I know I have not posted this month on my blog! I have been super busy with life, but I’ve spent a little bit of time on editing and prepping and doing photography (which will hopefully eventually be art) for Sweet Valley Hell. It’s a work in progress! I’m still planning on releasing it eventually. I still haven’t figured out how to make playtests happen, unfortunately.
Hearts in Crisis is on hold pretty much until I finish school because I can’t really do the amount of research I want to do for the project while also doing school. It makes me sad, but it is still something I intend to finish – I just need to build a stronger supporting text for it than I had originally planned.
Finally, I’m hoping to start work on a new project soon (starting with writing down stuff), but it is pending the final release of someone else’s project, because it is… well, a hack. Hacks aren’t normally my thing, but there is a big fiction property that I want to try building a game for. I don’t think it makes sense to make a whole original system for it when it will work well as a hack – this might change, but the main plan as of the moment is to hack another game for this project. I’m not much for secrets, so I’ll let you know: I’m hoping to hack Urban Shadows (because it is a beautiful game) to fit the Parasol Protectorate series universe. It’s obviously an unofficial thing, but I still want to make it, and it will probably be a massive undertaking. If you’re a fan of the series and familiar with Urban Shadows (via G+, the Kickstarter, or otherwise), feel free to drop me a message with any tidbits of ideas you have, if you want and don’t mind me using them. 🙂
I’ll try to update more! It’s been pretty hectic around here, so please accept my apologies.
Tag: gaming
Sweet Valley Hell – A like, Hellhole in the Valley
This is the game I’m working on during my pre-week of summer classes. I’m hoping to write up the Principal’s instructions and the monster section over the next couple of weeks. Enjoy!
SWEET VALLEY HELL (DRAFT)
PLAYER’S INSTRUCTIONS
“Oh. My. God. Did you see the dagger that Azazel was carrying last week? Did you know it like, devours souls?”
“No way!”
“Yes way. It was totally rad!”
—
So like, in this game, you play valley gals and guys in this totally sweet alternate universe where a portal to Hell has opened up in the Valley. There are like, really rad monsters, demons, and dead-walkers roaming the ‘burbs and like, magic is a thing. It’s bitchen.
Most of the time, you’ll be hitting up the mall and hanging with your friends, so sosh skills are like way important? But, you’re gonna find out how dangerous it really is living on the edge of Hell, too, so whether you’re into football or cheerleading, rock those abs.
In the game, you’ll see demons – some are friendly, others are, like complete jerks? I mean, what is their problem? Then, there are the monsters – you know, dudes and chicks who are like, not human and stuff, and they range from vamps to werecritters to like, other creepy stuff. Last are the dead-walkers. They’re like zombies or whatever, but most of the time they’re totally grody and used to be like, murderers, so you gotta watch out.
When you start the game, you get like, anywhere from 4 to 8 points to build your character’s skills, depending on how hard the Principal (the like, person running the game?) wants the game to be, or how long after the Hellhole opens they want it to be. You have two skills: Sosh and Fight. Life is simple in the Valley, so don’t bum anybody out by making it complicated. Your skills buy you die sizes in your skills. The first point in a skill buys you a four-sided die. This is like, sooo lower than average. So you can spend another two points to buy up to a six-sided die. Each die up costs two points, so if you wanted to start the game with a six-sided die in Sosh and an eight-sided die in Fight, you’d spend 3 points in Sosh and 5 points (3 for six-sided and 2 to move up to eight-sided) in Fight. This makes you a little tough for fighting and pretty average in social situations.
Your hit points are on your character sheet. There are both Body and Mind hit points. You only get 5 of each unless you get a magic boost.
Each player (like, you guys) starts with these things called Popularity Points (We’ll call them Pops, because yeeah) and duuuh, some of Daddy’s Money! Pops are really cool because you can spend them to increase the size of your dice when you are rolling against the baddies. Daddy’s Money buys you more dice to roll! The dice you buy are equal to the die size that your base die is or to the size that is bought with Pops, so like, if you buy your base die up to a ten-sided die, all of your dice you buy with Daddy’s Money would be ten-sided. Sweet!
