Hi all! Today I’ve got a great interview with Jacob Kellogg and Joseph Kellogg, creators of Rodent Rangers,a nifty roleplaying game currrently on Kickstarter! The project could really use some attention and it seems like a fun game, so please check it out, and see what they have to say about it in the responses below!
—
Tell me a little about Rodent Rangers. What excites you about it?
Jacob:Rodent Rangers puts players in the role of anthropomorphic mice who go on missions under the feet of modern humans to help those in need. In addition to the nostalgia of old animated films like The Rescuers or The Great Mouse Detective, what’s exciting about this game is the light-hearted, joyful purity of it. Especially with the real world being as dark as it is right now, the idea of sending your tiny persona into a big world and nonetheless making a difference—all without the constant violence or mechanical complexity that comes with other games—just feels really appealing. Be a cute mouse and go help somebody. Let everything be okay for a while.
Joseph: What excites me most is the ability to tell stories that let kids get creative and solve problems. Instead of trying to sanitize other systems that rely on violence, Rodent Rangers focuses on using wit and a pure heart to deal with villains, while allowing for daring feats and narrow escapes.
What do the players do to play the game mechanically – how do they take action and tell stories?
Jacob: Mechanically, Rodent Rangers starts with a familiar premise: shared narration, with dice to resolve uncertain or risky actions. It’s a very lightweight system, with no hard rules for action types or explicitly-defined special abilities like you have in games like D&D. Instead, activities are descriptive, with the dice determining success or failure. The dice system is pretty sleek as well, with no bonuses or penalties being added to die rolls. Instead, your attributes tell you how many dice to roll and your skills tell you which size those dice should be, then you roll a batch of them and see how many “hits” (dice that show a 4 or higher) you got. If you meet a minimum threshold of hits (depending on the difficulty of the task) you succeed.
Joseph: Rodent Rangers is a skill-based RPG, with a dice system specially designed to be as math-light as possible. When players want to try something, like befriending a stranger or finding a clue, they pick a type of die based on their skill level, and get a number of them based on basic attributes (like Strong or Clever). When they roll, they just have to count the dice that came up as 4 or more.
What do the characters do in the narrative? Are they rescuers? What kind of adventures do they have?
Jacob: Narratively, the Rodent Rangers are an in-world organization that spans the globe, and sends teams of field agents out on missions to help their fellow critters (or even humans sometimes). You might recover a museum’s stolen relic, help to evacuate mice from a flooding sewer city, or even help guide a lost human child back to their parents. There’s an emphasis on being part of a team and working together, as well as being noble and wanting to help people (after all, that’s why you became an agent of the Rodent Rangers).
Joseph: Characters in Rodent Rangers are agents of the titular organization, a worldwide network or do-gooders and adventurers. They get sent on missions to help other animals or people in danger, and hopefully make friends along the way. In the sample adventure, players will be asked to track down a researcher who was kidnapped by sinister treasure hunters. To rescue him, they’ll need to look for clues, get past a devious snake, make new friends, and maybe even get into a high-speed car chase!
Potentially even encounter villains such as this!
What kind of character becomes a Rodent Ranger, and how do they fit into the larger world? Do these characters stand out?
Jacob: There are really only three key aspects of a person who becomes a ranger: they’re part of animal society rather than human society, they have some kind of skill or ability to contribute, and they want to help. Beyond that, a character could be anyone, which I think is something I really like about this game. You don’t have to be born into the right circumstance, be the chosen one, be part of the dominant forces of society, or whatever else. If you want to do good in the world in your own unique way, then there’s a spot for you on the team that no one else can fill.
Joseph: A Rodent Ranger is someone who loves adventure and helping people. Many mice are content to live peaceful lives, and shun danger. Rodent Rangers are often the best at what they do, and driven to put their talents to good use in the wider world.
How is Rodent Rangers special to you in it’s design and concept?
Jacob: Aside from some of the conceptual elements that I’ve already talked about liking, I’m really into how straightforward and “essentials only” the mechanics are. Games can sometimes get a bit overwrought, trying too hard to make sure every element of the experience has its own mechanic instead of just giving you the tools you need and leaving room for imagination. For example, as much as I like D&D, I would probably like it even better if you dropped the entire “spells” chapter in favor of a more “here’s the general idea, do what makes sense” approach. That’s what Rodent Rangers does: it gives you enough to show you what the game’s about and enable you to play, then gets out of the way.
Joseph:Rodent Rangers is special because it reflects many of the cartoons of my childhood, in which a pure heart and brave soul were all that were needed to save the day.
Tell me a little about Impulse Drive. What excites you about it?
I’m a huge fan of all sorts of space opera books, movies, games, and shows. From the late Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels & Mike Resnicks Santiago: a myth of the far future to shows like Killjoys, Farscape, Andromeda, and Dark Matter, and games like Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect. Space Opera combines commentary on society and the myths we tell ourselves with pulpy romance, melodrama, and action in delightfully weird settings.
Impulse Drive is an expression of my joy for these melodramatic, heartfelt stories about volatile but endearing misfits.
What do players (and characters) typically do in play in Impulse Drive? What “drives” the game?
It’s the players job to create and play an interesting, active character by taking risks and embracing the consequences. Players describe their character, what they think, say, and do. Players look for when Moves apply to the situation the group is describing, and when their characters Hooks affect the situation or bring fraught relationships to the fore. Players are directed to think cinematically, like the game is a pulpy space opera movie or TV show.
Characters are misfits with simple motivations, but live in a world that complicates things. The characters have tense, fraught moments with each other and take dangerous jobs or missions that lead them into conflict and adventure. Lots of flying too fast, indulging too much, pissing off the wrong people, and getting into fights & shootouts.
What are the characters like in the game, and how do they function mechanically?
Characters are volatile and bombastic. They’re competent badasses with a lot of luck on their side – until that luck runs out. They rely on their unique strengths, skills, and gear to get them out of sticky situations. But their character flaws and complicated pasts & relationships mean there’s always more trouble around the corner.
Mechanically, the core function of a character revolves around their Approaches (5 modifiers ranging from a score of -1 to +2 at the start.) and their Moves, discrete chunks of rules made up of a trigger (usually fictional) a process (usually rolling 2D6 and adding a modifier) and an outcome (usually fictional). Impulse Drive is Powered by the Apocalypse, so it’s mechanics are very similar to games like Apocalypse World, Monsterhearts, and Masks to name a few.
The five approaches (Volatile, Calculating, Slick, Stalwart, and Alien) describe behaviors more than they describe physical or mental prowess. I wanted the names for the Approaches to be flexible and evocative. Slick means being kinda charming in an unreliable, slimy way, but it also describes pulling off a fancy maneuver. Slick is being quick, responsive, and hard to pin down. Volatile is about passion, but also unpredictability and violence. Calculating is being logical but also cold, you can’t be thoughtful or empathetic with Calculating. Alien is being weird and touching forces beyond your ken. All of the Approaches have a mildly negative connotation – except Stalwart, which is for being resistant, solid, but also reliable and dependable.
