This week we cover upcoming interviews about The Quick and Cortex Prime, and my past and current work with Cortex products, as well as how to make sun tea!
My stretch goal at $45k – Solarpunk! A post-scarcity setting where powerful corporate interests seek to destabilize the fruits of progress and the heroes try to stop them – it’s not about what you don’t have, it’s about keeping what you do.
Put 4 to 8 tea bags into a clean 2 quart or gallon glass container (4 teabags for a 2 quart container, 8 tea bags for a gallon container). Fill with water and cap. Place outside where the sunlight can strike the container for about 3 to 5 hours. Move the container if necessary to keep it in the sun. When the tea has reached its desired strength, remove from sun and put it in the refrigerator.
I add sugar and lemons, too! Lemons you add while it’s in the sun, and sugar you mix in while it’s still warm before refrigeration so it dissolves. Sugar is mostly to preference, anywhere from a half cup to a whole cup, in my experience. (Some people who LOVE sweet tea put in two cups!)
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
Playlist of muzak, played in the background with random control of the volume. Include at least one song played twice in a row (“Call Me Maybe” is great for this).
Roles
Four players are the cognizant, and control the mind.
Four players are the present, and control the body.
Setting
Players are people shopping at a Target [or equivalent shopping venue] for five things on their list. Each character will experience the dissociation of their mind from their body. When the parts of the character separate, the players will risk failure.
Play
There are ten things in the store as options to buy, and only five of them are on the characters’ lists. Characters must buy exactly those five items. When they enter the store, cognizant players flip a coin. On a heads, the character buys the first item on their list. On a tails, they miss it. After flipping, the cognizant steps one step back, away from the present. They must verbally communicate to the present no matter how far away they are, or how many people are shouting.
As they travel through the store, the players should converse about their day (in character or out). As each character finds an item, the cognizant will flip the coin to see if they buy it and take a step back. The present will pick up the item if appropriate. If the coin is ever dropped, the present will drop an item at random.
Play continues for no more than 15 flips. At the end, the cognizant tears up the list entirely and throws it away. The cognizant and the present come together and look at the items, to see if they matched their list to their remembrance.
Even if they did, they have no means to confirm.
– end –
It’s recommended to use the Script Change tools to ensure all players enjoy the game. It’s highly recommended to have a Wrap Meeting to go over the events of the game and decompress.
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
Tell me a little bit about Crescendo Giocoso. What excites you about it?
I like to think of Crescendo Giocoso as a my declaration of love to larp.
This live action role-playlist, as we like to call it, is not just a book which collect me and my favorite Italian authors scenarios, enhanced by Maria’s stunning graphics. It’s the sum of the experiences by a community of players, now gathered around the website Laiv.it. Each scenario has a very strong history, made by playtests and discussion. A lot of people and memories are involved in this project and we just want to engage as many others as possible. Because I think the main strength of games towards narrative, my other great passion, is the ability to establish a direct and close contact between all parties involved.
Over the years I had the pleasure of contribute to keep alive the interest for “chamber” larp in Italy and now, with the Italian Chamber Orchestra, I would like to put to good use this experience. So I develop a common approach to design for all the scenarios in Crescendo Giocoso, specifically to motivate me and my friends to reconsider our games in a new light. In order to make them accessible to everyone, to larpers with different background as well as to people who never played before. Without our supervision and without game masters or facilitators.
The group of players can read the instructions together and then begin to play, right here right now.
You say you developed a common approach. How did you do this? What did you use to make things work consistently?
We called our space Laiv.it, /laɪv/ as we pronounce it, because me and the other founders have a very hands-on approach: we’re most of all dedicated players and then authors. Once I decided to put the group of player at the heart of the project, I did my best to think from the standpoint of someone who tries to play a larp like ours for the first time.
First of all we have to choose one of the scenarios, so we need a technical data sheet (number of roles, time, replayability, leitmotiv), but also an effective preview. Since a scenario is a game about a story, it can benefit from something like a synopsis to charm readers and from a sneak peek to game mechanics, because they make the difference in the experience.
Once chosen the right scenario, we have to set it up and that’s where another important point for Crescendo Giocoso comes in: adaptability. We want to offer to players the opportunity to improvise out of nowhere, but at the same time we don’t want to discourage them to put a lot of efforts in costumes, props, soundtracks and so on. For this reason we wrote two possible staging for each scenario: Chamber staging, with only the bare essentials, and Symphony staging, with all the advices authors got from many runs.
Finally we come to actual instructions, specifically design bearing in mind the picture of a player reading them aloud to their peers. Without going even more into the details, I hope I made myself clear about my way of thinking, but on our Kickstarter page everyone can download and try a free scenario for 2 players, written by me and Alessandro Giovannucci and still in playtest: Letters not about love.
