Tag: game design

Five or So Questions on Spell: The RPG

I have an interview today with Taylor Smith on Spell: The RPG which is going up for purchase after a successful Kickstarter! Check out what Taylor has to say about this clever magic RPG!

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The cover of Spell: The RPG with characters casting spells of varying kinds, mostly in purple, pink, and white colors.
I love the colorful cover by Nathalie Fourdraine!
Tell me a little about Spell: The RPG. What excites you about it?

Spell: The RPG is a little bit of everything I love about making games. At it’s most simple, it’s a tabletop roleplaying game that uses a handful of six-sided dice and letter tiles; players can resolve actions with simple rolls or they can create magic by spelling out what they want to cast with the letters. So, it has a neat gameplay gimmick—and I’ve loved gimmicks since Mouse Trap and the Jumanji board game’s red filter reader—and it’s easy to teach and learn…and its name is a pun. It was really important for me to encourage creativity in play for Spell and I think that’s what I’m most proud of.

What’s really been exciting about Spell: The RPG for me is its potential, both for players and myself. I’m so happy to say that Spell has been quite a few people’s first ever tabletop game and has changed a few minds about the hobby. I’m also regularly very pleasantly surprised by things I’ve seen players do with the system, either in their interpretation of the rules or when they hack and mod it for their own play groups. And then there’s the potential of what it represents for me, as a product: I’m publishing Spellbook Vol. 1 alongside Spell: The RPG, which contains five campaigns written by me and illustrated by five fantastic artists; Spellbook Vol. 2 will have another set of campaigns, but written by other creators. I’m so excited to see creators I personally admire telling stories with Spell that I never could’ve told.

What was the inspiration for the clever main mechanic, and how does it work when someone decides to cast a spell?
About five years ago, I was co-running a larp and only tinkering with game mechanics at the time. After a rousing game of Scrabble, I got it stuck in my head to make an RPG using Scrabble tiles. The idea percolated, incomplete, until I was working on a piece of someone else’s game—a system meant to represent basic human motivations. That mechanic, which would evolve into the Impulses, wasn’t used for that other game, so I recycled it as a core game engine; I remembered the letter tiles and then plugged these two orphaned mechanics together.

The way these pieces work are complementary: basic tasks are accomplished with the twelve Impulses, which are motivation-oriented stats; players roll a number of six-sided dice equal to the Impulse they’d like to act on to accomplish a goal (to get through a locked door, maybe use Daring to burst in spells blazing, Force to break the door down, Reason to think through how the door might be dismantled, Style to make the best entrance, or Calm to just knock) and the results are compared against a difficulty.

To cast a spell, the player states their goal, rolls an Impulse, sums the results, and then draws that many random letter tiles. As the player tries to spell a word with the tiles, the character is sifting through glyphs of the universal language to rearrange reality. If a word is spelled (and adequately justified) the spell is successfully cast. If the spell is in conflict with someone else, like a baddie, they get a chance to defend, so there’s a fairness of rolled stats vs rolled stats with modifiers for how fitting the spell is for the situation. Players can spend Potential points in the moment to save spells they like and then reuse them later without having to spell them over again. There’s no “mana” or “slots,” so characters always have access to new, strange magic, as well as their own repertoire of custom spells they build over time.

A stack of wooden letter tiles.
A collection of the tiles used for “casting” in Spell!
What are the campaigns like – adventures, mysteries, etc.? How did you create unique and interesting campaigns?

Spell: The RPG is functionally “setting neutral,” meaning it can be played in any world in any era, so I’ve also included Spellbook Vol. 1, which is a collection of five campaign supplements. I tried to represent a variety of options for how play could look and invited players to hack and modify the game as they’d like for their own games. For example, Magic Moon Warrior is a monster-fighting magic girl adventure to the moon and includes some modified rules for transformation spells; Wakeful in Reverie has rules for only being able to use spells while lucid dreaming, as the story straddles the line of waking and sleep; Godqueen, which can be played as a GM-all/any campaign, has the players in the role of a pantheon guiding a civilization throughout history. Spell can support a serious ongoing campaign with longterm character growth and story progression or provide the minimum necessary structure for an absolutely wacky one-shot.

I believe in players’ ability to invent and create, so instead of providing a definitive lore, I wanted to make tools players could build their own world and stories with. Spell is written with goals of creativity and potential in mind, so even during the most daunting campaigns, there is agency in the ability for players to create their own magic. There’s also always an element of physical play involved—the actual rearranging of letters—which I think helps players feel collaborative and imaginative. The name of the game is literally a pun, so humor is absolutely welcome. Maybe a player wants a powerful spell to extinguish a raging inferno and while looking at their letters, they realize they can spell “cats.” The group can share a laugh, maybe a welcome reprieve from the intense situation, as they imagine a horde of kitty firefighters; they could even discuss this option in character! Maybe they go with that one or they spell something else, diving back into the action, but that moment of silliness and play still happens.

A cover of the Spellbook sectioned into parts representing the campaigns, one with a bird-cat-like creature, others with people and patterns.
The characters on this cover already gained my interest!
Tell me about Impulses. What do they mean to the characters, and how are they set up – default values, gained over time, etc.?

Impulses are goal-oriented stats that both provide the math for rolls to be made, as well as help shape the character’s personality and methodology. The twelve Impulses are: Calm, Daring, Feeling, Focus, Force, Grit, Hope, Reason, Renown, Scheme, Style, and Trust. The player assigns twelve points between them at character creation; some will likely start at zero, but that doesn’t mean the character doesn’t experience that Impulse, they just can’t rely on it to inspire action. For example, a character with zero Calm is still capable of being calm, they just can’t pull on that part of themselves enough to effectively diffuse a chaotic situation, but maybe they use Grit to weather it. Characters gain Potential points, which are like experience, but you get them at the start of a session and you can spend them in the moment; these points are used to both keep spells and to increase Impulses.

