Thoughty remains! So does Script Change. I still hope to do some interviews, as mentioned, very periodically. I want to talk more about design, and about leadership in games. I want to talk about the things I personally enjoy in games, break them down, see if I can make them make sense. I hope when the worldsuck eases I’ll release more games, though I doubt anything I do solo will be as big and fancy as Turn. I’ll be separately supporting my partners with their projects. Oh yeah, and I’ll still be accepting guest blogs here when I can build up a larger fund for paying creators!
Times do change.
My first interviews were before Thoughty – on my previous and now defunct site that I ported here with Systir Productions & 616, and on Gaming as Women with attendees of a Gamerati game day and then Judy Bauerof all people. I kicked off Thoughty and Five or So Questions in 2014 as a continuation of the original blog, but only the interviews really stuck around.
Me in 2013 at Gen Con with F. Wes Schneider, Paizo’s then Editor-in-Chief, who I had interviewed for GAW.
I have done over three hundred interviews on Thoughty, about 250 of those being Five or So Question interviews. I have only had a few interviews fully fail to be completed due to scheduling, and one pulled by the creator. I’ve interviewed people about not just tabletop but also card, board, and video games, plus lonely solo games, huge collections of tabletop and live action games, their artwork, their design process, their Kickstarters, and more. I have had an exceptional opportunity to pick the brains of the most brilliant designers in tabletop games, from legacy designers like Ron Edwards to genius women designers like Dr. Jessica Hammer and Meguey Baker to groundbreaking modern designers like Jay Dragon and Rae Nedjadi. Many of these people I have grown to consider friends and colleagues, and I’m so grateful for the amazing things I’ve learned from them and shared with you.
I have been supported by my Patreon supporters primarily for these interviews, enough funds to pay for my website and a bill every so often, some busy months enough to help me pay medical expenses. I am incredibly grateful for my supporters, for everyone who has shared an interview, recommended a creator to reach out to, or praised my interviews, regardless of whether they supported me financially!
You may ask, if this is so great, why does the title say you’re ending interviews? What does this mean for Thoughty? Why has the site been so slow recently, anyway? Well, that’s what I’m gonna try to answer here. This is… a bit long. I’m still me, you know.
Tell me a little about Brinkwood: Blood of Tyrants. What excites you about it?
Brinkwood is a Forged in the Dark game, a system I love working in. This is my second attempt at putting a hack of Blades together, and I’m excited to be working as part of a team now, as so many good ideas flow into the project from our consultants, playtesters, and others involved in the project.
The four-word pitch is “Robin Hood versus Vampires”, which I think, if that grabs your attention, this is a game you’ll be interested in. What excites me about it is the chance to build a game that has a lot of depth and longevity to it’s campaign level, without a lot of the baggage and book-keeping that typically goes into this sort of game. We’re putting a lot of work in to make it so that you have an evolving experience, starting from just a few bandits out in the woods, slowly building allies and relationships with other factions, many of whom who have been working at this a lot longer than you have, and slowly turning from a band, to a coalition, to a movement, to finally a true revolutionary force.
I’m probably most excited to bring in some of the real-world experience I’ve had in leftist organizing. In a lot of games or media about rebellion and revolution, the focus is on heroic individuals, rather than groups and movements. I think both narratives are valuable, and I wanted to include both in this game. In many ways, this game is about taking different groups who all share the same ideological goals, but differ in the details of how to accomplish said goals, which mirrors my experiences from 2016 onward. This isn’t a game where you try to get deeply opposed groups to work together, it’s about the smaller frictions of approach between groups that are incredibly committed to the same goals, and negotiating those competing approaches to try and build a successful rebellion.
Tell me more about integrating your organizing experience into the game. How does this come forth in play?
For my organizing experience, I think it comes out in play in two main ways, one subtle, and one not-so-subtle. On the subtle side, I think the interplay of the various campaign-level systems, be it your allied factions, their strength feeding into your strength, the sedition mechanics, and even the actions the GM takes as the “Vampire Lord” create a sort of test-kitchen effect, where players are put into the mind-space of organizers and revolutionaries. One of my favorite examples came in a recent game, where my players asked themselves first, not what they thought a community needed, but what they could do to find out what a community actually needed. I saw this problem crop up a lot in my organizing experience, with groups coming in with their own agenda, imposing solutions to what they thought were a community’s problems, without actually consulting said community. It was thrilling to see this very issue emerge organically, and for the pressures of the game system to guide my players to (what I believe to be) the correct choice for any organization: Ask people what they need first, don’t assume you know better, and then work with the community itself to provide mutual aid.
On the not-so-subtle side, we have the Conclave, a system whereby every few sessions, depending on the player’s actions, they will meet with the stakeholders in their rebellion. I was inspired in my own experience of meetings between different faction representatives (called “spokes”, both in anarchist organizing and in Brinkwood) to determine what goals to prioritize, what resources to allocate, etc. It’s a messy process in real life, and so far, when played out, it’s messy and dramatic in-game. To me, the most interesting conflicts are between people who both have the same goals and ideas, but differ only in their approach. It’s interesting for players to be in a space where they have to stake an opinion on the world, and actively make decisions about who-gets-what that actually impact the game’s world and their own relationships with one another and their NPC allies.
How are you building hope and the possibility of success into the game when mechanically Forged in the Dark mechanically can trend a little bleak?
We’ve done a lot of under-the-hood work on the Blades system to try and make things more hopeful and less bleak. The slow grind of vice, stress, and trauma tends to “wear down” PCs in Blades, and I’ve read a lot of reviews and analyses (some critical, some positive) of both Blades and, in some ways, Brinkwood‘s closer antecedent, Band of Blades. On the first level, I’ve changed how the stress grind works. For every resistance roll (Blades’s main mechanic for players to resist, or “cancel out” negative consequences), I’ve changed the math so that the range of stress goes from one to three, rather than from zero to six on a single roll. This means that most every action now carries a price, albeit a smaller, slower burn-down that, in my opinion, allows the players better control of how quickly their characters get into trouble.
