Tag: interviews

Five or So Questions with Graham Walmsley on Cthulhu Dark

Today I have an interview with Graham Walmsley on the new Kickstarter project, Cthulhu Dark. In spite of all of my misgivings about Lovecraftian themed games, I do still love the aesthetic and a lot of the elements – and Graham is pretty considerate about topics that matter most to me in the setting. Because of this, I’m excited to share this interview with you all!

—


Tell me a little about Cthulhu Dark. What excites you about it?

When you see Cthulhu Dark, the first thing you notice is how simple it is. But that’s not the thing that excites me. What excites me is how precise it is.

Take the Insight rule as an example. Your Insight starts at 1. Every time you see something that creeps you out, roll a die (that’s an “Insight roll”). If you get higher than your current Insight, your Insight increases by 1, until it reaches 6 and you lose your mind.

That sounds like a simple rule, but it’s designed very precisely. It means that your Insight increases fast at the start, then slower later. When it reaches 5, you’re on a knife edge, where every Insight Roll could send you over the edge but only if you roll a 6. (I did hours of thinking about probabilities for that rule.)

The whole game is like that. It looks simple, but it’s all perfectly engineered. And all of that feeds back into the game. Every so often, the dice throw out a little surprise that makes the story better.

That’s what excites me about the rules. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff that excites me about the project: the settings, my cowriters, the art, everything.


What kind of settings do you have as a part of, or in addition to, Cthulhu Dark? What in them shows the themes of the system?

Cthulhu Dark comes with four settings: London 1851, the dirty, stinking capital of the British Empire; Arkham 1692, Lovecraft’s city in a time of witch-hunts; Jaiwo 2017, modern-day West Africa; and Mumbai 2037, cyberpunk India.

Each of them comes with a scenario that showcases Cthulhu Dark‘s trademark style of bleak horror. But there’s something subtler going on too.

One of the main themes of Cthulhu Dark is: you play people with little power, investigating horror at the heart of the power. For example, in London 1851, you play thieves, beggars and other slum dwellers, investigating monsters within the aristocracy. That’s a deliberate choice: in other games, you’d be more likely to play aristocrats, investigating a horror in the slums. Cthulhu Dark switches that around. It means you play Investigators you wouldn’t usually play.

by Matteo Bocci, Mumbai 2037

How have you developed Cthulhu Dark – a lot of playtesting, revisions, new ideas?

Since the original two-page version of Cthulhu Dark, I’ve played it to death, and so have lots of others. It’s a robust, polished set of rules, so it didn’t need much revising.

What’s new is everything else in the book. There’s a section on how to use Cthulhu Dark‘s rules to full effect, with all the tips and tricks I’ve learned over the years. There’s a guide to Writing a Mystery, which takes you step-by-step through the process of writing a horror story to play, starting with the things you fear and ending with the finished mystery. And there’s a section on Playing A Mystery, which tells you how to play horror at the table, and another describing the Threats of the Mythos and how to use them in your game.

And then there’s the four settings above. There’s a lot of new stuff.


You know that this is well within my interests, so I have to ask – anything with the term “Cthulhu” in the title approaches the question of how mental health and “insanity” are handled. How did you approach this concept in Cthulhu Dark?

Instead of “insanity”, the new Cthulhu Dark talks about Insight. That’s your insight into the horror, the dark patterns behind the universe, the Mythos. Every time you see something that creeps you out, you roll to see whether your Insight increases.

To the outside world, your Insight looks like insanity. But you know better. You see things others don’t see. You understand things they don’t understand.

Cthulhu games haven’t always treated mental health well, but there’s no reason that they can’t. After all, Cthulhu is really the only genre that even includes mental health. You never think about mental health in a dungeon-crawling game, but you have to think about it in Cthulhu games. So, I think there’s the possibility of doing something really positive with mental health and Cthulhu gaming.

What sort of play does Cthulhu Dark do best? What can players expect when they sit down at a table?

Cthulhu Dark does bleak, mindbending horror. You can’t fight the Mythos: you can only run, hide or watch helplessly.

When you sit down to play Cthulhu Dark, expect your Investigator to spiral slowly down into darkness. Expect to be creeped out. Expect hyperpowerful creatures, which you cannot understand, let alone fight. Expect all that, then enjoy the ride.

by Matteo Bocci
—

Thanks so much to Graham for the interview! I’m excited to see the final product, it sounds really great! Readers, remember to check out Cthulhu Dark on Kickstarter and share with your friends!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Five or So Questions with Fraser Simons on Cascade

Hi y’all! Today I have an interview with Fraser Simons on a supplement to the cyberpunk game, The Veil, called Cascade. I talked to Fraser about Cascade, which is currently on Kickstarter, to see what’s new and interesting! Check it out. 🙂

—

Tell me a little about Cascade. What excites you about it?

Cascade is the second step in a larger design goal I have, The Veil being the foundation of that goal. There is a heavy focus on emergent play and reducing cognitive load; I love that someone could be playing The Veil right now and choose to take those characters they have spent time with and move them to this supplement and find out whole new things about them they never would have otherwise. There’s a new flashback mechanic, even more of the really cool stuff about this game is now player facing. There is a lot to discover about a character when their identity is upset, and in this game your mind is decanted into a whole new body. You have missing memories. The world is as foreign to you, as perhaps your body is now. And embodiment is a powerful journey of discovery people can touch on as little, or as much, as they like but they have a mechanical reason and benefit to engage with the exploration of this future world as well as their characters. And, at the same time I’m realizing this next step in the design goal, I get to also give more resources that I couldn’t include in The Veil. So really, it’s a continuation of the original text and the design work! Lastly, perhaps most exciting of all I get to experience some other settings from wonderful people like Kira Magrann, Kate Bullock, Dana Cameron, and Quinn Murphy lined up for stretch goals. Finding out what other people’s cyberpunk is and what it means to them is extremely exciting and interesting to me, the whole system is geared towards that, after all!

What is your cyberpunk? How is that reflected in Cascade?
I came to cyberpunk initially by getting my hands on a copy of Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan. At the time, I had never read something like it. It essentially injected politics into cyberpunk fiction in a way people hadn’t really done, to my knowledge. There was no real political stance in Neuromancer (beyond a slightly problematic Zion vs Wintermute semi-stance) and many of the other books that came out even, save for a few as I wasn’t very aware of the genre at that time. I hadn’t even heard of post-cyberpunk as a term yet, so I wasn’t sure what I was reading. It subverted some tropes in the genre, like typical macho masculine and generally all-white protagonists with a new kind of depth. Because Takeshi’s heritage was mixed and reiterated constantly, because he was intentionally hyper masculine while always reiterating making the political personal, we ended up with a character that was unlike any other cyberpunk protagonist I’d heard of or read. Race and gender were constructs of the mind instead of body, cortical stacks allowed the reader of the book to really think about one’s identity and what it’s comprised of; outside of embodiment issues as well as with them. To see that the natural progression of globalization and capitalism in the future is the same as it is now, with the only value a human life has is the money they have and can produce, with the very essence of their identity, the cortical stack becoming a commodity in of itself. The series depicts Takeshi as someone who understands the system and hates it but is nihilistic, to a more Utopian ending and feeling when he decides to actually do something against the system itself. Bridging concepts from old and new in cyberpunk texts, it represented the kind of fiction I could love.

