Tag: five or so

Five or So Questions with Eric Simon on Rockalypse

Hi all! I have an interview today with Eric Simon of Four-in-Hand games about his upcoming game, Rockalypse (quick start on DTRPG here!), which is currently on Kickstarter! It sounds really cool, but I’ll let Eric tell you all the details! He talks, too, about system choice and how it’s important for how a game plays. Good stuff!


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

I’ll start with my usual tagline: Rockalypse is the post-apocalyptic game of musical conflict. The quick high concept is “Scott Pilgrim meets Mad Max,” but it is every movie, comic, or TV show you’ve ever seen where someone pulls out an instrument or takes to the stage and fights someone with nothing but the power of music (or dance). One of the things that continues to excite me about this project is just how many inspirations keep showing up in media. Just this week I’ve watched The Get Down and Kubo and the Two Strings, both of which present different but equally evocative representations of the musical-battle motif. This is a concept that is ripe for play. It seems to be something most people can wrap their minds around fairly easily, simply because of how much source material is ingrained in our pop culture.

Tell me about the system for Rockalypse. What are the basic mechanics, and their inspirations?

Rockalypse is built on Fate Core and is specifically designed to tap into the strength and uniqueness of that system. In particular, collaborative combat and non-physical damage are essential to the feel of the game, and Fate does those things better than just about any other system. The first thing you’ll notice is that I’ve removed Fighting, Shooting, and Provoke, and added in Melody, Harmony, Rhythm, and Rhyme. Melody and Rhyme are now the two main attacking skills, Rhythm and Will are the two main defending skills, and Harmony is an especially powerful support skill. I’ve also built in a bunch of new stunts for those skills and for many of the regular skills for use in combat. Athletics has a stunt that allows dance to be incorporated into the conflict just like the other musical skills, Crafts becomes the main representation of offstage technical work, and even Stealth and Deceive have uses within a performance.

The other key difference is how combat is structured. I really wanted to emphasize the collaboration, so I broke initiative into different “counts” divided by types of actions. The first count is for Overcomes, the second for Creating Advantages, the third for Attacks, and the fourth for any Defends that happen because of those attacks. This encourages the group to really talk through and plan how they’re going to approach each round (or “phrase”). Cooperation is heavily encouraged by the structure and by the stunts attached to the various skills. For instance, a sound and lights technician can use Crafts to create advantages that provide a +3 instead of a +2 when used by their bandmates, but only if they themselves are not performing on stage. Meanwhile, a Rhythm player with the Perfect Time stunt can defend on behalf of her bandmates when they are attacked.

All of the new mechanics are designed around the idea of getting people to engage first with the things that make Fate awesome – aspects, collaboration, narrative positioning, and so on – and second with the fun of describing a musical performance spectacle. Because of the way everything works together, it also makes the Attack and Defend rolls much higher than those in most other Fate games once you get a few phrases into a combat. That helps to give it even more of an epic feel that’s appropriate to the themes.

What would a typical session of Rockalypse play out like?

I strongly recommend a solid session zero at the beginning of your campaign, but assuming you’ve already created your game and you’re into the story itself, Rockalypse resembles many other roleplaying games in how it plays. There’s still adventuring to be done with the usual amount of exploring, talking, and puzzle solving. But when there’s any kind of throw-down, it happens with music instead of fists or guns. I generally aim for a 50/50 split between conflicts and story-driven adventuring. Like most games, that exact balance will vary from session to session, but overall that should be about where you end up.

How did you come up with the concept and what made it fun for you?

This game emerged out of a thought experiment I started a couple years ago. At the time, I was working exclusively on my Steamscapes setting for Savage Worlds, and every once in a while people would ask me if I planned to convert Steamscapes to Fate. My answer was and still is no, because I feel that Savage Worlds is the right fit for that game. But those conversations got me to ask the question, “If I were to design a game that HAD to be run in Fate, what would it be?” After a few months of thinking, I hit on the core idea for Rockalypse, and I’ve been developing it ever since.

Part of the fun in development has definitely come from the great players I’ve had in all my demos and playtests. I love seeing all the different approaches they take to their bands, their characters, and their settings. Both Fate in general and Rockalypse specifically help to bring out the creativity in players, and it’s been a joy to be a part of that.

The other thing that’s been entertaining about the process has been the research. I always enjoy my historical research for Steamscapes, but Rockalypse has allowed me to approach research from a very different angle: watching cheesy movies from couch. And while some of that has still felt like work – I am much more familiar with the Camp Rock oeuvre than I ever wanted to be – I have still managed to find some surprising gems. My more obscure recommendations would include Bandslam (probably the most emotionally genuine teen band movie I’ve seen), Wild Zero (J-Pop stars vs. zombies with a trans-positive romance), and Equestria Girls: Rainbow Rocks (some may scoff, but it has even better band battles than Scott Pilgrim).

One last thing – you said that this game fit for Fate and that’s where you started. What did you do research-wise to design a Fate game, and how do you think your experience designing Rockalypse has influenced your design style?

When I first started, I did a combination of reading, listening to actual plays, and playing a few pick-up games with people who know the system well. I am also very fortunate to live in a city where I can meet up with other prominent game designers such as PK Sullivan and Tara Zuber, and I get to have conversations with them about the things that they have done with Fate and seen others do with Fate. PK in particular came on very early to help me playtest Rockalypse and give me feedback on the mechanics. He really helped me work out some of the early kinks.

As far as my own design style goes, one of the things I did with Rockalypse was to pull myself away from the heavy setting focus of my other work. Steamscapes is extremely setting-dependent, but I knew I wanted more flexibility with this game. I have enjoyed the challenge of writing a game where the setting is created by the players every time you play, and it has been very rewarding to see that pay off. Otherwise, I really feel that Rockalypse has been a good test and example of my overall design philosophy, which is to always look for the right match of theme, setting, and mechanics. I think the best games are the ones where all three of those things work together to support a cohesive play experience. That’s what I’m always striving for.

Thanks so much to Eric for the interview! Rockalypse sounds like a fun game that can definitely hit some flavor buttons for a lot of people. Check it out on Kickstarter!

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

Five or So Questions with Jason Godesky on The Fifth World

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Jason Godesky on his game, The Fifth World, produced with Guilianna Maria Lamanna. The Fifth World is currently on Patreon as an open-source shared universe, and Jason had a lot of interesting stuff to say about the game! Check out his answers to my questions below.

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

The Fifth World takes place 144,000 days from now — one b’ak’tun in the Maya Long Count calendar, or just shy of 400 years. Civilization has collapsed, but humanity thrives beyond civilization. Most of the problems we face today have disappeared. Instead, they have to navigate a tangled web of kinship that binds them to a more-than-human world, where people you love and respect may want completely opposite things from you.

I got started with this by combining two things that have excited me for quite a while: creating an open source shared universe, and creating neotribal, ecotopian, animist realist fiction.

Many people have argued before that shared universes like Marvel or DC, Star Wars or Star Trek, Doctor Who, or the Cthulhu Mythos constitute our modern-day mythology. Unfortunately, we’ve also seen what happens when our mythology constitutes a corporation’s intellectual property. They don’t always handle it with the care we’d want them to. We still bring all of our enthusiasm to it and create these wonderful and amazing fan art and fan fiction, but we run into limits with that, too, again because our mythology constitutes a corporation’s intellectual property. What if we could change that, though? What if we could have an open source shared universe, where that mythology doesn’t belong to a corporation, but to the community who loves it? What could we do with an open source roleplaying game designed to explore an open source universe?

