Choose Your Own: Sci-Fi Stock Art is a project that lets creators mix and match sci-fi stock art to create instant masterpieces for their tabletop roleplaying game.
I love the “choose your own…” style of the art for the Kickstarter and all – I was a big fan of such books growing up.
What is Choose Your Own: Sci-Fi Stock Art, both as a product and as your vision?
As a product, it is hundreds of individual sci-fi art assets that can be mixed, flipped, rearranged and more to create custom images for roleplaying games.
As my vision, it is a continued effort to help independent RPG publishers bridge the gap between pure commissioned art and stock art. It’s my way of giving back to a community that has given so much to me.
How did you develop and decide on the various art assets that you’ve put together for the purposes of the Kickstarter?
I will be using a mix of existing assets as well as creating all new illustrations from ideas that backers submit. I’ll read through the pool of ideas and take those that inspire me. It’s going to be exciting because it will be the first time in a long time that I get to create a bunch of art based purely on inspiration instead of assigned ideas. It’s also really cool because I can have ideas that I think are good, but then I get submissions and it will blow my mind that I get paid to illustrate ideas like that.
A collection of covers.
What has been the best part of running the Kickstarter, and what have you learned for future projects? The best part? Without a doubt, hands down, absolutely, it has been the response from the independent publishing community. I couldn’t ask for better support from the RPG community. The gratitude they express for creating this project is unparalleled. Every day for probably the first week, I’d have another voluntary offer to include their product as a reward for backing my project.
The amount of complimentary awards is so high that it is actually MORE than the value of my Kickstarter pledge levels!
I have learned, by accident, the value of symbiotic relationship in the RPG community. I began creating custom stock art as a way to express my thanks for publishers who have given me the best hobby ever. That act began friendships. I don’t have to try to sell a product to any of them. I just create something that my friends benefit from. Connecting through the shared experience of roleplaying games is what we should all strive for.
Tell me a little about Gather: Children of the Evertree. What excites you about it?
Gather: Children of the Evertree is a worldbuilding game built around a freeform/LARP style of play. I call it a “roundtable LARP” because while you’ll be immersed and in-character from start to finish you’re still sitting around a table with friends while you play. In Gather, you take on the role of Speakers – each of you an elected representative chosen by your respective Kinship or community – that have crossed the vastness of the Evertree to attend an annual meeting known as the Gather. In theory, the Gather is a great idea. Every year the Kinships of the Evertree may send a Speaker to go the Gather and discuss the previous year, talk about shifts and changes, discuss the affairs of the world, and so on. However, the Gather is a meeting so saturated with laws and customs that trying to conduct this meeting is often frustrating, limited, and feels almost alien and otherworldly (to the players) in its execution. The rules that govern the Gather don’t only limit what you can talk about, but how you can talk about it.
Practically, the game is played out with a deck of cards. The game is GM-less, zero prep, you just draw the first card and dive right in. The cards explain how to play, provide a little bit of information about the world in which you live, and then present the heart of the game – a number of Question cards. You’ll draw a card, ask the question to the group, and then the answers to these questions form the “discussion” of the Gather. What’s exciting about this is that every question and answer helps to shape the world around this meeting. Not just in abstract ways, but in how the world relates to the Kinships gathered at the meeting. We see the world through their eyes, and that’s what shapes it. A few small pieces of setting at the start, along with the questions, provide the edges of the world, but you fill in the rest of it as you play – what’s going on in this world, how do these Kinships interact, what threats are out there, what has happened, what is going to happen. It’s all hashed out as you play, and presented as it relates to the people who live within the world. In that way, the world is built less by images on a map, and more by the relationships and connections that fill it, which means that the parts of the world that you’re going to really dig into and flesh out are the ones that you’re interested in, and that you want to see more of.
How did you write the question cards and keep them from being boring or repetitive?
Every time you play, you’re playing with twenty question cards. Twenty-one if you count “By what name is your Kinship called?” which is always the introductory example question given near the start of each session to get players accustomed to how questions are asked and answered. Of the twenty remaining questions, five are set. Essentially, how large is your Kinship, what do you have a lot of, what do you have a shortage of, how many have joined your Kinship this past year, and how many have left or died. Thematically, these five questions were the ones asked at the very first Gather ever to be held, and so they have been asked at every Gather since. Conveniently, these also help players setup the boundaries and pillars of the world and Kinships so we can see the stakes we’re working with.
Beyond these, there are fifteen additional question cards. There are pulled, at random, from a deck of fifty when you’re setting up for your session. Thematically, these are questions that have been asked at other Gathers that have come and gone in previous years, since each time the Gather meets a new question is added to the collection (more on that in a bit). This provides you with a lot of variation when you play. Every time you sit down for a session you could choose to revisit a Kinship you’ve played before, or make one entirely new, and this may change how you play and the interactions you have with others. However, changing what the questions are from session to session and, just as importantly, changing the order in which they’re asked will drastically alter how players approach the game, and the themes that are present at your table.
After these twenty question cards have been gone through, every player has a chance to ask one question of their own design to the group. Once these have all been asked and answered, a vote is held, and a single player-generated question is added permanently to the game for a chance to be asked at all future Gathers.
Tell me more about the Kinships. How are they made up? What meaning do they have?
Your Kinship is the community, family, guild, nation, or assembly that you have come to the Gather on behalf of. It’s your job to represent your Kinship as their Speaker. Every player takes the role of a Speaker, each of them from a different far-flung Kinship scattered across the Evertree. To take up the role of Speaker is a heavy responsibility because within the Gather you don’t even speak as an individual. Every word you speak carries the weight of your entire Kinship behind it, so it is tradition to hear Speakers use words like “we”, “us”, and “our” rather than “I” and “me”.
Kinships start as nothing more than a name. While you’re learning how to play the game players are given an introductory example question which is: “By what name is your Kinship called?” Everyone then has the opportunity to name their Kinship. You know a little bit about the world at that point, about the Evertree in which you reside, but beyond that the name of your Kinship is entirely up to you. You’ll announce it, and then write it down on a notecard for all to see. Maybe you’re The Branch Tenders. Maybe you’re The Forgotten. Maybe you’re the Astral Cardinals. Maybe you’re Those Whom The Rot Found. Whatever you’d like. After the Kinships are named however, and you start into the first few questions of the Gather, magic happens and these communities that didn’t even have a name fifteen minutes ago suddenly come to life. All of the Gathers questions relate back to these Kinships, how they’re doing, what they need, and what they have to offer, so every time someone answers a question you learn a little bit more about what that Kinship is, who they are, and how their little corner of the world works.
Video by Galactic Network talking with Stephen about Gather.
How does player interfacing with the layers of tradition and rules at the Gather influence storytelling?
