Tag: five or so

Five or So Questions on Gather: Children of Evertree

Today I’ve got an interview with Stephen Dewey on Gather: Children of the Evertree, a freeform GM-less game currently on Kickstarter. Gather sounds like a really fascinating game and uses one of my favorite mechanics: asking questions. Check it out!

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a box and individual card with the text Gather: Children of the Evertree on it, fully illustrated.
Gather: Children of the Evertree box set.

Tell me a little about Gather: Children of the Evertree. What excites you about it?

Gather: Children of the Evertree is a worldbuilding game built around a freeform/LARP style of play. I call it a “roundtable LARP” because while you’ll be immersed and in-character from start to finish you’re still sitting around a table with friends while you play. In Gather, you take on the role of Speakers – each of you an elected representative chosen by your respective Kinship or community – that have crossed the vastness of the Evertree to attend an annual meeting known as the Gather. In theory, the Gather is a great idea. Every year the Kinships of the Evertree may send a Speaker to go the Gather and discuss the previous year, talk about shifts and changes, discuss the affairs of the world, and so on. However, the Gather is a meeting so saturated with laws and customs that trying to conduct this meeting is often frustrating, limited, and feels almost alien and otherworldly (to the players) in its execution. The rules that govern the Gather don’t only limit what you can talk about, but how you can talk about it.

Practically, the game is played out with a deck of cards. The game is GM-less, zero prep, you just draw the first card and dive right in. The cards explain how to play, provide a little bit of information about the world in which you live, and then present the heart of the game – a number of Question cards. You’ll draw a card, ask the question to the group, and then the answers to these questions form the “discussion” of the Gather. What’s exciting about this is that every question and answer helps to shape the world around this meeting. Not just in abstract ways, but in how the world relates to the Kinships gathered at the meeting. We see the world through their eyes, and that’s what shapes it. A few small pieces of setting at the start, along with the questions, provide the edges of the world, but you fill in the rest of it as you play – what’s going on in this world, how do these Kinships interact, what threats are out there, what has happened, what is going to happen. It’s all hashed out as you play, and presented as it relates to the people who live within the world. In that way, the world is built less by images on a map, and more by the relationships and connections that fill it, which means that the parts of the world that you’re going to really dig into and flesh out are the ones that you’re interested in, and that you want to see more of.

How did you write the question cards and keep them from being boring or repetitive?

Every time you play, you’re playing with twenty question cards. Twenty-one if you count “By what name is your Kinship called?” which is always the introductory example question given near the start of each session to get players accustomed to how questions are asked and answered. Of the twenty remaining questions, five are set. Essentially, how large is your Kinship, what do you have a lot of, what do you have a shortage of, how many have joined your Kinship this past year, and how many have left or died. Thematically, these five questions were the ones asked at the very first Gather ever to be held, and so they have been asked at every Gather since. Conveniently, these also help players setup the boundaries and pillars of the world and Kinships so we can see the stakes we’re working with.

Beyond these, there are fifteen additional question cards. There are pulled, at random, from a deck of fifty when you’re setting up for your session. Thematically, these are questions that have been asked at other Gathers that have come and gone in previous years, since each time the Gather meets a new question is added to the collection (more on that in a bit). This provides you with a lot of variation when you play. Every time you sit down for a session you could choose to revisit a Kinship you’ve played before, or make one entirely new, and this may change how you play and the interactions you have with others. However, changing what the questions are from session to session and, just as importantly, changing the order in which they’re asked will drastically alter how players approach the game, and the themes that are present at your table.

After these twenty question cards have been gone through, every player has a chance to ask one question of their own design to the group. Once these have all been asked and answered, a vote is held, and a single player-generated question is added permanently to the game for a chance to be asked at all future Gathers.

Tell me more about the Kinships. How are they made up? What meaning do they have?

Your Kinship is the community, family, guild, nation, or assembly that you have come to the Gather on behalf of. It’s your job to represent your Kinship as their Speaker. Every player takes the role of a Speaker, each of them from a different far-flung Kinship scattered across the Evertree. To take up the role of Speaker is a heavy responsibility because within the Gather you don’t even speak as an individual. Every word you speak carries the weight of your entire Kinship behind it, so it is tradition to hear Speakers use words like “we”, “us”, and “our” rather than “I” and “me”.

Kinships start as nothing more than a name. While you’re learning how to play the game players are given an introductory example question which is: “By what name is your Kinship called?” Everyone then has the opportunity to name their Kinship. You know a little bit about the world at that point, about the Evertree in which you reside, but beyond that the name of your Kinship is entirely up to you. You’ll announce it, and then write it down on a notecard for all to see. Maybe you’re The Branch Tenders. Maybe you’re The Forgotten. Maybe you’re the Astral Cardinals. Maybe you’re Those Whom The Rot Found. Whatever you’d like. After the Kinships are named however, and you start into the first few questions of the Gather, magic happens and these communities that didn’t even have a name fifteen minutes ago suddenly come to life. All of the Gathers questions relate back to these Kinships, how they’re doing, what they need, and what they have to offer, so every time someone answers a question you learn a little bit more about what that Kinship is, who they are, and how their little corner of the world works.

Video by Galactic Network talking with Stephen about Gather.


How does player interfacing with the layers of tradition and rules at the Gather influence storytelling?

To really explain this, let’s delve a bit into the mechanics behind the Gather, because how the “laws” of the Gather force you to engage in this meeting directly influence how storytelling takes shape. Once players have gotten past the setting cards and the “how to play” cards they’re left with the core of the game – the question cards. When a Speaker flips a question card they read it aloud. As an example, the question might be “Has war been brought upon you by another this past year, whether by words, stones, powder, or hex?” All of the Speakers then consider their answer to this question, and at the moment the Speaker who read the question discards the card all of the Speakers answer the question on behalf of their Kinship in unison. This unified answering is a critical component of the laws that govern the Gather as a sign of respect to all Kinships. No one Kinship’s voice is more important than another. Every Speaker begins the game with three tokens, and after this cacophonous answer is given to a question, Speakers may offer their tokens to their fellow Speakers, offering them to anyone they’d like to hear more from. This could be if you heard someone give an intriguing answer through the din, or for any number of other reasons. Once all of these tokens have been handed out, if you’ve been granted such a token (and have accepted it) you have the opportunity to state your answer once more. This time, you’ll say it by yourself, and may elaborate on it if you’d like.

