five or so – Page 7

Five or So Questions on Americana

Hey all, today I have an interview with Liam Ginty from Sandy Pug Games about Americana, a tabletop roleplaying game coming out on Kickstarter! It sounds like some fascinating times investigating a tragic murder, so check out the answers below, and give the quick start a look, too!

—

An orc standing next to a blue pickup talking to some goblins as a red drag racer flies past.

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

Americana is an idea I’ve had for ages – a retro-fantasy setting. The image of Orcs in letterman jackets, goblins in those awesome Pink Ladies outfits from Grease – it just came to me one day and stuck with me, but I didn’t really have anything to do with it till I made a game called Mirror, which gave me a dice engine to call my own, and suddenly I had something I could build from.

The game itself is about a lot of stuff – being a kid at a time when the idea of teenagers having a time and space of their own was new and strange and pretty scary to everyone, claiming the aesthetics of a time period that’s been off limits to a lot of marginalized people to create a fun, enjoyable and accepting place to play in – but the core gameplay revolves around investigating the death of your best friend while managing your time at school, social events and familial obligations and navigating a town full of weird gangs and magical places that you create during session zero. It’s a really interesting gameplay loop that I don’t think has been explored very much, we took that very teenage experience of trying to figure out when everyone can hang out and made it part of the game in a way that’s really fun.

Besides the aesthetic (which we have a really great team of creative folx bringing it to life, tons of stories, art and even an audio drama we’re planning on making), I’m mainly excited about a mechanic we’re calling Your Dead Friend. Your Dead Friend is the victim of the crime at the center of all of this, and as such, we wanted to make them very important to the game. You actually make a full character for Your Dead Friend, just like you would make a normal PC (player character), and you can tap their skills for assistance with tough challenges – doing this invokes a flashback, where you roleplay out a scene where you learned this skill, or shared a moment with your friend. So throughout play you build this character, and your relationships with them, and playtesters have created some incredible stories from this mechanic, and we’re really really hyped to see what people do with it.

We also have a mechanic called Ties and Connections that is just really cool visually – as you play you put together this conspiracy style board, drawing lines and connections between gangs, locations, characters and Your Dead Friend, slowly putting the mystery together.

a werewolf dressed up with earrings and fancy clothes

How do you handle creating a town with all these exciting elements in Americana?

We focus on the parts of the town that are, or would be, important to teenagers, and break the town down into Hangs, Crews, Risks and Adults. A Hang is somewhere designed for, or co-opted for the purposes of just being. The old water tower, a disused Goblin cave, the field outside of town. We encourage players to make these hangs as magical or as mundane as they like, and they’re modeled much like our characters are – with Strengths, Weaknesses and a Vibe that characters can tussle with or exploit for their own purposes. Of course, what’s a place without a gang to call it home. That’s where the Crews come in.

Crews are cliques, like greasers, preps, mage-kids or jocks. They similarly have a Vibe and a couple of strengths and weaknesses, a catchy name that sums up their whole deal (and probably gets printed on their custom varsity jackets) and a leader. The leader gets a little extra detail so players have a face for that group right from the start. You also give the crew a hang to call home. Maybe the greasers all hangout at “Felicities Garage” or something. Again, we want people to create crews that reflect their own game, so we let people be as mundane or as magical as they like. My favourite crew in playtesting so far was a gang of gothabilly inspired proto-goths, who hung out around an abandoned necromancers tower, reading poe and casting spells.

Risks are the kind of dangerous activities that you and your peers get up to when the adults aren’t watching. Parties, deadly races, and illicit wizard duels in the woods near town. These are events set up by the various crews as a way for everyone to test their mettle against one another, and provides some really cool ways for players to challenge people, get up in a crews business or otherwise make themselves known without having to resort to straight up fisticuffs. Risks have a name, a crew associated with it, and a danger level that tells everyone just how risky this whole activity is. I was a big fan of “Electric Dance Fighting”, one of our first playtests Risks, where crews would have big street dance contests on the arcing lightning from a power line.

Adults are a bit more simple, to reflect the info and perspective of a teenager – they have a name, some strengths and weaknesses, and a position that tells you where they sit in the Adult world.

This is all done during Session Zero, tho we encourage players to add or modify these as needed throughout play, and it’s also done non-sequentially, so you can come up with a crew, go make up a Risk then come back to make up the hang later. You have a variable number of all of these elements depending on the scale of the town you pick. We’ve found this system just pops with awesome ideas when you get a few people around the table, and I wish I could just list off all the examples we’ve heard during playtesting so far. Really makes for some fantastic story elements with clear narrative and mechanical purpose.

A sheet with the words pronouns, strengths, and weaknesses on it with a blank polaroid next to it.

A blank Your Dead Friend sheet…maybe you should be the one to fill it in!

I’d love to hear more about the Ties and Connections. How does that work and who gets to influence it?

Ties are how we lay out the various relationships between these crews, their leaders, locations, adults and characters all with the victim. We have a sheet that has the victim in the middle, their stats and so on, and a lot of blank space around them. As players investigate the world they’ve built, they record connections that NPCs, crews and locations have with Your Dead Friend by writing their names on the sheet and drawing these ties between the various factions and Your Dead Friend, which in turn makes it easier to figure out the next place to investigate, the next lead to track down and so on. This evolving document creates an ongoing campaign-length record of leads and dead ends, suspects and mysteries that you spent your game following up on. Here’s a WIP example of one after a couple playtest sessions. The final sheet will look a lil nicer than this, obviously, but it gives you an idea of what an in-progress set of Ties looks like.

Oh, and as for who gets to influence it – like almost everything in Americana, it’s a table-wide mechanic. The Storyteller can declare a tie, the players can confer and make one if they feel it makes sense, or everyone can agree together to make one. One area we really want to build on with Americana is making the dynamic between GM and Player less of a wall. Making the story more of a collaboration between the whole table from start to finish is a part of that.

So what are player characters like in Americana? How do they develop and fit into these towns?

Characters in Americana are all one of 6 Archetypes (what we call Classes) based on high school tropes – The Jock, The Nerd, The Royal, The Outsider, The New Kid and The Artist. They’re all friends of the victim, but not necessarily of each other, and we have a mechanic called The First Clue that’s specifically for bringing everyone together and getting the characters invested in the mystery. One thing we were super aware of when making these archetypes is that some of them are often depicted as cruel, or mean in popular culture – Jocks are bullies, Royals (the popular kids) are often vapid, and we wanted to avoid that at all costs, highlighting instead the positive traits of someone who really loves sports, or is a social butterfly.

These characters are, generally, people who’ve been part of the town most of their lives, and are personally devastated by the death of their best friend, and their character growth tends to come from their collective grief and the various support mechanics we have – working together is vital in Americana. The way the game is designed really forces this Us vs Them sentiment where the player characters are alone in their investigation, and have to rely on each other as much as possible.

Finally, tell me about Your Dead Friend. Where did this plot element idea come from, and how did it grow into a mechanic?

Your Dead Friend came from me watching Brick and realizing the single most important character in that – and almost every murder mystery – is the victim, but they’re so often neglected in RPGs that focus on similar themes. They’re either a plot thread or an inciting event, but never really show up much in the story from there. While doing my research for the game (Watching Riverdale mainly) I noticed how useful it was to have flashbacks where you can expand on that character and make them matter so much more to the audience than if they were just a corpse. It seemed obvious that the victim should sit at the table somehow.

First of all I played with the idea of having a player literally be Your Dead Friend, it’d be another Archetype, but I couldn’t really figure a way to make it work well with the other mechanics and vibe of the game. We played with the idea of having them be a summonable element, a ghost, a bunch of other things, but all of that went by the wayside when we realized how important Assists were for the game. It all kinda came at once at that point, the flashbacks, the assist skills, etc. It allows the character of the victim to grow really naturally through the players inventing that relationship they had from whole cloth and stops them just being a dice pool to draw from.

An orc in a leather jacket with great hair

I’m only mildly in love with this orc guy.

