Hi All! I havea quick shot today with Michael Dunn-O’Connor about Goblinville, which isavailableonPDFand in print! Check out what it’s about below!
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What is Goblinville, both as a product and as your vision?
Goblinville is a character-driven dungeon crawler that works for short, punchy sessions and long campaigns. The town itself is the key source of adventure and improving it is a core part of character advancement. The requirement that all player characters are goblins has shifted the tone of play (compared to other fantasy adventure rpgs). All the characters are from the same community, so there is an assumed shared interest. And the community is in peril, in a way reinforced by the procedures of play. The resulting spirit of underdog collaboration makes it stand out from other games in an often fraught genre.
Finally, the element of fantasy adventure games that I most take issue with is the portrayal of heroic player characters killing and stealing from subhuman, monstrous enemies. Goblinville subverts this by casting the goblins as protagonists, with cares and motivations and a distinct society. It doesn’t guarantee thoughtful dissection of the genre, but it intentionally avoids reasserting the worst of its cliches.
What are the basic mechanics like in Goblinville and how do they support the character-driven focus?
The character-driven focus of Goblinville starts during Goblin creation, the first step of a new game. When each player is creating their goblin, the rules tell them to choose or roll for a few aspects of your character. These aspects give a lot of texture to the character (rather than being a set of numbers): your job, your boss, a formative experience, and a notable physical trait and personality trait.
Then, all the players pause. In turn, they introduce
their Goblin to the table. The other players ask questions and
discuss. Then they agree on a Title for that goblin: a unique moniker
that sets them apart from the rest of the town while affirming their place in
it. They also decide on an ‘Esteem Trait’ for that goblin. How do
they fit into the adventuring group, what sets them apart from the other
goblins at this table?
These Titles and Traits are the most important part of a
character, because they are the only (limited) source of bonus dice for a
roll. Rolls in Goblinville are always full of compromise; getting to add
a die for a relevant Trait or Title (and drop your lowest result) lets you
mitigate those compromises.
At the end of a session, every player shares their goblin’s
defining moment. This could be a notable accomplishment, a new insight, or a
significant struggle. The other players at the table grant them a new
Title based on their actions. Traits can change over time in a similar
way.
The result of these design choices is that advancement
(gaining and changing Titles/ Traits) is linked to what is important to your
character in the fiction, and to your character’s dynamic with the rest of the
group. Every session ends with: how did you (as players) see my
character change? And the answer matters, because it’s tied to the dice
mechanics that come up every time the goblins take a risky action.
What is one of the most important ways you show goblins to be different than the standard portrayal, beyond their role as protagonists?
The humanizing details of being a goblin in Goblinville seep
in through play. The first things that become clear are the
character aspects in goblin creation. You have a job and a boss.
You have traits that goblins notice about you and a reputation (for good or
ill). You are part of a community. At the beginning of a session,
you also commit to an outlook and a goal. You have motivations that are
distinct from the other goblins. The prompts don’t push you toward
creating a stereotypical goblin, every prompt suggests that your character has
an inner life and relationships.
Some players still initially play up greedy or bloodthirsty goblins. And this is maybe a style of play that folks are looking for. Where this tends to become more nuanced is related to the improvement of Goblinville itself. Character specific advancement is fairly limited. You can only have three Traits and three Titles at a time. You can advance in rank a few times, but the added benefits are marginal. The most meaningful advancement over time comes from ‘unlocking’ new locations in town. To do this you need to find missing goblins, or convince goblins with a particular expertise to join your community. You need to repair broken equipment or go adventuring to find alternatives. The game repeatedly rewards you for caring about and investing in the town where you live. There is no reward for being greedy, selfish, or “evil”.
Tell me a little about Mysthea: Legends From the Borderlands. What excites you about it?
So! Mysthea: Legends From the Borderlands is a game of post-war rebuilding and divided loyalties in a geomantic fantasy world. It’s set in a city that’s in territory contested by two major powers, and now those powers are at war. The war front has passed over this city and is now a distant rumble, and the city is free again – though much worse for wear. Each player creates a faction active in the city, whether they’re an ancient order, a new organisation dedicated to refugee support, or sent by one of the great powers to rebuild the city and pursue their patron’s agenda. You’ll make a viewpoint character from your faction, dive into the politics and struggles of the wounded city, and see how it changes from flashpoint to flashpoint.
I’m excited about:
Telling a zoomed-in story: your group will find out how a single city grows and how its people change over the span of a few decades. You’ll craft this city and get to know its districts, its politics, its festivals.
A dive into weird fantasy: Mysthea is a world defined by the crystals scattered over it by a prehistoric impact. These crystals warp the environment and its creatures, but also resonate with human thought. What does a society look like where everyone has limited telekinesis, and can use these crystals to build, fight, control beasts, craft prosthetics, etc? I’m interested in finding out!
A game of empire and liberation. At least some of the player factions will be coming into the city as liberators, having ousted the previous occupiers. But the ousting wasn’t clean, and the faction’s patrons aren’t altruists. As you play you’ll deal with what happens after liberation, as each faction must reckon with their obligations to their patrons, the city, and each other. We’re hoping the fantasy setting will provide the needed distance to really dig into this thorny topics, and have hired cultural consultants to try and ensure we do so respectfully.
I like this zoomed in look, and I’m curious about the
flashpoints! What does it feel like in play to go from moment to moment in this
world, and how is that represented in the game?
A flashpoint starts with
you defining its core issue: why have we decided to pick up this city’s story
here? Maybe a battalion of soldiers has arrived at the city and demanded
supplies? Perhaps a shower of crystal meteors have hit the city, causing destruction
and warped the area? Or maybe one of the player factions has decided they’ve
had enough, and is going to try and seize control of the city?