Impulses are important to me, especially in trying to make them intuitive. While a player is assigning points to their character sheet, they have to think both about what the character can do, but also what the character is like, how they view the world, and how they meet their challenges. By using more common words, the idea is that a player could say something like, “My character just really hopes this is going to work out,” so that means they’re using Hope. Impulses also represent fields of knowledge from their past experiences related to that Impulse. For another example, if a character is Daring and skydiving is their main outlet for it, they’ll have the skills and experience associated with skydiving; if their thrill is on the stage, they’d have skills and experience related to their performances. The goal is, after filling in Impulses, the player has a holistic character with a lot of potential for inferred experiences and abilities.

A diverse cast of characters posing dramatically while preparing to cast spells.
These characters in this illustration by Christina Gardner look so fun!
How do you think the narrative control players have in the game will support a healthy play environment? What sort of supportive tools for the narrative are you including or recommending to go along with Spell: The RPG, since it’s such a freely flowing game?

I describe Spell: The RPG, in the book, as “light-hearted” and encourage players to use a setting that’s supportive and thinks magic is neat, though there are notes about more grimdark interpretations—with disclaimers about consent for those themes ahead of time. With that setting as a backdrop, it’s been my experience that the collaborative, creative, and just a bit silly process of rearranging letters, especially physical tiles, really helps the game feel like “play.” The party works together, but so too do the players in a very tactile way; it creates an environment of everyone wanting everyone else to succeed, not just be the best or coolest individual.

In addition to regular comments throughout the rules and settings, like “this can be heavy, so make sure to talk about it first,” the Game Moderator section (I’m using “moderator” instead of “master” because I believe a GM is a facilitator and a player, not a tyrant in a gross power dynamic) includes steps for conflict resolution, a summary of the lines and veils system, and a summary of your own Script Change system. These tools are super important to me and I’ve been using them in my own games. While Spell: The RPG is outwardly positive, it’s perfectly capable of including many, very different themes and content. Even simply the opportunity to spell swear words or slurs from random letters can disrupt the game for players, so guidance on these elements is also included. The rules also make specific mention that characters, as adventurers, are not at all limited in their gender, ethnicity, or background. Additionally, there’s a note on disabilities:

There are no mechanical “flaws” designed for Spell: The RPG. Impulses represent a character’s motivation, so no disability will make them less capable of adventure. The respectful inclusion of physical and mental disabilities as roleplaying cues or context for actions is certainly encouraged, but there are no one-size-fits-all modifiers to apply.

This intention is also reflected in the cover art (by Nathalie Fourdraine), which prominently features a variety of body types, gender and cultural representation, and the inclusion of a character with a hearing aid and a character with an athletic prosthetic leg. For the all the interior art of Spellbook Vol. 1, finding Own Voices illustrators was key and an open discussion of diversity in the characters was vital. My hope is to have Spell create a comfortable and inclusive foundation that players can play within—whatever those games may be—and feel like that foundation supports them, their identity, and their goals for play.

As a final note, I’d like to include that I love hearing from players, their experiences, and their feedback. I try to stay as open and accessible as possible myself. My contact info is included in the books, so both positive and negative comments will be heard.

Three characters - a bird person, a femme person, and a more masc person, all posing to cast spells under the text "The World of Spell."
I love the cute characters here by Leigh Luna!
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Thank you so much, Taylor, for the great interview! I hope you all enjoyed learning about Spell: the RPG and will check out the newly released materials when they come out! In the meantime, check out Taylor’s new work on Drip!

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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!

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.

Many Questions on Dream Askew // Dream Apart

I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum about their Kickstarter project, Dream Askew // Dream Apart, two games about community and belonging as marginalized people. I hope you enjoy the interview and that you’ll check out the Kickstarter!

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A dark haired woman in a black shirt smiling at the camera.
Avery Alder


Tell me about the project of Dream Askew // Dream Apart. Why does this joint project matter to you as a creator?

Avery: While these two games tell stories of very different communities—Dream Askew is about a queer enclave amid the collapse of civilization, while Dream Apart is a fantastical-historical game of the shtetl—they’re also united in being games about marginalized people building a community for themselves against the odds, what we call games of belonging outside belonging.

For me, this project matters because telling stories about finding our collective power and learning how to live together in community matters. And I feel really proud about how we’ve merged those themes with the mechanics: power is distributed around the table, and rather than relying on chance, everything is driven by the choices that we make together.

A dark haired man in a light colored shirt smiling at the camera, in black and white.
Benjamin Rosenbaum

Benjamin: I love the games we’ve made, I’m excited about people playing them. I think this kind of in-person game can be a great space for learning and exploring, and I think it’s cool that these games celebrate the agency and struggle of communities with complicated relationships to the outside world, in settings that I think matter a lot.

What was your collaborative experience like on the project, and how did you handle complications or struggles of any kind?

A: Our collaboration gained momentum really slowly! Benjamin first wrote me about using the Dream Askew framework to create a game about Jewish shtetl life in 2014, and it wasn’t until 2017 that we committed to an active collaboration and co-development process. I’ve been really delighted by the ways that Benjamin’s innovations in Dream Apart have looped back to transform Dream Askew; key relationships are instrumental in defining the relationship web of the community, and they weren’t even in my original design!

