There’s also been tons of interviews, and more to come, plus some articles about design, projects, and games. I’m getting a new website soon at briebeau.com, which currently redirects to the Blogger site y’all know. The Google+ exodus has begun and in a couple months it’ll be no more!
The last of these recordings didn’t properly upload to Google Play because I messed up my SoundCloud upload, but working on fixing that. I’m not great at tech stuff!
This recording is mostly an update on what I’ve been doing, and some thoughts about love. Specifically, loving your work and doing it without burning yourself out, and what to do when all is not enough.
Our recipe this week is what I call scratch cake, found here, even though it’s a family recipe too!
The music for this episode is by Yakov Golman, Reflection, and was found here.
Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/thoughty. Tell your friends!
ETA: Sorry, now with links! Blogger borked. Hey all, today I have an interview with Alice Grizzle, who has a really cool name and made an even cooler game: Kiss Her Before the World Ends. I’ve heard nothing but praise for it and her design since its recent release, so check out what Alice has to say!
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Tell me a little about Kiss Her Before the World Ends. What excites you about it?
Kiss Her Before the World Ends excites me because it prioritizes how the PC’s feel and allows space for all players. My main goal when creating the game was to create a game that encourages romance while still letting everyone play characters like themselves. Be the ace, pan, aromantic, polyam, etc. I think it achieves that.
There are so many games about being a badass, that focus on violence. I wanted to make a game about being vulnerable in front of other people. My hope is that people will see games like mine and realize that relationships and romance can be the centerpiece for your game. Tabletop games have the same ability to be about anything that every form of media has.
Alice Grizzle, designer.
What do players typically do and experience in a standard session of Kiss Her Before the World Ends? What did you do in the design to allow or encourage players to play inclusively, whether they are playing characters like themselves or choosing to play characters unlike themselves?
Kiss Her is an emotional game, stressful even at times which is by design. The use of a timer puts a lot of pressure on the players to say what they have to say before they’re no longer able to do so. It simulates the same pressure the characters feel really well.
During the design process I had to think of broad definitions for things like what it means to want Intimacy. That’s hard enough to quantify, especially while still being inclusive to ace and aromantic folks. I settled on “Intimacy is the desire for closeness” which is open to lots of interpretations. All the definitions for the types of Needs are equally interpretable.
What are the mechanics like in Kiss Her and how do players engage them?
The two main mechanics in Kiss Her Before the World Ends, the ones that control the flow of the game and what the game is about, are Needs and the timer. Needs are the things people want and they come in 4 types: Intimacy Needs, Empathy Needs, Escapism Needs, and Validation Needs. The main focus of the game is the characters negotiating how to get what they want while also fulfilling each other’s Needs. At certain points in play the players will clear Needs that they’ve resolved and replace them with new ones. Priorities change as the end draws closer.
The timer is the outside world collapsing around them. It is what pushes the characters forward, and hopefully towards each other. It also controls the pace of the game. Scenes can end whenever the players feel like they should, but none can go past the length of the timer.
What do you like best about the game and how it plays, from a design standpoint?
Probably the different types of Needs. Those four types and the definitions for them really feel like they incapsulate a huge part of what it is we as people want from our relationships. I feel like they push players into immediately playing interesting, conflicted characters.
I would say I also really like how we’ve formated it primarily with mobile viewing in mind. It encourages spontaneous play in a way that you just can’t do if your game is a full book. I seriously think that books almost always being the default way we present our games is to our own detriment. Games should be presented in the way that makes them most accessible and encourages players to play in the ways you want them too.
This cover is super gorgeous, and looks great in the mobile format. The book itself is designed to work great on mobile, which has gained a lot of praise from those who have bought the game to play!
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Thanks so much for the interview, Alice! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Kiss Her Before the World Ends today!
Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/thoughty. Tell your friends!
Today I have an interview with Epidiah Ravachol about Wolfspell, hitting Kickstarter on January 21, 2019! I actually proofread the original Wolfspell released in Worlds Without Master, and I’ve been wishing for a fancy new version for ages – though the WWW version played amazing stories about wolves who were once human to start with. I’m super excited to get to interview Epidiah! I hope you like what he has to say below.
Note: The included art is not the art that will be on Wolfspell! There is new art being created by the same artist, Shel Kahn, for the project – that’s most of what the Kickstarter is for! —
Tell me a little about Wolfspell. What excites you about it?
You were there for the beginning of it, but for the sake of your readers, I’ll recap the Wolfspell origin story. I was writing the short story “One Winter’s Due” for the second issue of Worlds Without Master. That story is about two adventuring sisters who, along with a small band of family and friends, seek to turn themselves into wolves in order to mete out vengeance without violating oaths that they had taken. I am, obviously, not the first person to tell tales about humans turning into wolves. And this wasn’t even that fresh of a take on the subject, but what hooked into my brain at the time–the part I couldn’t shake loose when it came time to dream up a game for that same issue–was this idea of these (mostly) aging, well-traveled folk who have seen it all suddenly finding themselves experiencing the world anew through the mind, body, and in particular the senses of wolves. I mean, you would HAVE to play, right? How else would you learn how to be a wolf? You would run and wrestle with each other, pause to scent the wind, and howl just to hear your own, new, voice. Before that moment, you had lead a hard life of killing or thieving or peering into the forbidding dark, but now you are newly born.
