What is CAPERS Noir, both as a product and as your vision?
CAPERS Noir is the first
supplement for my award-winning CAPERS RPG. It provides new character options
and new GM tools as well as an alternative setting for the game. It takes the
core game setting of the 1920s Prohibition era and moves it forward
twenty years to the WW2 years. This alternative setting shifts from
gangster shoot-em-ups to moody, atmospheric, crime noir stories filled with
mystery and some horror elements. The additional rules and tools help fill out
this noir setting but are also perfectly usable in the core Roaring Twenties
setting.
This supplement is a test case for me, to see if CAPERS has the legs to become a full game line. The early success of the Kickstarter makes me feel it does. The fan base (old and new) have been very enthusiastic, supportive, and looking forward to seeing more. I have plans to publish at least two more supplements, each about the same size as CAPERS Noir. Each will take a similar path of being an alternative historical period/setting/theme while also expanding options for all other versions of the game. My hope is to explore a variety of “cops vs robbers” themes and tropes with these supplements.
What are the Noir rules like and how do they change CAPERS?
The core rules of
CAPERS Noir are still the same (and you need the core book to play). There are
some new powers, and I’ve tried some different things with how you gain
abilities and boosts, flexing the powers system a bit. The first big difference
is that CAPERS Noir includes investigation rules using the core playing card
mechanics. This rule subset allows an investigation to move forward (that is,
clues keep getting found) without shutting down the whole thing over one bad
trait check. Success and failure on the investigation checks instead describes
how you gain additional information or add complications to the story.
Additionally, the horror elements brought to bear in CAPERS Noir provides for the possibility that your character’s soul will be corrupted. Temptation lies around every corner. Committing terrible acts at the wrong time can bring you a bit more power, but at a cost. A “shade track” defines how far your character has fallen to darkness and what benefits and hindrances this causes. You can pull yourself back out in a few different ways, most commonly by paying attention to and pursuing your “beacon,” a person, place, or thing that you hold dear and seek to help and protect.
What have you put
together to flesh out a 1940s setting and explore that complex era?
Noir fiction and film
that developed in the 20s and 30s (and feed forward into the 40s and 50s) are
at the core of CAPERS Noir. The crime noir themes of the alternate setting
explore the darker side of humanity, nihilism, fatalism, cynicism. Things
aren’t what they seem, morally gray characters are everywhere, and the
protagonist doesn’t always “win.” It’s a world of mystery and
darkness, where the good must struggle simply to stay good and the darker
characters are at risk of falling deeper into darkness even more easily. Plus,
lots of characters smoking cigarettes in the rain.
The supplement doesn’t deal directly with World War 2, but the ravages of war and its aftermath certainly are on characters’ minds in the game. (And that’s not to say I won’t ever explore the actual war, with super-powered characters taking part, in some future supplement.)
Hey all! Today I’ve got five or so questions with Michael Bacon about the game Dangerous Times, which is currently on Kickstarter! Hope that you like hearing about this game of journalism in the 1920s!
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Tell me about Dangerous Times. What excites you about it?
Dangerous Times is a small role-playing game for two or
more players, published in zine form, with a focus on storytelling. It’s about
reporters who risk their lives to expose corruption, crime and injustice, all
in a version of 1920’s New York that’s just learned stage magic is real. So now
magic is everywhere: children play with fire and levitation in the streets,
wall street moguls consult soothsayers before making investments, crooks turn
hypnotism and escape-artistry to devious purposes… and of course those who
seek power are messing with things best left alone.
One of the aspects I’m most excited about is the history
involved.
New York of the jazz age is a surprisingly modern time.
Broadway is decorated with neon lights, cars fill the streets and the subway
rumbles below. There’s even a budding intercontinental network of wires and
radio waves used to share photographs and news around the world.
It’s not just the technology that makes the twenties
modern, though: so many familiar social issues are present and cultural shifts
are happening, often in ways that resonate with the current time.
I’d love it if players were able to engage with all this history, and find ways to incorporate it into their play. I’ve tried to encourage that in the design. So even though the problems they bump into involve the supernatural, I’ve attempted to make those plotlines echo historic reality. It turned out to be… not easy (I’m still not sure I’ve got it right), but at least surprisingly straight-forward. This makes sense, though, because this is the culture that produced so many of those genre-defining fantasy, horror and mystery stories; they couldn’t help but bring reality into the fantastical.
The 1920s were a complex time in New York! I know that many Black Americans and queer people were among those living in the city. What kind of research are you doing to ensure that you have appropriate representation of the history and the people of the era?
I’m glad you brought this up, because how people treated
each other during this era has been a major focal point of my research.
I’ve been lucky enough to lean on the work of historians
who’ve spent their entire careers studying aspects of this, exploring how
specific conceptions of race, gender, sexuality and nationality influenced and
were influenced by society at large. There’s even a page at the end of the zine
dedicated to resources and references, so that players interested in learning
more can know where to start.
Going into this I’d only known the broadest shapes of the
era, and I was very excited to learn about ways society seemed to be expressing
interest in diversity— this romantic idea that New Yorkers at large were going
out to speakeasies, immigrant neighborhoods, jazz clubs, queer dances, and
encountering all sorts of other lifestyles and backgrounds— but when I started
doing the reading it turns out that these interactions served to reify existing
hierarchies as much as they transgressed against them.
And then the years rush ahead through the Great
Depression, WWII, and McCarthyism, all of which exacerbate expressions of
social backlash and undermine tentative steps made towards civil progress.
All this is to say that the past is a different place,
not a kinder one.
I have, however, made a serious effort to research and represent all the people living in the city, not just the ones in most easy reach. What this directly translates to is mention and often discussion of things like the black press, targeted enforcement of new immigration laws, police raids on cross-racial or queer dances, and so forth throughout the zine… though it’s difficult to fit all the nuance required within just 40 pages, especially when those pages also have to convey the core game mechanics and process of play.
One thing that drove me to set the game in the 1920s was
this article talking about Harlem’s Hamilton Lodge Ball, where hundred of queer
men and women annually danced in joyful defiance of prevailing gender and
sexual norms. These events became a sensation, with thousands from all over the
city showing up to observe and sometimes take part; notables in attendance
include Nora Holt and Wallace Thurman, even the Vanderbilts and Astors. The
newspapers at the time treat this with a range between shock and fascination,
but I can’t help but smile when I picture it— twirling on the dance floor,
fancy suits and gowns, and people from all over the city celebrating.
I’ve tried to make the game as much about players
encountering and protecting this positive parts of life in the city, as it is
about mystery, magic, and the dangers that are encroaching.
What kind of mechanics do you use in Dangerous Time for things like investigation, violence, and other things that might come up?
This is actually the area that’s seeing the most change, as I continue to playtest and refine what I’ve developed.
The setting and the mechanics are meant to reinforce
each-other, but I’ve also tried to keep them out of the way of the real point,
which is telling stories. So there’s some simple outcome randomization using
six-sided die, but there’s also a mechanic in place that lets players spend
this resource— credibility— to ignore the dice.
So for example this lets me keep reporters very squishy,
only distinguishing between “healthy”, “injured”, and “dead”, because the
transition between these states is almost always intentional.
The idea is that reporters sometimes exaggerate how
dramatic a situation is for the sake of selling more papers, so when you spend
credibility to succeed at something it actually means somebody, somewhere in
this article that your building, was lying.
And of course credibility is important when figuring out
the outcome of an adventure, because you might survive the big encounter only
to find nobody believes what you’re printing, and then the world gets worse
instead of better. Maybe dying for your ideals was the smarter choice.
Then there’s the investigation, which is where I’ve been
doing a lot of iteration lately. I’ve been toying with different ways to have
players encounter and build stories, but one piece I think I’ve finally got
down is the start of everything— the staff meeting.
