Tell me a little about Doikayt. What excites you about it?
Doikayt is a Jewish Tabletop Role Playing Game anthology. The word Doikayt itself is Yiddish, and roughly translates to “hereness”. It is this idea that I am most intrigued and excited by, truthfully. Judaism is a religion and a tradition that isn’t monolithic. It’s founded on the principles of conversation and argument, conflict and interpretation. Riley and I were lucky enough to get pitches and submissions from people that claim vastly different backgrounds and experiences, and subsequently have different ideas of what constitutes Judaism.
I can’t wait to see how everyone’s work comes together, how their worlds influence their ideas and words. For me, the moment I’m most looking forward to is seeing the games complete and spending the time thinking about how my Judaism is a product of my upbringing, and how the themes explored by each designer help to paint a picture of them and their Jewishness.
JR Goldberg and Riley Rethal, the project leads.
Awesome! What about tabletop RPGs do you think makes them a good medium for expressing the different experiences and perspectives of Judaism?
There are a few reasons. First and foremost, the Jewish tradition is steeped in things that could be generally classified as a LARP or a TTRPG. A lot of Jewish traditions, especially ones surrounding the holidays, have been gamified in some way. So I think for many Jews, expressing something that speaks to them about Judaism through a game is something that is perhaps not innate, but at the very least is experiential.
Additionally, Judaism is a tradition and religion that isn’t based on dogmatism. Discussion of everything is encouraged, and learning and discussion of the tenets of faith is encouraged with a partner or in a group. Other perspectives are necessary. I think this is helpful and true for design and for play, as well. My best game experiences and memories have been times when the group coalesced and built something together that would have been impossible to do by myself. While I don’t necessarily think that Jews have a monopoly on that sort of thing, I do think that having it be such a part of the culture will make for some interesting angles with regards to play and design.
What are some of the challenges and benefits of running a project like this for a group of people with such different, but still related, stories they want to tell?
Riley and I were lucky in that none of the pitches we gravitated toward felt too similar. I can only think of maybe one instance where we felt as though we had to choose between two games that were too thematically close to both be included. I think that speaks to the amount of stuff that can be covered, and the amount of stuff that people think of when prompted to make a “Jewish Game”. That being said, we did have to be conscious not to just represent one Jewish tradition.
When we realized that the majority of the perspectives that we got through the submissions were Ashkenazi, one of the first things we decided to do as a stretch goal was to add essays that would be representative of the rich histories that Sephardic, Ethiopian and Mizrahi Jewry have completely separate from Ashkenazi Judaism. We felt like getting context from community members themselves would be the best option, as we certainly did not want to be appropriative in any way.
What are some examples of the kind of games, concepts, and artistic presentations we’ll be seeing from Doikayt and its designers?
Gosh, I think we have some really varied and interesting stuff in the anthology. One thing that we did semi-consciously is try and make games that have original systems in some way. Because we anticipated have a readership that may not know exactly what PbtA or BoB is, having a book full of hacks of existing games might’ve been alienating for some, in that there is an inevitable shorthand used that less experienced players would’ve had a hard time with. But beyond that, we have games that run the gamut.
While we have many designers working on the book, we do have one unifying force: all interior art is being done by Never Angeline North. You can see Never’s first piece for Doikayt on the kickstarter page. She is a recent convert to Judaism, and I think that is a super interesting perspective that will be present throughout.
How does a Jewish approach to games and game design differ from the more mainstream work we’re used to seeing, and what do you most want people to take away from this project?
I’m honestly not sure if I can that question at this point in the process! I know, speaking for myself, I don’t think I can help but have my Judaism permeate all my design work, even the stuff that isn’t expressly Jewish. How that manifests exactly is something that I’m not sure I’m introspective enough to really answer. That being said, I think once we have the book in our hands, we will be able to see the start of something.
My hope is that it is something that defies simple classification, but I can already tell from what we have looked at thus far, it will contain the humor, vulnerability and contemplation that is present throughout most Jewish texts. I suppose that is also what I to leave people with: my Jewish experience was probably different from yours because my life was different than yours. You may not even be Jewish, just a fan of TTRPG and a curious soul. But rather than focusing on the differences or setting up hurdles, through these games, we will be able to find human similarities.
I generally try not to be so under the wire, but life has been hectic lately! Here’s an interview.
Today I have an interview with Meguey and Vincent Baker about Under Hollow Hills, which is currently on Kickstarter! It’s a game about traveling performers and explores a new realm of Powered by the Apocalypse design. Check out what Vincent and Meguey had to say!
All art by Vincent, after Rackham.
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Tell me a little about Under Hollow Hills. What excites you about it?
Meg: Traveling together as a group, seeking audiences, dealing with a stuck wagon or a friend in trouble, showing up at birthday parties to just utterly dazzle a human child and leave them with a touch more wonder than before – that’s all real neat to me. What excites me most though, perhaps, is the core ethic of this game, of paying attention to how we are together when times are good and when times are bad. Fairies often get portrayed as either all sweetness and light or all threat and magical terror, and I’m excited to see MORE than that. We’re drawing on a lot of different fairy stories, and I look forward to the new stories that come from this.
VB: In Under Hollow Hills you play the performers and crew of a circus that travels through Fairyland and through the human world, through good times, bad times, and dangerous times. I’m excited about the tour of Fairyland that the game offers – but it’s like a working tour, not a tourist tour. You’re behind the scenes, you see what goes on in the Wolf King’s Court, you perform for audiences who think they’ve commanded you, but really you’re playing them. You see through the glamor to the mystery, if that makes sense!
I’m also excited by how much the game loves words. Metaphor, poetry, wordplay, puns, it’s a game that loves and plays with language.
There are a lot of fairy tales that people might be familiar with. Where are you pulling influence from, and what are some examples of the things you’re spinning of your own?
VB: Yeah! Meg’s history with fairies is older than mine. I think I started, these decades ago, with Alan Lee and Brian Froud’s book Faeries. For me my main sources have been Yeats’ Fairy Tales of Ireland, Sikes’ British Goblins, and Kirk & Lang’s The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies. These all mix collected stories and folklore with the speculations of their authors / editors, much in the mode of a bestiary or field guide. This is where the idea of fairy kinds comes from, I think, these marvelous old collections.
I’m also influenced by Shakespeare, by Norse myths, and by
more contemporary fairy tales and fairy tellers like Francesca Lia Block,
Tanith Lee, John Crowley, Jane Yolen, and even Jack Vance per Lyonesse.
That said, we’ve tried to keep our interpretations fresh and
playful. In the playbooks, for instance, we always try to mix and cross
influences, not narrow down. The Chieftain Mouse has elements of Reepicheep and
Despereaux, and also of Rob Roy. The Crooked Wand harks back to the three old
women who share an eye, and to Odin, and then to Yubaba from Spirited Away and Nora Cloud from Little, Big.
Meg: I had a beloved storytelling teacher in 4th grade, Janet Glantz, who gave me Nancy Arrowsmith’s 1977 Field Guide to the Little People, which leads off with “In high summer meadows, nestled in the moors, near old castles, or behind the kitchen stove—these are the places where the Little People may be found.”. If I had to point to one clear influence alone, it would be this book and this line. The earliest fairy-tales I remember are the ones in Olive Beaupre Miller’s 1928 edition of My Bookhouse books, particularly volume two, which has fairy tales from around the world, and the first book I remember reading for myself is Midsummer Night’s Dream, when I was about 6.
The Muppet Show, of course, and Labyrinth. I saw the 1962
movie Gypsy a surprising number of times as a kid, so the backstage parts of a
traveling show were there, and when I was learning to walk and talk, my parents
were crew in a Shakespearean diner theater company, which was of course FULL of
fairies and actors and stage effects. I spent 8 years in the 1990s doing hair
design and costuming for our local Hampshire County Shakespeare Company, too.
Apples and trees, you know. Decades of thinking about the natural world in a
way that invites the possibility of fairies also fit into the game design, and
noticing the playfulness of bees, the enthusiasm of the berry bramble, or the
determination of a stream. Then blending all of that so that there are layers
on layers of influence, so players can bring their own influences to their
unique portrayal of fairyland.
What is Under Hollow Hills like mechanically? It seems like it might function a little differently because of the types of stories you’re telling!
VB: It does!
The structure of the game is, you travel through fairyland
and the human world, and everywhere you go, you put on a show. On the GM’s
side, this means that between sessions, you prep up where the circus is going
next. You don’t prep what’ll happen – there’s no way you could guess! – but
just what the place is like, and who’s there. There’s a quick system for this,
rules you follow in prep that help you decide who the audience is, what they
want from the circus, and what they have to give the circus in return.