That idea actually got into my head first, starting with an excited discussion my brother and I had about what could happen if you took the Open Game License beyond a marketing ploy and instead really ran with it. My wife helped me connect it to the other half, reminding me of something we’d long wanted to explore more deeply that we couldn’t really dig into in any other way.

Giuli and I had both studied anthropology, and that had stripped away a lot of the common misconceptions about life beyond civilization for us, but it was really artist Michael Green’s “Afterculture” project that helped bring it all together for us and really see it. On the project’s homepage, he even describes it as “a return to the rich ‘cultural biodiversity’ that has characterized the human species for most of its sojourn here,” and challenges us “to imagine other versions, other tribes.” Michael Green has amazing talent and creativity, but ultimately he has only his own brain. I can add a bit more to it, but I only have my own brain. Giuli can add a bit more to it, but she only has her own brain. As an open source shared universe, though, where we provide people with tools to imagine life in a neotribal, ecotopian, animist realist future in their own bioregion, we might begin to glimpse what such an incredible, diverse, beautiful, vibrant world could look like.

I think those both speak to things that a lot of us deeply need right now: a mythology that we can really make our own, and a hopeful vision of the future that we can really believe in.

What kind of shared mythologies have you been building, and do you intend to build?

In a world like ours, we can talk about “world history,” because we live in a time of globalization, where the individual strands of local history become more and more entwined, like strings forming ropes, and ropes forming cords. The Fifth World takes that in reverse, letting the big cord of world history unwind into hundreds of thousands of local histories. We want people to join in with local, bioregional histories of the future. I read a lot of indigenous authors who say things like what Joe Sheridan and Roronhiakewen “He Clears the Sky” Dan Longboat wrote about their own experience as Onkwehonwe that “[o]ld-growth minds and cultures mature, emerge, and encompass the old growth of their traditional territory.” Mythology comes from our specific place, and binds us to it. We can’t tell someone in Tasmania or Johannesburg or New Orleans or Taipei what stories that place tells. Instead, we try to make the Fifth World a way for a group of friends to listen to what a place has to say, try to tease it out, and have fun doing it.

That said, of course, the Fifth World does have some lasting legacies from our world. My wife, Giuli, is working on a novel set in the Fifth World called “Children of Wormwood,” which deals with the effect of nuclear waste four centuries in the future. It starts with an idea that Thomas Sebeok proposed to the Human Interference Task Force in 1981, formed by the U.S. Department of Energy and Bechtel to start exploring the problem of how you can establish protocols to protect nuclear waste, when nuclear waste remains dangerous longer than any human culture or language has existed before. Sebeok had the idea of establishing an atomic priesthood that would use ritual and myth to preserve knowledge of the locations of and dangers associated with nuclear waste. The idea has its problems, and when the novel begins we soon learn that these Vulture Priests pay a terrible price to slow the march of an inevitable problem. Without giving too much away, the novel tells the story of how they find a lasting solution by forming an alliance with a very different form of life.

My favorite stories in the Fifth World usually mix hard, mundane science fiction with animist realist sensibilities in just this way. That combination creates stories rooted in the real world, but look at it from a different perspective.

How does the game function mechanically and narratively?

Actually, I really owe you for my biggest breakthrough on that. I believe you had just started this interview series, and Epidiah Ravachol recommended it on Google+, and he said that questions offered the most innovative, powerful tool in roleplaying games today, and pointed to you at the forefront of that. That got me thinking. Today, questions really form the core of the Fifth World RPG.

Your character has some points of awareness (starting with five, but things can happen to change that), and you spend those points on a few things, but most prominently, asking questions. You spend a point of awareness, you ask a specific other player a question from a limited set available to you, and they answer. We talk freely during an encounter, but we don’t know any of those things for sure. We might discover later on that we misunderstood or misconstrued. When you spend a point of awareness and ask a question, we know something for sure, and the knowing creates one new constraint.

I think this really puts exploration at the heart of the game, and it makes the open source nature of the project fit right in with the game’s rules, as the wiki becomes a repository to all of the answers to the questions you’ve asked. Even with this, where we always learn more about the world, we never run out of questions to ask. We always find new corners to explore. One playtester once told me that he appreciated how the game made the familiar unfamiliar. Part of that comes from this focus on questions, because it pulls you in to explore deeper and ask more questions about places you thought you understood.

The other major breakthrough that helped me put it all together came from reading about the relationship between people, places, and awareness. I made awareness a pool of points, rather than a skill that you have, because that better models what we know now about how awareness works. You’ve probably read about decision fatigue, for example. Awareness works the same way. Even without a bunch of psychological research, just thinking it through, when you pay attention to one thing, you can’t pay attention to something else. It turns out, though, that while some environments drain our awareness, others replenish it. Specifically, those places where we have the most exposure to other-than-human life do the most to restore our awareness.

This helped me close the loop on the game’s mechanical cycle, and figure out how people, places, and awareness interact. Awareness accrues at places. People go from place to place and act in accordance with the spirit of the place (e.g., at a sacred place you can gather awareness when you perform a religious ritual, at a melancholy place you can gather awareness when you express your sadness, and at a creative place you can gather awareness when you create something). They spend that awareness to explore the world and pursue their dreams — including, sometimes, their dreams of changing the world, their family, or themselves.

How do you avoid cultural appropriation in such a mutable environment?

I’ve thought about this a lot. You know this: in roleplaying games, we rely heavily on genre. Getting everyone at the table to imagine the same thing doesn’t always come easily, and genre helps a lot. With the Fifth World, we don’t really have a genre to point to. I always end up saying that this book fits except for these parts, or watch the first 30 minutes of this movie, but I find I can’t really write a Fifth World mediography, only an annotated mediography. That can cause a problem, because even if it doesn’t fit, players may turn to stereotypes about native people and use that as the thing to lean on.

We only have four policy pages on the Fifth World website at the moment, but one of them addresses cultural appropriation directly. We cite Susan Scafidi’s “three S’s” — significance or sacredness, source, and similarity. Ultimately, we look at cultural appropriation as really failing to fulfill the project’s goal. We want to imagine a neotribal future. If you imagine a family that has stolen Anishinaabe culture but doesn’t actually descend from modern-day Anishinaabe with the right to use that culture and the knowledge of how to do so, you haven’t done a very good job of imagining a neotribal future. These people come from a different background and face different challenges, so how would something stolen from others help them? I think that alone helps keep us away from anything too similar, and by keeping away from that “s” we can also avoid the sacred. Sweat lodges have a sacred place in the traditions of native nations across the Americas, and with good reason, but why would the descendants of Scandinavians in Wisconsin copy the Anishinaabe madoodiswan and not the Nordic sauna?

We take that approach to questions from the game and extend it to the rest of the project. As an open source project, we expect that we’ll get contributions of questionable anthropological integrity. Usually it happens because of the gaps in anthropological knowledge generally. A lot of the things we know about traditional societies can seem really shocking to people. A lot of people won’t even believe it when you show them the evidence, because it contradicts their beliefs about human nature (I’ve almost finished “Stand on Zanzibar” now, and quite enjoyed how this very kind of thing tripping up the god-like supercomputer Shalmaneser). We don’t treat it as an error, though. Instead, we ask questions. We point out what makes it seem so unlikely, and then we ask, “What do you think happened here, to make such a bizarre thing happen?”

We haven’t had enough contributions from others yet to put this to the test to see if it will work, but I expect it will happen sooner or later: when we get that really shallow, culturally appropriative contribution, I’ll ask more questions about it. I’ll ask about how it developed, where it came from, and what it means. For the moment, at least, I expect questions like that to drive it further and further away from existing traditions, meaning less and less similar, and I would hope less and less sacred. If necessary, we won’t mind altering a contribution, though. Another of our policy pages makes clear that our community works together to make the best Fifth World we can together, and cultural appropriation doesn’t help us do that.