To really explain this, let’s delve a bit into the mechanics behind the Gather, because how the “laws” of the Gather force you to engage in this meeting directly influence how storytelling takes shape. Once players have gotten past the setting cards and the “how to play” cards they’re left with the core of the game – the question cards. When a Speaker flips a question card they read it aloud. As an example, the question might be “Has war been brought upon you by another this past year, whether by words, stones, powder, or hex?” All of the Speakers then consider their answer to this question, and at the moment the Speaker who read the question discards the card all of the Speakers answer the question on behalf of their Kinship in unison. This unified answering is a critical component of the laws that govern the Gather as a sign of respect to all Kinships. No one Kinship’s voice is more important than another. Every Speaker begins the game with three tokens, and after this cacophonous answer is given to a question, Speakers may offer their tokens to their fellow Speakers, offering them to anyone they’d like to hear more from. This could be if you heard someone give an intriguing answer through the din, or for any number of other reasons. Once all of these tokens have been handed out, if you’ve been granted such a token (and have accepted it) you have the opportunity to state your answer once more. This time, you’ll say it by yourself, and may elaborate on it if you’d like.
For example, if you heard me say something about hexes amid the united answer, you might offer me a token to hear more because hey, hexes are cool. If accepted I would repeat my answer and elaborate on it. For instance, I might say “Yes, a war of hexes. We believe the Rotchildren have laid a hex upon our crops. They do not grow, they only crumble and spoil in the fields.” Maybe I’ve just called out another one of the Kinships at the table, or maybe I’ve invented a new one. Now that I’ve given my answer, any Speaker may offer me another token to speak further, but these must be paired with a question. If I accept the token I must answer the question. So, you might ask me: “Believe? Do you have any proof that it was the Rotchildren?” If I accept your token, I’ll respond. “Technically, no. But we know the ways of the Rotchildren. This is how they work. Everywhere they travel in the Evertree they bring destruction with them. They have always looked on our lands with envy.” Again, any Speaker might offer me a token with a new question, and this will continue until either all questions have been asked and answered or until I refuse to answer a question. Perhaps the Speaker for the Rotchildren offers me a token and asks “And who exactly did that land of yours belong to before you stole it away?” If I hold up my hand and refuse to answer (sometimes a far more dramatic choice than answering) my time to speak is done and we move on to the next Speaker who was given one of the initial tokens.
While everything outside of the question cards and the initial setting information is entirely improvised and created by the players during play, this playstyle of questions and answers creates built-in prompts for storytelling to build off of. You’re never presented with a blank canvas and told to “go!” instead you’re guided more easily into collaborative storytelling by building off of each other’s prompts, questions, and answers.
What themes and setting elements do you think Gather does best, and what unusual possibilities are there to explore in the worldbuilding?
The structure of Gather’s gameplay is very similar to the Evertree itself. A good way to think about the game is to think about the question cards and the answers given in unison as the trunk of the tree. These are the solid foundation of the world. A question tells us things about the world, and the answers tell us things about the Kinships. From there, players have the ability to go down these tangents of questions and answers, literally off-shooting from the trunk like branches. These branching paths of answers, questions, more answers, and more questions allow you to follow these paths of story and worldbuilding as far as you’d like, letting players focus in on what is cool to them and really digging into the threads that excite everyone, before coming back to the trunk and shooting off onto the next branch. Finally, when all the branches you want to explore have been explored, we move up the tree to the next piece of the trunk.
I know that freeform, live action, or improv-heavy games can be intimidating to more traditional tabletop groups, but as with many of my games I have endeavored to make Gather a more guided experience. It’s like an improv with a safety net. Even if you’re not quick on your feet with creating answers that doesn’t matter as much because you can just speak quietly and let you half-answer get lost in the din. Not interested in exploring your thread further? You can always reject tokens. There are a lot of options here even for people who may not be as comfortable spinning worlds off the top of their heads.
What’s especially fun to explore in the worldbuilding is that there are very few boundaries. This world can truly be what you’d like it to be. And even if you play the same Kinship session after session, that doesn’t mean that anything about the world or the Kinships within it will stay the same. Are there societies and cities in the Evertree’s branches? Are you human? Are you a nest of birds? Nearly anything is possible, so the possibilities from session to session are endless. I anticipate that this is a game that will fuel fantastic, terrifying, and beautiful concepts for Kinships that will keep you wanting to come back to the table with it to try out your next great idea.
Lovely image of the Gather: Children of the Evertree title.
Hi all! Today I’ve got some answers from Misha Bushyager, Eloy Lasanta, and Jerry D. Grayson of New Agenda Publishing on what they’re working on, what they want to do, and what New Agenda Publishing means to them. They released a quick start this week for Orun and I wanted to highlight them while I could!
—
Tell me a little about New Agenda Publishing. What excites you about it?
Misha Bushyager
Misha: For me it was a chance to be the change I wanted to see. Too often when women or PoC or queer people ask for diversity, we get told to make our own thing if we want to see it, so this is us doing that, specifically calling out that it’s what we’re doing.
Eloy Lasanta
Eloy: My answer is pretty much the same. I love to create games and stories, but we are using New Agenda as more than just another game company. We have a platform through which to help new voices, many of which are from marginalized communities really tell their own stories, ones very different from what’s already out there. I wanna be a part of that.
Jerry Grayson.
Jerry: Being marginalized is the same as being invisible. Being invisible makes you easily discarded or trivialized. I’ve always been told I can have a seat at the hobby table, but it’s difficult when there is no chair. My agenda is to help provide enough chairs at the table for everyone. I’ve found my place, I’ve hit my stride, and I’ve achieved a slight amount of success. I want to play all that forward and help anyone, doesn’t matter color, creed, or orientation find a spot in the hobby. I want everyone to feel welcome and comfortable in their skin.
What excites me about New Agenda Publishing? The chance to amplify and execute ideas I believe in. To show that so-called minorities have just as much to offer to the hobby and industry as anyone else. To prove that varied backgrounds bring diverse ideas to the table and create something more significant than the individual creators. I’m excited to share a byline or credit with people of different colors and genders that want to make games.
What are the core goals of New Agenda? What is your mission?
Our core goals are to help designers from underrepresented populations successfully create games. This to us means more than just writing them. We want them to be able to find artists, and other writers and editors and distributors. We want to mentor people on both the creative side of games, but also the business side. We want to show them how to market, how to run a Kickstarter, how to work with a printer, all the nuts and bolts that get their games into the hands of players. Right now, we’re putting together all the foundations and structure for us to be able to do this.
How are you finding appropriate projects to publish and what are your criteria?
We decided early on that the first thing we did should be a flagship project that showed we could work together and that highlighted each of our strengths. We’re three very different people, all creative but with different backgrounds and skill sets. After we each separately came up with a list of ideas we narrowed it down to the couple of things we had in common and what is now call Orun is what emerged.
