The people living in those flatlands, they don’t know true horror. They’ve never heard its sound. They’ve never had to run, run downhill to the flats and hope there ain’t just another hill to come, hearing the growls, hearing the scream, the baaaaaaah it roars, the sound of its four feet pounding unevenly behind you. In the hills, we know. The hills don’t have eyes. They have the phimf.
Tarnin Covalesky, woodsman
This blessed image is of the Hillside Phimf by Thomas Novosel.
Background
The Hillside Phimf is a cryptid. The most elusive kind, that is, until you’re on a hillside at night. Then it’s just nearer than near, its hot breath just bristling your hair and its rage tenable, just behind you. It’s a perilous beast, and like none you’ve ever heard of. There are some who try to compare it to a sidehill gouger, but those beasts are sweet creatures in comparison to the giant Phimf.
It might sound the opposite of terrifying when it’s stuck to hillsides, but you’ll only think that until you spend some days in a region where there’s more sideways than straight. The creature walks on two short legs and two long ones, gripping the hillside, and reaching out with four arms to capture anyone caught unawares on the slope. It rarely goes hungry, and only ranges where dips and valleys make their home.
The screaming roar it makes seems to echo through the hillsides, but is never heard inside the thick-walled homes. The trees buffer its baahhhhing, its cry to the wind. The Phimf is said to be half gorilla, some sort of ape, with large grasping hands and fearful teeth, and half goat, with clopping hooves that find even steep cliffs no trouble at all. Where it comes from, no one knows, but we do know where it goes – ’round the hills, soon as dusk falls, and not stopping until its growls turn into satisfied grumbles from a good meal. If there’s no folk around to have a bite, it’s not afraid of partial cannibalism, eating everything from other goats to spare possums trying to find their way home in the night. All along it stalks the hills.
The Phimf has their weird goat eyes, rectangular pupils and wide, with a legendary ability to see in the dark. Bright lights shy them away, but if they’re hungry they’ll just eat the light. Goat gut’ll digest anything, so they say. They might yell while they do it, truth be told. Their bleating yells reveal squat, square teeth that crush more than shear. They batter on their chest with apelike hands that have long reach and strong grip.
The way to get at them, supposedly, is a crew with strong stomachs who can round it up onto the flat. Its strengths become weaknesses then as it’ll topple to the side, struggling between its short and long legs. It’s still grabby as all get out, but it’ll eat anything you put in front of it – even if that snack happens to be sleep-inducing or worse. No one knows for sure whether it’ll work, but someone had better do something to protect these hills.
All Arms. The Phimf has four arms and is always counted as having reach in all directions, and cannot be flanked.
Actions
Multiattack.The Phimf makes two attacks: one with its bite and one with its hands. It can make both attacks against the same target.
Bite. Melee Weapon Attack: +10 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 33 (4d12 + 7) bludgeoning damage. If the target is a Medium or smaller creature, it is grappled (escape DC 17). Until this grapple ends, the target is restrained, and the Phimf can’t bite another target.
Grasping Hands. Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit: 11 (2d6 + 4) bludgeoning damage. If the target is a Medium or smaller creature, it is grappled (escape DC 17). Until this grapple ends, the target is restrained, and the Phimf can’t grab another target.
Disgusting Roar. The Hillside Phimf has eaten ungodly things and its stomach works hard to digest it. When the Phimf roars to frighten its prey, anyone caught in the 20ft. cone must make a DC 10 Constitution save or suffer nausea and dizziness for 1d4 rounds (Temporary Constitution & Dexterity Penalty of -2).
Facilitator Notes
Drives
Driven by unending hunger.
Driven to find the tastiest food the most easily.
Doggedly pursues anything that smells like food regardless of when it last ate.
Interactions & Reactions
The Phimf is almost never seen during the day, seeking caves, shadowed cliffsides, and abandoned houses or barns to hide in when the sun is out.
If attacked, the Phimf will only try to fight back or resist. It will never try to run away. At most, it will seek cover when the sun is rising.
The Phimf is always hungry, and has no restrictions on its diet.
The Phimf is a large – some would say gargantuan – beast that has four cloven hooves like a goat, two short on the right and two long on the left, that make it easy for them to travel over hillsides, with a stout torso that’s heavily muscled and four gorilla arms and hands, as well as a ape-like face that’s long in the snout like a goat, and four pointed horns – perhaps the creature’s only point of pride.
Other System Notes
The Hillside Phimf has 8 hit dice.
Grasping Hands equivalent damage: Maul or Heavy Two-Handed Weapon.
Bite equivalent damage: Greataxe – three attacks for each bite.
Hillside Phimf for Monster of the Week
Monster: Devourer (motivation: to eat everything tasty)
Powers
All Arms: The Phimf has four arms and is always counted as having reach in all directions, and cannot be flanked.
Disgusting Roar: The Hillside Phimf has eaten ungodly things and its stomach works hard to digest it. When the Phimf roars to frighten its prey, anyone caught in the blast takes 1-harm close messy.
Teeth and Hands Attacks: Bite: 3-harm hand; Grasping Hands: 4-harm hand close.
Armor
Tough Skin: 1-armor.
Harm Capacity
12.
Weakness
Hunger & daylight: If the Phimf is tricked into eating something that could harm it, it takes harm more easily (no armor against ingestion). It also is weakened in daylight, but mostly in that it will cower and try to hide.
I’ve had some recent changes in my personal life, and they’ve reflected some changes in my professional life, too! As some people know, I have multiple romantic partners (I’m polyamorous), and that I work on game stuff and play games with my partners a lot. One of my partners is Thomas Novosel, who is a brilliant artist and game designer I met through Google+ a few years back. We’re dating, and we’re also working on some super rad game stuff.
Thomas Novosel, photo by Brie Beau Sheldon (c) 2019.
Thomas is in upstate New York, and he’s consulting with me on Turn’s border towns stretch goal that replaced the Mormon towns goal. This stretch goal is going to take a little longer to complete, but Thomas was part of the inspiration – I visited him in his town, on the northern US border, and realized there are a lot of stories to tell. He’s helping me get in touch with the local indigenous center (Akwesasne natives). This is hugely useful.
(P.S.: I’m still looking for a southern border consultant, preferably a person of color, from either side of the US southern border! Please use the contact page if you’re interested.)
Thomas and I have also made our own little game collective, called Assembludo (a mashup of assemblage+ludo for artistic mashup of game stuff, basically). It’s been really fun to work on so far, and we’re nearing having some projects ready to release! It’s hard figuring out how to fund projects, but in the meantime I’ve been helping Thomas get some game jam products out like The Heaven’s Prophet’s Tomb for the Pamphlet Dungeon, and he’s run his game Runaway Hirelings for me so I can get a better feel for his design sense. (Unsurprisingly, Runaway Hirelings was SUPER fun, very creative and adventurous, and plays in like 2 hours! It’s worth way more like $10!)
The other new projects we’re working on are even more exciting!
The first project we’re hoping to release as a joint effort as designers is called The Magic Hour, and it’s a short adventure for general fantasy campaigns with some custom creatures. It’s set in a small town in a rural fantasy land with a variety of characters in the town, where a mystery is occurring! People in the town have been disappearing, and no one can seem to figure out what’s happening!