For example, if you heard me say something about hexes amid the united answer, you might offer me a token to hear more because hey, hexes are cool. If accepted I would repeat my answer and elaborate on it. For instance, I might say “Yes, a war of hexes. We believe the Rotchildren have laid a hex upon our crops. They do not grow, they only crumble and spoil in the fields.” Maybe I’ve just called out another one of the Kinships at the table, or maybe I’ve invented a new one. Now that I’ve given my answer, any Speaker may offer me another token to speak further, but these must be paired with a question. If I accept the token I must answer the question. So, you might ask me: “Believe? Do you have any proof that it was the Rotchildren?” If I accept your token, I’ll respond. “Technically, no. But we know the ways of the Rotchildren. This is how they work. Everywhere they travel in the Evertree they bring destruction with them. They have always looked on our lands with envy.” Again, any Speaker might offer me a token with a new question, and this will continue until either all questions have been asked and answered or until I refuse to answer a question. Perhaps the Speaker for the Rotchildren offers me a token and asks “And who exactly did that land of yours belong to before you stole it away?” If I hold up my hand and refuse to answer (sometimes a far more dramatic choice than answering) my time to speak is done and we move on to the next Speaker who was given one of the initial tokens.

While everything outside of the question cards and the initial setting information is entirely improvised and created by the players during play, this playstyle of questions and answers creates built-in prompts for storytelling to build off of. You’re never presented with a blank canvas and told to “go!” instead you’re guided more easily into collaborative storytelling by building off of each other’s prompts, questions, and answers.

What themes and setting elements do you think Gather does best, and what unusual possibilities are there to explore in the worldbuilding?

The structure of Gather’s gameplay is very similar to the Evertree itself. A good way to think about the game is to think about the question cards and the answers given in unison as the trunk of the tree. These are the solid foundation of the world. A question tells us things about the world, and the answers tell us things about the Kinships. From there, players have the ability to go down these tangents of questions and answers, literally off-shooting from the trunk like branches. These branching paths of answers, questions, more answers, and more questions allow you to follow these paths of story and worldbuilding as far as you’d like, letting players focus in on what is cool to them and really digging into the threads that excite everyone, before coming back to the trunk and shooting off onto the next branch. Finally, when all the branches you want to explore have been explored, we move up the tree to the next piece of the trunk.

I know that freeform, live action, or improv-heavy games can be intimidating to more traditional tabletop groups, but as with many of my games I have endeavored to make Gather a more guided experience. It’s like an improv with a safety net. Even if you’re not quick on your feet with creating answers that doesn’t matter as much because you can just speak quietly and let you half-answer get lost in the din. Not interested in exploring your thread further? You can always reject tokens. There are a lot of options here even for people who may not be as comfortable spinning worlds off the top of their heads.

What’s especially fun to explore in the worldbuilding is that there are very few boundaries. This world can truly be what you’d like it to be. And even if you play the same Kinship session after session, that doesn’t mean that anything about the world or the Kinships within it will stay the same. Are there societies and cities in the Evertree’s branches? Are you human? Are you a nest of birds? Nearly anything is possible, so the possibilities from session to session are endless. I anticipate that this is a game that will fuel fantastic, terrifying, and beautiful concepts for Kinships that will keep you wanting to come back to the table with it to try out your next great idea.

The words "Gather: Children of the Evertree" in white over an image of yellow-green leaves on dark brown trees, looking up through them into the blue sky.
Lovely image of the Gather: Children of the Evertree title.

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Thank you so much for the interview, Stephen! I hope you all enjoyed hearing about Gather: Children of the Evertree and that you’ll check it out on Kickstarter today!


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Five or So Questions with New Agenda Publishing

Hi all! Today I’ve got some answers from Misha Bushyager, Eloy Lasanta, and Jerry D. Grayson of New Agenda Publishing on what they’re working on, what they want to do, and what New Agenda Publishing means to them. They released a quick start this week for Orun and I wanted to highlight them while I could!

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Tell me a little about New Agenda Publishing. What excites you about it?

A black woman in a black shirt.
Misha Bushyager

Misha: For me it was a chance to be the change I wanted to see. Too often when women or PoC or queer people ask for diversity, we get told to make our own thing if we want to see it, so this is us doing that, specifically calling out that it’s what we’re doing.

A dark skinned man in a green shirt.
Eloy Lasanta

Eloy: My answer is pretty much the same. I love to create games and stories, but we are using New Agenda as more than just another game company. We have a platform through which to help new voices, many of which are from marginalized communities really tell their own stories, ones very different from what’s already out there. I wanna be a part of that.

A black man in reflective sunglasses, a hoodie, and a tee shirt.
Jerry Grayson.

Jerry: Being marginalized is the same as being invisible. Being invisible makes you easily discarded or trivialized. I’ve always been told I can have a seat at the hobby table, but it’s difficult when there is no chair. My agenda is to help provide enough chairs at the table for everyone. I’ve found my place, I’ve hit my stride, and I’ve achieved a slight amount of success. I want to play all that forward and help anyone, doesn’t matter color, creed, or orientation find a spot in the hobby. I want everyone to feel welcome and comfortable in their skin.

What excites me about New Agenda Publishing? The chance to amplify and execute ideas I believe in. To show that so-called minorities have just as much to offer to the hobby and industry as anyone else. To prove that varied backgrounds bring diverse ideas to the table and create something more significant than the individual creators. I’m excited to share a byline or credit with people of different colors and genders that want to make games.

What are the core goals of New Agenda? What is your mission?

Our core goals are to help designers from underrepresented populations successfully create games. This to us means more than just writing them. We want them to be able to find artists, and other writers and editors and distributors. We want to mentor people on both the creative side of games, but also the business side. We want to show them how to market, how to run a Kickstarter, how to work with a printer, all the nuts and bolts that get their games into the hands of players. Right now, we’re putting together all the foundations and structure for us to be able to do this.

How are you finding appropriate projects to publish and what are your criteria?

We decided early on that the first thing we did should be a flagship project that showed we could work together and that highlighted each of our strengths. We’re three very different people, all creative but with different backgrounds and skill sets. After we each separately came up with a list of ideas we narrowed it down to the couple of things we had in common and what is now call Orun is what emerged.

Going forward, we plan to put out a call for designers interested in either publishing mentorship or contributing to one of our existing properties. We’re refining the criteria but at the moment it’s: a new designer (one that hasn’t published a game before, contest entries don’t count) with a concrete idea of what they want to produce, and the follow through to help make it a reality That belongs to one or more of the following categories Person of Color Female or Non-binary Trans* Queer

A book showing planets and space with the text ORUN CORE BOOK.
The Orun core book cover.