—

Thanks so much to Liam for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Americana on Kickstarter, so keep an eye out on the Sandy Pug Games site! While you’re here, check out the Americana quick start!

Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

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

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, follow the instructions on the Contact page.

Five or So Questions on Bee Lives

Hey all, today I have an interview with Matt Shoemaker on Bee Lives: We Will Only Know Summer, a board game that’s currently on Kickstarter! I learned some fun stuff about the game in Matt’s responses – check them out below!

—

A table with the Bee Lives board game spread out on it.

Tell me a little about Bee Lives: We Will Only Know Summer. What excites you about it?

Bee Lives: We Will Only Know Summer is a worker placement and resource management game for 1 to 4 players. I’ve been developing it for about a year now and the game play is heavily influenced by Euro games. Titles like A Feast for Odin, Carcassonne, and Clans of Caledonia (to name a few) have provided some inspiration for mechanics.

The theme, however, comes from my experience as a beekeeper. I’ve been tending bees in urban Philadelphia for the past 7 years and have learned a lot about them in that time. When I did some research and found that no one else had done a worker placement style game about bees yet I decided that I wanted to be the one to combine two of my passions and create that game.

There are several things that excite me about this game. The first is how much I hope this will introduce people to the world of bees. I really wanted to design the game in a way that made people think like a hive does. The victory point conditions are set up to reward actions and behaviors that do well for the survival of your own hive. Some of them, particularly swarming, creates challenges for you as well. You can’t just think about points, you have to also think about getting through the winter in order to win.

This all really ties into how I learned to design games as a librarian. I’ve been making tabletop games for close to a decade as part of my educator duties, and I really like that I’ve designed a game that lets you learn while playing but does not have the objective of teaching. Bee Lives was made to be a game first, with the learning piece a side effect.

I’m also just really excited about this whole process of creating and publishing a game. It’s great seeing the community response to the project and the positive energy that a lot of people are responding to the game with. I also loved bringing Helen and Alina onto the project and working with them. Alina captured the style I tasked her with through my art direction just how I was hoping. Helen has really helped tie the art and the game mechanics together with her graphic design. The graphic design in particular is so important for a game’s user experience and I’m pleased with how it’s all come together so far.

beehive tokens and cubes on the Bee Lives sheets

What is play like on an average turn in Bee Lives? What do you do?

In a turn of bee lives your primary task is decide how to most efficiently utilize the workers you have. There are 8 possible actions you can take, and each one helps your hive get to, and survive through, winter in some way. Do you need more honey and pollen so your bees don’t starve and you can make new bees? Send a couple workers out to forage. Maybe your hive is getting too much disease? Send some workers to clean it out. Is your neighbor being aggressive? Perhaps it is time to put some bees on defense or even go out on a raid to rob some honey from those neighbors.

Once you’ve decided how you want to spend your workers you take turns with your opponents, be it real players or the AI driven wild hives, taking those actions. This can of course throw you off of what you were originally planning. Raiding can leave you with less honey than you need forcing you to compensate elsewhere. Someone can block you from accessing a specific tile you wanted to forage from, forcing you to forage elsewhere with extra workers you were not planning. Then there is the main puzzle of managing the space in your comb so you can balance having enough food for all the bees while leaving enough space for new workers to hatch out of, and also keeping some water on hand in case you need to cool down your hive. There is a good amount of planning you need to do each turn, and then hope it doesn’t fall apart when it comes time to feed your bees and hatch out new workers in the upkeep phase between the 9 turns of the game.

The Bee Lives board with bee meeples on it, including the hexagons they land in and signs for swarming, scouting, requeening, and "cool hive"

How did you decide on the designs you use in the game for visual aid?

Helen and I worked pretty closely on this. We wanted everything to be attractive but functional and serve the player from a user experience perspective first. The graphics for visual aid are intended to be intuitive, and allow you to figure out what you need to do without having to look it up in the rule book each time. I also want to make the game language independent if we can.

Right now the only part of the game (apart from the rule book, obviously) that needs words are the event cards. Before we go to print I am hoping we can make those language independent as well. We also took care to add symbols to anything where color may be important so anyone who is color blind can still play.

This is most clear with the black and white icons we have added to the 4 different tile types that are in the game. It’s possible we’ll be having some of the actual art for the graphic design icons redone, but this is just for aesthetics if it happens. The symbols and why we chose them will remain the same.

Some hexagonal tokens with clear and solid cubes and a beehive meeple on top

How close to real life is the game in functionality – how much of a “bee life” are we living when we play?

Bee Lives is definitely an abstraction of what it is like for a bee hive in the Philadelphia area each ear. I’ve spent a lot of time with bees these past few years, and I wanted to really replicate what they need to do in this game without making a full blown simulation. The game doesn’t reflect every nuance of bee life.

For example, the bees don’t collect propolis or make royal jelly, and disease is abstracted down to the Varroa mite only, when in reality there are several health issues that can affect them. I want players to experience what it is like to be a hive without making them micromanage every aspect of it, and I believe I have succeeded in doing that.

The game board with the seasons and months and cards laid down to activate bonuses

Bee Lives sounds like a really great experience! How did you make those decisions in what to include, what to design into the game to interact with? That must have been challenging! What was most important to you?

This is where my experience creating games as a librarian really came into play. It can be really tempting to throw everything, including the kitchen sink, into a game. When you do that, though, you end up with a complicated simulation that makes sense to no one but the designer. You need to know what to trim and where to really emulate the real world experiences you want the players to experience through play.

When I did this for Bee Lives, I looked at what was important to understand about bees and what was needed mechanically to make the game enjoyable, competitive and balanced. I needed people to experience the difficulty bees go through in managing disease and resource gathering, so I made sure those were aspects that were included. I needed to balance those things with mechanics that would make the game challenging, which is where the main focus of resource management came from. Navigating these two pieces is a lot of what game design is, for me. It’s a way to let people experiment with a system they otherwise have no real way of interacting with, and I think that is a special thing.

—

Thanks so much to Matt for the interview! I hope you all liked it and that you’ll check out Bee Lives: We Will Only Know Summer on Kickstarter today!

Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

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

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, follow the instructions on the Contact page.

Five or So Questions on Amazing Tales

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Martin Lloyd on Amazing Tales, a roleplaying game that’s maybe a little more approachable for the kiddos of my readers than my normal fare! Feel free to check out some of the actual plays that exist for the game and the website, and check out Martin’s responses below!

—

A black femme person using a keyboard and high tech tools and interfaces

Tell me a little about Amazing Tales. What excites you about it?

Amazing Tales is a role-playing game for kids aged four and up. I wrote it to play with my daughter five years ago when she was four, and introduced my son to it at about the same age. We had so much fun playing it that I wanted to get it out there so other people could do the same. My first thoughts were to do it as a simple PDF download in the style of Lady Blackbird or Lasers and Feelings. But I was lucky enough to get a sabbatical from my job, and I decided to use that time to turn it into a full fledged book. I had a huge slice of luck when Iris Maertens agreed to do the artwork, that let me create the book I always wanted to make, packed with illustrations so kids can get inspired by it, and feel like it’s a book for them, even if they can’t read it.

Now 8 months have passed since release and I’m loving watching what happens as the game gets out into the real world. It is a huge kick to see people sharing pictures of themselves playing their first role-playing game with their kids, or pictures of their child’s first character sheet. One of my thoughts when I was writing the game is that as soon as role-players have kids they want to play role-playing games with them, but anticipate a wait of maybe ten years before they can. Amazing Tales gets that waiting period down to about four years, and that seems to be making a lot of parents very happy.

I am also delighted that Studio 2 have picked Amazing Tales up for distribution and an offset print run is happening. Amazing Tales is going to be in shops! For something that started out as a way to fill a rainy day it’s come a very long way.

a fantastical scene with mushrooms, a squirrel, a fairy, and a tower in the background, all very curvy and colorful

What are the mechanics like for conflict resolution in Amazing Tales? How did you make them approachable for kids?

