monsters – Thoughty

Five or So Questions on Brinkwood

Today I have an interview with Erik Bernhardt about the game Brinkwood: The Blood of Tyrants, on Kickstarter perfectly in time for the spooky season. It’s also the first example of castylpunk on Thoughty – if you’re curious what that means, read on!

Content warnings for images: blood, gory imagery

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Tell me a little about Brinkwood: Blood of Tyrants. What excites you about it?

Brinkwood is a Forged in the Dark game, a system I love working in. This is my second attempt at putting a hack of Blades together, and I’m excited to be working as part of a team now, as so many good ideas flow into the project from our consultants, playtesters, and others involved in the project.

The four-word pitch is “Robin Hood versus Vampires”, which I think, if that grabs your attention, this is a game you’ll be interested in. What excites me about it is the chance to build a game that has a lot of depth and longevity to it’s campaign level, without a lot of the baggage and book-keeping that typically goes into this sort of game. We’re putting a lot of work in to make it so that you have an evolving experience, starting from just a few bandits out in the woods, slowly building allies and relationships with other factions, many of whom who have been working at this a lot longer than you have, and slowly turning from a band, to a coalition, to a movement, to finally a true revolutionary force.

I’m probably most excited to bring in some of the real-world experience I’ve had in leftist organizing. In a lot of games or media about rebellion and revolution, the focus is on heroic individuals, rather than groups and movements. I think both narratives are valuable, and I wanted to include both in this game. In many ways, this game is about taking different groups who all share the same ideological goals, but differ in the details of how to accomplish said goals, which mirrors my experiences from 2016 onward. This isn’t a game where you try to get deeply opposed groups to work together, it’s about the smaller frictions of approach between groups that are incredibly committed to the same goals, and negotiating those competing approaches to try and build a successful rebellion.

An illustration of a regal white-haired woman in a white fancy dress with a golden crown. She is crying tears of blood and her lips, cheeks, chin, neck, and dress are stained with blood. — Art by Mohammed Saad.

Tell me more about integrating your organizing experience into the game. How does this come forth in play?

For my organizing experience, I think it comes out in play in two main ways, one subtle, and one not-so-subtle. On the subtle side, I think the interplay of the various campaign-level systems, be it your allied factions, their strength feeding into your strength, the sedition mechanics, and even the actions the GM takes as the “Vampire Lord” create a sort of test-kitchen effect, where players are put into the mind-space of organizers and revolutionaries. One of my favorite examples came in a recent game, where my players asked themselves first, not what they thought a community needed, but what they could do to find out what a community actually needed. I saw this problem crop up a lot in my organizing experience, with groups coming in with their own agenda, imposing solutions to what they thought were a community’s problems, without actually consulting said community. It was thrilling to see this very issue emerge organically, and for the pressures of the game system to guide my players to (what I believe to be) the correct choice for any organization: Ask people what they need first, don’t assume you know better, and then work with the community itself to provide mutual aid.

On the not-so-subtle side, we have the Conclave, a system whereby every few sessions, depending on the player’s actions, they will meet with the stakeholders in their rebellion. I was inspired in my own experience of meetings between different faction representatives (called “spokes”, both in anarchist organizing and in Brinkwood) to determine what goals to prioritize, what resources to allocate, etc. It’s a messy process in real life, and so far, when played out, it’s messy and dramatic in-game. To me, the most interesting conflicts are between people who both have the same goals and ideas, but differ only in their approach. It’s interesting for players to be in a space where they have to stake an opinion on the world, and actively make decisions about who-gets-what that actually impact the game’s world and their own relationships with one another and their NPC allies.

An illustration of a masked figure in a long sweeping cloak and practical clothing, carrying a bow and arrows. The mask has dramatic antlers, and the figure is traversing a tangled wood. — Art by Olivia Rea.

How are you building hope and the possibility of success into the game when mechanically Forged in the Dark mechanically can trend a little bleak?