Similarly, I’ve “split” the typical Blades sheet into two pieces, with the player character on one sheet, and the special abilities / archetype information on a separate “Mask” sheet. Players are free to choose between these masks on each Foray, and this allow players to be more flexible than they would in other systems (ie, play the mask of Violence if their character needs to be able to defend themselves, or play the mask of Lies if they need to deceive or socially manipulate their enemies). I’ve also “split” the stress track between Stress and Essence, so that players have access to more resources overall, but still have the tension of two slowly burning resources.
Lastly, in the reference documents we’ve prepared for players, we’ve put a lot of emphasis on giving the players all the tools they need to succeed, with advice on how to boost their rolls, their effectiveness, or what to spend and what to do. I think Blades can be an intimidating game to learn in some ways, and if you don’t have access to all the knowledge the game demands, it can become a lot more deadly or stressful than intended. We also state explicitly in our GM advice is that the GM is a co-conspirator and a player, and should remain on the PC’s side, giving advice on how to use the rules, how to spend resources, or how to navigate other more complicated aspects of the game to ensure the PCs know all of their options in a given situation. It amazes me how much less “aggressive” and more fun Blades becomes when you remember to do simple things like offer Devil’s Bargains, or remind players that they can resist any consequence you throw at them.
What is the world like that the characters exist in and that they’re encountering challenges in?
Brinkwood takes place in a castylpunk world, meaning it’s aesthetic is very much in line with stuff like Castlevania or similar properties, but with a punk intention brought to bear on it. So it’s medieval / gothic-esque, with lots of castles, gothic architecture, gloomy cities, sprawling manors, small villages, etc, but also alongside things like primitive firearms, smoke-belching factories, flesh-steamwork amalgamations, and other more anachronistic monstrosities and details. By saying this is a “punk” game, we mean that you aren’t here to admire the scenery or sympathize with oppressors, you are here to tear down systems of control and oppression, not to replicate or replace them.
What inspired the choice to split the character sheet into two parts, and what are some of the benefits that come with that design choice?
The inspiration came from a common problem I saw in some campaigns of Blades, as well as other games I ran. I found that often times, people would lose interest in the mechanical side of a character long before the character’s “story” had completed. By separating most of the mechanics out to a separate sheet, it allows people the freedom to “try out” different mechanical archetypes, and not shackle their character’s story development as closely to their mechanical development. Likewise, it allows interesting groups of characters to play together, without necessarily worrying that they’re “missing” a key archetype or ability.
Playgroups are free to experiment, try different types of Forays, and not feel pigeonholed into doing the same sort of thing over and over again. In a narrative sense, it helps contribute to the theme of “commonplace heroism,” your character isn’t exceptional by virtue of some in-born talent or ability, but by their willingness to take up the mantle of responsibility and take action.
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 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 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.
Heck yeah playing on the floor!
—
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!
Tell me a little about Rebel Crown. What excites you about it?
Rebel Crown is character-driven rpg with a player-facing campaign. Each character playbook focuses on a unique relationship with the claimant and gives that character a driving motivation to remain on this quest. The claimant is its own unique playbook, which thrives on sharing the spotlight with their allies and acting on their council. The campaign is driven by player choices: which factions to ally with and which holdings to pursue. As you group, you play to find out whether the claimant can take their throne and what sacrifices must be made along the way.
What are the various playbooks like, in a few examples of their abilities and how they interact with the game, and what power do they have in the narrative?
A lot of our design process started in
the playbooks. I tend to get the most out of campaigns where the
characters are deeply connected to one another and have a shared commitment to
a goal or objective. Since the premise of a succession crisis lends
itself to focusing on the relationship between a Claimant and their allies,
that created an opening for us to create purposefully asymmetrical
playbooks. Most of that asymmetry has to do with the Claimant
playbook. There must be a Claimant at the table, and the other playbooks
are sworn allies of the Claimant. This playbook is at the heart of
the campaign, but we didn’t want to make a game that follows the story of one
player character at the exclusion of the others. So we made the Claimant’s
player explicitly responsible for spotlight sharing and reinforced this
responsibility through their XP triggers:
The Claimant playbook triggers.
The result has been that the
Claimant is constantly pulling other characters into the scene to ask their
advice, to request a sacrifice, to reward their loyalty. The other playbooks
have XP triggers that reward them for taking initiative, to not wait until the
Claimant asks for their advice or intercession. Here’s the Devoted:
The Devoted playbook triggers.
The flow from these rewards has been really satisfying, and character motivation and relationship is constantly at the center of play.
The
playbook special abilities reinforce character dynamics without being too
restrictive (especially since special abilities may be chosen from other
playbooks).
The Idealist playbook triggers.
A sample of the Devoted’s special abilities suggests different approaches to protecting the Claimant (guarding them in battle, defending their name in a public forum, or engaging in duels on their behalf). The Devoted is defined by their love of the claimant, but there are many ways a player might take action on that motivation.
To dig in deeper, in the case of the claimant in play, how does the game guide the player toward a just and moral leadership that would make their claim to power morally superior to the claims of the usurpers?
The moral righteousness of the Claimant’s quest is in many ways the core fruitful void of this system: it’s a driving question that the game can’t answer for you without closing off some of the explorations that make RPGs really compelling. However, we try to direct play toward this question in thoughtful ways.
One way is the way that each sortie generates Unrest for the retinue, and more destructive sorties produce significantly more Unrest. The sortie objectives push the retinue to gain new objectives and ingratiate themselves with powerful factions, but the consequences of this expansion often impact the common people of your holdings the most. Here are the Entanglements you might roll at the highest level of Unrest:
The Unrest rules.
Unrest provides a slow creep of consequences for the people your Claimant has sworn to protect and provide for. How they address these consequences is an unavoidable topic of play.
The playbook that most explicitly focuses on the question of just rule and moral leadership is the Idealist, who has allied with the Claimant because they believe it is a path to the greater good. The Idealist’s XP triggers put pressure on the Claimant to do the right thing even when it’s not expedient and encourage the Idealist to keep that question of moral leadership right at the forefront of play.
Draft playbooks with some fun thematic details.
I note that you talk about expressing your heritage, background, or trauma. How are players supported within the game in regards to traumatic or triggering content, and also, speaking of heritages, are you involving sensitivity readers in the project?