I chose conflict resolution rather than task resolution for Amazing Tales, so unless you deliberately want to stretch stuff out to make it dramatic or climactic everything is handled by one roll, be it flying a spaceship, making friends with a talking monkey or exchanging cannon fire with a rival pirate ship. Characters in Amazing Tales are defined by four skills, and each skill has an associated dice. Either a D6, D8, D10 or D12. To use a skill you roll the relevant dice against a target number of three. The target number never varies. The only thing that changes is the size of the dice used.

Tests have two possible results, if you succeed, you succeed. If you fail, things get worse, but they don’t end. So the monster might catch you, but it won’t eat you. The GM – typically the parent – never rolls dice, which means they’re never playing ‘against’ their child.

I picked three as a target number because kids like succeeding, and I picked conflict rather than task resolution because it keeps the story moving. Watch how much stuff happens in the first two minutes of a kids’ cartoon show, that’s the attention span kids have. And that’s the kind of storytelling pace Amazing Tales aspires to. Tell some story, pose a challenge, choose an action, roll the dice, resolve and repeat.

What I’ve just described is a very very simple system and that simplicity is the key to making a game approachable for kids. I firmly believe that anyone’s enjoyment of a game increases when they know what they’re doing. We’ve all played games where we didn’t know the rules, someone told us to roll some dice, modified the result for reasons we couldn’t follow and then told us what happened. That sucks when you’re an adult, and it definitely sucks when you’re four. So Amazing Tales can be boiled down to ‘roll the dice for the thing you’re trying to do, if the result is three or more you succeeded’. Four year olds can understand that, they can repeat it back to you, or explain it to their grandparents and their friends.

In the early days of playing Amazing Tales I tried things like modifying the target number; providing magic items that gave +1 bonuses; or requiring multiple successes for difficult tasks, but I quickly realised that it made no difference to how much fun the kids were having. Young kids don’t understand probability, so why bring in things like modifiers? The only reasons for having different dice sizes for different skills are that one; kids love rolling dice, two; they like dice with interesting shapes and three; role-player parents can’t wait to introduce their kids to polyhedrals. To adults it’s clear that changing the dice size changes the odds, but that’s not why they’re there.

I have been pleasantly surprised by how happy older kids have been with these very simple rules. In my mind Amazing Tales was a game for kids aged about four to eight. In practice it turns out to be a game for kids aged between 3 and a half and ten. Seeing how well Amazing Tales works has also convinced me that most games for adults are unnecessarily complex.

A pirate on a ship with another ship in a distance, with an octopus on their arm that is holding a bottle

How did you approach providing a fictional background for the game that is welcoming to a diverse audience of children?

First off, Amazing Tales is absolutely a game for everyone. Iris and I worked hard to make sure that whatever your kid’s background there should be someone in the artwork that your they can recognise as relating to them. I don’t know if we nailed that, but it matters to us and we’ll keep trying in future projects.

The other way to look at this question is to think about what kids want in a game beyond a confirmation that it’s for them. Young kids don’t have the same breadth of cultural references to draw on that grown ups do. So when I was thinking about the settings to include in the book I tried to pick things that small kids would be familiar with from a very young age. I ended up with four settings, the Deep Dark Wood (think talking animals and fairies), Magical Kingdoms Long Ago (think King Arthur), The Pirate Seas (pirates) and Adventures Beyond the Stars (space). I thought about doing super-heroes, but left it out because my kids knew the names of super heroes, but had no idea what kind of stories they might appear in. In retrospect I think that was a mistake, there are plenty of kids out there playing Amazing Tales as super-heroes.

The settings themselves are quite vague. They’re really collections of prompts and ideas to get parents and kids making up worlds together. It’s up to you whether the deep dark wood is full of monsters or full of friendly animals, but the setting gives you a jumping off point to get started. What’s important is that parent and child can start from a shared idea of a wood, fairies that are small, have wings and can do magic, and animals that can talk. The settings include suggested skills, suggested plots and lots of ideas for parents to work with and artwork to inspire the kids. From there it’s up to the parents to work with their child to create something that will work for both of them.

I also wanted to write a game where that made good on role-playing games’ key promise – that you can be anything and do anything. That’s one of the reasons there’s a picture of King Tyrannosneak in the book even though he doesn’t fit in any of the settings. He’s a character my son came up with when he was five. He’s a giant robot t-rex, with four arms, which he needs because he has two swords and two shields. He’s also a ninja. When you tell kids their characters can be anything they want they take you at your word, and Amazing Tales supports that.

How did you play-test the game to make sure kids could understand it? Were there any specific experiences you had that you learned from?

Making sure kids could understand it wasn’t the hard part. Kids seem to get the game very quickly indeed. The character generation section includes a quick script – a list of questions to ask your child to walk them through the process. By the end of that kids are usually completely into the game, and it only takes a few minutes.

I was more concerned about making the game easy for parents to understand. I’d love non-gamer parents to consider Amazing Tales as something for their kids, so I tried to get as much advice for first time gamers and first time GMs into the book as I could. It’s also why I shot some actual play videos, just so people can see how it’s done. Amazing Tales also suggests that you don’t do much (or any) preparation for a game, it works well if you just improvise as you go. That’s a challenge for parents who haven’t done any kind of improvisational story telling before, so again I tried to pack in the advice.

A few experiences from play-tests do stand out though. One was with a friend of my daughter, a lovely five year old girl who elected to play a princess. At the first sign of trouble she announced ‘I stab it in the face with my dagger’, which was both fair enough, and rather jarring. Kids, it turns out, come out with this kind of thing all the time. This led to my including a section in the book on non bloodthirsty ways of resolving combats. I’m not a fan of my kids describing graphic violence, so I try to keep lethal encounters to a minimum when I run games. There are plenty of other ways to have fights end, with enemies running away, surrendering, begging for mercy, bursting into tears and so on. Evil robots, animated shadows, skeletons, those kinds of things are also great for heroes to fight their way through without having to worry too much about the morality of the situation.

Another thing that stands out happened when I was testing out the space setting. I had vaguely assumed that kids who want to play aliens would want some kind of star-trek kind of alien, a humanoid, with weird coloured skin and one or two distinguishing features. But no. At least in the test games I ran kids who played aliens launched into a competition to be the weirdest, most out there alien they could be. Tentacles galore, mouths on their feet, dozens of eyes…

And one last thing I noticed across a lot of the play-tests was that kids often like to copy each other’s characters. They’ll want to be the same kind of hero, then they’ll pick the same skills, describe their characters in the same way and so on. It’s doesn’t create a problem the way having a party of three wizards would in D&D, it’s just what they like to do.

A t-rex with two shields and two swords and armor in a desert wasteland

King Tyrannosneak!

I love King Tyrannosneak! As a designer, what are the important parts of those kind of imagined characters that you see across the age range – what do you see when people get to be creative with your game that you treasure knowing about?

I love that kids get to live out their fantasies, and that they get to do it at an age before their fantasies have been neatly organised into recognisable tropes by mass media. I can see in my own kids that as they consume more media their characters start to reflect that. My son loved Reepicheep in the Narnia books, and suddenly he’s playing a Pirate Mouse. But before that starts to happen kids come up with the most incredible stuff, hang glider piloting gnomes with poisonous noses, pirates with laser eyes and pet tigers, that kind of thing. A few years back my kids came up with a pair of knights/super heroes called ‘Key-man’ and ‘Crasher Girl’. Key-man had a sword which fired keys at things, which was obviously a useful weapon but also instantly unlocked doors. Crasher Girl was just great at crashing through things, I think she had rocket boots too.

So I hope that one of the things kids will get out of playing Amazing Tales is the idea that they can create new stuff and colour outside the lines.

Not that there’s anything wrong with more derivative characters. I know of a little girl who’s out there fighting the Clone Wars with a character who’s skills are ‘being a queen’, ‘shooting blasters’, ‘knowing things’ and ‘piloting spaceships’. I loved hearing about her, because her idea of being a queen involves saving the galaxy with laser guns, brains and charisma, which sounds like a good thing to learn when you’re growing up.

