Today I have an interview with Brian Van Slyke on his cooperative board game Good Dog, Bad Zombie, which sounds like a heckin’ good time – and is on Kickstarter for a few more days! Check out what Brian has to say about his game below. Brian shared some cute dog pictures, and I wanted to note that backer levels at $75 or more help with donations to One Tail at a Time, which is a no-kill all-breed dog rescue in Chicago area. Yay! Note: There are more images of the game on the Kickstarter page, I just felt some of them didn’t read well here, so I used pictures of Lupin (Brian’s dog) instead.
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A Dog player sheets, with an illustration of a brown dog with a white chest, detailing the dog’s stats and abilities.
Tell me a little about Good Dog, Bad Zombie. What excites you about it?
Good Dog, Bad Zombie [GDBZ] is a cooperative board game where players have to bark, lick, and sniff their way through the apocalypse to save the hoomans they love. Think Homeward Bound meets The Walking Dead.
The game has been on-and-off development for three years, and I just love that it drips dogginess. My favorite thing that has ever been said about it (and any game I’ve ever made, really) comes from a preview from Everything Board Games: “GDBZ is an immersive dog-mind experience. Every single detail is saturated with flavor. It wouldn’t really surprise me if it was designed by an actual dog, or maybe a kindly werewolf. I mean that in a good way.”
Really, that’s what we wanted – to create a game that was wholesome and also a little terrifying all at once. I love how I’ll hear players shout, “I’m going to lick you!” and “I found a hooman!” and “Woof, woof!” totally normally. This game really gets people in the mind of a dog.
So what do you know about dogs, and what do you know about zombies? How are they applied in GDBZ?
I know that I love dogs, and I know that dogs love us. Having a dog got me through one of the toughest times of my life.
Brian & his dog Lupin. Lupin is reddish brown with floppy ears, Brian is bearded and wearing a flannel shirt.
I’d always had dogs growing up, but after I graduated college, my girlfriend (and now wife) was afraid of dogs. She’d never had them growing up. Chalk it up to either annoyance or persistence, but after ten years of me begging for us to go look for a dog at a shelter, she finally she gave in. And after three days of living with us, she and our dog became best friends. In many ways, I became the third wheel in the relationship. But I’m not complaining.
I know it’s a cliche to say that dogs are humanity’s best friend, but I think it’s really true. Dogs understand us on a fundamental level that I’m not even sure we understand ourselves. In many ways, I think a lot of us prefer the company of many dogs than many humans for that reason. And that’s why I wanted to make a game about dogs being amazing.
In terms of zombies, I’ve always found zombie lore fascinating. I’m a huge scaredy-cat (pun intended), and I can’t deal with horror movies, but I’ve always made an exception for zombie movies and shows. However, one thing that I learned from a friend of mine many years back, is that zombies are often a projection of our fear of an uprising of the working class. He’s a professor that studies culture and has given lectures on zombies (cool job!). And that’s the reason in GDBZ we made the zombies look super professional, wearing business suits and giving off vibes of riches and wealth. We thought it was a fun way to spin the traditional narrative.
Lupin lying on his back Lupin is reddish brown with floppy ears.
What kind of dogs can players play in GDBZ, and are various dogs different in any way?
When we first launched Good Dog, Bad Zombie, there were only a few dogs you could play as – Lupin (based off my dog) the boxer/ridgeback mix, Waine the Alaskan mix, Captain Woofster the Great Dane, and Miss Fuzzy Ears. However, because of the success of the campaign, we’ve unlocked four additional dogs: Angelica the Corgi, Willow the St. Bernard, Gizmo the Boston Terrier, and Bandit the Dalmatian.
And yes, every dog is different! Both in real life as well as in Good Dog, Bad Zombie. In the game, each dog has the same basic set of abilities and actions. However, every dog has their own unique and powerful ability, which are triggered by playing “Good Doggo” cards. For instance, Lupin’s “Snuggle” ability allows players to restock on Energy Cards. Captain Woofster’s “Hunt” ability allows him to remove extra zombies from the board. Willow’s “Sniff the Air” ability allows her to peek at upcoming scent cards and plan around them.
We’re super happy that each time you play Good Dog, Bad Zombie, you can take on a different mix of characters (and breeds) and tackle the game in new ways!
Lupin with a blanket over his head. Lupin is reddish brown with floppy ears.
How do these doggie mechanics make such an accurate and immersive experience?
This was hugely important to us when we were designing GDBZ. We wanted the game to drip dogginess. Not just in its name, but in its spirit, its art, its mechanics, and even in terms of what people say while playing.
So, for instance, you’ll hear people shout “I’m going to lick myself!” often through each game. Everything you do in Good Dog, Bad Zombie is based around and named after a dog-like action. This really gets players into the spirit and mood of being a dog pack. So, for instance, even though it’s not a rule, you’ll often hear players burst into random bouts of howling after they rescue a human.
This game is all about being good dogs, and the love between humans and dogs. So in Good Dog, Bad Zombie – dogs don’t inherently hate zombies. They’ll often be trying to play with a zombie or chase it. It’s not until the zombie threatens a live human that dogs become protective. That’s something that we think makes GDBZ unique – it’s fun and playful, with a dash of horror, all wrapped up into a zombie game.
An image of the game board showing “Central Bark” and some tokens.
What’s your favorite part of the gameplay and fictional structure of GDBZ?
My favorite part of the gameplay of GDBZ is the cooperative aspect! As we say in the Kickstarter page, there’s no room for the lone wolf in GDBZ. Players really have to help each other and strategize together to rescue the humans and protect their pack. If a player is too low on Energy cards and a zombie startles them, you might have to move the Feral Track up (and that’s how you lose the game!). Often it takes two dogs working together to get a human home safely to Central Bark without being eaten by a zombie. This is really a game where it requires everyone to win together.
My favorite part of the fictional structure of GDBZ is how we were able to slightly tweak traditional zombie lore. So, for instance, in this game, the only thing that zombies are afraid of are dog barks. So whenever your dog barks, it’ll send a zombie running away from you – often off of a cliff! Also, in GDBZ, humans are helpless and kind of dumb – and they won’t survive the apocalypse without the aid of the brave, smart, loving doggos. I feel like we were able to take territory that’s been well-tread, but put a new, fun, funny, doggy spin on it.
Lupin with a big bone. Lupin is reddish brown with floppy ears.
I am legit delighted to say I’ve yet again had the chance for interview time with Nathan Paoletta, this time talking about his new game Imp of the Perverse, which is currently on Kickstarter. The game’s design has been percolating for a while, and I can’t wait for you all to hear more about the project. Check it out!
Note: Images are the collaborative work of Nathan and cartoonist/illustrator Marnie Galloway.
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A dark red image with an illustration in black and white showing a monstrous imp wreathed in smoke, creeping behind a woman reading a book. The text reads, “IMP of the PERVERSE: A Psychological Horror Game of Monster Hunting in Jacksonian Gothic America. Quite nice, really.
Tell me a little about Imp of the Perverse. What excites you about it?
Imp of the Perverse is a psychological horror game of monster hunting in what I call “Jacksonian Gothic” America. Your protagonists are members of society in the historical 1830s or 1840s, but with a little extra – an Imp of the Perverse on their shoulders, impelling them to do terrible deeds. Only by hunting down those who have already given in to their Imps, and thus turned into literal monsters, can yours hope to rid themselves of their Imps and regain their humanity.
I’ve been working on this game for a long time! I recently uncovered my very first files of notes on the first ideas I had, and it’s dated 2006. I’ve always been a fan of the work of Edgar Allan Poe (hence the name of the game, of course) and the compelling nature of his work seemed very gameable to me once I started making games, but it took me a really long time and the experience of doing so many other games (carry. a game about war., Annalise, World Wide Wrestling, etc) to figure out the “in” into the stuff that resonates with me.
So now I’m excited to be so close to done with something that’s been on my mind for so long, and just really pleased with how the game has turned out! It reliably does the things that I personally like the most in tabletop – good solid hooks for characters with enough space to develop in play, clear direction in what you do, the opportunity to get deep into your characters head without demanding that as the only way to play, and specific GM tools for developing situations that you’re excited about, and then making decisions in play that all build to a fictional climax without depending entirely on personal storytelling skills. In fact, one of the sneaky goals of the game is to subtly teach players who may have never GMed before how to do it (or at least, how to do it in this game). One of the conceits is that if your character gives in to their Imp (a very possible but by no means inevitable state), you build the character as a new monster for the next hunt and take over the Editor (GM) role – I hope that players will be excited to do that when it comes up in long term play and feel like they have the foundation to do it even if they’ve never GMed before.