Luckily not everyone in the orchestra is such as pragmatic as me, so we can count on an interesting manifesto, written by Alessandro and his brother Andrea with the rest of their Chaos League collective. It’s called “Southern Way – New Italian Larp” and I think it’s fun they write this with their “blockbuster” games (with many players and which last days) in mind, but it perfectly fits the spirit in which we play, passionate and free.
Why did you make the games free of game masters and facilitators, and how does it benefit the players?
As an author of larp, I’ve never been really fond in performing NPC or in storytelling like a tabletop game master. I’ve always preferred to sit back and watch while the game itself lead the players to the epilogue. Just watching can be very useful for me, to improve and develop the scenario, but it would be very boring for anyone else.
I know our habit at the conventions has always been to explain the games ourselves to each group of players, but I thinks this is great if you’ve designed your scenario as a “travelling show”, an experience through which you guide the players. Crescendo Giocoso instead is a (e)book and its authors are not included in the shipping.
It’s more like a board game. Would you ever play a board game which say “Ok, set up everything for your friends, then step back, take a sit and just watch them?”. I hope this design choice can help to spread larp to a larger audience and we’ve already got encouraging results, within acting class and educational events.
“We” taking the place of “you” in the instructions is also a way to make it clear that a larp, as we mean it, it’s all about teamwork. No one can just wait for another player to save the day.
Years ago I helped with an anthology called “Dopocena da brivido” (“Thrilling after-dinner”), published by a mainstream Italian publisher. The idea behind this project was an host who offer an entertainment for their guests. Crescendo Giocoso is more like a jam session, where every piece must play its part.
What are some of the scenarios we encounter in Crescendo Giocoso?
Crescendo Giocoso can count on scenarios with different settings and mechanics, each one for a different number of players, from 2 to 30. So we have an historic game like “First they came”, by Andrea & Alessandro Giovannucci, in which the players will be three opponents of the Third Reich and the high fantasy “The Age of Men”, by Lorenzo Martinelli, that looks like it’s stepped out of Dungeons & Dragons with an extra splash of drama. We have a scenario set in Florence, “Something abous us”, by Barbara Fini & Rafu, which is all about an apartment block meeting (very typical in Italy) and then “Sturm und drang”, by Andrea Rinaldi, which takes place in an American stop grocery, intended as a liminal space like the ones by Samuel Beckett. “The theatre of Major Arcana”, by Yuka Sato & Valerio Amadei, plays with the ideas of acting class and workshops, while “The last sunset”, by Francesco Rugerfred Sedda, is a pulp story which resembles visual novels with its multiple endings.
As for my scenarios, I love making literary references and mixing genres, so, for example, “Tell-tale hearts” is inspired from the title by Edgar Allan Poe and “Winds of change” tells a story not so far from the Balkan War with a fairytale atmosphere.
The leitmotifs of the anthology are wide variety of game mechanics and the special importance attached to the evocative power of writing. It applies to the many character sheets and handouts, but also to the instructions.
I’ve always admired texts where clarity and atmosphere go hand in hand, in order to bring out strong emotions. No wonder I’m a fan of “24 game poems” by Marc Majcher.
When playtesting and working across international borders, what do you think are the most important aspects of working with other designers, especially on a sizeable project and with live action games?
When I know, you’ll know. In all seriousness, so far I’ve cooperated mainly with Italian authors and players: only if our Kickstarter Campaign will succeed and reach some stretch goals, we’ll be able to work on Crescendo Giocoso – Volume II with our international guests, Mikolaj Wicher, Evan Torner, Luiz Prado, Ole Peder Giaever and Jason Morningstar, without forgetting Antonio Amato, another Italian game-designer from Sicily.
Over the years I’ve played a lot of international larp, but I’m not a traveller and a pioneer like Flavio Mortarino, our editorial consultant, or Lapo Luchini (who’s going to design an Android App for Crescendo Giocoso, if we reach the stretch goal), or Francesco Rugerfred Sedda (game design student at the It University of Copenaghen) or the Giovannucci brothers (theorists and keynote speakers).
They all suggested me many interesting games, I read them all and tried to pick up the ones most compatible with my design concept. Scenarios compatibile, but at the same time very different from ours, because the Volume II won’t be a more of the same at all.
Of course I’ve already speak with all these brilliant game designer and I’ve tried to communicate them a strong vision: we aren’t going to cut & paste their scenarios in our layout, we’ll work together for a “Crescendo giocoso edition” with all its peculiarities.