The description I gave to John one of the creatures is “okapi with condor wings” and I’m excited to see them realized in the game. We’re both obviously working on this while juggling our regular jobs, freelance work, and individual projects, so it’s taking a little bit of time. But, we’re making good progress, and I think it’s a cute game adventure that encourages nonviolence, explores a small town, and has a little bit of silliness baked in. We’re both capable of seriousness and spookiness, but I think that’s something really wonderful about what Thomas and I have been working on – there’s just a little lightheartedness in every bit!
We have a few other ideas bouncing around. Like, Thomas is working on a King Arthur and the Round Table inspired knight game, A Knight Rode at Dawn, which looks absolutely fantastic and has been fun to follow and contribute to as he needs. I’m working on Flicker, something I started writing inspired by Thomas’s art before we started dating, which is a game about hope where you burn down tiny paper houses as you, a living flame, travel the darkening world to relight the sun. I love the game a lot, and it’s reignited by Thomas’s gentle encouragement.
Our big project, which could take a long while, is Little Green Dot, which is a game about a world populated by animals that live on little islands. It’s a world touched by folk legend and there’s a lot of thinking about our actions, what they mean now, and what they’ll mean years from now to our community, our family, our party, and ourselves. Animals are sometimes bigger or smaller than they’d be in our world, but they’re also able to use leaf-swords and acorn-caps and travel to become legends in their own right.
One of my favorite things that Thomas has written in our draft notes is this, about one of the character types that I wanted to have.
The squids and the turtles children would grow together but would always be upset and miss each other and grow apart as one went towards land. The Whale saw this and kissed the squids mantles, giving them a soft membrane of water from home to follow them onto land. Allowing them to go as far as they want, with their friends, while also taking their home with them.
Thomas Novosel, draft notes for Little Green Dot, 2019
There is a section below it where he elaborated that I read as he typed, and it made me cry!
Specific Feeling: Taking a stone from the farm with you into the city. A stone that you looked at and liked. But someone put it in your hand so that you didn’t have to pick it up.
Thomas Novosel, draft notes for Little Green Dot, 2019
This is the weirdest thing about designing with Thomas. He still is quite technical and focused on mechanics, like John is. And he’s highly artistic, like John is. But Thomas is much more of a feelsy person like me! So when he wrote this, especially as a farm kid who moved to the city and no one gave me something to carry with me, just punched me in the heart forever. It was one of our first design sessions and it remains one of my favorite things I’ve ever seen a person write about something they were designing.
We recently went to Lake Placid and had a picnic looking at nearby mountains. Few things make me miss living in rural areas more than spending time in the wilderness!
I think my work with Thomas has made me reflect on how I design a lot! Like, maybe I need to start putting myself first, and the game after. And maybe, I should not tell myself it’s stupid to think about how mechanics feel. We ignore it so often, how games feel, what they do to us emotionally when we take action or don’t, and how we feel when we roll a die or flip a card or enforce a mechanical rule. Feelings aren’t stupid. And just because we have to work at understanding them sometimes does not mean that we should dismiss them in design. Needless to say, I can’t wait to show you more from Assembludo in the future!
One last thing I wanted to mention about my work with Thomas is something he put in the Little Green Dot document. It sounds simple, but it’s really important:
The Love Contract If this game affects our relationship negatively, or starts hurting us. We will stop working on it, because we love each other very very much. And being in love is more important than fighting over work.
Thomas Novosel, signed by Beau and Thomas both in the Little Green Dot documents.
I look at it and I think, my gosh. How many of my relationships would be less rocky around our design experiences if I’d put this in there? What if I had put in a Friendship Contract or a Respect Contract in my projects I’ve worked on? How simple of an idea is it to just stop doing something that’s hurting you, or hurting the relationships that build up the game in the first place? It smacked me right in the forehead with its sense. So I signed it!
I love all of my partners very much. And I work with them all, to varying degrees! I think what I was missing this whole time wasn’t the right person to work with, it was the right attitude to go about working with. Considering that Thomas and I, and John and I, are very aware of how fickle the game market is and how we can’t ever expect success. I think we also know how precarious relationships can be when you’re working together. Like, yikes. With that in mind, I think prioritizing love is worth it.
Beau & Thomas at Lake Placid, by Brie Beau Sheldon (c) 2019.
Find out more about Thomas at thomas-novosel.com and find him on Twitter at @thomasanovosel. His itch.io hosts a number of his games & game materials as well (including fonts!), and is a good place to follow!
P.S. I go by Beau now, tho the full name is Brie Beau Sheldon. 🙂
P.P.S. – My work with John continues on Roar of Alliance – check him out on Twitter as @johnwsheldon and on Pluspora to follow his progress. He is also still my husband, thankfully. 🙂
P.P.S. I’m still with Dillon long-distance, too, and he is running some really cool games as an awesome DM, and makes some awesome creatures for his games! Keep up with him on Twitter as @Damn_It_Dillon!
Tell me a little about A Town Called Malice. What excites you about it?
Nordic Noir is a great genre. It refers to more than just an international import, it’s an approach to ensemble-style drama where characters of different backgrounds all deal with the same dramatic tension equally. The BBS series “Broadchurch” is a great example where everyone in the same small town comes to terms with a murder over multiple episodes, and the first run of “Twin Peaks” is the same way. From a game mechanics perspective, it’s something I hadn’t done before – my previously credits used the Powered by the Apocalypse engine. It’s excite to explore a new style of gameplay.
What are the characteristics of Nordic Noir and how do they show up in A Town Called Malice?
Nordic Noir is more character-driven, I find the tragedy or crime to be
solved becomes a prism to show the internal conflicts the characters are
experiencing. Both the original and US version of “The Killing” show
how multiple backgrounds are affected by a terrible death and as the series
progresses, we as an audience see the story go deeper beyond just the basic
“Whodunnit” type of mystery. By going with a story game format, (as
opposed to something more stat driven), it emphasized the relationships the
player were building within the narrative. That seemed more of the portrayal of
the genre.
How do you ensure the players are comfortable, while still unsettling
them as appropriate, in a Nordic Noir game?
We of course make sure to highlight appropriate safety measures and basic responsibility when dealing with both the horror and relationship elements. Because the players cooperate in building the narrative, they also lead the drama to the levels that best suit their gameplay tastes.
What are the characters like and how are characters built for the game?
Characters are guided by several things – Each role has a Personal Goal which should influence the player’s actions. These guidelines are intended to be neutral to how the player feels they’re best served. The Personal Goal of the “Criminal” role for example, is to “Gain the Advantage”. This can be interpreted by the player, and can be either a good or a bad trait depending on the situation. Gaining the advantage can be interpreted into helping the Law in solving the bigger problems of the Town for example.
Characters are also developed by the relationships they have with the other players at the table, through the use of Heit and Kult dice. These dice are placed in between the players at the table, representing the immediate relationship around them. Both players have input into that relationship, so a relationship can be a mixture of both good and bad feelings. This allows the players to expand on the overall narrative and determine what they need to personally overcome in order to succeed.
If players wanted to play the game and get the most out of it, how would you suggest they prepare for it?
I have really enjoyed watching players going deeper than
they normally would’ve in say, a straightforward dungeon crawl. I think people
will enjoy it most when they focus on the relationship aspects as much as
trying to overcome the supernatural threats to the Town – what does your
character feel? What do they need? How can they overcome these things together?
