Tag: game design

Shadowrun: Anarchy Review

My very, very long Shadowrun: Anarchy Review is HERE!

Shadowrun: Anarchy
First things first

I won’t be commenting very much on the fiction in the book because I don’t typically read it and I’d rather focus on the game, but I will be looking at flavor text in character descriptions and so on. I haven’t yet played the game for logistics reasons, so this is purely a review of the mechanics, art, and characters. I intend to eventually read the Seattle background but I have set it aside for this review to get the things out that people will see first and most often.

I have only played Shadowrun 3e, and only built characters for 3e and 5e. I’ve been playing tabletop RPGs since I was 15, text-based since 11, and my first TTRPG that I recall playing was Shadowrun. I’ve played indie and story games since around 2011, and I’ve been writing on Thoughty about games, doing interviews, and occasionally writing reviews for like, 4 years I think. Maybe longer? I bounced blog names a couple times. I’ve GM’d and played, and I’ve worked on some tabletop games which you can read about here on my work page.

With that out of the way…

Shadowrun: Anarchy on first glance is a true family member to 5e, having beautiful art, lots of graphics, and fiction first. The art fits just fine! The graphics we’ll get to. The fiction… let me explain here that I don’t like fiction on RPGs, for the most part. I like fiction within RPGs – specifically, if you look back to like, Shadowun 3e where the interactions between The Smiling Bandit and Harlequin were interspersed in the rules and flavor text, that kind of thing I like. Unreliable narrators having interactions between bits of important information just really felt like the game to me.

That is, unfortunately, not the dealio in Shadowrun: Anarchy. I am sure the fiction is fun and great – but I don’t really have interest in it. I hope you do! But the fiction does you no good if you don’t like the rest. Covering art, then layout, then mechanics, then flavor text. Basically what you see first, whether you can even read it, what’s inside, and how it’s dressed up. (click thru)

The Art

I’m not doing a full numbers breakdown of the art in SR:A because 1) I don’t think it’s as valuable as it seems and 2) I don’t think it’s entirely necessary. The art in the book is still majority men or masculine, but there are a greater number of women or femmes than I expected to see. There are a number of androgynous people, but I was incredibly disappointed to see zero androgynous or nonbinary styled characters in the pregens. Getting close to gender binary parity is great, but this issue is in the forefront for me of late and I still can’t fathom why – I never have been able to – we don’t see more androgynous characters, especially in identity as opposed to simply presentation, in Shadowrun. I mean, y’all. Y’all.

Also, most of the time we get this:

But then we got this:

But let me be clear, my problems with the second piece here are mostly that it seems somewhat disjointed (kind of literally, but if it had a caption talking about an articulated spine, I’d be cool) and I was just kind of bummed out by how it felt in comparison to the other (frankly badass) art. This is the only piece that really stood out, but I wouldn’t be a cranky critiquing feminist if I didn’t point it out.

The Layout

The layout overall has a couple of hinky bits. Foremost, shaded boxes. Shaded boxes are not something I’m a fan of, and everyone who has talked about layout with me probably knows that. One of the biggest complaints I’ve heard thus far, that I agree with, is that the shaded boxes on the character sheets are bad news bears.

There is also shading/coloring on sidebars and callout boxes that could be done away with for readability and to make it possible to print. I’ll say this one time: If I cannot print a character sheet, it is functionally useless to me. Bonus note: If you make it a fillable form downloadable as well with the game that can also be printed and legible, I’ll love you forever.

Most of the rest of the book is bog standard Shadowrun/80s-90s-esque layout, from what I can tell. There are some more rounded edges, but that’s not too different. Standard two-column, as following.

There are also, of course, tables. I personally love tables, but the tables in SR:A leave me wanting because they don’t have any dividing lines. Some people like them without, they flow more easily. For me, they’re less readable, and I also just don’t really dig the look. Gimme something that looks directly ripped out of Excel and I’ll be cool. Example of current tables follows!

Also, the text is super, super small. Like, I have to zoom in to read it clearly a lot of the time, and I have no issues with reading up close most of the time. Perhaps it’s better in print? But we should be designing for digital too. I also don’t know if it works well with screen readers, as I couldn’t figure mine out. That’s something that should be clear!

Aside from those things? I’m sure someone with more graphics and layout experience could nail down further problems. Those are the ones that hit me. Moving on!

The Mechanics

First, a quick note on the way the game works in Shadowrun: Anarchy. Anarchy is not a game with a GM running the show and the players taking on roles within that show. Anarchy is about collaborative narrative storytelling (it’s a thing!) and there are things that they’ve done great about this, and things that may be confusing for people who haven’t done it before. I may be translating the rules incorrectly, but if you like what I’m saying, just play it that way, it’s just a damn book.

SR:A institutes turns, effectively letting each player take a turn playing their part of the scene. From what I can tell, there are no rules preventing other players from acting within that scene, but they would most likely need some input from the lead player in those scenes. From there, we can see each player narrates within their turn their actions and their interpretation of the situation. Cool! Now, I’ve seen some people get stuck on Talk Time. Admittedly, I kind of hate the term, and would prefer something like “free play,” but that’s just being a jerk about semantics.

Talk Time itself makes sense. When things are going down or it’s too hectic, let’s stop with turns for a minute and get shit done, right? However, from the comments on the Prototype review and the forums I’d seen it interpreted that you can’t interact freely at all outside of Talk Time, and regardless of how it was originally intended in the text, I read it otherwise, and it has been clarified since then in the text under Turns and Narrations. Specifically, it says that “Other players may have things to say during a narration–their characters may react somehow, or players may offer commentary, ideas, or observations–but the primary thrust of the Narration should be directed by the player whose turn it is.” Which, I mean, yeah? That’s just being polite. However, I see why they had to write it out. Hooray, rules to help solve social play problems!

For framing of the next mechanical bits, you use six-sided dice (d6s) in dice pools, scored individually – 5 or 6 on the die is a success.