The established power dynamic has a lot to do with what separates cultural appropriation from cultural exchange. Right now, the Fifth World mostly comes from me, a cishet white American man, and my wife, a cishet white American woman, but I don’t want it to stop there. I don’t want to take from other cultures and exclude the people. I want other people to join in, and tell me how they imagine their culture living and thriving in a neotribal future. I can’t tell those stories, and neither can Giuli, and I often worry that people might mistake the lack of stories that we have no right to tell to mean that we don’t want to hear them. I want to see Indigenous futurism and Afrofuturism in the Fifth World. My biggest hope for guarding against cultural appropriation lies in the open source nature of the project, again. I hope it means that we’ll have voices far beyond the one I can offer, telling the stories we each can tell, woven together.

What do you want to see people do with the game beyond just building materials?

I started with the roleplaying game because a roleplaying game provides such an incredible engine for creating setting. It makes our worldbuilding collaborative, which fits in well with our open source nature, and it starts to fill in the world and make it more real. From there, more people will have ideas to do new things with it.

I mentioned Giuli’s forthcoming novel, “Children of Wormwood.” We plan on releasing that as serial fiction, releasing each episode in text and as an MP3 podiobook you can subscribe to. We’ve toyed with the idea of serial audio drama in the form of a podcast — something like “Welcome to Night Vale” with the aesthetics of “The Memory Palace,” but with neotribal, ecotopian fiction instead of surreal comedy. I’d love to make a Fifth World LARP once we have the RPG in a more established place. I’d love to start something like a Renaissance Faire, but with the Fifth World. I’ve mentioned how much I’d love to see a Fifth World play some day. I’d love to see a web comic. I’d love to see people steal any or all of these ideas and run with them.

I can’t tell you what I hope to see most, though, because I most hope to see the thing that will totally take me by surprise, the thing that will make my smack my forehead and question why I never thought of it. Sure, I could’ve claimed to own the Fifth World, that I put these ideas together and so now it belongs to me, but really I’d much rather have the thrill of seeing the amazing things that other people might do with it. I’ll trade intellectual property to take part in an active community any day.


Thanks so much to Jason for the interview! Make sure you check out The Fifth World on Patreon and see what this unusual and fascinating world has to offer, and what you can contribute!


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

Five or So Questions with David Schirduan

Hi all! I have an interview today with David Schirduan about his games Mythic Mortals and Maroon Corps! He had some cool stuff to say about his projects, so check it out!
Tell me about your project. What excites you about it?

I’ve got two big projects right now, one is just wrapping up, and the other is just beginning.

Mythic Mortals was my first “real” project. Kickstarted last year, I just released the third expansion, which finishes off the content promised in the Kickstarter. In Mythic Mortals, you play as yourself suddenly granted incredible powers. The game uses cards and dice to provide quick, action-packed fights. I designed Mythic Mortals from the ground up to be perfect for one-shots and pick-up games. The thing that excites me most is how easily new players jump into the game. I play almost exclusively with new players, and Mythic Mortals was a unique opportunity to tailor a game specifically for those people.

  • Playing as yourself in your hometown makes it easy to jump into a game.
  • Combat is easy to understand, and easy to engage with.
  • The card mechanics FEEL good. They are very tactile and approachable, so much so that playing online is difficult, and required a bunch of special roll20 guides and assets.
I’m excited to see more games explore the design space for one-shots and introductory gaming.

As for my other project, Maroon Corps began as a sci-fi themed dungeon crawler; my attempt to understand the OSR movement (which is still mystifying to me). Over time it morphed into a board/card game, and then back into an rpg. Maroon Corps replaced skill rolls and resolution mechanics with a resource management, push-your-luck system. Dice are used to track resources, and are rarely rolled at all. There is some randomness, but most of the fun comes from exploration of “What’s in the next room?” rather than “Can I avoid the trap?”. Major inspirations are Into the Odd, One Deck Dungeon, and Paranoia.

Maroon Corps is exciting because it’s my first major dive into dungeon crawlers. I love reading through old modules, looking up maps, and thinking about interesting traps or puzzles. It’s something I haven’t done before. The mechanics themselves play more like a board game than a traditional role-playing game. I’m excited to explore how to blend the two, keeping the best from both mediums:

  • Preserve the straightforward rules and engaging mechanics of board games
  • While still allowing for story-telling and GM-centered world flexibility. 
With Mythic Mortals, you created the game to make it easier to accommodate new players and have short sessions. What did you consider with the design to ensure these things worked?
There are a few things about Mythic Mortals that make it easier for new players:

Simple Rules, Complex Classes. The core rules of Mythic Mortals are boringly simple, and can be explained in about 2 minutes. The complexity and the fun comes from the classes. Player’s only need to know about their own 16 abilities, only 4 of which are active at any given time. They don’t need to know about any other rules, or any of the enemy rules. As it turns out, it takes most players about an hour to figure out and grow comfortable with their class, and another hour or two to master their class completely. This is the sweet spot, and by the end of a session, players have fully explored and enjoyed their class.

  • No Advancement Requirements. Everything is available from the start, albeit with a little luck required. I always hated starting a new game and seeing a really cool level 20 ability that I know I’ll never get to use. Instead, Mythic Mortals uses shifting abilities/weapons/bonuses to provide variety, rather than locking content behind leveling walls.
  • Familiar Setting/Tone. Playing as yourself defending your hometown from monsters makes it very easy to jump into a game. Players can fight at their favorite restaurant, or school. The GM doesn’t need to explain the epic backstory behind this brand new town; everyone already knows the location and the culture.
  • Tactile and Tactical. The cards and the dice are fun to use, and feel really good to manipulate. No pencils or complex math needed! Some players are intimidated by character sheets full of numbers and text boxes, but everyone is familiar with cards and dice. It looks more like a board game, and feels like a card game.
  • Combat is easy and fun. I don’t know about you, but in my first few role-playing games, I clung to combat like a drowned rat. Role-playing, funny accents, dramatic dialogue, or clever planning were alien to me at first. But combat had very clear rules and created constraints for me to work around. “How do you kill it” is easier to engage with than, “What do you say to the king?”. Combat is a great place for new players to engage with the game.
  • Simple to GM. The GM doesn’t have a lot of work to do; enemies are simple, and plots are even simpler. The game includes a handful of adventures, and making your own scenarios is extremely simple. This means Mythic Mortals can be run off the cuff by a GM who just finished the core book.

Mythic Mortals is the kind of game I wanted to play when I started exploring rpgs. It won’t replace huge, multi-session games like DnD, Burning Wheel, or Numenera; but you’ll never find a better game for new players or one-shots.

Since sometimes dungeon crawls can get repetitive, how do you keep people engaged when playing Maroon Corps?

Oohh, great question! Many dungeon crawls live and die based on the quality of the dungeon, rather than the game. Some old-school dungeon modules are played again and again, while others are purposefully forgotten and ignored; even though the both are the same game! Maroon Corps uses a few tricks to get around this problem:

  • Death is Celebrated. A lot of Dungeon Crawlers try to create a tense, dangerous atmosphere where only clever planning and luck will save you. By contrast, Maroon Corps creates a funhouse of sawblades, spiky monsters, and dump traps. Players have 5 backup clones to replace their character when they die. Not only does this minimize death as punishment, but we encourage it by using Lockers.
  • Lockers. When a new clone is revived, they are randomly assigned a locker filled with goodies. Each locker could contain special weapons, one-use items, or strange little oddities. Whenever a trooper dies, it’s like opening a present on Christmas morning. This also means that dungeons don’t need to contain much loot, since most characters will get several lockers worth of goodies.
  • Quirks. A recent addition to the rules, new clones are also assigned a random Quirk which will change how they play the game. Some quirks are mechanical, some are more role-playing focused, but they are all funny and absurd., some are harmful, but most of them are weird or absurd. My favorite quirk so far is: “Clumsy – You cannot use your hands to manipulate your dice. No one may help you.” 
  • Maroon Corps is fast. The mechanics are stripped down and streamlined to provide an almost board-game like experience. Players can move through rooms very quickly, stopping where they want, and speeding through the things that don’t interest them. Players are never bogged down by checking or traps at each room, or slowly touching everything with a 10-ft pole.

