five or so – Page 16

Five or So Questions with Alessandro Piroddi on Touched by Evil

Today I have an interview with Alessandro Piroddi on the new game Touched by Evil! It sounds really interesting and seems like just the right kind of game for Halloween weekend. Check it out on DriveThruRPG here and give the interview below a read!
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Tell me a little about Touched by Evil. What excites you about it?

I love horror stories.

But the word “horror” can refer to wildly different things.

The specific brand of horror I love is the one that is all about a dreadful atmosphere, a creeping sense of unease, an indefinable sense of wrongness that has no obvious or rational source. One type of narrative that draws heavily on such elements is the Lovecraftian one, with its old fashioned rhythm where tension builds slowly but surely, inexorably crawling up to a final horror.

Traditionally this kind of game experience is considered to be very difficult to achieve even by veteran roleplayers.

What excites me about Touched by Evil is that it manages to deliver exactly this, and that it does so by virtue of system design rather than personal player ability or knowledge of the horror genre.

Can you tell me a little about the mechanics used in Touched by Evil? Are they strictly narrative, or are there tools you use? Why did you choose those mechanics?

First of all the rules outline a clear and specific structure in regards of “who can say what when and how”. It is not as articulated as some of my other games, like FateLess, but it’s definitely not a game where you just freeform-chat your way through the session. Everyone has clear tasks and procedures to perform such tasks.

That said, there is next to no crunch involved.

Most of the structure is focused on achieving the right kind of scene framing and story rhythm; here the main inspirations are Montsegur 1244 and Psi*Run.

Dice are rolled when the fiction demands it, with simple and minimalist mechanics inspired by Cthulhu Dark.

Overall things are set up just so that the Players can feel safe and in control, right up to the point when they are not anymore and realise how safety was always just an illusion. This feeling of being powerless before something you don’t fully understand while at the same time being an obvious protagonist and active agent that CAN get much accomplished, is a focal element in how the game drives home its emotional point.

Where did you pull inspiration for the horror concepts put forth in Touched by Evil?

The first and most important source is with no doubt Graham Walmsley’s essay Stealing Cthulhu. It sparked the idea of doing a horror rpg, to begin with. It revamped my old love for Lovecraftian literature. And gave me the basic tools to build something that FELT like Lovecraft … this is pretty obvious in the name and structure of the five Chapters that make up the story’s Path.

Another hugely important source of inspiration and technical help has been the YouTube series Extra Credits. I found out that most of the video game design concepts they present could be applied verbatim (or almost) to tabletop rpg design. Plus, in time they have built a pretty amazing selection of videos focused on horror games, unpacking and analyzing things like the structure an nature of protagonists, locations, monsters and narrative tropes in the horror genre … with a even a full episode specifically on Cthulhu!

Which, I would like to highlight, says lots of things that would go hand in hand with the concepts expressed by Graham in his own analysis of Lovecraftian literature.

Another important helpful hand came from the book by Kenneth Hite Nightmares of Mine as it put into focus the difference between different kinds of “horror”, helping me discern what was it that I wanted to aim for. I actually talk more about this in an article on my blog, here.

How does an instant setup for Touched by Evil work?

The game presents a default setup that is both the fastest and most effective in terms of emotional impact: you play in this city, in this day and age, a normal person. That’s it.

Then a single Touched Character needs to be generated. This is the one protagonist moved, in turn, but all the players. The procedure is also quick and easy: pick a name, a profession and three “loved ones”, three people that the TC cares about and that are part of their current life.

Finally, a “catalyst event” is generated. This is the event that “touches” the protagonist and kickstarts the whole story. A brief chat, moderated by the game procedures, is all that is needed here.

Done. After that the first Moment of the story is played.

What kind of experiences do you think players will get out of the game, and why should people play it?

The reason to play is the same one for watching a horror movie : you enjoy being frightened (in a friendly and controlled environment).

It is effective because, although by the end of the game you might have a taste of the kind of horror you dismiss easily as “obviously impossible” (monsters, gore, supernatural stuff), the main part of the experience is built on a creeping sense of unease we all can face in real life: something feels off but you don’t know what, something completely normal starts looking weird and menacing but you don’t understand why, everything is as usual but you feel unsafe or even threatened. And then you get isolated, nobody believes you.

That stuff gets under your skin.

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Thanks so much to Alessandro for answering my questions about Touched by Evil! I hope you enjoyed the interview, and that it’s piqued your interest enough to check out the game on DriveThru! Have a good time creeping yourselves out. 🙂

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

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Five or So Questions with Amit Moshe on City of Mist

Hi everyone! I have an interview with Amit Moshe from Son of Oak about the new game City of Mist (click here for a free starter set download!), which is on Kickstarter right now! It’s a super-powered detective RPG. I saw in passing a few pieces of art for the game, and it immediately drew me in. After looking at the starter set I knew I had to talk to Amit, and he kindly agreed to an interview! Check out the info below.

Tell me a little about City of Mist. What excites you about it?

City of Mist is a comic-book noir game that explores what happens when ordinary people come in contact with legendary powers. The protagonists (called Gateways) are street-level individuals in whom a legendary force (called a Mythos) has awakened, manifesting as supernatural powers but also driving them to explore its nature and story. The game is set in a haunted modern city forever under the influence of “the Myst”, a mystical veil that hides the work of the legendary forces and makes everything seems ordinary to the unaware residents. As new Gateways, the PCs inevitably become involved in strange cases and unsolved mysteries that gradually lead them to discover who they are and what forces operate beyond the Myst.

There are so many things that excite me about City of Mist, it’s hard to know where to start! 🙂 First, I find the setting very compelling; I have been developing it over 10 years now. As a fan of comic-book noir in fiction like Netflix’s Daredevil and Jessica Jones, detective Batman, Fables etc., I just love the street-level perspective infused with the legendary or super-human, so this contrast is really at the center of the game, with the Mythoi and the Myst fighting over the characters’ lives.

Then, there’s the game mechanics: I really tried to tailor everything to create a cinematic game that will put the mystery, action, and drama at the center. The Roll+Tags system was a breakthrough because it allowed the characters to be totally open-ended, with no archetypes, no classes, and no attributes and still retain the crunch. The other main game aspect that I love is the Mythos vs. Logos non-linear character evolution: you have to sustain your Identities and explore your Mysteries or you start losing parts of who you are, submitting to your Mythos or the Myst. This puts the players’ attention right on the ordinary-legendary conflict I mentioned.

And of course, I love the art and the design. I’ve worked with Marcin for many years and I knew he was the one for City of Mist. His ability to bring characters and scenes to life is just out of this world. And Juancho and Manuel, the graphic designers, managed to find the unique City of Mist style that I was hoping for. So it’s all very exciting!

Where did you originally come up with the concepts for City of Mist, with the Myst and the Mythos – what inspired you?

I have always been into myths and legends, and particularly modern retelling of such stories. The idea that myths and legends encapsulate universal and eternal qualities that repeat in the personal lives of human beings throughout history and particularly in OUR personal lives today has always appealed to me. But it’s evident that most of us are just unaware of it and see life as something very mundane. So for me the Myst is actually real and I’ve just given it a name and put it in a role-playing game. I find that every person I meet has a Mythos inside them waiting to grow. So these game elements are actually an analogue to reality.

The actual moment of conceiving City of Mist was quite cool. I was walking on a street in Jerusalem late at night and you can imagine it’s a very special city. That street had an ancient mausoleum over 2000 years old (!!!) on it but the apartment buildings were built around it, so you walk down the street seeing apartment building, apartment building, ancient mausoleum, apartment building… so it’s very much the mythical built into the city. Just as I was passing it, there was a gust of wind ruffling the fallen leaves; dogs started barking; a car alarm went off; and I could hear police sirens in the distance. There was something about this moment, as if a veil was lifted for just a second, that gave me the idea for City of Mist.

Can you talk more about the mechanics, like how players might build their character and what happens when they encounter challenges?

The idea behind the City of Mist mechanics was to create a very cinematic game that is rules-light on the one hand but packs enough dramatic punch on the other. When facing challenges PCs can employ eight core moves that cover the actions typical to the super-powered noir genre (Investigate, Convince, Hit with All You’ve Got, Sneak Around to name a few) BUT every PC enhances the roll using their unique tags. One PC may Investigate using her hacker skills while another using his charm and good looks to glean information from an NPC. So the way players describe their character’s actions affects which tags they can add to the roll and gives each move a totally unique flavor. Damage and conditions, represented by ‘Statuses’, are also tag-based so PCs can get statuses like Injured and Restrained but also Happy, Frustrated, Infected, Supercharged or anything you can think of, and these have a tangible effect on the character’s abilities when taking actions related to the status.

