Tag: kids

Five or So Questions on Princess World

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Kevin Petker about the game Princess World, which is currently on Kickstarter! The game has some fun beginnings – read all about it in the responses below!

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Tell me a little about Princess World. What excites you about it?

Princess World, “A Game of Girls who Rule” is a Powered by the Apocalypse role-playing game about playing diverse Princesses from varied realms who are trying to work together, despite their differences, to address problems in their world.  The most exciting thing about the game is that it was inspired by my daughter, she literally pitched it to me when she was three-and-a-half (She’s six now) and she’s been a great help in generating ideas and concepts for the game.  Princess World is designed to be accessible and engaging to new players, particularly younger ones, and deals a lot with the power and meanings of words, and how phrases can be reinterpreted in different ways.  Every character in the game is defined by four essential Truths, which are short narrative phrases; when players start to grasp how to use these Truths to expand the narrative power of their characters in the game, using them as springboards for their imagination.  Seeing  a player’s eyes light up when they think of a new way to use a Truth makes the whole game worthwhile for me.

The character playbooks with their Truths laid out on a table and an assortment of dice, pens, and a crown headband.
The Truths on the character playbooks.

I’m super curious about the Truths! What are the four Truths and how are they presented to players?

Truths are probably my favorite part of Princess World!  Truths are the “powers and abilities” of each Princess, like if you’d list four special things a character in a story or book are good at or known for.  Each archetype/playbook has a unique list of four Truths that the player must express about their character.  Some are extrinsic to the character, like equipment or things and some are intrinsic to the character, like experiences or legacies, and some purposely blur the line, so that the player can decide. 

These Truths are narrative statements, not just descriptive, that give the character options and abilities others probably don’t have access to.  For example, a Fairy Princess’s player wouldn’t just say, “I have green hair.”  There’s not much they can do with that in a story; it’s mainly just description.  If, instead, they said, “My hair consists of the intertwined flowers of Spring.”, then we can think about all the various narrative ideas and options we can unpack from that.  Maybe they can use the scent of their hair to calm others, or maybe they can cause other plants to thrive, or maybe they can call on powers of growth and renewal.  We’d play to find out the creative options the player could come up with, based on that Truth. 

Truths are usually written in the character’s favorite color, unless they’ve been deemed to be Unpleasant, in which case, they’re usually written in black.  Before a player writes down a Truth, they express it to the table of players first, and the other players judge the Pleasantness or Unpleasantness of that Truth, before the player writes it down.  Being Unpleasant, just means that the other players can immediately see how said Truth has the potential to cause problems for the character, though they could be bad or dangerous as well, but the player can still call on them! 

If a Truth is judged to be Unpleasant, the player has the option to accept that trouble or to rephrase the Truth in a way to address any concerns.  Most players seem to enjoy having potential trouble brewing for their characters as it can lead to interesting stories.

The Truths can be as direct or as flowery as the player desires, but they’re usually a single sentence.  For example, there was a Skateboard Princess who expressed this: “I can’t digest normal food, I eat batteries.” and the table of players was astonished and intrigued.  The player went on to explain, “I’m a robot!”  Now, they could’ve just expressed the Truth as “I’m a robot.”, but the whole “I eat batteries.” was thought of something more in line with what one would read in a story about a robotic Skateboard Princesses! 

As a nonbinary creator, I’d be lax if I didn’t think of kiddos like me – is there space for nonbinary or masculine players or characters in this world, or is it strictly about embracing the feminine “girl” power and identity? How are you framing gender identity for the princesses, with this answer in mind? By this I mean, are there princesses with different body types and presentations like in She-Ra?

I think it’s going to be very tough to overcome the assumption that “princess means girl” in Western culture, but that is not an assumption I make in Princess World; we say “Anyone can be a Princess.”  I lean more towards my daughter’s interpretation of princess which is “Someone who is capable and competent, and also pretty cool.”  Some of the playbooks lean towards the feminine side, for certain values of feminine, such as the Proper or Fairy Princess, but the player of such characters is not bound by that at all!  There are self-defining Skateboard Princeses, rough and tumble Warrior Princesses, and characters that are free to blur the lines in any way the players wish, like the Shadow or Pauper Princess.  In the actual text I tend to lean towards female (she/her) or gender inclusive (they/them) pronouns unless I’m talking about a specific character or person who has specified their pronouns.

For the player, if the gender of their character is important to them, they can work to include it in the Truths about their character; if it less of a factor in their interest in the character, it can be included in their descriptive details.  In actual play, their have been girl, boy, neither, amalgamated, changing, and artificially gendered Princesses.  It’s my goal that players can make character that reflect their desires and interests in what is cool or exciting.  Variations in age, body shape, gender, orientation, and even species have all occurred in actual play of Princess World.  For me, it’s really exciting to see the fantastic directions players take their character creation in, thinking both inside and outside the box of the archetype they’ve picked.  The new She-Ra cartoon has definitely been a touch stone.