Character generation is not complicated, in my opinion. There are definitely a crapton of characters to select from if you want to just quick start, as the section for pregenerated characters is massive (but I have some thoughts later). The game suggests you select a contract brief (scenarios for quick play), but if you want to build characters first or play without a contract brief, I’d just go to it. For a new GM or a new group, you might find the briefs useful, at the very least to learn useful structure for a general shadowrun.

Characters use some stuff that seem kind of “eh, maybe,” while others seem absolutely essential. The perceived essentials are: Personal Data, Attributes, Skills, Shadow Amps, Karma, Qualities, Weapons, Armor, Gear, and calculating your condition monitor. That’s a lot of words, not as hard as it sounds. The things I’ve noted as seeming optional are Dispositions and Cues. These don’t have a lot of mechanical impact, and I can guarantee for a lot of people they’ll be dismissed. However, you’re playing a narrative game here. That makes a difference.

If you look at the character sheet for Ms. Myth (one of my favorites), you can see how these things might be useful for 1) new players, 2) players new to narrative games, 3) players with a new character, 4) players who are unfamiliar with Shadowrun’s world, and/or 5) players who are just plain tired and need some good ideas on a slow day.

This is a moment where I remind people that just because you don’t need a thing, does not mean no one needs a thing, or would benefit from it.

Character creation goes through these items, however, pretty smoothly. Don’t be fooled by the early character creation section like I was at first, go straight to page 61.

To create a character, you:

  • Choose what type of character you want to play, name them, and create a character “theme” (basic description)
  • Optionally create “tags” (helping define your character)
  • Choose a game level (this is how many points you’ll get based on how hard or advanced a game you want, and should be chosen as a group)
  • Choose a metatype (Are you a little troll? Yes. Yes you are.)
  • Determine whether you’re Awakened or Emerged (you can be one, the other, or neither, and they basically mean you can do magic, you can do matrix junk with your mind, or neither)
  • Assign attributes (Strength, Agility, Willpower, Logic, Charisma, Essence, and Edge – I still kind of hate Edge, I miss when Karma was able to be spent for some of the purposes Edge is used)
  • Choose skills (general and specialized, the latter of which gives you bonus dice in appropriate situations)
  • Select Shadow Amps (encompassing all augmentations and magic, including technomancers and casting spells – there’s a list with some examples but there is a lot of freedom to define them. Also, there is essence loss! If your augment has essence loss, you get a penalty on your dice pool for magic- and healing-related tests.)
  • Figure out Karma (This functions as experience points, so you can obtain both points in attributes, skills, get Amps, change qualities, and get gear, weapons, and armor once earned)
  • Define some qualities and their effects (like edges and flaws for 3e, which I was super happy to see, though kind of took a bit to understand the differences between them and edge)
  • Choose your weapons (weapons have various ranges and impacts)
  • Choose your armor (armor is basically an add-on to your condition monitor, and gets marked off before you get hurt)
  • Sort out your condition monitor (has both stun and physical damage)
  • Get some gear (including Contacts)
  • Create cues (basically little phrases to help inspire your play, from the Cue System, which I haven’t bothered to read up, sorry)
  • Make a character background (personal data like size and gender – which they call “sex” in here and it made me really annoyed – the history of your character and how they behave, and dispositions that you can use to flag your actions in-game)

It sounds like a lot, but the individual actions don’t take very long themselves. There’s characters to choose from, and there’s not a lot of trouble in making your character, but this is way more than a lot of indie and story/narrative games. You will need to set aside more time for this game than you would, say, a Powered by the Apocalypse game – by a significant margin. That doesn’t mean it’s not a good game. Just different.

Combat in SR:A seems to be appropriately dice-heavy, which y’all know I love.

This isn’t actually that complicated, even though it looks it. It’s all simple numbers you’ll be adding, most single digits, versus similar numbers for the opponent. I like this combo, as I’m sure I’d learn it pretty quickly, which is a really good sign.

There is information on close combat damage, carry limits, unarmed combat, and lots of other stuff – one of my favorite bits is no more counting ammo! Handwaving ammo counts is awesome in my book (ha, my book). It also talks about custom mods of weapons (like knockbacks), which is awesome! There’s a note that I appreciated on making the game more or less lethal. Variety is good.

There are rules on taking and recovering damage, and repairing armor, which brings me to an important point: There are no nuyen in Anarchy. To me this is amusing on a conceptual level (of course there’s no monetary system! It’s anarchy!) but also I think it’s cool on a fiction level, in that everything has a cost – and more often than not, that cost is you.

Initiative advantages like wired reflexes now give you plot points, which are functionally shortcuts or cheats. They give you rerolls or change turn order, or add Glitch Dice (which I will say straight up I don’t understand, but the general idea is that if you roll a one on a glitch die, all goes to hell, if a 5 or 6, you get an exploit and things go well. This may sound fun and exciting to people who like adding additional chance into their game, but it’s not really something I love.), and so on.

Gear is mentioned in this same section (page 47) and is super duper basic. Gear has no specific mechanics, but can narratively help with problems, like med kits and tool sets. Very, very basic.

I don’t have much interest in hacking or cybercombat, but I’ll bet at least one of you do.

There is both AR & VR, where in AR you generally interact like software and icons and stuff, and in VR, you’re living all Second Life. AR doesn’t give any bonuses to hacking, but VR gives a +1 to hacking. With VR you can’t do anything non-virtual, and cybercombat kicks your ass. Hacking is basically a skill test, and cybercombat comes with a fun little dice pool calculation too.

There are additional matrix rules you can dive into on your own.

Spells and spirits and stuff have their own section. One of the most notable things is that there are no longer spell effect limits beyond those narratively defined, except in the case of combat spells, which only last for the time their damage is applied. GMs can apply a negative modifier if someone wants to maintain a spell for a long period of time. Not unreasonable, in my opinion, if you don’t have a jerk GM (if you do, try to find another GM! Look on the internet! Run, little chummer, run!).