Another key mechanic is the Mythos and Logos rules. In brief, your character is made of four themes divided between Mythos (legendary) and Logos (ordinary). Also, she has a set of four Mysteries and Identities related to her Mythos and Logos themes, mysteries being questions she seeks answers for and identities being statements she believes in. Should your character ever choose to ignore an opportunity to explore her mysteries or take action that goes against her identities, she gradually wears out that theme and will eventually lose it altogether. She then receives a new theme from the opposite side (Mythos<>Logos). The MC (GM) is specifically instructed to create situations that force the PCs to choose between two or more of their themes. This mechanic keeps the players exploring what really matters the most to their character.

The City of Mist Starter Set includes seven pre-generated characters and some very basic guidelines on how to sketch out your own character. In the full game, we are going to include Themebooks, which are in essence questionnaires that help you create a specific type of theme, e.g. for Logos: occupation, personality, defining relationship or for Mythos: ‘Expression’ for powers that can be projected, ‘Bastion’ for defensive powers, etc. The Themebooks will also include special moves for each theme type. So the process of creating a character will entail choosing the four types of themes central to your character and using the Themebooks to flesh out each theme and choose its tags.

How did you put together a team to work on the game and create the design, mechanics, and art, and make a cohesive vision for the project?

The vision for City of Mist was quite clear in my mind for a long time. I previously worked as a Product Manager, so my job was to hold the vision of the product and derive everything that the team needed to be do from that. From the onset, Neev was my inspiration and soundboard on how to make the game awesome: I actually met him on the the game’s first playtest in a local convention and we clicked. I think the key from that point on was to find the right people to translate the vision into a reality and that meant bringing in professionals to do the job.

When I started looking for talent, Marcin (the illustrator) was already a part of the project. We had been working together closely for a number of years and we both knew he was the one destined to bring City of Mist to life, so we made it happen. For designers, I searched Behance for weeks until I found portfolios which exhibited the skills I needed. After trying with a couple of designers, I approached Juancho Capic who suggested we’d bring Manuel Serra on board and it was a perfect match. Right from the start, these guys produced some seriously high-end work and they were open to receiving my vision and working with it. I am very demanding when it comes to design so it was good to find people who wanted to create something beautiful just as much as I did.

Finally, on the game design front, even though I’ve always worked alone and have already written the mechanics for City of Mist, I realized that no matter how good I thought it was, an editor would only make it better: I needed someone who would force me to think, to improve, to make the game more concise and clear and engaging. I turned to Eran because we already worked on a Cinematic GMing Guide before and I knew he was a really nice guy who would rip my work to shreds if he thought it wasn’t good, and I needed that, because I was adamant on making something awesome.

Throughout the process we worked closely together using tools like Slack (team chat), Google Drive, and Google Hangouts so that everyone was connected to what everyone else was doing. It was a pleasure and we’re all looking forward to the next step of creating the full game.

Ideal game experiences are hard to achieve, but what kind of emotional takeaways do you want players to have from City of Mist? Do you want players to have certain types of character moments or story revelations? Tell me what you hope players walk away from the game having experienced.

City of Mist is first and foremost a game, so my top priority is to provide the MC and players with tools to create their own stories and get what they feel is fun out of the game, be it drama, thrill or laughs (or all of the above). Having said that, City of Mist is built to create stories of inner and outer search, both personal and shared. Each character, as well as the group as a whole, has personal mysteries to unravel and at the same time identities that she is holding on to. I am hoping this will lead players to experience those dramatic moments that make up a good story when their characters discover something new and unexpected about themselves, especially when it happens through a hard choice they must make between two themes. And if that makes players somehow look at themselves as well and become more conscious of the struggle of themes in their own lives… well, that would be the best imaginable outcome of the game as far as I am concerned.

Thanks so much to Amit for the interview! I hope you all have a chance to check out City of Mist either through the free starter kit, the Kickstarter, or both!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Five or So Questions with Geoffrey McVey on Scion 2nd Edition

It is rare that I do multiple interviews for one game, but when Geoffrey asked if he could talk a little about myths and Scion, I couldn’t turn it down. Geoffrey talks about his work on Scion, myths, and scholarship in the following interview. You can check out the Scion 2nd Edition Kickstarter while you’re here, too – it’s only got a few days left!

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Tell me a little about Scion and myths. What excites you about it?

A little background: I started my academic career in comparative religion with a focus on mythology. I taught classes in it along with other, more general, courses in how to approach religion in an historical context. Ever since I’ve been writing roleplaying games, I’ve been interested in ways to represent religion authentically, and this game gives me the opportunity to do that.

It helped that Neall told me that I was the person he wanted to have joining the team in order to take care of issues of myth. Honestly, given the people he’s gathered, it feels like some sort of heist movie in which everyone has a very specific set of skills to contribute. Everyone else has their own particular talents that I respect immensely; my own is “theories of myth and religion,” which almost never affords a person the chance to walk down a street in stylish sunglasses while being accompanied by one’s allies. It’s a pity, really.

As for Scion and myths: I’ve tried to bring a lot of classic approaches to myth into the game and plan to include a full bibliography of my sources. I will freely admit that they’re all dated ones—the 1920s to the 1980s—but I think I’ve touched them up enough to be applicable and, I hope, interesting. Some elements (specifically, Joseph Campbell), we’ve set aside in favour of others. The reason behind that is another conversation entirely. I’ve been looking at storytelling structures from outside of the general Western European style and have offered ways to incorporate them into Scion games. If I had time, I would include more, but I may start to share some ideas once the game is out.

As for what gets me excited: think of the Táin Bó Cúailnge as an argument in the Canadian Maritimes about who has the best truck. Think of what it would look like if Hercules had to do community service to work out his anger issues. Think of the Ramayana revolving around a group of teenagers in a Midwestern small town. These are all things possible at even the smallest level of Scion. Just imagine what it becomes after the first few books.

For those unfamiliar with myths, what are some core concepts you think are valuable for understanding that aspect of the game?

From my perspective, what’s most important to understand is that myths never stand alone. Every story is part of a larger collection, which means that every image or theme connects to another one. Understanding the mess between Hephaestus, Aphrodite, and Ares means knowing the smith-god’s birth, its connection to the birth of Athena, the concepts with which those specific gods were associated, classical Greek ideas of physicality, and approaches to sexuality. It is, in short, a mess, and it’s supposed to be. That’s the most important thing to understand for Scion: that mythology cannot, and should not, be reduced to “X is the goddess of Y.” The writers for this game bring an amazing array of knowledge to it, and none of them approach the material without a careful consideration of all of the variations of myth.

For people who are unfamiliar with myths, I will say this: read one. Now read another, and, if you can, another. They probably won’t agree, but that’s okay. One of the examples that I used in my section is the fact that the Irish god of healing also killed his own son in a jealous rage (by throwing a sword at him repeatedly!), and messed up his daughter’s attempts to make the process of healing easy for everyone. Does it fit with our general ideas of what a healer should be? Of course not. It’s not supposed to, and it highlights the ways that real-world mythologies don’t fit into tidy categories.

Tell me a little about approaching myths through scholarship. How does that apply to Scion? How does it impact you as a creator?

This is a question that turns more complicated the more that I try to respond. On the one hand, I’ve linked my writing for Scion to some very traditional scholarship: Vladimir Propp, Emile Durkheim, Lord Raglan, Mircea Eliade, Northrop Frye, and others that any decent scholar of religion would wince at seeing mentioned. On the other, I’ve done my best to subvert their approaches, or at least turn them into something that translates well into a game. There are parts with which I’m pleased (Frye, for example, and a little bit on Stith “bane of my existence” Thompson), and there are parts where I recognize that I haven’t yet done enough to challenge the common approaches. It’s only the first draft, though, so I should still have time to mend things.

Can you tell me a little about the ways you’ve subverted the approaches of other scholars for the work you’ve done for Scion?

It’s a little difficult to go through in any relatively short form, but let’s see what I can manage. The scholars that I’m working with have had their theories tested, challenged, and (in some cases) entirely discarded. That doesn’t mean that they’re useless. Instead, in the way that I’ve tried to write it, it means that their own ideas are a sort of game in and of themselves: what would the world look like if (for example) Freud were right? So what I’ve tried to do is to take all of these rather outdated bits of scholarship and turn them into something that is both playable and entertaining.