B: It’s been amazing! Avery is brilliant, super nice, amazingly supportive, and has oodles of artistic integrity. She knows a tremendous amount about game design, community, and the technical praxis of creating and publishing games, and it’s been an enormous privilege to work with her. We’ve handled complications and struggles by talking through them, listening carefully to one another, and making decisions together — a process that has been strikingly full of fun and ease. I think our visions were very closely aligned from the beginning, and we also have very distinctive areas of expertise in the project. Each of us is the expert in our own game’s subject matter, so we tend to naturally defer to that expertise; and while I have a deep background as a writer and gamer, it’s my first professional game project, and Avery is one of my favorite game designers, so it’s been very easy to trust her judgement on game design and publication issues.

A yellow and green toned image with a collection of people gathered in a fallen city.
The Dream Askew cover.

Dream Askew

Tell me the core purpose of Dream Askew. What about it fuels your passion?

A: For me, the passion comes from building something that can be run at the drop of a hat, that tells meaningful stories, that’s legit fun to play, and that brings us closer to imagining possiblities for queer community.

I think the game is challenging in some ways! It requires players to take on a big creative load, and to jump into co-developing an apocalyptic world together. But for players who are up to the challenge, it’s a delight! The game uses lists and prompts to point players toward interesting dilemmas, and then gives them space to actually figure out how to handle them. That’s exciting! That’s what fuels my passion.

A sheet of paper labeled "Introducing the Hawker" with various lists of options for players to choose from, some already circled.
The Hawker playbook.

When you work on the project, what design elements do you keep as key priority?

A: I started work on Dream Askew in early 2013, when I was helping run a weekly, drop-in meetup group. It was queer-centering, but welcome to all who wanted to drop in and play something neat. I tried running Apocalypse World a couple times at those meetups, and it never quite worked: the sheets intimidated new players, the mechanics were slightly too dense to teach to new players in the short span of time we had each night, and the game always felt like it was cut too short. I designed Dream Askew to fit perfectly into that space: inviting, quick-paced, and perfect for weirdos. And that remains a priority. I want this to be a game that I can run at the drop of a hat for a gaggle of queers who’ve never played a roleplaying game before, and I want it to rock under those conditions.

An orange and brown toned image with angels - multi-winged creatures with eyes peeking through the wings and flaming halos - watching over people in a small neighborhood with tents and buildings.
The Dream Apart cover.

Dream Apart

Tell me the core purpose of Dream Apart. What about it fuels your passion?

B: What I really wanted was to capture the distinctive tone, setting, and underlying philosophy of Jewish fantasy and folklore, which differs from both the traditional high fantasy ethos of a titanic final battle between Good and Evil, and from the aimless-violent-vagabond ethos of sword & sorcery. I wanted to see characters who are rooted in community, in a deeply spiritual but also morally ambiguous world, a world in which evil is written with a small “e”: our own human failures of courage and compassion, rather than something alien and essentialized and external; characters who don’t wield triumphant violence to achieve their ends, but use wit, grit, and moxie to thrive in a world where they are likely to be always on the receiving end of violence; and just all the rich strangeness, cleverness, yearning, whimsy, irony, self-criticism, soul, and mystery of talmud, midrash, Yiddish folktales, and the literatures of the shtetl.

A sheet of paper labeled "Introducing the Klezmer" with various lists of options for players to choose from, some already circled.
The playbook for the Klezmer.

When you work on the project, what design elements do you keep as key priority?

B: I think the main priority is capturing that spirit described above; other priorities include making it an accessible game with elegantly simple mechanics, concise design, and very rich fiction, keeping players supported in story creation so they always have something to fall back upon and aren’t left hanging if the flow of creativity stutters, and supporting a social contract that centers everyone feeling safe and curious and excited and connected.

A black and white image of a sigil - the bottom half has three lines arranged like an A, with a half circle posed on top and multiple curved and straight lines emerging from it.
The sigil for Dream Askew.

Dream Askew

What have been some of the most vital elements of growth in Dream Askew over the past five years, mechanically and thematically?

A: Mechanically, there are two ways that the game has changed that I think are the most vital: the introduction of the community worksheet, and the introduction of key relationships for every character role. These two changes shift the story of Dream Askew in the direction of community, relationships under pressure, and questions of belonging. The game feels like it contains a deeper treatment of its themes, rather than a more aesthetic, surface-level treatment of what it means to belong to a queer enclave. Key relationships were a piece of the design that Benjamin first introduced into Dream Apart, which I was so excited to borrow back for the apocalypse.

Thematically, I think the biggest difference isn’t actually with the game, but with the real world that I’m going to be releasing the game into. The idea that apocalypse was a contemporary force which operated in waves at the margins of civilization, that the digital realm would factor into not only the collapse but also what came next… in 2013 this was closer to science fiction. In 2018 it feels startlingly timely to be talking about. I talk about this more in the design notes I’m releasing alongside the game, but I think it’s chilly how much more real the world of Dream Askew now feels for me and my friends.

The "The Outliers" book, black and white with a black and white illustration of queer, edgy characters, imposed over the faded cover of Dream Apart.
The Outliers zine, which is a stretch goal reached on the Kickstarter, includes additional game materials.

What elements of queerness speak the most to you personally, and to your experience in games, that you have brought forth in Dream Askew?