So – you’ve set up this
flashpoint. To play through it, you’ll jump between the actions of Houses
(slow, ponderous, and vast) and Heroes – agile and dynamic, but with their own
priorities. We’ve designed the two layers to feel very different in play. House
actions add new elements to the map and reshape the city’s balance of power,
but use up a limited pool of Decrees. The hero phase feels more like standard
PbtA, something like Monster of the Week. Your group of characters have a
mission to deal with, and as you play out the moment-to-moment drama of that
conflict you’ll test your bonds with your fellows and discover new truths about
the world. The two phases flow into each other. Your Houses’ actions set up
threats and opportunities for your Heroes to deal with, while your Heroes’
on-the-ground experience of this city and its people can completely change your
Houses’ priorities and goals.
How do you approach the
idea of consent and agency in a world where people can control things with
their mind, able to break rules with a thought?
One of the interesting things about magic in Mysthea is that it adds agency, and its most powerful effects need close friends working together on a common goal. It’s a link between the mental and the material and has been used in-setting to craft crystal prostheses amputees can telekinetically control, and literally give agency to constructed beings of stone and crystal.
There’s the other element
too – consent and agency. One person acting on their own can only perform a few
tricks with crystal shards and boost their normal actions – to do more, you
need to work together. By calling on the aid of those who have strong bonds
with you you add their wisdom to yours, letting you work together to go beyond
human limits, evoke world-warping auras and more.
The fact that magical
potency comes from close bonds and common goals instead of years of arcane
research and expensive components is really interesting! What sort of society
does that lead to? How does that change how minority groups organise and lobby
for their rights? How do autocrats maintain their power, knowing what power
lies in their subject’s hands if they work together? I’m interested to find
out!
I didn’t ask questions about the monsters but this thing is RAD.
I was just asking people
about making games that happen after the liberation! What do you think are the
challenges in designing a game with this focus, and what’s exciting about them?
One challenge is definitely
the messy complexity of these situations. You can’t turn back the clock – the
occupation happened, and it and your ‘liberation’ left scars on this place.
Among the city’s citizens you’ll have those who want to restore the old ways,
and those who suffered under that regime and want to keep moving forward. Among
the liberators, you’ll have isolationists wanting to minimise investment and
occupiers trying to claim this city permanently.
That’s a really interesting
social situation to drop players into, but it’s vital to keep the difference
between dogma and the true situation clear. Part of our solution is to make
sure the game prioritises humanity over ideology. We want to humanise all
parties involved, though that definitely doesn’t mean presenting all positions
as valid.
Finally, we’re aware of the
limits of our own perspectives, and have hired consultants to make sure we
treat sensitive matters with the appropriate degree of tact and care.
What are some of the more
complex aspects of designing a game focused on a whole city, rather than just a
few characters?
First, you have to treat
the city as a character in its own right, and give it a presence at the table.
The map of the city is central to the game: you begin by placing down its
districts and landmarks, and as you play you’ll introduce factors to it
representing people, places and events crucial to the current flashpoint.
It’s also important to
maintain the link between people and their community – to the extent that one
of the GM’s principles is ‘name everyone, and know who backs them’. There’s no
lone wolves in Legends From the Borderlands, and no faceless mooks – everyone
has their own identity, and their own place in the city’s cultural fabric.
Of course, the easiest way to make something feel alive is to have it change. The timeskips between flashpoints are here to establish that, letting the city grow physically and culturally – each time you jump ahead, you’ll describe ways the city’s appearance has changed, and a new festival that’s sprung up to remember the previous flashpoint.
Tell me a little about Gather: Children of the Evertree. What excites you about it?
Gather: Children of the Evertree is a worldbuilding game built around a freeform/LARP style of play. I call it a “roundtable LARP” because while you’ll be immersed and in-character from start to finish you’re still sitting around a table with friends while you play. In Gather, you take on the role of Speakers – each of you an elected representative chosen by your respective Kinship or community – that have crossed the vastness of the Evertree to attend an annual meeting known as the Gather. In theory, the Gather is a great idea. Every year the Kinships of the Evertree may send a Speaker to go the Gather and discuss the previous year, talk about shifts and changes, discuss the affairs of the world, and so on. However, the Gather is a meeting so saturated with laws and customs that trying to conduct this meeting is often frustrating, limited, and feels almost alien and otherworldly (to the players) in its execution. The rules that govern the Gather don’t only limit what you can talk about, but how you can talk about it.
Practically, the game is played out with a deck of cards. The game is GM-less, zero prep, you just draw the first card and dive right in. The cards explain how to play, provide a little bit of information about the world in which you live, and then present the heart of the game – a number of Question cards. You’ll draw a card, ask the question to the group, and then the answers to these questions form the “discussion” of the Gather. What’s exciting about this is that every question and answer helps to shape the world around this meeting. Not just in abstract ways, but in how the world relates to the Kinships gathered at the meeting. We see the world through their eyes, and that’s what shapes it. A few small pieces of setting at the start, along with the questions, provide the edges of the world, but you fill in the rest of it as you play – what’s going on in this world, how do these Kinships interact, what threats are out there, what has happened, what is going to happen. It’s all hashed out as you play, and presented as it relates to the people who live within the world. In that way, the world is built less by images on a map, and more by the relationships and connections that fill it, which means that the parts of the world that you’re going to really dig into and flesh out are the ones that you’re interested in, and that you want to see more of.
How did you write the question cards and keep them from being boring or repetitive?