Subversion, in this case, has to do with taking works that focus so much on the trope of the lone (white, male) Chosen One and finding ways to apply it to groups: a range of individuals with vastly different backgrounds and experiences whose interactions make stories more interesting. Think of it as something like the story of Jason and the Argonauts, where you have a whole collection of heroes with their own stories but who also come together to make something that isn’t specifically about them. That’s what I’d like to accomplish in this game: to remind players that the best thing they can do is to ignore the traditional approaches to myth and make their goal “find ways to make your fellow players seem awesome.”

What are your favorite things you’ve worked on in the Scion text, and how did you make them happen?

So far, my favourite has been to work up ways to play a range of supernatural characters. Neall handed the task on to me (despite my frequently and likely tiresome refrains of “I’m not good with game mechanics, because I’m old”) and I ended up writing twenty-four possibilities that covered all of the game’s myths. You want to be a Nuckelavee? We can do that. You want to be a Goetic sorcerer? Sure. You want to be a Deer Woman? We’ve got you covered. Taking an already flexible system and using it to explore so many world myths has been lovely.

To answer your second question, I have no idea how I made it happen. I will default to my usual answer, which is “sorcery, blackmail, and organ theft.”

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Thanks so much to Geoffrey for the interview! It was a good read, and I hope you all like it as well. Check out Scion 2nd Edition on Kickstarter if this piqued your interest!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Five or So Questions with Marc Hobbs on Eden

Today I have an interview with Marc Hobbs on his current project, Eden, which is on Kickstarter! It sounds like a lovely game to explore a story of growth, and I hope you’ll enjoy what Marc has to say.
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Tell me a little about your project. What excites you about it?

Eden is a story game for 3-5 players about learning of good and evil from talking animals. During play, we first choose the animals we want to encounter during the game, and then create a unique map of our version of Eden. Next, players take on the roles of the second generation of humans after Adam and Eve. Each human character is special, because they have learned a skill and a lesson from their favorite animal, both of which inform how that character behaves. Player characters also have deep connections to each other–your character has helped the character on your left and harmed the character on your right, creating a really tight, interesting bond in both directions.

I’m excited about this game because it does two things really well, both of which are super fun: first, playing as an animal is just a blast. It’s fascinating to watch complete strangers, without any guidance or coaching, act in perfect unison when playing a herd of horses, or a pod of whales, or a murder of crows. People just seem to naturally know what certain animals would say if they could talk. Second, the game traces the moral growth of an innocent person in a way I find really compelling. Player characters basically have two choices as they learn and grow (though these are never explicitly stated; rather, they are implicit within the structure of the game): the character can become more and more similar to their favorite animal, like a beast, or they can embrace their humanity and develop a nuanced moral code, like a person. Every possible blend of these two roads can occur in the game, and I’ve seen so many interesting twists in all the sessions I’ve played. So those are two things I really like about Eden.

What inspired you to create Eden?

Back in 2011, I played a story game called The Quiet Year with some close friends. The game takes place in a small post-collapse society, but the specifics are up to the players. We decided that we wanted to explore a Biblical paradise, so we set the game in post-Fall Eden. What resulted was a fascinating exploration of the morality and idiosyncrasies of the creation story. I decided after that to start working on a game that would touch on those kinds of topics. I was still pretty new to story games at the time, so the project went through quite a few iterations before it reached its current state, but overall, the inspiration came from just one session of another story game!

Why did you choose to have animals be the ones to teach the humans, instead of angels or other creatures?

This is a really great question! There are a number of reasons. First of all, I wanted the game to be about earthly life: animals and humans only. This is because when players take on the role of celestial beings like angels, there’s a tendency to get bogged down in understanding their behavior and culture. What do angels act like? What do they care about? The game isn’t about these questions, so having players get distracted by them is detrimental. Keeping the focus on animals and humans makes sure that everyone is directed toward what matters and what will create fun gameplay.

Secondly, I realized (albeit after many versions of the game that included the Devil in the form of The Serpent) that having supernatural beings in the game changed the dynamic of power dramatically. Angels and demons have nothing to lose in their interactions with humans, and are never in any true danger. They are so far beyond the humans that playing scenes with supernatural characters becomes one-sided; it creates a situation where you play a character who can remove themselves from the action with no consequences, and that can lead to boring or un-fun stories. I think there’s a lot of potential for supernatural beings in another game, but not in Eden.

Thirdly, supernatural beings have access to knowledge about good and evil that animals do not, and they have motives the animals lack. An angel already has an agenda: it wants the humans to be good. It also possesses perfect knowledge of what “good” is, and that’s a boring story if an angel just tells the humans what to do. Similarly (and this is part of why I took it out), The Serpent wants the humans to do evil; while it was fun to tempt the humans, it created an imbalance because the humans had no guide for how to be good. The animals, conversely, have no agenda; they care about what animals care about, and aren’t capable of acting rightly or wrongly. So it falls to the humans (and therefore the players) to interpret the animals’ advice and decide how to act–that’s the story I want players to tell, and the one that’s (I’ve found to be) the most fun.

Fourth and finally, the animals are much easier (especially for those unfamiliar with role-playing) to play, because you instinctively know how to act like animals. What does a wolf care about? You hardly need to think to start talking about loyalty and the pack and so on. We anthropomorphize and personify animals constantly, and those beliefs / biases / stereotypes come right into the game effortlessly. This makes role-play fun and easy, and provides juicy material for humans to egregiously misinterpret animal behavior or motives.

Has faith played any role in your development of Eden?

I am an atheist, but I used to be a very devout Catholic. I think that transition from religious to non-religious is paralleled in the game somewhat; you have human characters who, in the Bible story, are unaware of good and evil until they break God’s rules and eat the Forbidden Fruit. Suddenly they understand good and evil–no one has to teach them. In the game Eden, there is no instantaneous gaining of that knowledge. I suppose I was asking the question, “What if we had to learn good and evil from nature, instead of from a deity or holy book?” Or to put it another way, “If we exist as animals with a feeling of ‘moral’, what complex social and mental structures do we build to support that sense, and how does that make us different from all the other animals of the world?” It’s creation vs. evolution, in a way!

You said this represents the moral growth of an innocent person. Could you talk a little about the moral choices a character might make in the game?
Your character’s behavior is based on lessons they’ve learned from watching and talking to their favorite animal. These lessons constitute your character’s moral code–what they see as right and wrong. When confronted with a new situation that falls outside their lessons, you must decide how your character would react to that scenario. This is the basis of scenes during the game. The moral choices characters face are the same kinds of choices we face every day, but stripped of all the complexities of modern life. “Should I cause harm in order to get what I want?” for example, or “How should I treat someone who has hurt me?” Eden is essentially a game about going from a black and white worldview to one with shades of gray.

To give a specific example from a game I played, let’s say another human comes upon your prized collection of seashells, and decides to smash them up and put them in her hair. How does your character choose to react? You could try to get revenge, ignore the problem, forgive them, or (as happened in the game) make hurtful comments about her to the other humans, trying to poison them against her. The choice the character made was to avoid direct confrontation, and that was partially influenced by the character’s favorite animal–hermit crab, who taught that character to hide from danger (and to always keep track of your shell). Had the character taken some other animal as their favorite, the choice might’ve been very different.

How did you design the progression of the game with the lessons and rounds? Can you describe this part of the mechanics?

Eden has been in development for about five years. In that time it has gone through extensive changes; the very first version of the game would be barely recognizable to someone playing the current iteration. That said, it took most of those five years to figure out how to make the game consistently fun and interesting. Part of what makes that happen is simplicity, which is deceptively tricky to create. The current way of playing the game resulted from stripping away more complicated mechanics, slowly but surely. Just before the game reached its current (and more or less final) state, I realized that there is a simple progression of play that makes the most sense and is the most fun: learn from animals, try that lesson with humans, revise the lesson, try again or go learn something else, repeat.

My wife is a very talented designer (she made Downfall), but both of us have learned most of what we know about design from our friend Ben Robbins (creator of Microscope and Kingdom). A core part of Ben’s design philosophy is to set up some maxims for the game you’re making, and then try to orient everything in the game toward those maxims. It is so, so easy to go down a rabbit hole of design–you think of a cool new mechanic, or you try to fix a problem by using a more complex solution, or what have you, and the next thing you know, the game has drifted from what you intended it to be. Having maxims allows you to always aim your design toward what you want the game to be about; it gives you a bullseye to shoot for. With Eden, my maxims were “Talk to animals”, “Learn about good and evil”, and “Loss of innocence”. After five years, I think the game has finally gotten to a point where I’m doing all of those things, and nothing else–which is exactly where I wanted to be.