I had a dice mechanic sitting in the back of my brain for quite a while, inspired by the Doctor Who roleplaying game from the 90s called Time Lord. In that game, you rolled two six-sided dice and subtract the lower from the higher, giving you a result from 0 to 5, where 1 is the most likely outcome. I really dug how that worked. I posted about it here shortly after the game was released. In Wolfspell I saw an opportunity to combine that mechanic with the spirit of the Swords Without Master tone dice. You roll two dice, one is your Wolf Die and the other your Blood Die, you subtract the lower from the higher, apply the result to a Apocalypse World style move, but the move is determined to some extent by which die is higher. If you rolled well on the Wolf Die, you can act and think in wolf ways. If you rolled well on the Blood Die, you can act and think in the ways you’ve been used to. But crucially, you need to roll poorly on the opposite die to avoid confusion. Rolling a 6 Blood only helps you if your Wolf isn’t also a 6.
One of Shel Kahn’s pieces from One Winter’s Due, a fiction piece included in Worlds Without Master.
You mention that the characters are typically aging. How relevant to the story do you think that is and why?
Oh, good! That’s a part of my assumptions I’ve left unexamined. Thank you for asking! Technically, the only way I enforce aging characters in the game is by the identifying phrases players select for their characters during pack creation. They imply, at least to me, folks we’ve been around and seen some shit. “Many have tested my sword-arm and now wait to mete vengeance upon me in the afterlife,” or “I am witness to stranger worlds than most. The arcane and preternatural are to me as wolves and weather are to the farmer,” and so forth. They are not all exclusively evocative of veteran adventures, but as a whole, they hint at a certain field of experience. But it’s not restrictive. A clever player seeking to play a young, fresh-faced thrillseeker could definitely pull it off.
For me, though, the aging bit is bound tightly to the central theme of rebirth. Witnessing the world anew through the scents and sounds of the wild has more meaning if you’ve already seen everything through the narrow scope of human vision.
Plus, I just dig stories about old folks. If you want to play young, attractive folk who transform into wolves to wrestle and groom their way through their sexual tension, you can certainly do that with Wolfspell, but there are many fine–damn fine–games out there that serve that purpose. Now if you want to play broken, old, world-weary rovers who shed their skin-tag-haunted flesh in favor of a lithesome, sinewy wolf bod to wrestle and groom their way through their sexual tension, well that field’s a bit smaller.
Well-managed tone is something many people recognize in your games, and in this game it feels especially stark to me – the tone of the game blossoms from the moment you start play. What do you think creates the particular tone of Wolfspell, and what makes it flourish?
That’s very kind of you to say! For Wolfspell’s sense of tone, I blame Apocalypse World. Or more specifically, the Read a Situation move in Apocalypse World. That thing it does where it says, “Here, here are the questions you are allowed to ask and we must answer,” is so quietly beautiful that I think I’ll be hacking it for the rest of my days. In Wolfspell you may Behold the World and drink it in through your senses. When you do this and roll Wolf, you get to ask specific questions about what your eyes, ears, nose, and instincts tell you–inviting lush description of the world around you. But when you roll Blood, your questions are of a more human nature, about who is in control, what do they want from you, where are you most advantaged–inviting a more analytical response. It limits how you think about the world to the part of you that is most in control at the moment. All of the moves do this in their own little way.
Also, I dig the way the tone presents itself to new players. The first time they roll to wrestle with the other wolves and someone rolls Blood and is awkwardly isolated by their inability to embrace their inner wolf. Or the first time someone howls and the others must howl along with them. Or the first time someone’s hurt…but no spoilers about that.
Or maybe it’s just this rule right here: “You are now wolves. Describe your coat, your size, your scent and your voice.” That’s the very moment the tone is set in most games.
The form factor for the game is interesting and very cool! Can you tell me about it, and why you chose it?
Wolfspell, like everything that appears in Worlds Without Master, is of the sword and sorcery genre (or sword and sorcery adjacent, but one of the superpowers of this particular genre is its ability to seamlessly welcome adjacent works into the fold). In the 70s rock, prog, and early metal bands would spend long hours in the back of van or bus traveling from gig to gig. To fend off boredom, they would pick cheap paperbacks off the racks wherever the had to fuel up or stop for the night. This was the vector of infection for the sword and sorcery and fantasy genres of fiction into these genres of music. They would read tales of adventure, peril and strange magics, and regurgitate them in song. They would see the covers to these books, illustrated in imagined realism, and demand the same for their albums. Shortly thereafter tabletop roleplaying games followed a similar path, drawing on both sources for inspiration. We’re all spokes on the same wheel, and I wanted to acknowledge that.
Plus, how awesome would it be to show up at a con with a milk crate full of these puppies?
Another piece from Shel Kahn’s work on One Winter’s Due.
You’ve mentioned the struggles these characters face as they encounter inability to be wolf enough, and I wonder if you could talk a little about the parallel to that, or the opposition I guess. Do characters experience positive feelings more as they progress, finding pleasure or even joy in the experience? How does that happen?
When you revel in your wolfiness there’s an inherent reward of being able to explore the world through the mind and body of a different being. I mean, that’s why we’re all here, right? To roleplay as something else? The rules feed and reflect that by opening and restricting the paths before you. You act like a wolf, you gain Feral. Feral is the only real stat in the game. It is always added to your Wolf die. So the more Feral you gain, the better you get at rolling a Wolf result. And it feels good to cut loose at peak wolf! No stumbling over human concerns or anxieties. Embracing the wild and running with it! A wonderful way to build this Feral is to wrestle and groom with the pack, to celebrate the life of a wolf the way wolves do.
One of the central questions of this game involves rolling to become human again at the end of it all. Here all the Feral you’ve collected will count against you. Will you return to civilization, your quest complete, or will you be lost forever to the call of the wild?
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Hell yes! Thank you Epidiah for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading and that you’ll follow Wolfspell and then check it out on Kickstarter on January 21!
Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/thoughty. Tell your friends!
As I wait for the Turn Kickstarter payout to hit my inbox, I reflect on the contracts I’m having my contributors agree to. We ask a lot of freelancers, a very lot – I know, because I am one. I try to be fair to the people I hire, and I know I have not always paid as much as I want to, but I hope someday I will be able to.
One thing I hope to always do, though, is keep the lights on.
I have something that I ask for as a freelancer that can sometimes make people balk. It’s what I call my “keep the lights on” (KTLO) arrangement. The “keep the lights on” arrangement is that upon contract sign, I get 25%-50% of my payment up front, invoiced and paid.
Not everyone can afford this, so I don’t always get it, but that’s okay. Those who can pay it most of the time, and it does what it says on the tin – it helps me keep the lights on. This arrangement has improved my work massively.
When a client is willing to sign onto this, it tells me:
They have funds to pay
They care for my wellbeing
They trust that I will do the work
They understand economic stress
If someone is doing a Kickstarter, they rarely have good reason not to do this. Once they get the KS payout, they should be able to pay you at the very least your KTLO pay. They have all the funds! You shouldn’t be required to work without a contract, and they don’t know they can pay you for the work until they get that payout. Once they give you a contract and you invoice them, funds should hit your account.
This does mean we need to focus a little less on rush deadlines for projects, but that’s just better for the whole damn thing.
Once I’ve accepted just a small like 15% up front payment to KTLO. It ended up paying for the additional cell data costs I had while working to meet the tighter deadline. It was a big help!
I used this model with the freelancers I hired for Behind the Masc and some expressed to me how helpful it was. It was a tiny payout, but even tiny amounts help when you’re struggling, like most freelancers tend to be. It can be a doctor’s copay. A meal. A grocery run. A haircut for a job interview. We should be thinking one step ahead of the encroaching poverty that threatens anyone without a reliable salary!
People do, in my experience, work better when they’re fed. When they are less afraid of their electricity being turned off, or their water or heat. My hands certainly shake less when the temperature is above 50F in my house. I’ve been without various utilities, even briefly, and worrying about that is the worst.
I’ve implemented this with Turn, as well. Every freelancer for the project is receiving the KTLO agreement, unless they require otherwise (though so far it’s all of them). For me, I feel better knowing they’ll have some funds in their account over the holidays. For them, I know some may be in need, as is the way for freelancing!
With the Kickstarter funds, it was an easier choice to make. If you’re working on a project that doesn’t have a lot of up front capital, consider doing a small payment like I talked about earlier – the Behind the Masc 50% payout was $30 and still helped people make it through. Remember that this is as much about a show of faith in the freelancer as it is about their true financial situation, but that even the cost of a meal can be enough to keep someone going and keep them feeling enthused for the project – as well as committed to the work.
In my contracts, I don’t typically have clauses that require someone to refund me the funds if they can’t complete work. I do have a note that if they can’t complete it, the remaining funds are forfeit, and any completed work that is usable gets turned over to me, maintaining their credit for the work. You might choose to do things differently, but this has worked for me. I’ve had people drop out before signing a contract, but not so far after.
It might sound like a weird way to make someone work, especially post-Daniel Pink’s talk about how purpose, autonomy, and mastery are the real motivators for people doing brain work and often creative work. But, our economies are supporting that less, and creative work is constantly undervalued as hard work. So, give it a try, maybe.
Help someone keep their lights on. Goodness knows, we could use a little more light in this world.
Photos by and Copyright Brie Beau Sheldon.
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Hi all! Today I have an interview with Michael “Karrius” Mazur about Beneath a Cursed Moon, a roleplaying game currently available on itch.io and DriveThruRPG. It sounds pretty cool, a game with investigation and monsters! I hope you enjoy what Michael’s got to say below!
Hey all, today I have an interview with Benjamin Quiggins (he/him) and Audrey Stolze (she/her), the creators of Spaceships and Starwyrms (Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook). Spaceships and Starwyrms is a Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition supplement “that brings science fiction to the gaming table in a system that is familiar to many seasoned players and very accessible to new players. The supplement is nearly 400 pages long, with new species, classes, backgrounds, equipment, and combat rules, including rules for spaceship combat and travel.” It seemed different and cool, so I asked a few questions – here’s what Benjamin and Audrey had to say!
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Tell me a little about Spaceships and Starwyrms. What excites you about it?
Spaceships and Starwyrms is a sci-fi tabletop system built off the core tenets and philosophy of 5th edition. It’s an accessible d20 based system for people who enjoy the style of 5e but want to explore beyond fantasy into the realm of science fiction. The Core Sourcebook, which releases on December 11 on drivethrurpg, has the new combat rules, species, classes, equipment and everything else you need to jump right into a space adventure.
We’re excited to share the system and its setting with the gaming community. Neither of us have ever published something of this magnitude before, and it’s been a great learning experience. In particular, we’re really proud of all the work we put into creating unique spaceships and combat rules for spaceships. Plus, the setting (the Nacora Galaxy) really took on a life of its own during the creation process. It’s awesome to be able to put something out there that we’ve really poured our hearts and souls into. S&S is going to bring a lot of new opportunities and subtle changes to the d20 system everyone knows and loves, and we hope it has a broad appeal.
What made you decide to do a d20 system, and what have you added to it, including the combat rules?
We were aware that there are a lot of sci fi systems out there, and lots of them use special dice or unique systems. We wanted Spaceships and Starwyrms to be as accessible as possible, which is what informed our decision to create it as a 5e supplement. Our gaming table has been using 5e for a long time and Ben has been making homebrew for that system for a while. It only seemed logical to keep building on that system. Anyone who knows how to play 5e can play S&S without having to learn too many new rules.
