Hi all, today I have an interview with Craig Campbell on Die Laughing, which is on Kickstarter right now! I hope you all enjoy reading what Craig has to say about this cinematic horror-comedy game in the responses below!
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Tell me a little about Die Laughing. What excites you about it?
Die Laughing is a short-play, GM-less RPG. Players portray characters in a horror-comedy movie and everyone’s going to die. It’s just a matter of when it happens and how funny you can make it. After your character is gone, you become a producer on the movie and continue to influence the story and the characters right up until the end.
I’m really stoked that Die Laughing finally came together. One of the problems with horror games where characters actually die, as opposed to “thriller/mood” type games, is, “what do I do after my character dies?” You can make a new character, play an NPC. What else? I’ve been working on this game off and on for over a decade. Every couple years I’d come back to the idea and try something different. Hitting on the “making a movie” angle finally made it gel for me. It came together pretty quickly over the past year or so, kind of in the background while working on other games. It’s a game that embodies horror and embraces that type of game experience, but with comedic elements and the “making a movie” idea to keep it from getting too heavy.
What were the inspirations for Die Laughing and how is the game the most similar and dissimilar to familiar materials?
I’m a big horror movie buff. This most recent iteration of the game, I hit on the idea of the game being about making a movie specifically, rather than just generally a horror story. That introduced a “director” role into gameplay and also a “producer” role that players could take on after their characters are dead. Making it a horror-comedy opened up the idea that it’s OKAY for your character to die…in fact, it’s kind of the point of the game. Your character is going to die and you’re going to make it funny and then you’re going to do this other cool thing for the rest of the game.
It’s sort of a hybrid of a traditional RPG and a story game like Fiasco. You have a character sheet with four traits and a few cool capabilities that sort of bend the rules. But there’s no GM. Instead, there’s an act/scene structure that generates random scenes that everyone roleplays to move the story forward. But these are just prompts. The “director” of each scene helps set the stage, but the players with characters in that scene propel everything. A dice mechanic resolves general success/failure of your character in the scene, rather than for every action. The game has a little bit of this and that from a lot of horror RPGs and a LOT of horror movies, all kind of bent and twisted with some humor.
How does Die Laughing work mechanically?
During each scene in Die Laughing, one of the characters is the lead character (and that changes from scene to scene). That character’s player decides who will be in the scene with their character. One of the players portrays the director, setting their character aside temporarily to help set up and guide the scene (that also changes from scene to scene). Everyone in the scene plays the scene out. Sometimes the monster attacks during the scene. Sometimes it doesn’t.
At the end of each scene, everyone with a character in the scene makes a trait check by rolling their dice pool to determine whether their character succeeds in the scene or not. Then everyone narrates that success or failure for their character, thus pushing the story forward. As the game goes along, your dice pool decreases based on the results of those trait checks. This decrease is a countdown to your character’s death. When you run out of dice, your character dies and you narrate their death.
In addition to the director and producer stuff, there’s a unique rule for each monster that influences your involvement in the game after your character is gone.
What kind of horrors do the players encounter in Die Laughing? How do you ensure players are having a good time and not encountering subject matter that makes them feel alienated or afraid in a not-fun way?
The narrative, relatively open nature of the game allows the players to basically take it as far as they want. The monster is defined for the game you’re playing, but that’s not to say there couldn’t be multiple monsters or that the monsters could mutate or…well, whatever you want. I’ve played games where the violence was cartoony. I’ve played games where there were gory descriptions of things.
That said, any game — horror games in particular — can go too far. That is addressed in the book, encouraging players to be clear in what they expect from the game. The simple version is presented as a “movie rating system.” Everyone agrees the game will be PG, PG-13, or R-rated and plays appropriately. The book also points out some common sense…if you even remotely THINK that a particular subject would make ANYONE uncomfortable or hurt them, just don’t do it. Finally, the book points out there are a variety of other safety tools, such as the X-card, and information on those can be found easily online. Pick the one that is most fitting to your group.
You mention special rules for monsters post-kicking-it. When you die, what happens?
This is a little “extra” that gives players whose characters are gone something to do. It varies from monster to monster. For example, with the Mad Slasher with Weird Weapons, when your character is dead, you get to describe the moment when your character’s corpse is found at an inopportune time, like you see in so many slasher movies when everything hits the fan at the end. There’s a trait check that happens there that can weaken the character finding the body. With the Sexy Vampire, your character doesn’t die, but rather gets turned into a sexy vampire. And you can insert them as an NPC into scenes throughout the rest of the game.
Tell me a little about Dinosaur Princesses. What excites you about it? Dana: What is there not to be excited about? First, Dinosaur Princesses is also a colouring book—actually colouring and drawing is one of the most important parts of gameplay, in my opinion. One of the first things you do is draw and/or colour your dinosaur princess. As part of that, what I think is really great about the game is that it taps into the limitless and boundless imagination that we had a kids. The colouring and drawing parts are great at breaking down barriers that we often have as adults which tell us to reign in our creativity to make it fit within certain perimeters of consistency and probability; it gives permission to just have fun. It is meant to be able to be played by kids, but I think it really shines when adults play it.
Dinosaur Princesses is also very friendly to folx who are completely new to table-top RPGs. When I have run it, I have often had a high percentage of folx who have never played a ttrpg before. The system is very rules-lite, so players have very little stress worrying about system mastery. It’s also so fun and easy to run that it acted as a gateway to get me to finally get over my extreme social anxiety and be able to run the game myself!
Finally, I think of it as a queer game. Princesses are explicitly stated to be of any gender. “Dinosaur” is also a pretty open descriptor; you can be a t-rex or velociraptor, but your dinosaur can also be a cat or train. It’s subtly stating that what we see as rigid boxes, descriptors, or roles are actually malleable and able to be questioned. One can take those boxes and, if they want, subvert them to express other identities—and that is totally an acceptable and good thing to do. It’s a freeing experience.
What were the inspirations for Dinosaur Princesses, and how did you come to the point of making a game plus coloring book from those inspirations?
Hamish: The main inspiration for Dinosaur Princesses are the kids of a couple of my best friends in New Zealand. At the time, their favourite things were Dinosaurs and Princesses, and my friends were joking about finding a game they would both like. I said I’d write it and a few months later they playtested the first version! They were 4 & 6 at the time, so that’ll probably be my youngest playtesters for a long time! Beyond the origin story, I had a lot of discussions with those same friends about the kind of things that the game could do that other games don’t. The idea of the central mechanics being cooperation and problem solving came out of those discussions.
(Following on from Dana’s comment about it being a queer game) One of the fundamental design principles is that the rules should provide enough structure to help children tell stories that feel like an after school cartoon–with all weird and wonderful characters that involves!–and that, within the confines of a game about cooperative problem solving, the rules should never block them from imagining who they wanted to be while they play. I didn’t want an 8 year old telling their younger sibling that they couldn’t play a cat or a dragon or whatever because it’s “against the rules.”
Dana: I can tell the story about how it became a colouring book! Hamish was already working on it, but I didn’t know much about it at the time. We were in a small bar in Wellington, NZ a couple years back and he was telling a friend about the game. He said he wanted the rules book to look like a kids book and that he was also thinking of the character sheets as something for people to draw and colour on. I made the logical leap and (probably) shouted, “THE RULES BOOK SHOULD *BE* A COLOURING BOOK!!!!!!”. I guess that was my first touch on the game. I didn’t really start working on it actively until earlier this year.
What are the mechanics like in the game, and how do players interact with each other and the world?
Hamish: Dinosaur Princesses uses an opposed dice pool mechanic which is set up so that if a Dinosaur Princess tries to do something on their own, the odds are against them. After they assemble their dice pool, they ask their friends, the other Dinosaur Princesses, the most important question in the game, “Will you help me?” Then their friends build dice pools and hopefully overcome the problem together! Dinosaur Princesses has a GM who rolls the opposing dice pool, but it’s a very low-prep role that brings in a lot of the Powered by the Apocalypse ethos of encouraging player participation in worldbuilding and player-driven narratives. The players come up with the story together at the table.