A: I think there’s a bit of misdirection at play in how Dream Askew portrays queerness. Character creation opens with a prompt to choose from a list of strange and unprecedented genders, and to think visually through physical descriptions and wardrobe combinations. Queerness feels like a flashy aesthetic project. And that’s definitely a real part of the game, one that it’s fun to play around with! But queerness is also the relationships you attempt to hold in balance, and it’s the fact that everyone has a different kind of lopsided power that both contributes to the community and also puts them at odds with it. The Iris is a potential healer, but also an unsettling psychic weirdo. The Hawker is a resourceful provider, but also a territorial profiteer. The Stitcher is an engineering genius, but also a strange recluse. The drama of the game comes from watching how these people who hold sway in the community tug its ideals and character back and forth.

A black and white image of a shape almost like a bell with two concentric circles in the top center, then a straight line on top of a triangle that has a Hebrew symbol "alef" in the center.
The Dream Apart sigil.

Dream Apart

What were some of the elements of Jewish fantasy and folklore that you personally felt deeply about including in Dream Apart, and how did you include them?

B: Most people are familiar with a kind of Sunday School version of the Hebrew Bible, in which the Divine is a kind of mathematically omniscient and omnipotent Santa Claus whose job it is to make everyone be good. A cursory glance at the world around you should make it clear that this doesn’t make much sense. In fact the story (or rather stories) that the texts suggest are much weirder. The God of the Tanakh is volatile, mysterious, numinous, and alien; the midrashim and the Kabbalah make this weirder still, with a fractured Divinity in exile from Itself, and a universe-altering magic inherent in the smallest human actions (it’s not that much of a stretch to say that in the Lurianic Kabbalah, when mom lights the candles Friday night she is literally healing a tiny bit of the sundered Godhead). The psychic maelstrom of Apocalypse World (and thus of Dream Askew) is the closest thing to this theology that I’ve found in any game; it feels a lot like what Moses encountered at that bush in Midian. Magic in games tends to feel like engineering at best, and more commonly like ordering from a menu at Denny’s. Gods are either absent, or they’re statted-up dispensers of plot tokens and buffs. I wanted a kind of magic that would be terrifying, wondrous, unsafe, inchoate. I also wanted it to be tied deeply into the story’s drama of moral agency, because so much of Jewish tradition is about wrestling with complex moral questions that have no easy answers. Temptation, solace, power at a price, rebuke, reconciliation, grudges, forgiveness, these things are not just part of the social drama, they’re also central to the meaning of the Unseen World. A demon that just wants to try and kill you is not nearly as interesting as a demon that wants you to betray yourself. A golem isn’t just a monster, it’s an allegory of freedom and servitude, the limits and risks of violent self-defense and of human knowledge. A dybbuk isn’t just a possessing spirit, it’s one with an agenda and unfinished business.

A sheet of paper labeled "Welcome to the Shtetl" with various lists of options for players to choose from, some already circled, and a map of the Shtetl..
The sheet for the Shtetl for Dream Apart.

Were there any unique challenges for approaching the subjects of Jewish culture and beliefs that are not addressed often enough or respectfully enough in popular media?

B: To the extent that shtetl culture is addressed in popular media at all — think the musical-theater and cinematic versions of Fiddler on the Roof and Yentl — it tends to be in a sentimental, rose-and-sepia-tinted, elegiac frame, ignoring a lot of the complexities and real-world grittiness. Non-Jews are usually offscreen menaces (though to be fair, one of Tevye’s daughters does marry one); economics is flattened into a virtuous poverty; and in general, the viewer is encouraged to see the events as a kind of hagiographic ancestral origin story. (The original texts are grittier and sometimes queerer than their tamed stage & cinematic versions, too — there’s a good argument that Singer saw his Yentl, who keeps the name Anshel at the end of the story as opposed to putting a dress on and running off to America, as a trans man.) At one point Avery asked if we should find a more Yiddish-looking font for the Dream Apart playtest kit; I responded that I really liked using the same one we use for Askew, to get away from that coy sentimentality and ram home the point that this, too, was a gradual apocalypse, with — for its characters– the same apocalyptic immediacy.

A dark haired woman in a black shirt writing in a notebook while sitting at a table in a restaurant.
Avery writing notes.

One last…

Beyond basic structural elements, what are some pieces of Dream Askew // Dream Apart that are similar or contrasting – mechanically and thematically?

A: I think one of the most interesting contrasts—and one I haven’t talked about anywhere yet—is in how the two games approach supplemental reference materials. Since Dream Apart is historical, its reference materials need to offer up specific, tangible answers: here’s what that word means; here’s a plausible Russian surname from the era; here’s the river you’d walk alongside. Benjamin is working hard to make resources that feel thorough while remaining compact. On the other hand, Dream Askew is speculative and built upon a queer epistemology. Its reference materials need to do much the opposite, to reject a single definition in favour of pitching the question back to players in an encouraging way: that’s a great question, what do those words mean? My challenge is being exploratory and playful without coming across as hostile or opaque.

The book of Dream Askew // Dream Apart with the cover illustrations and white text over black cover, imposed over a faded image of the Dream Apart cover.
The Dream Askew // Dream Apart book and illustration.

—

Thank you so much to Avery and Benjamin for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and will share it with others! Please check out the Kickstarter for Dream Askew // Dream Apart today!

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.

#IAmQueerGames

Hi! I’m Brie Sheldon, and I am queer games.

June is Pride month, which is when we recognize the adversity queer people face and overcome, marked especially by remembering the Stonewall riots. When police raided a bar where queer people were gathered – trans people, gay and lesbian people, bisexuals, and all – the patience of queer New Yorkers ran out. Martha P. Johnson, a black transgender sex worker, is credited with initiating the riot as response to police aggression**. A number of other black people and people of color headed up the rejection of prejudice in power, alongside many queer resistors. Pride matters. When we talk about resistance and the pursuit of freedom, we should look to the best parts and most important parts of Pride.