The last thing, and perhaps the thing that makes me happiest is all the stories from people who’ve found playing games with their kids to be a fulfilling experience. Because Amazing Tales puts most of the cognitive load on the parent everyone playing is really engaged. Anyone who’s tried to spend lots of time with small children knows how tedious it can get. They can play snakes and ladders twenty times in a row, they don’t get bored of the same (very short) story book again and again, and they value your attention so highly that getting you to read that book again is the most important thing in their world. Amazing Tales is different because it makes the parents do some brain work, and then it becomes a real joint activity. I think kids can tell when their parents are really engaged, and I think parents find that rewarding too. So seeing all these parents find a new activity that they can do with their kids that they both genuinely enjoy – that’s been great.

—

Awesome, thanks so much Martin for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Amazing Tales on DriveThru!

Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

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

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, follow the instructions on the Contact page.

Five or So Questions on Something is Wrong Here

Today I have an interview with Kira Magrann, talking about her new live action game Something Is Wrong Here, which is currently on Kickstarter! It’s a very different game, from what I can tell, and that makes it all the more interesting to me. I hope you like reading Kira’s responses!

—

Kira, a dark haired nonbinary person with hair and clothing styled after a quintessential David Lynch character.

Tell me a little about Something is Wrong Here. What excites you about it?

Something Is Wrong Here is a roleplaying game inspired by the dark and uncanny work of David Lynch. It’s atmospheric, emotional, and personal, and THOSE are the things I’m most excited about in the game! A lot of Twin Peaks style games have been more like small town murder mysteries, which is great and fine, but my love of character relationships, dopplegangers, and personal horror is bleeding like, all over this game. I designed it to FEEL like a David Lynch gig more than follow the PLOT of one of his things. So its a pretty emotional experience, and I love that about it.

You talk about following David Lynch’s creative process in the Kickstarter video. What was the creative process? How did it affect the game in comparison to other processes you’ve used?

David Lynch’s creative process is very fine art and drawn from his subconscious. It’s so weird I love it, especially the fine art stuff. I’m a sucker for surrealist painters like Francis Bacon, who David Lynch’s uncanny films have often been compared to! He was a painter before a filmmaker, and he sees films like moving paintings. I see roleplaying games like fine art experiences, immersive and social performance art, so I really connect with this correlation of the cross contamination of art media. His ideas are drawn from meditation and dream images. He often says “Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.”

I thought I would experiment with this process while making a game inspired by his work, draw from my background as a fine artist as well as my own dreams and subconscious. I thought, what scares me the most in David Lynch things? What do I connect to the most? How can I make the narrative more from my queer non-binary perspective? I thought and dreamed and meditated on it for awhile. From there it was easy to focus on the identity issues that are so relevant in his work that I also deeply relate to. Issues that focus on multiple selves, and what we really need emotionally from relationships with people, and of course that feeling of creeping dread that I really do enjoy (I love being scared and always have).

Small cards with descriptive text on them, one titled "Optimistic innocent"

Character cards!

What is the structure of the game like, and how do players mechanically interact with the narrative?

The game’s structure is somewhat fluid in the plot sense, in that the plot isn’t the most important thing about the game. The characters are the focus, and the scenes that unfold are there just to focus on the each character’s personal feelings, and how their relationships with the other characters might influence their decisions in the final act. There are two acts basically, and the mechanics are card based, in addition to a Facilitator who helps frame scenes, keep time, and play music. The cards change and serve different functions as the game goes on. At first they are emotional prompts, then they are acting prompts that happen in scenes, and then finally they are cues to how to make decisions in a suddenly uncanny environment. The players are encouraged to dive deep into their character’s minds, and perhaps see correlations between those minds and their own. This, in addition to atmospheric props like a box and a mirror, create some deep emotional play.

How did you playtest and develop a game with this kind of complexity – and how replayable is it, with playtest experience in mind?

I actually just playtested it as normal! It played excellent both at home, and at a convention. It’s oddly simple once it gets going actually, as the rules are easy and repetitive, like a ritual, and the facilitator really just needs to guide the scenes and the timing. It’s reasonably replayable, because the spoiler doesn’t reaaaaaaaally matter to the story, its more what happens to the characters and the decisions the players make that are the heart of the game. People could play different characters, or you could end up spending more or less time in different setting options, and I bet it would present a different emotional journey each time. Although it is designed to be a unique, one night experience!

How is Something is Wrong Here different from the works it reflects? I think you address this a little with looking for queer, nonbinary aspects – how do you think that shows most in the game?

Hahahaha well, I love David Lynch but he is an old white guy with some problematic ideas about gender and hardly represents people of color in his work, etc etc problematic faves. My work obviously attempts to diverge from those problematic aspects of his. This game doesn’t have representation in it per se… the character archetypes are very flexible and undefined so you can make them whatever you want them to be. The clearest setting elements are “America” and “a forest, a living room, a diner, a roadhouse” so you could imagine perhaps a small American town, but it doesn’t say where. SO really, the queerest and most non-binary parts of this game are about questioning dualities and pre-determined endings. Like, at the end, each character has a choice when they’re confronted by themselves. How can you confront yourself? Are parts of your identity different than other parts? Those are pretty essential to my personal non-binary thinking. My identity is complex, and made of fluid moving parts, and sometimes I analyze different parts of myself like different parts of a big whole, right. So those themes about the complexness of identity are really central to Something Is Wrong Here.

A box of cards labeled "Something is wrong here" with thematic art.

The mockup for the cards and box!

—

Thanks, Kira, for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Something Is Wrong Here on Kickstarter today!

Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

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

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, follow the instructions on the Contact page.

Five or So Questions on Entromancy

Hi all, today I have an interview with M.S. Farzan about Entromancy: A Cyberpunk Fantasy RPG, which is currently on Kickstarter! I hope you’ll find something interesting in the responses below!

—

An illustrated masculine appearing person with facial hair holding a gun

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

I am super excited about Entromancy because it represents the realization of a dream: participating in a shared cyberpunk fantasy world with other fans of d20 tabletop games. When I wrote the first novel in the Entromancy series a couple of years ago, I was inspired by my experience playing and GMing for tabletop RPGs, and it’s been an amazing process translating that enthusiasm from the novel back into a game that we can all play.

How did you translate the novel into a mechanical structure like a game without sacrificing the narrative or overcomplicating things?

Great question! Building the world for the novel was a four-year process of scribbling notes, creating characters, and revising systems, in much the same way that one would approach making a game. It was important to me to have, for example, a magic system that was not only internally consistent, but that would also be plausible within the framework of a roleplaying game. Creating the RPG from the novel hasn’t exactly been “easy,” but a lot of things have translated well into mechanics because of that early structural decision. The core concept of magic, for instance, still draws from the same resource, a renewable element called “ceridium,” as in the book, but we’ve had to reconfigure most of the iconic spells that appear in the book (while building out a ton more) so that they make sense in a balanced, TTRPG imagining of the world.

character archetypes from the game in sketched illustration with bright colors overlaid

I love the idea of the Terramancer. What are they like in play? How do they function?

The Terramancer is based on Alina Hadzic, one of the main characters of the novel series and an all-around all-star. She’s a former baseball relief pitcher with powerful earth magic to boot, and represents another area in which we’ve had to work to build mechanics that make sense for a game, rather than just a book.

Like all other character classes in Entromancy, the Terramancer has two archetypes to choose from, which are specific advancement paths for their talents or spells. When you play as a Terramancer, you can choose to be either an Arcane Pitcher or a Nature’s Harbinger, and can add spells from your chosen archetype to suit your play style. The Arcane Pitcher is formidable at range and has spells to empower its returning projectile weapon, the ceridium orb, while the Nature’s Harbinger can support the group with buff spells, healing, and the ability to summon beasts. Both archetypes benefit from a shared Terramancer feat list that allows you to further enhance your character’s abilities and combat prowess.

a character dressed in heavy gear, carrying and reading a gadget shaped like a handheld system

What’s magic like in the narrative, and how do you make it happen mechanically? Is either particularly explosive, or can it be sly?