Every time you play, you’re playing with twenty question cards. Twenty-one if you count “By what name is your Kinship called?” which is always the introductory example question given near the start of each session to get players accustomed to how questions are asked and answered. Of the twenty remaining questions, five are set. Essentially, how large is your Kinship, what do you have a lot of, what do you have a shortage of, how many have joined your Kinship this past year, and how many have left or died. Thematically, these five questions were the ones asked at the very first Gather ever to be held, and so they have been asked at every Gather since. Conveniently, these also help players setup the boundaries and pillars of the world and Kinships so we can see the stakes we’re working with.
Beyond these, there are fifteen additional question cards. There are pulled, at random, from a deck of fifty when you’re setting up for your session. Thematically, these are questions that have been asked at other Gathers that have come and gone in previous years, since each time the Gather meets a new question is added to the collection (more on that in a bit). This provides you with a lot of variation when you play. Every time you sit down for a session you could choose to revisit a Kinship you’ve played before, or make one entirely new, and this may change how you play and the interactions you have with others. However, changing what the questions are from session to session and, just as importantly, changing the order in which they’re asked will drastically alter how players approach the game, and the themes that are present at your table.
After these twenty question cards have been gone through, every player has a chance to ask one question of their own design to the group. Once these have all been asked and answered, a vote is held, and a single player-generated question is added permanently to the game for a chance to be asked at all future Gathers.
Tell me more about the Kinships. How are they made up? What meaning do they have?
Your Kinship is the community, family, guild, nation, or assembly that you have come to the Gather on behalf of. It’s your job to represent your Kinship as their Speaker. Every player takes the role of a Speaker, each of them from a different far-flung Kinship scattered across the Evertree. To take up the role of Speaker is a heavy responsibility because within the Gather you don’t even speak as an individual. Every word you speak carries the weight of your entire Kinship behind it, so it is tradition to hear Speakers use words like “we”, “us”, and “our” rather than “I” and “me”.
Kinships start as nothing more than a name. While you’re learning how to play the game players are given an introductory example question which is: “By what name is your Kinship called?” Everyone then has the opportunity to name their Kinship. You know a little bit about the world at that point, about the Evertree in which you reside, but beyond that the name of your Kinship is entirely up to you. You’ll announce it, and then write it down on a notecard for all to see. Maybe you’re The Branch Tenders. Maybe you’re The Forgotten. Maybe you’re the Astral Cardinals. Maybe you’re Those Whom The Rot Found. Whatever you’d like. After the Kinships are named however, and you start into the first few questions of the Gather, magic happens and these communities that didn’t even have a name fifteen minutes ago suddenly come to life. All of the Gathers questions relate back to these Kinships, how they’re doing, what they need, and what they have to offer, so every time someone answers a question you learn a little bit more about what that Kinship is, who they are, and how their little corner of the world works.
Video by Galactic Network talking with Stephen about Gather.
How does player interfacing with the layers of tradition and rules at the Gather influence storytelling?
To really explain this, let’s delve a bit into the mechanics behind the Gather, because how the “laws” of the Gather force you to engage in this meeting directly influence how storytelling takes shape. Once players have gotten past the setting cards and the “how to play” cards they’re left with the core of the game – the question cards. When a Speaker flips a question card they read it aloud. As an example, the question might be “Has war been brought upon you by another this past year, whether by words, stones, powder, or hex?” All of the Speakers then consider their answer to this question, and at the moment the Speaker who read the question discards the card all of the Speakers answer the question on behalf of their Kinship in unison. This unified answering is a critical component of the laws that govern the Gather as a sign of respect to all Kinships. No one Kinship’s voice is more important than another. Every Speaker begins the game with three tokens, and after this cacophonous answer is given to a question, Speakers may offer their tokens to their fellow Speakers, offering them to anyone they’d like to hear more from. This could be if you heard someone give an intriguing answer through the din, or for any number of other reasons. Once all of these tokens have been handed out, if you’ve been granted such a token (and have accepted it) you have the opportunity to state your answer once more. This time, you’ll say it by yourself, and may elaborate on it if you’d like.
For example, if you heard me say something about hexes amid the united answer, you might offer me a token to hear more because hey, hexes are cool. If accepted I would repeat my answer and elaborate on it. For instance, I might say “Yes, a war of hexes. We believe the Rotchildren have laid a hex upon our crops. They do not grow, they only crumble and spoil in the fields.” Maybe I’ve just called out another one of the Kinships at the table, or maybe I’ve invented a new one. Now that I’ve given my answer, any Speaker may offer me another token to speak further, but these must be paired with a question. If I accept the token I must answer the question. So, you might ask me: “Believe? Do you have any proof that it was the Rotchildren?” If I accept your token, I’ll respond. “Technically, no. But we know the ways of the Rotchildren. This is how they work. Everywhere they travel in the Evertree they bring destruction with them. They have always looked on our lands with envy.” Again, any Speaker might offer me a token with a new question, and this will continue until either all questions have been asked and answered or until I refuse to answer a question. Perhaps the Speaker for the Rotchildren offers me a token and asks “And who exactly did that land of yours belong to before you stole it away?” If I hold up my hand and refuse to answer (sometimes a far more dramatic choice than answering) my time to speak is done and we move on to the next Speaker who was given one of the initial tokens.
While everything outside of the question cards and the initial setting information is entirely improvised and created by the players during play, this playstyle of questions and answers creates built-in prompts for storytelling to build off of. You’re never presented with a blank canvas and told to “go!” instead you’re guided more easily into collaborative storytelling by building off of each other’s prompts, questions, and answers.
What themes and setting elements do you think Gather does best, and what unusual possibilities are there to explore in the worldbuilding?