Image of the Kickstarter bits – quickplay cards, a clothbound hardcover, and a note on illustrated monsters and custom chapters! All of this is themed in red, dark red, black, and gold.
I have to ask about this transferable or shared GM role. What kind of powers do Editors hold, and how do they use them?
I think it’ll be familiar to most folks as a “traditional” GM kind of role. The Editor is in charge of coming up with the monster, setting up situations that challenge the protagonists, describing the world around them, playing NPCs, all that kind of stuff. This game is not Powered by the Apocalypse, but I absorbed many of the Agenda/Principle lessons from Apocalypse World, and do have a similar charge for the Editor in this game. Your job is to:
create monsters and put them in the same social context as the protagonist characters
construct a compelling, dark world full of challenge, doubt and wonder
engineer specific situations for each protagonist that dare them to embrace their darker self
demonstrate the consequences of the protagonists actions with integrity (in this order: integrity to the dark Gothic world, integrity to the characters development so far, integrity to the demands of the unfolding narrative, and ideally all three)
The game also asks the Editor to do specific prep (building the monster and the web of social relationships it influences). The goal here is two-fold: to give the Editor plenty to work with in play, so there’s always something to fall back to to keep the story going, and to draw them into investing in the world they’re preparing. The game shines when everyone is invested in what happens to these fictional characters, and prep is structured to make it as easy as possible for the Editor to do that.
As a player, you see the “effect” of the prep and the Editor’s agenda from the player side, and then when it’s your turn the game says “here are the tools the Editor you just played with used to make your game happen, and you saw how it went, so now it’s your turn to take them for a spin.” Obviously if it’s not within the players comfort zone there’s no artificial dictate that they MUST become the GM, but (again hopefully) by the time you get through a couple Chapters of play you’ll be able to see how it all works and maybe excited to try it out yourself!
How did you build and design the fiction of the game, especially ensuring you could integrate the imps without it seeming negatively garish or absurd?
The concept of “you play a character with an Imp on their shoulder pushing you to do perverse things” has been the central idea from the start, along with the idea that monsters should be unique to the perversity that spawned them, but developing the rest of the context took a long time. I knew I wanted to keep the realities of the historical time as the counterweight to the fantastical elements, but there were a lot of versions of doing that over the years. I had a key playtest that put me on the path to figuring it out – at the time, the characters were all part of a secret society of monster hunters who were recruited when their Imp appeared, and then kind of sent on a mission to hunt down the next monster. It worked to get everyone in the same place at the same time, but also felt very “you meet in a tavern” in a way that didn’t sit well at the table. We spent a lot of debrief time just kind of brainstorming about it, and someone made a comparison to the gravity well of a black hole, and the metaphor fell into place for me.
A series of symbols illustrated in maroon and white – a rose, a quill pen, a book, a gun, a compass, and a shovel.
A monster is the result of an Imp gaining the most power in the world of the living, and so when it appears everyone else who has an Imp can feel it, drawn to the perverse “gravity” it emanates. Implied by the dynamic of “when you know a monster appears, you know you have to do something about it” is that normal people CAN’T do anything to stop monsters, they’re too horrible and powerful, and the protagonists know this. And then, embedding the protagonists as well as the monster in a linked web of relationships gives the context for why they might care about this situation in particular, and have specific people they want to protect or save.
Beyond the basic concepts of Imps, monsters and the Shroud between worlds, one of the long-term mechanics is that the players build up the nature of their own gothic world through play. Between sessions, one of the things players can do is spend resources to establish facts about the Shroud and monsters. I want to provide the baseline fictional frame for “here’s what you do and why” and then see how different groups take that through the act of play, rather than build out a bunch of metaphysics for players to learn up front.
How do you handle a concept where the characters are continually tempted to do wrong, while they are hunting those who failed to resist the temptation? I’m really curious: what does morality look like in Imp of the Perverse?
One of the core rules is this: you are playing a historical character, but you are a modern person. We care about the actual concerns of the people playing at the table, not what we think other kinds of people might be worried about. So, perversity is always relative to something you actually think is wrong – for players, this is something that you should be interested in exploring and (possibly) overcoming, while for the Editor this is something that you want to see the protagonists destroy. The game doesn’t make overt moral judgements of what is and is not perverse, in that the development of individual perversities is totally freeform. But there are guidelines – it should be something that actually makes it hard to live a normal life, that the character sees the clear downsides of, but that is, well, tempting. Perversities are not superpowers, but they have both up and downsides. Then the mechanics provide specific moments where you choose whether it’s worth the temptation in order to get what you want right then in that moment. The game does give you permission to use whatever means necessary to destroy or deal with the monster, in that they are almost always worse than you, so in that way there is a bit of a moral statement of when violence is justified; but also, the means by which a monster is resolved can be very contextual to the individual monster and the nature of the protagonists, so it’s not ALWAYS a fight to the death.
There is also a bit of the morality of the era (or at least, my read of it) in how characters are built. For example, if you make a character who has a child out of wedlock, you’ll have the Scandalous Quality, or if your spouse is dead you’ll be Bereaved. These reflect the general sense of how people in your social circles view you, and have an equal ability to be used in play as more “positive” Qualities, but they do reflect a certain moral sense that centers on your family as the fundamental important thing in people’s lives – an important piece of embedding the characters in the society they’re a part of!
The words “IMP of the PERVERSE” in shimmering gold with filigree above and below.
You’ve been working on Imp of the Perverse for a long time (2006, right?)? What are some of your favorite moments of design and creation in that path that resonate with the game, and with you, today?
This is a great question, and a hard one because the arc of the design has basically been one of long gaps punctuated by short periods of focused progress, so it’s all kind of one amorphous blob of experience in my head. I’ll try to tease out some moments when I felt most satisfied that I was on the right track, because they stand out to me the most. First, when I decided to cut down the original idea of “play all kinds of different stories with these protagonists” down to “what if it’s just about hunting down the monsters in this world” (which was originally going to be one mini-game inside the larger game…) that was key to cutting the design space down to a manageable level. When I had the first playtests of the central die roll mechanic that tempts you towards perversity and saw it work, that was great. The game needed development to support that mechanic and fine-tune it, but I saw players engage with the critical decision point (do I or don’t I? is it worth it?) and that’s the beating heart of the game. The aforementioned playtest where we workshopped ourselves into the “perverse gravity” metaphor starting pulling the fictional frame together for me. I ran a long-term playtest around then where we got to see a protagonist fall to the Imp and then the player take up the Editor-ship, which worked great and let me go ahead and play on the other side to feel more of the player experience. Recently, I think one of the most gratifying moments I’ve had was at a convention game, where afterwards the players told me that they felt like they found it very easy to get into their characters and make principled decisions based on those characters. That was nice to hear as a GM of course, but also validation of the design goal of really putting players into the fictional world of their protagonists and giving them clear structure and direction for play through how the characters are made and interact.
And of course it is viscerally satisfying to see players defeat the horrible monsters I make that embody the things I really, truly want to see destroyed in the world!
Cover image, similar to the first of the image in the post: a dark red image with an illustration in black and white showing a monstrous imp wreathed in smoke, creeping behind a woman reading a book. The text reads, “IMP of the PERVERSE: A Psychological Horror Game of Monster Hunting in Jacksonian Gothic America.
Note: Mexican gamers have messaged me to say that this game is offensive and glorifies murder and the drug trade. I’m following up on it and apologize for not researching better – I’m sorry. The interview is staying up for now, but with this disclaimer. Today’s interview is with Mark Diaz Truman from Magpie Games, here to talk about Cartel, which is currently on Kickstarter! Cartel is a game about Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, in the complicated moral environment of the drug war. Check out Mark’s responses to my questions!
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Mexican man holding a large gun, surrounded by crates of drugs. Illustration by Andrew Thompson.
Tell me a little about Cartel. What excites you about it?
Cartel is a tabletop roleplaying game in which players portray bold narcos, naïve spouses, and dirty cops caught up the drama and violence of Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, trying to survive in a dangerous game of narcotics, money, and power. Cartel invokes crime fiction like Breaking Bad, The Wire, and El Mariachi, stories about ordinary people caught up in socioeconomic and cultural systems that push them to desperate places. There are no heroes in Cartel… but perhaps there aren’t any villains either. Either way, Cartel creates stories that are alternately tragic and darkly humorous, set against the backdrop of an eternal drug war.