After all some of their games have always been and will continue to be available for free, just like all my scenarios are on Laiv.it (in Italian only). We don’t want to offer to readers only Maria Guarneri’s graphics, or Chiara Locatelli’s translations, or the editing by Jason Morningstar and me, but a brand new look on larp design.
For this reason we need the support of smart authors from all over the world, but above all the enthusiasm of all dedicated larpers out there.
Tell me a little bit about The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power. What excites you about it?
Excellent and appropriately timed question! The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power (SCUP, for short) is a dark fantasy tabletop role-playing game by myself, Todd Nicholas, and my friend Thomas J. It is a hack of Apocalypse World that uses the core mechanics of that game to explore the kinds of political intrigue you would see in something like A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin, The First Law by Joe Abercrombie, Imperial Radch by Ann Leckie, and the TV show Vikings. We’re currently Kickstarting the game and it’s doing quite well, so we’re happy to finally get it into people’s hands. Tom and myself have been working on this game on and off for a number of years. We started because we had just played a game of Apocalypse World and we thought those mechanics might work well for a fantasy story about power, politics, and intrigue. We were never quite sure if we wanted to make SCUP a polished game that we put out into the world in physical form or just keep it something we passed around as a PDF, but there seemed to be enough interest in it that we decided to go ahead on it.
What excites me about SCUP is that I love that we’ve given players particularly powerful moves to affect their fictional world. The thing Tom and I spent the greatest amount of time on in the design of SCUP was the moves for character classes. We wanted people to be able to do big, dramatic things. For example, one class is called “The Beloved.” They’re sort of a preacher or prophet type. One of their moves lets them see and confront the inner demons of NPCs, permanently changing them in some way. The first time we actually had someone use this move at the table, and they were literally having a duel of wits with the manifestation of another character’s worst fears in an effort to help the character conquer them, we were incredibly stoked to be able to give players that sort of narrative agency. So yeah, that’s my answer. I like being able to watch people do bold things in our game that let them get their hands nice and dirty.
What have you done with SCUP to take the PbtA mechanics and make them really mesh with the fiction and framing?
The PbtA system already does a nice job of focusing on close up character drama, but we have created a number of mechanics that really drive this home. In particular, we have focused on giving the MC moves to push social hierarchy in their toolbox of moves. They have a different set of moves to use against common PCs and noble PCs, for example. Additionally, characters may be in the employ of a Patron or may be called on by a Faction to fulfill a duty or obligation. We wanted to push the idea that this game is about reputation, information, hierarchy, and obligation using mechanics such as these. Mostly, though, we want people to have fun getting involved in intrigue between characters!
You mentioned “The Beloved.” Tell me about some of the playbooks – who are they? How do the moves help tell the story?
What we’ve really focused on in SCUP is playbook moves that really drive the narrative and give players a chance to do big things in the fiction. Because the game is about intrigue and power, many of the moves focus on things like getting and spreading information, or making big, dramatic things happen in the gameplay. For example, I played a game last night at Forge Midwest with some folks. There was an NPC named Faela that two PCs wanted alive, cause they needed information from her, and one PC was tasked to assassinate. That PC, playing the class The Black Hood, rolled her move Their Eyes Never Open, which allowed her to assassinate an NPC within her reach. She had already snuck into the Ziggurat where the NPC was, and succeeded at her roll, allowing her to kill the character. When the other two PCs reached her, they found her deceased, but one of them, playing the Bloodletter, took her body and rolled his move God Complex to attempt to bring her back to life, though she came back as something awful, barely able to provide the information he needed. Meanwhile, a player playing The Voice, an advisor to the high priestess who ruled the city, had been using her move An Ear at Each Door to have her network of spies to gather information on the Priestess’s enemies which she ultimately used to betray the Priestess and claim power for herself. These are the kinds of blood-opera moments we’re really hoping players use the moves to create in games of SCUP.
What elements of your fictional inspirations were the most important to your design?
If you think about something like A Song of Ice and Fire, you think about the big things that George R.R. Martin makes happen in that world. Characters die, the world changes, relationships change, etc. As such, we wanted to make sure that the MC and players had a lot of power to affect the world in compelling ways. To give you an example, we have something we call “end of season moves,” which are triggered by the players when a campaign is nearing its conclusion. They give the players the ability to mechanize something like, say, the Red Wedding from A Storm of Swords. Most PCs wouldn’t just drop something that game changing on their players, but the end of season moves give them permission to, with the player’s input.
Additionally, we thought very hard about the kinds of characters in the books we used as inspiration. The playbook of The Screw, for example, is very much based on Sand dan Glokta from The First Law while The Voice is modeled after Littlefinger from A Song of Ice and Fire and Wormtongue from Lord of the Rings. We wanted the players to feel like they had more options available to them than fighters, wizards, and rulers. We wanted them to have characters that were powerful in more subtle ways, more backroom ways, etc., which is often very important to political, dark fantasy.