There’s information on astral projection (no test needed) and astral combat (use the Astral Combat skill and have a standard combat experience, take stun damage).

Vehicle and drone combat addresses AR vs. VR in regards to how you use the equipment, and there’s info on vehicle movement, just basic stuff, but I’m sure gearheads will be happy to know they’ve been recognized.

There are also additional rules about breathing, environments, and mind control, in case you were wondering. There’s an important note about what an NPC can’t make someone do under mind control:

I mean, if you like doing that stuff, you do you. I’m glad they pointed it out though.

For those not a fan of sharing their GM hat, there are rules about giving GMs more control via plot points and who interprets perception tests. In standard SR:A the player doing the narration has freedom to define a lot of what is seen with a perception test, but with the adjusted version, the control is given solely to the GM and controlled by how many successes are rolled. I really have to say, though, give shared narrative a shot if you’ve got the time and energy. It can be really fun for everyone.

The GM section is a lot of detail that I’d not normally read since I’m traditionally a player. I wanted to highlight two pages that I think are absolutely important.

This page shouldn’t be necessary. But, it is. Just… yeah. Be cool, kids.

If you all thought that someone could put a section in a book called “Asking Good Questions” and I wouldn’t pull it out, you were sorely mistaken. As people know from games like Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts, as well as about 80 other indie games, asking good questions is an amazing GM tool – hell, amazing for players, too (“Do you really want to kill that guy? Why? Oh, he killed your uncle? Shit. Let’s do that.”). I like seeing it hard coded into a game, though, because I love questions, sooo much, and for narrative games they are the soymeat in the sausage.

The pregenerated characters are pretty fucking cool on the start, I’ll be honest. I love cool character art, many of them are really interesting. I’ll try to keep this brief.

The Native characters are very cool on the surface, but the conflation of Pacific Northwestern tribes and the Plains tribes in their backgrounds, plus having one of them taking artifacts and putting them in a museum (with jokes about angry locals, even), and Coydog wearing an eagle feather headdress that’s most likely inappropriate for her background are problems! I’m intending to do an extended feature on Natives in RPGs and specifically in Shadowrun with a consultant I’ve been corresponding with, where I’ll explore this, but for now: Chrome Bison is _really, really cool_ but we need to think harder and ask more questions and remember whose stories we’re telling. I know Natives are a huge, huge part of Shadowrun, and I don’t want people to stop making them part of it – but we need to do it right.

Chrome Bison, following, is cool – but cool doesn’t erase responsibility. Chrome Bison would be very disappointed in cultural appropriation, I think.

There may also be other issues of cultural appropriation or misrepresentation here. It’s important to remember that while Shadowrun is an alternate-fantasy-history, the cultures that it’s pulling from are real and existing in the majority of these cases. I am disappointed when I see misrepresentation and negative stereotypes in fiction, and I am doubly so in games where players are supposed to take on these identities.

That being said, there are a ton of characters I love, starting with Ms. Myth.

LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I LOVE TROLL FACES. LET ME. No wait, that is way too much enthusiasm for this, I’ll never finish. But yes, she seems amazing. Borderline is incredibly cool, too cool for me. As mentioned, Chrome Bison, as a troll street samurai, is freaking amazing. Fourth is cool but I wish she’d been nonbinary or androgynous, as the art brought it pretty close to it.

Jinn is an elf brute force decker who is from Istanbul, and his jam is fashion, and I’d love some input from people on his presentation and cultural representation in the art and text at some point. There are TONS of really fascinating characters of so many different backgrounds. I still wish for nonbinaries because I’m a pain in the ass (and because we should be represented in such a world!), but the last one I want to shine a light on is Rose Red.

Rose Red has a fascinating background. I really love the concept, but it is a difficult one. The general idea (for those who can’t see the image or don’t feel like reading the teeny text), she was trafficked as a sex worker, then she awakened, and overtook her boss and became a trafficker herself. It leads to her trafficking her own sister, and then finding salvation through a neo-anarchist group. I have so many mixed feelings about the representation of sex workers here, because it’s good to see them represented, and there is a specific note about how the neo-anarchists welcomed her with no shaming, but it is still a hard line to walk. I’d love to hear the input of any sex workers on this topic, as I can’t speak from experience.

FINAL VERDICT

I really, really want to play this game. There are some issues, yes. And I’m not happy with all of the flavor text. But, I have to be honest: what I have read in Shadowrun: Anarchy feels more like Shadowrun to me than 5e ever did. Maybe it’s because it’s simpler in writing, I’m not sure. But, it’s simpler in mechanics, too, and way simpler than 3e. Shadowrun is my favorite fictional world and while it always could be improved, so could a lot of other games.

Shadowrun: Anarchy could use some better layout choices in regards to accessibility and print use. It could use more attention to nonbinary gender representation, and representation of cultures and races that are unfamiliar (or only stereotypically familiar) to the average white gamer. The mechanics are far more lightweight in comparison to all other Shadowrun editions, and in my opinion mix a lot of the good mechanical bits with a lot of my favorite narrative things. The fiction is supported in some ways by the mechanics with the damage, the complexity of combat and spell casting, and the impact of metahuman races, and the pregenerated characters are many and varied.

I would suggest that, if you have played Shadowrun and you like narrative games, you give this a shot. If you like narrative games but know nothing about Shadowrun or really any trad games, consider trying it out for a one-shot with pregenerated characters. If you’ve only played trad games and you like Shadowrun, consider trying this out – the worst that will happen is that you’ll decide it’s too simple, and that’s not much of a loss.

In general, I think it sounds really fun. I’m trying to find time to get a friend to run for me, and in the meantime, I’m going to continue enjoying the beautiful art and maybe build some characters if I have some free time.

Good luck, chummers!

If you’d like to throw some cash in the tip jar, you can do so at paypal.me/thoughty.