Orbiting Approaches and Moves, characters are made up of the Gear they can use, the Harm & Stress they can take, and two elements that complicate their lives; Hooks and Calamities.
Hooks are an opportunity to define their character through flaws and fraught relationships. There are some default Hooks on each Playbook that players fill in mad-lib style, but they’re an opportunity for players to describe the challenges and struggles us want to watch their character. Hooks give you an opportunity for interesting roleplaying but also earning more XP by increasing the chance of failure. Hooks are always activated at the Player’s discretion, so they can choose when they want a higher chance for complication and XP, or a higher chance for success.
Calamities are a finite list of mechanical changes and fictional events that happen to the character if they take 5 Stress. The last Calamity in each list is an exit for the character from the main stage – they’ll either retire to safety or go out in a blaze of glory. It’s always fun to see which players try to manage their Stress frugally, and which players jump in and aim for certain Calamities because they think they’re cool. I’ve never seen a Warhorse who can resist an opportunity for a great victory, at the cost of a part of their body.
What’s it like in the world of Impulse Drive? Where do characters live, and how does that influence the tone of play?
The “World” of Impulse Drive is an array of space stations, ships, and worlds that the PCs visit in their ship. The Galactic Community is made up of societies and civilizations with populations that count in the billions. Technology ranges in sophistication and style between these civilizations, but most are on par with the crew of PCs. The particulars of the societies that the PCs come into contact with is determined by the group, led by the Space Master. This ensures that the themes the group is interested in exploring will be embodied by the societies they are on the fringes of.
The parts of the galactic community that we generally see in Impulse Drive are the fringes, less settled areas where conflict, corruption, and crime are commonplace. Law and corporate interests encroach on these spaces and culture varies greatly from society to society, but the status quo teeters on a knife-s edge, waiting for the crew to come along and disrupt it.
The Space Master uses Strains, similar to Fronts & Threats from Apocalypse World to track and advance these volatile situations towards a climax.
How does being a misfit really impact one’s place in this space opera world?
Being a misfit is all about how you don’t conform to the status quo for society, how you disrupt and challenge what the majority sees as ‘normal’. It’s about being different, and having society at large be passively or actively suspicious and hostile to you.
PCs in most RPGs do this by the very nature of the rules of the games, but also how players generally embody characters who do this by default – whether that is desirable or not. The PCs have lots of mechanical tools that irrevocably change a situation once they interact with it – for better or worse.
Along with this, the game tracks how certain important groups or NPCs relate to the crew of PCs using Disposition. There are 5 states of disposition that describe how someone is likely to react to the PCs within the fiction, but also has a modifier attached to interact with certain Moves that deal in broader social or transnational situations. While the galaxy in general may not even register this one little ship and its crew in the fiction, in terms of the game we relate to NPCs by their relationship to the crew members.
This is open information. The players know how the various interests in their corner of space feel about them and what to expect when they dock at a station in a hostile faction’s territory. Even the positive dispositions Friendly and bonded come with strings attached or caveats. The PCs being misfits is mechanically encouraged by one of the XP triggers in the end of session Move. Your PCs earn XP if the crew made a new enemy, or thwarted an existing one. This encourages the characters to find organizations and societies that deny their individuality and stand against them in a way that gains their animosity.
Hey all, today I have an interview with Liam Ginty from Sandy Pug Games about Americana, a tabletop roleplaying game coming out on Kickstarter! It sounds like some fascinating times investigating a tragic murder, so check out the answers below, and give the quick start a look, too!
—
Tell me a little about Americana. What excites you about it?
Americana is an idea I’ve had for ages – a retro-fantasy setting. The image of Orcs in letterman jackets, goblins in those awesome Pink Ladies outfits from Grease – it just came to me one day and stuck with me, but I didn’t really have anything to do with it till I made a game called Mirror, which gave me a dice engine to call my own, and suddenly I had something I could build from.
The game itself is about a lot of stuff – being a kid at a time when the idea of teenagers having a time and space of their own was new and strange and pretty scary to everyone, claiming the aesthetics of a time period that’s been off limits to a lot of marginalized people to create a fun, enjoyable and accepting place to play in – but the core gameplay revolves around investigating the death of your best friend while managing your time at school, social events and familial obligations and navigating a town full of weird gangs and magical places that you create during session zero. It’s a really interesting gameplay loop that I don’t think has been explored very much, we took that very teenage experience of trying to figure out when everyone can hang out and made it part of the game in a way that’s really fun.
Besides the aesthetic (which we have a really great team of creative folx bringing it to life, tons of stories, art and even an audio drama we’re planning on making), I’m mainly excited about a mechanic we’re calling Your Dead Friend. Your Dead Friend is the victim of the crime at the center of all of this, and as such, we wanted to make them very important to the game. You actually make a full character for Your Dead Friend, just like you would make a normal PC (player character), and you can tap their skills for assistance with tough challenges – doing this invokes a flashback, where you roleplay out a scene where you learned this skill, or shared a moment with your friend. So throughout play you build this character, and your relationships with them, and playtesters have created some incredible stories from this mechanic, and we’re really really hyped to see what people do with it.
We also have a mechanic called Ties and Connections that is just really cool visually – as you play you put together this conspiracy style board, drawing lines and connections between gangs, locations, characters and Your Dead Friend, slowly putting the mystery together.
How do you handle creating a town with all these exciting elements in Americana?
We focus on the parts of the town that are, or would be, important to teenagers, and break the town down into Hangs, Crews, Risks and Adults. A Hang is somewhere designed for, or co-opted for the purposes of just being. The old water tower, a disused Goblin cave, the field outside of town. We encourage players to make these hangs as magical or as mundane as they like, and they’re modeled much like our characters are – with Strengths, Weaknesses and a Vibe that characters can tussle with or exploit for their own purposes. Of course, what’s a place without a gang to call it home. That’s where the Crews come in.
Crews are cliques, like greasers, preps, mage-kids or jocks. They similarly have a Vibe and a couple of strengths and weaknesses, a catchy name that sums up their whole deal (and probably gets printed on their custom varsity jackets) and a leader. The leader gets a little extra detail so players have a face for that group right from the start. You also give the crew a hang to call home. Maybe the greasers all hangout at “Felicities Garage” or something. Again, we want people to create crews that reflect their own game, so we let people be as mundane or as magical as they like. My favourite crew in playtesting so far was a gang of gothabilly inspired proto-goths, who hung out around an abandoned necromancers tower, reading poe and casting spells.
