Hi all! Today I’ve got an interview with Elizabeth Chaipraditkul about Afterlife, which is currently on Kickstarter! It sounds really fascinating, so check out what Liz has to say below!
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Tell me a little about Afterlife. What excites you about it?
So, here’s the elevator pitch taken right from our Kickstarter page:
Afterlife: Wandering Souls is a macabre fantasy game set in surreal plane known as the Tenebris. You take on the role of a Wanderer—someone who died, but didn’t end up in Heaven, Hell, or any other traditional afterlife. Devoid of any memories of your life on earth, you find yourself in an endless desert filled with gateways. Search different planes of existence for clues of your former life – or a semblance of one. Along the way you’ll encounter strange inhabitants, alien cultures, and other humans who’ve lost all hope and are bent on destroying you.
Afterlife is Alice in Wonderland meets What Dreams May Come set in a world inspired by the works of Guillermo del Torro, Hayao Miyazaki, and surrealist artists. *A few things really excite me about Afterlife: Wandering Souls (AWS) first, the concept of exploring forgotten memories has always called to me in rpgs. My favourite part of running games for people is having those poignant moments with players delving into their personal stories.Whatever type of game your playing – a sprawling adventure, a strange mystery, or a political nightmare – play is always heightened for me when characters have their own personal stories going on. In AWS you travel through strange worlds and get to experience a look into your character’s past. I love that!
On a more personal note I’m excited about this project, because it’s the work (for my company) that I am most proud of to date. I’ve learned a lot through my years of freelancing and I feel it’s culminated to this. One of the most important things I’ve learned is that you need a great team around you – and this project has the biggest team to date! When you have so many talented people working towards one goal – that excites me!
How does Afterlife work mechanically, just the basics, to demonstrate this surreal plane and the way you interact with it?
The basics of Afterlife’s mechanics are rolling a pool of d6’s and getting the number of successes required by the Challenge set by your GM. Around those base mechanics we’ve built in a lot of cool systems that help reflect the setting you’re playing in. For example, each Wanderer has an Approach which is a martial item that can warp and shape based on their personality. The more players define what their Approach does the more unique it becomes – but also mechanically it gives them a bonus to their checks. We also have something called Death Marks – which are tattoo-like markings on a Wanderer’s skin. Each Death Mark is linked to a memory the player helped develop during character creation and each gives a special mechanical benefit. Throughout the game people unlock their Death Marks by interacting with their memories.
What do you do to support players with the potentially difficult subjects that come up in game, considering the references like What Dreams May Come?
We encourage GMs to have an open and honest conversation about what player’s expectations are of the game before they start, along with going over themes that the players aren’t comfortable with. For public games where you might not know each other well or convention spaces we suggest GMs use safety tools like the X-card which can be easier for players to interact with when they don’t know everyone well. Afterlife is all about strange exploration and (OC) enjoying all the drama that comes with experiencing past memories and bringing them into play. To paraphrase what we’ve written in the corebook – Afterlife is a game where you play a dead planar traveler with magical powers searching through alien worlds for memories – arguing someone should re-live traumatic memories they’re not comfortable with because it is realistic is just obtuse.
Memories seem really important in Afterlife! How do players interact with their memories mechanically and in the story itself?
Within the game we have a mechanics called ‘naming a fragment’ whereby you as a player see something that you’d like to have relate back to your past life and denote its importance to your GM. When this happens you GM uses that person, place, or thing you named to create a small side scene for you known as a Break. During a Break your character goes into a catatonic-like state and they re-live a memory of their past life. When your Wanderer comes to, they have a better idea of who they once were and what their memories mean to them. Aside from getting some awesome play out of naming a fragment, it also has mechanical benefits. One of the best ones is unlocking a Death Mark, which gives you a cool power and also means you’re one step closer to the end of your Wanderer’s journey.
What are the alien worlds like and what influence do characters have on the world around them?
In Afterlife: Wandering Souls the alien worlds are known as Limbos. Each is strange and often macabre. For example, we have a Limbo in the book known as the Drowned Lands filled with shipwrecks, ghosts of the dead, and strange sea creatures. In another Limbo we have is a giant wall of roses under a rolling grey sky – daring to look into one of the roses could spell doom for your Wanderer as they contain memories of the living world.
Characters are encouraged to be active participants in the Limbos they visit. Without interacting with the world around them, they are unable to find memories of their past lives and therefore risk falling into Stagnation (a loss of hope). To put it in the simplest terms – Wanderers are encouraged to be the stereotypical adventurers getting embroiled in plots, going on adventures, and interacting with NPCs. The amount of influence a Wanderer wields is based on how they interact with the Limbo itself – if people like them, if they are helpful, if they can do something of us.
Tell me a little about A Town Called Malice. What excites you about it?
Nordic Noir is a great genre. It refers to more than just an international import, it’s an approach to ensemble-style drama where characters of different backgrounds all deal with the same dramatic tension equally. The BBS series “Broadchurch” is a great example where everyone in the same small town comes to terms with a murder over multiple episodes, and the first run of “Twin Peaks” is the same way. From a game mechanics perspective, it’s something I hadn’t done before – my previously credits used the Powered by the Apocalypse engine. It’s excite to explore a new style of gameplay.
What are the characteristics of Nordic Noir and how do they show up in A Town Called Malice?
Nordic Noir is more character-driven, I find the tragedy or crime to be
solved becomes a prism to show the internal conflicts the characters are
experiencing. Both the original and US version of “The Killing” show
how multiple backgrounds are affected by a terrible death and as the series
progresses, we as an audience see the story go deeper beyond just the basic
“Whodunnit” type of mystery. By going with a story game format, (as
opposed to something more stat driven), it emphasized the relationships the
player were building within the narrative. That seemed more of the portrayal of
the genre.
How do you ensure the players are comfortable, while still unsettling
them as appropriate, in a Nordic Noir game?
We of course make sure to highlight appropriate safety measures and basic responsibility when dealing with both the horror and relationship elements. Because the players cooperate in building the narrative, they also lead the drama to the levels that best suit their gameplay tastes.
What are the characters like and how are characters built for the game?
Characters are guided by several things – Each role has a Personal Goal which should influence the player’s actions. These guidelines are intended to be neutral to how the player feels they’re best served. The Personal Goal of the “Criminal” role for example, is to “Gain the Advantage”. This can be interpreted by the player, and can be either a good or a bad trait depending on the situation. Gaining the advantage can be interpreted into helping the Law in solving the bigger problems of the Town for example.
Characters are also developed by the relationships they have with the other players at the table, through the use of Heit and Kult dice. These dice are placed in between the players at the table, representing the immediate relationship around them. Both players have input into that relationship, so a relationship can be a mixture of both good and bad feelings. This allows the players to expand on the overall narrative and determine what they need to personally overcome in order to succeed.
If players wanted to play the game and get the most out of it, how would you suggest they prepare for it?
I have really enjoyed watching players going deeper than
they normally would’ve in say, a straightforward dungeon crawl. I think people
will enjoy it most when they focus on the relationship aspects as much as
trying to overcome the supernatural threats to the Town – what does your
character feel? What do they need? How can they overcome these things together?
It’s a really different focus for me as a creator, and I’m glad to see people
get excited about the prospects of what Malice can be.
And for fun, what would you suggest as the ideal murder?
Wait. Who talked to you? I wasn’t there, no matter what you’ve heard! (laughs)
Hi all! Today I have an interview with Sophie Lagace, PK Sullivan, and Ed Turner about Fate of Cthulhu, which is currently on Kickstarter. I am impressed with some of the changes they’ve made to the Mythos and to Fate for the project, and I hope you do too! Check it out!
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Tell me a little about Fate of Cthulhu. What excites you about it?
Sophie Lagace: It’s a take on Cthulhu I have not really seen before, where the heroes are seriously out-gunned and out-tentacled, but not hopeless. Maybe you can’t save humanity from an apocalypse, but you can save it from complete extinction, for example. It’s a game about fighting back even when you’re a tiny person against a monstrous evil, giving it all you got and having a chance to make a difference. I can seriously relate, these days.