[Brie Note: The collaboration encouragement here is SO GREAT.]
How do players choose their Dinosaur Princess, and what do they use to assemble their dice pool?
Dana: Players have a character sheet, some of which of have colouring-book style line art of typical dinos (t-rex, triceratops, etc) and some of which have the picture space blanks so folx can draw their own. Players decide on what type of dinosaur they will be—there is an example list in case someone has a hard time coming up with one. However, it’s important to note that we use “dinosaur” in a loose sort of way; I have played a cat and platypus “dinosaur”! Similarly, players then choose what type of princess they will be. This can be any sort of profession-like thing, such as doctor, aquanaut, news caster, and so forth.
They assemble their dice pool by describing how they use their strengths as a dinosaur and as a princess to help their friends. The mechanic is set up so that if a Dinosaur Princess tries to do something on their own, the odds are against them. It’s important that the player starting dice pool asks their friends, the other Dinosaur Princesses, the most important question in the game, “Will you help me?”
Hamish: There are sample lists of types of dinosaurs and princesses in the book and on the character sheets, but they’re supposed to be inspirational, not restrictive. Players are encouraged to be as inventive and imaginative as they like in choosing who they will play.
What kind of stories do you tell in Dinosaur Princesses? How do you keep it interesting?
Dana: The sorts of stories being told in the game are as unique as the Dinosaur Princesses that the players create at the table. The world-building and story plot directly grows from that foundation. I have had games where the plot revolved around the Dinosaur Princesses trying to find their Houses & Humans game miniatures, and I have had games where the Dinosaur Princesses rode around town on the monorailasaurus to try to uncover the mystery of the queen’s roving teapot. I have had games that took place in an abandoned mall and ones that took place in space. It really is a game where everyone’s boundless imagination shapes play! Hamish: Dinosaur Princesses is designed to be played as a one shot, it takes about 2 hours to play a game, and it draws on the creativity of everyone at the table; so it spreads the cognitive load of coming up with new stuff and people can usually keep the ideas coming over the short length of play.
Content Warning for discussion of memory loss, especially near the end of the interview. —
Tell me a little about Thousand Year Old Vampire. What excites you about it?
Well, first let me say that I don’t often get excited about things I make. I get nervous, nauseous, pent up. I used to joke about the “sweat test”; if I wasn’t sweating when I showed something to someone I wasn’t sufficiently invested in the project or the showing. This came out of the time when I was showing art in galleries, and it has something to do with the way I made and thought about art at the time. It still applies to a lot of games I make, but in a different way–the games I make are personal, or visceral, or difficult in ways that my art never was. Now I sweat because I’m making a machine that people play with, and if the manual for that machine is unclear people will break it or maybe even get hurt. There’s not a lot of room for excitement in any of this.
But I’m excited about Thousand Year Old Vampire in a way that leaves me quietly alarmed at myself. I’ve worked on this game differently than other games, with the biggest difference being that a reaching back to my old studio process. When I made a thing in the studio it was a quick, fraught process during which I could ingest or enjoy or experience the thing I was making it as it was made; the actual “artwork” was a shell left behind after this work was done. Game making is different in that you need people or systems to test things; there’s a space of time between the making and the experiencing of it. Because TYOV is a solo game it’s making was a self-contained process, I wrote and played and wrote and played in a closed system. It was fast and amazing and it’s how I want to be.
And it produced a game I am excited for and proud of. I’ve played this game so many times, and the prompts consistently produce a different experience with every go. And at least once during each game something happens that makes my innards churn, something unexpected and awful and it’s like I’m not controlling a character but being betrayed by one. I’m not a “let me tell you about my character” kind of person, but TYOV has gotten me excited enough to write game summaries on the Facebooks.
This is the journal in the PDF, which is gorgeous.
What is the motivation for a single-player game like this? As someone who loves lonely games and making them, I must ask: why is this game good alone?
I love your phrasing of “lonely games”! It’s perfect. For me, there were a couple of reasons to make a solo game. Maybe more than a couple.
Solo games are a weird design space. I have a print out of A Real Game by Aura Belle that I’ve been sitting on for a year, I’m so excited about it I can’t bear to play it. Every game I make is about communication and bodies in space; a framework for people pushing at each other to find play. Other players change the game space for each other with a constant barrage of gentle tugs which keep each other engaged and off-center—this is awesome and good but what if we didn’t do that?
A non-social game is tricksy and strange. How can you operate in the “story game” space and not have it be a choose your own adventure book? The game prompts in Thousand Year Old Vampire make you look inward for responses, you are building something between you and the machine of the game without any other conscious actors in the room. There’s no “yes and” here, oh mortal. And without other people in the room watching I can do things that I might not do otherwise when I ask questions and give horrific answers.
And the solo play echoes the subject of the game itself. You play a vampire who sees everything they love turn to dust. Your character is alone, you are alone, the two states echo each other. One play option is to keep a diary as you play. Journaling is a usually a thing you do alone. One of my objectives as a designer is to have the system and the setting inextricably bound together, so solo play works.
That said, I don’t see any reason that a person can’t play it with others. Why not share a pool of Characters and let the prompt reactions affect the world that the players occupy? The system is simple enough that players can do this if they want, and I’m sure some will—there’s been a remarkable amount of pushback over the idea of a solo game being a thing at all.
And practically speaking: I’m a lonely guy. Making a game I can play and iterate on my own is helpful. It echoes the prevalence of solo rules in wargame design—I’m the kind of person that can’t get people together to play things, so I’ll make the sort of things I can enjoy on my own.
Finally: I had a conversation with Jackson Tegu, who has a solo experience called I Was Once Like You, that helped me think about the solo play-ness of TYOV. In the friendly discussion-like thing we were doing I came up with “Petit Guignol” as a term that I thought fit TYOV. It literally means “tiny puppet” in French and has a direct connection to the “Grand Guignol” which was a style of bloody, horrifying, naturalist theater developed in the 1890s. As I play TYOV I sometimes play with scale in my mind, imagining the scenes happen in the space between my arms as I update the character sheet on a keyboard. It’s a play space I don’t think I can imagine with other people in the room, it’s tiny and close and personal. Anyways, there’s that.
Tell me about the design process. The way you handle moving through the prompts is simple but clever, and you have these memories and experiences that are created. How did you develop these aspects of the game?
My design process is a sham. I stare into space until my unconscious gets bored and gives me something that I can think about, and then maybe that becomes a game, or a joke, or an artwork. My games are not the product of rigorous engagement with discourse, they are random stuff that vaguely imitates a category of thing which I understand exists in the world. These are the “Sunday painter” equivalent of game design, if that Sunday painter just really liked wearing smocks and berets but never bothered to go to a museum.
I don’t design these games so much as find them laying around my brain-house. I pick them up and wipe the muck off, maybe paint them a different color to assuage a conscience that demands at least a semblance of effort, then I scribble my name on them and puff up with self-satisfaction.
But a serious aside: I don’t read a lot of games, and I do this on purpose. I’m more likely to solve a problem in a useful way if I’m not clouded up with other people’s solutions for similar issues. This is a good methodology unless you’re building bridges or stuff where people can die. This builds on my greatest strength, which is that I’m pretty dumb.
Occasionally these magical brain-gift games might need some rough corners polished up. With TYOV I had to figure out a way to progress through the prompt sequence so as to maximize replayability. (You, dear reader, haven’t played this game, so super quick summary: You roll some dice and slowly advance along a list of prompts which you answer about how your vampire continues its existence. If you land on the same prompt number more than once, there are second and third tier prompts you encounter. The game ends when you reach the end of the list.) By using a d6 subtracted from a d10, it created the possibility of skipping entries, of going backwards, and of landing on the same entry number more than once. This meant that rare and super rare results could easily be baked into the chart structure—you have the same chance of landing on any given number as you progress through the prompts, but there are diminished chances of landing on a number twice and getting the second-tier prompt. Landing on a number a third time usually happens once per game, and those rare third-tier prompts can be world-changing.