The latest version has the editor (the player who runs
the game) stating a fact about the world and then questioning the other players
about it.
So you open the meeting with “Rats and pigeons have been
dying”, “Strange sounds drift through the air”, “Discarded bits of clothing
keep turning up” and then start asking questions. Why are the rats dying?
Where are they finding the clothing? When are the sounds
being heard?
Who told you about this? What does this other group say
about it? Make it weirder! Do they contradict each-other?
These become the rumors players investigate, and with a little bit of work by the editor they get incorporated into and reshape the various archetypal plots written in the zine.
What are the kinds of experiences and actions players can have in Dangerous Times? What do they do, and what do they feel?
Mechanically and thematically, Dangerous Times is a game
about determining truth, and working out how a bunch of truths all fit together
into a narrative.
Players start the game by generating rumors and leads,
then tell stories about how their reporters follow up on those leads. Dice
rolling is used to give guidance during this process, letting players know when
a scene should provide answers or raise more questions. They also make
decisions about who pursues what leads, when to use magic or break laws during
the investigation, when to split up and investigate more leads, or to focus on
one lead together, reducing danger and increasing the chance it’ll pan out.
All the while players are accruing trouble, which
eventually comes calling, and they’ll use their dice, skills, and other
resources to get out of it— or they go out in a blaze of glory, getting one
last epic moment before they fall.
Finally publication starts, and players have to take all
these facts and rumors and fit them together into articles, coming up with
witty headlines for bonus points. The paper’s credibility, circulation, and
debts come together to influence decisions about what gets printed, and then
the impacts of the publication on the world and the newspaper’s future are
discussed.
Ideally players start out with interest and confusion,
and as the story progresses they get that slow, awesome sense of the facts
coming together. They feel pressure brewing as trouble builds up, and they make
decisions about which risks are worth taking. When the trouble finally happens,
they feel excitement and danger, but also in control— players are the ultimate
arbiter over their character’s fate, and they’ll have to weigh when sacrifices
are worthwhile. During publication they get to look back on the adventure,
recapping all those feelings mixed together with hope, satisfaction, or regret.
Finally, in a game called Dangerous Times, I have to wonder, how do you plan to encourage safe and respectful play at the table?
The way tabletop gamers have thought critically on player
safety, developing tools and methods to encourage everyone has a good time, is
one of the things I like best about this hobby. Coming from video games, where
the discussion really isn’t there yet, it’s like a breath of fresh air. So of
course I’m happy to reference things like Lines & Veils and the X-card, so
players new to the hobby or unfamiliar with these concepts can play with a
safety net.
As to the design itself, well. Dangerous Times opens with
a staff meeting, and there’s a note in the zine about using starting that off
with a quick conversation about the things players do and don’t want to see.
It’s my hope that this becomes a natural place to establish boundaries, proffer
ideas, and flavor the tone of upcoming play. If someone mentions they find
baseball boring but love ghost stories, the group can keep that in mind as they
start building rumors and playing the game. With luck this normalizes the times
when people need to draw boundaries, whether that’s to avoid deep-seated trauma
or just because they’ve had a shitty day.
Addressing the other part of your question, one of the
things I’ve been very careful with the plotlines inside the booklet is to keep
them (hopefully, respectfully) adjacent to reality— players encounter history
and fix fantasy. So there’s no rushing in and suddenly solving real-world
injustices that persist into the present, at least in the booklet as written. I
think it’s fine if players want to play that way, but it’s not the game I
wanted to write. Instead I’ve provided supernatural and imaginary plots, noted
parallels to real history, and tasked editors with “making the real
unreal”— drawing inspiration from the real world, but making it into
something everyone can feel comfortable playing with.
I’d be happy if the experience of playing can be informative and challenging, but first and foremost it has to be enjoyable. It’s my hope that the game can support both hard-hitting encounters with history as well as light-hearted escapism. Groups can and should play at their own comfort levels— the twenties were a terrible, dangerous time, but also one that could have promised a better future. If nothing else, playing in that space should be fun.
Today I’m so excited to share that I have an interview with Dr. Jessica Hammer and Moyra Turkington on their game Rosenstrasse, which is currently on Kickstarter! I hope you enjoy hearing what these amazing women have to say about this project – check it out below!
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Tell me a little about Rosenstrasse. What excites you about it?
JH: The Rosenstrasse story is an incredible story of non-violent protest and resistance to unjust authority. The game puts you inside marriages between Jewish and “Aryan” Germans. You play out what I like to call “ten years of marriage in three hours”; then, at the end of the game, the female characters have the chance to protest the roundup of the Jewish men in their lives. The historical protest we’re exploring was spontaneous, women-led, non-violent – and successful. That’s something we want to remember. At the same time, we remember that even these women, who were willing to stand up to the Reich, didn’t do so until their own families were on the line. We can honor their courage and still aspire to do better next time.
MT: A lot of things! Jess has the first thing that comes to mind – it is history that belies the story we’re told about our effective potential to affect oppressive regimes and that makes it an urgently important story to me in our current political climate. But I’ll also pick one that I don’t often mention – that it’s designed to be very procedurally easy to run! Unlike many games that require GM skill sets that experienced gamers take for granted (world building, scene framing, narrative positioning, mechanical management) Rosenstrasse takes care of the lion’s share of that work for you. In this game, the primary GM skill is emotional calibration – listening to a scene until it has reached an emotional place of fulfillment, asking questions to reveal how characters are processing the events in their lives, and checking in to make sure players are coping with the material. Because these are core emotional intelligence skills rather than specialized GM skills, this makes the game accessible to folks who have historically found GMing daunting – and as a result we’re seeing better representation among facilitators.
What inspired you to create the game specifically as a live action experience?
MT: Rosenstrasse is actually a hybrid larp & tabletop game so groups can play it as a live or tabletop experience. Because most of the gameplay involves the emotional negotiation between two people, the delineation between tabletop and larp start to naturally blur anyway; a scene where a husband and wife have a difficult conversation at a kitchen table looks and feels very similar in either game mode. When I run the game, I tend to do so in larp mode because I find that embodied roleplay is a powerful conduit to adopting the headspace and heartspace of the character, especially when there are strong relationship ties. I think that the emotion follows the body and vice versa.
JH: In contrast to Mo, I tend to run Rosenstrasse closer to a tabletop. Players still get to have meaningful in-character conversations where they embody their characters verbally and physically, but adopt a very different relationship to the game materials. For example, players in this mode often describe experiencing the card deck as a ticking clock, counting down to new horrors. This sense of dread is palpable at the table and very powerful for play.
What is the game like in play – what emotions do players normally experience, and what do they physically do?
JH: The game comes with eight pre-generated characters, and more than eighty scenes for them to encounter. In a typical scene, players get the description of a situation – for example, maybe two of the characters are going to work on the morning after Kristallnacht – and then a prompt for role-play. Prompts typically ask the characters to have a conversation, react to the situation being described, or show how their marriage changes.
MT: The game is meant to feel like an elegy – a thoughtful observance of the loss of security, dignity, freedom, and selfhood incurred under an oppressive regime. But it’s also a game about resilience and resistance – players through their characters struggle to hold on – or sometimes to let go. They discover that in an active genocide, that the minutiae of living and thinking and loving are themselves, resistance. The game play is often quiet, somber and serious – one where everyone shares a deep breath before the next scene because the story just keeps on getting harder. But there’s also moments of lightness, bright love, and true courage that also make it bearable.
What kind of research did you need to do to create Rosenstrasse?
MT: Research for historical games about people in marginalized situations can be hard. And it becomes harder still when you try to uncover their stories from a time where oppressive regimes have a stronghold on the narrative in which even documentation of your own story can be prosecuted as a treasonous crime against the state. You can double this down once more in a locus of war (Berlin) where victors literally displace the regime and with it wrest control of the story to broadcast their own victory. Stories get lost, they get distorted, they get overwritten – the stories of victims get defined by their victimhood in service to the vilification of the enemy and the righteousness of the victor.
