Hi y’all! Today I have an interview about Seco Creek Vigilance Committee with Keith Stetson! Seco Creek Vigilance Committee is currently on Kickstarter and sounds like a really fun time! It’s a one-shot length, western themed game. Check out Keith’s responses below!
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Tell me a little about Seco Creek Vigilance Committee. What excites you about it?
Seco Creek Vigilance Committee is a Western RPG about justice, law, revenge, and the discrepancy between what is right and what is good. It’s designed for intense, one-shot play with a non-random resolution system that emphasizes choices and their consequences. It’s not focused on if the characters can do something, but rather on what they’re willing to endure to do it.
The thing that really excites me about Seco Creek is how the situation balances on the knife edge. There are no easy answers and there are no right answers. In the shifting landscape of moral ambiguities every action has a reaction that pushes back against what the character thinks they believe and they want. Everyone has to find their own path through the fraught situation. I’ve run the game dozens of times; it rarely ends well, but it never ends the same way twice.
What inspired the Favor mechanic, and what kind of responses does it provide in game, especially in the one-shot format?
The whole design has migrated a lot as I fine tuned it to get what I wanted. Originally it was a more-or-less straightforward Lady Blackbird hack, but that lacked tools for the needed social interactions with NPCs. At the time (and at this time, too) I was fascinated with Avery Alder’s mechanics for Dream Askew, especially how you control the economy of chips by how strong a move you make. That translated into the idea of If you bow to a Faction you get a chip, but if you force them to bow to you you lose one. But just causing a Faction to do something didn’t make sense as always losing a chip. If the Townsfolk like me and I offer to buy the next round, “spending” a chip of Favor and becoming less popular didn’t make sense.
Players generally approach Favor in one of two ways. The first type grabs onto it as a way to amass power and directs their actions to gather Favor with as many Factions as possible. The second type does whatever they think is in keeping with their character’s nature and lets the Favor show how the world is reacting. Both are totally valid ways to play.
Seco Creek being a one shot means folks are less cautious about losing Favor and harvesting enmity from Factions. There is no tomorrow, so they go all in today. Conversely it means that if you’re sitting on a fat stack at the end of play, your character’s epilogue is looking pretty sweet.
How has Negotiation played out in game – how does it work mechanically, and how have players reacted to the level of control?
One of the unintentional features of Seco Creek that I love is its modularity. You can play an entire, satisfying game of it without ever engaging in certain mechanics. Negotiation is one of those. If you never take an action upon another player’s character, you never need to use it.
Now, if you want to start throwing haymakers and wrassling for keys, then you Negotiate. Mechanically, the acting player says what they want to come to pass:
I want to stop you from leaving the room, I want to knock the gun from your hand, I want to punch you in that ugly mug of yours. The acted upon player says what they require to make that action true: Alright, I don’t leave the room, but as I stride towards you, you flinch and everyone sees it. The Townsfolk no longer think you can keep them safe, and you lose a Favor with them. Plus, you get labeled a coward.
If the acting player agrees, everything stated occurs. If not, the players go back and forth until they can establish terms. If they can’t, the Judge (the GM role) decides the situation, most often to no one’s liking.
This works really well for most players, because if your character wants something bad enough, they can nearly always get it; you just have to be willing to pay the price. It gives you a similar level of control as Fate Points do, but what you’re spending is narrative positioning. Where are you willing to be weak so you can be strong here? And again we see a version of Avery’s Dream Askew mechanic popping up.
Is that a callout to 3:10 to Yuma I see in that initial descriptive text image? What are the inspirations for Seco Creek Vigilance Committee – movies, books, other games?
Well, you caught the reference to 3:10 to Yuma, so that’s the first one! 😉 There are also a handful of nods to tons of other classic Westerns. Game wise we’ve already talked about Lady Blackbird and Dream Askew, but another big influence was Apocalypse World – particularly the phrase “tell them the consequences and ask.” That’s basically both the Favor and Negotiation mechanics boiled down to a single phrase.
However, all those influences are secondary ones. The entire premise of the tense situation the players step into comes from Warlock by Oakley Hall. I’ve tweaked some particulars, but on the whole what you see is the set up that made me want to see it played out in an RPG desperately enough to write one. Warlock is a terrifically well written and nuanced book, and I’m actually thinking of using another section from it to craft a stretch goal…
Why a one-shot? What about this format really appeals to you and makes the game shine?
Like a lot of folks, one of the first indie games I ever played was Fiasco. Its one-shot nature made it so you could use your character hard and not worry about next week. Making Seco Creek a one-shot gives the players that same feeling; the characters are already prepared to go all in, and now you have permission to do so, as well. Seco Creek‘s rules are also designed to cause the character arc you might see in a campaign to be compressed down into one session. It’s a distillation of all the drama, tension and transformation.
— Thanks so much for the great interview, Keith! I hope you all enjoyed reading it, and that you’ll check out Seco Creek Vigilance Committee on Kickstarter, and share the interview with your friends! 🙂
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Legacy‘s about how people keep going after the world ends. It’s about the new communities and ways of living that spring up in a comprehensively changed land, and how people and societies evolve to adapt to the new environment. It’s a post-apocalyptic game that lets each group of players create an amazing world and then ruin it in a unique way. Then you dive into gameplay, with each player’s family of survivors dealing with the trials of surviving among the old world’s ruins while sending agents out into the wasteland to explore, make friends, and find the resources their family need to prosper. Your game zooms in to the drama of a few explorers scavenging for exotic technology in a flooded city, and zooms out to explore how a family seizes control of a town over the course of a few weeks.
The game’s also episodic: the group can decide to draw a line under the current point in history, and move the clock forward some significant chunk of time – a year, a decade, or even a century according to the group’s taste. Then you tell the story of how the world changed over that time, how each player’s family has changed, and start exploring this new age. This gets at what really excites me about Legacy – the family is your fixed point as you travel further and further into the future, and you get to explore how they change over the generations, how they change the world around them, and explore how this new culture takes form in the post-apocalypse.
What inspired you to make a game about families, especially a post-apocalyptic story?
Legacy started with the idea of taking a group far into the future over generations and seeing how they changed and grew over time. I was inspired by the Civilization series of games but thought that a tabletop RPG wanted to focus on a finer scale than nations and countries. At the same time, Quinn Murphy was talking a lot about the importance of community and how games often ignore it. These came together into the idea of families – dynasties that’d be your constant across the ages. I could have called them factions, or guilds, but I thought family was the best term for the ties between them. I wanted that feeling of belonging, of bonds that went beyond friendship and fealty.
The post-apocalyptic theme came partly from wanting groups to start with a blank slate and expand outwards in whatever direction they liked, and partly because the post-apocalyptic games I’d been playing at the time – Tribe8 and Fallout – had a pretty big emphasis on forming new communities to face the wasteland together.
Tell me about the setting and themes of Legacy. What will we recognize? What do you think will feel new or unusual for players?
Legacy’s a game about exploration, adaptation and evolution. My day job’s an ecologist and disease biologist, and some of that has definitely bled in! The gist is that the world’s been changed by some kind of reality-warping event, and nothing works the same way anymore. You’ve survived because you’ve found or held onto some source of strength – the tech of the old world, a driving passion for justice, a new religion from the apocalypse’s fires. But that won’t be enough to go beyond survival and start thriving. To do that, you’ll need to explore and understand the new world, find things you can use to make your family stronger or deal with their frailties, and become something that can prosper here.
So there’s a lot of your standard post-apocalyptic tropes: the playbooks are based on common archetypes in post-apoc fiction, and your group can pretty easily make their own version of anything from Planet of the Apes to Mad Max. What Legacy does differently is let you move past the ruins, and ask how the society that people build in this new world has moved beyond their ancestors to create something new. One of the things that really got to me in the most recent Fallout game was that it’s more than 200 years after the bombs fell and it feels like it’s only been a few generations – there are still skeletons and trash lying everywhere, even in the settlements where people live, and it seems like there was a real lack of imagination about people’s ability to rebuild. I’m hoping with Legacy to avoid that trap, and give every group the tools to make a society that’s weird, wonderful, and evolved to fit the new world.
How does the time advancement work in game? Is there mechanical impact, or impact on the environment?
As Legacy‘s powered by Apocalypse World, it’s all done by moves! The simplest one is triggered when everyone feels like they’re done with the current time period. If someone raises the possibility of moving forward, everyone else either agrees or says one final thing they want to do. Once these are done, the group decides how far they want to go forward. This is completely according to the group’s taste – you might want to hop forward only a few years or go a century into the future to give yourselves license to really mix things up.