I am excited to publish Cartel for so many reasons, but chief among them is the way that Cartel connects my love of crime fiction to my own heritage as a Mexican-America game designer. After a few years of designing games, I started having conversations with people in the community about representation. And as a Mexican-American designer, I had a terrifying thought: no one could look at my games and know anything about my life or my history or my family. I immediately had another disheartening thought: I have no idea what a Mexican-American game looks like.
Years later, while watching Breaking Bad, I finally got an idea: I wanted to write a game about the drug war from the people who really live inside of it. My people. Mexicans who wake up every day in what is effectively occupied territory, caught in the middle of the war between the law and the cartels. There are many Mexican stories to be told, but this is the one that spoke to me, that unified my love of tight, compelling mechanics with the kind of fiction I loved to watch and read.
But it’s also terrifying. Since there are so few “Mexican” games published within our community, Cartel has to do a lot of heavy lifting. I’ve spent the last three years honing the mechanics and experience, and I’m so proud now that it delivers both on the cultural experience I knew was possible and a gaming experience that I hope keeps folks coming back again and again.
Rear cover of the special edition book with a colorfully illustrated sugar skill on it. Coloring by Brooke Carnevale, Layout by Miguel Ángel Espinoza.
Considering your heritage and background, how have you approached writing those of native Mexican heritage, and intersecting identities like women, queer people, and biracial people? Class would also be pretty significant here, so I’m curious as well how you handled that.
For the most part, Cartel is about Mexican people, not Mexican- Americans. But those lines are blurry for Latinos. After all, the border crossed us. In my home state of New Mexico, for example, the land was colonized by the Spanish before it was annexed by the Americans. Who cares what borders the gringos try to put on us?
But… I also have to recognize my distance from the reality. I live in Albuquerque: 850 miles and a whole country away from Durango, MX, the setting for Cartel. Many people there live with the threat of narcoviolence every day, and I can’t expect to really understand their reality from reading a few books. I can do my research and know my own history, but I’ve needed help from folks like Miguel to get the details right. For example, the first draft of Cartel gave a large role to the local police… which I have since learned is pretty far off from how the world really works.
Issues like queerness and race are even more complicated once you cross the border. Much of my game is about class, the ways that your financial reality determines your available options, but I’ve tried to create room for folks to bring a variety of characters to the table to engage the systems. Ironically, the cartels can be very egalitarian; they don’t care if you’re gay or a woman if you’re effective at your job!
Image advertising the Cartel Quick Start, which can be downloaded here.
A game focused on drugs and the associated traumas like violence and oppression is pretty intense. How do you handle those topics in Cartel? Do you use any safety mechanics to support exploration of those aspects?
Yes, absolutely. I think that one of the best parts of Cartel is that it demands that everyone at the table take some time to discuss what they want from the game before they sit down to play it. No one signs up for a session of Cartel without some thought about the experience they are about to have! (I hope!)
In the full text, I plan to provide GM’s tools for working with safety at the table, ranging from how to have the first discussion to example safety mechanisms like the X-Card, etc. That said, I believe that those mechanics are primarily external to the game itself. Each group needs to figure out what is required for them to feel comfortable with the material, and that line is going to change a lot from group to group. I’ve found that it’s really hard for me to tell folks where that line should be.
That said, I’ve done a lot to structure the experience within the game’s mechanics, sometimes in really subtle ways. La Sicaria (The Enforcer), for example, is a character that I’ve spent a lot of time shaping to produce a specific experience. One major change to that playbook I made early in development was to make her a retired enforcer who came back to the game after some absence, adding some world-weary priming for anyone who picked up the character. That’s helped to structure the fiction in productive ways–way fewer psychokiller sicarias!–without limiting what any player brings to the table.
Character playbooks with stylized layout and illustrations, with La Sicaria in front. Illustrations by Mirco Pagnessi, Layout by Mark Diaz Truman and Miguel Ángel Espinoza.
What are the mechanical bits that you think express Cartel‘s narrative and the unique experience of the game? I think there are three main places that Cartel is expressed through the mechanics: basic moves, stress moves, and playbooks.
The basic moves in Cartel work like any other Powered by the Apocalypse game, but they put a heavy emphasis on the conversation the players are having. There are four separate moves dedicated exclusively to talking or texting (pressure someone, justify yourself, get the truth, make an offer) and several others (size someone up, press your luck) that can be triggered verbally. That makes Cartel a game about conversations in the same way that Pulp Fiction is a movie about conversations: there is violence, but the camera lingers far longer on a good argument.
Stress moves invoke the entire stress engine, the bloody, beating heart of Cartel. Essentially, each player character in Cartel marks stress to avoid problems or keep themselves together in difficult situations. Eventually, that stress builds…and need to be released. It’s possible to just lose yourself in a substance to get through the day, but you might find yourself verbally abusing or shaming someone you care about or dishing out a beatdown to someone in a weaker position.Or if things get really bad… you’ll end up confessing your sins to a priest, cabrón.
Finally, the playbooks themselves contain a ton of Mexican culture and narrative that each playbook brings to the table. El Halcón has a pandilla (a crew), that comes along with him on odd jobs for the cartel, sort of like Badger and Skinny Pete followed Jesse around. The specific structure of that crew, their features and problems, is absolutely Mexican, rooted in the kinds of close relationships that exist between folks who work the street-level drug trade. I consider each playbook to be a challenge: how can I add a new facet of Mexico to the game with this character?
Cartel cover with large white text on the left, vertically arranged, over the bright pink colored cover. The picture of the Mexican man with the large gun and crates of drugs is the cover image. Illustration by Andrew Thompson, Layout by Miguel Ángel Espinoza.
How does the design of Cartel address challenging subjects – things like race, gender, and intersections of communities and cultures?
I’m honestly skeptical sometimes of my own ability to interrogate my games: I think a lot about what I’m trying to do, but it’s hard to simultaneously play the violin and say what playing the violin is supposed to mean! My hope is that, at some level, Cartel asks more questions than it answers about race, gender, and culture. Certainly Reddit threads like this one are a great start to the conversation about what games like Cartel are supposed to accomplish.
But I also think that Cartel issues a fundamental challenge to the gaming industry through its mere existence: it forces a mostly white audience to consider what it means to be Mexican, without the distance of metaphor or time. In many ways, my game design has been an effort to live up to that challenge, to take seriously the idea that white folks who might not have close relationships with Mexican people might sit down and play through a few days in their lives, not as a joke or a farce…but as a compelling drama. I think Cartel makes some white folks uncomfortable because it makes them realize how alien the experiences of their fellow humans can be, that they are more comfortable playing orcs than they are people of color.
To quote Junot Diaz:
Motherfuckers will read a book that’s one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they [white people] think we’re taking over.
I absolutely see Cartel in the tradition of indie games that includes Steal Away Jordan, Dog Eat Dog, and Monsterhearts, works that strove to expand what’s considered “normal” in our spaces by demanding that the narratives of the oppressed be given some time in the spotlight.
A woman holding a serious firearm looking into the trunk of a vehicle, from which someone’s arm is extended, by Andrew Thompson.
P.S:Some updates made at 12:03pm on 3/20/18 to correct the names of the artists in the subtitles. Very sorry to Brooke Carnevale, Miguel Ángel Espinoza, Mirco Pagnessi, Andrew Thompson, and Mark Diaz Truman for my errors – it sounds ridiculous but I’m new to doing proper subtitling. I apologize.
Note: Mexican gamers have messaged me to say that this game is offensive and glorifies murder and the drug trade. I’m following up on it and apologize for not researching better – I’m sorry. The interview is staying up for now, but with this disclaimer.
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
Hi all! Thanks to friends on G+, I was able to get in touch with Juhana Pettersson to interview him about Chernobyl, Mon Amour, which is now on IndieGoGo! Chernobyl, Mon Amour is the English translation of Tšernobyl, Rakastettuni, which was published in 2016 by Juhana. The themes of the game sounded haunting and beautiful, and I wanted to hear more! Check out Juhana’s answers below.
BCS Note: It’s so odd but I never realized how beautiful Finnish is! Lovely to even read over without knowing the meanings.
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Cover art of a couple in front of a ferris wheel, with their skeletons highlighted in red. By Joel Sammallahti.
Tell me a little about Chernobyl, Mon Amour. What excites you about it?
It’s a very personal game for me, in some ways that are obvious and others less so. I visited Chernobyl with my wife and that certainly affected how I saw it. It was in the early summer, and the quiet, the light were beautiful. At the same time, the history of Chernobyl is horrible. I remember when I was a child, five years old, when the news of the radioactive cloud hit Finland. My parents were watching the tv news. I didn’t understand very much, but I sensed the fear and the panic. If you look at a visualization of how the radioactive particles traveled in the atmosphere after the accident, it seems as if they were almost willfully zooming straight for Lapland.