For Rosenstrasse we got very lucky in that an academic named Nathan Stoltzfus found the thread of the Rosenstrasse protests early enough to locate people who were actually impacted, and to collect their first hand accounts of the events. Those first-hand accounts became the heart of our research and our design. And since that work, many other academics have focused on the story and it has become a locus of debate in Resistance Studies – so for research we situated ourselves in the lives of people who told their story and followed as many threads as we could find outward until we felt we could create a palpable feel of what it was like to live in that time.
JH: While Mo focused on the historical research, I spent a lot of time looking into the challenges of Holocaust education. I have a lot of experience designing and studying educational games – that’s actually part of my day job as a professor at CMU – but Holocaust education has some pretty specific challenges that we needed to understand. For example, Holocaust games can backfire if they make the player feel that they could have done a better job in the circumstances. That can lead them to have contempt, not empathy, for the targets of Nazi persecution. So, we did research to identify these challenges, looked at what’s been done before, and specifically targeted our design to address them. Our research with the game so far, and our observations of playtesting, suggest that we’re succeeding!
Dr. Jessica Hammer, one of the creators of Rosenstrasse.
How is Rosenstrasse important to you as a creator, and as a person?
JH: I’ve been making transformational games for nearly twenty years, and I’ve rarely seen a game that has this kind of power. It’s humbling and a bit frightening to know that you’ve made a game that deeply impacts players. But, I’ve brought everything that’s in me to the table – my work with transformational games, my commitment to activism, my expertise in psychology and instructional design, my family history, my love of role-playing games – and I think that creates a special kind of alchemy.
I’m particularly grateful that Mo agreed to dedicate the game to my grandmother, Helen Hammer. She survived five different camps, including Auschwitz, and went on to live a life of intellectual commitment, grace, and dignity. I was particularly close to her growing up. She pushed me to read bigger, think bigger, adventure bigger; she wanted me to have a vision of the world as it could be, not just of the world as it was. She died when I was still in college, so I hope this game stands as a testament to her memory.
MT: Rosenstrasse has a harmony that’s critically important to me. Its historical focus, its design, the story it tells, the player experience, the impact of play, my personal goals as a creative activist, and the design relationship Jess and I have built are all aligned with a harmony that’s incredibly satisfying. I will forever be grateful that Jess agreed to do this work with me – it has been a uniquely fulfilling and powerful experience, and I am humbled by her trust and her courage.
Tell
me about Comrades. What excites you about it?
Comrades
is a new RPG about life in the revolutionary underground. I’ve been working on
it off and on since 2017 and I am just in love with it. I created
it because I wanted to give people who fall anywhere on the left of the
political spectrum a chance to engage with their history and remember how it
feels to fight, body and soul, for a cause.
The game is based on the Apocalypse World engine, which I love both because it’s so perfectly designed for depicting the dynamics of tightly-knit groups of adventurers and because it’s jaw-droppingly easy to teach. I designed this game for hardcore gamers and novices alike, and the Apocalypse World system is the best I’ve found for welcoming new players to the table.
How
have you altered the AW engine to suit Comrades as a system?
I
tinkered with a lot of different changes to the AW engine, and found during
playtesting that the simpler I kept things, the better the game played. There
are a few basic moves deliberately crafted to evoke the revolutionary
atmosphere of Comrades—”Start Something,” for instance, which gives
players a way to incite a crowd to riot, protest, or strike. Any other changes
I made were designed to make the system easier to teach and understand.
I’ve
also created an optional system for structuring the campaign, Pathways to
Revolution, which allows parties to advance along one or more of five tracks,
each of which represents a different approach to making a revolution. Each
level offers advantages, culminating in an opportunity to seize power in the
method best suited to the group.
What
gave you the idea for Comrades, and what are some steps you’ve taken in design
to make it happen?
I’ve been obsessed with leftist history since I was in high school. The Russian Revoluton, the Spanish Civil War, the guerrilla movements of the ’60s and ’70s… I am fascinated by the way that the ideals of those on the left collide with reality, and the endless tragedies that result when their dreams are destroyed by infighting, cynicism, or simple bad luck. I wanted to make a game that dramatized the infighting and quixotic daring common to revolutionary movements throughout history, and to give players the chance to express their own frustrations with modern politics in a fun, constructive way. Because of its emphasis on the dynamics of tightly-knit groups, the AW engine was a natural fit.
Tell
me more about Pathways to Revolution. It sounds fascinating! What sort of
experiences do players have in these tracks, and what kinds of tracks are
there?
There
are five tracks: Force, Organization, Zealotry, Mayhem, and Fellowship. Each
one correlates to one of the game’s five stats, and each is designed to give
players the opportunity to make a revolution in their own way.
If
the party is interested in forging a legitimate path to power, they may pursue
Organization, which provides logistical bonuses while making the party more
acceptable to the mainstream. At the fifth rank of that Pathway, they can call
for elections and attempt to win power democratically. If they prefer to rely
on the support of the mob, they’ll rise through Zealotry, which eventually
gives them the opportunity to win power via a series of massive, wild
demonstrations. In most campaigns, of course, different factions within each
party will want to pursue different pathways—creating the tensions inherent in
any revolutionary movement.
I
designed these both to reflect the wide variety of real-life revolutions, and
to give players more than one way to “win” the game. Because there
are bloodless ways to gain power, players who choose to pursue a more violent
Pathway—like Force or Mayhem—must reckon with the consequences of that choice.
How have you elected to handle and
frame violence as a part of the game, and what do you feel is important about
that?
Violence is a part of Comrades,
just as it is for nearly every roleplaying game. Because this game takes place
in a more realistic setting than most RPGs, it was intensely important to me
that it be presented in a responsible way. Players are free to do whatever
think necessary to achieve their goals, but the GM is instructed to make this
“a game of consequences, in which violence solves little and no death—even
that of a villain—goes unmourned.”
I believe that all violence is
abhorrent and all life is sacred, and while I think it’s okay to act out
violent situations in gameplay, it has to be done with thought and care. I hope
that the rules I’ve written will empower GM and players to do just that.
Tell me a little about Thousand Arrows. What excites you about it?
Thousand Arrows is a tabletop role-playing game of samurai drama and action during the Japanese Warring States Period (1467-1603 CE). It’s powered by the Apocalypse and inspired by both real-world history and chanbara media like Kurosawa films. I’m excited about this game because it highlights an era in Japanese history which is rarely in focus in the West. Most samurai media that makes its way to the English-speaking world focuses on lone wolves and duelists in the Edo period, the centuries of peace which followed the Warring States Period. Instead, Thousand Arrows gives players the roles of military, religious, and political leaders: samurai generals, Buddhist monks, desperate rebel farmers, and even spirits and sorcerers in which the sixteenth-century Japanese believed. Their decisions decide the actions of vast armies, religious sects, and feudal states. This game has personal narratives and romance and duels, but it’s equally about rewriting history in your character’s own image.
I know you research a lot. Could you tell me about the research you did for this project, including any direct consultation you did? What were the challenging topics to approach here?
I’ve put deeper and broader research into Thousand Arrows than I have into any other project of any kind.
As usual, I read a lot of Japanese primary sources, history books, and religious texts. If you’ve heard about my research processes for Scion 2nd Edition or 7th Sea, you know what I’m talking about. Brennan and I also watched a lot of Kurosawa Akira’s period films, as well as their modern derivatives like Samurai Fiction.