The structure of Gather’s gameplay is very similar to the Evertree itself. A good way to think about the game is to think about the question cards and the answers given in unison as the trunk of the tree. These are the solid foundation of the world. A question tells us things about the world, and the answers tell us things about the Kinships. From there, players have the ability to go down these tangents of questions and answers, literally off-shooting from the trunk like branches. These branching paths of answers, questions, more answers, and more questions allow you to follow these paths of story and worldbuilding as far as you’d like, letting players focus in on what is cool to them and really digging into the threads that excite everyone, before coming back to the trunk and shooting off onto the next branch. Finally, when all the branches you want to explore have been explored, we move up the tree to the next piece of the trunk.
I know that freeform, live action, or improv-heavy games can be intimidating to more traditional tabletop groups, but as with many of my games I have endeavored to make Gather a more guided experience. It’s like an improv with a safety net. Even if you’re not quick on your feet with creating answers that doesn’t matter as much because you can just speak quietly and let you half-answer get lost in the din. Not interested in exploring your thread further? You can always reject tokens. There are a lot of options here even for people who may not be as comfortable spinning worlds off the top of their heads.
What’s especially fun to explore in the worldbuilding is that there are very few boundaries. This world can truly be what you’d like it to be. And even if you play the same Kinship session after session, that doesn’t mean that anything about the world or the Kinships within it will stay the same. Are there societies and cities in the Evertree’s branches? Are you human? Are you a nest of birds? Nearly anything is possible, so the possibilities from session to session are endless. I anticipate that this is a game that will fuel fantastic, terrifying, and beautiful concepts for Kinships that will keep you wanting to come back to the table with it to try out your next great idea.
Lovely image of the Gather: Children of the Evertree title.
I have an interview today with Jacob Kellogg on his game Journey Away, which is currently on Kickstarter. You might remember Jacob from his approachable theory article about complexity in game design – but don’t think his cool thoughts on games and design stop there! Journey Away is a game that I think is doing something fun and it’s got dice pools, which means I’m interested. Check out his responses below!
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Tell me a little about Journey Away. What excites you about it?
Well, one of the exciting parts of Journey Away is that it’s my first project that’s big enough to not be a Pay What You Want title; that feels like a threshold to me as a new designer. As for the game itself, I like that it feels like a different kind of experience than most RPGs. Fantasy is probably my favorite gaming genre, which can be problematic due to there being so many fantasy games out there already, but I think that the non-challenge-based mechanics really help this to bring something new to the hobby instead of just being another rehash. I feel good about that.
What made you go towards non-challenge-based mechanics? What about that is important to you?
The decision to use non-challenge-based mechanics was a convergence of two things. First, I had noticed that fighting monsters (and to a lesser extent, facing traps and hazards) was so common in fantasy gaming that it seemed to be treated as an inherent part of the genre. That struck me as odd, since to me “fantasy” is more about the setting. Second, as I started developing my own setting and premise for the game, it didn’t make sense that curious villagers would explore a magical world with wide-eyed wonder if doing so involved facing mortal danger on a daily basis. At the intersection of those two observations is the notion of non-challenge-based gameplay.
The beautiful cover art for Journey Away. I finally learned how to do alt text properly, so full description is there.
How did you make fantasy interesting and different for Journey Away?
As I touched on above, I think part of what makes some people feel like fantasy is “done to death” is that it keeps getting done the same way each time. The dice may change and each setting might have its own quirk, but ultimately they’re almost always implemented as some variation of allocating attributes and skills for your best odds of success against a series of challenges. I think stripping that away offers something genuinely different. It’s like if someone has only ever seen pasta served with tomato sauce and they ask me how I’ll make pasta interesting and different, maybe I’ll give them some chicken lo mein or beef stroganoff.
Even so, I also wanted a reasonably original setting. I ended up with a world where magic is a recent addition, because that offers lots of great benefits, like having plenty of opportunity for discovery and adding a sense of wonder to any magical artifacts you might encounter. It also offers a nice solution to the common fantasy issue of “race”. People like to play fantastical beings, but there’s a lot of baggage with the traditional handling of races. What I get to do in Journey Away is say that everyone’s a human, and the new presence of magic causes some folks to be born with altered features. So if you want to play an “elf”, you can just say that you were born with pointy ears and give yourself the traits you want; or if you like tieflings, you can give yourself those features without having to introduce race-based prejudice into the game; or if you’re coming to fantasy gaming from some other background, you can easily adopt the features of a character you like (such as a sexy vampire or an anime catgirl) without having to find a race in a splatbook and convince the GM that the stats are balanced. The setting really offers a lot of freedom to everyone.
I love the idea of getting the magical features you want because of the flexibility of the world. So tell me, how do these work mechanically? How do you represent magic in the nuts and bolts?
Magic is handled the same way as any other feature of your character: you declare that something is true about your character, and assign a die size to it based on how significant or impactful you want it to be. It doesn’t matter whether that character trait is your experience with fishing, your cute demeanor, or the potency of some magical ability you have. For example, a friend gave her character animal-mind-reading powers with a d10. Then, whenever we rolled for a situation where that was helpful (like when trying to negotiate with someone), a d10 would be added to the player dice pool. If it could get in the way in a situation (like when surrounded by lots of creatures), then a d10 gets added to the complication pool.
What is the core of conflict and discovery in Journey Away?