Each player then rolls to see how their families prosper over that time, with the roll based on the balance between the family’s assets and weaknesses (more on that later). If they roll well, they get to pick a couple of good events that happen to them – maybe they go through a golden age and learn new tricks, or maybe they create a trading hub and gain some wealth. If they roll badly, they pick some bad events – maybe their family is absorbed by another, and they only break away and regain their own culture a few years before play resumes. Either way, these events change up the family in big ways, adding stat points, new moves, ties to other families and resources they can draw on. They also can change where each family lives, what guiding principles define them, and what resources, opportunities and dangers are lying out there in the wasteland. Finally, you alter the map, adding new features and expanding the safe portion of the wasteland according to the events picked.
There’s a special way to advance time – building a Wonder. These were directly inspired by Civilisation again: they’re grand projects that require you to invest lots of resources, but when they’re complete they permanently change the world. As soon as one’s complete, you zoom out to outline all the ways it’s changed the world. Each wonder has a custom table of good and bad effects that the other families go through, while the Wonder’s owner sits back and takes in the benefits. The Wonders in the book are a pretty eclectic bunch – there are things you physically build like The Capital or The Great Network, social efforts like Revolution and Total War, and even finding a new place to live with The Age of Discovery. Each one leaves its own mark on the world, giving a permanent benefit to whichever Family controls them.
How do resources work in Legacy, and do they translate over the episodes moving forward in time?
Legacy has a pretty simple resource system. Your family will have Surpluses of certain resources (e.g. Land or Morale) and a Need for others (e.g. Medicine or Trade), with the balance between those setting your family’s overall Mood. As your character takes action in the fiction you might gain surpluses from finding a cache of resources, lose a need by addressing its root problem, or trade surpluses with other families to deal with your needs. Each surplus helps define your family’s strengths and gives your character better gear; each need tells you what the family needs you to focus on, and gives your GM a stick to poke you with. Other than that they don’t take an active role, only kicking in when the balance between surpluses and needs goes past a certain extreme. Too many needs and your family falls into crisis; more surpluses than you know what to do with and you’re flush with resources and get some bonus for the rest of this age.
There are also consumable resources – Tech is the weird devices left over from the old world, and can be spent to boost your family’s chance of success or give characters a unique ability with limited uses. Data is your knowledge about the new world, and can be spent to boost your character’s actions or add new elements to the map. These flow more quickly in and out of your stock as your characters discover things out there in the world and use them to your advantage.
Finally, there are the treaties you have with other families and factions. These work a lot like Monsterhearts’ strings – you’ll have a stock of them for each other group, and can spend a point of Treaty to get a faction to do something for you or take their resources for yourself. You can freely give other people Treaty on you as a bargaining chip, but each Family playbook also has their own thing they can do to take treaty on others – the Enclave of Fallen Lore gets it when they show others how to use their technology properly, while the Servants of the One True Faith forgive others of their sins. That way you’re incentivised to keep getting out there and meddling in other people’s affairs so that you can call on their help when you need it.
All of these stay with you as you move forwards in time, although they can change their context – Surplus: Transport means something different when a horse and cart is state of the art compared to a few centuries down the line when everyone’s riding jet bikes.
Hey all! Today I have an interview with the fantastic Grant Howitt on his new game Spire, created alongside his cohorts Mary Hamilton and Chris Taylor from Rowan, Rook & Decard. Spire is currently on Kickstarter, and has some mad cool art. It’s got some themes I dig, so when Grant asked about an interview, I was stoked. Check out the responses below! —
Art by Adirian Stone
Tell me a little about Spire. What excites you about it?
Here’s the elevator pitch: you play a dark elf in a city ruled by high elves, and the high elves are cruel and uncaring and powerful and you’re downtrodden and your culture is being eroded, day by day, so you decide to fight back and subvert the high elf rule through shadow war and insurrection. It’s a storygame, in as much as it has a system which focuses more on abstraction than simulation, and we’ve tried to write it around making it as easy as possible to tell the sort of dark, desperate stories we envisage coming out of the setting.
The thing that’s exciting me now is, weirdly enough, the minutiae; after writing so many short games (or, like Unbound, games which don’t use setting at all) it’s wonderful to be able to really luxuriate in a world and poke around in its corners. I got to write a section detailing the different kinds of goats you get in the city of Spire, you know? And I don’t know if anyone will actually use that in their games, but I think that it all adds to the ecosystem of the thing, that it all supports itself. It’s been interesting to see how people have already taken to the setting.
Where did you pull from for the setting – from media and from your own experiences in games and otherwise?
We’ve drawn inspiration from all sorts of places. Off the top of my head: Unknown Armies, Perdido Street Station, Gormenghast, Necromunda, and Dredd have all been influential. I’ve also been fascinated by depictions of Kowloon Walled City, in terms of how humans can rebuild and repurpose spaces in desperate times for their own ends. (Something about the idea of building something in a space meant for something else really fascinates me.) As far as the look and feel of the thing goes, we’ve looked to the Brutalist movement of the 1960’s/70’s to inspire our architecture; lots of harsh lines, big angular shapes, jutting concrete.
We’ve also drawn heavily on our love for cyberpunk – Neuromancer is one of my favourite novels – to inspire us, but we’ve replaced technology with religion. A lot of the game is about control over religion, and in a fantasy world where clerics can perform actual provable miracles, you start veering into cyberpunk territory pretty quickly.
Art by Adirian Stone
What are the benefits to a D10 system for this kind of game? How does it make the action appropriate to the themes and setting?
It’s the one we settled on, really. We wrote no fewer than fifteen systems for Spire, trying to find one that was smooth enough to run without getting in the way but granular enough for us to write specific rules for characters, gods, etc; we had a playing card system, we used D20s, we used D6 pools, and so on, and so on. We tried everything. As we went through our first playtests, though, it became pretty clear to me that the system we were using wasn’t working, and I wanted something with more streamlined rules that the GM could run without really thinking about it.
The reason we ended up with a D10 system is that we didn’t want to, and couldn’t really, write rules for every single thing in the city. We wanted to leave a lot of it up to the GM to determine, because everyone’s game is different; and therefore rather than writing a comprehensive and perhaps unwieldy ruleset, we opted for something that GMs can grok really easily and then get on with the business of telling stories.
How do you see stress working out in playtests? What emotional experiences do the players have with it, and how does that match your intent with the design?
Honestly, I’d like to see more characters going mad and dying, but we seem to have quite lucky players. Stress is interesting; it rewires everything bad that can happen to you into a single number, so there’s kind of a floating badness behind a character with high stress – a high potential for something going really wrong. One thing we’ve tried to do is make sure that fallout, especially severe fallout, pushes the story forwards rather than stopping it. We don’t want to punish people for pushing their characters past the breaking point by removing them from the story; we wanted to reward them with more story, but not necessarily a nice story.
As far as concrete examples go… we had one character use his sacred rope to bind a door shut so no-one could open it (and thus escape from the massacre inside that the players had set up to assassinate a corrupt bishop), and as he watched blood pool under the gap, he developed a lasting phobia of doors. We had another group summon, and then sacrifice, a river god to power a ritual, and in seeing the river god come to earth our Azurite (a type of trader-priest) went utterly mad. I gave him the option of surviving if he betrayed his friends on behalf of the new god, and to the player’s credit, he immediately launched himself off the side of Spire and crashing down into the docks below than risk staying alive a minute longer. Those two really stand out for me.
Layout by Alina Sandu
What is the most challenging thing you’ve encountered with the path of design to funding? Have you had to rethink a rule shortly before the Kickstarter, and if so, how do you resolve that?
We’re rethinking and tweaking rules all the time; we invented an entire class (the Firebrand) about a fortnight before the campaign began because I felt like we needed to give players some more room to manoeuvre. Luckily, by now, we’ve got a feeling for the system and setting which means that we can intuit rules fairly easily now without the need for extensive testing.
We actually rewrote the equipment rules earlier this week; in the quick-start rules they use a level system, and if the level of your item is higher than the level of the area you’re in, you get an extra dice to roll… and I dunno, it worked, it just didn’t sing to me. It wasn’t doing what we wanted with equipment, which was to use it to help portray the character who’s carrying it. So now we’ve scrapped the level system and switched to a more narrative thing, where (non-weapon/armour) equipment is either mundane and it just lets you do the thing, or it’s special and you name a positive and negative aspect about it that marks it out from every other item of its kind in Spire. It gets players thinking more about their equipment choices and pushing the story forward to their specialties, which I like.