The main rules changes involve cover and a new action, the Hack action. In addition, there is a whole chapter on spaceship combat that should be a new experience for every table.
How did you come up with Nacora Galaxy setting, and what makes it exciting or unusual (or both!)?
When we first started working on this supplement, we were trying to keep the setting pretty generic. But as we made the species and started filling out the flavor of their homeworlds and cultures, we discovered we had a pretty strong foundation for an intriguing setting. We leaned into it 100%, creating planets, governments, religions, travel systems, and tons of other unique content for the setting.
One of the things we’re most excited about is the adaptability of the Nacora setting. We blended fantasy and sci-fi together to leave room for a slew of different genres of play. This came into play a lot in our spaceship-building section. We have options to create your traditional, tech-based spaceship, spaceships that run on magic, or a mix of both!
Plus, with a galaxy this big, there’s a lot of creative freedom for GMs and players to adapt to their preferences. In particular, we tried to turn some sci-fi tropes on their head to give the galaxy a vivid, fresh atmosphere. One of the best examples of this are the Ix, a playable species of humanoid insects. We wanted to counter the stereotypical monstrous attributes and attitudes given to bug species. The Ix of Nacora are a people who believe in community, friendship, and peace. They are inventors of the universal translator used across the Nacora and founders of the Galactic Coalition for galactic peace.
What is spaceship combat like, and how does it integrate with the 5e framework?
Spaceship combat uses the same timing and initiative system as normal combat, (i.e. each round is six seconds) which allows for simultaneous space and land combats mixed together. We find this really adds to the narrative for simultaneous fights while still keeping the pace moving. Combat feels different depending on situation and the size of the crew on the ship, as there’s different actions that can be taken on a spaceship. Using ability checks and attack rolls, your party can fire weapon systems at the enemy, pilot across the field with trick maneuvers, hack another ship, repair damage to their ship, and even boost the engine power. And those are just some of the highlights. There are also special rules for spaceship (and vehicle) chases.
What kind of research and exploration are you doing to build up to cultures, homeworlds, and species in the Nacora setting?
With each of our species, we tried to consider the environment and evolution of the species first and foremost. That process involved a lot of research of biology. For example, we consulted with a botanist for one of our plant species, and we read articles about the effects of living without sunlight for another. Ultimately, we didn’t let the research hold us back too much – this is still a realm of fiction, after all.
As far as the cultures go, we tried to avoid direct parallels between our aliens and past and current cultures on Earth. We’re only human, however, which means that each species inevitably has some bits of our human experiences and knowledge in their cultures, no matter how much we tried to avoid that. The big exceptions to that rule are the Kygorans, who live in an extremely capitalist society, and the two cultures of Humanity in the setting, which both take aspects of real world humanity.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of science fiction for us is asking the big questions about how a species advances to the point of being a galactic power. We spent a lot of time asking ourselves about their belief systems and motives, their governments and economy, and what day-to-day life on their planets might be like. The Nacora Galaxy is a melting pot filled with pockets of deep cultural roots as well as areas where those cultures overlap and blend. Finding a way to have a variety of cultural experiences was very important to us.
The Core Sourcebook contains all the base information you need for planets, species, and cultures, but it does have a pretty broad focus on the history and cultural identities of the galaxy. We are already discussing plans for splat books that will dig into the individual cultures on a deeper basis.
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Thanks so much to Audrey and Benjamin! I hope you enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Spaceships and Starwyrms, releasing today! Find more at their Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook, or email directly with any questions at spaceshipsandstarwyrms@gmail.com!
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The project ends near midnight on November 30th. As I look at it now, I wish I had left in an extra day or two, because we may be coming up short of some of the stretch goals. But, I’m glad that we’ve come so far!
Right now we are looking at Meguey Baker’s Smeed Hill stretch goal,
Smeed Hill will explore a town cut in half by closing mills, then closing schools, and now empty storefronts on Main Street and overgrown houses in the hills. There are still opportunities, but also needs that have yet to be met. Meguey has proposed adding a squirrel and a skunk to the available beast archetypes, wonderful new additions to a small town!
Like the other stretch goals, Smeed Hill will introduce some local NPCs to help your story along, a new town type, new beast archetypes, and a new or altered human role.
It sounds like a wonderful town!
We’re also in the running for the 525 backers challenge I issued last night! If we reach 525 backers, I’ll release The Confidante,
You don’t ask for much in life, just for some peace and quiet, and for people to listen to you once in a while. Well, nobody seems in on that plan, so you spend most of your days hearing pieces of everybody’s secrets, even through walls. And yet, no one listens when you cry “wolf!” Though, maybe that’s a good thing.
Just a sneak peek!
For the stretch goals that we don’t reach, I still hope to pursue them in the future, it just depends on whether I can get the funds together, because I still want to pay people fairly! I want to release Gerrit’s Halver, Germany ($18k) and Jaye Foster’s Harmouth, South Devon ($20k), and my own work-in-progress, a Moose, which has been a secret goal for $20k for a while. What it means if we don’t reach them is that they will take more time, and be dependent on things like future sales and success.
Much like the Overachiever, I’ll be juggling a lot trying to make it happen.
However, hope ain’t just a theme for way stations! We still have over 50 hours to make every bit of this happen that we can. So share, support as you can, and continue to have enthusiasm for Turn! If you can back, that’s just swell. If not, raising awareness – especially on different social media and sites – makes a huge difference to Turn’s success!
Thank you SO much for any support you have given and any you continue to give!
Tell me a little about Thousand Arrows. What excites you about it?