The tiered prompt system naturally evolved into a mini-story arc system. I can make the player introduce a self-contained Character or situation with a first-tier prompt, and in the second-tier prompt them interact with what they created in a new way. It’s perfectly fine if they never hit that second tier prompt, they won’t for most entries, but if they do it will naturally make a little story. It’s so satisfying and it’s all part of the same system, no additional rules are needed to support it.
One aspect of TYOV I’ve been thinking hard about is player safety. What are appropriate safety tools for solo play? What tools allow us to think terrible, soul souring thoughts but then put them behind us? I’m a fan of X-card-like thinking, and was around Portland while Jay Sylvano and Tayler Stokes were working on their own support signals systems. Stokes later developed the affirmative consent-based support flower, and is giving me guidance on my solo safety thinking.
One of my imperatives as a designer is getting rid of non-vital things. This is practical because additional complexity usually makes a game less fluid and harder to learn. If I can get by with three rules that’s great, but if I’m going to have eight then I might as well have a hundred. Not that there’s much wrong with games that have a hundred rules, I like those too. I’ve recently been converted to Combat Commander, of all things.
Something I threw out of TYOV are rules about tracking time. At one point I had a system in place for tracking the date. I mean, if the game is called Thousand Year Old Vampire then you want to know when a thousand years go by, right? But there was no benefit to tracking the actual year, it was easier to allow the player to just let the passage of time be loosely tracked in their answers to the prompts. Maybe an arc of prompts happens over a year in your head, maybe a whole generation goes by—the game works regardless. The only rule about time is “every once in a while strike out mortal Characters who have probably died of old age.”
Finally, I should acknowledge the importance of Burning Wheel and Freemarket to Thousand Year Old Vampire. Writing good Beliefs in Burning Wheel is a skill, and the idea of tying character goals mechanically to the game was mind-blowing. Freemarket has Belief-like-ish Memories, which are something that have game mechanical effects AND can be manipulated as part of play. Both of these mechanics had outsized influence on the way I thought about Memories in TYOV.
Memories in TYOV are everything that your vampire is. You have a limited number of Memories, and every Memory is made up of a limited number of Experiences. Every Prompt you encounter generates a new Experience which is tagged onto the end of a new Memory. Eventually you run out of space for Memories, so you older Memories to a Diary. You can and will lose our Diary, along with all the Memories in it, and it’s awful. But the Diary is just a stopgap anyways, as you are forced to forget things to make room for new Experiences.
Eventually you have an ancient, creaky vampire who doesn’t remember that he was once a Roman emperor, or that they used to live on a glacier, or that he fell in love two hundred years ago. But they at least know how to use a computer and are wrestling with the fact that the hook-up site they used to find victims was just shut down and how will they eat now? This design goal was crystallized when I read “The Vampire” by Ben Passmore in Now 3 put out by Fantagraphic Books. It’s a heartbreaking, sad story in which you see the vampire as a deprotagonized system of habits. It’s great.
What has the development of this game been like, from original inspiration to the speed of production?
This game flowed out quickly and mostly easily. My pal Jessie Rainbow I were playtesting and iterating the game over weeks instead of months. The game is built from a story games mindset and there aren’t any ridiculously novel mechanics that need to be explained; I hand the rules over to a playtester and they understand them immediately and the game works.
The game works and a year of refinement to get it five percent better isn’t worth it. It’s done, and like an artwork it might be slightly flawed but that’s part of the thing itself. I don’t necessarily want an extruded, sanitized perfect thing; instead I have, like an artwork, a piece that becomes a record of it’s own making. If I work on this game another year it won’t get better, it’ll just get different—2019 Tim will have different priorities than I do right now and all that’s going to happen is that TYOV will torque around to reflect that. I might as well let 2018 Tim have his moment and give 2019 Tim new things to worry over.
In regards to the themes of mortality and memory, as well as with aspects of queerness in some of the prompts, how do you relate to TYOV? How is it meaningful to you?
This is hard to talk about. I think I need to break this question down into three very separate categories: My understanding of evil, personas shifting over time, and a vampire-shaped momento mori.
The game is twined up in my own ideas of person-scaled evil which is based on my experience of social predators, thoughtlessly selfish idiots, and rich people exerting power over others. This evil is written into the “Why did you do that awful thing you did?” type prompts, which assign an evil deed which must be justified. There’s an important subtext in the game which I never say out loud: As the vampire is writing in their diary are they telling the truth? But the evil is about the wickedness that people do to each other, and this is my chance to pick out a version of it that I seldom see represented.
Completely unrelated to the themes around evil are the ideas of shifting identities. Over the centuries the vampire will be reinventing themselves so they can fit in with the societies shifting around them. As a cishet white guy I’m outside of the dialogues that happen around LGBTQA+ folks, but I see folks change over time and it’s exciting. A related prompt might draw attention to ingrained societal mores that can now be abandoned because the culture of your mortal years is centuries dead. I can gently make a space for this even if I don’t have that experience, with the understanding that my understanding isn’t necessarily another’s understanding of the space that needs to be made. Like I said before, this becomes a portrait of 2018 Tim thinking through difficult issues using creative work—this isn’t Truth with a capital T.
The shifting personas of the vampire are probably the most personally resonant aspect of the game for me. I have some pretty distinct phases in my life where I was having to be markedly different people. In NYC I used to exhibit art with a gallery owned by the son of billionaires. I’d get taken to a dinner that might cost more than I made in a week then go back to my home which had holes in the floor which I could see my neighbors through. I remember hanging drywall in the morning and meeting a Rockefeller descendant later that night; he got noticeably upset that I had a scratch on the back of my hand then shut me out when I said it happened “at work.” I learned that I had to keep these worlds very, very separate. And it went both ways, I found myself being reminded of the experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas telling a story about how no one in his Brooklyn neighborhood believed him when he told them he was teaching at NYU.
Now I’m a guy with a kid living in a suburban neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. I’m not the same person that I was five years ago in New York. I can’t be the same person, that guy couldn’t live this life.
Which leads me to my final bit: I did things that sound wonderful and which I can’t remember, I apparently did things that are terrible which I am glad I forgot. These moments are lost until someone else remembers them for me or I happen upon some chance evidence. My memory is going, and it’s awful—there’s a much more exciting version of me which is being forgotten. I can see my brain failing in other ways; sometimes I leave out a word when I’m writing now. I bet I did it within the text of this interview.
This loss of skill, of memory, of personality are reflected in the way the game has you lose or edit memories. Eventually I’ll die and be forgotten in turn, but at least I’ll have this self-reflection on mortality outlive me for a bit.
Today I have an interview with Elizabeth and Amber Autumn on Scherzando! (skert. ‘san.do), which is currently on Kickstarter. In this fascinating game you play both the characters…and the soundtrack! Check out Elizabeth & Amber’s responses below for more.
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Tell me a little about Scherzando! What excites you about it?
Scherzando! is a diceless, gm-less story game in which you play characters with big dreams and strong feelings, plus the soundtrack of their world. It’s often been described as “Fiasco, but with music,” but we like to think that Scherzando! is less about grand ambitions causing tragedy and more about grand emotions bringing people together.
It’s exciting for all the obvious reasons—creating a game with a soundtrack as you go is really cool! It’s fun and dynamic, and people laugh a lot. But we’re equally excited about the less obvious features of the game. We love that the game lets players have a physical, embodied experience; that it’s an experience built around collaboration and communication; and, most of all, that it creates a space where players can feel comfortable creating music regardless of their previous musical experience. In response to our game concept, we get “but I don’t know anything about music” all the time, so it was a real goal of ours to create something that helped people feel that they didn’t need to know everything in order to make something or communicate something, and to create a safe space in the game for that to happen. Every time a player picks up an instrument and starts feeling out some sounds during the game, it feels like a victory for us, and every time they manage to successfully communicate an emotion with it, it feels like a victory for them. That’s a dynamic we’re exceptionally proud of.