What oversight will you have of products your publish to make sure they meet your standards? How will you handle conflicts?

The great part about this new venture is that we all have experience in what we’re doing. We all have quite a few projects under our belts, but now we’re putting our collective abilities together to make something greater than the whole. If you’ve checked out any of our projects in the past, you’ll see that we already have incredibly high standards for our products so sticking to that is key.

As for conflicts, I think the thing to understand is that we certainly didn’t jump into New Agenda Publishing lightly. It is a company founded on mutual respect for each other opinions and skills, and we’ve already shown that we can handle conflicts internally with communication. We all come from different gaming backgrounds so we already knew we wouldn’t agree on every matter, but we have learned to find middle ground that pleases everyone on a few occasions. Other times, we’ll defer to the person most experienced or most excited about a particular concept. Conflicts are key to learning how you’ll work together, and thus far, I’m excited!

If you wouldn’t mind, what are each of your personal goals for New Agenda Publishing, both near and far reaching?

Misha: Near term I want to have a successful launch of Orun to prove we can take a project from soup to nuts and still want to work together. We’re three big personalities but so far we’ve meshed well and I can’t wait to see what else come out of our collaboration. Longer term, I want us to become a place where people aren’t afraid to pitch us their ideas, trusting us to help them nurture their ideas to completion, and hopefully success.

Eloy: I’m never one to build go small. I speak my mind, I push myself creatively, and I try to bring others along and make sure others are doing the same. With New Agenda, I see the next step in my own personal goals of advocating and encourage the industry to continue to grow and evolve. Specifically, I see New Agenda Publishing becoming one of the few big RPG companies within the next few years. We’re starting small but our plan is to surge with activity as soon as everything is off the ground. Oh man, I really can’t wait!

Jerry: Near – I want to make games that bring everyone to the table. My Questing Beast is making something so excellent and inclusive that everyone wants to participate. To do this, I need the best and the brightest creative talents out there, and I believe many are not yet discovered. I can’t do this alone, I don’t want to do this alone, and I refuse to do this alone. The well is a lot deeper than any of us can imagine and the world is full of people that want to create and play the game. I want to touch them all.

Far-Reaching – I want to build a community that’s inclusive, sprawling and informed. For the longest time, many in the community have felt left out, underserved, and disenfranchised. The hobby community is like a huge quilt made up of many colors, textures, and points of origin. I want the community I play in to reflect that. I’m not one monolithic culture, and the hobby community isn’t either. Let’s celebrate what makes us different in a positive way. Ultimately, I want us all under that quilt snuggling and keeping warm together.

A blue and orange gradient backround with a rotating symbol of a circle and the letters NAP, next to the words New Agenda Publishing in white text.
The New Agenda Publishing logo.

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Thank you so much Misha, Eloy, and Jerry for the interview! I hope you’ll all look out for the Orun quick start and everything else that New Agenda Publishing has to offer!

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

Five or So Questions on Champions Now

Hi all!

I did an interview with Ron Edwards on his Kickstarter project, Champions Now! Ron prepared our audio recordings and edited everything into a video, so you get to hear the interview on the following video. I hope you enjoy it and that you’ll check out Champions Now on Kickstarter today!

https://youtu.be/Pkfg6uxu2EY

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

Five or So Questions on BFF!

Hi all, today I have an interview with Terri Cohlene and her son, Ross Cowman, designers of BFF! BFF! is currently on Kickstarter and is a game about girlhood, friendship, and adventure – it looks like such a fantastic time, and I hope you love hearing what Terri and Ross have to say about it! 

FYI: This game is nearing the end of its Kickstarter and could super use some support – please share and consider backing an interesting new project that has a diverse cast of characters to play!

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The Kickstarter video is so good! So much happy!


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

Terri: Finally! After all this time, it’s getting out into the world! BFF! is a role playing game about friendship, girlhood, and adventure. Originally I wanted to create a game about friendship that girls would love. Turns out, lots of people (young, old and of different genders) are having fun getting into that mindset.

The art is fantastic and provides a backdrop for all kinds of great adventures, from school to sleepovers to summer camp to road trips to just hanging out at the mall.

Ross: Yes, all of those things. And it is really cool to be be working with my Mom, and all of the other folks on the team. BFF has so many people’s wonderful ideas in it!

As a design nerd: I’m excited to be using boardgame techniques to make a role playing game. I think this design space has a ton of potential to bring story gaming to a new audience that maybe didn’t feel like they had access before.

A board game box and board, along with stand up character tokens, "charm" tokens, some cards, and character cards.
BFF! really does look like a combination of a board game and a roleplaying game, and I think that’s awesome!

BFF! seems to be almost a board game + story game hybrid. How did this design come about?

T: Maybe that happened because I didn’t know what I was doing. I started the ball rolling and, because my expertise is “story,” that’s where I began. I was thinking about what was important to ‘tween girls, and, Bingo! Friendship, of course. Then I shared my idea with Ross and he fine-tuned the game design, plus we brainstormed A LOT to get the results we have now. The landscapes were kind of obvious, except the fabulous details we ended up with were totally inspired by the artists and everyone else on the team.

R: When my mom brought me her idea my first thought was to hack Fall of Magic somehow to make this work. We eventually added some unique mechanics like charm bracelets and friendship cards to specifically support the friendship theme.

A series of character tokens representing girls of all backgrounds and types, including disabled characters, girls of color, athletes, musicians, and more! Very colorful!
Speaking of friends, look at all these awesome friends!
Where are the character concepts and fictional structure being drawn from? Have have you come up with mechanics that connect those characters? 
T: The brains of Cowman/Cohlene! Then we added the creativity of the rest of Team Deernicorn. Welcome to our world!!
R: Terri and I came up with initial ideas, then bounced them off everyone else in the team who added their own stuff to the mix. We wanted to have a balance of urban and rural, of indoor and outdoor, of crowded and spacious…
The characters are connected explicitly at the start of the game through the charm mechanics. Everyone trades charms which represent things our characters like about eachother.

A person with dark hair bent over paintng.
The art for BFF! is really adorable, done by artist Veta Bahktina.

The charms sound so cool! What is their function mechanically, and what makes them important narratively?
T: The charms sound cool because they are cool! I initially had the idea of actual charm bracelets that best friend players could even wear between play sessions. While a nifty idea, it wasn’t practical. At all. (Ross wisely pointed this out!) Then we briefly considered having charm necklaces that the friend tokens could wear. Again, not practical. So we ended up with bracelet templates and custom charms brilliantly designed by Taylor Dow. They represent traits or memories that the friends like about themselves or each other. Throughout the game, there are opportunities to add charms, gift them or get rid of them, each time explaining why you are taking this action. They add to the depth of understanding, growth, and bonding (& fun!) that happens during play.