Who are some of the characters you’ve seen in play, NPCs or PCs, that you think embody The Spire as a story and setting?
We’ve had a hired killer who packed it all in and joined the community-focused church of the light side of the moon; we’ve had a towering glamazon with an Amy Winehouse beehive and a sacred hyena chained to her wrist; a rough-and-tumble Knight of the North Docks (think a sort of feudal mafia) whose player decided that all Knights are in fact women wearing giant codpieces and dressing up as men, and more power to her because that’s a brilliant idea; a Firebrand espousing Marxist ideals; and one guy who, when he was held at gunpoint, about to be sacrificed to a hungry god of vengeance, managed to convince the ritual leader that there was a better life for her with him – and the pair of them ran away and now live unhappily above a pub.
Map by Tim Wilkinson Lewis
How does religion work mechanically, at least in a vague sense, in Spire? I’m curious about the application!
Each class has a Refresh ability which they use to remove stress – and in the case of religious characters, this is tied to their faith. The Lahjan, moon-clerics, remove stress when they help people who can’t help themselves; the Carrion-Priests remove it when they complete a hunt; and so on. We’ve also got a few additional abilities tied to minor faiths – not minor in the sense of power, but minor in the sense that we didn’t feel that there was enough material to build a whole class around them. Anyone who fits the prerequisites can access these abilities, and with them they get an additional Refresh ability.
In terms of what it does in-game; at low levels, many of the miracles are coincidental or limited in their scope (so you can heal people for a bit, or summon a flock of crows, or buy access to a proficiency you don’t have) and later on they ramp up to some real weirdness, like turning into moonlight or a massive hyena or a crowd or an idea. (The Firebrand, as I mentioned earlier, gets access to divine powers but only really at high levels; due to the loose way that reality works in Spire, and in our setting, the more successful they get, the more power they start generating from the faith that people place in them until they can enchant improvised weapons by touching them.)
Art by Adirian Stone
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Thanks so much to Grant for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading about Spire and that you’ll check out the Kickstarter as it’s rounding up to finish soon!
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Hello! Today I have an interview with Ross Cowman and Mo Golden on Night Forest, which is currently on Kickstarter. The game looks fascinating and I’ve heard really cool stories about it, so I hope you enjoy what they have to say!
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Tell me a little about Night Forest. What excites you about it?
Ross: Night Forest is a ritual game where we play wandering memories. It is a practice in self reflection, embodiment, and deep witnessing.
Mo: As for what is exciting, one thing for me is our collaboration and the meeting of our two disciplines and perspectives. I think it is a jumping off point for more interdisciplinary collaboration.
Ross: Yeah! Totally. I feel like watching your work in expressive arts has really inspired me to pay more attention to transitions and the process of immersion. This had a big impact on my work Fall of Magic and it is great to be able to now design something together.
What inspired you to make a game about memories, especially ones that can be forgotten?
Mo: There’s so much that happens in our lives that we forget. By working with embodiment and evocative images, we can often retrieve what has been forgotten, which is really powerful and inspiring to me. Night Forest offers an opportunity to look at what we remember and what is lost.
Ross: We wanted to create a space where people could share things about themselves that they don’t normally have cause to share. There is something precious about these rarely visited memories.
Why do players use a candle to signify their lasting memory? Is their physical presence otherwise important? (Along that, do you think this could play remotely?)
Ross: The candle does a lot of work in Night Forest, it creates an intimate space, it constrains your movement, it requires care and is actually kind of a burden. Becoming forgotten is a relief of that responsibility and also of the responsibility of having to share and explore your memories. Now you just listen.
Mo: The flame is alive and has to be cared for. It slows us down and focuses us. I wonder if it could be played remotely… My concern with that has less to do with the candle and more to do with moving around. Movement and having a physical experience are central to this game. I would be curious to see how that could work virtually.
How do you see players interact with each other when they share their memories, and do you see much variety in the memories they share?
Mo: There’s a ton of variety, which is cool to watch. Even with the same card, there are infinite possibilities. It’s a very personal and intimate experience, yet somehow really accessible. There’s a tenderness I see in people while they’re sharing.
Ross: There is a lot of listening and smiling and serious looks. For me it has been a reminder of how much we can still communicate without our voices. How much we can connect with just our faces and our energy.
How did you design the content of the cards, as well as the appearance, and make them seem coherent and consistent?
Ross: The cards and images are designed to pull at each other. Contrast is a source of energy in nature, and it is the same with our imaginations.
Mo: I loved illustrating the cards. It was like swimming through a dream, making associations and letting myself be surprised by my pen. The choice to use black paper and metallic ink was so that the image would shine in candle light. The over all aesthetic takes players into a dark, wooded, magical place… even if they’re looking at the cards in an office building in the middle of the day.
Tell me a little about Dungeon Dome! What excites you about it?
The Dungeon Dome is a new actual play project that I’m hoping to produce through Kickstarter. The basic Idea is D&D meets professional wrestling. Players take on the role of fantasy gladiators fighting for wealth and glory in an arena full of deadly traps.
There is a lot that excites me about this project. Actual Play is rapidly becoming a major part of the RPG landscape. Shows like The Adventure Zone, Critical Role, and to a lesser extent my own ONE SHOT have shown that you can indeed export the experience of RPGs to a mass audience. So far, actual play games have been traditional, just putting a mic or camera in front of a normal game. I’ve reached a point with my audience where I feel comfortable messing with the formula.
The Dungeon Dome is the type of campaign that wouldn’t really work without an audience. The players are disconnected, the story is primarily moved through one type of play, PVP is usually only fun for the winning parties, and the only person playing who experiences the whole thing is the DM. With an audience, these disconnected stories play out in a way that other people can experience. Having people observe play heightens the drama inherent to combat. The PVP element is fun win or lose because in wrestling a lose can be as beneficial to a character as a win. I can also use competitive challenges that would feel out of place in a traditional game.
I’m also folding in mechanics that allow the audience to actively participate in the game. By cheering on the team they support that can grant that team special abilities to use in the game. This is a chance for me to experiment with the form of observed play, a style I think we will see more of in design over the next few years.
Also, on a more personal note, if The Dungeon Dome funds, it will allow me to pursue game design and performance gaming full time. That would be rad!
How have you developed the initial project – setting, concept, and so on?
I drew inspiration from a few places. Primarily the WWE and Yuri on Ice.
For the past few years I have been lightly getting back into wrestling. I watched a little when I was 10, but I wasn’t a die hard fan, eventually I grew out of it. However, a lot of the podcasters I listen to are huge wrestling fans, and there are a surprising number of wrestling fans in nerdy spaces. More accurately it surprised me initially. Now the parallels between wrestling, superhero comics, LARP, and improv are glaringly obvious to me. I guess I was pretty mired in the perception of wrestling as “low art” which is really stupid.
Anyway, after watching some matches I saw a lot of things that I could appreciate, and a lot of things that frustrated me. There is still a lot of old fashioned misogyny and toxic masculinity in big company wrestling. To the point that I can’t really watch it regularly. I see that it has merit, and understand what people enjoy, but there is a lot that grates on me. I also don’t see enough of the kind of theatrical experimentation in televised wrestling. Like, Lucha Underground comes really close but I want really wild storytelling. I want to see Shakespeare plays told through wrestling matches. Mainstream wrestling, understandably, was not going to do that.
Competition is one of the main levers in traditional games. Crunch games really show off the wargaming DNA in RPGs, and war gaming is really competitive. People who know my work know I don’t feature a ton of tactical, crunchy games. I think ONE SHOT, for the most part, doesn’t lend itself to those games. Yuri on Ice, among other things, is a really good sports story. You love almost everyone in it, they are all driven and fierce, and in the end only one of them can win. Even as a written thing it had beautiful, surprising highs and lows. It was so good it made me long for competition drama at the table.
The Dungeon Dome became a way for me to explore competitive games, sports narratives, and the things I like in wrestling.
One final note, after I started work on this I discovered X Crawl through the podcast. It was another attempt at arena Dungeon Punk competition. It was neat there there were similar ideas in game design. We’re in slightly different places but I want to give them a nod.
What tech will you be using to bring Dungeon Dome to the people in accessible ways?
