Tag: five or so

Five or So Questions with Todd Nicholas on The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Todd Nicholas on the new game The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power (SCUP) which is currently on Kickstarter! It’s a Powered by the Apocalypse game of dark fantasy. Check out the answers below!

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Todd!
Tell me a little bit about The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power. What excites you about it?
Excellent and appropriately timed question! The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power (SCUP, for short) is a dark fantasy tabletop role-playing game by myself, Todd Nicholas, and my friend Thomas J. It is a hack of Apocalypse World that uses the core mechanics of that game to explore the kinds of political intrigue you would see in something like A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin, The First Law by Joe Abercrombie, Imperial Radch by Ann Leckie, and the TV show Vikings. We’re currently Kickstarting the game and it’s doing quite well, so we’re happy to finally get it into people’s hands. Tom and myself have been working on this game on and off for a number of years. We started because we had just played a game of Apocalypse World and we thought those mechanics might work well for a fantasy story about power, politics, and intrigue. We were never quite sure if we wanted to make SCUP a polished game that we put out into the world in physical form or just keep it something we passed around as a PDF, but there seemed to be enough interest in it that we decided to go ahead on it.

What excites me about SCUP is that I love that we’ve given players particularly powerful moves to affect their fictional world. The thing Tom and I spent the greatest amount of time on in the design of SCUP was the moves for character classes. We wanted people to be able to do big, dramatic things. For example, one class is called “The Beloved.” They’re sort of a preacher or prophet type. One of their moves lets them see and confront the inner demons of NPCs, permanently changing them in some way. The first time we actually had someone use this move at the table, and they were literally having a duel of wits with the manifestation of another character’s worst fears in an effort to help the character conquer them, we were incredibly stoked to be able to give players that sort of narrative agency. So yeah, that’s my answer. I like being able to watch people do bold things in our game that let them get their hands nice and dirty.

What have you done with SCUP to take the PbtA mechanics and make them really mesh with the fiction and framing?

The PbtA system already does a nice job of focusing on close up character drama, but we have created a number of mechanics that really drive this home. In particular, we have focused on giving the MC moves to push social hierarchy in their toolbox of moves. They have a different set of moves to use against common PCs and noble PCs, for example. Additionally, characters may be in the employ of a Patron or may be called on by a Faction to fulfill a duty or obligation. We wanted to push the idea that this game is about reputation, information, hierarchy, and obligation using mechanics such as these. Mostly, though, we want people to have fun getting involved in intrigue between characters!

You mentioned “The Beloved.” Tell me about some of the playbooks – who are they? How do the moves help tell the story?

What we’ve really focused on in SCUP is playbook moves that really drive the narrative and give players a chance to do big things in the fiction. Because the game is about intrigue and power, many of the moves focus on things like getting and spreading information, or making big, dramatic things happen in the gameplay. For example, I played a game last night at Forge Midwest with some folks. There was an NPC named Faela that two PCs wanted alive, cause they needed information from her, and one PC was tasked to assassinate. That PC, playing the class The Black Hood, rolled her move Their Eyes Never Open, which allowed her to assassinate an NPC within her reach. She had already snuck into the Ziggurat where the NPC was, and succeeded at her roll, allowing her to kill the character. When the other two PCs reached her, they found her deceased, but one of them, playing the Bloodletter, took her body and rolled his move God Complex to attempt to bring her back to life, though she came back as something awful, barely able to provide the information he needed. Meanwhile, a player playing The Voice, an advisor to the high priestess who ruled the city, had been using her move An Ear at Each Door to have her network of spies to gather information on the Priestess’s enemies which she ultimately used to betray the Priestess and claim power for herself. These are the kinds of blood-opera moments we’re really hoping players use the moves to create in games of SCUP.

What elements of your fictional inspirations were the most important to your design? 

If you think about something like A Song of Ice and Fire, you think about the big things that George R.R. Martin makes happen in that world. Characters die, the world changes, relationships change, etc. As such, we wanted to make sure that the MC and players had a lot of power to affect the world in compelling ways. To give you an example, we have something we call “end of season moves,” which are triggered by the players when a campaign is nearing its conclusion. They give the players the ability to mechanize something like, say, the Red Wedding from A Storm of Swords. Most PCs wouldn’t just drop something that game changing on their players, but the end of season moves give them permission to, with the player’s input. 
Additionally, we thought very hard about the kinds of characters in the books we used as inspiration. The playbook of The Screw, for example, is very much based on Sand dan Glokta from The First Law while The Voice is modeled after Littlefinger from A Song of Ice and Fire and Wormtongue from Lord of the Rings. We wanted the players to feel like they had more options available to them than fighters, wizards, and rulers. We wanted them to have characters that were powerful in more subtle ways, more backroom ways, etc., which is often very important to political, dark fantasy.
What makes SCUP special to you, as a creator and gamer each?
SCUP is the first game I really started designing. I designed it with Tom so we could play something fun with our friends. Some of the campaigns we’ve done with SCUP have been some of my favorite gaming experiences, and the fact that something I created with my friend, on a lark, just to have some fun is going to be a real thing in the world that hopefully brings some fun to other people’s gaming table is genuinely humbling and astonishing to me.

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Thanks so much to Todd for the interview! I hope it was a good time, and I hope all of you enjoyed reading about it. Check out The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power on Kickstarter now! 

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Five or So Questions with Burning Games on FAITH

Hi All! Today I have an interview with Burning Games on FAITH: The Sci-Fi RPG and Miniatures, which is currently on Kickstarter. FAITH is an Ennie-award winning RPG and this is the FAITH 2.0 version. Check out the interview below!