Also, we acknowledge the glaring flaws in the source material and in H.P. Lovecraft himself, take the good, and reject the bad. I love critical examination of our faves rather than pretending everything is fine
PK Sullivan: This is the first genuinely hopeful take on the Cthulhu mythos that I’ve seen. That’s something really important to me. Sean Nittner reached out to me in July 2015 asking if I would be the lead designer for this Fate Cthulhu game that Evil Hat wanted to make. My first response was, “Me? Are you sure? I’m not a Cthulhu fan.” Ultimately I think that worked in my favor. Stephen took point on the mythos story while my job was to design a system that reinforced the themes of the mythos. But I need hope in my stories — I made that very clear early on — so Fate of Cthulhu started to lean more toward the good you can do in the timeline
It can still be a pyrrhic victory, or you can still completely screw things up and make the future worse but there’s always the chance, the possibility, the hope that things can be better. And ultimately that’s what you’re trying to achieve as a character: a better future.
Which is surprisingly easy to achieve when the timeline starts as dark as possible.
Ed Turner: Sophie and PK already adequately covered the joys of cosmic horror with a side of hope, so I’m going to be a bit more mechanics-focused: it’s corruption that excites me. As characters deal with phenomena related to the Great Old One, they’ll slowly be corrupted by the sheer wrongness of eldritch forces. Left unchecked, corruption takes the form of horrible mutations. You want claws and tentacles and dripping ichor and other body horror shenanigans? Eat your heart out. Maybe literally… corruption can do weird things.
I love corruption for so many reasons. It’s a way to convey the danger of these alien entities without falling back on tired and problematic notions of “madness.” It’s a way to give players actual hard consequences when things go awry—having a character die is almost never as interesting as having a character’s very humanity get twisted. But more than anything else, it’s a way to empower characters… as bad as corruption is, your new tentacles are also tools in your arsenal, a way you can use the Great Old One’s own malevolence against itself. It ties back to that all-important sense of hope: the worse things get for a character, the better they are able to fight back. As bad as the threat you’re facing is, it contains the seeds of its own destruction.
And of course it means your character can have tentacles. Nothing wrong with more tentacles. The heroes need to even out the tentacle playing-field.
Sophie Lagace
What is your role in the project, and what did you especially enjoy working on over the course of the project?
SL: I have had three roles. The project stretched on for nearly four years (with almost a year out of that devoted to the playtest rounds), so many things changed along the way. I started on quality control, a sort of sounding board for “Does this thing fit as a Fate game?” Eventually the project management work was rearranged across all Evil Hat products and Sean Nittner asked me to take over project management for this one. And as of almost a year ago, when Lenny Balsera didn’t have time to be Fate Line Developer, I have taken that on as well.
I tremendously enjoyed working (once again!) with top talent, and this will continue with our stretch goal collaborators. On a personal level, I had a flash of elation when, after compiling the mass of data from our beta playtest round, I suddenly realized that we had objective confirmation that we had addressed the problems revealed by the alpha round. We all had a vague, hopeful sense from the comments received that maybe we were on the right track, but it was great to get hard data
PK: I’m the lead designer and I love weird challenges in game design. The first four or five months of design was very collaborative. Sean, Sophie, Stephen, and I (wow, am I the only not-S on the original team?) had a bunch of Skype calls where we hashed out the parameters of the game, both fiction and mechanics. The thing we hit on was that the meat of this game would be in an ever-changing, non-deterministic timeline. Which is hella tricky because we have characters coming from the literal future who know the timeline as a matter of fact.
The first iteration of our timeline mechanisms pretty detached from any role play the characters made. At the conclusion of an event (more or less what we call an adventure) one of the players would get slapped with paradox and suffer terrible visions of the new future they’ve created. This involved a skill check against an epic difficulty that was almost sure to cost resources (Fate points, etc.), followed by rolling four Fate dice with modifiers based on how well that skill check went. If the player had been able to shake off time’s assault just fine, then they got to improve dice. If they blew that defense roll, then one of the dice was guaranteed to be a negative. The dice result became the new rating of the event the players had just completed (more or less how badly it screws humanity) and those dice rippled out to the other events in the timeline. This did two things: it gave the characters valuable information about the new state of the timeline and made sure no one could game the system for the best result.
Playtesters hated it
So I had to go back to the drawing board. I redesigned the timeline mechanisms so that the heroes and the squamous horrors of the void are competing on a track for changes to the timeline. As those rack up, ripples get made across the other events. But! Now it’s up to the GM to interpret what those ripples mean. This was a really clever solution to a problem I didn’t know we had. I was leaning too hard into the action element of the action-horror stories we set out to tell. By making the timeline changes a GM element, while giving them tools and guidance to convey those changes to the players in thematically appropriate ways, the uncertainty that players faced dramatically increased. Uncertainty is key to horror stories. We need to keep the players in a state of imperfect information, even if other Fate games rely on perfect information.
That was the biggest challenge in the game and one I hope goes over well. Fred and some of the early readers have really responded to the condensed, concise Fate Core rules set I’ve put together for the game. The first stretch goal was to put that into the Fate Core SRD so people can build their own Fate games using those 50 pages of rules. That’s very flattering. I really hope people build tons of great games off this chassis I put together. It would be the greatest reward so far in my game design career.
ET: I got pulled into the project relatively late, to help get it ready for the second round of playtests, and after that I was part of the writing team. In practice, most of my energy went into the detail work: example text, spells and rituals, corruption stunts, things of that nature. Whenever you see a list of things, I probably had a hand in it. It’s not easy to pick a favorite part—by the time I started working on the project, the core of it had already come more-or-less together. It meant that I was given a wonderfully ghastly playground to explore.
Perhaps my favorite part was helping to finalize the timelines themselves. Stephen wrote some wonderful apocalypses, which are just an absolute delight to read; my job involved statting up the NPCs and horrible monsters that populate his world. In short, getting them ready for a GM to pick up and throw at their players, while still being as weird and scary as Stephen envisions. It’s a fun challenge.
Ed Turner
What are the unique challenges of a timey wimey affected game? You’ve talked about the timelines – what do those mean to the players?
SL: For one thing, it means being able to play some pretty unusual characters, whether by having corruption aspects and stunts, or by confronting temporal paradox. We had playtester groups who reported that some of their members played different versions of the same character, and that seemed to generate a lot of fun moments for them.
For another, it means that the heroes will be dealing with high stakes; for example, if you can’t change the timeline, you have not the possibility but the certitude that everyone you ever cared about will suffer a horrible, ah, fate.
Finally, the fact that a group can tackle any of the four key events in a timeline in any order in turn makes each story truly unique to that group. It’s likely that two gaming group taking on the same timeline and Great Old One will have a very different narrative, so replay value should be good.
ET: It means that players and GMs alike will be contending with an interesting juxtaposition of knowledge and uncertainty. The timeline gives players many, though not all, of the essential details about what they’ll encounter during an event, but their actions ripple forward, changing subsequent events. The knowledge they were so sure of at the outset grows less and less helpful as time goes on. And it gives the GM room to really mess with players’ expectations. Of course, that does also suggest part of the challenge: rationing out that change. PK pointed out earlier that uncertainty is key to horror stories, but uncertainty requires a solid baseline, otherwise things change so rapidly that they stop being unsettlingly wrong and start being pure static. In other words, the GM can’t mess with players’ expectations if things get so chaotic that the players don’t have any expectations anymore. Timelines, and the timeline track, help contain that chaos, so players will always know more-or-less what’s going to happen, but can be shocked by the details.
PK: The biggest challenge was finding a way to have timeline actually matter. We decided early on that a timeline would play a significant role in the game. That’s why the whole structure of Fate of Cthulhu is built around the timeline. When I started mucking about with possible timeline systems, I realized that for it to work it needed to do two contradictory things: the players have to know the timeline and the timeline has to change and shift. From there it was a tightrope to walk of having the changes be unpredictable and Lovecrafting while letting the players feel like they earned the changes to it.
How did you approach making an inclusive game in something that most marginalized consider volatile, the Lovecraftian mythos, both mechanically and in the fiction and in presentation of the game rules?
SL: It was clear from the first moment that to make this a game which Evil Hat could publish, we would have to face the true monsters in the Lovecraft story. It just would not have been compatible with our mission to gloss over racism, ableism, and other -isms.
It may be tacky but I’m going to toot my own horn here regarding the concept of sanity: I was the first to suggest a corruption mechanic and the high cost of facing the horrors being the slow transformation into a monster yourself. I’m very fond of RPGs that ask the question “What are you willing to sacrifice in order to succeed?” instead of just “Will you succeed?” I think it’s central to Fate, a game where PCs have lots of resources to draw on in order to achieve goals.
That said, I’m certain someone else would rapidly have come up with the corruption idea, but I felt good about being the one to pull it out of an evil hat.