What makes SCUP special to you, as a creator and gamer each?
SCUP is the first game I really started designing. I designed it with Tom so we could play something fun with our friends. Some of the campaigns we’ve done with SCUP have been some of my favorite gaming experiences, and the fact that something I created with my friend, on a lark, just to have some fun is going to be a real thing in the world that hopefully brings some fun to other people’s gaming table is genuinely humbling and astonishing to me.
This week we talk about upcoming interviews and features, as well as Turn (my shapeshifter game in progress), poverty in rural towns, and a recipe from my childhood, Brownie Stew!
1 lb ground beef (seasoned as preferred, optionally using garlic and/or pepper) ½ onion, diced to ½ inch or smaller 1 bell pepper, diced to ½ inch or smaller 4 regular size cans condensed Campbells vegetarian vegetable soup 4 cups of white Minute rice with 4 cups water (if using other rice, this is 8 cups cooked equivalent)
Brown the burger with onion and pepper. Drain grease from the mixture. Add into the mixture the cans of soup and add one soup can of water. Heat the mix until it is evenly hot.
Separately make the 4 cups of white Minute rice using the Minute rice instructions or the 8 cups rice otherwise cooked. Pour the stew mix over the rice. Salt to taste.
Note: I do really hope to get these podcasts on various sites like iTunes and Google Play soon but it’s a combination of energy and money to do so. I hope you understand!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
ETA 4/16/2017: FYI, the recording for Designer & Devourer Episode 1 has had the hiss removed, so hopefully will be easier listening. Brie learned a skill! https://www.patreon.com/posts/8779339 — New podcast, I think?
Note: This is my first time recording a larger piece and my first podcast, so please understand I’m new! I hope to use some music in the intros sometime in the future, possibly? But here’s it!
Designer & Devourer is a 15-30 minute audio episode with my thoughts on upcoming games, design, and game theory, plus a semi-relevant personal or internet-sourced recipe. This week I talk upcoming interviews on Thoughty, the #200wordRPG contest, and my Great Grandma’s punch recipe.
Today Slade Stolar is back for an interview about this new project, Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers! It’s currently on Kickstarter and Slade and I nearly crossed emails contacting each other about it! It sounds like a fantastic adventure, and I’m excited to share Slade’s responses with you.
—
Tell me a little about Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers. What excites you about it?
It would be weird to say “everything”, right? — I’ve had the core image of the game in my head for a long while. There are three thieves in ragged, dirt-smeared clothes running through smog-filled alleyways in a late-medieval city. They arrive at junction where there are government officers (some kind of police patrol) with lanterns and barking dogs cutting off their escape. The thieves get noticed. They grin slightly, and activate a device that turns them as immaterial as the smog. They drift away, making their escape.
After publishing The Indie Hack, and seeing how the core rules resonated with certain people, I wanted to write a game that could make that scene happen. I think I’ve done that.
The main components of the game that excite me are the relationship system, which revolves around the classical four humours (sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic, and choleric), and the proto-industrial setting, which revolves around all kinds of pseudo-science or non-science (trepanning, feng shui, astrology, numerology, etc.), and all of which are very real within the setting.
What kind of action can we see in the game – fast fights, stealth? How do the mechanics support it?
One of the great things about this game is that you tailor your experience based on the Patron of the characters. If you are looking for a stealthy game, perhaps your Patron wants valuable artwork stolen to complete her collection. If you’re itching for a fight, perhaps your Patron is a gang boss, who wants to muscle out rival gangs. Maybe you’ve got a Patron who wants notoriety and influence, and you end up doing a lot of socially focussed missions. The core mechanic is the same for all of these: with good dice rolls, you collect little chunks of narrative control called “details”, just as in our previous game, The Indie Hack. Once you’ve got a certain number in your favour, you succeed. But, if, along the way, you get some bad rolls and collect a certain number of details against you, you’re out of commission. The game ends up being quick and intense, as an extreme roll can grant up to two or three details out of a total of three to five. Because rolls are so important and dangerous, players will want to role-play up until a point of crisis before grabbing the dice. I would say, you can’t play this game slowly: it’s a crisis machine.
I’d like to hear more about the relationship system! How does it function, and what was the inspiration?