With all that being said, there is, in very early development, a playbook that is specifically called the Boy Princess; my daughter wanted that included (she generated the seed ideas for fourteen of the sixteen playbooks we’re working on) and I’m excited to see how players will interpret and expand on that concept!

The character name tents and character portraits for the Space Princess, Pirate Princess, and Shadow Princess, beside some tokens, pens, and index cards.
The character portrait is very important!

Awesome! The Boy Princess sounds my style. Speaking of style, I see that you’re using a system Powered by the Apocalypse. What led you to choose this system, and how have you modified it to suit your unique needs?

Well, I really fell in love with Apocalypse World when I was first introduced to it; it really mapped to my style of facilitating games and gave me words and structures to actually explain what I was doing.  Also, it allowed for a very low level of pre-game preparation, something I’m really liking as I have less time to game.  I feel that the PbtA approach worked really well for being a Weaver, what we call the “game master” in Princess World, as we stress that they are there to help the other players tell a story about their characters, not a story the Weaver makes up to put the princesses through; that collaboration between all the players, collectively creating the fiction of the narrative is what I find most satisfying in playing PbtA games.

For Princess World, I narrowed things down to four basic moves; all of which are ways of dealing with obstacles or problems that the characters face. Essentially: order things to do what you want, try to change their minds, evade things, fight things; they seem to cover all the ground I want for the players to explore when making choices for their characters.  There’s a single auxiliary move that is dependent on how connected a Princess is to another Princess, using a currency we call Threads, which are statements about the characters’ relationships, written down on strips of paper and handed out to other players.  As well, every Princess has a special knowledge move that reflect their unique perspective on Princess World, though other Princesses can use their Threads to tap into another Princess’s way of looking at things.

Apocalypse World, and many PbtA games, tend to be pretty loose on framing and pacing scenes; I’ve put a little more structure for that in Princess World, specifically using number of scenes to measure the difficulty or challenge of a situation; the more difficult a challenge is, the more scenes will be required to overcome or resolve it.  I’m hoping this will make pacing of the story and sharing spotlight time easier for newer players to grasp and use.

There’s no lists of equipment or gear in Princess World, basically, if it makes sense for a Princess to have access to something, the Weaver is encouraged to say “Yes!”, especially if it’s something the player can narratively unpack from one of their Truths!  Encouraging creativity and experimenting with ideas is strongly encouraged!

As a parent, being able to create a world for your kids to play in has got to be amazing. I can see some of this in the Truths, but what are the values and principles you’ve considered in design, and the emotional experiences, that you have made an effort to ensure come across in play?

Yes, it’s been amazing both from a design perspective and from a playing one.  Sebastian, my son, has already played Princess World; he created the first Dragon Princess and did an amazing job with her, creating a monstrous Princess who was both scary and kind!  Freya hasn’t played yet, but has done some basic role-playing with her cousins.  All seem to have really enjoyed it and I’m looking forward to more games with them.

One of the core experiences I wanted to have in Princess World was for the players to have to grapple with the question of “What is important to my character?”, with the subtext asking, “What is important to me?” Many moves and options revolve around choosing to help yourself, to help others, or to help the greater world around you and that, often, you won’t have enough to do all three at once so you’ll need to make hard choices.  I interviewed a lot of kids, aged 9-13, during the early development process and I wanted the game to reflect what that age group wanted in a game: that their characters had agency, that they could make important choices, and that their choices mattered; I’m really hoping that Princess World will provide that for players, both new and experienced.  So far, it seems to be working.

Three children of varying ages and genders playing with the playsheets and associated documents from Princess World on a floral carpet in a small room, drawing characters and filling in character sheets.
Heck yeah playing on the floor!

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Thanks so much to Kevin for the interview and to the Weaver Princess, Freya, for being such an inspiration! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Princess World on Kickstarter today!

Quick Shot on Campfire Memories

Hi all, today I have an interview with Matt Bohnhoff on Campfire Memories, which is currently on Kickstarter for Zine Quest 2! Check out the interesting responses from Matt below!

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What is Campfire Memories, both as a product and as your vision?

Campfire Memories is GM-less one-shot game about families going on a difficult camping trip and then looking back on the experiences fondly later. It’s going up on Kickstarter as a Zine Quest project from Feb 4 through 16. I want this game to be an accessible, light way for people to get talking. In addition to the camping problems in the fiction, it usually brings up real anecdotes from the player’s own trips, which is perfect! Interestingly, after talking with my editor, the safety tool we settled on is the Luxton Technique from your website!

An interior view of the Campfire Memories book with lovely cartoonish art and larger print.