What my cyberpunk needs to have in it because of this touchstone: depth, in a word. I want to have extrapolation from our present to look into the future and explore where we could be going. I want it to have commentary on the human condition and what makes us human. I want technologies to be represented as neutral, with its potential good and bad being explored, and how our relationship to it changes as we change because of our technology. It should pose questions to me that I need and want to answer; make me think. Make me feel. And it needs to be relevant; diverse and inclusive. And I think it also needs to continue to redefine the terms “cyber” and “punk” as these words change with our lives and our society. I think that is a major part of making relevant fiction, and if it is relevant it walks across the line from merely being entertainment to something else entirely.

How does the flashback mechanic work? 
In Cascade, I really wanted to hit on emergent play because The Veil has a fairly high cognitive load. To that effect, I decided to change the reward system so that people got experience when they explored questions within the game. Your character is decanted into a Slack; a vacant body. And because of this process, which is imperfect, some of your memories are missing. You are in a new body, you’re a character from The Veil brought further into the future and you don’t have some of your memories. Cascade is all about finding out the answer to these questions. And as you make your way through this world, players will have emergent ideas about what the answer to these questions may be. So, when they make a roll for any move they can also hit on the flashback mechanic as well. They’ll take the lowest die and subtract it from the highest and add the amount of emotion spikes equal to that sum, and then simply narrate what it is they see about their past. Keeping it short and brief as most flashbacks are. You can also have a flashback as a separate move, but typically the inspiration for the answer to a question comes off the boot heels of something else, I find. And because it’s rooted in emotion like the rest of the game, it becomes as important as any other move, plus you get experience!

What did you do to focus more on emergent play? 

The flashback mechanic is a major focal point for emergent play. Making really large questions about identity and the world around them “bite-sized”, so that players can nibble at them as they play to find out what happens next without having to come up with something interesting and neat right then. It also frees up the person running the game to take these flashbacks, these questions the characters have made and want to inject into their game, and simply work them into the game as it unfolds. With beliefs, it was more difficult because everyone needs to be cognoscente of them while driving the fiction forward towards these things with every scene frame you did. This way, as ideas bubble up to the surface the player introduces them and then it is incorporated naturally into the fiction by the person running the game in a manner I find much more approachable. Players are constantly waving their fictional flags, getting rewarded for it, and then seeing what those answers mean for the world around them as they also use them to define themselves.

I have also hit on emergent themes when crafting the new playbooks. There is a move that defines the world around them as they make their way through it. For instance one playbook will be about defining counter-culture in the future, where the other will define other cultural things, like traditions, fashion, etc. As players have ideas of how this future differs from what they know now, they have these moves to insert them as they they go,and because it is also a move when they do so it will still propel the story forward. I wanted to make sure that if people were into the idea they could unravel the mysteries of this future in a manner unrelated to the questions everyone uses for experience. Showing them that their character is integral to defining the cyberpunk fiction they now inhabit. 

How do the other settings integrate with Cascade? 
The settings we have lined up for stretch goals are so exciting!! Some will be slotted into any campaign, for instance in Quinn Murphy’s incarceration setting, you could use that at any point the players are incarcerated or as something stand alone. Others, like Dana Cameron’s one focusing on the players moving their identities into cats, could be the entire focus of a campaign, or merely a portion of it. Taipei, which comes with the game and is the one I wrote, is meant as an adventure starter with a hook built into it. Each setting can be used for short term play, inspiration for what you will create for your own unique cyberpunk fiction. Or the beginning of something you will define as you play. With a wide range of possibilities should be able to get maximum utility out of these stretch goals as they do not all have the same parameters for use with the game. From queer, feminist cyberpunk, to uploading your mind into cats, to a setting where emotions are traded as commodities. I think there is something for everyone and can’t wait. I really wanted to show that cyberpunk is different for everyone as it seems slightly pigeon-holed. I have a couple more stretch goals to reveal too, including more settings. Can’t wait!
—

Thanks Fraser! It was great to interview you again. I hope all of my readers liked learning about Cascade and will check it out on Kickstarter today!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Five or So Questions with Jeff Tidball on The White Box

In a last minute burst, I have an interview with Jeff Tidball about the project he’s currently publishing via Kickstarter, The White Box! It’s an unusual concept and when I saw it, I had to ask about it! See what Jeff has to say below.

—

Tell me a little about The White Box. What excites you about it?

The White Box is very simple: It’s a book of essays and a box of components. The essays are about how to design and produce tabletop games. The components are a very generic set of pieces — dice, cubes, meeples, etc. — designed to get people started experimenting and prototyping right away.

I really, really like making games. For me, this has also become an enthusiasm for talking about the process of making games, which has lead to more and more teaching folks how to make games. The White Box is a very efficient way to spread that to a large number of people, over (what will hopefully be) a long period of time, if we can establish an evergreen place for it in retail stores.

Something I think we’ve seen more and more, in the last 10–20 years, are increasing non-formal educational opportunities for people who just want to learn to do some particular creative thing. They don’t want a degree, they just really like the idea of learning how to do a thing, and I think they also like thinking of themselves as people who could do that thing. We’ve seen an explosion of classes (in person, online, at retreats, during conventions…) about writing novels, composing screenplays, making documentaries, and — yes — designing games.

One of the non-obvious upsides of this interest in learning is that there’s a chance to do this teaching as something other than philanthropy. Am I going to get rich publishing The White Box? No. Neither is Jeremy (its author), or Gameplaywright, or Atlas Games. But it can become a self-sustaining thing. So, in addition to liking to talk and teach about gaming, I’m excited at having (with this Kickstarter’s apparent success) worked my way into a format for talking and teaching that’s financially sustainable,

What kind of components are inside The White Box, and why?

The stuff inside The White Box is a set of relatively common board game components: cubes, meeples, dice, and punchboard counters. The cubes, meeples, and dice come in a variety of colors. The base was four colors; our 1,000-backer stretch goal added a fifth color. We’ll add a sixth if we hit 100 retail backers.

The one unusual thing we’ve got in that vein of componentry is a giant wooden cube in each color. They look great in the pictures, and I’m interested in seeing what they inspire in designers.

What we *don’t* have is also interesting. Earlier versions of the parts list included blank cards, and a blank game board. We had to cut down the list to make the box more affordable, because we were really invested in the idea that The White Box should be a no-brainer purchase for someone interested in design. We really didn’t want to lose them over price. In my design experience, cards are much better created on a printer (cut a sheet of office paper into nine pieces) and then sleeved. We can’t compete with the cheapness of that (and the reusability of the sleeves), and we’d be providing something worse than that anyway. So they went.

The board was both especially expensive, and not large enough to accommodate what I thought would be relatively standard design uses. And large sheets of paper aren’t hard to come by, so again, it didn’t seem like a huge loss to lose it from the roster.

