the fairy tale lent itself so well to the PBtA framework. It seemed like a great way to frame an elegant horror game without getting bogged down by too many preconceived ideas about what the player experience should be.

Tell me a little about the design process. I played the game at an earlier stage, and a second time a while later, but I haven’t seen the final product. What iterations did you have to go through to make the game an experience true to your intentions?

The game has certainly gone through many iterations. A lot of trimming, gutting, and trial and error. One of the biggest changes we went through was shifting a large part of the game to a diceless mechanic. I felt we had been running up against a wall with the Maiden moves, but eventually (with the help of a wonderful group of playtesters) we found a solution. This shift feels to me like a nod to old ghost stories that influence so much horror we all know and love.

Bluebeard’s Bride has a tendency (in my experience) to touch on some really intense, and sometimes difficult, topics (including domestic abuse). What safety measures do you have in place for the game, and how are you preparing the game materials to address those things respectfully?

Yep! This horror game can touch on all of those things, so the game has advice, tips, and rules for helping the players and Groundskeeper manage any real out-of-character conflicts that might arise. For example, we use a variant of the X-card developed by John Stavropoulos that promotes self-care and dispels the expectation that anyone at the table will have to be a mind reader.

How does Bluebeard’s Bride encourage the players to work together to tell a story, while allowing conflict between the parts of the Bride’s psyche?

It helps that we trapped all the players in the body of one woman! We have made space for disagreement within the Bride’s own mind. If a player has the Bride act in a way that one player didn’t agree with, the Ring mechanic allows them to take control and guide her actions when it is their turn.

When all is said and done, what game elements do you think help the most to guide the story through horror and twisted narrative to its inevitable – and hopefully satisfying – conclusion?

We have tools called Room Threats and Groundskeeper Moves that help guide the players through consistent bouts of horror. These Threats and Moves point at one of the cores of horror – that of personal, intimate fears. We also baked the conclusion of the fairy tale into the game so player’s choices will directly impact the telling of their tale.
—

Thanks to Marissa for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading and get the chance to check out Bluebeard’s Bride on Kickstarter!

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To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

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

Playtesting Bluebeard’s Bride with Sarah Richardson!

Yesterday I had the pleasure of playing a session of Bluebeard’s Bride with Emily Care Boss, Hannah Shaffer, and J Li, with the fantastic Sarah Richardson as our GM. (Note: this was an amazing group to play with. WOW.) Sarah Richardson, Marissa Kelly, and Whitney Beltrán are the creators of Bluebeard’s Bride and I was very excited to get into my second playtest of this gorgeous game.

Up front for people interested in this game: First off, this game is still in development and has not been released. Everything in this has the possibility of changing. It is not a game for kids. It often contains very twisted material, including seriously NSFW and graphic descriptions. This review will cover some sexual content (I’ll try to keep it relatively vague), generally creepy stuff, and violence against women.

Bluebeard’s Bride has a really awesome initial setup. It’s currently based on Apocalypse Word mechanics, but it’s quite far removed from that material. The game is about the story of Bluebeard, a fairy tale that has seen many different interpretations. The core of the story is that a woman marries a man with a blue beard, and instructs her that she can explore his whole castle except one room, then leaves for business. Eventually she opens that room, and finds that it is full of the corpses of Bluebeard’s previous wives. Bluebeard finds out that she’s opened the door, and kills her (in some versions she is rescued, but the regular story results in her death). How this plays out in the game and how it ends is something you’ll just have to find out through play! My two experiences with this game have been quite different, so it is one of the few games that is kind of encapsulated in one specific story that has a ridiculous amount of replayability.

The general idea in this game is that there is one bride, and the players play different parts of her psyche. The playbooks we used were the Animus (physicality, masculine bravado, and independence), the Fatale (sex, sensuality, and intrigue), the Virgin (innocence, exploration, and critique), and the Witch (transgression, magic, and power). There is also a playbook called the Mother, but we didn’t try that out.

The playbooks are one of my favorite things. They include six sections: Wedding Preparations, Sisterly Bonds, Token Tracks, Stats, Burdens, and the Trauma Track. I don’t want to overcomplicate this review so I’ll just talk about my favorite things: the Wedding Preparations and the Burdens. Wedding preparations are basically character generation. There are questions about whether you trust your husband or not (I didn’t), what gift did you give him (a stag’s head and the knife I used to cut it off with, to demonstrate my power), and then a question about the physical appearance of the bride, with a second question about the way other people influence her appearance. This was a fascinating exercise.

The Burdens are basically playbook specific moves. I am a huge fan of these. The Animus has one presently (though this could change) that involves investigating objects by breaking them. This was so my thing. I was super excited to play it.