ET: I think Sophie really hits the nail on the head: getting rid of the tired and thoughtless treatment of “sanity” pulls a lot of weight. I think it also helps to be absolutely explicit when we call out Lovecraft’s bigotry. It’s so commonly elided over, or dismissed as being a product of its time. And that’s no good… his writings often, and with varying levels of subtlety, other real-world groups, and that’s something we don’t want to lazily perpetuate.
And of course, we can’t forget the contributions of our sensitivity reader, Misha Bushyager. Sensitivity consultation is great idea in general, but on something like this, it’s invaluable.
PK Sullivan
How is Fate of Cthulhu different from other experiences in Fate, from your perspective? What do you hope people enjoy in the variation?
SL: I think it puts in doubt whether you will achieve success like no other Fate game we’ve released before. Also, there are not that many role-playing games that provide mechanical support to allow time travel and changing the future, and I don’t know of any other based on the Fate engine. In fact, most time-travel RPGs I know of have a lighter tone: TimeWatch (Pelgrane Press), Doctor Who (FASA, Cubicle 7), Time & Temp (Dig a Thousand Holes Publishing), etc.. On the other hand, Fate of Cthulhu can have funny moments, but it’s not meant to be played for laughs
ET: The timelines give the game a very strong narrative superstructure; there is a very clearly defined end point that you are building to: eventually the moment of the Great Old One’s rise will arrive, and it’s on you to be ready for it. It means there’s a grand finale always on the horizon, which gives the campaign an ongoing sense of pace… the characters might not know what the best next step is, but it’s impossible for them to lose sight of their greater goal. It’s not the very first Fate game to do something like this; Uprising has a built-in narrative arc leading to an end point. But Fate of Cthulhu pushes the concept even further, diving really deep into the short, focused campaign concept. I also hope that people take advantage of the focused, relatively brief campaign by going through multiple apocalypses. Not only by re-trying a timeline, hoping to get a better result with the next iteration, but by trying out the variety of timelines in the book and coming out as stretch goals from the Kickstarter.
PK: Most Fate games have characters change laterally, sometimes gaining in power but only in small doses. Because a given campaign is really just four adventures — four events on the timeline — and a denouement in the form of the final event Rise of the Great Old One, we actually put advancement on the fast track. PCs get a new skill every milestone. But… that’s tempered by the corruption mechanisms. This is the only Fate game I know of where you can end up in a mechanically reinforced spiral of self-destruction. Corruption stunts offer you great power but at the cost of further corruption. Not to mention many of the horrors you’ll face can push you down that path, as well. It’s another interesting dichotomy where characters can get very powerful very fast but also just wind up taking themselves right out of play by getting too dark.
One last question! If you could be in the Fate of Cthulhu world, what would you most want to do and see? What would be the wildest adventure you could want?
PK: Is it a cop out to say I don’t want to go there? We made the worst future! Futures! There are five of them! They’re all completely terrible. War, plague, famine, pestilence, and unending subjugation await anyone who lives long enough to see the future. If I had to be someone in Fate of Cthulhu, I think I’d want to be a modern day mystic. Maybe someone who has visions of the future. Being haunted by nightmarish visions of things yet to be is about the most chill thing you can be in this world.
SL: I’m with PK! But I would want to see success in avoiding a cataclysm, righting things to the point where humanity can build a better future. So, ++++ on the timeline!
ET: Yeah, there’s definitely no great place in the Fate of Cthulhu world. But I dunno, I think the Dagon timeline might be pretty okay? I mean, assuming you survive the horrible transformation into a Deep One. Sure, you’d suffer eternal subservience to a giant paranoid fish-monster at the bottom of the ocean, but you’d get to breathe underwater, and that’s pretty cool. That’s about as good a trade-off as a Great Old One is going to offer.
I have an interview today with L A Wilga and James Lader on the new roleplaying game Sundown, which is currently on Kickstarter! It sounds like a really interesting new game and I’m excited for it. Check out the interview below, and the Kickstarter too!
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Sundown’s cover art by Mayara Sampaio.
Tell me a little about Sundown. What excites you about it?
L A: So, Sundown is a rules light tabletop roleplaying game. It’s set in a pre-industrial frontier where, instead of magic, we have “science.” Science is the intersection of two things. Wonders: inventions that just make everyone’s life easier, and changing: the art of taking someone and reshaping their flesh. In fewer words, engineering and biology
There are two main facets to the game: surviving the wild, with fauna just as changed and dangerous as the folk, and surviving the politics, with a power struggle in every town and a populace that needs you but doesn’t want you.
I certainly get excited to face down giant winged frogs and angry murderbirds, my pink undershave flowing in the wind, but I find catharsis in the politics. You have to navigate finding work, getting paid, finding a place to stay, making friends, and avoiding the authorities as someone disdained by most of society. It’s an experience I think most in our queer rpg community will recognize.
It’s kind of like a cyberpunk game with the punk aesthetic, the politics, and the transhumanism, but if you took away its technology and sent it to the West Marches.
J L: I’m really excited about how much control you have over your body in Sundown. Changes are probably my favorite part of our game, because as a trans man, being able to reshape your body on a whim is the ultimate fantasy. And I’m sure other people think that’s super cool too.
The other thing I’m excited about is intentionally including politics in the premise. Social strife is the lifeblood of this game, where more of the people are monsters than the fiends. I really like that the direction of your career can be toppling the ruling class in Cragsmouth, or becoming a thief-assassin who saves themselves at all costs. You make your way through Sundown by surviving how best you can, and it really mirrors to me how to navigate a world where a lot of the power isn’t yours.
You talk about the Changing. How does Changing work, and are there any special benefits or consequences from it?
L A: This is a good question, because people tend to assume that you just drink a potion and seconds later you have claws or something.
Changes are made by a scientist specialized in changing, and in a laboratory devoted to changing. You get stuffed into an egg-like pod with the changing agents and a medium called lungwater that keeps you alive for the weeks or months your changes take. Breaking down flesh and building it back up takes a lot of time and energy. When you break out of your egg, you’re ravenously hungry, everything is too bright, and you just want to go back to sleep.
Changing agents are derived from plants and animals out in the wild that have already been observed to do… something to people. Indigoji turns your skin purple, for instance. Modern changes were discovered by blending random assortments together and logging the resulting effect on humans, not all of them consenting test subjects.
J L: Changing is arduous. It really does mirror the transition process in the real world, but it’s less limited. It’s expensive to get access to changes. Special equipment and making sure you don’t die in stasis isn’t cheap. The time cost, too, matters. And some changes can stress your body. It’s not a perfect science, and you can end up with additional things that identify you as a changeling, like black nails when you asked for super strength.
We also did name the pods where Changes happen eggs. That’s not a very subtle metaphor I think. If people know you’re a changeling, too, they’ll treat you very different. The best reaction you can expect in most of Sundown is mild disdain, which is very real. So if people know you’re a changeling, that alone is a consequence.
This was labeled frogbeast, which I think is such a fun name!
How do your identities as queer and trans (or queer/trans identities in general) reflect in the broader world beyond the Changing? Do they relate to Wonders, or even to the politics?
L A: We didn’t really use wonders to say anything about queerness or transness, they’re kinda just neat things, like goggles that let you see at night. We definitely do intend, though, for guns to be a symbol of the class war. Did we mention there’s guns? They’re more like railguns than gunpowder guns. They use a fictional material called floatstone.
There is this wonder called pitch, though. It’s a black syrup thing that’s injected, and it knits your body back together after some nasty injuries. The catch, though, is if you use too much, you run the risk of becoming a pitchblood. Basically, your blood is replaced with pitch. You lose twenty years off your life, but you’re near invincible. I think some folk can sympathize with that sort of deal-with-the-devil transformation?
Beau’s Note: This specific one reminds me of my own experiences with lithium as someone with bipolar disorder, to be honest.
L A, continued: The politics is really where our queerness comes through. For one, if you have any sort of visible change, which includes things like colored hair, over half of the people in Sundown won’t really want anything to do with you. Not to mention you’re already othered because of your profession. The isolationists of Sundown really don’t like outsiders doing their work for them. Too bad they need drifters like you for things like translation, bounty hunting, and trailblazing.
J L: Definitely. The otherism experienced in Sundown based on being a drifter is pretty much a direct metaphor for how it feels to be disdained and desired. Very much as a queer person it’s easy to feel consumed and discarded at the earliest opportunity, and since you’re a travelling contractor, it’s even more direct.