We’ve done a lot of under-the-hood work on the Blades system to try and make things more hopeful and less bleak. The slow grind of vice, stress, and trauma tends to “wear down” PCs in Blades, and I’ve read a lot of reviews and analyses (some critical, some positive) of both Blades and, in some ways, Brinkwood‘s closer antecedent, Band of Blades. On the first level, I’ve changed how the stress grind works. For every resistance roll (Blades’s main mechanic for players to resist, or “cancel out” negative consequences), I’ve changed the math so that the range of stress goes from one to three, rather than from zero to six on a single roll. This means that most every action now carries a price, albeit a smaller, slower burn-down that, in my opinion, allows the players better control of how quickly their characters get into trouble.

Similarly, I’ve “split” the typical Blades sheet into two pieces, with the player character on one sheet, and the special abilities / archetype information on a separate “Mask” sheet. Players are free to choose between these masks on each Foray, and this allow players to be more flexible than they would in other systems (ie, play the mask of Violence if their character needs to be able to defend themselves, or play the mask of Lies if they need to deceive or socially manipulate their enemies). I’ve also “split” the stress track between Stress and Essence, so that players have access to more resources overall, but still have the tension of two slowly burning resources.

Lastly, in the reference documents we’ve prepared for players, we’ve put a lot of emphasis on giving the players all the tools they need to succeed, with advice on how to boost their rolls, their effectiveness, or what to spend and what to do. I think Blades can be an intimidating game to learn in some ways, and if you don’t have access to all the knowledge the game demands, it can become a lot more deadly or stressful than intended. We also state explicitly in our GM advice is that the GM is a co-conspirator and a player, and should remain on the PC’s side, giving advice on how to use the rules, how to spend resources, or how to navigate other more complicated aspects of the game to ensure the PCs know all of their options in a given situation. It amazes me how much less “aggressive” and more fun Blades becomes when you remember to do simple things like offer Devil’s Bargains, or remind players that they can resist any consequence you throw at them.

An illustrated bust of a long haired vampire with a goatee and red eyes wearing a very high-collared red cloak over a smaller high-collared top. — Art by Mohammed Saad.

What is the world like that the characters exist in and that they’re encountering challenges in?

Brinkwood takes place in a castylpunk world, meaning it’s aesthetic is very much in line with stuff like Castlevania or similar properties, but with a punk intention brought to bear on it. So it’s medieval / gothic-esque, with lots of castles, gothic architecture, gloomy cities, sprawling manors, small villages, etc, but also alongside things like primitive firearms, smoke-belching factories, flesh-steamwork amalgamations, and other more anachronistic monstrosities and details. By saying this is a “punk” game, we mean that you aren’t here to admire the scenery or sympathize with oppressors, you are here to tear down systems of control and oppression, not to replicate or replace them.

An illustration of an arrow-ridden corpse laid over a stone block with "The Blood of Tyrants" written in blood on the wall behind it. — Art by Olivia Rea.

What inspired the choice to split the character sheet into two parts, and what are some of the benefits that come with that design choice?

The inspiration came from a common problem I saw in some campaigns of Blades, as well as other games I ran. I found that often times, people would lose interest in the mechanical side of a character long before the character’s “story” had completed. By separating most of the mechanics out to a separate sheet, it allows people the freedom to “try out” different mechanical archetypes, and not shackle their character’s story development as closely to their mechanical development. Likewise, it allows interesting groups of characters to play together, without necessarily worrying that they’re “missing” a key archetype or ability.

Playgroups are free to experiment, try different types of Forays, and not feel pigeonholed into doing the same sort of thing over and over again. In a narrative sense, it helps contribute to the theme of “commonplace heroism,” your character isn’t exceptional by virtue of some in-born talent or ability, but by their willingness to take up the mantle of responsibility and take action.

A Brinkwood: The Blood of Tyrants promotion with preview of the book, a link to www.brinkwood.net, and a brief description before a call to action to "Join the Rebellion!"

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Thanks so much Erik for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Brinkwood: The Blood of Tyrants on Kickstarter today!

Monster Care Squad with Sandy Pug Games

Hey y’all, today I have an interview with Liam Ginty at Sandy Pug Games about the Ghibli-inspired Monster Care Squad, a tabletop adventure of healing Monsters and solving local problems in the gentle, unique world of Ald-Amura! Check out the responses below.

All art by Leafie.