We’re also excited about it because it’s our first game at this scale! It’s mind-blowing to have a book with all this art and all this support and to have this Kickstarter start off so well—it really does feel like being invited to sit at the grown-up table. But it feels good to know that our investments in time, effort, and money are paying off. The game has been in development for over a year and a half (or over two years depending on how you want to talk about it); no blood comes to mind, but there’ve certainly been sweat and tears, so finally getting to print it will be incredible.
What kind of music do people experience in the game? Where did you take inspiration from for the tunes?
Since players make their own music, there’s no specific style or genre that Scherzando! works best with. We encourage players to take inspiration from whatever they like in their own life, up to and including just copying pieces they like if they think it’ll get their point across. So what the music actually sounds like in a game depends on who’s playing, what kinds of music they spend most time with, and what kind of mood they’re in as they sit down to play.
One effect of this is that it turns music into a creative expression unique to the people sitting at your table. People bring in the music, styles, sounds, and methods of experimentation that make sense to them, that they would use outside the game, and that’s a way of bringing a part of their personality into the creative text in a direct, meaningful, and mechanically significant way. Having each player bring their own inspiration and style makes the session’s music a direct creative expression of who the players are.
How did you design the game, considering that it’s diceless and GMless AND uses music as a part of the game?
The game actually began neither diceless nor GMless—both of those got iterated out in the design process! The dice were adding needless complications, causing too much swing in the resolution mechanics, and making it significantly less accessible to anyone who didn’t already own a ton of dice. We dropped them at the recommendation of the incredible Avery Alder, who wrote Monsterhearts and Ribbon Drive (one of the only other music games on the market), and who was kind enough to give us some sage advice early on.
The GM role (which we called the “conductor,” because we thought it was cute) would rotate around the table to maintain the sense of a democratic story where everyone contributed, but we found pretty quickly that the conductor didn’t have much to do. The scene setup generally implied itself, and players turned out to be quite good at arbitrating how the NPCs and the universe would react to their actions in the most interesting way. Plus, the game includes an interjection mechanic which allows players to temporarily gain narration powers for either a bonus (if they’re adding a complication) or a penalty (if they’re adding a boon) at the end of the scene. The ability and incentive to add elements to a scene made the conductor role almost entirely obsolete.
Development began in its very early phases maybe two years ago, with a lot of research on historical music games and current music education techniques. We spent a lot of time working through the logistics of who was on the team for the project and who would be doing what, and trying to lay out a plan. Once we knew who was working on it, how we would do it, and that what we wanted to do hadn’t been done before, the next step was more research. We read books, played games, emailed musicians and educators, and eventually started throwing around ideas for how a system would work. We wrote up a list of core values that we wanted our game to embody, some of which have changed and shifted over the course of development, but some of which are still core to the game today! Then we designed a game around those values.
That game was completely broken and did not work at all.
The bulk of the process at that point was holding playtests, dozens of playtests, at cons and game stores and especially with our friends, with a different group of people every time. We took notes, and at the end of each test we discussed which items functioned and which needed to be changed or dropped, and adjusted the rulebook accordingly. Eventually we ended up with a system we felt good about, give or take minor details, and somewhere approaching that point we started doing the logistical work of commissioning art, reaching out to podcasts, and all the other publishing prep work necessary for a Kickstarter. From there, the actual changes to the game itself have mostly been tweaking numbers, revising stock setting choices, and other minor changes, most of which still require playtests to happen.
This piece of art is mindblowing!
What resources do players need to participate in Sherzando, and what kind of skills are useful?
We like to bring a lot of small, cheap instruments to playtests, but they’re not a requirement—the game works just as well when players hum and tap on the table. The only physical items players need, besides the rules, are a) notecards and something to write with; b) six differently-colored/otherwise distinguishable tokens per player; and c) an opaque container per player that is capable of hiding the tokens within it. As far as skillsets are concerned, we maintain that musical experience really isn’t necessary (although it is fun to play with a group of musicians!); we find that the game runs most smoothly when players aren’t self-conscious about their musical or roleplaying “talent.” Earnestness and willingness to engage with a ridiculous story are probably the most important tools in the game.
How do you hope players experience the game and what do you want people to take forward? What have you already seen taken forward in playtests?
One of the most exciting pieces of feedback we’ve ever received was really recently, when someone who had listened to our actual play on One Shot tweeted at us to say that she could see the players gradually learning to express themselves through music over the course of the game.
In addition to the “yes, you too can make music” lesson we’ve been harping on this whole time, we also hope players experience the game as an exciting way of adding meaning and tone to their stories in a way you can’t find anywhere else. There are all these connections between narrative and emotions and semiotics that we wanted to explore and link together, and we think being able to play through those links in a really direct way is new and refreshing and cool. We also hope players have fun! Not every game needs to be fun, but Scherzando! is, and we love seeing people get really animated during gameplay.
There are plenty of things we’ve seen people take forward from this: confidence, communication skills, and even sometimes a better understanding of a musical instrument. But we also hope that people take home a really good memory about a fun story they told with their friends, not only in words but in music.
Today I have an interview with Mark Sabalauskas on Return to the Stars, which is currently on Kickstarter! I’m contributing a solarpunk scenario for the game, but I’m really interviewing Mark because it’s a hopepunk game in a world that could really use some hope. So check it out, and see what Mark had to say below!
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Tell me a little about Return to the Stars. What excites you about it?
Return to the Stars is an optimistic science fiction role playing game, powered by Fate.
I am excited to share a game with people where they can imagine having cool adventures in better future.
The direct inspiration was the sense of community that came from being surrounded by diverse, smart, and curious people at a Sci-Fi convention I attended. Hanging out with enthusiastic pop culture geeks was a real respite from much of the darkness in world. It occurred to me that the original Star Trek may have resonated because it provided a similar respite in the 60s, a very turbulent time.
So I created a game that combines the best parts of gamer and geek culture with science fiction exploration. Imagine if Chiana from Farscape was a genetically enhanced cosplayer, or Scotty was someone who loved hacking things to take to a Maker Faire.
The basic premise is that in a post-scarcity future hyperspace travel gave easy access to countless worlds, and humanity sorted itself into like-minded communities. One such society was the Convention Authority, founded to celebrate the now classical arts of science fiction, fantasy, and gaming.
One day, without warning, the stellar beacon that illuminated hyperspace went silent rendering galactic travel impossible. The systems of the Convention Authority stayed connected thanks to a replica fleet of early starships. Now, after more than a century of effort, a long-range exploration craft has been built. Its purpose: to return to the stars and reconnect the lost civilizations of humanity.
You play as one of a new generation of geeks — makers, genetically enhanced cosplayers, scientists, and pop culture enthusiasts setting out on an adventure of exploration and discovery.
What are some of the challenges of making a hopepunk type game, and how have you approached them?
Hopepunk is a subgenre centered around the idea that in the face of oppression and cynicism caring about things is an act of resistance. It is about being kind and also fighting against injustice.
One challenge was to balance hopepunk with other themes in the game. I addressed this by having a setting where long isolated civilizations are reconnecting. Around the table, this means the world being rediscovered “this week” can tell a unique story, giving you a chance to dive deeply into its themes.
Also, player characters come from a fairly utopian society. They could simply chose to stay in their post-scarcity paradise, complacent, sitting around a pool discussing seven centuries of anime and arguing if the 78th edition of D&D was the best, while robots serve them pina coladas. During character creation you have to create an aspect that explains why your character wants to leave this privilege behind. Why they are willing to put their comfort aside and risk their lives to explore and help the rest of humanity.
To encompass the full scope of hopepunk, Return‘s skill system had to players plenty of non-combat options–play can revolve around making and learning and sharing what you’ve learned, not just combat. Also, the mechanics for competitions and down-time tinkering give players ways to show off the the things their characters care about.
Tell me a little more about the world. What kind of people are there? What sort of technology do they have access to?
Return to the Stars is set in the early 27th century, 600 years from now. During that time humanity spread through the Galaxy thanks to origami drives that fold hyperspace. 125 years ago, Stellar Beacon that illuminated hyperspace suddenly went silent, rendering galactic travel impossible. Now a limited form of interstellar travel has been discovered. Communication is limited to the speed of space travel, so players need to act on their own initiative, they can’t phone home for instructions.