I think, honestly, the other parts of the system also show some of the good parts of being queer, too. When you create your character, for example, your character is rooted in the people at your table. One of the traits that embodies who you are is defined by your relationship to another character at the table. Drifters often are building an intentional community, a network of people who know where the good work is, who you should work with on what jobs, where it’s safe to travel, and sharing stories of your best exploits. I think that really reflects how queer and trans folx band together to keep each other safe and loved in a world that is otherwise hostile to them.
James Lader.
How are things like changing and wonders, and those politics you discuss, mechanized or formalized in the game?
J L: So all of these things involve infamy, which is the currency we use in Sundown. Infamy isn’t coin, though, it’s a representation of your influence in the area, and how well people know you. The more infamy you have garnered, the more leverage you have. Political action that earns infamy takes place during heats, the jobs drifters take on every month. You might slay fiends, debate a public official, steal from a guild, or lead an uprising.
Getting wonders and changes requires you to spend your infamy to obtain them. Some wonders are special and rare enough to use your downtime between heats as well as your infamy to obtain them. Changes always take downtime, and usually cost infamy.
One of the neat things about infamy is that you only have so much influence you can gain, and once you use that leverage, it’s gone. You have to think carefully about what you want to achieve and use that influence wisely.
L A: Ok so James mentioned heats. That’s basically an adventure, and downtime is the time between them. We intend for downtime to be played kind of like play-by-post between sessions
When you make improvements to your character that involve big investments of time, like learning a new skill or rebuilding your fleshy prison, you do that during your downtime. Spending your infamy on changes is just one of the things you can spend your downtime on.
J L:Downtime is when most of your character improvements can happen, so you have to choose really carefully what you want to spend your time on between jobs. Sundown is a hard place to be and choosing to better your traits or gain cat ears can be life or death. It’s really tricky because you can also only get so many things before not having any more infamy to gain.
What have you done with the game to support players in exploring these relatively serious subjects, including consent and safety mechanics and other aspects of your design?
J L: One of the first sections of the book is a consent tool we developed based on our stress mechanic. Stress is sort of a measure of your character’s health, and it worked really well to measure how safe a topic was for the players.
We also reinforce throughout the book to be mindful of others at the table, to use additional safety and consent tools you might be more familiar with, and to check in with your fellow players.
These are really hard topics and not everyone wants certain themes in the game, and we went out of our way to remind people to check in, and check often.
L A: Regarding serious subjects, I wrote from my own experience as a poor queer person, and I think the queerphobia and classism and Sundown really reflect that
For the experiences I haven’t lived, we took on two non-white sensitivity editors. Their input was invaluable for fleshing out the cultures that have made their way to Sundown in a respectful manner.
Even though I’m disabled too, James has far more lived experience in that regard. The section on disabled drifters in the intro section is entirely his doing.
Every time there’s a “make sure you check in with your fellow players” regarding a marginalized identity, all four of us had a hand in it.
Tell me a little about Mysthea: Legends From the Borderlands. What excites you about it?
So! Mysthea: Legends From the Borderlands is a game of post-war rebuilding and divided loyalties in a geomantic fantasy world. It’s set in a city that’s in territory contested by two major powers, and now those powers are at war. The war front has passed over this city and is now a distant rumble, and the city is free again – though much worse for wear. Each player creates a faction active in the city, whether they’re an ancient order, a new organisation dedicated to refugee support, or sent by one of the great powers to rebuild the city and pursue their patron’s agenda. You’ll make a viewpoint character from your faction, dive into the politics and struggles of the wounded city, and see how it changes from flashpoint to flashpoint.
I’m excited about:
Telling a zoomed-in story: your group will find out how a single city grows and how its people change over the span of a few decades. You’ll craft this city and get to know its districts, its politics, its festivals.
A dive into weird fantasy: Mysthea is a world defined by the crystals scattered over it by a prehistoric impact. These crystals warp the environment and its creatures, but also resonate with human thought. What does a society look like where everyone has limited telekinesis, and can use these crystals to build, fight, control beasts, craft prosthetics, etc? I’m interested in finding out!
A game of empire and liberation. At least some of the player factions will be coming into the city as liberators, having ousted the previous occupiers. But the ousting wasn’t clean, and the faction’s patrons aren’t altruists. As you play you’ll deal with what happens after liberation, as each faction must reckon with their obligations to their patrons, the city, and each other. We’re hoping the fantasy setting will provide the needed distance to really dig into this thorny topics, and have hired cultural consultants to try and ensure we do so respectfully.
I like this zoomed in look, and I’m curious about the
flashpoints! What does it feel like in play to go from moment to moment in this
world, and how is that represented in the game?
A flashpoint starts with
you defining its core issue: why have we decided to pick up this city’s story
here? Maybe a battalion of soldiers has arrived at the city and demanded
supplies? Perhaps a shower of crystal meteors have hit the city, causing destruction
and warped the area? Or maybe one of the player factions has decided they’ve
had enough, and is going to try and seize control of the city?
So – you’ve set up this
flashpoint. To play through it, you’ll jump between the actions of Houses
(slow, ponderous, and vast) and Heroes – agile and dynamic, but with their own
priorities. We’ve designed the two layers to feel very different in play. House
actions add new elements to the map and reshape the city’s balance of power,
but use up a limited pool of Decrees. The hero phase feels more like standard
PbtA, something like Monster of the Week. Your group of characters have a
mission to deal with, and as you play out the moment-to-moment drama of that
conflict you’ll test your bonds with your fellows and discover new truths about
the world. The two phases flow into each other. Your Houses’ actions set up
threats and opportunities for your Heroes to deal with, while your Heroes’
on-the-ground experience of this city and its people can completely change your
Houses’ priorities and goals.
How do you approach the
idea of consent and agency in a world where people can control things with
their mind, able to break rules with a thought?
One of the interesting things about magic in Mysthea is that it adds agency, and its most powerful effects need close friends working together on a common goal. It’s a link between the mental and the material and has been used in-setting to craft crystal prostheses amputees can telekinetically control, and literally give agency to constructed beings of stone and crystal.
There’s the other element
too – consent and agency. One person acting on their own can only perform a few
tricks with crystal shards and boost their normal actions – to do more, you
need to work together. By calling on the aid of those who have strong bonds
with you you add their wisdom to yours, letting you work together to go beyond
human limits, evoke world-warping auras and more.
The fact that magical
potency comes from close bonds and common goals instead of years of arcane
research and expensive components is really interesting! What sort of society
does that lead to? How does that change how minority groups organise and lobby
for their rights? How do autocrats maintain their power, knowing what power
lies in their subject’s hands if they work together? I’m interested to find
out!
I didn’t ask questions about the monsters but this thing is RAD.
I was just asking people
about making games that happen after the liberation! What do you think are the
challenges in designing a game with this focus, and what’s exciting about them?
One challenge is definitely
the messy complexity of these situations. You can’t turn back the clock – the
occupation happened, and it and your ‘liberation’ left scars on this place.
Among the city’s citizens you’ll have those who want to restore the old ways,
and those who suffered under that regime and want to keep moving forward. Among
the liberators, you’ll have isolationists wanting to minimise investment and
occupiers trying to claim this city permanently.
That’s a really interesting
social situation to drop players into, but it’s vital to keep the difference
between dogma and the true situation clear. Part of our solution is to make
sure the game prioritises humanity over ideology. We want to humanise all
parties involved, though that definitely doesn’t mean presenting all positions
as valid.
Finally, we’re aware of the
limits of our own perspectives, and have hired consultants to make sure we
treat sensitive matters with the appropriate degree of tact and care.
What are some of the more
complex aspects of designing a game focused on a whole city, rather than just a
few characters?
First, you have to treat
the city as a character in its own right, and give it a presence at the table.
The map of the city is central to the game: you begin by placing down its
districts and landmarks, and as you play you’ll introduce factors to it
representing people, places and events crucial to the current flashpoint.
It’s also important to
maintain the link between people and their community – to the extent that one
of the GM’s principles is ‘name everyone, and know who backs them’. There’s no
lone wolves in Legends From the Borderlands, and no faceless mooks – everyone
has their own identity, and their own place in the city’s cultural fabric.
Of course, the easiest way to make something feel alive is to have it change. The timeskips between flashpoints are here to establish that, letting the city grow physically and culturally – each time you jump ahead, you’ll describe ways the city’s appearance has changed, and a new festival that’s sprung up to remember the previous flashpoint.