Each session of the game, you get a bit of each of these – kind of like, an allowance or something. Along with setting the difficulty of the game with the skill points, the Principal will decide how many Pops and how much of Daddy’s Money you get. Typically you’ll start with two Pops and, since Daddy’s Money only comes in hundreds, like, $400? Each die you add with Daddy’s Money will cost you $100. Cha-ching! If it’s going to be an extremely long game or the Hellhole is going to bite you hard, the Principal might up it a bit. You can always gain more Pops by doing sweet things in game, like risking your life for another player or a bystander, or maybe like, doing something epic. Daddy’s money, though, only comes once a sesh.
Fighting demons, monsters, and dead-walkers is pretty rad. You like, run up to them, or try to trick them, or something like that, and then you grab a die from the table – a like, six-sided one sometimes, or bigger. You can change the size of it and totally add more dice.
You’ll roll the die and the Principal (the like, person running the game?) will roll a die or a couple of dice to represent the monster (find more on that later), and you compare them to see who has the highest numbers, and how many of them. The roller who has the highest number on a die wins, and the loser takes hits equal to how many dice show a number higher than their highest.
So like, if you’re rolling against a vamp, and the Principal lays out like, four dice – all six-sided – based on the vamp’s powers? You put out the same number of dice, using your base die (In this case, for your Fight skill), which you buy up to an eight-sided die, and then some added ones. You both roll. You get a 6, 8, 3, and another 3. The vamp’s results are 4, 5, 3, and 2. You win because you have the highest number – 8. They take 2 hits because you have two dice (6 and 8) higher than their highest number (5). Bam, bam! You kick ass.
Social situations are simpler, because bystanders and non-player characters (like your BFF or your Dad or your Coach) mostly have skills equal or lower than yours. If you’re going up against them, this is normally a time you can be pretty chill, unless it like, means a lot. If you’re in a social situation with a demon or a monster, it rolls like the Fighting scenes, except you use your Sosh skill. Dead-walkers can’t be reasoned with – they’re raw and stupid, just filled with rage.
You’re ready to start the game. The next part of this is for the Principal’s eyes only – like, seriously, dudes, you don’t want to be totally uncool.
Musings on Horror Games
I’m playing Alien: Isolation on PC right now. I’m not very far in, but I’ve found some stuff I wanted to talk about (which I recorded the audio of while playing but the file corrupted or something).
I want to make a horror tabletop RPG at some point. This is something I have been interested in for a while but have not had the capacity to do as I don’t have a ton of experience with horror games. I’ve played some tabletop horror RPGs – Don’t Rest Your Head, Black Stars Rise, and a fantastic game by +Nick Wedig that should be published if it isn’t already (I’m a little behind on Nick’s work.) (ETA: I’ve also played Dread, very late at night at a party, and it was pretty great). These games are good, but they require two things: good, experienced players, and a great GM. The systems do some of the work, but I feel like they wouldn’t work as well without the support of the players and GM. I want to make a game approachable to new players, which is challenging for me in the first place, but I also want something compelling.
There are a few things I want to avoid that I have found to be way to common in various horror media (games, television, movies, etc.): boredom and sexually predatory themes. The former is just wasting time, but the latter actually kind of pisses me off. I feel like I should be able to avoid that kind of trigger in horror instead of being constantly confronted with it, so I’ve tasked myself with aiming for the kind of horror – maybe dread? – that avoids that specific trope.
Things I want to include: suspense, vivid descriptions, and the ability to run and play the game without tons of tabletop experience. Much harder than it sounds.
Part of me wants to interrogate the people I know who are good about horror, but at the same time, I feel like I need to focus on what makes me scared in order to satisfy what I want.
One of the feelings I want to incorporate is that feeling of “I know what’s going to happen, I can’t stop it, and it’s terrible,” that dread. One of the movies I was unable to finish because of how distressing and dreadful was Buckets of Blood (1959). Part of this is because I for serious cannot handle harming animals in film (we shut it off before the first icky part, admittedly), but part of it is that kind of dread just shakes me up. I would love to capture that in a game, but how do you do that? I feel like there needs to be a script, so I’m wondering how you include three things:
- The illusion of free will
- Freedom of description
- Compelling story
I mean, part of it is that I’m just not a super experienced writer or designer. Part of it is I need to consume more horror media, but I don’t want to consume too much and lose my focus, you know? I think video games are a really good place to focus because I am learning a lot about games and interaction from them (I’ll eventually write another post about some of the games I’m playing now).