I think the inspiration was a few random mentions of this in Shakespeare. It was interesting to research this strange classical interpretation of psychology based on the liquids that flow in the body (and fits well with this setting based on pseudo-science and non-science). You have a primary humour that is your outward facade (maybe you’re melancholic, meaning reclusive and depressive, but cautious and prudent). As you interact more intimately with people, you show them other aspects of your personality, i.e., your secondary humours (maybe, in front of your fellow player characters you act sanguine, meaning smothering and judgemental, but joyful and optimistic); you make a list of these characters. Once you’ve written four people under a secondary humour, you have a bit of a crisis of personality (who am I, really?) and shift your primary humour over. It encourages you to think a bit about how we’re always performing our personality. I think it’s more dynamic and engaging than nature/demeanor (of Vampire) or alignment (of general fantasy games).
What are some setting elements you really love and how do they interact?
In terms of world-building, I really like the hierarchy I’ve set up (as a player, I’ll hate it and want to see it destroyed). In contrast to the typical fantasy setting, which has lots of monarchies, Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers is a mixed oligarchy, where a highly corrupt technocratic class rules the masses and the aristocracy has its own power system outside (often above) the law. The players are at the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder, and that’s why the accept the help of a Patron. The Patron helps them to feel powerful, by giving them alchemical powers, but only while performing these (often illegal) missions. The setting really feeds into the character motivations and the types of adventures that the players will go on. I want characters to take on the bureaucracy and lose. I want them to try to mingle with the high-society types and be humiliated. Other times, I want them to win.
In terms of mechanical moving parts, I like the “looking for trouble” tables; each district has random interesting happenings that can draw the players into larger conflicts or expose hidden parts of the setting.
You talked about the thieves and their adventures – what other types of characters and experiences would people often find in Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers?
I don’t know that I can answer this one, at least, any more than I could predict what a given group will do with a given game. Just to be clear, I’m okay with thieves of the Robin Hood type, but I’m guessing that your Patron doesn’t have that many scruples. A big part of this game is navigating a difficult moral path, although that sounds a bit dull. Basically, I want characters to experience hard decisions, pride, pain, shame, confusion, and split loyalties. I want them to do things that they wouldn’t do if it were their choice, and have to deal with the consequences just the same. At the end, as in much of Shakespeare, nearly everyone is dead. I want the characters to lead intense, dangerous, tragic lives.
Today I have an interview with Fraser Ronald on his current project, Sword’s Edge, which is on Kickstarter now! Fraser answered some of my questions about the updated, refined Sword’s Edge game below!
—
Tell me a little about Sword’s Edge. What excites you about it?
What I love about Sword’s Edge is how it allows for evocative and strong characters while trying to lower the amount of work required by GMs so that they can focus on facilitating the story. The characters are built out of ideas and descriptions, so it’s as easy as “tell me about the character you want to play,” write down the response, take a bunch of descriptions out of that and you have your character. For the GM, it’s very easy to run improvisational games – which is my preferred method – by boiling down most mechanical obstacles to a few choices guided by a couple of tables. There’s no dice rolling for the GM, and the mechanics are simple enough that one can spend one’s time helping to keep the story moving.
Players get invested in characters that work mechanically pretty much how they described them narratively, and the GM gets to spend their time helping those characters be awesome, sometimes by creating really challenging obstacles, and other times creating scenes where they get to show their uber competence.
What are the origins of Sword’s Edge mechanically? What got the game going at the start, and what are important elements of the game in it’s final form?
Sword’s Edge is really an amalgam of ideas from a bunch of different games. Its nearest relation is PDQ by Chad Underkoffler by way of Jaws of the Six Serpents by Tim Gray. This was the game that led me to design Sword Noir, which was the direct ancestor of Sword’s Edge. Along with PDQ, I would say that important influences came from the Shadow of Yesterday by Clinton R. Nixon; Fate 3.0 by Rob Donoghue, Fred Hicks, and Leonard Balsera; Lady Blackbird by John Harper, and Old School Hack by Kirin Robinson. These all had impact on the designs of Sword Noir and Kiss My Axe, which had Sword’s Edge at their core and through which Sword’s Edge developed.
There are a few keys in my mind to Sword’s Edge. The use of descriptive Qualities to create characters allows players to pretty much play whatever they can imagine. That only players roll dice helps remove one task from the GM and a very abstract action system further allows all activities to run through the same mechanics – there are no sub-systems in Sword’s Edge. Finally, the Initiative system really changes how one approaches actions as once a character has Initiative, it is necessary to take a risk to seize that Initiative. Only as an active character can one affect change, so Initiative is super important and can lead to some risky actions as PCs try to seize it from tough opponents.
What are the fictional inspirations for Sword’s Edge?