In 2013 I graduated from St John’s College in Santa Fé, New Mexico with a master’s degree in Eastern classics. I learned classical Chinese and read and wrote about a literary tradition that traveled from India through China and into Japan. My undergraduate work focused mostly on African topics, but I had always wanted to study Asian history and religion in more rigorous detail. Reading the Tale of the Heike, the Tale of Genji, and the Pillow Book established the narrative and behavioral conventions underlying the game’s moves. Reading the Buddhist canon inspired Thousand Arrows’s tragic tone and attachment mechanisms. I think an accurate, respectful portrayal of Asia and Asians, whether fantastical or historical, requires understanding where continuities do and don’t exist between different Asian cultures. It makes the difference between cultural exchange and cultural conflation.
In 2006 I took up a Japanese martial art called Bujinkan budō taijutsu, which teaches traditional Japanese battlefield and espionage techniques. The Bujinkan’s oral and written history begins in the tenth century CE and, like most martial arts’ histories, combines historical fact with fanciful myth—both of which influence Thousand Arrows’s historical fiction. Thousand Arrows weapon masters’ special moves come from my own experience with medieval and early modern Japanese arms and armor. The Kuki Spirit and Cloud-Hidden fighting styles, available respectively to characters from the Kuki Clan and the Iga Provincial League, come from the Bujinkan’s curriculum. But rather than presenting specific techniques and movements which would confuse and bore unfamiliar players, Thousand Arrows models fighting styles in terms of the narrative situations in which they offer special advantages. For example, since the Kuki Clan controlled the Kumano Navy, Kuki Spirit stylists get an advantage when fighting on the rocking deck of a ship, making them effective marines and pirates. Thick forest covered the Iga region during the Warring States Period, so Cloud-Hidden stylists from Iga gain a preternatural ability to leap and swing through a forest canopy, making them excellent rangers and scouts.
Cover art by Yoshi Yoshitani.
What are actions like in game, in regards to how they feel and what you can do?
Thousand Arrows characters start the game as feudal Japan’s movers and shakers. Even the actions they take on an interpersonal scale affect the fate of entire religions, states, and armies. This is wartime, and every character has a section of between a dozen and a hundred well-trained soldiers who follow their orders. Characters without personal skill at martial arts or generalship are crucial to the war effort as intelligencers, diplomats, chaplains, and saboteurs.
The action also focuses on interpersonal drama via the attachment system: as you get more invested in a value that drives you or a relationship with another PC, you get better at helping or hindering their actions on or off the battlefield, as well as more vulnerable to losing control of your behavior and giving in to impulses related to that attachment. In keeping with Japanese historical narratives, Thousand Arrows’s social atmosphere is highly emotional and volatile. A few characters, like courtiers, may be polished, calculating, and restrained; but most samurai express themselves through passionate outbursts of torrid emotion, extemporaneous poetry, or sudden and uncontrollable weeping.
What is the character creation process like, to create these complex characters?
Two playbooks make up each Thousand Arrows character: an allegiance (what team you play for) and a role (your position on that team). Allegiances include various samurai clans (the Hōjō, Kuki, Oda, Shimazu, Takeda, Uesugi, and Yagyū), revolutionary leagues (the Single-Minded League and the Iga Provincial League), and belief systems (the Nichiren School of Buddhism, Confucian academy, and Catholic Church); or, if you want to play Thousand Arrows on hard mode, you could be a knight-errant (also known as a rōnin) and not really have an allegiance. Roles include the courtier, retainer, knight, secret agent, foot soldier, warrior monk, shaman, and farmer. PCs in the same game frequently share allegiances, but roles are unique. Both allegiance and role modify your stats and give options for your starting special moves, equipment, and followers.
I’ve found that the process takes about as long as most other Apocalypse Engine games: longer than Monsterhearts, a little longer than Apocalypse World itself, a little shorter than The Sprawl or Masks. I think it’s worth it to help players make characters they feel are their own: a Takeda courtier, a Catholic courtier, and a knight-errant courtier feel very, very different to play. That said, the game comes with eight pre-generated characters in case you prefer to hit the ground running at a one-shot or convention.
What are some of the exciting stretch goals we’ll see from Thousand Arrows?
We’ve already unlocked Jenn Martin’s Fox, a sneaky, sexy, and duplicitous nature spirit who can disguise themself as a human. The Fox is a more traditional playbook, counting as both allegiance and role, and is a good option for players who want to engage with Japan’s wilderness or supernatural landscape. The Corsair, Merchant, and Artisan roles are also coming up. But there are two stretch goals which are larger in scope, and which I’m most excited about.
One is “Dragon King’s Gambit,” a campaign set in winter 1592 CE during the contentious and tragic Japanese invasion of Joseon Korea, then a vassal state of Míng China. During this campaign, the Azure Dragon King of the East Sea attacks with an army of sea monsters, forcing Japanese, Chinese, Mongolian, and Korean combatants to work together against a common enemy. DKG is playable either as a standard campaign, or as a convention game: we’ve run it successfully with three sessions, three tables, three GMs, and fifteen players (five each loyal to the Joseon, the Míng, and the Imperial Regent of Japan).
Another is “Street Samurai versus Code Ninja,” which takes Thousand Arrows to a dystopian future where samurai have traded their warhorses and lamellar in for hoverbikes and power armor, where ninja stalk the shadows of the Internet as well as those in the real world. This setting deconstructs the orientalist and Japanophilic tropes which dominate cyberpunk fiction and gaming from the 1980s and 1990s by modeling the cities of the future on early modern Japanese conventions instead of just appropriating Japanese terms to describe Western concepts and anxieties about a looming Asian economic threat. SSvsCN includes futuristic versions of the standard roles: the Social Engineer, Salaryman, Street Samurai, Code Ninja, Ganger, Cybermonk, Technoshaman, and Gold Farmer. It also features new allegiances to represent major immigrant groups in Japan, such as China, Korea, Brazil, and the Philippines.
I really like the way our stretch goals expand what Thousand Arrows is about and to whom it can appeal, with higher-fantasy and futuristic play. I want this game to bring together players who are usually interested in different things and grant them common ground they didn’t expect to have.
Hey all, today I have an interview with Liam Ginty from Sandy Pug Games about Americana, a tabletop roleplaying game coming out on Kickstarter! It sounds like some fascinating times investigating a tragic murder, so check out the answers below, and give the quick start a look, too!
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Tell me a little about Americana. What excites you about it?
Americana is an idea I’ve had for ages – a retro-fantasy setting. The image of Orcs in letterman jackets, goblins in those awesome Pink Ladies outfits from Grease – it just came to me one day and stuck with me, but I didn’t really have anything to do with it till I made a game called Mirror, which gave me a dice engine to call my own, and suddenly I had something I could build from.
The game itself is about a lot of stuff – being a kid at a time when the idea of teenagers having a time and space of their own was new and strange and pretty scary to everyone, claiming the aesthetics of a time period that’s been off limits to a lot of marginalized people to create a fun, enjoyable and accepting place to play in – but the core gameplay revolves around investigating the death of your best friend while managing your time at school, social events and familial obligations and navigating a town full of weird gangs and magical places that you create during session zero. It’s a really interesting gameplay loop that I don’t think has been explored very much, we took that very teenage experience of trying to figure out when everyone can hang out and made it part of the game in a way that’s really fun.
Besides the aesthetic (which we have a really great team of creative folx bringing it to life, tons of stories, art and even an audio drama we’re planning on making), I’m mainly excited about a mechanic we’re calling Your Dead Friend. Your Dead Friend is the victim of the crime at the center of all of this, and as such, we wanted to make them very important to the game. You actually make a full character for Your Dead Friend, just like you would make a normal PC (player character), and you can tap their skills for assistance with tough challenges – doing this invokes a flashback, where you roleplay out a scene where you learned this skill, or shared a moment with your friend. So throughout play you build this character, and your relationships with them, and playtesters have created some incredible stories from this mechanic, and we’re really really hyped to see what people do with it.
We also have a mechanic called Ties and Connections that is just really cool visually – as you play you put together this conspiracy style board, drawing lines and connections between gangs, locations, characters and Your Dead Friend, slowly putting the mystery together.