What was the biggest inspiration for The White Box and its specific components as a product, beyond seeing a need?

Jeremy Holcomb, the creator of The White Box, seems like he was most inspired by both his teaching (he’s a professor at DigiPen) and the same questions recurring in convention panels. The essays in the book are calibrated to answers those perennial questions. But I suppose those are both in the category of “seeing a need.”

I can’t speak for Jeremy as to deeper inspirations, but I have done a fair amount of teaching — formal and informal — and mentoring in the area of game design, and I’m inspired by a love of creative pursuits generally, and game design in particular. I also love the entrepreneurial endeavor of bringing a game to market, and so teaching people how to make games that can succeed in a greater marketplace games is something that I dig, and that I think is valuable.

This is such an unusual product, and sounds like a challenge to prepare for a larger audience. How have you tested The White Box?

Jeremy has literally tested the component mix by collecting samples and dumping them out on a table with friends to see what they can make. He’s also passed the book’s essays around to students and colleagues in order to garner feedback and improve their content.

For my part as a publisher, I spent a lot of time worrying about whether the marketplace had any interest in a product like this, and trying to figure out how I could test the general idea to get a deeper sense before launching a Kickstarter that might fail.

Those concerns seem ridiculous now that we’ve raised five times our funding goal halfway through the campaign, but it’s impossible to know what will succeed and what will fail beforehand, which is *nervewracking*.

My publisher’s “testing” consisted of creating a graphic that looked as much as possible like the contents we were proposing — it’s more or less the same graphic we’re using as the Kickstarter feature image — and showing it to both designers and retailers. I asked things like, “Do you need one of these?” “Would you buy one?” “How much would you pay for one?” “Could you sell this?” “How much would be too much?” That’s the process that provided as much validation as we could get (without doing it for real), and led us to a $29.95 price point, as opposed to something higher.

What benefits do you think educational game products bring, particularly The White Box? Are there skills (ability to complete tasks), or traits (behaviors and trends in ideals)?

I definitely think you can learn things from other people, whether that learning takes the form of reading their written works, listening to their lectures, or talking with them in a conversation.

But I don’t think you can get all the way to an *understanding* that way, and (obviously) learning in that way doesn’t allow you to directly product anything. (Other, maybe, than notes.) To arrive at a deeper understanding, and to produce something, you have to sit down and make. And usually, you have to make iterations. Drafts of a novel, prototypes of a game, or even individual performances (or rehearsals) of a piece of music. And of course, in a creative pursuit like game design, to produce a thing is also the goal. So you deepen your understanding in the act of making.

But then you wind up going back to learning, as you hit walls, or as you seek feedback on the last thing you made. So, I think it’s cyclic. Learn, make, learn more, make again.

Circling back to The White Box, I’ll say this: I think the best thing a teacher — be it a person, a book, or whatever — can do is to encourage the making phase. If the teacher sees the learning as an end in and of itself, I think the whole enterprise is a little sad and incomplete. So part of the crucial thing about The White Box is that *the things inside of it encourage the making*. It’s not just a book of advice; it’s also a call to action. And I think those two things are both critical to the endeavor.

The White Box teaches skills, probably, except insofar as it takes excitement and investment to begin the process of learning (to trigger the process of making), and the way the essays approach game design — with enthusiasm and love — will hopefully engender those traits necessary to invest the time to learn the skills.

—

Thanks so much to Jeff for answering my questions! The White Box only has a couple more days on Kickstarter, so if you want in, check it out now! 

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Five or So Questions with Kevin Allen Jr. on Trouble for Hire

Today I have an interview with Kevin Allen, Jr., creator of Trouble for Hire, which is a game about road warriors and is currently on Kickstarter! Road warriors are pretty cool, and Kevin was real cool about answering my questions. Check ’em out below!

—

Tell me a little about Trouble for Hire. What excites you about it?

Trouble for Hire is a game that lets 3-6 friends create stylized, fast-paced, road adventure stories set in a trash-culture pastiche of the 1970’s(ish) American West. It’s kind of a reverse roleplaying game; There’s one character –a tough/cool Mexican wheelman– who the game focuses on, while distributing the responsibilities of a traditional GM between the other players. These roles shift throughout play, so everyone gets a chance to do everything in the course of a session. It’s rules light, plays a whole story in single session, and is chock full of really unique color.
What about all that has me excited? Well, beyond the general excitement of publishing a project that I’ve been working on for a little over half a decade, and getting to work with some of my absolute favorite artists, the thing that I’m most jazzed about is seeing what people create with the world I’m giving them. There’s so many games on the shelves, great ones even, but they’ve been telling the same kind of stories in the same kind of worlds for a long time now. Fantasy sword bros. Steampunk gutter thieves. Spaceship superhero armor dudes. I love those games; I play the hell out of those games, but I always wondered where were all the games about Jane Fonda and Warren Oates trying to smuggle 8 kilos of California Kush through Petrified Forest National Park? Trouble for Hire is THAT game. Getting to see the unique content that people make, to hear about their adventure stories: That’s what I’m excited about. I’ve assembled what I think is a really rich toy box, and I can’t wait for people to play with it.”

I love this idea of one player, many GMs. Tell me a little more about these roles that the GM style players have – what keeps them involved? How much control do they have?

Glad you’re as keen on the Roles as I am. They break up traditional GM duties and assign them out in themed abstract chunks. There’s a role for setting stuff, antagonist npcs, neutral npcs, the main character’s sidekick or allies, and a few more. There are roles that are optional, depending on if you want them in a particular story or not; one for supernatural stuff, one that introduces a second major character. There’s even an Editor role who doesn’t so much create content like the other roles do but remixes it (with things like flashbacks and insights) like a live dj scratching your story instead of records.

There were a couple design problems I was looking at when making trouble for hire that speak directly to this issue of control and how it engages your interest in the story and as a device of play. The big one was ‘how do you make a group roleplaying game about the strong silent loner?’ Wolverine is cool in comics, but when he comes to the gaming table he tends to fall flat. The answer I came to was character non-monogamy, allowing everyone at the table the chance to be Wolverine (or in this case, Mexican smuggler Ruben Carlos Ruiz). Once I resolved to have the main character change hands in play it made sense for the rest of the responsibilities to do so as well. Every role has tricks they can pull, situations they can create in the story, general abstract territories they each lord over. When you first start playing certain roles appear more useful or engaging than others (who would want to be unnamed background characters when you could be the big bad villain?) but you’ll quickly realize they all do cool tricks –tricks that the story is just begging you to pull off. They give you ideas for ways to tweak the narrative. Eventually you realize that the scene you’re playing would be greatly enriched by the addition of some unnamed background characters, perhaps the kind who will eventually turn into the big bad villain, but as yet their allegiances are unknown.

The roles offer players a great deal of control. They are more about enabling fun storytelling than putting boundaries on what you can and can’t do. There’s plenty of overlap between the roles and any big important game thing (like initiating challenges where dice get rolled, or advancing the turn rotation) are backed up across many players. It’s less you only get to play with this corner of the sandbox and more you can play with the whole sandbox, but you have to look at it through these particular tinted glasses.