Because Sword’s Edge is a generic RPG, it’s not really rooted in fiction, however the stretch goal is for “Lawless Heaven,” my homage to Korean action cinema. I’ve been enamoured of Korean action movies since I saw Nowhere to Hide in 1999. Since then, Korean movies have continued to improve and are now some of the best on the planet. Recent years have seen some insanely great action and crime movies, like Man from Nowhere and A Bittersweet Life. Then there are the neo-noirs, like Oldboy and The Yellow Sea. These are absolutely riveting movies. So “Lawless Heaven” tries to boil down the experience of a Korean actioner into a one-shot, specifically built to be run at conventions. It includes a discussion of using it as either then beginning or part of an ongoing campaign, but the scenes presented are for a single adventure arc.
Some of the example characters appear to be Asian (1). How did you prepare to write about non-Canadian characters, fictions, and backgrounds? Did you find it challenging?
The characters on the Kickstarter page are from “Lawless Heaven,” so they are Korean. The action is set in the industrial city of Ulsan, which is home to a Hyundai Motors car factory and the largest shipyard in the world, owned by Hyundai Heavy Industries. In the adventure, I try to introduce some interesting aspects of Korean culture – like the lack of firearms in general and the prevalence in certain areas of drinking tents or pojangmacha – but the story is designed so that it would be easy to set it elsewhere.
On a more Kickstarter-level question, how have you worked to integrate your past products into the release of this product, while still ensuring Sword’s Edge gets priority in attention?
Having two successful Kickstarters under my belt allowed me to approach the whole process with a little less concern and stress. Also, for backers, I have a record of meeting my commitments and delivering promises product, so I think that improves the chance people will be willing to put their money down. — Thank you Fraser for answering my questions! I hope you all enjoyed reading and that you’ll check out Sword’s Edge on Kickstarter!
[(1 – Brie here!) This originally said Chinese in this question because I wasn’t sure based on the pictures and Googled last names. I try really hard to be better at this judgment, but the images aren’t very clear – I have no better excuse. I changed it so that it is clearer to my readers, but wanted to let you know that I did fuck up, and I’ll try to do better next time.]
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
Today’s interview is with Jakob Schindler-Scholz about the Kickstarter project Meet Diana Danko, a live-stream interactive vampire tale. When Jakob emailed me with the Kickstarter link, I was immediately intrigued – interactive performances are fascinating to me and I wanted to hear more! Check out the interview below and see more at their press page and Kickstarter.
—
Tell me a little about Meet Diana Danko. What excites you about it?
The aspect I’m most passionate about is that we are creating a truly open experience, while still maintaining a strong narrative. The project is heavily inspired by “choice and consequence” games like the Walking Dead Series by Telltale or Life is Strange, but with limitless possibilities.
We achieve this by having four amazing actresses perform live and reacting to the input of the audience, who is watching via live stream. They can type anything they want at any time while they watch. It has elements of tabletop RPG, LARP, theater and FMV video games, but I don’t think there is anything like it currently out there.
Example of the process of the show.
How did you come up with the idea for Meet Diana Danko?
The setting, characters and basic concept were created for a local short theater festival in Vienna. The audience found themselves trapped in a room with a vampire trying to get in, discussing different strategies to get out. The inspiration for this was the classic horror movie trope “heroes have to fight their way to freedom”, and I thought it would be a fun way to engage the audience – which it was. There were lots of intense discussions and great interactions with the audience, sometimes resulting in totally unexpected outcomes, for example people occupying the vampire’s coffin – which was exactly what we hoped for.
We then discussed how to take the concept even further, and came up with the idea of turning it into an online performance, but without losing the direct connection with the audience – which is an immense challenge because people are not physically present. So the story, setting and mode of interaction will change, but the heart of it all – the characters – will stay the same.
How does the event work technically, from receiving input from viewers to making it happen?
You watch the show through the eyes of the protagonist (wearing a head mounted camera), who sort of stumbles into the whole thing, and bit by bit learns about the characters and the backstory. In the interface, you can also type anything that comes to your mind, at any time. The idea is that you provide us with the thoughts of the protagonist – and as is the nature of thoughts, some are only brief flashes, some are more present, some are concrete and some obscure. We employ a sorting algorithm to visualise all thoughts at once, sort of like multiple word clouds put together. This visualisation will be available for all to see.
So the visualisation is handled by a program, but the crucial part – incorporating these thoughts into the story – is not. We have a person dedicated to that who watches the visualisation constantly and has a voice link to the protagonist. So this person gets an impression of how the audience feels, what ideas are there, and uses that information to give commands or suggestions to the protagonist. So it is kind of an inner voice, but one she takes really seriously.
The important thing is: With this procedure, most of the actresses have to worry about anything going on outside the performance. The protagonist gets input from outside, but all other actresses can concentrate on their characters and react authentically to what is happening. This is why we came up with this quite complex process: To ensure that the improvisation can be really focused, because we believe that’s what it takes to create a fascinating experience.