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Thank you so much to Marc for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading, and that you’ll give the Eden Kickstarter a look. It sounds like a lot of fun!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Five or So Questions with James Mendez Hodes on Scion 2nd Edition

Today I have an interview with James Mendez Hodes on Scion 2nd Edition, which is currently on Kickstarter! I think James talks about some really cool aspects of Scion that some of you might find interesting. Check it out!

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Tell me a little about Scion 2nd Edition. What excites you about it?

Scion is a role-playing game about demigods: the children and the chosen of the gods in a modern setting, à la Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. I’m writing dossiers on four pantheons in the core game: the Òrìṣà of Yorùbáland, the Devás of South Asia, the Loa of Dahomey by way of Haiti, and the Shén of China. I’m excited about Scion because back when I was studying religion at Swarthmore College, my first and most formative gaming group always played in exactly this genre: urban fantasy with a diverse scope, drawing from far-flung world mythologies.

What in particular did you focus on in the Scion game development?

My main role is to characterize four pantheons to which player-character Scions and their divine parents belong. First, I pare hundreds of deities down to about thirteen principals who publicly represent the pantheon in Scion. Then I profile each principal: their identity, outlook, relationships, and purviews (what they’re god of). I describe their dealings with other pantheons, the religions which venerate them, their mythological supporting cast and artifacts, and their Virtues. Scion 1e gave each pantheon four Virtues such as “honor” and “compassion” from a generic list, but for 2e I pushed instead to assign two unique values in tension or conflict with one another in the pantheon’s associated mythology. For the Òrìṣà and Loa, those values are Tradition versus Innovation: they’re part of a stressed but unbroken heritage that reaches back to ancestral West Africa, but to preserve that heritage they’ve had to confuse their own identities just as their worshippers have had to use deception and syncretism to keep them intact. For the Devás, those values are Duty versus Conscience: Indian epic heroes’ deep-seated understanding of the right thing to do frequently clashes with law’s explicit mandate, such as when Prince Arjuna hesitated to fight his family at Kurukṣētra. For the Shén, there’s Yīn and Yáng: they literally maintain the universe by guarding the balance and the cycle between positive and negative forces, but the place of an individual in that cycle is often confusing and paradoxical. I’ve also worked with Robert Vance to design “pantheon-specific purviews”: sets of superpowers peculiar to that pantheon and its Scions. This part is particularly fun because I get to comb through the pantheon’s myths to find supernatural themes which distinguish the pantheon from other theogonies.

The Òrìṣà and Loa have possession—“Gún” in Yorùbá, (“Cheval” in French and Kreyol Ayisyen). An òrìṣà or loa can possess a willing subject to share their body and senses, or lend their own physical form to a spirit who needs to act through them.
The Shén have Tiānmìng (“Mandate of Heaven”), a power derived from their pantheon’s expansive and confusing bureaucracy. Evoking the first few chapters (that is, the fun ones) of the Chinese epic Journey to the West, they can bestow supernaturally empowered titles and promotions (wanted or unwanted) on others, or curse an organization with bureaucratic inefficiencies.
The Devás have Yoga, a set of South Asian religious practices which bring the individual closer to the divine through selfless service, contemplation, or devotion. In Indian mythology, yoga’s most dedicated practitioners often manifest awesome supernatural powers or receive magical treasures from the gods to whom they’re devoted—but it’s not uncommon for those powers or treasures to corrupt their recipient, transforming them into supervillains like King Rāvaṇa of Lanka.

Where did you source information for the project – what efforts did you make to honor the subject matter?

This is one of the first projects I’ve ever undertaken where my entire academic background is relevant. As an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, I majored in religion, concentrating on West African and Afro-Atlantic traditions. I read primary and secondary sources, spoke with scholars and clergy, and attended religious services where I met several of the loa appearing in fictional form in this game. I also minored in English literature and in dance, concentrating on capoeira (relevant to the Afro-Atlantic content) and North Indian classical dance (relevant to my work on the devás). I also have a master’s degree in Eastern classics from St. John’s College in Santa Fé, New Mexico; that’s where I studied classical Chinese and the Asian epics and scriptures on which I based the shén and the devás. As I work, I’ll be updating an annotated bibliography of the most relevant sources on my website at http://lula.transneptune.net/rpg/scion2bibliography.

When playing Scion, what kind of experiences can players have in such a rich world?

Scion supports various modes of play, from street-level pop-culture myth à la Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo on up to conflict over the fate of existence à la Sandman; but one feeling I really hope we can instill in our players is the particular combination of familiarity and surprise which makes mythology both awe-inspiring and funny. Remember when Thor dressed up as Freyja and pretended to marry a jötunn so he could steal back his magic hammer? Or when Vimalakīrti faked an illness so he could lure the Buddha’s entire congregation to his house to preach to them? Those are the moments I really hope players will find in Scion: familiar myths and traditions leading them to unexpected places.

Compared to your previous gaming experience in this genre, how do you think Scion 2nd Edition improves upon or carries on the voice of the ideas and concepts you see to be the most vital to the experience?

The most important quality Scion shares with those early games is the axiom that mythic play is about relationships. Back in college, whenever we introduced a figure of legend to the game, the best moment wasn’t their first appearance—it was their second or third, when their foray into the story flooded all our characters with memories of what interactions they’d had the past few times they saw one another. For example, one historical legend I introduce to many games, Scion included, is the White Eyebrow: a Shàolín monk who studied Daoist black magic (supposedly that’s a thing?) and betrayed his brethren, precipitating one of the Shàolín Monastery’s many destructions. Wǔxiá canon resurrects this guy all over time and space, attaching him to the White Lotus Society, the Wǔdāng Clan, the Qíng regime—anyone even remotely villainous—such that he’d have to be a Daoist immortal to have been everywhere and everywhen they say he was. So whenever it turned out he was behind some scheme, every player and every character at our table was like, “White Eyebrow … I should have known this treachery had your stamp all over it. Don’t think I’ve forgotten what the White Lotus did at the Battle of Demon Alley!” By emphasizing the relationships between Scions, their divine progenitors, and their pantheons, Scion sets you up to create these intermingled histories yourself. The first time you meet your father, the sun god Sūrya, maybe you’re both nervous and tense because you’ve read the Mahābhāratam and you remember the fate that befell his most famous son, King Karṇa of Anga. But after that first adventure, you have your own legend of Sūrya that you created yourself. So when you run into him again two games afterward, or in a different RPG, or on the wall of a temple in India, you’ll remember a story about Sūrya and your character—maybe even about Sūrya and you—that started two thousand years ago and ended at your Scion table.

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Thanks so much to James for the interview! What’s been said here about Scion 2nd Edition makes me think some of my friends would really love it, so I hope my readers who like how it sounds take a chance to check it out on Kickstarter now!

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Five or So Questions with Craig Judd on Blade Bind

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Craig Judd on Blade Bind, which is currently on Kickstarter! It sounds pretty interesting. Check it out!

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Tell me a little about Blade Bind. What excites you about it?

Blade Bind is a GMless game with a focus on PvP and melodrama, inspired by Shinobigami, Eternal Contenders, and the “emo shonen fighting anime” genre in general. It’s designed for one-shots (you can play out a whole game in 3 to 6 hours), and uses regular playing cards to resolve epic swordfights! Players each take on the role of a Chosen, someone with strong motivations who has made a pact with an ancient supernatural Blade. The Blade gives you immense power, and only another Chosen can stand in your way, but if you falter on your path the Blade will not hesitate to take control and use you as the instrument of its own vengeance!

I’m interested in games where the player-characters work at cross-purposes, and I’ve played several games in this vein. I feel that you can get a richer and more challenging experience when everybody is creating opposition for each other — and since I’m usually the GM, it’s nice to get a bit of a break by distributing the workload. I also really enjoyed designing Blade Bind, as I had a really strong vision for it and all the pieces came together fairly easily.

I really like that the system isn’t that complex, but it has some really cool emergent properties. The card-based duelling is informed by my HEMA experience, and once you get past the surface mechanics there are some interesting strategies you can employ. When Chosen oppose one another, they duel to decide who gets their way. The Chosen are defined minimally, and a lot of the game comes down to managing your goals — known as Threads — and learning how to manipulate those of the other Chosen to your benefit. There’s also a cool Will/Power mechanism, where you need to increase your Power to win fights, but if your Will (generated by Threads) ever drops below Power, you lose control and become a self-destructive berserker known as a Bladebound! You can engage the mechanics and “meta-game” as much as you like, and it’ll create interesting drama when you look back on what happened.