Sweet line art by Amy Houser.
What’s gone into the design process, technique and testing wise, for Trouble for Hire over the time you’ve been working on it? 
I started working on this game way back in 2010. For the first year the game shapeshifted around in different forms before settling into essentially what it is today. I’ve been testing and playing the game since then. Hundreds of hours. It’s the most extensive review I’ve ever given a project before publishing –not because there were unresolved issues, but because I was really enjoying playing the game and crafting the world. A creator’s intention is interesting to examine, but ultimately I believe that art (in this case a game) belongs to it’s audience. My opinion doesn’t matter at your gaming table, I’m not there to lord over you and dictate what’s kosher, so I’ve spent a lot of time with the text making sure it’s jam packed full of my voice and ideas.


What non-game media did you watch or read (or rewatch and reread!) to get ideas, flavor, and style from for Trouble for Hire?
This game was very much born in a cauldron of simmering influences, the biggest being post-western films of the 70’s. By post-western (and I go into this topic a bit more in-depth in the game text) I’m talking about a movement/realization in the latter half of the 20th century that the noble story of the western hero (read: white cowboy) was perhaps not as noble as it once seamed. Or perhaps the vicissitudes of modern life had rendered the romance of a “wild west” irrelevant. Either way, filmmakers started examining the role of the loner hero and a conflicted national identity. Sometimes that influence was serious (i.e.: Vanishing Point) and sometimes less so (anything with Burt Reynolds hassling Jackie Gleason). I present a pretty robust “appendix N” in the game, including a number of inspirations that might not normally be found in a gaming context. I took a lot from the paintings of Rosson Crow and Wes Lang, the photography of Neil Krug, and a musical combination of old school outlaw country, stoner metal, and Mexican narco ballads.
What are some key moments of play you’ve seen that just really exemplify Trouble for Hire as a game and experience?
There are three flagship adventures included in the game that represent kind of the purest expression of the setting and it’s themes (there’s a bunch of other adventures included too, that deviate from and play with those themes). The one included in the preview document –“Hollywood Brad Freeman’s Special Delivery”– is an adventure that centers on delivering a mystery box to a biker gang and the tribulations that occur along the way. I never declare what’s in the box, that’s for players to discover at the table. It’s always the first question I ask when I hear from people who played the game. What was in the box? Best answers: A solid gold phallus from an ancient Aztec temple; a sex tape featuring president Jimmy Carter; and thousands of poisonous scorpions. I’m really proud to have made a game where those are all totally reasonable and fantastic solutions. I can’t wait to see what else people put in my mystery box and what they get out of Trouble for Hire.
More gorgeous line art by Amy Houser.
  

—

Thanks so much to Kevin for answering my questions and sharing about Trouble for Hire, and thanks to Nathan Paoletta for hooking up the interview! Please take a minute to check out Trouble for Hire on Kickstarter today, and share this post around! 

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Five or So Questions with Colin Kyle on Axon Punk: Overdrive

Today I have an interview about the game Axon Punk: Overdrive, which is currently on Kickstarter. Colin Kyle , the lead designer, answered some of my questions about this cyberpunk, hip hop game set in 2085 megacities! Check them out below.

—

Tell me a little about Axon Punk: Overdrive. What excites you about it?

Axon Punk: Overdrive is a tabletop Roleplaying Game that combines classic cyberpunk with hip hop. The game has a very collaborative, improvisational feel like Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo, but set in the megacities of 2085. In addition to being futuristic badasses, players together create a Community of locations and fellow city dwellers that they live in during the game. Based on the choices the players make, their Community will produce missions, give rewards, and evolve over time – or it could be consumed by the chaos and anarchy caused by futuristic corporate oppression.

I am so excited about Axon Punk for many reasons. The top thing I’d say is that I get to work with so many interesting and different people. I originally began the game with my brother two years ago for fun and to help us get through some tough times, calling ourselves the Wrong Brothers. When we decided to get really serious about the game, we reached out for help. One of the key people that responded to us was Keisha Howard, who is the leader and founder of the Sugar Gamers and is working on a similar cyberpunk game called Project Violatea. Because of our shared love of games, sci-fi, music, storytelling, and many other things, Keisha began collaborating with us to refine, polish, and share Axon Punk with the world. Since Keisha joined the project, we’ve expanded the team to include a huge range of people – artists, musicians, writers, game designers, and people too hip for labels – that all add their own perspectives to the game. Managing a team of almost a dozen people across the continent, split primarily between Chicago, IL, and Dallas, TX, has had its challenges but it is absolutely worth it. Because we have this team and explicitly incorporate ideas from different perspectives in the game, we are putting together something that is exciting, authentic, immersive, and greater that I ever hoped it could be.

What themes of cyberpunk and hip hop are you aiming to bring together in Axon Punk, and how do they conflict and come together?


In our minds, cyberpunk and hip hop share many core themes that we wanted to highlight. Hip hop was born from the counter-culture of the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, just like cyberpunk. Hip hop ravenously incorporates new and experimental technology (turn-tables, synthesizers, beat machines, etc.) like few other genres of music. Hip hop artists often include science-fiction and social/political elements in their songs and imagery. Examples of artists and groups that incorporate major sci-fi/cyberpunk themes in their music include Janelle Monáe, Saul Williams, Erykah Badu, Afrika Bambaataa, Deltron 3030, Hieroglyphics, MF Doom, Missy Elliot, and OutKast.

One of the foundational themes of hip hop that we wanted to stress above almost all else is the sense of community and connectedness. Hip hop frequently focuses on uplifting people and bringing them together to survive inequality, poverty, and systemic oppression. While cyberpunk absolutely supports the “us vs. them” themes in hip hop, cyberpunk stories often follow disillusioned loners who are isolated by technology and society. We deliberately inverted that trope and built a world where you can only hope to survive by working in groups and depending on your neighbors. Focusing so much on the communities in the megacities in which the characters live gives our cyberpunk a great grassroots feel that players really connect with. In Axon Punk, your motivation during play is to help your neighbors, build your community, and try to change conditions in the megacities for the better.

What are the base mechanics in Axon Punk like, and how do they support the themes?

We built our own home-brew system for Axon Punk because we wanted every component of the game to tie into the desired theme and experience. For example, because cyberpunk and hip hop are so innovative, imaginative, and unorthodox, we incorporated rules to allow players to improvise actions, locations, technology, Non-Player Characters, and other narrative elements of the game. We will never make rules for ever situation and, in fact, we want our players pushing the boundaries of the game to discover new things and tell the stories they really want to tell. We also actively encourage players to collaborate during play and have a mechanic called “Rhythm” that lets players work together and cover each other’s backs.
The United Church of Tupac
To really bring out the hip hop feeling, the game is extremely focused on the community in the megacity in which the Player Characters live. To survive in the dystopian future full of corporate excess and oppression, people band together into communities that exchange goods, services, and generally look out for the members of the group (collectively called “the family”). At the beginning of a campaign of Axon Punk, after players make their characters, they would then follow rules to collectively and organically make up the Community in which their team of cyberpunk deviants lives. Over time, the group’s Community will evolve over time, producing missions, rewards, and challenges, based on the choices made by the players. The Community creation process is one of our absolute favorite parts of the game, but we have a pre-made Community full of Locations that GMs can use to run quick one-shot games or easily start out a campaign. Some of the starting locations include “The United Church of Tupac,” which uses rap music from turn of the twenty-first century as prayers, hymns, and meditations for those oppressed by the megacorporations, and “Cindy’s,” which is a dance hall built in an old paint factory and filed from floor to ceiling with ever changing murals painted by its patrons (heavily inspired by Janelle Monae).