ONE SHOT has a production studio in Chicago outfitted with a four camera setup, good audio equipment, and decent lighting. I think we have one of the best-looking setups on twitch, at least for the space we can afford. I really wanted to have solid audio quality be cause it was important to me that folks be able to hear us clearly. We’re exporting all of our episodes to backers as podcasts as well, so folk how prefer/need to listen don’t need to bother with video files.
Ideally, I want to have some sort of replay transcript, but this might have to be a down the road priority. It bothers me that hearing impaired listeners don’t have access to so much of what we do. Stuff like subtitles and transcripts are a priority if we go far enough over our funding.
Elaborate a little on your reasons for liking actual play. What are your personal reasons for liking it, and your reasons as a creator? How do you think it’s influencing the heart of games?
Actual play excites me for so many reasons. The best way to grow the roleplaying hobby has always been to show people how much fun it is. The problem has always been that the experience of an RPG is difficult to show off. Games usually serve smaller groups, and explaining them has a “you had to be there” element for a lot of people. With actual play, people can actually be there. It’s experiencing RPGs second hand, but you still get to experience them. It completely changes the way the hobby grows.
On a personal and somewhat selfish level, games are the form of artistic expression that works best for me. I have Dyslexia and ADD as a result, I write very slowly. On top of that, just about everything I produce takes a lot of editing. I love storytelling, but writing has a major prohibitive barrier for me. A ton of traditional storytelling mediums require heavy writing: novels, films, TV, plays, ect. For someone in my position, that sucks.
Stories in games flow naturally for me. The improvisational nature of gaming drops all of those barriers. The performance aspect plays to one of my other strengths. At the table I feel confident and excited, it feels effortless. At times it feels like my ADD is an asset more than a liability. Actual play means that a games are viable performance space. Thanks to actual play my creative outlet is a career. I cannot express how huge that is.
How do you handle tone and support players when it comes to content in a game that’s effectively live? What happens when there is a “no”?
This is something that Kat (my best friend and business partner) and I have talked about this. Right now the plan is to just have an X Card. So far we haven’t run into X Card issues. TheDungeon Dome falls into a much more cartoony depiction of violence and triggering subjects. However you never know. Like, if a player has a phobia and a monster exhibits qualities of that phobia we’ll be in a tough spot. Especially if the monster is audience submitted. Thankfully games are flexible, so you can make changes on the fly.
For those who are curious, if an X Card shows up, we will say we have an X Card and explain what it means to the stream. Normally, you don’t do this. You don’t call attention to that sort of thing to protect the player. ONE SHOT is in a different position than normal games though. People look up to the network as community leaders. So If we get an X Card I want to show the audience how it is used. I want players advocating for X Card at their tables to be able to point to us and say “ONE SHOT does it.” We won’t force people to tell us why we need to change what we are changing, just show of that it is happening and the method we’re using to organize it.
Last thing – tell me about these audience participation mechanics. How do they work? Just how much can one person influence the game?
Boy howdy this is a good question! The Dungeon Dome is part performance, part live playtest. I fully expect The way The Dungeon Dome operates episode 1 of season one to be different than the way it works episode 15. We will testing out, adding, and changing audience participation mechanics throughout Season 1 if we fund.
Right now we have a few ways we know the audience can influence the story:
Backers can buy the right to directly collaborate with me on monsters, traps, items, and NPCs that will show up in The Dungeon Dome and directly affect matches, the overall story, and the game’s world.
During streams the audience can grant the team or performer they support Inspiration (a D&D 5e mechanic.) Normally inspiration is something the DM awards, but I have taken it completely out of my hands. I won’t be able to do it even if I want to.
In The Dungeon Dome games I ran before the Kickstarter, folks did this by spamming the chat with team hashtags. Now we are Twitch Affiliates, so we have access to Bits and Cheer. These are a gamified currency Twitch uses to allow a viewing audience to tip streamers. For The Dungeon Dome it could be a more effective and noticeable way for folks to influence the stream live.
Also in the pre-KS Dungeon Dome if a character dropped below 0 HP the audience could vote whether that character succeeded or failed on their Death Save. 3 failures would kill a character permanently. The audience still has this power and I think it’s pretty buck wild how much this could change the story.
That’s what we know. I fully expect to create more avenues for interaction but I need to experiment in order to find them.
Tell me a little about The Warring Kingdoms. What excites you about it?
The Warring Kingdoms Nostria and Andergast are part of The Dark Eye’s core setting, the continent Aventuria. They are two smaller realms caught in a hateful struggle that has been going on for generations. Taking a toll on the countries, depriving them of economic and social growth. Neither Nostria nor Andergast are in the focus of sweeping metaplot events or the plans of bigger realms. They are very much focused on each other. The setting very much is a down to earth approach to fantasy, going for a middle ages feel. It feels grounded, lived in and true to life and human experience. It is a setting where nature, history and magic have their own mysteries and where war has a real cost. But without going grim dark with it. There is room to be heroic and for good people to succeed in the end, even if not everything is black and white and there is room for moral choices to be made. This medieval fantasy feel is showing in the artwork and the text, making Nostria and Andergast into specific places and not just pastiche.
There are a lot of elements and plothooks in the setting that I am really excited about. Like the city of Nostria ravaged by a plague a few years ago and in decline since, with empty rows of houses that serve as home to gangs of criminals. The labyrinthine castle above the city home to the educated Queen Yolande, trying to be a wise ruler to her backwards country. The storm swept coast, where free farmers are holding back the sea by building dykes. Something that speaks to the northern German in me. The deep and endless forests and what might lurk within, places where nature makes all manmade borders obsolete and the woods themselves are the true sovereign of the land.Personally I also like how The Warring Kingdoms as a setting allows us to examine accepted fantasy tropes. There is a lot that sounds very familiar here. A feudal order, knights, kingdoms in endless conflict. But the way it is portraited [portrayed] and rooted in the setting gives it weight and allows to ask questions. The feudal order is just as playable from the peasant perspective and what it means for them. The wars take their toll, yeomen are recruited to fight, farms and castles are damaged. Conquered villagers have to swear fealty to a new liege. But there also is an emotional cost. The inherited hate and prejudice after generations of fighting, even if in the borderlands only the rulers are changing and cultures are mixing. Where often picking a site in the conflict would be the only way to go, striving for peace, however uneasy it might be, and an understanding between cultures is portraited [portrayed] as just as viable as becoming a war hero. War itself is, unsurprisingly with a title like The Warring Kingdoms, one of the big themes. It will never be truly won or over. The war is as much a force of nature and creeping background threat as a sandbox to play in. But to give a heroic fantasy aspect to it there is a totemistic aspect to the war as well. An ancient quarrel between Animal Kings, the firstborn of their species and a mythic Root of Hatred the players can engage and appease. But even if they succeed there still is the resentment of generations at war, looping back again and grounding it in human experience.
Another trope that gets examined is gender roles in the tropes of medieval fantasy. Aventuria as a setting has been explicitly equal rights since it’s development in the 80s. Allowing for female fighters, rulers and artisans on the same footing as their male counterparts. Andergast however is one of the few patriarchies on the continent. Which culturally isolates them from their neighbors. By putting them next to and in conflict with Nostria it put “medieval” gender roles in contrast with a emancipated society and shows their injustice. But without painting every Andergastan as an evil cliché. It is an aspect of their culture, that is hard to unlearn and without contact to others not often question. Cultures are an important part of a The Dark Eye character and have weight in the rules on equal footing with their species and profession. So you are not a human fighter but an Andergastan Forest Knight and the Warring Kingdoms gives this culture weight and a setting to use it in.
As a supplement, how does The Warring Kingdoms integrate into The Dark Eye? What makes it unique beyond other settings and supplements?
With Nostria and Andergast focused on each other and the region providing a lot self-contained of hooks and conflicts while on the surface level fitting the European flavored take on a medieval fantasy setting, The Warring Kingdoms work well as the first regional supplement. Before this we had the core rules and the Aventurian Almanac, describing the whole continent, in less detail for each of the regions of course. With The Warring Kingdoms we are zooming in on this two realms and the setting they provide. They are not only geographically in the same place but united by narrative themes and a similar feel. You will just need the corebook and to a lesser extend the Almanac to get full enjoyment from The Warring Kingdoms, everything that you need to know and all rules to play in the setting are collected in the setting supplement. But the setting book is not the only thing that we offer. In the Kickstarter it comes with a adventure modules for the region and playing into the themes. New Bonds and Ancient Quarrel for example is about securing an uneasy peace, starting with a political marriage. We also provide a novella and a comic set in the Warring Kingdoms and, if our backers are generous, a soundtrack album. So there is material to engage with the setting in a lot of ways. The setting book being the core and working on it’s own. So within The Dark Eye you are getting a lovingly detailed and ready to play setting.