Something in that combination, the peace of Chernobyl as it is now and the terror of the story seemed like it could form the basis of an interesting roleplaying game.There’s also a book by a Belarusian journalist called Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl, which had an enormous effect on me. It collects the stories of individuals who were involved with the accident or its aftermath.
I like love stories in roleplaying games, but they seem very underrepresented in the games that have been published so far. The Romance Trilogy of games by Emily Care Boss is obviously a huge inspiration, but I think the roleplaying field could take more than what we have now.
As a less obvious thing, the game is also an attempt to communicate the specific roleplaying game culture in Helsinki, Finland, where I discovered roleplaying and still play. Through international contact I’ve come to believe that the community has some unique and interesting ideas about roleplaying, and I’ve struggled to express some of them here, especially relating to very freeform-style character based social play.
Juhana Pettersson
What struck the romantic tone in Chernobyl, and how do you bring it to forefront in the game?
I’ve always liked love stories in roleplaying games, both as a player and as the GM. I think they’re fun to play and very well adapted to the social situation of a tabletop game. A lot of a real life romance consists of talking, and talking happens to be the one thing that we can do in a tabletop game with minimal or no game mechanics.
I played my very first roleplaying game romance scenes when I was sixteen years old and just starting with Vampire: the Masquerade. Because we didn’t actually have much real life experience with love and relationships, these scenes tended to be kinda awkward and heartfelt. In retrospect, it almost feels like we were using the game to practice for real life. Later in life, there’s been a shift in content on what kind of relationship roleplaying works in the games I play in. They’ve become more about exploring things we don’t necessarily want to experience in real life and fictionalizing actual experience either for fun or to come to terms with it.
Because of this experience, I knew for a fact that romance in roleplaying games can be very good stuff. Since the selection of published material was so sparse, I figured it would work for a game book like this one. However, I also felt that when it came to pushing the theme, subtlety was not going to work. This is why I tried to put romance front and center and have everything orbit around it. The game has two themes, radioactivity and romance. The radioactivity theme is much more perverse, involving an essentially self-destructive impulse. Yet my intuition was that it would come easier to a lot of players.
Aged and detailed map of nuclear zones. By Miska Fredman.
How does the game work mechanically? Does romance interact with the mechanics?
In terms of game mechanics, Chernobyl, Mon Amour is an attempt to broaden the scope of what we consider game design. It has no real mechanics to speak of in the traditional sense. No stats, xp, combat rules. Instead, I’ve attempted to code the design into the world description, the character creation guidelines, the preparatory workshops and so on.
Fundamentally, I think the goal of game mechanics is to create a definite kind of experience. Following the rules you experience what the game wants to convey. Chernobyl, Mon Amour follows a similar kind of logic in that by doing what the book says you should do, you’ll have the experience. It’s just not facilitated by mechanics but instead by the other guidelines. In this sense, it shares a lot of the same thinking as Nordic Larp does. Instead of designing a game, the goal is to design a very particular social situation.
Because of this, I suspect that it’s also a little harder to run than most roleplaying games, and perhaps more limited in who can play it together. However, I’ve also found that this style can be appealing to many people who find more mechanics-oriented roleplaying games difficult to approach.
How did you playtest Chernobyl, Mon Amour, if you did playtest? If you did not, what makes you feel confident about the game succeeding?
I ran playtest games before and during the design and writing process. When I first had the idea, I wasn’t sure of its viability, so I ran games to try it out. After those, I felt more confident that I was able to make a game out of this. From a playtesting perspective, this is an unusual game. Often playtesting means making sure that the mechanics of the game work robustly, but this time there isn’t really any of that. Rather, playtesting is about the ideas and concepts, as well as the functionality of the exercises for creating the right social atmosphere with players. These are much more subjective in terms of whether they work or not, and more prone to confusion created by differences in basic cultural assumptions.
In terms of success, I see this as an experimental game. It’s an attempt to convey a culture and style of roleplaying in a format that should make it possible to replicate it. I hope people will find it interesting, good and worth trying but I have a suspicion that I will be surprised by what people will do with it. Which is of course great, and a part of the appeal of roleplaying games in general.
Kuva, a person with long brown hair and dark skin in a hoodie. By Joel Samallahti.
What kind of workshops do you include with the game, and what sort of content and safety mechanics do you have to help players in the intimate scenario?
At least in the Finnish roleplaying scene, using workshops in tabletop games is highly unusual. I’m not really aware of anybody else even suggesting it. However, in Nordic Larp they’re routine and extremely useful. I figured that if these social tools work in larp, why not in roleplaying games? And I’m under the impression that in other countries, there’s been successful experiments with this.
The goal of workshops in Chernobyl, Mon Amour is get the participants aligned with the subject matter of the game and become more comfortable with each other. Because of Finnish cultural characteristics, the exercises as they are now are pretty talky, and I was planning of adjusting them a little for the English version to take into account the fact that in my experiences, international players are better at this than Finns are.
As for safety, I take it seriously. I’ve had experiences in tabletop roleplaying games myself where I’ve felt that my personal boundaries have been crossed in a negative way. Roleplaying based on intimacy and trust is powerful stuff, and it means that sometimes things can go bad emotionally even if all the participants are doing their best to accommodate each others’ limits. The game as it exists now has some simple safety mechanics to help with these situations, but this is another thing I wanted to adjust for the international version to give participants more tools.
Perhaps the simplest and most important safety technique, if you can call it that, is to make sure that everybody really wants to play it together, that everybody wants to play a roleplaying game about romance and death in an emotionally raw way. Sort of “enthusiastic consent” of roleplaying games, if you like.
“Valokuva 2,” distant image of buildings and industrial structures. Juhana & Maria Pettersson.
Today I’ve got an interview with Craig Campbell on CAPERS, a super-powered roleplaying game set in the 1920s, which is currently on Kickstarter! Craig talks about the setting and the mechanics of the game in the following responses – check them out!
Tell me a little about CAPERS. What excites you about it?
CAPERS is a super-powered RPG of 1920s gangsters. Players portray bootleggers and mobsters working to make their fortune and their mark during Prohibition in the U.S. And they have low-level superpowers. But so do their rivals and so do the feds. The game uses a press-your-luck playing card based mechanic. You might have a successful card flip but only be barely successful and opt to flip another card to try for a better success. But you might fail in the process.
I’m not a huge comics fan, but I am a superhero TV and movie fan. I love stories of people with extraordinary abilities in what is otherwise our normal world. There’s plenty of supers games out there set in the modern day (and plenty that are about HEROES), so I decided to explore a period in history from a less heroic angle. The Prohibition era has always interested me and I enjoy the romanticized movies and TV shows that tell stories set during that decade. So I thought it’d be fun to explore it in RPG form. There aren’t many RPGs that touch on the 1920 other than Call of Cthulhu stuff. And the majority of supers games fall in the comic book style, capes and cowls and all that. These two things make CAPERS pretty unique, but also familiar.
It’s become sort of a chocolate and peanut butter thing for me. I took two things I really dig (super-powered characters and the 1920s) and mashed them together to see what would happen. I feel it’s worked out pretty well.
Where did you build your setting from? Did you use a lot of realistic resources or did you span out?
The world of CAPERS is based on real-world history but with some liberties taken. Most notably, a small percentage of people started exhibiting extraordinary abilities shortly after the Great War (WWI). For the most part, the origin of these abilities is kept vague. However, there’s a chapter that brings science into the game setting, along with a largely not understood source for the powers.
A trio of primary backdrops have been developed for the game – New York, Chicago, and Atlantic City – along with a bit of info describing a handful of other cities. Much of what’s described there is based in real history, though some details have been changed and some new things have been added, wholly from my and other writers’ imaginations. A general overview provides context for the world. What are the new technologies of the era? What’s popular in entertainment? What is life like in the 1920s.
Several notable personalities of the era are present. Enoch “Nucky” Johnson and Al “Scarface” Capone are described in some detail and provided with stat blocks. However, given that the well-known personages of the time are largely Irish and Italian guys in their 20s-40s, historically, I’ve taken some liberties. Atlantic City’s Mayor Bader is a black woman. Charles “Lucky” Luciano has become Carla “Lucky” Luciano. And the hardcase DOJ agent making trouble for Capone in Chicago is Vanessa “Ness” Elliott rather than her real-world male counterpart. Additionally, a wider variety of characters of color, female characters, and LGBT characters are presented to round out the world. All in all, this is presented simply as “how this world is” though some of the animosities between different ethnicities remains for flavor, such as Capone’s largely Italian gang squaring off against Dean O’Banion’s largely Irish northside crew in Chicago.