Those parts are the people. So, as a gamer, I’m a people. I wanted to offer a way to connect with other queer people, and to have an easier way to frame who I am as a queer person – while showing how it matters to things I love.

This video includes a series of questions that I’ve responded to below. If you’re a queer gamer or queer person-who-plays-games, please consider answering these questions in your preferred format – video, social media, blog – and use the hashtag #IAmQueerGames.

This is supported by my Patreon at Patreon.com/briecs, as part of my community outreach and efforts in recognizing diverse creators. Thank you for watching! Here we go!

1) Who are you?
I’m Brie Sheldon, formal game designer, journalist, and editor. I run a site called Thoughty were I talk game design and do interviews, supported by my Patreon. I’m a graduate of leadership studies and creator of Leading with Class, using games to teach leadership, which is supported by Patreon.com/leadingwithclass.

2) What are your pronouns?


I use either they/them or he/him, whichever is easier and makes more sense.

3) What’s your queer, in a few words?


I’m genderfluid nonbinary-masculine, queer in orientation.

4) What are your intersections and chosen labels?
On the marginalized side, I’m disabled and have mental health stuff. For privileges, I’m white, well educated, and married to a cisgender man with a decent paying job and live in a safe neighborhood. On the fun end, I’m polyamorous, a gamer, and an artist.

5) What’s your gender (or lack thereof) and what does it mean to you?
I describe my gender as genderfluid nonbinary-masculine because my gender identity – the inside part of me – fluctuates between nonbinary androgynous and nonbinary masculine, where I am never a man but I have some masculinity. I call myself a boy a lot because the soft masculinity that I associate with boyness is basically where I am then.

My gender is very important to me. I struggled with it for 24 years before coming out on a small scale and 26 before I told my family. It’s who I am and I love to live it freely.

6) What’s your orientation and what does it mean to you?
I am queer, and I call myself queer because it makes the most sense to me. Being a fluid person and being non-cisgender, I fluctuate a lot on how I define my relationships, but basically I’m attracted to people of pretty much every gender. My attraction is different with different people – sometimes romantic, sometimes sexual, sometimes both, or sometimes aesthetic or none at all, and I also have a lot of platonic attraction. It’s all important to me! I feel a lot of feelings, and they find homes in many different places.

7) How do you present yourself, and how do you want to present yourself, including clothes, makeup, body mods, and anything else?
My ideal presentation is moving between soft masculine and edgy androgyny, but both with boobs. I like my boobs and hate that having them decreases my masculinity, and my androgyny. I wish that I could be those things and still have boobs, and still wear makeup – which I do enjoy. I like wearing masculine or more unisex clothes – I could live in simple jeans, ballcaps, and tee shirts – but I super dig getting to wear those alongside low cut tops and stuff. It suits me.

I’m not planning on getting any further body mods than my piercings and tattoos – except more tattoos. Gender affirmation and hormones aren’t what will make me whole, from what I know.

8) What’s this got to do with games – gender, queerness, Pride?
Games have a good dose of queerness in them already once you realize how easily you can put on another gender and orientation and have it be the identity you perform for a session, event, or campaign. If you think you’ve never touched queerness, think of how many times you’ve played a character of a different gender or who was attracted to a gender you aren’t. It doesn’t make you queer, but it shows how you can connect those things.

Gender and orientation are so tied to our experiences at the table because they’re tied to our real lives. Mechanics and settings in games can encourage queerness, and safe environments encourage engagement with identity questions – when we’re playing a game, it is a safety buffer. It’s a way to explore with training wheels. And when the wheels come off, we can tell stories we want to be told, since good media for us is so hard to find.

We must tell our own stories. We can make them rich and interactive for queer and not-queer people alike. It’s an amazing medium to dig into both queer reality and queer fantasy, and it gives us a unique power to frame the mechanics of the worlds we play in when we design queer games – how we handle violence, how we handle sex, how we handle stigma. The control it gives us to realize queerness is really important.

9) When do you remember being queer in game the earliest? What does it tell you about games and queerness?

Honestly, it started when I was playing Harry Potter text based roleplay when I was in my early teens. I started playing androgynous characters – very clumsily – and exploring who my characters could be attracted to. In my mid-teens I played some androgynous characters in D&D and flirted with the ideas of queer characters like lesbians and gay men, and even pansexuality.

But it was not well executed. We need games that support queerness and identity questioning, where it’s okay to explore these things and encouraged to explore them, and done with support in the text and community. Games can’t hold these spaces alone, they need support from those making them and playing them who know about queer culture and life.


10) What can cis straight people do to help?

Listen. Look at your life, look at your choices. If you’ve fucked up, apologize and don’t do it again. Remember that kink isn’t inherently queer. Donate money and time where you can. Honor our history. Hire queer creators. Support sex workers. Don’t write about us without doing research and consulting us. Use people’s proper pronouns. Be better than you ever have been.


Share a message with other queer gamers, both out and not, about the future.

Things are a hot damn mess right now, but we can make it through. Pride month is a big deal but it’s not the only month of the year we need to raise our voices, support each other, and keep moving forward. No queer person is alone in their queerness – we can find ways to work together. We need to recognize black queer people, queer people of color, trans and nonbinary people, bisexual and pansexual people, queer Jewish and Muslim people, and asexual and aromantic people.

Don’t forget that sex workers, disabled people, and people with mental illnesses are queer people sometimes, too. We need to remember we are in this together. Don’t let the pressure from privileged bigots crush you. And if you are still keeping private – it’s okay. We’ll be here when you’re ready.