Tell me a little about vs. KICKSTARTER. What excites you about it?
vs.
KICKSTARTER began as three small roleplaying games based on Phil Reed’s vs.
Monsters. More accurately, they are inspired by his vs. Outlaws, a
pared-down Wild West-themed version of his original game. That game was
produced on both sides of a multi-panel screen that folds down to a 5-1/2″
square.
A
bit over a decade ago, Phil opened the vsM Engine up for others to use. At that
time, I had worked a bit on three games based on vsM, but I wound up focusing
on completing a BFA and plans for development were pushed back. A few months
ago, there was a discussion on twitter about one of the settings I had
developed as a vsM-powered game. I looked back at the old files and while that
particular game needed a lot of work, I saw that vs. MARS was nearly done. So
much so, that a bit of trimming and it would fit on that folded screen
template. From there, the other two initial games featured in the campaign
followed.
vs.
MARS is a game about an alien invasion in a small town. I’ve always been a fan
of survival fiction — things like zombie movies where the focus and threat is about
the other survivors but there is some external threat pressuring the survivors.
vs. MARS really slots into that role. The unlocked expansion opens the game up
to leading a resistance on occupied Earth.
vs.
MIRRORSHADES is a fast-playing cyberpunk game. I love the cyberpunk genre and
my hope is this game falls a bit more into the social change/punk part of
cyberpunk rather than the chrome fetishization side. An unlocked two-panel
expansion to this adds fantasy races and magic to the MegaCity — it’s the
most-requested addition to any cyberpunk game.
vs.
PIRATES is a game in the golden age of piracy from our childhood memories. The
already-unlocked expansion came first: I’ve always wanted to play a game that
was a mashup of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and The Pirates of the
Caribbean. Without the expansion, you’re playing more of a Treasure
Island or Black Sails game. With the expansion, you’ve got undead
pirates, the kraken, and cursed treasure.
We’ve
recently unlocked vs. EMPIRE, a game that isn’t so much “Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off” as it is “Star Wars with
the serial numbers filled in Play-Doh”.
Initially, I thought the campaign would need $400 to fund and would probably top out at $600 or about 40 or 45 backers. I am excited about the response to the campaign so far! As I write this, the campaign is 500% funded and we are nearing 100 backers — that’s twice the number of backers and nearly twice the amount pledged past a point in my initial spreadsheet where I wrote “we’re probably dreaming at this point”. That these small games are inspiring people I don’t even know to come on board and help make them a reality is just something that surprised me — it really impressed me.
Great!
What about this particular mechanical system appealed to you to use in such a
variety of settings, and what have you changed to suit them?
When
I started designing my initial vs. game, I was interested in survival fiction.
Rather than being the proactive monster hunters of vs. Monsters where
your characters decide to hunt down monsters, having a setting where you are
forced to take on that role appealed to me. You’re a regular person and then
something happens: how do you react to that?
I
had two different main games I was developing which had the same underlying
elements: normality is interrupted by an invasion; you are simultaneously being
hunted and take on the role of the hunters. One game was somewhat campy, the
other somewhat serious. They combined and the theme of vs. MARS wound up
engulfing the other.
Since
my initial designs, my preferred game style has changed from one where we’re
just players reacting to the twists and turns of the GM’s story to more of a
style where there is player collaboration in they way the story is shaped. In
vs. MARS, there are rules for scene framing where a player answers two
questions: “What is this scene about?” and “Where does it take
place?” Adding an element like this helps to emulate the type of fiction
vs. MARS emulates — in a setting like an alien invasion, one major element is
isolation or separation. By adding scene framing, our protagonists don’t have
to be in a small clump of adventuring heroes all the time.
When
there is damage involved, conflict resolution now incorporates the suits of
cards drawn to speed up determining damage taken. The cyberpunk game, vs.
MIRRORSHADES, has a Metal stat that is used whenever cyberware augmentations
are used. To reflect the setting’s concept that cyberware is an improvement,
using Metal makes the highest card revealed a suit that trumps all others. It
effectively guarantees that you’re going to have some effect on the scene if
you use these augments.
You know I love small towns, so I’m curious, what do you do to make the town small and still feel worth being in for vs. MARS?
During
character creation, one of the things you would choose for your survivor is
their concept: something about what they did before the invasion and what they
want. This desire is something that should tie them into the town. The current
example character is Tabitha Masters, a French major at ETU who wants to get
home to make sure her family is safe.
Stock
locations are listed for a few things found in and around the town that convey
the theme of isolation.
What have you done to make fantasy character types exciting and respectful for cyberpunk, mechanically or setting-wise?
To
get to that, I have to work through the constraints of the project. Whenever I
see a new game come out the first question I always see asked is: “Can I
play Star Wars with it?” (Which is where vs. EMPIRE comes from.)
The second question is: “Can I play Shadowrun with it?” When
developing the cyberpunk vs. game, it seemed that a straight cyberpunk game
with an option to add on the fantasy elements would fit the limited space I had
available.
With
vs. MAGICSHADES, a player chooses their character’s heritage, which adds a
simple one-use bonus to the character. Some implied setting material, such as
the elf nation of Tir nAill claiming all elves as citizens, start to bring in
some classic tropes of pseudo-Shadowrun.
How are your pirates and their world different from and the same as those we most commonly see in media?
The
tagline for vs. PIRATES says the setting is based on the way we remember tales
of pirates from our childhood. I feel it is more cartoonish than serious. Even
though you could play something straight like the Black Sails television
show, I anticipate the default play style would be more like The Pirates of
the Caribbean if one stripped out all the supernatural aspects.
The
way vs. PIRATES works is we establish the approach one will take to a
situation. Our stats in the game are Swashbuckling and Parley. Basically if
you’re fighting, your approach uses Swashbuckling. If you’re not, it’s Parley.
An antagonist also has approaches, but they are based on their role. So a
pirate antagonist would be drawing more cards if they were doing something
piratey and fewer if they were doing something outside their role.
Going
back to that default play style, adding in the vs. DAVY JONES expansion bumps
the game towards that Buffy + Pirates of the Caribbean game, so
we can add some more supernatural elements to the antagonists and their goals.
What more do you have in store both for those already-achieved stretch goals and anything else to come?
I
really don’t want to overextend myself on this, which is the first Kickstarter
campaign I’ve handling myself. While I have been collaborating and working on
over a dozen others, I’ve seen a few easy ways how a successful campaign can be
twisted into become a financial nightmare.
I’ve
spoken to a few other campaign creators when it looked like we were close to
unlocking the vs. EMPIRE stretch goal. Nearly every one told me to not add
anything else that I don’t feel comfortable with. At this point, the project is
funded and will be delivered — with the planning I’ve done for the campaign,
it’s all good. I don’t want to take on additional costs that could disrupt
fulfillment of the project.
So
right now, the last stretch goal was “I’ll add a second topping to a
celebratory pizza when this is all over.”
However, I have plans for further developing some of those earlier vsM games into this format, including one game designed to be a 1-on-1 one-shot. I’ll see how fulfillment goes for this campaign first!
Hey all! Today I’ve got five or so questions with Michael Bacon about the game Dangerous Times, which is currently on Kickstarter! Hope that you like hearing about this game of journalism in the 1920s!
—
Tell me about Dangerous Times. What excites you about it?
Dangerous Times is a small role-playing game for two or
more players, published in zine form, with a focus on storytelling. It’s about
reporters who risk their lives to expose corruption, crime and injustice, all
in a version of 1920’s New York that’s just learned stage magic is real. So now
magic is everywhere: children play with fire and levitation in the streets,
wall street moguls consult soothsayers before making investments, crooks turn
hypnotism and escape-artistry to devious purposes… and of course those who
seek power are messing with things best left alone.
One of the aspects I’m most excited about is the history
involved.
New York of the jazz age is a surprisingly modern time.
Broadway is decorated with neon lights, cars fill the streets and the subway
rumbles below. There’s even a budding intercontinental network of wires and
radio waves used to share photographs and news around the world.
It’s not just the technology that makes the twenties
modern, though: so many familiar social issues are present and cultural shifts
are happening, often in ways that resonate with the current time.
I’d love it if players were able to engage with all this history, and find ways to incorporate it into their play. I’ve tried to encourage that in the design. So even though the problems they bump into involve the supernatural, I’ve attempted to make those plotlines echo historic reality. It turned out to be… not easy (I’m still not sure I’ve got it right), but at least surprisingly straight-forward. This makes sense, though, because this is the culture that produced so many of those genre-defining fantasy, horror and mystery stories; they couldn’t help but bring reality into the fantastical.