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Tell me a little about FAITH. What excites you about it?

What excites us about FAITH the most is its very essence. We made it as a statement on how we think RPGs should be, however risky that was. It’s an RPG with a card based mechanic that lets players be in control of their actions; it makes the humans a minor species, at the sidelines of the main plot-events; it introduces gods in a sci-fi setting as moral scales to test the very fabric of which characters are made; and it dives right into an ideological conflict between two powerful alien species, without leaving aside morality, politics, or economics.

The fact that people have trusted us and placed their faith in our game, pun intended, is something that we take very seriously and it’s the most potent source of excitement we can imagine. We look forward to continue to expand the game into something greater than we could have imagined when we first started, and we are grateful to everybody who supports us in this journey.

How do you integrate gods with a world of sci-fi and humanity? 


The five Gods of Faith are not the usual “omnipotent being” interpretation of deities. They are moral in nature, , and they can only interact with the world through their believers, by providing them with supernatural powers, thus shaping what actually happens in the universe by giving more power to those who follow one of the moral paths laid out by one of the Gods.

Living beings within the universe of Faith can’t really choose in which God they believe or which God they follow. It is each God itself who chooses certain people to grant powers, depending on their actual actions. Who you are and what you do determines whether one God or another will take notice of you and maybe grant you powers.

There’s little room in the way of “believing” in the Gods; when you see you have been granted a special power, you know that something’s definitely up. On the other end, Clark’s adage “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” may be applied, too. Within the lore of the game, there are people who question their nature and go on “Godseek” expeditions within the confines of the Labyrinth wormhole to try to uncover their mysteries. Similarly to how our A Garden in Hell campaign explores the origins of the Ravager, we plan to devote an entire campaign to this topic and we hope it will become an exciting perspective on Gods in a science fiction setting.


Tell me a little about this ideological conflict! What about it encouraged you to make it a major point of the game?

Similarly to forces of nature, the moral bearings rewarded by the Gods have ended up merging with certain civilisations, and shaping their progress and destiny. This means that there are species leaning towards the moral path set by some Gods, while others lean towards others, making them fundamentally different in their approach to cultural interaction both within their own civilisation and with other civilisations. This is the case of the Corvo and the Iz’kal, each leaning respectively to individualism or collectivism, and this is what sparks their constant conflict.

When two such species find each other, there are three options: they fight, they flee or they cooperate. Right now, the Corvo and the Iz’kal must cooperate if they want to avoid total anihilation: the Ravager, a powerful mutant species, is on a destruction sprue through the known universe. Of course, this doesn’t mean they don’t still have their conflicts, and they still fight clandestine, proxy wars to arrest each other’s development in anticipation to the defeat of the Ravager threat.

We made this conflict such an integral part of the setting because we believe it raises very interesting issues that are worth considering and discussing. Both these species have very different approaches to society, each with their rights and their wrongs, and thinking about alien societies can put things in perspectives that are not as apparent if one was to analyse the same issues in the real world.


How do the base mechanics of the cards work, and what do you think is expanded by including the miniatures?
The card mechanics are the aspect we are the most proud of. Many people are extremely skeptic about it at first, but after playing a couple of rounds most people gets it. We need to stress that we didn’t create this mechanic just to be different, or as a gimmick.

It is an honest to God attempt to make a game where the players are in charge of their efforts, as represented by the values of the cards they play. The hand of cards represents the stamina of each character, and, just like in real life, each character can choose when to make a big effort (playing a high card), and when to conserve energies (playing a low card, which often triggers a rule to draw a new card). As you run out of cards, your character gets exhausted and has more and more limited options.

A very common misconception is that people can just attempt banal actions to get rid of low cards. Because you only have the chance to play cards when you are contested, or, as we call it in Faith, confronted, there’s really no possibility for this. When you play your low cards, you will be putting yourself in danger.

Lastly, it’s important to mention that the cards are not proprietary: you can use any regular poker deck to play FAITH.

The miniatures do not change the core mechanics of the game. It’s just that it can be much more immersive for some people to play with a cool set of minis!


What are some of your favorite elements about the available species for play?

What we like the most are the different roleplaying possibilities that each of their civilisations bring to the table. If you are in the Corvosphere, you can basically do whatever you want, but nobody will look out for you. It’s like a cyberpunk jungle: each for their own, and only if you know how to get others to value your specific skillset you will manage to make a life for yourself. On the other hand of the spectrum, we have the Iz’kal state. There, all your basic needs are taken care of, but you can’t own anything, and you must comply with the state’s orders, which will use your skills for the benefit of the state. If you are in a Raag world, you’ll need to be very careful with your approach to technology and how you maintain it, and you may become a renowned scavenger. Lastly, if you are a human, you won’t be the center of the universe for a change. Humans in the universe of Faith have their work cut out for them: they must either bend their knee and serve the corvo; survive in the wasteland; or become part of the Human Front and seek the foundation of a free Earth.
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Thanks so much to Burning Games for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading and that you’ll check out FAITH: The Sci-Fi RPG and Miniatures on Kickstarter. Make sure to share the post if you think your friends might be interested in FAITH, too!

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Five or So Questions with Slade Stolar on Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers

Today Slade Stolar is back for an interview about this new project, Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers! It’s currently on Kickstarter and Slade and I nearly crossed emails contacting each other about it! It sounds like a fantastic adventure, and I’m excited to share Slade’s responses with you.

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Tell me a little about Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers. What excites you about it?


It would be weird to say “everything”, right? — I’ve had the core image of the game in my head for a long while. There are three thieves in ragged, dirt-smeared clothes running through smog-filled alleyways in a late-medieval city. They arrive at junction where there are government officers (some kind of police patrol) with lanterns and barking dogs cutting off their escape. The thieves get noticed. They grin slightly, and activate a device that turns them as immaterial as the smog. They drift away, making their escape.