My experiences camping as a kid always had a fair share of troubles to encounter! What sort of troubles do players in Campfire Memories encounter that make their time difficult?

The complications in Campfire Memories are best framed as man-vs-nature obstacles. These can take the form of broken gear, bad weather, animal encounters, or other things. The important part is that they pit the characters against their environment, not each other. Characters can, of course, get upset with each other but that becomes more of a sub-plot than the focus of the game. When a player has their turn setting a scene, it’s the job of the player to their left to come up with the complication.

The exterior of Campfire Memories with the cartoon illustrations of a family canoeing and the logo.

What do you do, mechanically or otherwise, to provide structure to the camping trip and story for the players and keep them engaged?

There are a couple mechanical widgets that keep players engaged in the game. Players all take turns setting scenes and creating complications. In my experience, most folks are super excited for the chance to do one of those. Also, characters are built with a goal, the kinds of experiences they want to have on their trip. This provides a lot of direction for players to push their characters in during camping scenes. The goal comes back into the play during the reflection phase, as the characters look back on their trip!

The Campfire Memories logo designed to look like a sign for a forest park, surrounded by trees and blue skies, with the tagline "familial bonding through recreational hardship."

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Thanks so much Matt for the interview! I hope all my readers enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check Campfire Memories out on Kickstarter for Zine Quest 2 today!

Quick Shot on Big Book of Amazing Tales

I’ve got another great quick interview with Martin Lloyd, this time about the Big Book of Amazing Tales, currently on Kickstarter! It sounds like a great game resource for kids to add to your Amazing Tales collection. Check out Martin’s responses below!

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Two kids sitting at a table with an adult with character sheets and dice in front of them. The one kid has their hand raised triumphantly.

What is the Big Book of Amazing Tales, both as a product and as your vision?

Some of the most fun I’ve had with Amazing Tales has been playing games with the kids while on holiday, that’s when we’ve played out campaigns, and the idea of the Big Book is to make it easy for other families to do the same.   So in the book I’m including four campaigns, one for each of the settings in the book. So you’ll get…

  • A Dream of Trees – for the Deep Dark Wood setting
  • The Quest for the Dragon Crown – for the Magical Kingdoms setting
  • Captain Cadava’s Treasure – for the Pirate Seas setting
  • The Cryptid Conundrum – for the Adventure among the Stars setting

The Big Book of Amazing Tales should be seen as a companion volume to Amazing Tales. Amazing Tales gives you all the tools you need to make up amazing adventures with your kid and get them started on role-playing. The Big Book of Amazing Tales is about providing you with some really great campaigns that can take things to the next level. 

Before I started writing I set myself some goals. One of them was to include elements in the games that would bring the games alive in the real world as well as the player’s imagination. So in the Quest for the Dragon Crown there is a crown for the players to cut out, colour in and put together when they find it. It doesn’t look like a conventional crown, but its form is a clue to what it really does so having it right there in the players’ hands is important. One of the other goals is to include ‘moments of awesome’ for the players, to make sure they have those moments where their characters get to do something amazing. You really will save the kingdom, slay the dragon, stop the alien invasion and so on. 

It’s also a chance for me to answer two of the questions I’ve been asked most frequently since launching Amazing Tales. Namely – ‘How do you use this game in a classroom?’, and ‘Can I use this game to help my kid with some kind of problem?’. Although to be honest I won’t be the one doing the answering. Baz Stevens, who is both a teacher and a game designer will be answering the first question, and Lilly Smith who is a child therapist will be answering the second.  

Dice lying on a character sheet with a character illustration.

As an ongoing product, how do you keep coming up for ideas for Amazing Tales, and keep them fresh?

It really helps that Amazing Tales doesn’t have a fixed setting. So I’m not stuck trying to come up with five different fantasy adventures, or a new twist on space pirates or whatever. If I’m writing a pirate adventure I can make it the most piratey pirate adventure imaginable, a kind of Pirates of the Carribean in RPG form, and try and cram it full of as many pirate ideas as I can. I don’t need to worry about having used all the good stuff and then having to write another pirate campaign next week. * Once a month I publish a set of story seeds in the Amazing Tales newsletter, and those are always a good chance to really interrogate an idea. I pick a simple concept like ‘Temples’ and then try and come up with a set of ideas that do something interesting with that idea – stretching it in different directions. It’s a good practice. 

And then there are the games I hear about people playing with their kids. Often there will be a couple of sentences on Facebook that sound brilliant, but that’s all there is. So it becomes a jumping off point for new ideas. Someone posted the other day about an adventure involving a lost circus in a forest. That’s about all I know, but it’s a great starting point. An adventure about a lost circus in a forest, it almost doesn’t matter what genre or system you’re playing – that’s a great place to start. 