It’s a really different focus for me as a creator, and I’m glad to see people
get excited about the prospects of what Malice can be.
And for fun, what would you suggest as the ideal murder?
Wait. Who talked to you? I wasn’t there, no matter what you’ve heard! (laughs)
Hi all! Today I have an interview with Sophie Lagace, PK Sullivan, and Ed Turner about Fate of Cthulhu, which is currently on Kickstarter. I am impressed with some of the changes they’ve made to the Mythos and to Fate for the project, and I hope you do too! Check it out!
—
Tell me a little about Fate of Cthulhu. What excites you about it?
Sophie Lagace: It’s a take on Cthulhu I have not really seen before, where the heroes are seriously out-gunned and out-tentacled, but not hopeless. Maybe you can’t save humanity from an apocalypse, but you can save it from complete extinction, for example. It’s a game about fighting back even when you’re a tiny person against a monstrous evil, giving it all you got and having a chance to make a difference. I can seriously relate, these days.
Also, we acknowledge the glaring flaws in the source material and in H.P. Lovecraft himself, take the good, and reject the bad. I love critical examination of our faves rather than pretending everything is fine
PK Sullivan: This is the first genuinely hopeful take on the Cthulhu mythos that I’ve seen. That’s something really important to me. Sean Nittner reached out to me in July 2015 asking if I would be the lead designer for this Fate Cthulhu game that Evil Hat wanted to make. My first response was, “Me? Are you sure? I’m not a Cthulhu fan.” Ultimately I think that worked in my favor. Stephen took point on the mythos story while my job was to design a system that reinforced the themes of the mythos. But I need hope in my stories — I made that very clear early on — so Fate of Cthulhu started to lean more toward the good you can do in the timeline
It can still be a pyrrhic victory, or you can still completely screw things up and make the future worse but there’s always the chance, the possibility, the hope that things can be better. And ultimately that’s what you’re trying to achieve as a character: a better future.
Which is surprisingly easy to achieve when the timeline starts as dark as possible.
Ed Turner: Sophie and PK already adequately covered the joys of cosmic horror with a side of hope, so I’m going to be a bit more mechanics-focused: it’s corruption that excites me. As characters deal with phenomena related to the Great Old One, they’ll slowly be corrupted by the sheer wrongness of eldritch forces. Left unchecked, corruption takes the form of horrible mutations. You want claws and tentacles and dripping ichor and other body horror shenanigans? Eat your heart out. Maybe literally… corruption can do weird things.
I love corruption for so many reasons. It’s a way to convey the danger of these alien entities without falling back on tired and problematic notions of “madness.” It’s a way to give players actual hard consequences when things go awry—having a character die is almost never as interesting as having a character’s very humanity get twisted. But more than anything else, it’s a way to empower characters… as bad as corruption is, your new tentacles are also tools in your arsenal, a way you can use the Great Old One’s own malevolence against itself. It ties back to that all-important sense of hope: the worse things get for a character, the better they are able to fight back. As bad as the threat you’re facing is, it contains the seeds of its own destruction.
And of course it means your character can have tentacles. Nothing wrong with more tentacles. The heroes need to even out the tentacle playing-field.
Sophie Lagace
What is your role in the project, and what did you especially enjoy working on over the course of the project?
SL: I have had three roles. The project stretched on for nearly four years (with almost a year out of that devoted to the playtest rounds), so many things changed along the way. I started on quality control, a sort of sounding board for “Does this thing fit as a Fate game?” Eventually the project management work was rearranged across all Evil Hat products and Sean Nittner asked me to take over project management for this one. And as of almost a year ago, when Lenny Balsera didn’t have time to be Fate Line Developer, I have taken that on as well.
I tremendously enjoyed working (once again!) with top talent, and this will continue with our stretch goal collaborators. On a personal level, I had a flash of elation when, after compiling the mass of data from our beta playtest round, I suddenly realized that we had objective confirmation that we had addressed the problems revealed by the alpha round. We all had a vague, hopeful sense from the comments received that maybe we were on the right track, but it was great to get hard data
PK: I’m the lead designer and I love weird challenges in game design. The first four or five months of design was very collaborative. Sean, Sophie, Stephen, and I (wow, am I the only not-S on the original team?) had a bunch of Skype calls where we hashed out the parameters of the game, both fiction and mechanics. The thing we hit on was that the meat of this game would be in an ever-changing, non-deterministic timeline. Which is hella tricky because we have characters coming from the literal future who know the timeline as a matter of fact.
The first iteration of our timeline mechanisms pretty detached from any role play the characters made. At the conclusion of an event (more or less what we call an adventure) one of the players would get slapped with paradox and suffer terrible visions of the new future they’ve created. This involved a skill check against an epic difficulty that was almost sure to cost resources (Fate points, etc.), followed by rolling four Fate dice with modifiers based on how well that skill check went. If the player had been able to shake off time’s assault just fine, then they got to improve dice. If they blew that defense roll, then one of the dice was guaranteed to be a negative. The dice result became the new rating of the event the players had just completed (more or less how badly it screws humanity) and those dice rippled out to the other events in the timeline. This did two things: it gave the characters valuable information about the new state of the timeline and made sure no one could game the system for the best result.
Playtesters hated it
So I had to go back to the drawing board. I redesigned the timeline mechanisms so that the heroes and the squamous horrors of the void are competing on a track for changes to the timeline. As those rack up, ripples get made across the other events. But! Now it’s up to the GM to interpret what those ripples mean. This was a really clever solution to a problem I didn’t know we had. I was leaning too hard into the action element of the action-horror stories we set out to tell. By making the timeline changes a GM element, while giving them tools and guidance to convey those changes to the players in thematically appropriate ways, the uncertainty that players faced dramatically increased. Uncertainty is key to horror stories. We need to keep the players in a state of imperfect information, even if other Fate games rely on perfect information.
That was the biggest challenge in the game and one I hope goes over well. Fred and some of the early readers have really responded to the condensed, concise Fate Core rules set I’ve put together for the game. The first stretch goal was to put that into the Fate Core SRD so people can build their own Fate games using those 50 pages of rules. That’s very flattering. I really hope people build tons of great games off this chassis I put together. It would be the greatest reward so far in my game design career.
ET: I got pulled into the project relatively late, to help get it ready for the second round of playtests, and after that I was part of the writing team. In practice, most of my energy went into the detail work: example text, spells and rituals, corruption stunts, things of that nature. Whenever you see a list of things, I probably had a hand in it. It’s not easy to pick a favorite part—by the time I started working on the project, the core of it had already come more-or-less together. It meant that I was given a wonderfully ghastly playground to explore.
Perhaps my favorite part was helping to finalize the timelines themselves. Stephen wrote some wonderful apocalypses, which are just an absolute delight to read; my job involved statting up the NPCs and horrible monsters that populate his world. In short, getting them ready for a GM to pick up and throw at their players, while still being as weird and scary as Stephen envisions. It’s a fun challenge.
Ed Turner
What are the unique challenges of a timey wimey affected game? You’ve talked about the timelines – what do those mean to the players?
SL: For one thing, it means being able to play some pretty unusual characters, whether by having corruption aspects and stunts, or by confronting temporal paradox. We had playtester groups who reported that some of their members played different versions of the same character, and that seemed to generate a lot of fun moments for them.