After publishing The Indie Hack, and seeing how the core rules resonated with certain people, I wanted to write a game that could make that scene happen. I think I’ve done that.

The main components of the game that excite me are the relationship system, which revolves around the classical four humours (sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic, and choleric), and the proto-industrial setting, which revolves around all kinds of pseudo-science or non-science (trepanning, feng shui, astrology, numerology, etc.), and all of which are very real within the setting.

What kind of action can we see in the game – fast fights, stealth? How do the mechanics support it?

One of the great things about this game is that you tailor your experience based on the Patron of the characters. If you are looking for a stealthy game, perhaps your Patron wants valuable artwork stolen to complete her collection. If you’re itching for a fight, perhaps your Patron is a gang boss, who wants to muscle out rival gangs. Maybe you’ve got a Patron who wants notoriety and influence, and you end up doing a lot of socially focussed missions. The core mechanic is the same for all of these: with good dice rolls, you collect little chunks of narrative control called “details”, just as in our previous game, The Indie Hack. Once you’ve got a certain number in your favour, you succeed. But, if, along the way, you get some bad rolls and collect a certain number of details against you, you’re out of commission. The game ends up being quick and intense, as an extreme roll can grant up to two or three details out of a total of three to five. Because rolls are so important and dangerous, players will want to role-play up until a point of crisis before grabbing the dice. I would say, you can’t play this game slowly: it’s a crisis machine.

I’d like to hear more about the relationship system! How does it function, and what was the inspiration?


I think the inspiration was a few random mentions of this in Shakespeare. It was interesting to research this strange classical interpretation of psychology based on the liquids that flow in the body (and fits well with this setting based on pseudo-science and non-science). You have a primary humour that is your outward facade (maybe you’re melancholic, meaning reclusive and depressive, but cautious and prudent). As you interact more intimately with people, you show them other aspects of your personality, i.e., your secondary humours (maybe, in front of your fellow player characters you act sanguine, meaning smothering and judgemental, but joyful and optimistic); you make a list of these characters. Once you’ve written four people under a secondary humour, you have a bit of a crisis of personality (who am I, really?) and shift your primary humour over. It encourages you to think a bit about how we’re always performing our personality. I think it’s more dynamic and engaging than nature/demeanor (of Vampire) or alignment (of general fantasy games).

What are some setting elements you really love and how do they interact?

In terms of world-building, I really like the hierarchy I’ve set up (as a player, I’ll hate it and want to see it destroyed). In contrast to the typical fantasy setting, which has lots of monarchies, Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers is a mixed oligarchy, where a highly corrupt technocratic class rules the masses and the aristocracy has its own power system outside (often above) the law. The players are at the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder, and that’s why the accept the help of a Patron. The Patron helps them to feel powerful, by giving them alchemical powers, but only while performing these (often illegal) missions. The setting really feeds into the character motivations and the types of adventures that the players will go on. I want characters to take on the bureaucracy and lose. I want them to try to mingle with the high-society types and be humiliated. Other times, I want them to win.

In terms of mechanical moving parts, I like the “looking for trouble” tables; each district has random interesting happenings that can draw the players into larger conflicts or expose hidden parts of the setting.

You talked about the thieves and their adventures – what other types of characters and experiences would people often find in Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers?
I don’t know that I can answer this one, at least, any more than I could predict what a given group will do with a given game. Just to be clear, I’m okay with thieves of the Robin Hood type, but I’m guessing that your Patron doesn’t have that many scruples. A big part of this game is navigating a difficult moral path, although that sounds a bit dull. Basically, I want characters to experience hard decisions, pride, pain, shame, confusion, and split loyalties. I want them to do things that they wouldn’t do if it were their choice, and have to deal with the consequences just the same. At the end, as in much of Shakespeare, nearly everyone is dead. I want the characters to lead intense, dangerous, tragic lives.

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Thanks so much to Slade for the interview! I hope you’ve all liked what you’ve read, and that you’ll give the Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers Kickstarter a gander!

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Five or So Questions with Fraser Ronald on Swords Edge

Today I have an interview with Fraser Ronald on his current project, Sword’s Edge, which is on Kickstarter now! Fraser answered some of my questions about the updated, refined Sword’s Edge game below! 

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Tell me a little about Sword’s Edge. What excites you about it?

What I love about Sword’s Edge is how it allows for evocative and strong characters while trying to lower the amount of work required by GMs so that they can focus on facilitating the story. The characters are built out of ideas and descriptions, so it’s as easy as “tell me about the character you want to play,” write down the response, take a bunch of descriptions out of that and you have your character. For the GM, it’s very easy to run improvisational games – which is my preferred method – by boiling down most mechanical obstacles to a few choices guided by a couple of tables. There’s no dice rolling for the GM, and the mechanics are simple enough that one can spend one’s time helping to keep the story moving.

Players get invested in characters that work mechanically pretty much how they described them narratively, and the GM gets to spend their time helping those characters be awesome, sometimes by creating really challenging obstacles, and other times creating scenes where they get to show their uber competence.

What are the origins of Sword’s Edge mechanically? What got the game going at the start, and what are important elements of the game in it’s final form?