CW for animal harm in the illustrations, it’s tastefully done (and not done by the Monster Care Squad), and done to demonstrate the nature of the Monster Care Squad in the game.

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Thanks for agreeing to the interview! It’s exciting to see you on a new project, but for those new to your work, how did you come into games and design?

Of course! Always love to chat with y’all. I’ve been making games for about 6 or 7 years now in some shape or form – I started out making print and play board games and trying to sell them at conventions and such. That didn’t quite work out, and so I pivoted to making TTRPGs, primarily supplements for games like Fate or Apocalypse World. About 2 years ago me and a friend had a sort of funny idea for a game called Orc Stabr, this one page game where you played as a gang of orcs hunting a wild and powerful Beast. The campaign had a $20 goal and raised 17,500% of that by the end, which I think might be a KS record? Anyway, that success kinda allowed me to build Sandy Pug Games to what it is today – still very small, but big enough that I can pull a lot of people into bigger and more complicated projects.

THE SandyPug dog inspired by Pumba, the real dog, chasing a bone on a string. — *THE SandyPug dog inspired by Pumba, the real dog.*

What have you learned in previous projects that you think you’re bringing forward to Monster Care Squad?

Definitely the no.1 thing is my experience with crowdfunders and co-op working. The Roleplayer’s Guide To Heists was a project we ran last year with the San Jenaro Co-Op that was kind of the first experiment into co-op based games development, and it was such a huge success that it’s laid the foundations for everything I’ll be doing moving forward. Making games is just so much more fun when you’re doing it with a crowd of great people, and there’s really nothing like having a discord full of talented and creative artists all building something together. It’s a real joy.

Adventurers in the foregound wander a path towards a mysterious object with an eye towards the sky. — Adventurers adventuring!

Tell me a little about Monster Care Squad. What excites you about it?

It has to be designing a game that allows for those big epic showdowns you have at the end of a session, but without the violence and blood that usually comes with that. The game is designed so that every session should build up to this glorious crescendo where you face down against this wounded, massive Monster, and make it better again. The kind of storytelling you can do within that structure just makes me so excited to see what people come up with. There’s also the artwork, I think basically everybody is thinking the same thing, right? Leafie, our illustrator, is just a wizard, she’s unstoppable. I can’t wait to see what she does with the world.

A massive furry creature with antlers, bat-like antlers, and bird-claw like feet is crying out in pain as it has been impaled by red spears or branches and it is bleeding gold. The Monster Care Squad has arrived to help! — The Monster Care Squad has arrived to help this Monster in need!

Considering tabletop RPG history, what brought you to the choice of focusing on caring for monsters?

Well, I think you hit the nail on the head right there. Games are always about killin’ stuff! I’m not judging that, particularly. I think action, combat, violence, all of these are tools and narratively powerful ones that work as effective shorthand for other, deeper, conflicts, and TTRPGs can do a great job at letting you tell those stories, but an oversaturation of those stories does kinda make the scene a little bland, at least in my opinion. Healing specifically was looked at cause when you get down to it, there’s very little mechanical difference between dealing damage and healing, the numbers are just flipped! It gets a lil more complicated than that when you expand the philosophy past the pure numbers, but once that clicked for me, Healing as the players’ main verb suddenly blossomed into all these possibilities.

An illustration like a bestiary entry of a massive furry creature with antlers, bat-like antlers, and bird-claw like feet. A smaller head shot of the creature is included with a halo and a smile. It's labeled a Bauvur and has a very small description that reads "A peaceful mountain spirit who gently tends to the flora and fauna of the snowy mountains of the Tinar mountain range. His shiny white coat allows him to become invisible around snow which enables the monster to escape dangerous situations unnoticed." — This creature as a Bauvur. The description reads, “A peaceful mountain spirit who gently tends to the flora and fauna of the snowy mountains of the Tinar mountain range. His shiny white coat allows him to become invisible around snow which enables the monster to escape dangerous situations unnoticed.”

What sort of monsters will players see in the game, and what challenges do they face upon encountering them?