What inspired you to combine hip hop and classic cyberpunk?

I had been into hip hop and cyberpunk independently since my teens. My older brother and design partner, Cameron, was one of the people responsible for introducing me to both genres. To pinpoint it as much as possible for me personally, the inspiration for the combination was first sparked for me one night in 2010 when my girlfriend at the time took me to a Janelle Monáe concert. Janelle Monáe’s music was such a perfect blend of futurism, heart, joy, and all-around, unapologetic badassness that I wanted to wrap myself up in her world and live forever. The end product of Axon Punk is quite different from the universe in Janelle Monae’s Metropolis Saga albums, but her music is absolutely a core inspiration (Janelle, if you want to make a game, hit me up).

We were also heavily inspired by the work of Saul Williams, who blends hip hop, poetry, and cyberpunk into beautiful, raw, and socially progressive music. Deltron 3030 and the Gorillaz were also hugely influential. From a visual and thematic viewpoint, we drew immense inspiration from the anime series Samurai Champloo, which expertly mashes up feudal Japan with hip hop, and Cowboy Bebop, which combines space bounty hunters with jazz.

How did you playtest and work on the game early on to develop the concepts?

My brother and I split the playtests primarily between the two of us, using two different approaches. I took the game to as many conventions around Chicago as I could and ran one-shot after one-shot with groups of different, new players (I took Axon Punk to 9 conventions in the last 2 years). At the same time, my brother in Dallas got together a group of friends, musicians, game designers, and other lovable weirdos to run a long campaign where they played almost every other week for over 6 months.

Splitting the development process between these two approaches was quite challenging. We had to rework many parts of the game repeatedly until we found the right balance that worked for both styles of play. As difficult as it was, this development process was extremely beneficial and we would not have created such a robust, immersive, and authentic game without it.

For example, constantly running games for new people at cons forced me to have very streamlined rules and play materials. I wanted a big hip hop influence in the game from the beginning, but running at cons limited my ability to dig into the flavor and setting during a game and things started off pretty generic cyberpunk publicly. Having the campaign playtest, on the other hand, let us stew over ideas and playtest things that I was not comfortable exposing to random people at a con. The world that we developed in that at-home campaign is what ultimately lead to the final setting and rules of Axon Punk. It took a lot of deliberation to take our personal campaign setting, which was full of hip hop influence, and make it the default world for the game (as opposed to something more generic or “crowd friendly”). But, because we had this successful campaign where we were able to flesh out ideas for things like “The United Church of Tupac” for months at a time, we had the confidence to really embrace and push the hip hop influence in the game publicly. We started asking for help, adding team members like the Sugar Gamers, refining the rules, playtesting at cons using the hip hop inspired communities in the game, and haven’t looked back for one moment since.

—

Thanks so much to Colin for answering my questions about Axon Punk: Overdrive! Please take a minute to check out the Kickstarter if the interview piqued your interest, and share the interview with anyone you think might like it!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Cortex Prime Featurette with Cam Banks on Cortex Prime

This interview is part of a series of interviews sponsored by Magic Vacuum Design Studio.

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Cam Banks on the current Cortex Prime project! Cam shares about the stretch-goal selection process, setting up the Kickstarter, and why he is choosing to make Cortex Prime! (Note: there’s a disclosure at the bottom of this post.)

—

Tell me a little about Cortex Prime. What excites you about it?

Cortex Plus was my first ground-up system build for any published game. I’d messed around with rules from other games before, but when I went to develop Leverage and Smallville for MWP with the two design teams on those projects, I came with a desire to create the games I really wanted to play. So I stripped the Cortex System down to the bare bones and rebuilt it. Each time we designed a new Cortex Plus game, we took that same approach, trying to capture what was great about the license and adapt these rules to it. Now that the rights are back with me thanks to my MWP agreement, and I’m looking ahead to new games and the community creator program, I’m really keen to take what I’ve learned in the past ten years and incorporate all of those lessons into a singular, modular set of rules that anyone can tinker with.

It has all the things I like most: lots of dice of different sizes, descriptive and thematic traits, a game currency of points to spend to make things interesting, and a focus on letting the player choose when and how to screw up or to look awesome.


What are you bringing into Cortex Prime that’s different than Cortex Plus?

Cortex Plus was really something like four or even five different games all under the same system umbrella. Smallville, Leverage, Marvel Heroic, Firefly, and Dragon Brigade were different games even if some of the mechanics were common among them all. With Cortex Prime, there’s now just one game system but with a bunch of options. I want to make it a single unified toolkit, which it hasn’t been before, even with the Cortex Plus Hacker’s Guide.

How did you determine what content you’ll be focusing on in the main book, and what to include as stretch goals?
The stretch goals were where I was hoping a lot of settings and genre mashups would go, with expanded rules and developed archetypes or pathways mechanics or even just their own traits specific to the settings. In the Cortex Prime Game Handbook there’s a lot of advice and guidance for implementing genres using Cortex Prime, but I don’t have the space to do every possible combination of ideas. I want to see cool worlds by creators who aren’t me, and make those as integral to the experience of this game as anything else I do.

A more business-related question – how did you plan the Kickstarter backer levels, rewards, and so on?
I used a Kickstarter budget spreadsheet shared by my colleague Jeff Tidball (http://www.jefftidball.com/posts/budget-game-projects-well) and my own past experience managing Kickstarters and producing games at Atlas and MWP. I knew what I wanted to offer and kept it relatively simple. No dice, no T-shirts, nothing that I couldn’t put into a box and ship out at an affordable rate. I wanted to pay additional creators (and myself) a top standard rate, and fairly compensate artists and layout. In the end I found that I could manage the whole thing for $30K and that stretch goals were roughly $10K each, so that helped me come up with the various pledge levels and stretch goal numbers.

Where do you find inspiration for a genre-flexible game? How do you keep it rich without tying it to just one setting?

So much depends on trusting that players are able to put down some fairly straightforward and essential ideas for their character. Cortex has always used narrative and descriptive terms for things, and that’s where a lot of the flavor of a genre lives. The rest comes from knowing what rules best suit a genre and making sure those are part of the toolkit available to players and GMs.

What is your biggest hope for Cortex Prime and the Kickstarter itself, beyond funding and sales?