Sword’s Edge is really an amalgam of ideas from a bunch of different games. Its nearest relation is PDQ by Chad Underkoffler by way of Jaws of the Six Serpents by Tim Gray. This was the game that led me to design Sword Noir, which was the direct ancestor of Sword’s Edge. Along with PDQ, I would say that important influences came from the Shadow of Yesterday by Clinton R. Nixon; Fate 3.0 by Rob Donoghue, Fred Hicks, and Leonard Balsera; Lady Blackbird by John Harper, and Old School Hack by Kirin Robinson. These all had impact on the designs of Sword Noir and Kiss My Axe, which had Sword’s Edge at their core and through which Sword’s Edge developed.

There are a few keys in my mind to Sword’s Edge. The use of descriptive Qualities to create characters allows players to pretty much play whatever they can imagine. That only players roll dice helps remove one task from the GM and a very abstract action system further allows all activities to run through the same mechanics – there are no sub-systems in Sword’s Edge. Finally, the Initiative system really changes how one approaches actions as once a character has Initiative, it is necessary to take a risk to seize that Initiative. Only as an active character can one affect change, so Initiative is super important and can lead to some risky actions as PCs try to seize it from tough opponents.

What are the fictional inspirations for Sword’s Edge? 

Because Sword’s Edge is a generic RPG, it’s not really rooted in fiction, however the stretch goal is for “Lawless Heaven,” my homage to Korean action cinema. I’ve been enamoured of Korean action movies since I saw Nowhere to Hide in 1999. Since then, Korean movies have continued to improve and are now some of the best on the planet. Recent years have seen some insanely great action and crime movies, like Man from Nowhere and A Bittersweet Life. Then there are the neo-noirs, like Oldboy and The Yellow Sea. These are absolutely riveting movies. So “Lawless Heaven” tries to boil down the experience of a Korean actioner into a one-shot, specifically built to be run at conventions. It includes a discussion of using it as either then beginning or part of an ongoing campaign, but the scenes presented are for a single adventure arc.
Some of the example characters appear to be Asian (1). How did you prepare to write about non-Canadian characters, fictions, and backgrounds? Did you find it challenging?
The characters on the Kickstarter page are from “Lawless Heaven,” so they are Korean. The action is set in the industrial city of Ulsan, which is home to a Hyundai Motors car factory and the largest shipyard in the world, owned by Hyundai Heavy Industries. In the adventure, I try to introduce some interesting aspects of Korean culture – like the lack of firearms in general and the prevalence in certain areas of drinking tents or pojangmacha – but the story is designed so that it would be easy to set it elsewhere.

On a more Kickstarter-level question, how have you worked to integrate your past products into the release of this product, while still ensuring Sword’s Edge gets priority in attention?

Having two successful Kickstarters under my belt allowed me to approach the whole process with a little less concern and stress. Also, for backers, I have a record of meeting my commitments and delivering promises product, so I think that improves the chance people will be willing to put their money down.
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Thank you Fraser for answering my questions! I hope you all enjoyed reading and that you’ll check out Sword’s Edge on Kickstarter!

[(1 – Brie here!) This originally said Chinese in this question because I wasn’t sure based on the pictures and Googled last names. I try really hard to be better at this judgment, but the images aren’t very clear – I have no better excuse. I changed it so that it is clearer to my readers, but wanted to let you know that I did fuck up, and I’ll try to do better next time.]

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Five or So Questions with John Adamus on Noir World

Today I have an interview with designer and well-known editor John Adamus on his new RPG product, Noir World, which is on Kickstarter right now! Having known John on Twitter & face to face for a fair amount of time now, I know that an incredible amount of work has gone into this game, and I wanted to talk about his final product. See his responses below!

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

Noir World is a collaborative Apocalypse World hack where everyone gets together to create a Movie using film noir archetypes, dealing with the terrible outcomes of their emotional decisions. The game uses a variety of film and television techniques to express film noir and character development to give people a chance to be both player and GM, ideally letting people tell whatever kind of story they want. 
What excites me most about this is that people are going to get to tell these stories using a framework that prizes agency and decisions. You get to make whatever character you want in whatever way you want, and there’s enough modular elements (you pick the time period, you build the City) so that everyone gets to help this Movie happen. This is a game built on collaboration and empowerment.


What were your inspirations, and guidance in development, for the themes and fiction of Noir World? 


I divide my inspirations into 2 camps: films noir like The Big Sleep, The Third Man, Night of the Hunter and TV shows with detectives like the Nero Wolfe mysteries; Murder, She Wrote; Magnum PI; Remington Steele. I make the distinction because they’re two ends of a range from serious (the films) to far less so (television), though they all have a lot of the same DNA when it comes to storytelling components and methods. While the material covers completely different subjects, that all becomes somewhat superficial when you look past the crime-of-the-week or the good-guy-bad-guy-binary and look at how characters relate to each other and how what happens in the story affects those relationships. Taking any of the source material and finding that emotional mechanism informed a lot how the game got onto the page.

Especially early on, this meant I could sift through material not because it featured the same actors or the same plot, but because it represented certain emotional choices or consequences – X amount of shows and movies involve betraying a lover or revealing at least one person’s intimate secrets, for instance, and it kept the design process very rooted in how I wanted the game and ultimately the players to feel when playing. Everything from the art to the example text spawned from locking down the idea that feelings and relationships are at the heart of the game. 

What are the archetypes in Noir World, and what are some aspects you like about them?

There are 20 Roles a player can choose from in Noir World, from the expected ones like The Good Cop or The Dirty Cop or The Fatale to ones that maybe don’t come up a lot like The Disgraced Doctor or The Musician. What excited me about fleshing them out and making them available for play was that I got to put my own spin on these tropes, which was often giving them small touches of pop culture or referencing something that’s slightly anachronistic or unexpected so that no Role feels “stuck” being played a certain way. For The Career Criminal, I got a chance to make references to Leverage, and The Gambler has quite a few mentions of the Kenny Rogers song. At first I was worried these small nods to non-noir would pull people out of the play experience, but I’ve found the opposite to be true: it makes them laugh while keeping them connected to what’s going on.