What are some of your favorite things in the Big Book and what are they like for players?

I’m really looking forward to some of the special extras. So in the Cryptid Conundrum, where the heroes need to crack the alien codes, there’ll be a decoder ring for the players to cut out and make. Now a lot of kids will probably make something like that at some point while growing up, but how many of them will get to use it to rescue the victims of an alien kidnapping? In a similar way that bit of research about kids being better at identifying logos than trees really bothers me. So A Dream of Trees will definitely include puzzles that require learning about trees, leaves, nuts and the like. Hopefully that will be enough to make kids a bit more excited by being outdoors, because playing outside is almost as important as role-playing 🙂

* Thinking about it, this is probably one of the reasons the Pirates of the Carribean sequels ended up the way they did…

Two pirates dressed in fancy pirate regalia discovering treasure inside a seaside cave.

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Thank you so much Martin for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out the Big Book of Amazing Tales on Kickstarter today!

Quick Shot On The Quest for the Dragon Crown

Hi all! I’ve got a quick interview today with Martin Lloyd about The Quest for the Dragon Crown, a campaign for Amazing Tales! Check it out below.

Illustrations by Iris Maertens.

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A cobweb and spider filled library with a specter on a ladder reading a book.

What is The Quest for the Dragon Crown, both as a product and as your vision?  

The Quest for the Dragon Crown is a campaign for Amazing Tales, the RPG I wrote for kids aged four and up. Since Amazing Tales is a zero prep game I wasn’t initially sure it needed adventures, but a lot of people were asking so I thought I’d better write one.

I set out to write an adventure that would take people’s games to the next level. So The Quest for the Dragon Crown tries to put in place some of the things that you might not get in an improvised game. There’s a plot that carries on through five separate adventures, there are riddles and puzzles to solve – these are some of the hardest things to improvise.

I also wanted to give small players a big story. There’s a tendency in games for kids to make the player characters children and give them ‘child size’ challenges. That’s fine, but my experience of gaming with kids is that they want to be mighty heroes and do big stuff. So the Quest for the Dragon Crown plays into that – the heroes get to save a kingdom (two actually), fight dragons and consort with kings and queens. 

Finally, I wanted to bring some of the game into the real world. Amazing Tales is very much a ‘theatre of the mind’ experience, but I know lots of kids like to bring their toys into the game. Indeed there are even people who create games simply by going on a journey from one side of their toy strewn living room to the other, improvising encounters as they go. Anyway – I loved the idea of the game becoming physical at various stages. I couldn’t quite get my idea for a magic mirror to work (another time), but there is a cut out and color in dragon crown, a color in map of the kingdom, and a multi-part riddle that parents can cut out and prepare ahead of the game for their kids to solve.

Now I’ve done one I’m pretty sure there are going to be more – and I’ll try and stick to these principles as I write them.

A black mermaid queen floats on a shell throne in front of her castle underwater.

What are some of the unique challenges for designing for younger players that you have addressed with these new elements of the supplement like coloring and cut outs – how do those keep kids interested? It seems like an interesting design piece!

In fairness I think there are plenty of adult gamers who would like things to cut out and colour in too. There’s a DCC supplement that includes a maze for the players to solve and that always goes down well. 

The challenge in designing for kids comes from two directions. The first is in the need to keep things simple – kids want to know that they’re doing the right thing. They’re not going to keep track of some extended sandbox environment with a developing plot. So it’s important that every session has a clear start point, a clear end point and a sense of achievement in between. 

The next is the challenge of designing for kids of different ages. There’s a huge difference between a four year old and a ten year old in terms of how much complexity they can handle. For a four year old you’re likely to run a game that feels like Dora the Explorer. You’re given a mission. The mission is repeated at regular intervals. When you accomplish something it’s repeated back to you with a reminder of what’s coming next. That’s just how four year olds need things structured if they’re goint to stick with something.

Ten year olds will have much more agency, they’ll make plans and try to carry them out, and make efforts to anticipate the consequences of their actions.  Give them too much guidance and they’ll start to feel contrained.

A lot of how this gets dealt with is down to the GM. But it’s also important to make sure that there are NPCs around who can lead the characters to the right answer at each stage if needed. For players who want a bit more room Amazing Tales has a strong improvisatory element and the Quest for the Dragon Crown has plenty of moments where the heroes can go off and have a side adventure if they want to. The plot will still be there when they get back. 

I love the idea of riddles and puzzles, but they seem kinda…dicey. How do you design exciting and fun but still not too challenging riddles and puzzles?

I’m hoping I’ve got this right. The main puzzle was finalised after playtesting so we’ll see.  Again  the insurance policy is having NPCs around who can guide the players through the puzzles if they need help. In this sense it’s not too different for a parent than helping their child think their way through other puzzles they might come across outside the game. The big puzzle is also designed to take place inbetween sessions. One session wraps up with the heroes acquiring everything they need to solve it, with the next starting once they’ve cracked it, so there’s no risk of the game grinding to a halt if they get stuck.