I hope that the creator community takes off, now that there’s going to be a definitive and straightforward set of rules to use in making new games. I’m hoping that Cortex Prime games scratch an itch for somebody, either a gamer or a designer, who then feels encouraged to use it. I also hope that lots of designers get the chance to create their own stuff who wouldn’t otherwise have that opportunity or a community that includes them.
—

Thanks so much to Cam for the interview! It’s great to hear more about Cortex Prime, and I hope you will all check out the Kickstarter that’s running now!

Full disclosure: I’m a stretch goal for Cortex Prime (my Solarpunk setting I discussed in Episode 4 of Designer & Devourer!) and hope to do a continued series with my fellow designers. The interviews are funded, but still include my full dedication to getting good information about the projects for my readers!

Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Five or So Questions on The Quick

Today I have a great interview with the creators of The Quick, a Nordic noir ghost story RPG! It sounded really cool to me when I found it scrolling through Kickstarter, where it’s currently up, so I had to ask them some questions. Ville Takanen, Petri Leinonen, and Teemu Rantanen were a joy to interview. Check out the answers below!

—

Tell me a little about The Quick. What excites you about it?
Ville: The Quick started as a twisted lovechild of the Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, True Detective and my earlier experiments with the New Weird. It was supposed to be a quick one-off experiment with those building blocks without any greater plans, but the first demo game we had turned out to be a massive success. The Quick let us combine the low-key – or almost magic realism like – touch on the supernatural seen on some of the newer Scandinavian new weird and the brutal storytelling of the new wave of Nordic detective stories.

Teemu: To me, the atmosphere of Nordic Noir has always held a feeling of unseen forces and threats under the surface. What we are doing is manifesting these originally psychological themes in both more concrete and at the same time more symbolic form to the setting. In this way Nordic Noir and Ghost Stories are a perfect match, and I’m loving working to combine them into this cool setting.
(Yeah, when I watched the Millenium-trilogy, I was just waiting for it to turn into a supernatural horror movie)

Petri: I’m a game mechanics kind of guy, so I’m really excited to be creating something like this that takes these Story Game elements and combines them with a more traditional kind of a system. The end result, that I’m really excited about, is the nice coherent engine that drives the character stories forward in a way that fits our genre mashup extremely well.

What mechanics will we see in play the most often? 
Petri: Our base mechanic is pretty simple and revolves around the players having their characters accomplish what they set out to do if they really want to do it, the question always being more about what price they’re willing to pay for it. This base is supplemented by player moves (we’ve dipped a bit into the Powered by the Apocalypse pool, even if we’re not doing a PbtA game) that enforce the genre expectations -by making things like violence always a messy option or the closing a gate to a major Echo a very dangerous thing to do.

On the GM side, the most prominent mechanic probably is the Threat Track, which creates mechanical momentum to the story elements the players spend their effort investigating, pushing the story always forward. 

How have you developed the setting for The Quick? What have you done to make it rich?

Teemu: I think that the genre-aware approach has worked well on for us: The starting point has been a sort of mix between urban horror and magical realism. From that point, we started to think ‘Ok, so what central themes of Nordic Noir does this embody?’. And then begun building the game around these things. We feel we ended up with something cool, clearly matching the distinct feeling we want the setting to have. This genre-aim has also enriched the material, often taking it to complete new directions from where we have started.

What are the character types in the game? How do they integrate with the base mechanics?

Petri: We drew the character concepts or types from the stereotypes of Nordic Noir fiction and then gave them a spin so that they fit the ghost-hunter stories we’re creating. The seven concepts vary from the very mundane ones that can still play a bit of a Scully to our Mulders, to those concepts that make it clear from the start that there’s something strange happening. The concepts, ordered by their strangeness, are called Spook, Seeker, Old Soul, Bloodbound, Touched, Channel and Rogue Ops.

The concepts provide another layer for the character, giving them a perspective on the world. The system doesn’t have stats or skills, so instead of giving the character something like +1 to shooting or +5 to agility, each concept gives the character a power that will make things easier, and a flaw that pushes the characters to work as one of the Quick.

How has working on English and Finnish texts alike influenced your experience as designers and gamers? Do you find that it influences your design at all?

Ville: I actually find it easier to write in English. The Role-playing and Story Games lingo has in many cases originated from the American gaming community: being able to use the original terms instead of bickering on how it should be translated to Finnish helps us a lot when it comes to writing the game text. 
What is (for each of you) your favorite thing you’ve worked on in The Quick?
Petri: The Touched character concept is something I’ve really enjoyed working on. Probably because it’s been a long road to get to this point. We knew from the start it was something we needed to have it in the game, but it’s taken numerous iterations to get to this stage where it sings with both the mundane and the supernatural side of things (they can detect things from the Echoes others can’t). And still, represent a very classic archetype from the Scandinavian Noir stories (the person who is trying to get in touch of something they’ve lost by immersing themselves in the mystery).

Ville: Aside from the whole book? The track tech we are developing must be my favorite part. I was introduced to the ideas behind the tech by Petri’s PtbA hack “New Horizons/H+,” and I instantly knew they were the missing part we needed to have for the Quick. The threat tracks create an elegant mechanics for the storyteller to run mystery games, the way I had tried to run White Wolf games as a teenager. And the Harm track which puts the player in control of the character’s downward spiral, giving us a neat way to model the character’s kinda anti-“hero’s journey” found in many of Nordic Noir stories.

Teemu: The favorite thing I have worked on would probably be the Rogue Ops character concept. One thing that has really worked well in this project has been the way we have taken turns in writing items, each writer bringing their own perspective and ideas to the text and then passing it on. The Rogue Ops sort of started as an outside-the-box character idea I played in one of the early playtests. Since then every time someone developed it further, it was enriched in the process, so that when I returned to work on it there was so much better and versatile foundations to build on than there would have been if it would have just stayed with one writer.

And of course, I do find the idea of company men sneaking to save the world behind the backs of their corporate employers charming. It’s sort of like an environmental activist with the day job in the oil industry.

When it comes to the stories that will be told, what elements of the game do you hope will resonate with players?

Ville: The combination of Nordic detective story and new weird is a new and fresh take on the urban fantasy genre. The harsh and realistic take on violence, the bleak view of society and the low-fi supernatural create a unique platform to tell player stories.

We feel the way we have modeled the genre limitations, and possibilities to the game engine will help players to bring the things we love about the game to life.

For me, I hope that the main themes of the game, and way the Quick focuses around this with the player concepts and the moves provided by the engine, will resonate with players and let them create new and exciting stories of complex characters and scary ghost stories.

—

Thanks to Ville, Petri, and Teemu for their responses! I hope y’all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out The Quick on Kickstarter, and share with your fellows! 

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Five or So Questions with Todd Nicholas on The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Todd Nicholas on the new game The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power (SCUP) which is currently on Kickstarter! It’s a Powered by the Apocalypse game of dark fantasy. Check out the answers below!