In play, then, you arrive at this new place, and you know
that you’ll be performing here, but before you do, you want to get the lay of
the land. As much as your audience here wants something from you, you want
something from them too. So you introduce yourselves, enjoy your hosts’
hospitality, get people’s stories out of them, and meddle as you see fit. When
you’re satisfied, then you plan your show and perform.
Planning and performing your show are distinct phases in the
game, and they give you a lot of power. In your performance you can change the
season of the place – “season” here includes mood, fortunes, history,
even who rules and who’s ruled over. You can win from the audience what they
have in plenty, or win from them what they hold most dear. You can also change
the circus, switching up the performers’ jobs, welcoming new performers or
bidding old ones goodbye, and opening the way forward from one world to the
other.
Now this is the large view, the overall structure. Your
character has cycles and structures of their own. Your capabilities include,
yes, ways to get the lay of the land, and ways to plan a show and perform in
it, but they also include your own angle on things. Ways to get what YOU want,
whether you line up with the circus or not.
Meg: A lot of game mechanics are designed in terms of a linear progression, from point to point to future point. Under Hollow Hills mechanics cycle and spin, as we spiral through the seasons and through our own emotions and the characters’ emotional relationships with each other. Players may come back to things that feel familiar several times in the course of play, but from a different angle each time.
I’m intrigued by the implicit theme of transience in these stories because of the traveling nature of the troupe and the temporary nature of performance. How does Under Hollow Hills address the concept and experience of transience by the characters, and naturally, players?
Meg: Playing with time and space is part of fairyland, as well as of stagecraft and performance. The magical thinking of childhood when summer never ends, and how it takes forever for a special event to arrive, and the way time moves oddly when you are fully engrossed in the current moment even as an adult, are all part of the game. All those can be tiny windows into fairyland, that may open only for a fleeting moment. We all change over time, in myriad ways. Major ways that come to mind are gender fluidity and variance and how that permeates Under Hollow Hills in reflection of the actual world we live in, and seasonal cycles as they affect all life on the planet. There’s a third, of course, which is mortality, and the questions around death that come up from the fay viewing it as a game and the mortals knowing that for them it is the biggest and most permanent change. Shifting through these moments smoothly takes practice.
As characters pass from moment to
moment, in terms of Under Hollow Hills game design specifically, we built in
ways to shift your character’s expression fluidly across their summer aspect
and their winter aspect, and we recognize the impact people have on places (and
vice versa) in the way that the Circus can move the place they perform towards
different seasons. Illustrating the pinwheel of the seasons, choosing as a
group how you move the circus and spaces through the pinwheel, helps convey the
transient but also the cyclical nature of the game, and therefore of life.
Movement is a basic part of the game.
Building a game where travel is
intrinsically part of the story helps address some fictional issues in
storytelling as well. Have you ever encountered a detective series you like,
set in “a small country town” where there’s multiple mysteries and
murders in each book? For heaven’s sake, get out of that town! It’s a
hell-mouth! Making the circus mobile, building an interconnected group that is
traveling together, with the inherent community needs and relationship
complications that arise when people come to rely on each other, and when they
are constantly encountering new groups of people wherever they go, allows for
very different stories than having the characters in a fixed location.
Another topic that interests me is the diversity found in traveling troupes in history, and the prejudice with which they’ve been treated. A hard topic, I know, but have you addressed it at all in Under Hollow Hills, and why or why not?
VB: Not so hard a topic! Historically, traveling people, especially traveling performers, have been treated all different ways – with horrifying violence and racism, with glory and celebrity, with suspicion, with reverence – all different ways. Right now in the US, for instance, a lot of carnival workers are seasonal migrant workers, vulnerable to the US’ racist anti-immigrant policies and sentiments.
In Under Hollow Hills, we’re
definitely presenting a romantic version of the traveling circus. When the
circus travels, it’s usually easy. Where it arrives, it’s usually welcome. When
you come into conflict with your audience, usually it’s a personal matter, a
disagreement or personal animosity. It’s possible in the game for you to come
into town to find a racist hate mob waiting for you with knives and clubs, but
the way violence works in the game, it disarms even this kind of situation.
Our goal isn’t to examine real-world racism and violence, or even just the real-world difficulties of taking a show on the road. Those are different games, and ones we’d love to play!
—
Thank you to Meg and Vincent both for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Under Hollow Hills on Kickstarter today!
Hi all! I’ve got an awesome interview with Lucian Kahn today about Visigoths vs. Mall Goths, which is currently on Kickstarter! It sounds super cool and I’m personally looking forward to playing it at Big Bad Con. Check out Lucian’s responses below!
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Tell
me a little about Visigoths vs. Mall Goths. What excites you about it?
Visigoths vs. Mall Goths is a tabletop
roleplaying game and dating sim about the conflicts and romances among the
warriors who sacked ancient Rome and 20th century spooky teens, set
in a shopping mall in a Los Angeles suburb in 1996. There are a lot of bisexuals.
The plot structure of Visigoths vs. Mall
Goths resembles an open-world videogame RPG. Designed for either one-shot or
campaign play, each adventure episode offers several quests that you may choose
to pursue (or ignore), and the mall setting is packed with many strange retro
marvels to discover. Or you can just replay the game over and over to kiss all
the kissable clerks.
Imagine a surreal combo of The Craft, Empire Records, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and Clueless. In addition to all that, I’m thrilled to be working with an incredible array of artists and writers on this project. The famous, talented, and extremely nice Robin Eisenberg has done an incredible job on the cover. We’ve got illustrations by Lluis Abadias Garcia, who did all the art for the Retroverse D&D 5e expansion. Vee Hendro, the graphic designer for Good Society, is doing the graphic design. We’ve got guest adventure modules by a very cool bunch of game designers, including Liz Gorinsky from Goth Court, and Maja Bäckvall who was the runes expert on Civilization VI and God of War. I could go on. The artists on this project rule.
What are some of the challenges and more exciting aspects of combining ancient Visigoths and 90s mall goths?
The only real design challenge I faced in the
goth-on-goth arena was figuring out exactly how disoriented I wanted to make
these time-traveling Visigoths. This could have gone very Encino Man,
but I didn’t really want the game to be about ancient warriors staring in awe
at escalators, so it took some work to get the narrative framing right, where
the Visigoths are historically displaced but we’re assuming they’ve somehow
learned English and know what a computer is. Fortunately, this game is
completely surreal and absurd anyway, so this extremely fast learning process
doesn’t have to be plausible to buy into the premise and have fun.
Part of what’s exciting for me about throwing
together these 2 types of goths is that they’re both outsiders. The Visigoths
are outsiders for 2 reasons: first and most obviously because they’ve been
displaced from their original historical context and dumped into a ‘90s mall,
but they were also oppressed outsiders in Roman culture before the time travel.
The Mall Goths are also outsiders in 2 directions: they’re too weird to fit
into mainstream teen culture, but they’re also both too young to get into goth
clubs and too commercial to be accepted by the avant garde. So the scenario
I’ve set up pits these 2 groups against each other, but both groups are
outsiders within the context of the mall and the suburbs. This makes for a
weird and fascinating array of potential social dynamics that the players can
mess around with.
It’s weird to think of it, but a 90s game is now a period piece! What’s it like writing a near-history piece and how did you make the game feel totally 90s?
I was a bisexual grunge-rock teen in Los Angeles in the 90s and started goth clubbing as soon as I turned 18, so the aesthetics of this game are very close to my heart and my personal experience. Honestly, this entire design process has been extremely heartwarming, partially because I’ve gotten to indulge my nostalgia, but also because the past year of playtesting at cons and stuff has brought me into so many cute conversations with other people who still carry a torch for 90s counterculture. People who were there at the time will find a lot of Easter Eggs that refer to real stuff that was going on back then, and at the same time, I’ve made the world vivid enough that it’s still fun for younger players or people who weren’t in the USA at the time, etc. I don’t want to give too many spoilers, but the mall has a salon for humans and pets called Gerbil Essences.
Gerbil Essences is
amazing! It sounds like you had a lot of fun with the project. What was it like
in playtesting – how did the design choices you made come to fruition with
different diverse groups?
I playtested this game for over a
year, which is a long time for me, and it definitely evolved a lot over that
time. One constantly recurring theme was the balance between structure and
freedom in the game rules. I wanted this game to accommodate the needs of some
very different types of players, from Dungeons & Dragons fans, to indie
storygamers, to LARPers, to total newcomers. Based on player feedback in the
past few months, I think I’ve struck a fun balance that lets a lot of different
people enjoy the game.
How are the Visigoths and Mall Goths
represented mechanically in the game, and how do their mechanics interact with
each other?