The 1920s were a complex time in New York! I know that many Black Americans and queer people were among those living in the city. What kind of research are you doing to ensure that you have appropriate representation of the history and the people of the era?
I’m glad you brought this up, because how people treated
each other during this era has been a major focal point of my research.
I’ve been lucky enough to lean on the work of historians
who’ve spent their entire careers studying aspects of this, exploring how
specific conceptions of race, gender, sexuality and nationality influenced and
were influenced by society at large. There’s even a page at the end of the zine
dedicated to resources and references, so that players interested in learning
more can know where to start.
Going into this I’d only known the broadest shapes of the
era, and I was very excited to learn about ways society seemed to be expressing
interest in diversity— this romantic idea that New Yorkers at large were going
out to speakeasies, immigrant neighborhoods, jazz clubs, queer dances, and
encountering all sorts of other lifestyles and backgrounds— but when I started
doing the reading it turns out that these interactions served to reify existing
hierarchies as much as they transgressed against them.
And then the years rush ahead through the Great
Depression, WWII, and McCarthyism, all of which exacerbate expressions of
social backlash and undermine tentative steps made towards civil progress.
All this is to say that the past is a different place,
not a kinder one.
I have, however, made a serious effort to research and represent all the people living in the city, not just the ones in most easy reach. What this directly translates to is mention and often discussion of things like the black press, targeted enforcement of new immigration laws, police raids on cross-racial or queer dances, and so forth throughout the zine… though it’s difficult to fit all the nuance required within just 40 pages, especially when those pages also have to convey the core game mechanics and process of play.
One thing that drove me to set the game in the 1920s was
this article talking about Harlem’s Hamilton Lodge Ball, where hundred of queer
men and women annually danced in joyful defiance of prevailing gender and
sexual norms. These events became a sensation, with thousands from all over the
city showing up to observe and sometimes take part; notables in attendance
include Nora Holt and Wallace Thurman, even the Vanderbilts and Astors. The
newspapers at the time treat this with a range between shock and fascination,
but I can’t help but smile when I picture it— twirling on the dance floor,
fancy suits and gowns, and people from all over the city celebrating.
I’ve tried to make the game as much about players
encountering and protecting this positive parts of life in the city, as it is
about mystery, magic, and the dangers that are encroaching.
What kind of mechanics do you use in Dangerous Time for things like investigation, violence, and other things that might come up?
This is actually the area that’s seeing the most change, as I continue to playtest and refine what I’ve developed.
The setting and the mechanics are meant to reinforce
each-other, but I’ve also tried to keep them out of the way of the real point,
which is telling stories. So there’s some simple outcome randomization using
six-sided die, but there’s also a mechanic in place that lets players spend
this resource— credibility— to ignore the dice.
So for example this lets me keep reporters very squishy,
only distinguishing between “healthy”, “injured”, and “dead”, because the
transition between these states is almost always intentional.
The idea is that reporters sometimes exaggerate how
dramatic a situation is for the sake of selling more papers, so when you spend
credibility to succeed at something it actually means somebody, somewhere in
this article that your building, was lying.
And of course credibility is important when figuring out
the outcome of an adventure, because you might survive the big encounter only
to find nobody believes what you’re printing, and then the world gets worse
instead of better. Maybe dying for your ideals was the smarter choice.
Then there’s the investigation, which is where I’ve been
doing a lot of iteration lately. I’ve been toying with different ways to have
players encounter and build stories, but one piece I think I’ve finally got
down is the start of everything— the staff meeting.
The latest version has the editor (the player who runs
the game) stating a fact about the world and then questioning the other players
about it.
So you open the meeting with “Rats and pigeons have been
dying”, “Strange sounds drift through the air”, “Discarded bits of clothing
keep turning up” and then start asking questions. Why are the rats dying?
Where are they finding the clothing? When are the sounds
being heard?
Who told you about this? What does this other group say
about it? Make it weirder! Do they contradict each-other?
These become the rumors players investigate, and with a little bit of work by the editor they get incorporated into and reshape the various archetypal plots written in the zine.
What are the kinds of experiences and actions players can have in Dangerous Times? What do they do, and what do they feel?
Mechanically and thematically, Dangerous Times is a game
about determining truth, and working out how a bunch of truths all fit together
into a narrative.
Players start the game by generating rumors and leads,
then tell stories about how their reporters follow up on those leads. Dice
rolling is used to give guidance during this process, letting players know when
a scene should provide answers or raise more questions. They also make
decisions about who pursues what leads, when to use magic or break laws during
the investigation, when to split up and investigate more leads, or to focus on
one lead together, reducing danger and increasing the chance it’ll pan out.
All the while players are accruing trouble, which
eventually comes calling, and they’ll use their dice, skills, and other
resources to get out of it— or they go out in a blaze of glory, getting one
last epic moment before they fall.
Finally publication starts, and players have to take all
these facts and rumors and fit them together into articles, coming up with
witty headlines for bonus points. The paper’s credibility, circulation, and
debts come together to influence decisions about what gets printed, and then
the impacts of the publication on the world and the newspaper’s future are
discussed.
Ideally players start out with interest and confusion,
and as the story progresses they get that slow, awesome sense of the facts
coming together. They feel pressure brewing as trouble builds up, and they make
decisions about which risks are worth taking. When the trouble finally happens,
they feel excitement and danger, but also in control— players are the ultimate
arbiter over their character’s fate, and they’ll have to weigh when sacrifices
are worthwhile. During publication they get to look back on the adventure,
recapping all those feelings mixed together with hope, satisfaction, or regret.
Finally, in a game called Dangerous Times, I have to wonder, how do you plan to encourage safe and respectful play at the table?
The way tabletop gamers have thought critically on player
safety, developing tools and methods to encourage everyone has a good time, is
one of the things I like best about this hobby. Coming from video games, where
the discussion really isn’t there yet, it’s like a breath of fresh air. So of
course I’m happy to reference things like Lines & Veils and the X-card, so
players new to the hobby or unfamiliar with these concepts can play with a
safety net.
As to the design itself, well. Dangerous Times opens with
a staff meeting, and there’s a note in the zine about using starting that off
with a quick conversation about the things players do and don’t want to see.
It’s my hope that this becomes a natural place to establish boundaries, proffer
ideas, and flavor the tone of upcoming play. If someone mentions they find
baseball boring but love ghost stories, the group can keep that in mind as they
start building rumors and playing the game. With luck this normalizes the times
when people need to draw boundaries, whether that’s to avoid deep-seated trauma
or just because they’ve had a shitty day.
Addressing the other part of your question, one of the
things I’ve been very careful with the plotlines inside the booklet is to keep
them (hopefully, respectfully) adjacent to reality— players encounter history
and fix fantasy. So there’s no rushing in and suddenly solving real-world
injustices that persist into the present, at least in the booklet as written. I
think it’s fine if players want to play that way, but it’s not the game I
wanted to write. Instead I’ve provided supernatural and imaginary plots, noted
parallels to real history, and tasked editors with “making the real
unreal”— drawing inspiration from the real world, but making it into
something everyone can feel comfortable playing with.
I’d be happy if the experience of playing can be informative and challenging, but first and foremost it has to be enjoyable. It’s my hope that the game can support both hard-hitting encounters with history as well as light-hearted escapism. Groups can and should play at their own comfort levels— the twenties were a terrible, dangerous time, but also one that could have promised a better future. If nothing else, playing in that space should be fun.
Today I’m so excited to share that I have an interview with Dr. Jessica Hammer and Moyra Turkington on their game Rosenstrasse, which is currently on Kickstarter! I hope you enjoy hearing what these amazing women have to say about this project – check it out below!
—
Tell me a little about Rosenstrasse. What excites you about it?
JH: The Rosenstrasse story is an incredible story of non-violent protest and resistance to unjust authority. The game puts you inside marriages between Jewish and “Aryan” Germans. You play out what I like to call “ten years of marriage in three hours”; then, at the end of the game, the female characters have the chance to protest the roundup of the Jewish men in their lives. The historical protest we’re exploring was spontaneous, women-led, non-violent – and successful. That’s something we want to remember. At the same time, we remember that even these women, who were willing to stand up to the Reich, didn’t do so until their own families were on the line. We can honor their courage and still aspire to do better next time.