You’ll travel from world to world, encountering a diverse array of human societies. There are no intelligent aliens in the setting, and digital life can’t travel through hyperspace. Stories exist to help people understand humanity, these choices are very intentional. Of course, you still have the option spinning a tale about a runaway AI on a particular planet.
Probably the most unique tech in the game is cosplay, which in the 27th century is the aptitude for self-presentation using costuming, genetic modification, posture, and movement. Because cosplay involves granular genetic control of your body it is a skill you can use to recover from physical consequences.
What’s the mechanical system like in Return to the Stars? How do players interact with the world?
Return to the Stars is powered by Fate, which is a proven indie game system that has been popular over the past decade. It is great for telling stories that are centered on who your character is and what they care about as opposed to what stuff they carry.
You characters have skills and stunts that let them bend the rules. But the heart of the system are aspects, short phrases that describe who your character is. You start a session with 3 Fate points, when you need a boost, and it makes sense, you can spend a Fate point to get a skill check bonus. On the other hand, if you chose, your aspects can complicate you life, earning a Fate point, so you can be awesome later. So if your character is a very curious science officer, they might tempted to wander off to investigate a strange screech, earning a Fate point, or they might spend a Fate point to be awesomely effective at solving a scientific mystery. In this way the game emulates the up and down beats of a story.
Return to the Stars comes with an adventure specially designed to teach the core concepts of the game. In playtests at many different conventions, new players have been up and running and having a good time after ten minutes of explanation.
My goal: if you love anime or games or science fiction or cosplay, and have thought about trying roleplaying games, you can get Return to the Stars, read it, and play.
If you already love games powered by Fate, I’ve added fun new subsystems: character arcs, props, downtime tinkering, and competitions. You can learn more about them on the Kickstarter. And, of course, there is a dedicated set of sci-fi skills and over 100 new stunts to mix things up!
At the center of it, what kind of stories do players tell in the game, and what do you wish to see the most?
Return to the Stars is designed to help players tell stories of sci-fi exploration and adventure. I hope players players take advantage of a game that can be as much about making, learning, and communicating as it is about punching space fascists.
Ultimately, of course, the great thing about a tabletop role playing game is that people can bring their own interest and passions into the game, adding theme to the themes in the game: optimism, space opera, pop culture, and hopepunk.
Hi all! Today I’ve got a great interview with Jacob Kellogg and Joseph Kellogg, creators of Rodent Rangers,a nifty roleplaying game currrently on Kickstarter! The project could really use some attention and it seems like a fun game, so please check it out, and see what they have to say about it in the responses below!
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Tell me a little about Rodent Rangers. What excites you about it?
Jacob:Rodent Rangers puts players in the role of anthropomorphic mice who go on missions under the feet of modern humans to help those in need. In addition to the nostalgia of old animated films like The Rescuers or The Great Mouse Detective, what’s exciting about this game is the light-hearted, joyful purity of it. Especially with the real world being as dark as it is right now, the idea of sending your tiny persona into a big world and nonetheless making a difference—all without the constant violence or mechanical complexity that comes with other games—just feels really appealing. Be a cute mouse and go help somebody. Let everything be okay for a while.
Joseph: What excites me most is the ability to tell stories that let kids get creative and solve problems. Instead of trying to sanitize other systems that rely on violence, Rodent Rangers focuses on using wit and a pure heart to deal with villains, while allowing for daring feats and narrow escapes.
What do the players do to play the game mechanically – how do they take action and tell stories?
Jacob: Mechanically, Rodent Rangers starts with a familiar premise: shared narration, with dice to resolve uncertain or risky actions. It’s a very lightweight system, with no hard rules for action types or explicitly-defined special abilities like you have in games like D&D. Instead, activities are descriptive, with the dice determining success or failure. The dice system is pretty sleek as well, with no bonuses or penalties being added to die rolls. Instead, your attributes tell you how many dice to roll and your skills tell you which size those dice should be, then you roll a batch of them and see how many “hits” (dice that show a 4 or higher) you got. If you meet a minimum threshold of hits (depending on the difficulty of the task) you succeed.
Joseph: Rodent Rangers is a skill-based RPG, with a dice system specially designed to be as math-light as possible. When players want to try something, like befriending a stranger or finding a clue, they pick a type of die based on their skill level, and get a number of them based on basic attributes (like Strong or Clever). When they roll, they just have to count the dice that came up as 4 or more.
What do the characters do in the narrative? Are they rescuers? What kind of adventures do they have?
Jacob: Narratively, the Rodent Rangers are an in-world organization that spans the globe, and sends teams of field agents out on missions to help their fellow critters (or even humans sometimes). You might recover a museum’s stolen relic, help to evacuate mice from a flooding sewer city, or even help guide a lost human child back to their parents. There’s an emphasis on being part of a team and working together, as well as being noble and wanting to help people (after all, that’s why you became an agent of the Rodent Rangers).
Joseph: Characters in Rodent Rangers are agents of the titular organization, a worldwide network or do-gooders and adventurers. They get sent on missions to help other animals or people in danger, and hopefully make friends along the way. In the sample adventure, players will be asked to track down a researcher who was kidnapped by sinister treasure hunters. To rescue him, they’ll need to look for clues, get past a devious snake, make new friends, and maybe even get into a high-speed car chase!
Potentially even encounter villains such as this!
What kind of character becomes a Rodent Ranger, and how do they fit into the larger world? Do these characters stand out?
Jacob: There are really only three key aspects of a person who becomes a ranger: they’re part of animal society rather than human society, they have some kind of skill or ability to contribute, and they want to help. Beyond that, a character could be anyone, which I think is something I really like about this game. You don’t have to be born into the right circumstance, be the chosen one, be part of the dominant forces of society, or whatever else. If you want to do good in the world in your own unique way, then there’s a spot for you on the team that no one else can fill.
Joseph: A Rodent Ranger is someone who loves adventure and helping people. Many mice are content to live peaceful lives, and shun danger. Rodent Rangers are often the best at what they do, and driven to put their talents to good use in the wider world.
How is Rodent Rangers special to you in it’s design and concept?
Jacob: Aside from some of the conceptual elements that I’ve already talked about liking, I’m really into how straightforward and “essentials only” the mechanics are. Games can sometimes get a bit overwrought, trying too hard to make sure every element of the experience has its own mechanic instead of just giving you the tools you need and leaving room for imagination. For example, as much as I like D&D, I would probably like it even better if you dropped the entire “spells” chapter in favor of a more “here’s the general idea, do what makes sense” approach. That’s what Rodent Rangers does: it gives you enough to show you what the game’s about and enable you to play, then gets out of the way.
Joseph:Rodent Rangers is special because it reflects many of the cartoons of my childhood, in which a pure heart and brave soul were all that were needed to save the day.
Tell me a little about Impulse Drive. What excites you about it?
I’m a huge fan of all sorts of space opera books, movies, games, and shows. From the late Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels & Mike Resnicks Santiago: a myth of the far future to shows like Killjoys, Farscape, Andromeda, and Dark Matter, and games like Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect. Space Opera combines commentary on society and the myths we tell ourselves with pulpy romance, melodrama, and action in delightfully weird settings.
Impulse Drive is an expression of my joy for these melodramatic, heartfelt stories about volatile but endearing misfits.
What do players (and characters) typically do in play in Impulse Drive? What “drives” the game?
It’s the players job to create and play an interesting, active character by taking risks and embracing the consequences. Players describe their character, what they think, say, and do. Players look for when Moves apply to the situation the group is describing, and when their characters Hooks affect the situation or bring fraught relationships to the fore. Players are directed to think cinematically, like the game is a pulpy space opera movie or TV show.
Characters are misfits with simple motivations, but live in a world that complicates things. The characters have tense, fraught moments with each other and take dangerous jobs or missions that lead them into conflict and adventure. Lots of flying too fast, indulging too much, pissing off the wrong people, and getting into fights & shootouts.