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

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

Five or So Questions with Nathanael Cole on Gattaibushido!

Today’s interview is with Nathanael Cole about his new game Gattaibushido, which is a story-driven mecha-pilots game! It’s currently on Kickstarter and sounds like a great time. Check out the interview, and then click-thru to the Kickstarter if you’re interested!.

Full disclosure: My volunteered voicework is included in the Kickstarter video for Gattaibushido.

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Tell me a little about your project. What excites you about it?

Gattaibushido is my personal RPG love letter to a number of old cartoons and animes that own permanent crash space in my heart. I grew up watching shows like Voltron and the Power Rangers, but honestly the biggest inspirations came from two anime series called Gunbuster and Vandread. When I first saw those series, I immediately wanted to game in those worlds. Once I realized that I had a good foundation for teamwork games with Motobushido, I got ridiculously excited about finally getting to write my own person Gunbuster game using those mechanics.


What mechanical inspirations did you have for Gattaibushido?

From the very beginning, I wanted a way to involve Colors in every aspect of play. The first obvious step was basing the team roles off of the classic color roles in Super Sentai shows. But beyond that, I wanted more of a focus on colors than just numerical stats all over the place. Turns out this was already easy enough to do. Motobushido had a heavy focus on threes and sevens as part of its thematic core, and porting that over to a “Roy G Biv” color scale was a cinch. By this point in the design process, almost the entire system has some aspect of the rainbow scale within it, and I’m pretty happy with the way that part has turned out.

However, probably the biggest of the more recent inspirations came from a video game called Chroma Squad. For weeks and weeks I had tried to nail down the Final Form Fight mechanics, and went through dozens of iterations. I kept working the “natural extension to the core fight mechanics” angle, but nothing was working, nothing felt right. Finally I took a long break to chill out and play some video games, one of which was Chroma Squad. I don’t want to spoil that game (it’s amazing!), so I’ll just say that when the first “season” of its story ended, there was a sudden change in mechanics that came out of nowhere, a whole new kind of battle sequence that had not even been hinted at before. And then suddenly it all made sense: if I really wanted to showcase the difference in scale netween the normal battles and the final form battles, I needed a whole new approach, something totally different than the core mechanic. Two design jam session later and the current “Rumble” mechanic was born.


How did you come up with flavor of the game including themes and associated mechanics?
The basic “combining robos vs space monsters” originally came to this project as just a nifty idea for a spin-off “hack” of the core Motobushido rules. Once I started re-immersing myself in the source genre, I grew more and more inspired, and likewise the hacked text grew more and more complicated. Eventually I realized that it needed its own spotlight, and decided to make it an entirely new stand-alone game.
But specifically, two animes deeply inspired the core themes of teamwork. The first was Gunbuster, which was in fact the original kickstart my brain needed to get moving with this project in the first place. The team relationships within that show were so intense and conflicted and _real_ that I felt that those characters could very well have been created using the previous Motobushido rules, just needing a few tweaks to fit the material. Later on I was introduced to a newer series called Majestic Prince. While not actually a “gattai” show, it might as well have been for all the ways that the themes of teamwork and intra-team conflict guided every aspect of that show. I wanted my game to play just like that and I think I’ve done a good job so far bringing out that team dynamic in the playtests.


Coming from your inspirations, what choices did you make to ensure the game is approachable for all ages, genders, etc.?
Specifically, in order to deal with certain old sexist tropes inherent in the classic super sentai genre character roles, I’ve tweaked the colors a bit to make them more versatile. This has had a positive effect with my current test groups, and although a handful of people were expecting more traditional SS color roles, they adapted to the alterations pretty easily enough.

Additionally, I made a few conscious-but-not-overt design choices very early on in the art and writing process. I chose to show only women and girls in the vast majority of the artwork and text (there is one, singular character exception, and it is a bit of an homage to Gunbuster). There’re no outright statements in the book saying “you have to play women,” but if you follow the artwork and the text, it’s pretty much assumed. Additionally, I specifically requested that the majority of the girls in the art be non-Caucasian, and of a variety of body types. I have been pretty pleased with the stuff Juan’s done so far, and I hope my readers will be too.

As for ages? Ah, this might not be a good game for kids, as the themes can be pretty violent and I don’t really hold back with some bits of language here and there.



What do you think are the core elements of Gattaibushido that you want players to see when playing the game, and how do you think the mechanics and flavor help make that happen?
Hands down, teamwork is the absolute number one core element that I want to be ever-present throughout the entirety of play. Everyone has a “Harmony” track, which keeps them in sync with the team spirit. It’s front and center in the gaming space, and integrated into almost every action and component. The characters can of course function on their own, but they truly excel the most when working in synch with the rest of the team. The core fight mechanics heavily involve teamwork combos, including an “Uno” like rotation and reversal mechanic that encourages the players to strategize and synch their abilities together. And of course, the Final Form Rumble fights are pretty much impossible without a well-synched team. =)
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Thanks so much to Nathanael for the interview. I hope you all get the chance to check out Gattaibushido on Kickstarter now!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Shadowrun: Anarchy on PDF

Hey all, just got word that Shadowrun: Anarchy got released on DriveThru on PDF! Hoping to pick it up this weekend and currently scheduling an interview with designers! Check it out!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Women with Initiative: Elsa Sjunneson-Henry

Hi all! Today’s Women with Initiative feature is with Elsa Sjunneson-Henry, a well-known writer, designer, editor, and creator, as well as a accessibility coordinator and consultant for conventions. She is a huge advocate for disability accommodation, representation, and accessibility in gaming and fiction arenas, and has started doing educational programs like the Writing the Other Master Class, Writing Deaf and Blind Characters coming up September 10th (spots are still open!). 
Elsa blogs regularly on Feminist Sonar, talking about everything from feminism on screen to her personal experiences and how they impact her and the world around her. She’s worked on a number of fiction and RPG products including writing Elizabeth Bathory for Dracula Dossier, and her current game DEAD SCARE, a tabletop RPG of zombies and 1950s housewives that Kickstarted last year. I asked Elsa a few questions about her work on DEAD SCARE.