The entire primary mechanic is basically what I just described for magic: you give yourself traits to define your character, and assign die values based on how big of an impact you want them to be, with bigger dice having bigger impacts. Those traits then contribute dice to one pool when they’re helpful in a situation, or to another pool when they could get in the way. Circumstances can also contribute dice to both pools, but mostly to the complication pool. Both pools are rolled, and the players arrange the dice into pairs (one die from each pool). Pairs where the die from the player pool is higher generate beneficial developments, while pairs in which the complication die is higher generate complications. The player to the left of whoever rolled then narrates the majority development type (boons or complications), then passes to the player on the right of the one who rolled, and that player narrates the remaining developments. Of course, there will be structures in place to guide this narration with prompts for those who aren’t interested in or comfortable with absolute openness, but that’s the basic idea.
Conflict isn’t a major component of the intended emotional focus of the game. Instead, we’re framing the journey as primarily positive. Even the “bad” complications serve as an opportunity for fun moments, and the game is mainly about diving headlong into the wondrous unknown. This means that the game encourages forward movement, curiosity, and laughing together when things take unexpected turns. Journey Away very much presents the discovery of new things as a positive and joyful endeavor. I want to encourage a way of thinking: that things outside your current experience aren’t inherently bad and dangerous, but instead will enrich your life and make you glad you stepped outside the village to have a look.
Hey all, I’ve got a great interview with Elizabeth Chaipraditkul on the new tabletop game Familiars of Terra, which is currently on Kickstarter! Liz got in touch and when I heard “familiars of Terra is a tabletop roleplay game set in a beautiful world where everyone has their own animal familiar” I knew many of you would be super amped to check it out. So here’s the interview!
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A dark skinned person with a beard, wearing a fancy shirt with a fur collar, with an animal that l can only describe as a poodle with wings. SO CUTE.
Tell me a little about Familiars of Terra. What excites you about it?
Familiars of Terra is a tabletop roleplay game set in Terra, a fantasy world in which every person has an animal familiar. As a heroic Seeker you travel the lands with your familiar healing the devastation of a war which left nations scared and people scattered. The game is all about exploration, adventure, and heroics. If you’re a fan of the Golden Compass or Pokemon you’ll probably enjoy our game.
What makes me most excited about Familiars of Terra is that it is a very positive game. Yes there was a war, yes your main job as a Seeker is to make sure something terrible like that never happens again, but behind all that is hope. Being a Seeker is about making the right choices when they matter most and when there are grey decisions – helping, healing, and thriving. I wanted to make a game that left people feeling good about themselves, that built them up, and also had a bunch of awesome animals in it. 🙂
What was the initial design and conception process like? If you just woke up one day and wrote it, what was the spark? If it took a longer road, how did you find your way?
After I finished WITCH I kinda needed a break from the dark. I love dark, dramatic games, but focusing so much on that type of world was really exhausting. You can’t live in shadows forever it isn’t healthy. So Familiars of Terra really came from a place of wanting to design something happy and uplifting. I wanted to write about heroes and cool animals. That’s where the game really began. From there I started testing different mechanics with dice and then eventually with cards – once we had the base system it took off from there. Funnily enough, I had a really clear picture in my mind of what Terra looked like right from the start, so the mechanics was where I had to invest a lot of development time.
Left to right: a person with a beard and mustache, a necklace with a big shiny gem in it, and a fancy shirt and collar in blue and beige; a dark skinned person with round pigtails, in a cream colored midriff shirt and beautiful facial jewelry; a white person with red hair wearing a brown vest with a fluffy collar over a light blue dress; a dark skinned person with dreadlocks, wearing a purple-ish scarf and a long green vest; and an indigenous-appearing person wearing a strappy vest, with organic lines down their cheek in red, carrying a large stick on their back.
When you say grey decisions, what do you mean by that, and how does it tie to the heart of the Seeker-familiar relationship?
By grey decisions, I guess I mean very real decisions. Life is really difficult with out any supernatural threats and the choices we make as humans are tough. In Terra I wanted to tackle real problems, but then in a fantasy world. You basically play a modern day hero and that means the decisions you’re faced with are realistically tough – we don’t have many true villains in the game, but we do have a lot of people who think differently than one another. We have people who hurt people to help themselves (or their families) and Seekers are often faced with greed. However, as a Seeker you fight for the greater good – you’re part of the generation that will heal the world. It’s your job to make the tough calls and practice radical empathy and creative problem solving. You’re faced with grey decisions, but you play hope :).
A person wearing flowing clothing with beautiful geometric patterns who has a red line across their cheeks and nose, carrying a harpoon-like weapon and standing beside a large deer with a saddle.
How do the mechanics tie in with your familiar and that relationship?
Actually, in Familiars of Terra you have one character sheet for two characters. Half your sheet is for your familiar and half your sheet is for yous Seeker. You can make checks with either and as a player it’s basically like playing one soul in two bodies. Also, familiars are always the one to fight! Humans are weak compared to familiars, so in order to protect their companions, familiars are always the one to get into a scuffle. We have lots of cool Combat Powers for you to pick and customize how your familiar fights. Finally, each familiar gets a legacy which is both story and mechanics. By following a story you create to your familiar’s epic destiny you earn cool new Traits which alter how your familiar looks, moves, and even fights.
How do players engage the mechanics to express empathy, and how do the familiars help with that?
A lot of our mechanics work by ‘defining’ things. You can buy Items and then in the moment when you want to use them – you define the item’s history and how it is used. This encourages player’s creativity and allows people to take different paths to problem solving. A lot of times you make a check and you’re done – you succeed or fail and sometimes that’s absolutely terrible when you’re trying to do something kind or empathetic. When I was creating Familiars of Terra I really wanted to make sure doing something empathetic or creative (or anything really) relied on more than that. By having a mechanical work around your character can use one check isn’t the end of empathy, it’s a challenge and an encouragement to use the items you have at your disposal to still reach your desired outcome.