I would say the european, specifically german perspective on a grounded, sometimes fairytale like medieval fantasy setting. Written by people who just need to walk a few steps to get a view on a real life castle. We are inspired by different landscapes, our own culture and history, when writing fantasy and I think it shows in a lot of small details.
more below the cut!
How have you made The Warring Kingdoms mechanically interesting, beyond just being part of The Dark Eye? Are there new items, new roles to play?
The Warring Kingdoms are introducing rules that support and reward thinking about your character’s culture. There are traits you can pick that give you a little bonus and a little drawback for something that is typical of your culture. Using this rules we are also giving an identity to the culture of smaller regions within the Warring Kingdoms. While the core rules only featured Nostria and Andergast as a whole. That way the verbose Nostrians can lose time when a skill check involves talking but depending on fishing for a living they get a small bonus for that. While Andergasters from the eastern Steppes are not just stubborn than the rest of their culture they also deal with horses for a living and get some bonus there, but their rough homeland and dealing with orcs gives them less courtly manners. So small mechanical benefits that also tell you something about what life in that character’s homeland is like.
We are also featuring new schools of magic for mages and new familiars for witches supported with some new spells. If you want to throw exploding fireballs as an Andergastan battlemage or if you want an owl friend as a witch of the Silent Sisterhood, this book has you covered. As a faction important to the setting we are introducing druids as a new school of magic with their own set of rituals, spells and tradition. Our druids, called Sumes in the Warring Kingdoms because they worship the earth goddess Sumu, are more like the priest of celtic and pagan Europe than the shapeshifters of D&D.
New items are featured with all the rules to use it and some description in the sourcebook. But if you want even more details we also offer the Armory of the Warring Kingdoms with illustrations for each piece of equipment and some optional additional rules and some deeper descriptions. There are of course weapons typical for the Warring Kingdoms. Like the Nostrian long bow or the Andergaster, a 7ft long two handed sword. But there are everyday items as well, like clothing typical for the Kingdoms, tools to build a dyke or works of art.
What inspiration have you used to develop the setting of The Warring Kingdoms?
We had a history to build on, since the setting, like most for The Dark Eye, has been around for some decades. People used it before, first as a setting for novels and later adventures. There has been another sourcebook describing it, as well as the computer game series Chains of Satinav. So we could build from there and expand on those ideas. But of course we did set the focus to support the themes we found interesting and wanted to put a spotlight on. Another goal was to describe those things that enhanced the play experience foremost.
As a feudal setting with knights, longstanding feuds and wars we of course took inspiration from classic tales about knights. So even if the setting is not Arthurian there is some inspiration to be found. We of course couldn’t ignore Game of Thrones. But Grimm’s fairytales and Ottfried Preußler’s Krabatt and Astrid Lindgren’s Ronja the Robber’s Daughter did lend a lot of inspiration as well. European history and the image we have of the middle ages as well as real historical research also played a big role. Some sources on inspired certain elements of the setting. You can find a lot of the hanseatic city of Bremen and its harbor Bremerhaven in the trading hub Salta and Slaterhaven for example. While the steppes of Teshkal in Andergast are in a lot of ways draw inspiration from Rohan in the lord of the rings, which is not as big an influence on the rest of the setting.
Do you think that there are significant differences between The Dark Eye and USian games like Dungeons & Dragons, and that this has influenced The Warring Kingdoms?
I think there is a difference in playstyle that developed over the years and influenced the design decisions that went into creating the rules for subsequent editions of The Dark Eye. TDE is less combat and encounter focused in it’s scenarios. Instead pushing for engaging with the background, it’s lore and NPCs. There are a lot of social challenges in adventures for the dark eye as well as a big metaplot that often is featured and engaged in published scenarios. But there is also room to just experience the world, featuring scenes of exploration, fluff and sight-seeing. Which is something our players enjoy. There are of course American settings that do similar things Glorantha comes to mind as a setting with very deep lore and the World of Darkness featured a metaplot. But The Dark Eye as the defining game of the market it changed what mainstream assumptions look like in Germany and is it’s own mixture of stylistic elements.
Players of The Dark Eye usually enjoy to have their character’s backstory and connection to the world of Aventuria represented on their character sheet. So there are mechanical representations of mundane things, that mostly offer flavor. They of course can feature in scenarios. We offer mechanics that allow players to zoom in as deep as they like. For some players it is okay to know their character is from Nostria. Others take one of the cultural personality traits, others arrange their stats to have their fighter be good at fishing or their mage to know how to build a dyke. Making the stats tell a story about your character is something the system has to do and something we expanded on in The Warring Kingdoms. Of course it still has to be able to also handle fights in a balanced way and all the other things a traditional rpg design demands. A character who learned how to build a dyke will be rewarded in a scenario where that plays a role, that is delivered with the Kickstarter. Even if it will not come up too often, it still feels important then. But it might define what the character is like, even if it never is the skill that saves the day. To allow for builds like this TDE has a pointbuy system with roles defined by the setting. Similar to Shadowrun I would say. [Beau says: Shadowrun 3e point buy is my favorite crunchy game build ever so this like, is totally my jam.]
Of course this influenced The Warring Kingdoms. To provide a working metaplot you have to give players room to do their thing and be the most important people in the setting, at their table at least. But you also have to give a few hints at what can happen in the future. So we have to decide what to hand over to the players and never touch again, so they are free to use it and what to point out as something that we will pick up in the future. We are marking NPCs with chess pieces for example. A pawn we will not mention again, a knight will remain in the setting but can for the plot be easily replaced with any npc the GM likes, a king will be important later on and it is important for later developments that this person show up in this scenario. So metaplot considerations featured into designing the setting. Within The Dark Eye the setting is trending towards being less metaplot heavy and leaving a lot in the GMs hands. We still put in a few hints that will keep people interested in what the future holds.
The description of the setting is providing plot details as well as challenges and conflicts as well as a lot of cultural details and interesting fluff. Necessary to explore and feel the setting through your characters perspective or to give a deep background to your character, even if you play them in another culture. So The Warring Kingdoms is not only describing a field to play in, a destination to travel, a series of storyhooks or a set of difficulties to measure up against but also a lens through which a character can experience the world.
What do you mechanically to handle social interaction in The Dark Eye, and how is it reflected in The Warring Kingdoms? What influence does the setting have on the understanding on the mechanics for social situations?
It can be done done as a skill check, where we have a variety of skills divided by approach. Either as a contested check between two characters (PC or NPC), just going for a success and seeing how good you rolled or a long time task, where you are accumulating points, till you reach certain milestones for a full or partial success. Each of these three core mechanics are there for every skill check. They can be applied to social interaction depending on what your goal is. The quick roll for a success works best if it isn’t too important how long a task takes and what the other character is doing. The contested roll is important if you want a defense and to compare two characters against one another. It is used between player characters or between player characters and important NPC. The long term task works well if you want to convince people over time, turn asking around for information into a montage or do other long term things like counseling someone in a time of grief.
There also is a ladder of attitudes people can have towards each other ranging from bitter enemies to unconditional love. You can roll to move people along that scale or to just get them to do something. Which gives more of a choice and makes a difference between long and short term goals. Those rules are covered more in depth in the Compendium, which is not yet released in English.
Your social status and other traits modify your roles or sometimes allow you to roll for things you otherwise wouldn’t be allowed to roll for. In The Warring Kingdoms it is important where you stand in the feudal hierarchy. A peasant will have trouble addressing the Queen in a forthright manner and it would be a harder roll for the player. But if the peasant plays into his lower status and pleads instead of demanding, that might make the roll easier. On the other hand the Queen will not have it easy if she is trying to speak with the peasant as equals or if she attempted to mingle with criminals to gather information. It is a medieval world, with distinct social classes, which is reflected in the mechanics. But we also allow characters to rise above that system and interact as people. There are a few scenarios where looking beyond the feudal system and showing compassion for both sides will lead to the best outcome. Still feudal rule is normal for most of Aventuria and certainly The Warring Kingdoms.
For The Warring Kingdoms specifically we used some mechanics to have the rules interact with the themes of resentment and enmity between Nostria and Andergast. The cultural personality traits we talked about can provide hints how to play a character from a certain region, also having a small mechanical impact. One trait you can pick up for any Nostrian or Andergastan is the inherited hatred between them. So interacting peacefully with someone from the other country gets a bit harder. There is a “animosity track” you can use to see how much a character is influenced by hate and to reduce it or raise it in steps by using social rolls. You can tie this into the mystical background of the Root of Hatred as well.