How do you handle creating a town with all these exciting elements in Americana?
We focus on the parts of the town that are, or would be, important to teenagers, and break the town down into Hangs, Crews, Risks and Adults. A Hang is somewhere designed for, or co-opted for the purposes of just being. The old water tower, a disused Goblin cave, the field outside of town. We encourage players to make these hangs as magical or as mundane as they like, and they’re modeled much like our characters are – with Strengths, Weaknesses and a Vibe that characters can tussle with or exploit for their own purposes. Of course, what’s a place without a gang to call it home. That’s where the Crews come in.
Crews are cliques, like greasers, preps, mage-kids or jocks. They similarly have a Vibe and a couple of strengths and weaknesses, a catchy name that sums up their whole deal (and probably gets printed on their custom varsity jackets) and a leader. The leader gets a little extra detail so players have a face for that group right from the start. You also give the crew a hang to call home. Maybe the greasers all hangout at “Felicities Garage” or something. Again, we want people to create crews that reflect their own game, so we let people be as mundane or as magical as they like. My favourite crew in playtesting so far was a gang of gothabilly inspired proto-goths, who hung out around an abandoned necromancers tower, reading poe and casting spells.
Risks are the kind of dangerous activities that you and your peers get up to when the adults aren’t watching. Parties, deadly races, and illicit wizard duels in the woods near town. These are events set up by the various crews as a way for everyone to test their mettle against one another, and provides some really cool ways for players to challenge people, get up in a crews business or otherwise make themselves known without having to resort to straight up fisticuffs. Risks have a name, a crew associated with it, and a danger level that tells everyone just how risky this whole activity is. I was a big fan of “Electric Dance Fighting”, one of our first playtests Risks, where crews would have big street dance contests on the arcing lightning from a power line.
Adults are a bit more simple, to reflect the info and perspective of a teenager – they have a name, some strengths and weaknesses, and a position that tells you where they sit in the Adult world.
This is all done during Session Zero, tho we encourage players to add or modify these as needed throughout play, and it’s also done non-sequentially, so you can come up with a crew, go make up a Risk then come back to make up the hang later. You have a variable number of all of these elements depending on the scale of the town you pick. We’ve found this system just pops with awesome ideas when you get a few people around the table, and I wish I could just list off all the examples we’ve heard during playtesting so far. Really makes for some fantastic story elements with clear narrative and mechanical purpose.
A blank Your Dead Friend sheet…maybe you should be the one to fill it in!
I’d love to hear more about the Ties and Connections. How does that work and who gets to influence it?
Ties are how we lay out the various relationships between these crews, their leaders, locations, adults and characters all with the victim. We have a sheet that has the victim in the middle, their stats and so on, and a lot of blank space around them. As players investigate the world they’ve built, they record connections that NPCs, crews and locations have with Your Dead Friend by writing their names on the sheet and drawing these ties between the various factions and Your Dead Friend, which in turn makes it easier to figure out the next place to investigate, the next lead to track down and so on. This evolving document creates an ongoing campaign-length record of leads and dead ends, suspects and mysteries that you spent your game following up on. Here’s a WIP example of one after a couple playtest sessions. The final sheet will look a lil nicer than this, obviously, but it gives you an idea of what an in-progress set of Ties looks like.
Oh, and as for who gets to influence it – like almost everything in Americana, it’s a table-wide mechanic. The Storyteller can declare a tie, the players can confer and make one if they feel it makes sense, or everyone can agree together to make one. One area we really want to build on with Americana is making the dynamic between GM and Player less of a wall. Making the story more of a collaboration between the whole table from start to finish is a part of that.
So what are player characters like in Americana? How do they develop and fit into these towns?
Characters in Americana are all one of 6 Archetypes (what we call Classes) based on high school tropes – The Jock, The Nerd, The Royal, The Outsider, The New Kid and The Artist. They’re all friends of the victim, but not necessarily of each other, and we have a mechanic called The First Clue that’s specifically for bringing everyone together and getting the characters invested in the mystery. One thing we were super aware of when making these archetypes is that some of them are often depicted as cruel, or mean in popular culture – Jocks are bullies, Royals (the popular kids) are often vapid, and we wanted to avoid that at all costs, highlighting instead the positive traits of someone who really loves sports, or is a social butterfly.
These characters are, generally, people who’ve been part of the town most of their lives, and are personally devastated by the death of their best friend, and their character growth tends to come from their collective grief and the various support mechanics we have – working together is vital in Americana. The way the game is designed really forces this Us vs Them sentiment where the player characters are alone in their investigation, and have to rely on each other as much as possible.
Finally, tell me about Your Dead Friend. Where did this plot element idea come from, and how did it grow into a mechanic?
Your Dead Friend came from me watching Brick and realizing the single most important character in that – and almost every murder mystery – is the victim, but they’re so often neglected in RPGs that focus on similar themes. They’re either a plot thread or an inciting event, but never really show up much in the story from there. While doing my research for the game (Watching Riverdale mainly) I noticed how useful it was to have flashbacks where you can expand on that character and make them matter so much more to the audience than if they were just a corpse. It seemed obvious that the victim should sit at the table somehow.
First of all I played with the idea of having a player literally be Your Dead Friend, it’d be another Archetype, but I couldn’t really figure a way to make it work well with the other mechanics and vibe of the game. We played with the idea of having them be a summonable element, a ghost, a bunch of other things, but all of that went by the wayside when we realized how important Assists were for the game. It all kinda came at once at that point, the flashbacks, the assist skills, etc. It allows the character of the victim to grow really naturally through the players inventing that relationship they had from whole cloth and stops them just being a dice pool to draw from.
Hey all! Today I have an interview with Greg Stolze on Reign, which is currently on Kickstarter! I asked Greg some challenging questions about the role of a game like Reign in modern day, which I hope you enjoy reading!
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Tell me a little about Reign. What excites you about it?
REIGN really was kinda my baby. UNKNOWN ARMIES was great, but that was me and Tynes, so REIGN was really the first thing I did that was all Stolze all the time. Also, it’s high fantasy sword ’n’ sorcery, which I love, and which I don’t get to do as much — somehow, between UA and all my WoD work and DELTA GREEN, I sort of got pigeonholed as a horror guy which is… not inapt. But REIGN is close to my heart.
On a less squishy emotional level, I liked the idea that REIGN took events that had always been matters of “Oh, the GM will hand-wave what’s happening on the wide-scope political scale” and bolted them to dice and stats so that the players can have a new arena in which to go nuts and wreak havoc. I remember in old D&D where, if… fighters, I think?… got to a high enough level they got a keep and I really thought that was interesting! But it didn’t give you any options to liberate peasants or go to war against your neighbors or any of the dramatic stuff of governance. I hadn’t played PENDRAGON or BIRTHRIGHT or gotten into the covenant stuff in ARS MAGICA, but maybe that’s just as well. Having not seen the way anyone else handled it, I built it myself from scratch. I just knew I wanted the collective your characters lead to be as important to the game as any individual PC.
And, well, I had this nifty set of rules I’d built for GODLIKE that seemed like they’d work just as well for castles and crossbows as they did for superheroes in WWI, so I built out from that. I think it worked pretty well.
What are some ways has Reign grown and changed between 2007 and today? What is new, what’s been refined?
In those intervening years, I released a LOT of supplements online, after getting them collectively crowdfunded. Sixteen of them, in fact. Rather than burn all that to the ground and rebuild on the foundation, I thought what the game needed more than anything else was (1) better art in the supplements — that’s kind of the dark side of my “one man show” approach, (2) organization so that you can find what you want to use in a tangle fo optional systems and rules tweaks and (3) a nicer print version, since the hardbacks have been unavailable for some time.
