Hi all, today I have an interview with Craig Campbell on Die Laughing, which is on Kickstarter right now! I hope you all enjoy reading what Craig has to say about this cinematic horror-comedy game in the responses below!
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Tell me a little about Die Laughing. What excites you about it?
Die Laughing is a short-play, GM-less RPG. Players portray characters in a horror-comedy movie and everyone’s going to die. It’s just a matter of when it happens and how funny you can make it. After your character is gone, you become a producer on the movie and continue to influence the story and the characters right up until the end.
I’m really stoked that Die Laughing finally came together. One of the problems with horror games where characters actually die, as opposed to “thriller/mood” type games, is, “what do I do after my character dies?” You can make a new character, play an NPC. What else? I’ve been working on this game off and on for over a decade. Every couple years I’d come back to the idea and try something different. Hitting on the “making a movie” angle finally made it gel for me. It came together pretty quickly over the past year or so, kind of in the background while working on other games. It’s a game that embodies horror and embraces that type of game experience, but with comedic elements and the “making a movie” idea to keep it from getting too heavy.
What were the inspirations for Die Laughing and how is the game the most similar and dissimilar to familiar materials?
I’m a big horror movie buff. This most recent iteration of the game, I hit on the idea of the game being about making a movie specifically, rather than just generally a horror story. That introduced a “director” role into gameplay and also a “producer” role that players could take on after their characters are dead. Making it a horror-comedy opened up the idea that it’s OKAY for your character to die…in fact, it’s kind of the point of the game. Your character is going to die and you’re going to make it funny and then you’re going to do this other cool thing for the rest of the game.
It’s sort of a hybrid of a traditional RPG and a story game like Fiasco. You have a character sheet with four traits and a few cool capabilities that sort of bend the rules. But there’s no GM. Instead, there’s an act/scene structure that generates random scenes that everyone roleplays to move the story forward. But these are just prompts. The “director” of each scene helps set the stage, but the players with characters in that scene propel everything. A dice mechanic resolves general success/failure of your character in the scene, rather than for every action. The game has a little bit of this and that from a lot of horror RPGs and a LOT of horror movies, all kind of bent and twisted with some humor.
How does Die Laughing work mechanically?
During each scene in Die Laughing, one of the characters is the lead character (and that changes from scene to scene). That character’s player decides who will be in the scene with their character. One of the players portrays the director, setting their character aside temporarily to help set up and guide the scene (that also changes from scene to scene). Everyone in the scene plays the scene out. Sometimes the monster attacks during the scene. Sometimes it doesn’t.
At the end of each scene, everyone with a character in the scene makes a trait check by rolling their dice pool to determine whether their character succeeds in the scene or not. Then everyone narrates that success or failure for their character, thus pushing the story forward. As the game goes along, your dice pool decreases based on the results of those trait checks. This decrease is a countdown to your character’s death. When you run out of dice, your character dies and you narrate their death.
In addition to the director and producer stuff, there’s a unique rule for each monster that influences your involvement in the game after your character is gone.
What kind of horrors do the players encounter in Die Laughing? How do you ensure players are having a good time and not encountering subject matter that makes them feel alienated or afraid in a not-fun way?
The narrative, relatively open nature of the game allows the players to basically take it as far as they want. The monster is defined for the game you’re playing, but that’s not to say there couldn’t be multiple monsters or that the monsters could mutate or…well, whatever you want. I’ve played games where the violence was cartoony. I’ve played games where there were gory descriptions of things.
That said, any game — horror games in particular — can go too far. That is addressed in the book, encouraging players to be clear in what they expect from the game. The simple version is presented as a “movie rating system.” Everyone agrees the game will be PG, PG-13, or R-rated and plays appropriately. The book also points out some common sense…if you even remotely THINK that a particular subject would make ANYONE uncomfortable or hurt them, just don’t do it. Finally, the book points out there are a variety of other safety tools, such as the X-card, and information on those can be found easily online. Pick the one that is most fitting to your group.
You mention special rules for monsters post-kicking-it. When you die, what happens?
This is a little “extra” that gives players whose characters are gone something to do. It varies from monster to monster. For example, with the Mad Slasher with Weird Weapons, when your character is dead, you get to describe the moment when your character’s corpse is found at an inopportune time, like you see in so many slasher movies when everything hits the fan at the end. There’s a trait check that happens there that can weaken the character finding the body. With the Sexy Vampire, your character doesn’t die, but rather gets turned into a sexy vampire. And you can insert them as an NPC into scenes throughout the rest of the game.
Content Warning for discussion of memory loss, especially near the end of the interview. —
Tell me a little about Thousand Year Old Vampire. What excites you about it?
Well, first let me say that I don’t often get excited about things I make. I get nervous, nauseous, pent up. I used to joke about the “sweat test”; if I wasn’t sweating when I showed something to someone I wasn’t sufficiently invested in the project or the showing. This came out of the time when I was showing art in galleries, and it has something to do with the way I made and thought about art at the time. It still applies to a lot of games I make, but in a different way–the games I make are personal, or visceral, or difficult in ways that my art never was. Now I sweat because I’m making a machine that people play with, and if the manual for that machine is unclear people will break it or maybe even get hurt. There’s not a lot of room for excitement in any of this.
But I’m excited about Thousand Year Old Vampire in a way that leaves me quietly alarmed at myself. I’ve worked on this game differently than other games, with the biggest difference being that a reaching back to my old studio process. When I made a thing in the studio it was a quick, fraught process during which I could ingest or enjoy or experience the thing I was making it as it was made; the actual “artwork” was a shell left behind after this work was done. Game making is different in that you need people or systems to test things; there’s a space of time between the making and the experiencing of it. Because TYOV is a solo game it’s making was a self-contained process, I wrote and played and wrote and played in a closed system. It was fast and amazing and it’s how I want to be.
And it produced a game I am excited for and proud of. I’ve played this game so many times, and the prompts consistently produce a different experience with every go. And at least once during each game something happens that makes my innards churn, something unexpected and awful and it’s like I’m not controlling a character but being betrayed by one. I’m not a “let me tell you about my character” kind of person, but TYOV has gotten me excited enough to write game summaries on the Facebooks.
This is the journal in the PDF, which is gorgeous.
What is the motivation for a single-player game like this? As someone who loves lonely games and making them, I must ask: why is this game good alone?
I love your phrasing of “lonely games”! It’s perfect. For me, there were a couple of reasons to make a solo game. Maybe more than a couple.
Solo games are a weird design space. I have a print out of A Real Game by Aura Belle that I’ve been sitting on for a year, I’m so excited about it I can’t bear to play it. Every game I make is about communication and bodies in space; a framework for people pushing at each other to find play. Other players change the game space for each other with a constant barrage of gentle tugs which keep each other engaged and off-center—this is awesome and good but what if we didn’t do that?
A non-social game is tricksy and strange. How can you operate in the “story game” space and not have it be a choose your own adventure book? The game prompts in Thousand Year Old Vampire make you look inward for responses, you are building something between you and the machine of the game without any other conscious actors in the room. There’s no “yes and” here, oh mortal. And without other people in the room watching I can do things that I might not do otherwise when I ask questions and give horrific answers.
And the solo play echoes the subject of the game itself. You play a vampire who sees everything they love turn to dust. Your character is alone, you are alone, the two states echo each other. One play option is to keep a diary as you play. Journaling is a usually a thing you do alone. One of my objectives as a designer is to have the system and the setting inextricably bound together, so solo play works.
That said, I don’t see any reason that a person can’t play it with others. Why not share a pool of Characters and let the prompt reactions affect the world that the players occupy? The system is simple enough that players can do this if they want, and I’m sure some will—there’s been a remarkable amount of pushback over the idea of a solo game being a thing at all.
And practically speaking: I’m a lonely guy. Making a game I can play and iterate on my own is helpful. It echoes the prevalence of solo rules in wargame design—I’m the kind of person that can’t get people together to play things, so I’ll make the sort of things I can enjoy on my own.
Finally: I had a conversation with Jackson Tegu, who has a solo experience called I Was Once Like You, that helped me think about the solo play-ness of TYOV. In the friendly discussion-like thing we were doing I came up with “Petit Guignol” as a term that I thought fit TYOV. It literally means “tiny puppet” in French and has a direct connection to the “Grand Guignol” which was a style of bloody, horrifying, naturalist theater developed in the 1890s. As I play TYOV I sometimes play with scale in my mind, imagining the scenes happen in the space between my arms as I update the character sheet on a keyboard. It’s a play space I don’t think I can imagine with other people in the room, it’s tiny and close and personal. Anyways, there’s that.
Tell me about the design process. The way you handle moving through the prompts is simple but clever, and you have these memories and experiences that are created. How did you develop these aspects of the game?
My design process is a sham. I stare into space until my unconscious gets bored and gives me something that I can think about, and then maybe that becomes a game, or a joke, or an artwork. My games are not the product of rigorous engagement with discourse, they are random stuff that vaguely imitates a category of thing which I understand exists in the world. These are the “Sunday painter” equivalent of game design, if that Sunday painter just really liked wearing smocks and berets but never bothered to go to a museum.
I don’t design these games so much as find them laying around my brain-house. I pick them up and wipe the muck off, maybe paint them a different color to assuage a conscience that demands at least a semblance of effort, then I scribble my name on them and puff up with self-satisfaction.
But a serious aside: I don’t read a lot of games, and I do this on purpose. I’m more likely to solve a problem in a useful way if I’m not clouded up with other people’s solutions for similar issues. This is a good methodology unless you’re building bridges or stuff where people can die. This builds on my greatest strength, which is that I’m pretty dumb.
Occasionally these magical brain-gift games might need some rough corners polished up. With TYOV I had to figure out a way to progress through the prompt sequence so as to maximize replayability. (You, dear reader, haven’t played this game, so super quick summary: You roll some dice and slowly advance along a list of prompts which you answer about how your vampire continues its existence. If you land on the same prompt number more than once, there are second and third tier prompts you encounter. The game ends when you reach the end of the list.) By using a d6 subtracted from a d10, it created the possibility of skipping entries, of going backwards, and of landing on the same entry number more than once. This meant that rare and super rare results could easily be baked into the chart structure—you have the same chance of landing on any given number as you progress through the prompts, but there are diminished chances of landing on a number twice and getting the second-tier prompt. Landing on a number a third time usually happens once per game, and those rare third-tier prompts can be world-changing.
The tiered prompt system naturally evolved into a mini-story arc system. I can make the player introduce a self-contained Character or situation with a first-tier prompt, and in the second-tier prompt them interact with what they created in a new way. It’s perfectly fine if they never hit that second tier prompt, they won’t for most entries, but if they do it will naturally make a little story. It’s so satisfying and it’s all part of the same system, no additional rules are needed to support it.
One aspect of TYOV I’ve been thinking hard about is player safety. What are appropriate safety tools for solo play? What tools allow us to think terrible, soul souring thoughts but then put them behind us? I’m a fan of X-card-like thinking, and was around Portland while Jay Sylvano and Tayler Stokes were working on their own support signals systems. Stokes later developed the affirmative consent-based support flower, and is giving me guidance on my solo safety thinking.
One of my imperatives as a designer is getting rid of non-vital things. This is practical because additional complexity usually makes a game less fluid and harder to learn. If I can get by with three rules that’s great, but if I’m going to have eight then I might as well have a hundred. Not that there’s much wrong with games that have a hundred rules, I like those too. I’ve recently been converted to Combat Commander, of all things.
Something I threw out of TYOV are rules about tracking time. At one point I had a system in place for tracking the date. I mean, if the game is called Thousand Year Old Vampire then you want to know when a thousand years go by, right? But there was no benefit to tracking the actual year, it was easier to allow the player to just let the passage of time be loosely tracked in their answers to the prompts. Maybe an arc of prompts happens over a year in your head, maybe a whole generation goes by—the game works regardless. The only rule about time is “every once in a while strike out mortal Characters who have probably died of old age.”
Finally, I should acknowledge the importance of Burning Wheel and Freemarket to Thousand Year Old Vampire. Writing good Beliefs in Burning Wheel is a skill, and the idea of tying character goals mechanically to the game was mind-blowing. Freemarket has Belief-like-ish Memories, which are something that have game mechanical effects AND can be manipulated as part of play. Both of these mechanics had outsized influence on the way I thought about Memories in TYOV.
Memories in TYOV are everything that your vampire is. You have a limited number of Memories, and every Memory is made up of a limited number of Experiences. Every Prompt you encounter generates a new Experience which is tagged onto the end of a new Memory. Eventually you run out of space for Memories, so you older Memories to a Diary. You can and will lose our Diary, along with all the Memories in it, and it’s awful. But the Diary is just a stopgap anyways, as you are forced to forget things to make room for new Experiences.
Eventually you have an ancient, creaky vampire who doesn’t remember that he was once a Roman emperor, or that they used to live on a glacier, or that he fell in love two hundred years ago. But they at least know how to use a computer and are wrestling with the fact that the hook-up site they used to find victims was just shut down and how will they eat now? This design goal was crystallized when I read “The Vampire” by Ben Passmore in Now 3 put out by Fantagraphic Books. It’s a heartbreaking, sad story in which you see the vampire as a deprotagonized system of habits. It’s great.
What has the development of this game been like, from original inspiration to the speed of production?
This game flowed out quickly and mostly easily. My pal Jessie Rainbow I were playtesting and iterating the game over weeks instead of months. The game is built from a story games mindset and there aren’t any ridiculously novel mechanics that need to be explained; I hand the rules over to a playtester and they understand them immediately and the game works.
The game works and a year of refinement to get it five percent better isn’t worth it. It’s done, and like an artwork it might be slightly flawed but that’s part of the thing itself. I don’t necessarily want an extruded, sanitized perfect thing; instead I have, like an artwork, a piece that becomes a record of it’s own making. If I work on this game another year it won’t get better, it’ll just get different—2019 Tim will have different priorities than I do right now and all that’s going to happen is that TYOV will torque around to reflect that. I might as well let 2018 Tim have his moment and give 2019 Tim new things to worry over.
In regards to the themes of mortality and memory, as well as with aspects of queerness in some of the prompts, how do you relate to TYOV? How is it meaningful to you?
This is hard to talk about. I think I need to break this question down into three very separate categories: My understanding of evil, personas shifting over time, and a vampire-shaped momento mori.
The game is twined up in my own ideas of person-scaled evil which is based on my experience of social predators, thoughtlessly selfish idiots, and rich people exerting power over others. This evil is written into the “Why did you do that awful thing you did?” type prompts, which assign an evil deed which must be justified. There’s an important subtext in the game which I never say out loud: As the vampire is writing in their diary are they telling the truth? But the evil is about the wickedness that people do to each other, and this is my chance to pick out a version of it that I seldom see represented.
Completely unrelated to the themes around evil are the ideas of shifting identities. Over the centuries the vampire will be reinventing themselves so they can fit in with the societies shifting around them. As a cishet white guy I’m outside of the dialogues that happen around LGBTQA+ folks, but I see folks change over time and it’s exciting. A related prompt might draw attention to ingrained societal mores that can now be abandoned because the culture of your mortal years is centuries dead. I can gently make a space for this even if I don’t have that experience, with the understanding that my understanding isn’t necessarily another’s understanding of the space that needs to be made. Like I said before, this becomes a portrait of 2018 Tim thinking through difficult issues using creative work—this isn’t Truth with a capital T.
The shifting personas of the vampire are probably the most personally resonant aspect of the game for me. I have some pretty distinct phases in my life where I was having to be markedly different people. In NYC I used to exhibit art with a gallery owned by the son of billionaires. I’d get taken to a dinner that might cost more than I made in a week then go back to my home which had holes in the floor which I could see my neighbors through. I remember hanging drywall in the morning and meeting a Rockefeller descendant later that night; he got noticeably upset that I had a scratch on the back of my hand then shut me out when I said it happened “at work.” I learned that I had to keep these worlds very, very separate. And it went both ways, I found myself being reminded of the experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas telling a story about how no one in his Brooklyn neighborhood believed him when he told them he was teaching at NYU.
Now I’m a guy with a kid living in a suburban neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. I’m not the same person that I was five years ago in New York. I can’t be the same person, that guy couldn’t live this life.
Which leads me to my final bit: I did things that sound wonderful and which I can’t remember, I apparently did things that are terrible which I am glad I forgot. These moments are lost until someone else remembers them for me or I happen upon some chance evidence. My memory is going, and it’s awful—there’s a much more exciting version of me which is being forgotten. I can see my brain failing in other ways; sometimes I leave out a word when I’m writing now. I bet I did it within the text of this interview.
This loss of skill, of memory, of personality are reflected in the way the game has you lose or edit memories. Eventually I’ll die and be forgotten in turn, but at least I’ll have this self-reflection on mortality outlive me for a bit.
Hi all! Today I have an interview with John Scott Tynes on Delta Green: The Labyrinth, which is currently on Kickstarter! I pushed John on a few things I’m curious about with the game so I’m excited to share the answers below!
Notes: Mental illness and its handling in horror and cosmic horror media, including Lovecraft, is discussed in this article, as well as the general topic of inclusivity in this type of horror media. Also, John uses the term “savages” in quotation marks in this, referring to the stereotype of “savage” people in historical media. This use does not intend to validate any racist perspective, but is used in context of the fiction being discussed. —
Tell me a little about Delta Green: The Labyrinth. What excites you about it?
I love building new worlds and new mythologies. When we took twenty years of Delta Green sourcebooks and fiction and brought them all forward into the present with Delta Green: The RPG, we wrapped up and killed off nearly all of our old enemies. Villainous groups like the Fate, the Karotechia, and Majestic-12 really defined the classic era of Delta Green, but it was time to wipe the slate clean and start fresh. The Labyrinth is where I’m rolling out a whole new set of enemies that will define a lot of Delta Green campaigns for the next decade, and that’s incredibly exciting.
The new enemies I’m designing aren’t just targets in a shooting gallery. They’re in it for the long haul and they have their own story arcs to work through as your campaign continues. Each group has three specific stages of growth or change they go through in response to the actions of Delta Green.
Just as an example, and I’m going to avoid spoilers here by not using any names, there is a nefarious group I’ve designed who on the surface don’t seem too terrible. They have horrible origins, and long term they’re a huge problem for humanity, but they’re not trying to blow up the White House or whatever. Yet as Delta Green begins to tangle with them, the group reacts. First they start securing everything they’re doing to avoid detection. Then they start hiring muscle to defend themselves and even proactively try to assassinate the Agents. Finally, if Delta Green is still hitting them around the world, they launch a crash program to train large numbers of their members as sorcerers and dramatically escalate their supernatural power.
In other words: because Delta Green attacked them, they actually become more villainous and more powerful than if they’d been left alone. But if you leave them alone, then long term they’re a huge problem for humanity.
That’s the approach I’m taking as a game designer. When the players try to solve these problems, they will generally make the problems worse before they can make them better. I think that’s a much more interesting and dynamic way to think of enemy organizations and one that really lends itself to campaign play. It also ties directly into some of DG:RPG’s key mechanics, where the more time you spend as an Agent, the more your own connections to life, family, and home corrode and fall away.
And the book isn’t just enemies. I’m also designing a bunch of groups who can be allies. But as with the enemies, the allies also go through three stages the more they interact with the Agents. So a character who starts out really helpful may eventually turn on you, or let their life fall apart because they buy into your crusade, or they may endanger themselves and others because you haven’t actually told them the truth about the dangers they’re facing. Over time, you’ll see these allies rise, suffer, and fall — or even become your worst enemies.
And finally, I’m excited that The Labyrinth is all about America. Delta Green has always resonated with the mythic American themes of sheriff and outlaw, the civilized East and the wild West, and the power of the government versus the freedom of the individual. But today we’re seeing more schisms, more oppression, more prejudice in this country than I’ve seen in my lifetime. It feels like we’re tearing at the seams. And it’s those conflicts and those tensions that are driving my thinking with this book. I want to capture what this country feels like in 2018 and transmute it into inspiration for a new generation of tabletop storytellers to shape in their own directions.
When you talk about capturing this country in 2018, how are you approaching that? The US in 2018 is volatile, and hard for a lot of people. Fundamentally, Delta Green is in the horror genre. That means that for any avenue I explore, I end up looking for a particularly horrific version of it. That doesn’t always mean monsters and cultists, however. In some cases it’s the horror of a good person who starts falling apart. In other cases it’s a completely non-supernatural situation that is nonetheless genuinely awful.
Horror is by its nature triggering. What I work to avoid is being exploitative. As much as I love the horror genre in principle, in practice I have little interest in most horror media. So much of it repeats the same tropes over and over and often in ways that feel deliberately, even leeringly exploitative. There’s a thread of horror creators who seem to take joy in the depiction of suffering or degradation, who cross a line between shining a light on the dark corners versus snuffing out that light to entrap and even victimize the audience.
I’m writing some horrific material, but I really work to come at it from a perspective of humanity. I want the reader to be not simply triggered, but moved. Fear is a powerful emotion, but at the end of the day I can do a better job of scaring you if you’re emotionally engaged by what you’re experiencing.
As for America in 2018: the news regularly outdoes my best efforts as a horror writer. I could never outdo the wretched things humans actually do to each other every day. What I want to accomplish with this book is to take some of those situations and agendas and put them into a fictional framework that challenges the players. I want to give them hard problems, even human problems, and see how they respond. I want them to question the society they live in and even the narrative structure they’re playing in: because as much as Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos is presented as corrosive to those who encounter it, the same can very much be said for Delta Green itself. As a creator, my own creation has things to answer for.
What themes are you engaging with, and how are you addressing your own potential blind spots?
My work is largely intuitive rather than planned. I get the kernel of an idea, I start drafting, and I usually can see just far enough ahead to steer in the right direction. This means themes tend to emerge organically. To some degree I learn what I was writing about in the rear-view mirror and then it’s in the revision process that I flesh out what has emerged and shape it into coherency.
At this point in the project I’d say that an emerging theme is embodied in the ancient Roman question, “Who benefits?” When you look at any conflict in American society and study the actors involved, that question can illuminate their motivations. Who benefits when women are bullied? Who benefits when the right to vote is eroded? Who benefits when nascent social norms are opposed and rolled back?
The question of blind spots is a good one. I’m a middle-aged cis male caucasian and I surely have them. Life experience is part of the answer. I have made my own journey — bumpy at times — into greater understanding and awareness of how multifaceted humanity is and that happened because of many different people and moments in my life.
When I create characters for this book, I take time to think about each one: where they’re from, their family’s culture, their perceived race and gender. I’m not trying to tick boxes on a checklist but when the fictional context coincides with a particular character trait and some kind of frisson occurs, I go with it.
In college I got my degree in journalism and my first step with nearly any idea is simple: do the research. For my 1999 novel Delta Green: The Rules of Engagement I interviewed several people including a staffer at the Ft. Leavenworth military prison and a random guy I found online who’d recently taken a vacation to Vieques Island. I think the most fundamental trait any writer needs is curiosity. The more you want to know about the world, the richer and more diverse your writing can be and the likelier you are to fill in your own blind spots. And we live in a golden age for satisfying our curiosity.
In the current chapter, I have a female character whose parents moved here from India before she was born. I wanted her to grow up in a mid-sized American city and Tulsa, Oklahoma, came to mind. So then I wondered what life was like for Indian immigrants there and an internet search led me to the India Association of Greater Tulsa. My conception for her character blossomed the more I learned and curiosity is what drove me.
In what ways do the enemies and allies in The Labyrinth differ from earlier Delta Green work, narratively and in inspiration?
Delta Green’s original antagonists were great but also fairly straightforward. I mean we literally had Nazis you could go punch! Plus sinister government conspirators and evil occultists, all straight out of the villain playbook. We did great things with them and we brought a lot of historical context and creative juxtaposition to the table, but that was twenty years ago.
When I look at the world now, I have to see the Cthulhu Mythos not as an end but as a means. Why would someone start worshipping a tentacle god? “Because they went insane!” is just not a good enough answer for me anymore. Everyone wants something — who benefits? — so when I look at the supernatural in Delta Green I ask how people would exploit it, not just worship it.
Even so, those kinds of rational motivations only help you understand how people start exploiting the Mythos; on a long enough timeline, they really do go insane and howl at the moon because that’s Lovecraft’s universe. But these days I’m much more interested in that early phase, when they have one foot in the unnatural and one foot in the mundane and you can still see the terrified human behind the mask of insanity as the door of reason closes on them forever.
The concept of insanity is one I often get curious about with games, as a person with bipolar disorder and PTSD, both of which often get made into a mockery. How do you write about these kinds of cosmic “insanities” – minds overwhelmed by some supernatural force – without sounding hackneyed, and without repeating previous work you’ve done for the game?
Unlike a novel, in game writing we mostly deal with externalities. We don’t typically get into inner monologues or thoughts or even much dialogue, so the usual ways writers depict mental issues in fiction don’t come up. Instead we rely on actions, agendas, and backstory to communicate character and that is where, in Lovecraftian gaming, we express our ideas about the mental states caused by exposure to the supernatural.
Fundamentally, the mental issues Lovecraft described were what “normal people” experience when their rational minds encounter the supernatural and experience an existential crisis that challenges their religious faith, their sense of the natural order, their belief in humanity’s primacy, and their logic and reason. At the climax of “The Rats in the Walls,” for example, the narrator’s discovery of his family’s ancestral secrets causes him to regress to a wild, primitive, and cannibalistic state.
But it’s noteworthy that Lovecraft does not necessarily treat his cultists this way. Wilbur Whateley in “The Dunwich Horror,” for example, is a half-human child of an Outer God and a human cultist mother, but he has no serious problems checking out library books or navigating human society. Herbert West, while not exactly a cultist, is a classical mad scientist but is fully functional and even rational in his extreme experiments. The unnamed cultists around the world in “Call of Cthulhu” are presented as typical “savages” — dancing around bonfires, conducting sacrifices, that sort of thing — and are probably the closest to the RPG’s conception of madness in this sense. But I believe their behavior is presented more as a cultural phenomenon, the result of their secluded upbringing and indoctrination, rather than madness per se.
I think where Lovecraft was coming from was that ordinary people who experience this kind of crisis may break down, but those who have accepted the truth of reality can live their lives even if they’re unusual ones. The Whateleys are doing just fine. And even some ordinary people, such as Doctor Armitage, can challenge the supernatural and emerge intact through force of will.
When Chaosium first created the Call of Cthulhu RPG, they took Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu makes you crazy” idea and applied fifty years of psychology to present a diverse array of game-able mental problems that went far beyond the general hysteria or depression Lovecraft evoked. Of course, they were generally neurotypical designers writing for a hypothetically neurotypical audience and weren’t necessarily considering the reaction of people who fall outside that range.
Our Delta Green RPG’s focus on Bonds is, I think, a more productive approach for the future. You can stay away from the cliches of diagnoses but still demonstrate the trade-offs our characters make in this fictional context between home and work, family and obsession, socializing and isolation. We didn’t jettison the old Sanity approach by any means, but Bonds are a narrative way of expressing the fundamental corrosion and I think a more frequent and meaningful tool at the table.
With The Labyrinth, I’m not concerned with specific labels or diagnoses. When I write of a character who is slipping into obsession and madness, my interest lies in how this impacts their life and what it means for the Agents who have to deal with the consequences. From a narrative perspective, that’s much more useful and interesting than declaring that a given character has Borderline Personality Disorder, for example.
I’m really interested in the stretch goal with props! How do you plan to create those props and interesting bits and pieces? How do they integrate with the sourcebook? The Labyrinth is a sourcebook, not a set of adventures, so it’s somewhat unusual to create handouts for it. But my hope is that for many Handlers, the Labyrinth will infect their campaign and even hijack it. The characters you meet from the book have their own agendas and arcs, and even when the Agents aren’t thinking about them, they’re thinking about the Agents. And every organization in the book has connections to several other organizations, so once you enter you can really go in all kinds of directions.
Our hope is that the handouts will transform the Labyrinth’s organizations into an organic, dynamic campaign that just goes even if the Handler isn’t using a prewritten scenario for a given session. They will provide clues and connections that can lead from one group to another, introducing more characters, opportunities, and challenges.
Ultimately, I’d love for a gaming group to have a corkboard covered in Labyrinth handouts with push pins and strings connecting them together so that their friends and family wonder: are they totally losing it?
— Thank you so much John for such a fun and informative interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Delta Green: The Labyrinth today on Kickstarter!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
Today I have an interview with Brian Van Slyke on his cooperative board game Good Dog, Bad Zombie, which sounds like a heckin’ good time – and is on Kickstarter for a few more days! Check out what Brian has to say about his game below. Brian shared some cute dog pictures, and I wanted to note that backer levels at $75 or more help with donations to One Tail at a Time, which is a no-kill all-breed dog rescue in Chicago area. Yay! Note: There are more images of the game on the Kickstarter page, I just felt some of them didn’t read well here, so I used pictures of Lupin (Brian’s dog) instead.
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A Dog player sheets, with an illustration of a brown dog with a white chest, detailing the dog’s stats and abilities.
Tell me a little about Good Dog, Bad Zombie. What excites you about it?
Good Dog, Bad Zombie [GDBZ] is a cooperative board game where players have to bark, lick, and sniff their way through the apocalypse to save the hoomans they love. Think Homeward Bound meets The Walking Dead.
The game has been on-and-off development for three years, and I just love that it drips dogginess. My favorite thing that has ever been said about it (and any game I’ve ever made, really) comes from a preview from Everything Board Games: “GDBZ is an immersive dog-mind experience. Every single detail is saturated with flavor. It wouldn’t really surprise me if it was designed by an actual dog, or maybe a kindly werewolf. I mean that in a good way.”
Really, that’s what we wanted – to create a game that was wholesome and also a little terrifying all at once. I love how I’ll hear players shout, “I’m going to lick you!” and “I found a hooman!” and “Woof, woof!” totally normally. This game really gets people in the mind of a dog.
So what do you know about dogs, and what do you know about zombies? How are they applied in GDBZ?
I know that I love dogs, and I know that dogs love us. Having a dog got me through one of the toughest times of my life.
Brian & his dog Lupin. Lupin is reddish brown with floppy ears, Brian is bearded and wearing a flannel shirt.
I’d always had dogs growing up, but after I graduated college, my girlfriend (and now wife) was afraid of dogs. She’d never had them growing up. Chalk it up to either annoyance or persistence, but after ten years of me begging for us to go look for a dog at a shelter, she finally she gave in. And after three days of living with us, she and our dog became best friends. In many ways, I became the third wheel in the relationship. But I’m not complaining.
I know it’s a cliche to say that dogs are humanity’s best friend, but I think it’s really true. Dogs understand us on a fundamental level that I’m not even sure we understand ourselves. In many ways, I think a lot of us prefer the company of many dogs than many humans for that reason. And that’s why I wanted to make a game about dogs being amazing.
In terms of zombies, I’ve always found zombie lore fascinating. I’m a huge scaredy-cat (pun intended), and I can’t deal with horror movies, but I’ve always made an exception for zombie movies and shows. However, one thing that I learned from a friend of mine many years back, is that zombies are often a projection of our fear of an uprising of the working class. He’s a professor that studies culture and has given lectures on zombies (cool job!). And that’s the reason in GDBZ we made the zombies look super professional, wearing business suits and giving off vibes of riches and wealth. We thought it was a fun way to spin the traditional narrative.
Lupin lying on his back Lupin is reddish brown with floppy ears.
What kind of dogs can players play in GDBZ, and are various dogs different in any way?
When we first launched Good Dog, Bad Zombie, there were only a few dogs you could play as – Lupin (based off my dog) the boxer/ridgeback mix, Waine the Alaskan mix, Captain Woofster the Great Dane, and Miss Fuzzy Ears. However, because of the success of the campaign, we’ve unlocked four additional dogs: Angelica the Corgi, Willow the St. Bernard, Gizmo the Boston Terrier, and Bandit the Dalmatian.
And yes, every dog is different! Both in real life as well as in Good Dog, Bad Zombie. In the game, each dog has the same basic set of abilities and actions. However, every dog has their own unique and powerful ability, which are triggered by playing “Good Doggo” cards. For instance, Lupin’s “Snuggle” ability allows players to restock on Energy Cards. Captain Woofster’s “Hunt” ability allows him to remove extra zombies from the board. Willow’s “Sniff the Air” ability allows her to peek at upcoming scent cards and plan around them.
We’re super happy that each time you play Good Dog, Bad Zombie, you can take on a different mix of characters (and breeds) and tackle the game in new ways!
Lupin with a blanket over his head. Lupin is reddish brown with floppy ears.
How do these doggie mechanics make such an accurate and immersive experience?
This was hugely important to us when we were designing GDBZ. We wanted the game to drip dogginess. Not just in its name, but in its spirit, its art, its mechanics, and even in terms of what people say while playing.
So, for instance, you’ll hear people shout “I’m going to lick myself!” often through each game. Everything you do in Good Dog, Bad Zombie is based around and named after a dog-like action. This really gets players into the spirit and mood of being a dog pack. So, for instance, even though it’s not a rule, you’ll often hear players burst into random bouts of howling after they rescue a human.
This game is all about being good dogs, and the love between humans and dogs. So in Good Dog, Bad Zombie – dogs don’t inherently hate zombies. They’ll often be trying to play with a zombie or chase it. It’s not until the zombie threatens a live human that dogs become protective. That’s something that we think makes GDBZ unique – it’s fun and playful, with a dash of horror, all wrapped up into a zombie game.
An image of the game board showing “Central Bark” and some tokens.
What’s your favorite part of the gameplay and fictional structure of GDBZ?
My favorite part of the gameplay of GDBZ is the cooperative aspect! As we say in the Kickstarter page, there’s no room for the lone wolf in GDBZ. Players really have to help each other and strategize together to rescue the humans and protect their pack. If a player is too low on Energy cards and a zombie startles them, you might have to move the Feral Track up (and that’s how you lose the game!). Often it takes two dogs working together to get a human home safely to Central Bark without being eaten by a zombie. This is really a game where it requires everyone to win together.
My favorite part of the fictional structure of GDBZ is how we were able to slightly tweak traditional zombie lore. So, for instance, in this game, the only thing that zombies are afraid of are dog barks. So whenever your dog barks, it’ll send a zombie running away from you – often off of a cliff! Also, in GDBZ, humans are helpless and kind of dumb – and they won’t survive the apocalypse without the aid of the brave, smart, loving doggos. I feel like we were able to take territory that’s been well-tread, but put a new, fun, funny, doggy spin on it.
Lupin with a big bone. Lupin is reddish brown with floppy ears.
I am legit delighted to say I’ve yet again had the chance for interview time with Nathan Paoletta, this time talking about his new game Imp of the Perverse, which is currently on Kickstarter. The game’s design has been percolating for a while, and I can’t wait for you all to hear more about the project. Check it out!
Note: Images are the collaborative work of Nathan and cartoonist/illustrator Marnie Galloway.
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A dark red image with an illustration in black and white showing a monstrous imp wreathed in smoke, creeping behind a woman reading a book. The text reads, “IMP of the PERVERSE: A Psychological Horror Game of Monster Hunting in Jacksonian Gothic America. Quite nice, really.
Tell me a little about Imp of the Perverse. What excites you about it?
Imp of the Perverse is a psychological horror game of monster hunting in what I call “Jacksonian Gothic” America. Your protagonists are members of society in the historical 1830s or 1840s, but with a little extra – an Imp of the Perverse on their shoulders, impelling them to do terrible deeds. Only by hunting down those who have already given in to their Imps, and thus turned into literal monsters, can yours hope to rid themselves of their Imps and regain their humanity.
I’ve been working on this game for a long time! I recently uncovered my very first files of notes on the first ideas I had, and it’s dated 2006. I’ve always been a fan of the work of Edgar Allan Poe (hence the name of the game, of course) and the compelling nature of his work seemed very gameable to me once I started making games, but it took me a really long time and the experience of doing so many other games (carry. a game about war., Annalise, World Wide Wrestling, etc) to figure out the “in” into the stuff that resonates with me.
So now I’m excited to be so close to done with something that’s been on my mind for so long, and just really pleased with how the game has turned out! It reliably does the things that I personally like the most in tabletop – good solid hooks for characters with enough space to develop in play, clear direction in what you do, the opportunity to get deep into your characters head without demanding that as the only way to play, and specific GM tools for developing situations that you’re excited about, and then making decisions in play that all build to a fictional climax without depending entirely on personal storytelling skills. In fact, one of the sneaky goals of the game is to subtly teach players who may have never GMed before how to do it (or at least, how to do it in this game). One of the conceits is that if your character gives in to their Imp (a very possible but by no means inevitable state), you build the character as a new monster for the next hunt and take over the Editor (GM) role – I hope that players will be excited to do that when it comes up in long term play and feel like they have the foundation to do it even if they’ve never GMed before.
Image of the Kickstarter bits – quickplay cards, a clothbound hardcover, and a note on illustrated monsters and custom chapters! All of this is themed in red, dark red, black, and gold.
I have to ask about this transferable or shared GM role. What kind of powers do Editors hold, and how do they use them?
I think it’ll be familiar to most folks as a “traditional” GM kind of role. The Editor is in charge of coming up with the monster, setting up situations that challenge the protagonists, describing the world around them, playing NPCs, all that kind of stuff. This game is not Powered by the Apocalypse, but I absorbed many of the Agenda/Principle lessons from Apocalypse World, and do have a similar charge for the Editor in this game. Your job is to:
create monsters and put them in the same social context as the protagonist characters
construct a compelling, dark world full of challenge, doubt and wonder
engineer specific situations for each protagonist that dare them to embrace their darker self
demonstrate the consequences of the protagonists actions with integrity (in this order: integrity to the dark Gothic world, integrity to the characters development so far, integrity to the demands of the unfolding narrative, and ideally all three)
The game also asks the Editor to do specific prep (building the monster and the web of social relationships it influences). The goal here is two-fold: to give the Editor plenty to work with in play, so there’s always something to fall back to to keep the story going, and to draw them into investing in the world they’re preparing. The game shines when everyone is invested in what happens to these fictional characters, and prep is structured to make it as easy as possible for the Editor to do that.
As a player, you see the “effect” of the prep and the Editor’s agenda from the player side, and then when it’s your turn the game says “here are the tools the Editor you just played with used to make your game happen, and you saw how it went, so now it’s your turn to take them for a spin.” Obviously if it’s not within the players comfort zone there’s no artificial dictate that they MUST become the GM, but (again hopefully) by the time you get through a couple Chapters of play you’ll be able to see how it all works and maybe excited to try it out yourself!
How did you build and design the fiction of the game, especially ensuring you could integrate the imps without it seeming negatively garish or absurd?
The concept of “you play a character with an Imp on their shoulder pushing you to do perverse things” has been the central idea from the start, along with the idea that monsters should be unique to the perversity that spawned them, but developing the rest of the context took a long time. I knew I wanted to keep the realities of the historical time as the counterweight to the fantastical elements, but there were a lot of versions of doing that over the years. I had a key playtest that put me on the path to figuring it out – at the time, the characters were all part of a secret society of monster hunters who were recruited when their Imp appeared, and then kind of sent on a mission to hunt down the next monster. It worked to get everyone in the same place at the same time, but also felt very “you meet in a tavern” in a way that didn’t sit well at the table. We spent a lot of debrief time just kind of brainstorming about it, and someone made a comparison to the gravity well of a black hole, and the metaphor fell into place for me.
A series of symbols illustrated in maroon and white – a rose, a quill pen, a book, a gun, a compass, and a shovel.
A monster is the result of an Imp gaining the most power in the world of the living, and so when it appears everyone else who has an Imp can feel it, drawn to the perverse “gravity” it emanates. Implied by the dynamic of “when you know a monster appears, you know you have to do something about it” is that normal people CAN’T do anything to stop monsters, they’re too horrible and powerful, and the protagonists know this. And then, embedding the protagonists as well as the monster in a linked web of relationships gives the context for why they might care about this situation in particular, and have specific people they want to protect or save.
Beyond the basic concepts of Imps, monsters and the Shroud between worlds, one of the long-term mechanics is that the players build up the nature of their own gothic world through play. Between sessions, one of the things players can do is spend resources to establish facts about the Shroud and monsters. I want to provide the baseline fictional frame for “here’s what you do and why” and then see how different groups take that through the act of play, rather than build out a bunch of metaphysics for players to learn up front.
How do you handle a concept where the characters are continually tempted to do wrong, while they are hunting those who failed to resist the temptation? I’m really curious: what does morality look like in Imp of the Perverse?
One of the core rules is this: you are playing a historical character, but you are a modern person. We care about the actual concerns of the people playing at the table, not what we think other kinds of people might be worried about. So, perversity is always relative to something you actually think is wrong – for players, this is something that you should be interested in exploring and (possibly) overcoming, while for the Editor this is something that you want to see the protagonists destroy. The game doesn’t make overt moral judgements of what is and is not perverse, in that the development of individual perversities is totally freeform. But there are guidelines – it should be something that actually makes it hard to live a normal life, that the character sees the clear downsides of, but that is, well, tempting. Perversities are not superpowers, but they have both up and downsides. Then the mechanics provide specific moments where you choose whether it’s worth the temptation in order to get what you want right then in that moment. The game does give you permission to use whatever means necessary to destroy or deal with the monster, in that they are almost always worse than you, so in that way there is a bit of a moral statement of when violence is justified; but also, the means by which a monster is resolved can be very contextual to the individual monster and the nature of the protagonists, so it’s not ALWAYS a fight to the death.
There is also a bit of the morality of the era (or at least, my read of it) in how characters are built. For example, if you make a character who has a child out of wedlock, you’ll have the Scandalous Quality, or if your spouse is dead you’ll be Bereaved. These reflect the general sense of how people in your social circles view you, and have an equal ability to be used in play as more “positive” Qualities, but they do reflect a certain moral sense that centers on your family as the fundamental important thing in people’s lives – an important piece of embedding the characters in the society they’re a part of!
The words “IMP of the PERVERSE” in shimmering gold with filigree above and below.
You’ve been working on Imp of the Perverse for a long time (2006, right?)? What are some of your favorite moments of design and creation in that path that resonate with the game, and with you, today?
This is a great question, and a hard one because the arc of the design has basically been one of long gaps punctuated by short periods of focused progress, so it’s all kind of one amorphous blob of experience in my head. I’ll try to tease out some moments when I felt most satisfied that I was on the right track, because they stand out to me the most. First, when I decided to cut down the original idea of “play all kinds of different stories with these protagonists” down to “what if it’s just about hunting down the monsters in this world” (which was originally going to be one mini-game inside the larger game…) that was key to cutting the design space down to a manageable level. When I had the first playtests of the central die roll mechanic that tempts you towards perversity and saw it work, that was great. The game needed development to support that mechanic and fine-tune it, but I saw players engage with the critical decision point (do I or don’t I? is it worth it?) and that’s the beating heart of the game. The aforementioned playtest where we workshopped ourselves into the “perverse gravity” metaphor starting pulling the fictional frame together for me. I ran a long-term playtest around then where we got to see a protagonist fall to the Imp and then the player take up the Editor-ship, which worked great and let me go ahead and play on the other side to feel more of the player experience. Recently, I think one of the most gratifying moments I’ve had was at a convention game, where afterwards the players told me that they felt like they found it very easy to get into their characters and make principled decisions based on those characters. That was nice to hear as a GM of course, but also validation of the design goal of really putting players into the fictional world of their protagonists and giving them clear structure and direction for play through how the characters are made and interact.
And of course it is viscerally satisfying to see players defeat the horrible monsters I make that embody the things I really, truly want to see destroyed in the world!
Cover image, similar to the first of the image in the post: a dark red image with an illustration in black and white showing a monstrous imp wreathed in smoke, creeping behind a woman reading a book. The text reads, “IMP of the PERVERSE: A Psychological Horror Game of Monster Hunting in Jacksonian Gothic America.
Tell me a little about Kids on Bikes. What excites you about it? Doug:Kids on Bikes is a narrative-driven story telling game set in your favorite 80’s movie or TV show. We like to say that it takes place in a town small enough that everyone knows each other (for better and for worse) and in a time before cell phones could take videos of monster. The GM acts more like a facilitator, and the players are really the ones telling the story.
One of the things that excites me about Kids on Bikes is the way that the game starts! The town and character creation, especially the rumors and the questions about the relationships between the characters, helps to start the game even as you’re creating the world you’ll be playing in. Stories often start to emerge and tensions start to become clear there in pretty cool, open-ended ways!
What was the motivation for putting together Kids on Bikes? What about the concept put your hearts into it?
D:Stranger Things! Two summers ago, like most of America, I’d just binge-watched the first season, and I posted on Facebook, “Okay – who wants to make this a game?” Jon responded, and we got rolling on it. But even more than that, I grew up as an AD&D player. I had a paladin, a wild mage, and a few classes I created myself, and seeing D&D played on the show really made me want to replicate that in some streamlined way – but also to pay homage to the wonderful 80s tropes that I grew up on.
How do you approach violence and violent content in Kids on Bikes?
D: Personally, I play games for escapism, so violence for me in games has to be one of two things: either absurd, cartoonish, and completely divorced from reality like it is in D&D – or nonexistent. Kids on Bikes is super close to reality, which is something that I love about it, but that also means that the violence in it is supposed to be terrifying. In the rulebook, when we talk about combat, one of our statements is that there’s no such thing as “safe” violence in Kids on Bikes. And our first step in creating the world of the game is having all of the players establish what they want to see and what they don’t want to see. Ultimately, Kids on Bikes is a framework for players to create what they want within it, but it’s definitely a framework that discourages casual violence.
Tell me about the design process. How did you start mechanically? What has changed since the game’s inception?
D: We started with thinking about making a game that felt like AD&D but streamlined. I had a bunch of ideas that complicated things, and Jon was really great at saying things like, “Yeah, THAC0 was a thing…but maybe that’s not in anything anymore for a good reason.” As we went, we kept streamlining and streamlining to keep the focus on the story. That’s something that Jon is really, really good at…and that I’m learning from him!
Another thing that was probably the main aspect of the design at the start was the notion of duality. We love the idea of inversions and balancing acts that happens in so many of these things from the 80s, the way that the villain is some corrupted version of the good guy or the way that every negative is a positive and, usually, vice versa. In our initial creation, we kept asking ourselves, “Great… What balances that? What’s its counterpoint?”
What is your focus audience for Kids on Bikes, and why? Is it a nostalgia product, considering the timeline restriction, or something different?
D: Our audience is new and experienced RPG players. It’s an easy enough to pick up game that even folks who’ve never rolled a d12 before can jump in and get rolling, but we think the opportunity for narrative is rich enough that it can appeal to people who love narrative games and have played a bunch of them. I don’t think of it as, first and foremost, a nostalgia product; I think of the time restriction as a way to complicate what, in the modern day, would be easy solutions and drive the narrative. Like, if a current high school stumbles upon a cult, they shoot some quick cell phone video, they post it to Snapchat, and it’s a scandal. 30 years ago, though, they have to convince people that it’s really a thing. That’s the kind of space I’d want to tell stories in right now, so that’s the kind of engine we made. That said, there’s for sure a nostalgia element to pretty much everything I design, so I think that influences the kinds of stories I want to tell.
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Thanks so much to Doug for the interview. I hope you all enjoyed reading it and that you’ll pedal your way over to Kickstarter with a few friends to catch the last few days ofKids on Bikes!
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Today I have an interview with Robin Laws on his new game,The Yellow King. The Yellow King is currently on Kickstarter, and looks absolutely fascinating. I asked Robin some questions about how he’ll be handling content and how the mechanics flow with fiction – check out his responses below!
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Books and slipcover
Tell me a little about The Yellow King. What excites you about it?
The four slim stories that make up Robert W. Chambers’ King in Yellow cycle offer a rich, elegantly creepy starting point for an ambitious new game of literary horror. We’re used to seeing his work through the lens of Lovecraft, who championed these stories, and later expanders of the Mythos like August Derleth. Tackled on their own, they present an shockingly contemporary set of themes. Central to the stories are a visual symbols and a work of art that, once you are exposed to them, break you down and change you. In this game I take that a step further and explore the idea that reality itself is coming apart.
I’ve always come at Lovecraftian themes and cosmic horror as a whole from a diagonal, because the themes of “insanity” and “breakdowns” are ones I’m intimately familiar with. How do you address this in The Yellow King? What are you including in the game to both carry the gravity of the impact of cosmic horror, and are you examining real-life trauma parallels?
When you remove the Lovecraftian overlay from Chambers, it ceases to be cosmic horror and, especially in YKRPG’s take on him, becomes what we’re calling reality horror. Lovecraft proposes that when you really see humankind’s absolute insignificance in a vast and utterly random universe, the mind cracks, plunging you into insanity. The King in Yellow cycle by contrast focuses on an idea, an artistic expression, that can rewrite people’s personalities and sense of reality—but can also change objective reality itself.
This allows me to lean away from the idea that the characters are becoming literally mentally ill, or that sanity is a resource you lose over time. There are no insane cultists, but rather people who have been altered or compelled by the exposure to the play The King in Yellow or the sight of the Yellow Sign.
As characters you encounter Mental Hazards, rolling your Composure ability to resist them or take a lesser effect. Rather than losing Sanity or Stability points you get Shock cards, which you try to get rid of as play continues. When you have 3 Shock cards, your character loses her bearings and leaves play, to be replaced by another.
In framing the text, particularly of the Shock cards, I’m steering away from the real life terminology of mental illness. So there’s no Shock card that tells you you’ve suddenly developed, say, paranoid schizophrenia or clinical depression. Nor is there an indication that becoming mentally ill turns people evil or violent.
Now it’s entirely possible that folks who struggle with mental health issues either directly or through the experiences of the people around them still won’t want to explore reality horror at the gaming table. And if it’s not fun, you shouldn’t do it. But a great function of pop culture is as a vehicle to safely process life’s horrors and traumas through a protective veil of outlandishness and the fantastic. Godzilla movies help audiences come at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 9/11 reverberated through comics and spy movies. SF TV shows or a movie like Get Out can get at racial hierarchies in a disarming and metaphorical way. When constructing the treatment of trauma in YKRPG I aspire for it to work in a like fashion.
Ultimately though it all comes down to personal tastes and limits, which can differ even for one person over time. What you might be into at one point in your life could be too close too the knuckle in another.
Aftermath interiors
What are the elements of the new combat system, and how do they influence player interaction with the setting?
Combat is fast and player-facing, meaning that each player rolls only once and the GM never rolls anything, just establishes a difficulty for the foe at hand and modifiers for the situation.
Before starting you decide what your goal is—which might be to kill your foes, but could also be capturing one of them and running away, driving them off, getting through them, and so on. If your Fighting roll fails to overcome the opponent’s difficulty, which varies based on your objective, you take on either a minor or major Injury card. Even as victor you might take a minor Injury if you decline to pay a toll in Athletics, Health or Fighting points. Like the Shock cards Injuries have various ongoing effects, and conditions allowing you to discard them. These often require you to do something in the narrative. Here’s an example (note that the published versions will look much better than my primitive graphic design abilities allow for):
Example Injury
As with Shocks, having 3 Injuries in hand requires you to permanently retire your character.
Tell me a little about each of the books. What makes them unique in theme, and what were their inspirations?
Like two of the Chambers stories, Paris takes place in the City of Lights in 1895. It gives you your classic historical horror experience of interacting with the rich details and personalities of a classic time period, in this case the Belle Epoque, as you deal with supernatural menace.
The Wars follows one of the stories in my collection New Tales of the Yellow Sign by setting itself in a fractured timeline caused by the influence of the play. It’s 1947 and the Continental War rages across Europe. Characters play a squad of soldiers whose military assignments draw them into weird mysteries. They must duck not only monsters from Carcosa but bizarre Jules Verne war machines.
Aftermath, again based on a story from NTYS, proposes that the bizarre then-future described in “Repairer of Reputations” was the basis of an actual reality. A century after the events described in that story, you play revolutionaries in an alternate present who have just toppled the tyrannical and supernaturally-backed Castaigne regime in America. Your investigations confront you with eerie holdovers of the old regime. At the same time you choose a way to help rebuild your nation, involving yourself in post-revolutionary politics.
Finally, This is Normal Now is our modern day, with an emphasis on the glittering, the new, and a horrific spin on contemporary trends. It brings the cycle back to basics, and in full campaign mode, leads you to connect and wrap up the big arc resolving the parallels between your characters from the four settings.
Four books, so many stories to tell!
I’m somewhat familiar with GUMSHOE, and I know that there is a lot of mutability, but it can be challenging to really hammer out the best final decisions. What has your development process been like for The Yellow King? Did you have any moments of clarity that you appreciated?
The key revelation where mechanics are concerned came from
the desire to take the Problem and Edge cards from the GUMSHOE One-2-One engine from in Cthulhu Confidential and translate them back into multiplayer GUMSHOE.
a longstanding Pelgrane goal of making combat player-facing, as discussed above
Since then it’s been a matter of refinement, which is ongoing as I move from the preview draft backers get as soon as they join to a version ready for out-of-house playtest.
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Thanks so much to Robin for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading about what’s coming withThe Yellow King! Make sure to check it out on Kickstarter & tell your friends!
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Today is the second part of Mike Evans’ Hubris setting book review! See the first part here.
We’ll continue with the chapter on the Wizard’s Spellbook (spells and Patrons). It has tables for spellbook constructions, options for Patrons from both DCC and Hubris (including the Charred Maiden, Floating Island of Terror, Spider Goddess, and Twisted One), and then spells.
The Summon from the Void spell is pretty… uh. Yikes. There’s some really cool stuff going on but wow, it’s mega gross, and reminds me why I am not a magic user.
There are unique spells for the various Patrons, which come with every level of creepy and gross and twisted nature that the others have, some going even farther like those of Charred Maiden that involve the Patron who is known for eating children and the spells that bring the twisted corrupted spirits of the children to life.
The following chapters include the gods of Hubris. I admit, and this is just personal preference, I wasn’t super enthused about this section. I think it’s because I don’t typically play or enjoy the narrative of clerics. There are plenty of useful things I think a lot of people would enjoy – various cleric invokations, information about the god’s alignment, holy symbols, and weapons, which are cool. The gods have names like “The Corpulent One,” “Yelsa, Goddess of Sex and Violence,” and “The Heathen Below.” I’m sure a lot of people would enjoy this if they’re into kind of twisted morbid deities, but it’s not really my jam, primarily because it’s focused on clerics.
In the following chapter on GM Tools and Tables, I think that the Demigod creation charts are really cool. You roll for the demigod form, holiday, altar, blessing/curse, followers, temple, cult leader, and what they are a god of. There are things like “God of the Never-Ending Kaleidoscope Nightmare” and the bodies include things like “twitching fingers for nipples” and “eyes are mouths and mouth is an eye” and some things that are way more unsettling. A couple of these did genuinely make me uncomfortable and upset (like some of the altars that included harm to animals and stuff), so I’m not including many details here.
There is a nifty table on “Bandits, Brigands, and Rapscallions” that has gangs, encounters, and bandit leaders. I like the City District Generator, too, which has some fun plot hooks and I think would be a great kickoff for anyone trying to get a game started quickly or pick up a game that’s slowed down.
Hive Mind
The Diseases of Hubris are so, super gross. Blighted Eyes is so gross and cringey, involving yucky things happening to your eyes. The Ghost Pox is very haunting (pun intended), but Hive Mind (bees take rest in your head) is so vile and probably going to give me nightmares just from reading it. Also, the Whistler’s Lament is terrible – and possibly could annoy the entire table completely.
There’s a brief table for grave digging, which I think would be pretty useful in some campaigns. Another table – probably more widely useful – is the NPC generator. It has a lot of variety, and a lot of unique qualities for NPCs. I really like random tables for NPCs, in part because it can make life way easier for GMs.
This section in general is loaded with cool tables – planes of Hubris, what happens when you make camp (like waking up with fungus growing on you), herbs you might find (like ones that let you climb on walls), taverns and inns (one has a pickled rat brain eating contest), vials (you could grow a beard! Or barbed skin!), villages (including one that’s built on mummified bird legs!), ruins (featuring living statues and demons of lies, strange black obelisks and pink spider webs), and a way to label years.
The section on Magic Items has a fancy table for random stuff but also has a list of other items both attached to gods and otherwise. I almost talked about what some of them do, but I think that would be almost too spoilery, for lack of a better term! Some of the named items are: The Armor of the Horned Blood Crab, The Six Sinister Skull Bracelets of Facious the Cruel, and The Despicable Clay Jug of the Maggot. Yes, that last one is just as gross as it sounds!
Demon Contamination
The Monsters section is pretty fun. There’s a table on contamination from demon possession, which has some gross stuff and some interesting stuff, and includes a table called What’s on Their Festering Dead Body? And it is obviously ridiculous (in a good way). One of the options is a “Convulsing Sphincter Muscle of an Ox,” and another is a “Bladder of a Badger” that you can drink from (ew). I’m annoyed that the Face of a Scorned Lover is gendered, because, come on. There’s also “Ulcerated Stomach of the Three Pronged Goat,” which is for carrying items, so, gross. Fun grossness.
The monsters include such fun things as barghests (one of my favorites), dinosaurs, fae (with some random tables), malfactorum (anthropomorphic beetles), carnivorous mermaids (YES), skeletons what use guns, and wooly mammoths. They all sound really cool and I’d love to see some of these in play (especially the mermaids!).
Mermaids!
I am not covering the Adventures section because that’s something I prefer to leave for GMs and players to discover on their own, so you’ll have to pick it up to see!
Overall, I think that Hubris is pretty fascinating! If you’re looking for a setting book with lots of material that will give plenty of substance to a twisted, gross campaign with plenty of vile monstrosities, Hubris is a good option! There are plenty of new environments, magical effects, story hooks, and choices for character building that I think give a lot of leads for both short play and longer campaigns.
I hope you liked reading about it! Check out Hubris here if it seems like your kind of thing. 🙂
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(This is part 1 of two, part 2 will be released on Monday, January 9, 2017.)
The introduction to Mike Evans’ Hubris is a vivid, almost technicolor cover that reminds me of the covers of old, used paperback sci-fi and sword and sorcery novels I saw in my childhood, covered in dust, wiped with an 80s brush. This is a good thing.
Gorgeous cover!
Inside the pages I find similar evidence of the weird nostalgia of gritty dark adventure, like the monsters of Beastmaster and from those stories I shouldn’t have read in the back of the bookstore. These days I typically stick to lighter materials in my gameplay, but fuck knows that in the back of my mind those things still creep. What makes Hubris appealing? The visceral nature of it, for sure.
Hubris uses Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) as its main mechanical structure, so I had to wiggle my brain a little since I’m not super familiar with the system. Thankfully, it’s relatively simple and nothing interfered with my ability to examine the game’s setting and structure. There are lots of random tables, which I looove.
The art of the book is black and white or grayscale, and not only is it great to look at it but it’s well suited to the content of the text and theme of the book. I enjoyed just scrolling through looking at the images – the artists (Alex Mayo, David Lewis Johnson, Jeremy Duncan, Angie Groves, Doug Kovacs, Jason Sholtis, and Wayne Snyder) did an excellent job capturing the “feel” of Hubris from my reading. There are a few spots where I (as an editor and proofreader) might have changed a few things textually, and some layout hiccups, but they’re minor and don’t disrupt reading, I don’t think. Overall the book is really well put together and easy to read!
The setting summary and flavor text of Hubris includes a lot of “appealing” concepts (by which I mean, oh, god, no, please! (wait, yes!)). A few bits from the setting summary itself:
“Legend states that Hubris was created from the fetid corpse of a long-dead god.”
“The Black Queen rules the citizens of the Floating Island of Terror from her throne of bones and dreams terrible machinations for Hubris.” (*swoon*)
“There are no easily recognizable heroes in the world.”
“Your epic tale will be forgotten in days as the dangerous world continues on without you…”
Yep. Yep.
Lovely world map!
The maps in Hubris are really nice! They have the kind of tight feeling that I enjoy in this Tolkien-esque kind of map, but it’s clearly readable. They also immediately draw in my interest with the small icons of the locations. You know, places like “Ruins of the Deranged Elephant Emperor” and “Lake of the Flayed” and “Bleeding Mountain that Pierced the Sky.” The kind of places you really wanna go, but kind of wish you’d never heard of.
In character creation, Hubris includes no elves, dwarves, or halflings. I was kind of surprised by that as I’m so used to them being standard in a lot of settings, but it was cool to see. There is a list of occupations with weapons and goods, and I admit I laughed when I read that the chimney sweep child has a broom (as a club) as their weapon. There’s also gems like the heathen carrying a bucket of dung, a nosey neighbor with a rake (as a club) and a rooster, and a rabid raven fanatic. (There’s also later a “disgusting torturer’s kit.”)
(Note: I am fully aware that Hubris contains some terms and subjects that are or may be problematic (g*psy, prostitute), so please don’t think I’m ignoring them. This is my note that they do exist and I’m aware of them.)
There are also additional races with specific occupations available: Avarians, Ekrasks, Half Demons, Murder Machines, and Mutants. The phrase “Murder Machine” as a race does amuse me, especially considering one of the available occupations is “Tinkerer.” These are also doubled as classes, along with the additional human-only occupations of Alchemist, Blood Witch, Druid, and Shadowdancer, as add-ons to the base DCC classes. I am not commenting on everything – just stuff that sticks out.
Blood Witch
I admit I nearly shit myself while reading the Blood Witch class because of the Blood Walk ability:
“A blood witch can play a dangerous game and jump through a living creature that is the same size or larger than herself, traveling through their blood and can emerge from another living creature on the same plane of existence.”
Like. Fuck. Yes. This is totally my kind of ability, and it’s so gross. To be honest, I said to John (husband) that it is one of the coolest abilities I’ve ever seen. A+. (Oh, and the Familiar ability is really cool and gross, too. You’ll have to see the book to find out why!)
One of the interesting things about the Druid class that I liked a lot was the Animal Shape manifestations, corruptions, and misfires. They include things like worms burrowing out of the druid’s skin and reshaping the druid to the new form, the druid’s head turning permanently into the chosen animal, and a tree growing out of the top of the druid’s head, respectively. Nice.
Druid
I will note my one big complaint is the general nonconsensual nature of the Half Demon race. This is such a stupid stickler for me, I know it pisses people off, but I’ll always dislike it (and I’ve written articles about the use of this in half-orc backgrounds). However, I know a lot of people dig it and it doesn’t bug everyone, and I get that it’s evil demons, and not just women getting raped (but rape is legit bad for anyone, regardless of gender, so). But, consider this my registered gripe. Aside from that, the race is pretty cool.
Murder Machines are just… like, dude. I can’t even register how cool and fucked up they are. They’re basically humans melded into armor and made into… murder machines. They also have something called a “Swiss-Army Hand.”
So the Mutant has this thing… It’s a cosmetic mutation, and I’m just gonna… share it:
“Your teeth fall out and in their place grows: 1) fingernails; 2) worms; 3) open sores; 4) small gasping mouths; 5) small writhing tentacles; 6) tiny, infant-like fingers.”
You’re welcome (from Mike, probably).
The Mutant powers are so disgusting I am still just kind of grossed out but they’re so inventive and brilliant I’m amazed. I laughed and gagged. Amazing. (Stomach maggots. Worm infested skin. Plague skin. Acidic belch. Ooze-like body. Ant colony. Boneless.)
As we move along through the gear and services things, it’s pretty standard and useful (including a great Quick Start Gear option!), but I have to make a vote that we stop with the “prostitution” tables in games… or at least not make them about how likely you are to get an STD. It’s just kind of a bummer and negative. I love having sex workers in games! But I like them to be done respectfully. This is not exclusively judging Hubris either, this shit is everywhere, but it’s in my read while I’m here, so pointing it out. Other people might like it! Not my jam.
Next up we hit the Territories section. I love that Mike specifically talks about how the Void of Hubris (kind of the post-life plane) has a lot of room to explore whatever the Judge (the GM) wants to explore. Pretty cool! I like that, and I also like that in the basic “Lay of the Land” options it’s a chart (d100) that works with a d100 chart of encounters and descriptions of locations.
The Territories section is a really good read and has a ton of material that could support a really significant campaign without ever risking boredom or repetition. I’m just going to cherry pick some of my favorite bits of the flavor text for the settings and items from their d100 lists here for you all!
“Devastating sandstorms, raging gigantic beasts, harsh environments, and a psychotic empire is all that stands in the way between an adventurer and unimagined riches from a long forgotten age.” (The Blighted Sands)
“Grove of weeping willows, used by a sect of extremist druids as their outpost. They are preparing for war against the heathens that destroy nature.” (d100 table, Bogwood Swamp)
Note: There is a list of what the mushrooms of the Bogwood Swamp do that is suuuper cool, but I think it would ruin a player experience to learn about all of them in advance!
“The petrified remains and shell of the gargantuan turtle, Slathereth the Destroyer, rises out of the Bogwood like a jagged mountain.” (Locations, Slathereth, Bogwood Swamp)
“The constant gathering and release of energy has caused the veil of reality to become weak in the forest and it is not uncommon for those in it to have strange visions, become warped or monstrous, or even be transported to another area of Hubris, or teleported to another reality entirely.” (Locations, Wrath, the Crystal Forest, Canyons of the Howling Red Rock)
“Vineyard with grapes that have the faces of humans, young or old. The grapes scream when they are squeezed.” (d100 table, Great Plains of Unbidden Sorrow)
FYI THERE IS AN ENTIRE TOWN THAT IS BUILT ON THE BACK OF A GIANT METAL DOGGIE THAT BREATHES FIRE. It’s called The Roving Nibbleton.
The Roving Nibbleton
“Strange mechanical ruins that stagger the imagination, gigantic reptiles and insects, altars of blood, druidic cults, moss-covered zombies, ancient stone temples of complex design, and plants that feed off living creatures’ life-force await all who are brave or foolish enough to enter the Unsettled Expanse.” (The Unsettled Expanse)
“A Tyrannosaurus Rex with a head-mounted laser cannon rumbles through the forest.” (d100 Encounters table, The Unsettled Expanse)
—
On Monday, January 9, 2017, the review will be continued! Keep an eye out. 🙂
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
Today I have a brief interview with Marissa Kelly on the Bluebeard’s Bride RPG, currently on Kickstarter. I played an early version of Bluebeard’s Bride, and a second session as well, and really enjoyed it, so I hope you all enjoy reading about it and check out the Kickstarter.
From the Kickstarter:
Bluebeard’s Bride is an investigatory horror tabletop roleplaying game for 3-5 players, written and designed by Whitney “Strix” Beltrán, Marissa Kelly, and Sarah Richardson, and based on the Bluebeard fairy tale.
In this game you and your friends explore Bluebeard’s home as the Bride, creating your own beautifully tragic version of the dark fairy tale. Investigate rooms, discover the truth of what happened, experience the nightmarish phantasmagoria of this broken place, and decide whether or not you are a faithful or disloyal bride.
—
The story of Bluebeard is not commonly known in modern fairy tales, and is definitely not a media favorite. What inspired you to use this specific fairy tale to make a game?
The idea came from Sarah and Strix at the Hacking as Women event. As their coach, I was excited to hear that the fairy tale lent itself so well to the PBtA framework. It seemed like a great way to frame an elegant horror game without getting bogged down by too many preconceived ideas about what the player experience should be.
Tell me a little about the design process. I played the game at an earlier stage, and a second time a while later, but I haven’t seen the final product. What iterations did you have to go through to make the game an experience true to your intentions?
The game has certainly gone through many iterations. A lot of trimming, gutting, and trial and error. One of the biggest changes we went through was shifting a large part of the game to a diceless mechanic. I felt we had been running up against a wall with the Maiden moves, but eventually (with the help of a wonderful group of playtesters) we found a solution. This shift feels to me like a nod to old ghost stories that influence so much horror we all know and love.
Bluebeard’s Bride has a tendency (in my experience) to touch on some really intense, and sometimes difficult, topics (including domestic abuse). What safety measures do you have in place for the game, and how are you preparing the game materials to address those things respectfully? Yep! This horror game can touch on all of those things, so the game has advice, tips, and rules for helping the players and Groundskeeper manage any real out-of-character conflicts that might arise. For example, we use a variant of the X-card developed by John Stavropoulos that promotes self-care and dispels the expectation that anyone at the table will have to be a mind reader.
How does Bluebeard’s Bride encourage the players to work together to tell a story, while allowing conflict between the parts of the Bride’s psyche? It helps that we trapped all the players in the body of one woman! We have made space for disagreement within the Bride’s own mind. If a player has the Bride act in a way that one player didn’t agree with, the Ring mechanic allows them to take control and guide her actions when it is their turn.
When all is said and done, what game elements do you think help the most to guide the story through horror and twisted narrative to its inevitable – and hopefully satisfying – conclusion? We have tools called Room Threats and Groundskeeper Moves that help guide the players through consistent bouts of horror. These Threats and Moves point at one of the cores of horror – that of personal, intimate fears. We also baked the conclusion of the fairy tale into the game so player’s choices will directly impact the telling of their tale. —
Thanks to Marissa for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading and get the chance to check out Bluebeard’s Bride on Kickstarter!
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