Trauma is a term from Blades in the Dark that appears in many Forged in the Dark games. We replaced that mechanic with ‘Scars’. When a character’s Stress exceeds their limitations, they must choose whether to take one final action before collapsing or to pull themselves together and carry on. We both wanted to avoid the term Trauma given its specific meaning in the context of psychology, and we wanted to rework the mechanic to provide more player choice in the moment.
We’re working on integrating safety tools into the rules text. I’ve been influenced in this regard by playing with some folks through The Gauntlet’s community. We want to provide clear prompts on CATS (content, aim, subject matter, tone) that people could leverage when introducing the game to a group. We’ll also encourage the use of Lines & Veils and the X cards. When we run are games at Games on Demand, these are the tools we’ve used and we want to provide the same resources to folks running it on their own.
The design team is just Eric and me; we haven’t brought in outside readers, though our playtesters have given a lot of valuable feedback on how we can directly address the more problematic aspects of any fiction set in a feudal setting.
What does an average session look like, including the sorties you mention (a term some of my readers may be unfamiliar with)?
A typical session runs through three phases:Recon: In which the retinue (the Claimant and the allies) gather information about other factions and identify an objective.
The Sortie: The main ‘mission’ of the session. This could be an attack on an enemy faction, a diplomatic meeting, or an attempt to drive off wraiths from a vulnerable holding. The goal of a Sortie is typically to gain a new Holding (some property or asset) for the Claimant’s Domain, to strengthen relations with another faction, or to weaken an enemy faction in some way. The retinue may also seek to vassalize another faction, bringing them under the Claimant’s rule without seizing their Holdings.
Downtime: In which the retinue recovers from injury and stress, engages in long terms projects, and trains their skills. Downtime abstracts weeks of time as the player character pursue their own interests, discuss their long-term priorities, and seek solace together from the difficult campaign.
The Domain sheet includes a calendar for players to track their Sorties, Seasons change every two Downtimes, providing a richer sense of time scale and place.
At the end of the session, players asses how they earned XP based on their playbook, and whether their character’s Beliefs and Drive changed based on the events of the session.
Tell me a little about Red Rook Revolt. What excites you about it?
Well, that’s sorta like choosing between my babies. There are three things which really excite me. The first is the combat system, which is inspired by the game Hyper Light Drifter as well as Strike!: A game of heedless adventure! It uses a single d6 for every roll, almost every attack deals one damage, and people have very low hit HP. In playtests, it has given us fast, tactical, and dangerous combat. Melee attacks always hit, but expose you to danger, while ranged attacks can miss, and require you to spend Dark Power, which you get from melee attacks, which forces people in and out of dangerous situations and helps ensure more dynamic encounters.
Another thing that excites me is the memory and corruption system. For a long while, I struggled with making a cool way both to portray relationships and the creeping demonic corruption that happens once you start powering up the summoned demon in your gun. But I solved both, by having a system where you have specific memories with the other party members.
During each adventure, you can gain more, but you can also draw on those personal connections to keep away the demon’s whispers. If you fail, however, those memories can get twisted. Memories of your brother supporting you through hard times get reinterpreted to into memories of your bother being smothering or controlling. Memories of supporting your friends when they needed you become memories of your friends being needy and needing constant support, and so on. This isn’t necessarily permanent, but the fight against the demon is one of the central conflicts of the game.
The last thing I wanna mention here that excites me is the setting, which i am currently writing! I’m drawing on English and Roman history, and focusing down on a single empire and the rebellion happening there. That allows me do to more than just a cursory look at the place, and detail culture and religion to a greater extend, show some of the ways the rebellious areas differ in culture from the main empire, but also the ways they are the same, the things they share. Some central cultural concepts are birds as ancestors, and the actual, literal magic which is at work in most things of cultural significance, including community rituals and festivals, and a strong tradition of communal stews.
What inspired your interest in these cultures to build this specific story, and how are you building this story while being respectful to the cultures themselves?
To be clear, when I say I draw on British and Roman history, I mean mostly – but not entirely, as I’ll get to! – in terms of structure, in terms of how the empire works, how they extract resources from their conquered territory, how they justify their imperialism. That also helps answer the first part of your question: I needed empires to draw from for my evil empire. I had already decided on guns as an element, as the game started as a small combat engine and I didn’t want modern time, so 19th-century England was right there. As I worked on the culture and the history of the people of the empire, I had some ideas which resonated with Roman history, and the empire ended up as something like a Roman empire that had evolved into a modern empire, though more territorial.
I do use some roman culture – aspects of its religion and visual aesthetic, the importance of the Familias, the prevalence and importance of omens and minor magic. I have a friend working with me on some of the writing who knows his Roman history very well, so I’m not afraid to accidentally misrepresent it, though much of it isn’t what I’m using as inspiration. And while there are possibly some that would have issues with using, say, roman gods, I’m not doing that, just some aspects of how society was structured in antiquity.
Tell me more about memories! How do the players typically respond to these when they play them out, and how do they interact with other parts of the game?
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able playtest this part of the game at the time of writing, so how players typically respond is unknown to me, but I will have the chance to playtest it soon!
I can talk about how they interact with other parts of the game, though! The memories represent the character’s relationships with each other, and during their adventures, they get strengthened and weakened.
The game is structured around a mix of downtime and adventuring. During the adventuring portions, the players get into battle and accrue corruption tokens as they draw on the dark magic of their demons. Afterward, they roll to determine if they get corrupted. If they fail, their friends have to help them, reminding them of their relationship with a memory; if that succeeds, the memory is simply exhausted from the emotional stress, and can’t be used for a while. Otherwise, it gets corrupted, twisted somehow, and the relationship weakens. Actions in battle and their willingness to win at all costs thus affect their relationships and their memories.
This, in a sense, forms the central conflict, and a central theme of the game: the importance of relationships, friendships and organization as you struggle for liberation, and resistance to forces that would separate you, make you try to fight the world alone with just you and your gun. During downtime, exhaustion and (with more difficulty) corruption can be healed, as can physical wounds, and new memories can be made. Downtime, in a bigger way, ties into what adventures you go on, what battles you fight and so on, which feeds back into corruption and memory.
What is the general activity of the game – like what do the players mostly do in each session, or are they intended to do? How does the game support these actions?