Familiar-wise, even though familiars can fight, they definitely don’t have to. In fact, lots of familiar’s traits are based around healing, comforting, and empathizing. For example, you can have a comforting familiar who can calm situations and make people feel better in their presence – much how ‘mundane’ therapy dogs do as well :).
A red-haired person in a green jacket and yellow dress reaching their hands up to the sky where cats with wings are flying, with the text “Familiars of Terra” over the background of a seaside sunset.
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Thanks to Liz for the great interview and for sharing Familiars of Terra with me and you all, my readers! I hope you enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out the Familiars of Terra Kickstarter and maybe help it reach its goal!
P.S. – I tried to find out if it was okay to use “dark skinned” as a descriptor and I saw it used in some places where it seemed okay, but if it is not, please email contactbriecs at gmail and I will update the post as soon as possible. Thank you.
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Tell me a little about New World Magischola House Rivalry. What excites you about it?
New World Magischola House Rivalry is our first foray into board/card games design and publishing. That’s both awesome and scary! When we decided two years ago to open a wizard school live roleplay experience in the United States, we realized that to do it the way we wanted to required us to write a whole new magical world that was specific to North America and its history. We wanted to be both respectful and inclusive of the many peoples and cultures — and magical traditions — of North America, and to also honor and engage thoughtfully with our fraught history of Colonialism. While we originally set out to design a larp, we ended up writing a world, and now we have an intellectual property that exists beyond the larp, with stories that can be told in many media, including board/card games, RPGs, books, and more.
So for me, I’m excited because we are opening up the world of the Magimundi and the experience of going to wizard school in it to a lot more people than those who are able to attend our 4-day signature wizard school events. They get to experience at the table some of the fun, whimsy, and magical mayhem of Magischola by taking courses, joining clubs, and using conjures to improve their progress or hinder a rival’s. They get a feel of navigating school because you have to pass your courses with a B or better to get credit, and you earn more points for completion the higher your grade is. It’s definitely a competitive game, since only one House can take the Trophy, but there are lots of opportunities for roleplay and fun engagement with your friends around the table.
There are two other things I’m pretty excited about regarding House Rivalry:
1. The deliberate design choices to be inclusive in the playable characters. Of the original 6 PCs, 2 are people of color and also have Hispanic names: Martín Spinoza and Soledad Reyes. We also designed Jax Slager to be deliberately agender or nonbinary, and we ensured our art showed different ages and body types or sizes. It is very important to us to not fall into the same sorts of fantasy art that we often see in posters, games, and comics. This is a diverse and inclusive world, and we want everyone to imagine themselves as being part of it. We have to do that through the fiction and the artwork. Of the five House founders of New World Magischola, there are two women of color (Tituba and Marie Laveau), one white male (Étienne Brûle), one white female (Virginia Dare) and one indigenous nonbinary (Calisaylá). We paid homage to the diverse peoples who form the history of North America: indigenous peoples, people from Africa & West Indies, British, French, and Spanish. All too often people have a tendency to over-simplify our history and our fictions, rather than showing the tensions and the multiplicities within it, and we wanted to embrace that instead. The Magimundi is for everyone, even though it’s not a utopia.
2. I’m excited because this game is designed for mixed groups of gamers. All-too-often we can get into conflicts by identifying as *either* a “gamer” or a “hard-core gamer” or a “casual gamer” or a “non-gamer.” We, as a gaming community, can gatekeep in these ways, subtly asking “are you one of us?” One of the ways we do this is by designing games that are more complex and have a lot of rules to master, or that take a long time to learn. Some gamers look down on casual games as not being challenging enough, and even make fun of these games and the people who play them. It can be difficult to prove your credibility as a gamer, and some gamers don’t want to take the time to include newer gamers to their gaming groups. House Rivalry is designed as a bridge game. It’s complex enough that the more hard-core gamers have something they can do and enjoy. There are multiple strategies and different tactics to manage your resources, choose your actions, and use the variable player powers of your character and House. However, the game is easy-to-learn, and there are lots of party game elements, especially in the Clubs. What this makes House Rivalry really good for are mixed groups of gamers: the hard core and the casual and the in-between. It’s a great game to get people together and to play when you don’t have the time to teach a complicated new system, but you want some strategy. It blends luck and strategy in a way that feels satisfying to all levels of gamers. For me, getting different groups of gamers of varying abilities and credibilities around the table is a great aspect of the game, and one I’m most proud of and excited about.
MORE MAGICAL GOODNESS AFTER THE CUT:
Tasty tasty board game bits.
What were the greatest challenges mechanically for making a themed game that is appealing for mixed groups?
The greatest challenge was finding the balance between being easy-to-learn, but also having depth and strategies that are not necessarily apparent to the casual gamer. We know that frequent gamers prefer strategy and meaningful choices, which should mean that if you play well, you will win. Casual gamers are more tolerant of luck and randomness in a game; too much “swing” and a hardcore gamer will not want to play. One of the things that our developer, Mike Young, did so well was apply math to the game, figuring out the “worth” of each action, and balancing the effects of cards so that when you took a calculated risk, you got a calculated reward. Another thing is the balance of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Everyone has been to school in their lives, so they have some idea of how it works. You take classes (only so many at a time) and you study to improve your grade, or do extra work to finish the course faster. So the actions of Enroll and Study are pretty intuitive, and easy to pick up even for young players. The third action, Conjure, is when you use some resources in your hand to your advantage. This is where the hardcore gamers love to evaluate the different resources they have, and calculate the effects of them based on their turns and time. More casual gamers might choose a Conjure just because they like the art, or because they want to say “take that” to a rival. Either way, because the game is carefully balanced, the effects are going to be similar. A good player will be able to prioritize and stack these resources to greater effect, but a new player can just throw some spells and make things happen.