What are the characters like in the game, and how do they function mechanically?
Characters are volatile and bombastic. They’re competent badasses with a lot of luck on their side – until that luck runs out. They rely on their unique strengths, skills, and gear to get them out of sticky situations. But their character flaws and complicated pasts & relationships mean there’s always more trouble around the corner.
Mechanically, the core function of a character revolves around their Approaches (5 modifiers ranging from a score of -1 to +2 at the start.) and their Moves, discrete chunks of rules made up of a trigger (usually fictional) a process (usually rolling 2D6 and adding a modifier) and an outcome (usually fictional). Impulse Drive is Powered by the Apocalypse, so it’s mechanics are very similar to games like Apocalypse World, Monsterhearts, and Masks to name a few.
The five approaches (Volatile, Calculating, Slick, Stalwart, and Alien) describe behaviors more than they describe physical or mental prowess. I wanted the names for the Approaches to be flexible and evocative. Slick means being kinda charming in an unreliable, slimy way, but it also describes pulling off a fancy maneuver. Slick is being quick, responsive, and hard to pin down. Volatile is about passion, but also unpredictability and violence. Calculating is being logical but also cold, you can’t be thoughtful or empathetic with Calculating. Alien is being weird and touching forces beyond your ken. All of the Approaches have a mildly negative connotation – except Stalwart, which is for being resistant, solid, but also reliable and dependable.
Orbiting Approaches and Moves, characters are made up of the Gear they can use, the Harm & Stress they can take, and two elements that complicate their lives; Hooks and Calamities.
Hooks are an opportunity to define their character through flaws and fraught relationships. There are some default Hooks on each Playbook that players fill in mad-lib style, but they’re an opportunity for players to describe the challenges and struggles us want to watch their character. Hooks give you an opportunity for interesting roleplaying but also earning more XP by increasing the chance of failure. Hooks are always activated at the Player’s discretion, so they can choose when they want a higher chance for complication and XP, or a higher chance for success.
Calamities are a finite list of mechanical changes and fictional events that happen to the character if they take 5 Stress. The last Calamity in each list is an exit for the character from the main stage – they’ll either retire to safety or go out in a blaze of glory. It’s always fun to see which players try to manage their Stress frugally, and which players jump in and aim for certain Calamities because they think they’re cool. I’ve never seen a Warhorse who can resist an opportunity for a great victory, at the cost of a part of their body.
What’s it like in the world of Impulse Drive? Where do characters live, and how does that influence the tone of play?
The “World” of Impulse Drive is an array of space stations, ships, and worlds that the PCs visit in their ship. The Galactic Community is made up of societies and civilizations with populations that count in the billions. Technology ranges in sophistication and style between these civilizations, but most are on par with the crew of PCs. The particulars of the societies that the PCs come into contact with is determined by the group, led by the Space Master. This ensures that the themes the group is interested in exploring will be embodied by the societies they are on the fringes of.
The parts of the galactic community that we generally see in Impulse Drive are the fringes, less settled areas where conflict, corruption, and crime are commonplace. Law and corporate interests encroach on these spaces and culture varies greatly from society to society, but the status quo teeters on a knife-s edge, waiting for the crew to come along and disrupt it.
The Space Master uses Strains, similar to Fronts & Threats from Apocalypse World to track and advance these volatile situations towards a climax.
How does being a misfit really impact one’s place in this space opera world?
Being a misfit is all about how you don’t conform to the status quo for society, how you disrupt and challenge what the majority sees as ‘normal’. It’s about being different, and having society at large be passively or actively suspicious and hostile to you.
PCs in most RPGs do this by the very nature of the rules of the games, but also how players generally embody characters who do this by default – whether that is desirable or not. The PCs have lots of mechanical tools that irrevocably change a situation once they interact with it – for better or worse.
Along with this, the game tracks how certain important groups or NPCs relate to the crew of PCs using Disposition. There are 5 states of disposition that describe how someone is likely to react to the PCs within the fiction, but also has a modifier attached to interact with certain Moves that deal in broader social or transnational situations. While the galaxy in general may not even register this one little ship and its crew in the fiction, in terms of the game we relate to NPCs by their relationship to the crew members.
This is open information. The players know how the various interests in their corner of space feel about them and what to expect when they dock at a station in a hostile faction’s territory. Even the positive dispositions Friendly and bonded come with strings attached or caveats. The PCs being misfits is mechanically encouraged by one of the XP triggers in the end of session Move. Your PCs earn XP if the crew made a new enemy, or thwarted an existing one. This encourages the characters to find organizations and societies that deny their individuality and stand against them in a way that gains their animosity.
Hey all, today I have an interview with Liam Ginty from Sandy Pug Games about Americana, a tabletop roleplaying game coming out on Kickstarter! It sounds like some fascinating times investigating a tragic murder, so check out the answers below, and give the quick start a look, too!
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Tell me a little about Americana. What excites you about it?
Americana is an idea I’ve had for ages – a retro-fantasy setting. The image of Orcs in letterman jackets, goblins in those awesome Pink Ladies outfits from Grease – it just came to me one day and stuck with me, but I didn’t really have anything to do with it till I made a game called Mirror, which gave me a dice engine to call my own, and suddenly I had something I could build from.
The game itself is about a lot of stuff – being a kid at a time when the idea of teenagers having a time and space of their own was new and strange and pretty scary to everyone, claiming the aesthetics of a time period that’s been off limits to a lot of marginalized people to create a fun, enjoyable and accepting place to play in – but the core gameplay revolves around investigating the death of your best friend while managing your time at school, social events and familial obligations and navigating a town full of weird gangs and magical places that you create during session zero. It’s a really interesting gameplay loop that I don’t think has been explored very much, we took that very teenage experience of trying to figure out when everyone can hang out and made it part of the game in a way that’s really fun.
Besides the aesthetic (which we have a really great team of creative folx bringing it to life, tons of stories, art and even an audio drama we’re planning on making), I’m mainly excited about a mechanic we’re calling Your Dead Friend. Your Dead Friend is the victim of the crime at the center of all of this, and as such, we wanted to make them very important to the game. You actually make a full character for Your Dead Friend, just like you would make a normal PC (player character), and you can tap their skills for assistance with tough challenges – doing this invokes a flashback, where you roleplay out a scene where you learned this skill, or shared a moment with your friend. So throughout play you build this character, and your relationships with them, and playtesters have created some incredible stories from this mechanic, and we’re really really hyped to see what people do with it.
We also have a mechanic called Ties and Connections that is just really cool visually – as you play you put together this conspiracy style board, drawing lines and connections between gangs, locations, characters and Your Dead Friend, slowly putting the mystery together.
How do you handle creating a town with all these exciting elements in Americana?
We focus on the parts of the town that are, or would be, important to teenagers, and break the town down into Hangs, Crews, Risks and Adults. A Hang is somewhere designed for, or co-opted for the purposes of just being. The old water tower, a disused Goblin cave, the field outside of town. We encourage players to make these hangs as magical or as mundane as they like, and they’re modeled much like our characters are – with Strengths, Weaknesses and a Vibe that characters can tussle with or exploit for their own purposes. Of course, what’s a place without a gang to call it home. That’s where the Crews come in.
Crews are cliques, like greasers, preps, mage-kids or jocks. They similarly have a Vibe and a couple of strengths and weaknesses, a catchy name that sums up their whole deal (and probably gets printed on their custom varsity jackets) and a leader. The leader gets a little extra detail so players have a face for that group right from the start. You also give the crew a hang to call home. Maybe the greasers all hangout at “Felicities Garage” or something. Again, we want people to create crews that reflect their own game, so we let people be as mundane or as magical as they like. My favourite crew in playtesting so far was a gang of gothabilly inspired proto-goths, who hung out around an abandoned necromancers tower, reading poe and casting spells.