Risks are the kind of dangerous activities that you and your peers get up to when the adults aren’t watching. Parties, deadly races, and illicit wizard duels in the woods near town. These are events set up by the various crews as a way for everyone to test their mettle against one another, and provides some really cool ways for players to challenge people, get up in a crews business or otherwise make themselves known without having to resort to straight up fisticuffs. Risks have a name, a crew associated with it, and a danger level that tells everyone just how risky this whole activity is. I was a big fan of “Electric Dance Fighting”, one of our first playtests Risks, where crews would have big street dance contests on the arcing lightning from a power line.
Adults are a bit more simple, to reflect the info and perspective of a teenager – they have a name, some strengths and weaknesses, and a position that tells you where they sit in the Adult world.
This is all done during Session Zero, tho we encourage players to add or modify these as needed throughout play, and it’s also done non-sequentially, so you can come up with a crew, go make up a Risk then come back to make up the hang later. You have a variable number of all of these elements depending on the scale of the town you pick. We’ve found this system just pops with awesome ideas when you get a few people around the table, and I wish I could just list off all the examples we’ve heard during playtesting so far. Really makes for some fantastic story elements with clear narrative and mechanical purpose.
A blank Your Dead Friend sheet…maybe you should be the one to fill it in!
I’d love to hear more about the Ties and Connections. How does that work and who gets to influence it?
Ties are how we lay out the various relationships between these crews, their leaders, locations, adults and characters all with the victim. We have a sheet that has the victim in the middle, their stats and so on, and a lot of blank space around them. As players investigate the world they’ve built, they record connections that NPCs, crews and locations have with Your Dead Friend by writing their names on the sheet and drawing these ties between the various factions and Your Dead Friend, which in turn makes it easier to figure out the next place to investigate, the next lead to track down and so on. This evolving document creates an ongoing campaign-length record of leads and dead ends, suspects and mysteries that you spent your game following up on. Here’s a WIP example of one after a couple playtest sessions. The final sheet will look a lil nicer than this, obviously, but it gives you an idea of what an in-progress set of Ties looks like.
Oh, and as for who gets to influence it – like almost everything in Americana, it’s a table-wide mechanic. The Storyteller can declare a tie, the players can confer and make one if they feel it makes sense, or everyone can agree together to make one. One area we really want to build on with Americana is making the dynamic between GM and Player less of a wall. Making the story more of a collaboration between the whole table from start to finish is a part of that.
So what are player characters like in Americana? How do they develop and fit into these towns?
Characters in Americana are all one of 6 Archetypes (what we call Classes) based on high school tropes – The Jock, The Nerd, The Royal, The Outsider, The New Kid and The Artist. They’re all friends of the victim, but not necessarily of each other, and we have a mechanic called The First Clue that’s specifically for bringing everyone together and getting the characters invested in the mystery. One thing we were super aware of when making these archetypes is that some of them are often depicted as cruel, or mean in popular culture – Jocks are bullies, Royals (the popular kids) are often vapid, and we wanted to avoid that at all costs, highlighting instead the positive traits of someone who really loves sports, or is a social butterfly.
These characters are, generally, people who’ve been part of the town most of their lives, and are personally devastated by the death of their best friend, and their character growth tends to come from their collective grief and the various support mechanics we have – working together is vital in Americana. The way the game is designed really forces this Us vs Them sentiment where the player characters are alone in their investigation, and have to rely on each other as much as possible.
Finally, tell me about Your Dead Friend. Where did this plot element idea come from, and how did it grow into a mechanic?
Your Dead Friend came from me watching Brick and realizing the single most important character in that – and almost every murder mystery – is the victim, but they’re so often neglected in RPGs that focus on similar themes. They’re either a plot thread or an inciting event, but never really show up much in the story from there. While doing my research for the game (Watching Riverdale mainly) I noticed how useful it was to have flashbacks where you can expand on that character and make them matter so much more to the audience than if they were just a corpse. It seemed obvious that the victim should sit at the table somehow.
First of all I played with the idea of having a player literally be Your Dead Friend, it’d be another Archetype, but I couldn’t really figure a way to make it work well with the other mechanics and vibe of the game. We played with the idea of having them be a summonable element, a ghost, a bunch of other things, but all of that went by the wayside when we realized how important Assists were for the game. It all kinda came at once at that point, the flashbacks, the assist skills, etc. It allows the character of the victim to grow really naturally through the players inventing that relationship they had from whole cloth and stops them just being a dice pool to draw from.
Hi all! Today I have a post from J Dymphna Coy on the subject of post-consent safety paradigm. For some advance clarity, consent is basically whether or not we grant permission for people to do a given thing. And if you click here, you can find some references for the safety tools mentioned. Otherwise, I think you should be able to follow the article pretty well! — A few months ago, I attended a session at RightsCon about Sidewalks Toronto. Sidewalks Toronto is a project by Alphabet (i.e., Google) to build an entirely new neighborhood in the city of Toronto from the ground up. They want to create a so-called “Smart City,” which uses various electronic surveillance tools in order to allocate resources more efficiently.
Naturally, the attendees of a digital rights conference cast a somewhat skeptical eye at this development. But one of the things I kept hearing about was “informed consent.” The most common question was some version of the following: “How can we make sure that people have informed consent about what kind of data is being collected about them?”
Mark Surman of the Mozilla Foundation brought up an interesting point: the business model of Google (and virtually every other Silicon Valley company) is to collect as much data as possible and then decide what to do with it all later. How can we even have informed consent, he said, when even Google doesn’t know what we’re consenting to?
Ultimately, my conclusion from the session was this: consent is ultimately meaningless in the context of the information economy. We cannot place the burden upon the populace as individuals to protect itself from Big Data; we must collectively assert our rights as a society and place the duty upon megacorporations to not exploit us.
That’s all well and good, you might say, but what does it have to do with gaming?
The inimitable Jess Hammer once mentioned that the X-Card has been dubbed a safety tool when it should more properly be considered a consent tool. The observation stuck with me, and I’ve been tooling it around in my head ever since.
So what is the difference between consent and safety?
Consent* happens before a game begins, or during a game. It involves mechanisms for determining the content of a game, or whether the game will continue at all. The X-Card, cut-and-brake**, and lines and veils are all good examples of consent tools.
Safety happens during or after a game. It involves mechanisms for directly attending to the emotional well-being of the players. A well-done debrief is a safety technique. De-roling is a safety technique. Anything that requires that players provide care (rather than merely asking if care is necessary) is a safety technique.
This is not to say that consent tools are bad, or should not be used. Quite the opposite is true! But they should be regarded for what they are, and used in a way that complements safety tools.