Thousand Arrows is a tabletop role-playing game of samurai drama and action during the Japanese Warring States Period (1467-1603 CE). It’s powered by the Apocalypse and inspired by both real-world history and chanbara media like Kurosawa films. I’m excited about this game because it highlights an era in Japanese history which is rarely in focus in the West. Most samurai media that makes its way to the English-speaking world focuses on lone wolves and duelists in the Edo period, the centuries of peace which followed the Warring States Period. Instead, Thousand Arrows gives players the roles of military, religious, and political leaders: samurai generals, Buddhist monks, desperate rebel farmers, and even spirits and sorcerers in which the sixteenth-century Japanese believed. Their decisions decide the actions of vast armies, religious sects, and feudal states. This game has personal narratives and romance and duels, but it’s equally about rewriting history in your character’s own image.
I know you research a lot. Could you tell me about the research you did for this project, including any direct consultation you did? What were the challenging topics to approach here?
I’ve put deeper and broader research into Thousand Arrows than I have into any other project of any kind.
As usual, I read a lot of Japanese primary sources, history books, and religious texts. If you’ve heard about my research processes for Scion 2nd Edition or 7th Sea, you know what I’m talking about. Brennan and I also watched a lot of Kurosawa Akira’s period films, as well as their modern derivatives like Samurai Fiction.
In 2013 I graduated from St John’s College in Santa Fé, New Mexico with a master’s degree in Eastern classics. I learned classical Chinese and read and wrote about a literary tradition that traveled from India through China and into Japan. My undergraduate work focused mostly on African topics, but I had always wanted to study Asian history and religion in more rigorous detail. Reading the Tale of the Heike, the Tale of Genji, and the Pillow Book established the narrative and behavioral conventions underlying the game’s moves. Reading the Buddhist canon inspired Thousand Arrows’s tragic tone and attachment mechanisms. I think an accurate, respectful portrayal of Asia and Asians, whether fantastical or historical, requires understanding where continuities do and don’t exist between different Asian cultures. It makes the difference between cultural exchange and cultural conflation.
In 2006 I took up a Japanese martial art called Bujinkan budō taijutsu, which teaches traditional Japanese battlefield and espionage techniques. The Bujinkan’s oral and written history begins in the tenth century CE and, like most martial arts’ histories, combines historical fact with fanciful myth—both of which influence Thousand Arrows’s historical fiction. Thousand Arrows weapon masters’ special moves come from my own experience with medieval and early modern Japanese arms and armor. The Kuki Spirit and Cloud-Hidden fighting styles, available respectively to characters from the Kuki Clan and the Iga Provincial League, come from the Bujinkan’s curriculum. But rather than presenting specific techniques and movements which would confuse and bore unfamiliar players, Thousand Arrows models fighting styles in terms of the narrative situations in which they offer special advantages. For example, since the Kuki Clan controlled the Kumano Navy, Kuki Spirit stylists get an advantage when fighting on the rocking deck of a ship, making them effective marines and pirates. Thick forest covered the Iga region during the Warring States Period, so Cloud-Hidden stylists from Iga gain a preternatural ability to leap and swing through a forest canopy, making them excellent rangers and scouts.
Cover art by Yoshi Yoshitani.
What are actions like in game, in regards to how they feel and what you can do?
Thousand Arrows characters start the game as feudal Japan’s movers and shakers. Even the actions they take on an interpersonal scale affect the fate of entire religions, states, and armies. This is wartime, and every character has a section of between a dozen and a hundred well-trained soldiers who follow their orders. Characters without personal skill at martial arts or generalship are crucial to the war effort as intelligencers, diplomats, chaplains, and saboteurs.
The action also focuses on interpersonal drama via the attachment system: as you get more invested in a value that drives you or a relationship with another PC, you get better at helping or hindering their actions on or off the battlefield, as well as more vulnerable to losing control of your behavior and giving in to impulses related to that attachment. In keeping with Japanese historical narratives, Thousand Arrows’s social atmosphere is highly emotional and volatile. A few characters, like courtiers, may be polished, calculating, and restrained; but most samurai express themselves through passionate outbursts of torrid emotion, extemporaneous poetry, or sudden and uncontrollable weeping.
What is the character creation process like, to create these complex characters?
Two playbooks make up each Thousand Arrows character: an allegiance (what team you play for) and a role (your position on that team). Allegiances include various samurai clans (the Hōjō, Kuki, Oda, Shimazu, Takeda, Uesugi, and Yagyū), revolutionary leagues (the Single-Minded League and the Iga Provincial League), and belief systems (the Nichiren School of Buddhism, Confucian academy, and Catholic Church); or, if you want to play Thousand Arrows on hard mode, you could be a knight-errant (also known as a rōnin) and not really have an allegiance. Roles include the courtier, retainer, knight, secret agent, foot soldier, warrior monk, shaman, and farmer. PCs in the same game frequently share allegiances, but roles are unique. Both allegiance and role modify your stats and give options for your starting special moves, equipment, and followers.
I’ve found that the process takes about as long as most other Apocalypse Engine games: longer than Monsterhearts, a little longer than Apocalypse World itself, a little shorter than The Sprawl or Masks. I think it’s worth it to help players make characters they feel are their own: a Takeda courtier, a Catholic courtier, and a knight-errant courtier feel very, very different to play. That said, the game comes with eight pre-generated characters in case you prefer to hit the ground running at a one-shot or convention.
What are some of the exciting stretch goals we’ll see from Thousand Arrows?