It’s not a big reinvention, and the first two books don’t have a lot of new material, because I honestly didn’t think it needed a ton of work. I’m going through and making the language clearer, finding those decades-old typos and homonym errors, but mostly it’s taking this mess of parts and putting them in an order to be more useful. REIGN was written with the expectation that a lot of people would be using it to toolkit their own settings, and that hasn’t changed.
One change, though, is my willingness to let other people play with the toys. One reason I didn’t write anything for UNKNOWN ARMIES for a while was, quite simply, I didn’t have an idea I thought was really top notch, and I didn’t want to write something just to dump it on the market. Partly, that’s a matter of pride, but it’s also a matter of greed. I don’t want to serve lukewarm stuff because I don’t think that’s how you keep an audience. But when I got a bunch of new writers working on UA3, their new perspectives and experiences and approaches really pushed me to keep up. So I’ve gotten a bunch of fresh new voices and salty old wordsmiths to give me their takes for stretch goals.
How do you replicate leadership in Reign? What do players do when they’re leading? What is leading?
OK, these are three very different questions.
Leadership in REIGN is replicated with die rolls, the same way that mighty sorcery and deeds of martial renown are. One of the big pleasures of playing a game (as distinct from running one) is the opportunity to imagine myself as someone with very different skills and behaviors. Someone who’s not shy, for example, or someone who doesn’t get embarrased and uncomfortable with confrontation. Or, y’know, a ninja.
To take the third question second, leading seems, to me, to be a lot of listening to people and understanding them. Good leaders — and I’m thinking certain editors and developers here — inspire a sort of loyalty. You want to give them your best. It’s not just a paycheck. Good leaders draw the best out of you. They see you, not just as the role into which you’ve been thrust, but as the individual adapting to that roll. Good leaders know the strengths and weaknesses of their people, and put them where the strengths are leveraged, and where their weaknesses do the least damage. In real life, I’m a terrible leader. Not the world’s greatest listener, surprisingly dense about people’s feelings sometimes, something of a hermit. But the idea of playing someone who’s listened to and who can organize people into a greater whole… yeah, that’s my fantasy. One of ‘em.
What players do when they’re leading is that sort of organization, understanding and inspiration. Only instead of having to really get through to people with charisma, you can create a character who has that sort of compelling presentation. Your characters can be the kinds of people who make the St. Crispin’s Day speech, even if you yourself are plagued by podium paralysis.
I mean who hasn’t, at some point, fantasized about being listened to and obeyed? That’s the wish-fulfillment REIGN offers.
The special edition covers are really beautiful!
I asked Greg two sets of questions and then I got a collective response: Sixteen supplements is a lot! How do you keep all of these things connected and consistent – the fictional themes, the mechanical structures – when there is so much information? Does that amount of stuff end up paralleling to bookkeeping in game?
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You discuss modularity on the Kickstarter page, basically explaining options for different ways of playing. Tell me more about this! How does it work?
Hah, the answer to these questions is really the same thing… the modularity from the KS is the solution to having the giant pile of supplemental rules and setting material. It’s like when you have a bunch of different LEGO sets, and you build them, and that’s fine, but eventually (if you’re like me) you take them apart and wind up with a giant bin of undifferentiated components. So then you sort them so you can make something new.
In this metaphor, the original supplements are like individual LEGO sets. You can get the sort of… pre-planned experience. The chaotic pile is where the material, as a whole, is now. The organization is what we’re going after with the KS, cross-referencing different stuff so that you can find the thing you were thinking of. Just as importantly, perhaps, we can also help you figure out what to exclude. Not every group needs every rule, so getting that clarified is a pretty high priority.
Why do you think a game about leadership and strategy like Reign has an important place in play in the modern era, during a time that’s so tumultuous for so many people?
Hoooo boy…
OK, I’ll start with something from Lynda Barry — I read her book WHAT IT IS, although it feels more like I should say I “witnessed” or “experienced” it? It’s this deep-dive art book about creativity and her intense personal history with it, and it’s very strong medicine. One thing she touched on was the idea of art as “escapism,” and she said she doesn’t think we create or engage with art in order to escape from reality, but to change our experience of it. She didn’t draw to get away from the sharp edges of her childhood, but to survive them.
So we’re in a tumultuous time and I’m writing a tumultuous elfgame. Am I just a little white ball on a golf tee, waiting for a driver labeled “accusations of frivolity” to come slamming down on me for a power drive? Eh, well maybe. Maybe for some people, playing a game where they’re the powerful bosses can be a distraction from doing the gloomy, necessary, unmeasurable work in the real world. But maybe, for some people, playing that game could let them (or help them) believe that change is possible, that individuals do influence these looming power gangs.
Or, maybe it’s OK to just have fun playing the game.
But our creations are always mirrors of our concerns. If roleplaying isn’t INEXTRICABLY creative, you have to work really hard to do it without any aspect of acting, or authorship, or imaginitive innovation. So your feelings about the villainies of modern politics are just about certain to make their way into REIGN, whether you do it deliberately or not. Maybe that’s also OK. Maybe the satisfaction of decapitating an imaginary evil king is just the catharsis you need to avoid screaming at a co-worker about politics until both of you cry.
I’ve thought a lot about why we engage unpleasant themes, intense stories, fictions of tragedy… After all, now more than any time in history, we can access genuine tragedy all the time. Why horror stories? Why make up more of it? Maybe it’s the relief of knowing that THIS awful thing isn’t real. Or maybe when an issue is painful to handle, putting a layer of fiction around it allows the mind to contemplate it more coolly. Consider the game RED MARKETS — it’s about zombies, but it’s REALLY about poverty. John Carpenter’s movie THE THING is about a gnarly space alien, but it’s REALLY about the dangers of trust and mistrust in a cold and uncaring universe. A lot of media that’s about X is REALLY about Y, and REIGN can certainly do that. This clash between the trade guilds of Uldholm while the Dindavarans sharpen their swords can be about how liberals persecute radicals while white-power revanchists snicker up their sleeves.
I don’t know. Maybe creativity shouldn’t teach lessons, but I think it almost always does. Maybe in an intensely political reality, an intensely political game can offer a framework for disentangling complicated feelings. Or, maybe it just promises some kind of paradoxical relief.
What is Atisi, both as a product and as your vision?
Atisi is a work of love and research — I’ve put a good effort in mixing the various cultures depicted in the book with something a game designer should never forget: playability. The best reference book would be meaningless in a gaming table if the material there is not able to make the players excited about it and eager to play. In other words, I’ve hit the books about sub-Saharan people, sought real life for inspiration, but I’ve also considered what fiction tells about all those, directly and indirectly. So, if one wants a simple answer, Atisi could be compared to Conan in Stygia, but it’s (a lot) more than that.
Consider this point: people in Atisi are not the Caucasian Eurocentric types. This, for once, is a change of paradigm when compared to standard sword & sorcery. The original book (Atisi was published in Portuguese powered by Barbarians of Lemuria system) was even used as a tool for teaching children about ethnics/racial diversity, so I believe I transcended the original goal — I wanted a fun campaign setting to play, but I’ve also got a kind of bridge able to bring people together. So, as a campaign setting for Dungeon World, Atisi is a book that goals beyond describing the world: it gives the Game Master tools to create her own setting, as the multitude of questions (each point of interest on the map — big enough to include lots of blanks to be filled later — has its own set of questions, for example) will help the gaming table make it unique. This means the playbooks, the moves, the magic items, the monsters, the people, and the landscape add together to make this an exquisite sword & sorcery campaign setting. And as Atisi (one of the insular realms of the setting, and focus to this book) is inspired by a fantastic Egypt, you’ll surely find a lot of adventure inside the mysterious pyramids that dot the place.
It’s 280-pages full of wonders for the Game Master and the players, and we have 70% of the basic goal funded already (at the time of writing this). I’m pretty sure we’ll fund this crowdfunding project soon and aim toward the first stretch goal.