Final Thoughts


I’m doing this because I want to see queer people in games be recognized and welcome them, as well as talk about why these things are important. I want to highlight the diversity in games that is so often brushed under the rug. I also want to open up the floor for queer voices. If I can do that for even one person, make just one person be heard? Yeah, I’ll like that.

This post is supported by Patreon.com/briecs patrons like you! Please feel free to support my work there or donate through the donation links in the description.

Note: In my video, I state that Marsha P. Johnson (a black trans woman) was the one who started the riot at Stonewall. According to this tweet: https://twitter.com/BlackFemmeinism/s…, the riot was started by Stormé DeLarverie, a Black Butch lesbian, and Marsha P Johnson & Sylvia Rivera (a Latinx trans woman) founded & organized PRIDE. I apologize for any errors – finding consistent information was pretty challenging.



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 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

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.

Turn Grows, So Do I

a gif of Chris Evans breaking a log in half
Chris Evans is a representation for me, the log is my fear of running games.

I recently updated the biggest games document I’ve ever worked on myself, the Turn playtest document. It’s like almost 80 pages now. Like, that’s a lot. The updates included:

  • minor changes to Human role abilities for clarity
  • minor changes to Beast archetype powers for clarity
  • adjustment to refresh for exposure
  • integrated essay content
  • more Storyteller content
    • how to on session 0
    • session checklist
    • explanation of rules
    • character creation
  • an entire player’s guide to all of the roles and archetypes
  • elaboration on some mechanics
  • rewritten elaboration on mechanics 
  • complete step-by-step on how to start a game of Turn

I don’t know if that sounds like a lot, but it was a lot of work!

I’m hoping to talk about a variety of these things over time, but the biggest one I wanted to talk about is the Storyteller’s Guide and how that came to be.

Storyteller Purposes Make everything personal (to the characters) Always put the characters at risk of exposure Keep the characters connected Love the characters and all of their flaws Give everyone a secret Use status as leverage Give every wrong a reason Don’t let deviance go unnoticed Keep in mind that everything takes time Offer every player and character moments of comfort and of success
The Storyteller Purposes were actually written by dictation to John while we were driving across the state last year.

I am not a particularly gifted facilitator, especially not in an actual “game master” type of role. I avoid it like the plague because it stresses me out, I don’t feel like I do a good job, and I don’t have experience in it. However, for Turn, I have very clear ideas on how the game should work. It’s the only game I’ve run 4 sessions of, ever. But I didn’t write any of these ideas down.

So, when John and I went to the lake cabin (my parents’), he asked me a ton of questions. I answered as best I could, and realized I kind of had to write all of it down. Since then I’ve been adding text to the Turn document like wild! I have a lot of ideas for how to solve the little issues people have come up with before I made the changes, but I have no idea if they’ll work for people other than me.

To some kind of credit, I did try out the first draft of the “how to set up Turn” the other night and it went awesomely. I even did the new Session 0! And it worked great. I’ve added some detail since then, so I hope it’ll work. Here’s some things I wrote about, which are in addition to the materials I’d already written:

Character Creation
This has guidance on helping the players answer questions about their characters, how to handle animal groups, a note on NPCs, and special rules for some of the roles. It’s stuff that I know will come up, but didn’t write down. Some of this is just hard to figure out how to word, or I hadn’t had time to put on paper. Some things I just didn’t know needed written guidance, but it did – like the special rules for the Late Bloomer or the NPCs. But, now it’s written down!

Two sheets of paper, one titled "The Beastborn" and the other "A Wolf," with various details of the characters on it
The Beastborn and Wolf character sheets for John’s character in my new game, created by John W. Sheldon.

Session 0
This is how to actually get the game going. It directs the Storyteller to the Beginning Your Game section and then walks them through a structured first couple scenes. I’m really pleased with it and when I tested it out it went amazingly well, for someone like me to run, so I’m glad it’s on paper. I had to really separate out what was important in a first session, and I think that this meets it – connecting the characters, placing them within the town, and establishing the personality of the characters.

Running an Average Session
This covers the typical things a Storyteller will encounter in a session of Turn. Some people had expressed they weren’t sure how to engage stress or how to run beast scenes, so I wrote up some details on that to get people really on the same page. This involved writing up how you should pepper each session with mundanity – everyday tasks that will stress out shifters – and beast issues like territory and habitat struggles.

I also included a Storyteller Session Checklist that makes sure that there are NPC to PC connections, PC to PC connections, gossip, mundane vignettes, and beast scenes alongside the human scenes everyone leans to. I’m pleased with it!

Tracking Goals
This section was to make more concrete guidance on how to handle players trying to achieve goals. It includes guidance on using progress bars based on difficulty, and how that comes across for each goal. I needed to give a more solid way to mark and record this so that there wouldn’t be unfair imbalance in how quickly some goals were achieved. Plus, this way the Storyteller can have visual representation of the progress.

The top of two pieces of paper titled "The Beastborn" and "A Wolf," with text describing the character following.
A closeup of the character sheets – wolves have packs in the game, did you know? by John W. Sheldon.

Reintegrating into Animal Groups After Exposure
After I’d made a small change to the refresh rate for exposure, I realized I’d never noted that animal group stress doesn’t refresh. I fixed that, and then wrote up some rules on how Storytellers will use a progress bar to help shifters reintegrate with their own group or find a new group, based on difficulty. I think that this, the explanation of exposure, and my new guidance on beast scenes will help Storytellers more actively engage that material.