Maroon corps provides danger and death, like all good dungeon crawls. But Death is an exciting event, rather than something to be dreaded and avoided.

Mythic Mortals has some interesting card mechanics. Can you talk about how they work and why you put them in place?

I’ve always been a “Mechanics First” kind of designer. Mythic Mortals start out as a small project with one goal: design a role-playing game where your cards are your stats. My original game had about 8 different card slot players needed to fill. With a setup like that, players don’t make decisions; they just keep drawing and placing cards, keeping the best ones, and getting rid of the worst. It wasn’t until I came up with the idea of cards constantly shifting that the game really came together.

I think this is the primary appeal of Mythic Mortals. Every few turns, players get to completely re-build their characters, allowing them to adapt to new situations. It also means that every few turns players get to try out new powers, weapons, or character flaws. Each card presents a tough decision.

Every card has two components: the value, and the suit. Higher values are ALWAYS better, so those cards should be placed with care. There are 4 slots:

  • Mythos: Roll under this slot to use your special abilities.
  • Accuracy: Roll under this slot to use your weapon.
  • Defense: Roll under this slot to dodge attacks.
  • Damage: This is how much damage your attacks deal.

So if you’re surrounded by enemies, and waiting for backup, put your highest card in Defense. On the other hand, if the boss is almost dead, and you need to finish it off, put your highest card in Damage. However, you must also take into account, the Suit of the card. Each Slot has 4 options that can be enabled by the suit of the card in that slot. For example:

You draw a 10 of Hearts, and a 3 of Spades. Normally, you would put the 10 in the slot, simple as that. But the weapon unlocked with Hearts is not very helpful to you right now. The spades weapon, however, is VERY useful. Which one should you put in that slot? It is choices like these that keep Mythic Mortals interesting, forcing you to make tough decisions every few turns.

Could you talk about how you track resources with dice in Maroon Corps?


In Maroon Corps you have two main resources: Suit Charges and Blaster Charges. The Blaster charges are tracked with a 6-sided die showing the current charges. The Suit charges are tracked with a 10-sided die. As you use charges and gain charges, you rotate the die to show the current charges. The core of the game is focused around managing and spending your charges wisely. A few examples:

  • In combat, you can fire your Blaster at an enemy. It deals damage equal to its current charges, and then loses one charge. For example: Your blaster has 4 charges. You fire, dealing 4 damage. Your blaster now has 3 charges.
  • When you take damage, your suit charges are reduced, one for one. For example: You have 5 suit charges. You take 3 damage. You have 2 suit charges remaining. You can also spend suit charges to overcome obstacles: open doors, translate information, detect lifeforms, etc. 
  • When either your suit or your blaster charges get low, you can try charging up. I won’t go into the full rules, but the higher your blaster charges, the more dangerous it is to try and re-charge your suit. Not only does this mean you can accidentally die while trying to charge up, but it also encourages you to shoot as many things as possible.
One of the core themes of the game is that the dice are rarely, if ever, rolled. There is still a little bit of luck and randomness, but the emphasis is on resource management rather than random die rolls. Any tension comes from the mystery of “what’s in the next room” rather than, “Can I roll above a 7?” Players almost never feel cheated by the dice in Maroon Corps.

When can we expect to see more on Maroon Corps?

I have no idea. After running the Kickstarter, I’ve become all too wary of how much pressure sits on a game with an announcement date 🙂 So for now, Maroon Corps is in a casual beta. If anyone wants to peek at the rules, just shoot me an email. I’d be glad to hear some feedback and get some playtesting in.

Thanks so much to David for the interview! I’m looking forward to seeing more about Maroon Corps and I hope everyone enjoys checking out Mythic Mortals!

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

Five or So Questions with Christian Griffin on Meridian

Today I have an interview with Christian Griffen on Meridian! Meridian is hitting Kickstarter and I’m excited to see how it goes. I’ll let Christian tell you about Meridian in the answers below, and you can check out an actual play as well!

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

Ever since I was little and The Neverending Story came into my life, I’ve been daydreaming of journeys to amazing worlds of the imagination. Occasionally works like Labyrinth or Mirrormask tapped into that same vein and reminded me of how profoundly touching these stories are to me. I’ve always wanted to have that kind of experience with a roleplaying game, but the Hero’s Journey that we get from most adventure RPGs are quite a different thing. It’s only now, after 26 years of playing and 11 years of designing and publishing RPGs that I’ve developed the techniques to bring this dream to life.

What excites me about Meridian is that it provides evocative places, characters, and moments for anyone to go on a fantastical journey, while leaving enough to the group’s imagination to make each experience unique. Of course it’s not exactly the same journey as Atreyu’s in Fantasia or Alice’s in Wonderland, because Meridian is its own place and follows its own laws. It’s my unique addition to the wondrous journey genre, and the games I’ve played with others have been nothing short of magical.


What are the most important elements of the wondrous journey genre that you wanted to bring forth in Meridian?

There is a special sense of fantastical exploration in these stories. Usually the worlds have a dreamlike quality and provide a wonderful canvas for the imagination. We get to experience wonder together with the protagonist, like when Sarah meets a talking fox riding on a sheepdog, or when Alice grows and shrinks because of the foods she ingests in Wonderland.

Though these worlds are dreamlike, they follow their own internal rules. This is true for Meridian as well: every Locale that you visit has three laws, which are generally unbreakable. They also invite imaginative play. For example, in the Midnight Conservatory, anything that’s planted in the soil sprouts and grows into some sort of flower or tree. Players have a lot of playful exploration with this as they figure out what would grow from the various things that the Journeyer has on hand. And most of the time, they’ll find that their subconscious will come up with things that fit, thematically, with the kind of journey they’re on.

What kind of mechanics do you use in Meridian to resolve conflicts and involve story elements?

These journeys are not about conflicts, which sets Meridian apart from most other RPGs. Instead, the mechanics in Meridian focus on changing those who travel through it. Each Journeyer also has an important final decision at the end that’s influenced by the choices made along the way.

Providing story elements is where Meridian really shines. Each Locale has a list of sensory impressions, details, and characters with titles like Helea of the Abandoned Heart or Morok the Shadowmonger. The players use these in conjunction with Cadence cards, which are short, evocative statements such as “a tiny creature, mumbling, eagerly gathering for its collection” or “gauzy walls of gossamer with shadows moving on the other side.” By adding their own dash of imagination, players have a lot of fodder for truly unique characters and moments.

How do you define the different roles in the game – the Journeyer, Guide, Touches, and Companions?

One player controls the Journeyer who explores Locales, interacts with other characters, and goes through changes and choices. Another player, the Guide, is in charge of the Locales and of transitioning the Journeyer among them. The other players start as Touches, who introduce additional characters that interact with the Journeyer. These characters usually remain at their Locales, but a Touch can claim one of them and become a Companion, who will then travel alongside the Journeyer for the rest of the game. There are several kinds of Companions with different roles and options, ranging from a possible romantic connection to a dark aspect of the character’s personality stalking them through Meridian.