There are 3 types of Visigoths
(Conqueror, Charlatan, and Runecaster) and 3 types of Mall Goths (Theatre Tech,
Witch, and Cyber Pet). Each character type comes with 3 skills that get bonuses
on dice rolls. For example, the Theatre Tech has bonuses to costumes,
pyrotechnics, and rappelling. They also each have a special skill they can use
once per day without rolling dice. For example, the Cyber Pet can put on cute
animal ears for a half-price discount at any store.
But the most important mechanic is
probably Embarrassing Traits. Each character has 1 or 2 of these, and the
options are different for Visigoths and Mall Goths. For example, one Visigoth
embarrassing trait option is “Fear of Animals,” which gets especially dicey if
you’re a Conqueror with the “control animals” skill, and another is “Allergic
to Metal,” which sucks if you’re wearing chainmail. The way these work is that
you can embarrass yourself to make your friend look cool in comparison or draw attention
away from them, giving one of your fellow Visigoths or Mall Goths a bonus to
their roll.
Finally, while most games only track physical damage, Visigoths vs Mall Goths only tracks emotional damage. That’s right, physical combat only has emo outcomes — and if you get too emotionally overwhelmed, you can’t fight anymore until you talk about your feelings with a friend!
Today I have an interview with Kieron Gillen about his new game, DIE! It’s based on his popular comic of the same name. This game has layers – layers! It sounds really cool so I hope you’ll check it out. See what Kieron has to say below.
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Tell me a little about DIE RPG. What excites you about it?
I’m
going to circle around this before pouncing, as I’m terrible. Sorry.
In my day job, I write comics. My latest book can be basically paraphrased as “Goth Jumanji”. It’s a portal fantasy where kids who got dragged into a fantasy game as teenagers get dragged back as middle aged adults, and so acts as a device to compare teenage dreams with adult realities, explore the purposes of fantasy and do a warped conspiracy-addled history of the development of the RPG. As part of its typically over-researched development, I decided I wanted to do an RPG, in some form. The first arc is called “Fantasy Heartbreaker” which is my mea culpa about the whole endeavour.
As such, the first thing excites me about the DIE RPG is
that it’s not my day job. I am a puppy, running through long grass, on a summer
day.
In a previous life, I used to be a game critic – mainly
videogames, but I see all games as part of the same form. In terms of adaptations,
I tend to believe the most interesting allow you to replay the underlying
structure of a narrative. The 1980s Alien spectrum game was about hunting down
the alien aboard the ship, but it randomised which individual actually carried
the chestburster. As such, it was interested in the possibilities inside the
scenario of the movie rather than the specific example of the scenario played
out in the movie. Re-enact the dramatic arc, sure, but find a way to make it
your own – that’s how you make it live. I wanted to do something like that. I
mean, I had a handful of other design goals, but that was my top line goal –
create a structure which allows people to create their own personal version of
the structure of the first arc of DIE.
A comic page from the DIE comic.
First the players get together and generate a social group of messy, flawed people. Who liked who? Who hated who? How has their life gone horribly awry? Each player makes one of these Persona. “Player” includes the GM. This is a pure piece of conceptual story game.
Secondly, when it’s decided this is an interesting group of people, everyone steps away from the table. When they step back to the table, they’re all in character as the Persona they generated. After the proper level of social chit-chat, the GM’s persona lobs a RPG on the table, and everyone starts playing, generating a character. Yes, you play someone playing an RPG.
Thirdly, after that’s done, everyone around the table gets
dragged into a fantasy world. They go through a psychodrama fantasy adventure
based on all the Persona’s faults, dreams and issues. After overcoming them
they then go home. Or not. That’s kind of the point.
So, yes, it’s a meta game, and how it moves between modes of modern play is key – the three levels are clearly inspired by the story game tradition, the nordic larp and something more traditional (though, really, a bit trindie). That’s the most obvious bit of flash, but the core of the game for me is that it how the game changes depending what persona you throw into the situation. There’s a lot of flexibility, but with sufficient scaffolding to head towards a conclusion with the details entirely up in the air. In the current Beta, that’s designed to be in 1-4 sessions. That I’ve been playtesting it for so many games, and being delighted how it works with radically different persona, remains exciting. I’m running it, and I really don’t have a clue how it’ll end up.
I think you’re one of the first designers I’ve interviewed who has talked about meta with enthusiasm and I love it! What did you do while you were designing to bring out that meta – how could an experienced player or designer see the key lines, so to speak? – without making it hard to approach?
Now, I warn you. There’s a line which I think I got
from the wonderful Natasha’s Dance, with a quote about the difference between
19th century German and Russian writers, which I’ll badly paraphrase. The
former will work out a theory in advance, and then try and put it into
practice, and the latter will write what they want, and then, almost as a game,
work out a theory which fits what they’ve done. I can come across as a German,
but I suspect I’m very much a Russian. So much of DIE’s core design was done by
instinct, and then analysed to death, so now it tends to sound I had a grand
plan.
So much just came from looking at the nature of DIE. This is
a game about messy people who get dragged into an RPG and transformed into
fantasy heroes. They travel a world which is a warped version of their
fantasies and fears. They have to all agree to go home to go home. Can they
come to an agreement? And if so, at what cost?
Logically, you need…
1) A way to generate a group of messy people.
2) A fantasy world which speaks to the specific nature of
those messy people
3) A set of core dramatic in-world rules which gather whatever
group of messy people you create towards a satisfactory (or at least,
interesting) conclusion.
From the DIE comic.
That you’re making a group of players instantly makes it
Meta, and there’s just no turning back from it, and I lean into it as hard as I
can. There’s a frisson and delight there. You’re people pretending to be people
playing a role playing game. That just amuses me, and I tend to pursue it in
the games I run. My standard con game of DIE has all the Persona playing people
at the con they’re actually at, for example. Seeing what other people approach
the idea is the best thing about actually releasing it – if someone had told me
how much fun it was to see what people do with a structure you’ve created, I’d
have done this years ago.
Not quite as much in the RPG in the Beta stage, but there’s
a lot of the other kind of meta in DIE as well – the world itself is made up of
elements that all went into the making of the RPG, from German Kriegspeil to
Tolkien WW1 horror and more. It’s all about our fantasies, why we get lost in
them and so on. A lot of that works its way into the game as well.
How do Personas work? I love this idea of layers of play, and I wonder how the mechanics here function! What really drives a Persona, and how does that punch through the layers of game?
The Persona’s are absolutely the thing which makes the game
interesting, for me. It’s deliberately the rules-lite approach. It’s just a
series of formalised (or less formalised questions) spinning off a given
context.
In the Beta, I’ve narrowed it slightly to “You are
friends who played an RPG as teenagers, and now have got back together years
down the line to play a game.” That narrowing of a certain shared
history makes it easier to give a reliable “This will definitely
work” for the later stages in the Beta, but I’ve ran it with completely
different set ups too.
There’s a bunch of suggestions for useful angles of
questions – “how did the group form? Was it around a shared social
interest?” “Was it at school? What kind of school was it?” –
which lead to more questions, about the specific nature of individuals
(“What did you play in the RPG?” “How did you do in
class?”) and their interactions (“Did you fancy any of the
persona?” “Are any of you siblings?”). You then work out the gap
– “How many years is it since you used to play?” “Why are you
getting together to play a game now?” The Gamesmaster is also making a
Persona at this stage, and the players are encouraged to ask questions to each
other as well.
There’s guidance in terms of whether to ask soft questions,
hard questions or extremely hard framed questions depending on the tone and
level of inter-group personal messiness you’re looking for. “Do you hate
your brother” versus “Why do you hate your brother?” for
example.
While this is happening, the Gamesmaster is noting all the
information that’s relevant. Some of this is absolutely surface stuff (“He
really like Harry Potter!”). Some of it is more deeply personal (“He
has a really strained relationship with his husband.”) Some of it what I
call the character’s core drive – the thing which they’re missing in their real
life, and they’re looking for (“I always wanted to be an artist, and have
never, ever pursued it.”) The latter is generally approached tangentially,
but in a real way, it’s what the game is about – finding out how a group of
people respond to being offered their desire… and then discovering what they
may have to do to get it.
The players have huge freedom to invent whatever they want
about the people’s real lives – this actually continues into the more
traditional fantasy adventure. The Master asking the player about details of
their persona’s life is a constant. Those details, and all the previous ones
are then warped into the fantasy.
Part of the dichotomy of the game is that everything at the
Persona level is almost entirely freeform and without classical RPG rules.