Word clouds!
What do all of the people involved bring to the table to make the show happen?
First I have to say, I am really honored to have a team where everyone is extremely invested in the idea and not just focusing on their respective area. Denise, who does the design and communications is excellent in finding the right way to get across what we’re all about, which is especially important because there are so many aspects to this. Adam and Gregor are very passionate developers who will not be satisfied until the algorithm and UI are so well-defined that you’ll forget about them while being drawn into the story, and Philipp has the intuition and experience to get what the audience is looking for and translating it into actionable hints for our protagonist.
That being said, I have to highlight Julia, Stella and Paula, the actresses (we will cast the fourth actress, the protagonist, with the help of our backers). Because their contribution is what makes the show: Usually, when you have a piece of fiction, there is a writer or a writing team, they create the characters and tell the story. But this way, it is extremely likely that some characters will be extremely well written and others will be weak – and there is only so much even a talented actress can do with a bland character.
When you talk about the performance, what do you really think makes this format help the fiction to really shine?
I think we have extremely well-developed characters. Because we don’t know what will happen, it’s not enought to know how they react in a handful of specific situations. We already spent a lot of time getting to know the characters for “Diana Danko in Concert”, and we will do a lot more development for this piece. It’s a very collaborative process: We discuss the fears, secrets, and desires of the characters together, explore them in improvisations and make sure we create characters who are complex, with nuances and little quirks and secrets that may not come to pass every time we perform, but they are there, ready to be discovered and adding to the experience.
—
Thanks so much to Jakob for the interview! Meet Diana Danko sounds really interesting and definitely worth learning more about. Check out the Kickstarter if it tickles your fancy and share this post with anyone you think might like it!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
I wanted to write a bit today about a technique I’ve been using for a long time now to design games and conceptualize sessions and campaigns (even if I’m not running, I know how I want my character to feel, or how to advise people who are running). The technique is what I call an “emotion map.”
Emotion maps use word clouds to establish what emotions are the most important to put into a game, and what ones you want to avoid. I have a few different ones I’ve used – one for designing a game itself, one for session planning (for one-shots), and one for campaigns. I’ve put together some examples of them to walk you through!
The first thing I do is grab a piece of paper and pen (you could do this digitally, though!) and title whatever it is I’m working on. Here’s the starting page for Turn.
Look at all that beautiful blank space.
A title is important because it reminds you of what you’re looking for when you’re stumped. You want to have a relatively big space to write on, because it gives some room to breathe or scratch stuff out if you need to.
(ETA:)
Emotion maps are kind of like our solar system, where the words all have different sizes and go around a point just beside what we consider the center (our system circles a spot right off center of the sun). You can choose to put them closer or farther away based on importance as well as based on desired impact, or you can scatter them. I generally use the mapped out on importance with bigger things.
The words are intermixed to show that they can conflict and interfere with each other. You could list them or order them otherwise, but this visual representation works best for me and provides an organic representation of the emotions I want present in the game. (/ETA)
From here, I’ll write in a few words in larger text. Let’s start with four!
Companionship, conflicted, desire, hopeful.
The words here are the most prominent emotions. I want the characters in Turn to feel these things during the game the most. The words don’t have to be consistent (verbs, nouns, adverbs, adjectives, whatever), they just have to mean something and relate to emotions.
The words I chose are companionship, conflicted, desire, and hopeful. You can see how these things would tie into a game like Turn, which is about shapeshifters in small towns struggling between their two identities, wanting to satisfy the needs of both, in need of support from their fellow shapeshifters, and looking forward to finding balance. Right?
More words! In smaller text! Use one more than the prominent emotions, to create some interference.
Hunger, wonder, rejection, isolation, trust.
These are secondary emotions. These leap off of other emotions or are in deeper and less often found, but are still vital to the story. They’re smaller than the prominent emotions in size to show their lessened influence, but big enough to start interfering with the others. The words are hunger, wonder, rejection, isolation, and trust. For Turn, PCs might experience love or greed, or just actual human or animal needs. They could also marvel at the abilities they use and gain, but be denied from the societies they live within – leaving them alone. That’s why they need to rely on their fellow shifters.
Final words! Smallest! Now use two more than the first (so six!), to make the sheet like a minefield.
These are avoided emotions. They are the emotions that can come from the experiences in the game that I want to have happen less, or not at all! They are the smallest because they can’t be forgotten but you don’t want to be reminded of what they really are until you look, because you don’t want to seek them out. The words are satisfaction, confidence, powerlessness, fear, pain, and loneliness.