I’ve got loads of ideas for future games though. There are loads of parenting websites packed with activities kids can do that can easily be incorporated into games. Lots of craft activities or basic science experiments that could be turned into magic. My daughter was learning about ciphers and codes at school , something that will definitely feature in future supplements. You can also just think about things kids might not have encountered before. One of the first puzzles I set my kids in a game just required them to be able to read grid coordinates. But since they’d never come across them before it seemed to make no sense. So they enlisted the help of an outside expert (Grandad) and five minutes later they had the answer and were feeling very proud of themselves.

A dragon bearing down on a knight dressed in a hood, with a castle in the background and the text Amazing Tales and The Quest for the Dragon Crown in large white font.

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Thank you so much to Martin for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out The Quest for the Dragon Crown today!

Five or So Questions on Sleepaway

Hi y’all, I have an interview with Jay Dragon about Sleepaway, which is currently up on Kickstarter! Jay had some really interesting things to say about Sleepaway. I hope you enjoy the responses below!

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The Sleepaway book cover with a person in a yellow raincoat who has a red tree growing out of their chest and wolves running towards the red blooe on their white tee shirt. One of their eyes is wide open and they have thumbpins in a circle around them, while a forest is in the background. The text "Sleepaway" is in white outlined text.

Tell me about Sleepaway. What excites you about it?

Sleepaway is a Belonging Outside Belonging game about a group of summer camp counselors protecting their children from a nightmarish monster. It is born from both my complex and intense relationship with the summer camp I work at, and my own thoughts and reflections on my childhood. It’s secretly a very autobiographical work, with themes ranging from my own friendships to important places from my teenage years to certain experiences I’ve had with my mental illnesses. I’m also really excited about the design space – it manages to merge the collaborative GM role of Belonging Outside Belonging games with a bizarre structure that resembles a “ghost GM” (as I’ve facetiously referred to it to friends). Horror is a genre with a narrative arc, and building an arc and a “Legacy Games” -esque framework into Belonging Outside Belonging becomes a really fascinating intersection of design space.

A person in a lace and floral top in a car, wearing a floral crown.
Jay Dragon.

That sounds really cool! I remember summer camps being the height of complex emotions as a kid. How do you approach the emotions and excitement of those environments with care?

I think that care and compassion are the most important part of Sleepaway to me. An early and immediate concern is making sure that the campers have narrative weight and independence, that they’re not just extensions of the staff’s emotional journeys. I think it’s really important that the campers get to have their own life paths, and that as a counselor in the game you can support their endeavors but you’re not in a position to fix them and you can’t protect them from everything.

Being a queer summer camp counselor is so complicated because you see kids going through things you’ve been through yourself, and no matter how much you want to help them, you know they’re on a journey of self-discovery that they need to engage in on their own. The game has ways for the kids to go off and engage with each other without the players interacting, and ways to put down the counselor characters and play out the campers interacting in an abstracted, ritualized way.

A campfire scene in sepia and black with kids all around a campfire deep in the woods.

What are the mechanics like in Sleepaway? How do players engage with the fiction?

The beating heart of Sleepaway is the Belonging Outside Belonging system by Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum. Players pick up and pass around setting elements that represent locations and forces within the setting, while building a web of interpersonal relationships. Periodically, players end up invoking the Lindworm, which results in a moment of tension as everyone closes their eyes and a card is picked from a deck, causing horrific events to happen. My favorite mechanical moment in Sleepaway is the Lindworm – there’s a purposeful decision that players never have the chance to roleplay as the Lindworm, and the Lindworm is treated as an outside entity outside the game itself.

As you play the game, you can also end up developing a corkboard of motifs, characters, items, and locations that are tethered together, which at the end of a campaign you unravel in order to defeat the Lindworm. It, along with Rituals (moments when you put the traditional structure of the rules aside to enter into a new fictive space that abstracts a moment of play that wouldn’t normally get space to show up) really show my camp LARP origins! I think bodies are always implicated in all games, and I really love the way a tabletop game can challenge and shift the way that engagement can occur.

A rocky cliffside with trees on the top by a body of water.

The Belonging Outside Belonging system is really intriguing. How does it suit Sleepaway in regards to player interaction? What types of design choices did you have to make with the system to make it suit your vision?

I’ve rapidly fallen in love with Belonging Outside Belonging since I started working within it. It’s one of those systems that can transform game design into poetry, just through it’s invitation to play. The move “Ask: Why won’t your character just fuck off?” is both one of my favorite ones to use in play and also one of my favorites to be asked! Belonging Outside Belonging allows for a game that integrates less on the characters and more on their relationships with one another and the land.