What were the most important things you found you had to focus on while designing DEAD SCARE in terms of inclusivity, accessibility, and staying true to the fictional goals you had for the game?

I wanted to write a game about zombies that wasn’t actually about the zombies. At its core, DEAD SCARE is about communities, and how they react under pressure. In order to do that, I needed to pay attention to how women differentiate themselves from each other, while still making sure that each and every single playbook could be played by a woman of any race, class, ability or age. It was important to me that racism not play a part in the way in which the game read to players.

DEAD SCARE can include some very scary and intense situations. How do you design the game to help GMs and players navigate you, and do you have an example of an experience at the table where you thought your efforts in that regard showed fruitful results?

DEAD SCARE has a section on what I call the tone dial. Essentially, you can play DEAD SCARE any number of ways, from it being a LEAVE IT TO BEAVER episode where zombies just happen to show up and ruin the church bazaar, to a game where everyone engages with the social and political struggles of the 1950s. It’s a game where you opt in to the difficulties, not a game where you force players to engage with them. I like to run Dead Scare as a story about community, but some players want it to be a dungeon crawl through suburbia.

What lessons have you brought from your work on Dead Scare as you move forward with more RPG products, and what projects are on the horizon for you?

DEAD SCARE taught me that I shouldn’t be afraid of mechanics, which is something that I have brought forward to my work on the FATE ACCESSIBILITY TOOLKIT. In the next few months, though, I am focusing on teaching writers and how to write disabled characters. I’ll be teaching a course with Writing the Other on writing D/deaf and Blind Characters. I’m currently working on a book which I’ll be querying to agents hopefully this fall, and many short stories. I’m working to diversify what I write, moving to do more fiction, because I love it.

Thank you so much to Elsa for allowing me to interview her for this month’s feature! Make sure to follow her blog posts at Feminist Sonar and her words on Twitter @snarkbat, and you might still be able to grab a spot in her Writing the Other Master Class on Writing Deaf and Blind Characters by registering here! 

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Five or So Questions with Slade Stolar on The Indie Hack

Hey all, I have an interview today with Slade Stolar about The Indie Hack, which I really enjoyed checking out. Have a good look at his responses below.

Tell me a little about The Indie Hack. What excites you about it?

I was really inspired by The Black Hack. It’s a thin volume–just 20 page–and it cuts to the core of old-school dungeon delving. You’ve got four classes, you roll d6s, d8s, d20s, etc., you face monsters with HP, and you hope to pass your skill check vs. poison. But all of that can be done in just 20 pages once you’ve got roleplaying figured out (4 or 5 years in, maybe). I wondered whether something that was more story-focused could work in the same way (I’m not claiming a strong dividing line between Old-school/OSR and Story/Indie/Post-Forge gaming here, I like a mix of both sides in nearly all of my games).

The Indie Hack is my fantasy heartbreaker, which Ron Edwards will tell you to go out and write, if nothing else, just to get it out of your system. I’ve had notebooks lying around for years with little tidbits of adventures, settings, and mechanics. Recently, I’ve been playing a lot of games that are Apocalypse World adjacent. I’ve been watching and listening to people play on YouTube and podcasts. I’d started work on a huge game, maybe 200 pages, called 100 Clones of Hitler!!. Lots of setting stuff. I had a big pack of beautiful, pulpy artwork done up for it (for a fair price, but more than I was used to spending on my own projects). I took 100 Clones to Forge Midwest (Madison, WI) in the spring of 2016 to playtest, and to my great shock, no one wanted to play the Hitler game. I started to question everything: Maybe these people weren’t as transgressive as I had hoped. Maybe the title causes such visceral disgust that no one can get past it. Maybe I should have pitched it in a different time slot. Maybe I should have called the game what it’s now called, specifically, Might Makes Reich: Stop the Nazi Menace!!, to make it clear that you’re fighting against (not with or as) the clones of Hitler. So, that’s where I’m coming from.

I took the core dice mechanic out of 100 Clones and polished it up a bit. I started thinking about minotaurs. I started writing a fantasy rule set. I had some new and different and beautiful art commissioned. I took the religion system that I’ve been sitting on for a few years and mechanized it. I think that these three things are the most exciting to me: the dice-and-details-and-allies-contributing mechanic, the art, and the Goddesses.

In essence, it’s 28 pages of dungeon-delving without HP or d4s or XP. There’s a stronger focus on players saying how they do things and what happens because of it, rather than saying what they do.

You have a number of games cited in the front of the book as inspirations or as places you borrowed from (the best designers know how to borrow & recontextualize, imo, as much as do something new). What about these specific games really wormed into your design concept?

I borrowed aspects of many different games. Of course, The Black Hack was the main impetus; I was drawn in by the extreme minimalism of it.

I love the statistics of the dice rolling in Apocalypse World, but almost everyone retains the 10+/7 to 9/6- results and I didn’t want to do that; I made each result have a different effect, such that rolling a 2 and a 6 is slightly better than rolling a 2 and a 5. Naturally, I liked the deadliness, and the fraught relationships, trading in Barter/Jingle, and the only-ever-hinted-at setting.

I really like Dungeon World, as a game and as a text, and it has a high place on my shelf. I’d run it over 5e or Pathfinder any day. The approach to relationships between the characters is great. Ranged combat (all combat, really) is great. It takes a few steps down the path toward minimalism, whereas The Indie Hack runs.

Into the Odd helped me to re-think monsters and magic items. Monsters aren’t really monsters, they’re more like magical or strange animals; they become monsters when we have tales of them biting the heads off adventurers. And I’m guessing that the adventurers started it.