How do superpowers function in CAPERS? What makes them really pop?
First a bit on the game mechanic.
The game uses playing cards, rather than dice. Each player, and the GM, has their own deck (52 suit cards plus 2 jokers). Your character has six traits – Charisma, Agility, Perception, Expertise, Resilience, and Strength. Each trait is ranked from 1 to 3 (higher if you have the right powers). When you make a trait check, you look at the trait’s rank and that is your card count. If you have a skill appropriate to the trait check, your card count is increased by 1 .
To make your trait check you flip cards. You can flip as many cards as your card count but can stop at any time and take the most recent card flipped as your check. The pip count of the cards flipped (2, 3, 4, etc, on up to ace) determine success or failure, whilst the suit of the card determines the degree of success or failure, starting with clubs (lowest) and proceeding alphabetically to spades (highest). So, you might succeed, but barely, and choose to gamble for a better success by flipping another card… but risking failure.
Each superpower has a standard effect, the thing it does or effect it generates most of the time. Each power also comes with a variety of boosts. You choose which ones you want when your character gains a power and gain more boosts as you increase a power’s level. Each boost makes the standard effect better or more versatile, provides an alternate standard effect, or provides something else your character can do related to that power. However, each boost you use in a turn reduces the card count of whatever you’re trying to do by one. You can stick with your standard effect and not suffer card count reduction OR you can use several boosts to gain other cool stuff but reduce the chances of success on your action for that turn.
It’s a “press your luck” system. The combination of trait check mechanic and boost use makes the system a balancing act for each character each turn. More power equals reduced chance of success. Less power means greater chance of success. You also have a sense of what cards remain in your deck, so that colors your choices as well. Players have found the system very engaging. You’re making active choices whenever you’re flipping cards, not just rolling a die and looking at the number.
What were challenges you encountered trying to emulate both a unique time and place and a very trope-heavy genre?
Combining a specific time period and a trope-heavy genre can easily become overwhelming. The first thing I did was make a conscious decision that CAPERS is not a superhero game. It’s not a supervillain game. It’s not even a supers game really. It’s a gangsters game where the gangsters and law enforcement HAPPEN to have superpowers at their disposal.
Once I focused in on the gangster game, it became a question of what tropes of supers were appropriate and which weren’t. I wrestled with a number of powers I thought were cool, but ultimately ended up being too complicated for a game that is, at its core, a stylized cops and robbers game. I also scaled back the POWER of the superpowers. There’s no mind control. That’s a power that becomes to easily abused unless you give the target ways to get out from under the influence. And if you make that readily available, mind control loses its “cool factor.” There’s no magnetism control either. It’s just too darn versatile compared to the other powers in the game. There’s a reason Magneto makes such a formidable foe even on his own.
So, too, I looked at other tropes of comic book stories and developed my own take on them (or had another designer help with that). A 1930s version of super-science. An explanation for where powers come from. Alternate Earths and planar travel. Super-prisons. That stuff is in the game, but it’s all optional.
There are a lot of chances for something to fail, even though it’s got a lot of chances to win. What makes failing in CAPERS interesting?
I’m a big fan of failure in RPGs. They add drama, insert complexity, and turn the story on a dime. That said, I don’t want every failure to be a huge narrative-laden thing that slows the pacing down. In CAPERS, you can succeed with a complication (a mini-failure), fail with a special bonus to help you next time, straight up fail (with no additional effect), or botch. Each type of failure has its place and helps the story in a different way. Complications add interesting tidbits that make the encounter more fun. Failure with a bonus later incentivizes the player to take further risks. Straight failure keeps the pacing moving. And of course, botches make for the best stories, especially when the characters ultimately succeed later, overcoming the botch.
The playing card mechanic requires the players to make choices on whether they keep the card they have or flip another and take a chance. A player who succeeds with a complication may choose to suffer that complication just because the group needs a success, even if it’s minimal. A player who fails with a bonus later may take that failure because they’ve suddenly come up with a cool idea for their character’s action next turn and want that bonus to come into play for their big risk.
How failure plays a role in a character’s actions is in the player’s hands a fair amount of the time. It’s not entirely at the whim of the random. It’s my hope that this provides for a more memorable story for the players.
CAPERS is coming from Craig’s company, Nerdburger Games!
— Thanks so much to Craig for the interview! CAPERS looks pretty cool and I hope you’ve all enjoyed learning about it, and that you’ll check it out on Kickstarter today!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
What is the Fate Accessories Kickstarter about, both as a product and as your vision?
The Fate Accessories Kickstarter is a follow-up to our 2014 Kickstarter for Fate Dice that launched that whole line (now 11 catalog entries deep) and breathed new life into the whole Fudge Dice thing. In the years since the Fate Dice have continued to be a real tentpole for us in terms of revenue, but our initial stock from that run has been dwindling. We’ve sunk profits from the line into reprinting the most of the stuff that’s getting low or even ran out (in the past several months we’ve gotten reprints rolling for the Antiquity, Eldritch, Centurion, and Vampire sets), but we also want to expand the line with more dice offerings in new styles and quantities, as well as launch a new line of Fate Point tokens that are color-coordinated with an existing (or to-be-funded) set. We’ve got a bunch of potentials waiting in the wings that we really want to show people, get their thoughts on, and get their help expanding the catalog.
Infernal dice style.
What have been some of the challenges approaching reprinting and expanding – both creatively and from a business perspective?
I’ll answer this backwards. 🙂
Dice are expensive, not on an individual scale, but on a manufacturing-run scale. When we get dice made it’s a 5000 unit minimum order with the folks we have our primary die mold with, so that means for any one packaged dice item it’ll cost us in the low 5-digits (think $10k-$15k range) to get another run made. Our original runs that were Kickstarter-funded in 2014 were manufactured at around 8000 units each, but as we approached 2018 most of them were down to around 1000 units or less. They’ve been a good supporting pole of our company’s revenue stream, so letting multiple catalog entries run dry just wasn’t an option.
So we looked at the most popular ones based on the last few years of data and made sure to get reprints of those rolling. Our Core Dice had already sold out, but the iridescent material we use there is a bit more difficult to source, which increases the minimum print quantity, so we decided to leave that one be (especially given something I’m about to get to below). We also decided we’d let our two licensed sets, Winter Knight and Atomic Robo dice, run their course without a reprint. I love the sets, but I also like the idea of not needing to pay royalties on our dice sales. We’d already brought back the Antiquity one, so that meant Vampire, Centurion, and Eldritch Fate Dice needed the reprint.
Of course that meant that the dice money we could have spent on developing and releasing new sets was spent on reprints… which brings us to our first Kickstarter of the year. Given that it had been four years since our first Fate Dice kickstarter, we felt it was a good time to turn to our fans again and ask for some help funding an expanded line.
Creatively, tho, man, that’s the more difficult part of all this. There are only so many materials styles and distinctly-different colors you can offer before there starts being some kind of overlap. And honestly that’s not something we came to terms with as much as we should’ve before we launched. We faltered a bit in our first week of the Kickstarter because we didn’t make a good enough case that we were offering enough new and different, despite it feeling really obvious to us how things were different even if they fell in the broad categories of “green” or “blue” or “purple.” But recently (just yesterday at the time I write this) we started off our second week of the KS with a reshuffling of our stretch goals to put the new and different more visibly and more close at hand, which seems to be working as we’re getting a new surge of interest.
This was made possible in part because we’re bringing a new dice construction method to the party: layered dice, where different colors of material are injected in sequence, letting you produce dice that have a striped or gradient effect depending on what colors and sequence you choose. Of course, that triples the difficulty in color selection, but does let you produce some dice that definitely don’t look like any others we currently have.
Malachite dice design.
How do you choose what products are the right ones to bring back or newly develop – what ones really called for the action, and which ones are you most excited about?
I’ve already talked about some of the decision making that went into deciding what we brought back, so I’ll focus on new development here.
We knew we wanted to get into the Fate Point token space. Campaign Coins did a great set of metal Fate tokens, and those are still out there if you can find them, but we didn’t want to get into metals manufacture. That left us with the idea of creating a line of Fate Points tokens that use the same material as an associated set of dice; if we get the chance to expand the line further, we’ll do more tokens in more styles to match other sets we’ve had done (or will have done). That’s the other baseline goal of the Kickstarter, to make a new accessories line of Fate Points possible.