In the 2020s, green researchers discovered the ability to synthesize ceridium, a renewable energy source that, over time, was found to also power burgeoning schools of magic. These schools are collectively known as “mancy,” and ceridium, while stable, has been proven to expose a genetic mutation among certain populations. This mutation – the “underrace gene” – results in phenotypic variation among carriers of the gene, giving rise to new races of people known colloquially as “underraces” or “aurics.”

It’s posited that ceridium is a synthesization of “blue orichalcum,” a once naturally-occurring element that was depleted by humankind centuries ago. The connection between ceridium and blue orichalcum is unproven, but would explain why most civilizations have a cultural memory of things like magic, spellcasting, and fantastic races and creatures.

In Entromancy, most spells are dependent upon the availability and use of ceridium, and range from the infiltration-focused shadowmancy of the NIGHT Agent to the utility-enhancing spells of the Technomancer.

a character dressed in a cowboy hat and longcoat

What does a d20 system bring to the table to make this specific setting and playstyle flourish?

We love 5th Edition, and find it to be a wonderful springboard for the type of game that we want to share with everyone. We’ve done a lot to streamline the game systems to place an emphasis on meaningful action and storytelling, while building out other systems to support a cyberpunk world that incorporates intrigue, espionage, hacking, and cybernetics. So anyone who’s familiar with 5th Edition or other d20 systems will be instantly familiar with how the core mechanic works, and will also notice the areas in which Entromancy is different, in terms of character creation and progression, spellcasting, equipment, and more.

There are a lot of great game systems out there, and in fact, the first few iterations of Entromancy were based on a proprietary game system that we were developing. Early in the game’s development, we decided instead to utilize 5th Edition as a framework as it felt a natural fit for the game that we wanted to make. Over time, Entromancy grew into the d20 core mechanic and, through development and playtesting, we have been able to identify more and more areas where we’ve been able to streamline, make adjustments, and create our own game that feels authentic to the original fiction.

—

Thank you to M.S. Farzan for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Entromancy: A Cyberpunk Fantasy RPG on Kickstarter today!

Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

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

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, follow the instructions on the Contact page.

Five or So Questions on Domina Magica

Get to twirling, everyone! I have an interview today with Emily Reinhart on Domina Magica, a magical girl game that’s currently on Kickstarter! Check out the magic below!

—

a magical girl spinning with bright lights, wearing a pink and white dress, surrounded by a colorful illustrated border

Tell me about Domina Magica. What excites you about it?

Hey!!! Domina Magica is magical girl RPG that myself and my team Third Act Publishing created!! It is an episodic game that emulates an episode of a Magical Girl Anime. It has a ton of unique mechanics to help facilitate the feel of some of the iconic anime tropes. There is the “cootie catcher” or “fortune teller” that allows you and your group of players to set the scene and tone of your game by filling out the “flaps,” it also allows the players to fill in “secret trials” that will activate later in the game. There is also a dual sided Character Sheet that allows you to build a School Girl character first and then when you transform your physically flip the sheet over and build your “Magical Girl!!!”

We are really excited for this Game!!! Our Kickstarter funded in 15 hours and we are sending out Slap Bracelets to backers as we speak!!! If you are in the US and fund at any level, even the $1 level we will send you a purple “Fight like a Magical Girl Bracelet” right away. Not when it is over, not when the books comes out…..now!!! Sending hundreds of Slap Bracelets in the mail and seeing them pop up all over social media is something we are super excited about!!!!

I LOVE the character sheet idea! Clever character sheets can make games more fun! So can transformation – is that a big aspect of Domina Magica?

Transformation was and still is a huge part of Domina Magica. The dual character sheets was a game mechanic that I wanted to implement from the very beginning and one of the very few things that have changed. I liked the idea that your magical girl, and your school girl would have different identities and I wanted to represent that at the game table. Double Sided character sheets fit that mechanic perfectly. We also created a way that the character sheets build off of each other so that what you do in your school girl person directly impacts what your Magical Girl looks like!!

Goodies!

How does the game work mechanically – what do players use to resolve conflicts, or to interact with each other and non-player characters?

The Game works off a “roll low” system. Your school girl will have 5 traits, and you as the player will have 5 die, D4 through D12. Your traits are Friendship, Strength, Honesty, Kindness and Persistence. Since it is a “roll low” system you want to roll as close to 1 as possible so your D4 is your highest die. You get to assign the 5 die to the five traits, picking what trait is your highest (d4) and what trait you still need to work on (d12.) When the transformation happens and you flip over your character sheet, you get to reassign your die to the same 5 stats, so your Magical Girl might not have the same strengths as your school girl persona. To confront a “bully” or “dark enemy” you will simply pick a trait you think represents what you are doing and it will be a contested roll against the target, whoever rolls closer to 1 succeeds the check.

After all she is the 1 Sailor Moon!!! After hearing that song for years I really wanted a system that made ‘1’ the best number and not 20.

Tell me about the magical girls and school girls you play. What are they like? How are they presented? What do they do?

Ok, I will start with the School Girl because you build her first. At this point you can play any school girl you want. Schoolboy? Thats fine! Transgender? Great! You get to decide on her traits, stats and characteristics! The character sheet has the typical Likes/Dislikes and Blood type portions for you to fill out. You give her a name and then assign the dice to her stats. After you have filled all of that out, you get to present her and tell the table a bit more about your character. So the players get to choose literally everything about the School Girl!

Once the party has transformed you physically turn your character sheet over to reveal the Magical Girl Side. Here you can reassign her dice, and give her a name. Since she is a part of a team, the players have to decide what type of Magical Girls they are playing and describe the transformation process. So some of the Magical Girl traits are filled in by the table and some are filled in by the player! Then they fight the Boss that has been building throughout the course of the “episode.”

Share some of the highlights and challenges of this project. What has it been like playtesting and creating a game so femme focused?

There were several challenges that we have run into even in the early stages of the game. I wanted this game to be Everything!!! I wanted it to have every theme, troupe, cliche and mechanic that I could cram in, but after playtesting it and looking back at it…….the game was a hot mess. We had to get rid of a few mechanics and tweak others to make play more smooth and the concepts to flow better.

Play testing has been a huge help! Most of my players are men who are so excited to get to play magical Girls!! Playtesting with different groups of people helped me see different things i could do to appeal to a wider audience as well. I changed the character sheets to include all body types and not just the stereotypical “Skinny Anime Girl” If we get to print off full color character sheets I would love to do different skin tones as well!!!

the Domina Magica cover with stylized metal and gold, a winged heart with stars inside, and the appearance of being chained.

—

Awesome, thank you so much Emily for answering my questions! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Domina Magica on Kickstarter today!

Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

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

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, follow the instructions on the Contact page.

Five or So Questions on Free Spacer

Hi all, I have an interview today with Christoph Sapinsky, talking about his game on Kickstarter, Free Spacer. You can check out the Free Spacer website, or find info on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google+, and I hope you also dig the responses to my questions that Christoph shared below!

—

an image of a burning sun in space with the text Free Spacer: A starship tabletop RPG.

Tell me about Free Spacer. What excites you about it?

Free Spacer is a sci-fi starship roleplaying game. You play the crew of a contracted starship. The Exploration Wars have recently ended due to outside intervention and a cold war has replaced it. Free Spacers are the tool of choice in this new conflict. You take contracts, perform operations, and hope that you can retire to rejoin society… someday.

To me, the most exciting aspect of Free Spacer is that is it feels like sci-fi. Everything from the way you modify rolls to the core setting stem from the science fiction. For example, while the tasks you perform depend on your crewmember’s skills and specialities, you can gain advantage from the situation and route additional charge to your tools to gain additional dice. In play, this feels like tweaking levels to get the output you want.