We also designed the game with some party mechanics that each player has choice over playing. This is done with our Clubs, which were a new addition to Dylan’s game idea. About one-third of the Clubs include roleplaying party mechanics to earn (or lose!) House Points for the RP. These include singing while in Kokopelli’s Choir, whispering while in the secret society Obsidian Circle, and starting every utterance with “Wrong!” while you’re in Debate Club. Those who love this sort of thing enroll in those clubs and have a great time with it! Others have to catch them messing up, which is fun. If these active, party mechanics are not your jam, you’re not required to enroll in those clubs, and can instead get your club requirement through another club, such as Crossed Wands Club, where you manage your time and resources in a more traditional manner.
What we wanted was to hit the “sweet spot” where the casual gamers could learn to play quickly and have fun, and the hardcore gamers could see the layers and strategize toward victory at the same time. That means the game has to be seemingly simple and surprisingly complex, accessible as you learn, and then a later epiphany of “oh! I see how this works!” after playing a few times. The game introduces casual gamers to the concept of resource management and variable player powers, but moves along quickly with a series of rounds that include chance-based mechanics such as the Magischola deck, which keeps the hardcore strategists from necessarily running away with it in a mixed group. Definitely a tough balance, but our playtesting shows that we’ve done a pretty good job! (there’s a quote on our Father Geek review that sums this up rather nicely).
The school crest. They’ve got turtles, y’all.
How did you integrate the fiction and themes into the mechanics? Did you leave anything specific out that might feature in other formats?
Ha! Yes, the Magimundi is really deep, and there was no way to include all the elements into this game. One thing we had to leave out that I wish could have had more play is the presence of the House Founders of New World Magischola. It’s one of my favorite parts of the lore, and where the inclusive nature of the world and its engagement with North America’s Colonial past comes through. Otherwise, the game is 2-5 players because there are 5 houses of New World Magischola, and you play by House. We had to name the actions taken by the players to feel like something they would do in magic school. Enroll and Study are definitely school actions, but they’re also rather mundane. The third action was originally called “Dominate” but that didn’t feel very magical, and it also felt too punitive or hyper-competitive for the feel of the game. It took us a while to come up with Conjure, but that has the magical feel of casting spells or using the magical artifacts at your disposal, which either help you along magically, or hex your rivals. There are definitely some easter eggs on the cards for those who are more familiar with the world or the larp. Things like the Wendignado card, which is a reference to the tornado that hit our location during the inaugural larp — while students were in the woods casting elemental wind spells against a wendigo. Rather than call one of the cards “Sugar Rush,” it’s called “Hot Fudge in the Dining Hall,” which was a refrain in our third run as participants discovered the chocolatey goodness was available at every meal, and began to top everything with it. We had created a lot of creatures and lore, so the wizard courses are the actual NWM curriculum, as well as the clubs. The creatures expansion are all from our book, the Compendium of North American Cryptids & Magical Creatures.
A photo from the New World Magischola larp, the inspiration behind the board game.
What motivated designing a board/card game for Magischola – why move away from roleplaying?
We realized that a lot of people loved the world we created, the lore we had built, and the creatures we’d imagined. We own this work as an intellectual property, so leveraging it into multiple media makes sense. We’re already at work on a collaborative storytelling board game, also set in the Magimundi, but with completely different play. We definitely aren’t moving away from roleplaying as a company! This game has a roleplaying element, the next one does to an even greater extent, and we have two (maybe three!) RPG scenarios coming out in 2018! The world is rich with opportunity so we wanted to have the chance to tell stories within it in a variety of ways. We also realized that we have a lot of fans who can’t attend the premium larp experiences, but want to interact with the world. It’s definitely been a challenge! We’re newcomers to the board game industry and trying to gain a foothold. But it’s a huge market, if we can successfully break in! We want others to know about the Magimundi!
Larpers at a Magischola event repping their house. 🙂
Tell me about the role of competitiveness in New World Magischola: House Rivalry. What made you choose to make a competitive game? How does it further the goals that you have for the game, and the stories you want to tell?
This is a tough one! I consulted with Ben to answer this one, to talk through my feelings about it, because it’s complicated. One of the things people wanted from their magic school experience at New World Magischola larps, was the kind of fierce competition for House Points that they had seen in the Harry Potter books and films. While neither I nor my partner Ben Morrow are very competitive people (and our larp design is based around consent, cooperation, and relationships), our players were motivated by the competitive aspect of the First House Trophy. It drove a great deal of enthusiasm, creating an external motivation for taking an interest in their magic school classes and engaging in plot that could lead to a points reward. Also, getting recognition feels good, and the adrenaline rush that can come from healthy competition also feels good.
Dylan’s initial idea for the game, long before he met Ben and me, was to capture the feel of being at magic school, and helping your House win the day. When he made his pitch to us, we knew that the competitive play for points was a motivating force for many of our players, and we thought that offering that kind of feeling through a board game would make the game feel like the magic school experience that they had read about, and had been waiting to experience for quite some time. Since the object of the game is to win the First House Trophy, this game is not the most ideal generator of stories, but it does share our world. Players can look at Jax Slager’s card and wonder about their story, and Jax does have a fairly big story waiting to be discovered in some of the other media that’s forecoming. Similarly, our magical creatures book can give players more info about the Ghost Helicoprion when they see its tooth whorl on a Conjure card. Ultimately, we wanted to entertain, and we’re hoping that our game’s content and artwork invites the curious to find out more about our magical world, and the stories within it. The *next* game, already in development, is very collaborative and storytelling-based, akin to Mice & Mystics.