There are a lot of modifiers and use cases for the rules described in the core book that come from The Warring Kingdoms but the core mechanics remain. Rather traditional skill check, social class, culture and approach matter. There are a few ways to have more than binary success, like the animosity track, long-term tasks or the attitude scale.
Tell me more about the schools of magic! What can you tell me about new familiars and druids? How do they interact with the setting and mechanics?
The background of The Dark Eye determines what approaches there are to magic. There are different of traditions that shape how your character casts their spells. Shaping the general outlook a spellcaster has as well as some of the flavor of casting spells. Like if they need incantations, gestures or just force of will.
The guild mages have a scientific approach to spellcasting, write books and have academies. There are three recognized guilds of mages, all with protection by the laws. Except in Andergast, where those laws never were established. Still there is an academy in Andergast, the Combat Seminary. The mages trained there are ready for war and the rough manners of a rough land. They do not seem like your typical bookworm, instead often serving with the Andergastan troops, using their staff and magic as weapons in the skirmishes against Nostria. They have some of the most destructive spells in the system in their grimoire. So an Andergastan Guild Mage is a good pick for a fighting adventurer.
Nostrian mages are very different. Supported by Queen Yolande, who graduated from this school, they study the history and hidden magic of the land. Called the Academy of Light and Darkness they use magic of both as well as magic that transforms objects and the environment. The worldview taught at the Academy is one of strict dualism and a divide between good and evil. They are a good choice to play an academic character in the backwards Warring Kingdoms and someone whose assumptions about the world will be challenged outside the university walls.
The tradition of the witches is more guided by intuition, being in tune with your familiar and the sisterhood of witches that share the affinity to your type of animal. A witch can conjure curses on people they dislike, they can fly on a wooden item (not necessarily a broom) and of course cast spells. They lack the protection by the laws but in Nostria they are not persecuted or anything but respected as advisors and a power factor. We introduce the Serpent Witches in The Warring Kingdoms. A member of the Sisterhood of Knowledge they have snake for familiars and are hungry for knowledge, sometimes dangerous knowledge and known for knowing a lot of secrets. They have snake, divining and disruptive magic.
The owl witches of the Silent Sisterhood are secretive, at home in the wide forests of the warring Kingdoms and sworn protectors of all witches. They do hunt down witch hunters and other enemies of their tradition. They are seen as the best fighters amongst the witches and their magic supports this a lot it buffing her abilities in combat. Growing claws, running up trees or making branches attack their enemies.
The witches are the most important tradition in Nostria. Attuned to the land and revered by it’s inhabitants. Witches being predominantly female, even if other gender identities are found in their ranks, they are a good counterweight to the Andergastan patriarchy.
Andergast’s most important tradition are the druids or “Sumes”,as they are called in the Warring Kingdoms, they influence and advise the king and are seen on par with clerics of the gods, speaking for the earth goddess Sumu. They can influence people’s mind with rituals and use magical obsidian daggers in their spellcasting. Still their magic is attuned to the forests of their homelands which they protect. The Sumes speak for the forest and can decide if trees are to be cut down or animals to be hunted. A privilege that can get them in conflict with nobility.
There are two factions of druids in Andgergast, the servants of Sumu, who are like I just described them, whose magic is of the forstes and the elements. They usually genuinely want to protect the land and keep Sumu, who they see as a dying goddess alive.
The Augmenters of Power are different, in method and often motivation. They still are Sumes and seen as envoys of nature but their magic is more about influencing people. They can tell if someone is lying and cause fear or confusion. Most of their spells take control of someones body or reactions without outright dominating their thoughts. Their workings and intrigues are a big part of the setting and tied to the Root of Hatred. Even if they still try to save the land, most heroes will question their methods.
Tell me a little about The Midderlands. What excites you about it?
The Midderlands is an OSR mini setting and bestiary for Swords & Wizardy although as with all retro clones, it’ll work interchangeably with minimal effort.
The setting itself is based on the area in England where I live, the Midlands. The idea of taking this area and turning it into a more twisted, darker fantasy-land excited me. I could take landmarks and towns and run riot.
All that said, the idea of the book started as I was drawing weird creatures. I thought it would be good if they lived in and around where I lived, kind of like the Spiderwick Chronicles by Terlizzi. The idea evolved from there.
Tell me about weird creatures! Bestiaries and monster manuals are a favorite of mine. What will we see spilling forth from the pages?
The book contains a bestiary section which contains 25 new monsters. These include the Muckulus, Oorgthrax, Mud Cow, Thorned Briarling, Six-headed Sewer Gripe, Mawling and Nobblin to name a few. Each of the 25, also have a pre-generated NPC. Of these 25, 18 have defined race-classes that you can play. Now don’t get me wrong, some of these are bonkers but they have a lot of fun gaming potential. Some favourite monsters are the Conus Ogre that feeds on electricity, and the Six-headed Sewer Gripe with its decapitation attacks. Edwin Nagy has done a great job of adding flesh to the bones of the monsters. I would give him the art, tell him some things I wanted it to do/be like – and he would create these monsters of wonder.
Slitherling by Jim Magnusson.
What sort of elements are you bringing to your home of the Midlands to make it darker, to find a deeper root?
I wanted an undercurrent of something chthonic, dark and unknown going on beneath the earth. The spinning core deep below the land is made of Gloomium – a green substance which leaks to the top and taints things. The sky is green-hued and fires burn with green flames and such. There are black-clad folk about and their intent is shadowy. I don’t elaborate too much on stuff, allowing the gamemaster to take it where he wants to go with it – to fit their own agenda, or campaign ideas. I just wanted to create enough “game-juice” to give the feeling that there is untoward stuff going on.
fishy fishy fishy oh
How do you find inspiration for different monsters and game elements?
I’m never quite sure where the inspiration was coming from. I spend lots of time going through G+ and some people post some great art. In terms of the monsters whatever appeared on the page as I drew it. The drawing of the head happened first. Once I had all the heads, I created a set of headless bodies. I then printed them all out and matched up heads and bodies till I got something cool. Then I would come up with a concept and send it to Edwin for stats.
The setting just kind of fell out. A good example is that there is a ruined windmill on my way into RL work. I decided to add that the location section as Bognock Windmill. Many RL landmarks were harmed in the making of this book.
What are you doing to make The Midderlands accessible for multiple systems (OSR to Pathfinder, even) – freedom from mechanical trappings is one thing, so what in the setting makes it work for more than one system?
As it’s written for Swords & Wizardry Complete, it is easily moved to other retroclones. S&WC is generally single saving throw and doesn’t use Morale so there is a tweak needed to use in LotFP. Most OSR folk can pick this stuff up and go on the fly.
Pathfinder, D&D5E and DCC would be a little more tricky in terms of stats, but The Midderlands is not intended to be overly complicated. The setting contains no real stat stuff at all – so that can be taken and used anywhere. Other than the bestiary stats, there are magic items and oddities that can easily be used in other non-OSR systems. As an example, a Wodensblade is a +1 longsword, +3 vs green-skinned creatures. That kind of thing can be used pretty much anywhere 😊. Spells are referred to such as Charm Person, so that will be understood in most systems. Monster stats will need a little more work for non-OSR systems.
So far, the support for the Kickstarter has been fantastic, given the ambitious funding total. I want the book content and production quality to be something people get in their hands and go “whoa, this is so cool!!”, so I’d rather fund something memorable than a PoD offering if I can. That does have a cost though. We are almost half-funded at this stage and still over 20 days to go, so it’s very-promising and myself and the team are massively lucky to have such great support.
Thank you for your hosting hospitality, great questions and for your interest in the project!
#themidderlands 😊
— Thanks so much to Glynn for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading and that you’ll check out The Midderlands on Kickstarter, and remember to share the post around!
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Hi all! Today I have an interview with Alex Hakobian on the new game Broadsword, which is currently on Kickstarter! It looks like a fun romp and I wanted to give you all the opportunity to check it out. See Alex’s responses to my questions below!
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Illustration by Gary Chalk (originally drawn for (IINM) Lone Wolf and licensed for reuse in Broadsword)
Tell me a little about Broadsword. What excites you about it?