R: The charms are the biggest mechanical deviation from Fall of Magic and really crucial to getting players into the friendship mentality at the start of the game. At the start of the game we each take turns selecting a charm for ourselves and talking about how that charm represents something we like about our character. Then we go around a second time and each give a charm to another character and say something we like about them. Between each hangout each do another charm scene which functions as a kind of mini-debrief in the middle of the game.

The box for BFF! and the heart of the deernicorn logo. The box is colored orange, green, yellow, and blue and has a cast of diverse characters on the cover.
The BFF! box art is so pretty and colorful. I love seeing all of the characters on the cover!
You’ve had some awesome sounding playtests. Were there any unique challenges in playtest with the broad age demographics or with keeping tone? What was some of your favorite feedback?
T: Not really. It’s been pretty easy to get into the middle grade mindset, whether that means imagining an older or younger (or same age) alternate self. Once that’s set, the playing field seems to be pretty equal. Favorite feedback? “I love it! It’s my new favorite game!” Or maybe, “You want to be an eggplant? Be an eggplant!”
R: We’ve had consistently awesome playtests, people grinning, laughing, and just having a really fun relaxing time roleplaying these friendships together. Some of the kids from the YWCA playtest group told us after they were really inspired to make their own characters and hangouts for the game. For me, inspiring some of these young women and gender-queer youth to become future game designers, is the best possible feedback I could ask for.

A visual map of a town, including a local mountain, various buildings, a river, a seaside, and a lighthouse.
The gorgeous map/game board in BFF! is colorful and compelling!

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Wow! Thank you so much to Terri and Ross for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading and that you’ll skip on over to the BFF! Kickstarter page to check it out, and share this article with your friends! There’s a few days left to make BFF a reality, and I think it’s totally worth it.

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

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

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

Five or So Questions on Yarnia

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Tania Richter about Yarnia – A Yarn Quest Knitting RPG, Tania’s roleplaying game using knitting that’s currently on Kickstarter!

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a person facing a snow covered scene, spreading their arms out to show a green and black shawl patterned like a dragonfly.
A lovely dragonfly patterned shawl.
Tell me a little about Yarnia. What excites you about it?

Yarnia is a quiet little land that has a habit of being invaded by monsters. Eons ago the rulers of Yarnia set up a summoning system to bring in heroes from different worlds to aid them in their constant quest to repel the wool-thieving monsters. Part of what makes this so fun is that it’s a system that allows players to bring their RPG characters into Yarnia or roll an entirely new character for the quest.
A person with dark hair and glasses facing the camera wearing a black shirt and an orange and pink patterned black shawl.
A lovely cowl & a creative designer!
How did you come up with the idea for Welcome to Yarnia and start integrating the knitting aspect into play?

Yarn Quest – Heroes to Yarnia is an RPG knitting pattern that I designed to make a randomly generated pattern. We’ve done quite a few Yarn Quests now, and I wanted a pattern that would allow me to teach people how to double knit, along with introduce new gamers to RPG-style gaming. Welcome to Yarnia is designed as a sort of Introduction to the world of Yarnia. It also offers a gateway between the knitting and gaming communities, allowing members to cross over and bring new ideas to both communities.


What are some of the types of patterns players will encounter during their Yarn Quest?


There is a combination of geometric patterns and pixel monsters. I try and model my art after a lot of the classic RPGs like Pokemon, Final Fantasy, and Dragon Warrior while putting my own spin on it.
A fabric piece with a detailed black and white wing pattern.
Gorgeous wings pattern.
How do the roleplaying and storytelling mechanics function in the game?

The game is heavily based on storytelling as there’s no way to shift the full story on the fly like a traditional RPG. Your role as the player character is to make choices as you progress through the story, and the dice are the main tool you’ll use to determine what charts you’ll knit. As the quests are designed to be played solo or in a group they are often set up as almost a choose your own adventure. At the base of it I believe that RPG’s are a very extensive form of a choose your own adventure.
What makes knitting work with the roleplaying so well, and provide a rich framework for storytelling?

There is a large community of geeks who are also knitters, and knitterly folks love to try out new things. There are so many different stories to tell through the RPG format, and each person’s adventure is going to be different. Overall, it’s fun to experience new things, and Yarn Quest is different from any knitting pattern. The ability to record your character’s journey through a project that is almost a tapestry is a fun and unique method of knitting a pattern.
a person facing trees and grass, spreading their arms out to show a white and black shawl patterned like a bird with outspread wings
This black and white shawl with the bird pattern is so beautiful.
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Thank you so much Tania for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading and that you’ll check out the Yarnia Kickstarter today! Make sure to share the post with all of your friends, knitters and gamers alike!


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

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

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

Five or So Questions on Archives of the Sky

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Aaron Reed on Archives of the Sky, which is currently on Kickstarter! Archives of the Sky is a GMless game with collaborative story telling, set in the broader reaches of the universe where characters seek purpose in the epic galaxy. It seems pretty nifty, so please check out the interview below! You can also peek at at a play example here.

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Kickstarter video for Archives of the Sky.

Tell me a little about Archives of the Sky. What excites you about it?

Archives of the Sky is a tabletop storytelling game that uses epic science fiction as a stage for stories about very human conflicts and values. I love sci-fi and roleplaying, but most of the existing games I know of in the genre focus more on its external trappings: spaceships, laser guns, and so on. There are a few rare exceptions that focus on the more human, philosophical side of sci-fi– “Shock” by Joshua A.C. Newman is one of my favorites– but I wanted a system that also took inspiration from GM-less improvisational games like Microscope, Fiasco, and Downfall. After a lot of iteration and playtesting, Archives is the result.

What excites me about it is that it really evolved into a great vehicle for supporting a group of people to collaboratively create an amazing story together. The mechanics of the game really work to provide a structure for a plot, and to ensure that plot is based around a conflict between beliefs. The characters are then forced to resolve this dilemma somehow, which means they need to get down to the heart of why the believe the things they do and why they’re worth defending– and that tends to lead to some great roleplaying.


four people in a semi-circle around a table filled with index cards, paper, and writing instruments.
A group of people playing Archives of the Sky. Index card tents! yay!
How do you set up a game of Archives of the Sky – who has input into the story, the characters? – and how do plot hooks happen?


