Hi all! This is the week three set of my #33in28 reviews! The final post will go up on Sunday of next week. This week I’m covering a lot of self-care and meta type games like Ego and soulQUEST, but don’t worry, there’s still time to get Lost in the Deep. Enjoy!
Hi all! This is the week three set of my #33in28 reviews! The final post will go up on Sunday of next week. This week I’m covering a lot of self-care and meta type games like Ego and soulQUEST, but don’t worry, there’s still time to get Lost in the Deep. Enjoy!
This is the second week’s installment of #33in28, my birthday celebration reviewing 33 solo games in 28 days! Today I’m featuring Bear, Morning Phase, Operation Cat Chat, and more! Check out these awesome games through my reviews and make sure to click through on their itchio links to find out more and buy your favorites! I want to point out with this post that every single one of these games could be priced far more and still be more than worth it, so *please consider tipping if you buy!*
Hi all! This is the second week’s installment of #33in28, my birthday celebration reviewing 33 solo games in 28 days! Today I’m featuring Bear, Morning Phase, Operation Cat Chat, and more! Check out these awesome games through my reviews and make sure to click through on their itchio links to find out more and buy your favorites! I want to point out with this post that every single one of these games could be priced far more and still be more than worth it, so *please consider tipping if you buy!*
Continue reading “#33in28 Week 2 Reviews”Thousand Year Old Vampire is a multi-award winning game by Tim Hutchings currently available on itchio and in print at DriveThruRPG. It uses journaling and dice mechanics to guide the player through a solo roleplaying game about the subject – a Thousand Year Old Vampire (TYOV). The game has been widely popular, but I have a lot of thoughts to share!
By Tim Hutchings
Genre Tags: solo, lonely, dice, journaling, roleplaying game
Replayable? Yes!
Actual Play Available? Examples included
Length: Short or Long, Journaling (At your own pace)
Thousand Year Old Vampire is a multi-award winning game by Tim Hutchings currently available on itchio and in print at DriveThruRPG. It uses journaling and dice mechanics to guide the player through a solo roleplaying game about the subject – a Thousand Year Old Vampire (TYOV). The game has been widely popular, but I have a lot of thoughts to share!
As someone who initially interviewed Tim about the game, I’ve been fascinated with it from the start. I love games about characters who have superpowers like immortality or who are living over centuries, and media like that in general. This game explores that full tilt, including some really challenging topics.
The text includes warnings that you will encounter:
“themes of death, selfishness, and predation. Your character may be injured, victimized, trapped, or killed. Your character will murder and victimize people of all sorts, possibly including children, animals, loved ones, marginalized people, or themselves. You might find yourself exploring themes of imperialism, colonialism, or oppression. Characters might engage in self-harm or drug abuse. Illness, debilitation, and body horror may come into play. Your character may have their memories altered, they will certainly forget important things.
Some of this will emerge from the Prompts, some will emerge from the choices you make as a player.
This is a personal, challenging game for mature adults. Please play hard, but stay aware of yourself and your feelings. Some good thoughts about safety in solo games can be found in Appendix Three.”
– Thousand Year Old Vampire
I love Thousand Year Old Vampire. Right now, I can’t play it.
The book is one of the most beautiful artifacts I’ve ever owned. The hardcover has gold riddling the marbled cover, and the interior is packed with images and a stunning, original layout that draws attention to the nature of this book as a well-used immortal’s journal, complete with the impression of things tucked into pages, taped into place, or scribbled into the margins. I love every time I open it, finding new gorgeous, character-building bits and pieces I missed the first four or five times I looked through. It’s sturdy, and while you can write in the book as you play, it may take some bravery to embellish the pages with your own scribbles of isolation and loneliness.
The mechanics are simple, using a d10 and d6 to select and narrow prompts and affect resolution, and the narrative mechanics of Memories and Experiences – the former the bucket for the latter, where multiple short written Experiences make up an arc of a Memory, of which you only have five total at a time. When you gain new Experiences, you lose Memories if you don’t have a space for them.
This mechanic makes so much sense to me when you consider the sheer number of prompts included to put a character through years of triumph and trauma, love and regret, camaraderie and loneliness. Imagine the number of experiences – real moments of eternal living – that a vampire would have in their endless life, how they might imagine ways of ending waking loneliness and sleeping suffering without their loved ones, regretting their deeds, wishing they could do greater ones! It is something that could be played equally passionately and dispassionately, engaging in the powerful prompts with the keen eye of a monster who only has more lives to take or instead with the weary heart of someone who has lived too long and only has longer to live. The possibilities! They are as endless as the days your vampire will sleep through and as engaging as the nights they hunt through.
I want to play this game so badly! It’s so well-written and executed, and the mechanics make so much sense for this immortal being who lives through hundreds of years of life and loss. But, as someone who struggles with memory loss, and during this time of isolation that has been very hard on me, I elected not to play it – right now. Thousand Year Old Vampire will remain on my to-play list until I get the courage to delve into its stunning pages and pen my own story of immortality, but if you want to dive in right now, don’t miss out!