For another, it means that the heroes will be dealing with high stakes; for example, if you can’t change the timeline, you have not the possibility but the certitude that everyone you ever cared about will suffer a horrible, ah, fate.
Finally, the fact that a group can tackle any of the four key events in a timeline in any order in turn makes each story truly unique to that group. It’s likely that two gaming group taking on the same timeline and Great Old One will have a very different narrative, so replay value should be good.
ET: It means that players and GMs alike will be contending with an interesting juxtaposition of knowledge and uncertainty. The timeline gives players many, though not all, of the essential details about what they’ll encounter during an event, but their actions ripple forward, changing subsequent events. The knowledge they were so sure of at the outset grows less and less helpful as time goes on. And it gives the GM room to really mess with players’ expectations. Of course, that does also suggest part of the challenge: rationing out that change. PK pointed out earlier that uncertainty is key to horror stories, but uncertainty requires a solid baseline, otherwise things change so rapidly that they stop being unsettlingly wrong and start being pure static. In other words, the GM can’t mess with players’ expectations if things get so chaotic that the players don’t have any expectations anymore. Timelines, and the timeline track, help contain that chaos, so players will always know more-or-less what’s going to happen, but can be shocked by the details.
PK: The biggest challenge was finding a way to have timeline actually matter. We decided early on that a timeline would play a significant role in the game. That’s why the whole structure of Fate of Cthulhu is built around the timeline. When I started mucking about with possible timeline systems, I realized that for it to work it needed to do two contradictory things: the players have to know the timeline and the timeline has to change and shift. From there it was a tightrope to walk of having the changes be unpredictable and Lovecrafting while letting the players feel like they earned the changes to it.
How did you approach making an inclusive game in something that most marginalized consider volatile, the Lovecraftian mythos, both mechanically and in the fiction and in presentation of the game rules?
SL: It was clear from the first moment that to make this a game which Evil Hat could publish, we would have to face the true monsters in the Lovecraft story. It just would not have been compatible with our mission to gloss over racism, ableism, and other -isms.
It may be tacky but I’m going to toot my own horn here regarding the concept of sanity: I was the first to suggest a corruption mechanic and the high cost of facing the horrors being the slow transformation into a monster yourself. I’m very fond of RPGs that ask the question “What are you willing to sacrifice in order to succeed?” instead of just “Will you succeed?” I think it’s central to Fate, a game where PCs have lots of resources to draw on in order to achieve goals.
That said, I’m certain someone else would rapidly have come up with the corruption idea, but I felt good about being the one to pull it out of an evil hat.
ET: I think Sophie really hits the nail on the head: getting rid of the tired and thoughtless treatment of “sanity” pulls a lot of weight. I think it also helps to be absolutely explicit when we call out Lovecraft’s bigotry. It’s so commonly elided over, or dismissed as being a product of its time. And that’s no good… his writings often, and with varying levels of subtlety, other real-world groups, and that’s something we don’t want to lazily perpetuate.
And of course, we can’t forget the contributions of our sensitivity reader, Misha Bushyager. Sensitivity consultation is great idea in general, but on something like this, it’s invaluable.
PK Sullivan
How is Fate of Cthulhu different from other experiences in Fate, from your perspective? What do you hope people enjoy in the variation?
SL: I think it puts in doubt whether you will achieve success like no other Fate game we’ve released before. Also, there are not that many role-playing games that provide mechanical support to allow time travel and changing the future, and I don’t know of any other based on the Fate engine. In fact, most time-travel RPGs I know of have a lighter tone: TimeWatch (Pelgrane Press), Doctor Who (FASA, Cubicle 7), Time & Temp (Dig a Thousand Holes Publishing), etc.. On the other hand, Fate of Cthulhu can have funny moments, but it’s not meant to be played for laughs
ET: The timelines give the game a very strong narrative superstructure; there is a very clearly defined end point that you are building to: eventually the moment of the Great Old One’s rise will arrive, and it’s on you to be ready for it. It means there’s a grand finale always on the horizon, which gives the campaign an ongoing sense of pace… the characters might not know what the best next step is, but it’s impossible for them to lose sight of their greater goal. It’s not the very first Fate game to do something like this; Uprising has a built-in narrative arc leading to an end point. But Fate of Cthulhu pushes the concept even further, diving really deep into the short, focused campaign concept. I also hope that people take advantage of the focused, relatively brief campaign by going through multiple apocalypses. Not only by re-trying a timeline, hoping to get a better result with the next iteration, but by trying out the variety of timelines in the book and coming out as stretch goals from the Kickstarter.
PK: Most Fate games have characters change laterally, sometimes gaining in power but only in small doses. Because a given campaign is really just four adventures — four events on the timeline — and a denouement in the form of the final event Rise of the Great Old One, we actually put advancement on the fast track. PCs get a new skill every milestone. But… that’s tempered by the corruption mechanisms. This is the only Fate game I know of where you can end up in a mechanically reinforced spiral of self-destruction. Corruption stunts offer you great power but at the cost of further corruption. Not to mention many of the horrors you’ll face can push you down that path, as well. It’s another interesting dichotomy where characters can get very powerful very fast but also just wind up taking themselves right out of play by getting too dark.
One last question! If you could be in the Fate of Cthulhu world, what would you most want to do and see? What would be the wildest adventure you could want?
PK: Is it a cop out to say I don’t want to go there? We made the worst future! Futures! There are five of them! They’re all completely terrible. War, plague, famine, pestilence, and unending subjugation await anyone who lives long enough to see the future. If I had to be someone in Fate of Cthulhu, I think I’d want to be a modern day mystic. Maybe someone who has visions of the future. Being haunted by nightmarish visions of things yet to be is about the most chill thing you can be in this world.
SL: I’m with PK! But I would want to see success in avoiding a cataclysm, righting things to the point where humanity can build a better future. So, ++++ on the timeline!
ET: Yeah, there’s definitely no great place in the Fate of Cthulhu world. But I dunno, I think the Dagon timeline might be pretty okay? I mean, assuming you survive the horrible transformation into a Deep One. Sure, you’d suffer eternal subservience to a giant paranoid fish-monster at the bottom of the ocean, but you’d get to breathe underwater, and that’s pretty cool. That’s about as good a trade-off as a Great Old One is going to offer.
I have an interview today with L A Wilga and James Lader on the new roleplaying game Sundown, which is currently on Kickstarter! It sounds like a really interesting new game and I’m excited for it. Check out the interview below, and the Kickstarter too!
—
Sundown’s cover art by Mayara Sampaio.
Tell me a little about Sundown. What excites you about it?
L A: So, Sundown is a rules light tabletop roleplaying game. It’s set in a pre-industrial frontier where, instead of magic, we have “science.” Science is the intersection of two things. Wonders: inventions that just make everyone’s life easier, and changing: the art of taking someone and reshaping their flesh. In fewer words, engineering and biology
There are two main facets to the game: surviving the wild, with fauna just as changed and dangerous as the folk, and surviving the politics, with a power struggle in every town and a populace that needs you but doesn’t want you.
I certainly get excited to face down giant winged frogs and angry murderbirds, my pink undershave flowing in the wind, but I find catharsis in the politics. You have to navigate finding work, getting paid, finding a place to stay, making friends, and avoiding the authorities as someone disdained by most of society. It’s an experience I think most in our queer rpg community will recognize.