Everyone’s involved with setting up the world and telling the story– there’s a role called the Archivist to help facilitate, but everyone has equal creative authority. The first thing you do when you sit down to play is create a House together, a group of near-immortal wanderers who have been exploring the galaxy for thousands and thousands of years. You start by coming up with their core purpose, which becomes the game’s first value. This might be something like “We preserve life,” or “We learn truths,” or even something simpler like “We hunt” or “We sing.” It’s something this House has sworn to pursue as their highest calling.

The rules walk you through fleshing out the House a bit more, giving them a few more Values and figuring out their place in the galaxy, and then each player makes their own character, someone within the House. Characters each have their own personal Values, which may or may not line up with the House’s Values, or with each others’. These are the seeds of stories– think of Captain Kirk in the early Star Trek movies, who has sworn to uphold the Federation’s mission of peace, but will also “never forgive” the Klingons for the death of his son. Clearly, he’s going to have to face this conflict sooner or later. (Sentences starting “I always” or “I never” make great Values, by the way.)

Once the game begins, players take turns staging Scenes that advance the plot. Each scene is based around a Question which that player has about where the story is going. So if a mysterious transmission was detected in the previous scene, the next player might ask “Who sent the transmission?” as their Question– or might introduce a new complication by asking something like “Why can’t we find the source of the transmission?” Everyone then collaboratively plays a scene around answering the Question, both playing their character as well as making things happen in the story world (like a GM).



Some "trove" cards, created by the players to support storytelling - the words are machines, magnitude, nightfall, prisoners, absorbtion, decaying, and disturbance.
Some “trove” cards, created by the players to support storytelling.

What are the basic mechanics like for social and other conflicts, and how do they engage players emotionally?


Players have the option of resolving conflicts through roleplay, but there’s a mechanic that provides a bit of randomness and an uncertain outcome that can be used by any player who wants it. Another thing you do at the start of play is create a deck of index cards called the Trove, each one with a single word on it. (The rules encourage you to pull these words from your favorite sci-fi novels.) When you want to resolve an uncertain outcome, you can draw from the Trove and let the word inspire the outcome. What’s great about this is the interpretation can be anything you want: literal, metaphorical, even tangential. So the word “fire” might inspire one person to narrate a catastrophic explosion, while another might read it as the fire in someone’s eyes as they pull off a wild maneuver.

Where emotions come in is when the story gets to a Dilemma, a conflict between two Values. This is a situation where the characters need to decide on a course of action, but either decision would threaten one of the Values in play. Say the players have created a House with a core Value of staying hidden; but one of the characters has a personal value to protect the helpless, and the House has a chance to save a lot of lives by coming out of the shadows. Can that character convince the others to change their minds and go against their House’s highest value? Or will she find a way to live with betraying what she believes for a greater good? It’s not an easy decision, because any character who acts against a Value they believe in might have to Adapt at the end of the session, making a permanent change to their character.

An example of a Value, "We Always Show the Truth" with one in the background reading "We Record Tragedies."
An example of a Value, “We Always Show the Truth.”

What was your playtesting process like? Tell me about any realizations you had, and how you dealt with necessary changes.

I’ve been making digital games for a long time, but this is my first fully finished and released tabletop roleplaying game, and one of the things that surprised me was how much more playtesting and iteration tabletop takes. With digital games, you spend some amount of time thinking of ideas, a hellishly long amount of time programming them, and then some amount of time playtesting: ideally throughout the process, but often closer to the end. With tabletop, almost all of your iteration time is spent actually playing the game and seeing how it works, with a few hours here and there to think through problems people are having and revise the rules.

Archives morphed a lot as it went through close to twenty fairly significant revisions (i.e. not just tweaking wording) over about two years. It accumulated more and more rules as I tried to get all the parts to work the way I wanted them to. The downside was this is as you went through a game, you kept bumping into new rules, and needing to stop to explain them. Finally I sat down and counted up the number of individual rules and mechanics in the game, and there were something like 27 of them. I challenged myself to try to make a version of the game that had only 10 concepts that needed to be explained. I think the simpler version that came out of that was when I really cracked the code of how the game worked, and from then on everything was just refinement.

The biggest two realizations I had were A) the game was really about Values, not the plot events (in the original version, you did a lot of writing down plot points on cards, moving them around the table, taking special moves to revise them, etc.– in the final version, all that focus is placed on the Values in play instead). And B) A bunch of separate mechanics in older versions could be combined into the simple rule “Ask a question to begin a scene.” So at certain times of the game that’s a fixed question; at some times there are some questions that make more sense than others; but it’s only one rule to explain, and everything else follows naturally from that framing, which simplified things a lot.

How do you put the “epic” into the game, with mechanics, narrative, and structure?


I wanted all players to get involved in telling the story: contributing details to scenes, helping build the world, and so on, but in practice people were often afraid to contribute when it wasn’t their “turn” to stage a scene. So I added the concept of two meta-roles, called the Epic and the Intimate, that people take turns playing. Your job when you’re the Epic is to look for opportunities to make the story huge and awe-inspiring in scope… so if someone mentions a spaceship, you might jump in with “It’s three miles long and made from some incredibly black material that totally swallows up the starlight.” By contrast, the Intimate looks for moments to keep the focus on emotions and small human details: they can ask a player what their character is feeling at any time during a scene, or add small touches of detail, like a texture or a significant glance between two characters. This system works really well to give players “permission” to tweak the story, and having those two things to focus on help make the stories feel like the kind of sci-fi I want to emulate.
The Archives of the Sky cover, reading "Archives of the Sky, a tabletop storygame of galactic scope and human ideals, by Aaron A. Reed."
The Archives of the Sky cover.
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Thanks so much to Aaron for the interview! This was a real cool game to learn about. I hope you all enjoyed the interview and will check out the Archives of the Sky Kickstarter today!

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

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Five or So Questions on Journey Away

I have an interview today with Jacob Kellogg on his game Journey Away, which is currently on Kickstarter. You might remember Jacob from his approachable theory article about complexity in game design – but don’t think his cool thoughts on games and design stop there! Journey Away is a game that I think is doing something fun and it’s got dice pools, which means I’m interested. Check out his responses below!
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Tell me a little about Journey Away. What excites you about it?