Thousand Year Old Vampire is a lonely journaling vampire game by Tim Hutchings currently available on itchio and in print at DriveThruRPG. It is one of my favorite games I’m reviewing this month and I hope you’ll check it out soon!
This week I have a bundle of reviews for you, my readers! As part of #33in28 for my 33rd birthday I’m reviewing 33 solo games in February, which has 28 days. Each week I’ll post a single review on Monday, then a collection of six reviews on the following Sunday. The remaining three reviews will be peppered in on the big review days or as solo posts! As these are Let’s check out what today has to offer…
This week I have a bundle of reviews for you, my readers! As part of #33in28 for my 33rd birthday I’m reviewing 33 solo games in February, which has 28 days. Each week I’ll post a single review on Monday, then a collection of six reviews on the following Sunday. The remaining three reviews will be peppered in on the big review days or as solo posts! As these are Let’s check out what today has to offer…
*Edited 2/9/2021 to correct a name and fix some formatting.
Hi all! Today I have an interview with Michael Dunn-O’Connor about Rebel Crown, which is currently on Kickstarter! Check out the responses to my questions below!
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Tell me a little about Rebel Crown. What excites you about it?
Rebel Crown is character-driven rpg with a player-facing campaign. Each character playbook focuses on a unique relationship with the claimant and gives that character a driving motivation to remain on this quest. The claimant is its own unique playbook, which thrives on sharing the spotlight with their allies and acting on their council. The campaign is driven by player choices: which factions to ally with and which holdings to pursue. As you group, you play to find out whether the claimant can take their throne and what sacrifices must be made along the way.
What are the various playbooks like, in a few examples of their abilities and how they interact with the game, and what power do they have in the narrative?
A lot of our design process started in the playbooks. I tend to get the most out of campaigns where the characters are deeply connected to one another and have a shared commitment to a goal or objective. Since the premise of a succession crisis lends itself to focusing on the relationship between a Claimant and their allies, that created an opening for us to create purposefully asymmetrical playbooks. Most of that asymmetry has to do with the Claimant playbook. There must be a Claimant at the table, and the other playbooks are sworn allies of the Claimant. This playbook is at the heart of the campaign, but we didn’t want to make a game that follows the story of one player character at the exclusion of the others. So we made the Claimant’s player explicitly responsible for spotlight sharing and reinforced this responsibility through their XP triggers:
The result has been that the Claimant is constantly pulling other characters into the scene to ask their advice, to request a sacrifice, to reward their loyalty. The other playbooks have XP triggers that reward them for taking initiative, to not wait until the Claimant asks for their advice or intercession. Here’s the Devoted:
The flow from these rewards has been really satisfying, and character motivation and relationship is constantly at the center of play.
The playbook special abilities reinforce character dynamics without being too restrictive (especially since special abilities may be chosen from other playbooks).
A sample of the Devoted’s special abilities suggests different approaches to protecting the Claimant (guarding them in battle, defending their name in a public forum, or engaging in duels on their behalf). The Devoted is defined by their love of the claimant, but there are many ways a player might take action on that motivation.
To dig in deeper, in the case of the claimant in play, how does the game guide the player toward a just and moral leadership that would make their claim to power morally superior to the claims of the usurpers?
The moral righteousness of the Claimant’s quest is in many ways the core fruitful void of this system: it’s a driving question that the game can’t answer for you without closing off some of the explorations that make RPGs really compelling. However, we try to direct play toward this question in thoughtful ways.
One way is the way that each sortie generates Unrest for the retinue, and more destructive sorties produce significantly more Unrest. The sortie objectives push the retinue to gain new objectives and ingratiate themselves with powerful factions, but the consequences of this expansion often impact the common people of your holdings the most. Here are the Entanglements you might roll at the highest level of Unrest:
Unrest provides a slow creep of consequences for the people your Claimant has sworn to protect and provide for. How they address these consequences is an unavoidable topic of play.
The playbook that most explicitly focuses on the question of just rule and moral leadership is the Idealist, who has allied with the Claimant because they believe it is a path to the greater good. The Idealist’s XP triggers put pressure on the Claimant to do the right thing even when it’s not expedient and encourage the Idealist to keep that question of moral leadership right at the forefront of play.
I note that you talk about expressing your heritage, background, or trauma. How are players supported within the game in regards to traumatic or triggering content, and also, speaking of heritages, are you involving sensitivity readers in the project?
Trauma is a term from Blades in the Dark that appears in many Forged in the Dark games. We replaced that mechanic with ‘Scars’. When a character’s Stress exceeds their limitations, they must choose whether to take one final action before collapsing or to pull themselves together and carry on. We both wanted to avoid the term Trauma given its specific meaning in the context of psychology, and we wanted to rework the mechanic to provide more player choice in the moment.