Avoiding boredom is suuuuper hard. This is my biggest problem with horror movies and games. If the suspense isn’t done right, or things are too repetitive, I totally lose focus and interest. Sometimes this is useful because there can be jump scares, but jump scares are not only hard in RPGs but can be kind of silly. I don’t want players to be uninvolved enough that they want to start checking their phones or having side convos.
That’s where I am right now. I’d appreciate your thoughts!
Brie Creates Religion
Hi all!
I wanted to talk a little bit about some work I did in the past on a game setting called A Deadly Affair. It was a game run by my husband +John Sheldon, originally in a modified D&D 3.5 system, then later a modified Pathfinder system. One of the biggest elements of the game was that players were able to build parts of the setting – species, religions, cultures, historical events. It was really cool! I got to be really involved in setting creation and John allowed me to build one of the religions for the game.
The religion was called the Nord. You can read some about it on the Deadly Affair wiki page on Obsidian Portal. In the religion, there are five gods. “Norric the cruel god of ice and cold, Eitne the chaotic god of the winds and herald of change, Shima the benevolent lord of the earth representing growth and life, Raer the demanding deity of fire and warmth, and the Unnamed – a treacherous god of magic, spirits, and deceit.”
I spent a long time while I was growing up reading myths and legends about Norse and Greek polytheistic religions. I was a huge fan of them. This is part of why I wanted to create a religion specifically for A Deadly Affair.
One of the first things I did was determine whether I wanted to do a polytheistic religion, or stick with a single god, or something different. I was most familiar with the myths of polytheistic religions, so I picked that. I then wanted to pull from something recognizable to begin the definitions of the gods, and I picked a compass. Norric was the North, Raer the South, Shima the West, the Unnamed the East, and Eitne as the center, ever changing.
Once I had that down, I spent a lot of time on my own just thinking about it. I wish I’d taken the time to write down everything I thought of. Hindsight, you know? If I had written it down, though, there would have been a lot about the behaviors of the gods, the rituals of the priests, and the habits of the followers. There would have been descriptions of the avatars of the gods, and of the symbols carried by the followers.
I guess, I regret not writing them down. And I’m hoping to play the game again, so maybe I can get my stuff together and write down some new information to put in the Wiki, or on here. I hope that people enjoy whatever I choose to share when the time comes.
<3
Five or So Questions with Avonelle Wing on Convention Organizing
Tell me a little about what you do as a convention coordinator. What’s exciting about it?
What do I do? that’s a very complicated question, because I wear many hats, and the list of things I do could read like a resume.
From the practical and very concrete perspective, my job is to make sure the resources are available for the convention staff to provide the most satisfying convention experience possible to the broadest segment of our population. Among the things I do are:
- Remembering to buy the right envelopes (peel and stick, #10), card stock, poster board, tape, packing tape, duct tape, and knowing which brand and why.
- Keeping track of ridiculous things, like remotes, wires, plugs, components – making sure everything gets packed to and from every con, and I know where each important piece is. all the time.
- Refreshing our extension cord supply.
- Counting bed spots accurately so senior staff and guests all have a place to sleep.
- Soliciting and tracking prize support and library copies of games.
- Keeping track of special guests and making sure they have satisfying experiences at the con.
- Maintaining a social media presence so the conventions are people, not faceless corporate entities to attendees.
My brain holds a million vital little details that mean we don’t ahve to reinvent the wheel. and we never have to deal with the experience of buying the wrong duct tape again. (the whole Big Board system fell off the walls at DEXCON. Within hours of putting it up. It’s my job to remember that horror and to make sure we avoid it in the future. 1,000 events on the ballroom floor. oi.)
I talk to game masters. I help piece the schedule together (my husband does the lion’s share of the scheduling and I still get a little swoony when I look at the sheer magnitude of the task he takes on every convention.). I coordinate staff.
On a more ephemeral level, I get to be part of the magic of our community. I am the welcome wagon – I notice when somebody is looking a little lost and I loop them into something exciting. I forge connections, solve problems. When somebody is in the middle of a devastating breakup and needs to hide, they end up in my room, because that’s a safe place to hide and I always feed you after I scrape your sobbing self up off a hallway floor. Our conventions are described by lots of people in our community as “giant family reunions” and I get to make that magic happen. It’s akin to being the eccentric aunt who rents the pavilion, hires the magicians and buys 100lbs of charcoal. The difference is that our community has chosen to be here. and I love them for that.