Role cards for each player lay out their part in the game and any special rules that apply to them, so players don’t need to pass around the rulebook. It’s a very important design principle for me that players can just focus on their shared imagined journey through Meridian and don’t need much out-of-character talk once they begin.

If you were able to tell a story through Meridian that really captured the essence of the game, what would happen to the Journeyer, and what would you want to have players carry forward?

This is a tough one, because a major part of the design is that every journey is different. I’ve played several journeys through Meridian, both with close friends and with new people at conventions, that have really touched me. In one of them, a Journeyer came to Meridian because, after losing his wife to cancer, he was searching for a way to give his heart away so that he would no longer feel the pain. He thought he would never get better, that his own life was at an end.

As he journeyed through Meridian, he gathered a couple of Companions around him. One was a singer of mournful hymns he met at the Mausoleum of Mirrors. At one of the Locales, she used her progression to sacrifice her own heart to help the Journeyer with his pursuit. They finally arrived at the Midnight Conservatory, where the Journeyer shared the Mournful Gardener’s sorrow and asked him why he was so sad, surrounded by all those beautiful plants. As their tears watered the ground, he realized: “Without sadness there can be no growth.”

So the Journeyer planted his own heart in the soil, and in accordance with the Midnight Conservatory’s laws, a new plant sprung up with fresh hearts growing on it. He took one for himself and gave one to his Companion. He realized now that he had to feel the pain in order to grow, to really live. At the end of that journey, we had tears in our eyes. And we carried something forward from that, something I will always remember as if I’d lived through it myself.

I would love for players to carry their own such insights forward from each of their journeys. But even when a theme didn’t emerge so strongly, we always had moments of beauty, of quirky wonder, of strange but fantastical interactions. And those are always worth the trip.

Thanks so much to Christian for answering my questions! You can check out Meridian on Kickstarter, and see more on Berengad Games’ website.

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

Five or So Questions with Tod Foley on DayTrippers

Today I have an interview with Tod Foley, who introduced me to his game DayTrippers, which sounds like a cool scifi experience. It’s available on RPGnow and TabletopLibrary, and you can learn more about it on the DayTrippers website. Check out the interview below!

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

To answer that, I’ll need to talk about two things: themes and mechanics. This will take a little explanation.

Thematically, DayTrippers is my love letter to weird science fiction. I’ve always been a SF fan, but the appeal was never about the science or technology. For me it was all about the mind, and about questioning the nature of reality. I grew up reading “new wave” authors like Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, Michael Moorcock, James Tiptree Jr. and Philip K. Dick. Their works were more about “inner space” than “outer space”. To this day, the movies that affect me most are nominally science fiction, but of the type that messes with your head: from classics like “2001: A Space Odyssey” (which had a powerful and lasting effect on my six-year-old mind) to modern-day brain-benders like “Inception”. For me, the truth is where the weird is. As I got older I began seeing the links between this “weird” school of SF and surrealist artists whose work also affected me deeply: people like Roger Dean, Richard Corben, H.R.Giger and my personal favorite, Moebius (Jean Giraud).

Of course, there have been plenty SF RPGs over the years. I contributed heavily to the “Space Master” line (from Iron Crown Enterprises) in the 80s. But these games tend to lean toward hard science, and follow the common materialist themes of exploration and combat. You know: laser weapons, starship battles, hostile alien “natives” and bug-eyed monsters. These themes never grabbed me as deeply as the new wave had grabbed me. What I really wanted was a game that would get inside players’ heads, and take them to those bizarre corners of existence where sanity (or reality itself) comes into question, like the weird SF I loved from my youth.

These ideas percolated in my head for many years. One day in 2014 I was talking with Mike Burrell on story-games.com, and the subject came around to our love of Moebius and other “Heavy Metal” artists. In the best of these stories, alternate realities and heavy symbolism blend together in a way that’s both technological and surrealistic. We realized there was an opening for a new type of SF RPG, but it couldn’t be just an ordinary “simulation” – because such a game wouldn’t have the deep psychological impact that drives weird fiction and surrealist art. I thought the best way to attain that powerful sense of strangeness and displacement would be to fuse traditional GMing approaches with narrativist and surrealist techniques, and I threw myself into the project with wild abandon. Suddenly everything just *clicked*. Within a year, DayTrippers was born.

Of course, once you decide you’re going to fuse traditional and narrative techniques in a single hybrid game, you run into a lot of roadblocks – none the least of which is the insular nature of player groups and GMs on opposite sides of that imaginary “rift” in our hobby. To appeal to both groups it was imperative that the game’s mechanics be new and flexible, but also simple and narratively-driven. There weren’t many designers who had ever attempted such a fusion.

Two of my main inspirations were Steffan O’Sullivan’s “FUDGE” (from which the original FATE was a branch-off), and Matthijs Holter’s “Archipelago”. From the former I took the idea of a descriptive difficulty scale and lack of a “canonical” setting, and from the latter I took the concept of bipartite action resolution (“yes and”, “yes but”, “no and”, “no but”), along with the contextual and narrativistic interpretation of action results. Everything in the game would come down to a single unified action resolution system. With this core mechanic in place, I was able to create a “toolkit” that could be used in a number of different ways: as a collaborative narrativist game, as a strongly-GM’d traditional game, or (my favorite mode) as a blend of both approaches. The core mechanic has just enough crunch to simulate any type of situation, while the random generators and surrealist techniques add a level of subconscious projection that keeps things from becoming predictable – even for an experienced GM.

I’ve been designing games professionally since the mid 80s. I’ve done both trad and narrative games. But with DayTrippers, I was able to unite the best aspects of both schools, and give people the flexibility to run in whatever style suits their group. That’s what excites me, and that’s why I can’t shut up about it. 🙂

Can you talk a little about the fiction for DayTrippers, both the content in the game and any specific features you think new players would find exciting?

Future settings always require a bit of exposition, and DayTrippers is no different. The game is set in an UbiComp version of the first world, 100 years in the future, although I’m deliberately vague on the details in order to allow GMs to make up their own minds about future history.

The Core Rules book begins with the story of Zayim Diaspora, open-source technologist and inventor of “SlipShips” – those incredible machines that allow travel into alternate dimensions, as well as forward and backward in time. Because slipship technology is open-source, it’s “out of the bag” and no government or corporation can keep a lid on it. This means DayTrippers can come from all walks of life: from high-ranking military or corporate specialists to garage tinkerers with a lot of free time on their hands. It’s a simple conceit that allows for all types of characters to be created, and permits the vast entirety of SF realities to be explored. Total narrative freedom, baby! There’s a massive list of inspirational material by all my favorite authors in the GameMasters Guide; stories of alternate earths, tales of time travel, and explorations of alien planets and other dimensions. No two DayTrippers multiverses are alike. GMs and Players are free to approach the game with whatever inspirations they find appealing. You can do “Star Trek” one day and “Buckaroo Banzai” the next, then follow it up with “Solaris” or “The Man in the High Castle”.


Tell me about LifeShaping, how does it influence character development, and how does it impact gameplay?

“LifeShapers” are things that effect the PCs’ personally. They may be influential events from the characters’ pasts, or psychological issues they’re dealing with in the present. In a game of DayTrippers, Players may begin playing with only a vague idea of who their character is (much like the protagonist of a book or movie in the first scenes, when we have very little knowledge about them). Through a process I call “Progressive Character Generation”, Players can develop their characters in more detail over sessions or campaigns.