Going forward, we plan to put out a call for designers interested in either publishing mentorship or contributing to one of our existing properties. We’re refining the criteria but at the moment it’s: a new designer (one that hasn’t published a game before, contest entries don’t count) with a concrete idea of what they want to produce, and the follow through to help make it a reality That belongs to one or more of the following categories Person of Color Female or Non-binary Trans* Queer
The Orun core book cover.
What oversight will you have of products your publish to make sure they meet your standards? How will you handle conflicts?
The great part about this new venture is that we all have experience in what we’re doing. We all have quite a few projects under our belts, but now we’re putting our collective abilities together to make something greater than the whole. If you’ve checked out any of our projects in the past, you’ll see that we already have incredibly high standards for our products so sticking to that is key.
As for conflicts, I think the thing to understand is that we certainly didn’t jump into New Agenda Publishing lightly. It is a company founded on mutual respect for each other opinions and skills, and we’ve already shown that we can handle conflicts internally with communication. We all come from different gaming backgrounds so we already knew we wouldn’t agree on every matter, but we have learned to find middle ground that pleases everyone on a few occasions. Other times, we’ll defer to the person most experienced or most excited about a particular concept. Conflicts are key to learning how you’ll work together, and thus far, I’m excited!
If you wouldn’t mind, what are each of your personal goals for New Agenda Publishing, both near and far reaching?
Misha: Near term I want to have a successful launch of Orun to prove we can take a project from soup to nuts and still want to work together. We’re three big personalities but so far we’ve meshed well and I can’t wait to see what else come out of our collaboration. Longer term, I want us to become a place where people aren’t afraid to pitch us their ideas, trusting us to help them nurture their ideas to completion, and hopefully success.
Eloy: I’m never one to build go small. I speak my mind, I push myself creatively, and I try to bring others along and make sure others are doing the same. With New Agenda, I see the next step in my own personal goals of advocating and encourage the industry to continue to grow and evolve. Specifically, I see New Agenda Publishing becoming one of the few big RPG companies within the next few years. We’re starting small but our plan is to surge with activity as soon as everything is off the ground. Oh man, I really can’t wait!
Jerry: Near – I want to make games that bring everyone to the table. My Questing Beast is making something so excellent and inclusive that everyone wants to participate. To do this, I need the best and the brightest creative talents out there, and I believe many are not yet discovered. I can’t do this alone, I don’t want to do this alone, and I refuse to do this alone. The well is a lot deeper than any of us can imagine and the world is full of people that want to create and play the game. I want to touch them all.
Far-Reaching – I want to build a community that’s inclusive, sprawling and informed. For the longest time, many in the community have felt left out, underserved, and disenfranchised. The hobby community is like a huge quilt made up of many colors, textures, and points of origin. I want the community I play in to reflect that. I’m not one monolithic culture, and the hobby community isn’t either. Let’s celebrate what makes us different in a positive way. Ultimately, I want us all under that quilt snuggling and keeping warm together.
I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum about their Kickstarter project, Dream Askew // Dream Apart, two games about community and belonging as marginalized people. I hope you enjoy the interview and that you’ll check out the Kickstarter!
—
Avery Alder
Tell me about the project of Dream Askew // Dream Apart. Why does this joint project matter to you as a creator? Avery: While these two games tell stories of very different communities—Dream Askew is about a queer enclave amid the collapse of civilization, while Dream Apart is a fantastical-historical game of the shtetl—they’re also united in being games about marginalized people building a community for themselves against the odds, what we call games of belonging outside belonging.
For me, this project matters because telling stories about finding our collective power and learning how to live together in community matters. And I feel really proud about how we’ve merged those themes with the mechanics: power is distributed around the table, and rather than relying on chance, everything is driven by the choices that we make together.
Benjamin Rosenbaum
Benjamin: I love the games we’ve made, I’m excited about people playing them. I think this kind of in-person game can be a great space for learning and exploring, and I think it’s cool that these games celebrate the agency and struggle of communities with complicated relationships to the outside world, in settings that I think matter a lot.
What was your collaborative experience like on the project, and how did you handle complications or struggles of any kind?
A: Our collaboration gained momentum really slowly! Benjamin first wrote me about using the Dream Askew framework to create a game about Jewish shtetl life in 2014, and it wasn’t until 2017 that we committed to an active collaboration and co-development process. I’ve been really delighted by the ways that Benjamin’s innovations in Dream Apart have looped back to transform Dream Askew; key relationships are instrumental in defining the relationship web of the community, and they weren’t even in my original design!
B: It’s been amazing! Avery is brilliant, super nice, amazingly supportive, and has oodles of artistic integrity. She knows a tremendous amount about game design, community, and the technical praxis of creating and publishing games, and it’s been an enormous privilege to work with her. We’ve handled complications and struggles by talking through them, listening carefully to one another, and making decisions together — a process that has been strikingly full of fun and ease. I think our visions were very closely aligned from the beginning, and we also have very distinctive areas of expertise in the project. Each of us is the expert in our own game’s subject matter, so we tend to naturally defer to that expertise; and while I have a deep background as a writer and gamer, it’s my first professional game project, and Avery is one of my favorite game designers, so it’s been very easy to trust her judgement on game design and publication issues.
The Dream Askew cover.
Dream Askew
Tell me the core purpose of Dream Askew. What about it fuels your passion?
A: For me, the passion comes from building something that can be run at the drop of a hat, that tells meaningful stories, that’s legit fun to play, and that brings us closer to imagining possiblities for queer community.
I think the game is challenging in some ways! It requires players to take on a big creative load, and to jump into co-developing an apocalyptic world together. But for players who are up to the challenge, it’s a delight! The game uses lists and prompts to point players toward interesting dilemmas, and then gives them space to actually figure out how to handle them. That’s exciting! That’s what fuels my passion.
The Hawker playbook.
When you work on the project, what design elements do you keep as key priority?
A: I started work on Dream Askew in early 2013, when I was helping run a weekly, drop-in meetup group. It was queer-centering, but welcome to all who wanted to drop in and play something neat. I tried running Apocalypse World a couple times at those meetups, and it never quite worked: the sheets intimidated new players, the mechanics were slightly too dense to teach to new players in the short span of time we had each night, and the game always felt like it was cut too short. I designed Dream Askew to fit perfectly into that space: inviting, quick-paced, and perfect for weirdos. And that remains a priority. I want this to be a game that I can run at the drop of a hat for a gaggle of queers who’ve never played a roleplaying game before, and I want it to rock under those conditions.
The Dream Apart cover.
Dream Apart
Tell me the core purpose of Dream Apart. What about it fuels your passion?