Conversely, everything in the game is deliberately mechanistically neutral,
with all characters being treated equally by the system, and all the persona’s
character’s edges coming from in-world reasons. It’s a bit odd that I’ve come
back to a hard (if light) simulationist core from a hefty narrativist
tradition, but I figured in a game which is about the nature of reality (“Is
this place real?”), if the rules already give you the answer (“No,
it’s not real – only we get to roll the dice.”), it’s somewhat pointless.
Basically it’s kind of a Cartesian thing – the Persona level
is very much mind and the character is the body, and the lack of a true
connection between the two is interesting. The game’s more obviously meta in
other ways (the “why are these people playing the game?” of it all)
but I think this is the stuff which really interests me. A lot just is my love
song to the RPG, in lots of different ways.
One of my current things is trying to find ways to write
something akin to a Scenario – there’s an early take that we’ll be releasing in
the back matter of DIE. It’s basically a more structured set of questions, so
rather than being entirely freeform, you can create a social dynamic just by
asking the questions. It’s a formalised version of my standard Con game –
basically all the group are people who work in the comic industry. So one
person is the publisher, another a creator, another a fan and so on. By hard
framing questions, you generate a dynamic that gives a lot of space for player
expression, but still can be meaningfully prepared for. It’s been fun. The
question I most like basically goes like..
“Fan – you want to work in the industry. What job do you want to do?”
“I’d love to be a writer.”
“Writer – does the fan have any talent at all?”
That’s very much DIE at its hard-framing most, I stress. That whole scenario is wicked, but I want to do some other set approaches. I’m hoping the structure gives people enough to write their own, if they want.
One of the things that comes to mind while reading your responses is the subject of nostalgia – if I were playing a game with old friends, a game we’d played before, I’d expect to have some of that. Does nostalgia show up as a theme in the game? Is it something that was relevant for you as a designer?
Well, designer and a writer both. The first series I did as
a comic writer was called Phonogram: Rue Britannia, this urban fantasy about
magicians who use pop music (Phonomancers). It was used as an inspiration for
the excellent LARP My Jam recently, which was a delight. Anyway – that first
series was about – I quote – “Nostalgia, memory and history”. It’s
how those things tangle together, and get in each other’s way. So it’s
always been there, and it’s certainly there in the DIE RPG.
What’s more there is a certain critique of nostalgia – it’s
like how nostalgia can sicken. It’s not that time any more – what has changed
with you? Worse, what hasn’t changed? How much have you failed to
escape the person you were there, and the desires you had? I normally describe
the comic as comparing these teenage dreams with adult realities, but
transformed into an RPG it becomes about the two periods in the persona’s life.
They were there. Now they are here. How has their live gone awry?
What are they going to do about it?
Nostalgia turned creepy is certainly the another element.
There’s one optional element in the design we call the Box Of Crap, which the
GM drops on the table at the start of the Persona section of the game, claiming
it’s the actual game that a bunch of kids were playing when they disappeared
back in the 1990s. The box contains anything the GM collects – I suggest old
RPG supplements, and the game dice as a useful minimum, but we cram in anything
in there. I’ve included some of my own teenage RPG maps I drew, and character
sheets, for example. If a group is okay with it, putting stuff from their own
real life games in there is also a move, and very much fourth-wall blurring (as
in, putting player nostalgia in the mix, as well as persona nostalgia). There’s
not much with the box in the current beta rules, but in terms of stuff in the
Arcana (i.e. what I’ll be releasing as optional weird rules) it’s basically
used as a tarot deck during play as a device for inspiration.
I’m fascinated by the deeper fantasy world, since it reflects the Personas and the characters themselves. This is something that’s rarely codified, even if it’s alluded to in games. What is this like for the Master and the players to experience? What does it end up looking like to play in?
In terms of what it’s like to experience, what I’m trying to
evoke is the experience of being listened to.
What happens in the world riffs off what this persona a
player has invented. Rather than a lot of games where narrative creation is
direct (i.e. a player gets to define a world directly) DIE tends to primarily
works as a once remove (a player invents and the GM twists and gives it back).
The magical thing is that it’s both the big things the player are aware of (for
example, if a player’s persona spends some time talking about how they’re
closeted and are scared to come out, that may as well be an explicit ask for that
to be a theme in the game) but also what they’re saying without being aware of
(for example, a player’s persona making a joke about a random TV show they’ve
binged watched, having elements of that show pop up in conjunction with their
main theme). One of DIE’s core bits of GM advice is taking one of those big
things the players want included and adding an element which the players may
not actually have ever expected to be integrated. One core thing, and a twist,
both of which show they were being listened to. It’s like being given a
present, even when it’s horrific. Sometimes it’s really subtle, with just grace
notes. Sometimes it’s just incredibly obvious – in a playtest where all the
persona were people who met on a Buffy fanforum back in the day, I just
downloaded the map of Sunnydale and went from there.
It’s always a way to externalise a persona’s problems and
have them deal with it. It’s how DIE the comic works, and trying to get that
explicitly in a game, and codify ways for players to make that work easily at
the table was absolutely what I was aiming for. An early playtester noted that
the DIE RPG is kind of a manual and mechanisation of how to create a Kieron
Gillen Style Story, which made me nod in recognition. Trying to nail down
specifically what the story does, so it can either be turned into mechanics or
play guidelines was very much what I was trying to do.
It’s been lots of fun. I wish my designer friends had told me how much fun it was to see someone take a structure you’ve created and go and do awesome things with it, as I’d have done it years ago.
—
Thanks so much Kieron for the awesome interview! I hope you all liked it and that you’ll check out DIE today!
Hi y’all! Today I’ve got an interview with Liam and Ren from Sandy Pug Games about Disposable Heroes, which is currently on Kickstarter! It sounds like an interesting take on superheroics. Check out their responses below!
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Mockup/Work-in-Progress prototypes of the cards for Disposable Heroes.
Tell me a little about Disposable Heroes. What excites you about it?
Liam: So the basic pitch is a PbTA/Dungeon World based game where the playbooks are replaced by cards that are rapidly cycled in and out of play. We got rid of HP for the heroes, and made it so every hit they take is deadly – when they die, they discard their card and draw a new one – with a new class, weapon and set of stats. Obviously this changes the dynamic of the game a lot, and pushes players to get really creative with their class powers. One thing that I tell people is; you know how every pbta playbook has That One Move. The one that makes you go “oooh snap, yes, this is it right here”? What we tried to do with Disposable Heroes is capture that feeling the whole game. We want players to be hyped and excited and have their minds race when they draw a new character.
I’m
also really pumped about the art design. We’ve tapped into the
electro-neon-funk of Jet Set Radio and Lethal League where possible, lots of
vibrant and loud colors, high energy, thick line art. Stuff rarely, if ever,
seen in TTRPGs. It’s mostly being done by my partner Ren, who also came up with
the core concept and who I’m assisting with the game, but if funding goes well
we’ll also be bringing a bunch of guest artists on board to do a set of the
cards – and they have a wide wide variety of styles that we’re really excited
to showcase. Like so many Sandy Pug projects, I guess what I’m most thrilled
about is getting to show off the amazing talents of other folx.
This sounds very cool! How have you altered the PbtA type system to suit this, beyond HP, to make the disposability snappy but still really grabby?
Liam: Honestly, not a whole lot had to be done to adapt the system itself – We encourage GMs to run things so that whenever they can inflict damage as a move, they do so, and we made armor ablative rather than subtractive (That is, it acts as a HP pool for characters that have it). The rest of the changes really come from applying the PBTA system to a card game. Making moves around the deck and drawing and such. Dungeon World already feels, at least in my opinion and experience, snappy and exciting. Making it so you’re constantly getting new tools to solve problems just amplifies what’s already there in a big way.
Mockup/Work-in-Progress prototypes of the cards for Disposable Heroes.
That art sounds amazing. What are some of the benefits of a variety of artists and how it presents the characters in your game?
Liam: For a start, it means your game looks amazing. I’m a big believer in the idea that having lots of perspectives and ideas makes a project grow and pop more than anything. All the artists have their own really cool takes on the characters who are, remember, just a class and a name and an animal for the most part. To see them take those ideas and make this logo that screams a ton of personality is worth it all by itself for me.
On a more mercenary level, having a big team has always helped Sandy Pug Games punch above our weight. One person yelling about the game they made is one thing, having 10 people doing the same yelling amplifies things a whole bunch, and I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t a consideration when we were kicking around ideas. As for how it changes how characters are presented – you know how people tend toward the same kind of themes for their characters in TTRPGs sometimes? I know I’m a big fan of Fighters With Cool Weapons and playing Tieflings all the time, I find artists tend to have a “vibe”, and while Ren’s vibe is really freaking awesome, it’s rad to get a bunch more “vibes” on the project.
Mockup/Work-in-Progress prototypes of the cards for Disposable Heroes.