We’ve already unlocked Jenn Martin’s Fox, a sneaky, sexy, and duplicitous nature spirit who can disguise themself as a human. The Fox is a more traditional playbook, counting as both allegiance and role, and is a good option for players who want to engage with Japan’s wilderness or supernatural landscape. The Corsair, Merchant, and Artisan roles are also coming up. But there are two stretch goals which are larger in scope, and which I’m most excited about.
One is “Dragon King’s Gambit,” a campaign set in winter 1592 CE during the contentious and tragic Japanese invasion of Joseon Korea, then a vassal state of Míng China. During this campaign, the Azure Dragon King of the East Sea attacks with an army of sea monsters, forcing Japanese, Chinese, Mongolian, and Korean combatants to work together against a common enemy. DKG is playable either as a standard campaign, or as a convention game: we’ve run it successfully with three sessions, three tables, three GMs, and fifteen players (five each loyal to the Joseon, the Míng, and the Imperial Regent of Japan).
Another is “Street Samurai versus Code Ninja,” which takes Thousand Arrows to a dystopian future where samurai have traded their warhorses and lamellar in for hoverbikes and power armor, where ninja stalk the shadows of the Internet as well as those in the real world. This setting deconstructs the orientalist and Japanophilic tropes which dominate cyberpunk fiction and gaming from the 1980s and 1990s by modeling the cities of the future on early modern Japanese conventions instead of just appropriating Japanese terms to describe Western concepts and anxieties about a looming Asian economic threat. SSvsCN includes futuristic versions of the standard roles: the Social Engineer, Salaryman, Street Samurai, Code Ninja, Ganger, Cybermonk, Technoshaman, and Gold Farmer. It also features new allegiances to represent major immigrant groups in Japan, such as China, Korea, Brazil, and the Philippines.
I really like the way our stretch goals expand what Thousand Arrows is about and to whom it can appeal, with higher-fantasy and futuristic play. I want this game to bring together players who are usually interested in different things and grant them common ground they didn’t expect to have.
Hi all, today I have an interview with Nick Zachariasen on METAL WORLD! It’s currently on DriveThru! I normally don’t include game pitches here, but the METAL WORLD pitch is so rad, I had to!
METAL WORLD takes the breadth of the heavy metal genre and throws it all into one game world. It doesn’t care how much sense something makes as long as it’s awesome. It has a demon-possessed lawman who rides a rocket-powered robot horse and carries a pair of 666-shooters. It has an undead ship made of the bones, sinews, and skin of the sailors it kills. Hell is a continent you can get guided tours of from the MegaDevil himself. The cherry on top? It has a volcano made of dragons, which shoots lava and more dragons when it erupts. The game system— including character building— are as loose as possible to allow your group to play the way you want.
With that in mind, check out Nick’s responses below! —
Boris Vallejo’s Kalevanpojat.
Tell me a little about METAL WORLD. What excites you about it?
The germ for the idea that became METAL WORLD came about when I looked at the Boris Vallejo painting Kalevanpojat (above). There’s this giant half-man/half-dragon thing posing like he’s trying to impress this only nominally-dressed woman who could not possibly be interested any less. She has an expression as if to say “Yeah, buddy, just get down the mountain, already. Three of whatever you are have passed through in the last half hour. They’re probably at the tavern.” I imagined what kind of world that must be for such a fantastic sight to leave her completely unfazed. Fast forward to after the premiere of Metalocalypse and I finally come up with the vague idea of a world of heavy metal in all its breadth. Of course, a couple weeks later I learn about Brütal Legend, which was sort of what I’d conceived spiritually but for the most part not even close aesthetically, although I did draw some inspiration from it all the same.
METAL WORLD, then, takes every kind of metal— whether basic, “classic” metal like Black Sabbath and Judas Priest or just about any subgenre you can think of like doom, black, pirate, or whatever— and throws it all into a blender so that you can have situations like a barbarian riding a nightmare steed charge a tank crewed by cyborgs and actually have a chance at winning! It’s everything Ronnie James Dio ever sang about. It’s anything you might see in a Dethklok video. It’s everything power metal sings about, with valiant heroes, fire, dragons, The Gods™, and all that. In short, METAL WORLD tries to bring everything awesome into one place without regard to piddly details like “Wait a minute, how does a region with this ecology sustain a tribe of human-hunting giants? They’d strip the population bare in months and then have no food source!”
METAL WORLD ignores pesky things like so-called “continuity” or “travel time” unless it’s important for the overall story you’re telling with your group, and I think that’s what excites me most about METAL WORLD. I’m not aware of anything quite like it, where any play style your group could want is not just possible but encouraged so long as everyone’s on board, and the game actually mechanically encourages it with a rule set that’s just vague enough to be accommodating but specific enough to be playable while also having fun with its readers to keep from taking itself too seriously.
What are the mechanics of METAL WORLD like and how do they relate to the theme?
The mechanics try to be simple and stripped-down. You have five main stats, each named for a subgenre of heavy metal: Death (your health), Power (strength and “persuasion”), Prog (intelligence, perceptiveness, and actual persuasion), Speed (agility, reflexes, and overall coordination), and Thrash (combat ability). I kept it that simple because A) it keeps creation easy and B) on the eventual character sheet I can put each one at the point of a pentagram.
The design philosophy is that instead of worrying about how far you can move in a round, exactly how long a round is, and that sort of thing you see some other games get bogged down with, METAL WORLD tries to focus in the in-game exploits of the characters and what they bring about in the world around them. It didn’t grow out of a wargame and god-of-your-choice help me if it grows into one. METAL WORLD’s main concern is giving people a setting that facilitates telling an interactive story with evocative imagery. That’s one reason I don’t have classes; they pigeon-hole characters into a predefined type without allowing for a player’s creativity to show through.