We’re working on integrating safety tools into the rules text. I’ve been influenced in this regard by playing with some folks through The Gauntlet’s community. We want to provide clear prompts on CATS (content, aim, subject matter, tone) that people could leverage when introducing the game to a group. We’ll also encourage the use of Lines & Veils and the X cards. When we run are games at Games on Demand, these are the tools we’ve used and we want to provide the same resources to folks running it on their own.
The design team is just Eric and me; we haven’t brought in outside readers, though our playtesters have given a lot of valuable feedback on how we can directly address the more problematic aspects of any fiction set in a feudal setting.
What does an average session look like, including the sorties you mention (a term some of my readers may be unfamiliar with)?
A typical session runs through three phases:Recon: In which the retinue (the Claimant and the allies) gather information about other factions and identify an objective.
The Sortie: The main ‘mission’ of the session. This could be an attack on an enemy faction, a diplomatic meeting, or an attempt to drive off wraiths from a vulnerable holding. The goal of a Sortie is typically to gain a new Holding (some property or asset) for the Claimant’s Domain, to strengthen relations with another faction, or to weaken an enemy faction in some way. The retinue may also seek to vassalize another faction, bringing them under the Claimant’s rule without seizing their Holdings.
Downtime: In which the retinue recovers from injury and stress, engages in long terms projects, and trains their skills. Downtime abstracts weeks of time as the player character pursue their own interests, discuss their long-term priorities, and seek solace together from the difficult campaign.
The Domain sheet includes a calendar for players to track their Sorties, Seasons change every two Downtimes, providing a richer sense of time scale and place.
At the end of the session, players asses how they earned XP based on their playbook, and whether their character’s Beliefs and Drive changed based on the events of the session.
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Thanks so much to Michael for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Rebel Crown on Kickstarter today!
I have a quick few questions with Eli Seitz on The Last Place on Earth, a Zine Quest 2 project on Kickstarter! Check out the responses below.
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What is The Last Place on Earth, both as a product and as your vision?
The Last Place on Earth is a tabletop role playing game inspired by the Heroic Age of Exploration and by Robert F Scott’s fatal 1912 expedition to the South Pole. It’s a game about the hardships of Antarctic exploration and the arrogance of men who believe that they can or must overcome nature. It’s designed as a one or two shot experience with black and white zine of rules accompanied by archival photos and an illustrated map of the route to use a play aid.
This sounds like an intensive research project! What kind of research have you been doing for the project, and how have you found that research to be useful in designing the game?
My research started with a much broader scope as I was interested in a game about historical exploring. I was reading about mountain climbing which had a lot of juicy material: harsh environments, bad equipment, improper safety procedures, great scenery, but almost all that history engages in indigenous erasure. As a white designer, it is not my place to write that game so I turned my attention to the South Pole, and Scott’s Terra Nova expedition drawn in by the photographs and journal entries. The journal entries.
The journal entries are fascinating because they provide insight into the thought processes of the expedition members during their ill-fated march. We can read about the dynamics within the group and later what they want to be remembered in the history books. Journaling is included as a mechanic in the game as a form of monologuing, and as a stretch goal, I will be writing a solo RPG variant that relies on journaling extensively. In the end, the emotional arc of the expedition became the focal point, and the technical aspects of exploration were relegated to window dressing. The best gameplay comes from exploring the attitudes and relationships of these men at the end of the earth.
I like the way you say “the arrogance of men who believe they can or must overcome nature.” Can you expand on this perspective and how it shapes your design and your approach to this project?
Beneath the mechanics and setting, the Last Place on Earth is about colonialism and masculinity. These men traveled to a place with temperatures of -45 degrees Fahrenheit and winds regularly over 100 miles an hour so that they could claim the glory of reaching the center of an uninhabited continent. This toxic mindset is just so deeply ingrained in their identities. For example, they viewed skis as children’s toys and barely used them instead they walked almost all of the 900 miles to the pole. It’s also apparent in their words. One of Scott’s last journal entries reads, “we have been to the Pole and we shall die like gentlemen. I regret only for the women we leave behind.” Or Lawrence Oates’ last words were, “I am just going outside and may be some time,” then he walked into a blizzard with no boots.
In the game, the characters are created to evoke the absurdity of these historical attitudes. During the game, the players explore how characters with this mentality deal with intense physical hardship, failure, and possibly even death. They form close bonds with fellow expedition members and see if they can weather the storm as their entire world is challenged. I hope that the critique offered by the game will lead players to think about their own beliefs on nationalism, masculinity, and the natural world.
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Thanks so much Eli for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out The Last Place on Earth on Kickstarter today! Also, take a look at Eli’s other ZineQuest project about rules, pomegranates, and arguing, Fruit of Law.
Hi All! Today I have an interview with Magnus T. Hansen on Red Rook Revolt, which is currently on Kickstarter. Check out what Magnus has to say below!
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Tell me a little about Red Rook Revolt. What excites you about it?