Risks are the kind of dangerous activities that you and your peers get up to when the adults aren’t watching. Parties, deadly races, and illicit wizard duels in the woods near town. These are events set up by the various crews as a way for everyone to test their mettle against one another, and provides some really cool ways for players to challenge people, get up in a crews business or otherwise make themselves known without having to resort to straight up fisticuffs. Risks have a name, a crew associated with it, and a danger level that tells everyone just how risky this whole activity is. I was a big fan of “Electric Dance Fighting”, one of our first playtests Risks, where crews would have big street dance contests on the arcing lightning from a power line.
Adults are a bit more simple, to reflect the info and perspective of a teenager – they have a name, some strengths and weaknesses, and a position that tells you where they sit in the Adult world.
This is all done during Session Zero, tho we encourage players to add or modify these as needed throughout play, and it’s also done non-sequentially, so you can come up with a crew, go make up a Risk then come back to make up the hang later. You have a variable number of all of these elements depending on the scale of the town you pick. We’ve found this system just pops with awesome ideas when you get a few people around the table, and I wish I could just list off all the examples we’ve heard during playtesting so far. Really makes for some fantastic story elements with clear narrative and mechanical purpose.
A blank Your Dead Friend sheet…maybe you should be the one to fill it in!
I’d love to hear more about the Ties and Connections. How does that work and who gets to influence it?
Ties are how we lay out the various relationships between these crews, their leaders, locations, adults and characters all with the victim. We have a sheet that has the victim in the middle, their stats and so on, and a lot of blank space around them. As players investigate the world they’ve built, they record connections that NPCs, crews and locations have with Your Dead Friend by writing their names on the sheet and drawing these ties between the various factions and Your Dead Friend, which in turn makes it easier to figure out the next place to investigate, the next lead to track down and so on. This evolving document creates an ongoing campaign-length record of leads and dead ends, suspects and mysteries that you spent your game following up on. Here’s a WIP example of one after a couple playtest sessions. The final sheet will look a lil nicer than this, obviously, but it gives you an idea of what an in-progress set of Ties looks like.
Oh, and as for who gets to influence it – like almost everything in Americana, it’s a table-wide mechanic. The Storyteller can declare a tie, the players can confer and make one if they feel it makes sense, or everyone can agree together to make one. One area we really want to build on with Americana is making the dynamic between GM and Player less of a wall. Making the story more of a collaboration between the whole table from start to finish is a part of that.
So what are player characters like in Americana? How do they develop and fit into these towns?
Characters in Americana are all one of 6 Archetypes (what we call Classes) based on high school tropes – The Jock, The Nerd, The Royal, The Outsider, The New Kid and The Artist. They’re all friends of the victim, but not necessarily of each other, and we have a mechanic called The First Clue that’s specifically for bringing everyone together and getting the characters invested in the mystery. One thing we were super aware of when making these archetypes is that some of them are often depicted as cruel, or mean in popular culture – Jocks are bullies, Royals (the popular kids) are often vapid, and we wanted to avoid that at all costs, highlighting instead the positive traits of someone who really loves sports, or is a social butterfly.
These characters are, generally, people who’ve been part of the town most of their lives, and are personally devastated by the death of their best friend, and their character growth tends to come from their collective grief and the various support mechanics we have – working together is vital in Americana. The way the game is designed really forces this Us vs Them sentiment where the player characters are alone in their investigation, and have to rely on each other as much as possible.
Finally, tell me about Your Dead Friend. Where did this plot element idea come from, and how did it grow into a mechanic?
Your Dead Friend came from me watching Brick and realizing the single most important character in that – and almost every murder mystery – is the victim, but they’re so often neglected in RPGs that focus on similar themes. They’re either a plot thread or an inciting event, but never really show up much in the story from there. While doing my research for the game (Watching Riverdale mainly) I noticed how useful it was to have flashbacks where you can expand on that character and make them matter so much more to the audience than if they were just a corpse. It seemed obvious that the victim should sit at the table somehow.
First of all I played with the idea of having a player literally be Your Dead Friend, it’d be another Archetype, but I couldn’t really figure a way to make it work well with the other mechanics and vibe of the game. We played with the idea of having them be a summonable element, a ghost, a bunch of other things, but all of that went by the wayside when we realized how important Assists were for the game. It all kinda came at once at that point, the flashbacks, the assist skills, etc. It allows the character of the victim to grow really naturally through the players inventing that relationship they had from whole cloth and stops them just being a dice pool to draw from.
What is The Forest Hymn & Picnic, both as a product and as your vision?
As a product it’s a tabletop adventure game where players take on the roles of oddballs that live an absurd, unending and often haunted forest. It’s a mix of exploration and slice of life gameplay much closer to D&D in play than something like Apocalypse World. The game takes cues from some of my favorite things from when I was a little dude—I didn’t grow up in love with The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings, I didn’t grow up with D&D; I even missed out on Harry Potter ’til I was 23 despite my generation growing up with those books and movies.
I did, however, love books like The Wind in the Willows, and the Frog & Toad stories when I was a kid. Fairy tales and fables and cartoons, too, all left their mark on me in ways traditional fantasy fiction never did. So the game digs into those influences more than anything, and I guess my vision is that adventuring in The Forest Hymn invokes those memories we have of what fantasy was to us as kids, before we read The Hobbit, but in a way seen more so through the lens of being an adult. Like what if Little Bear was all grown up and needed to sell off some heirlooms to hire someone to help him get a ghost out of his closet, or what if Frog got lost in the woods and Toad got a musket-toting posse together to go find him? I am not trying to hit a nostalgia button with this game, instead I am re-imagining all those things in my own voice and outside influences like Americana folklore, old tall tales, living in the southern US, and ghost stories.
How have you designed the game to address tone, pacing, and mood, considering how particular the various referenced media are in that regard?
The three biggest influences on The Forest Hymn & Picnic are The Wind in the Willows and various children’s books about animals being idiots, the music of The Decemberists, and the cartoon Over the Garden Wall. They all poke their head in on things one way or another, but like I mentioned it’s through my own grown-up eyes and I take license here and there to reflect my own personality and get a bit weird with it. Tonally, you’ll find the game to be more adult than those children’s books; the player characters have more grown-up flaws and superstitions and especially the Ghost characters tend to er on the sad side of things—when you decide to play a ghost you pick a costume that reflects however you might have died in your former life.
The ghosts made their way into the game after I watched OtGW. I was telling a friend about this game I was making that was about animals in a haunted forest, and they recommended it to me. I instantly watched it a thousand times, and how that cartoon handled things like death and family and basic human behavior really showed me you could do more with children’s stories.
You can play as Animal Folks who are animals that walk and talk and are pretending to be what they think people are like, which is kind of the entirety of Mr. Toad from Willows expressed as an entire set of player options. Animal Folk are busy bodies and gossipers, concerned with social standing and prone to commerce. You can also play as people, who like Christopher Robin are a little more grounded in reality, but they’re naturally lost in the woods. So the mood and tone very much my own projections of looking back at those influences as an older person. It’s real silly, but a little bit serious.
The book and the art, too, reflects a lot of these influences. I’ve been painting backgrounds and backdrops in traditional, mixed mediums like watercolor and colored pencils while the other artists, Casey and Sam, will be doing the action and foreground art in their own digital styles to give it that sort of old cartoon feel. They layout is closer to a children’s book than a traditional RPG textbook, and graphic novelist Gabe Soria has contributed the lyrics to songs the forest dwellers sing to open each chapter.
I’m gunna answer the part about pacing in the next question, but my good pal Dustin told me that the way The Forest Hymn & Picnic is presented is like inviting kids to eat at the adult table and I think that’s a good way to sum up the tone and mood of this game.
Tell me a little about the progression of the game in play, from inception of characters to milestones and on. What was challenging to create here, and how does it feel in play?
The pacing of the gameplay is made to intentionally mimic the way those kid’s books are read. A lot of those books are collections, two or three-page accounts of whatever mischief the characters get into; each chapter is a contained story all bound into a single book but the characters very much feel like they’re up to the good times in between the pages. The Forest Hymn & Picnic does this too. Each adventure is meant to be a contained experience the players have. A single adventure, a quest, a day at the county fair, 48 hours on the road between towns, etc. The narrator can choose to craft those episodes in a way that links them all together with an overarching plot, or choose to just explore the woods and the world across several sessions.