B: What I really wanted was to capture the distinctive tone, setting, and underlying philosophy of Jewish fantasy and folklore, which differs from both the traditional high fantasy ethos of a titanic final battle between Good and Evil, and from the aimless-violent-vagabond ethos of sword & sorcery. I wanted to see characters who are rooted in community, in a deeply spiritual but also morally ambiguous world, a world in which evil is written with a small “e”: our own human failures of courage and compassion, rather than something alien and essentialized and external; characters who don’t wield triumphant violence to achieve their ends, but use wit, grit, and moxie to thrive in a world where they are likely to be always on the receiving end of violence; and just all the rich strangeness, cleverness, yearning, whimsy, irony, self-criticism, soul, and mystery of talmud, midrash, Yiddish folktales, and the literatures of the shtetl.
The playbook for the Klezmer.
When you work on the project, what design elements do you keep as key priority?
B: I think the main priority is capturing that spirit described above; other priorities include making it an accessible game with elegantly simple mechanics, concise design, and very rich fiction, keeping players supported in story creation so they always have something to fall back upon and aren’t left hanging if the flow of creativity stutters, and supporting a social contract that centers everyone feeling safe and curious and excited and connected.
The sigil for Dream Askew.
Dream Askew
What have been some of the most vital elements of growth in Dream Askew over the past five years, mechanically and thematically?
A: Mechanically, there are two ways that the game has changed that I think are the most vital: the introduction of the community worksheet, and the introduction of key relationships for every character role. These two changes shift the story of Dream Askew in the direction of community, relationships under pressure, and questions of belonging. The game feels like it contains a deeper treatment of its themes, rather than a more aesthetic, surface-level treatment of what it means to belong to a queer enclave. Key relationships were a piece of the design that Benjamin first introduced into Dream Apart, which I was so excited to borrow back for the apocalypse.
Thematically, I think the biggest difference isn’t actually with the game, but with the real world that I’m going to be releasing the game into. The idea that apocalypse was a contemporary force which operated in waves at the margins of civilization, that the digital realm would factor into not only the collapse but also what came next… in 2013 this was closer to science fiction. In 2018 it feels startlingly timely to be talking about. I talk about this more in the design notes I’m releasing alongside the game, but I think it’s chilly how much more real the world of Dream Askew now feels for me and my friends.
The Outliers zine, which is a stretch goal reached on the Kickstarter, includes additional game materials.
What elements of queerness speak the most to you personally, and to your experience in games, that you have brought forth in Dream Askew?
A: I think there’s a bit of misdirection at play in how Dream Askew portrays queerness. Character creation opens with a prompt to choose from a list of strange and unprecedented genders, and to think visually through physical descriptions and wardrobe combinations. Queerness feels like a flashy aesthetic project. And that’s definitely a real part of the game, one that it’s fun to play around with! But queerness is also the relationships you attempt to hold in balance, and it’s the fact that everyone has a different kind of lopsided power that both contributes to the community and also puts them at odds with it. The Iris is a potential healer, but also an unsettling psychic weirdo. The Hawker is a resourceful provider, but also a territorial profiteer. The Stitcher is an engineering genius, but also a strange recluse. The drama of the game comes from watching how these people who hold sway in the community tug its ideals and character back and forth.
The Dream Apart sigil.
Dream Apart
What were some of the elements of Jewish fantasy and folklore that you personally felt deeply about including in Dream Apart, and how did you include them?
B: Most people are familiar with a kind of Sunday School version of the Hebrew Bible, in which the Divine is a kind of mathematically omniscient and omnipotent Santa Claus whose job it is to make everyone be good. A cursory glance at the world around you should make it clear that this doesn’t make much sense. In fact the story (or rather stories) that the texts suggest are much weirder. The God of the Tanakh is volatile, mysterious, numinous, and alien; the midrashim and the Kabbalah make this weirder still, with a fractured Divinity in exile from Itself, and a universe-altering magic inherent in the smallest human actions (it’s not that much of a stretch to say that in the Lurianic Kabbalah, when mom lights the candles Friday night she is literally healing a tiny bit of the sundered Godhead). The psychic maelstrom of Apocalypse World (and thus of Dream Askew) is the closest thing to this theology that I’ve found in any game; it feels a lot like what Moses encountered at that bush in Midian. Magic in games tends to feel like engineering at best, and more commonly like ordering from a menu at Denny’s. Gods are either absent, or they’re statted-up dispensers of plot tokens and buffs. I wanted a kind of magic that would be terrifying, wondrous, unsafe, inchoate. I also wanted it to be tied deeply into the story’s drama of moral agency, because so much of Jewish tradition is about wrestling with complex moral questions that have no easy answers. Temptation, solace, power at a price, rebuke, reconciliation, grudges, forgiveness, these things are not just part of the social drama, they’re also central to the meaning of the Unseen World. A demon that just wants to try and kill you is not nearly as interesting as a demon that wants you to betray yourself. A golem isn’t just a monster, it’s an allegory of freedom and servitude, the limits and risks of violent self-defense and of human knowledge. A dybbuk isn’t just a possessing spirit, it’s one with an agenda and unfinished business.
The sheet for the Shtetl for Dream Apart.
Were there any unique challenges for approaching the subjects of Jewish culture and beliefs that are not addressed often enough or respectfully enough in popular media?
B: To the extent that shtetl culture is addressed in popular media at all — think the musical-theater and cinematic versions of Fiddler on the Roof and Yentl — it tends to be in a sentimental, rose-and-sepia-tinted, elegiac frame, ignoring a lot of the complexities and real-world grittiness. Non-Jews are usually offscreen menaces (though to be fair, one of Tevye’s daughters does marry one); economics is flattened into a virtuous poverty; and in general, the viewer is encouraged to see the events as a kind of hagiographic ancestral origin story. (The original texts are grittier and sometimes queerer than their tamed stage & cinematic versions, too — there’s a good argument that Singer saw his Yentl, who keeps the name Anshel at the end of the story as opposed to putting a dress on and running off to America, as a trans man.) At one point Avery asked if we should find a more Yiddish-looking font for the Dream Apart playtest kit; I responded that I really liked using the same one we use for Askew, to get away from that coy sentimentality and ram home the point that this, too, was a gradual apocalypse, with — for its characters– the same apocalyptic immediacy.
Avery writing notes.
One last…
Beyond basic structural elements, what are some pieces of Dream Askew // Dream Apart that are similar or contrasting – mechanically and thematically?
A: I think one of the most interesting contrasts—and one I haven’t talked about anywhere yet—is in how the two games approach supplemental reference materials. Since Dream Apart is historical, its reference materials need to offer up specific, tangible answers: here’s what that word means; here’s a plausible Russian surname from the era; here’s the river you’d walk alongside. Benjamin is working hard to make resources that feel thorough while remaining compact. On the other hand, Dream Askew is speculative and built upon a queer epistemology. Its reference materials need to do much the opposite, to reject a single definition in favour of pitching the question back to players in an encouraging way: that’s a great question, what do those words mean? My challenge is being exploratory and playful without coming across as hostile or opaque.