Ald-Amura is a big place, and we say Monsters can really be anything – some of them are massive, city-sized behemoths that blot out the sun with gargantuan wings made of the wind and the clouds themselves. Some are like little fairies, barely visible unless you know where to look. Variety is the real key to a game like this, where every session revolves around building up a Monster and its capabilities and its needs, so we’re casting a pretty wide net. I’m sure a lot of people can see some of our obvious influences – Shadow of the Colossus, Monster Hunter, Studio Ghibli – but some of our writers are also calling from legends and myths from their own cultures, and I’ve been such a big fan of strange monsters in media and history, we have a kind of bottomless well to work with.

First and foremost we want every Monster to be beautiful, powerful, and awe-inspiring. From the smallest to the largest, from the wisest to the wildest, each of these beings should immediately scream “Important, Precious, Ancient”. We want you to wonder what this Monster can do, what it has seen, what it would be like to live alongside it for generations. We also kinda want you to fall in love with them and wanna heal them, so cute is often a word we throw in the pot. Leafie also has her own instincts when it comes to creating Monsters that I think I’d struggle to put into words, but I think anyone who sees the art knows what I mean. They all have a certain Leafie-ness that I think makes the world super unique.

A wyvern moving around and shooting a small burst of flame.

I know you always have something more up your sleeve. What’s this I hear about a grant for other creatives? Tell me all about it!

Yes! The Ald-Amura Historical Society Grant is a big, big deal for us at SPG. The 101 is that we’ve put aside a percent of our KS funds to a grant we’re awarding people looking to make fan works, or hacks, or art that’s inspired by Monster Care Squad (yes, you don’t even have to set your work *in* Ald-Amura). We have a label for these works (“Legends Of Ald-Amura”) and an official looking stamp plus some art asset sharing, but there’s no requirement to use those if you don’t want to. You can sell your creation, share it, or keep it private. People can request up to $300 for their project, no (or, well, very few anyway) strings attached. It’s maybe one of the most exciting things we’ve ever gotten to do at SPG.

When we announced Monster Care Squad, I’d say a half dozen people DM’d me asking me for details, asking if they could work on the game, asking if they could make fan games or telling me about similar projects they have that they were thinking of porting to the setting. It was kind of overwhelming! This is the first time anyone has responded to a project SPG has done like this, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that community is all we have these days, and fostering that community is never a mistake. I wanted to give back a little of the endless support I’ve gotten from the TTRPG industry (and the wider art world in general), and anyone that knows me, knows how important I feel financial support is to a community.

Thus, the grant was born. I guess you could see it as a reaction to things like the DMsGuild taking 50% of creatives’ money from them – that just seems backwards to me. There needs to be a more equitable paradigm between publishers and people making content for their worlds and settings, and this seems like one small thing we can do to try and shift that balance. It’s an experiment, turning the theory and discussions the community have been having for a while now into praxis.

Two massive giant steam rays and one small baby skate excitedly over the water while a small (in comparison) Monster Care Squad member rides on top of the largest. — That looks fun!

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Thanks so much, Liam, for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll make sure to check Monster Care Squad out in its last few days on Kickstarter. It’s doing well, but every dollar makes the product do more and be more, so don’t hesitate to back!

Dissident Whispers with Jeremy Childrey

I’m lucky enough to have today’s interview with Jeremy Childrey about Dissident Whispers, an anthology collection of 58 two-page adventures by diverse, international creators supporting the National Bail Fund Network.

Note: Today seems pretty packed with pics because this particular style of design and art appeals to me a lot, so please excuse this indulgence.

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Tell me a little about yourself and your work. What’s your background like and how has it led you to Dissident Whispers?

My name is Jeremy and I did the layout for ‘Hopebringer’ and ‘Rhemati’s Spring’ for DW. I’ve been tabletop gaming for around 6-7 years and creating stuff for around 3 years. I am a Warden (moderator) on the Mothership discord and active in a few others. One day “Silver Goat” posted up a request seeking volunteers for a BLM project, as a mixed race man (black and white if it matters) who lives in a rural area I had been struggling to find my place in the protests, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to get involved.

The interior of Dissident Whispers, on the pages for Hopebringer, showing a diagram of an arena.

What other projects have you worked on that you’ve brought forward knowledge to working on Dissident Whispers?