I debated what to do with alignment. I think it’s usually done poorly in games. And players often use it as an excuse to be jerks. Why would you want to look down at your character sheet and be reminded that you should be at odds with the goals and desires of the other characters? I’d been reading the PDF of My Life with Master and figured a good way to get people to reluctantly do good (or evil) was to give them bosses.

In a lot of fantasy games, you can run into issues of repetition, so what differentiates The Indie Hack? What would players find in this game that they wouldn’t find in, say, D&D or Pathfinder?

Yes, there are thousands of fantasy games out there. The Indie Hack is novel in a few ways.

Character creation for three players who have never played takes about 30 minutes, including the time in which they form relationships and tell the GM some facts about the world. This isn’t novel, just rare.

The dice mechanic is really neat: you have degrees of success, some of which ask your fellow players for input. Once you roll successfully, you did the thing you were trying to do, and you spend “details” to enrich the fiction: I didn’t just hit the Skeletal Soldier, I shattered eight of his ribs, the GM writes “Eight missing ribs” on the monster’s sheet, so that the players and the GM can work that fact into the story later if they wish. Details like this count towards defeating the creature.

In terms of time at the table, unlike 5e and Pathfinder, no one has their nose in a book for more than a few seconds. Nearly all of the information used in play is written down somewhere on a sheet or index card on the table, usually written in pencil, and usually written by one of the players. The GM doesn’t need to shuffle through a lot of books and papers or hide dice behind a screen. Don’t even give the GM the dice.

Regarding the question of repetition, as it’s the players who enrich the narrative, it’s only repetitive if the players give out the same details time and time again. My bet is that the players will get more and more confident and creative.

I personally love gear in games, but it often can get a little cumbersome – literally and figuratively. Can you talk about how The Indie Hack handles gear and how it might appeal to people who like the concept of gear, but get burnt out with doing complicated math to see how many candles they can accommodate in their haversack?
Gear is lovely, as is the wordplay in this question. In most games, I get a lot of enjoyment out of selecting gear, and a lot of pain out of managing it. When adventuring in The Indie Hack, you’ll probably have between 5 and 10 items. For all of the fiddly stuff, you can get ‘kits’. If you’re playing an Occultist, take “Flasks of Foul Liquids”, which contains “Acid, poison, ether, lye, etc.” And if you want to have some glue, grease, fertilizer, bat fur, or snake bile for your evil rituals, there’s probably some of that also. The candle (one big candle or a bundle of little candles) can take 3 ‘narrative damage’ before it’s out, which can be from a long time spent burning or being dropped in a puddle. You can watch as it slowly takes these points of ‘narrative damage’ and plan out your packing for next session, assuming your characters survive the catacombs. You might take “1 Candle” or “2 Candles”, but you absolutely will not have to figure out how many pounds of candles to take.
Finally, can you tell me about some of your archetypes and how they interact with both the setting/fiction of The Indie Hack and the mechanics themselves?
The classes were really fun to write. I took the standard fantasy archetypes and give each one a slight twist. The classes are Veteran, Exorcist, Hunter, Scoundrel, Elementalist, Occultist, and Outlander.
The characters provide information about the fictional world. For example, the Scoundrel might tell us a little bit about the economy and crime of the world. The Veteran might tell us about a great battle (and thereby, the nations or factions of the world). The Outlander is an enigma, here are some of his/her questions: “You can hear them too, can’t you (what do they say)? What lies buried deep beneath these hills? Where can you never go? Where must you always return?” You don’t have to answer all of them, just a few. Just enough to get the GM’s mental gears turning.

The players want a very different type of game if they answer “Where can you never go?” by saying “The Blood-splashed Crags of Southern Tybis, where I can hear their time-hollowed bones whistle in the wind” versus “The bawdy house where I let my second cousin die of tuberculosis four winters ago”. The players establish locations and personages in the fiction and set the initial tone.
The initial skills and spells should be familiar to those who’ve played the classic fantasy RPGs. Typically, the spell gives a guide on writing the “details” that are created by the effect. In essence, spellcasting is little different from combat or diplomacy or stealth or navigation.

I just love the classes. Certain players might have favorites, but I’d be equally happy to play as any one of them.


Thanks so much to Slade for talking with me about The Indie Hack. You can check it out on DriveThru and hopefully take it to the table! 

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Behrend Bernhard, Esq. Version 1 – A Performative Party Game

Hello All!

It’s your friendly neighborhood Brie with a new game! This is, as with my previous games, a text-only version 1, so if I need to make edits I will do so and update the original file with a new version.

It’s a performative party game* where you get together friends and play out a court scene where one player gets to play a larger performative role as the title character, Behrend Bernhard, Esquire, one plays a court reporter who handles record taking, tallying records, and so on, and the rest of the players are witnesses providing testimony. All of the players have a small chance to roleplay, while Behrend’s character is the most active and asks questions of the witnesses. However, at the end, there’s a chance that any of the players could have a final dramatic scene. Yes, there is a twist, but it’s clearly detailed, and it is at the forefront that everyone is making up their stories. 🙂

I’ve been exploring player involvement and how much players want or need to participate in games, and at what level they’re most comfortable, as well as how to integrate different levels of power or authority in a game. I’ve also been looking at how we can make lies and secrets public while still playing within the fiction we’ve concocted.

Here it is!




*Some might consider this a live action roleplay game, and in some ways it is, but I think it’s a step away from that, personally, and you can argue about it if you want.

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

I AM Mental

A slight diversion from our normal content, here. It’s semi-political, if my mental health is political. 

Content/Trigger Notice: mental health, depression, bipolar, and similar illnesses are all discussed/specific mentions of binge drinking, suicide, and self-destructive behavior. 

I was going to write about Are You Mental? and its Kickstarter when I got home today. I don’t need to, because there’s this excellent post by Kate Bullock, who is wonderful. I’m going to say shit anyway.