Well, that’s sorta like choosing between my babies. There are three things which really excite me. The first is the combat system, which is inspired by the game Hyper Light Drifter as well as Strike!: A game of heedless adventure! It uses a single d6 for every roll, almost every attack deals one damage, and people have very low hit HP. In playtests, it has given us fast, tactical, and dangerous combat. Melee attacks always hit, but expose you to danger, while ranged attacks can miss, and require you to spend Dark Power, which you get from melee attacks, which forces people in and out of dangerous situations and helps ensure more dynamic encounters.
Another thing that excites me is the memory and corruption system. For a long while, I struggled with making a cool way both to portray relationships and the creeping demonic corruption that happens once you start powering up the summoned demon in your gun. But I solved both, by having a system where you have specific memories with the other party members.
During each adventure, you can gain more, but you can also draw on those personal connections to keep away the demon’s whispers. If you fail, however, those memories can get twisted. Memories of your brother supporting you through hard times get reinterpreted to into memories of your bother being smothering or controlling. Memories of supporting your friends when they needed you become memories of your friends being needy and needing constant support, and so on. This isn’t necessarily permanent, but the fight against the demon is one of the central conflicts of the game.
The last thing I wanna mention here that excites me is the setting, which i am currently writing! I’m drawing on English and Roman history, and focusing down on a single empire and the rebellion happening there. That allows me do to more than just a cursory look at the place, and detail culture and religion to a greater extend, show some of the ways the rebellious areas differ in culture from the main empire, but also the ways they are the same, the things they share. Some central cultural concepts are birds as ancestors, and the actual, literal magic which is at work in most things of cultural significance, including community rituals and festivals, and a strong tradition of communal stews.
What inspired your interest in these cultures to build this specific story, and how are you building this story while being respectful to the cultures themselves?
To be clear, when I say I draw on British and Roman history, I mean mostly – but not entirely, as I’ll get to! – in terms of structure, in terms of how the empire works, how they extract resources from their conquered territory, how they justify their imperialism. That also helps answer the first part of your question: I needed empires to draw from for my evil empire. I had already decided on guns as an element, as the game started as a small combat engine and I didn’t want modern time, so 19th-century England was right there. As I worked on the culture and the history of the people of the empire, I had some ideas which resonated with Roman history, and the empire ended up as something like a Roman empire that had evolved into a modern empire, though more territorial.
I do use some roman culture – aspects of its religion and visual aesthetic, the importance of the Familias, the prevalence and importance of omens and minor magic. I have a friend working with me on some of the writing who knows his Roman history very well, so I’m not afraid to accidentally misrepresent it, though much of it isn’t what I’m using as inspiration. And while there are possibly some that would have issues with using, say, roman gods, I’m not doing that, just some aspects of how society was structured in antiquity.
Tell me more about memories! How do the players typically respond to these when they play them out, and how do they interact with other parts of the game?
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able playtest this part of the game at the time of writing, so how players typically respond is unknown to me, but I will have the chance to playtest it soon!
I can talk about how they interact with other parts of the game, though! The memories represent the character’s relationships with each other, and during their adventures, they get strengthened and weakened.
The game is structured around a mix of downtime and adventuring. During the adventuring portions, the players get into battle and accrue corruption tokens as they draw on the dark magic of their demons. Afterward, they roll to determine if they get corrupted. If they fail, their friends have to help them, reminding them of their relationship with a memory; if that succeeds, the memory is simply exhausted from the emotional stress, and can’t be used for a while. Otherwise, it gets corrupted, twisted somehow, and the relationship weakens. Actions in battle and their willingness to win at all costs thus affect their relationships and their memories.
This, in a sense, forms the central conflict, and a central theme of the game: the importance of relationships, friendships and organization as you struggle for liberation, and resistance to forces that would separate you, make you try to fight the world alone with just you and your gun. During downtime, exhaustion and (with more difficulty) corruption can be healed, as can physical wounds, and new memories can be made. Downtime, in a bigger way, ties into what adventures you go on, what battles you fight and so on, which feeds back into corruption and memory.
What is the general activity of the game – like what do the players mostly do in each session, or are they intended to do? How does the game support these actions?
The general activity of the game is fighting imperialist scum. You play as members of the red rook commune, which is under attack from the cruel Imperium Alarum, and throughout the game, you keep the pressure on to prevent them from turning their full attention towards the commune. You sabotage railways, distribute propaganda, organize general strikes, assassinate generals, and lead battles against the enemy. When things go wrong and the empire turns their full might upon the Red Rook Commune, you man the barricades and drive back the invaders! In between hectic fights and missions, you rest at the commune and rebuild your strength. This is when you heal and reaffirm your friendships.
As for how the game supports these actions, it is built around that structure of mission/rest/mission with the first result of failure being an attack on the red rook commune. If you aren’t putting the pressure on the empire, they will attack your home and deny you the chance to heal and rest.
What made you elect to use Hyper Light Drifter and Strike! As inspirations for design, and how have you differed from them?