I wanted the game to reflect my own experiences roleplaying at The Wayfinder Experience (my LARP Summer Camp) while growing up. This meant the game is really rooted in developing a complex relationship to the land. At The Wayfinder Experience, we always thank the land before engaging in play, and I’ve always missed that sensibility in regards to tabletop. Belonging Outside Belonging games allows me to build a game where the players are all collaboratively representing a world that is just as much a living breathing identity as any individual player, and can in some ways exist outside the players as a sense beyond us.

A mockup of the Sleepaway text with a campfire scene in sepia and black with kids all around a campfire deep in the woods. The text Sleepaway is in white.

What is the Lindworm, and how does it work? How does it interact with the fiction?

The Lindworm is the monster of the summer camp, the thing that hangs in the background of everything. It represents cycles of trauma, abusive people, and the ways in which the outside world can hurt us beyond our control. The Lindworm isn’t a character in the game, nor is it a setting element or anything else that any one player is responsible. The closest you get is that one player secretly channels the Lindworm during the session, but they are never referred to as actually roleplaying as the monster. There’s some things that shouldn’t be roleplayed as or sympathized with.

At the start of each session, both to set the tone and protect the space, you invite the Lindworm to play. I wanted the sense that the Lindworm was an actual creature that hovers over the game itself, but also by inviting it you’re able to ensure the safety of the space, because it’s not actually there. Over the course of the game, the Lindworm’s channeler makes secret decisions for it, playing cards from a deck to determine how everyone (themself included) are in danger.

The Lindworm acts callously, infallibly, and unrelatably – it will casually murder important characters and destroy everything the players have built. The horror of the Lindworm comes from knowing that its actions can happen to anyone, but due to the way Belonging Outside Belonging works as a system, the Lindworm is always invited to act upon the group, and the group as a whole interprets the Lindworm. As a collaborative horror game, the fear comes from a collective desire to be afraid and to build horror together, inviting the Lindworm like a tabletop version of Bloody Mary to play with before putting it back where it began.

A corkboard with tons of playing cards, index cards, and notes on it with string tying the thumbtacks together.

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Awesome! Thank you so much Jay for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Sleepaway on Kickstarter today!

Five or So Questions on Dinosaur Princesses

Hi there! I have a new interview today with Dana Cameron and Hamish Cameron on Dinosaur Princesses, which is a fantastic new game on Kickstarter! Please check out their answers below on this nifty project!

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A t-rex and smaller dinosaur storm through the jungle in doctor outfits while avoiding banana peels. Text "Dinosaur Princesses"

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.

A character sheet with a hand-drawn winged dinosaur with great eyelashes on it.

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.

a whole collection of character sheets with drawings and a map in the center of a table

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.

dinosaurs of all different types and shapes all dressed up in different outfits including a chef, a doctor, and one holding a boombox while wearing a monocle, and the text Dinosaur Princesses.

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Awesome! Thanks Dana and Hamish for the interview! I hope everybody enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Dinosaur Princesses on Kickstarter today!

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Five or So Questions on Rodent Rangers

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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A mouse in a glasses, a sweater vest, and a button down with dark pants and a red messenger bag, holding an armful of papers and running off to chase after some that have blown away

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.

A mouse with piercings and a choker in casual clothes and a backpack with their foot resting on a compass
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. 

A mouse in a green shirt and brown pants holding a notepad and pencil.

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Thanks so much Jacob and Joseph for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading and that you’ll check out Rodent Rangers on Kickstarter today!

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Quick Shot on The Forest Hymn & Picnic

Hey all, got a little piece with Cecil Howe on The Forest Hymn & Picnic, which is currently on Kickstarter! Check out Cecil’s responses to my questions below.

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A tree with a pumpkin-headed friend floating nearby, plus the text The Forest Hymn & Picnic

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.

A bear in a blue plaid shirt and green cap going fishing, smoking a pipe
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.

a floating pumpkin headed friend holding a bouquet of flowers and a book labeled "Die-ary"
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.

Thanks for reading! Love,
Cecil

The text The Forest Hymn & Picnic and an image of the book with black cover, then a stork carrying a bundle and some trees.
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I don’t normally include signoffs, but Cecil’s was part of the answers given, and I liked it. 🙂 Thanks to Cecil for a great interview! I hope you’ll all check out The Forest Hymn and Picnic on Kickstarter today!

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Five or So Questions on Power Outage

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Bebarce El-Tayib on Power Outage, a superhero game for kids that’s currently on Kickstarter! Bebarce has given some excellent answers to my questions, so please check it out below!

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The words "Power Outage: Be a Hero" in yellow and purple. The O's in Power Outage are lightbulbs, one of which is broken. In the P, the hollow space is a lightning bolt.
This is a logo that was announced post-launch!