So why should I bring up Google’s data collection practices in this context? Surely a put-upon LARP organizer who already has to deal with the utterly thankless task of running a game does not have anything in common with Silicon Valley megacorporations. After all, the power relations are completely different. We can negotiate consent with another player of a game in a way that we can’t with a company like Apple. I can walk up to my fellow player and say, “Hey Fred, please don’t include bananas in this game, I have terrible fructiphobia!” By contrast, the notion that would could just write a letter that read, “Dear Apple, Please remove line 52 of this iTunes agreement because I don’t like it!” and expect results from it is absurd.
I bring up the comparison because much like Sidewalk Labs, your fellow players of a game have no idea what’s going to happen, and therefore any consent-based paradigm has limited utility at best. I bring it up because I want to emphasize the importance of safety and care, and to make sure that we’re not glossing over these things as designers and communities.
I’m not a big fan of making up categories of things for its own sake, or of having self-important internet arguments, or crushing my community with the tyranny of small differences. But I’ve heard the common complaint for years that safety mechanics don’t quite do what they’re advertised, and I hope that making the distinction between consent and safety might make something clearer in at least one person’s head, and maybe even make games a little better for the people who play them.
– *It is perhaps worth noting that consent originated as a legal term. It’s designed to protect various parties from indemnity or liability. While legal protections are important, focusing on what technically legal is not necessarily the best way to give guidance on how to navigate ways to avoid hurting or exploiting the people around you.
**The OK check-in straddles the line between what I’m deeming as “safety” versus “consent.” It resembles safety insofar as it places the onus on the entire community to ensure that that all of the participants are OK, rather than on other mechanics that place the onus on the affected person to tell the other persons in the scene to stop. I’m calling it “consent” here because it primarily involves whether or not care is necessary, as opposed to actually providing said care for the most part. But like all categories, the point is not to get into nitty-gritty arguments about where the boundaries are, unless you find that sort of thing really exciting (I find it tedious).
—
Thank you so much to Dymphna for the excellent article! I hope you’ve all learned something a little new today. 🙂
P.S. If you’d like to write an article for approachable theory, email Brie at contactbriecs@gmail.com with a one paragraph pitch, your name, and your pronouns.
Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
Tell me a little about Bee Lives: We Will Only Know Summer. What excites you about it?
Bee Lives: We Will Only Know Summer is a worker placement and resource management game for 1 to 4 players. I’ve been developing it for about a year now and the game play is heavily influenced by Euro games. Titles like A Feast for Odin, Carcassonne, and Clans of Caledonia (to name a few) have provided some inspiration for mechanics.
The theme, however, comes from my experience as a beekeeper. I’ve been tending bees in urban Philadelphia for the past 7 years and have learned a lot about them in that time. When I did some research and found that no one else had done a worker placement style game about bees yet I decided that I wanted to be the one to combine two of my passions and create that game.
There are several things that excite me about this game. The first is how much I hope this will introduce people to the world of bees. I really wanted to design the game in a way that made people think like a hive does. The victory point conditions are set up to reward actions and behaviors that do well for the survival of your own hive. Some of them, particularly swarming, creates challenges for you as well. You can’t just think about points, you have to also think about getting through the winter in order to win.
This all really ties into how I learned to design games as a librarian. I’ve been making tabletop games for close to a decade as part of my educator duties, and I really like that I’ve designed a game that lets you learn while playing but does not have the objective of teaching. Bee Lives was made to be a game first, with the learning piece a side effect.
I’m also just really excited about this whole process of creating and publishing a game. It’s great seeing the community response to the project and the positive energy that a lot of people are responding to the game with. I also loved bringing Helen and Alina onto the project and working with them. Alina captured the style I tasked her with through my art direction just how I was hoping. Helen has really helped tie the art and the game mechanics together with her graphic design. The graphic design in particular is so important for a game’s user experience and I’m pleased with how it’s all come together so far.
What is play like on an average turn in Bee Lives? What do you do? In a turn of bee lives your primary task is decide how to most efficiently utilize the workers you have. There are 8 possible actions you can take, and each one helps your hive get to, and survive through, winter in some way. Do you need more honey and pollen so your bees don’t starve and you can make new bees? Send a couple workers out to forage. Maybe your hive is getting too much disease? Send some workers to clean it out. Is your neighbor being aggressive? Perhaps it is time to put some bees on defense or even go out on a raid to rob some honey from those neighbors.
Once you’ve decided how you want to spend your workers you take turns with your opponents, be it real players or the AI driven wild hives, taking those actions. This can of course throw you off of what you were originally planning. Raiding can leave you with less honey than you need forcing you to compensate elsewhere. Someone can block you from accessing a specific tile you wanted to forage from, forcing you to forage elsewhere with extra workers you were not planning. Then there is the main puzzle of managing the space in your comb so you can balance having enough food for all the bees while leaving enough space for new workers to hatch out of, and also keeping some water on hand in case you need to cool down your hive. There is a good amount of planning you need to do each turn, and then hope it doesn’t fall apart when it comes time to feed your bees and hatch out new workers in the upkeep phase between the 9 turns of the game.
How did you decide on the designs you use in the game for visual aid?
Helen and I worked pretty closely on this. We wanted everything to be attractive but functional and serve the player from a user experience perspective first. The graphics for visual aid are intended to be intuitive, and allow you to figure out what you need to do without having to look it up in the rule book each time. I also want to make the game language independent if we can.
Right now the only part of the game (apart from the rule book, obviously) that needs words are the event cards. Before we go to print I am hoping we can make those language independent as well. We also took care to add symbols to anything where color may be important so anyone who is color blind can still play.
This is most clear with the black and white icons we have added to the 4 different tile types that are in the game. It’s possible we’ll be having some of the actual art for the graphic design icons redone, but this is just for aesthetics if it happens. The symbols and why we chose them will remain the same.
How close to real life is the game in functionality – how much of a “bee life” are we living when we play?
Bee Lives is definitely an abstraction of what it is like for a bee hive in the Philadelphia area each ear. I’ve spent a lot of time with bees these past few years, and I wanted to really replicate what they need to do in this game without making a full blown simulation. The game doesn’t reflect every nuance of bee life.
For example, the bees don’t collect propolis or make royal jelly, and disease is abstracted down to the Varroa mite only, when in reality there are several health issues that can affect them. I want players to experience what it is like to be a hive without making them micromanage every aspect of it, and I believe I have succeeded in doing that.
Bee Lives sounds like a really great experience! How did you make those decisions in what to include, what to design into the game to interact with? That must have been challenging! What was most important to you?
This is where my experience creating games as a librarian really came into play. It can be really tempting to throw everything, including the kitchen sink, into a game. When you do that, though, you end up with a complicated simulation that makes sense to no one but the designer. You need to know what to trim and where to really emulate the real world experiences you want the players to experience through play.