I love how open and adaptable the Roles turned out to be. One of the big issues for me with the source material is that it’s very phobic and bigoted, there’s sexism and racism overt and otherwise, and that’s not something I wanted to mechanize or condone in play, so I’m really proud that the Roles can be played by any person in any way they way want even if it wouldn’t be “true to film noir”. I want it to be more true to the player’s wants and interests than condoning 70-year-old social conventions. We can do better.

How did you take Apocalypse World/Powered by the Apocalypse mechanics and make them work with the cinematic, somewhat gritty world of noir stories?

I took it all apart. I had to. I seldom play a game without houserules, mainly because a lot of games have a lot of moving parts, and I don’t want to stop to consult a book when an idea pops in my head. This led to a lot of deconstructing and questioning how and why the rules are what they are, then going backwards to the games one generation removed and continuing to question mechanics like “why do we roll dice when X happens?” “why do we always look at the GM at that moment?” and then asking myself if I wanted to make a game that kept doing stuff like that. When I found out that I didn’t want to do the same thing, or just file off all the serial numbers with a re-skin of what was already there, I realized I didn’t have to come at this like a game designer first and a film/TV/story nerd second, I could reverse that.

So I put the focus on the story elements: how plot gets made, how characters take actions, how characters interact and then I put game design on top. It was both easier (because I kept the focus on the story structure) and harder (because game mechanics are popular and re-used because they’re familiar and easy) but I think I struck a balance where the game is about telling stories that feel very baked in genre and give players enormous creative freedom and permission while having mechanics that don’t get in the way because they’re neither particularly complex or numerous. The focus stays on the story, which lets the story go in whatever direction the group feels it needs to.

In what way do you think Noir World really captures your favorite things about the noir genre, and puts them in the hands of players and Directors to make a good film?

Film noir is about being faced with terrible choices that you know will have some awful consequences, making the choice and then finding out there are consequences worse than what you thought. You didn’t just lose your job and your marriage, you’ve been convicted of murder because your mistress gave you up to the cops. The severity of consequences and the natural downward evolution of consequences, in a worsening spiral make for really interesting and tragic characters. I don’t think it would be as much fun to have a terrible character that just kept having worse and worse things happen to them if they had limited or no agency in those events. In Noir World, a Role gets themselves into that position and then has to deal with things, it’s the very emotional version of “Make your bed, now lie in it.” People are invested in and have a hand in their own emotional rollercoaster, which I think is what makes the experience connect with people in an active way – it’s their choices and what happens because they were pro-active, rather than just reacting to a GM saying something like “since you rolled a 12, this happens.”

I don’t like games where the players can’t get creative except in some non-meaningful way. The game where we’re all knights and the only thing that could distinguish us might be our weapons or whether or not someone speaks in a funny voice does not have long term appeal to me. The characters don’t feel like anything more than plot-tools for the GM to use, and that’s not how I want to spend my gaming nights, especially if the GM had a bad day at work and the adventure gets boring or long-winded. Noir is about choice and consequence, so to me that screams “agency” and “empowering players to be creative.” A lot of the best games I’ve seen have players who are normally very hesitant to take a leadership role or a very decisive position, because this game is a permission slip to say what happens and people will help each other to get where they need to be, because everyone should have a voice at the table, and everyone should have the opportunity to develop and use their agency in non-selfish ways to work together to tell a great story.

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Awesome! Thanks so much, John, for giving us some info about Noir World! I hope you all will check it out on Kickstarter, and share the interview for others to read!

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Five or So Questions on Tales of the Warrior Princesses

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

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

Brennan: Tales of the Warrior Princesses is a Kickstarter for a setting and adventures taking fairy tale princesses and turning them into the active heroes of their own stories. We’re funding two books, Warrior Princesses in the Realm of Everafter, a setting book that includes character sheets for all the princesses and details their world, and Tales of the Warrior Princesses, a book of 11 adventures, each focusing on one of the princesses as the star of an adventure going up against the enemies in her realm.
What excites me about this project is taking these characters and turning them into role-playing game heroes. The person who conceived the project, John Carimando, is really passionate and excited about this, and he is committed to making sure that the Tales and any future projects are written by women. He’s been very generous with his concept, putting it out there for other writers to take and really make their own. I love seeing these new stories come in and the great creativity that’s being applied. I think this project is going to create something great for parents with kids looking to get them into role-playing, and because we are using 5th edition, it’s got a broad appeal to people in the hobby that I usually don’t reach with my very indie-focused games.

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

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


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

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

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


John: The overarching themes are sorority, friendship, and adventure. The Warrior Princesses are depicted more as freedom-fighters than royalty (even though, some have noble backgrounds). The island they live on is called Avalon, and hold council at a round table under a silver dome, obvious references to Knights of the Round Table.
The writers get to expand the game universe and get to showcase their style of adventure. The consistent structural each Tale is different content wise and in presentation.

Brennan: We have a team of really talented writers working on all the new material for the Kickstarter. It’s a real dream-team for this project. We brought in an author for each princess so that each one has a special perspective and feel. As we continue to develop adventures and other material for the world we want to keep working with these same creators.
Danielle Ackley-McPhail: Snow White
Jacqueline Bryk: Scheherazade
Elsa S. Henry: Moira
James Mendez Hodes: Hua Mulan
Betsy Isaacson: Cinderella
Kira Magrann: Briar Rose
Darcy Ross & Rebekah McFarland: Josephine
Willow Palecek: Rapunzel
Ishki Ricard: Yokopa
Beth Rimmels: Belle
Monica Speca: Thalassa


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

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

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

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Five or So Questions with Anna Kreider and Andrew Medeiros on The Watch

Today I have an interview with Anna Kreider and Andrew Medeiros on their new game, The Watch! It’s now on Kickstarter and Anna and Andrew wanted to tell you all about it. Check out the interview below!