Character sheets with six and ten sided dice.

How do you take action in Free Spacer? What does an average resolution look like?

Free Spacer uses a task system, every task is a set of related actions that includes the appropriate movement. For each task, you as the player roll a pool of dice we call a Salvo. The Salvo is made up of d10s opposing d6s.

The d10s are task dice primarily from your appropriate skill and specialty plus situational advantage; additionally, you can spend a Charge resource on a tool to gain its rating in dice.
The d6s represent the threat faced, beginning with its difficulty and disadvantages. The Gamemaster can also spend their complication resource to add more threat dice.

When you roll the Salvo, you minus the number of d6s that roll 1-3 from the number of dies that roll 5-9 (0 is worth 2). The results determine the Outcome of the task, which the Gamemaster, uses to determine how you alter the scene.

1 = a partial success
2 = a complete success
3 = critical, which gives you a charge resource and 5 a double crit!
0 = a fail
-3 = Consequences

The bust of an alien with spiked brow and jawline and large eyes, and a protrusion of the back of their skull, and tan skin.

Tell me more about the science fiction. What’s different about Free Spacer from other media, and how does it remind us of sci fi we love?

Together, you and friends decide what sort of game you want to play by choosing a ship flag, each flag refers to a type of play:
Agent are social; think spies, negotiators, com artists, and assassins
Bounty Hunter bring rough justice to a frontier, like Killjoys or Cowboy Bebop
Courier is the rogue trader, they smuggle, speculatively trade, and run blockades. Think Firefly or Traveller.
Mercenary are military sci-fi. Your crew are space marines and fly combat ship. This is like Dark Matter or Space Above and Beyond
Scout is the exploration flag. You chart new systems and discover new worlds. The flag that is the most Star Trek.
Technicians are scavengers and tech experts. Think Farscape or shadowrunning.

Free Spacer is my attempt to speculate on the future based on contemporary science. This future has the internet, biotechnology, and space-time folds. The societies of this future are unequal mixing of different alien Sophonts with many factions that struggle to control each sector of space. You have to deal with the difficulties of space, alien worlds, and the situations that come from faction conflict. Your most potent way to deal with these situations are projects. Projects are the advanced mechanics of the game, which use science to enable your crew to work together and get outcomes that you cannot get alone.

character sheets and a grid patterned map with some six and ten sided dice.

Beyond the type of flag you fly, what kind of characters do you play in Free Spacer? How do they fit into the world?

As the title implies, you play Free Spacers. Free Spacers are outsiders, they are set apart, above, and beyond the ordinary people. You are above the people—distant in space, advanced in technology, and legally superior. Conversely, this also separates you from local worlds; you do not fit on any world, you cannot participate in local culture, invest in a business, run for government, or live a normal life. Before you were a Free Spacer, you might have been anyone living through the Exploration Wars from an ordinary citizen, a drifter refugee, veteran soldier, or even a powerful leader.

How is space represented in game – narratively, mechanically, both? I’m curious how players interact with it.

Space is the central motif of Free Spacer. Space divides worlds from one another, isolates the crew from support, and delays communications. Conversely, space grants you independence for operations and self determination to distant settlements. Scientifically, Zero-point technology manipulates spacetime to forms shields, project blaster pulses, and fold space to travel between systems. Space is a danger, an empty void of exposure. Finally, Spaceflight is a type of Encounter in which you and your crew work together to operate your starship.

two body harnesses and radio headsets, 3-D modeled

—

Thanks so much to Christoph for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed hearing a little about Free Spacer and that you’ll check it out on Kickstarter today!

Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

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

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, follow the instructions on the Contact page.

Five or So Questions on Your Best Game Ever

Hi all, today I have an interview with Monte Cook Games on Your Best Game Ever, a new project on Kickstarter that’s brought together a variety of consultants to develop guides for the best tabletop game experience. I asked questions about Your Best Game Ever of Monte Cook, Darcy Ross, Sean Reynolds, Tammie Webb Ryan, and Bear Weiter, and I’m sharing their answers with you!

—

Tell me a little about Your Best Game Ever. What excites you about it?

Monte: This is a book that is for everyone, no matter what game you play. It’s a book that basically celebrates tabletop roleplaying. It talks about every aspect of the hobby, from hosting a game to finding a group to building characters and worlds for fun (and your friends’ fun).

Darcy: I’m thrilled that it will be a resource for literally anyone who is interested in RPGs. New folks just learning about RPGs, experienced players wanting to stream their game for the first time! One of my favorite things about RPGs is how many avenues of skills it brings together–there’s always room to become a better player, GM, and storyteller. Sometimes it’s hard to know where to start, however, so this book will make it easier by giving people hands-on tools and techniques to try out.

Tammie: As a relatively new GM, I’m excited about the concrete examples and recommendations that Your Best Game Ever will contain, which will help me–and all GMs, no matter their skill levels–be better at all aspects of creating and running a game.

Bear: As someone who gamed a lot during the 80s and early 90s, only to then step away from tabletop gaming for almost twenty years, I feel like there’s a big hole for me to fill to be where I should be as both a GM and player. And as the art director for Monte Cook Games, I’m extra-excited to work on this book and make it a beautiful item that people are proud to have on their bookshelves, coffee tables, and game tables.

An image with the Your Best Game Ever and Monte Cook Game logos that includes a list of all topics for players, GMs, everyone, and game designers

So many topics!

What are some of the awesome things we’ll see inside Your Best Game Ever? How is the book structured?

Monte: Basically, it’s divided into sections pertaining to everyone (picking the right game, finding a group, hosting games in-person and online, solving problems that can arise), players (creating an interesting character, working within the group structure, dealing with other players), GMs (building a world, creating an adventure, managing rules, running games) and aspiring game designers (making your own game, playtesting, marketplaces, selling and marketing your creation).

Darcy: A recent stretch goal just funded an accompanying video series, too, which will begin in early 2019! Multimedia goodness.

Check out this video that will be a part of the video series stretch goal of Your Best Game Ever!

What are some qualities and bits of experience each of you are bringing to the project?

Darcy: I’m excited to bring to this project my experiences of being a relatively new gamer, a brand-new Twitch streamer, and my role as someone who works to welcome new people into the hobby. I’ve run 30-minute demos of Numenera for dozens of people who had never heard of an RPG before at a planetarium, and I’ve also brought acquaintances over for dinner parties to try it out. I can’t wait to make it easier for people to grow their local gaming community!

Monte: Well, I’m not exactly new to this. I’ve been writing rpgs for 30 years, and gaming for 40. I’ve written a lot of this kind of material, although most of it has been aimed at GMs, so I’m even more excited about the player-focused material, particularly because I feel like a lot of things that have traditionally been put on the GM, like dealing with player problems or conflicts. I think in actual fact such things are everyone’s responsibility.

Tammie: As I mentioned, I’m relatively new to GMing, so for the material dealing with running games, I bring a newcomers perspective.

Sean: I’m a few years behind Monte—gaming for almost 40 years, writing for about 25. I’ve played and run in many games with friends and strangers, at home and conventions and organized play, been the steamrolled player and done a little steamrolling, seen some great games and train wrecks, run games with published adventures and a ton of prep and completely off the cuff, and I’ve brought too many snacks and eaten the last of someone else’s favorite snack.

Bear: I can’t compete with most of my co-workers gaming experience in years, but I am a writer, and I know how to craft and pace stories. I’m also cognizant of some of my own bad habits, which I believe is important to look at and work on. And of course I’m bringing thirty-plus years of graphic design to the table to make sure the book is both beautiful and usable.

The Stay Alive! cover with the white silhouette of a person waving a torch in front of a large, multi-limbed dark and inhuman figure, and the text Stay Alive!, and the whole cover bordered by white silhouetted hands reaching in.

I couldn’t choose between the Stay Alive! and The Stars Are Fire covers for which one is the best looking, so we’ll have to see which ends up the most useful!

What looks to be your personal favorite bit of the project, where you get to dig in and really see something you love about gaming shine?