Broadsword is a tactical adventure game in the format of a hybrid boardgame/RPG – a “roleplaying boardgame,” if you will. It’s about a group of valiant Heroes working together to defeat the evil forces of the Abyss.
What excites me about it most is the foundation on which it was conceived and built. Although Broadsword takes evident inspiration from many sources ranging different genre, its greatest asset is its direct bloodline to the classic 1989 Milton Bradley/Games Workshop boardgame HeroQuest.
Like many youngsters in those days, I have very fond memories of the game. It was, in fact, my personal gateway drug to D&D and similar roleplaying games later in life. It was only natural that some of that deeply engrained experience bleed though into Broadsword.
What are the aspects of HeroQuest you found valuable enough and important enough to bring forward into Broadsword?
In the most basic of terms, Broadsword is my love letter to HeroQuest. As such, it was important to me that the spirit of the game stayed intact. I wanted you to come away from a session feeling like, “Wow, that was just like the original. But better!” Thankfully, this was easily done in great part because my game originally started out as an expansion on the original, but quickly grew into its own entity.
Speaking specifically, I knew I had to keep some of the key boardgamey elements. Foremost among these were the custom pictographic dice, known as Combat Dice. I felt these were the backbone to the whole thing. Remove the dice and the entire thing falls apart, severing its legacy bloodline.
Going hand in hand with that was the tactical, grid-based combat. It simply wouldn’t be itself if I were to, for example, have it use narrative, storygame or “theater of the mind” type rules.
There are a couple other, much smaller assets or concepts brought forward, but the two mentioned above are far and away the ones that carry the most weight.
Illustration by Gary Chalk (originally drawn for (IINM) Lone Wolf and licensed for reuse in Broadsword)
How are you venturing out into different genres and sources, both mechanically and flavor-wise?
I’m not sure I would qualify it as “venturing out” into different genres and sources so much as experiencing them, internalizing them, then funneling it through into the game. For example, if you hear “Fireball,” “Lightning Bolt,” or better yet, “Magic Missile,” you are going to think “classic D&D Wizard spell.” So I consider: What makes them so great? Once I believe I’m come up with the essence of the answer in mechanical terms, I can then move forward with including it in some form in the game in a way that makes sense for the system, mechanics, and flavor.
Let’s take “Fireball” as an example. The Pyromancer class has a spell called “Explosion.” The flavor text reads, “A massive fireball explodes, doing great damage.” Mechanically, that translates to: “Any figure on one square you can see takes 2 Body Points of damage. All figures in the surrounding squares each take 1 Body Point of damage. Elite monsters defend the attack normally.”
Now, when compared to other systems where PCs or monsters will have Hit Points typically reaching double digits or beyond, a paltry 2 points of damage seems like nothing. But for Broadsword, that’s really quite tremendous. Even the beefiest classes in the game only top out around 8 Body Points. And that most monsters in the game generally only have half that. Seen in that light, “Explosion” can easily completely eliminate or severely damage a crowded room of monsters.
Getting back to the question at hand, however, I extend this same process to aspects of games from other genres and systems – video games, books, what have you.
Can you tell me a little about the classes in Broadsword and how they interact with the core mechanic and the game itself?
Sure. The game starts with a dozen different classes (with more being supplemented in the near future). In order to provide niche protection to keep the core theme of each class as unsullied as possible, I came up with a system of keywords that I applied to each piece of equipment. I then took each class and sussed out which keywords would make sense for that class to be restricted from using. This process quickly gave way to the need for categorization of the classes themselves, eventually ending with 3 categories of classes.
There are 5 Fighter classes (Berserker, Hunter, Paladin, Ranger, Warrior), who have the least keyword restrictions and can use the most types of gear. Each of the Fighter classes also have their own Class Ability, a talent unique to that class. 5 Caster classes (Aeromancer, Geomancer, Hydromancer, Necromancer, Pyromancer) have the highest restrictions on usable gear. (This is, of course, balanced by the fact that Casters have lots of spells.) And 2 Hybrid classes (Cleric, Druid), who dabble in both melee combat as well as a little magic usage, but they can’t use the very best weapons and armor, nor can they cast as many spells as often as their Caster counterparts.
Your choice of class determines what gear you start with (and by extension, how many Combat Dice you can attack and defend with), what your spell list looks like, and what types of items you are restricted from using. It also provides the baseline for your Body and Mind Points – which may be modified slightly by your choice of race.
What are the experiences and discoveries you have enjoyed most about designing Broadsword?
I found that, despite there being a number of different systems interacting with each other at any one time, the game remains incredibly simple to pick up and learn. This is good, because while I did indeed want to add some granularity and “crunch” on the RPG side of things, I also wanted to keep it streamlined, with a low barrier to entry.
Running the playtests were also a lot of fun, and I don’t believe the level and quality of fun I had ever really diminished through the process, even while testing some new mechanic I wasn’t sure of. It certainly helped that my playtesters were HeroQuest junkies themselves! They quickly learned the ins and outs of the game nearly as well as I did, so it was painless to run a half-baked idea by them before putting anything down on paper and see if it was an idea worth pursuing.
Illustration by David Lewis Johnson
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Thanks all for reading, and thanks to Alex for answering my questions! I hope you all will check out the Kickstarter for Broadsword and share this around in case anyone else might enjoy it!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
Today I have an interview with Robin Laws on his new game,The Yellow King. The Yellow King is currently on Kickstarter, and looks absolutely fascinating. I asked Robin some questions about how he’ll be handling content and how the mechanics flow with fiction – check out his responses below!
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Books and slipcover
Tell me a little about The Yellow King. What excites you about it?
The four slim stories that make up Robert W. Chambers’ King in Yellow cycle offer a rich, elegantly creepy starting point for an ambitious new game of literary horror. We’re used to seeing his work through the lens of Lovecraft, who championed these stories, and later expanders of the Mythos like August Derleth. Tackled on their own, they present an shockingly contemporary set of themes. Central to the stories are a visual symbols and a work of art that, once you are exposed to them, break you down and change you. In this game I take that a step further and explore the idea that reality itself is coming apart.
I’ve always come at Lovecraftian themes and cosmic horror as a whole from a diagonal, because the themes of “insanity” and “breakdowns” are ones I’m intimately familiar with. How do you address this in The Yellow King? What are you including in the game to both carry the gravity of the impact of cosmic horror, and are you examining real-life trauma parallels?
When you remove the Lovecraftian overlay from Chambers, it ceases to be cosmic horror and, especially in YKRPG’s take on him, becomes what we’re calling reality horror. Lovecraft proposes that when you really see humankind’s absolute insignificance in a vast and utterly random universe, the mind cracks, plunging you into insanity. The King in Yellow cycle by contrast focuses on an idea, an artistic expression, that can rewrite people’s personalities and sense of reality—but can also change objective reality itself.
This allows me to lean away from the idea that the characters are becoming literally mentally ill, or that sanity is a resource you lose over time. There are no insane cultists, but rather people who have been altered or compelled by the exposure to the play The King in Yellow or the sight of the Yellow Sign.
As characters you encounter Mental Hazards, rolling your Composure ability to resist them or take a lesser effect. Rather than losing Sanity or Stability points you get Shock cards, which you try to get rid of as play continues. When you have 3 Shock cards, your character loses her bearings and leaves play, to be replaced by another.
In framing the text, particularly of the Shock cards, I’m steering away from the real life terminology of mental illness. So there’s no Shock card that tells you you’ve suddenly developed, say, paranoid schizophrenia or clinical depression. Nor is there an indication that becoming mentally ill turns people evil or violent.
Now it’s entirely possible that folks who struggle with mental health issues either directly or through the experiences of the people around them still won’t want to explore reality horror at the gaming table. And if it’s not fun, you shouldn’t do it. But a great function of pop culture is as a vehicle to safely process life’s horrors and traumas through a protective veil of outlandishness and the fantastic. Godzilla movies help audiences come at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 9/11 reverberated through comics and spy movies. SF TV shows or a movie like Get Out can get at racial hierarchies in a disarming and metaphorical way. When constructing the treatment of trauma in YKRPG I aspire for it to work in a like fashion.
Ultimately though it all comes down to personal tastes and limits, which can differ even for one person over time. What you might be into at one point in your life could be too close too the knuckle in another.
Aftermath interiors
What are the elements of the new combat system, and how do they influence player interaction with the setting?
Combat is fast and player-facing, meaning that each player rolls only once and the GM never rolls anything, just establishes a difficulty for the foe at hand and modifiers for the situation.