What is your house, what’s your favorite spell, and why? 🙂
Now, I’m the organizer and designer! I can’t have a favorite House! But I will say that I test into Calisaylá, with Laveau close behind. Favorite spell? Hmmm. A young person at Gen Con created and cast a “Fair Wages” spell. I think that one is pretty awesome. If I could cast “Fair Wages” and “Universal Health Care” on everyone, I would. Otherwise, I really like Pàgakwàn (PAH-guh-kwahn), which is from the Algonquin, and creates a protective shield against physical attacks.
Thank you SO much to Maury for this fantastic(al) interview! I’m excited to see more from Magischola, and hope you’ll all check out the Kickstarter today! Share this interview with your friends, too, so more people can read and enjoy. <3
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Tell me a little bit about The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power. What excites you about it?
Excellent and appropriately timed question! The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power (SCUP, for short) is a dark fantasy tabletop role-playing game by myself, Todd Nicholas, and my friend Thomas J. It is a hack of Apocalypse World that uses the core mechanics of that game to explore the kinds of political intrigue you would see in something like A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin, The First Law by Joe Abercrombie, Imperial Radch by Ann Leckie, and the TV show Vikings. We’re currently Kickstarting the game and it’s doing quite well, so we’re happy to finally get it into people’s hands. Tom and myself have been working on this game on and off for a number of years. We started because we had just played a game of Apocalypse World and we thought those mechanics might work well for a fantasy story about power, politics, and intrigue. We were never quite sure if we wanted to make SCUP a polished game that we put out into the world in physical form or just keep it something we passed around as a PDF, but there seemed to be enough interest in it that we decided to go ahead on it.
What excites me about SCUP is that I love that we’ve given players particularly powerful moves to affect their fictional world. The thing Tom and I spent the greatest amount of time on in the design of SCUP was the moves for character classes. We wanted people to be able to do big, dramatic things. For example, one class is called “The Beloved.” They’re sort of a preacher or prophet type. One of their moves lets them see and confront the inner demons of NPCs, permanently changing them in some way. The first time we actually had someone use this move at the table, and they were literally having a duel of wits with the manifestation of another character’s worst fears in an effort to help the character conquer them, we were incredibly stoked to be able to give players that sort of narrative agency. So yeah, that’s my answer. I like being able to watch people do bold things in our game that let them get their hands nice and dirty.
What have you done with SCUP to take the PbtA mechanics and make them really mesh with the fiction and framing?
The PbtA system already does a nice job of focusing on close up character drama, but we have created a number of mechanics that really drive this home. In particular, we have focused on giving the MC moves to push social hierarchy in their toolbox of moves. They have a different set of moves to use against common PCs and noble PCs, for example. Additionally, characters may be in the employ of a Patron or may be called on by a Faction to fulfill a duty or obligation. We wanted to push the idea that this game is about reputation, information, hierarchy, and obligation using mechanics such as these. Mostly, though, we want people to have fun getting involved in intrigue between characters!
You mentioned “The Beloved.” Tell me about some of the playbooks – who are they? How do the moves help tell the story?
What we’ve really focused on in SCUP is playbook moves that really drive the narrative and give players a chance to do big things in the fiction. Because the game is about intrigue and power, many of the moves focus on things like getting and spreading information, or making big, dramatic things happen in the gameplay. For example, I played a game last night at Forge Midwest with some folks. There was an NPC named Faela that two PCs wanted alive, cause they needed information from her, and one PC was tasked to assassinate. That PC, playing the class The Black Hood, rolled her move Their Eyes Never Open, which allowed her to assassinate an NPC within her reach. She had already snuck into the Ziggurat where the NPC was, and succeeded at her roll, allowing her to kill the character. When the other two PCs reached her, they found her deceased, but one of them, playing the Bloodletter, took her body and rolled his move God Complex to attempt to bring her back to life, though she came back as something awful, barely able to provide the information he needed. Meanwhile, a player playing The Voice, an advisor to the high priestess who ruled the city, had been using her move An Ear at Each Door to have her network of spies to gather information on the Priestess’s enemies which she ultimately used to betray the Priestess and claim power for herself. These are the kinds of blood-opera moments we’re really hoping players use the moves to create in games of SCUP.
What elements of your fictional inspirations were the most important to your design?
If you think about something like A Song of Ice and Fire, you think about the big things that George R.R. Martin makes happen in that world. Characters die, the world changes, relationships change, etc. As such, we wanted to make sure that the MC and players had a lot of power to affect the world in compelling ways. To give you an example, we have something we call “end of season moves,” which are triggered by the players when a campaign is nearing its conclusion. They give the players the ability to mechanize something like, say, the Red Wedding from A Storm of Swords. Most PCs wouldn’t just drop something that game changing on their players, but the end of season moves give them permission to, with the player’s input.
Additionally, we thought very hard about the kinds of characters in the books we used as inspiration. The playbook of The Screw, for example, is very much based on Sand dan Glokta from The First Law while The Voice is modeled after Littlefinger from A Song of Ice and Fire and Wormtongue from Lord of the Rings. We wanted the players to feel like they had more options available to them than fighters, wizards, and rulers. We wanted them to have characters that were powerful in more subtle ways, more backroom ways, etc., which is often very important to political, dark fantasy.
What makes SCUP special to you, as a creator and gamer each?
SCUP is the first game I really started designing. I designed it with Tom so we could play something fun with our friends. Some of the campaigns we’ve done with SCUP have been some of my favorite gaming experiences, and the fact that something I created with my friend, on a lark, just to have some fun is going to be a real thing in the world that hopefully brings some fun to other people’s gaming table is genuinely humbling and astonishing to me.