—

Todd!
Tell me a little bit about The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power. What excites you about it?
Excellent and appropriately timed question! The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power (SCUP, for short) is a dark fantasy tabletop role-playing game by myself, Todd Nicholas, and my friend Thomas J. It is a hack of Apocalypse World that uses the core mechanics of that game to explore the kinds of political intrigue you would see in something like A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin, The First Law by Joe Abercrombie, Imperial Radch by Ann Leckie, and the TV show Vikings. We’re currently Kickstarting the game and it’s doing quite well, so we’re happy to finally get it into people’s hands. Tom and myself have been working on this game on and off for a number of years. We started because we had just played a game of Apocalypse World and we thought those mechanics might work well for a fantasy story about power, politics, and intrigue. We were never quite sure if we wanted to make SCUP a polished game that we put out into the world in physical form or just keep it something we passed around as a PDF, but there seemed to be enough interest in it that we decided to go ahead on it.

What excites me about SCUP is that I love that we’ve given players particularly powerful moves to affect their fictional world. The thing Tom and I spent the greatest amount of time on in the design of SCUP was the moves for character classes. We wanted people to be able to do big, dramatic things. For example, one class is called “The Beloved.” They’re sort of a preacher or prophet type. One of their moves lets them see and confront the inner demons of NPCs, permanently changing them in some way. The first time we actually had someone use this move at the table, and they were literally having a duel of wits with the manifestation of another character’s worst fears in an effort to help the character conquer them, we were incredibly stoked to be able to give players that sort of narrative agency. So yeah, that’s my answer. I like being able to watch people do bold things in our game that let them get their hands nice and dirty.

What have you done with SCUP to take the PbtA mechanics and make them really mesh with the fiction and framing?

The PbtA system already does a nice job of focusing on close up character drama, but we have created a number of mechanics that really drive this home. In particular, we have focused on giving the MC moves to push social hierarchy in their toolbox of moves. They have a different set of moves to use against common PCs and noble PCs, for example. Additionally, characters may be in the employ of a Patron or may be called on by a Faction to fulfill a duty or obligation. We wanted to push the idea that this game is about reputation, information, hierarchy, and obligation using mechanics such as these. Mostly, though, we want people to have fun getting involved in intrigue between characters!

You mentioned “The Beloved.” Tell me about some of the playbooks – who are they? How do the moves help tell the story?

What we’ve really focused on in SCUP is playbook moves that really drive the narrative and give players a chance to do big things in the fiction. Because the game is about intrigue and power, many of the moves focus on things like getting and spreading information, or making big, dramatic things happen in the gameplay. For example, I played a game last night at Forge Midwest with some folks. There was an NPC named Faela that two PCs wanted alive, cause they needed information from her, and one PC was tasked to assassinate. That PC, playing the class The Black Hood, rolled her move Their Eyes Never Open, which allowed her to assassinate an NPC within her reach. She had already snuck into the Ziggurat where the NPC was, and succeeded at her roll, allowing her to kill the character. When the other two PCs reached her, they found her deceased, but one of them, playing the Bloodletter, took her body and rolled his move God Complex to attempt to bring her back to life, though she came back as something awful, barely able to provide the information he needed. Meanwhile, a player playing The Voice, an advisor to the high priestess who ruled the city, had been using her move An Ear at Each Door to have her network of spies to gather information on the Priestess’s enemies which she ultimately used to betray the Priestess and claim power for herself. These are the kinds of blood-opera moments we’re really hoping players use the moves to create in games of SCUP.

What elements of your fictional inspirations were the most important to your design? 

If you think about something like A Song of Ice and Fire, you think about the big things that George R.R. Martin makes happen in that world. Characters die, the world changes, relationships change, etc. As such, we wanted to make sure that the MC and players had a lot of power to affect the world in compelling ways. To give you an example, we have something we call “end of season moves,” which are triggered by the players when a campaign is nearing its conclusion. They give the players the ability to mechanize something like, say, the Red Wedding from A Storm of Swords. Most PCs wouldn’t just drop something that game changing on their players, but the end of season moves give them permission to, with the player’s input. 
Additionally, we thought very hard about the kinds of characters in the books we used as inspiration. The playbook of The Screw, for example, is very much based on Sand dan Glokta from The First Law while The Voice is modeled after Littlefinger from A Song of Ice and Fire and Wormtongue from Lord of the Rings. We wanted the players to feel like they had more options available to them than fighters, wizards, and rulers. We wanted them to have characters that were powerful in more subtle ways, more backroom ways, etc., which is often very important to political, dark fantasy.
What makes SCUP special to you, as a creator and gamer each?
SCUP is the first game I really started designing. I designed it with Tom so we could play something fun with our friends. Some of the campaigns we’ve done with SCUP have been some of my favorite gaming experiences, and the fact that something I created with my friend, on a lark, just to have some fun is going to be a real thing in the world that hopefully brings some fun to other people’s gaming table is genuinely humbling and astonishing to me.

—

Thanks so much to Todd for the interview! I hope it was a good time, and I hope all of you enjoyed reading about it. Check out The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power on Kickstarter now! 

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Five or So Questions with Slade Stolar on Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers

Today Slade Stolar is back for an interview about this new project, Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers! It’s currently on Kickstarter and Slade and I nearly crossed emails contacting each other about it! It sounds like a fantastic adventure, and I’m excited to share Slade’s responses with you.

—

Tell me a little about Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers. What excites you about it?


It would be weird to say “everything”, right? — I’ve had the core image of the game in my head for a long while. There are three thieves in ragged, dirt-smeared clothes running through smog-filled alleyways in a late-medieval city. They arrive at junction where there are government officers (some kind of police patrol) with lanterns and barking dogs cutting off their escape. The thieves get noticed. They grin slightly, and activate a device that turns them as immaterial as the smog. They drift away, making their escape.

After publishing The Indie Hack, and seeing how the core rules resonated with certain people, I wanted to write a game that could make that scene happen. I think I’ve done that.

The main components of the game that excite me are the relationship system, which revolves around the classical four humours (sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic, and choleric), and the proto-industrial setting, which revolves around all kinds of pseudo-science or non-science (trepanning, feng shui, astrology, numerology, etc.), and all of which are very real within the setting.

What kind of action can we see in the game – fast fights, stealth? How do the mechanics support it?

One of the great things about this game is that you tailor your experience based on the Patron of the characters. If you are looking for a stealthy game, perhaps your Patron wants valuable artwork stolen to complete her collection. If you’re itching for a fight, perhaps your Patron is a gang boss, who wants to muscle out rival gangs. Maybe you’ve got a Patron who wants notoriety and influence, and you end up doing a lot of socially focussed missions. The core mechanic is the same for all of these: with good dice rolls, you collect little chunks of narrative control called “details”, just as in our previous game, The Indie Hack. Once you’ve got a certain number in your favour, you succeed. But, if, along the way, you get some bad rolls and collect a certain number of details against you, you’re out of commission. The game ends up being quick and intense, as an extreme roll can grant up to two or three details out of a total of three to five. Because rolls are so important and dangerous, players will want to role-play up until a point of crisis before grabbing the dice. I would say, you can’t play this game slowly: it’s a crisis machine.

I’d like to hear more about the relationship system! How does it function, and what was the inspiration?