Tell me a little about Power Outage v 1.4. What excites you about it?

Power Outage 1.4 is a large leap in a series I’ve been developing for the past 4 years. It’s a Super Hero themed tabletop roleplaying game designed to be played by kids and GMed by adults. This would be the first attempt at making the book something I’m comfortable with being available in Print.

It’s exciting to me for a ton of reasons aside from the fact that it’s probably the largest and longest running creative endeavor that I’ve ever taken on. But I would have to say that the biggest excitement comes from the scope of change between 1.3 to 1.4. It’s a monumental shift. There is a completely revised mechanic system, much greater resources for crafting your own adventures, and the biggest thing of all is the expansion of guidance to not only include differentiation, but also a focus on creating more accessible gaming tables. Plus its just the inherent potential of creating something that introduces a new generation to a hobby that I and many others love.

Two character sheets, one more complicated design (labeled before) and one refined visually on the left (labeled after).
An example of the result of the Kickstarter funding on the character sheet.

When making games for kids, your point about a accessibility is super important. How do are you designing and developing Power Outage to be accessible, and why does it matter to you?

My work in Public Education as a technologist has me dealing with data often. Part of that involves creating considerations for Special Education, and managing Special Education Data. So when it comes to creating accomodations I realize the monumental task in front of me. As soon as I started I realized there was no end, so I’m tackling it from two fronts. In the book I have a section dedicated to Accessibility guidance. I broke the sections into 5 specific domains outside of general guidance. Physical, Communicative / Receptive, Behavioral, Cognitive, and Emotional. What I’m essentially doing is tackling the topic from a symptomatic approach, rather than a cause approach. Tthat limits me to an extent from the specificity inherent with conditions, but allows for the broadest spectrum of guidance. I have 2 directors of special education I’ve worked with helping to ensure that the information I’m providing is safe, sound, and that the terminology is effective.

Seperate from that I created a wiki called www.accessible-rpg.com It is currently under developed, and tailored primarily to children, but eventually I’d like it to become a free resource to people developing games or running tables, to create a more accessible gaming table. It’s a larger goal than Power Outage itself, and its only going to be successful with community involvement. That’s why it’s built in the wiki format. It has to be populated with information from the people who are directly effected. It has to be live, and continually changing. I plan on jumping right back into it once I’m done with the kickstarter, and pulling in as much guidance as I can get.

As to why it’s important to me, I could try to relate to work, or family members, or some forms of tangible relationships to be people I know that have disabilities, but in all honesty, it is something that we should ALL be working toward. Roleplaying games allow all of us to not only break free of the limitations we find in our every day lives, but express our real selves through our avatars. We bring our strengths and our perceived weaknesses and allow them to shape a world we actively create. The absolute NEED to make that process available to everyone is imperative. We need to be accessible. We need to be inclusive. We need to bring everyone to the table, and if we can’t, then we need to drag that table over to them.

A muscular character in a cropped jacket with a toaster for a head, a carafe as a gun, and a waffle press hammer labeled "BREAK FAST"

What are the mechanics like in Power Outage? How do you encounter and overcome challenges?

So we’re working with kids. That takes “expectations” and throws them into the waste bin. So the idea behind Power Outage’s mechanics is in compartmentalizing game play so that kids can be playing their own individualized game while still contributing to the greater narrative. It’s taking the concept of differentiation from the classroom and applying it the gaming sphere.

What it boils down to is the idea that the game is more a guide then a hard set dogmatic codex that must be followed. GMs provided guidance to players based off of their capabilities, and to do this effectively, the mechanics have been made so that it’s easily accessible to everyone involved.

Characters have 4 attributes. IMPACT – which effects basic human characteristics POWER – which effects their super heroic capabilities OHMER – which is the stat that IMPACT and POWER compare againsts and YP – Yield Points – which is the point pool that Heroes have before deciding them must Yield or regroup. There is no death in Power Outage.

The 4 attributes covers a lot of types of conditions, but is a reduced amount of record keeping so that not only are kids able to focus more on roleplay and story elements, but so that GMs can more easily manage groups of kids who for instance may not be able to read yet, or add large sums.

In order to allow creative freedom for kids to make the heroes they want, Power tables are provided with effects are provided and grouped to Combat, Support, and Utlity. Kids work with the GM to determine what their heroes can do, and the GM helps match the power to an effect on the table. So if you’re doing 1d4 damage from up to 20 spaces away, it doesn’t matter if that effect comes from a flame torch, or a snow ball, or lightning bolt or psychic shock. In short, Power Outage provides the effect, and the hero provides the flavor.