The Dream Askew // Dream Apart book and illustration.
Hi all, today I have an interview with Terri Cohlene and her son, Ross Cowman, designers of BFF! BFF! is currently on Kickstarter and is a game about girlhood, friendship, and adventure – it looks like such a fantastic time, and I hope you love hearing what Terri and Ross have to say about it! FYI: This game is nearing the end of its Kickstarter and could super use some support – please share and consider backing an interesting new project that has a diverse cast of characters to play!
—
The Kickstarter video is so good! So much happy!
Tell me a little about BFF. What excites you about it?
Terri: Finally! After all this time, it’s getting out into the world! BFF! is a role playing game about friendship, girlhood, and adventure. Originally I wanted to create a game about friendship that girls would love. Turns out, lots of people (young, old and of different genders) are having fun getting into that mindset.
The art is fantastic and provides a backdrop for all kinds of great adventures, from school to sleepovers to summer camp to road trips to just hanging out at the mall.
Ross: Yes, all of those things. And it is really cool to be be working with my Mom, and all of the other folks on the team. BFF has so many people’s wonderful ideas in it!
As a design nerd: I’m excited to be using boardgame techniques to make a role playing game. I think this design space has a ton of potential to bring story gaming to a new audience that maybe didn’t feel like they had access before.
BFF! really does look like a combination of a board game and a roleplaying game, and I think that’s awesome!
BFF! seems to be almost a board game + story game hybrid. How did this design come about?
T: Maybe that happened because I didn’t know what I was doing. I started the ball rolling and, because my expertise is “story,” that’s where I began. I was thinking about what was important to ‘tween girls, and, Bingo! Friendship, of course. Then I shared my idea with Ross and he fine-tuned the game design, plus we brainstormed A LOT to get the results we have now. The landscapes were kind of obvious, except the fabulous details we ended up with were totally inspired by the artists and everyone else on the team.
R: When my mom brought me her idea my first thought was to hack Fall of Magic somehow to make this work. We eventually added some unique mechanics like charm bracelets and friendship cards to specifically support the friendship theme.
Speaking of friends, look at all these awesome friends!
Where are the character concepts and fictional structure being drawn from? Have have you come up with mechanics that connect those characters?
T: The brains of Cowman/Cohlene! Then we added the creativity of the rest of Team Deernicorn. Welcome to our world!!
R: Terri and I came up with initial ideas, then bounced them off everyone else in the team who added their own stuff to the mix. We wanted to have a balance of urban and rural, of indoor and outdoor, of crowded and spacious…
The characters are connected explicitly at the start of the game through the charm mechanics. Everyone trades charms which represent things our characters like about eachother.
The art for BFF! is really adorable, done by artist Veta Bahktina.
The charms sound so cool! What is their function mechanically, and what makes them important narratively?
T: The charms sound cool because they are cool! I initially had the idea of actual charm bracelets that best friend players could even wear between play sessions. While a nifty idea, it wasn’t practical. At all. (Ross wisely pointed this out!) Then we briefly considered having charm necklaces that the friend tokens could wear. Again, not practical. So we ended up with bracelet templates and custom charms brilliantly designed by Taylor Dow. They represent traits or memories that the friends like about themselves or each other. Throughout the game, there are opportunities to add charms, gift them or get rid of them, each time explaining why you are taking this action. They add to the depth of understanding, growth, and bonding (& fun!) that happens during play.
R: The charms are the biggest mechanical deviation from Fall of Magic and really crucial to getting players into the friendship mentality at the start of the game. At the start of the game we each take turns selecting a charm for ourselves and talking about how that charm represents something we like about our character. Then we go around a second time and each give a charm to another character and say something we like about them. Between each hangout each do another charm scene which functions as a kind of mini-debrief in the middle of the game.
The BFF! box art is so pretty and colorful. I love seeing all of the characters on the cover!
You’ve had some awesome sounding playtests. Were there any unique challenges in playtest with the broad age demographics or with keeping tone? What was some of your favorite feedback?
T: Not really. It’s been pretty easy to get into the middle grade mindset, whether that means imagining an older or younger (or same age) alternate self. Once that’s set, the playing field seems to be pretty equal. Favorite feedback? “I love it! It’s my new favorite game!” Or maybe, “You want to be an eggplant? Be an eggplant!”
R: We’ve had consistently awesome playtests, people grinning, laughing, and just having a really fun relaxing time roleplaying these friendships together. Some of the kids from the YWCA playtest group told us after they were really inspired to make their own characters and hangouts for the game. For me, inspiring some of these young women and gender-queer youth to become future game designers, is the best possible feedback I could ask for.
The gorgeous map/game board in BFF! is colorful and compelling!
—
Wow! Thank you so much to Terri and Ross for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading and that you’ll skip on over to the BFF! Kickstarter page to check it out, and share this article with your friends! There’s a few days left to make BFF a reality, and I think it’s totally worth it.
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
Tell me a little about Yarnia. What excites you about it?
Yarnia is a quiet little land that has a habit of being invaded by monsters. Eons ago the rulers of Yarnia set up a summoning system to bring in heroes from different worlds to aid them in their constant quest to repel the wool-thieving monsters. Part of what makes this so fun is that it’s a system that allows players to bring their RPG characters into Yarnia or roll an entirely new character for the quest.
A lovely cowl & a creative designer!
How did you come up with the idea for Welcome to Yarnia and start integrating the knitting aspect into play?
Yarn Quest – Heroes to Yarnia is an RPG knitting pattern that I designed to make a randomly generated pattern. We’ve done quite a few Yarn Quests now, and I wanted a pattern that would allow me to teach people how to double knit, along with introduce new gamers to RPG-style gaming. Welcome to Yarnia is designed as a sort of Introduction to the world of Yarnia. It also offers a gateway between the knitting and gaming communities, allowing members to cross over and bring new ideas to both communities.
What are some of the types of patterns players will encounter during their Yarn Quest?
There is a combination of geometric patterns and pixel monsters. I try and model my art after a lot of the classic RPGs like Pokemon, Final Fantasy, and Dragon Warrior while putting my own spin on it.
Gorgeous wings pattern.
How do the roleplaying and storytelling mechanics function in the game?
The game is heavily based on storytelling as there’s no way to shift the full story on the fly like a traditional RPG. Your role as the player character is to make choices as you progress through the story, and the dice are the main tool you’ll use to determine what charts you’ll knit. As the quests are designed to be played solo or in a group they are often set up as almost a choose your own adventure. At the base of it I believe that RPG’s are a very extensive form of a choose your own adventure.
What makes knitting work with the roleplaying so well, and provide a rich framework for storytelling?
