Tag: joy

A Very Merry Mental Illness to Me

Hey, friends, supporters, consumers, and colleagues. this one is a little important.

I hope the best came for you in major holidays for each culture and religion or lack thereof that came before this post, and the same wishes for you in the festivities (or lack thereof!) to come. Please stay safe in the continuance of COVID-19 and the many dangers all marginalized people face, and seek joy in every moment – even if it’s fleeting, it heals more than all the rest.

That being said, this is me. Beau Sheldon.

Beau in a black and grey hoodie tee with festive makeup.
Me. 2020.
Content warnings for discussion of mental illness, physical disability, financial insecurity, gender identity, gender dysphoria, mention of hallucinations, mention of schizoaffective disorder, mentions of political and social issues in the United States, and details of creative dysfunction.
Continue reading “A Very Merry Mental Illness to Me”

Wanderhome with Jay Dragon

Hey y’all, today I have something really good for you – Jay Dragon is here to talk about Wanderhome, which is currently blowing past goals on Kickstarter! This game of traveling animal-folk is so much more than just a walk through the meadow – check out Jay’s responses below.

The cover art of the roving animal-folk is by Sylvia Bi.

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What has your experience in games been like and how did you get into it?

I’ve been designing games since I was 12 years old for my summer camp The Wayfinder Experience. I ran my first game when I was 14, a largescale LARP with 50+ players, a full team of staff, and a production budget. I got into tabletop years later through Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition and Monsterhearts. I released my first largescale tabletop game, Sleepaway, on Kickstarter last year, where it would go on to win an ENnie and be nominated for two Indie Groundbreaker Awards.

Since then I’ve been designing games nearly continuously, and I’ve released more than two dozen projects of various sizes on my Itch.io page and on my Patreon. Wanderhome is my second solo Kickstarter, although it represents my fourth Kickstarter involvement, either as co-writer or project manager.

A sketch of a lizard standing on two feet, fully dressed and wearing armor with banded feet, smoking, labeled "The Veteran."
The Veteran by Letty Wilson, a sketch.

What projects do you think you’ve worked on that have led you to designing Wanderhome, which seems so new and exploratory?

Wanderhome is very much the culmination of a lot of the work I’ve been doing over the past year. As I become more comfortable with the No Dice, No Masters engine (often called Belonging Outside Belonging) through Sleepaway, I realized the sheer flexibility involved in the system. Projects of mine like Dungeon helped me realize that the structure that Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum had built, with tokens, moves, setting elements, and community worksheets, was intentionally an enormous well of unexplored design space. Wanderhome takes all the tools I’ve been futzing with – longer-form narrative games, modular structures, toolkits and other OSR principles, integrated safety mechanics (which I know we’ve talked about!), an enormous variety of options, and a general focus on prosody, lyricism, and art direction to give the game a tone that go beyond the normal RPG ruleset.

So, tell me a little about Wanderhome itself. What excites you about it? What makes it whole?

Wanderhome is a pastoral fantasy RPG about the peaceful world of Hæth and the folks who live there. You play as a group of traveling animal-folk (including but not limited to; a dancer who moves with the soul of the world, a caretaker for a gaggle of small and forgotten gods, a delivery-person who uses carrier moths to send letters by moonlight, a shepherd with a herd of bumblebees, a little kid with a big heart, and a veteran who has sworn to never draw their sword) as you go from place to place over the course of many seasons, helping people and making friends.

There’s a lot of things about it that excite me – it’s in a lot of ways everything I’ve wanted from a game for a while. I think right now I’m thinking a lot about the way it rejects so much of what we’re used to from RPGs in its genre. It focuses on the idea of a journey over a story, it lacks rules for failure (and in fact challenges the idea that failure exists), it’s designed for very longform play (you can play it for years or decades!) and it reimagines what play can be like.

An assortment of small brown and white or colored-in sketches of mushroom, pinecone, flower, match, tissue, and wax stamp folk.
Art by Jennie Lindberg of the Small and Forgotten Gods.

How did you come up with this concept that defies some of the norms we expect from RPGs, and that has already captured many enthusiastic fans?