I didn’t so much choose to use hyper light drifter as an inspiration as the other way around: the appeal of Hyper Light Drifter’s smooth, flowing combat rhythms is what inspired me to start working on what would become Red Rook Revolt. Hyper Light Drifter is a video game with an incredible combat loop, and I wanted to capture that particular loop, that particular flow, in a tabletop game, something, quick, smooth, and tactical.
That’s why I turned to Strike! for inspiration for the combat. That game uses a single D6 for combat, rolling on a table of hits, misses, and critical hits, and It goes rather fast for that reason. Strike, of course, also has a lot of other things going on, but I liked that particular idea and I took inspiration from that in designing my combat system and combined it with the things I liked and wanted to replicate from Hyper Light Drifter.
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Thanks so much Magnus for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Red Rook Revolt on Kickstarter today!
Hi all! I’ve got an awesome interview with Lucian Kahn today about Visigoths vs. Mall Goths, which is currently on Kickstarter! It sounds super cool and I’m personally looking forward to playing it at Big Bad Con. Check out Lucian’s responses below!
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Tell me a little about Visigoths vs. Mall Goths. What excites you about it?
Visigoths vs. Mall Goths is a tabletop roleplaying game and dating sim about the conflicts and romances among the warriors who sacked ancient Rome and 20th century spooky teens, set in a shopping mall in a Los Angeles suburb in 1996. There are a lot of bisexuals.
The plot structure of Visigoths vs. Mall Goths resembles an open-world videogame RPG. Designed for either one-shot or campaign play, each adventure episode offers several quests that you may choose to pursue (or ignore), and the mall setting is packed with many strange retro marvels to discover. Or you can just replay the game over and over to kiss all the kissable clerks.
Imagine a surreal combo of The Craft, Empire Records, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and Clueless. In addition to all that, I’m thrilled to be working with an incredible array of artists and writers on this project. The famous, talented, and extremely nice Robin Eisenberg has done an incredible job on the cover. We’ve got illustrations by Lluis Abadias Garcia, who did all the art for the Retroverse D&D 5e expansion. Vee Hendro, the graphic designer for Good Society, is doing the graphic design. We’ve got guest adventure modules by a very cool bunch of game designers, including Liz Gorinsky from Goth Court, and Maja Bäckvall who was the runes expert on Civilization VI and God of War. I could go on. The artists on this project rule.
What are some of the challenges and more exciting aspects of combining ancient Visigoths and 90s mall goths?
The only real design challenge I faced in the goth-on-goth arena was figuring out exactly how disoriented I wanted to make these time-traveling Visigoths. This could have gone very Encino Man, but I didn’t really want the game to be about ancient warriors staring in awe at escalators, so it took some work to get the narrative framing right, where the Visigoths are historically displaced but we’re assuming they’ve somehow learned English and know what a computer is. Fortunately, this game is completely surreal and absurd anyway, so this extremely fast learning process doesn’t have to be plausible to buy into the premise and have fun.
Part of what’s exciting for me about throwing together these 2 types of goths is that they’re both outsiders. The Visigoths are outsiders for 2 reasons: first and most obviously because they’ve been displaced from their original historical context and dumped into a ‘90s mall, but they were also oppressed outsiders in Roman culture before the time travel. The Mall Goths are also outsiders in 2 directions: they’re too weird to fit into mainstream teen culture, but they’re also both too young to get into goth clubs and too commercial to be accepted by the avant garde. So the scenario I’ve set up pits these 2 groups against each other, but both groups are outsiders within the context of the mall and the suburbs. This makes for a weird and fascinating array of potential social dynamics that the players can mess around with.
It’s weird to think of it, but a 90s game is now a period piece! What’s it like writing a near-history piece and how did you make the game feel totally 90s?
I was a bisexual grunge-rock teen in Los Angeles in the 90s and started goth clubbing as soon as I turned 18, so the aesthetics of this game are very close to my heart and my personal experience. Honestly, this entire design process has been extremely heartwarming, partially because I’ve gotten to indulge my nostalgia, but also because the past year of playtesting at cons and stuff has brought me into so many cute conversations with other people who still carry a torch for 90s counterculture. People who were there at the time will find a lot of Easter Eggs that refer to real stuff that was going on back then, and at the same time, I’ve made the world vivid enough that it’s still fun for younger players or people who weren’t in the USA at the time, etc. I don’t want to give too many spoilers, but the mall has a salon for humans and pets called Gerbil Essences.
Gerbil Essences is amazing! It sounds like you had a lot of fun with the project. What was it like in playtesting – how did the design choices you made come to fruition with different diverse groups?
I playtested this game for over a year, which is a long time for me, and it definitely evolved a lot over that time. One constantly recurring theme was the balance between structure and freedom in the game rules. I wanted this game to accommodate the needs of some very different types of players, from Dungeons & Dragons fans, to indie storygamers, to LARPers, to total newcomers. Based on player feedback in the past few months, I think I’ve struck a fun balance that lets a lot of different people enjoy the game.
How are the Visigoths and Mall Goths represented mechanically in the game, and how do their mechanics interact with each other?