MT: A lot of things! Jess has the first thing that comes to mind – it is history that belies the story we’re told about our effective potential to affect oppressive regimes and that makes it an urgently important story to me in our current political climate. But I’ll also pick one that I don’t often mention – that it’s designed to be very procedurally easy to run! Unlike many games that require GM skill sets that experienced gamers take for granted (world building, scene framing, narrative positioning, mechanical management) Rosenstrasse takes care of the lion’s share of that work for you. In this game, the primary GM skill is emotional calibration – listening to a scene until it has reached an emotional place of fulfillment, asking questions to reveal how characters are processing the events in their lives, and checking in to make sure players are coping with the material. Because these are core emotional intelligence skills rather than specialized GM skills, this makes the game accessible to folks who have historically found GMing daunting – and as a result we’re seeing better representation among facilitators.
What inspired you to create the game specifically as a live action experience?
MT: Rosenstrasse is actually a hybrid larp & tabletop game so groups can play it as a live or tabletop experience. Because most of the gameplay involves the emotional negotiation between two people, the delineation between tabletop and larp start to naturally blur anyway; a scene where a husband and wife have a difficult conversation at a kitchen table looks and feels very similar in either game mode. When I run the game, I tend to do so in larp mode because I find that embodied roleplay is a powerful conduit to adopting the headspace and heartspace of the character, especially when there are strong relationship ties. I think that the emotion follows the body and vice versa.
JH: In contrast to Mo, I tend to run Rosenstrasse closer to a tabletop. Players still get to have meaningful in-character conversations where they embody their characters verbally and physically, but adopt a very different relationship to the game materials. For example, players in this mode often describe experiencing the card deck as a ticking clock, counting down to new horrors. This sense of dread is palpable at the table and very powerful for play.
What is the game like in play – what emotions do players normally experience, and what do they physically do?
JH: The game comes with eight pre-generated characters, and more than eighty scenes for them to encounter. In a typical scene, players get the description of a situation – for example, maybe two of the characters are going to work on the morning after Kristallnacht – and then a prompt for role-play. Prompts typically ask the characters to have a conversation, react to the situation being described, or show how their marriage changes.
MT: The game is meant to feel like an elegy – a thoughtful observance of the loss of security, dignity, freedom, and selfhood incurred under an oppressive regime. But it’s also a game about resilience and resistance – players through their characters struggle to hold on – or sometimes to let go. They discover that in an active genocide, that the minutiae of living and thinking and loving are themselves, resistance. The game play is often quiet, somber and serious – one where everyone shares a deep breath before the next scene because the story just keeps on getting harder. But there’s also moments of lightness, bright love, and true courage that also make it bearable.
What kind of research did you need to do to create Rosenstrasse?
MT: Research for historical games about people in marginalized situations can be hard. And it becomes harder still when you try to uncover their stories from a time where oppressive regimes have a stronghold on the narrative in which even documentation of your own story can be prosecuted as a treasonous crime against the state. You can double this down once more in a locus of war (Berlin) where victors literally displace the regime and with it wrest control of the story to broadcast their own victory. Stories get lost, they get distorted, they get overwritten – the stories of victims get defined by their victimhood in service to the vilification of the enemy and the righteousness of the victor.
For Rosenstrasse we got very lucky in that an academic named Nathan Stoltzfus found the thread of the Rosenstrasse protests early enough to locate people who were actually impacted, and to collect their first hand accounts of the events. Those first-hand accounts became the heart of our research and our design. And since that work, many other academics have focused on the story and it has become a locus of debate in Resistance Studies – so for research we situated ourselves in the lives of people who told their story and followed as many threads as we could find outward until we felt we could create a palpable feel of what it was like to live in that time.
JH: While Mo focused on the historical research, I spent a lot of time looking into the challenges of Holocaust education. I have a lot of experience designing and studying educational games – that’s actually part of my day job as a professor at CMU – but Holocaust education has some pretty specific challenges that we needed to understand. For example, Holocaust games can backfire if they make the player feel that they could have done a better job in the circumstances. That can lead them to have contempt, not empathy, for the targets of Nazi persecution. So, we did research to identify these challenges, looked at what’s been done before, and specifically targeted our design to address them. Our research with the game so far, and our observations of playtesting, suggest that we’re succeeding!
Dr. Jessica Hammer, one of the creators of Rosenstrasse.
How is Rosenstrasse important to you as a creator, and as a person?
JH: I’ve been making transformational games for nearly twenty years, and I’ve rarely seen a game that has this kind of power. It’s humbling and a bit frightening to know that you’ve made a game that deeply impacts players. But, I’ve brought everything that’s in me to the table – my work with transformational games, my commitment to activism, my expertise in psychology and instructional design, my family history, my love of role-playing games – and I think that creates a special kind of alchemy.
I’m particularly grateful that Mo agreed to dedicate the game to my grandmother, Helen Hammer. She survived five different camps, including Auschwitz, and went on to live a life of intellectual commitment, grace, and dignity. I was particularly close to her growing up. She pushed me to read bigger, think bigger, adventure bigger; she wanted me to have a vision of the world as it could be, not just of the world as it was. She died when I was still in college, so I hope this game stands as a testament to her memory.
MT: Rosenstrasse has a harmony that’s critically important to me. Its historical focus, its design, the story it tells, the player experience, the impact of play, my personal goals as a creative activist, and the design relationship Jess and I have built are all aligned with a harmony that’s incredibly satisfying. I will forever be grateful that Jess agreed to do this work with me – it has been a uniquely fulfilling and powerful experience, and I am humbled by her trust and her courage.
Bite Me! is a game about the emotional life of a werewolf pack. So it has mechanics for superhuman action and also mechanics for emotional connection and dealing with the fall out of the violence in your life.
I love games that dive deep into a mess of pressure cooker relationships. A werewolf pack is my perfect setting for that. It has 4 essential elements:
the fear of losing control of the monster inside,
the created family who share something that sets them apart,
the threat of a violent end, and
people closer to their emotional states and less able to hide how they feel.
Bite Me! uses those elements to keep the drama and tension high whilst doing the work for you to make the characters and the players feel like they are part of a pack. I’ve taken some of my learning on organisational culture from my MBA and baked it into the game to really make that a powerful part of the experience.
It is also a Powered by the Apocalypse game and that excites me a lot for two reasons: first because PbtA is a powerful engine for creating this cascade of action which gets out of control fast, and control is a huge theme in the werewolf genre. But secondly because the playbooks and moves allow you to design a very precise gaming experience for a given setting or genre. So, this is absolutely a game with a big theme of control, but the moves and skins in Bite Me! allow a group to also explore sharing emotions, having heartfelt conversations and having relationships in the centre of a storm of violence.
Most of all this game excites me because it is absolutely the game I’d want someone to run for me.
Tell me more about using your MBA! What did you bring forward, and how did you apply it to the game?
In my MBA I did a lot of work on how a culture can define an organisation even to the extent of eclipsing some pretty important things like strategy. I came to realise that culture is a powerful tool, but more than that – it already exists. It sits at the gaming table with us. And that got me thinking, if we have such a powerful thing sitting alongside us then shouldn’t we be using it? Shouldn’t we be designed games for it – to make sure that the culture doesn’t eat our carefully designed settings and systems.
I’ve designed this game with culture in mind. Deliberately using and establishing culture both in and out of character to replicate that sense of camaraderie that exists both in Packs and close gaming groups. Character advancement (in part) is tied to expressing and sharing culture as a Pack and every in-joke you share should make the game feel that much more gripping and heartfelt. One of my favourite things it when you experience a genuine moment of camaraderie at the gaming table. A moment that lights up your heart in a way that is shared with everyone else in your gaming group. I wanted to make a game that acknowledged and even facilitated that experience.
With such an emotional environment, considering the elements of family, struggle, and relationships, how do you handle safety and consent in the game?
I think that safety and consent is one of the hardest and most important conversations in our hobby right now. I recommend for Bite Me! a set of three different tools to help everyone at the gaming table take care of each other.
I like to start all my games by establishing a list of topics we agree not to bring into the game, a ‘Banned List’. This can be done anonymously or not as the needs of the players require and everyone including the MC is encouraged to use the opportunity to define what they want to keep out of the game. This allows players to veto things in advance. But of course you don’t always know in advance what stuff is going to come up in a game, and gaming is on ongoing exercise in consent. So we need tools to use during the game as well as before we start. In Bite Me! I recommend that groups investigate the X-card and your own Script Change techniques and I talk about how they might use one or both of those in a game. I think that the X-card is good for when someone who gets in real trouble and needs to shut down a piece of play quickly with no questions asked, and it can be used very effectively to remind people of the Banned List if someone forgets and accidentally references something on that list in the heat of the moment. Script Change is particularly amazing for when something needs to be adjusted in a game but everyone is either comfortable with more discussion or actively needs to discuss it and it gives better clarity over what the problematic element is and how best to deal with it.