One last thing I’ll mention is the CAPE system (Combat, Alternative, Puzzle, and Exploration) It’s a way to compartmentalize adventures so that you can cherry pick what you want for your play sessions. In the prewritten adventures (to be released, although one is included with the core book) it becomes a choose your own adventure mechanic. Do you prefer to not have violence in your session, Alternative Components match up to every Combat Component. Are puzzles too difficult? Move around them directly to exploration. It allows GMs to build adventures that pertain to the needs of their group.

All of this comes from the game kids want to play, rather than the game kids are forced to play. And it happens at all levels. From something as simple as the character sheets “Character image” section being enlarged because kids want more room to drawing their characters, to color/symbol coding Attributes so that a GM can easily say “Tell me the red number” or “Tell me the number with the boot symbol”

letters and symbols in primary colors: C with a fist in red, A with a shield in green, P with a puzzle piece in yellow, and E with a magnifying glass in blue.

The five regions for playing in sound really fun! What are they like to play in? What exciting elements do they have in store?

So not only are the 5 regions different stylistic settings, the settings themselves allow for potentially uniquely suited playstyles as well.

The Atomnyy Zavod is a always night gothic soviet atomic punk city. It’s gritty, and confusing, and the some of the starker elements are only highlighted by the oddity of it’s semi-futuristic elements. You’ll see old-timey vehicles driving under nuclear battery powered street green glowing street lights. But this is the perfect setting for gritty noir mysteries. You’ll use Exploration and Puzzle solving components just as often if not more often then Combat/Alternative.

Shorai City is it’s opposite in many ways, with it’s soaring Neo-Japanese inspired towers, flying cars, and robotic servants. This city has become a gathering point for many big heroes and villains, and often becomes the setting for large confrontations. This setting is great for large Beat Em Up style baddies that hearken back to the Golden Era comic days. Villains include Mrs. Roboto and The Tempuritan.

The Overgrowth is by far the most expansive region of Outage. The product of Outages once barren but strange landscape, had tests done on it in the early stages of American involvement causing the worlds largest forrest to grow. That forrest however was both invasive, aggressive, and sentient. Still outpost seem to coexist within the Overgrowth. A musical troll city, a city of Outcast Powers (the name for people with Powers in Outage), and a School for Sandwich Magic are just a few examples of what is discovered, but certainly more mysteries lie within under the canopy. This setting is great for all sorts of Campy Adventures or Mythical Fantasy type games. One area might hold dragons, and the other might hold dinosaurs. Ancient civilizations come to light or scientific outposts. Villains include Treestache and Swagneto.

The sink is a geological anomoly. It is a peninsula on the south eastern coast of Outage. One end appears to be sinking steadily in the ocean while the other side of it emerges from the ground far inland, seemingly with intact ancient structures. At it’s tip, the sink features a floating shanty city of disreputable individuals known as The Scum. Under the ocean as the sink delves further into it’s depths lie ancient cities under the water, sealed off from the ocean that surrounds it (for now). This is a great city for acting a bit rebellious enjoying some not so squeaky mission, confronting morale dilemmas, or just outright exploration. Whether you’re in the muddy bayou, exploring submerged catacombs or getting into naval battles with or against pirates, it’s usually a nonstop adventure. Villains of note include The Boat Rocker and InstaGator.

Finally, Seward’s Refuge is central to the island continent. It is an American run scientific and military facility, that serves often as a waystation between regions, a central government, a barrier to the Overgrowth, and it’s Space Elevator even provides access to the stars. This region is great for multi-region adventures, political intrigue, science gone wrong, or incursion/spy missions. Villains of note include Agent Orangutan and General Specific.

Each region has areas that aren’t directly drawn out leaving exploration up to the imagination and creation of the GM. There is also a section in the book detailing potential other locations including Dimensional and Temporal options. It’s a huge sandbox that kids and adults can play in. You can build just about any game you want to in the world.

A character with short hair, goggles, and augmented clothing - armor with radar antennae, a claw hand, and braces at the knees.

With all of the efforts that you have put in, do you have any hopes moving forward for Power Outage and even other games to become more accessible for kids?

Yes, I think you’ll see a lot more of this cropping up. There is a positive shift in the culture of gaming that not only lends to more voices being heard, but a general awareness of the roles we play in inclusiveness, accessibility, and security. A lot of people grew up with these games, and are looking to share it with their kids. In he end, getting families around the table and talking and gaming with each other was the seed that my game grew out of. And as we learn more and more how games effect the ability to understand and retain knowledge, to become flexible and willing to learn new things. It’s becoming an imperative.

The Power Outage cover including an imposing image of a toaster-headed being in the background next to turrets, with a knight-styled character with a cape in the front holding a horse staff, next to a person in crash-test dummy styled costume.
What a nifty cover!

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Thank you so much to Bebarce for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Power Outage on Kickstarter today!

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

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

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