We’ve also prior to the Kickstarter begun an effort to make sure there are single player packs of Fate Dice out there — ones that contain 4 dice instead of 12 — as we’ve been hearing over the past few years that there are folks who want to buy a specific, single style of dice rather than a 3-style pack. As a dice addict I don’t really understand that line of thinking, but I know my biases are not universal! So that’s what gave birth to our Fire and Midnight Fate Dice single-player sets at $6 each. Our layered dice will also come in that kind of packaging, in part because they’re a little more expensive to make, so that lets us price them at $8 per set — a 12-die set of all layered dice would need a price a lot higher than the $15 we normally charge for 12-die sets.
New materials styles and new construction methods tend to play into our choices of what to develop as well. Another set we had made without Kickstarter backing is our Frost Dice 12-die set that we released a year or so back. That came about because our manufacturer told us about a “matte” finish that could be applied to translucent dice, which give them a frozen-liquid appearance. It’s an attractive set. Obviously the layered dice from our Kickstarter stretch goals also arose from access to a new construction method. To a great extent what can be done in manufacturing tends to drive the creative side of this more than the reverse — what methods can be used act as a fruitful constraint on the creativity.
As far as what I’m most excited about from the Kickstarter? Besides the Fate Points, it’s definitely those layered dice. Have a look. 🙂
Hi all! Today I have an interview with Shannon Campbell from Astrolago Press about the new bestiary currently on Kickstarter, Faerie Fire, which is compatible with Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. Shannon is the creator alongside Dillon MacPherson and Malcolm Wilson. The Kickstarter runs until the morning of February 7, 2018. Check out Shannon’s answers below!
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The Conglomadog by Kory Bing
Tell me a little about Faerie Fire. What excites you about it?
Faerie Fire is a collaboration between myself and two of my gamemasters: Dillon MacPherson and Malcolm Wilson. The three of us are friends and colleagues and we’re all very passionate about tabletop gaming–we’re active homebrewers, Dillon and Malcolm especially.
There’s loads of things that excite me tremendously about Faerie Fire: the fact that it’s full of items and creatures that the three of us have enjoyed so much in our own campaigns, and now we get to share them with everyone; the list of incredible illustrators that I’m so grateful to have had the chance to work with; and the fact that it’s entirely up to our own creative vision what goes in the book. AND THE AESTHETIC IS KEY. I’m super stoked to get to work on such a vibrant, colourful project. We wanted to make a really wild book that felt a little bit sexy, a little bit dangerous–but at the same time super inclusive.
What was the inspiration for Faerie Fire, and how did you start compiling and creating all of this content together?
To start, a lot of it was homebrew we had developed for our own campaig ns. Dillon and Malcolm have known each other for a decade and as they were both game designers and avid game masters, they were constantly developing and exchanging new content. They’d always wanted to make a tabletop compendium of their own, and the success in recent years of similar projects spurred them on. I’m a writer and narrative designer in video games but I’ve also had experience as an editor on various print publications–including Bones of the Coast, a Kickstarter-funded comics anthology I helmed in 2016, and The Underground: A Sam & Fuzzy RPG, a tabletop system & setting I edited a couple of years ago.
Right away it seemed clear to me that we should do something aggressive and bold–that it wasn’t enough to just produce content that was the same flavour as the vanilla stuff already widely available. We were spending a lot of time in the fairy realm in a campaign that Malcolm was GMing and it seemed like there was a lot of content there to explore and develop–and it quickly became clear that anything we made for the Wilds would be anything but vanilla.
Pox and Pilfer by Amy T. Falcone
Why did you choose to use 5e as your base? Is any of the material flexible to use in other systems, even just the flavor?
Dillon and Malcolm have been playing for 10 years but I only came onto tabletop games with D&D 4th edition, which I played for about a year before 5e came out. After that I went through a handful of systems–but I kept coming back to 5e. I like long-form storytelling and character-driven stories, and 5e is just the right combination of intuitive and versatile–and it’s so, so homebrew friendly. Pretty much every 5e campaign I played ended up having homebrew added before too long: custom player races and classes, new magic items, weird hybrid monsters–and everyone I played with was always happy to go off book. 5e feels like a robust and elegant toolset.
One of the things we’d really like to do with Faerie Fire is make it Fate-compliant as well (I’m a huge fan of Fate Accelerated)–whether this is done as a stretch goal, or as a side hobby over the next year, is hard to say. We think that the style and aesthetic of Faerie Fire would readily fit into a lot of systems and worlds–though the mechanics would obviously need to be adapted a little. And, of course, the fast-paced, glamorous, brilliant setting of Faerie Fire would make it a perfect fit for one of my favourite impromptu systems: All Outta Bubblegum.
How did you choose artists for the project to capture the aesthetic you were looking for? What was your search like?
I come from a comics background, and for five years I ran a curated comics festival called VanCAF that put me in touch with a large network of artists, so I quickly compiled a shortlist of talent that I thought would be a great fit for the project. We had an open submissions process, as well, where artists could pitch monster ideas for us to collaborate on–but in the end we only selected a handful of artists that way.
The vision was for Faerie Fire to be vivid and stylish and bold and glamourous, but I also wanted it to be non-binary and queer. It seemed to me that if we approached it as an art book as well as a supplemental, then it might provide an opportunity for people who have otherwise felt excluded from gaming to discover how incredible these worlds could be. To that end, we wanted to collaborate with diverse creators. My own connections were very LGTBQ+ representative, and feeds like @sffpocartists on Twitter and the #drawingwhileblack and #latinxartists hashtags provided a bounty of skill & talent that made it incredibly easy to discover new names I might not have been introduced to otherwise.
Tell me a little about the design process. How did you flesh out the creatures? What did you do to make sure everything was consistent thematically and mechanically?
The design process was a little bit different from artist to artist–some artists preferred to be assigned a creature, in which case they’d give us some requests (flowers! or feathers!) and tell us what they hated to draw, and we’d build them a custom creature that played to their strengths. Other artists had their own idea for a creature, so we’d get them to run it by us and then cross-reference it to all the other monsters going into the book to make sure that it was unique. We’d send back design notes, if necessary, but otherwise we wanted to give the artists as much autonomy as possible.
Making sure that each monster is unique involves, basically, a lot of spreadsheets. We have cross-references for creature type, whether they’re humanoid or not, sentient or not–whether they have damage resistances or vulnerabilities, whether they can be used as a familiar or a mount. The book runs the whole gamut. Dillon and Malcolm design the stat blocks between the two of them and each of them reviews the other’s work–I come in at the last to give the final review, whip up the lore, and make sure everything looks hunky dory from there. As the art comes in we review it and, if there’s anything that doesn’t quite sync up with the lore & stats we’ve developed, or if the artist has surprised us with something we weren’t quite expecting, we’ll tweak the written content one last time to make sure it gets the most out of the art and doesn’t introduce any confusing inconsistencies.
The book is designed around the a chaotic Fairy plane, home of the fey. While not all the creatures originated there, they’ve all been affected by it, and that shapes their powers and design. We’ve also introduced the Plane of the Living Light, a neon-inspired plane that kind of bumps up against the Wilds–those with special sensitivities can see into it, and certain creatures can channel its living energy through them. Everything in the book, therefore, has been touched by one of these two things: either chaotic fey magics, or the pulsing, energizing Living Light.
Because the aesthetic ranges from the cyberpunky Neon Noir to the fun colours and friendly animals of certain beloved 90s stationery, there’s a wide range of creatures: some are monstrous, some are sexy, some are friendly–some are just plain weird. Each and every one of them is an original creation.
To finish off, what are a few of your favorite items and creatures in the text, and why?
My favourite probably comes down to two or three different creatures: there’s the Kapny (which is going to be drawn by Jemma Salume), dryad-like creatures that live in the husks of trees burned by wildfire; I’m also a huge fan of the Cawillopard (drawn by Desirae Salmark), a tall, giraffe-like creature whose head can’t be seen for the weeping willow branches that trail down its neck; it has a symbiotic relationship with glittering spiders that live in its branches. When you’re under its expansive canopy, the spiders make it look like the night sky shining above you. Pretty! But also creepy, depending on your particular phobia. And, lastly, I’m a big fan of our “cover girl”, Sepal: she’s the warden of the fey prison, where all the prisoners are transformed into flowers and shrubs for the duration of their imprisonment. She keeps a disciplined, well-manicured garden, and she’s a fierce and cunning member of the fairy nobility; though she mostly prefers to stay out of the various squabbles and underhanded politics of the court, it’d be pretty stupid to underestimate her–she literally grows her own army. Yuko Ota drew Sepal for the cover of the book and the interior illustration of her, as well.