I know I do problematic things in relation to mental health and representation, I totally do, but I’m also extremely aware of how my literal crazy is heavily misrepresented by media and fiction crazy. See, here’s the thing. I live my crazy in public. I don’t think there has ever been a day when someone has asked me about my mental health and I’ve denied them an answer. I joke about it, occasionally, but not often. Often, I’m too busy with it. 

For reference, I have bipolar disorder, anxiety (generalized and social), mild obsessive/compulsive behaviors, issues with seasonal depression, a history of emotional abuse, and have many panic attacks.

Somewhere around 2013ish, I’m not sure when, I started a spiral into an incredibly tragic and damaging mixed/manic episode in which I destroyed friendships, professional relationships, had abusive relationships and may have been abusive myself, wasted more money than is reasonable, experienced massive physical health issues in part because of the irresponsible and self-destructive behavior, and I did a lot of wrong things, including some things that other people would never admit to.

If you ask me? I will try to tell you honestly what happened. There are some times I don’t really know. The funny thing about being so crazy is that you don’t always remember the worst things. Or the best things. Like, I remember drinking an entire bottle of vodka after my then-partner screamed and shook the dinner table for half the meal and tried to hit me. That was not my crazy, nope, but there it was, nestled in the situation my crazy put me in. I don’t remember seeing some of my best friends at conventions where I was so manic, so close to breaking, that I didn’t really sleep for almost 72 hours, and barely ate, and talked so fast I don’t even remember how I managed to talk. I crave those moments. Those moments, at a gaming con, as a gamer, where I was crazy.

I am well medicated, doing therapy, and thankfully with access to good healthcare to keep those things. (No worries, potential employers!) Not everyone has that. Even having it doesn’t mean you’re safe. Everyone who watches me on social media sees these ups and downs of my moods, my bleak moments of depression, my hypomania. Lithium is great, but it does not cure me.

If you sit down and play a game, and you play a mad character, a crazy character, oh, it’s so exciting, isn’t it? To be crazy? To be INSANE? You can do whatever you want! No matter what you do, it’s okay, you’re crazy! Hahaha OMG NOT REALLY.

My freelance career is mostly in tatters. I couldn’t do the work. I couldn’t’ focus. I got nothing done. I have some work – thanks to some very, very generous people – but I’m not a professional. I burned that flag to ashes and dust. I was not a nice person. I wasn’t respectful. Hell, I honestly feel like I lost tons of social relationships alone on this, in part because everyone thought I made someone cheat on their wife,* because that’s totally something I want on my resume.

I am very honest about my mental illnesses so that people can see, in reality, what crazy is. It is not laughing enthusiastically because things are so, so funny, it’s laughing because you actually can’t stop and you don’t know what’s wrong and if you stop you might die. It’s not feeling morose and sad, sitting at a windowsill dripping with raindrops, it’s sitting on your kitchen floor crying because you almost killed yourself, again, you might do it again, you might die. It’s not being nervous around new people you’ve never met before, it’s being afraid to go to your best friend’s house and if they see how much of a goddamn mess you are, you might die. Some of these are figurative. Some of them are extremely not.

Are You Mental? may be super fun and exciting and make a lot of people very happy. All I can say is that I am, actually, mental, and games like that make me feel like I should fucking die.

——————————–

Small addendum: 1) I am not asking for this to be paid via Patreon. That feels weird. 2) I did do consulting on the essays for mental health representation in the Lovecraftesque game by Becky Annison and Joshua Fox, and I’m available to do that for other games. Just comment and tag me and we’ll go from there.

*I literally have no desire to deal with people’s defenses of this or justifications. Just leave it alone, it’s better off dead.

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Whose Stories We Tell

If you are making a thing about people who are not like you, you should talk to people who are like that.

I can’t count how many game ideas or fiction ideas I’ve dropped completely because I couldn’t do the research, didn’t have the time to interview, or couldn’t read accurate accounts. People’s stories matter so much. We should not fly off the cuff. We should not make assumptions based on media.

If you’re working on something about people other than you that those people could be emotionally affected by,* pause and 

Consider whether you should do it at all. 

If you’re still determined to do it, look for the people you are writing about or people similar to them. Ask them if they will share their experience. If they will not,

Consider whether you should continue.

If you’re still determined to do it, look for accurate and complete personal accounts. If you can’t find them, or they seem unreliable, or they are confirmed to be inaccurate,

Consider whether you should keep going.

If you’re still determined to do it, review the available media regarding those people or their experiences. If you can’t find them, or they seem unreliable, or they are confirmed to be inaccurate,

Stop.

That’s right. Stop. Take a break, return to it later. Think about why you want to tell these stories.

Ask yourself:

  • Are you willing to tell stories without people’s permission?
  • Are you willing to tell stories without accurate information?
  • Are you willing to tell stories that could be inaccurate or misleading?
  • Are you willing to tell stories that could damage reputations, risk people’s jobs, or their lives?
  • Are you willing to tell stories that ignore people’s identities, stereotype them, or marginalize them? 
  • Are you willing to lie?

If you answer yes to those questions, I say to you: Look at your life. Look at your choices.

Walk away.



*Sex, wars, religion, gender, queerness, identities, trauma, politics, etc. – all of these are important. Imagine if someone wrote a story about something you consider personal and emotional, like about your life personally, and told it wrong, and maybe even lied or misrepresented you in a way that stereotyped you or made you seem dangerous, evil, or just simply wrong. If it’s a topic like that? Think about it.


Note: When you consult people, compensate them fairly for their time and experience.

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Five or So Questions with Monte Cook on Invisible Sun

Good news everyone! I’ve been lucky enough to interview Monte Cook of Monte Cook Games about his new game on Kickstarter, Invisible Sun. Invisible Sun is a new tabletop RPG with a flexible play function and some fun bits and pieces that can round out the experience, which promises an escape to surreal fantasy and secrecy. Check out Monte’s responses to my questions below!

I love this piece so much, the colors and structure are so good.