This approach lets you get into the game quickly, without being forced to make up a bunch of details about a person you don’t really know yet. It also allows for great surprises to occur later in the game, such as suddenly learning in the third episode that a character has had military training, or was once a famous athlete, etc. It can give you a new view of your character, and allow for skills and experiences you hadn’t considered when the character was first drawn up. If you think about it, this sort of thing happens in movies and TV all the time. DayTrippers embraces it.

Vehicle combat in cyberpunk can be hella complicated. Could you talk about vehicular combat in DayTrippers?

It’s true that there are a lot of variables involved in vehicular combat. But it’s really no crunchier than any other type of conflict in DayTrippers, where everything – and I do mean *everything* – is resolved using the same core mechanic. Vehicular combat just includes more possible variables. Everyone onboard can get involved.

The most exciting thing about vehicles in DayTrippers is building your own SlipShip. My main influence there was “Car Wars” approach to vehicle design. Vehicles in DayTrippers range from massive interdimensional luxury liners to tiny Rube Goldberg-like contraptions. While the rules do allow for heavy armaments and shielding, most of the important action (at least in my own campaigns) takes place outside the ship.

Finally, I’m interested in what you expect, or want, players to get out of a session or campaign of DayTrippers. What would be the ideal takeaway, for you, from playing DayTrippers?

A DayTrippers campaign is like a series of one-shots; each adventure is designed to last a single session and return the PCs back to Earth. At root, it’s a “Genre Sim” for weird science fiction. The rules are basically a toolbox for creating surreal “short stories” that take place in weird worlds and other dimensions. Each session forms a tight narrative arc, but because the action resolution system is loose and interpretive, there’s a wide range of dramatic and unpredictable outcomes for every roll.

A trad game with narrativist elements, the system is optimized for spurious improvisation and high bleed. That’s where the surreal stuff comes from: it’s a combination of GM ideas, the output of random generators, and the “Psychic Content” contributed by the Players themselves. In play, the game tends to elicit ideas that weren’t even considered when the session began, and it incorporates these changes in unpredictable ways. The GM is not playing against you: instead, together you’re creating a story that has bizarre twists in it, and weirdness flows freely as narrative control goes back and forth. For all these reasons, a DayTrippers adventure is capable of surprising not only the Players, but the GM as well.

Thanks so much to Tod for the interview! I really hope that everyone enjoys checking out DayTrippers (and other games by Tod!) and that everyone got something fun out of this interview!

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

Five or So Questions with Jaye Foster on Age of Legends

Today I have an interview with Jaye Foster on the 6d6 game setting Age of Legends! Age of Legends was Kickstarted last year and will be available for new customers in May, so I asked some questions about the setting. Check out Jaye’s answers below!

Tell me a little about Age of Legends. What excites you about it?

Age of Legends is a RPG set in Ancient Greece in 370 BCE. After centuries of dormancy, the Olympic gods have begun to select mortal champions to combat and counter the agents of the Titans. Imprisoned within Tartarus, the Titans hope their human agents can weaken Olympian strength enough that they can break free.

The player characters are the champions of the fifteen Olympic gods. When not dealing with Titanic plots, they’ll have glorious adventures fighting monsters, engaging in wars between city states and fending off the interests of foreign powers.

What excites me about the setting is the unique stories you can tell with it. Not only do you get classic swords and sandals action inspired by the Iliad and Argonauts you get deeper roleplay about interactions between devout mortals and capricious gods. We’re hoping to provide enough detail about Ancient Greek life that players can properly delve into the now long past culture.

Can you tell me about how the setting of Age of Legends melds with the 6d6 RPG system?

The setting provides a complete and entirely new set of paths using a lot of new advantages. The paths from Modern Generic didn’t fit at all well with the historical and fantastical setting. No changes have been made to the core rules, but keywords have been added for advantages that allow a player to make use of their patron god’s symbols and realms.

When dealing well-known myths, it could make it challenge to keep things fresh and appealing – what did you do with Age of Legends to draw in players and bring Greek myths to life with new concepts?

Mostly this started with avoiding a lot of the well known stories. A lot of the legends and myths in Age of Legends are focuses on the gods themselves, rather than heroes such as Jason or Odysseus. This meant delving into the less well known parts of the Greek mythology and then adapting them to fit out setting concepts. For a lot of the lesser known gods, like Hestia, Hecate and most of the Titans, the surviving literature is very limited to non-existent. So we got to make up our own legends in the style of Greek mythology.

It’s also partially avoided by these old stories not being the focus of the setting. They’re referenced as inspiration only, for the players to be aware of as they write new myths with their characters. The freshness comes from making new stories rather than roleplaying through the well known ones.

How do you handle making the characters as interesting and heroic as the legendary Titans and monsters they’re fighting against?

This is one of the risks of the setting. We’ve given the players / characters access to their gods realms and symbols. With these advantages, they champions of the gods are able to perform incredible heroic acts. But the roleplay to back that up and put it in context can only come from the players.

We’ve given them a lot of guidance about Ancient Greece and how to build a character suitable for the setting. Hopefully it’ll be put to good use.

How did you put together the history and myths into a cohesive text, and what research did you have to do?

Wikipedia was our most common starting point. We also bought and rented a few books on the lives of ordinary Ancient Greeks to fill in the important cultural aspects that our different from our own.

A really big help was http://www.theoi.com/ a website, now-defunct and not updating, where the creator had gone through large amount of the primary source material and organised it by god and by theme. With it we were able to quickly find stories and myths about specific gods without having to read vat quantities of Ancient Greek literature.

Cohesion came about through organizing the book at the start of the project. We knew what information about each god we wanted to communicate. This saved us having to read lots and then determine what was wanted; instead we went looking for stories that fitted our defined needs.

In example – rather than read all of the stories about Zeus and then pick the ones we wanted, we went specifically looking for a story about his childhood, a story about his favour and a story about his wrath.

Thanks so much to Jaye for answering my questions! Make sure to check out Age of Legends, available this month!

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

Five or So Questions with Craig Campbell on Murders and Acquisitions

I have an interview here with Craig Campbell about his new game Murders and Acquisitions! It’s a game that’s unexpected but sounds like a lot of fun, and it’s currently on Kickstarter! Check out the Kickstarter, and Craig’s responses to my questions below!

Tell me a little bit about Murders and Acquisitions. What excites you about it?

Murders and Acquisitions is a tabletop RPG of subterfuge, espionage, intrigue, theft, and murder in an absurd corporate world. The players portray corporate go-getters who seek money, power, and prestige, by whatever means necessary. The game is a little tongue in cheek with humor thrown in here and there. The game mechanics are simple. The world is very easy to understand. The character sheet looks like a resume.

Firstly, I’m excited to be creating my own RPG. I’ve done freelance for D&D, Pathfinder, Gamma World, and Iron Kingdoms, but Murders & Acquisitions is my own creation. Seeing finally come to fruition is very satisfying. Secondly, it fills a niche that I think most gamers haven’t seen before. When big, corrupt corporations show up in RPGs, they’re usually the bad guys. In M&A, you play within the hostile (deadly) work environment and, hopefully, rise to the top. It’s part fantasy wish fulfillment and part fun, engaging storytelling. With full dental.

What inspired you to make a game about corporate subterfuge and the like?

The initial idea for the game came from my friend Matthew at work. He described a game about corporate go-getters working with each other but also sometimes betraying each other as they rose up the corporate ladder. The game he described felt like a board or card game, maybe a reskinning of Munchkin, where players portrayed company employees rather than dungeon-delving adventurers. My background in freelance RPG design put me in the head space of making this idea a tabletop RPG. I asked Matthew if he’d be cool with me expanding his idea into an RPG and he said, “Go for it.”