What are the heroes like? Who these
one-punch people?
Ren:They are Delivery beings just trying to get the job done and go home in one piece! I say beings because we like to allow players imagination run wild on this one. The heroes are anything from literal animals, animal humanoids, or humans dressed up with ears and tails and process said animal characteristics. As the artist, I particularly found it amusing to imagine a literal whale using a hovercraft pool as a means to get around on land. The art in particular allows for creative leeway and a more versatile cast.
What are the activities like in
Disposable Heroes? What do players encounter?
Liam: Although the Heroes’ main goal is delivering a package, their missions take them through treacherous, neo-future dungeons. The game is essentially a classic dungeon crawler; our heroes solve puzzles, dodge traps, fight monsters, and the usual. The only real twist is the package has to remain intact and undamaged, then instead of facing off against the Big Bad Guy at the end, they simply deliver it. Gotta get that 5 Star Rating!
When I found out Chuck Tingle released The Tingleverse, an RPG set in the world of his Tinglers books, I was immediately on board – and super excited when Chuck granted me an interview! Check out Chuck’s responses below.
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Tell me a little about The Tingleverse. What excites you about it?
first question is good but it has many answers because WHERE WE ARE RIGHT NOW IS THE TINGLEVERSE this is just layer of reality we are on (these are in stacks that go from top to bottom) and outside of this is THE VOID. so each layer of this stack is a potential timeline they are infinite and together they make up the tingleverse. but i can say that GAME of the tingleverse is an important way to explore other layers or timelines that buckaroos might not have been to mostly the timelines that i write about in my books. so i think if you are fan of tinglers by worlds greatest author chuck tingle then you will definitely like this important game because it will give you a chance to trot as a unicorn or a bigfoot or a raptor and maybe even a human to. i think that games in this way help with empathy and understanding that we all have our own unique trot and that is a WONDERFUL THING i think this is proof of love thats for dang sure
What was it like collaborating with others on making The Tingleverse into a roleplaying game?
thank you not really sure if this
is reference to something but i did not really collaborate much in this
way it was normal edited by son jon and there were playtests way but i do not
really see this as collaboration just helpful buds along the way. this
does not mean they were not important in fact they were VERY IMPORTANT mostly
to say to man name of chuck ‘wow this is good and this works you should keep
going’ so i appreciated that way for buds. sometimes you need an extra
voice to say ‘ you can do it bud’ this bit of encouragement is nice even fore
worlds greatest author. but mostly i think i was able to make game because of
unique and important way my brain works with is very methodical way and says
that if you take things piece by piece they might not make sense but
eventually they will make BIG TIME SENSE just gotta but head down and work a
little every day thats how you prove love at the end of the road buddy
What were some of your favorite elements of your Tinglers and books to bring into the Tingleverse RPG project?
i think i enjoyed being able to talk on the lonesome train as this is very important to me and i have a lot of anxiety on its way and its call. so anytime i get to prove love is real by speaking about it and making it into a force that I CAN HANDLE by putting it into a game is very good. DEEP DANG DOWN i think this makes me feel better but in broader sense i think this is a way of the artistic bud to take issues that we have and to turn them into something that you can process through a game or a story or a song and then reflect on these issues in way that MAKES SENSE TO YOU. so i would say talkin on the lonesome train felt very nice in this context and other times it can be a difficult way.
The Tingleverse book is pretty big! It had to have taken a lot of time and love to put it together. Did you have a particular process for developing the game and organizing the book?
thank you for saying book is very big i think so to it took LONG DANG TIME to make and was sometimes very daunting process made me shake and drool on a number of days thinking ‘dang this is a lot of work’ but now that it is done i can look back and think even though it was a work time it was a fun time, and now i am working on monster book so whenever this makes me shake and drool i feel same way and that helps. but i would say most of all process was to ask self ‘what would YOU be wondering right now?’ normally in books you ask this to think about journey of reader feelings but in instructional book like this it is journey of readers thinkings but it is basically same at the end of the dang day
I’m a game designer who has mental health struggles but fights through them to try to create projects with messages of love, so this project appeals to me! When you look at The Tingleverse RPG project, why did you feel it was a good suit to put forward the stories you tell and the messages you like to send?
i am glad you have put up a first in your struggling way to
say GUESS WHAT BUDDY TODAY IS MY DAY NOT THE DAY OF SOME SCOUNDREL INSIDE MY
WAY THAT IS NOT REALLY MY WAY so i think that is so important and i think that
you have proved love very much. and also when you make an artistic way with
love at the core it will only bring people towards it and that is very special
but also powerful. so i will say that with TINGLEVERSE GAME i think it is a
good way to tell stories and prove love because it is community game and it
makes me think of good times trotting with buds, and i think that it is nice to
make something that others can used together and maybe laugh and maybe cry but
most of all love. it is okay to have this journey on your own with a dang good
but and i have written many of those so with this i just thought ‘what the heck
lets try something new’
—
Thanks so much to Chuck for the awesome interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out The Tingleverse today!
Tell
me a little about Eldritch Care Unit. What excites you about it?
The basic idea of Eldritch Care Unit is that you’re playing
a doctor, nurse, or something more occult like a ritualist or alchemist, who’s
working in the “Eldritch Care Unit” of a hospital. The ECU is a hidden wing in
most modern hospitals, where mostly mundane folks like the player characters do
their best to treat supernatural illnesses and ailments, whether the disease
itself is magical or it’s just infecting a magical creature; maybe Fae react
strangely to a certain strain of the flu, for instance. But, these hidden
sections still rely on typical hospital funding and bureaucracy, so you need to
try and maneuver the already insufficient and bureaucratic American medical
system to try and account for creatures that most of the world won’t
acknowledge even exist.
Eldritch Care Unit is my first “full” independently published game, which is itself exciting, and it’s an idea I came up with kind of at a weird whim while listening to other people talking about something entirely different (if I recall, they were talking about clerics healing people on a battlefield after a fight). What excites me most is the unique concept combined with the unique but fairly simple system I came up with for it, called the Adversarial System, which relies more on rolling to withstand external pressures than to see if you’re skilled enough.
This sounds fascinating! How do players mechanically interact with the game? What is gameplay like?
It’s
a fairly simple system. Essentially, characters have “training” in various
fields, which has a simple numerical rating, and said numerical rating is
almost always higher than the difficulty of the task that’s being done; for
example, your highest rating starts at 25 and the highest difficulty usually
used is 15. You then roll dice not to see how well you use that rating, but to
see how well you withstand any external pressures; instead of flat penalties,
they provide dice to an “Adversarial Dice Pool,” which is rolled to see how
much your rating gets penalized. For example, if you’re pitting your rating of
25 against a difficulty of 15, but are on a tight schedule and your patient’s
noncooperative, that might provide 2-3 (d6) dice to roll, so you need to roll a
10 or less on them to succeed. There’s ways to negate or lower those penalties
too, though, and other little permutations and optional rules, but for the most
part it comes down to that core mechanic.
As
for the core gameplay, it revolves around difficult patients. While your day to
day might involve some checks to continue long term care or check up on normal
patients, the interesting part that the game’s meant to focus on are those that
have some difficulty; either the ailment is unique and difficult to deal with,
the patient’s insurance is bad and you need to work around that, there’s a time
crunch before the disease really sets in, the hospital lacks the right
ingredients for a curative, or anything similar. It’s left largely to player
creativity at that point, to come up with ways to get around the problems, and
usually involves a series of different things they’ll need to get done, whether
working together or in parallel, depending on their time vs difficulty needs.
To
note, there’s no combat in the game. The system doesn’t even work particularly
well for it, as we don’t track health as anything more than maybe lingering
dice penalties (3d6 on manual tasks while your hand’s injured, etc). You COULD
make it work, but I don’t see many doctors and ritualists being thrown into
fights in a hospital.
What are the bounds of the fiction here? How weird does it get?
The fiction is pretty open. There’s some basic guidance on
how magic works, and how the supernatural exists within the world, but the
basic idea is that if there’s some folk tale, movie, or other story about a
given type of creature, it probably exists in some forms. Most of the time,
they integrate well into the modern world; think of how it happens in Men in
Black, but with supernatural creatures instead of aliens. They’re everywhere,
and most people don’t realize it. It’s less your typical “they stalk you in the
shadows” and more “they’re trying to figure out how to do their thing in a
modern world.”
The ECU itself isn’t the only “human” organization that knows about magic and the paranormal, of course; the book mentions that there’s government agencies, supernatural lawyers (never sign a demonic pact without one), and similar groups out there, but the ECU is the main focus of the game. Though, the nature of the Adversarial System would make it pretty easy to play some of those other sorts of groups too, with a bit of tweaking, if someone wanted.