You can have a band (METAL WORLD’s term for an adventuring party) containing traditional sword-and-sorcery fantasy characters like elves, humans, dwarves, and so forth alongside robots, cyborgs, Atlanteans, and METAL WORLD’s gnomes, which are a race of mad geneticists called ge-nomes— essentially, they’re a race of Bioshock-style Splicers. The environment contains everything from fantasy’s quasi-medieval environment to near-ish future tech and references galore to metal, its inspirations, and occasional random other things. You need complete freedom to be able to have that kind of spread in characters and environment, so METAL WORLD focuses a lot on group consensus as to the tone of the game, which means the Metal Lord (the GM) has very wide latitude of what to allow or to rein in if it proves unbalancing.
Another important thing I think bears mentioning about that latitude is that the guiding metric of METAL WORLD is “as ______ as it needs to be.” Because everything worries more about the story than thinking about ensuring you have enough provisions for the trip or how much you can carry, let’s say an invading army approaches. Your story is about the epic battle that ensues like the battle of Helm’s Deep, so the band and NPCs have plenty of time to prepare defenses and have a grand old siege ahead of them. Now say you have a story in mind where the focus is more on evacuating those who can’t fight and making a stand to buy time. That same army leaving from the same place will take less time to get to the same destination. In METAL WORLD, space actually dilates or contracts depending on the needs of the narrative, though no character is ever aware of this— it’s just a cognitive blind spot created by reality itself. Similarly, a character can carry as much as (s)he reasonably could.
Then you also have Metal points, which reflect the favor of The Gods™ like Fate Points in d6 Star Wars or bennies in Savage Worlds. They serve two purposes. First, they fuel magic use for those who know how to do that that as well as other effects, like maybe the powers of a magical item. More generally, though, they serve to allow characters to (usually) unconsciously generate special game effects depending on what they want to accomplish. You get them by doing particularly impressive things or just because the Metal Lord feels like it.
What kind of player characters exist in the game, and what are they like?
As I said before, you can make pretty much anything you can think of within reason and even perhaps a bit beyond. Your band can have an axe-wielding barbarian who rides a nightmare steed, a mad scientist who raises and otherwise experiments on the dead, a lizard man martial artist, a shroom-addled shaman who drives a wicked van with amazing scenery painted on its side, and a dwarf who’s replaced both of his hands with chainsaws. Mind you, all of these are among the sample characters I’ve created— the dwarf is named Angus Mac Chainsaw Hands. You truly are bounded only by your imagination and what the Metal Lord will allow. I haven’t statted minotaurs for use as PCs, for example, but if you want to play one, work with your group’s Metal Lord and figure out how to run one so it’s balanced with the rest of your group’s characters. Maybe you want to play something I haven’t even provided for yet at all. Make it up and work it out! Again, I want people to be able to create the most awesome things they can imagine so everyone can have fun with it.
How do you handle topics like violence, sexual content, and so on in a game themed so wildly and intensely?
bviously, violence is going to be present given that heavy metal isn’t exactly known for diplomacy over tea and crumpets. I mean, Hell is a continent you can physically go to and get a guided tour of, possibly by the MegaDevil himself. As far as sexual content, I do make a note about that in the introduction when I mention the traditional scantily-clad women you’d see in the artwork of Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo & Julie Bell, and other fantasy staples who inspired much of METAL WORLD’s aesthetic. I tell people to play it up to their group’s taste. This game tries to encompass the breadth of metal in its entirety. Some of that will involve mature-audience content and if you end up playing those kind of things up to the point where they become ridiculous, that’s totally fine if you’re enjoying yourselves.
As you say, METAL WORLD is indeed wild and intense and I feel the form that takes should be subjective, determined by what you want out of it. It’s like how if you’re listening to metal and you want something dark and brooding you listen to doom metal while if you want something that fills you with a sort of positive energy, you’d listen to power metal. It’s clay in your hands. If you want to make that clay look like something you might not want your parents to see, what’s important is that it’s what you want, not what somebody else wants. When you get right down to it, that’s one of the classic themes of metal as a genre.
What is one of your favorite moments from playtesting or designing METAL WORLD so far, and why?
I honestly haven’t gotten to playtest METAL WORLD nearly as much as I’d like. I mean, having to work a full-time job will necessarily do that, especially when you have a family. That’s why I hope people run through some sessions on their own (via downloading METAL WORLD: The Rough Cut) and give me feedback so I know what makes sense to people who don’t already know what it’s supposed to mean.
That said, I guess I have a few— deviating from your question just a bit— favorite design moments. The first is when I was writing about skills. I mentioned meteorology and added a footnote (the work as a whole is peppered with them throughout as asides, whether for comedy or to clarify without disrupting flow) that the Meteorology skill also teaches you about space because that’s where meteors are. This game is at least 20% puns and that’s probably my worst/best. The one with the best result as far as the overall work is how I added a chapter between the world (the fourth) and the creatures (then the fifth) so that I could have Chapter 666: The Number of the Bestiary. That chapter lists some adventure hooks and an example of play, which I think it really needed. I think the ge-nomes are one of my most clever ideas, having come to me as one of those thoughts that pops into your head about 15 seconds or so after your head hits your pillow at night.
That said, though, I am aware of a moment from a friend of mine running a playtest session. Someone commented that METAL WORLD “reads like it was written by a madman with a law degree.” I don’t know what this person’s clue was, but apparently it caused “tear-inducing laughter” when my friend informed this person that it reads that way because it was written by a madman with a law degree!
Hi all! Today I’ve got an interview with Miguel Ángel Espinoza about Nahual, a game currently on Kickstarter. It sounds really fascinating, and I asked about some of the parts of the game that were new to me, like how your characters run a small business! Check out the answers below!