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Tell me a little about The Watch. What excites you about it?

Anna: The Watch is a low-fantasy PBTA game about women and femmes/non-binary femmes who are fighting to retake their homeland from the Shadow – a darkly sorcerous threat that has the power to possess men and use them for its own violent ends. So much has already been lost to the Shadow – land, loved ones, and traditions. But their people have come together, forming a new fighting force from those able to resist the Shadow, which they call the Watch.

As for what excites me about it, that’s a tough call… Probably the thing I find most exciting, though, is the fact that The Watch creates stories that typically are reserved for male protagonists. When I was younger, the stories that I craved (and wasn’t able to find) were stories about women who fight, so it’s super great having created a game that tells the stories that I wanted to hear. And it’s even better to see other people get just as excited about the chance to play out these stories!

Andrew: I’ve always loved military dramas, I grew up with them and they really excite me. The chance to co-design a game like The Watch that aims to capture the feel and tone of those stories has been a real delight; and taking the ‘band-of-brother’ trope and inverting it to include people who are usually excluded from the genre makes me very very happy.

What have you done with the PbtA system to fit the themes and play expectations of The Watch?

Andrew: First off, we went with a ‘less is more approach’ for The Watch; streamlining the harm mechanics and simplifying weapons and gear, this let’s us focus on who the characters are, not what they are. We’ve also added in new mechanics to reflect the hardships of war and the stressors therein: Jaded and Weariness. Jaded makes your characters better and more experienced soldiers but comes at the cost of burn-out down the road (not unlike Corruption from my earlier game: Urban Shadows), and Weariness is short term fatigue and stress that, if left unchecked, can lead to your character doing or saying something hurtful that they’ll later regret. Basically, war is hard on people, and we have lots of ways to show that pressure.

Have you done anything with character relationship mechanics, and if so, what have you done and how are you integrating it into the fiction and the rest of the mechanics?

Andrew: Yep, we designed a new relationship mechanic called Camaraderie for the game. Camaraderie is earned as points with other characters (and NPCs). It isn’t a representation of how good of friends you are, but simply how much potential you have to be so. When you’re in need of help with a roll, you need to look to your comrades for aid, and the Camaraderie you have with others is what let’s them help you out. In essence, the more good will you’ve stored up with others, the more potential there will be for them to help you in meaningful ways in the future. Many of the basic moves play with this new system of currency, allowing you to spend or earn it in unique ways.

With a focus on telling stories about fighting divorced from a primarily masculine point of view, how do you frame violence in the game?

Anna: As Drew mentioned, we streamlined the harm mechanics and simplified how dealing and taking harm works – and generally I find that the number of mechanics you have supporting a given outcome (like violence), the more players tend to engage with that outcome.

But also, perhaps more importantly, with any PBTA game, the basic moves are what define what sort of actions the PCs will be taking, and thus what the major story beats in any campaign will be. And while we have a basic move to Prevent Bloodshed, we don’t have a basic move to inflict violence, and that really informs how players approach the issue of violence in general. And something we do have are moves based around building and strengthening relationships with the people around you.

Additionally, The Watch borrows from the structure of Night Witches, which has two distinct phases of play, each with its own moves and system. There are missions, in which characters engage in the military campaign against the Shadow’s forces, and “normal” play, which is more normal PBTA-style play. So on your missions, you’re going out and engaging in violence against Shadow forces, but when you come back to “normal” play, that’s when you’re falling back on the structure informed by the basic moves, which de-center violence in favor of other modes of interpersonal relations.

So violence is still very much a part of the game. But it’s framed very much as a necessary evil, in fighting for your existence against the Shadow, and when it’s engaged in outside of a mission, there are mechanics that specifically call that out as toxic and socially maladaptive.

What elements of The Watch do you hope will come out when people play it?

Anna: Obviously, given the premise of the game, there’s a level of gender commentary that is baked into the game, and I’m really happy about how excited some people have been to engage with that. But even if that’s not your thing, it’s really great seeing people telling stories with wonderfully diverse casts of women and nonbinary people about the struggle against injustice. And I hope that people will get as excited about the diversity of weird, wonderful, and diverse characters that get created as I do.

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Thanks so much to Anna and Andrew for the interview! Check out The Watch on Kickstarter now if it sounds your style!

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Five or So Questions with Storybrewers Games on Alas for the Awful Sea

Today I have an interview with the creators of Alas for the Awful Sea, a PbtA game currently on Kickstarter noted as being about “why people hate, and what they fear.” I imagine you can see why I was excited to interview them! Hayley Gordon and Veronica Hendro (Vee) from Storybrewers Games answered my questions below!

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Tell me a little about Alas for the Awful Sea. What excites you about it?

Vee: Alas for the Awful Sea is a tabletop RPG about politics, folklore, and the human heart set in a rural 19th century UK town desperate to survive. You can read more about it on Kickstarter and our website. What excites me about it is the game’s focus on a grey moral landscape. The setting focuses on the toughness of daily life and the choices people make in order to survive.
Hayley: Damn it Vee, that’s also what excites me most! But I also get excited about the narrative focus of the game, and the way the Apocalypse World system allows us to zoom in on small moments, and ask questions of the world.