The general activity of the game is fighting imperialist scum. You play as members of the red rook commune, which is under attack from the cruel Imperium Alarum, and throughout the game, you keep the pressure on to prevent them from turning their full attention towards the commune. You sabotage railways, distribute propaganda, organize general strikes, assassinate generals, and lead battles against the enemy. When things go wrong and the empire turns their full might upon the Red Rook Commune, you man the barricades and drive back the invaders! In between hectic fights and missions, you rest at the commune and rebuild your strength. This is when you heal and reaffirm your friendships.
As for how the game supports these actions, it is built around that structure of mission/rest/mission with the first result of failure being an attack on the red rook commune. If you aren’t putting the pressure on the empire, they will attack your home and deny you the chance to heal and rest.
What made you elect to use Hyper Light Drifter and Strike! As inspirations for design, and how have you differed from them?
I didn’t so much choose to use hyper light drifter as an inspiration as the other way around: the appeal of Hyper Light Drifter’s smooth, flowing combat rhythms is what inspired me to start working on what would become Red Rook Revolt. Hyper Light Drifter is a video game with an incredible combat loop, and I wanted to capture that particular loop, that particular flow, in a tabletop game, something, quick, smooth, and tactical.
That’s why I turned to Strike! for inspiration for the combat. That game uses a single D6 for combat, rolling on a table of hits, misses, and critical hits, and It goes rather fast for that reason. Strike, of course, also has a lot of other things going on, but I liked that particular idea and I took inspiration from that in designing my combat system and combined it with the things I liked and wanted to replicate from Hyper Light Drifter.
Tell me a little about Last Fleet.
What excites you about it?
The elevator pitch for Last Fleet
is that you’re brave pilots, officers, engineers, politicians and journalists
aboard a rag-tag fleet, fleeing from the implacable inhuman adversary that
destroyed your civilisation. The game focuses on action, intrigue and drama in
a high-pressure situation.
The game delivers the experience I
got when I first watched Battlestar Galactica (the noughties reboot). I
remember the incredible sense of pressure, an exhausted fleet and characters
both on the edge of collapse, the high stakes, and the explosive action. I remember
the simmering political tensions between different factions. I remember how
everyone was under constant suspicion of maybe being a secret traitor, and
sometimes people even suspected themselves. And I remember how all of this was
demonstrated through personal conversations between friends, family members,
lovers, and rivals. That’s what the game is designed to do.
Also, I just flipping love the bad guys in this game. The Corax are a hive mind, an immense extradimensional fungus network that live in the tenebrium, the realm outside normal space that FTL ships travel through. When the Corax fleet attacks, it’s by extruding these huge fungus tendrils out of a dimensional rift and then launching swarms of spore ships.They’re able to absorb their victims’ genetic material and also the information content of their brain, enabling them to create an exact copy of the victim, memories and all, but who is actually a flesh puppet for the Corax. And so, if you lose a fight to the Corax, rather than just getting killing you’re typically paralysed and dragged off to be deconstructed in a biological cauldron. The next time we see you, you won’t be you anymore. Which is pretty horrible.
How does the game mechanically approach
the Battlestar-style relationship environment?
A key part BSG is obviously the
political environment: a military hierarchy, the presence of elected officials
whose interests are only partly aligned with the military, and other factions
such as Zarek’s people, Baltar’s cult, the union and others. I’ve baked that
into the game setup, so that whether you create a setting yourself or use one
out of the box, you’ll generate groups whose agendas will push against fleet
unity. That’s then reinforced by the Call for Aid move, which enables players
to get certain benefits that they can’t get anywhere else – like access to rare
equipment, or the ability to perform an action at a larger scale – often in
exchange for tying themselves more closely to that faction.
Of course, like most PBTA games,
Last Fleet also comes with a set of charged relationships between the player
characters, to get things going. These are handled fairly loosely initially,
just little seeds of friendship or rivalry or a grudge or suspicion. But then
the game’s core mechanic reinforces that. The nub of it is that you can
voluntarily ramp up pressure on your character in exchange for bonuses to your
die rolls – an effect that allows you to succeed at almost any roll, if you
wish. But to get that pressure down, you have to take actions that generate
interesting relationship drama.
There’s three ways to do it:
You can Let Loose, indulging a vice and losing control. Let Loose is an easy, almost-guaranteed way to reduce pressure, but it also automatically puts you in tricky situations: even on a hit you’ll do something you otherwise wouldn’t like revealing a secret, making a promise, or falling into another character’s arms.
You can Reach Out, sharing a hope or a dream or a fear or suchlike. Reach Out reduces pressure by strengthening relationships – but then everyone who you build a relationship with has a bit of that pressure invested in them, so if something should happen to them, the pressure comes rushing back all at once.
You can hit Breaking Point, allowing the pressure to come to a head and then doing something foolish or dangerous. Breaking Point is a bit like getting Marked in Night Witches, in that initially it’s evocative and fun, but do it too many times and you’ll come to a sticky end.
So between all of the above stuff, you get a pretty rich stewpot of political, social and emotional drama.
That potential result with the enemy changing you instead of death sounds really intense – what is the effect of this on the game, and on the players?
That potential
result with the enemy changing you instead of death sounds really intense –
what is the effect of this on the game, and on the players?
It’s not something
I’d typically expect to happen to player characters. The game’s principles
encourage you to build up interesting NPCs and make the players care about
them, partly so you can “kill their darlings” later on. Or better yet
turn them into baddies.
If it does happen
to a player character, you have two options: bring them back as an NPC, or give
them the Sleeper Agent move. Sleeper Agent is a start-of-session move, which
generates bad stuff that your character has secretly been doing off-screen.
Even you, the player, don’t know what it is. How well you roll tells us how bad
it is, how much evidence there is to implicate you, and how much chance you
have to stop it.
Incidentally you can start as a Sleeper Agent by taking the Scorpio playbook.
What do players typically do in
Last Fleet to occupy their time – are there adventures with strange worlds, or
are they more likely to be negotiating in a dramatic scene?
It really depends a lot on what
roles and playbooks are chosen. The roles include soldier types to engineers to
more political characters. The playbooks are slightly more personality-based,
but each one will colour the type of play you’re likely to see, with playbooks
like Gemini bringing in skulduggery, or Scorpio bringing in intrigue, or Pisces
bringing in the supernatural.