It’s kind of like a cyberpunk game with the punk aesthetic, the politics, and the transhumanism, but if you took away its technology and sent it to the West Marches.
J L: I’m really excited about how much control you have over your body in Sundown. Changes are probably my favorite part of our game, because as a trans man, being able to reshape your body on a whim is the ultimate fantasy. And I’m sure other people think that’s super cool too.
The other thing I’m excited about is intentionally including politics in the premise. Social strife is the lifeblood of this game, where more of the people are monsters than the fiends. I really like that the direction of your career can be toppling the ruling class in Cragsmouth, or becoming a thief-assassin who saves themselves at all costs. You make your way through Sundown by surviving how best you can, and it really mirrors to me how to navigate a world where a lot of the power isn’t yours.
You talk about the Changing. How does Changing work, and are there any special benefits or consequences from it?
L A: This is a good question, because people tend to assume that you just drink a potion and seconds later you have claws or something.
Changes are made by a scientist specialized in changing, and in a laboratory devoted to changing. You get stuffed into an egg-like pod with the changing agents and a medium called lungwater that keeps you alive for the weeks or months your changes take. Breaking down flesh and building it back up takes a lot of time and energy. When you break out of your egg, you’re ravenously hungry, everything is too bright, and you just want to go back to sleep.
Changing agents are derived from plants and animals out in the wild that have already been observed to do… something to people. Indigoji turns your skin purple, for instance. Modern changes were discovered by blending random assortments together and logging the resulting effect on humans, not all of them consenting test subjects.
J L: Changing is arduous. It really does mirror the transition process in the real world, but it’s less limited. It’s expensive to get access to changes. Special equipment and making sure you don’t die in stasis isn’t cheap. The time cost, too, matters. And some changes can stress your body. It’s not a perfect science, and you can end up with additional things that identify you as a changeling, like black nails when you asked for super strength.
We also did name the pods where Changes happen eggs. That’s not a very subtle metaphor I think. If people know you’re a changeling, too, they’ll treat you very different. The best reaction you can expect in most of Sundown is mild disdain, which is very real. So if people know you’re a changeling, that alone is a consequence.
This was labeled frogbeast, which I think is such a fun name!
How do your identities as queer and trans (or queer/trans identities in general) reflect in the broader world beyond the Changing? Do they relate to Wonders, or even to the politics?
L A: We didn’t really use wonders to say anything about queerness or transness, they’re kinda just neat things, like goggles that let you see at night. We definitely do intend, though, for guns to be a symbol of the class war. Did we mention there’s guns? They’re more like railguns than gunpowder guns. They use a fictional material called floatstone.
There is this wonder called pitch, though. It’s a black syrup thing that’s injected, and it knits your body back together after some nasty injuries. The catch, though, is if you use too much, you run the risk of becoming a pitchblood. Basically, your blood is replaced with pitch. You lose twenty years off your life, but you’re near invincible. I think some folk can sympathize with that sort of deal-with-the-devil transformation?
Beau’s Note: This specific one reminds me of my own experiences with lithium as someone with bipolar disorder, to be honest.
L A, continued: The politics is really where our queerness comes through. For one, if you have any sort of visible change, which includes things like colored hair, over half of the people in Sundown won’t really want anything to do with you. Not to mention you’re already othered because of your profession. The isolationists of Sundown really don’t like outsiders doing their work for them. Too bad they need drifters like you for things like translation, bounty hunting, and trailblazing.
J L: Definitely. The otherism experienced in Sundown based on being a drifter is pretty much a direct metaphor for how it feels to be disdained and desired. Very much as a queer person it’s easy to feel consumed and discarded at the earliest opportunity, and since you’re a travelling contractor, it’s even more direct.
I think, honestly, the other parts of the system also show some of the good parts of being queer, too. When you create your character, for example, your character is rooted in the people at your table. One of the traits that embodies who you are is defined by your relationship to another character at the table. Drifters often are building an intentional community, a network of people who know where the good work is, who you should work with on what jobs, where it’s safe to travel, and sharing stories of your best exploits. I think that really reflects how queer and trans folx band together to keep each other safe and loved in a world that is otherwise hostile to them.
James Lader.
How are things like changing and wonders, and those politics you discuss, mechanized or formalized in the game?
J L: So all of these things involve infamy, which is the currency we use in Sundown. Infamy isn’t coin, though, it’s a representation of your influence in the area, and how well people know you. The more infamy you have garnered, the more leverage you have. Political action that earns infamy takes place during heats, the jobs drifters take on every month. You might slay fiends, debate a public official, steal from a guild, or lead an uprising.
Getting wonders and changes requires you to spend your infamy to obtain them. Some wonders are special and rare enough to use your downtime between heats as well as your infamy to obtain them. Changes always take downtime, and usually cost infamy.
One of the neat things about infamy is that you only have so much influence you can gain, and once you use that leverage, it’s gone. You have to think carefully about what you want to achieve and use that influence wisely.
L A: Ok so James mentioned heats. That’s basically an adventure, and downtime is the time between them. We intend for downtime to be played kind of like play-by-post between sessions
When you make improvements to your character that involve big investments of time, like learning a new skill or rebuilding your fleshy prison, you do that during your downtime. Spending your infamy on changes is just one of the things you can spend your downtime on.
J L:Downtime is when most of your character improvements can happen, so you have to choose really carefully what you want to spend your time on between jobs. Sundown is a hard place to be and choosing to better your traits or gain cat ears can be life or death. It’s really tricky because you can also only get so many things before not having any more infamy to gain.
What have you done with the game to support players in exploring these relatively serious subjects, including consent and safety mechanics and other aspects of your design?
J L: One of the first sections of the book is a consent tool we developed based on our stress mechanic. Stress is sort of a measure of your character’s health, and it worked really well to measure how safe a topic was for the players.
We also reinforce throughout the book to be mindful of others at the table, to use additional safety and consent tools you might be more familiar with, and to check in with your fellow players.
These are really hard topics and not everyone wants certain themes in the game, and we went out of our way to remind people to check in, and check often.
L A: Regarding serious subjects, I wrote from my own experience as a poor queer person, and I think the queerphobia and classism and Sundown really reflect that
For the experiences I haven’t lived, we took on two non-white sensitivity editors. Their input was invaluable for fleshing out the cultures that have made their way to Sundown in a respectful manner.
Even though I’m disabled too, James has far more lived experience in that regard. The section on disabled drifters in the intro section is entirely his doing.
Every time there’s a “make sure you check in with your fellow players” regarding a marginalized identity, all four of us had a hand in it.
My products are temporarily on reverse sale to gear up for tax time I’ve increased the prices by a very nice percentage – hopefully to help me get through this year’s taxes! Buy all of the products for a cool nice $69 – yes, that’s more expensive. Just like taxes!
My goal for the sale is $420. I will not use it for blazing it, just to give a boost to my funds to pay taxes owed. It runs until 4/1/19!
We recently posted an update about Turn’s progress, and it’s going pretty well! We may soon be closing pre-orders (which are still open here!) if all goes well with layout, and we are pushing on thru with the
stretch goals. I wanted to talk a little about Turn in playtesting, and a
big thing that happened recently in our longest-run playtest.