When I did this for Bee Lives, I looked at what was important to understand about bees and what was needed mechanically to make the game enjoyable, competitive and balanced. I needed people to experience the difficulty bees go through in managing disease and resource gathering, so I made sure those were aspects that were included. I needed to balance those things with mechanics that would make the game challenging, which is where the main focus of resource management came from. Navigating these two pieces is a lot of what game design is, for me. It’s a way to let people experiment with a system they otherwise have no real way of interacting with, and I think that is a special thing.
Hi all! Today I have an interview with Martin Lloyd on Amazing Tales, a roleplaying game that’s maybe a little more approachable for the kiddos of my readers than my normal fare! Feel free to check out some of the actual plays that exist for the game and the website, and check out Martin’s responses below!
—
Tell me a little about Amazing Tales. What excites you about it? Amazing Tales is a role-playing game for kids aged four and up. I wrote it to play with my daughter five years ago when she was four, and introduced my son to it at about the same age. We had so much fun playing it that I wanted to get it out there so other people could do the same. My first thoughts were to do it as a simple PDF download in the style of Lady Blackbird or Lasers and Feelings. But I was lucky enough to get a sabbatical from my job, and I decided to use that time to turn it into a full fledged book. I had a huge slice of luck when Iris Maertens agreed to do the artwork, that let me create the book I always wanted to make, packed with illustrations so kids can get inspired by it, and feel like it’s a book for them, even if they can’t read it.
Now 8 months have passed since release and I’m loving watching what happens as the game gets out into the real world. It is a huge kick to see people sharing pictures of themselves playing their first role-playing game with their kids, or pictures of their child’s first character sheet. One of my thoughts when I was writing the game is that as soon as role-players have kids they want to play role-playing games with them, but anticipate a wait of maybe ten years before they can. Amazing Tales gets that waiting period down to about four years, and that seems to be making a lot of parents very happy.
I am also delighted that Studio 2 have picked Amazing Tales up for distribution and an offset print run is happening. Amazing Tales is going to be in shops! For something that started out as a way to fill a rainy day it’s come a very long way.
What are the mechanics like for conflict resolution in Amazing Tales? How did you make them approachable for kids?
I chose conflict resolution rather than task resolution for Amazing Tales, so unless you deliberately want to stretch stuff out to make it dramatic or climactic everything is handled by one roll, be it flying a spaceship, making friends with a talking monkey or exchanging cannon fire with a rival pirate ship. Characters in Amazing Tales are defined by four skills, and each skill has an associated dice. Either a D6, D8, D10 or D12. To use a skill you roll the relevant dice against a target number of three. The target number never varies. The only thing that changes is the size of the dice used.
Tests have two possible results, if you succeed, you succeed. If you fail, things get worse, but they don’t end. So the monster might catch you, but it won’t eat you. The GM – typically the parent – never rolls dice, which means they’re never playing ‘against’ their child.
I picked three as a target number because kids like succeeding, and I picked conflict rather than task resolution because it keeps the story moving. Watch how much stuff happens in the first two minutes of a kids’ cartoon show, that’s the attention span kids have. And that’s the kind of storytelling pace Amazing Tales aspires to. Tell some story, pose a challenge, choose an action, roll the dice, resolve and repeat.
What I’ve just described is a very very simple system and that simplicity is the key to making a game approachable for kids. I firmly believe that anyone’s enjoyment of a game increases when they know what they’re doing. We’ve all played games where we didn’t know the rules, someone told us to roll some dice, modified the result for reasons we couldn’t follow and then told us what happened. That sucks when you’re an adult, and it definitely sucks when you’re four. So Amazing Tales can be boiled down to ‘roll the dice for the thing you’re trying to do, if the result is three or more you succeeded’. Four year olds can understand that, they can repeat it back to you, or explain it to their grandparents and their friends.
In the early days of playing Amazing Tales I tried things like modifying the target number; providing magic items that gave +1 bonuses; or requiring multiple successes for difficult tasks, but I quickly realised that it made no difference to how much fun the kids were having. Young kids don’t understand probability, so why bring in things like modifiers? The only reasons for having different dice sizes for different skills are that one; kids love rolling dice, two; they like dice with interesting shapes and three; role-player parents can’t wait to introduce their kids to polyhedrals. To adults it’s clear that changing the dice size changes the odds, but that’s not why they’re there.
I have been pleasantly surprised by how happy older kids have been with these very simple rules. In my mind Amazing Tales was a game for kids aged about four to eight. In practice it turns out to be a game for kids aged between 3 and a half and ten. Seeing how well Amazing Tales works has also convinced me that most games for adults are unnecessarily complex.
How did you approach providing a fictional background for the game that is welcoming to a diverse audience of children?
First off, Amazing Tales is absolutely a game for everyone. Iris and I worked hard to make sure that whatever your kid’s background there should be someone in the artwork that your they can recognise as relating to them. I don’t know if we nailed that, but it matters to us and we’ll keep trying in future projects.
The other way to look at this question is to think about what kids want in a game beyond a confirmation that it’s for them. Young kids don’t have the same breadth of cultural references to draw on that grown ups do. So when I was thinking about the settings to include in the book I tried to pick things that small kids would be familiar with from a very young age. I ended up with four settings, the Deep Dark Wood (think talking animals and fairies), Magical Kingdoms Long Ago (think King Arthur), The Pirate Seas (pirates) and Adventures Beyond the Stars (space). I thought about doing super-heroes, but left it out because my kids knew the names of super heroes, but had no idea what kind of stories they might appear in. In retrospect I think that was a mistake, there are plenty of kids out there playing Amazing Tales as super-heroes.
The settings themselves are quite vague. They’re really collections of prompts and ideas to get parents and kids making up worlds together. It’s up to you whether the deep dark wood is full of monsters or full of friendly animals, but the setting gives you a jumping off point to get started. What’s important is that parent and child can start from a shared idea of a wood, fairies that are small, have wings and can do magic, and animals that can talk. The settings include suggested skills, suggested plots and lots of ideas for parents to work with and artwork to inspire the kids. From there it’s up to the parents to work with their child to create something that will work for both of them.
I also wanted to write a game where that made good on role-playing games’ key promise – that you can be anything and do anything. That’s one of the reasons there’s a picture of King Tyrannosneak in the book even though he doesn’t fit in any of the settings. He’s a character my son came up with when he was five. He’s a giant robot t-rex, with four arms, which he needs because he has two swords and two shields. He’s also a ninja. When you tell kids their characters can be anything they want they take you at your word, and Amazing Tales supports that.
How did you play-test the game to make sure kids could understand it? Were there any specific experiences you had that you learned from?
Making sure kids could understand it wasn’t the hard part. Kids seem to get the game very quickly indeed. The character generation section includes a quick script – a list of questions to ask your child to walk them through the process. By the end of that kids are usually completely into the game, and it only takes a few minutes.