There’s always a lot of stuff going
on in Last Fleet, which could include things like:
– Dealing with a tense stand-off
between civilians and the military, or between other political factions
– Handling the results of mass
panic: protests, riots, or other civil disobedience
– Addressing practical problems
like mechanical breakdown or resource shortages
– Investigating suspicious stuff,
which could turn out to be political, or could turn out to be enemy
infiltration
– Handling the fallout from the
above – bomb threats, sabotage, poisoned food supplies, etc
– Battling the enemy, whether in
tense space dogfights or holding off boarding actions
Whichever roles and playbooks are
chosen, the above will be going on at some level, but the emphasis and the
approach to problem-solving will vary massively. So you could get more
politicking, crisis management, investigation, scouting/away missions, or
battle scenes. All interleaved with the interpersonal drama generated by the
pressure system.
How do you control the level of
violence in the game for players to ensure they’re not veering into
monstrosity?
Last Fleet is the first game I’ve
written where violence is explicitly coded into the rules, because the war-time
setting makes it inevitable. Nevertheless in my experience, violence in play is
typically instigated by the enemy who, by definition, are implacable – intent
on humanity’s destruction or (as the canonical bad guys, the Corax have it)
borg-style absorption. Indeed the nature of the setting makes this almost
inevitable. Desperately trying to fend off waves of enemy fighters, protect
civilian ships, hold off boarders, and so on. So there’s violence, but it’s
mostly defensive in nature or (Night Witches-style) action aimed at destroying
military targets.
But violence is a thing that can
get more extreme if an enemy, particularly an enemy infiltrator, is captured.
We see that in the source material as the characters are so desperate to win
the war that they’re prepared to torture or kill in cold blood to get their
way. All I can say here is that the game provides absolutely no benefit to
doing this. The only interrogation moves are in no way enhanced by putting the
target under duress, except perhaps emotional duress (by using the move
“call them on their shit”).
Even so, something about the
setting is likely to make some players go there, let’s face it. My games always
contain a section discussing safety (not yet written for Last Fleet) and
war-time issues like violence and torture would be front-and-centre for an
initial discussion around lines and veils. Every game I’ve run to date has
banned torture from the game before the first scene is played, for instance.
That is what I’d recommend unless a group is keen to explore this very dark
territory.
There
is one particular playbook, Capricorn, who is a risk in this regard. They are
explicitly set up as a character who is willing to do anything to defeat the
enemy, with moves that hard code in collateral damage, for instance. In this
case play is focused on the social and personal consequences of this behaviour:
if you’re lucky you steady the fleet, if you’re unlucky you can cause more
damage than the enemy, and spark panic. In a way the story of the Capricorn
playbook is “can you avoid becoming a monster”, and obviously there’s
a chance that the answer is “no”.
Tell me a little bit about The Last Stand of the Dream Guard. What excites you about it?
The Last Stand of the Dream Guard
is a tragedy that takes place over a single night. The dream guard are toy like
creatures that exist in the dreamlands, the place where we go when we dream. They’ve
been fighting a war against The Nightmares and have all but lost. The adventure
uses player prompts and cues to build the detail and drama for what will be the
final battle of the war and the effect this will have on the few remaining
members of the Dream Guard who will fight it.
What engages me most about the adventure is who the characters will face a battle that will almost certainly lead to their death. Will seek solace in the nobility of their actions, retreat into a cynical fatalism or adopt an angry denial of their circumstances.
One of the Nightmares from The Last Stand of the Dream Guard.
What are The Nightmares and what threats do they present?
The Nightmares are the darkness
of humanity given form. Humans visit the dreamlands when they sleep, with the
dreamlands changing and being changed with each dream. Every human nightmare
left a little mark of evil on the dreamlands that accumulated and aggregated.
The nightmare are creatures of such hate that they bring only violence and
destruction where they go. The longer a nightmare “lives” the larger,
stronger and more cunning it gets. They are an existential threat to the
toylike native inhabitants of the dreamlands and should they be victorious
human dreams will be always tainted by their presence.
A page from Character Creation The Last Stand of the Dream Guard.
Why is death so ever-present and so likely for these characters? Is it preventable, and if so, how?
The Dream Guard have been losing this war since it started. The Nightmares seem to be endless and all attempts at negotiation have failed. The survivors of the Dream Guard have retreated to their last standing holdout where The Nightmares have surrounded them and put them under siege. They know it is only a matter of time before the assault begins. What hope and how forlorn it is is part of the story setup by the players and the story leader. Should they choose to, then perhaps the war could be won but they most hold out until dawn. Mechanically, the three phases of combat have been designed to be highly challenging and would require exquisite luck to pass through unscathed.
The first phase of play sounds intriguing!
How do players mechanically interact with the world and each other – what are the basic mechanics like? What are these phases of combat?
The adventure uses the 6d6 2nd Edition rules set. The basic mechanic is building a dice pool using which of the character’s advantages are best suited for the task at hand. The main body of the adventure takes place over one night that is divided into 6 phases. 3 of these character interaction phases where the story is progressed through prompts, cues and questions asked by the story leader. The other three phases are combat when the nightmares attack the hold out with increasing strength and threat.
What sort of support is there to help players approach these elements that might be very frightening or stressful in play?
The adventure doesn’t include specific advice on this, so I would recommend that the story leader and the players work together to select the safety tools they feel most comfortable using.
Hey all, today I have an interview with Alex Sprague on MoonPunk, which is currently on Kickstarter! It’s got a lot of awesome stretch goals to hit, so check out what Alex had to say below!
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Tell me a little about MoonPunk. What excites you about it?
MoonPunk is a Powered by the Apocalypse game that is about punks on The Moon. It has a punk zine aesthetic and has praxis and direct action as a focal point for the gameplay. There are 12 Punk playbooks with several mechanics that are fairly new yet simple. We have made a game where when the players see an issue they have total freedom to try to fix it. We give them a few guidelines about how to do so, but I expect to hear about similar problems being dealt with through serious trade negotiations or beating up The Authority.