I get to facilitate our evolution. When somebody comes to me and says “freeform. it’s a thing. we need more of it” I get to say “ok! fill out the form and let’s do it!”
When somebody says “gender. It matters in gaming and we need to talk about it.” I get to say “OK! space, exposure, attention. let’s go.”
18 months later, somebody said the same thing about race. “Great. Let’s talk. Let’s talk long and loud and let’s get angry and let’s do positive things to change our world. Let’s go!”
We hear “old school roleplayers feel lost. we want a home too!” and we launch a convention within a convention to serve them too.
Our job is to be responsive and supportive and encouraging. and I think we do a decent job of it. It’s exciting to me to hear somebody say “I want to…” and to be able to say “and I can help make that happen. I’m excited! let’s go!”
I am often humbled, watching our community support each other. and I get to know that they’ve come together because I’ve given them the venue and the opportunity and the reason to do so.
What is the biggest challenge to hosting a con?
The biggest challenges of any convention lie in the unknowns – will the air conditioning be able to keep up? how many bottles of soda will we blow through this year? The system and process stuff? We’ve got that down, and it’s entirely on us. Once you set the machine in motion, you become dependent on other people to see things through, and on the universe to cooperate.
I drove all the convention badges, the printer and all the other registration materials to a convention once through a storm system that spawned tornadoes. As I drove down the highway, I watched trees falling behind me – it felt cinematic and not as terrifying as it should have been. Those things, you can’t plan for. You just have to keep your head screwed on straight and keep moving.
What do you think is the most valuable advice you could give someone starting their own event?
Talk to other local events. Make sure you’re not crashing their party. Ask them about venues – sometimes there’s a reason an event moved suddenly. Schedule so you’re not stepping on anybody’s toes. Ask for help – Double Exposure is always happy to help a small even negotiate for space and sometimes we even help staff for your first couple of years.
Figure out a reasonable budget and double it.
Carry the best insurance you can possibly afford. Wait. what? insurance? Yes, insurance. Trust me, it’s worth it.
Don’t run by committee. Take personal responsibility for things that go wrong and be generous in sharing the credit for things that go right.
What are your goals with Maelstrom and DEXCON, which are two wildly different cons?
Maelstrom is an experiment, and I’m still sorting out my goals. I need to go back to my brain trust and discuss what worked and what didn’t, and to set community-guided goals.
DEXCON’s goal is, always, to provide the most action-packed, diverse, intense, intimate five days of gaming anywhere. We’ve got the excitement of one of the mega-cons with the comfort and friendliness of a local con.
What’s big for the next year for Double Exposure?
Big… I’m not sure we are ready for much bigger than 2014! We’re up to four conventions a year of our own, plus we’re doing the First Exposure Playtest Hall at Gen Con.
I’m just getting my feet under me when it comes to talking about the importance of social justice – of advocacy and representation. That has become a bigger part of Double Exposure’s program over the last several years, as I’ve realized that we were above the curve, but had more we could be doing. the rest of 2014 and likely most of 2015 is going to be continuing to present the best possible product to our community while refining and advancing our approach to outreach, education and representation. I have so much to learn, and so many brilliant people to learn it from.
I have a still-flickering hope that we will be able to do a larp-oriented project in 2015, but that won’t be decided until we’ve gotten home from Gen Con, at the soonest.
Why do you run these conventions?
Riding home from Gen Con last year, I found myself pondering the fact that these conventions – even with their stress, financial exposure, physical toll, worry and effort – are as close to worship as I come. We create a thing that is ephemeral. It’s temporary, like a play, and when we’re done, we strike the set and we go home. But while they exist, we create something that is as close to a Divine act as possible.
Conventions connect people in a very tangible way. We step outside of our daily lives and enter a space outside of time. We storytell – one of the most human and most sacred of acts. We trade pieces of ourselves. We laugh. we cry. We see friends we only see a couple of times a year, and we pick back up right where we left off. There’s an emotional resonance to conventions that is unlike anything else I’ve experienced.
Also, it’s safe place to be a nerd – to love My Little Ponies. to know the dialogue to every Star Trek movie. to remember every model number of every Terminator to show up on screen, ever. There’s very little fear of mockery or disdain. As somebody who was vexed for being a reader, for being a nerd, for having a grown-up vocabulary, sometimes it moves me to tears to watch folks (often younger folks) come in – a little awkward, a little wound up, a little too much – and to see them unwind, slow down, find their own unique pace. We create a space where we protect each others’ weirdnesses, and share them. It gives folks who find themselves on the fringe at school, at work, in their daily life, a chance to be in the middle of the puppy pile – to be respected, to acknowledged and seen and known.