I have been working on writing and laying out a Mothership Hack called Gordinaak for way to long, and recently released a very dumb nega tower called ‘Why is there a Wizards Tower in this Dump?’ on Itch with my writing partner.

Tell me about Dissident Whispers. What kicked off such a project concept and how did it come together? What’s the pitch?

Dissident Whispers is a collaborative compilation of adventures for various systems. For me, it all started when I saw a message on Exalted Funeral’s Discord looking for volunteers to do various pieces for a project. As we were talking about logistics the projects founder, Silver Goat, mentioned posting on the Mothership Discord. It just so happened that I warden there (moderate) so I reached out to Sean Mccoy about it and then it just kinda took off. As far as a pitch goes I’m pretty terrible at that so I guess it’s a book with a bunch of dungeons and adventures so anyone who plays games needs it.

The interior of Dissident Whispers showing the Mirstone Manor adventure - on one page, a detailed map, and on the other, an unusual pink creature. — The interior of Dissident Whispers showing the Mirstone Manor adventure – on one page, a detailed map, and on the other, an unusual pink creature.

How is planning the content of such a project impacted by the increased focus on inclusivity and a specific message?

I think for everyone involved it was different, some people made things that were topical while others did stuff that was standard adventure fare. For instance one of the adventure’s I did layout for, Hopebringer, was very stick it to the man and defeat the oppressors.

What are some examples of the adventures in Dissident Whispers that players will have to dig into?

There are soooooo many, I did the layout for Hopebringer, and Rhemati’s Spring, both very different, both system agnostic. There are some really interesting ones for Mork Borg, and I actually played one for Mothership called Ghost Ship, on the night we finished everything, which was amazing.

The interior of Dissident Whispers, focusing on the College of Acoustic Ministration, showing alien creatures and men with lobster hands.

What were some of the best parts of working on this project and putting together the collection for players to experience?

My favorite part was probably watching a flood of talented people get involved, one day it was a few people then the next the discord exploded. It was just amazing watching everything develop and how cohesive everyone was moving as a unit. I’m still in awe of what was accomplished.

The interior of Dissident Whispers showing the Snake Temple Abduction adventure, with a beautiful illustration on the right page in blue and white and a simple but useful map in blue and white on the left, along with the guiding text.

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Thank you so much to Jeremy for the interview (and the amazing layout!)! Check out Dissident Whispers and help support justice for those in need!

Five or So Questions on the Curse of the House of Rookwood

Hi all, today I have an interview with Mike Addison about The Curse of the House of Rookwood, which is currently on Kickstarter and looking to hit some stretch goals! It sounds really interesting and explores family dynamics – check out Mike’s responses below!

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A black & white illustration that looks like a woodcutting featuring a tall white-haired man, a shorter dark haired man, a long-haired woman in a white dress, a very elderly man in front sitting, and a man in the back holding a stick of some kind adjusting something.

Tell me a little about The Curse of the House of Rookwood. What excites you about it?

Rookwood is a story game where you play a family with an ancient curse that grants them supernatural powers, but slowly transforms them into inhuman monsters. Since you play as members of a family — parents, children, aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins — the game is packed with relationships that your characters value, but did not choose for themselves. The rules support this part of play by giving you tools to create interesting problems that complicate these relationships, and reward you for exploring them during play. I spent the last year running the game for different groups at conventions, and it is exciting to see the different ways that players interpret “family” as a game/story concept. It can be funny, poignant, and sometimes a little bit intense, but it always seems to ring true because family is a common denominator for pretty much everyone.

A broken-down cemetery depicted in black and white linework.

How do the rules work to connect and structure the family, and complicate those relationships?

Family is defined in the rules on several levels. First, during character creation, players collaborate to answer questions about their progenitor, their ancestor who brought the curse upon the family. Their answers shape the current standing of the family, as well as what resources the family shares. Second, players define for themselves what family roles they want their characters to fulfill — parent, child, aunt, grandparent, etc. It’s up to the players how their family is structured in terms of age, gender, and identity.