I think the inspiration was a few random mentions of this in Shakespeare. It was interesting to research this strange classical interpretation of psychology based on the liquids that flow in the body (and fits well with this setting based on pseudo-science and non-science). You have a primary humour that is your outward facade (maybe you’re melancholic, meaning reclusive and depressive, but cautious and prudent). As you interact more intimately with people, you show them other aspects of your personality, i.e., your secondary humours (maybe, in front of your fellow player characters you act sanguine, meaning smothering and judgemental, but joyful and optimistic); you make a list of these characters. Once you’ve written four people under a secondary humour, you have a bit of a crisis of personality (who am I, really?) and shift your primary humour over. It encourages you to think a bit about how we’re always performing our personality. I think it’s more dynamic and engaging than nature/demeanor (of Vampire) or alignment (of general fantasy games).

What are some setting elements you really love and how do they interact?

In terms of world-building, I really like the hierarchy I’ve set up (as a player, I’ll hate it and want to see it destroyed). In contrast to the typical fantasy setting, which has lots of monarchies, Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers is a mixed oligarchy, where a highly corrupt technocratic class rules the masses and the aristocracy has its own power system outside (often above) the law. The players are at the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder, and that’s why the accept the help of a Patron. The Patron helps them to feel powerful, by giving them alchemical powers, but only while performing these (often illegal) missions. The setting really feeds into the character motivations and the types of adventures that the players will go on. I want characters to take on the bureaucracy and lose. I want them to try to mingle with the high-society types and be humiliated. Other times, I want them to win.

In terms of mechanical moving parts, I like the “looking for trouble” tables; each district has random interesting happenings that can draw the players into larger conflicts or expose hidden parts of the setting.

You talked about the thieves and their adventures – what other types of characters and experiences would people often find in Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers?
I don’t know that I can answer this one, at least, any more than I could predict what a given group will do with a given game. Just to be clear, I’m okay with thieves of the Robin Hood type, but I’m guessing that your Patron doesn’t have that many scruples. A big part of this game is navigating a difficult moral path, although that sounds a bit dull. Basically, I want characters to experience hard decisions, pride, pain, shame, confusion, and split loyalties. I want them to do things that they wouldn’t do if it were their choice, and have to deal with the consequences just the same. At the end, as in much of Shakespeare, nearly everyone is dead. I want the characters to lead intense, dangerous, tragic lives.

—

Thanks so much to Slade for the interview! I hope you’ve all liked what you’ve read, and that you’ll give the Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers Kickstarter a gander!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Five or So Questions with Fraser Ronald on Swords Edge

Today I have an interview with Fraser Ronald on his current project, Sword’s Edge, which is on Kickstarter now! Fraser answered some of my questions about the updated, refined Sword’s Edge game below! 

—

Tell me a little about Sword’s Edge. What excites you about it?

What I love about Sword’s Edge is how it allows for evocative and strong characters while trying to lower the amount of work required by GMs so that they can focus on facilitating the story. The characters are built out of ideas and descriptions, so it’s as easy as “tell me about the character you want to play,” write down the response, take a bunch of descriptions out of that and you have your character. For the GM, it’s very easy to run improvisational games – which is my preferred method – by boiling down most mechanical obstacles to a few choices guided by a couple of tables. There’s no dice rolling for the GM, and the mechanics are simple enough that one can spend one’s time helping to keep the story moving.

Players get invested in characters that work mechanically pretty much how they described them narratively, and the GM gets to spend their time helping those characters be awesome, sometimes by creating really challenging obstacles, and other times creating scenes where they get to show their uber competence.

What are the origins of Sword’s Edge mechanically? What got the game going at the start, and what are important elements of the game in it’s final form?

Sword’s Edge is really an amalgam of ideas from a bunch of different games. Its nearest relation is PDQ by Chad Underkoffler by way of Jaws of the Six Serpents by Tim Gray. This was the game that led me to design Sword Noir, which was the direct ancestor of Sword’s Edge. Along with PDQ, I would say that important influences came from the Shadow of Yesterday by Clinton R. Nixon; Fate 3.0 by Rob Donoghue, Fred Hicks, and Leonard Balsera; Lady Blackbird by John Harper, and Old School Hack by Kirin Robinson. These all had impact on the designs of Sword Noir and Kiss My Axe, which had Sword’s Edge at their core and through which Sword’s Edge developed.

There are a few keys in my mind to Sword’s Edge. The use of descriptive Qualities to create characters allows players to pretty much play whatever they can imagine. That only players roll dice helps remove one task from the GM and a very abstract action system further allows all activities to run through the same mechanics – there are no sub-systems in Sword’s Edge. Finally, the Initiative system really changes how one approaches actions as once a character has Initiative, it is necessary to take a risk to seize that Initiative. Only as an active character can one affect change, so Initiative is super important and can lead to some risky actions as PCs try to seize it from tough opponents.

What are the fictional inspirations for Sword’s Edge? 

Because Sword’s Edge is a generic RPG, it’s not really rooted in fiction, however the stretch goal is for “Lawless Heaven,” my homage to Korean action cinema. I’ve been enamoured of Korean action movies since I saw Nowhere to Hide in 1999. Since then, Korean movies have continued to improve and are now some of the best on the planet. Recent years have seen some insanely great action and crime movies, like Man from Nowhere and A Bittersweet Life. Then there are the neo-noirs, like Oldboy and The Yellow Sea. These are absolutely riveting movies. So “Lawless Heaven” tries to boil down the experience of a Korean actioner into a one-shot, specifically built to be run at conventions. It includes a discussion of using it as either then beginning or part of an ongoing campaign, but the scenes presented are for a single adventure arc.
Some of the example characters appear to be Asian (1). How did you prepare to write about non-Canadian characters, fictions, and backgrounds? Did you find it challenging?
The characters on the Kickstarter page are from “Lawless Heaven,” so they are Korean. The action is set in the industrial city of Ulsan, which is home to a Hyundai Motors car factory and the largest shipyard in the world, owned by Hyundai Heavy Industries. In the adventure, I try to introduce some interesting aspects of Korean culture – like the lack of firearms in general and the prevalence in certain areas of drinking tents or pojangmacha – but the story is designed so that it would be easy to set it elsewhere.

On a more Kickstarter-level question, how have you worked to integrate your past products into the release of this product, while still ensuring Sword’s Edge gets priority in attention?

Having two successful Kickstarters under my belt allowed me to approach the whole process with a little less concern and stress. Also, for backers, I have a record of meeting my commitments and delivering promises product, so I think that improves the chance people will be willing to put their money down.
—

Thank you Fraser for answering my questions! I hope you all enjoyed reading and that you’ll check out Sword’s Edge on Kickstarter!

[(1 – Brie here!) This originally said Chinese in this question because I wasn’t sure based on the pictures and Googled last names. I try really hard to be better at this judgment, but the images aren’t very clear – I have no better excuse. I changed it so that it is clearer to my readers, but wanted to let you know that I did fuck up, and I’ll try to do better next time.]

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.