Wanderhome came about towards the start of quarantine, when I was struggling with a lot of mental and physical health issues and a friend came by for a week to check up on me. While we were sitting together in the grass, I had a vision of a landscape that could exist in a world after all this. I sat down and sketched out how I’d want people to engage in the world, and figuring out basically a bounding limit of what playing the game is like – I didn’t care about failure, and I didn’t care about enormous success.

I concentrated most things you can do in the game as essentially a toolbox of window dressing, “idle animations” and basic tools you can use to unpack what’s happening. It uses the token system classic in Belonging Outside Belonging games to push and pull you in and out of your character’s comfort zone. I think it’s attracted a lot of attention because there’s not really anything like it – there’s some comparisons to games like Ryuutama, but to me that’s like night and day. I think people are clamoring for a game that proposes a world after COVID, after our global trauma, and tries to figure out ways to heal – even if it’s not always going perfectly.

I definitely want to talk more at some point with you about electing not to have rules for failure since I’m a fan, but first I want to talk about your choice to do extremely long campaign play as an option. Why allow such long engagement with the same campaign potentially the same characters? How does the design support the different lengths of play?

I’ve been captivated since I was a little kid by those tabletop RPG campaigns that have been meeting for 20+ years. Generally those groups aren’t actually playing whatever game they originally set out to play – they’ve been messing with the system for so long that it’s become something deeply personal and totally new. When I got into Indie TTRPGs, I fell in love with so much of those games, but I found myself missing the dream of that long, long play. It’s not that I needed every campaign to last that long, but the idea of playing a game for so long that I’ve completely reshaped it into my own is so appealing. I think of a lot of my game designs as being about teaching the players how to write the game and make it their own.

The moment I started working on Wanderhome I was so struck by the idea of a game that, if you spent enough time with it, could become another feature in the landscape of your life. When you play Wanderhome for long enough, you eventually have to give up your characters and make new ones, but that’s intentional. If you play it for decades and decades, it stops being about the people, but the shared world you’ve all made. The episodic structure of Wanderhome, along with the sheer variety of options, means that shorter journeys feel natural and easy, while also giving you the sense of what more is out there, if you just kept on traveling.

Colored illustrations of a lizard, a monkey or lemur, and a ram with two large bugs as sidekicks. All of the creatures are fully dressed and standing on two feel, with unique accoutrements.
More amazing work by Lettie Wilson, this time a few character types.

Everything I have seen out of Wanderhome and everything you’ve said here has made me envision the vibe that you give off when we’ve chatted – calm and quietly investigatory, but with the chance at any time to run off with an idea and a half drawn map that’ll be fully drawn by morning. Tell me, what are a few example scenes you’ve had or envisioned for the game, and how do your mechanics support that type of play?

As I designed Wanderhome, I was constantly making note of the sorts of scenes I wanted people to have, and possible landscapes where that could happen. Many of the things you can do in Wanderhome came directly from the lists of ways I wanted players to navigate the world – leaving offerings to small and forgotten gods, opening up about their feelings, taking time to tell the other players about the beauty of a sunset or the path a butterfly travels through the air. Ultimately though, I worked hard to keep Wanderhome from making confident statements about what you feel. I wanted to create the space in the game for you to fill in your own meaning, and treat the mechanics as more of an interface to engage with the world than a prescriptive set of laws that dictate the world itself.

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Thank you so much Jay! I hope you all enjoyed reading the interview and that you’ll hop over to Wanderhome on Kickstarter today to join the many excited backers!

First Friday Hi-Day Video!