What were your goals for integrating setting and theme in Alas for the Awful Sea? What do you want to see mirrored between emotion and fiction?
Hayley: I was lucky, the setting and theme integrated itself! The themes in Alas really arose from what was happening historically at the time. Poverty, crime, and political turmoil characterised the rural experience in 1800s UK, especially in Wales, Scotland and Ireland. We’ve really tried to tease that out by incorporating conflicts as part of our recommended process for creating a story in the world of Alas. Emotionally, my aim is for players to experience the difficult and desperation these themes present, and the experience of navigating that. So the emotion sort of arises from the fiction directly.
Vee: I agree, and I’ll just add from my perspective of the art direction and design side of things that for me, what we wanted to achieve with the integration of setting and theme is encapsulated in the cover illustration of the book. The muted colours of the setting reflects and amplifies the internal struggles of the woman which is a strong theme in our book.
What have you done with Powered by the Apocalypse mechanics to make the game fit the game concept?
Hayley: The basic moves have remained fairly similar, although we have updated them to fit the theme and tone of the game. Mechanically, the theme comes through in Alas’ character sheets and custom moves. We were really excited to hit a stretch goal in the Kickstarter recently that will allow us to add “descriptors” – attributes like clansman and lover which will come with their own unique bond and custom moves. These have the potential to marry the theme and mechanics of the game even further. 
Vee: But I think, beyond the mechanics of the game and to the way stories are told in Alas, we changed the way an ‘adventure’ is plotted out. We adapted the idea of ‘fronts’ into ‘encounter families.’ Each family is centred around a central piece of the fiction, such as a person or place, but also a central conflict. Within the family sit individual encounters that GMs can draw on when they feel it is most appropriate.
What have you done for research for the setting and concept?
Hayley: I read a lot of history around the period, including 3rd party sources, but also journals which I found really useful for understanding the concerns of the time. My most exciting find however was a book of folktales published in the 19th century called The Wind and the Waves. The author had lived in the Hebrides, and had recorded many of the folktales in the form of stories that were told to him. He also writes in this amazing and very moving poetic style. If I could capture a small fraction of that pathos in Alas I would be stoked.
What are some of the stories you think can be told with Alas for the Awful Sea?
Hayley: At its heart, Alas is for telling stories about conflict between ideologies, and the tough choices this creates. It’s best for telling very personal stories with lots at stake to the individuals within them. It’s not great at telling the stories of heroes triumphing over evil, or of battles and large scale conflicts.
Vee: In terms of the specifics, the kind of things you might see include sea voyages, the ecosystems of small towns and rural areas, attempts to seek out or defend from the supernatural, conflicts between families or between the rich and the poor. But I’m sure those GMing Alas will invent amazing stories and ideas we never could have dreamed of!
Hayley: It’s more about the emotions and drive behind the story than exactly where it’s set and what happens with Alas I think.
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Thanks so much to Hayley and Vee for doing this interview! Make sure to check out Alas for the Awful Sea on Kickstarter now if this piqued your interest, and share the interview with your friends!

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Five or So Questions with Elizabeth Chaipraditkul on The Monster

Today I have an interview with Elizabeth Chaipraditkul about her current project, The Monster, which is on Kickstarter! The Monster is an illustrated novel with a haunted house tucked inside. Check out more below!

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Tell me a little about The Monster. What excites you about it?

I was a really weird kid and while going through old stuff of mine my mom kept I came across a whole slew of books I created between the ages of seven and eight. I typed up and illustrated all these stories and then got my teachers to take them to the school library so they could be sewn together.

The Monster is one of these stories. Reading it back as an adult it’s obvious writing was a way for me to deal with a lot of things and this story is mainly about sexuality, fear, and death. I thought it would be fun to re-write this story as an adult and get someone to illustrate it. And since I am now a big gamer, we’re also turning the story into a system-neutral giant gameable dungeon. Gennifer Bone is the amazing illustrator who will be making the new image and Glynn Seal of Monkey Blood Designs will be making the maps.

In the end, the book we will produce with the Kickstarter will have the original story, a new story, and an epic map with room descriptions to explore.

What are the type of stories you would like players to tell in the dungeon?

There is a lot you could do in the dungeon. The first, and I guess most obvious, would be a dungeon crawl – killing a bunch of monsters and getting the heck out of there. However, the dungeon is essentially one huge and weird haunted house map, so there are a lot possibility for play. It could set the scene for a really intense Monsterhearts pay session – teenage drama in a house that is trying to kill the players. Or it could be a place your coterie of vampires have to explore in Vampire the Masquerade maybe a few local neonates have gone missing and the Prince sends in the players to investigate. The red thread through all these stories is gonna be exploration and the fun is gonna be seeing what is behind every door of the house.

What are some ways you explored those topics – sexuality, fear, and death – in The Monster?

I’ve always seen the written word as something you can play around with and try out things that may seem strange or exciting. In the monster I explore the themes of sexuality, death, and fear in a few rather funny ways. When the children are faced with the monster chasing them, in fear for his mortal life one of the boys reminiscences about home and the smell of his mother’s cooking. As a kid a played with the idea of death and what I would think of just before my life was snatched away from me – apparently my mom was a great cook.

Likewise, in the story I toy with the ideas of sexuality and death, two concepts that have always been tied to one another in literature (albeit more elegantly than what my eight year old self could produce). I wrote about the fear of bodily exposure and what that meant to a little girl who was scared.

What are you doing with the dungeon to make it system-neutral while still packing a good punch?