There are 3 types of Visigoths (Conqueror, Charlatan, and Runecaster) and 3 types of Mall Goths (Theatre Tech, Witch, and Cyber Pet). Each character type comes with 3 skills that get bonuses on dice rolls. For example, the Theatre Tech has bonuses to costumes, pyrotechnics, and rappelling. They also each have a special skill they can use once per day without rolling dice. For example, the Cyber Pet can put on cute animal ears for a half-price discount at any store.
But the most important mechanic is probably Embarrassing Traits. Each character has 1 or 2 of these, and the options are different for Visigoths and Mall Goths. For example, one Visigoth embarrassing trait option is “Fear of Animals,” which gets especially dicey if you’re a Conqueror with the “control animals” skill, and another is “Allergic to Metal,” which sucks if you’re wearing chainmail. The way these work is that you can embarrass yourself to make your friend look cool in comparison or draw attention away from them, giving one of your fellow Visigoths or Mall Goths a bonus to their roll.
Finally, while most games only track physical damage, Visigoths vs Mall Goths only tracks emotional damage. That’s right, physical combat only has emo outcomes — and if you get too emotionally overwhelmed, you can’t fight anymore until you talk about your feelings with a friend!
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Thanks so much to Lucian for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Visigoths vs. Mall Goths on Kickstarter today!
Today I’ve got questions for Catherine Ramen about Red Carnations on a Black Grave, a historical RPG currently on Kickstarter! Check out the interview below!
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Tell me a little about Red Carnations on a Black Grave. What excites you about it?
Red Carnations on a Black Grave is a freeform rpg about the Paris Commune, a brief but intense socialist revolution in 1871. For ten weeks radicals, socialists, and the working class controlled the greatest capital in Europe–until the French army arrived and brutally put down the “rebellion.”
The game explores the lives of 12 characters caught up in this intense moment in history, exploring their personal lives and relationships against a backdrop of a doomed resistance.
I came accidentally to this moment in history and then became fascinated by it. The Paris Commune is not well known, and I’m delighted to bring this crucial moment in the history of revolutionary struggle to more prominence. As a designer, it succeeds pretty well in capturing the kind of drama-infused and emotional play that I love to bring to the table.
What kind of research did you have to do to write the game and capture this experience?
It started when I picked up, more or less by chance, a copy of Mary and Bryan Talbot’s graphic novel The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia which is about the socialist and anarchist activist Louise Michel (who is a playable character in the game). I’d never learned much about the Paris Commune before this time, but I had been looking at maybe doing some kind of French Revolutionary-themed game. The Commune is much later than the original revolution, but it quickly became a source of deep interest to me.
I read several works in English (John Merriman’s Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune is an excellent overview and introduction), mostly on the academic side of things, with a focus on the experience of women in the Commune, but also some primary sources written by the participants in the Commune. My French isn’t terrible, so I was also able to read some of the primary accounts of the Commune in French–this was the only place I could find anything in depth about Joséphine Marchais, for example, even though I mostly left that information off of her card in the game.
The one thing I think that really helped was to look at some of the many, many posters the Commune government issued during its brief life. I used those as a source for the Inspiration cards in the game–these are cards that contain a historical event or situation and some sense impressions; it’s a good way to get some historical information into the game without overwhelming the players. About 90% of those cards are based on actual posters I found.
Who are the people in this story? How do you think modern players can relate to them?
Right now there are twelve base characters in the game, plus a thirteenth optional character we were able to add thanks to hitting a stretch goal; we’re also going to have some more optional characters become available if we hit other funding goals.
The characters are a mix of historical people and plausibly historical characters. There’s Louise Michel, who was a badass (and a pain in the ass) all her long public life; Joséphine Marchais, one of three women to be sentenced to death for arson after the fall of the Commune (the sentence was commuted). There are two families, the Marchandons with a former political prisoner and a young widow among them, and the family of Amanda Mercier a single mother and sex worker. She is in an explicitly queer relationship with Lodoïska Caweska, another historical figure who was often described as an “Amazon” and wore a uniform and carried pistols; in the game she’s a veteran of the failed Polish revolution of 1864. I wanted to make sure that the community of Montmartre (where the game is set) was vibrant and diverse–as it was in reality; plus I wanted to make sure there was representation from France’s imperialist ventures: so we have Dominique Rousseau, a physician from Martinique who got her MD in the United States, and Tariq Tannoudji, an Algerian light cavalryman who stayed in France after the war against the Prussians. (Algeria went into revolt during the period of the Commune, and was repressed pretty brutally as well.)
These are characters mostly living on the edge of society and of poverty, with a political system that is unresponsive to their needs and wants and voices that are not heard over the shouts of the rich. This is unfortunately probably relatable to a lot of people right now! Certainly as a queer designer I often find my anxieties about my future and my place in society are a pathway into these characters’ lives.