I’d love to hear about your research. What are some of the things you’ve researched that you’re really enjoying putting forward in the text? Did anything surprise you?
At first it’s difficult to leave the castles and crusades behind, the knights in shining armor, the dragons… As we are all the fruit of our past experiences — and we are usually surrounded by Medievalish and Eurocentric settings — I had to approach everything with a clean mind. A blank canvas, to be honest. I was already familiar with the writings of Robert Ervin Howard, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Poul Anderson, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Jessica Amanda Salmonson (to name a few), so my sword & sorcery background was sound. What I needed was to focus on the people and their mythology.
What we call mythology, however, is another people’s religion — and I’ve learned a lot about Kemetism (a revival of Ancient Egyptian religion) and African religion (there’s a shamanic vibe in those, but it’s a lot more than that) — and I needed to respect that. This led me to many monsters of legend particular to Sub-Saharan Africa and I’ve tried the best to convey their spirit (even if I used different names).
Learning about the people, the culture, was also delightful. There’s such a vast amount of details that, together, creates a wonderful tapestry. There’s honor. There’s mutual respect. There’s a constant fight for survival. And those reflect today, as those values were never lost.
Yet I’m no Historian. So I grabbed some of my research and talked to some scholars (I dare to call them such, as this makes my writing journey a little more epic, don’t you agree?) to give me a better perspective of everything I was learning at the time: History and Sociology professionals were my best friends during those research phases of my work.
And I’m glad I’ve learned so much. It gave me a better notion of who I am, as I believe we only know about us when we learn about others.
Sample image by Brazilian artist Paloma Diniz.
How do you envision the material you’ve researched and developed will integrate with Dungeon World? How will it work together mechanically?
Not everything was “translated” into rules. After all, Ancient Worlds: Atisi is a game, not a treaty on those cultures. And another important thing: this is a fantasy world, not an exact replica of the reality (albeit real world sometimes is more fantastic than we can conceive at first, there are limits on what is “gameable”). So the heroes, the Player Characters, are larger than life, with abilities that mimic the legends, not the ordinary people (and, as a side note, I need to thank David Guyll and Melissa Fisher for the help in designing the playbooks — they were fantastic people to work with). Monsters of ancient tales are part of the landscape, old stories are forged once again and are transformed in tidbits of the lore of the places of the kingdoms of the land…
This means magical items and monsters, while inspired by Egyptian mythology, have their own tags and moves, becoming familiar to those used to Dungeon World. Even each point of interest becomes an adventure in itself (like a proto-dungeon starter), but none are set on stone as the related questions the GM may ask are able to turn Atisi into a unique setting for each gaming table.
Of course, everything is already written and playtested: I’ve started this crowdfunding campaign with a set goal in mind and the backers are already receiving an “alpha” version of the book, so they can start playing right now, even before the campaign ends. This way, all mechanics are already interwoven with the setting, as one reinforces the other.
I recently found an Instagram account called @vintagerpg, thanks to being tagged in by John. I was immediately enthused by it, excited to see all of the different games showcased there. There’s not a lot of interestingly showcased and easily accessible game material history/curation, and the creator, Stu Horvath, shares a lot of great information about the games shown on Vintage RPG. Stu was willing to answer a few questions of mine – check them out!
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What inspired you to start your Instagram? What makes you excited to post?
My friend Ken (@zombiegentleman on Instagram) prodded me to start @VintageRPG. Over the last couple years, my collection went from respectable to Serious and, coupled with the fact that my brain somehow got packed with RPG history, it just seemed like a no-brainer to find a way to share it. Instagram seemed like the place to do that.
The excitement, that’s changed and evolved a bit over the course of the feed’s (shockingly short) existence. I’ve written about tabletop RPGs in the course of my career, so at the start it was mostly just an extension of that, maybe in the service of some nebulous larger project. A lot of the early entries seem like notes for a book, or something along those lines. Still do, I guess. As the feed drew more and more followers (it blows my mind that so many people are following me – I truly expected a couple hundred folks and for the whole thing to fizzle after a few months), I’d be lying if I said that watching the Likes accrue didn’t give my lizard brain some primitive satisfaction.
I spend a few happy minutes every day rooting for new posts to break my top ten most liked. Lately, though, I’ve been enjoying puzzling out what folks will respond to and it is always a surprise. I run a criticism site called Unwinnable and we long ago closed the comments sections because they were so toxic. The experience with @VintageRPG has been the complete opposite: almost entirely positive, an outpouring of enthusiasm and personal stories. When communication works on social media, its a hell of a drug.
How do you curate the games, and where do you find backup information for them?
Curation is improvisational. A lot of it comes down to my whims – what I feel like photographing and writing about on a given week. A lot of it is context. I try to not do too much of any one thing in consecutive weeks. If I’m bored, I’ll do something from totally left field, like covers of fiction books that inspired games. A lot of it is just plain editorial instinct, too. I try to work four to five weeks ahead to give myself some ability to address what I think my followers want to see. Big name games, like D&D (a mainstay) and some of the big licenses like Star Wars and Middle Earth Roleplaying get a lot of attention and demand a lot of interaction, so I try to cool things down after a big week with more obscure games I am passionately interested in but probably won’t generate a ton of comments, like the modern indie I covered last week.
I’ve been reading, reading about and playing RPGs practically my entire life, so a lot of what I’m writing is stuff I’ve internalized or my critical impressions of art or mechanics or theme or what have you. I have a near complete run of Dragon Magazine that has contributed greatly to my historical knowledge, as has Shannon Applecline’s four-volume history of the industry, Designers & Dungeons. If I’m in a bind, I hit up RPG.net or just reach out to the creator in question – a lot of RPG designers are pretty accessible online these days. If all else fails, I guess – and if I get it wrong, someone who knows better points it out in the comments, which is always pretty great.
What are a few of the coolest things you have discovered while running the account? What’s something that just really blew you away with how unusual or interesting it was?
I am going to answer this two different ways, if you don’t mind.
One of the most surprising things was actually discovered by my pal and DM, @JohnMiserable. We had played through a series of classic modules – Against the Slavers and Against the Giants – and, using Vintage RPG, I publicly guilted him into finishing up the drow modules after a long hiatus. In one session, he noticed something in Bill Willingham’s art for the D&D module D1-2: Descent into the Depths of the Earth and it just blew all our minds.
[The following Instagram embed includes art from the aforementioned module, captioned: OK, check this out – don’t flip to the second image yet. This is an illustration from D1-2 – Descent into the Depths of the Earth by Bill Willingham. I posted it a few weeks back. We’re playing it in a 5E conversion now and our DM, @JohnMiserable, spotted something super cool in there. Can you see it? OK, you can flip to the second image now. Captain America’s shield and Iron Man’s helmet, in a drow chest, decorated with what some might call Spider-Man eyes. What the hell did the drow do to the Avengers?!”]
Second, a few months ago, I scored a copy of something I have been searching for a long time: the 1983 Imperial Toys catalog. I love it because Imperial Toys sold knock-off D&D toys and just, you know, totally ripped off the art for the cover in a way only a Hong Kong toy manufacturer in the 80s could. It is delightful in every singe way. So I love it for that, but I also love it because no else does. Most people probably have no clue this exists or how weird it is. That I was able to find something so disposable as a dime store distribution catalog feels important to me in a way I suspect few people would understand. And that’s OK! That’s why I’m here, doing my thing.
[The following Instagram embed includes images from the 1983 Imperial Toys catalog, including a Pegasus and two-headed dragons, and the caption: “This week, I’m talking about knock-offs. First off: one of the crown jewels of my collection, the 1983 Imperial Toys catalog. I have been looking for this for a very long time and finally scored a near-perfect copy last month. The reason for my desire should be apparent from the cover art, which rips off two things I love in dizzying fashion. First off, don’t those dragons look familiar? That’s because they are crude, modified traces of David C Sutherland III’s art from the Monster Manual. Then there’s the Pegasus/Centurion that seems to want to capitalize on Clash of the Titans. The toy line was called Dragons & Daggers. It was a blatant attempt to capitalize on the popularity of LJN’s Dungeons & Dragons toys (right down to the sliding puzzles), aimed at the five & dime market. I got the two-headed dragon at my local Ben Franklin (which I just learned was a chain!). Later additions to the line were a variety of cool riding beasts made in for the scale of Battle Cat and Panthor from the He-Man line. Catalogs like this (and maybe catalogs in general) feel special to me. By their nature, they are disposable, so there can’t be that many of them still in circulation, especially in the case of distro catalogs like this that were aimed toward business owners. I suspect not a lot of collectors know about the odd little corner of D&D history this occupies, and likely even fewer care. It is special in another way. The other toys and junk in the catalog are an amazing trip down memory lane. I have zero nostalgia for this stuff and would never have remembered them if not for seeing them here, but I appreciate the chance the catalog affords me to catch a glimpse of those long gone five & dime shelves.”]
This is so damn pretty regardless of anything else. Dang. By Shen Fei.
Tell me a little about 7th Sea: Khitai. What excites you about it?
The Khitai setting expands 7th Sea’s 17th-century swashbuckling fantasy to Asian, Oceanian, and Pacific settings. I’m excited to represent times, places, and legends close to my heart and my real-life ancestry, many of which have never appeared before in tabletop role-play. Khitai also ups the scale of the game’s heroism: one Hero can lead an outlaw gang in the marshes of Shenzhou, a slave revolt on the peninsula of Han, a pirate fleet in the islands of Tawalisi, or a samurai clan governing a warring state in Fuso. We get to stretch the boundaries of what a Hero looks like and how they can change the world.
I know in previousinterviews we’ve spoken about your academic and personal expertise, but I’m curious what new you may have studied, played, or what kind of media you looked at to work on Khitai. What were some specific things you enjoyed reviewing as you’ve worked on the project? Tell me how they’re reflected, at least a little, in the game.
Khitai has brought a great deal of new media into my life. Here are a few inspirations that really stand out.
The Water Margin Classic, also known as Outlaws of the Marsh, is probably the single most significant influence on Asian swashbuckling adventure in general, and my vision of Khitai in particular. It’s one of Chinese literature’s Four Great Classical Novels alongside the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, and Dream of the Red Chamber. It’s about 108 martial heroes whose … eventful … lives drive them to join a bandit gang in the Chinese swamps, where they make trouble, rebel against the unjust government, and then ascend to positions of responsibility and authority in a new government.
I based indigenous Fusoese religion on The Song the Owl God Sang, a book of folk songs and stories compiled by a young woman of indigenous Japanese ancestry who mysteriously and tragically died hours after she completed it. Fusoese Kamuyru will reflect the sometimes-playful, sometimes-deadly kamuy who rule the land, animals, and humans’ relationships with the foregoing in Ainu thought.
To research Han, I started watching a K-drama called Slave Hunter because it’s set in seventeenth-century Joseon Korea, where somewhere from 10% to 33% of the population were slaves or serfs of some kind. I think I might have gotten more than I bargained for, because it’s sexy swashbuckling pseudo-historical nonsense in exactly the same genre as 7th Sea. I highly recommend it. Things I have learned so far about historical Korea:
only NPCs wear shirts
disguising yourself as a member of a completely different social class is trivially easy
all combat involves super jumps and/or backflips
hip hop is the most traditional Korean musical genre
the more complicated someone’s hat, the more likely they are to be evil.
Han sourcebook cover!By Shen Fei.
[Brie’s Note: As someone who is a big fan of some major K-pop/Korean hip-hop style bands, this amused me a lot actually.]
What are some challenging aspects of creating adventuring type games that travel over sea and in non-Western/Western-assumed settings, in regards to fictionally aiming it towards players and gathering interest?
Tropes define a great deal of Western popular media’s relationship with Asian material. Navigating and integrating those tropes into new stuff is tough because so many people have such different assumptions and feelings attached to those tropes. Let’s look at martial arts as an example. If we’re telling a swashbuckling story about Asia, we should of course include martial arts action. But gamers have different priorities about these topics: some players get really excited about fidelity to their understanding of realistic combat, others want to do unrealistic things on purpose, and many gamers are just tired of martial arts storylines because all too often, that’s all there is when it comes to Asian content.
Still, Asians developing and excelling at martial arts has a strong basis in both military history and fiction, with characters like Preceptor Droṇa from the Indian epic Mahābhārata or places like the Shàolín Monastery. So we’re going to feature both realistic and unrealistic (but still well-sourced) martial arts action in Khitai; but what we can’t do is perpetuate the stereotype that martial arts are either a) peculiar to Asia and Khitai and not other continents, or b) assumed to be known by every individual Asian or Khitan you meet. Nearly every culture in history (and every culture in 7th Sea without exception) has practiced martial arts; fewer, but still many, have traditions of martial fiction as robust as China’s. Martial arts figure prominently in The Three Musketeers, Things Fall Apart, and The Summer Prince. America’s 52 hand blocks and Nigeria’s dambe are no less effective boxing systems than wing chun or karate. It’s okay for tropes (though not stereotypes) to inform and expand our storytelling. It’s not okay for them to limit us.
Naoko, a young Hero whose home was destroyed by bandits. By Charlie Creber.
What are heroes like in Khitai?
They’re complicated! To answer that question I want to revisit the Water Margin Classic’s 108 Stars of Destiny, the rebellious outlaws of Liángshān Marsh, because they represent a lot of the internal contradictions I hope to see in Khitan storytelling. They prize honor and loyalty, but they spend most of the story getting drunk and committing crimes for reasons ranging from revenge to boredom. They rebel against the corrupt government, but wind up in positions of authority in that government. This theme comes back again and again in Asian heroic literature: very often the individual who winds up with the job of “hero” isn’t very good at their job, and the one who winds up with the job of “villain” seems way better in comparison.
Similarly, the arch-villain of the Mahābhārata, Prince Duryodhana, is a pretty bad guy; but his best friend, King Karṇa of Anga, is the most badass, loyal, and honorable warrior in the entire epic—he just winds up on the wrong side because he’s of mixed-caste parentage, and only Duryodhana is willing to look past it. In the final Battle of Kurukshetra, Karṇa’s chariot wheel gets stuck in a rut and he gets out to fix it, reminding the hero Prince Arjuna that attacking him while he’s coping with technical difficulties would violate the laws of honorable warfare. But Arjuna’s charioteer, Lord Kṛṣṇa—who is an avatar of Viṣṇu!—tells Arjuna to shoot Karṇa now because Karṇa’s harder than Arjuna and it’s the only way they’ll ever beat him. So the shining hero shoots the villain in the back, his head goes flying, and that’s how you win a land war in Asia. These are the kinds of problems the players will have to sort out. Or cause.
Agnivarsa sourcebook cover. Such drama! By Cassandre Bolan.
What has been your favorite part of working on Khitai, in any aspect of the project?
The most exciting part of this project has been watching the creative team and the players—myself included—go from knowing nothing whatsoever about certain places and times in history to champing at the bit to play characters from there. John Wick has gone from doubting we could do Korea justice to posting excited links about Admiral I Sunsin on Facebook. I never knew about the Sultanate of Sulu and the Moro pirates until I started reading about them for background on the Kiwa Islands, and now I’m plotting what might be my first ever Renaissance faire costume. A little while ago, a fan posted a sea shanty she’d composed herself with reference to Théans sailing to Nagaja and seeing the elephants there. I get to watch 7th Sea‘s world grow larger and more colorful one player at a time.