There is a large community of geeks who are also knitters, and knitterly folks love to try out new things. There are so many different stories to tell through the RPG format, and each person’s adventure is going to be different. Overall, it’s fun to experience new things, and Yarn Quest is different from any knitting pattern. The ability to record your character’s journey through a project that is almost a tapestry is a fun and unique method of knitting a pattern.
This black and white shawl with the bird pattern is so beautiful.
—
Thank you so much Tania for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading and that you’ll check out the Yarnia Kickstarter today! Make sure to share the post with all of your friends, knitters and gamers alike!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
Hi all! Today I have an interview with Aaron Reed on Archives of the Sky, which is currently on Kickstarter!Archives of the Sky is a GMless game with collaborative story telling, set in the broader reaches of the universe where characters seek purpose in the epic galaxy. It seems pretty nifty, so please check out the interview below! You can also peek at at a play example here.
—
Kickstarter video for Archives of the Sky.
Tell me a little about Archives of the Sky. What excites you about it?
Archives of the Sky is a tabletop storytelling game that uses epic science fiction as a stage for stories about very human conflicts and values. I love sci-fi and roleplaying, but most of the existing games I know of in the genre focus more on its external trappings: spaceships, laser guns, and so on. There are a few rare exceptions that focus on the more human, philosophical side of sci-fi– “Shock” by Joshua A.C. Newman is one of my favorites– but I wanted a system that also took inspiration from GM-less improvisational games like Microscope, Fiasco, and Downfall. After a lot of iteration and playtesting, Archives is the result.
What excites me about it is that it really evolved into a great vehicle for supporting a group of people to collaboratively create an amazing story together. The mechanics of the game really work to provide a structure for a plot, and to ensure that plot is based around a conflict between beliefs. The characters are then forced to resolve this dilemma somehow, which means they need to get down to the heart of why the believe the things they do and why they’re worth defending– and that tends to lead to some great roleplaying.
A group of people playing Archives of the Sky. Index card tents! yay!
How do you set up a game of Archives of the Sky – who has input into the story, the characters? – and how do plot hooks happen?
Everyone’s involved with setting up the world and telling the story– there’s a role called the Archivist to help facilitate, but everyone has equal creative authority. The first thing you do when you sit down to play is create a House together, a group of near-immortal wanderers who have been exploring the galaxy for thousands and thousands of years. You start by coming up with their core purpose, which becomes the game’s first value. This might be something like “We preserve life,” or “We learn truths,” or even something simpler like “We hunt” or “We sing.” It’s something this House has sworn to pursue as their highest calling.
The rules walk you through fleshing out the House a bit more, giving them a few more Values and figuring out their place in the galaxy, and then each player makes their own character, someone within the House. Characters each have their own personal Values, which may or may not line up with the House’s Values, or with each others’. These are the seeds of stories– think of Captain Kirk in the early Star Trek movies, who has sworn to uphold the Federation’s mission of peace, but will also “never forgive” the Klingons for the death of his son. Clearly, he’s going to have to face this conflict sooner or later. (Sentences starting “I always” or “I never” make great Values, by the way.)
Once the game begins, players take turns staging Scenes that advance the plot. Each scene is based around a Question which that player has about where the story is going. So if a mysterious transmission was detected in the previous scene, the next player might ask “Who sent the transmission?” as their Question– or might introduce a new complication by asking something like “Why can’t we find the source of the transmission?” Everyone then collaboratively plays a scene around answering the Question, both playing their character as well as making things happen in the story world (like a GM).
Some “trove” cards, created by the players to support storytelling.
What are the basic mechanics like for social and other conflicts, and how do they engage players emotionally?
Players have the option of resolving conflicts through roleplay, but there’s a mechanic that provides a bit of randomness and an uncertain outcome that can be used by any player who wants it. Another thing you do at the start of play is create a deck of index cards called the Trove, each one with a single word on it. (The rules encourage you to pull these words from your favorite sci-fi novels.) When you want to resolve an uncertain outcome, you can draw from the Trove and let the word inspire the outcome. What’s great about this is the interpretation can be anything you want: literal, metaphorical, even tangential. So the word “fire” might inspire one person to narrate a catastrophic explosion, while another might read it as the fire in someone’s eyes as they pull off a wild maneuver.
Where emotions come in is when the story gets to a Dilemma, a conflict between two Values. This is a situation where the characters need to decide on a course of action, but either decision would threaten one of the Values in play. Say the players have created a House with a core Value of staying hidden; but one of the characters has a personal value to protect the helpless, and the House has a chance to save a lot of lives by coming out of the shadows. Can that character convince the others to change their minds and go against their House’s highest value? Or will she find a way to live with betraying what she believes for a greater good? It’s not an easy decision, because any character who acts against a Value they believe in might have to Adapt at the end of the session, making a permanent change to their character.
An example of a Value, “We Always Show the Truth.”
What was your playtesting process like? Tell me about any realizations you had, and how you dealt with necessary changes.
I’ve been making digital games for a long time, but this is my first fully finished and released tabletop roleplaying game, and one of the things that surprised me was how much more playtesting and iteration tabletop takes. With digital games, you spend some amount of time thinking of ideas, a hellishly long amount of time programming them, and then some amount of time playtesting: ideally throughout the process, but often closer to the end. With tabletop, almost all of your iteration time is spent actually playing the game and seeing how it works, with a few hours here and there to think through problems people are having and revise the rules.
Archives morphed a lot as it went through close to twenty fairly significant revisions (i.e. not just tweaking wording) over about two years. It accumulated more and more rules as I tried to get all the parts to work the way I wanted them to. The downside was this is as you went through a game, you kept bumping into new rules, and needing to stop to explain them. Finally I sat down and counted up the number of individual rules and mechanics in the game, and there were something like 27 of them. I challenged myself to try to make a version of the game that had only 10 concepts that needed to be explained. I think the simpler version that came out of that was when I really cracked the code of how the game worked, and from then on everything was just refinement.
The biggest two realizations I had were A) the game was really about Values, not the plot events (in the original version, you did a lot of writing down plot points on cards, moving them around the table, taking special moves to revise them, etc.– in the final version, all that focus is placed on the Values in play instead). And B) A bunch of separate mechanics in older versions could be combined into the simple rule “Ask a question to begin a scene.” So at certain times of the game that’s a fixed question; at some times there are some questions that make more sense than others; but it’s only one rule to explain, and everything else follows naturally from that framing, which simplified things a lot.
How do you put the “epic” into the game, with mechanics, narrative, and structure?