–
Overall this has been a heck of a lot of work. This is only the ONE section, out of all of the ones in my bulleted list up top. The thing is, I’m not really changing rules for 90% of this – I’m just explaining stuff. More of this whole project is explaining things than I ever thought it’d be, and I’ll tell you, I’m hoping that this makes a difference when people get into the text!

One of the hardest things I’ve had to do is make guidance for Storytellers. It’s not something I do a lot, and honestly, a lot of people in that role are people I don’t actually enjoy working with (just a personality thing, maybe?). I don’t necessarily want Storytellers in Turn to work the same way a D&D GM would, or even a Fate GM. I want them to care a lot more. It’s a heavy workload to run the game, by many people’s counts, especially for a “story game” sort of game – but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I started a game on Friday as Storyteller, and we have a fantastic group of a Late Bloomer otter, a Showoff raven, and a Beastborn wolf in a town full of intrigue because the shifters know who each other are and there’s formal shifter culture, and it’s incredibly exciting to think of the places it could go. I know I’m gonna have a lot of little progress bars and it’s gonna be exciting to mark each one off. I can’t wait!

A map with circles and lines showing a town, three cards showing a fast forward, a pause, and a rewind, and the Human Form struggles sheet.
Our town, Script Change, and the Human Form struggles – just the stuff I was reviewing while I was taking a break.

And that’s the thing, right? I’m excited about running a game. Me! I have literally pretended to be sick to avoid doing it, and here I am, enthusiastically planning NPCs and secrets, anxiously bugging my friends about playing the next session. I actually did an okay job, and it’s me saying that!

There’s so many things I love about game design, and as hard as it can be to do it on spare dollars, I can’t ever stop being amazed by how much it teaches me. It is a constant learning experience, and I’m very glad that my time spent digging into Turn’s mechanics and text has encouraged me to do something I find terrifying – and made it exhilarating instead!

It’s awesome, and so is Turn. Check it out if you want to see the hard work I’ve been putting in! Thanks for reading <3

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.

approachable theory: Types of Fun

The approachable theory logo, with the text "approachable theory" and an image of two six-sided dice with one pip showing, with a curved line below it to make a smile. The dice are black with cyan for the pip and yellow with black for the pip.
The approachable theory logo.

Hi all! Today I have a post by Selene Tan on Types of Fun! Selene is a game designer who is always up for a design competition, and writes about games and GMing. This post is about types of fun – the ways we enjoy games – using a variety of existing theory and talking about how we can understand those things in our own experiences. Selene said she loves “interacting with dynamic systems that produce unexpected and inspiring outcomes, and it’s even better with friends!” So let’s see what she has to say!

I ask that you remember the requests I put forth about treating my writers with respect and understand that a lot of game design theory is still growing, so definitions can be a little fluid. 

—

A table with assorted playing components, dice and playing cards, and play sheets and mats.
A collection of materials for a game of Roar of Alliance (Game and photo by John Sheldon.) during play. 

Whether you call it “fun,” “enjoyment,” or “involvement”: when you’re playing the right game, there’s something that makes you want to play it, and keep playing. But not all games are fun in the same way.

The fun of tactical miniatures combat in D&D 4th edition is different than the fun of a collaborative story/map-making game like The Quiet Year. There are many types of fun, and while people have preferences, none is intrinsically better than any other.
We can sort these different types of fun into categories. Sorting and labeling experiences is a good way to analyze them, and analyzing game experiences is a key skill for game design. There are schemes that classify games or players, and schemes that classify fun directly. I find schemes that classify players reductive. As a player, I enjoy many kinds of games, depending on my mood and situation. Classifying games is more useful, but again, most games combine different types of fun. I prefer to classify fun because as a designer, those are my building blocks. The types of fun I want to focus on are a key part of my design vision.
It’s worth comparing several schemes to learn what works for you. The main factors that I consider when deciding on a scheme to use are:
  1. how applicable it is to the kinds of games I want to classify. If there are a lot of experiences not covered by the scheme, some of the types are unused, or most experiences go under one type, the scheme is a bad fit.
  2. how easy it is to remember. If there are too many categories, or the names are confusing, it’s hard to remember the scheme.
  3. how easy it is to apply. The categories should clearly describe what experiences belong to them, and most experiences should clearly belong to one or two categories, without confusion.
I’m including links to several others, but here are three schemes with different approaches that I find
useful for analyzing RPGs.

Schemes of Fun

8 Kinds of Fun

My personal favorite scheme, and the one that started me on categorizing fun, is 8 Kinds of Fun, originally described by Marc LeBlanc as part of the Mechanics/Dynamics/Aesthetics framework (overview).
Chris Sniezak at Gnome Stew has written in more detail about the 8 Kinds of Fun for RPGs. Here’s a quick summary of the types:
  • Sensation: Game as sense-pleasure. e.g. playing with miniatures and detailed terrain, background music, or props; drawing; manipulating dice.
  • Fantasy: Game as make-believe. e.g. exploring a world from the point of view of a character. This is the most “RPG-y” kind of fun.
  • Narrative: Game as unfolding story. e.g. playing through a story with cool set-piece encounters, crafting a story together with other players.
  • Challenge: Game as obstacle course. e.g. dungeon crawls or combat-focused games, any encounter where the point is for players to overcome it with skill.
  • Fellowship: Game as social framework. Playing as an excuse to hang out with friends. e.g. Kaleidoscope, where you “remember” (invent) a movie with friends and discuss it.
  • Discovery: Game as uncharted territory. e.g. sandbox games, hex crawls, and dungeon crawls.
  • Expression: Game as soap box or self-discovery. e.g. drawing your character or other game elements, creating detailed characters.
  • Submission: Game as mindless pastime. In RPGs, this is usually combined with Fellowship. e.g. Kick-in-the-door play where the goal is to defeat baddies without thinking too hard.
Pros

Classifies types of fun, not games or players
Flexible enough to apply to RPGs, board games, and video games
The eight categories cover a wide range while being easy to remember
Cons

The categories have a video game bias
Some of the word choices seem awkward (submission, soap box)
A table with assorted playing components, dice and playing cards, and play sheets and mats.
I used Roar of Alliance because it has a variety of materials and two parts of play, with strategic combat and “downtime” roleplaying making up the game – both could be very different kinds of fun. (Photo by John Sheldon.)