So MoonPunk is, in essence, a game Jessica Geyer and I made in response to the idea that games shouldn’t be political. Almost everything is political and for many just trying to live has become a political issue. In much the same way I can’t actually slay a dragon, I probably can’t steal a corrupt politicians tea supply and jettison it into space. These stories of political unrest and oppression are stories that people want to talk about. Every fantasy story of a dragon hoarding wealth and eating peasants could be a metaphor for how billionaires act in our current world. So everything excites me about this game, it really feels like a large part of me laid out in game form.
Powered by the Apocalypse games can vary quite widely. How is MoonPunk unique in its design, specifically exploring some of these new mechanics?
Part of the process when making a game for us is trying to find the one element we are hoping it embodies. For our micro-RPGs we were able to really hammer this home. 10 Paces was Western movies, My Mecha has Shark Arms was every Voltron-esk anime, we then did Superheros, Afterschool specials, slang words, road trips, an entire game written as a script for an Action Movie game. For MoonPunk it was taking that core concept, Direct Action, and making it more than a 1-dimensional game. We had the what, then the Where became The Moon and the Who became punks. Each of those came from our own perspective. Our mechanics directly came from that.
Combat is different than other games because even a big guy like me only weighs about 35lbs on The Moon. Low gravity means a punch is going to send both parties just kinda floating backward. So our combat is called Throw Down, and unless you get some leverage, or literally slam someone into something, you aren’t going to do much damage. Our favorite mechanic though is TANSTAAFL (there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch), a term popularized in the book The Moon is a harsh Mistress. This mechanizes the idea of asking favors of others, allowing quest hooks to have a place in the cultural norm of the setting.
Twelve playbooks seems like a lot of variety! How did you find so many opportunities for differences and variety in the playbooks, and what kind of playbooks are there?
The playbooks came along when we were looking for what roles were needed in a revolution. I think the only trope we vetoed was The Spy because it didn’t feel very punk. So our game only has 4 stats, and 3 playbooks embody each stat in a different way. For example, we have the stat Presence: we have Guildy, Politician, and Rocker. Guildy is your hard-working well-liked person around town that just seems to know everyone, you’d have a beer with them. The Politician is your silver-tongued type, they tend to be likable when you are talking to them, but leave a bad taste in your mouth later. The Rocker is a catch-all artist, they might play music and get you riled up, or draw a political cartoon people can rally behind. These different facets of stats and the role they could play in a revolution is how we built most of these playbooks.
When you talk about the punk aesthetic, and about being punks, what does that mean to you and to MoonPunk, in comparison to other potential understandings of the term? How does it affect the experience of play?
The most important part of the punk aesthetic to us is the DIY culture. This is seen a lot within the game but it is also a point we make a lot in our game design. We made a ton of small games live on Twitch to show our process and attempt to show others the act of creation is mostly just starting. Anyone who wants to see a game come to life completely has the ability to get it made. I can basically guarantee even the most diehard D&D fans are homebrewing a little bit, and that little start of tinkering should be embraced; not rules lawyered out of existence.
As far as the idea of being a punk, that is something I have seen plenty of people gatekeep in the past. That is about the only thing I don’t abide, I mean sure people saying “conservatism is the new punk rock” are fucking idiots and wrong, but saying a kid is not punk because they don’t know anything about Milo or why he is going to college is silly. Punk is about individual freedom to me, and I think that comes across in the game.
Tell me a little about the plan of your Kickstarter, including your choice to include an Economic Hardship and a Hardship Supporter level. How has the activist ideal of the game MoonPunk been reflected in your ethical choices with the actual crowdfunding?
The choice to include the economic hardship and hardship supporter tiers came from a few peers in the TTRPG space who had already done it. It’s something we will be doing for all our games if we can, it reflects our attitudes toward gaming more so than our attitude towards activism. We want people to play our games, we want people to take away lessons and truths from these games. The Kickstarter was just about the only way for people without funds to get a game up, and a more diverse group of voices writing and doing art for the game without us having to ask people to work for free. We can work for months on a passion project, and we have, but to ask anyone else to do something for us for free really bothers us.
Tell me a little about The Curse of the House of Rookwood. What excites you about it?
Rookwood is a story game where you play a family with an ancient curse that grants them supernatural powers, but slowly transforms them into inhuman monsters. Since you play as members of a family — parents, children, aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins — the game is packed with relationships that your characters value, but did not choose for themselves. The rules support this part of play by giving you tools to create interesting problems that complicate these relationships, and reward you for exploring them during play. I spent the last year running the game for different groups at conventions, and it is exciting to see the different ways that players interpret “family” as a game/story concept. It can be funny, poignant, and sometimes a little bit intense, but it always seems to ring true because family is a common denominator for pretty much everyone.
How do the rules work to connect and structure the family, and complicate those relationships?
Family is defined in the rules on several levels. First, during character creation, players collaborate to answer questions about their progenitor, their ancestor who brought the curse upon the family. Their answers shape the current standing of the family, as well as what resources the family shares. Second, players define for themselves what family roles they want their characters to fulfill — parent, child, aunt, grandparent, etc. It’s up to the players how their family is structured in terms of age, gender, and identity.
Lastly, each player will choose a Skeleton for their character. Skeletons are complications that strain a character’s relationship with another character. This could be a dark secret that will harm the other character, a past mistake they want to reconcile, or an unequal relationship such as a need for approval or being overprotective. Each Skeleton has “bones” — scenes or events that might happen during play that players are rewarded for pursuing. As a story arc comes to an end, players decide if their Skeletons have been resolved positively, which improves the family’s standing, or negatively, which hurts the family.
Family drama can be difficult for some players! How do you provide support for play to help ensure everyone has a safe experience?
Safety tools are really important, especially with an emotionally charged subject like family relationships. The rules include a section on safety tools, which we introduce upfront. We recommend that players make use of Lines and Veils, as defined by Ron Edwards of Sex and Sorcery fame, as well as an X-card/O-card at the table. References to learn more about these tools are included.
What are the general activities of The Curse of the House of Rookwood – what do player characters encounter in play (such as monsters or situations), and how do they interact with it mechanically?