Most of all, I’m excited that it seems to consistently create a good experience at the table. Once you’re through the setup, there’s no meandering and feeling out the situation, it’s just BAM! Threads provide a great sense of direction and purpose that lets the game kick off at full speed.

What motivated you to create a GMless PvP game? It sounds like a challenge! Did you encounter major problems with the concepts in general?

I’ve enjoyed a few games of Eternal Contenders, which is GMless and PvP (and also uses cards, but in a very different way). But it was the Shinobigami Kickstarter last year that really helped fire my imagination on Blade Bind. Shinobigami still has a GM, but it’s very focussed on PvP-style action, and the GM mainly facilitates and sets up the initial situation.Blade Bind was heavily inspired by the idea of Shinobigami, but I wrote it before actually reading that game’s rules!

I wouldn’t say I encountered major problems, but there were some things I needed to work around. I sort of started from a blank slate and only built in stuff that the game needed. I considered including a GM, but the game didn’t really need one – all the GM duties of setting up a situation and framing scenes are delegated to the players, much like Fiasco. Once the setup’s in place the characters simply follow their motivations, guided by the rules, until the game reaches a conclusion.

I first developed the duelling system. Once I had an engaging conflict resolution engine, the hardest part was building the rest of the game around it! I tried out a lot of iterations of the various pieces, but after testing alternatives and thinking about things for a while, I found I could analyse the pros and cons and decide on the best approach.

The game pushes you into situations where you must fight to either get what you want or prevent something awful happening. This basically forces PvP, because if you don’t take up arms then the things you care about will be destroyed or taken from you.

How do you have a PvP game without risking interplayer conflict? Was that something you had to consider while designing mechanics?

As Cam Banks says about Smallville, it’s more about character vs character than player vs player. I have had even CvC games fall apart in the past though, so it’s definitely something I thought about during the design process. I think it’s mostly a matter of setting clear expectations before play, and in the introduction I emphasize that while the characters are at odds, the players are actually collaborating to create a rich drama. You need to go into it with a mindset where you can enjoy your character’s arc regardless of whether they come out on top or go down in flames.

Something else that helps avoid player conflict is a clear-cut and rigidly-defined rule set. In games that rely on GM judgment calls, plotting against other player-characters in secret can create uncertainty and concerns of bias or unfairness. By using a set of strict procedures, the players have certainty at least as far as knowing what is permitted and what is not. The game system itself acts as an impartial arbiter. You do lose a little of that “you can do anything!” aesthetic, and the rules are more like that of a board game. Even so, within the framework of the rules you can still play a cool character, come up with interesting situations, and unleash evocative descriptions. It’s an approach that Blade Bind shares with Shinobigami.

A while ago, I thought: if people can play against opposition fielded by a GM without getting upset, why is it any different when the opposition is created by one of the other players? So long as everyone is clear up-front about what’s permissible, you should be able to avoid out-of-game animosity.

Can you talk a little more about Threads, and how they influence play?

To talk about Threads, I’ll first need to explain Knots. A Knot is a MacGuffin that acts as a source of motivation for the Chosen — something they think is worth fighting for. Knots are often NPCs (someone you want to protect, control, or destroy), but they can also be objects, locations, or even organisations. Each player defines one Knot during the setup.

Threads connect the Chosen to various Knots, and sometimes to other Chosen. A Thread expresses a goal or desire, and they’re rigidly defined. You pick one of the available Thread-types and fill in the details. For example, common Threads include “I will Control [KNOT]” or “Nobody will Destroy [KNOT]”, but there are also ones like “[CHOSEN] will not Control [KNOT]” or “I will Defeat [CHOSEN]”. Each Chosen can only have three Threads at a time. You start with one connected to your own Knot, and two connected to other Knots or Chosen. This creates a web of motivations that inevitably leads to conflict.

Each Thread has three states: Secure (achieved, even if temporarily), Loose (striving to be achieved), or Cut (impossible to achieve). The more complete a Thread is, the more Will it’s worth. Cut Threads are worth 0 Will, so they bring you closer to becoming Bladebound. You’re therefore strongly motivated to pursue and complete your own Threads, but at the same time you can try to manipulate other people’s Threads to your advantage.

When someone wins a duel, they get to pick a prize. They can either take control of or destroy a Knot that was at stake, or they can rewrite one of their own Threads, or a Thread belonging to one of the vanquished Chosen. While deciding a Knot’s fate is a powerful way to change the state of the game (and cause big changes in Will values), rewriting Threads is a more subtle tool that may let you stop an enemy from even wanting to attack your Knot, or turn them into an ally.

While Threads are powerful motivators, they aren’t mind control; even if your enemy gives you a Thread to protect a Knot that you’ve been trying to destroy, you can still choose to destroy it if you really want to. Threads also act a bit like Fates in Tenra Bansho Zero — as they shift, they create an ever-changing picture of what your character finds important.

Can you talk a little about dueling, and how it is essential to the game?

I wanted the dueling system to provide a similar back-and-forth to actual swordplay, and while this often leads to a back-and-forth exchange like regular turn-based combat, there are also opportunities to seize the initiative… or to find yourself fighting defensively on the back foot. At the start of a duel you draw cards equal to your Power. Whoever has initiative puts forward one card as an attack, and the defender must equal or exceed the attack’s value with one or more cards. There are several defense options (depending on whether the value is higher, equal, lower, if you play a matching suit, or if you play multiple cards), and each affects the flow of play differently. If the defense isn’t good enough, the Chosen is hit and knocked out of the fight. It’s possible to turn a fight around if you start with fewer cards, but it requires luck and skill. I like that dueling relies on player skill to some extent, even if luck and Power are still major factors.

Each Blade also has three special Techniques that allow their wielder to bend the rules, and since the Chosen don’t have much mechanical definition this is the main way to individualize your fighter’s style. To use a Technique you must spend points of Resonance, which you gain whenever your Blade locks with another in a “Bind” – hence the game’s name. A Bind happens when two cards of equal value are played against each other.

The Blades give their wielder immense supernatural power, so they can steamroll any mundane opposition. If it’s your scene, you can describe how your Chosen is going to go and demolish a skyscraper, or wipe out a private army, or capture an NPC — and if none of the other Chosen step up to oppose you, then you just do it. When two or more Chosen are at odds though, they can try to talk it out — but if the aggressor refuses to back down, then their opponents only have two choices: stand aside and let them do what they want, or draw Blades and duel.

Duels are the game’s only mechanical resolution system. They’re an impartial and concrete way to determine which player gets to decide how things turn out. They are a bit more involved than simple “skill checks”, but don’t often take more than a few minutes to resolve, and they are pretty cool to play. There’s a real sense of tension as you try to pick your best available move without knowing exactly what your opponent is holding.

If people would like to take a look, I’ve released a free Sword Practise PDF that introduces the basic dueling rules. It’s missing Resonance and Techniques (and the rest of the game), but it’s a handy way to get used to the mechanical heart of the system.

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Thanks so much to Craig for the interview! I hope that everyone enjoyed reading, and I also hope you’ll take a minute to check out Blade Bound on Kickstarter, or at least look at the free Sword Practise PDF!

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If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Five or So Questions with Nathanael Cole on Gattaibushido!

Today’s interview is with Nathanael Cole about his new game Gattaibushido, which is a story-driven mecha-pilots game! It’s currently on Kickstarter and sounds like a great time. Check out the interview, and then click-thru to the Kickstarter if you’re interested!.

Full disclosure: My volunteered voicework is included in the Kickstarter video for Gattaibushido.

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Tell me a little about your project. What excites you about it?

Gattaibushido is my personal RPG love letter to a number of old cartoons and animes that own permanent crash space in my heart. I grew up watching shows like Voltron and the Power Rangers, but honestly the biggest inspirations came from two anime series called Gunbuster and Vandread. When I first saw those series, I immediately wanted to game in those worlds. Once I realized that I had a good foundation for teamwork games with Motobushido, I got ridiculously excited about finally getting to write my own person Gunbuster game using those mechanics.

What mechanical inspirations did you have for Gattaibushido?