I was more concerned about making the game easy for parents to understand. I’d love non-gamer parents to consider Amazing Tales as something for their kids, so I tried to get as much advice for first time gamers and first time GMs into the book as I could. It’s also why I shot some actual play videos, just so people can see how it’s done. Amazing Tales also suggests that you don’t do much (or any) preparation for a game, it works well if you just improvise as you go. That’s a challenge for parents who haven’t done any kind of improvisational story telling before, so again I tried to pack in the advice.
A few experiences from play-tests do stand out though. One was with a friend of my daughter, a lovely five year old girl who elected to play a princess. At the first sign of trouble she announced ‘I stab it in the face with my dagger’, which was both fair enough, and rather jarring. Kids, it turns out, come out with this kind of thing all the time. This led to my including a section in the book on non bloodthirsty ways of resolving combats. I’m not a fan of my kids describing graphic violence, so I try to keep lethal encounters to a minimum when I run games. There are plenty of other ways to have fights end, with enemies running away, surrendering, begging for mercy, bursting into tears and so on. Evil robots, animated shadows, skeletons, those kinds of things are also great for heroes to fight their way through without having to worry too much about the morality of the situation.
Another thing that stands out happened when I was testing out the space setting. I had vaguely assumed that kids who want to play aliens would want some kind of star-trek kind of alien, a humanoid, with weird coloured skin and one or two distinguishing features. But no. At least in the test games I ran kids who played aliens launched into a competition to be the weirdest, most out there alien they could be. Tentacles galore, mouths on their feet, dozens of eyes…
And one last thing I noticed across a lot of the play-tests was that kids often like to copy each other’s characters. They’ll want to be the same kind of hero, then they’ll pick the same skills, describe their characters in the same way and so on. It’s doesn’t create a problem the way having a party of three wizards would in D&D, it’s just what they like to do.
King Tyrannosneak!
I love King Tyrannosneak! As a designer, what are the important parts of those kind of imagined characters that you see across the age range – what do you see when people get to be creative with your game that you treasure knowing about?
I love that kids get to live out their fantasies, and that they get to do it at an age before their fantasies have been neatly organised into recognisable tropes by mass media. I can see in my own kids that as they consume more media their characters start to reflect that. My son loved Reepicheep in the Narnia books, and suddenly he’s playing a Pirate Mouse. But before that starts to happen kids come up with the most incredible stuff, hang glider piloting gnomes with poisonous noses, pirates with laser eyes and pet tigers, that kind of thing. A few years back my kids came up with a pair of knights/super heroes called ‘Key-man’ and ‘Crasher Girl’. Key-man had a sword which fired keys at things, which was obviously a useful weapon but also instantly unlocked doors. Crasher Girl was just great at crashing through things, I think she had rocket boots too.
So I hope that one of the things kids will get out of playing Amazing Tales is the idea that they can create new stuff and colour outside the lines.
Not that there’s anything wrong with more derivative characters. I know of a little girl who’s out there fighting the Clone Wars with a character who’s skills are ‘being a queen’, ‘shooting blasters’, ‘knowing things’ and ‘piloting spaceships’. I loved hearing about her, because her idea of being a queen involves saving the galaxy with laser guns, brains and charisma, which sounds like a good thing to learn when you’re growing up.
The last thing, and perhaps the thing that makes me happiest is all the stories from people who’ve found playing games with their kids to be a fulfilling experience. Because Amazing Tales puts most of the cognitive load on the parent everyone playing is really engaged. Anyone who’s tried to spend lots of time with small children knows how tedious it can get. They can play snakes and ladders twenty times in a row, they don’t get bored of the same (very short) story book again and again, and they value your attention so highly that getting you to read that book again is the most important thing in their world. Amazing Tales is different because it makes the parents do some brain work, and then it becomes a real joint activity. I think kids can tell when their parents are really engaged, and I think parents find that rewarding too. So seeing all these parents find a new activity that they can do with their kids that they both genuinely enjoy – that’s been great.
Today I have an interview with Kira Magrann, talking about her new live action game Something Is Wrong Here, which is currently on Kickstarter! It’s a very different game, from what I can tell, and that makes it all the more interesting to me. I hope you like reading Kira’s responses!
—
Tell me a little about Something is Wrong Here. What excites you about it?
Something Is Wrong Here is a roleplaying game inspired by the dark and uncanny work of David Lynch. It’s atmospheric, emotional, and personal, and THOSE are the things I’m most excited about in the game! A lot of Twin Peaks style games have been more like small town murder mysteries, which is great and fine, but my love of character relationships, dopplegangers, and personal horror is bleeding like, all over this game. I designed it to FEEL like a David Lynch gig more than follow the PLOT of one of his things. So its a pretty emotional experience, and I love that about it.
You talk about following David Lynch’s creative process in the Kickstarter video. What was the creative process? How did it affect the game in comparison to other processes you’ve used?
David Lynch’s creative process is very fine art and drawn from his subconscious. It’s so weird I love it, especially the fine art stuff. I’m a sucker for surrealist painters like Francis Bacon, who David Lynch’s uncanny films have often been compared to! He was a painter before a filmmaker, and he sees films like moving paintings. I see roleplaying games like fine art experiences, immersive and social performance art, so I really connect with this correlation of the cross contamination of art media. His ideas are drawn from meditation and dream images. He often says “Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.”
I thought I would experiment with this process while making a game inspired by his work, draw from my background as a fine artist as well as my own dreams and subconscious. I thought, what scares me the most in David Lynch things? What do I connect to the most? How can I make the narrative more from my queer non-binary perspective? I thought and dreamed and meditated on it for awhile. From there it was easy to focus on the identity issues that are so relevant in his work that I also deeply relate to. Issues that focus on multiple selves, and what we really need emotionally from relationships with people, and of course that feeling of creeping dread that I really do enjoy (I love being scared and always have).
Character cards!
What is the structure of the game like, and how do players mechanically interact with the narrative?
The game’s structure is somewhat fluid in the plot sense, in that the plot isn’t the most important thing about the game. The characters are the focus, and the scenes that unfold are there just to focus on the each character’s personal feelings, and how their relationships with the other characters might influence their decisions in the final act. There are two acts basically, and the mechanics are card based, in addition to a Facilitator who helps frame scenes, keep time, and play music. The cards change and serve different functions as the game goes on. At first they are emotional prompts, then they are acting prompts that happen in scenes, and then finally they are cues to how to make decisions in a suddenly uncanny environment. The players are encouraged to dive deep into their character’s minds, and perhaps see correlations between those minds and their own. This, in addition to atmospheric props like a box and a mirror, create some deep emotional play.
How did you playtest and develop a game with this kind of complexity – and how replayable is it, with playtest experience in mind?