But also: one of the things I do when facilitating the game is to remind the players that while the game is often intensely political, those politics will emerge from the situation and the various historical inputs into the game. The best games of Red Carnations on a Black Grave in my experience have been the games when people focus first on their relationships, rivalries, hopes, and fears, and let those flow into the situation formed by the historical events. I mean, I don’t know how to play a revolutionary socialist in 19th century France, and I actually did the research! But I do have some thoughts on how to play a queer person caught up in a tangled love triangle, or an artist afraid of never having her voice heard, or someone trying to figure out how to keep food on the table. In that way I think most players can find a way to understand and relate to their characters.
What decisions did you have to make in design to encourage the complicated relationships and drama you want to see?
I have a story about that! When
I first started designing the game, I knew the characters were going to be the
most important part of the game so all my early work was concentrated on trying
to come up with plausible candidates and thinking about how they related. I
knew I wanted Louise Michel; I found references to Lodoiska Caweska in several
sources and she seemed too interesting to pass up, as was Josephine Marchais.
Beyond them I had plans for a physician, a priest, etc. Around October of 2017
I thought I had my final cut ready.
Then I went and saw Peter Watkins’ film La Commune (1871). It’s an
amazing and powerful movie, five and half hours long and in French, filmed on a
soundstage with over 200 actors, most of whom weren’t professionals; I highly
recommend it even with its eccentricities (for example, there’s ahistorical
television stations broadcasting from both Versailles and the Commune) and
after I got home at 2 AM I realized I had to tear up a lot of what i had
started and ground all the characters in the working class.
The other main change came after the early playtests. I originally had several questions for each character printed on their cards; but I quickly realized this was too limiting. One of the earliest rules changes was to create a small deck of questions that the players would randomly draw. These are pretty provocative and leading questions, and answering them fills out the deliberately skeletal relationships between the characters. It also really increases replayability as the setup will change every time the game is run–and there are a lot of ways to answer the questions and use them. At one recent game at Dexcon, one of the players leaned so hard into Marie having been a police informant that she remained a spy for the Versailles government, challenging her father’s beliefs and causing havoc to everyone around her. I’d never seen that in a game before!
How do you support players emotionally and safely in such an intense emotional environment that also deals with difficult political issues?
There are safety tools mandated in the game; right now these
are the XCard, Open Door, and Lines and Veils, but I’m exploring the
incorporation of other tools. I’ve also asked Jonaya Kemper to help create some
exercises to deal with traumas that emerge from the game and do de-roleing
after it ends.
This goes back to asking players not to concentrate on the politics of the game
when framing scenes–the game is suffused with political content and doesn’t
paint the Commune with utopian colors (although the game is of course very
sympathetic to its cause). This helps I think ground players and distance them
a little bit from the grinding, mechanistic tragedy that will overwhelm their
characters.
This is an area that is going to continue to be worked on as we finish
development on the game; I’ve had games of Red Carnations that were extremely
cathartic and games that were extremely emotionally draining. I’m very invested
in making sure that this experience is emotionally deep but also safe for
everyone to enjoy as much as possible.
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Thanks so much Catherine for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Red Carnations on a Black Grave on Kickstarter today!
Today I have an interview with Alex White about A Cool and Lonely Courage, which is currently on Kickstarter! This game is about women in occupied France in World War II and I asked Alex about the research involved. Read on to see more!
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Tell me a little about A Cool and Lonely Courage. What excites you about it?
Last summer I was discussing the role of women in World War II with a friend, thinking about the courage which they had displayed and the encouragement that can give to us today. The next evening on the flight home I remembered a museum exhibit I had come across once about the women who worked as spies in occupied France, and the germ of an idea for the game formed – I’ve still got the half page of scribbled notes which are the underpinnings of the game even now! I wanted to design a game with simple rules that would allow us to tell emotionally complex stories.
I followed this up by several weeks research into the women who served as part of the Special Operations Executive and I was rocked back on my heels by their history. They came from all kinds of backgrounds and faced incredible peril. A third of them were captured, tortured and executed, but they performed a vital role in the liberation of France. The photo below shows Violette Szabo, Noor Inayat Khan, Nancy Wake and Odette Sansom.
I decided that I wanted the game to remember and honour the women who had faced such dangers. I’ve put as much history as I can as examples into the rules and made every effort to help the players understand the kind of circumstances these real women found themselves in. I’ve been delighted that many people have said afterwards that they want to find out more about these spies, and I’ve included a book and film bibliography in the rules to help people find our more.
The central mechanism of the game reflects the fates of war, and gives a tremendous replay value to it. Every time that someone plays, very different stories will result. Because the game is interested primarily in the relationships these women had with the people around them, and tracks the changing relationships during their time, it has the capability to be very emotionally engaging – even shocking. As one player, new to story games, said during a recent session “I can’t believe that I’m crying over someone that we just made up in the last hour”.
That’s a long response to a short question! But in a nutshell I’m excited about the capacity of this game to give the players genuine emotional experiences and a new respect for the women who did this for real.