Jesse Turner is drawing all our items as we speak and each time he turns in a new one, it’s even more fantastic than the last. I’m most looking forward to seeing the finished art for the Comet’s Tail: a magical flail that looks something like a glowing comet, and allows the wielder to cast Minute Meteor.
Can you tell me about the genesis of this collection? What prompted you to make a series of games focused around this particular tool, and what was your process for discovery and creation?
I take a lot of selfies, like a really lot. They mean a lot to me! Cell cameras are a vital advance in modern communication and our ability to share our identities and emotions with people around the world, even if we don’t speak the same language. Part of it is also just that I like trying new ways of telling stories and exploring game experiences.
I love dice but it’s fun to take different mechanics from weird things we do. In Literally, I Can’t, one of the games in the collection, you use the MASH (mansion, apartment, shack, house) game that I played as a kid to build characters. That is the kind of thing I want to explore in games!
I also design in response to things. I saw a few games using phone cameras that I felt didn’t do what I wanted. I have had to learn a lot about selfies and myself to use this technology, and needed to apply it to games to get the experiences I wanted.
To make games, I honestly just took selfies. A lot. And I remembered how selfies have been relevant to my life. They are instrumental in my long distance relationships, and a part of how I feel connected to others, but also are ways that I know I can appear to not measure up to expectations or fade into the background if I’m not interesting enough. All of that came through in the collection! Every game has my heart in it, somehow, just with some “how to break it” instructions included!
Using mobile technology as a play aid and intermediary is such an interesting area to explore. Obviously this offered enormous design inspiration, but I’m wondering what challenges it also presented. Does it complicate aspects of design or play?
It certainly does! There are a lot of elements that are challenging. The first, one I’m very aware of, is that not everyone can afford a cell phone with a camera. I hated this, because it’s a reality I wish I could fight, but to make games with this element I had to accept that loss. I am trying to figure out a way to make up for it, but my own financial status isn’t awesome either.
Second, not everyone likes to take selfies, and not everyone even really knows how to take them (there’s not really a wrong way, though, honestly). When I playtested Who Made Me Smile? at Big Bad Con this year, most of my table was people who either didn’t take selfies, or didn’t take them often, and most people approached it with some anxiety. Thankfully, we talked about it and I encouraged them and it went great! I don’t know how it’ll go with others, though.
Third and final so I don’t write ten paragraphs, privacy and safety are huge concerns. For some of the games you’ll pass your phone to other players or share your phone number, for others you’re alone outside, and for some games you’re dealing with emotionally trying things. All of these have their own measures. For sharing contact information and phones I tried to give strong reminders about respecting safety and deleting the other players’ numbers unless they permit otherwise, and I also require that people hide NSFW pictures and content to avoid any consent violation. Being alone during game is risky, so I ask that people have an emergency check-in contact – and I also ask that for the emotionally intense games to help people get support. I also recommend Script Change for all of the games.
It’s all complicated, I think, but it is worth it, I think.
I love the way this collection blends analog and digital and subverts expectations. The four group games imply that the participants will be together physically rather than distributed, and I wonder if you could talk about this choice.
One of the most troubling things I’ve seen with selfies, and one of my secret goals to target with the games, is the negative perception of taking selfies in front of other people. People regularly shame young people for taking selfies in public, and mock tourists who get selfie sticks to take pictures in front of huge landmarks. We don’t mock people who have strangers take their pictures, or people who take pictures of other things or other people. Only people who dare recognize their own existence in public. I struggle, personally, with embarrassment over this – and I wanted to poke at it and prod it to see if I could fix that a little. In the games, you have to take selfies in front of people – sometimes making weird expressions or while feeling complicated feelings. I want to normalize that.
I want to normalize being in an airport crying before you head home after leaving a loved one and taking a selfie to say goodbye to them, or to let the person you’re coming home to see that you’re struggling, but okay. I want to normalize sharing your joy publicly by taking a picture of your smiling face to send to faraway friends. And I want to let that start with an environment that pretends you’re far away from each other, which is where the games make it possible. In Literally, I Can’t you have to take “competent”-looking selfies while all together for play – it’s a challenge against the anxiety and stigma.
It’s also important with Don’t Look at Me, a two-player selfie game in the collection about my personal experiences in a long-term relationship with my husband while he was deployed in Iraq. The purpose of being together, but not facing each other and only able to see each other through selfies, is to create the emotional tension of knowing the person is there, feeling them just out of touch, and not being able to see them except through these constrained circumstances. John and I were, and are, very close, and I always felt like he was with me, but I couldn’t touch him, I couldn’t look at him face to face – everything was through lenses and bytes. I cry every time I think about the game because I know that tension, and it was important to me to make sure that the people playing it could experience it too. In Now You Don’t, it’s important to be around other people to create that experience of physical closeness and emotional ignorance. Surrounded by a crowd, but invisible – almost palpable.
Your games push back against a popular narrative that selfies are trivial narcissism. I feel like these games make selfies tools of meaningful expression, communication, and inquiry. What would you say to someone hostile to, or uncomfortable with, selfies?
Well, honestly, first I’d ask them how they feel about Van Gogh’s self portraits. Maybe those are narcissistic, too, I guess, but I don’t think that would be the majority opinion. I could direct them to the interview I did alongside a professional fine artist where I talk about the use of selfies as a grounding element in life, and where the artist (Robert Daley) says that selfies are simply modern portraiture.
Video by John W. Sheldon
For me, there’s the first aspect of selfies as being about identity and recognizing your own existence, validating who you are, making you feel whole. Then, there’s the second part: it’s just art. Photography is art, most people agree, and so are the oil painting portraits of people throughout history, including those like Van Gogh’s that are self-portraits.
I don’t see what is different about using a modern camera to take a self portrait, aside from it being more accessible to people of all backgrounds (excepting those of very low income who have trouble accessing this tech). It removes the boundary of needing an extensive education in technique to paint yourself! Instead you take pictures in a moment, and learn with every photo how to change the angle, how to adjust lighting, how to open your eyes wider or raise your eyebrow to convey emotion, and how to show you, who you are or even who you want to be. It’s magical, to me. I would just have to tell them that much: selfies are about showing who you are to whoever you want, and they are an artistic expression that’s more easily accessible than many of those before.
You write in your introduction how important selfies are to you as a way to present yourself to the world in images you control. Do you see ways to incorporate either selfies as artifacts or mobile phones and their liberating ability to document a person’s personal vision more generally in other games, old or new?
I would love to see some larger scale larps use selfies for storytelling – specifically, in larps where there are mystery elements or similar things that they could use a selfie to identify a character not in a scene, and distribute it to players. This would be excellent for games where there’s reason to be suspicious of specific individuals. Using selfies that you either take in costume or alter to represent your character in game would, I think, bring a level of personal identification with the character that isn’t often had. It also lets you record the experience of a game from the viewpoint you choose – you frame the moment, not anyone else.
Doing selfie diaries for very emotional or intense games could be exciting – much like The Story of My Face in the collection, combining your words with a visual representation can make experiences feel more vivid. When I did test plays of The Story of My Face for the photos in the book, I really had fun in part because when I looked back at the pictures, I could remember the spooky story I was telling myself. Mid-game selfie logging, much like taking pictures of character sheets or game materials, can help keep memories rich and more easily recoverable. And that latter part, with taking pictures of game material – using phones to document game materials is really awesome because you can refer back to it easily. I also like using texting for “secret” communication in game or for sharing codes – the day someone makes an Unknown Armies-style horror game that uses text messages, selfies, and cell pictures to tell the story and guide players is the day I am pretty sure we win at games.
(by Brie)
— Thanks for your time, Brie!
I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll share this interview and the DriveThruRPG link with all your friends! [From Brie: Thank you to Jason so much for this, it was a really fun experience and I’m so glad to talk more about LMTAS!]
Note: All images except the cover are by Brie Sheldon and excerpted from the collection used to write and layout LMTAS, and the cover is a compilation of Brie’s photos with a super nice layout by John W. Sheldon.
Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
Today I have a great interview with Jason Morningstar about his fascinating new project, WINTERHORN, which has information on the Bully Pulpit site and is also on DriveThruRPG. This game sounds really cool and also really important. I hope you enjoy what Jason says below!
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Really nice layout and design for the materials!
Tell me a little about WINTERHORN. What excites you about it?