Players start with character generation; they’re given the numbery, mathy stuff like characteristic scores and whatnot up front to get it out of the way. Then you’re given a set of personality generating tables to sort of build the background of their character; they can make random rolls or pick and choose from the tables to learn things about themselves. People learn how they ended up in the woods and how they were raised, Animal Folk learn what kind of animal they are and what silly quirks they have, and Ghosts put their costumes together.
You take all of that and put it together to form a description for your adventurer. What you’re left with at the end of character generation is an extremely unique adventurer who has their own fears and goals and personalities, built-in adventuring hooks like finding your long lost father or working to become mayor of some town, and a relationship with the woods itself.
After each episodic adventure players will go up in a level, and the options they take and decisions they make represent what those characters are up to between adventures. So like, a player might decide that in between level 0 and level 1 they want to get involved with the supernatural and learn some magic tricks so they become a Fortune Teller. Or maybe the player can’t decide just yet what they want to do, so they take on the role of a rakehell and bum around town with not much to do. Each of those choices then give the players new options, skills, magic tricks, and cool moves, and even adventure hooks to use on their next adventure and advance their unique personal stories and lives in The Forest Hymn. Not including the different types of Animal Folk, and not including the different micro decisions players make at each level-up and their own contributions, there is over 500 different combinations of unique dweller to choose from.
That’s where the influence of The Decemberists comes in; their songs tend to be storied, melodic looks at seemingly ordinary people and the different player options work they same way: you don’t choose to be Mega Sword Hero™, but you do decide to take up the quiet life of a knife sharpener or burglar, bakers, librarians and all that good stuff. In play it feels very much feel like players are a part of the world rather than heroic outsiders, which is delightful and intentional. It gives the actual adventuring narrative weight; it’s odd to go adventuring in the woods, it’s not normal to go traipsing around The Spookwood, making it all more interesting when you do these things as a someone who’s really good at churning butter and keeping books instead of swinging a sword.
The most challenging thing about creating anything with this game is staying true to the setting and making sure it’s cool. The Forest Hymn & Picnic is running on a very very simplified version of the same engine that powers a game that couldn’t be further from different than it: Shadow of the Demon Lord by Robert J. Schwalb. SotDL is a—fantastic!—super gritty, grim dark hack & slash RPG and what I’ve made from it is different by leagues of night and day.
I’ve quieted the importance of fighting and weapons and replaced it with a more granular task resolution system using the same math. So the easy part, the math, was done already. But making sure the setting comes through in player options and the magic tricks, in the character generation and the songs, the art, and the brief introduction to the world has been the toughest part. It’s not a genre covered heavily in RPGs or really in mainstream media very often at all; fewer of us have the concepts and tropes that define it burned into our brainholes like we do typical fantasy or sci fi ones.
Tell me a little about Bee Lives: We Will Only Know Summer. What excites you about it?
Bee Lives: We Will Only Know Summer is a worker placement and resource management game for 1 to 4 players. I’ve been developing it for about a year now and the game play is heavily influenced by Euro games. Titles like A Feast for Odin, Carcassonne, and Clans of Caledonia (to name a few) have provided some inspiration for mechanics.
The theme, however, comes from my experience as a beekeeper. I’ve been tending bees in urban Philadelphia for the past 7 years and have learned a lot about them in that time. When I did some research and found that no one else had done a worker placement style game about bees yet I decided that I wanted to be the one to combine two of my passions and create that game.
There are several things that excite me about this game. The first is how much I hope this will introduce people to the world of bees. I really wanted to design the game in a way that made people think like a hive does. The victory point conditions are set up to reward actions and behaviors that do well for the survival of your own hive. Some of them, particularly swarming, creates challenges for you as well. You can’t just think about points, you have to also think about getting through the winter in order to win.
This all really ties into how I learned to design games as a librarian. I’ve been making tabletop games for close to a decade as part of my educator duties, and I really like that I’ve designed a game that lets you learn while playing but does not have the objective of teaching. Bee Lives was made to be a game first, with the learning piece a side effect.
I’m also just really excited about this whole process of creating and publishing a game. It’s great seeing the community response to the project and the positive energy that a lot of people are responding to the game with. I also loved bringing Helen and Alina onto the project and working with them. Alina captured the style I tasked her with through my art direction just how I was hoping. Helen has really helped tie the art and the game mechanics together with her graphic design. The graphic design in particular is so important for a game’s user experience and I’m pleased with how it’s all come together so far.
What is play like on an average turn in Bee Lives? What do you do? In a turn of bee lives your primary task is decide how to most efficiently utilize the workers you have. There are 8 possible actions you can take, and each one helps your hive get to, and survive through, winter in some way. Do you need more honey and pollen so your bees don’t starve and you can make new bees? Send a couple workers out to forage. Maybe your hive is getting too much disease? Send some workers to clean it out. Is your neighbor being aggressive? Perhaps it is time to put some bees on defense or even go out on a raid to rob some honey from those neighbors.
Once you’ve decided how you want to spend your workers you take turns with your opponents, be it real players or the AI driven wild hives, taking those actions. This can of course throw you off of what you were originally planning. Raiding can leave you with less honey than you need forcing you to compensate elsewhere. Someone can block you from accessing a specific tile you wanted to forage from, forcing you to forage elsewhere with extra workers you were not planning. Then there is the main puzzle of managing the space in your comb so you can balance having enough food for all the bees while leaving enough space for new workers to hatch out of, and also keeping some water on hand in case you need to cool down your hive. There is a good amount of planning you need to do each turn, and then hope it doesn’t fall apart when it comes time to feed your bees and hatch out new workers in the upkeep phase between the 9 turns of the game.
How did you decide on the designs you use in the game for visual aid?
Helen and I worked pretty closely on this. We wanted everything to be attractive but functional and serve the player from a user experience perspective first. The graphics for visual aid are intended to be intuitive, and allow you to figure out what you need to do without having to look it up in the rule book each time. I also want to make the game language independent if we can.
Right now the only part of the game (apart from the rule book, obviously) that needs words are the event cards. Before we go to print I am hoping we can make those language independent as well. We also took care to add symbols to anything where color may be important so anyone who is color blind can still play.
This is most clear with the black and white icons we have added to the 4 different tile types that are in the game. It’s possible we’ll be having some of the actual art for the graphic design icons redone, but this is just for aesthetics if it happens. The symbols and why we chose them will remain the same.
How close to real life is the game in functionality – how much of a “bee life” are we living when we play?
Bee Lives is definitely an abstraction of what it is like for a bee hive in the Philadelphia area each ear. I’ve spent a lot of time with bees these past few years, and I wanted to really replicate what they need to do in this game without making a full blown simulation. The game doesn’t reflect every nuance of bee life.
For example, the bees don’t collect propolis or make royal jelly, and disease is abstracted down to the Varroa mite only, when in reality there are several health issues that can affect them. I want players to experience what it is like to be a hive without making them micromanage every aspect of it, and I believe I have succeeded in doing that.
Bee Lives sounds like a really great experience! How did you make those decisions in what to include, what to design into the game to interact with? That must have been challenging! What was most important to you?
This is where my experience creating games as a librarian really came into play. It can be really tempting to throw everything, including the kitchen sink, into a game. When you do that, though, you end up with a complicated simulation that makes sense to no one but the designer. You need to know what to trim and where to really emulate the real world experiences you want the players to experience through play.
When I did this for Bee Lives, I looked at what was important to understand about bees and what was needed mechanically to make the game enjoyable, competitive and balanced. I needed people to experience the difficulty bees go through in managing disease and resource gathering, so I made sure those were aspects that were included. I needed to balance those things with mechanics that would make the game challenging, which is where the main focus of resource management came from. Navigating these two pieces is a lot of what game design is, for me. It’s a way to let people experiment with a system they otherwise have no real way of interacting with, and I think that is a special thing.