What we aim to do is give GMs a lot of information about each room – weird things their players can find, experience, and speak to. Since the dungeon is designed to be system neutral, we are gonna make sure there is enough information for GMs to use. We’ll also include a lot of random generators for the rooms (at least one for each) so the dungeon is repayable and strange. For example, we have a limb removal generator, roll 1d4, and one of your limbs falls off – perfectly intact and still moving – good luck getting it reattached.


What sort of new story are you hoping to tell to accompany the original, and what themes does it bring forth?

Mainly, I’d like to delve into all the information I put on each page. The original story jumps from one place to another in the truly hectic style of a kid and I would like to add some continuity. Like at one point in the story a young boy’s arm falls off – it just falls off and that is about it. I’d like to go into why and how.

Also, the original story is quite comical which was totally unintentional, but as an adult you just have to read it and chuckle. I’d like to add some real horror to the story, while still keeping the soul of the old story.

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Awesome! Thanks so much Liz for answering my questions about The Monster. If the project sounds interesting to you, my readers, please check it out on Kickstarter!

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Five or So Questions with Chris Longhurst on Pigsmoke

Today I have an interview with Chris Longhurst about the new Powered by the Apocalypse wizard school game, Pigsmoke! Pigsmoke is currently in its last few days on Kickstarter. Check out the interview below.

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Tell me a little about Pigsmoke. What excites you about it?

Pigsmoke is a game about playing jaded academics at a magical college — an amalgamation of Harry Potter and The Thick Of It, to use two cultural touchstones that everyone probably knows about.

What excites me about Pigsmoke — or any game, really — is the potential of the stories it helps you tell. And Pigsmoke is, as far as I know, breaking new ground by telling stories about the lives of academics under impossible demands. Like, ‘magic school’ RPGs are plentiful but you’re always playing the students, and RPGs where you play wizards are plentiful, and RPGs where you play academics are… Ars Magica. But Pigsmoke sits in a neat little intersection between all those that none of them really explore.

Also it’s PbtA, and I’m a huge fan of PbtA as a system.

What have you done with the PbtA system to make it suit the concept and themes of Pigsmoke?

I haven’t done much with the PbtA system, at least not mechanically — there’s a system for tracking time-consuming actions that acts as a limit on how quickly you can do certain things, and I’ve replaced ‘+1 forward’ with a system of advantage and disadvantage stolen pretty much entirely from 5th edition D&D — but I’ve completely replaced all the basic moves to more accurately simulate the life of an academic in a black comedy about bureaucracy. (Imagine a lengthy digression here about how in PbtA the fiction is the mechanics, so changing the fictional triggers and outcomes of the basic moves is changing the mechanics of the game…)

For example, let’s say you want someone to do you a favour. There are no moves for simply asking someone for a favour; if you want someone to do you a solid you either have to butter them up (with the schmooze move), or shout at them until they do what you want (with the scathe move). In fact if you do just ask someone for a favour, that’s likely to trigger an MC move and those are almost always bad for you.

As a result, in the world of Pigsmoke it’s impossible to have a straightforward conversation and exchange of favours. You have to lie to people or intimidate them, and then deal with the complex social tangles those actions generate.

Unless you’re the Networker, which is a playbook built around just being able to ask people for favours, or in the Department of Mindbending, which contains several moves for simply compelling obedience. But in those cases you’ve specifically chosen to be that sort of character doing that sort of thing.

How does magic conceptually and mechanically work and integrate in Pigsmoke?

Conceptually magic in Pigsmoke is vague as anything — it’s meant to be defined as necessary by each group. All that’s required for Pigsmoke to function is a) that magic is something that can be researched and studied in an academic setting and b) that it’s something that can be taught to other people. For other questions about the nature of magic — for example ‘Can anyone learn it, or only the gifted?’ — the real question is ‘Is this relevant to the game right now?’ If no, it’s not important. If yes, make the decision at the table and that’s how it works in that game.

Mechanically, all characters have a Sorcery stat and (except the Fake) access to the cast a spell move. When you use your magic to solve a problem you roll cast a spell and on a hit the problem’s solved — at a greater or lesser cost. If the magic you’re using is outside your department’s specialty, you roll at disadvantage. On top of that the department playbooks have various moves which address specific use of magic — maintaining a mob of walking dead if you’re with Life and Death, predicting the future for Foresight, and so on.

If you’re familiar with Masks you can probably see the influence of the ‘don’t sweat the details’ way that system handles superpowers, which was a strong inspiration for this approach.

What is the fiction of Pigsmoke like?

Goofy.

I mean, it doesn’t have to be that way — the fiction of Pigsmoke is wide open for definition at the table and has room for black, black comedy or even totally serious play if the group is up for it — but pretty much all the prompts in the book lean goofy because that’s the kind of game I run.

Who do you hope will enjoy Pigsmoke and what have you done to make it inclusive for more audiences?

Well naturally I hope everyone enjoys Pigsmoke. I wrote it using singular they instead of he or she, tried to keep explicitly gendered options out of the playbooks (and made sure that the sample names span as many nationalities as I could think of), and I’ll be paying special attention to the characters depicted in the art — I want a good mix of genders, ethnicities, body types, able-bodied vs not, etc. My intent is that anyone should be able to look at this book and see someone at least a little bit like them.

That said, as a hetero-cis white man I’m not really the best at judging this sort of thing — so I’ve hired Katherine Cross (https://twitter.com/Quinnae_Moon) to do a diversity consult for me, and write some additional material about marginalisation and academia so that those issues aren’t just quietly swept under the rug. She’s agreed to do the job but I haven’t seen what she’s written yet, so I can’t really tell you much more than that.

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Thanks so much to Chris for the interview! If you’ve liked reading the interview and have an interest, check out Pigsmoke on Kickstarter right away – only a few days left!

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