From the very beginning, I wanted a way to involve Colors in every aspect of play. The first obvious step was basing the team roles off of the classic color roles in Super Sentai shows. But beyond that, I wanted more of a focus on colors than just numerical stats all over the place. Turns out this was already easy enough to do. Motobushido had a heavy focus on threes and sevens as part of its thematic core, and porting that over to a “Roy G Biv” color scale was a cinch. By this point in the design process, almost the entire system has some aspect of the rainbow scale within it, and I’m pretty happy with the way that part has turned out.

However, probably the biggest of the more recent inspirations came from a video game called Chroma Squad. For weeks and weeks I had tried to nail down the Final Form Fight mechanics, and went through dozens of iterations. I kept working the “natural extension to the core fight mechanics” angle, but nothing was working, nothing felt right. Finally I took a long break to chill out and play some video games, one of which was Chroma Squad. I don’t want to spoil that game (it’s amazing!), so I’ll just say that when the first “season” of its story ended, there was a sudden change in mechanics that came out of nowhere, a whole new kind of battle sequence that had not even been hinted at before. And then suddenly it all made sense: if I really wanted to showcase the difference in scale netween the normal battles and the final form battles, I needed a whole new approach, something totally different than the core mechanic. Two design jam session later and the current “Rumble” mechanic was born.

How did you come up with flavor of the game including themes and associated mechanics?

The basic “combining robos vs space monsters” originally came to this project as just a nifty idea for a spin-off “hack” of the core Motobushido rules. Once I started re-immersing myself in the source genre, I grew more and more inspired, and likewise the hacked text grew more and more complicated. Eventually I realized that it needed its own spotlight, and decided to make it an entirely new stand-alone game.

But specifically, two animes deeply inspired the core themes of teamwork. The first was Gunbuster, which was in fact the original kickstart my brain needed to get moving with this project in the first place. The team relationships within that show were so intense and conflicted and _real_ that I felt that those characters could very well have been created using the previous Motobushido rules, just needing a few tweaks to fit the material. Later on I was introduced to a newer series called Majestic Prince. While not actually a “gattai” show, it might as well have been for all the ways that the themes of teamwork and intra-team conflict guided every aspect of that show. I wanted my game to play just like that and I think I’ve done a good job so far bringing out that team dynamic in the playtests.

Coming from your inspirations, what choices did you make to ensure the game is approachable for all ages, genders, etc.?

Specifically, in order to deal with certain old sexist tropes inherent in the classic super sentai genre character roles, I’ve tweaked the colors a bit to make them more versatile. This has had a positive effect with my current test groups, and although a handful of people were expecting more traditional SS color roles, they adapted to the alterations pretty easily enough.

Additionally, I made a few conscious-but-not-overt design choices very early on in the art and writing process. I chose to show only women and girls in the vast majority of the artwork and text (there is one, singular character exception, and it is a bit of an homage to Gunbuster). There’re no outright statements in the book saying “you have to play women,” but if you follow the artwork and the text, it’s pretty much assumed. Additionally, I specifically requested that the majority of the girls in the art be non-Caucasian, and of a variety of body types. I have been pretty pleased with the stuff Juan’s done so far, and I hope my readers will be too.

As for ages? Ah, this might not be a good game for kids, as the themes can be pretty violent and I don’t really hold back with some bits of language here and there.

What do you think are the core elements of Gattaibushido that you want players to see when playing the game, and how do you think the mechanics and flavor help make that happen?

Hands down, teamwork is the absolute number one core element that I want to be ever-present throughout the entirety of play. Everyone has a “Harmony” track, which keeps them in sync with the team spirit. It’s front and center in the gaming space, and integrated into almost every action and component. The characters can of course function on their own, but they truly excel the most when working in synch with the rest of the team. The core fight mechanics heavily involve teamwork combos, including an “Uno” like rotation and reversal mechanic that encourages the players to strategize and synch their abilities together. And of course, the Final Form Rumble fights are pretty much impossible without a well-synched team. =)

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Thanks so much to Nathanael for the interview. I hope you all get the chance to check out Gattaibushido on Kickstarter now!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Five or So Questions with Brandon Williams on Demon Gate

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Brandon Williams about the new game from Arcanum Syndicate, Demon Gate, which is currently on Kickstarter with a little over a week left! You may recognize Brandon’s name from the cyberpunk RPG Chaos 6010 A.D. Demon Gate is an apocalyptic fantasy RPG with survivalist elements. Check out the interview below!

Tell me a little about Demon Gate. What excites you about it?

Demon Gate is an apocalyptic dark fantasy RPG that places the players into a very harsh and dangerous world that really forces players to survive together. There are no alignments and all characters begin the game with the bare minimum of gear that is primarily established depending upon what your character class is. I try to let GMs know that it is very important to keep track of the mundane things in this game like food and provisions and warmth, for surviving in a hostile wilderness should be just as tough as the monsters you may encounter.

Everything about it excites me realistically, but if I had to choose a couple it would be the combat system and the setting. It is kind of meant to start out very fantasy lite where all these things, monsters and such are supposed to be scary stories you heard around the campfire at night in your village but as you start to explore the dark world you find out the stories are all real. There are these prophesies about the end of the world where the demons and devils from the Black Plane (Hell) will eventually enslave our world, and you will begin to realize that this can really happen unless you band together and try to stop it.

The combat system uses resisted rolls so you roll a d20 to hit but you also roll a d20 to defend by trying to match or beat your attacker’s roll. There are also cool talents and abilities that help you out in the midst of combat where you can sometimes spend legend points to activate them. If you roll a natural 20 to defend an attack you gain an immediate riposte at your enemy, there are a lot of fun things like that which makes rolling against one another a good time.

What inspired you with your design of Demon Gate, including games, other media, and your own interests?

I originally created the idea back in the 90s working on another RPG called Chaos 6010. So back in the day I really loved the setting for Forgotten Realms during 2nd edition. Yet since then I have taken a lot more inspiration from the art in other games like Diablo, or the Necronomicon, Call of Cthulu. I also took a great deal of influence from a really old rpg computer game called Darklands, a game about medieval Germany. Inspiration from movies like the Hell scene in Constantine. Even many of my own nightmares have been a great inspiration, while very frightening they were also inspirational and I had to jump up and write them down. I have always been fascinated by the idea of Hell in many religions so it takes a lot of inspiration from real world religious beliefs as well and I tried to tie the storyline into our world’s history in a way. For instance how to explain how entire civilizations or villages just vanished in the past. Hellraiser was also an inspiration to me and series of books on the Lesser Key of Solomon, Ars Goetia, as well as goetic art and symbols.

For a survivalist game, tracking gear and rations can be complex. How does Demon Gate handle that mechanically and fictionally?

When you are traveling the GM rolls a chance for random encounters each day (optional but recommended) and due to the planet’s harsh climates at times bad weather conditions can pop up effecting your chances of survival. So it is good to have survival skills to help out. Players are allowed untrained skill checks for those who do not possess the proper skills even though it is much harder to succeed. Since each character skill is based off of an attribute you make an attribute check for an untrained skill check and your target number is raised. The GM has the option to use the random encounter tables for all different types of locations or they can simply make situations up of course. Due to the planet having two suns, a broken moon, and many close planet’s during parts of the year, the climate and gravity shifts can sometimes cause some strange anomolies.

When keeping track of provisions you are allowed a certain amount of days for your water skin to deplete so you just make a little tick off for each day on a scrap paper. For food there is a very helpful hunting and foraging table that lets you make one roll to pretty much figure out how many meals you gain from the hunt and also how many hides and bones you are getting from the kill determined by the result of your hunting skill result.This works the same when foraging or fishing. The roll will determine if you catch anything that night at all, how many portions, and units of leather, bones, scales, etc. These can be saved and traded on the road or sold at a town, or if one of the characters possessed the proper skills can be used during crafting. For long adventures across the wilderness it is always good to pack your provisions so that you do not have to worry if you will eat that night, for starving will begin to degrade your stats as will freezing to death.

When players encounter challenges in the game, are they more likely to be physical in nature and if so, how? What mechanics are in place to address physical and social or mental challenges?

In the game master chapter I talk about making sure all NPCs (non- player characters, just in case someone doesn’t know), aren’t just brutes who care nothing about living and just wish to kill you and take your money. Some may have starving families, some may even end up helping you. I think that this might depend on the GM and players but in Demon Gate there are rules for social engagements, and very many mental afflictions. Travelling to the Veil or Shadow Plane, or Hell even, as some may do at times in quests to forever kill a spirit’s soul can have repercussions. Characters must also have a good Willpower attribute to be strong in mind. Having a high willpower will grant you fortitude which is like armor for your mind. Armor in this game soaks damage so if a character has a high willpower they might have +2 to defend mental attacks and a fortitude of 5. This if hit with 20 mental damage the fortitude soaks 5 of it letting you take only 15 damage.