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Tell me a little about Nahual. What excites you about it?
I’m mainly excited about being able to bring a Mexican game into existence, to be able to present my culture in this hobby that I am passionate about. I discovered role-playing games in 1994, and almost 25 years later I’m writing a game of my own. I wish I could go back and tell me from the past this is what I’ll be doing. That he doesn’t actually need to be american or work on TSR to make it happen.
I’m also excited about being able to base the game on Edgar Clements works. He’s a very talented artist and also a very generous creator. The ideas he came up with for his graphic novel capture perfectly this complicated culture that we are, heir to a cultural clash that to this day still has repercussions. We are neither Spanish, nor Indigenous… we are mestizo. And Clement’s way to represent that fusion of folklore and myths, is brilliant. The first time I read his work I felt joyous envy, and thought that it was perfect for a Mexican RPG. So here I am, making it happen. Couldn’t be more excited.
What do players do in Nahual? What kind of characters do they play?
Players in Nahual play shapeshifting angel hunters. They inherited the power of the nahual, that allows them to transform into their totem animal and perform supernatural feats. But their knowledge is incomplete, because their ties to their ancestral indigenous culture were severed by the invading conquistadors and their armies of angels. So in present day struggle, they use this gifts to hunt down angels, to sell them as a commodity. They could be heroes or liberators, but instead all they manage to do is worry about putting food on the table, and live one day at a time.
You talk about being mestizo. How does that affect your design work in Nahual? How does it impact your role as a creator in regards to representing this story?
I’m not sure. All I know is that being mestizo, latino, gives me a certain point of view that has to do with the way I grew up. But it is not something I’m actively paying attention to, or trying to convey. I can see for example how I (and other Mexican players) connect to Edgar’s stories without much trouble, and how some English speaking audiences struggle to understand some aspects of those stories. There’s of course a cultural gap, it is just natural. So what I’m actually actively trying to do is build a bridge for those audiences, for them to cross that gap.
You ask how being mestizo impacts my role as creator, I don’t think it does in this particular case. Because these are our stories, I’m part of it and they are part of me. If I was writing a Euro-fantasy game, inspired by Tolkien and all its tropes, then I think me being mestizo would have an impact, I would be playing as the visitor team, a fish out of water. With Nahual I’m not, I’m the home team, I’m in my element.
I would love to hear more about the transformation, how it influences play, and the emotional context. How did you design a transformation that is progressive without becoming overpowered or confusing, and how do players react when they play this out in playtests?
The idea is that your character’s Totem Animal is really a reflection of your personality. So if you are bold and strong, and maybe violent, your animal will be a jaguar. If you’re sneaky, a bit of a trickster and a little carefree, your animal will be a possum. So, unlike in some classic shapeshifting tropes, when you transform in Nahual you are really becoming a heightened version of yourself, instead of something else.
The design process has been complicated, I had to find a way to convince players to transform—on my first iterations players were hesitant to do it, like they wanted to “save it” for the real moment, which may never comes. So I had to tweak my design and mechanics to not only enforce the transformation, but also tell characters this is something you’ll want to do, something cool, because the game is about that! However I still needed to represent this toll characters have to pay for not having complete knowledge of how this power works (that lost connection to their roots I’ve mentioned before), so I’ve tied the transformation to stress and traumas. To be honest though, I’m still playtesting this, looking for the right connection/combination between its parts to make it work best and be tied to the fiction.
About the progressive power of the transformation, it is inspired in Epyllion, functioning as the advancement system for the game. As with Epyllion ages, each stage of transformation has its own XP track and as you unlock advancements, you push thru to the next levels of transformation. So you get more powerful, but that only means the MC can now punch harder at you! Hahaha.
And as for player reactions, the transformation is my favorite part of the game, whenever each character transform for the first time I tell the player that for each person the feeling is different, and I ask them how for their character the perception of the world around them changes…and I always get awesome creative responses from players, and it helps them getting involved in the game. And what I love is that it is not really a mechanic is only players creating the fiction.
Tell me a little more about the changarro! How does it work, and how do players interact with it? Why do you feel it is important to Nahual?
When I first started working on the game I was trying to include almost everything Clement has on his comic books. And it was all over the place. So, when I got in touch with Mark Diaz Truman, from Magpie Games, he helped me realized I need to focus my design, to tighten it up and make it sharper. And it was a feeling I had already, he just put a name to it, and he called it “holding environment”. And what that means is, I need something to make the characters come together, and it is different for each game, depending on the type of fictions they tell. And for Nahual, it became clear to me I had to focus on the angelero trade, the hunting of angels, and the way to do it was to have the characters working together in a Changarro, were they team up to share the burdens of handling the business.
Once I decided that will be the focus of the game, the holding environment, I started to work on mechanics for how the dynamics of the changarro will be. And something was clear from the beginning, I wanted players to feel what it is like to try to keep a small business afloat to make a living, despite harsh circumstances. So the changarro mechanics are about that grind. About needing to take care of the business in a day to day basis, running out of product…so they’ll need to go hunting, and having a bunch of problems—for players to choose from—that will come knocking at their door. At first it sounds repetitive, but on all the play testing I’ve have the problems characters face are completely different, because they’re also tied to the character’s backstory and relationships between them and the barrio they live in.
So the changarro is the glue that keeps players together and that jumpstarts the action, and also is the engine that will avoid things to stagnate, because there’s always going to be product you’ll need to restock, neighbors that’ll stick their noses in, rivals that will try to take you out of business, unhappy clients, or a big company that wants to either buy you out or crush you.