How do you handle being respectful to potential human, real life people who might identify with the supernatural entities – allowing for safety tools, special guidance, or otherwise?
The
book makes it clear to avoid getting into too much detail unless you’re sure
your players will appreciate it, and despite the general motif of “Life isn’t
fair,” the general goal is that when the Player Characters are involved, things
will usually get fixed up. It inherently gives a bit of hope for even a broken
medical system, and focuses on the good people in that system. It’s something
I’ve found cathartic, as someone who’s been given the runaround by insurance
companies and hospitals
With
it being a small book, I didn’t include a lot of full writeups for tools beyond
that vague advice to make it a cooperative, positive experience, but I’m
personally a strong supporter of systems like X cards and other safety tools,
and definitely recommend them.
It’s awesome to have a game with no combat! What are a few exciting or compelling examples of experiences players have had with ECU?
In the one shot I’m running right now, the characters were
going about their day to day when a Dragon more or less barged its way into the
hospital, demanding treatment. Dragons are rare beings even in the open ended
sort of world involved in this game, so there’s a bit of excitement and stress
involved in making such a large, none-too-cooperative creature comfortable so
they can diagnose its diseased wing, especially since experts on dragon anatomy
aren’t really available.
And pity whomever ultimately has to ask them to pay the bill…
Hi all! Today I have an interview with Brendan “Beej” Dery from Loading Ready Run about all of the amazing stuff Loading Ready Run does as a comedy troupe that touches on gaming and various geek media. Their community really impresses me, and I wanted to talk to someone in the leadership about the work they do and how they created the space. Check it out!
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An illustration of Beej.
For the uninitiated, what is Loading Ready Run (LRR) to you and what is your role within the organization? What makes you excited about LRR?
I’m Brendan “Beej” Dery and I work as the Business Manager for LoadingReadyRun. LoadingReadyRun is a comedy troupe that does all of their work on the Internet, focussing on sketches, streaming, podcasts, and playing video games and tabletop games, including a lot of time playing Magic: the Gathering. Working for LRR is still work, but it’s a lot of fun too.
As Business Manager, I spend my time working on managing our merchandise and taking care of office admin whatnot, but I also get to spend time acting in sketches or streaming games, so there’s more variety to my job than just sitting at a desk. What gets me excited about LRR is meeting people who enjoy what we do and seeing them in Twitch chat or in our Discord (http://discord.gg/lrr/), talking about the stuff we make, but also just interacting with each other in general. The fact that we’ve built – and are still building – such a great, supportive community of people makes me really proud to be a part of something so positive to so many people.
You seem to have a caring focus, ethically. As a group that’s run their shows for so long, how do you work towards maintaining high quality and variety while not burning yourselves to dust?
I think we keep ourselves honest by listening to each other and to our fans. Integrity is one of those things that you can cultivate for a long time, but lose it immediately. So we try to train ourselves to be better people. It’s not about “acting” a certain way, either. It’s easier to write comedy that doesn’t punch down when you have the kind of mindset that doesn’t punch down. That’s not to say we haven’t messed up before, or that we won’t mess up in the future. But I do think we do our best to acknowledge mistakes, listen to each other, and try to learn to be better.
We’ve also been making a ton of content for over fifteen years, so it’s not as if some of us haven’t felt burned out every so often. As the group has gotten bigger and taken on more projects, we’ve also been having regular meetings to plan our production and streaming schedules, to plan editing, and to write upcoming sketches and pre-recorded bits. That’s helped a lot, but we’ve also adopted a new rule – “Get to 80%” – at our last annual “take-stock” meeting. “Getting to 80%” means to limit the amount of projects we do, so that we’re operating at 80% of our maximum capacity. That way, when special projects pop up throughout the year, we’ll be able to do them (as opposed to missing great opportunities to do something fun or lucrative).
Like, Road Quest was a lot of fun, but it was also a lot of work, a lot of time spent, and a lot of money. And with all of the other projects we’re still working on, it’s taken longer to finish Road Quest than I think we’d like, and that’s meant having to do things like temporarily putting me on CheckPoint+ or putting Watch + Play on hiatus. Getting to 80% has helped inform some of our production scheduling and I think it’s going to get better and better for us as time goes on.
Experience and specialization has also helped a lot. Graham and Paul have been doing this for a long time, and over the years, they’ve trained new people to do some of their tasks. And that’s let everyone learn new things in their specialties to improve how we make stuff and entertain people. And as we get more experience, I think we’re getting better – and faster – at our jobs.
For those that make such decisions at LRR, how do you determine who to have on which shows, and how do you handle any problems that you encounter with personality conflicts, ethical concerns, and so on?
A lot of content is driven by the people that are interested in making it in the first place. We don’t assign people to do shows – people volunteer. We’re trying to change up the ensemble shows more and more (like AFK, The Long Game, or Friday Night Paper Fight), because we think the variety helps keep things more entertaining. When it comes to pre-recorded content like Friday Nights or commodoreHustle, that’s driven by the needs of the script or by how simple we need to make the filming process.
Like, we don’t have time to film more than a six-minute commodoreHustle during a LoadingReadyLIVE filming day, so it’s usually solved during the writing meeting that happened weeks before. Who hasn’t had an episode focus on their character yet, how are they getting into trouble, who else should be involved, etc. As far as streaming or other pre-record content goes, it’s like I’ve said previously – if someone wants to do a thing, we see if we can support it. Not all stream ideas will ever make it to air, and not all pre-record ideas are going to get filmed. But if an idea has a champion, it’s going to get a lot further.
We all like working with each other, but that also doesn’t mean there’s no conflict. It’s hard for me to address a question about personality conflicts, because I just straight-up don’t like having them. And I want to keep the focus of LRR on what we produce for people to enjoy. When it comes to solving conflicts between people, it’s down to Graham and Paul, largely, as they’re the co-presidents of the company. Same goes for ethical concerns – most of us in the office will become aware of a problem pretty fast and then we’ll end up talking about how we’re going to address it. We don’t always agree on how to handle things, but again, it’s a business and an organization and everyone wants our decision and our message to be unified, so that no one is confused about our position. We owe that to our audience.
What kind of content do you most enjoy bringing to streaming, whether it’s games or sketches or larger things like Road Quest, and how do you make the decision for what’s “good for TV,” so to speak?
I like making stuff that focuses on our strengths as entertainers – we’re funny, we’re positive, we’re doing our best. Road Quest was amazing but it’s not the kind of thing we can make all the time. Logistically, it requires a ton of planning and effort and funding just to get to Day 0, and then we have to start making the thing. And after that, there’s a lot of post-production, and that involves even more people. And the impact that a large project like Road Quest has on the rest of the production team is easy to see – reorganizing streams, allocating editing resources, etc. But I think it’s exactly the kind of content we want to bring to our fans. Road trip shows have been done before, but I think us doing the road trip show brings that kind of “surprise and delight” that we hope keeps everyone entertained.
Overall, I’m happy that we’ve been able to split our production into a wider variety of things. In the early days – when I was just an actor coming in on weekends – I wasn’t sure how all-year streaming was going to benefit us, but looking at it now, it’s clear that providing the variety has allowed us to attract more people to work with LRR and let us have a lot more immediate fun with our audience. And I think that’s what helps us decide what’s good for TV: is this going to be interesting or fun for us to make, and do we think that the majority of our fans are going to respond positively to it. And then after that, can we afford the money to make this, and can we afford the man-hours to make it. We’re still a business and we still want our employees to be able to make rent every month.
You may be best known for your charity event, Desert Bus for Hope, which is an annual playthrough of the Desert Bus video game for the Child’s Play charity. It seems like a real logistical challenge! What has kept you coming back to this event every year, and what does the planning entail for each of you? How do you keep safety in mind?
In order to answer this question properly, I’d have to go into a ton of detail about different departments and the number of planning meetings we have and managing a project that’s grown to involve fifty people on-site, as well as multiple people from around the world making contributions in other less visible ways.
So instead, forgive me for answering it purely from my perspective and involvement. I started doing Desert Bus for Hope during DBfH 5, and I showed up because I knew LRR and I wanted to be up there, performing for people and having fun. The charity aspect didn’t enter my mind. These days, I’m the de facto Zeta Shift producer, meaning that I take my job of getting Desert Bus from midnight to 06:00 very seriously – and I do that by trying to not to care too deeply about it. There’s a “screw-it-let’s-do-it-live” aspect to DBfH that I’ve always loved and if we ever lost that, I’d probably be done. So I try to bring that sense to the Zeta Shift by prepping only a few things, but mostly just seeing where it goes. It’s fun to come in at the start of the week and see “$0.00” and then see “$700,000” at the end of the week and just marvel that so many people came together to raise that money in exchange for a week of sleepless broadcasting. That’s pretty amazing.