Love, Joy, Empathy, and Why I I’m Not Giving Up

Last night I had the awesome experience of going to see Mikey Neumann’s Movies with Mikey Live, courtesy of my friend Anders as a 30th birthday gift. Mikey reviews films and is a video game writer, and he is one of my favorite people. It was amazing – I laughed, I cried, and it hit some nerves in important ways.
There are a few things Mikey said that made an impact more than all the rest, and some of them weren’t just a few words. I’m gonna go through the hard ones first then roll it back to good. This will relate to games, I swear.
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Mikey at one point asked, “how many of you have been alone with your thoughts for two months?”
I raised my hand (I think there were two or three of us). When he said it, my mind rubberbanded – shot backwards and snapped forward. When my husband John was deployed in Iraq, I lived alone for over a year in an unfamiliar neighborhood. I shut myself inside, I tried to vent it out in journals or on places like LiveJournal that was mostly screaming into a void, but I couldn’t escape my own mind.
My mental health deteriorated rapidly, and my physical health didn’t do well – I’d lock myself in the house for days. I saw people, but it wasn’t broken until I sat on the floor of my mom’s house, completely delusional and fully in belief that the world was ending. I sobbed for hours and sat in terror of what would come and my biggest fear, the scariest thing about an apocalypse, was that I might live and be alone with myself forever.
That fear hasn’t faded. It’s still scary to me, and I worry that my being a trash fire to be around will make that a reality – my behavior and incompetence will lead to my partners and friends deserting me, because I know I would desert me.
So there was that.
Then Mikey talked about his experiences in the hospital when he had his frankly terrifying event last year. I have not been hospitalized long term, but the facts of physically deteriorating, not having diagnoses, and sudden onset symptoms are familiar – and the experience he described is one I desperately fear. Every time I have a twinge in my back, a cold, a night where waking up seems like the worst option. So it shook me up, just like listening to him talk about things close to this before. I cried a lot.
I’m struggling right now because every thing that goes wrong just wrecks me. I made one mistake at work the other day and just destroyed myself over it for hours. I’m still thinking about it. I struggled with design work and almost bailed out on a contract because I can’t look at my own work and see value. I told myself I wasn’t allowed a birthday because I don’t deserve it.
So that also happened.
Mikey also, earlier, had talked about altering perspectives, helping people see movies in different ways that might change how they feel about them. He talked about Deep Dive, and it reminded me how I wished he would do a do-over of the Jupiter Ascending episode because John said it wasn’t nice and that I would get upset. See, I love Jupiter Ascending, and it’s often hard to get people to see the good in it. But it made me think about how our first tries are often not our best ones. That gave me a little shiver of hope. Over the past few years I’ve nearly shut down this blog and quit games multiple times, after my work continued to be inadequate and the blog floundered. I don’t want to end things, but my self-loathing and lack of success has been heavy. But maybe if I keep trying?
Then he talked about the important part – love, joy, empathy.
I honestly can’t remember everything he said. I was so overwhelmed. A lot of people might know that I’ve been struggling with my mental and physical health for a long time, and one of the ways I’ve tried to do that is to try to be kinder.
I’m an angry person. I always have been, angry, ready to fight, every day. I’m bitter and fiery and it’s exhausting. But ever since the Dark Years, I’ve been trying so hard to be better.
I worked on not calling people names and swearing at them. I disengaged from relationships that allowed my anger to grow and fester. I preached to be kinder, to love people, and I asked people to stop hurting people.
But lately, I have not done this. I have been exhausted, surrounded by everyone else’s anger, boiling in hurt every day by the words of my friends, colleagues, and the people who control my life. My work makes me angry. School makes me angry. I am so angry all of the time, and it turns into this cycle of self loathing because I don’t want to be angry, but it often feels like my only alternative is sadness.
My doctors have told me that a happy medium will always be a challenge for me, and that experiencing joy will be fraught because it’ll be hard to find and the crash can often be very brutal. I’m glad they told me, but it’s something I struggle with because it’s true.
I need to change that. I may never normalize to happy, and I might not be able to be joyful without a crash. But that has to be okay. It must be. With that in mind, I’m reflecting on how I pursue games and create them, and how I engage with the community.
Love
– I will give my love freely in all ways, even if it’s just a general love of humanity.
– I will try to ensure that love is a part of my games, encouraged and recognized.
– I will remember that hate is less effective than love.
Joy
– I will have more fun! I want to find at least one fun thing a week to enjoy, in games or out.
– I will support joyful games, bring attention, and encourage more joyful games to be made.
– I will put joy out, too, by trying to post more about good in my life, including the positive work I’m doing in design.
Empathy
– I will support those in my community who struggle in the ways I can.
– I will continue to fight against injustice, and against harassment, and try to find opportunities to change our landscape to support those in need.
– I will let go of bitterness against those who have wronged me.
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The last of those is one I have already started pursuing, with my apology weekend where I asked people to apologize to me freely, without any given reason, and I forgave everyone who did. It was revolutionary for me.
I have realized, just while thinking on this, that my recent deep struggles might not be solved by these efforts, but that it doesn’t actually matter. This isn’t about fixing me, or anyone else.
It’s about living.
<3