Just a picture of a cat to start us off right.
Some people may have heard me talk on Twitter about my character Beau Taggart, who is a professional hunter, the game’s Late Bloomer, a Cougar, and super gay. In his early character background during character generation, we established that Beau had turned for the first time only recently, about six months ago (as required for the Late Bloomer role). When he turned for the first time, he his truck had just been hit by a drunk driver while he was driving down a winding back road.
He got out of the car to check on the driver, but the driver was behaving aggressively, and tried to punch him. Beau knew something felt wrong, but he was scared and panicked, and responded by hitting the guy back. He didn’t know that his body had started to turn, that his super strength had grown. The hit was so hard it broke the guy’s neck, and while Beau was realizing with horror he’d killed a man, he also turned into a cougar for the first time.
This gif is not an accurate representation of Beau. It’s just funny!
His animal instincts kicked in – he hid the body, and ate some of it, leaving his claw and teeth marks on it, desperately hungry in light of the force turn. In his panic, he was found by Camellia, a fellow shapeshifter (Overachiever, Bison) who helped him get back to human form, and over time, he learned better how to calm down. He didn’t tell Camellia, or anyone else, about the drunk driver, harboring his accidental crime as yet another secret.
Not many Turn characters have super tragic backstories, and this one isn’t even all that bad (sometimes people accidentally kill people, and those are small town secrets I’ve heard), but I knew there was a risk of it being an element when people played so I built a character with a high risk background to see how fast we could ramp up to exposure. It still took over a year at our slow playing pace – which is ideal. If we were playing weekly, it would happen more quickly, but it paces out well.
How did I plan this out? Well, I knew the number of exposure marks for towns and town characters, I knew the average number of scenes per session (5-8), how many of those typically risk exposure (4-7), and how many sessions each character is generally in (3-6). I knew that having a higher risk background meant that I would end up on the higher range of everything, and that Beau was starting with a generally positive reputation as a Late Bloomer.
That doesn’t mean I was ready for the exposure to hit max!
Turn has ten marks on the exposure track for the town. You can get positive or negative marks, based on the type of interaction that causes them. You take the marks when you’ve done something that might cause someone to suspect your shifter identity – it can be behavioral, it can be physical, etc. Something like slipping up and saying you spent all night in the woods, or maybe your eyes shine oddly in a photograph.
Beau’s track grew and grew over time, including his town character (TC) tracks, which are separate. One TC of his was Diego, his best friend who knew everything but this secret. Early on in the campaign, I played Beau to slowly reveal his identity as a shifter to Diego, purposefully planning positive encounters. He managed to do so successfully, which was good, because Beau was truly in love with Diego. They later became partners, but it was still pretty quiet, because the town was relatively conservative in that regard. Their own professional hunter in love with his buddy? Beau wasn’t sure they could handle it.
There are three results you can get when you become fully exposed to a TC or the town itself: reviled, which is the lowest result, and results either in a toxic and risky relationship with the TC or you getting run out of town or dealing with violence; revealed, which is the middling result and means you may risk comforts, safety, or gossip but you’ll be able to stay in town; and known, which is the best result, and means you’re accepted in the town or by the TC.
With Diego, Beau got known, so he was able to get together with Diego, stay friends and more, and not have any risk increased from it. Over time Beau had some more positive and some more negative interactions with people in the town, just like you do – simple things that cause conflict last longer in people’s minds than we thing. It was pretty balanced. But, rumors arose when a body was found in the woods that it turned out matched the drunk driver, whose car was found, too.
This combined with Beau acting out of sorts because he found out who his birth mother was and it led to a spectacular new ability – the ability to turn into a Raven, as well! These events combined led to an exposure roll, which is 2d6 plus the exposure track, added up based on the +’s and -‘s on the track, and a + for any known TCs. I rolled poorly, but had enough based on the roll, the track, and Diego, I got the middling result – revealed. That meant no immediate danger, but it meant time had come to face facts.
The rumors spread faster than Beau could do anything for, and before he could even come clean to his closest friends (Camellia and Iris, his cousin and coworker), the cops were at Camellia’s door looking for Beau. He managed to tell Diego what happened, and Diego supported him, but he was going to have to deal with the police at some point. He decided to turn himself in. Meanwhile, on the in-fiction Facebook, his fellow townspeople were spreading memes of the Cougar Killer, claiming he’d murdered the man and mutilated the bodies. This is something that would eventually die out without the police arresting him, but in the moment it was challenging!
A little bit of coordination led to him having enough time to sneak past the deputy posted at Camellia’s (where his truck was*) to tell Camellia and Iris what was going on, then turn himself in with some legal support obtained by Camellia. He confessed to fighting with the guy, but stopped short of admitting to murder. The cops didn’t have enough evidence to keep him. In the end, Beau will still live in Cauldron Springs, unable to leave easily because of the ties that hold him there, and hopefully happy with Diego (because that cat’s outta the bag).
This cat, specifically. a Cougar, by Cecilia Ferri
But, once you’re brought in for something this serious, it’s hard for people to drop their suspicions. Combining it with Beau becoming obviously out as queer since Diego went with him to the police station, Beau’s once stellar social standing is pretty decreased. He’ll be able to survive, but he’s not who he once was to these townspeople – many of them will go on believing he actually murdered someone, others will simply struggle with his identity especially when tied with the stigma of being questioned for murder.
So basically it all worked out? Like this is exactly how this sort of result should be narratively. Maybe some people might choose to have the shifter identity be the forefront and have it be more fantastical, some people might want to diminish the fantasy even further, and either is okay – just keeping in mind that people rarely want to believe the most fantastical things, even though they’ll often use fantastical things as metaphor or illusion for the reality.
The pacing for the exposure to max out worked perfectly, the narrative surrounding it hit all the right notes, and all I did was start with some trouble baked in, like so many characters do. It meant a lot to me to play this character** and have it play out so true to what I designed. The game works, it works really good, and it tells the stories I want to be told.
I can’t ask for more, honestly.
I’m curious, what have you worked on in games that you played out in playtesting or just when you released the game that made you have that, like, damn, I did it! moment? A moment with the math lining up just right, or the narrative tone hitting the right button? Share it in the comments, and please share this on social media to talk about those moments of design success!
*Beau constantly forgot his truck at Camellia’s, where he often went to have tea to calm down and to hang out, then turned into a cougar to hit the woods. It actually became a feature on the map! Oops.
**Who some might have guessed was a test run for my chosen name
Tell me a little about Mysthea: Legends From the Borderlands. What excites you about it?
So! Mysthea: Legends From the Borderlands is a game of post-war rebuilding and divided loyalties in a geomantic fantasy world. It’s set in a city that’s in territory contested by two major powers, and now those powers are at war. The war front has passed over this city and is now a distant rumble, and the city is free again – though much worse for wear. Each player creates a faction active in the city, whether they’re an ancient order, a new organisation dedicated to refugee support, or sent by one of the great powers to rebuild the city and pursue their patron’s agenda. You’ll make a viewpoint character from your faction, dive into the politics and struggles of the wounded city, and see how it changes from flashpoint to flashpoint.
I’m excited about:
Telling a zoomed-in story: your group will find out how a single city grows and how its people change over the span of a few decades. You’ll craft this city and get to know its districts, its politics, its festivals.