It’s a calling, and I’ve known that since I first walked into a Double Exposure convention in 1997. I welcome each new face like a companion on this path to carve out a spot of acceptance, creation and joy every few months.
Five or So Questions with Steve Radabaugh on Dungeon Marauders
Tell me a little about Dungeon Marauders. What’s exciting about it?
Dungeon Marauders is a dungeon delving digital card game for iPhone. A deck of cards represents your hero, and you go through short dungeons that are represented by five cards. You also get to create your own dungeon that people go through.
What I find exciting about Dungeon Marauders is that it’s trying to focus on people challenging each other face to face. The only way to go directly to another person’s dungeon is to scan the QR code from their phone. I’ve also taken that a step further to have special dungeons that companies can post at their booth at conventions as a Booth Beast.
What did you do to test Dungeon Marauders?
I started out by printing up some physical cards on my home printer and bringing the concept with me to Metatopia. I did a fair amount of ninja-playtesting there (There weren’t any official events, just a handful of games with various people at the bar). After Metatopia, I knew that I had a solid concept. During development, I had a group of 25 or so testers that I frequently sent builds out to and solicited feedback from.
What was your inspiration for Dungeon Marauders?
It started out with the concept of a game that could be played at conventions. I wanted to make Booth Beasts that were QR codes that companies could put at their booth for an exclusive something. I was working with some other projects with QR codes, and had them on the brain. So I had the meta game kind of planned out before I had any actual game mechanics thought up. As far as the card game part of it, I’m not sure that I had a direct inspiration.
What suggestions would you have for people new to the app design industry?
Create the things that you want to have for yourself, don’t create things just because you think that they’ll make you rich. Also, keep your day job until you are making enough money to support yourself.
What’s up next for you?
I’m actually really excited about the game that I did for GameChef, so I’m probably going to start doing more playtesting and development on that. I’m also going to start figuring out Dungeon Marauders as a physical card game. I’m hoping to playtests of both of those things over the summer and see where that takes me. I have some contract work lined up both in the RPG realm and in the app realm. Maybe when things quiet down I’ll start working on that SHMUP game I’ve been wanting to make for years.
Okult by Wilhelm Person and Asking Good Questions
Recently on G+ I put out a post saying how I wish I could just get copies of the games I interview people about. A few people sent me stuff, which was super cool! One of the things that got into my grabby hands was Wilhelm Person’s Okult.
I’ve been watching Okult from afar for a while. I saw when it came out and was vaguely interested, and got a little more interested when I read a little about it. However, I’m both cheap and busy, so I hadn’t put it on my urgent list yet. Getting it and reading it was a genuine pleasure. I loved the photography in the book and was excited to take a look at the game itself.
Okult is a horror game and photo book. First off, the game is mega simple. It is a storytelling game of a sort, and has a scale of the intensity of the horror in the game. There are no complicated mechanics. It’s also GMless, which I dig.
What I like about it is that one, when you get to a point in a scene where you ask a question, someone else gets to answer it, and two, it’s all about asking good questions. Questions about your Hometown, questions about your past, questions about what you can do in the game, questions about the secret of the town. So many questions!
Epidiah Ravachol said (In a post supporting me, no less!):
As a whole, game designers are only just starting to wake up to the fact that the single most effective mechanic is a question. That’s going to change soon and over the next few years you’re going to see a lot of hot new games built entirely around the questions players can ask and how they can be answered. When this happens, we’re all going to appreciate just what it takes to craft a well-asked question.
I think that Okult has a decent handle on this.
When I think of asking questions, which I do, quite a lot of the time (in case you hadn’t noticed), I think of how I want the responder to feel, how I want them to think, where I want their train of thought to go. I never like closed questions, so I always look for a why, or a what, and press for it.
I want to write a game about asking questions, but I think I’m just so wrapped up in the questions that I can’t find my way to answers. I like that Okult doesn’t give you the answers – it lets you explore them on your own. And it does so visually! It uses a map, a big map, and you also record facts on the map, answering the questions.