Darcy: CHARACTER ARCS. Okay, deep breaths. One of my absolute favorite parts about running Invisible Sun has been the way it empowers, and in fact requires, my players to bring narrative to the table. One of the ways it does that is by linking character progression to Character Arcs that the player chooses, like Justice, Solve a Mystery, Romance, Finish a Great Work, or even Fall From Grace. As the character progresses along those arcs (whether successfully or unsuccessfully, for ultimate good or for ill), the player is rewarded with advancement currency for their character. I love that players come to the table with lots of ideas and momentum. Your Best Game Ever will include how to use this Character Arc system in any game system you might be playing!

Monte: I’m excited about a lot of it. I think the thing I’m most excited about it just approaching this from the point of view that rpgs are a group experience and so all the various issues and problems that might arise are for the group to deal with, not just the GM. Likewise, the understanding that a great player can have as much positive effect on the game as a great GM, and offering ideas and suggestions on how to be that great player.

Bear: The depth of the offering. This will be a significant book.

Significant books it looks like! There are now five books included when you back the I Want It All! level. If you have the funds, it’s a pretty impressive collection!

What are some of the challenges and some of the bonuses of working with other consultants on a project that might bring to light differing opinions?

Darcy: There’s no one right way to game, and Your Best Game Ever embraces that, leading you to a host of advice, ideas, and tools to curate for your specific best gaming experience. Even so, the text is going to be one cohesive piece, but we wanted to make sure we’re not stamping out the unique voices of our experts either! To balance this, each consulting expert will weigh in on the text as a whole, and will have a short section all their own.

Monte: I’m the main author, but I’m just one person. I try to look at games from different directions and different expectations and perspectives (that’s just part of being a good game designer), but if we really want this book to be for everyone–and we do–we want to ensure that we have as many different experiences and points of view represented as possible. I’m thrilled that not only do I have the whole MCG team helping with this, but that we’ve assembled a great team of consulting experts who all bring their own perspectives and backgrounds to the project. Everyone involved is incredibly intelligent and talented, and I’m positive that each person will make this a better book.

Sean: I love hearing different perspectives on gaming. I’m lucky in that my regular gaming group is people I’ve known for years and like very much, but other people don’t have that luxury and may be sharing a table with a stranger or someone they don’t associate with outside of gaming. Hearing from the consulting experts is like sitting at a table with a bunch of skilled gamers I don’t personally know, like at a convention game—there’s an anticipation and excitement to see how the individuals mesh together into a group.

Even if I disagree with another person’s playing philosophy, I like to understand what they’re thinking and how they got there. It’s quite possible they might change my mind about how I want to play or run games, or they’d at least give me some perspective about how to interact with another player who thinks like they do. The trick to incorporating their ideas is to present it as either a complementary or contrasting point of view to the other material in the book.

—

Thank you so much to the interviewees for answering my questions! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and you’ll check out Your Best Game Ever on Kickstarter today!

Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

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

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, follow the instructions on the Contact page.

Five or So Questions on Prism

Prism is now on Kickstarter!

Hi all! Today I’ve got Whitney Delaglio back to talk about Prism, a project we discussed a long time ago that’s now coming up on Kickstarter! To keep up on what’s coming up while the project’s counting down to crowdfunding, follow Whitney on G+ and mind the Little Wish Productions site. I hope you enjoy hearing what Whitney’s got to say about this awesome project!

—

The colorful Prism Kickstarter cover with symbols decorating the sides, a rainbow of colors at the top, and two figures handfasted together in the center

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

Prism is a roleplaying game about relationships and conflict resolution set in an aquatic world. Instead of using dice, players will rely on predetermined levels of expertise to solve narrative conflicts, and interact with others. The rules rely less on crunch, and more on negotiations between players and the GM. I’m excited about it because in most games, characters are stuck on land, so it’s difficult to play characters that thrive in the water. I’m also excited about this project because it encourages sensuality and social combat.

What makes the aquatic environment different for characters, mechanically and narratively?

I am a huge fan of sealife, so it was important to integrate an underwater environment to Prism. I designed the game to give players an opportunity to play as merfolk, or humanoids that turn into tiny sea creatures. Since all six humanoids in the game are amphibious, it also means there can be unhindered underwater exploration. It also gave me the opportunity to draw plant folk with the attributes of a water lily, and merfolk with the qualities of a shark, wearing their own teeth as a necklace.

How do the negotiations work between players and the GM? What kind of power does each player hold at the table to influence the results of a conflict?

I’m not a huge fan of rolling dice with the exception being Lady Blackbird. I didn’t like how you could dump all your points into something you really want to excel at, roll poorly, and not get the results you want. So instead if a character doesn’t have enough expertise, the player can either agree to have their character succeed at a cost, or make a case that it takes more than one skill to resolve the conflict.

For example, a Chameleon (has the ability to cast cantrips) wants to impress someone with a lavish meal, but doesn’t have enough expertise to do so. They could make argument that a fire cantrip (which requires the use of another skill) could help them cook the food more evenly.

What techniques did you use for the art in Prism, and how did you conceptualize the designs – did you do drafts of the illustrations, get inspirations from playtests, etc.?

Most of the artwork in the book are pinups. My goal was to draw sexy people and not sexy objects. The rest is either revamped artwork from back when Prism was a video game concept, or inspired by the comic that preceded the game (such as the symbols that represent the six realms). The artwork in the game either started out as a pencil sketches, a sketch on my phone (S Note), or were started from scratch using Adobe Animate.

What’s the most challenging (but promising!) part of putting Prism out there for the public, and how do you feel about the final product? What parts of it stick out to you as your favorite?

I wanted to make a game about relationships emotional intimacy, but that presented me with the challenge of making a game where a player can feel safe being vulnerable. I’ve mentioned elsewhere how consent is sometimes conveyed as a rigid negotiation. Where you add and remove filling from the sandwich, until it’s a sandwich no one involved wants to eat anymore. I tried to make Prism a game where you discuss consent from the beginning, and it remains a fluid conversation that continues during play. So, the sandwich starts off on the table, and anyone at any given time can say…you know, I usually really like this to be in my sandwich, but today I don’t have the appetite for it…or, my friend and I really want to add this to the sandwich, but we can change our mind if either of us want to.

I think the final product looks gorgeous. My favorite part is the Tea Party (character generation). It really takes you gently by the hand and walks you through the process.

a merfolk couple, one darker skinned with dark hair and wearing a shark necklace, and one lighter skinned with red hair and biting the other's neck playfully

I love the art <3

—

Thanks so much to Whitney for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading about Prism and that you’ll check it out when it’s live on Kickstarter!

Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

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

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, follow the instructions on the Contact page.

Five or So Questions on Reign

Hey all! Today I have an interview with Greg Stolze on Reign, which is currently on Kickstarter! I asked Greg some challenging questions about the role of a game like Reign in modern day, which I hope you enjoy reading!

—

The Reign Kickstarter banner showing the two book covers (labeled "funded!") and the text "funding now on Kickstarter."

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

REIGN really was kinda my baby. UNKNOWN ARMIES was great, but that was me and Tynes, so REIGN was really the first thing I did that was all Stolze all the time. Also, it’s high fantasy sword ’n’ sorcery, which I love, and which I don’t get to do as much — somehow, between UA and all my WoD work and DELTA GREEN, I sort of got pigeonholed as a horror guy which is… not inapt. But REIGN is close to my heart.

On a less squishy emotional level, I liked the idea that REIGN took events that had always been matters of “Oh, the GM will hand-wave what’s happening on the wide-scope political scale” and bolted them to dice and stats so that the players can have a new arena in which to go nuts and wreak havoc. I remember in old D&D where, if… fighters, I think?… got to a high enough level they got a keep and I really thought that was interesting! But it didn’t give you any options to liberate peasants or go to war against your neighbors or any of the dramatic stuff of governance. I hadn’t played PENDRAGON or BIRTHRIGHT or gotten into the covenant stuff in ARS MAGICA, but maybe that’s just as well. Having not seen the way anyone else handled it, I built it myself from scratch. I just knew I wanted the collective your characters lead to be as important to the game as any individual PC.