It depends on the Campaign Concept your group selects. You could be secret agents for the British Crown, employed to contain or eliminate supernatural threats. You might play as high society dilettantes, plying your talents as supernatural communicators and hunters. Or you might even play a traveling troupe of entertainers, looking for your next gig. Regardless what situation you place your family in, the core loop of play is trouble presented by the chronicler — a mystery, an adversary, and outright monstrous threat — and the family’s response to that threat.
Each family member has a finite amount of resources available to them to move the story in the direction they want. They have Traits, which are a pool of six-sided dice, and Assets, which can be spent to gain some immediate guaranteed success, or to gain extra dice when a Trait roll goes wrong. Like many rpgs, the game proceeds as a conversation.
When the outcome of what a player wants to accomplish seems uncertain, the GM and the player work out a list of Risks, things that could go wrong, and Rewards, things that could go right. The player chooses how many dice to roll from their pool — 1, 2, or 3 — and Assets to spend. Any dice that roll 4 or higher count as a success, which are used one-for-one to cancel Risks or buy Rewards.
Where it gets interesting is that the number of dice you roll reflects the amount of effort your character is putting forth in the fiction of the game. One die is normal effort. Two dice is extraordinary effort — if you roll any doubles, the effort is stressful and you lose a die from your pool. Three dice is supernatural effort — you must call forth the gift of your curse. If you roll doubles, not only do you lose a die, you also gain a new Mark of your curse.
The descent into monstrosity could reflect any number of fears in metaphor. How is it represented in the game mechanically and narratively, and what does it mean to the characters?
As alluded to above, every time you use the power granted to you by your curse — calling forth crows to act as spies, wrapping shadows about you to conceal your movement, suffocating a foe with a billowing mist — you risk gaining a Mark of your curse. Marks are outward, physical signs of your curse, but could also have an emotional or psychological element. For instance, if you have the Curse of the Rookery, your Marks could be amber eyes of a crow, black feathers instead of hair, literal crow’s feet, or an uncontrollable urge to steal shiny things. Each character can gain a limited number of Marks.
Mechanically, Marks function as a story timer. The last Mark on your character sheet is always “Lost to the Curse”. Using your power can give you a lot of narrative control over the story, but the more you use it, the closer you come to being completely lost. At that point, the character is gone from the story — transformed into a statue, a hideous bird monster hidden by the family in the attic, or lost in an endless void of shadows.
Characters might struggle with identity as their bodies transform against their will, feel dread about suffering the same fate as a lost ancestor with a similar curse, or leave troubled relationships unresolved when they are lost. It’s tragic stuff. And though a character’s fate might be out of their control, it’s important to note that the player does have control over their story. They choose their Skeleton and their Curse upfront, and they choose how the Marks of their curse manifest.
I have an interview today with Rae Nedjadi on BALIKBAYAN: Returning Home, which is currently available on itch.io! This game sounds so fascinating, and Rae talked about some really deep thoughts with me. Check them out below!
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Tell me a little about BALIKBAYAN! What excites you about it?
BALIKBAYAN: Returning Home is a narrative tabletop role-playing game that gives everyone at the table equal creative opportunities!
Specifically
it’s a story about Elementals, beings of Supernatural Filipino Folklore come to
life. BALIKBAYAN takes place in the far future, in a Cyberpunk setting at the
mercy of The Corp, that has enslaved the elementals through machinery.
Over
the generations these machines have infused with the magic, so BALIKBAYAN is
also about wielding machine-magic and using it to stay on the run, destroy the
Corp, and rebirth Magic.
I’m
excited about so many things about BALIKBAYAN, but I’m most excited about
offering a creative playground for everyone to enjoy. I’ve never understood
this boundary between science fiction and fantasy, technology and ritual,
machine and magic. I wanted to offer people to play with these ideas, while
also offering my own modern reimagining of Filipino folklore.
I’m
really happy with the response, and how excited everyone is to enjoy Filipino
games made by Filipino designers! I’m honestly hoping this will encourage more
people to create their own games so we can have more creative voices in the
community.
Another thing that excites me is the game system. BALIKBAYAN is a Belonging Outside Belonging game, which gives everyone more creative control. It’s different from your typical TTRPG experience, where only the Game Master controls most of the narrative.
Many of my readers will be excited to hear about the Filipino roots of the game! What are some of the elements (themes, history, magic) of BALIKBAYAN that players will see that are very much Filipino?
The strongest and most
apparent Filipino themes are present in the Playbooks themselves. Currently
BALIKBAYAN has six playbooks: Tikbalang, Diwata, Saint, Aswang Santelmo, and
the Duwende. I wanted to unapologetically use the original names for these
beings of myth and legend.
I did this mainly because
I come across a lot of Filipinos who are familiar with the folklore of other
countries (most people who play D&D here know about elves, gnomes, and all
that). But when I run a Filipino inspired game and lean into our roots, most of
the people I know, living here in this country, don’t know much about our own
myths. And often they use a western perspective when approaching these myths,
which breaks my heart.
I will say though that I decided to personally interpretat the essence of
these myths and legends. There are some problematic aspects of our folklore
that reflects the centuries of colonization that still influences the
Philippines to this day.
For example I wanted to take the Tikbalang and break it away from just being
an anthropomorphic horse. Horses aren’t even a natural local animal here, and
to this day they’re associated with the elite and privileged. Instead I wanted
to lean into our shamanic and animism roots. The Tikbalang in BALIKBAYAN can
change into any anthropomorphic animal form, and I wanted that fluidity to be
an important aspect of the playbook. I also wanted to reflect how we often look
to spiritual leaders in our community, and the Tikbalang is true to that.
I think the SAINT is another important one. Religion is a big thing here in
the Philippines, for better and for worse. We have so many beautiful stories
about Saints and the mystical miracles they embodied to protect communities. I
wanted to acknowledge that, but once again honor our pre-colonial roots and
have the SAINT be a playbook that interacts with Small Gods, in a Cyberpunk
setting.
I could just go on and on about each playbook!
In general I wanted to
honor our folklore, but I wanted to respectfully bring it into the present and
reflect our modern values, nuances, and struggles. Because I’m bi-racial,
queer, and non-binary, I think that shows in the design. I put so much of
myself, and my complex love for my country, into this game.
BALIKBAYAN also speaks to
leaving behind our masters and becoming our own masters. I wanted this to reflect
in the premise and creative setting, but also in the mechanics and narrative
prompts.