What’s so great about questions? To me, I love questions. Questions often demand answers, and even when they don’t, they invite thought. They lead to exploration. They guide us through the unknown by giving us a point to start and a reason to answer – the good ones, anyway. Plus, questions lead to interaction. Yes, you can ask yourself questions and answer them alone, but the most enjoyable way to explore questions is to share it with other people. To ask, and receive responses, and then ask more, continuing the discourse.
Vincent Baker says that games are a conversation.
What’s a conversation without questions?
Five or So Questions with Wade Dyer on Fragged Empire
Tell me a little about Fragged Empire. What excites you about it?
There is a lot about my project that excites me. But most of all, is the dream of having my book completed & being enjoyed by others. I have a real ‘artisan’ approach to my work, pouring all of my skill, time & passion into this project. But I long for it to be completed, for people to not only hold it & read it, but for it to be used. I want it to be sitting at peoples gaming tables, in their bookshelves & being discussed on obscure RPG forums.
Before we talk about the game – your website and art are bangin’! Tell me a little about the artist selection, art direction, and overall feel you were going for with the art.
Ha ha, love the word ‘bangin’!
I’m a freelance graphic designer (who also dabbles in illustration) by trade, so I made the website myself & have a lot of experience working with other creatives.
I’m very passionate about working with emerging artists, you will intentionally see no big names in my books credits. I must have went through almost 200 hundred (no joke) different artists galleries. I then sent emails or DeviantArt notes to those who met my criteria. While I have artwork from almost a dozen different artists in my book, most of it will be done by 4 particular artists who demonstrated a passion for not only my project, but for their own trade. Clonerh Kimura, Fyodor Ananiev, Alexandrescu Paul & Niam. These guys & gal have been fantastic to work with, so full of passion & dedication, they really get what I’m trying to do.
I really want the art in my book to show 2 things. Firstly, it needs to convey the tone of the setting; beautiful, modern, detailed, subtle depth, but vibrant & fun. That mix of energy & grit. Secondly, it needs to convey the passionate craftsmanship that has gone into this book. Visual art is so easy & fast to consume, reading stories & non digital game mechanics can take a lot longer to grasp. Its my hope that people will look at the art & the website, & see that I & my team have really poured our passion & skill into this project, in every way.
On to the game! Tell me a little about the different character types in Fragged Empire. What makes them unique?
Characters in this setting are not defined by a class, they are a person. Able to draw their identity from anything they choose. Which could be as straight forward as their profession or weapon, or it could be through their relationships with other characters. Each choice they make, is also a choice to not be other things.
Each character will also carry a certain amount of baggage, primarily from their race & culture. Prejudice, regret & hope run deep through every race, but in dramatically different ways.
What kind of mechanics did you use to emphasize the game’s aesthetic?
This is quite a big question, so I will focus on just two examples.
Cultural tension; when you choose a race, you automatically gain prejudice from at least one other playable race. By default, that race will be suspicious of you, possibly even violent towards you. Who you are, not just how good you roll, will often define how other characters respond to you. You will also have a number of game options (Traits) that will be opened to you, while others will be closed to you, simply because of your race & cultural upbringing. It is not possible for one person to completely overcome their racial baggage.
Post-apocalyptic; a lack of readily available civilized infrastructure & self reliance are two major themes of the setting. This is highlighted through a Spare Time Points system, where each character only has a certain amount of spare time to spend on their personal hobbies & side interests. Including: Research, Trading, Modifying their Weapon or exercising. How your character spends their spare time is important, as time is a valuable resource. Are you a practical or theoretical engineer? Do you spend all your time modifying, maintaining & upgrading equipment, or do you spend your time researching ancient mechanical artifacts & exploring theoretical ideas?
What players do you think would most enjoy Fragged Empire?
If you like long, sandbox games with miniatures, then this game system is ideal for you.
If you like culture & art (both visual & narrative), then you will enjoy this setting.
If you like science fiction, you will love this book.
If you like culture & art (both visual & narrative), then you will enjoy this setting.
If you like science fiction, you will love this book.
Five or So Questions with Andrew Medieros on Urban Shadows
Tell me a little about Urban Shadows. What excites you about it?
Urban Shadows is an urban fantasy roleplaying game in the vein of The Dresden Files novels and the television series’ Angel and Supernatural. Players take on the roles of serious power players in their city’s political structure and play classic archetypes like vampires, ghosts, half-demons and much more. It’s powered by the Apocalypse World engine which allows us to cram in as much drama, action and tension as we can with minimal rules that still pack a punch.