You mentioned your research. What kind of research did you do? How did you find the right sources?
When it comes to research, happily there are many books available! Historians have done all the hard work in research or working as biographers. I started by looking at some authors who have covered a number of the women who worked with the SOE such as Rick Stroud who wrote ‘Lonely Courage’ or Beryl E. Escort who wrote ‘The heroines of SOE: F Section: Britains secret women in France’. I followed this up with more in depth biographies of women such as Pearl Witherington and Nancy Wake.
I supplemented this real life history by looking into some of the fiction based on these activities. I really enjoyed the young adult novel ‘Codename Verity’ by Elizabeth Wein, and I was able to obtain a 1988 TV series called ‘Wish me luck’ by Lavinia Warner and Jill Hyem.
A friend of mine is an amateur historian of World War II and he was able to give me a lot of additional context about the situation in occupied France too.
Did you reach out to the families of the women who you based the game on, whose likenesses you’re using, to gain their perspective or permission?
No, I didn’t attempt to reach out to any of the families – None of the public resources I had available referred to any family members much, and trying to track them down would have felt too stalker-y.
What happens in play of A Cool and Lonely Courage? What do players do, and what are their hard questions?
When it comes to playing A Cool and Lonely Courage, it goes like this:
There are a series of questions which each player answers to develop an initial view of their character – their background, how they speak french, the reason they joined up, a strength discovered during training and a weakness revealed by training. Whether they were going to be primarily a courier or a radio operator. Their code name, and the name of the circuit leader they would be working with in France (who is their first supporting character).
As the play starts, the players have to picture themselves in neighbouring cells, captured by the Nazis. They briefly introduce themselves, and they start telling each other their stories…
Each player is dealt a hand of 6 cards, held face down.
There are going to be five chapters, and in each chapter every player will have a scene. The chapters are arrival (meeting the resistance), a mission with the resistance, an interlude which is a period of quiet and getting to know people, the chapter where you are captured, and a final chapter in prison.
As each player is going to have a scene they draw one of their cards, and the suit determines whether the focus of the scene is one of love, success, misfortune or death. The scenes will involve one or more supporting characters, adding to a selection in front of each player or reusing existing ones in later scenes. Other players take the role of the supporting characters in the scene.
As the chapters progress it will be natural to revisit some of the supporting characters and depending upon the fall of the cards you will see relationships grow, deepen, fracture or sometimes be tragically ended by death. Through playing out the scenes there is a real sense of personality in the supporting characters… and when a spade is drawn and the players set a scene where a lovely person has to die… that can feel really tough – but true to the sense of the wartime story that is being told.
The conclusion is a real point of decision. Everyone has one card left. They then secretly decide whether to keep that card for themselves or donate it to another player. When these decisions are revealed, anyone with two cards is rescued! Anyone with no cards is killed out of hand. Anyone with one card is sent to the concentration camps and if your card is black you die there, if it is red you survive.
Finally, in the epilogue, the players think about what happened next to the survivors after the war. And who remembers those who died.
It is sometimes a little quiet at the conclusion of the game, as we think about the stories that have been told, and perhaps reflect upon the real women who the game is based upon.
How do you support players who might find this kind of play overwhelming or upsetting once they’ve jumped into it?
One of the things that has always been important when running the game is that everyone knows that there is an open door policy – anyone can excuse themselves for the game for any reason. They might want a break, or they might feel that they have to exit the game entirely. It is important that people know that this is an option at the start of the game, and that if during the game someone feels they have to step out it is important for the rest of the table to reassure them that is perfectly fine, and it won’t ‘spoil the game’ for anyone else.
I’ve seen this used twice, once in a game that I was facilitating and once in a game a different person was facilitating. In each case it was easy to reassure the person that was fine, and they left with no worries that it would impair anyone else’s fun.
Occasionally someone finds one particular thing that is brought up somewhat upsetting, and the game rules discuss right up front using Ron Edwards “lines and veils” or John Stavropoulos “X-card” mechanics to help avoid troublesome areas up front or during play.
How do you feel sometimes knowing the end of the story can affect play and the experience of the game?
I think that knowing the end of the story actually plays really well. Although it may not be fashionable, I really loved the movie Titanic. We all know the ship sank, but it was interesting to see the stories leading up to that point. Indeed, it lent a bitter-sweet aspect to some of the stories. The same holds true in A Cool and Lonely Courage.
Knowing that these stories end in capture can make the sense of small moments of joy or victory shine like candles in the darkness. And of course, the very end of the story isn’t known. You know that you are all in prison, but there is the question about what you do with your final card… to keep it or to give it away, once you know everyone else’s stories. The final end of each character isn’t known until the epilogue!
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Thanks so much to Alex for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out A Cool and Lonely Courage on Kickstarter today!
Note: As required by my standards, you’ll note that I asked Alex about whether he reached out to the families of any of those he’s writing this game based on. I understand Alex’s perspective, but as I have spoken of before, I care about whose stories we tell, so I wanted to ask to get that perspective.