A dive into weird fantasy: Mysthea is a world defined by the crystals scattered over it by a prehistoric impact. These crystals warp the environment and its creatures, but also resonate with human thought. What does a society look like where everyone has limited telekinesis, and can use these crystals to build, fight, control beasts, craft prosthetics, etc? I’m interested in finding out!
A game of empire and liberation. At least some of the player factions will be coming into the city as liberators, having ousted the previous occupiers. But the ousting wasn’t clean, and the faction’s patrons aren’t altruists. As you play you’ll deal with what happens after liberation, as each faction must reckon with their obligations to their patrons, the city, and each other. We’re hoping the fantasy setting will provide the needed distance to really dig into this thorny topics, and have hired cultural consultants to try and ensure we do so respectfully.
I like this zoomed in look, and I’m curious about the
flashpoints! What does it feel like in play to go from moment to moment in this
world, and how is that represented in the game?
A flashpoint starts with
you defining its core issue: why have we decided to pick up this city’s story
here? Maybe a battalion of soldiers has arrived at the city and demanded
supplies? Perhaps a shower of crystal meteors have hit the city, causing destruction
and warped the area? Or maybe one of the player factions has decided they’ve
had enough, and is going to try and seize control of the city?
So – you’ve set up this
flashpoint. To play through it, you’ll jump between the actions of Houses
(slow, ponderous, and vast) and Heroes – agile and dynamic, but with their own
priorities. We’ve designed the two layers to feel very different in play. House
actions add new elements to the map and reshape the city’s balance of power,
but use up a limited pool of Decrees. The hero phase feels more like standard
PbtA, something like Monster of the Week. Your group of characters have a
mission to deal with, and as you play out the moment-to-moment drama of that
conflict you’ll test your bonds with your fellows and discover new truths about
the world. The two phases flow into each other. Your Houses’ actions set up
threats and opportunities for your Heroes to deal with, while your Heroes’
on-the-ground experience of this city and its people can completely change your
Houses’ priorities and goals.
How do you approach the
idea of consent and agency in a world where people can control things with
their mind, able to break rules with a thought?
One of the interesting things about magic in Mysthea is that it adds agency, and its most powerful effects need close friends working together on a common goal. It’s a link between the mental and the material and has been used in-setting to craft crystal prostheses amputees can telekinetically control, and literally give agency to constructed beings of stone and crystal.
There’s the other element
too – consent and agency. One person acting on their own can only perform a few
tricks with crystal shards and boost their normal actions – to do more, you
need to work together. By calling on the aid of those who have strong bonds
with you you add their wisdom to yours, letting you work together to go beyond
human limits, evoke world-warping auras and more.
The fact that magical
potency comes from close bonds and common goals instead of years of arcane
research and expensive components is really interesting! What sort of society
does that lead to? How does that change how minority groups organise and lobby
for their rights? How do autocrats maintain their power, knowing what power
lies in their subject’s hands if they work together? I’m interested to find
out!
I didn’t ask questions about the monsters but this thing is RAD.
I was just asking people
about making games that happen after the liberation! What do you think are the
challenges in designing a game with this focus, and what’s exciting about them?
One challenge is definitely
the messy complexity of these situations. You can’t turn back the clock – the
occupation happened, and it and your ‘liberation’ left scars on this place.
Among the city’s citizens you’ll have those who want to restore the old ways,
and those who suffered under that regime and want to keep moving forward. Among
the liberators, you’ll have isolationists wanting to minimise investment and
occupiers trying to claim this city permanently.
That’s a really interesting
social situation to drop players into, but it’s vital to keep the difference
between dogma and the true situation clear. Part of our solution is to make
sure the game prioritises humanity over ideology. We want to humanise all
parties involved, though that definitely doesn’t mean presenting all positions
as valid.
Finally, we’re aware of the
limits of our own perspectives, and have hired consultants to make sure we
treat sensitive matters with the appropriate degree of tact and care.
What are some of the more
complex aspects of designing a game focused on a whole city, rather than just a
few characters?
First, you have to treat
the city as a character in its own right, and give it a presence at the table.
The map of the city is central to the game: you begin by placing down its
districts and landmarks, and as you play you’ll introduce factors to it
representing people, places and events crucial to the current flashpoint.
It’s also important to
maintain the link between people and their community – to the extent that one
of the GM’s principles is ‘name everyone, and know who backs them’. There’s no
lone wolves in Legends From the Borderlands, and no faceless mooks – everyone
has their own identity, and their own place in the city’s cultural fabric.
Of course, the easiest way to make something feel alive is to have it change. The timeskips between flashpoints are here to establish that, letting the city grow physically and culturally – each time you jump ahead, you’ll describe ways the city’s appearance has changed, and a new festival that’s sprung up to remember the previous flashpoint.
Tell me a little about vs. KICKSTARTER. What excites you about it?
vs.
KICKSTARTER began as three small roleplaying games based on Phil Reed’s vs.
Monsters. More accurately, they are inspired by his vs. Outlaws, a
pared-down Wild West-themed version of his original game. That game was
produced on both sides of a multi-panel screen that folds down to a 5-1/2″
square.
A
bit over a decade ago, Phil opened the vsM Engine up for others to use. At that
time, I had worked a bit on three games based on vsM, but I wound up focusing
on completing a BFA and plans for development were pushed back. A few months
ago, there was a discussion on twitter about one of the settings I had
developed as a vsM-powered game. I looked back at the old files and while that
particular game needed a lot of work, I saw that vs. MARS was nearly done. So
much so, that a bit of trimming and it would fit on that folded screen
template. From there, the other two initial games featured in the campaign
followed.
vs.
MARS is a game about an alien invasion in a small town. I’ve always been a fan
of survival fiction — things like zombie movies where the focus and threat is about
the other survivors but there is some external threat pressuring the survivors.
vs. MARS really slots into that role. The unlocked expansion opens the game up
to leading a resistance on occupied Earth.
vs.
MIRRORSHADES is a fast-playing cyberpunk game. I love the cyberpunk genre and
my hope is this game falls a bit more into the social change/punk part of
cyberpunk rather than the chrome fetishization side. An unlocked two-panel
expansion to this adds fantasy races and magic to the MegaCity — it’s the
most-requested addition to any cyberpunk game.
vs.
PIRATES is a game in the golden age of piracy from our childhood memories. The
already-unlocked expansion came first: I’ve always wanted to play a game that
was a mashup of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and The Pirates of the
Caribbean. Without the expansion, you’re playing more of a Treasure
Island or Black Sails game. With the expansion, you’ve got undead
pirates, the kraken, and cursed treasure.
We’ve
recently unlocked vs. EMPIRE, a game that isn’t so much “Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off” as it is “Star Wars with
the serial numbers filled in Play-Doh”.
Initially, I thought the campaign would need $400 to fund and would probably top out at $600 or about 40 or 45 backers. I am excited about the response to the campaign so far! As I write this, the campaign is 500% funded and we are nearing 100 backers — that’s twice the number of backers and nearly twice the amount pledged past a point in my initial spreadsheet where I wrote “we’re probably dreaming at this point”. That these small games are inspiring people I don’t even know to come on board and help make them a reality is just something that surprised me — it really impressed me.
Great!
What about this particular mechanical system appealed to you to use in such a
variety of settings, and what have you changed to suit them?