The two most exciting things about Urban Shadows are our new Corruption mechanic and our choice to address and challenge race and gender in an urban setting.
Corruption is gained when your protagonists crosses a line they shouldn’t (such as taking a life) and rewards you for these choices with new and very potent powers. But this new power comes at a cost, keep it up and you’ll find yourself becoming more and more a slave to your inner darkness.
When you create a character in Urban Shadows you choose your Look: how the city sees you. Ambiguous, female, male or transgressing? Asian, black, caucasian, hispanic, mixed, or other? These choices are purely descriptive and inform the kind of stories you wish to tell in the game.
Tell me more about the Corruption mechanic. Is it just a toggle on-off to monstrousness?
Corruption is the dark mirror to our experience system, except instead of gaining standard advances, you gain access to some really powerful and potent Moves. You mark a point of corruption whenever your character takes a life, breaks a rule set by their archetype, or when they MC offers it to them and you accept: Gain corruption five times and you get a new Corruption Move.
These moves give your character access to some game breaking abilities, but there’s a couple catches: Firstly, each of them generate further corruption when used and secondly, you can only select a maximum of four of them. If you reach the point where you need to select a fifth, you lose your character to the MC, who can choose bring them back into the story as a Threat (which is usually really bad news for the city).
You can buy off corruption moves through advances but that’s an expensive path, it’s far easier to just avoid it altogether. However, temptation calls on us all, and it’s a hard thing to resist.
Tell me a little about Debts. How do they work?
Debts are how we track favours in Urban Shadows. When you do something worthy of note for someone, or vice versa, a Debt is given (unless of course that action was to pay off a previous debt). They let you influence both player characters and non-player characters with no risk, just the cost of the Debt. Non-player characters can just as easily gain Debts on player characters, which lets the MC use those Debts to make hard moves against them. Owing favours to powerful people is a dangerous prospect.
What made you decide to put race front and center?
This was something we feel really passionate about: we wanted stories told within cities to be representative of the cultures and races in that city, so we made it part of character creation. By asking players to choose their character’s race, we ended up seeing casts of really diverse protagonists and that was exactly what we wanted. It’s been great to see how it’s changed the game and it’s now become a central theme for our project. It’s important to note that your choice of race has no mechanical implications for your character but it is an important part of who they are.
This was something we feel really passionate about: we wanted stories told within cities to be representative of the cultures and races in that city, so we made it part of character creation. By asking players to choose their character’s race, we ended up seeing casts of really diverse protagonists and that was exactly what we wanted. It’s been great to see how it’s changed the game and it’s now become a central theme for our project. It’s important to note that your choice of race has no mechanical implications for your character but it is an important part of who they are.
Tell me how factions work. What do they influence in the game?
Factions are how we divide the city’s populace into not-so-neat categories. They are arenas of conflict that represent rough communities of mortal and supernatural creatures: The Factions are Mortality, Power, Night and Wild. Mortality are the vanilla mortals, Power are humans with supernatural gifts, Night are people who have been turned into monsters, and Wild are beings who originate from outside our world.
Protagonists have a stat that correlates to each of the four factions: the higher the stat, the better understanding they have of that world and their members. For example, the Night faction includes vampires, werewolves, and ghosts. Having a low Night score means you don’t really understand how these people operate and don’t know many of them personally. A higher score in Night means you have a solid grasp of how they work and you know many of them fairly well. So it’s one part understanding and one part relationship.
Factions power a lot of the moves in the game: when you seek info from your contacts, look for resources to help you get things done, or when messing around in other players’ business in the hopes of influencing their dice rolls, you roll Faction to see how that plays out. The scores change through play, they’re not static by any means.
What’s up next for you after Urban Shadows?
I think maybe I’ll go outside and take a long walk. Then I have plans for a couple of other games, one of which is also powered by the apocalypse. I can’t say too much here but it includes fighter pilots and drama! Lots and lots of drama!
Five or So Questions with Moyra Turkington on Fastaval
Tell me a little about Fastaval. What’s got you excited about it?
Fastival is a roleplay and boardgame festival that takes place yearly on the Easter weekend in Denmark (since 1987). New scenarios and board game designs are premiered there, and it is also a friendly competition. This year there were about 700 participants in attendance, playing 34 scenarios and 13 board games that were making their debut.