Quantic Foundry Gamer Motivations

Another scheme is Quantic Foundry’s Gamer Motivations. It classifies reasons that people play games, where each reason is a type of fun. There are two schemes, one for video games and one for board games. The video games scheme has 12 motivations in 6 groups, while the board games scheme has 11 motivations in 4 groups.

These are the video game groupings:
  • Action, containing excitement and destruction, e.g. fast-paced combat like Savage Worlds, or causing mayhem in towns.
  • Social, containing competition and community, e.g. combat in Agon, where whoever deals the killing blow gets more Glory; most D&D play where the party works together; or D&D Adventurer’s League play, where you’re part of a larger community.
  • Mastery, containing challenge and strategy, e.g. dungeons, combat, and character build optimization.
  • Achievement, containing completion and power, e.g leveling up, stomping enemies, and completing quests.
  • Creativity, containing discovery and design, e.g. hexcrawls and sandboxes, creating characters, or coming up with unusual uses for items and spells.
  • Immersion, containing fantasy and story, e.g. speaking and playing in character, following elaborate pre-planned plots, or playing dynamic characters that create emergent plots.
Pros

Data-driven. Quantic Foundry used a combination of survey questions about preferences and favorite games to create clusters of users, then labeled those clusters to get the 11-12 motivations.
Comprehensive. It’s hard to think of anything not covered.
Cons

Since the schemes are for video and board games, some categories are barely used while others are heavily used for RPGs.
It’s hard to remember all 11-12 motivations.
The category “Immersion” has a different meaning than its usual meaning in RPGs

Threefold Model and GNS

The third scheme is the Threefold Model (Drama, Simulation, and Game), including its descendant, Gamism/Narrativism/Simulationism (GNS). The Threefold Model and related models classify play styles or modes by what aspect of RPGs is their highest priority.
Gamism is a play style where the highest priorities are challenge and competition. One example is the Dungeon Crawl Classics “character funnel,” where each player starts with multiple Level 0 characters and tries to keep at least one of them alive to Level 1.
Narrativism/Drama is a play style where the highest priority is exploring theme through character. Different characters address the theme in different ways, and highlight it through decisions. For example, every playbook (character class) in Apocalypse World has a unique take on surviving in the wilderness, from solving everything with guns to building a community.
Simulationism/Explorative is a play style where the highest priority is to experience a world or characters that have deep, consistent internal logic. Investigating crimes in Mutant City Blues, where the Quade Diagram describes how mutant powers relate to each other and therefore what kind of mutant criminal you’re looking for, is an example of simulationism/explorative play.
Pros
Created for RPGs
Only three categories to remember
Cons
Lots of arguments and confusion about the definitions of each category
Ignores some common types of fun, e.g. Sensation or Creativity: Design

Other Schemes

Using Schemes

One way to use a classification scheme is to analyze play. I’ve adapted Nathan Paoletta’s Two List Method for this.

Make a list of all the things you like and dislike when playing RPGs.

Then play an RPG session with that list in mind. Afterwards, write down a new list of things you liked and disliked from that session. If you won’t get to play for a while, make a list from your most recent session, but it’s best to do this while it’s fresh in your mind.

Pick a scheme and classify your list items. For each like, write down the type of fun. For each dislike, write down the type of fun it interferes with, and if applicable, the type of fun it promotes. Don’t worry about forcing things to fit: it’s okay to have some lone items. But if there are a lot, you might want to pick a different classification scheme!

For example:

I like to play characters that help people. (Fantasy, Expression)

I dislike games where everyone plays backstabbing schemers who are out to get each other. (Inteferes with: Fellowship, Submission. Promotes: Challenge, Expression.)

You’ll see trends arise from the lists. Some categories will have more items than others, and some reasons will keep showing up.

The categories that keep showing up in your likes are the types of fun you enjoy the most. You have the most experience playing and creating that type of fun, and the strongest intuition for them. You’ll also find complements: groups of types that keep showing up together, or types that show up occasionally on your list of likes but not in your dislikes. The types that show up on your dislikes list interfere with or detract from the types you enjoy.

When you’re designing a game or wrestling with a mechanic, ask yourself what types of fun you’re aiming for. If the mechanic doesn’t seem to be working, is it encouraging a different type of fun than the one you’re aiming for? Is it related to a fun that interferes with your goal? If you have a design that feels like it’s missing something, try adding one of the complementary fun types.

If you want to read more about classifying and analyzing fun, here are some resources:

A table with assorted playing components, dice and playing cards, and play sheets and mats.
Roar of Alliance is a fun game to play, and now after reading Selene’s article, I can’t stop wondering how someone would evaluate the game in regards to the type of fun – what type of fun is your favorite game?

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Thank you so much to Selene for the excellent article and for making the theories of fun a little more approachable! I learned from reading this article, so I hope you did, too! Please share and keep checking back for more approachable theory!

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

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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.