Well, one of the exciting parts of Journey Away is that it’s my first project that’s big enough to not be a Pay What You Want title; that feels like a threshold to me as a new designer. As for the game itself, I like that it feels like a different kind of experience than most RPGs. Fantasy is probably my favorite gaming genre, which can be problematic due to there being so many fantasy games out there already, but I think that the non-challenge-based mechanics really help this to bring something new to the hobby instead of just being another rehash. I feel good about that.

What made you go towards non-challenge-based mechanics? What about that is important to you?

The decision to use non-challenge-based mechanics was a convergence of two things. First, I had noticed that fighting monsters (and to a lesser extent, facing traps and hazards) was so common in fantasy gaming that it seemed to be treated as an inherent part of the genre. That struck me as odd, since to me “fantasy” is more about the setting. Second, as I started developing my own setting and premise for the game, it didn’t make sense that curious villagers would explore a magical world with wide-eyed wonder if doing so involved facing mortal danger on a daily basis. At the intersection of those two observations is the notion of non-challenge-based gameplay.

A scenic view of a forest, hills, and mountains, with trees peeking into view. Two people sit and look off a gentle cliff, one in a vest, long sleeved shirt, pants, and boots, and the other in a skirt, tights, waist cincher, shirt, and boots. The title text "Journey Away" is in gold.
The beautiful cover art for Journey Away. I finally learned how to do alt text properly, so full description is there.
How did you make fantasy interesting and different for Journey Away?

As I touched on above, I think part of what makes some people feel like fantasy is “done to death” is that it keeps getting done the same way each time. The dice may change and each setting might have its own quirk, but ultimately they’re almost always implemented as some variation of allocating attributes and skills for your best odds of success against a series of challenges. I think stripping that away offers something genuinely different. It’s like if someone has only ever seen pasta served with tomato sauce and they ask me how I’ll make pasta interesting and different, maybe I’ll give them some chicken lo mein or beef stroganoff.

Even so, I also wanted a reasonably original setting. I ended up with a world where magic is a recent addition, because that offers lots of great benefits, like having plenty of opportunity for discovery and adding a sense of wonder to any magical artifacts you might encounter. It also offers a nice solution to the common fantasy issue of “race”. People like to play fantastical beings, but there’s a lot of baggage with the traditional handling of races. What I get to do in Journey Away is say that everyone’s a human, and the new presence of magic causes some folks to be born with altered features. So if you want to play an “elf”, you can just say that you were born with pointy ears and give yourself the traits you want; or if you like tieflings, you can give yourself those features without having to introduce race-based prejudice into the game; or if you’re coming to fantasy gaming from some other background, you can easily adopt the features of a character you like (such as a sexy vampire or an anime catgirl) without having to find a race in a splatbook and convince the GM that the stats are balanced. The setting really offers a lot of freedom to everyone.

I love the idea of getting the magical features you want because of the flexibility of the world. So tell me, how do these work mechanically? How do you represent magic in the nuts and bolts?

Magic is handled the same way as any other feature of your character: you declare that something is true about your character, and assign a die size to it based on how significant or impactful you want it to be. It doesn’t matter whether that character trait is your experience with fishing, your cute demeanor, or the potency of some magical ability you have. For example, a friend gave her character animal-mind-reading powers with a d10. Then, whenever we rolled for a situation where that was helpful (like when trying to negotiate with someone), a d10 would be added to the player dice pool. If it could get in the way in a situation (like when surrounded by lots of creatures), then a d10 gets added to the complication pool.

What is the core of conflict and discovery in Journey Away?

The entire primary mechanic is basically what I just described for magic: you give yourself traits to define your character, and assign die values based on how big of an impact you want them to be, with bigger dice having bigger impacts. Those traits then contribute dice to one pool when they’re helpful in a situation, or to another pool when they could get in the way. Circumstances can also contribute dice to both pools, but mostly to the complication pool. Both pools are rolled, and the players arrange the dice into pairs (one die from each pool). Pairs where the die from the player pool is higher generate beneficial developments, while pairs in which the complication die is higher generate complications. The player to the left of whoever rolled then narrates the majority development type (boons or complications), then passes to the player on the right of the one who rolled, and that player narrates the remaining developments. Of course, there will be structures in place to guide this narration with prompts for those who aren’t interested in or comfortable with absolute openness, but that’s the basic idea.

Conflict isn’t a major component of the intended emotional focus of the game. Instead, we’re framing the journey as primarily positive. Even the “bad” complications serve as an opportunity for fun moments, and the game is mainly about diving headlong into the wondrous unknown. This means that the game encourages forward movement, curiosity, and laughing together when things take unexpected turns. Journey Away very much presents the discovery of new things as a positive and joyful endeavor. I want to encourage a way of thinking: that things outside your current experience aren’t inherently bad and dangerous, but instead will enrich your life and make you glad you stepped outside the village to have a look.

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Thank you to Jacob for an excellent interview! I hope you all enjoyed learning about Journey Away and that you’ll travel on over to the Kickstarter to check it out today! Please share this interview widely!

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

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

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

Five or So Questions on The Sword and the Loves

Hi all, today I’ve got an interview with Antonio Amato from Mammut RPG on The Sword and the Loves, an Arthurian legends inspired game using mechanics adjusted from Archipelago, one of my favorite games, to fit the themes. It’s a lovely read and I wanted to let you all learn more about it! Enjoy Antonio’s interview below.

Full disclosure: I edited the English translation of the text.

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The cover and example of the Sword and the Loves cards and map, illustrated in black & white.

Tell me a little about The Sword and the Loves. What excites you about it?

I think that “The Sword and the Loves” is the game I wanted to play when I was a teenager and I discovered the Arthurian cycle and the stories of the knights of the Round Table. During the summer vacation, I read a book about King Arthur and his knights, and I instantly fell in love. Then a couple of years ago I discovered “Archipelago” and I immediately thought it would be the perfect game to tell those stories. I then started writing my Archipelago hack.

​​What are the key aspects of the mechanical structure in ​​The Sword and the Loves that you think carry the emotional impact of the Arthurian legends?

Undoubtedly, the hopefulness and the bleakness. These are typical themes of the Arthurian legends that serve as a starting point for players to make the story more dramatic and to emphasize the role of the protagonist. This is a mechanic that I borrowed in part from “Love in the time of Seið”, a game that I always recommend to play.

A black and white illustration of a knight lying in bed, ill, while a femme person looks at them, dismayed.

​​How did you approach an era and themes that had complex perspectives regarding gender and agency?