Charisma is your social skill. This is not how pretty you are, there is a physical beauty rating for that. Charisma is how well you do in social engagements. I did this because I’m sure many people have met a very pretty person with a really bad charisma. A high charisma will alter your reputation points which are great to have when trying to seek an audience with a local magistrate or lord, etc. There are resisted rolls in most cases if it comes down to having to roll. I say this because some game masters would prefer you use words but Jon the player might not be very good with them while Arun who is Jon’s character might have a high charisma so he would make his charisma check by rolling the dice and trying to either reach a target number or another character’s resisted roll.

There are a great deal of physical alterations of course, so I put a lot of rules within the combat mechanics as if you are playing a mix between an rpg and a miniature battle game. I love using miniatures to show fight scenes of course it isn’t necessary but I believe it adds a whole new level of fun to the game. You do not have to use miniatures but the rules are explained with them in mind. I love the combat system being resisted d20 and it has proven to be a good time for many years.

The Black Plane sounds cool! Could you talk about the fiction of the game a little, and share any of your favorite flavor bits?

I have written a great deal of lore about this world but I do wish to keep much of it a mystery and hope to unleash more and more of the story in future books. I will say that it is meant to start as if all these prophesies and legends are just fairy-tales but as adventurers begin to explore the world they find the remnants of an ancient alien race called the Void Gods who once ruled this world and inhabited it for it’s metallic resources. There is a few metals on this planet that can glow and channel energy and magic very well, these mertacullum weapons that are found can do some powerful things. I still keep it all within the medieval fantasy genre though so you never find a ray gun, but a lance that can retract and fire lightning out of it is a little more on point. The ancient alien tech that is found is primarily thought of as “magic items”.

The demons once ruled this world, it was theirs because many of them were the criminals of the void gods. They were the most foul and wicked of their kind, so bad that they left them imprisoned on this planet within dungeons. A very powerful demon lord who is from a little planet called Earth is the one who started to set them free when he was banished to this world long ago by the God of Earth. These demons were able to reconstruct the powerful gates of the Void Gods that they made using the mertacullum. These gates could travel to other worlds and even other planes of existence. They would use these gates to bring creatures from the surrounding planets and enslave them, forcing them to mine the metals of this world, to serve them, to force them to worship them as their new gods, and to use them for their suffering. Well once the gods of the Forgotten Worlds found out about this, they united and brought angels and nephilim to the planet through the gates and fought the demons in what is called the Thrall War. The demons were defeated and locked away in prisons in the Black Plane, or Hell. Each world has its own planes of Heaven, Purgatory, Shadow, Hell, even Elemental ones. Hell has a special prison called Tartarus, where the demon god Baal was locked within and sealed up forever. Until the seals began to break and fantatical cults a thousand years later sought to unleash the ancient lord Baal upon the world. Now the Age of Falling, the Pale Plague all of the signs are coming true, and now everyone is afraid.

Thanks to Brandon for the interview, and definitely check out Demon Gate on Kickstarter! It only has a little bit of time left but has some great art and seems like a cool time for survivalist, apocalyptic fantasy fans.

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Five or So Questions with Slade Stolar on The Indie Hack

Hey all, I have an interview today with Slade Stolar about The Indie Hack, which I really enjoyed checking out. Have a good look at his responses below.

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

I was really inspired by The Black Hack. It’s a thin volume–just 20 page–and it cuts to the core of old-school dungeon delving. You’ve got four classes, you roll d6s, d8s, d20s, etc., you face monsters with HP, and you hope to pass your skill check vs. poison. But all of that can be done in just 20 pages once you’ve got roleplaying figured out (4 or 5 years in, maybe). I wondered whether something that was more story-focused could work in the same way (I’m not claiming a strong dividing line between Old-school/OSR and Story/Indie/Post-Forge gaming here, I like a mix of both sides in nearly all of my games).

The Indie Hack is my fantasy heartbreaker, which Ron Edwards will tell you to go out and write, if nothing else, just to get it out of your system. I’ve had notebooks lying around for years with little tidbits of adventures, settings, and mechanics. Recently, I’ve been playing a lot of games that are Apocalypse World adjacent. I’ve been watching and listening to people play on YouTube and podcasts. I’d started work on a huge game, maybe 200 pages, called 100 Clones of Hitler!!. Lots of setting stuff. I had a big pack of beautiful, pulpy artwork done up for it (for a fair price, but more than I was used to spending on my own projects). I took 100 Clones to Forge Midwest (Madison, WI) in the spring of 2016 to playtest, and to my great shock, no one wanted to play the Hitler game. I started to question everything: Maybe these people weren’t as transgressive as I had hoped. Maybe the title causes such visceral disgust that no one can get past it. Maybe I should have pitched it in a different time slot. Maybe I should have called the game what it’s now called, specifically, Might Makes Reich: Stop the Nazi Menace!!, to make it clear that you’re fighting against (not with or as) the clones of Hitler. So, that’s where I’m coming from.

I took the core dice mechanic out of 100 Clones and polished it up a bit. I started thinking about minotaurs. I started writing a fantasy rule set. I had some new and different and beautiful art commissioned. I took the religion system that I’ve been sitting on for a few years and mechanized it. I think that these three things are the most exciting to me: the dice-and-details-and-allies-contributing mechanic, the art, and the Goddesses.

In essence, it’s 28 pages of dungeon-delving without HP or d4s or XP. There’s a stronger focus on players saying how they do things and what happens because of it, rather than saying what they do.

You have a number of games cited in the front of the book as inspirations or as places you borrowed from (the best designers know how to borrow & recontextualize, imo, as much as do something new). What about these specific games really wormed into your design concept?

I borrowed aspects of many different games. Of course, The Black Hack was the main impetus; I was drawn in by the extreme minimalism of it.

I love the statistics of the dice rolling in Apocalypse World, but almost everyone retains the 10+/7 to 9/6- results and I didn’t want to do that; I made each result have a different effect, such that rolling a 2 and a 6 is slightly better than rolling a 2 and a 5. Naturally, I liked the deadliness, and the fraught relationships, trading in Barter/Jingle, and the only-ever-hinted-at setting.

I really like Dungeon World, as a game and as a text, and it has a high place on my shelf. I’d run it over 5e or Pathfinder any day. The approach to relationships between the characters is great. Ranged combat (all combat, really) is great. It takes a few steps down the path toward minimalism, whereas The Indie Hack runs.

Into the Odd helped me to re-think monsters and magic items. Monsters aren’t really monsters, they’re more like magical or strange animals; they become monsters when we have tales of them biting the heads off adventurers. And I’m guessing that the adventurers started it.

I debated what to do with alignment. I think it’s usually done poorly in games. And players often use it as an excuse to be jerks. Why would you want to look down at your character sheet and be reminded that you should be at odds with the goals and desires of the other characters? I’d been reading the PDF of My Life with Master and figured a good way to get people to reluctantly do good (or evil) was to give them bosses.

In a lot of fantasy games, you can run into issues of repetition, so what differentiates The Indie Hack? What would players find in this game that they wouldn’t find in, say, D&D or Pathfinder?

Yes, there are thousands of fantasy games out there. The Indie Hack is novel in a few ways.

Character creation for three players who have never played takes about 30 minutes, including the time in which they form relationships and tell the GM some facts about the world. This isn’t novel, just rare.

The dice mechanic is really neat: you have degrees of success, some of which ask your fellow players for input. Once you roll successfully, you did the thing you were trying to do, and you spend “details” to enrich the fiction: I didn’t just hit the Skeletal Soldier, I shattered eight of his ribs, the GM writes “Eight missing ribs” on the monster’s sheet, so that the players and the GM can work that fact into the story later if they wish. Details like this count towards defeating the creature.

In terms of time at the table, unlike 5e and Pathfinder, no one has their nose in a book for more than a few seconds. Nearly all of the information used in play is written down somewhere on a sheet or index card on the table, usually written in pencil, and usually written by one of the players. The GM doesn’t need to shuffle through a lot of books and papers or hide dice behind a screen. Don’t even give the GM the dice.

Regarding the question of repetition, as it’s the players who enrich the narrative, it’s only repetitive if the players give out the same details time and time again. My bet is that the players will get more and more confident and creative.