Within just a few weeks, I had the basic game worked out. I started playtesting with friends just to see if the game idea had some legs underneath it. Within a month or three, Murders & Acquisitions was in full design mode.

Could you walk me through the mechanics of a basic encounter, such as a character sneaking around trying to steal a rival’s secrets?

Very simple game mechanics. Each character has twelve skills that cover everything you can do in the game. Skills are ranked d4 – d12, higher is better. When making a skill check, you roll this Skill Die along with a d6 called the Synergy Die. Add them up. Compare to a target number for the task. Success/failure as well as DEGREE of success/failure is resolved with this one skill check. If you succeed on a skill check and get a “6” on the Synergy Die, you gain a boon. Your skill check results in a better than normal result. If you fail on a skill check and get a “1” on the Synergy Die, you suffer a botch and the GM describes a problem your character has to deal with.

The skills in the game read like they are “corporate speak” or “resume keywords.” Your ability to “sneak around” is called Bodily Grace. Telling lies falls under a skill called Social Equivocation. Covering up your horrible acts of wrongdoing falls under a skill called Loss Mitigation. Your character’s physical strength is Force Application; the application of force to achieve your ends.

The stretch goal for magic in the game has been unlocked! How does magic impact the alternate reality you’ve built for M&A?

Magic doesn’t affect the core game at all. The core game is built around the idea of our real world, but with some significant differences…how the game world is different from our real world. Companies in the game world are more corrupt and cut-throat that those in our world.

The stretch goals (including the Magic & Spellcasting goal already hit) add optional rules for the M&A game. These optional rules allow players to add fantastic elements so often present in RPGs. Magic. Monsters. Future Tech. Cosmic Horror. And more. These chapters allow the players to create a more complex and unique game world environment. These optional rules are sort of a mix-and-match thing. They all work with the core rules, but provide added dimension to the game. You can pick and choose which optional rules you want to use in your game.

What has your experience designing your first full RPG been like, and how do you think it shows in M&A as a game?

Designing Murders & Acquisitions has been a labor of love. It’s been in development for well over two years and has gone through multiple iterations. Playtesters have offered a ton of advice and revision goals. It’s been tweaked and re-tweaked. I feel the game I’m providing in the Kickstarter is as good as I can make it. 
Despite my past RPG design freelancing, I’m always surprised by Murders & Acquisitions. Playtest and demo players surprise me with their actions. The game supports such surprises, encouraging GMs to “roll with the punches” and help the players create a memorable story of corporate intrigue. The GM in M&A is actually called the “Supervisor.” His job is to supervise the game experience to help everyone at the table have fun and tell an evocative story. It’s an apt moniker, I think.

When it comes down to brass tacks, Murders & Acquisitions is a game where players create stories together. I’m proud that the game supports such a worthwhile endeavor. Stories are what bind us together as a people. If my little game can help the players do that, I’ll consider it a resounding success.

Plus, you can “kill your boss” in the game without having to find a new job afterwards. So that’s pretty fun.

Thanks to Craig for the interview, and I’m excited to see where Murders and Acquisitions goes from here! Remember to check out the Kickstarter and share this interview with your friends!

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

Five or So Questions with Mike Young on A Grandiose Disaster

Today I have an interview with Mike Young, writer and designer of A Grandiose Disaster, a live action roleplaying game currently on Kickstarter through Nathan D. Paoletta. It sounds like a really interesting play experience, so I hope you enjoy the answers I’ve shared below!

Tell me a little about A Grandiose Disaster. What excites you about it?

A Grandiose Disaster is a horror and disaster movie simulation larp. It’s
takes about 3 hours to run in a house, or at a gaming convention, or
wherever people congregate to play games. First the players work together
to create characters that care about each other. Then they go through the
scenario scene by scene, reacting to the disaster and deciding which
characters live and which die.

I’ve been writing larps for many years and I also perform improvisational
theater, and I think A Grandiose Disaster is the end result of all that
I’ve learned doing these things. The ruleset is simple and easy to learn.
It is designed to facilitate roleplaying, making the players feel heroic
at times and despair at other times. The structure of the scenarios
allows for players to focus on roleplaying without worrying if they are
doing something that might harm their character.

And as a larp writer, I really enjoy how easy it is to design a scenario
for A Grandiose Disaster compared to the traditional secrets and powers
larps I’ve written in the past. I love running scenarios for this larp; it
allows me to sit back and watch the roleplaying unfold. I’m really excited
about how everything really works together to highlight the disaster movie
experience.

In A Grandiose Disaster, players create characters that care about each
other. How does this character creation work, and what helps solidify the
emotional connection?

It’s pretty simple. The players get into a circle and form relationships
with the people to their left and right. If there are enough people, then
they get a third relationship too. The relationships can be anything, but
the rules suggest close relationships that have existed for a while:
family members, coworkers, or close friends.

The rules have all sorts of suggestions for creating close relationships.
Players can create a defining event for the relationship giving them
something to discuss and reference during the larp. There are warmups
taken from improv theater that allow the players to roleplay some of the
shared history of their characters to help form a bond. And players can
spend time together discussing the shared history to get as many details
as they want for the history.

What kind of experiences can people expect in the game – are there zombies
or monsters, or are these natural horrors like nature gone wild or
catastrophic?

Well, it really depends on the scenario. I’ve been encouraging blatant
foreshadowing in scenario descriptions so players can create character
that would make sense in such a movie. So players know what to expect in
Trapped in a Mall With Some Zombies, and the descriptions of Fire and Ice
and Space Station Omega make it clear that they are inspired by The
Poseidon Adventure and Alien respectively.

How do the rules encourage both heroism and despair for the players?

The player characters each start with one one-use Ability that allows them
to save a life or learn crucial bits of information or do something else
that breaks the rules of the larp. This allows them to feel heroic as they
drag people to safety or keep people from dying.

However, the scenarios are designed such that characters will die, and
that the players must go from scene to scene in order. The scenes become
more and more horrifying and the players must choose someone to die in
most of the later scenes. Since the players have created deep
relationships with their characters, they will often have to choose
someone they care about to die which can lead to horror and despair.

In an ideal game, what would you want players to take out of the game, in
the end?
I want the players, both whose characters survived and died tragically, I
want them to say they enjoyed the experience. I want them to feel like
they have actually survived a disaster movie and that they had some
genuine emotional responses because of it.

Thanks so much Mike for answering my questions! Make sure to check out A Grandiose Disaster on Kickstarter, and Mike’s other projects if you like his style.

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

Five or So Questions with Alek­san­dra Son­towska and Kamil Wegrzynow­icz on The Beast


Today I have an interview with Alek­san­dra Son­towska and Kamil Wegrzynow­icz on their game, The Beast, a single player, long-play, narrative game. I played The Beast in an early playtest, and it was fascinating – an experience I could never repeat, but certainly a game I’d try again to see something new! See their answers to my questions below.

Note: The Beast is targeted for adults, and the game and this interview both contain sexual content.

What excites you about The Beast?
Kamil: For me it’s about body horror and physiology. It was about breaking boundaries about what I can do with my body and how can I perceive it. There’s a lot of tension and excitement with breaking, rearranging the body, the way it works, experimenting with it.

On the other hand there are feelings involved. What do I feel about sexuality, how do I approach my physiology. How can I deal with all the things that turn me on. So, yeah, these are all the things I found in Barker and Cronenberg and was fascinated by them and I wanted to put in the game.

Aleksandra: One of the things that excites me most about Beast are secrets. The Beast is a secret. You can remember that when I was organizing playtests, the playtesters reveal sparingly what happened with their Beasts, what they looked like, what they wrote in their diaries. People told me what cards didn’t work and why, but without details. They pointed which cards were triggering, but not why. Even now, when there are 2 or 3 actual plays online, I feel there’s so much more, hidden behind what was said or written.