Turn is about shapeshifters with significant power, so they shouldn’t ever feel like there’s nothing they can do. But, they shouldn’t ever feel like everything is done, or feel secure that they have everything under control. I don’t want players to struggle and feel like they’re in a bad state, and as much as there will be times when they are alone, I don’t want them without companionship (callback to the prominent emotions!) or someone to turn to (hey, trust!), components (from my translation) that when lacking produce loneliness.
Here are the notes I made on the sheet to give some context to the map:
Notes! I made them!
These notes are for a full game (obvs), but the point is that they’ll grow over time. You can expand the emotion map, adjust it as time goes on, and so on. You can also use the avoided emotions as reference for threats in the game – how do you have something bad happen without making someone afraid? These also will influence the core elements of my design.
The number of words is important because of where it places emphasis. You only have a few core emotions to focus on as the big ones, or else you’ll get exhausted trying to fill in every experience from just a top-level build. You have more of the secondary emotions so that there’s room to grow into them as the game develops. And you have even more avoided emotions to really highlight this is what I want to avoid, this is what will go away from the point of my game – when you know what you don’t want to do, it helps show what you do want to do.
You’ll notice in the final sheet that there are not just good emotions as prominent, nor are there only bad emotions as avoided.
Not all bad, not all good.
It’s important to know that in long term games, you’ll have good stuff and bad stuff, and when designing a game, you have to factor in all of those possibilities and figure out the big thing: if your players are going to have a negative experience – and they will! – what kind do you want it to be?
I also have in the following gifs the pages of the one-shot session of Shadowrun: Anarchy I conceptualized, and a three-session long-play of Monsterhearts.
Shadowrun: Anarchy Session – Prominent: Excitement, pressured, powerful, motivation. Secondary: Vindication, amusement, failure, anxiety (should have had 5). Avoided: Frustrated, anger, disappointment, boredom, lost, vengeful. Giphy Link
As noted in the gif and caption, I missed one in the secondary emotions, but I think the point still sits! This has a similar structure of fewer prominent emotions to more avoided emotions. The reasoning for this is that in a shorter game like a one-shot, you only have time to hit a few emotional peaks on purpose, but the secondary emotions might come in along with them or be good to throw in as additional bites. But you really want to avoid the emotions you focus on avoiding.
Here are my notes on the one-shot:
One-shot notes!
I noted here that this kind of structure is for one shots or single sessions, if you don’t plan out full campaigns or play an episodic game. It also has notes about having fewer positive emotions on it – if you look at the list, almost all of the avoided emotions are negative. This is totally okay! There are still some negative emotions in the secondary and prominent ones, but the point here is that hey, it’s a one shot of a bombastic game, and I super don’t want my players to get bummed out or bored.
The final Shadowrun: Anarchy one-shot emotion map:
Punchy!
Next, I did one of my more complicated emotion maps that I’ve used for both plotting game stuff, but also fiction! It’s for a three-session Monsterhearts game.
I feel terrible for the players in this game, honestly. Anyway, as you can see, there are some varying emotions all through the sessions, some that reflect off of each other, and some that conflict. This is good! You don’t want the same emotions every session, though you can have them evolve (no safety to finding comfort to building trust and having gratitude, suspicion to understanding to obsession).
My notes on the Monsterhearts emotion map:
In the Monsterhearts sessions, you have more prominent emotions and fewer avoided ones! Why change this? First off, you’re working with a full arc of story – this isn’t encompassing a potential of many stories or a single run in a one-shot, it’s a story told to complete emotional arcs for PCs. You could do something like this for a single session of Monsterhearts or similar games if you intend to go through a full experience, but if it’s a piece of time instead of a range, it’s not as useful.
I also think that it depends on the type of game. Shadowrun, for example, can have emotion in it, but it typically has fewer, focused emotions. Monsterhearts is a game about teenagers and sex and horror, so it runs the whole range of complicated emotions, especially in long play. And you want to welcome all sorts of emotions – it is less common to say “Oh, I don’t want the ghoul to feel that right now” because you really want to see what happens when a ghoul feels, say, absolution, or joy!
The final Monsterhearts long-play emotion map:
I am really bad at sizes of words. I’ll work on it. 🙂
You can go inside out, or outside in, with how many words you use. Just be super cognizant of what you’re saying with that construction!
Remember:
Too many prominent emotions can wear people out in shorter games.
Fewer overarching prominent emotions for designing full games is better because you can’t predict every session.
If the game is super emotionally intense, go wild with the desired emotions, but make sure to avoid emotions that really spoil the essence of the game.
I hope you find the emotion map technique useful! It’s been really valuable for me as a designer, as a creator in general, and as a player. I think it looks at games from the perspective that matters to me as a designer and player, where things feel. I might not be super great at math or anything, but I know feelings pretty damn well.