It was not easy, I have to admit it. Through hopefulness and bleakness, I tried to give thickness to the archetypes (especially those most penalized by a vision of the women that was a product of its time). I also thought the game needs a change in perspective because I believe that embracing those stories (contextualising and renewing them) is a pure act of love. That’s why I decided to devote an archetype to a figure that owes much to Tolkien’s re-reading of the female figure: the wandering damsel.

Do you think you could elaborate just a little to the last question to explain some of what the wandering damsel is? I think that would be useful.

The wandering damsel is a homage to all those brave and free women we can read about on modern and contemporary novels. However, I didn’t want just to create a “female version” of the wandering knight, then I choose to develop a different type characterised by a strong connection to adventure, exploration, and freedom. While the wandering knight has a special relationship with his family, the “positive themes” of the wandering damsel are the valour and the gravitas, two virtues particularly appreciated in leaders. The archetype is inspired by Éowyn and Joan of Arc.

Illustrated cards representing the character archetypes, with the wandering damsel enlarged.

What about Archipelago and Love in the time of Seið fit with The Sword and the Loves so well mechanically and fictionally?

Archipelago (as well as Love in the time of Seið) is a story game in which the destiny of the characters is at the heart of the gaming experience. From the very first moment, I thought that The Sword and the Loves had to rely on such a structure. This allowed me to remain faithful to the literature of reference, while giving me sufficient freedom to change the game in the direction chosen by me. For example, the idea for the roles of guide and misleader come from Love in the time of Seið, even if with some little modifications.

A detailed black and white illustration of someone pulling a sword from an anvil.
You spoke of the hopefulness and the bleakness. How did you come up with these for each archetype? What do you think they will contribute most to play?

Hopefulness and bleakness are flags for players. You can use it to corroborate and consolidate the narration of other players or to play with the “dark side” of their characters. I based hopefulness and bleakness on the chivalric tradition related to the respective archetypes. So, for example, the hopefulness of the Wise Old Man is the tradition, while the bleakness is the hubris. I think that hopefulness and bleakness convey the right atmosphere among the players because they are seeds for the fiction.

The cover of The Sword and the Loves, which features an illustration of a femme person wearing a crown and holding up a sword, in front of a detailed landscape background. 

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Thank you so much to Antonio for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed learning about The Sword and the Loves and that you’ll check it out soon!

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

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

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

Five or So Questions on Two-Player Games and Star Crossed

Hi all! I have a stellar interview today with Alex Roberts about two player games and her new game Star Crossed, a game that uses a block tower (like Jenga) to tell stories of forbidden romance. It’s currently on Kickstarter! Why don’t you check out her responses?

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Art by Jess Fink of a man in a long, fancy jacket and beige pants with a ruff collar sitting across the table from a purple being with a pink ponytail thing, also in fancy dress, both gazing romantically at each other while one pulls a block from the tower.
Alex Roberts, being intensely cute *and* talented.

Tell me why you care about two-player games, and how that ties into Star Crossed. What excites you about them?

For me, the joy of roleplaying games is in the connection with other players; not that we told a great story but that we told it together, not that we played cool characters but that we built this great character dynamic, or had these special shared moments with them. That’s a kind of satisfaction you can only get from this art form. So, having identified what I’m after, the challenge I get as a designer is to figure out how to generate that effect, and intensify it. Frankly, it’s a miracle that strong moments of connection ever happen at tables of five people – that’s a lot of interests, ideas, desires, and boundaries to align! It’s wonderful when everyone in a group is totally on the same wavelength, but it’s rare. With Star Crossed, I wanted a feeling of intense creative connection, as frequently and intensely as possible. I wanted to see it right from character generation.

183 Days, by Sara Williamson and James Stuart, is a huge inspiration to me because playing it was a profound act of connecting to another person. And of course I have to mention Emily Care Boss’ Breaking the Ice – also a game experience where I felt very much in tune with the other player, and it was in a gentler, less intense, and more playful way. I really fell in love with those games, which I think put me in a certain design head space. Even the >2 player games I love have a dyadic focus in some way. Avery Alder’s A Place to Fuck Each Other is for 3 players, but the scenes are always between two characters, and the GM role gets passed around. Danielle Lewon’s Kagematsu can take up to 5 players, but every scene is an intense one-on-one with the GM (and the other players do not get bored, trust me.)

Also… there’s a practical aspect to 2-player gaming. Scheduling is hard. Not everyone you know is into roleplaying. A lot of adults organize themselves into intimate dyadic relationships. It helps to have some 2-player options on your shelf!

As a designer, how do you mechanically make two-player games interesting?

It’s easy! You’ve got two people to think about. They’re going to be focused on each other by default. Helping them be present to the scene and invested in what’s happening will just take giving them something that keeps their creative energy moving without being distracting. Remember that mechanics don’t produce great ideas; the players do that. The game itself is just a hamster wheel. It enables and allows running; it doesn’t have to provide an incentive because hamsters love running. And people love being creative! I’m oversimplifying by the way; if anyone else gave an answer like this I would complicate the heck out of it.

Oh, and you can prototype mechanics so rapidly in a 2-player game because you only need to ask one person for help!

Art by Jess Fink of a fallen block tower between a blue-translucent person and a dark skinned feminine person in a lab coat.

Is there a difference between designing for romantic relationships versus platonic or familial?

I would say that designing for romantic relationships isn’t a specific enough focus! The relationships in Star Crossed are almost always romantic, but sometimes they’re entirely sexual, and sometimes they can’t fit into any category I know. They are only united by the quality of compelling impossibility. I’m designing to produce desirable relationships that can’t be. So how do you make players want a relationship to work? Fortunately for me, you start by telling them it probably can’t.

If you’re trying to give players tools to generate interesting relationships, I would say drill down and get as specific as you can, or help them do so. Family? Vague. Parent and child? Ok. Distant parent and over-achieving child? Now you’re onto something. And even that can be made so much more detailed and interesting. You could make a game where one person plays the Distant Parent, and the other the Over-achieving Child. And it would be so replayable. Hm, that’s a good idea, actually.

An image from a playtest of Star Crossed of a tower in a precarious state, with someone in the background covering their face in excitement and anticipation.

How do you playtest a game like Star Crossed, or really any two-player game, and make sure it’s not just like those two specific people getting the good play out of it?

You test with a lot of different people, in a lot of different relationships to each other. For example, it was especially important to me that some folks on the ace/aro spectrum play and have a good time. Also: it was sweet to hear couples enjoying the game, but to me, a much greater test was putting it in front of total strangers. I played it with a complete stranger myself actually, at a con. It was fun. I was relieved.