Everyone else has different feelings about DBfH and I’m glad they do. It means that everyone found a piece of the show that they love and want to preserve, and I think it means that the bus is always going to keep running.
As for safety? There’s enough people on-site that safety is critical. We tape our cables to the floor, we leave as much room as we can to move around the equipment, we have food volunteers that do their best to adhere to FoodSafe guidelines. We also try to look for volunteers who have first aid training or better – we’ve even had off-duty paramedics on-staff before. While we mess around on camera, the audience doesn’t want to see any of us choke or break a bone. So it’s very important for us to be as safe as possible.
What are the tools and decision-making you consider essential as a streamer and a performing professional in games that you would recommend others ensure they have before starting streaming on their own?
The most important tools are also good life advice:
Grow a thicker skin.
Get a good emotional support system.
Breathe.
Your time may not be worth that e-mail in your inbox.
We lucked out when we started because we had already built a good community from our sketch comedy videos and from Desert Bus for Hope. So don’t tie your hopes and dreams of streaming fame to what we did – we had to make videos for over ten years and also engage with our audience in our forum and try to build things that would keep that relationship growing. Unless you have done some amazing stuff already, you are not going to step into an instant audience.
But when you are getting started, you will have to hustle. You’ll probably need a day job, or a partner with a day job. You’ll need to project integrity and confidence – and that doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to change your mind about things, but you’ll need to show your audience that you’re trying to do the right thing and that you’ll willing to admit when you’re wrong. And that might also mean not taking every opportunity that comes into your inbox because it’s a quick $200. Or maybe it’ll mean that you need to take it to make rent, and you let your audience know what’s up about that.
Being a streamer or influencer or social media whatever is a rough gig these days. Not everyone can do it. And it’s not an easy ride. But whatever you do, be honest to yourself about what you want to do and why you want to do it. Play the games you want, host the streams you want, talk about the subjects you want. Don’t pander to your audience, but don’t ignore them either. Be willing to put in the work to push your career forward, but also – and this is really hard – be ready to recognize if it’s not working out. Maybe you can pivot to a different kind of stream. Maybe you’ll need to find partners to stream with. Maybe you’ll need to stop altogether.
I believe firmly in leading in place and skills transfer, and it seems like LRR does too! How do you each act as leaders in your own roles at LRR, and how do you handle skills transfer with the team?
This is kind of a difficult question, actually. With hiring so many people, we’ve been trying to provide training and also write documentation so that we can have processes and procedures to refer back to, if employees have questions about e.g. running tech on a podcast, or what style guidelines we use for our videos.
This is new territory for us, because LoadingReadyRun hasn’t had to do this before. With the amount of work we’re already doing, finding time to document what we do is really hard. BUT! We have recognized that it’s important and we’re trying to find ways to do it.
We’ve also established more people in specific roles. Graham and Paul are both co-Presidents of Bionic Trousers Media Inc – our operating company. James acts as our scheduler and producer for the bulk of our shows. Kathleen is our Managing Editor and also performs the vast majority of our writing. And I’m the business manager, meaning my eye is on the bottom line (and also on merchandise development).
Everyone is trying to involve team members with more projects and teach them more skills, but given the nature of our office and how we do business, we don’t do things like seminars or group teaching. The most instruction you would get was by working on-the-job – here’s how you hold a boom correctly, here’s how you operate the camera, here’s how we use J-cuts when editing, etc. I’m hoping that developing some documentation will help make training easier for both the trainers and the employees.
We absolutely have a long way to go, but I’m optimistic that we’ll get there – especially if we can get to 80% first.
Tell me a little about Hit the Streets: Defend the Block. What excites you about it?
Hit the Streets: Defend the Block (HtS:DtB) is a tabletop RPG about street-level supers. A game series of Hts:DtB will have the entire group working together to make up their team of Super-Powered Beings, drawing out a simple map of the neighborhood where they live and work, and dreaming up their rivals and threats to their neighborhood.
What excites me about HtS:DtB is how well it plays at the table, allowing players to exist in the space of shows like Luke Cage and Daredevil, or to tell stories like you might read in Spiderman or Spider Gwen comics. I also love how the game pushes characters to expend or lose their Spark, a resource similar to Hit Points that represents their will to struggle and fight the good fight. That loss of Spark then sets up scenes where those characters have to regain that resource by doing positive things for the community or forging tighter bonds with their team. It has such a nice flow of emotional scenes to action and conflict and back again.
Nice! How did you find the right vibe for the game, considering how widely superheroes are interpreted in different mediums and styles? What is the right style for Hit the Streets?
Hit the Streets: Defend the Block came from a need for something that would fit in a new living campaign that I began with Lowell Francis and Jim Crocker this year called Gauntlet Comics, which is for the Gauntlet community (https://www.gauntlet-rpg.com/ ) as you’d suspect. See, I pitched them the concept of a shared GM setting called New Gauntlet City where each of us, and other GMs who wanted to join in, would run games set in this comic book universe. We have a city map with only a few neighborhoods defined, and we’ve been adding neighborhoods and characters to the map and wiki as we play. New GMs have jumped in, like Alexi Sargeant and Chris Newton, it’s been a real blast to see the world evolve, to create new characters and see different players’ spin on them.
Of
course, there’s lots of Masks: A New Generation happening in Gauntlet
Comics and I’ve loved those games, but I like to run a different RPG system
each month for this series. Last October as I prepared for Gauntlet Comics, I
sat down and pored over the hundreds of Supers RPGs that I have on PDF and
created a list of “Want to GM” games. When I looked over the games on
my list, I didn’t see anything that would work in a single neighborhood, that
would deal with smaller scope problems that I saw on shows like Luke Cage‘s
Harlem or Daredevil’s Hell’s Kitchen on Netflix, or Black Lightning‘s
Freeland on the CW. I’d tried out the RPG Icons, which had most of
what I wanted, but it was a bit heavy of a system for my tastes.
I’d been running an RPG: 1%er – The Outlaw Biker Game, from Creepy Doll Studios (a.k.a. Robert Nolan) for a couple of years for the Gauntlet and loved the sessions we’d had. I even hacked it for Star Wars and called it 1%er Swoop Gang (Kark yeah!) and it was so thrilling and fun to run and play. There was this yummy mix of thrilling action and connection between the characters and their community that I enjoyed. I started wondering if this simple but clever d6-based system would be the right chassis for a street-level supers game.
I started calling it 1%er Supers and put it on the Gauntlet calendar. Playtested an early version in November and December of last year, and it was solid. It needed some more bits, like a neighborhood-creation system as well as a few rules tweaks, but the vibe was spot on. Eventually, I renamed 1%er Supers to Hit the Streets: Defend the Block (hat tips to Patrick Knowles and Alex Prinz for that name) That vibe, to finally answer your question, is a bare knuckles game where the Super-Powered Beings (I don’t call them superheroes) have day jobs, they have connections to people in their neighborhood, and they have to fight to keep the people they love safe.
They can’t just topple an alien invasion and walk away from the wreckage. They’d have to LIVE in the wreckage. Hit the Streets: Defend the Block characters have to make choices about how to deal with threats to their neighborhood, and punching it isn’t always the best answer. Of course, it’s comics, so punching is the best answer sometimes. Usually once per game session. But the fights in HtS:DtB are super quick, often one or two die rolls, then it’s dealing with the aftermath.
Tell me more about Spark and how it interacts with other mechanical bits. What are the core mechanics of the game like? Do different players use it differently?
Spark is the “killer app” of Hit the Streets: Defend the Block. It’s a reskin of a mechanic in 1%er – The Outlaw Biker Game. Your Spark represents your character’s will to fight. It’s the strength of their body as well as their mental resolve. You can spend Spark to add dice to an important roll. You can throw a Spark to another player to help them on a roll of their own. But you have to keep a close eye on that Spark because in big conflicts, the hits that your character takes reduce your Spark.
When you run out, your character is “out of the crime-fighting game”. Maybe they’re in the hospital. They might be locked up in jail. Perhaps, they’re dead (that’s up to the player). They aren’t out of the game if the player wants to bring them back in, but you have to regain their Spark somehow.
How do you do it? Help to rebuild your community with works of charity or help to fight crime as a regular everyday citizen. Or you can call upon your team, the other player characters, and bond with them, share what’s important, ask for their help, or tell them how they’re important and how they make the world better, worth fighting for. Once you regain some Spark, you can don the mask and get out there again!
How do you support players in engaging with things that could be difficult to address like threats to home and family and trauma?