WINTERHORN is a live action game for 5-8 players about how governments degrade and destroy activist groups. The thing that excites me most about WINTERHORN is that it might actually be useful. I’m an American and I feel like my country is in genuine danger right now. WINTERHORN arose from a pretty intense internal conversation about what I could do about it. What skills could I bring to bear? How could I amplify my voice and offer tools to resist a worst case that is pretty fucking bad? I looked to history as a guide – what happens when authoritarians come to power?
The playbook is well worn and it is being methodically repeated. I thought about how important resistance and dissent are, and the many tools governments have to suppress them. I read further on the Stasi, on COINTELPRO, on the Soviet Union and its successor states, and from that came the germ of the game – play the “bad guys” to learn how to be a better “good guy” in real life. Of course it isn’t that simple, but through the game you’ll absorb a dozen different ways activists get interfered with, and maybe that will spur some conversations about encryption, operational security, or hardening groups you care about against disinformation or worse. The game itself is fun and interesting, and it isn’t at all didactic, but I feel like you really have a chance to embody these government operatives, which gives you both perspective and maybe even empathy. And you come away with these awful techniques on your mind. Every time I see the game hit the radar of some little Reddit anarchist cell or humanities academic I get excited.
What were elements of your research that stood out most regarding the emotional factors of power, control, and resistance that had the most influence on WINTERHORN?
I’ve read pretty deeply on the Stasi (Staatssicherheitsdienst, the security apparatus of the former East Germany) in the last few years, which was influential (The agencies you work for in WINTERHORN are mirrors of the organizational hierarchy of the Stasi). But I’d say the most influential elements were pulled from American history. FBI and Chicago police collusion leading to the death of Fred Hampton made a powerful impression, for example. If you are familiar with his killing and pursue a violent path in WINTERHORN you will see its unsubtle echoes.
How do you, in this game specifically, represent the “bad guys” in the game without making them into soulless monsters?
In the full-on larp version of WINTERHORN the characters are tangled in bureaucracy and divided into two factions that roundly dislike each other (The Ministry of State Security and the People’s Police). Each character has a professional and emotional attachment to a partner, and each has some affinity or soft spot that might color their choices. One likes the deeply stupid but brave, for example, and another likes the elderly. So there’s enough meat on those bones to slightly humanize them, even if they are doing fundamentally inhuman things. In the more edu-game version of WINTERHORN, you are making the same decisions ina much more abstracted way, and there’s none of this nuance but many more inputs from participants.
Why did you choose to present WINTERHORN in the format you have, a live action game with a card deck, as opposed to any other, and what value do you think it brings to the experience?
I wanted the game to be flexible and accessible, because I wanted it to be used outside of “normal” roleplaying contexts – in other words, outside of the living rooms and convention hideaways of super intense gamers. I also wanted the game’s information to be smoothly and organically transmitted in play rather than through a didactic lesson. In my experience live action play is great for this – you embody a character, and that’s a dial I, as the designer, can set low or high – and being physically engaged really aids in retention. WINTERHORN is dead simple and that was also a design goal. From the beginning I wanted to make sure that you could sit down and play it, even if you weren’t a huge nerd who knew what a larp was. Cards are a great way to share and transmit information. To be honest the game grew a little bit and now requires printed material as well, but I’m totally OK with that. I’m really proud of the handouts and what they communicate.
WINTERHORN sounds like the kind of game that could use workshopping, debriefing, support mechanics, or other methods to help players engage with the material safely and deal with the harsh realities that they may uncover. Which of these do you use? If none, why?
You begin with some light workshopping, and the game guides you through it. There are six player-level roles in the game – Orientation, Time, Case Board, Dynamics, Paperwork and Debrief. Orientation presents the game world and your goals, as well as introducing you to the game’s safety tools and touch boundaries. Dynamics’ sole responsibility is to make sure all the players are engaged and having a good, productive time. Debrief leads a directed post-game discussion where you check in as players and segue into talking about how the game’s content reflects real life, if you want. Time, Case Board and Paperwork all have in-game responsibilities. For larp nerds, the safety tools are Cut, Largo/Brake, and The Door Is Always Open. In play it is surprisingly chill – essentially WINTERHORN is a committee larp played around a table staring at a case board covered in photos, which makes it pretty accessible if you’ve ever seen a detective show.
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Thanks so much to Jason for this great interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll share this interview, the WINTERHORN link, and the DriveThruRPG link with all your friends!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
I had a great interview with the creators of Potlach: A Game about East Coast Salish Economics! The researchers and creators of Potlach, The N.D.N. Players, are Jeanette Bushnell, PhD; Jonathan S. Tomhave, PhD; and Tylor Prather. We talked about the origins of the game and the meanings that are held in the cards and language of the game. Check out the interview below!
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Picture of the Potlach cards on a table – lovely artwork!
Tell me a little about Potlach: A Card Game About Coast Salish Economics. What excites you about it?
Potlach: A Card Game About Coast Salish Economics is a strategic, educational card game based on indigenous philosophies. It is designed to meet K-12 educational standards for teaching about native history, economics, culture, and government. Potlatch was developed as a community effort with local elders and language experts. The game is written in both English and Lushootseed, an indigenous language of the Salish Sea region. Game mechanics are based on sharing resources to meet other players’ needs for food, materials, technology, and knowledge.
What excites me about our game is that as you play it, you get a shift in your thinking towards valuing sharing within a community rather than accumulating as an individual. Or, as one of our early game testers wrote, “A big change in thinking from other games. I started out thinking about what I was getting and by the end it was more important the way I was sharing.”
Players at a table playing Potlach with great enthusiasm!
What was the impetus for making Potlach into a game?
The impetus to make a game based on indigenous philosophy came after a couple years of analyzing games for our podcasts. For indigenous scholars like ourselves who study systemic oppressions (and live them), analyzing and playing game after game that reproduced these oppression got tedious. One aspect in particular was individual accumulation – a concept often associated with capitalism. So, one night, Tylor said he’d always wanted to develop a board game and we started working on one that used concepts and values from indigenous economic systems rather than those from capitalism. Eventually we decided on looking at the very specific system local to us (Salish Sea region) that redistributed wealth.
The word potlatch comes from Nuu-chah-nulth who live in what is now British Columbia, Canada. The word was altered via the commerce language knows as Chinook Jargon that was used throughout Washington and British Columbia after Europeans settled in the area. Potlach is not a Lushootseed word but has become commonly used to describe events associated with wealth distribution actions.
The “above waterfall” card with the number 3 in a primary color at each corner, and the card name in English and Lushootseed. The style is really easily understood, which I love.
How do the basic mechanics work?
The deck has two types of cards – Resource Cards and House Cards.
Each player has one House Card that indicates the size of their extended family dwelling. Historically, the largest known house was Old Man House at Suquamish, WA. (Link to press release from 2014 about this dwelling.) Our House Cards are sized as having 3, 4, 5, or 6 fires that indicate the amount of resource needs for the people in the house.
Every player is dealt six resource cards of various types and sizes. Players take turns Gifting their Resources to meet the house needs of other players.
With the cards representing resources that are being given gifts, how do players understand the meaning and importance of those concepts – is it through language, symbols, or how the cards can be used, or something else?
Primarily our game is about a sharing-based economic system so what players tend to notice the most is that the play moves them to strategizing ways to insure that every players has all their needs met rather than one player accumulating more of anything.
The game can actually be played without understanding the meaning and concepts of the various cards. The cards are all color-coded and numbered to facilitate play. That said, each card has a picture and the name of the item in both English and Lushootseed (the local indigenous language).
Based on our own experiences of attending potlatches (or giveaways) in Washington, Alaska, and British Columbia we developed four types of giftable resources. Then we talked to some local elders and language experts and finalized the types of resources as: food, gathered materials, crafted technologies, and teachings.
Ideally, players will look at and read the cards while playing. We are working on a Teacher’s Guide to facilitate more teaching about local resources. With the success of the Kickstarter Campaign, we will have some funds to make a podcast with a native Lushootseed speaker so players can hear what the Lushootseed words sound like.
The “clam” card with the number 4 in red at the corner, and the card name in English and Lushootseed.
What are the important parts of the gifting and, to me, ethical caring that are demonstrated in Potlach – to you and from your world perspective?
Our game is about an economic system that very pragmatically assures that all members of society respectfully have their needs met so that they can continue being active and valued participants. From our world perspective, in which all things are interconnected and impact each other in highly complex and nuanced ways, it would be illogical to do anything else. Keeping the system in balance is the ultimate goal.
Gifting is the word we use to represent the reciprocal distribution and redistribution of available resources. The societies that have used this system are highly complex and have many ancillary systems in place.