Okay, I do have to mention the other playbook sections: Sisterly Bonds are relationships between you and the other Sisters (pieces of the bride’s psyche). To my knowledge there is not a specific mechanic. The Token Tracks are Faithfulness and Disloyalty tracks that are marked when you exit rooms to help determine some of the details of the end game mechanics. Stats are self-explanatory. The Trauma Track is effectively harm. I can’t remember exactly what happens when your Trauma Track reaches max, but it’s called “shattering” so that’s pretty cool. 🙂

The play involves passing around a ring from player to player in no specific order (the player with the ring chooses who it passes to for the most part). There are moves for investigation, supporting or interfering with other Sisters, and some other really good ones – my favorites are shivering from fear, which is typically called on when the GM sees you get really creeped out (this is an awesome body language thing to me), and dirty yourself with violence, because yesssss.

There is a cool thing where you leave a room and you have choose a token kind of representing what you discovered, which I think is cool because it makes you reevaluate everything having to do with that room. There are also a few instances where the game asks you what the scariest thing or most horrible thing that could happen is. I love how it gives players the agency to terrify themselves.

Agency is actually something really important to me in games. Bluebeard’s Bride actually, imo, does a pretty good job with it. First of all, I don’t know if the other creators do this, but Sarah did get in touch with players in advance and allow us to flag any major triggers. This is hugely appreciated for me, because the game is filled with a lot of really upsetting things. She also allowed use of an X-card in game. On top of that, Sarah is an incredibly perceptive GM, which I think helps a lot. If you plan to run horror games, I think that it is way valuable to have a good read on body language.

Another part of the agency is that how the players approach the materials – like in other AW games – tends to influence the type of horror and danger, as well as the severity. This allowed us to take things in worse directions for some subjects, and better directions for others. When the game asks “what is the worst thing that could happen here?” the GM can see by our responses what is really working, and where buttons could further be pushed.

Also! I liked that this game has a very elegant way of violating perception. Like, when we play games, they are fiction, and we can have our characters experience stuff like hallucinations – particularly popular in horror. This, however, is a story where we are expecting bad stuff to happen and when the horrific stuff happens it’s very easy to assume that it’s actually happening! Because the game is contextually horrific, seeing horrific things is very easy to accept as reality. This is able to be turned over its head by the GM revealing the mundanity. It’s very cool because it has this element of “this could be real, but it could also not be real, but what is real?!” while still keeping a great flow to the story.

Beyond the mechanics!

The session was SO fun. I am just going to cherry pick some stuff, because while the story changes with every session in a lot of ways, I want to leave a lot more mystery regarding the structure.

In one scene, while the bride was investigating the bathroom, a mosaic on the ceiling depicting a standing man and woman changed by looking into the water in the bath below into the man strangling the woman. While the bride was examining this, a shade of some sort came from behind her, and began to strangle her and shoved her into the water. Upon waking, the bride discovered no markings or other indications that it had happened, except that she was now lying in the bathtub. While examining herself in the mirror, the shade came behind her, and when she tried to attack it, it grabbed her shoulder, and seemed to physically break something. The pain continued throughout the session.

In another scene, the bride was examining some locks of hair and the Witch tried to divine whether they were from violence. The response was for the walls and ceiling to start bleeding, and blood to pour over the bride. When she tried to wipe it off, her skin peeled off as she touched it, coming off in ribbons. When she screamed for help, the maid arrived, and there was nothing happening at all. Instead of the locks of hair on the dresser in front of her, there was a large, wooden dildo. The scene that followed with the generally creepy maid involved a disturbing kinda BDSM scene where the bride was somewhat involved, as well as a second maid.

Later, the bride went into the dining room to discover a huge banquet of food, all of which smelled just like what her mother cooked at home. A third maid offered her a small pie, all the while talking about how the bride shouldn’t each very much. The bride eventually dug in and ate a little bit of everything, and by then the other two maids had arrived and they started shaming her, talking about how Bluebeard didn’t like chubby girls. Since the Animus (me) was in charge of the character at that point, that resulted in a little violence – the bride hauled off and punched one of the maids, and then two of them held her while that maid punched her in the stomach. When they left, the bride was so full of rage at everything – the maids, Bluebeard, and especially her mother for forcing her to do this – that she shattered a ton of the now-bare plates. That led to another discovery…

The ending scene was incredibly dramatic, and super fucked up, but it was great! The whole exploration of both the house, Bluebeard’s character, and the bride herself was fascinating. I fully recommend checking Bluebeard’s Bride out soon – playtests are currently rare, but I think it will soon be coming to us all on Kickstarter. I, for one, am hella excited!

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

Tag: fairy tales

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