I always talk about how game mechanics feel in design, not just about how they function. What are some mechanics you see in two-player games like these, and specifically Star Crossed, make players feel?

Well, I have to call out 183 Days for using a card that prompts extended eye contact. It’s so effective! Is closeness an emotion? Being relaxed, happy, and connecting those emotions to the person you are currently with–that’s what it does. And I think Star Crossed does the connecting part too, but in a more panicked “we’re in this together” kind of way. Which is great. I ask playtesters what they felt while playing; that’s often my first question. They usually mention excitement, trepidation, nervousness, joy–even though the stories sometimes end sadly, there’s quite an emotional journey to get there. Of course, I don’t have to ask about certain things. When I see players laughing, putting their hands over their mouths, even making little squeals of excitement! That’s when I know I’m nailing it.

Art by Jess Fink of an astronaut and a satyr playing with a block tower that is positioned on top of a spaceship pod.

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Thanks so much to Alex for the interview! I hope you’ve all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll click over to the Kickstarter for Star Crossed and fall in love!

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

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

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

Five or So Questions on Familiars of Terra

Hey all, I’ve got a great interview with Elizabeth Chaipraditkul on the new tabletop game Familiars of Terra, which is currently on Kickstarter! Liz got in touch and when I heard “familiars of Terra is a tabletop roleplay game set in a beautiful world where everyone has their own animal familiar” I knew many of you would be super amped to check it out. So here’s the interview!

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A dark skinned person with a beard, wearing a fancy shirt with a fur collar, with an animal that l can only describe as a poodle with wings. SO CUTE.
Tell me a little about Familiars of Terra. What excites you about it?
Familiars of Terra is a tabletop roleplay game set in Terra, a fantasy world in which every person has an animal familiar. As a heroic Seeker you travel the lands with your familiar healing the devastation of a war which left nations scared and people scattered. The game is all about exploration, adventure, and heroics. If you’re a fan of the Golden Compass or Pokemon you’ll probably enjoy our game.

What makes me most excited about Familiars of Terra is that it is a very positive game. Yes there was a war, yes your main job as a Seeker is to make sure something terrible like that never happens again, but behind all that is hope. Being a Seeker is about making the right choices when they matter most and when there are grey decisions – helping, healing, and thriving. I wanted to make a game that left people feeling good about themselves, that built them up, and also had a bunch of awesome animals in it. 🙂

What was the initial design and conception process like? If you just woke up one day and wrote it, what was the spark? If it took a longer road, how did you find your way?
After I finished WITCH I kinda needed a break from the dark. I love dark, dramatic games, but focusing so much on that type of world was really exhausting. You can’t live in shadows forever it isn’t healthy. So Familiars of Terra really came from a place of wanting to design something happy and uplifting. I wanted to write about heroes and cool animals. That’s where the game really began. From there I started testing different mechanics with dice and then eventually with cards – once we had the base system it took off from there. Funnily enough, I had a really clear picture in my mind of what Terra looked like right from the start, so the mechanics was where I had to invest a lot of development time.
Left to right: a person with a beard and mustache, a necklace with a big shiny gem in it, and a fancy shirt and collar in blue and beige; a dark skinned person with round pigtails, in a cream colored midriff shirt and beautiful facial jewelry; a white person with red hair wearing a brown vest with a fluffy collar over a light blue dress; a dark skinned person with dreadlocks, wearing a purple-ish scarf and a long green vest; and an indigenous-appearing person wearing a strappy vest, with organic lines down their cheek in red, carrying a large stick on their back.
When you say grey decisions, what do you mean by that, and how does it tie to the heart of the Seeker-familiar relationship?
By grey decisions, I guess I mean very real decisions. Life is really difficult with out any supernatural threats and the choices we make as humans are tough. In Terra I wanted to tackle real problems, but then in a fantasy world. You basically play a modern day hero and that means the decisions you’re faced with are realistically tough – we don’t have many true villains in the game, but we do have a lot of people who think differently than one another. We have people who hurt people to help themselves (or their families) and Seekers are often faced with greed. However, as a Seeker you fight for the greater good – you’re part of the generation that will heal the world. It’s your job to make the tough calls and practice radical empathy and creative problem solving. You’re faced with grey decisions, but you play hope :).
A person wearing flowing clothing with beautiful geometric patterns who has a red line across their cheeks and nose, carrying a harpoon-like weapon and standing beside a large deer with a saddle.

How do the mechanics tie in with your familiar and that relationship?

Actually, in Familiars of Terra you have one character sheet for two characters. Half your sheet is for your familiar and half your sheet is for yous Seeker. You can make checks with either and as a player it’s basically like playing one soul in two bodies. Also, familiars are always the one to fight! Humans are weak compared to familiars, so in order to protect their companions, familiars are always the one to get into a scuffle. We have lots of cool Combat Powers for you to pick and customize how your familiar fights. Finally, each familiar gets a legacy which is both story and mechanics. By following a story you create to your familiar’s epic destiny you earn cool new Traits which alter how your familiar looks, moves, and even fights.
How do players engage the mechanics to express empathy, and how do the familiars help with that?
A lot of our mechanics work by ‘defining’ things. You can buy Items and then in the moment when you want to use them – you define the item’s history and how it is used. This encourages player’s creativity and allows people to take different paths to problem solving. A lot of times you make a check and you’re done – you succeed or fail and sometimes that’s absolutely terrible when you’re trying to do something kind or empathetic. When I was creating Familiars of Terra I really wanted to make sure doing something empathetic or creative (or anything really) relied on more than that. By having a mechanical work around your character can use one check isn’t the end of empathy, it’s a challenge and an encouragement to use the items you have at your disposal to still reach your desired outcome.

Familiar-wise, even though familiars can fight, they definitely don’t have to. In fact, lots of familiar’s traits are based around healing, comforting, and empathizing. For example, you can have a comforting familiar who can calm situations and make people feel better in their presence – much how ‘mundane’ therapy dogs do as well :). 

A red-haired person in a green jacket and yellow dress reaching their hands up to the sky where cats with wings are flying, with the text “Familiars of Terra” over the background of a seaside sunset.
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Thanks to Liz for the great interview and for sharing Familiars of Terra with me and you all, my readers! I hope you enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out the Familiars of Terra Kickstarter and maybe help it reach its goal!  
P.S. – I tried to find out if it was okay to use “dark skinned” as a descriptor and I saw it used in some places where it seemed okay, but if it is not, please email contactbriecs at gmail and I will update the post as soon as possible. Thank you.

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

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

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