I know, too, that the fact that the game explicitly says to burn or hide the diary makes people uneasy. There’ll be a reason for them to do it.

And I too won’t tell what happened with my Beast. I too shivered with desire and disgust of vivid imagery that came to me.

When you were designing The Beast, what sources did you use for inspiration?

Kamil: I was this brooding and rebellious art geek for a long time, so it was my hobby to find transgressive and weird media. Right now I’ve mellowed but there’s counterculture guy still inside – besides the most important here and mentioned before – Clive Barker and David Cronenberg there was JG Ballard, Kathe Koja, Dusan Makajevev’s Sweet Movie, cinema of transgression, Coum Transmissions’ art and so on. Not always obvious and not always mentioned, we didn’t have enough space, but I guess I owe them a lot.

Also, we were thinking about and designing games about sex and sexuality before. This is what you get when two game designers become a couple. For my part it was a follow up to our earlier game project – Mistress and Sexbot – and the thought that we couldn’t finish this game was nagging me. The Beast first appeared from this design frustration.

But most important and inspiring thing for me here was Aleksandra’s input – her emotions, ideas, and sources she found. They really pushed The Beast forward.

Aleksandra: My sources were more personal . I suddenly discovered pleasure of sex, and then I was reading everything I could find. Mostly these were articles about sex and interviews with people into BDSM and kink. Kvinden der drømte om en mand was an important movie for me, showing a woman sexually obsessed with a man – who was an asshole, really, but it didn’t matter for her. Not often can you find a movie showing sex from woman’s perspective.

What about The Beast do you think causes players to dig so deep into their dark fantasies?

Aleksandra: Is it so? I think important part of this experience is that we’re upfront what the game is about. And when I say: “in this game you’re fucking the monster in your basement” most people will know in a second whether they’re excited or disgusted by the idea (or both). If they’re excited, we’re just helping them.

Kamil: First, long term play. You get used to the beast, and even if question you get is triggering or uncomfortable, you have whole day to deal with your emotions. And long term play makes The Beast part of your daily routine.

Second, questions. Every question had to:

  • be presupposing and provocative, and,
  • involve one or more of four categories: sexual, physiological, personal, social.

This way almost every question should push story forward and affect the player even though the player doesn’t have to answer them. And with all the categories, some questions will hit the player hard and make them think and feel.

With the secretive nature that Aleksandra mentioned, how did you encourage players to both share and keep secrets, using the game’s mechanics and language?
Aleksandra: And why haven’t you shared your Diary widely? ‘Hide or burn’ is for a reason. The Beast is obviously skewed toward keeping silence about what happened during those 21 days, mostly because in the game you’re playing yourself or someone similar to you. It’s the reason the game feels personal – and why players don’t go around talking about it.

Kamil: As of both sharing and keeping secrets – it’s a funny thing. When players are in “honeymoon phase” of the gameplay, by which I mean the moment they bought it and later on the first five or six questions, they are really eager to show off their game and enthusiasm. But later when they’re become invested in the fiction and the game hits them hard they go silent. And even when someone plays The Beast in public it’s visible for me there’s a lot more than what they show to the world.

Most of the instructions and the way it was written is Aleksandra’s work. She really tried to take care of the player and make them feel safe. I think this part is important here. It guides the feel of the gameplay.

What is the most intense experience you have had (that you are willing to share!) with The Beast on your own?
Kamil: For me it was realization how mean and cold I could be in a relationship. I perfectly knew the game tricks me to feel this way but I was still caught off guard when it happened. And even now I’m writing “this happened” instead of ”I thought and decided in the game”.

Second thing in the same gameplay was also realization how my fantasies were growing in unexpected direction. At first I wasn’t sure of my beast, it’s not really my kink, I thought, but let’s see what happens. Later in the game I started to like it and experiment with it. It was scary.

Aleksandra: Excerpt from my Diary:

“Someone knows about the Beast, why aren’t they talking about it?

I panic.

‘I’ll give you a blowjob, just don’t tell anyone about it’.

Kneeling, I clench my mouth on his dick. I’m doing it like the Beast is with my whole body. I swallow his penis, I’m choking, I’m swallowing it again, I’m vomiting his penis and full dinner.

He runs off.

He won’t tell anybody.”

—

Wow! Thank you to Aleksandra and Kamil both for their answers, for sharing their experiences, and for this brilliant look into The Beast. Make sure to check The Beast out on DriveThruCards!

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

Five or So Questions with Stephanie Bryant on Threadbare


The correct Kickstarter link is 

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mortaine/threadbare-rpg-a-stitchpunk-tabletop-role-playing?ref=nav_search 
Sorry, working from mobile and can’t update the links!


Today I have an interview with Stephanie Bryant on her new game, Threadbare! It sounds like a really interesting play experience, and it’s currently on Kickstarter! I hope you’ll take the chance to check it out.

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

Threadbare is a stitchpunk role-playing game where you play a broken toy in a broken world, trying to get along, make the world better, and patch yourself up in the process.

What excites me the most about this game is what happens when I sit down at a table with new players. Every time I’ve run this game or watched someone else run it, there’s been a player who came to the table with their favorite childhood toy, either literally or just in their memories, and they brought that to the party. They got to play their favorite stuffed animal or toy truck, and for a little while, they were visiting an old friend in a weirdly broken world.

What motivated you, and continues to motivate you, to tell a story about this concept – broken toys in a broken world?

I’m in my 40s, and it seems like everyone I know or meet is a little bit broken. You just don’t get to this point in life without a few thousand scars. Sometimes, it feels like the world is also terribly broken. But Threadbare is a game with hope and optimism at its core– you can fix things, you can make things work, sometimes better, and sometimes just different.

What base mechanics (modifiers, moves, etc.) are you using for Threadbare, and what made you decide on those mechanics?

I’m using a Powered-by-the-Apocalypse system for Threadbare because it’s very clean, mechanically. I went through several other mechanical ideas first, including a dice pool that didn’t work out, before hitting on PbtA. In the system, probably the most important move you have is the repair move, which you can use on yourself or on someone or something else.

But I streamlined so much in Threadbare, it’s become its own game. For example, in a game so focused on material things, I got rid of inventory almost entirely. Whether or not you have the stuff you need to do something is a toggle– you either have “Stuff” or you don’t and need to go find it.

I also got rid of combat rules.

How do you create a real sense of danger or conflict in a game where all the characters are simply toys?

Any time they roll a 6 or less (on 2d6), or any time they try to fight, they lose a part of their body. In this way, every “hit point” is a named body part, and when they get damaged, they can literally lose a limb. (Of course, repairing them is relatively easy, too.) Since combat doesn’t play out in mechanical rounds, they just lose a body part and have to deal with the consequences of the fight afterwards.

In terms of writing adventures, though, I try to pose questions that focus on something that they care about, something they’re trying to protect. That gives me something that can be endangered besides themselves– and then they can endanger themselves trying to protect or save that thing.

Do you think that the abstraction of character identity into toys can help explore emotional and imaginative parts of our experiences, and that this is reflected in Threadbare?

Yes, although I’d say that I’m currently working on improving the emotional part of the abstraction in Threadbare. It’s the hardest part of the game at the moment (there’s a problematic “mental health” component that I don’t like in the game). Capturing a sense of nostalgia while still giving players room to explore ideas that are more current and mature for themselves is a challenge worth tackling.


Fascinating! Thanks to Stephanie for the interview! Make sure to check out Threadbare on Kickstarter, and let others know too!

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