And, well, I had this nifty set of rules I’d built for GODLIKE that seemed like they’d work just as well for castles and crossbows as they did for superheroes in WWI, so I built out from that. I think it worked pretty well.

What are some ways has Reign grown and changed between 2007 and today? What is new, what’s been refined?

In those intervening years, I released a LOT of supplements online, after getting them collectively crowdfunded. Sixteen of them, in fact. Rather than burn all that to the ground and rebuild on the foundation, I thought what the game needed more than anything else was (1) better art in the supplements — that’s kind of the dark side of my “one man show” approach, (2) organization so that you can find what you want to use in a tangle fo optional systems and rules tweaks and (3) a nicer print version, since the hardbacks have been unavailable for some time.

It’s not a big reinvention, and the first two books don’t have a lot of new material, because I honestly didn’t think it needed a ton of work. I’m going through and making the language clearer, finding those decades-old typos and homonym errors, but mostly it’s taking this mess of parts and putting them in an order to be more useful. REIGN was written with the expectation that a lot of people would be using it to toolkit their own settings, and that hasn’t changed.

One change, though, is my willingness to let other people play with the toys. One reason I didn’t write anything for UNKNOWN ARMIES for a while was, quite simply, I didn’t have an idea I thought was really top notch, and I didn’t want to write something just to dump it on the market. Partly, that’s a matter of pride, but it’s also a matter of greed. I don’t want to serve lukewarm stuff because I don’t think that’s how you keep an audience. But when I got a bunch of new writers working on UA3, their new perspectives and experiences and approaches really pushed me to keep up. So I’ve gotten a bunch of fresh new voices and salty old wordsmiths to give me their takes for stretch goals.

How do you replicate leadership in Reign? What do players do when they’re leading? What is leading?

OK, these are three very different questions.

Leadership in REIGN is replicated with die rolls, the same way that mighty sorcery and deeds of martial renown are. One of the big pleasures of playing a game (as distinct from running one) is the opportunity to imagine myself as someone with very different skills and behaviors. Someone who’s not shy, for example, or someone who doesn’t get embarrased and uncomfortable with confrontation. Or, y’know, a ninja.

To take the third question second, leading seems, to me, to be a lot of listening to people and understanding them. Good leaders — and I’m thinking certain editors and developers here — inspire a sort of loyalty. You want to give them your best. It’s not just a paycheck. Good leaders draw the best out of you. They see you, not just as the role into which you’ve been thrust, but as the individual adapting to that roll. Good leaders know the strengths and weaknesses of their people, and put them where the strengths are leveraged, and where their weaknesses do the least damage. In real life, I’m a terrible leader. Not the world’s greatest listener, surprisingly dense about people’s feelings sometimes, something of a hermit. But the idea of playing someone who’s listened to and who can organize people into a greater whole… yeah, that’s my fantasy. One of ‘em.

What players do when they’re leading is that sort of organization, understanding and inspiration. Only instead of having to really get through to people with charisma, you can create a character who has that sort of compelling presentation. Your characters can be the kinds of people who make the St. Crispin’s Day speech, even if you yourself are plagued by podium paralysis.

I mean who hasn’t, at some point, fantasized about being listened to and obeyed? That’s the wish-fulfillment REIGN offers.

a blue book and a red book, both with a gold-foil stamped and embossed art of a warrior with a spear and armor, and what appears to be braided hair

The special edition covers are really beautiful!

I asked Greg two sets of questions and then I got a collective response:

Sixteen supplements is a lot! How do you keep all of these things connected and consistent – the fictional themes, the mechanical structures – when there is so much information? Does that amount of stuff end up paralleling to bookkeeping in game?

AND

You discuss modularity on the Kickstarter page, basically explaining options for different ways of playing. Tell me more about this! How does it work?

Hah, the answer to these questions is really the same thing… the modularity from the KS is the solution to having the giant pile of supplemental rules and setting material. It’s like when you have a bunch of different LEGO sets, and you build them, and that’s fine, but eventually (if you’re like me) you take them apart and wind up with a giant bin of undifferentiated components. So then you sort them so you can make something new.

In this metaphor, the original supplements are like individual LEGO sets. You can get the sort of… pre-planned experience. The chaotic pile is where the material, as a whole, is now. The organization is what we’re going after with the KS, cross-referencing different stuff so that you can find the thing you were thinking of. Just as importantly, perhaps, we can also help you figure out what to exclude. Not every group needs every rule, so getting that clarified is a pretty high priority.

Why do you think a game about leadership and strategy like Reign has an important place in play in the modern era, during a time that’s so tumultuous for so many people?

Hoooo boy…

OK, I’ll start with something from Lynda Barry — I read her book WHAT IT IS, although it feels more like I should say I “witnessed” or “experienced” it? It’s this deep-dive art book about creativity and her intense personal history with it, and it’s very strong medicine. One thing she touched on was the idea of art as “escapism,” and she said she doesn’t think we create or engage with art in order to escape from reality, but to change our experience of it. She didn’t draw to get away from the sharp edges of her childhood, but to survive them.

So we’re in a tumultuous time and I’m writing a tumultuous elfgame. Am I just a little white ball on a golf tee, waiting for a driver labeled “accusations of frivolity” to come slamming down on me for a power drive? Eh, well maybe. Maybe for some people, playing a game where they’re the powerful bosses can be a distraction from doing the gloomy, necessary, unmeasurable work in the real world. But maybe, for some people, playing that game could let them (or help them) believe that change is possible, that individuals do influence these looming power gangs.

Or, maybe it’s OK to just have fun playing the game.

But our creations are always mirrors of our concerns. If roleplaying isn’t INEXTRICABLY creative, you have to work really hard to do it without any aspect of acting, or authorship, or imaginitive innovation. So your feelings about the villainies of modern politics are just about certain to make their way into REIGN, whether you do it deliberately or not. Maybe that’s also OK. Maybe the satisfaction of decapitating an imaginary evil king is just the catharsis you need to avoid screaming at a co-worker about politics until both of you cry.

I’ve thought a lot about why we engage unpleasant themes, intense stories, fictions of tragedy… After all, now more than any time in history, we can access genuine tragedy all the time. Why horror stories? Why make up more of it? Maybe it’s the relief of knowing that THIS awful thing isn’t real. Or maybe when an issue is painful to handle, putting a layer of fiction around it allows the mind to contemplate it more coolly. Consider the game RED MARKETS — it’s about zombies, but it’s REALLY about poverty. John Carpenter’s movie THE THING is about a gnarly space alien, but it’s REALLY about the dangers of trust and mistrust in a cold and uncaring universe. A lot of media that’s about X is REALLY about Y, and REIGN can certainly do that. This clash between the trade guilds of Uldholm while the Dindavarans sharpen their swords can be about how liberals persecute radicals while white-power revanchists snicker up their sleeves.

I don’t know. Maybe creativity shouldn’t teach lessons, but I think it almost always does. Maybe in an intensely political reality, an intensely political game can offer a framework for disentangling complicated feelings. Or, maybe it just promises some kind of paradoxical relief.

the blue book cover with full color art of a diverse cast of characters and the red cover with the same warrior, a dark skinned person in red and blue

—

Thanks so much Greg for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Reign on Kickstarter today!

Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

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

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, follow the instructions on the Contact page.

Tag: five or so

Five or So Questions on Americana

Like this:

Five or So Questions on Bee Lives

Like this:

Five or So Questions on Amazing Tales

Like this:

Five or So Questions on Something is Wrong Here

Like this:

Five or So Questions on Entromancy

Like this:

Five or So Questions on Domina Magica

Like this:

Five or So Questions on Free Spacer

Like this:

Five or So Questions on Your Best Game Ever

Like this:

Five or So Questions on Prism

Like this:

Five or So Questions on Reign

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: