Hello all! Today I have an interview with Jan Martin, creator of Crow Island Funeral // PROCESSION! I’m so excited to share this interview, Jan is an amazing creator and Crow Island is SO cool!
Jan: ” I wanted to have this section of the overall story play out as a game because it underlines the importance of surviving the trip in a way that a short story couldn’t do on its own. Being able to fail, actually fail and lose and not make it at all, would have huge implications in the universe. There’s no telling how the future would have unfolded if that group didn’t survive the trek to the City of Seven Nations. “
Hello all! Today I have an interview with Jan Martin, creator of Crow Island Funeral // PROCESSION! I’m so excited to share this interview, Jan is an amazing creator and Crow Island is SO cool!
Thank you for the interview, Jan! You have been designing games for a while now, but for people who are new, could you tell me a little about yourself and what gives you passion for games?
Jan: I think the biggest thing for me with games is I love how they can help putting together a good story. Every great TTRPG session would make a great TV show, film, book, comic, whatever medium. That’s a magical thing to me, a book with some rules and ideas, in the hands of a group of humans, leads to great stories. Stories that come together organically, with lively characters and compelling scenes. I’ve spent my life writing fiction and I’ve never been able to come close to the kind of story you can make with friends around a table.
It’s that idea that I might be able to craft a game that can help people create compelling stories of their own that really excites me. Game designers have an incredible power in this way, and I guess I’m always trying to chase that same power. To facilitate stories full of laughter, drama, and intrigue between friends with a book of ideas is amazing. That’s what gives me passion, is the pursuit of the dream that I too can someday make a game that can do that.
Beau: Today we’re talking about your solo game, Crow Island funeral // PROCESSION. It is a really well put together game with a lot of content, & I am excited to know more! What excites you about Crow Island funeral // PROCESSION?
Jan: This is the first introduction to a much larger world and Universe that all my games and fiction are set. This game takes place in the same location as seen earlier this year in a short-story I wrote for Wizardpunk by Sandy Pug Games. That story was set in the modern day. In Crow Island funeral // PROCESSION players explore that area in the early years of civilization on the planet. It’s the year 349, exactly 10 years before the discovery of Spirit Trees and Spirit Magic. It introduces some names that will show up again and again, Asogomas and Naad, as well gives a peek into early culture.
Anyone who picks up my games now and follows from here on will keep seeing familiar details and learn more and more about them. I’m really excited to be able to share these bits of the world, and even more excited to see peoples reactions as they learn how things end up. I’m also a little worried, because the deeper it goes, the wilder it gets and I run the risk of alienating some people along the way. The expectations of what this world is and its place in the Universe it lives aren’t obvious at this point. I’ve got some plans to try and keep people onboard and interested so hopefully those work out.
Beau: Creating a world in which your games are set sounds really awesome! Having read through your game, I feel like there’s a lot of richness there. What is guiding your planning for this world and what are some ways you can see it in Crow Island funeral // PROCESSION?
Jan: It’s a combination of things, a large part of it is making sure everything fits within the larger Universe. There are a lot of different planets and even Universes involved so it’s a challenge to keep everything organized. For Crow Island funeral // PROCESSION in particular a key part of keeping organized is a timeline of the planet that starts when Crow Island itself is in year 1, when it created by Kiskik the Creator.
The timeline goes all the way up until current day, the year 13,425, which happens to be the year the larger game in the series is set. You can see this in the game itself through some of the lore, for example the two paths you can take. There’s the Path of Asogomas and the Path of Naad I mentioned before, but another example is the location Mudgash River. This is the location where the story in Wizardpunk is set, and will be an important spot in other games and stories. Some of the areas on the map will come up again more than others, but pretty much everything you see in this game will be present or referenced in future ones.
The map from Crow Island’s text with a zoomed in focus on East Central Crow Island, featuring a legend of the landmarks and settlements, by Jan Martin.
Beau: Crow Island funeral // PROCESSION has a really cool card mechanic and I love the structure of it. How does the design of the mechanics interrelate with the world building and the fiction of the stories you tell in the game?
Jan: The mechanics are meant to reflect the uncertainty of life while still being predictable. This ties directly into the world which is very similar to how my people lived pre-Colonialism. We had great understanding of the land and how to move through it and survive, but there is always that element of unpredictability, random chance, chaos, whatever you want to call it. It makes it so even the most skilled individuals must take care and have constant respect for the dangers of nature. Having the cards always have the same set of resources available, just presented in different order thereby taking something predictable and adding tension.
At the time of me typing this the game is too easy, and I’ll have to tweak things a little bit to better reflect the dangers of travel through the wilderness. The dice mechanic is similar when fording rivers, technically it’s possible to get through river obstacles without issue, but it’s highly unlikely. Basically I wanted to have the mechanics reflect two things, that you are experts of travelling through this wilderness, but despite that, it can still kill you. This is important to get right because future games will be difficult but for different reasons. I want there to be a strong contrast between how things were tough “back in the day” versus modern day, but keeping it clear that both times were rough.
Beau: The timeline of Crow Island seems very significant! Designing your own universe sounds like a big task, but what are the best parts of making something so big but accessed in individual play experiences?
Jan: It’s really nice to be able to zoom in on something in your Universe and have people pay attention to it on a deeper level. Originally this was all going to be a sprawling science fantasy novel series, with endless lore and backstory. That felt too tedious to subject readers to, even if I enjoy that sort of thing myself I don’t have the writing chops to deliver that kind of content in an enjoyable way. Anything I wrote sounded like a history text book and I wanted something immersive. Breaking the Universe up into separate experiences allows me to share a lot more about a particular part of it without worrying about people getting bored. It’s also really enjoyable to have a Universe just sitting there to think of like a sandbox. Anytime I’m feeling blocked on progress in a game, I can just hop into the Crow Island Universe timeline or map and find a new thread to pull.
The World Map for Crow Island by Jan Martin.
Beau: The experiences of your people are valuable, & it’s really awesome how you’ve reflected them in this game. Are there any unique challenges to designing a pre-Colonialism game?
Jan: Absolutely, there’s all kinds of worries about depicting things accurately and not viewing the past through a modern lens. Originally this game was about North America and an alternate-history where Indigenous Nations drove off Colonial forces. The more I worked on it through that lens, the more I started to feel guilty. Sometimes I will talk out loud to my ancestors and ask them about what I’m doing, they never answer me, but, just the act of asking about it gets me to think of it through their mindset. The more I thought about that the more I realized I wasn’t being fair to my ancestors, assuming I or anyone could have done anything differently to predict or avoid what happened.
As a result I ended up re-writing about 40k words or so of my “Universe Bible”, and changed it from an alternate history project, to an entirely unique Universe of its own without any of the trappings of our current history. I don’t think anyone would have taken issue with my game the way it was, but for me personally it just didn’t feel right anymore and I had to change gears. That same thing happens continually throughout this process. I’ll have some idea for the world, game, or story in this Universe and the more I talk it over with my ancestors, the more I come to realize things have to change. It’s an extra layer in the process that has no clear answers.
Unlike many problems we face in the game design process, some of the questions I arrive at I can’t look up online or even find the answers from my Elders, because we don’t know anymore. The Mi’kmaq were some of the first Indigenous peoples to meet Colonial forces and as such we’ve been subjected to the ongoing effects of their occupation since the start. So many of our practices, so much of our language, is just gone. Often the best we can do is speculate. That complicates things even further, I obviously don’t want to offend anyone living or misrepresent our culture. But more than that, I don’t want to offend my ancestors, the people who actually lived in the time periods I’m romanticizing in my games.
Beau: In playing Crow Island funeral // PROCESSION, players encounter a lot of dangers. How did you design the game to balance those dangers while still keeping players hopeful of reaching the end of their journey?
Jan: Working out mechanics is a slow process for me, especially the math side of things. Any semblance of balance the game has right now I owe to keeping the math simple. Well to be honest it’s not super balanced right now, I thought it was, but I didn’t account for my own terrible luck. I balanced everything by playtesting it myself, and historically I’m an abysmal dice roller. In games where rolling a 1 is a failure, I roll lots of 1’s.
In games where rolling a 1 is a failure *and* you get XP for it, I never roll 1’s. So in my personal playtests, the balance felt right. I lost a couple times, and most other playthroughs I barely scraped by or had some a series of close calls. But then, all the feedback I’ve received so far from playtesters has been the opposite, that outside of a few terrible run-ins with a river, for the most part they managed to cruise through the game without any problems. Balance will be an ongoing thing.
In the next update I’ll have tweaked the math a little bit to try and increase the difficulty to be more in line with my original vision. I don’t know what will happen after that, if people playtesting say it’s much harder but they’re not having fun anymore, I’ll tweak again. I want to make sure I don’t let my vision get in the way of an enjoyable experience and I’m lucky to have some people sending me this valuable feedback so I’m taking it to heart.
The Choose a Role card for Crow Island by Jan Martin.
Beau: I find the visual design of Crow Island funeral // PROCESSION approachable & really gorgeous! What was your perspective on how to present the game to your audience, & how did you work to implement it?
Jan: I wanted to capture the same sort of feeling and vibe I got from the original Oregon Trail games I played as a kid on school computers. Everything was pretty stripped down in the version I played, but it really captured the vibe of going on a road trip. To pull that off I wanted to go for really simple graphics, something like you might see on a sign at a National Park. It felt right to go a little more cartoony than that, but that was my launching point.
Beau: It’s remarkable how complex of an approach to your design choices you have, including in how you involve & respect the experiences of your ancestors. What about this medium, games, makes it well suited to telling stories that reflect those experiences?
Jan: Games are one of the best mediums to tell stories that have experiences you want to communicate in a more interactive way. It can help make the gravity of a situation meaningful in a fun way. In Crow Island funeral // PROCESSION I could have written the game as a story, but in the story they succeed in making it to the City of Seven Nations and that’s that. I wanted to have this section of the overall story play out as a game because it underlines the importance of surviving the trip in a way that a short story couldn’t do on its own. Being able to fail, actually fail and lose and not make it at all, would have huge implications in the universe. There’s no telling how the future would have unfolded if that group didn’t survive the trek to the City of Seven Nations.
In later installations of this game world, people will see that importance in a new light. It’s a small thing, but having “lived” in the footsteps of people in this world I think will lend that gravity I mentioned to how things went. I don’t mind spoiling it, but essentially the discovery of Spirit Magic hinged on the body of the Chief being examined at the City of Seven Nations. It’s a hugely important detail, and players being able to fail at carrying out that detail gives more life to the words than I think I could pull off with a story alone.
Today I have an interview with Connor Alexander about Coyote & Crow, which is currently on Kickstarter! This game sounds so incredible and is something I have hoped to see in games – a sci-fi fantasy game that’s about an America that was never colonized by white settlers. I feel like this is a really major project and I hope you enjoy learning about it, like I did!
Today I have an interview with Connor Alexander about Coyote & Crow, which is currently on Kickstarter! This game sounds so incredible and is something I have hoped to see in games – a sci-fi fantasy game that’s about an America that was never colonized by white settlers. I feel like this is a really major project and I hope you enjoy learning about it, like I did!
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I’m excited for the opportunity to interview you about Coyote & Crow! It has been very successful on Kickstarter thus far, but I’d love to know more about you and the project. Can you tell me a little about yourself and how you came to work on the game?
Hi Beau! Really excited to chat with you. Thanks for taking the time. I’ve been a gamer my whole life, but I only started working in the hobby game industry in 2014. Pretty quickly I began to notice the representation gap in both presentation and in creative teams. The gap in the game industry seemed to mirror most of the rest of media and pop culture, which surprised me a little at first. Doing something about it didn’t occur to me until I was chatting with a Native representation consultant and they said something to the effect of, ‘even when they do representation accurately, it’s almost always through a colonial lens’. That really stuck with me. Then I saw the trailer for the video game Greedfall and I knew I had to take some kind of action.
I feel so very privileged that I have a steady job in the game industry and had access to many experienced voices who were willing to give me advice. I’m just a working stiff so it was really tempting to create a proposal and try to just sell the idea off to another publisher and let them run with it. In the end though, I felt that there were too many ways that the project could lose integrity along the way. Once I decided to tackle it myself, it became about team building. And that’s where the game began to become something much bigger and more important.
It’s pretty clear there’s a lot that makes this game unique and intriguing. How would you approach a new player to pitch the idea of the game to them, and are there any things players should know starting out?
That’s actually been one of our biggest hurdles. There’s almost no comparative media out there. When you talk about classic fantasy, even non-gamer audiences know Game of Thrones and Lord of the RIngs. Traditional sci-fi and cyberpunk also calls up a dozen properties and tropes. That cultural shorthand is embedded deeply in our collective conscience. On the one hand, you have to battle all of the negative stereotypes and assumptions non-Natives have. On the other, you have to create a world that’s both exciting and challenging to Natives, but also speaks to an incredibly broad array of Native cultures and traditions in a way that’s inclusive while not appropriative. It’s an extremely narrow ledge.
So to answer your question, when speaking to someone about it for the first time, I try to put them in the mindset of when they first read about Wakanda in the Marvel Universe or when they first played Horizon Zero Dawn. Not the cultural specifics of those worlds, but the idea of shifting your perspective of what could be. Once they’re in that headspace, I usually ask folks to picture what our continent would look like if Europeans or any other colonial forces had ever set foot here. And not at the point of contact 500 years ago, but in the future. From there, I usually can start filling their heads with all of the little details that make this world feel lived in. And while our game has a speculative future with fantasy elements to it, we made it a point to build a world that has a lot of potential grounded in reality.
As for things players should know starting out, there’s a big one that many folks have mentioned. I’ve heard so many variations on ‘I want to play but I’m worried I’ll do or say something insensitive’. I love that so many have asked that. It means there’s progress being made. But we are designing the game so that non-Natives can jump into this and play without worry. There’s a section at the beginning on how to approach the book and what to avoid. And throughout the book we give explanations for words and phrases and additional context for certain concepts or rules. On the flip side, we have specific things we call out where we indicate that Natives can add on or tweak a rule to help it fit their tribal specific customs or context.
That’s all really useful to know! You have a great team with a lot of varied experiences. What is the process like for deciding which ideas for mechanics or content goes into the final product? How do you ensure the most voices are heard?
That’s actually one of the most rewarding portions of development for me. I created the broad parameters of the game and set the stage. Once we had an initial draft, I invited everyone on the team to comment on it and if they felt strongly about a section or a concept, invited them to have a chat with me about either doing edits or re-writes. Nothing in the book is so sacred it can’t be changed. If someone on the team has a brilliant idea, I want it in. As long as the idea doesn’t derail the core concepts or conceits of the game or cause internal inconsistencies, I’m on board. It’s led to some really vibrant discussions and concepts I never would have thought of on my own.
We’re certainly in the ‘kill your darlings’ stage of development and with that comes the pain of seeing some of your initial ideas break in play testing. From a personal standpoint that stings, of course. As the game development progresses, it’s like I built the framework of a house and I’m seeing people add walls and paint and windows. The more work they do, the more mine becomes invisible. But that’s fine. I never wanted this game to be some sort of statement about me personally. From the start I knew this project would be better thematically and mechanically if we had a chorus of voices.
You’ve shared a lot of cool stuff on the Kickstarter page, but I would love to know more! What are some of the exciting things we can expect from the game, the kind of things that really make you want to share with others?
For me, it’s the little details that make a world feel lived in. A perfect example is the underground transit system of Cahokia. It was built originally as a system of tunnels to keep people warm and safe during the brutal winters. As we thought about it practically, we saw flaws. How would this be lit? Keeping fires going in enclosed tunnels would be difficult for so many reasons. Our answer was one that I think is equal parts inspired and reasonable. The people of this world eventually grew their light sources through cultivation of bioluminescent fungi along the walls and ceiling of the tunnels. The effect is that in this future the interior ceilings and walls of these tunnels and the magnetic levitation rail transit system all glow green and blue and purple. While having a living ceiling as a light source is a cool image, I like to also think that it represents a different way of problem solving. We’re working hard to fit as many of those kinds of thoughtful ideas as we can into the book.
We’ve also got bigger ideas that we at least want to set up. I’ve always been a fan of storylines in games that involve shadowy organizations or grand conspiracies. Mystery in TTRPGs is one of my favorite hooks. So we have lots of story prompts and adversaries that are based around those kinds of adventures. It also leaves lots of room for Story Guides to build out around their own concepts.
What led to the decision to make this a game that focused on sci-fi fantasy vibes and encourage the specific style of play (which seems unique) that you did?
That’s a great question. I don’t think there’s a way to answer that without addressing my own personal tastes, so I hope I don’t come off as self-absorbed. I grew up on original Star Trek, Star Wars and authors like Ray Bradbury. Stories that were full of forward thinking and hope. In contrast, my Native heritage always felt grounded in now, in today. It was a very personal and not always a happy part of my relationship with my father and our family.
But in the last decade, we’ve seen some media that has started to meet somewhere in the middle of those two points. It’s not all utopia and hope or escapist fantasy, but it’s also not grim and dirty reality. Shows like the Expanse, newer Star Trek, video games like Horizon Zero Dawn and tabletop games like Android Netrunner were all able to put fresh spins and new perspectives on some of those old concepts, while also highlighting diversity and representation in a way that didn’t feel obligatory.
When I knew I wanted that kind of feeling for Coyote and Crow, it just became a process of elimination. I didn’t want just fantasy because too often non-Natives exoticize Native Americans and that setting is just too ripe for them to abuse, even if it was told well. And pure science fiction doesn’t leave as much room for the subjective and the immaterial that I wanted to make sure spoke to so many Native beliefs across tribes.
I wanted it set in the future because I wanted Natives to see this as a hopeful view of what could have been and maybe some things that might still be, but it had to be built on a different past because I wanted it very clear to everyone that this was a world that colonists and specifically Europeans, had no part in building.
It was also important that the core mechanics offer combat as an option and not the default. Most fantasy games are geared toward going somewhere unfamiliar, killing everything there and then measuring your success based on how much you looted. That sort of storytelling is really limited. For me, the best stories are about building bridges, righting wrongs, finding equilibrium in the middle of chaos and optimizing your gifts in ways that benefit as many as possible, not just yourself. I’m really hoping that Coyote and Crow becomes the launching pad for those kinds of stories.
Amazing! So much good stuff here. I just have one last question to finish this off. As you’ve worked on the design and playtesting for Coyote & Crow, what are some experiences that stand out and excite you for the game and for players to enjoy? What lasting impact do you hope for?
That’s actually a long list. The first time we did a playtest and one of the players got to experience the exploding dice mechanic and they were so thrilled. I knew I was on to something when I saw that look of joy and excitement. Another great moment was when my Native group of playtesters got to meet the supernatural entity that we were using in our adventure (and appears in the one shot that’s in the book). That feeling like we were all playing something that was “ours” was palpable and deeply gratifying.
Since I’ve passed along some of the play testing to our team, I’ve heard some incredible stories from our Story Guide. They said one group just decided to completely cozy up and become friends with a group we’d originally written as sort of adversarial. That was great! As much as I love writing stories and being a Story Guide, having players take it down their own path is always such a treat. Most of my own personal favorite RPG stories over the years usually involve some amount of deviating from the gamemasters plans.
Which leads me to the second part of your question. The lasting impact that I’m hoping for is that people, Native and otherwise, find themselves exploring the world we’ve built and feel inspired to tell new stories and new kinds of stories. I’m a firm believer in storytelling and the power of it. It has the power to unify, to heal, to inspire. My greatest wish is that Coyote & Crow does what all of the best science fiction does, which is to bring some hope to our real lives by giving us a thought provoking world to temporarily escape to. If I can do that for some folks, especially my Native cousins out there, then I’ve succeeded.
Today I have an interview with Dominique Dickey about their project, Tomorrow on Revelation III, which is currently on Kickstarter! This project seems really amazing and explores a lot of complex themes, so I hope you enjoy hearing about it! Check it out!
Today I have an interview with Dominique Dickey about their project, Tomorrow on Revelation III, which is currently on Kickstarter! This project seems really amazing and explores a lot of complex themes, so I hope you enjoy hearing about it! Check it out!
I’m excited for the opportunity to interview you about Tomorrow on Revelation III, which you’re launching on Kickstarter. It sounds fascinating! Before we talk in detail about the game, can you tell me a little about yourself and how you came to be designing this project?
DD: I’m Dominique Dickey! I’m a writer, editor, and consultant. I’ve previously worked as a freelancer on projects such as Thirsty Sword Lesbians, Sea of Legends, Lost Roads, and Pathfinder Lost Omens. You can also find my rpg TRIAL on itch.io: it’s a narrative game that explores race and the criminal justice system via the story of a murder trial, and was my first foray into games as a mechanism of social change.
Last summer, I had the idea for a game about farmers avoiding becoming obsolete on a space station. I was interested in themes of capitalism and finding meaning outside of labor. I also wanted to design a game about community-driven social change, and find a way to represent that change through game mechanics.
I spoke to my dear friend Charles Linton and realized that my initial premise was more suited for a one-shot than a campaign, as resolving the problem (making sure the space farmers had rights and protections) would break the game (by obliterating a core aspect of the setting). I also didn’t want it to become a game about making oneself necessary to the capitalist machine: what if the farmers’ profession actually does become obsolete, but they find value outside of their labor? The way I initially envisioned the game would not allow players to answer that question, or others like it.
From those discussions with Charlie, the game shifted to be about a group of people on a heavily stratified space station, all with different backgrounds and levels of privilege, working together to improve their collective circumstances. I was really excited by the idea of developing the eponymous station and its stratifications—this was my first time writing a game with a super concrete setting, and I wanted to create a rich and generative sandbox for players and GMs to enjoy.
Thoughty remains! So does Script Change. I still hope to do some interviews, as mentioned, very periodically. I want to talk more about design, and about leadership in games. I want to talk about the things I personally enjoy in games, break them down, see if I can make them make sense. I hope when the worldsuck eases I’ll release more games, though I doubt anything I do solo will be as big and fancy as Turn. I’ll be separately supporting my partners with their projects. Oh yeah, and I’ll still be accepting guest blogs here when I can build up a larger fund for paying creators!
Times do change.
My first interviews were before Thoughty – on my previous and now defunct site that I ported here with Systir Productions & 616, and on Gaming as Women with attendees of a Gamerati game day and then Judy Bauerof all people. I kicked off Thoughty and Five or So Questions in 2014 as a continuation of the original blog, but only the interviews really stuck around.
Me in 2013 at Gen Con with F. Wes Schneider, Paizo’s then Editor-in-Chief, who I had interviewed for GAW.
I have done over three hundred interviews on Thoughty, about 250 of those being Five or So Question interviews. I have only had a few interviews fully fail to be completed due to scheduling, and one pulled by the creator. I’ve interviewed people about not just tabletop but also card, board, and video games, plus lonely solo games, huge collections of tabletop and live action games, their artwork, their design process, their Kickstarters, and more. I have had an exceptional opportunity to pick the brains of the most brilliant designers in tabletop games, from legacy designers like Ron Edwards to genius women designers like Dr. Jessica Hammer and Meguey Baker to groundbreaking modern designers like Jay Dragon and Rae Nedjadi. Many of these people I have grown to consider friends and colleagues, and I’m so grateful for the amazing things I’ve learned from them and shared with you.
I have been supported by my Patreon supporters primarily for these interviews, enough funds to pay for my website and a bill every so often, some busy months enough to help me pay medical expenses. I am incredibly grateful for my supporters, for everyone who has shared an interview, recommended a creator to reach out to, or praised my interviews, regardless of whether they supported me financially!
You may ask, if this is so great, why does the title say you’re ending interviews? What does this mean for Thoughty? Why has the site been so slow recently, anyway? Well, that’s what I’m gonna try to answer here. This is… a bit long. I’m still me, you know.
Hi all! Today I have an interview with the creators of Into the Mother Lands, a new project being performed on and sponsored by Twitch and released on YouTube, developed using the Cortex Prime RPG system. You can keep up to date on the project through their Twitter or Discord, and until then, check out the responses from Tanya DePass (T.D.), B. Dave Walters (B.D.W.), and Gabe Hicks (G.H.) below!
Catch Into the Mother Lands, a Cortex Prime RPG actual play using a new sci-fi IP created by Tanya DePass, leading a team of veteran Black & POC creatives as they build the world and its stories together at twitch.tv/cypheroftyr, Sundays at 4pm Pacific/6pm Central/7pm Eastern/5pm Mountain time.
What an amazing team, and with Tanya at the lead! For our readers who may be new to your work, could each of you introduce yourselves and talk about your experience and specialties that you’re bringing to the Into the Motherlands RPG?
B.D.W.: I say words about things! I have been playing games for about 30 years now. I’m the writer and co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons: A Darkened Wish and DM for the streaming series of the same name. I also have written for Werewolf the Apocalypse 5th Edition and some other unannounced World of Darkness projects.
I have also consulted on increasing diversity and inclusion in a number of well-known gaming properties.
T.D.: I’ve been a diversity & inclusion consultant in RPG’s for the last few years, have writing credits with Green Ronin, Paizo, Monte Cook Games, WotC and have been playing RPG’s since I could hold a D6.
G.H.: Hi, my name is Gabe Hicks! I’m a voice actor, streamer, and designer who works in digital and tabletop. I have written for MOBAs, worked with Paizo, Zweihander, a plethora of other companies and systems and narrative work and taking those experiences and working with different worlds is part of how my design and narrative process have helped me in building this world for Into the Motherlands RPG. It’s learning a little bit from each piece that I’ve done and considering how it all blends in the world together.
There is hype for Into the Motherlands already, but what are you most excited to explore? How does your use of streaming and your varied backgrounds impact your presentation of these exciting elements?
B.D.W.: I am most interested in being able to explore a sci-fi setting that’s not ultimately a bland retelling of the Westward Expansion! We have the privilege of painting an entirely new portrait of a civilization completely free from colonialism, and that has been an incredibly satisfying mental exercise. I can’t wait for you to see it!
TD: I’m excited to tell a story without colonization and slavery as part and parcel of the world’s lore and history. To see where our folks wind up and how their choices become a canon part of our world.
G.H.: I’m really excited to give a core premise for worlds and then see how people build onto them or build their own. There’s a lot here that we have to build up and create more and more, and it’s an opportunity not often given to really have a whole fresh start especially when it comes to world’s imagined specifically by people of color. With the different skill set and experiences of the team as a whole when it comes together it’s beautiful. We’re able to figure out and design a game that plays well in a show format but doesn’t have to be a show to be fun.
That sounds great! So tell me about Into the Motherlands. What is different about it from other sci-fi settings? How are you demonstrating the unique elements?
TD: It’s different in that we’re not going for super grim dark, it’s populated by a variety of cultures and does its best to invert a lot of tropes.
G.H.: We built this system with such a heavy emphasis on storytelling in a sci-fi setting. So many people try to make games that are combat in space without as much emphasis I’d like in story, world building, and creating entirely just new ideas rather than playing off tropes. Not to mention, when we do see these things there is almost never African inspiration tied into them.
What is it like debuting a game on Twitch? Are there unique challenges or benefits that come from this platform as your showcase?
TD: It’s hard because we discovered people will backseat literally anything, including a brand new system and even the production of the show. Benefits are that people can see it done real-time, but also you get to see the weird commentary and other things people are throwing around. For me, it’s hard because all these theories are so incredibly wrong, but you can’t stop playing to address it in chat.
G.H.: I honestly think I’m spoiled now with development. We get a chance to see LIVE what people are interested in, what people want to see more of, what people want to know more about and it honestly makes my job so much more interesting. It’s an opportunity to literally focus on the things people want and then create extra on top. This isn’t a circumstance where we have to wait and see what gets people interested during development. It’s such a fortunate thing.
Where did the inspiration for Into the Motherlands or your work on it come from? How have you workshopped ideas when you’re working to avoid colonialism? Does that come naturally to your team?
TD: We just talked, and decided there would be no colonialism, slavery etc. It’s not that hard and we didn’t need to workshop it. With an all Black & POC writing team, we just opted out off that, simply because Sci fi and fantasy don’t need those to tell a compelling story.
G.H.: It does come pretty naturally. It’s a team effort and that’s so clear when we sit down and work. Like Tanya said it was just a straight up choice, none of it. I’ve literally been reading into the different biomes and environments in Africa, the way flora and fauna interact, and how much variety there is in life. It’s been a never ending supply of inspiration and stuff to share.
What’s it like working on an inclusive and diverse team that’s got such varied perspectives? Does it feel more freeing to work in this way, and does it help on this specific project to be such a diverse team?
TD: Absolutely it’s more freeing. However, we assembled this talented team of Black & POC creatives not just to be ‘diverse’ but because everyone is super talented and capable. While it’s being pointed out that we’re an all Black & POC team, by us because for me (and maybe others) it’s the first time we’ve had that option. But it’s not the only thing about our group, game and show.
G.H.: It’s freeing. Someone always has a new perspective or an insight. IT’s not just one point of view but it’s like knowing we all have some different experiences in some of our similar views. I feel a bit like I have less to prove of myself, a bit like I can already say “These people get it.”. On this project especially, having a diverse team is huge part of why this game works as well as it does. It’s a testament to diversity being such a boon in creation.
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Thank you so much to all three of those able to respond for this interview! I hope you all enjoyed this interview, and that you’ll check out Into the Mother Lands on Twitch each Sunday!
Catch Into the Mother Lands, a Cortex Prime RPG actual play using a new sci-fi IP created by Tanya DePass, leading a team of veteran Black & POC creatives as they build the world and its stories together at twitch.tv/cypheroftyr, Sundays at 4pm Pacific/6pm Central/7pm Eastern/5pm Mountain time.
The cover for The Map is not The Territory. Love it!
Thanks for joining me for an interview, Chris! I’m excited to hear about your project, The Map is not The Territory. What is your experience like in games that it led you to this project?
I’ve been noodling around the RPG industry in a variety of capacities since the mid-2000s, but I didn’t get serious about freelancing and publishing my own stuff until the tail end of 2014. Since then I’ve published a few things ‘the old-fashioned way’, and run four Kickstarters — three successful, one un. I think what specifically led me to this project though is less of my industry experience and more that running my RPG business as a side gig means I tend to make whatever I feel like making and hope it speaks to people. TMINT itself springs from my love of remixes, remakes and covers — I love the way different people can arrive at such wildly different creations even if you give them the same origin point.
In essence it’s a project motivated by my personal foibles when it comes to running a business and my personal tastes in creative media, to which I am personally contributing very little. The irony feels good.
Coordinating a big team of creators and being part of such a team can create a lot of challenges. What made you uniquely suited for this project and this team?
Like… as I mentioned above, this is a very personal project. It’s a thing I wanted to exist, so I decided to take the steps to make that happen. And in that sense I am the only person who could have originated this project, because it has its roots in things I enjoy and things I appreciate. I’m the only person with this particular combination of perspective, tastes, skills, and reach — therefore, I am uniquely suited to this project and this team because anyone else who did something similar would produce a different project with a different team.
But.
Everybody has a network and a perspective and some tastes. Skills can be learned, or skilled people can be hired. I like to remind people that if I ever do something that looks complex, it’s really just several simple things layered together. If I do something that looks difficult, at base it’s just several smaller, easier things combined into a greater whole. Anything I can do, can be done by someone else. Anybody could create this kind of project, and in that sense there is literally nothing that positions me as uniquely qualified to do so.
Which, I’d like to emphasize, is a good thing. Every human being is unique, and brings a unique perspective to their creations — which, full circle, is the whole point of TMINT. To highlight those unique perspectives by giving them a common origin and seeing how they grow outwards from there.
…of course, if you’re asking ‘do you have any excellent team management skills?’ the answer is ‘lol no I’m making this up as I go along’ — but I like to get the old philosophy degree out for an airing now and then.
The map by Dyson Logos that is at the center of the project.
What is The Map is not The Territory as a project, and what is the vision for the project? What from your prior experience helped you create it?
The Map is not The Territory is a project to show what a single origin point can look like when viewed through as many different lenses as possible. The vision is to bring together authors, game designers, scientists, and poets, and showcase the creativity which each individual brings to the basic concept. I want anyone into RPGs to find something they can use in there, whether it’s a dungeon quest, a whole other game, a world of adventure… something. I want people to flip through it and go ‘ooooh’.
Because I’ve been noodling around the RPG industry for years and running my own publisher for slightly fewer years, I’ve got experience with the practicalities of turning manuscripts into finished pdfs and printed books. I know how to budget and run a Kickstarter because I’ve run three successful ones (and if people want to know more about that, I do a public postmortem after every one). I’ve got all the skills needed to turn a concept into a reality. I, uh… just need the money.
For each of the 24 contributors, what is included in their contribution to the project? How did you determine the scope of the project – how long it should be, what it should cover, etc.?
Each contributor is going to write me 500-1000 words on a subject of their choice, inspired by the map, which will go alongside a customised version of the map. Some versions of the map are going to be almost the same as the original. Some are going to be wild.
I always wanted it to cover as many different interpretations of the map as possible — and to have those interpretations be as far from each other as possible — and I think we’ve hit a really good range. The sheer variety of responses when I asked for pitches was stunning, and I deliberately grabbed a selection each from ‘normal with a twist’, ‘kinda weird’, and ‘left field’ to make sure there was something for everyone.
The scope of the project was defined largely by the tension between two opposing forces: wanting to pay everyone a decent sum for their work on one hand, and what I could expect to sell it for on the other. (Down with capitalism.) I wanted to include as many authors as possible, so I just kept incrementing that number on my budget spreadsheet until I hit the balancing point between ‘will sell for about $15’ and ‘paying all the contributors okay money’.
My basic idea was that every interpretation of the map, plus the custom map, plus some art and/or layout flourishes, would sit on a double-page spread, making for a slim softcover. Once again, I was thinking about how much I could afford to pay each contributor without exploding my budget — you get 300-ish words per page, so 500 words plus a map can fit on one spread. My original idea was for a minimum of 32 pages, but with 24 contributors we’re looking at minimum 48 pages plus a few frontmatter odds and ends. I think some of the pitches I’ve received are going to run somewhat longer than that though, so the page count might go up.
Kickstarter takes a decent amount of risk out of the equation, but at the same time I didn’t put it on Kickstarter to see if it was workable — I put it on there because I already think it’s workable and I want it to succeed.
The map for Samantha Hancox-Li’s “The Luminous Depths.”
This seems like such a cool idea! So how did you find your amazing contributors? What did you look for in their ideas?
I put an open call for pitches out on Twitter and left it open for… two weeks? A month? I forget exactly. Some time. Anyway, I also specifically reached out to some marginalised creators and asked them for pitches directly because I’d heard that marginalised folk tend to self-select out of stuff like this. Once I had a nice Google sheet full of pitches, I extracted all the pitch details without looking at the names so I could do a proper blind pick.
Once I had all the pitches, I divided them into three broad categories: ‘dungeon crawl with a twist’, ‘something unusual’, and ‘highly weird’. Then I grabbed my (more or less) eight favourites in each category and that was the final 24.
I looked for slightly different things in each category. For the weird section I wanted properly out-there stuff — things which used the map in such a way that it was barely recognisable as a dungeon any more. The unusual section consists of things which are recognisable as roleplaying adventures but use the map in an interesting way or have a unique twist. And for the dungeon crawl section I wanted to see fresh elements which you don’t often see in other dungeons. And I got all of those things in spades! The scale of creativity in the pitches was amazing, and if I could make
What made you decide on the particular map that you’re using? What is unique about it?
I originally went to Dyson Logos’ page because I knew he was a very good dungeon cartographer. I was sort of half thinking to hire him, half thinking to consult his designs for inspiration. When I saw he was allowing people to use some of his maps for free, I immediately jumped on that. Quality stuff! For zero dollars! Then it was just a matter of sifting through his extensive back catalogue for just the right map. I eventually settled on the The Lost Temple of Aphosh the Haunted because it’s big enough to have a lot of encounters without being sprawling, and offers a mixture of natural and artificial terrain. I wanted something that people could project their own ideas onto and that had enough conceptual ‘hooks’ to work with without being prescriptive.
Map chosen, I emailed Dyson juuuust to make sure the plan was ok, he said yes, and here we are.
The mockup for the physical form of The Map is not The Territory.
Tell me a little about Brinkwood: Blood of Tyrants. What excites you about it?
Brinkwood is a Forged in the Dark game, a system I love working in. This is my second attempt at putting a hack of Blades together, and I’m excited to be working as part of a team now, as so many good ideas flow into the project from our consultants, playtesters, and others involved in the project.
The four-word pitch is “Robin Hood versus Vampires”, which I think, if that grabs your attention, this is a game you’ll be interested in. What excites me about it is the chance to build a game that has a lot of depth and longevity to it’s campaign level, without a lot of the baggage and book-keeping that typically goes into this sort of game. We’re putting a lot of work in to make it so that you have an evolving experience, starting from just a few bandits out in the woods, slowly building allies and relationships with other factions, many of whom who have been working at this a lot longer than you have, and slowly turning from a band, to a coalition, to a movement, to finally a true revolutionary force.
I’m probably most excited to bring in some of the real-world experience I’ve had in leftist organizing. In a lot of games or media about rebellion and revolution, the focus is on heroic individuals, rather than groups and movements. I think both narratives are valuable, and I wanted to include both in this game. In many ways, this game is about taking different groups who all share the same ideological goals, but differ in the details of how to accomplish said goals, which mirrors my experiences from 2016 onward. This isn’t a game where you try to get deeply opposed groups to work together, it’s about the smaller frictions of approach between groups that are incredibly committed to the same goals, and negotiating those competing approaches to try and build a successful rebellion.
Tell me more about integrating your organizing experience into the game. How does this come forth in play?
For my organizing experience, I think it comes out in play in two main ways, one subtle, and one not-so-subtle. On the subtle side, I think the interplay of the various campaign-level systems, be it your allied factions, their strength feeding into your strength, the sedition mechanics, and even the actions the GM takes as the “Vampire Lord” create a sort of test-kitchen effect, where players are put into the mind-space of organizers and revolutionaries. One of my favorite examples came in a recent game, where my players asked themselves first, not what they thought a community needed, but what they could do to find out what a community actually needed. I saw this problem crop up a lot in my organizing experience, with groups coming in with their own agenda, imposing solutions to what they thought were a community’s problems, without actually consulting said community. It was thrilling to see this very issue emerge organically, and for the pressures of the game system to guide my players to (what I believe to be) the correct choice for any organization: Ask people what they need first, don’t assume you know better, and then work with the community itself to provide mutual aid.
On the not-so-subtle side, we have the Conclave, a system whereby every few sessions, depending on the player’s actions, they will meet with the stakeholders in their rebellion. I was inspired in my own experience of meetings between different faction representatives (called “spokes”, both in anarchist organizing and in Brinkwood) to determine what goals to prioritize, what resources to allocate, etc. It’s a messy process in real life, and so far, when played out, it’s messy and dramatic in-game. To me, the most interesting conflicts are between people who both have the same goals and ideas, but differ only in their approach. It’s interesting for players to be in a space where they have to stake an opinion on the world, and actively make decisions about who-gets-what that actually impact the game’s world and their own relationships with one another and their NPC allies.
How are you building hope and the possibility of success into the game when mechanically Forged in the Dark mechanically can trend a little bleak?
We’ve done a lot of under-the-hood work on the Blades system to try and make things more hopeful and less bleak. The slow grind of vice, stress, and trauma tends to “wear down” PCs in Blades, and I’ve read a lot of reviews and analyses (some critical, some positive) of both Blades and, in some ways, Brinkwood‘s closer antecedent, Band of Blades. On the first level, I’ve changed how the stress grind works. For every resistance roll (Blades’s main mechanic for players to resist, or “cancel out” negative consequences), I’ve changed the math so that the range of stress goes from one to three, rather than from zero to six on a single roll. This means that most every action now carries a price, albeit a smaller, slower burn-down that, in my opinion, allows the players better control of how quickly their characters get into trouble.
Similarly, I’ve “split” the typical Blades sheet into two pieces, with the player character on one sheet, and the special abilities / archetype information on a separate “Mask” sheet. Players are free to choose between these masks on each Foray, and this allow players to be more flexible than they would in other systems (ie, play the mask of Violence if their character needs to be able to defend themselves, or play the mask of Lies if they need to deceive or socially manipulate their enemies). I’ve also “split” the stress track between Stress and Essence, so that players have access to more resources overall, but still have the tension of two slowly burning resources.
Lastly, in the reference documents we’ve prepared for players, we’ve put a lot of emphasis on giving the players all the tools they need to succeed, with advice on how to boost their rolls, their effectiveness, or what to spend and what to do. I think Blades can be an intimidating game to learn in some ways, and if you don’t have access to all the knowledge the game demands, it can become a lot more deadly or stressful than intended. We also state explicitly in our GM advice is that the GM is a co-conspirator and a player, and should remain on the PC’s side, giving advice on how to use the rules, how to spend resources, or how to navigate other more complicated aspects of the game to ensure the PCs know all of their options in a given situation. It amazes me how much less “aggressive” and more fun Blades becomes when you remember to do simple things like offer Devil’s Bargains, or remind players that they can resist any consequence you throw at them.
What is the world like that the characters exist in and that they’re encountering challenges in?
Brinkwood takes place in a castylpunk world, meaning it’s aesthetic is very much in line with stuff like Castlevania or similar properties, but with a punk intention brought to bear on it. So it’s medieval / gothic-esque, with lots of castles, gothic architecture, gloomy cities, sprawling manors, small villages, etc, but also alongside things like primitive firearms, smoke-belching factories, flesh-steamwork amalgamations, and other more anachronistic monstrosities and details. By saying this is a “punk” game, we mean that you aren’t here to admire the scenery or sympathize with oppressors, you are here to tear down systems of control and oppression, not to replicate or replace them.
What inspired the choice to split the character sheet into two parts, and what are some of the benefits that come with that design choice?
The inspiration came from a common problem I saw in some campaigns of Blades, as well as other games I ran. I found that often times, people would lose interest in the mechanical side of a character long before the character’s “story” had completed. By separating most of the mechanics out to a separate sheet, it allows people the freedom to “try out” different mechanical archetypes, and not shackle their character’s story development as closely to their mechanical development. Likewise, it allows interesting groups of characters to play together, without necessarily worrying that they’re “missing” a key archetype or ability.
Playgroups are free to experiment, try different types of Forays, and not feel pigeonholed into doing the same sort of thing over and over again. In a narrative sense, it helps contribute to the theme of “commonplace heroism,” your character isn’t exceptional by virtue of some in-born talent or ability, but by their willingness to take up the mantle of responsibility and take action.
Thank you very much for joining me to talk about Mnemonic! Before we talk too deeply about the game, I’d like to introduce you to my readers – your debutante, so to speak. What brought you to games? Why do you choose to design?
DP: I’ve been playing games since I was 10, when my friends and I would walk down the halls between class and talk through “roleplaying” stories in the Star Wars universe. We tinkered with the design ideas from video games like Gauntlet Legends and Legend of Zelda to imagine what other stories might look like. Sometimes those stories were capital s Stories; sometimes they were just aesthetic ideas, like “What if a game like Gauntlet but you’re all summoners conjuring big magic beasts?”
It wasn’t until high school that I touched a tabletop roleplaying game with mechanics and character creation. My group of friends played D&D every Friday for four years, because D&D was the game we knew. The Mnemonic setting came out of a play-by-post game twelve years ago, and it’s been growing steadily ever since.
LA: I started formal, written RPGs… sometime in middle or high school? Thereabouts. But I was introduced informally through improvisational dungeon crawling in (ugh) Boy Scouts. I tolerated entirely too many years of that, but at least I got this out of it. Next was, of all things, freeform forum RP in the GameFAQs Metroid Prime social message board. For formal systems, I got started with D&D, as many are, because it was the cultural monolith that people recognized.
I spent a long time reading Vampire: the Masquerade core books and sourcebooks in a bookstore nearby, but never played it because I didn’t have a group for it. D&D was interesting to theorycraft, but I never got a regular group for an extended campaign. Shadowrun was the next game I played seriously and the first I had a real extended campaign of. Shadowrun has a complicated relationship for me, one that I don’t have nearly enough time or space here to address. The much abbreviated explanation is that they made me aware that my TTRPGs could say something, mean something, be something, not just be the aesthetic trappings for a series of ever-escalating violent encounters.
NM: I played my first TTRPG at 14 in highschool – D&D, naturally – and my experience was so bad I didn’t play again until I was 19 or 20! Through Games Club at university I was introduced into Dark Heresy, Deadlands, Vampire: the Masquerade, and Legend of the Five Rings (they also tried hard to get me to give D&D and Pathfinder another chance but I never did, really). But we always ended up house-ruling our games to do the things we wanted them to do that they didn’t. Designing games from the ground up was the next step: something I’ve done for over a decade without ever imagining myself a ‘game designer’ or participating in TTRPG Twitter!
It’s only in the last year or two I’ve really called myself a “game designer” or thought of what I do as design, let alone dreamed I could do it as a job!
PP: I grew up reading more tabletop and wargaming books than “proper” literature: AD&D, L5R, Mechwarrior, Warhammer, and oWoD all introduced me to interesting possibilities that I could make my own rather than stories that were set in stone. This is interesting to me in retrospect, because this was the 80s in Vancouver, and that period was the height of the Satanic Panic. You’d think that my staunchly Catholic Filipino parents would have despised such books as works of the Devil, and would have then barred my older brothers from playing. Turns out that they didn’t mind because tabletop games meant that they got to play with friends. Brown kids in a very white section of town needed friends.
Of course, I was too young to join any of their games. My first forays happened much later in high school, with close knit circles of friends from my school and with my younger brother plus some cousins. There was a long period where I was disillusioned from tabletop because a lot of my peers were cishet, male, and/or sexist – which led me to the new World of Darkness books, and had me making my own campaign on my own terms. Did a copious amount of kitbashing and homebrewing for WoD in particular, and I always got the same comments. “This is such a cool world!” “This doesn’t feel like WoD, but in a good way?” “Why don’t you make your own games?”
It’s been a pretty wild game design journey for me since last year. I don’t think I can answer why I design in so many words, but if I were to try… I think I design to find myself, and make more room for other people like me. There are always stories to be told, and each one of us brings something different to our tables. I like exploring the many things I can offer, both for my own pleasure and for anyone who may read my works and realize they could make their own things from the tools I can give them.
SP: I started playing Tabletop RPGs in 2015, but I’d been curious about it for much earlier, there was just no time. Mid 2014 was the beginning of my thesis year in college and I really wanted to finish college because at that point I was already about 5-6 years in University. When 2015 came, though, I was just about to enroll for my last semester when I was told that some of my units that I took in the University’s constituent campus were apparently not going to be credited. It meant that I’d need to retake some classes before going for my thesis. Funny circumstances, because that’s what gave me the time to actually get into games. I had a boyfriend at the time who had friends that were coming together for a D&D campaign which was how I got invited. They were taking up the same course (Library Sciences), so by majority, we agreed to meet at their college building (which was… the University Library). My college building was across the campus so I was often arriving just when everybody was settling in.
My first campaign was, in a word, chaotic. We were fifteen players, what can you do? But surprisingly, my DM was really good at it. So good, in fact, that I thought this was just… normal. I thought the normal table count was fifteen players and that any less was… just a little lonely. I was very wrong. I think having such a great DM at first also gave me very rose-colored lenses for every DM that I played under afterwards. There were lots of DMs that I experienced afterwards that were… not so great, but I thought “Oh, maybe my first DM is just exceptional.” Unfortunately, this mindset paved the way for me sort of… allowing myself to be thrown around under games and tables that were not so respectful of my boundaries with players and DMs that felt less than safe to be with. Exhausted, I broke away from that and later fell into a game design project that soared for a bit, but eventually also moved away from due to differences in direction and principles. It was here that I think where I really started. I met some great people from the Gamers and Gaming Meets, an organisation that hosts TTRPG events here in Manila. They helped me move towards design and expand my horizons.
I still remember when my friends took me to their place and showed me all sorts of TTRPG books and how the layout was done and how the mechanics were presented. The art, the themes, the dynamics all spoke so deeply to me and I was hooked ever since. I began creating games with ideas and themes that were close to me (plants, haha) and I’m now trying to explore making games that mean a lot to me. I’ll admit that while my first gaming experience wasn’t terrible, the ones that followed for a long time were exhausting and far from ideal. I want to make games that touch on ideas that are important to me, like the struggles of growing up in this country that seems to love making it hard for people like me (queer, non binary, not part of the upper class) to exist. I want to create games that inspire others to also make games so that their voices can also be heard.
Syn: Gaming had always been a thing for me – Mario, Sonic, Tetris, etc. – but tabletop games and design is a bit more recent for me. I started playing tabletop games somewhat seriously around 2016 and started DM’ing after some encouragement in 2017. It was a wild time learning how to handle all of that, but the further I progressed in learning how to DM and looking into the lore of these systems, the more questions I asked about why things were as they were. As I put those thoughts out into the world, the responses that came back were “Have you thought of designing a game?” I hadn’t. I thought I was just asking average questions that someone had surely thought about. They were, but the people who thought those things were, in fact, designers.
I asked about skill checks, dice rolls, worldbuilding, and kobolds and so much so that I ended up here, writing about this friggin’ exciting game.
Illustration by Sinta Posadas.
To follow that, I’d like to ask a little about your background. What are your areas of expertise, your storied histories? What makes you the designer to make Mnemonic and make it the perfect experience it’s meant to be?
DP: Mnemonic is the world I play in when I think about stories; it’s the universe of fantasy and magic that exists in my head, and most of the characters I create exist somewhere within that universe.
Mnemonic is a setting where memory has power, both as a life force for the world itself and as a source of magic. A lot of the setting’s ideas come from my own grapples with memory, things I remember from childhood that look a lot different in retrospect. Some things are happy remembrances; others, less happy. But giving people the space to explore that recontextualization is important to me.
I’m also White, which means I have a healthy load of unexamined biases when it comes to what stories can exist and what an imaginary world can look like. Would you believe me if I said I’m not the ideal person to tell stories in this setting? A lot of my design process for this world comes from a place of enabling players to tell stories that are personal to them, with as little White European Colonialist Bullshit as possible. For Mnemonic, this means asking questions to invite the player to bring themselves into the world. But I can’t do that alone.
For my first game in this setting, Cracks in the Mirror, I hired a sensitivity consultant to help me identify the spots where I was stumbling into presumptive or harmful tropes. They were immensely valuable in helping me realize everything in the previous paragraph, too.
For our Weaver’s Almanac, I wanted even more help, and not from people with the same unexamined biases as me. Which is why most of the members of our team are BIPOC.
LA: I’m a high-generation mixed-race Japanese American. The relation between memory and reality in Mnemonic is interesting to me because of a particular story I have about growing up. Whenever I went to visit my grandparents, they would have documentaries about the Japanese internment camps on the TV. I learned a key part of my heritage through passive absorption. They never addressed it directly until I was much older. It was just there, lingering in the background.
Part of the basic premise of Mnemonic as a broader world is that memories, and how they affected people differently, are lingering in the world. They affect it. Their impacts, not just by their objective truth but by how people feel about them and even by how people manipulate when those are looked back on, are real, in a way even more real than the idea of a thing that happened some time ago.
NM: I’m mixed-race Black Canadian. I’m very interested in the shifting negotiations, interpretations and the power of memories, particularly in the way different groups and cultures remember their histories. Worlds where those cultures and their histories come alive through the power of memory and of story – particularly collaborative story – are so compelling to me because they allow us agency in how our histories are told in ways that we so rarely are allowed in reality.
One of the reasons I find Mnemonic so compelling is because of how it leans into tools for telling stories, rather than simply telling them. For me part of designing games is about creating gaps for the players to fill and create their own stories and memories. Players are really the game designers, if you think about it – I can write this and that, but those stories are no longer mine the second someone else picks them up. All I’m doing, hopefully, is opening windows they might not have noticed, and asking “what do you see? And what does it remind you of?”
PP: I’m a queer Filipino woman born in the Philippines. My parents fled from an oppressive regime, full of dreams of a better future for them and their children in Canada. My memories of Canada as a child are beautiful flashes – some I can see, some I can taste, some I can feel, and some I can smell. What’s much sharper is the jarring sense I had with my family’s return to Manila. The past few years have been an intriguing yet at times painful study in turning back towards those feelings I had, and realizing, now, what my past self was wrestling with: displacement, confusion, never fitting in even if I was as “Filipino” as my peers. Then, of course, there are the extra tensions of me being polyamorous (and discovering it late, after years of thinking I was bisexual and had “bad, extra” feelings towards multiple people), me being a woman in a hypermasculine, Catholic society that will take every opportunity to tell you that you and your body are nothing without the approval of men, and me being the only daughter out of six children in a rather traditional Filpino family (thus making me someone both in constant need of protection, and also someone who was expected to put their dreams and ideas aside if they were offensive or improper to her brothers). People will constantly try to rewrite you in the hopes of fitting you into easily digestible parts for themselves. They’ll try to ignore the fact that you have your own stories, and your own desire to write it the way you want to.
And that brings me to why I was happy to join Dee in designing Mnemonic. This was one of the first games that was capable, with every word, of telling me, “Hey. I see you. This is a story for you, that you can make as you like. I am a game that respects you for you.” Memories are things that transform, shift, break apart, come back together, write, and revise themselves as we grow older with them. Bringing that sort of beautiful process into a game is something I’m really into.
SP: I have always viewed Mnemonic with fascination. The dream-like feeling, the exploration of memory – that’s always what has drawn me to it. When I fully read it for the first time, I felt that idea of being able to become something – I don’t know exactly what, but the concept itself, to me, seemed necessary. As someone who often has to be A Certain One Thing in their daily life, it is comforting to have a game that exists that allows you to shift, be different, reform along with the memories that you explore in the game. I haven’t played it but I wish to someday.
As for the art, I wasn’t actually expecting to do the art for the project. I thought I was going to do writing and then suddenly a discussion for artists was happening and… I decided to shoot my shot. And it happened! Before I knew it, I was designing art for the project.
Art has always been a complicated thing for me. I don’t talk about my art a lot because my feelings for my art and my skills are Difficult. I started making art when I was a tiny kid watching Powerpuff Girls in our living room back in my grandparent’s house in the countryside. I really took to it and enjoyed making drawing after drawing, filling one notebook after another. I was a hungry mind stuck in a small child’s body. I wanted to learn to make better art and I kept pushing myself so, so hard to as far as my small hands could possibly take me. Much like many of my peers, my skills were forever unrecognized by my mother (she raised me and my brother on her own) and I was constantly told to wake up and concentrate on more “money-making” pursuits. This constant push and pull made me hate my art but also made me unable to stop. My struggle with this continues to this day. My mother also still hasn’t recognized my skill and I don’t think she ever will. I don’t really want her approval anymore anyway, but I hope she knows she’s wrong. My art is going to be part of a kickstarter that will definitely touch hearts and also, bluntly, make money. I didn’t become a doctor like she wanted, but I’m sure the project will heal others in a different way.
Syn: I’m just a person with questions. Lots of them. So when you mix my innate curiosity about every single thing with my utter fascination with worldbuilding, I guess this was almost destined for me. I remember when I was asked to join the team. It felt surreal; I’m just a guy with questions about the worlds we build and the systems that support them.
When Dee asked me if I would like to build in a world of memory, I was still learning what it was that I wanted to do in the world of tabletop games and the stories I wanted to tell. I read the mechanics and a bit of the lore and it was just… obvious. The stories I want to tell are the kind where you dig into yourself and ask questions and deal with the challenges that come from those answers. Everything in Mnemonic speaks to that need.
An excerpt from The First Gathering written by Dee Pennyway, layout by Dee Pennyway. Click the picture to check out the draft (work in progress!)!
Cool! So, now that we know a little about you, tell me a little about Mnemonic. What excites you about it? What spurred its creation?
DP: Mnemonic emerged from a question I had in a play-by-post game a dozen years ago: If I have to spend Experience Points to use this ability, what do those Experience Points represent, and what does it mean to lose them? I settled into memory as a source of power, which evolved over the years into a world concept where the world itself has memories that exert themselves on occasion. I’ve played around with characters who lost their memories after abusing magic, characters who trapped unpleasant memories inside of powerful relics to try and forget traumatic events, characters who sang songs to resonate their own memories with the memories of others.
I’m pleased with the current version of the world that exists in my mind, which is that memory is inherently fluid, not something that can be spent or saved or stored but something that we engage with and observe on a constant basis. We remember things, we misremember things, we forget things…and the world does too. There’s something really neat to me about a world that remembers the things we do, even if no one else sees us do them. What memories does the world choose to hold onto, like keepsakes? What memories does the world try to forget?
Synxiec and I have talked about what happens when the world wants to forget somebody but can’t. Like a kind of cursed immortality. The story gets a lot heavier when we start exploring trauma as a world event, but it’s a thing my mind drifts to when I think about stories I want to tell in Mnemonic.
PP: I mentioned how Mnemonic is a game that spoke to me, and acknowledged me as someone full of stories that I wanted to tell. What excites me most about this project is the fact that by design, the emotions, intent, and player understanding of “memory” will change according to who joins you for a session. My first game had us exploring our gender identities, how we connected with other people, and how we viewed family and love. Being guided through the session with prompts and a constant reminder of “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to; respect the silence” felt magical. The thought of being able to expand upon these experiences for more players, this time as a member of the dev team, really excites me!
The other big thing that I’m looking forward to would be all of the subsystems that the Almanac will have, plus all the gameable lore that our team will be bringing to the table. As a designer who is extremely comfortable with either systems that use dice or systems that are purely narrative, playing around with fascinating card mechanics is uncharted territory. The things we have planned make me feel like I can both contribute well to the Almanac, and challenge myself to design for new things.
Syn: The thing that excites me about the game the most is a hard question. At first, it was the die. Each of them having a distinct purpose. Then as I looked more closely at it, I found what excited me the most: the questions. Did I mention I like asking questions? Because I really enjoy asking questions and Mnemonic’s challenges are unique in that respect. What game asks a question like “What lies do you tell yourself?” as part of character creation? These are the kind of foundational things that build worlds I like to explore and get lost in.
We’re not even going to talk about how every other thing this game gives you has safety built into it. I’ve already thought about the many stories I want to tell in this world of memory, but don’t tell Dee that. It’s a surprise.
Also, the people I get to work with are people I have so much respect for and many of them are people I just enjoy for their own sake. I’m happy to work with them.
NM: Unreliable narration, anti-canon and player-collaborated and -created game history, lore, and content are things I’m particularly invested in. Games are shared storytelling endeavors, after all – it makes it that much more enjoyable when everyone is empowered and able to contribute to communal worldbuilding rather than passively experiencing those worlds.
Mnemonic excites me in the way Dread and Trophy excite me: asking pointed questions of ourselves and others to build a shared world and a shared experience, as it pertains to memory – which is both a very personal thing and a communal one. Any time I’ve ever spent with friends, half the conversation is inevitably “remember that time?” Mnemonic, to me, is an entire game of that, and that excites me.
LA: The anti-canon nature of the setting is particularly cool to me because it more explicitly invites the players to make the world theirs. Most settings are fruitful not just for standing on their own, but for inviting players to be part of it, to participate actively. Mnemonic takes this a step further by saying that the instance the players are in is as true, as valid, as real, maybe even more real, than anything imagined by anyone else, up to and including the creators of the setting. It ties back to a core theme of the setting that the memories of something – the feelings and echoes and the ways they affect people – are more important than a theoretical objective truth. It’s about the experiences, both in-game and for the players.
The Tale of Five Strings lore piece (one of 26) and story arc, draft, by Synxiec with layout by Dee Pennyway.
When dealing with memory, we can encounter some bumps along the road. How is Mnemonic designed to respect player’s agency and consent, and allow them to control content to avoid any triggers, squicks, or undesirable unhappy times?
DP: Agency and consent are two of my biggest guiding targets in game design, and Mnemonic is no different. Everything in this game gives players permission to paint their own picture of the events, and character creation asks each player to name at least one boundary for something they will not include in the story, with some guiding language about how to best take care of not just their character’s needs, but the needs of everyone’s characters, and of every player at the table as well. I’ll drop the excerpt from that section here:
The Boundary
When we tell stories, we inevitably leave some details out, some rooms unexplored, some doors closed. We do this for our own safety and for the safety of those around us. What is a boundary you will not cross in this story? How close to it are you willing to wander before you turn away?
Your boundary can be something your character would want respected, or it can be something you care about personally. For example, Dee has a fear of heights, but their character does not. They might say, “I’d like to set a boundary on detailed descriptions of vertigo or other feelings of being up high. We can go to high places, but I as a player don’t want to experience that feeling in my imagination.”
You can set more than one boundary, and you can add more as the story progresses or as you think of them. If privacy is a concern, you may want to consider some form of anonymization, such as a shared digital document or a trusted facilitator.
Respecting boundaries is about more than just not crossing the line; it’s about knowing when a boundary needs to remain entirely outside the scope of the story, even in reference. If your character has a pet and you want to set a boundary around that pet’s safety, you may want to establish that as a convention of play: that this pet will never come to harm, and will never even be perceived to be in any danger, no matter the stakes of the scene.
Mnemonic doesn’t directly present players with descriptive content; instead, we ask questions that guide the players to the kinds of themes we want them to explore, in their own space and at their own comfort level. We also include language that makes it explicit that players are allowed to change any aspect of the story, whether it’s something that’s happening in the current scene or something that happened three sessions ago. I don’t want anyone to feel like they have to commit to a traumatic consequence of a piece of fiction they established before they recognized it would be a problem.
I take a lot of inspiration from Script Change on that, actually. The idea of being able to Rewind a scene to take a different approach was incredibly influential for me. I hope that players are able to build that kind of agency into their play groups when they play Mnemonic.
The other thing we do that I’m quietly excited about is how we handle “A thing happened in the mechanics that you don’t like.” If it’s something that happened because of the dice, you can…just reroll them. Dice are an abstraction, a story generator. There’s a ritual quality to rolling a die, but I want players to know that if the Fire Die says you set fire to the entire world, you can opt out of that outcome and roll again until you get you send up a bright signal to let your friends know where you are.
Your character also can’t be removed from the story without your consent, which seems like a small thing but so many of the biggest games out there have some form of “Game Over” scenario where my character can be taken away from me by a cruel GM, or fickle dice. In Mnemonic, the only way your character can die is if you make the decision for them to leave the story. We have mechanics for it. It’s a big deal. You can do it. No one else can do it for you.
That’s a lot of words to dance around the fact that at the end of the day, we can’t completely protect players, we can just offer tools and guidance. If you’re a player who experiences bleed in a significant way (where the events of the story affect you on a personal level in a way that lingers after the story ends), I’d encourage you to check in with yourself regularly; don’t feel like you have to choose the “heavy” answer to every question. This advice appears in just about every game I write now, so I’m gonna put it here too: Take care of yourself. Take care of each other.
Illustration by Sinta Posadas. (I love this one!)
It’s clear you’ve dug deeply into the world and what the action and reaction mean. What made you elect to use the mediums you do – cards, the particular art style, etc. – to represent the world to people and to have them interact with? How does the medium give meaning to the art?
DP: I want Mnemonic to be…hm, accessibility has its own connotations, and I have goals on that front as well but when it comes to the use of cards, what I’m aiming for is, “Can a person play this game with the things they already have”. And my family never played roleplaying games, but we did always have a deck of poker cards ready to go. And I know that a lot of general-purpose stores have decks available for less than $5, which means that if you don’t happen to have a deck at your home, you can probably find one even if you don’t have a “gaming store” near you. That was pretty important to me early on. That’s also why our dice are six-sided; I love polyhedral dice sets, but until very recently you couldn’t just go to Target and pick up a set.
The artwork is important here too, but for me it’s more about conveying the sense of “this is something that someone might have drawn or painted directly into their notebook while traveling.” Sin’s illustrations are wonderful and intimate, full of…I hesitate to tell people what they should be feeling when they look at these pieces, but I know that when I look at them I get a strong sense of “the person who painted this cares a lot about the subject.” And I hope that comes through.
We care a lot about the stories we’re telling. And I want players to care, too. About their stories, and about each other sitting around the table.
The Rain Die draft written by Dee Pennyway, layout by Dee Pennyway, illustration by Sinta Posadas.
As someone who has personally struggled with memory loss but also finds beauty in the ephemeral and has things they’d like to forget, I am genuinely curious how a session of Mnemonic plays out. What are an example or two of your experiences with the game and what did you take away – or leave behind?
DP: Mnemonic usually feels…weighted? I sometimes describe it as the feeling of holding your breath in anticipation, of choosing your words carefully in a space that allows you to do so.
We’ve been playing on the Actual Play twitch channel the past few weeks, and there are some things that I’ll hold onto forever, and at least one thing I wish I could take back (and probably would, if we were playing a longer-running series).
One thing I cherish is how readily everyone at the table takes ownership of the group’s well-being. Sean introduced his character, Warren, as a habitat for a community of rabbits, and after what was probably about a minute but what felt like only an instant, Synxiec announced that we were now, us, the storytellers, the players on stream, committed protectors of the bunnies. And like…yes, of course! Mnemonic, the game, is about being careful storytellers and recognizing when it’s your job as a player to look after the characters in your own story.
A thing I would change is that Misha introduced a piece of local folklore around a dragon living nearby, and it was super interesting–but then when I tied our first session together with my character’s closing scene, I used my own character’s backstory as a vehicle instead of connecting it to hers. It would have been a much more compelling story beat, and more personal to the entire group, and more meaningful to the town we were in, to make that moment about something someone else had introduced.
It was one of those things that I didn’t even think about until the next day, when it was already too late to go back and change. And the nice thing about Mnemonic is that if something like that happens in your home game, you can just…change it. You can go in next week with your group and say “Hey, this happened last time but I kinda want to retcon it to something else if that’s okay?” and then work out how the change might affect everybody, and the story you’re telling together.
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Thank you so much to the whole team for the interview, including those unable to participate because of life – see you next time! I hope all you readers enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Mnemonic: A Weaver’s Almanac on Kickstarter today!
Hey y’all, today I have something really good for you – Jay Dragon is here to talk about Wanderhome, which is currently blowing past goals on Kickstarter! This game of traveling animal-folk is so much more than just a walk through the meadow – check out Jay’s responses below.
The cover art of the roving animal-folk is by Sylvia Bi.
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What has your experience in games been like and how did you get into it?
I’ve been designing games since I was 12 years old for my summer camp The Wayfinder Experience. I ran my first game when I was 14, a largescale LARP with 50+ players, a full team of staff, and a production budget. I got into tabletop years later through Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition and Monsterhearts. I released my first largescale tabletop game, Sleepaway, on Kickstarter last year, where it would go on to win an ENnie and be nominated for two Indie Groundbreaker Awards.
Since then I’ve been designing games nearly continuously, and I’ve released more than two dozen projects of various sizes on my Itch.io page and on my Patreon. Wanderhome is my second solo Kickstarter, although it represents my fourth Kickstarter involvement, either as co-writer or project manager.
The Veteran by Letty Wilson, a sketch.
What projects do you think you’ve worked on that have led you to designing Wanderhome, which seems so new and exploratory?
Wanderhome is very much the culmination of a lot of the work I’ve been doing over the past year. As I become more comfortable with the No Dice, No Masters engine (often called Belonging Outside Belonging) through Sleepaway, I realized the sheer flexibility involved in the system. Projects of mine like Dungeon helped me realize that the structure that Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum had built, with tokens, moves, setting elements, and community worksheets, was intentionally an enormous well of unexplored design space. Wanderhome takes all the tools I’ve been futzing with – longer-form narrative games, modular structures, toolkits and other OSR principles, integrated safety mechanics (which I know we’ve talked about!), an enormous variety of options, and a general focus on prosody, lyricism, and art direction to give the game a tone that go beyond the normal RPG ruleset.
So, tell me a little about Wanderhome itself. What excites you about it? What makes it whole?
Wanderhome is a pastoral fantasy RPG about the peaceful world of Hæth and the folks who live there. You play as a group of traveling animal-folk (including but not limited to; a dancer who moves with the soul of the world, a caretaker for a gaggle of small and forgotten gods, a delivery-person who uses carrier moths to send letters by moonlight, a shepherd with a herd of bumblebees, a little kid with a big heart, and a veteran who has sworn to never draw their sword) as you go from place to place over the course of many seasons, helping people and making friends.