Tell me a little about Invisible Sun. What excites you about it?

Invisible Sun is a new RPG of surreal fantasy, where player characters use magic to discover the secrets of the world, and the world beyond the world. There are many, many things that excite me about the game. If I had to pick, say, two, I’d say the surreal nature of the setting–a place where not only can anything happen, but does–and some of the new gameplay elements. In Invisible Sun, we have something called Development Mode (as in, character development), where players get time away from the table to really focus on their own, personal story arcs. Everything in the game is story-based, and even a character’s advancement is based on progress through one or more story arcs that they player has set up. Development mode gives players a way to interact with the game and with each other even when the whole group can’t meet. It’s great for everyone, but particularly for those of us who sometimes struggle to make our schedules all mesh.

Both of these aspects of the game are really about the same thing: escaping the demands of the real world to escape–at least for a time–into a realm of imagination and wonder. Invisible Sun is about escape in both setting and mechanics.

I really like combining nature and humanity, so this image is right up my alley.

For Development Mode, outside of the flexibility, what do you think about that option really opens up the experience for players – is it just lonely fun, or do you think it’s more of an exploration, or more?

I’m not sure what you mean by “lonely fun.” Development mode allows a player or players to interact with the GM–either indirectly or directly, as they desire and as is convenient–to play out side-scenes involving only some subset of the group. So the GM and players can have personal storylines going as well as group stories, or a single character can break off and do their own thing in between sessions. Or maybe the side-scene is a flashback, and just enriches a character’s background (or, like in good fiction, maybe something that happens in that flashback then directly affects the present storyline). It’s also a great way to give players who are a bit quieter in a large group a way to shine on their own–that is to say, it’s great for introverts.

Shhhhh.

Invisible Sun has a lot more going than just a book. What components come with the game, and what do they do? With that, what do you personally enjoy about integrating them into Invisible Sun’s play?

Now that we’ve unlocked the “Whole Box Upgrade” stretch goal, the game comes with dozens of player handouts, in-depth 4-page character tomes, a pad of grimoire sheets for keeping track of spells and secrets, a GM notebook filled with creative prompts and ways to manage all the various story arcs in the campaign, hundreds of tokens (some specific to certain character orders), and over a thousand cards, ranging from spell and artifact cards to the 60-card divinatory Sooth Deck that figures into every aspect of play. And that’s still not everything.

The point here is that Invisible Sun is a game that recognizes the challenges of getting the group to gather around a table and so it celebrates it with all sorts of fun visual and tactile enhancements to play the game. For example, Vance characters manage their magic in a way that restricts the number of living spells they can have ready in their mind at once. They will have cards that have their spells written on them in different sizes and shapes. If they can fit some combination of those cards into the diagram that represents their mind, they can ready that many spells. Weavers, however, use magic in an entirely different way and have game bits that help them keep track of that.

There are all kind of board games with glorious boxes filled with fun stuff to help play the game. I think RPGers should have that option if they want it too.

The little curlicues in here and the snail are so cute but spoopy.

Escapism is a huge part of tabletop RPGs, and it often seems like there’s more to escape than ever. What do you think about the surreal setting of Invisible Sun makes it compelling, and accessible, for people who have so many realms to dive into already?

The stranger and more surreal a setting is, the easier, rather than harder, it is to escape into it. Because in a setting like that, you don’t ever have to say no. You never say, “no, that can’t work,” or “that’s not realistic.” You don’t have to be a history scholar or a science expert or really know anything other than how to use your imagination. It’s not a free-for-all, of course. It’s still an rpg, and rpgs have rules, but it takes away restrictions that would be purely setting-based. It’s a deep-dive into fantasy, to be sure, but it’s appealing to people who maybe sometimes want something beyond the standard genre tropes. The game, of course, will come with all manner of creative prompts (first and foremost, the aforementioned Sooth Deck) to help generate ideas for all of this. Sometimes “anything is possible” is hard, at least at first. So the game gives you a hand.

Multiple eyes like that freaks me out but I still like the kitty.

What have been some of your favorite parts of designing and playing Invisible Sun, the kind of moments and concept realizations that you really found valuable as a creator?

For more than two years now, I’ve kept a set of notebooks of just every weird idea that I came across. Things too out there for anything else. “A thief who literally steals ideas.” “Armor made out of protective words and a weapon constructed of dangerous ones.” “A monster that feeds on the concept of starvation.” Things like that. That’s my favorite part. In the end, I read, I watch television and movies, I play games, and I write all for the ideas. Ideas are my passion, and the freer I am to let my imagination soar, the happier I am.

Beyond that, I’m really enjoying thinking about the things that keep us from playing games and trying to overcome them. There’s where Development Mode came from. That’s why Invisible Sun treats character death in a way that doesn’t force a player to stop playing. That’s why there are specific aspects of the game to handle both introvert and extrovert players. That’s why player absences are worked right into the conceit of the setting. And so on.

As an rpg designer in 2016, I think we need to start thinking about these things. Playing a game as adults in the modern world isn’t like gathering in the basement back when we were 13. It’s simply harder now. Some other designers will come up with different (and possibly far better) solutions to these issues, but it’s something we need to be thinking about.

Thanks so much to Monte for answering my questions about Invisible Sun and his experience designing it! Check out Invisible Sun on Kickstarter!

Note: for others unfamiliar with the term “lonely fun,” it’s typically referring to solo roleplay or the game time spent creating characters and setting elements for group games that is done alone or away from the group. Lonely fun is essentially self-propelled roleplay and creation or design. 

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

I love you and I adore you: A letter writing game

Hello all!

I wrote a game that I’m hoping you’ll enjoy! It’s a queer love letter writing game inspired by the love letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lenora Hickok, and it’s very simple and hopefully easy. It’s fully story based, but has some rules on communication. This is a Version 1 document so please excuse any flaws for now. 

I hope you like it! Feel free to play, and if you’d like to offer feedback, let me know.

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.