Becoming our own masters is something I want to happen for Filipinos in
general. We were colonized for centuries, and the scars still show. As a
society, we haven’t done the collective and deeply emotional work to decolonize
our perspectives, approaches, and values. In a way we are still bowing down to
Masters that have long left us to rot, and it shows in our governance and
social value systems.
I have faith that we can do the work. Many artists, teachers, and leaders
are already helping their communities to do so. BALIKBAYAN is my own personal
attempt to help along and honor that decolonization process.
BALIKBAYAN seems like a big step away from what we’ve seen from cyberpunk. How have you altered the standard cyberpunk setting to really make it yours and to do something different?
It’s funny, I really get
this a lot! But to be perfectly honest, BALIKBAYAN simply embodies how I’ve
always seen and engaged with Cyberpunk. For one thing, I’ve always gravitated
more to portrayal of Cyberpunk themes in anime, especially from the 80s and
90s. I’ve always appreciated that lens more, and it really speaks to me.
I did want to make magic a big part of the game. This is again deeply
personal. I believe magic and technology aren’t at odds with each other, and
magic shouldn’t be regulated to fantasies chained to the past either. I was
initially inspired by games like Shadowrun, but I didn’t like how the lore and
system created this great divide between magic and technology. So in BALIKBAYAN
I wanted to make that barrier non-existent.
I think the main issue with Cyberpunk as a genre is that we often see the
aesthetic markers and surface indicators of the genre, but we ignore the important
work that POC and queer creators have done in the space. They’ve given me the
permission to define Cyberpunk on my own terms.
And in turn, I want to do the same for the people who will play BALIKBAYAN.
The game asks you to bring about the rebirth of magic and to create a
Revolution, but what that will actually entail is up to the players and is out
of my hands. I believe Cyberpunk, and the Revolution it inspires, is a deeply
personal experience.
Because I don’t think the world will change from one Revolution. I believe it will change, and has changed, from the series of ongoing neverending Revolutions that we bring to life.
There is a lot of discussion about
decolonizing games and how many major games are from a colonized perspective,
so I really appreciate you talking about that! Does any of this translate to
the actual mechanics you use in the game? What are the mechanics like?
I definitely feel that the
decolonization process can be incredibly personal. For me it was in realizing
that the games I used to love to run and play, namely Dungeons & Dragons
and games like it, focused on violence, possession, taking things through
strength, with a focus on exploring the “alien” and
“exotic” and marveling at how “weird” it all was. This was
reflected in the mechanics of the game too, I feel. As a Filipino, knowing that
my own country was treated this way by its colonizers, it left a really bad
taste in my mouth.
In BALIKBAYAN, the Belonging
Outside of Belonging system favors narrative play that is entirely in the hands
of the players. I also added a few mechanics that center on the decolonization
process. First, each playbook asks the players to choose and build on a
“human form” and a “true form”. Because the Elementals are
on the run, this is basically what forms are “acceptable” versus what
they truly look like. I wanted to leave it up to the players and each story
what this means, how do they navigate this? Next the playbooks ask you to
choose “What you hope for”. While the players are tasked to bring
about the Rebirth of Magic (more on that in a bit), I also wanted to give the
players a personal goal to help drive the story. In a way this reflects how I
feel about the decolonization process: each path is unique, deeply personal.
People can talk about what their decolonization process is like, but they
cannot dictate to others what it SHOULD be like. Each of us interacts with
different intersections of class, race, background, and so on. What the
decolonization process is like in America is VERY different from what it is
like in the Philippines, and so on. The individual hope reflects that, but it
also asks each player to balance or find common ground with that hope and the
rebirth of magic.
Which brings us to another mechanic
I added. Originally I just liked the idea of having a sort of countdown
mechanic, to give the players some structure or urgency to the story being
told. There are two clocks running. The first clock is you start ON THE RUN,
but can eventually end up CAPTURED by the Corp again. The second clock has you
start at FADING, your magic is weak and dwindling compared to your ancestors,
but you want to reach REBORN, with the magic being your own.
In my mind, decolonization is not
about returning to what was before our colonizers came. That is in the past,
and much of our history has been rewritten by those more powerful than us. When
I think about what we’ve lost, what we could have been, it frustrates me. When
I think of the privilege I enjoy because of my circumstances that are favored
by a colonial mentality, I feel guilty and ill at ease. For example, I speak
English well and that opened a lot of doors for me, when it shouldn’t have. I
strongly feel that the way forward is in acknowledging the past, while building
our own sense of worth and grace outside of our colonial mentality. In the
Philippines we need to acknowledge that much of our systems and infrastructure
are badly compromised by these centuries of colonization. We need to rebuild,
to be reborn, to reclaim our own magic.
I’m nonbinary too, so I’m always
fascinated to see how other nonbinary designers make games. How do you feel
that your queerness, your nonbinary identity, being bi-racial, and these other
personal aspects of yourself have impacted the design and presentation of
BALIKBAYAN and the cyberpunk world within it?
To be honest, I used to really struggle with the idea of queer design, and what that looks like. I have to truly give credit to the community of indie designers who looked at my work and reflected on it, helping me see the queerness and nonbinary nature of my design. In BALIKBAYAN my nonbinary asserts itself by allowing the players to choose how active or passive they wish the story to flow. There are tools available, but I provide many examples that show how each game can be unique and flow completely differently. As a nonbinary, I believe in nuance and push away from the black and white. There are some cool mechanics tied to that (for example, even if you bring about the Rebirth of Magic, you have to answer the question “Which one of us runs away, and helps rebuild the Corp?”). Though I also have to say that also reflects my colonial pain, many of us resort to acting like our colonial masters in the way of rebirth and revolution (those dang intersections, right?).
But yes as a nonbinary designer, I come from a place of nuance and push that towards the forefront. I think that also gave me the sheer confidence to tackle the Cyberpunk genre. I grew up loving it, and like so many people like me (queer, POC, etc) I also felt disappointed by how so much of its core themes of revolution and self-acceptance were rewritten and downplayed. But I refuse to back down, and I’ll continue designing in these spaces and do my work to reclaim it along with other diverse artists.