When
I started designing my initial vs. game, I was interested in survival fiction.
Rather than being the proactive monster hunters of vs. Monsters where
your characters decide to hunt down monsters, having a setting where you are
forced to take on that role appealed to me. You’re a regular person and then
something happens: how do you react to that?
I
had two different main games I was developing which had the same underlying
elements: normality is interrupted by an invasion; you are simultaneously being
hunted and take on the role of the hunters. One game was somewhat campy, the
other somewhat serious. They combined and the theme of vs. MARS wound up
engulfing the other.
Since
my initial designs, my preferred game style has changed from one where we’re
just players reacting to the twists and turns of the GM’s story to more of a
style where there is player collaboration in they way the story is shaped. In
vs. MARS, there are rules for scene framing where a player answers two
questions: “What is this scene about?” and “Where does it take
place?” Adding an element like this helps to emulate the type of fiction
vs. MARS emulates — in a setting like an alien invasion, one major element is
isolation or separation. By adding scene framing, our protagonists don’t have
to be in a small clump of adventuring heroes all the time.
When
there is damage involved, conflict resolution now incorporates the suits of
cards drawn to speed up determining damage taken. The cyberpunk game, vs.
MIRRORSHADES, has a Metal stat that is used whenever cyberware augmentations
are used. To reflect the setting’s concept that cyberware is an improvement,
using Metal makes the highest card revealed a suit that trumps all others. It
effectively guarantees that you’re going to have some effect on the scene if
you use these augments.
You know I love small towns, so I’m curious, what do you do to make the town small and still feel worth being in for vs. MARS?
During
character creation, one of the things you would choose for your survivor is
their concept: something about what they did before the invasion and what they
want. This desire is something that should tie them into the town. The current
example character is Tabitha Masters, a French major at ETU who wants to get
home to make sure her family is safe.
Stock
locations are listed for a few things found in and around the town that convey
the theme of isolation.
What have you done to make fantasy character types exciting and respectful for cyberpunk, mechanically or setting-wise?
To
get to that, I have to work through the constraints of the project. Whenever I
see a new game come out the first question I always see asked is: “Can I
play Star Wars with it?” (Which is where vs. EMPIRE comes from.)
The second question is: “Can I play Shadowrun with it?” When
developing the cyberpunk vs. game, it seemed that a straight cyberpunk game
with an option to add on the fantasy elements would fit the limited space I had
available.
With
vs. MAGICSHADES, a player chooses their character’s heritage, which adds a
simple one-use bonus to the character. Some implied setting material, such as
the elf nation of Tir nAill claiming all elves as citizens, start to bring in
some classic tropes of pseudo-Shadowrun.
How are your pirates and their world different from and the same as those we most commonly see in media?
The
tagline for vs. PIRATES says the setting is based on the way we remember tales
of pirates from our childhood. I feel it is more cartoonish than serious. Even
though you could play something straight like the Black Sails television
show, I anticipate the default play style would be more like The Pirates of
the Caribbean if one stripped out all the supernatural aspects.
The
way vs. PIRATES works is we establish the approach one will take to a
situation. Our stats in the game are Swashbuckling and Parley. Basically if
you’re fighting, your approach uses Swashbuckling. If you’re not, it’s Parley.
An antagonist also has approaches, but they are based on their role. So a
pirate antagonist would be drawing more cards if they were doing something
piratey and fewer if they were doing something outside their role.
Going
back to that default play style, adding in the vs. DAVY JONES expansion bumps
the game towards that Buffy + Pirates of the Caribbean game, so
we can add some more supernatural elements to the antagonists and their goals.
What more do you have in store both for those already-achieved stretch goals and anything else to come?
I
really don’t want to overextend myself on this, which is the first Kickstarter
campaign I’ve handling myself. While I have been collaborating and working on
over a dozen others, I’ve seen a few easy ways how a successful campaign can be
twisted into become a financial nightmare.
I’ve
spoken to a few other campaign creators when it looked like we were close to
unlocking the vs. EMPIRE stretch goal. Nearly every one told me to not add
anything else that I don’t feel comfortable with. At this point, the project is
funded and will be delivered — with the planning I’ve done for the campaign,
it’s all good. I don’t want to take on additional costs that could disrupt
fulfillment of the project.
So
right now, the last stretch goal was “I’ll add a second topping to a
celebratory pizza when this is all over.”
However, I have plans for further developing some of those earlier vsM games into this format, including one game designed to be a 1-on-1 one-shot. I’ll see how fulfillment goes for this campaign first!
What is CAPERS Noir, both as a product and as your vision?
CAPERS Noir is the first
supplement for my award-winning CAPERS RPG. It provides new character options
and new GM tools as well as an alternative setting for the game. It takes the
core game setting of the 1920s Prohibition era and moves it forward
twenty years to the WW2 years. This alternative setting shifts from
gangster shoot-em-ups to moody, atmospheric, crime noir stories filled with
mystery and some horror elements. The additional rules and tools help fill out
this noir setting but are also perfectly usable in the core Roaring Twenties
setting.
This supplement is a test case for me, to see if CAPERS has the legs to become a full game line. The early success of the Kickstarter makes me feel it does. The fan base (old and new) have been very enthusiastic, supportive, and looking forward to seeing more. I have plans to publish at least two more supplements, each about the same size as CAPERS Noir. Each will take a similar path of being an alternative historical period/setting/theme while also expanding options for all other versions of the game. My hope is to explore a variety of “cops vs robbers” themes and tropes with these supplements.
What are the Noir rules like and how do they change CAPERS?
The core rules of
CAPERS Noir are still the same (and you need the core book to play). There are
some new powers, and I’ve tried some different things with how you gain
abilities and boosts, flexing the powers system a bit. The first big difference
is that CAPERS Noir includes investigation rules using the core playing card
mechanics. This rule subset allows an investigation to move forward (that is,
clues keep getting found) without shutting down the whole thing over one bad
trait check. Success and failure on the investigation checks instead describes
how you gain additional information or add complications to the story.
Additionally, the horror elements brought to bear in CAPERS Noir provides for the possibility that your character’s soul will be corrupted. Temptation lies around every corner. Committing terrible acts at the wrong time can bring you a bit more power, but at a cost. A “shade track” defines how far your character has fallen to darkness and what benefits and hindrances this causes. You can pull yourself back out in a few different ways, most commonly by paying attention to and pursuing your “beacon,” a person, place, or thing that you hold dear and seek to help and protect.
What have you put
together to flesh out a 1940s setting and explore that complex era?
Noir fiction and film
that developed in the 20s and 30s (and feed forward into the 40s and 50s) are
at the core of CAPERS Noir. The crime noir themes of the alternate setting
explore the darker side of humanity, nihilism, fatalism, cynicism. Things
aren’t what they seem, morally gray characters are everywhere, and the
protagonist doesn’t always “win.” It’s a world of mystery and
darkness, where the good must struggle simply to stay good and the darker
characters are at risk of falling deeper into darkness even more easily. Plus,
lots of characters smoking cigarettes in the rain.
The supplement doesn’t deal directly with World War 2, but the ravages of war and its aftermath certainly are on characters’ minds in the game. (And that’s not to say I won’t ever explore the actual war, with super-powered characters taking part, in some future supplement.)