When
I started writing Hit the Streets: Defend the Block, I made a decision to have
it reflect the ways I most enjoy gaming, which is with an engaged and safe
group of friends. To that end, the book starts with an excellent discussion of
the X Card safety tool written by my late friend Paul Edson who was also my
developmental editor. The game stresses that the safety tool is only part of
the process, that each participant needs to look out for their fellow players,
check in, and proceed with best intentions while remaining aware that we are
here to have fun.
The
GM section covers Roses and Thorns, my feedback tool of choice. This is another
powerful tool to ensure safety, giving voice to players after a session on
areas of the game that may have been sketchy. Of course, my preference is the
use of the X Card up front, but a Thorn that mentions the content is a nice
fail-safe.
One
important factor to Hts:DtB is that it isn’t supposed to be a grind of a game.
There are lighter moments in the game with Refresh scenes where the player
characters take the opportunity to perform charity work to improve their
neighborhood and help out their neighbors. Also, there are bonding scenes where
player characters strengthen their connection to one another to lift themselves
up to continue the fight.
What are some of the threats these superpowered characters encounter in their experiences, and how does it go down mechanically with some different threats?
During the first session, the
playgroup works together to not only draw out their neighborhood, but they talk
about the threats to their home, whether it’s financial, corruption, or
otherwise. Then, they create a group of Rivals, these are GM-played characters
(GMCs) who are opposed to the player characters. They aren’t black and white
villains, they are rivals. Sometimes they seem villainous to the
players, but the GM should ensure they have a motivation. Also, the rivalry is
messy. At least one player character has a personal relationship of some kind
with a member of the rival team, the rivals have something the PCs lack, and
the PCs have some way to thwart their rivals when they need it. That sets up a
nice opposition between the team and the world.
Mechanically, your characters will
face down threats and conflicts by declaring their intention, then they look
through their character’s details to pull from different areas, like the mode
of their approach, the stat they’re leaning on, if they’re fulfilling their
team role, what powers, if any, are in play, then adding in Spark from their
own pool or from anyone who’s trying to help. That builds their die pool of
six-sided dice that they roll against a GM declared difficulty. In most
conflicts, it’s a single roll to bring things to a resolution. The system is
quick and has a nice bite when things are on the line.
Along with the regular approach to
a challenge, the GM has some neat little tools to play with that difficulty to
amp up conflicts. They can set two difficulties for a challenge. The first is a
lower, “get it done” target number. The second is a higher difficulty
with an even more comprehensive victory or with adding benefits (something
as simple as “you’ll look awesome doing it” or something more tangible like
“and they won’t be able to fix their security system any time soon”). That gives the player a bit of a
tactical risk-reward decision to make as they build their die pool. It’s really
fun to see folks consider how much to push towards the big win.
Last, but not least, is the Big
Threat or Big Bad. This how HtS:DtB models a conflict with a major foe or an
extended stressful conflict (like a large fire burning down the block, a
torrential rainstorm, open warfare between gangs on the streets, whatever is
most interesting to the group). The GM sets a Total Threat Difficulty, a very
high target number. Any player who decides to have their character tackle the
threat can slowly winnow it down, but as long as that threat still has muscle
(the total number of successes needed hasn’t been met or exceeded), each attempt
is at best a mixed success and things will continue to escalate. The Total
Threat Difficulty often ends up with player characters in dire straights, hurt,
and paying the price for their victories, which then leads to Refresh scenes
where they work back up their Spark. It’s a lovely cycle of play.
Tell me about Magical Kitties Saves the Day. What excites you about it?
What has me truly excited about Magical KittiesSave the Day is how much fun everyone has during our playtests. People are enthusiastic
about trying the game. People are even more enthusiastic to try it again. As a
game master, that kind of enthusiasm is infectious. And the world of Magical
Kitties, based around just a few core principles, so endlessly varied and
effortlessly rewarding to create in: Your magical kitties can be in your
hometown. Or in the Old West. Or fighting aliens. Or living in a Martian
colony. Or, really, anywhere.
Let me back up. In Magical Kitties everybody plays a kitty with a unique supernatural power. Every kitty has human. (Some humans believe that they own the kitties, but that’s clearly ridiculous.) Every human has a Problem. The kitties need to use their powers to solve their humans’ problems and save the day! On top of that, every hometown has Troubles. Troubles can be almost anything: Witches. Aliens. Hyper-intelligent raccoons. To run an adventure, all the GM has to do is take a Trouble and point it at a Problem. As the Trouble makes the Problem worse, the kitties have to fly into action! (Often literally.)
How do players create their human
characters and kitties?
You can either very deliberately craft your
kitty or you can use the random character generators to discover your kitty.
Either way, character creation is very fast, so it’s more about whether you
have a specific vision or if you want to be surprised and challenged. You can
also mix-and-match the approaches: Maybe you care a lot about what your kitty’s
Magical Power is, but want to randomly generate your kitty’s Talent and Flaw
and then figure out what your kitty’s personality is from that. You can do
that!
Kitty’s attributes: They are Cute, Cunning, and Fierce. They also have
Talents and Flaws, describing what they are particularly good at (being a
talented actor or a keen sense of hearing) and also what gets them into trouble
(like having a big mouth or being a scaredy cat). And, of course, they also
each have a cool Magical Power — invisibility, telekinesis, technopathy, frost
breath.
When it comes to humans, the most important thing is their Problem. Again,
players are empowered to customize their own Problems. But we also include a generator
that combines an emotion — like sad, angry, scared — with a source, things
like money, illness, family, friends, work/school, and so forth. This is
ultimately a creative seed, and so you need to make it specific to your human
(and your kitty).
So if a human is scared about money, for example, that might mean they’ve
fallen behind on their mortgage payments and they don’t know what to do. Or
maybe they owe money to dangerous monsters. If they’re angry about money, on
the other hand, then maybe someone has stolen something from them and they’re
furious about it.
What’s the mechanical structure of Magical Kitties Save the
Day, especially in regards to dealing with Troubles and Problems?
The core mechanic of Magical Kitties is a streamlined dice pool system that effortlessly creates degrees of success:
Failure
Success, but…
Success
Success, and…
Super success!
Each degree has some generic structure to outcomes. For example, on a Success,
but… the kitty will succeed, but also:
A foe uses its reaction.
You suffer an Owie.
You get into a sticky situation.
You are unable to act for some time.
You have one fewer die in your next pool.
The GM forces your flaw.
Something else that’s creative.
By moving beyond a simply binary of success and failure, the game inherently
encourages both game masters and players to engage deeply with the outcome of
any action resolution. Young players, in particular, get really engaged by the
results.
Problems have a Severity and Troubles have an Intensity. Both measure how difficulty it is to solve or overcome them. As Problems and Troubles are resolved, the story of your magical kitties will slowly come to an end… or you can have new Trouble come to town.
This sounds like a really lighthearted
game, but I admit some of the Problems you mentioned hit nerves for me as a
player. How are you supporting players in encountering topics that might be a
little bit, uh, Problematic?
One of the reasons we’ve embraced the Source
+ Emotion method of generating problems is that it isn’t providing
specific problems. That specific problem is still coming from the player. If
you ask a six-year-old what “money + sad” or “friends +
angry” means, you won’t get the same kinds of problems you will if you ask
a twelve-year-old or twenty-four-year old that question.And since we’re
not pushing a specific problem into the playing space, the players generally
self-control for what they’re comfortable exploring through play without even
really thinking about it.
Magical Kitties is framed as an all-ages
game. What have you done to make the game approachable for people of different
ages, backgrounds, and abilities?
In working on Magical Kitties I’ve
personally done a lot of research into age-appropriate cognition. The results
are frequently surprising! For example, character creation uses
d6-as-percentile tables. I initially thought that might be a difficult concept
for our target age range and was looking at alternatives, but it turns out that
specific exercise if used in Grade 2 curriculums.
Our creative team for Magical Kitties is already diverse, and making it even more diverse as we bring more creators
onboard is a priority for me. Bringing all of these different viewpoints into
the Magical Kitties universe is making that universe bigger and more
exciting in every way possible. If there’s one thing we’ve discovered, it’s
that the love of kitties is about as universal as you can get! Kitties and the
people who love them can be found everywhere.
I also believe that Magical Kitties can be an opportunity for people who have never played a roleplaying game
before to discover a whole new hobby. We think reaching out to all-new
audiences is really important in terms of making sure that all voices get to be
part of our conversation. To that end, Magical Kitties includes a lot of
tools for new players: There’ll be a solo play scenario, for example, so that
within literally moments of cracking open the box you can start playing the
game for the first time. And there’ll be a My First Adventure book for
first-time GMs, taking them step-by-step through running their first scenario.