I wanted all players to get involved in telling the story: contributing details to scenes, helping build the world, and so on, but in practice people were often afraid to contribute when it wasn’t their “turn” to stage a scene. So I added the concept of two meta-roles, called the Epic and the Intimate, that people take turns playing. Your job when you’re the Epic is to look for opportunities to make the story huge and awe-inspiring in scope… so if someone mentions a spaceship, you might jump in with “It’s three miles long and made from some incredibly black material that totally swallows up the starlight.” By contrast, the Intimate looks for moments to keep the focus on emotions and small human details: they can ask a player what their character is feeling at any time during a scene, or add small touches of detail, like a texture or a significant glance between two characters. This system works really well to give players “permission” to tweak the story, and having those two things to focus on help make the stories feel like the kind of sci-fi I want to emulate.
Hi all! I have a Patreon spotlight today and it’s on the designer and creator Kira Magrann, who makes some queer, experimental games that explore intimacy and cyberpunk themes, among other things.
Kira Magrann
Bio via Kira:
Kira is a tabletop roleplaying game designer, queer NB cyborg, and snake mom living in Columbus, Ohio. She currently has a Patreon where she designs experimental games, a YouTube channel where she talks about game design, and she blogs a few times a month at Gnome Stew. With the support of her patrons she recently released a game about Lesbisnakes in wintertime titled A Cozy Den.
Tell me about yourself and your work. Who are you, and what does your work do?
I’m a queer cyborg game designer living in Columbus, Ohio. I’m a horror movie lover, snake mom, and I’m working on making my hair look like Major Kusanagi’s. My work, my game design work anyway, aims to educate, titillate, and inspire. When people play my games I want them to feel things and have learned something they didn’t know before. Hopefully the designs and concepts are also accessible enough to reach a diverse audience which is something I work hard at doing.
The identification stats for lesbisnakes in A Cozy Den, featuring a range from High Femme to Stone Butch.
Descriptions of the various stats in A Cozy Den, including presentation.
You’re a known activist and queer designer. How does your perspective regarding these things affect your design work and the work you do for your Patreon?
Gosh, well, being an activist and a queer designer means that basically all my work will have some aspects of those two parts of me in them. Everything I make is queer, or cyberpunk (emphasis on the punk), or related to queer or feminine monster metaphors. It’s a huge pool of inspiration to pull from, which means I can make games that are kind of like, combinations of these things, and maybe not like, 100% just one of them. So A Cozy Den, my game about lesbisnakes, is about half snake half lesbian mythical monster creatures who are trying to live together during the winter. It’s also a non-violent game and focuses on cozy stories and mechanics. It also uses lesbian terminology, your stats being derived from a scale of High Femme to Stone Butch. So that’s easily like, all three of my main interests in one game. This is how all my games go! I basically draw from what’s important to me in my personal life, and also the genres I’m inspired by and care a lot about.
Three lesbisnakes from A Cozy Den.
Tell me a little about A Cozy Den. What inspired you to write the game? What about it speaks to your design and you as a person?
A Cozy Den came about because I’ve been obsessed with snakes since I adopted my 8 year old corn snake Sol about a year and a half ago now. I basically read about them daily and am in all these FB groups in the snake community and just love them so much. I’ve actually loved snakes since I was a child but never really owned any until now (I’m 37!). I had recently learned that snakes den together, and it really humanized them, painted them in a more communal and cozy way.
I like finding ways that make snakes less scary for people, because I think that removing fear even in a small way toward an animal can make huge changes in a person’s life and in removing fear in the world in all kinds of ways. I’d also been really into lesbian lifestyle history at the time and watched this short documentary on lesbian communes, and suddenly it clicked… snake dens and lesbian communes are so similar in all these ways like, culturally. They’re outsiders, American culture is kind of afraid of them, and the communes in the 70s and 80s in particular were very purposeful outsider ways for lesbians to live outside of the norm in America.
“What’s a Den?” section of the A Cozy Den text.
So I basically just combined the two and was like, I can make a game that can teach simultaneously about two things I love: snakes and queer history. That is so typical of my design style. I’ll basically find all these connecting points with the many genres and things in the world I love, combine them into an interesting genre game setting, and somehow teach about them in the game. I’m queer and a snake lover too, so this game is very personal, very much about me and the things I love. I also wanted to experiment with mechanics, to see if I could make a pbta game without physical conflict as the main driver. I’m more and more interested in games that don’t have violence, and instead create different types of feelings or situations. So in A Cozy Den all the conflict is inter personal… can the characters get along with each other during the winter in a closed space? What does cozy look like in a tabletop game vs a video game? There’s a lot going on in this tiny weird game, and its very much how my design brain and personal brain work. I could talk about it for awhile lol.
The “Healing” section of A Cozy Den.
Your new videos have been well-received! How do you decide what to do videos about? What is your process for creating the videos?
So, my videos, basically I recently got obsessed with YouTube (you’re probably seeing a pattern here with my creative obsessions) and I was like, shit, I could do this. I’ve always wanted to learn more about video making and a lot of my personal media on my insta has been drifting toward video too. Whenever I want to get better at something, I get obsessed with it and do it until I get better. It’s worked ok so far although I wish I could stick with one thing it’d be easier lol.
My videos are about my design process and thoughts, so while I’m working on things throughout the week I try to note particular issues I’m having while writing or designing, or thoughts another youtube video or article made me have, and then I write those down. Then I pick one, and make a word document with a bunch of bullet points stream of conciousness style what I might like to talk about in that video topic. Then I’ll step away for a few hours or a day, come back to it and clean it up.
I’ve cleaned up my extra bedroom office so that the space behind me looks decent and I have windows in front of me for natural light, and I just use a very cheap tripod from amazon and my iphone for recording. Then I’ll record in about 50 second pieces (I’ve found smaller ones are easier to upload to dropbox for whatever reason), upload them to dropbox, download them to my computer (this usually takes hours) then edit them in a free editing program I have on my ubuntu computer called kdenlive. I don’t do anything fancy with the editing, just add music and text. Once that’s done I’ll upload to youtube!
A video from Kira’s YouTube on Playtest Process and Design Iteration.
There’s lots of tricks on youtube to get more traffic and stuff in like, the way you tag things and name stuff and put ending credits in… all those I learned from watching videos on youtube about how to do it. I want to get a little more vloggy with my videos in the future, play with cinematography more, but for right now I’m trying to get a rhythm and skill set to just make them regularly. I think of my youtube channel like a blog basically, like, what would I write about to the community on g+ or gnome stew, then instead of writing I just film it. I’m getting better! It’s still mostly an experiment.
What are some goals you have for your Patreon and your design practice in general?
My Patreon is helping me become a better designer while simultaneously putting out content that I can’t make anywhere else. It’s a really unique opportunity to be able to explore whatever kinds of games my heart desires and not worry to terribly about the “sellability” of it, y’know? I think a lot of creators know what types of content really sells, something with fantasy fighters, something grimdark, something with skullduggery… basically new takes on the typical rpg stuff.