Before starting you decide what your goal is—which might be to kill your foes, but could also be capturing one of them and running away, driving them off, getting through them, and so on. If your Fighting roll fails to overcome the opponent’s difficulty, which varies based on your objective, you take on either a minor or major Injury card. Even as victor you might take a minor Injury if you decline to pay a toll in Athletics, Health or Fighting points. Like the Shock cards Injuries have various ongoing effects, and conditions allowing you to discard them. These often require you to do something in the narrative. Here’s an example (note that the published versions will look much better than my primitive graphic design abilities allow for):
Example Injury
As with Shocks, having 3 Injuries in hand requires you to permanently retire your character.
Tell me a little about each of the books. What makes them unique in theme, and what were their inspirations?
Like two of the Chambers stories, Paris takes place in the City of Lights in 1895. It gives you your classic historical horror experience of interacting with the rich details and personalities of a classic time period, in this case the Belle Epoque, as you deal with supernatural menace.
The Wars follows one of the stories in my collection New Tales of the Yellow Sign by setting itself in a fractured timeline caused by the influence of the play. It’s 1947 and the Continental War rages across Europe. Characters play a squad of soldiers whose military assignments draw them into weird mysteries. They must duck not only monsters from Carcosa but bizarre Jules Verne war machines.
Aftermath, again based on a story from NTYS, proposes that the bizarre then-future described in “Repairer of Reputations” was the basis of an actual reality. A century after the events described in that story, you play revolutionaries in an alternate present who have just toppled the tyrannical and supernaturally-backed Castaigne regime in America. Your investigations confront you with eerie holdovers of the old regime. At the same time you choose a way to help rebuild your nation, involving yourself in post-revolutionary politics.
Finally, This is Normal Now is our modern day, with an emphasis on the glittering, the new, and a horrific spin on contemporary trends. It brings the cycle back to basics, and in full campaign mode, leads you to connect and wrap up the big arc resolving the parallels between your characters from the four settings.
Four books, so many stories to tell!
I’m somewhat familiar with GUMSHOE, and I know that there is a lot of mutability, but it can be challenging to really hammer out the best final decisions. What has your development process been like for The Yellow King? Did you have any moments of clarity that you appreciated?
The key revelation where mechanics are concerned came from
the desire to take the Problem and Edge cards from the GUMSHOE One-2-One engine from in Cthulhu Confidential and translate them back into multiplayer GUMSHOE.
a longstanding Pelgrane goal of making combat player-facing, as discussed above
Since then it’s been a matter of refinement, which is ongoing as I move from the preview draft backers get as soon as they join to a version ready for out-of-house playtest.
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Thanks so much to Robin for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading about what’s coming withThe Yellow King! Make sure to check it out on Kickstarter & tell your friends!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
Today I have an interview with Hannah Shaffer on her game Damn the Man, Save the Music! which is currently on Kickstarter kicking ass. Damn the Man, Save the Music! is an exciting, thoughtful, 90s-music-filled game and I hope you all love hearing what Hannah has to say.
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Cover by Evan Rowland
Tell me a little about Damn the Man, Save the Music. What excites you about it?
Damn the Man, Save the Music! is a game about a bunch of weirdo outcasts trying to save their ’90s record store from collapse. It’s inspired by one of my favorite movies, Empire Records, which everyone should go watch right now. What excites me about Damn the Man is that it uses ’90s nostalgia as a way to explore the best parts of ’90s media while challenging the worst parts.
I watch a lot of ’90s movies, and while I love their structure (like where did action-romance movies go? Why aren’t those getting made anymore?), it was a weird time for minority representation. Queer characters started to appear in ’90s movies, but they were often there just to add a bit of edgy humor. And you’d find people of color in most ’90s comedies, but their roles were at best “token” and at worst, the same deal, there for stereotyped jokes. Empire Records is a movie that celebrates the music of its time, but the only reference it makes to hip hop is in a line that disses rap and makes a homophobic joke at the same time.
I love Damn the Man because it provides this opportunity to play out a ’90s movie but better. It asks people to think about what ’90s nostalgia is all about, and to explore that nostalgia with a critical eye—without even realizing that’s what you’re doing.
In-progress art by Evan Rowland
What is the gameplay like in Damn the Man, Save the Music!? What kind of action do we see?
Damn the Man is a single-session game and all of the game’s action takes place over the course of one day. The day is divided into a three act structure—the store opening, a big record signing event, and closing shop at the end of the day. During each act every character gets one Schedule Scene. That’s a scene where the spotlight is shining on your character, even if there are other people in the scene with you!
There are a few different things you can do during your schedule scene: you can try to heal a relationship with a friend (all relationships start off damaged in the game), you can try to double down and accomplish a task your boss assigns you, or you can shoot for your goal.
Choosing to heal a relationship might look like taking a smoke break with a friend you’ve been avoiding after learning you’re both secretly gay. Doubling down looks like diving right into a store task, like trying to catch a shoplifter before they make off with an entire rack of new CDs. And shooting for your goal looks like finding the time to confess your love, or pay back a debt, or find the lost cat… right in the middle of your schedule scene.
Every scene ends with rolling dice to see if you accomplished the task your boss assigned you. Winning lets you accomplish the task and functionally prevent a store trouble, losing means you failed to accomplish the task (like screwing up everyone’s coffee orders) and a store trouble escalates as a result.
The game’s action is centered around the scenes. Trying to juggle increasingly absurd retail tasks while also trying to accomplish your heart’s true goal and heal relationships with the people you love. There’s a real sense of not being able to do it all, and things getting wackier and spiraling out of control as the day goes on!
What sources did you pull inspiration from, aside from the ’90s as a whole?
The most obvious inspiration for Damn the Man is the movie Empire Records, a movie about a bunch of teenagers working at a ‘90s indie record store, who take a dramatic shot at saving their store when they learn it’s going to be bought out by a big corporate record chain. The game follows the structure of Empire Records pretty closely, but it also follows this ‘90s movie coming-of-age structure, where everyone totally freaks out and then undergoes a major personal transformation in the course of a day.
I really liked movies by Kevin Smith and Richard Linklater during my high school years, so you’ll see that inspiration in Damn the Man as well: Dazed and Confused is a surprisingly poignant movie, Slacker, Clerks, and Chasing Amy, a movie about how things break down when we try to force our own expectations and demands on someone else’s identity.
Finally, I think the game is inspired by my complicated relationship with nostalgia. We’re in a golden age of ‘90s nostalgia right now, but the ‘90s really sucked for a lot of people. Nostalgia can be this way of reframing history through a rose-colored lens that privileges certain types of experiences. I wanted to make a game that celebrated ‘90s music and counterculture that wasn’t just another Buzzfeed “remember when” listicle.
How did you move from “hey, this is a thing that matters” to “this is a game you can play” with the game – did you do a lot of playtesting, or spend a lot of time privately testing mechanics?
I did do a lot of playtesting! The game started as kind of a joke hack of Questlandia, when I was re-watching Empire Records and realized it shared the exact structure of a Questlandia game:
A big personal goal you have to accomplish today, only three scenes before you’ve got to accomplish it, characters who are just trying to do their best with what they’ve got, and then a big collapse—or not!—at the end.
Questlandia was the first game I made, and I think the mechanics need some work. I just kept bringing Damn the Man to conventions and playing it with friends, watching closely for the places where people got stuck. I took away mechanics and added them and took them away and added them until finally I was seeing games that regularly had a great flow, a good energy, and rules that supported exactly the types of stories the game is trying to tell.
Art by Sarah Robbins
Tell me about some of the important themes of the game. Weirdo outcasts, queer characters—what matters about them beyond representation? What strength lies in their stories for Damn the Man, Save the Music!?
I talked a little bit about nostalgia before, and how it paints over the past with these “everything was great” rosy-colored brush strokes.
I wanted to make sure Damn the Man told these stories that captured the feel of a ‘90s romance-comedy, without erasing the experiences of queer people and people of color. Beyond the importance of representation (which is really important), these are coming of age stories, whether or not the characters are teenagers.
Everyone in Damn the Man is searching for something. They’re trying to make things right with their friends, they’re trying to manage the demands of retail and the people who treat you crappy while also trying to find meaning in their lives. I really like telling those kinds of stories. I feel like there are a lot of big hero stories, but not a lot of “people just trying their best” stories. I wanted a story that shines a light on a single day, or a single moment in time, that maybe changes everything or maybe just gets lost to history.
Fictional Damnster Fire band poster by Sarah Robbins