It was very exciting to have our own game on the program, and to travel there to see it live. They have a phenomenal culture of service and feedback happening in the Fastaval community – I’ve never seen anything like it. Every single person who lays eyes on a game – from the players to the GMs to the Jury who select the nominations for the Otto (Fastaval’s golden penguin equivalent of the Oscar) take the time to provide plentiful, constructive and really remarkably articulated feedback to the designers. They have whole subcultures of support staff that work tirelessly to make the venue happen: maintenance crews, Food and logistics volunteers. informational squads, and a fleet of translators for us international folks.
And the games were phenomenal!
What did you find most valuable about Fastaval’s feedback process?
So many things! Because it is a place where giving feedback is an integrated part of the process, a lot of the feedback was extremely articulate and thoughtful. Because there was so much of it at once we could easily identify trends that would indicate a systemic issue vs. a place where one individual play style didn’t work with the game. Most importantly because there were so many runs happening in so short of a time, it really allow you to measure the breadth of the game and understand how many different stories it could tell, and how reliably. It’s definitely a design process that gets me excited and that I would like to explore again.
What game did you take to Fastaval? Tell me all about it!
Run Them Again is a scenario for five players and a GM. It’s a science fiction space drama about the indifference of the systems we live under, and the cold equations of life within their grasp. Essentially, it is a labour drama; It came out of a conversation Brand and I had when driving through rural Newfoundland, a place that was devastated in economic collapse once in the 70’s and again in the 90’s when the Atlantic northwest cod fisheries bottomed out.
We talked about fishers and farmers and miners and labourers. We talked about my dad working high steel and his dad having to pick up work as a janitor for a while. We discovered we both had mining in our blood: one of his great granduncles died in a cave in. My grandfather went into coma after three tons of rock ruptured his spleen and stayed there for three days till he was dug out. My grandfather’s cave-in resulted in safety reviews, Brand’s granduncle’s death resulted in union strikes and a resulting massacre. We talked about how random that felt. And we made this game.
The characters are long haul space miners, working much like deep sea crab fishers do… going on long dangerous runs to mine valuable minerals from asteroids on ships that have seen too many runs for wages that are shit but the best they can hope for. They wake from cryosleep to find something has gone wrong with the ship, and they have four hours to help right the course and save their lives as the universe gives not one fuck about them.
I was very nervous about designing a new style of game (Danish freeform) for an audience that I had never met before. It was also the first fully co-operatively designed game together. I was worried with all those unknowns that the Fastafolk might look at us like crazy North Americans (that we are), but the game was a hit! The players really enjoyed it, we scored two nominations (Best Storytelling and Jury’s Selection), and took home an Otto (Fastaval’s answer to the Oscar)!
I’m still blown away.
What did you find useful about the logistics at Fastaval?
It was a well run machine – there was always an answer in support of a game or event… and it seemed that no one minded pitching in on the work. Some came just to be part of the work! A side note on our logistics is that the Østerskov Efterskole made itself available for people to stay and we got to take a tour. This is a high school who’sentire curriculum is based on roleplaying! They play everything from steampunk to historical re-enactment to crime dramas and learn all of their math, natural sciences, languages, ethics, history… all of it through larps. They have a full medieval town on the school grounds! It was phenomenal. I can’t imagine what life would be like now had I been able to attend a school like that.
It was a well run machine – there was always an answer in support of a game or event… and it seemed that no one minded pitching in on the work. Some came just to be part of the work! A side note on our logistics is that the Østerskov Efterskole made itself available for people to stay and we got to take a tour. This is a high school who’sentire curriculum is based on roleplaying! They play everything from steampunk to historical re-enactment to crime dramas and learn all of their math, natural sciences, languages, ethics, history… all of it through larps. They have a full medieval town on the school grounds! It was phenomenal. I can’t imagine what life would be like now had I been able to attend a school like that.
Are you planning to go back? What are you looking forward to doing next time you’re there?
Yes! I hope so. It was amazing fun and full of creative energy and I met so many amazing people doing so many amazing things. I’d look forward to seeing them again, and having the chance to be part of that community for another glimpse in time. I didn’t feel like I had enough time to talk to anyone!
Yes! I hope so. It was amazing fun and full of creative energy and I met so many amazing people doing so many amazing things. I’d look forward to seeing them again, and having the chance to be part of that community for another glimpse in time. I didn’t feel like I had enough time to talk to anyone!