There’s a lot of things about it that excite me – it’s in a lot of ways everything I’ve wanted from a game for a while. I think right now I’m thinking a lot about the way it rejects so much of what we’re used to from RPGs in its genre. It focuses on the idea of a journey over a story, it lacks rules for failure (and in fact challenges the idea that failure exists), it’s designed for very longform play (you can play it for years or decades!) and it reimagines what play can be like.
Art by Jennie Lindberg of the Small and Forgotten Gods.
How did you come up with this concept that defies some of the norms we expect from RPGs, and that has already captured many enthusiastic fans?
Wanderhome came about towards the start of quarantine, when I was struggling with a lot of mental and physical health issues and a friend came by for a week to check up on me. While we were sitting together in the grass, I had a vision of a landscape that could exist in a world after all this. I sat down and sketched out how I’d want people to engage in the world, and figuring out basically a bounding limit of what playing the game is like – I didn’t care about failure, and I didn’t care about enormous success.
I concentrated most things you can do in the game as essentially a toolbox of window dressing, “idle animations” and basic tools you can use to unpack what’s happening. It uses the token system classic in Belonging Outside Belonging games to push and pull you in and out of your character’s comfort zone. I think it’s attracted a lot of attention because there’s not really anything like it – there’s some comparisons to games like Ryuutama, but to me that’s like night and day. I think people are clamoring for a game that proposes a world after COVID, after our global trauma, and tries to figure out ways to heal – even if it’s not always going perfectly.
I definitely want to talk more at some point with you about electing not to have rules for failure since I’m a fan, but first I want to talk about your choice to do extremely long campaign play as an option. Why allow such long engagement with the same campaign potentially the same characters? How does the design support the different lengths of play?
I’ve been captivated since I was a little kid by those tabletop RPG campaigns that have been meeting for 20+ years. Generally those groups aren’t actually playing whatever game they originally set out to play – they’ve been messing with the system for so long that it’s become something deeply personal and totally new. When I got into Indie TTRPGs, I fell in love with so much of those games, but I found myself missing the dream of that long, long play. It’s not that I needed every campaign to last that long, but the idea of playing a game for so long that I’ve completely reshaped it into my own is so appealing. I think of a lot of my game designs as being about teaching the players how to write the game and make it their own.
The moment I started working on Wanderhome I was so struck by the idea of a game that, if you spent enough time with it, could become another feature in the landscape of your life. When you play Wanderhome for long enough, you eventually have to give up your characters and make new ones, but that’s intentional. If you play it for decades and decades, it stops being about the people, but the shared world you’ve all made. The episodic structure of Wanderhome, along with the sheer variety of options, means that shorter journeys feel natural and easy, while also giving you the sense of what more is out there, if you just kept on traveling.
More amazing work by Lettie Wilson, this time a few character types.
Everything I have seen out of Wanderhome and everything you’ve said here has made me envision the vibe that you give off when we’ve chatted – calm and quietly investigatory, but with the chance at any time to run off with an idea and a half drawn map that’ll be fully drawn by morning. Tell me, what are a few example scenes you’ve had or envisioned for the game, and how do your mechanics support that type of play?
As I designed Wanderhome, I was constantly making note of the sorts of scenes I wanted people to have, and possible landscapes where that could happen. Many of the things you can do in Wanderhome came directly from the lists of ways I wanted players to navigate the world – leaving offerings to small and forgotten gods, opening up about their feelings, taking time to tell the other players about the beauty of a sunset or the path a butterfly travels through the air. Ultimately though, I worked hard to keep Wanderhome from making confident statements about what you feel. I wanted to create the space in the game for you to fill in your own meaning, and treat the mechanics as more of an interface to engage with the world than a prescriptive set of laws that dictate the world itself.
Hey y’all, today I have an interview with Liam Ginty at Sandy Pug Games about the Ghibli-inspired Monster Care Squad, a tabletop adventure of healing Monsters and solving local problems in the gentle, unique world of Ald-Amura! Check out the responses below.
CW for animal harm in the illustrations, it’s tastefully done (and not done by the Monster Care Squad), and done to demonstrate the nature of the Monster Care Squad in the game.
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Thanks for agreeing to the interview! It’s exciting to see you on a new project, but for those new to your work, how did you come into games and design?
Of course! Always love to chat with y’all. I’ve been making games for about 6 or 7 years now in some shape or form – I started out making print and play board games and trying to sell them at conventions and such. That didn’t quite work out, and so I pivoted to making TTRPGs, primarily supplements for games like Fate or Apocalypse World. About 2 years ago me and a friend had a sort of funny idea for a game called Orc Stabr, this one page game where you played as a gang of orcs hunting a wild and powerful Beast. The campaign had a $20 goal and raised 17,500% of that by the end, which I think might be a KS record? Anyway, that success kinda allowed me to build Sandy Pug Games to what it is today – still very small, but big enough that I can pull a lot of people into bigger and more complicated projects.
THE SandyPug dog inspired by Pumba, the real dog.
What have you learned in previous projects that you think you’re bringing forward to Monster Care Squad?
Definitely the no.1 thing is my experience with crowdfunders and co-op working. The Roleplayer’s Guide To Heists was a project we ran last year with the San Jenaro Co-Op that was kind of the first experiment into co-op based games development, and it was such a huge success that it’s laid the foundations for everything I’ll be doing moving forward. Making games is just so much more fun when you’re doing it with a crowd of great people, and there’s really nothing like having a discord full of talented and creative artists all building something together. It’s a real joy.
Adventurers adventuring!
Tell me a little about Monster Care Squad. What excites you about it?
It has to be designing a game that allows for those big epic showdowns you have at the end of a session, but without the violence and blood that usually comes with that. The game is designed so that every session should build up to this glorious crescendo where you face down against this wounded, massive Monster, and make it better again. The kind of storytelling you can do within that structure just makes me so excited to see what people come up with. There’s also the artwork, I think basically everybody is thinking the same thing, right? Leafie, our illustrator, is just a wizard, she’s unstoppable. I can’t wait to see what she does with the world.
The Monster Care Squad has arrived to help this Monster in need!
Considering tabletop RPG history, what brought you to the choice of focusing on caring for monsters?
Well, I think you hit the nail on the head right there. Games are always about killin’ stuff! I’m not judging that, particularly. I think action, combat, violence, all of these are tools and narratively powerful ones that work as effective shorthand for other, deeper, conflicts, and TTRPGs can do a great job at letting you tell those stories, but an oversaturation of those stories does kinda make the scene a little bland, at least in my opinion. Healing specifically was looked at cause when you get down to it, there’s very little mechanical difference between dealing damage and healing, the numbers are just flipped! It gets a lil more complicated than that when you expand the philosophy past the pure numbers, but once that clicked for me, Healing as the players’ main verb suddenly blossomed into all these possibilities.
This creature as a Bauvur. The description reads, “A peaceful mountain spirit who gently tends to the flora and fauna of the snowy mountains of the Tinar mountain range. His shiny white coat allows him to become invisible around snow which enables the monster to escape dangerous situations unnoticed.”
What sort of monsters will players see in the game, and what challenges do they face upon encountering them?
Ald-Amura is a big place, and we say Monsters can really be anything – some of them are massive, city-sized behemoths that blot out the sun with gargantuan wings made of the wind and the clouds themselves. Some are like little fairies, barely visible unless you know where to look. Variety is the real key to a game like this, where every session revolves around building up a Monster and its capabilities and its needs, so we’re casting a pretty wide net. I’m sure a lot of people can see some of our obvious influences – Shadow of the Colossus, Monster Hunter, Studio Ghibli – but some of our writers are also calling from legends and myths from their own cultures, and I’ve been such a big fan of strange monsters in media and history, we have a kind of bottomless well to work with.
First and foremost we want every Monster to be beautiful, powerful, and awe-inspiring. From the smallest to the largest, from the wisest to the wildest, each of these beings should immediately scream “Important, Precious, Ancient”. We want you to wonder what this Monster can do, what it has seen, what it would be like to live alongside it for generations. We also kinda want you to fall in love with them and wanna heal them, so cute is often a word we throw in the pot. Leafie also has her own instincts when it comes to creating Monsters that I think I’d struggle to put into words, but I think anyone who sees the art knows what I mean. They all have a certain Leafie-ness that I think makes the world super unique.
I know you always have something more up your sleeve. What’s this I hear about a grant for other creatives? Tell me all about it!
Yes! The Ald-Amura Historical Society Grant is a big, big deal for us at SPG. The 101 is that we’ve put aside a percent of our KS funds to a grant we’re awarding people looking to make fan works, or hacks, or art that’s inspired by Monster Care Squad (yes, you don’t even have to set your work *in* Ald-Amura). We have a label for these works (“Legends Of Ald-Amura”) and an official looking stamp plus some art asset sharing, but there’s no requirement to use those if you don’t want to. You can sell your creation, share it, or keep it private. People can request up to $300 for their project, no (or, well, very few anyway) strings attached. It’s maybe one of the most exciting things we’ve ever gotten to do at SPG.
When we announced Monster Care Squad, I’d say a half dozen people DM’d me asking me for details, asking if they could work on the game, asking if they could make fan games or telling me about similar projects they have that they were thinking of porting to the setting. It was kind of overwhelming! This is the first time anyone has responded to a project SPG has done like this, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that community is all we have these days, and fostering that community is never a mistake. I wanted to give back a little of the endless support I’ve gotten from the TTRPG industry (and the wider art world in general), and anyone that knows me, knows how important I feel financial support is to a community.
Thus, the grant was born. I guess you could see it as a reaction to things like the DMsGuild taking 50% of creatives’ money from them – that just seems backwards to me. There needs to be a more equitable paradigm between publishers and people making content for their worlds and settings, and this seems like one small thing we can do to try and shift that balance. It’s an experiment, turning the theory and discussions the community have been having for a while now into praxis.