When I started role-playing there were no discussions around safety techniques or any widely known tools. I don’t think we are at the end of figuring out safety because it always must be calibrated to the needs of the players in the game at the time and it is and should be an ongoing conversation. But I’m really glad we are having those conversations now and I’m always looking to see what the next advances in the discussion will be. But these are just tools. It would be great if we could roll them out like an encumbrance table or a bunch of Moves and have it all work like a smooth set of mechanics should do. Ultimately though games are conversations between real, warm human beings with all our messy emotions and culture and relationships. The tools are great – but they won’t work if we don’t prioritise the safety and comfort of our people at the gaming table, even over the fun of others.
In the written game text all I can do is encourage people to prioritise caring for each other and give them some tools. At my own gaming table I use these tools but I watch and listen, I check in with my players before, during and after tough scenes and I make it clear in the culture of my table that the people I sit with matter more than the game. I don’t get it perfect – messy human feelings will always be a work in progress. But we need to keep working on it.
What are the important differences and similarities between werewolf media and Bite Me! as a game? What might players be excited to find in Bite Me! that they might not find elsewhere?
I consume quite a lot of werewolf media (unsurprisingly) and I love it. But as a gamer, every time I find a film or book that I love I’m always thinking – ‘what is it I’m really excited about here, and how can I put that into a game!’ The cool thing about gaming is getting to experience stories as an active participant, instead of a passive consumer. I’ve put a lot of what I love about Werewolves (and my interpretation of them) into this game. The mechanics get you experiencing the closeness of pack life, the knife edge of control and the temptation to become violent or dominant to get the job done. But the one thing I’m hoping all players will get is that flash of genuine and heartfelt camaraderie both in and out of character; in the moment when the pack puts its differences aside, when the pack member you hate saves you because you are pack, when the Alpha sacrifices their life for the good of the group. Those are the things I hope that gamers will get to feel instead of observe. In terms of werewolf lore e.g. the full moon’s influence, being bitten or born a werewolf, the effects of silver or wolfsbane etc – all these things are for the players to decide on at the table. There is so much wolf mythology out there and I’d like the players to pick and choose their favourite bits to play with. There is no ‘Becky’s Definitive Guide to Werewolves’ because what I love about the stories maybe very different to someone else and the core of the system is the story of the pack anything else should feed that dynamic.
Tell me about building a pack, and how you create that culture. How does this play out at the table? What are some fun results you’ve had in playtesting?
The pack has a playbook of its own which includes powerful Pack Moves. But you only get access to those Moves when you have accumulated enough Pack Pool, using the emotion-sharing Moves. The pack playbook is also where the players will agree and record their Culture and Traditions. Culture is the outward signifiers revealing who is in the pack and who is not. You might choose a certain style of clothing, slang wordsor rituals around food to show belonging. Displaying culture in scenes does two things, firstly it will make you feel more like a pack.
Secondly it will tick off your boxes to get you advancements for your character. Culture always emerges in social groups – in the ttrpg world we have our own cultural touchstones like D&D (even if we don’t all play it), we have our shared language and slang which often comes from the games. Bite Me! leverages the fact we do that anyway and channels it into the pack experience. If our gaming group is going to come up with some slang, then let’s do it in the game as well and make it feel like we are a pack. When I MC I make sure I’m using that slang in and out of character and addressing my players as my packmates even when I’m doing the admin around arranging sessions. In game play I usually find that one or two of the created words really stick and when people start using those words in and out of character you’ve hit the jackpot – completing the culture of cycle into and out from the game.
Tradition are also another aspect of pack culture but they are more like the laws of the pack, things that would incur a serious punishment if breached. They should be thorny, throw up moral dilemmas and create unstable situations. Examples might be ‘Never reveal yourself as a Wolf to a human’, ‘Never eat a human’, ‘Only Alpha’s may create Wolves’. Once the players have agreed what the rules are I then tell the MC to ask one more question ‘Which PC has broken a tradition and which PC is keeping their secret (for now)?’ This gives a couple of players the chance to start with an extra tense situation which will strongly inform their relationship.
One of the best examples I’ve seen of that is the pack who had the Tradition that ‘All relationships with humans must be disposable’, at the start of the game one of the characters had just married their human boyfriend and the youngest member of the Pack had seen an incriminating text message. Setting that up changed the entire trajectory of the relationship between them and it was very powerful as the younger packmate wrestled with the conflict of loyalty that it created
Tell
me about Comrades. What excites you about it?
Comrades
is a new RPG about life in the revolutionary underground. I’ve been working on
it off and on since 2017 and I am just in love with it. I created
it because I wanted to give people who fall anywhere on the left of the
political spectrum a chance to engage with their history and remember how it
feels to fight, body and soul, for a cause.
The game is based on the Apocalypse World engine, which I love both because it’s so perfectly designed for depicting the dynamics of tightly-knit groups of adventurers and because it’s jaw-droppingly easy to teach. I designed this game for hardcore gamers and novices alike, and the Apocalypse World system is the best I’ve found for welcoming new players to the table.
How
have you altered the AW engine to suit Comrades as a system?
I
tinkered with a lot of different changes to the AW engine, and found during
playtesting that the simpler I kept things, the better the game played. There
are a few basic moves deliberately crafted to evoke the revolutionary
atmosphere of Comrades—”Start Something,” for instance, which gives
players a way to incite a crowd to riot, protest, or strike. Any other changes
I made were designed to make the system easier to teach and understand.
I’ve
also created an optional system for structuring the campaign, Pathways to
Revolution, which allows parties to advance along one or more of five tracks,
each of which represents a different approach to making a revolution. Each
level offers advantages, culminating in an opportunity to seize power in the
method best suited to the group.
What
gave you the idea for Comrades, and what are some steps you’ve taken in design
to make it happen?
I’ve been obsessed with leftist history since I was in high school. The Russian Revoluton, the Spanish Civil War, the guerrilla movements of the ’60s and ’70s… I am fascinated by the way that the ideals of those on the left collide with reality, and the endless tragedies that result when their dreams are destroyed by infighting, cynicism, or simple bad luck. I wanted to make a game that dramatized the infighting and quixotic daring common to revolutionary movements throughout history, and to give players the chance to express their own frustrations with modern politics in a fun, constructive way. Because of its emphasis on the dynamics of tightly-knit groups, the AW engine was a natural fit.
Tell
me more about Pathways to Revolution. It sounds fascinating! What sort of
experiences do players have in these tracks, and what kinds of tracks are
there?
There
are five tracks: Force, Organization, Zealotry, Mayhem, and Fellowship. Each
one correlates to one of the game’s five stats, and each is designed to give
players the opportunity to make a revolution in their own way.
If
the party is interested in forging a legitimate path to power, they may pursue
Organization, which provides logistical bonuses while making the party more
acceptable to the mainstream. At the fifth rank of that Pathway, they can call
for elections and attempt to win power democratically. If they prefer to rely
on the support of the mob, they’ll rise through Zealotry, which eventually
gives them the opportunity to win power via a series of massive, wild
demonstrations. In most campaigns, of course, different factions within each
party will want to pursue different pathways—creating the tensions inherent in
any revolutionary movement.
I
designed these both to reflect the wide variety of real-life revolutions, and
to give players more than one way to “win” the game. Because there
are bloodless ways to gain power, players who choose to pursue a more violent
Pathway—like Force or Mayhem—must reckon with the consequences of that choice.
How have you elected to handle and
frame violence as a part of the game, and what do you feel is important about
that?
Violence is a part of Comrades,
just as it is for nearly every roleplaying game. Because this game takes place
in a more realistic setting than most RPGs, it was intensely important to me
that it be presented in a responsible way. Players are free to do whatever
think necessary to achieve their goals, but the GM is instructed to make this
“a game of consequences, in which violence solves little and no death—even
that of a villain—goes unmourned.”
I believe that all violence is
abhorrent and all life is sacred, and while I think it’s okay to act out
violent situations in gameplay, it has to be done with thought and care. I hope
that the rules I’ve written will empower GM and players to do just that.