In order to create something truly new and different, it means that you’re taking a huge chance as a creator that no one in the rpg community will be interested in playing your weird stuff. So having this patreon to support me even a little monetarily helps me make those unique and innovative games. Also it is paying my bills! I’d love to get it up to 1500 a month, cause then it’d legit be like a part time job! But until then I’m scrambling to fill the extra money in with freelance work which to be honest is kind of overwhelming. It’s a dream to be able to live off my patreon. I think it’ll get there.
The Actions from A Cozy Den with some handwritten markup.
When do you experience the most joy, and the most satisfaction, while creating?
Wow this is a spectacular question and I’m not sure 100% how to answer it lol! The whole process for me is very joy inducing. I’m a hyper creative person and my imagination is always on overdrive, so coming up with the ideas is really fun. I also love to be critical, and I think editing is a critical skill, so basically the part where you’re taking the ideas and narrowing them and sculpting them into something more specific is also really satisfying. The act of writing is sometimes a little tedious, but when I get a flow going I disappear into the document for hours at a time and that flow feels really good, creatively.
I do really love collaborating, especially when I’m in charge of a project and can choose who else is on my team. I’m very proud to work with other marginalized creators and hire them to create art or other work like in A Cozy Den or RESISTOR. Sharing creative work is definitely scary, but I love creating artwork that people use or wear, so when people are getting the game and playing it I feel very accomplished and get this feeling of sympathetic joy. So I guess those are my favorite parts of creating, and the things that give me the most satisfaction in the process.
A character sheet from A Cozy Den.
Patterns and colors for the various lesbisnakes in A Cozy Den based on their stats.
—
Thank you so much to Kira for stopping in to talk about her Patreon,A Cozy Den, and her design! Please check out Kira’s work and share around this spotlight to show off the cool work she is doing.
You can find Kira on Twitter as @kiranansiand on YouTube, as well as through Patreon where she designs experimental games, and sometimes at Gnome Stew. Make sure to check out A Cozy Den, too!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
I have an interview today with Jacob Kellogg on his game Journey Away, which is currently on Kickstarter. You might remember Jacob from his approachable theory article about complexity in game design – but don’t think his cool thoughts on games and design stop there! Journey Away is a game that I think is doing something fun and it’s got dice pools, which means I’m interested. Check out his responses below!
—
Tell me a little about Journey Away. What excites you about it?
Well, one of the exciting parts of Journey Away is that it’s my first project that’s big enough to not be a Pay What You Want title; that feels like a threshold to me as a new designer. As for the game itself, I like that it feels like a different kind of experience than most RPGs. Fantasy is probably my favorite gaming genre, which can be problematic due to there being so many fantasy games out there already, but I think that the non-challenge-based mechanics really help this to bring something new to the hobby instead of just being another rehash. I feel good about that.
What made you go towards non-challenge-based mechanics? What about that is important to you?
The decision to use non-challenge-based mechanics was a convergence of two things. First, I had noticed that fighting monsters (and to a lesser extent, facing traps and hazards) was so common in fantasy gaming that it seemed to be treated as an inherent part of the genre. That struck me as odd, since to me “fantasy” is more about the setting. Second, as I started developing my own setting and premise for the game, it didn’t make sense that curious villagers would explore a magical world with wide-eyed wonder if doing so involved facing mortal danger on a daily basis. At the intersection of those two observations is the notion of non-challenge-based gameplay.
The beautiful cover art for Journey Away. I finally learned how to do alt text properly, so full description is there.
How did you make fantasy interesting and different for Journey Away?
As I touched on above, I think part of what makes some people feel like fantasy is “done to death” is that it keeps getting done the same way each time. The dice may change and each setting might have its own quirk, but ultimately they’re almost always implemented as some variation of allocating attributes and skills for your best odds of success against a series of challenges. I think stripping that away offers something genuinely different. It’s like if someone has only ever seen pasta served with tomato sauce and they ask me how I’ll make pasta interesting and different, maybe I’ll give them some chicken lo mein or beef stroganoff.
Even so, I also wanted a reasonably original setting. I ended up with a world where magic is a recent addition, because that offers lots of great benefits, like having plenty of opportunity for discovery and adding a sense of wonder to any magical artifacts you might encounter. It also offers a nice solution to the common fantasy issue of “race”. People like to play fantastical beings, but there’s a lot of baggage with the traditional handling of races. What I get to do in Journey Away is say that everyone’s a human, and the new presence of magic causes some folks to be born with altered features. So if you want to play an “elf”, you can just say that you were born with pointy ears and give yourself the traits you want; or if you like tieflings, you can give yourself those features without having to introduce race-based prejudice into the game; or if you’re coming to fantasy gaming from some other background, you can easily adopt the features of a character you like (such as a sexy vampire or an anime catgirl) without having to find a race in a splatbook and convince the GM that the stats are balanced. The setting really offers a lot of freedom to everyone.
I love the idea of getting the magical features you want because of the flexibility of the world. So tell me, how do these work mechanically? How do you represent magic in the nuts and bolts?
Magic is handled the same way as any other feature of your character: you declare that something is true about your character, and assign a die size to it based on how significant or impactful you want it to be. It doesn’t matter whether that character trait is your experience with fishing, your cute demeanor, or the potency of some magical ability you have. For example, a friend gave her character animal-mind-reading powers with a d10. Then, whenever we rolled for a situation where that was helpful (like when trying to negotiate with someone), a d10 would be added to the player dice pool. If it could get in the way in a situation (like when surrounded by lots of creatures), then a d10 gets added to the complication pool.
What is the core of conflict and discovery in Journey Away?
The entire primary mechanic is basically what I just described for magic: you give yourself traits to define your character, and assign die values based on how big of an impact you want them to be, with bigger dice having bigger impacts. Those traits then contribute dice to one pool when they’re helpful in a situation, or to another pool when they could get in the way. Circumstances can also contribute dice to both pools, but mostly to the complication pool. Both pools are rolled, and the players arrange the dice into pairs (one die from each pool). Pairs where the die from the player pool is higher generate beneficial developments, while pairs in which the complication die is higher generate complications. The player to the left of whoever rolled then narrates the majority development type (boons or complications), then passes to the player on the right of the one who rolled, and that player narrates the remaining developments. Of course, there will be structures in place to guide this narration with prompts for those who aren’t interested in or comfortable with absolute openness, but that’s the basic idea.
Conflict isn’t a major component of the intended emotional focus of the game. Instead, we’re framing the journey as primarily positive. Even the “bad” complications serve as an opportunity for fun moments, and the game is mainly about diving headlong into the wondrous unknown. This means that the game encourages forward movement, curiosity, and laughing together when things take unexpected turns. Journey Away very much presents the discovery of new things as a positive and joyful endeavor. I want to encourage a way of thinking: that things outside your current experience aren’t inherently bad and dangerous, but instead will enrich your life and make you glad you stepped outside the village to have a look.