Lastly, each player will choose a Skeleton for their character. Skeletons are complications that strain a character’s relationship with another character. This could be a dark secret that will harm the other character, a past mistake they want to reconcile, or an unequal relationship such as a need for approval or being overprotective. Each Skeleton has “bones” — scenes or events that might happen during play that players are rewarded for pursuing. As a story arc comes to an end, players decide if their Skeletons have been resolved positively, which improves the family’s standing, or negatively, which hurts the family.

Family drama can be difficult for some players! How do you provide support for play to help ensure everyone has a safe experience?

Safety tools are really important, especially with an emotionally charged subject like family relationships. The rules include a section on safety tools, which we introduce upfront. We recommend that players make use of Lines and Veils, as defined by Ron Edwards of Sex and Sorcery fame, as well as an X-card/O-card at the table. References to learn more about these tools are included.

A black and white illustration showing woman in a long dress shining a light toward the mantle of a very fancy fireplace in a ornate household.

What are the general activities of The Curse of the House of Rookwood – what do player characters encounter in play (such as monsters or situations), and how do they interact with it mechanically?

It depends on the Campaign Concept your group selects. You could be secret agents for the British Crown, employed to contain or eliminate supernatural threats. You might play as high society dilettantes, plying your talents as supernatural communicators and hunters. Or you might even play a traveling troupe of entertainers, looking for your next gig. Regardless what situation you place your family in, the core loop of play is trouble presented by the chronicler — a mystery, an adversary, and outright monstrous threat — and the family’s response to that threat.

Each family member has a finite amount of resources available to them to move the story in the direction they want. They have Traits, which are a pool of six-sided dice, and Assets, which can be spent to gain some immediate guaranteed success, or to gain extra dice when a Trait roll goes wrong. Like many rpgs, the game proceeds as a conversation.

When the outcome of what a player wants to accomplish seems uncertain, the GM and the player work out a list of Risks, things that could go wrong, and Rewards, things that could go right. The player chooses how many dice to roll from their pool — 1, 2, or 3 — and Assets to spend. Any dice that roll 4 or higher count as a success, which are used one-for-one to cancel Risks or buy Rewards.

Where it gets interesting is that the number of dice you roll reflects the amount of effort your character is putting forth in the fiction of the game. One die is normal effort. Two dice is extraordinary effort — if you roll any doubles, the effort is stressful and you lose a die from your pool. Three dice is supernatural effort — you must call forth the gift of your curse. If you roll doubles, not only do you lose a die, you also gain a new Mark of your curse.

A black and white illustration of a skeleton in a cloak covering their body with their back reflected behind them.

The descent into monstrosity could reflect any number of fears in metaphor. How is it represented in the game mechanically and narratively, and what does it mean to the characters?

As alluded to above, every time you use the power granted to you by your curse — calling forth crows to act as spies, wrapping shadows about you to conceal your movement, suffocating a foe with a billowing mist — you risk gaining a Mark of your curse. Marks are outward, physical signs of your curse, but could also have an emotional or psychological element. For instance, if you have the Curse of the Rookery, your Marks could be amber eyes of a crow, black feathers instead of hair, literal crow’s feet, or an uncontrollable urge to steal shiny things. Each character can gain a limited number of Marks.

Mechanically, Marks function as a story timer. The last Mark on your character sheet is always “Lost to the Curse”. Using your power can give you a lot of narrative control over the story, but the more you use it, the closer you come to being completely lost. At that point, the character is gone from the story — transformed into a statue, a hideous bird monster hidden by the family in the attic, or lost in an endless void of shadows.

Characters might struggle with identity as their bodies transform against their will, feel dread about suffering the same fate as a lost ancestor with a similar curse, or leave troubled relationships unresolved when they are lost. It’s tragic stuff. And though a character’s fate might be out of their control, it’s important to note that the player does have control over their story. They choose their Skeleton and their Curse upfront, and they choose how the Marks of their curse manifest.

An image of the book for The Curse of the House of Rookwood in black and grey with very stylized block serif text and a cameo with a skeleton in clothes and with hair on the cover.

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Thanks so much to Mike for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out The Curse of the House of Rookwood on Kickstarter today!

Five or So Questions on Eldritch Care Unit

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Chris Falco on Eldritch Care Unit, which is currently on DriveThruRPG and itchio from Falconian Productions and supported by the San Janero Co-Op! It sounds really cool! Check out Chris’s responses below.