I actually just playtested it as normal! It played excellent both at home, and at a convention. It’s oddly simple once it gets going actually, as the rules are easy and repetitive, like a ritual, and the facilitator really just needs to guide the scenes and the timing. It’s reasonably replayable, because the spoiler doesn’t reaaaaaaaally matter to the story, its more what happens to the characters and the decisions the players make that are the heart of the game. People could play different characters, or you could end up spending more or less time in different setting options, and I bet it would present a different emotional journey each time. Although it is designed to be a unique, one night experience!
How is Something is Wrong Here different from the works it reflects? I think you address this a little with looking for queer, nonbinary aspects – how do you think that shows most in the game?
Hahahaha well, I love David Lynch but he is an old white guy with some problematic ideas about gender and hardly represents people of color in his work, etc etc problematic faves. My work obviously attempts to diverge from those problematic aspects of his. This game doesn’t have representation in it per se… the character archetypes are very flexible and undefined so you can make them whatever you want them to be. The clearest setting elements are “America” and “a forest, a living room, a diner, a roadhouse” so you could imagine perhaps a small American town, but it doesn’t say where. SO really, the queerest and most non-binary parts of this game are about questioning dualities and pre-determined endings. Like, at the end, each character has a choice when they’re confronted by themselves. How can you confront yourself? Are parts of your identity different than other parts? Those are pretty essential to my personal non-binary thinking. My identity is complex, and made of fluid moving parts, and sometimes I analyze different parts of myself like different parts of a big whole, right. So those themes about the complexness of identity are really central to Something Is Wrong Here.
What is Legacy: Life Among the Ruins – The Next World, both as a product and as your vision?
At its most basic, the new campaign is a collection of three supplement books for Legacy. Two of them – Engine of Life and End Game – combine new rules and options for Legacy with backer-created content made as part of the first kickstarter, while the third – Free From the Yoke – is a standalone setting hack of the original game transposing it into political fantasy rooted in Slavic folklore.
At a higher level, it’s our opportunity to really stretch our wings with the 2nd edition of the game. While we’re very proud of what we achieved with the 2e corebook, a lot of it was a revision and restatement of things created for 1e. With these new books, we’re bringing completely new options to the game that change up some key assumptions to the game: the Timestream Refugees don’t use standard stats but instead get better at moves the more they’ve helped others, while the Herald isn’t defined by their role in their Family but instead by the pre-apocalypse cultural icon they’re emulating. Free From the Yoke completely rewrites many of Legacy’s core systems, bringing in magic and chains of fealty and nation-scale logistics.
Beyond even that, these books give you the tools to decide the trajectory of your campaign: The Engine of Life gives ways to guide the wasteland towards a new flourishing and an eventual peace, while End Game presents final threats that might finish the world off for good and offers sacrifices you might make to push it back.
Finally, Free From the Yoke presents players with a newborn nation feeling the after-effects of generations of foreign occupation, and asks them how much they prize the communal health of the nation over their own wealth, prosperity and independence. It’s an opportunity for us to explore a more measured, large-scale kind of storytelling, and a way to return to some of Legacy’s inspirations – Reign and Birthright.
I love this picture so much.
What are some of the ways Timestream Refugees become better, more advanced?
The Timestream Refugees are focused on stopping the future calamity they fled from, and to do that they need to guide the actions of others while avoiding being tied down by obligations. This is core, and so instead of the standard stats of Reach, Grasp and Sleight that have Momentum and Balance. They roll Momentum for most family moves, but it reduces by 1 each time they do. They get a point back each time they successfully help another family, but in addition you secretly write down your vision for each family at the start of each Age. If your vision comes to pass you gain more momentum, but otherwise the world slips closer to ruin. Depending on the player’s choices, they could gain Momentum from characters reaching a satisfying end to their arc, from great projects being completed, or from resolving systemic problems with the homeland. And building on that, their other moves let them do things like uplift a generic NPC into a legendary hero, predicting that a new age would provide a bounty of resources, appear when other players roll double-1s or double-6s to share in the glory or mitigate tragedy, or help other players better understand the world. They’re a playbook all about ‘striving to put right what once went wrong’, drawing on Quantum Leap, Terminator and Travellers, and I really enjoy how we’ve managed to make that work and draw you into the other Families’ stories.
Tell me about the magic in Free From the Yoke – how does it work? How does it change the way Legacy works?
Technology in Legacy is materialistic – it’s disposable, and self-powered, and tied to the physical device. In contrast, magic in Free From the Yoke is a story you tell the land to get it to help you. All magic needs a tutor – either a more learned sage, or the land itself. When you learn a ritual it triggers a new core move where you and your tutor negotiate what obligations you accept in return for power. Maybe you’re not allowed to teach the ritual to others, or must act virtuously to retain access to it, or must regularly perform a particular observance.
Then, when you enact the ritual, that’s another negotiation – depending on how well you performed it, you can call on the land for extra power, control, healing, or insight into your tutor’s current state. In return, the GM picks costs, with more costs if you’ve broken any of those obligations you agreed to. These downsides might include a small sacrifice, a change in the weather, strange behaviour from animals and plants, or a cost to your health.
Finally, this is still a Legacy game, so this all shapes your family over generations. Every time the ages turn and you retire an old character, you may add one ritual they know to your House’s lore – gradually building up a corpus of knowledge that future characters will be able to call on as they adventure, but tying your House closer to the Land’s waxing and waning health in the process.
Tell me a little about Entromancy. What excites you about it?
I am super excited about Entromancy because it represents the realization of a dream: participating in a shared cyberpunk fantasy world with other fans of d20 tabletop games. When I wrote the first novel in the Entromancy series a couple of years ago, I was inspired by my experience playing and GMing for tabletop RPGs, and it’s been an amazing process translating that enthusiasm from the novel back into a game that we can all play.
How did you translate the novel into a mechanical structure like a game without sacrificing the narrative or overcomplicating things?
Great question! Building the world for the novel was a four-year process of scribbling notes, creating characters, and revising systems, in much the same way that one would approach making a game. It was important to me to have, for example, a magic system that was not only internally consistent, but that would also be plausible within the framework of a roleplaying game. Creating the RPG from the novel hasn’t exactly been “easy,” but a lot of things have translated well into mechanics because of that early structural decision. The core concept of magic, for instance, still draws from the same resource, a renewable element called “ceridium,” as in the book, but we’ve had to reconfigure most of the iconic spells that appear in the book (while building out a ton more) so that they make sense in a balanced, TTRPG imagining of the world.
I love the idea of the Terramancer. What are they like in play? How do they function?
The Terramancer is based on Alina Hadzic, one of the main characters of the novel series and an all-around all-star. She’s a former baseball relief pitcher with powerful earth magic to boot, and represents another area in which we’ve had to work to build mechanics that make sense for a game, rather than just a book.