I personally love gear in games, but it often can get a little cumbersome – literally and figuratively. Can you talk about how The Indie Hack handles gear and how it might appeal to people who like the concept of gear, but get burnt out with doing complicated math to see how many candles they can accommodate in their haversack?

Gear is lovely, as is the wordplay in this question. In most games, I get a lot of enjoyment out of selecting gear, and a lot of pain out of managing it. When adventuring in The Indie Hack, you’ll probably have between 5 and 10 items. For all of the fiddly stuff, you can get ‘kits’. If you’re playing an Occultist, take “Flasks of Foul Liquids”, which contains “Acid, poison, ether, lye, etc.” And if you want to have some glue, grease, fertilizer, bat fur, or snake bile for your evil rituals, there’s probably some of that also. The candle (one big candle or a bundle of little candles) can take 3 ‘narrative damage’ before it’s out, which can be from a long time spent burning or being dropped in a puddle. You can watch as it slowly takes these points of ‘narrative damage’ and plan out your packing for next session, assuming your characters survive the catacombs. You might take “1 Candle” or “2 Candles”, but you absolutely will not have to figure out how many pounds of candles to take.

Finally, can you tell me about some of your archetypes and how they interact with both the setting/fiction of The Indie Hack and the mechanics themselves?

The classes were really fun to write. I took the standard fantasy archetypes and give each one a slight twist. The classes are Veteran, Exorcist, Hunter, Scoundrel, Elementalist, Occultist, and Outlander.

The characters provide information about the fictional world. For example, the Scoundrel might tell us a little bit about the economy and crime of the world. The Veteran might tell us about a great battle (and thereby, the nations or factions of the world). The Outlander is an enigma, here are some of his/her questions: “You can hear them too, can’t you (what do they say)? What lies buried deep beneath these hills? Where can you never go? Where must you always return?” You don’t have to answer all of them, just a few. Just enough to get the GM’s mental gears turning.

The players want a very different type of game if they answer “Where can you never go?” by saying “The Blood-splashed Crags of Southern Tybis, where I can hear their time-hollowed bones whistle in the wind” versus “The bawdy house where I let my second cousin die of tuberculosis four winters ago”. The players establish locations and personages in the fiction and set the initial tone.
The initial skills and spells should be familiar to those who’ve played the classic fantasy RPGs. Typically, the spell gives a guide on writing the “details” that are created by the effect. In essence, spellcasting is little different from combat or diplomacy or stealth or navigation.

I just love the classes. Certain players might have favorites, but I’d be equally happy to play as any one of them.

Thanks so much to Slade for talking with me about The Indie Hack. You can check it out on DriveThru and hopefully take it to the table!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Five or So Questions with Monte Cook on Invisible Sun

Good news everyone! I’ve been lucky enough to interview Monte Cook of Monte Cook Games about his new game on Kickstarter, Invisible Sun. Invisible Sun is a new tabletop RPG with a flexible play function and some fun bits and pieces that can round out the experience, which promises an escape to surreal fantasy and secrecy. Check out Monte’s responses to my questions below!

I love this piece so much, the colors and structure are so good.

Tell me a little about Invisible Sun. What excites you about it?

Invisible Sun is a new RPG of surreal fantasy, where player characters use magic to discover the secrets of the world, and the world beyond the world. There are many, many things that excite me about the game. If I had to pick, say, two, I’d say the surreal nature of the setting–a place where not only can anything happen, but does–and some of the new gameplay elements. In Invisible Sun, we have something called Development Mode (as in, character development), where players get time away from the table to really focus on their own, personal story arcs. Everything in the game is story-based, and even a character’s advancement is based on progress through one or more story arcs that they player has set up. Development mode gives players a way to interact with the game and with each other even when the whole group can’t meet. It’s great for everyone, but particularly for those of us who sometimes struggle to make our schedules all mesh.

Both of these aspects of the game are really about the same thing: escaping the demands of the real world to escape–at least for a time–into a realm of imagination and wonder. Invisible Sun is about escape in both setting and mechanics.

I really like combining nature and humanity, so this image is right up my alley.

For Development Mode, outside of the flexibility, what do you think about that option really opens up the experience for players – is it just lonely fun, or do you think it’s more of an exploration, or more?

I’m not sure what you mean by “lonely fun.” Development mode allows a player or players to interact with the GM–either indirectly or directly, as they desire and as is convenient–to play out side-scenes involving only some subset of the group. So the GM and players can have personal storylines going as well as group stories, or a single character can break off and do their own thing in between sessions. Or maybe the side-scene is a flashback, and just enriches a character’s background (or, like in good fiction, maybe something that happens in that flashback then directly affects the present storyline). It’s also a great way to give players who are a bit quieter in a large group a way to shine on their own–that is to say, it’s great for introverts.

Shhhhh.

Invisible Sun has a lot more going than just a book. What components come with the game, and what do they do? With that, what do you personally enjoy about integrating them into Invisible Sun’s play?

Now that we’ve unlocked the “Whole Box Upgrade” stretch goal, the game comes with dozens of player handouts, in-depth 4-page character tomes, a pad of grimoire sheets for keeping track of spells and secrets, a GM notebook filled with creative prompts and ways to manage all the various story arcs in the campaign, hundreds of tokens (some specific to certain character orders), and over a thousand cards, ranging from spell and artifact cards to the 60-card divinatory Sooth Deck that figures into every aspect of play. And that’s still not everything.

The point here is that Invisible Sun is a game that recognizes the challenges of getting the group to gather around a table and so it celebrates it with all sorts of fun visual and tactile enhancements to play the game. For example, Vance characters manage their magic in a way that restricts the number of living spells they can have ready in their mind at once. They will have cards that have their spells written on them in different sizes and shapes. If they can fit some combination of those cards into the diagram that represents their mind, they can ready that many spells. Weavers, however, use magic in an entirely different way and have game bits that help them keep track of that.

There are all kind of board games with glorious boxes filled with fun stuff to help play the game. I think RPGers should have that option if they want it too.

The little curlicues in here and the snail are so cute but spoopy.

Escapism is a huge part of tabletop RPGs, and it often seems like there’s more to escape than ever. What do you think about the surreal setting of Invisible Sun makes it compelling, and accessible, for people who have so many realms to dive into already?

The stranger and more surreal a setting is, the easier, rather than harder, it is to escape into it. Because in a setting like that, you don’t ever have to say no. You never say, “no, that can’t work,” or “that’s not realistic.” You don’t have to be a history scholar or a science expert or really know anything other than how to use your imagination. It’s not a free-for-all, of course. It’s still an rpg, and rpgs have rules, but it takes away restrictions that would be purely setting-based. It’s a deep-dive into fantasy, to be sure, but it’s appealing to people who maybe sometimes want something beyond the standard genre tropes. The game, of course, will come with all manner of creative prompts (first and foremost, the aforementioned Sooth Deck) to help generate ideas for all of this. Sometimes “anything is possible” is hard, at least at first. So the game gives you a hand.

Multiple eyes like that freaks me out but I still like the kitty.

What have been some of your favorite parts of designing and playing Invisible Sun, the kind of moments and concept realizations that you really found valuable as a creator?

For more than two years now, I’ve kept a set of notebooks of just every weird idea that I came across. Things too out there for anything else. “A thief who literally steals ideas.” “Armor made out of protective words and a weapon constructed of dangerous ones.” “A monster that feeds on the concept of starvation.” Things like that. That’s my favorite part. In the end, I read, I watch television and movies, I play games, and I write all for the ideas. Ideas are my passion, and the freer I am to let my imagination soar, the happier I am.

Beyond that, I’m really enjoying thinking about the things that keep us from playing games and trying to overcome them. There’s where Development Mode came from. That’s why Invisible Sun treats character death in a way that doesn’t force a player to stop playing. That’s why there are specific aspects of the game to handle both introvert and extrovert players. That’s why player absences are worked right into the conceit of the setting. And so on.

As an rpg designer in 2016, I think we need to start thinking about these things. Playing a game as adults in the modern world isn’t like gathering in the basement back when we were 13. It’s simply harder now. Some other designers will come up with different (and possibly far better) solutions to these issues, but it’s something we need to be thinking about.

Thanks so much to Monte for answering my questions about Invisible Sun and his experience designing it! Check out Invisible Sun on Kickstarter!

Note: for others unfamiliar with the term “lonely fun,” it’s typically referring to solo roleplay or the game time spent creating characters and setting elements for group games that is done alone or away from the group. Lonely fun is essentially self-propelled roleplay and creation or design.

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Tag: five or so

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