Like all other character classes in Entromancy, the Terramancer has two archetypes to choose from, which are specific advancement paths for their talents or spells. When you play as a Terramancer, you can choose to be either an Arcane Pitcher or a Nature’s Harbinger, and can add spells from your chosen archetype to suit your play style. The Arcane Pitcher is formidable at range and has spells to empower its returning projectile weapon, the ceridium orb, while the Nature’s Harbinger can support the group with buff spells, healing, and the ability to summon beasts. Both archetypes benefit from a shared Terramancer feat list that allows you to further enhance your character’s abilities and combat prowess.
What’s magic like in the narrative, and how do you make it happen mechanically? Is either particularly explosive, or can it be sly?
In the 2020s, green researchers discovered the ability to synthesize ceridium, a renewable energy source that, over time, was found to also power burgeoning schools of magic. These schools are collectively known as “mancy,” and ceridium, while stable, has been proven to expose a genetic mutation among certain populations. This mutation – the “underrace gene” – results in phenotypic variation among carriers of the gene, giving rise to new races of people known colloquially as “underraces” or “aurics.”
It’s posited that ceridium is a synthesization of “blue orichalcum,” a once naturally-occurring element that was depleted by humankind centuries ago. The connection between ceridium and blue orichalcum is unproven, but would explain why most civilizations have a cultural memory of things like magic, spellcasting, and fantastic races and creatures.
In Entromancy, most spells are dependent upon the availability and use of ceridium, and range from the infiltration-focused shadowmancy of the NIGHT Agent to the utility-enhancing spells of the Technomancer.
What does a d20 system bring to the table to make this specific setting and playstyle flourish?
We love 5th Edition, and find it to be a wonderful springboard for the type of game that we want to share with everyone. We’ve done a lot to streamline the game systems to place an emphasis on meaningful action and storytelling, while building out other systems to support a cyberpunk world that incorporates intrigue, espionage, hacking, and cybernetics. So anyone who’s familiar with 5th Edition or other d20 systems will be instantly familiar with how the core mechanic works, and will also notice the areas in which Entromancy is different, in terms of character creation and progression, spellcasting, equipment, and more.
There are a lot of great game systems out there, and in fact, the first few iterations of Entromancy were based on a proprietary game system that we were developing. Early in the game’s development, we decided instead to utilize 5th Edition as a framework as it felt a natural fit for the game that we wanted to make. Over time, Entromancy grew into the d20 core mechanic and, through development and playtesting, we have been able to identify more and more areas where we’ve been able to streamline, make adjustments, and create our own game that feels authentic to the original fiction.
Tell me about Domina Magica. What excites you about it?
Hey!!! Domina Magica is magical girl RPG that myself and my team Third Act Publishing created!! It is an episodic game that emulates an episode of a Magical Girl Anime. It has a ton of unique mechanics to help facilitate the feel of some of the iconic anime tropes. There is the “cootie catcher” or “fortune teller” that allows you and your group of players to set the scene and tone of your game by filling out the “flaps,” it also allows the players to fill in “secret trials” that will activate later in the game. There is also a dual sided Character Sheet that allows you to build a School Girl character first and then when you transform your physically flip the sheet over and build your “Magical Girl!!!”
We are really excited for this Game!!! Our Kickstarter funded in 15 hours and we are sending out Slap Bracelets to backers as we speak!!! If you are in the US and fund at any level, even the $1 level we will send you a purple “Fight like a Magical Girl Bracelet” right away. Not when it is over, not when the books comes out…..now!!! Sending hundreds of Slap Bracelets in the mail and seeing them pop up all over social media is something we are super excited about!!!!
I LOVE the character sheet idea! Clever character sheets can make games more fun! So can transformation – is that a big aspect of Domina Magica?
Transformation was and still is a huge part of Domina Magica. The dual character sheets was a game mechanic that I wanted to implement from the very beginning and one of the very few things that have changed. I liked the idea that your magical girl, and your school girl would have different identities and I wanted to represent that at the game table. Double Sided character sheets fit that mechanic perfectly. We also created a way that the character sheets build off of each other so that what you do in your school girl person directly impacts what your Magical Girl looks like!!
Goodies!
How does the game work mechanically – what do players use to resolve conflicts, or to interact with each other and non-player characters?
The Game works off a “roll low” system. Your school girl will have 5 traits, and you as the player will have 5 die, D4 through D12. Your traits are Friendship, Strength, Honesty, Kindness and Persistence. Since it is a “roll low” system you want to roll as close to 1 as possible so your D4 is your highest die. You get to assign the 5 die to the five traits, picking what trait is your highest (d4) and what trait you still need to work on (d12.) When the transformation happens and you flip over your character sheet, you get to reassign your die to the same 5 stats, so your Magical Girl might not have the same strengths as your school girl persona. To confront a “bully” or “dark enemy” you will simply pick a trait you think represents what you are doing and it will be a contested roll against the target, whoever rolls closer to 1 succeeds the check.
After all she is the 1 Sailor Moon!!! After hearing that song for years I really wanted a system that made ‘1’ the best number and not 20.
Tell me about the magical girls and school girls you play. What are they like? How are they presented? What do they do?
Ok, I will start with the School Girl because you build her first. At this point you can play any school girl you want. Schoolboy? Thats fine! Transgender? Great! You get to decide on her traits, stats and characteristics! The character sheet has the typical Likes/Dislikes and Blood type portions for you to fill out. You give her a name and then assign the dice to her stats. After you have filled all of that out, you get to present her and tell the table a bit more about your character. So the players get to choose literally everything about the School Girl!
Once the party has transformed you physically turn your character sheet over to reveal the Magical Girl Side. Here you can reassign her dice, and give her a name. Since she is a part of a team, the players have to decide what type of Magical Girls they are playing and describe the transformation process. So some of the Magical Girl traits are filled in by the table and some are filled in by the player! Then they fight the Boss that has been building throughout the course of the “episode.”
Share some of the highlights and challenges of this project. What has it been like playtesting and creating a game so femme focused?
There were several challenges that we have run into even in the early stages of the game. I wanted this game to be Everything!!! I wanted it to have every theme, troupe, cliche and mechanic that I could cram in, but after playtesting it and looking back at it…….the game was a hot mess. We had to get rid of a few mechanics and tweak others to make play more smooth and the concepts to flow better.
Play testing has been a huge help! Most of my players are men who are so excited to get to play magical Girls!! Playtesting with different groups of people helped me see different things i could do to appeal to a wider audience as well. I changed the character sheets to include all body types and not just the stereotypical “Skinny Anime Girl” If we get to print off full color character sheets I would love to do different skin tones as well!!!