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A black and white photorealistic image of someone putting herbs into a bowl with other herbs. The bowl is surrounded by various instruments like carved antlers, sage, and oils.

Tell me a little about Eldritch Care Unit. What excites you about it?

The basic idea of Eldritch Care Unit is that you’re playing a doctor, nurse, or something more occult like a ritualist or alchemist, who’s working in the “Eldritch Care Unit” of a hospital. The ECU is a hidden wing in most modern hospitals, where mostly mundane folks like the player characters do their best to treat supernatural illnesses and ailments, whether the disease itself is magical or it’s just infecting a magical creature; maybe Fae react strangely to a certain strain of the flu, for instance. But, these hidden sections still rely on typical hospital funding and bureaucracy, so you need to try and maneuver the already insufficient and bureaucratic American medical system to try and account for creatures that most of the world won’t acknowledge even exist.

Eldritch Care Unit is my first “full” independently published game, which is itself exciting, and it’s an idea I came up with kind of at a weird whim while listening to other people talking about something entirely different (if I recall, they were talking about clerics healing people on a battlefield after a fight). What excites me most is the unique concept combined with the unique but fairly simple system I came up with for it, called the Adversarial System, which relies more on rolling to withstand external pressures than to see if you’re skilled enough.

This sounds fascinating! How do players mechanically interact with the game? What is gameplay like?

It’s a fairly simple system. Essentially, characters have “training” in various fields, which has a simple numerical rating, and said numerical rating is almost always higher than the difficulty of the task that’s being done; for example, your highest rating starts at 25 and the highest difficulty usually used is 15. You then roll dice not to see how well you use that rating, but to see how well you withstand any external pressures; instead of flat penalties, they provide dice to an “Adversarial Dice Pool,” which is rolled to see how much your rating gets penalized. For example, if you’re pitting your rating of 25 against a difficulty of 15, but are on a tight schedule and your patient’s noncooperative, that might provide 2-3 (d6) dice to roll, so you need to roll a 10 or less on them to succeed. There’s ways to negate or lower those penalties too, though, and other little permutations and optional rules, but for the most part it comes down to that core mechanic.

As for the core gameplay, it revolves around difficult patients. While your day to day might involve some checks to continue long term care or check up on normal patients, the interesting part that the game’s meant to focus on are those that have some difficulty; either the ailment is unique and difficult to deal with, the patient’s insurance is bad and you need to work around that, there’s a time crunch before the disease really sets in, the hospital lacks the right ingredients for a curative, or anything similar. It’s left largely to player creativity at that point, to come up with ways to get around the problems, and usually involves a series of different things they’ll need to get done, whether working together or in parallel, depending on their time vs difficulty needs.

To note, there’s no combat in the game. The system doesn’t even work particularly well for it, as we don’t track health as anything more than maybe lingering dice penalties (3d6 on manual tasks while your hand’s injured, etc). You COULD make it work, but I don’t see many doctors and ritualists being thrown into fights in a hospital.

A person with long hair in sunglasses and wearing white while holding two bowls that are pouring smoke while they stand in front of a blackboard covered in complex equations and diagrams.

What are the bounds of the fiction here? How weird does it get?

The fiction is pretty open. There’s some basic guidance on how magic works, and how the supernatural exists within the world, but the basic idea is that if there’s some folk tale, movie, or other story about a given type of creature, it probably exists in some forms. Most of the time, they integrate well into the modern world; think of how it happens in Men in Black, but with supernatural creatures instead of aliens. They’re everywhere, and most people don’t realize it. It’s less your typical “they stalk you in the shadows” and more “they’re trying to figure out how to do their thing in a modern world.”

The ECU itself isn’t the only “human” organization that knows about magic and the paranormal, of course; the book mentions that there’s government agencies, supernatural lawyers (never sign a demonic pact without one), and similar groups out there, but the ECU is the main focus of the game. Though, the nature of the Adversarial System would make it pretty easy to play some of those other sorts of groups too, with a bit of tweaking, if someone wanted.

A black and white photorealistic image of potion bottles and chemistry bottles.

How do you handle being respectful to potential human, real life people who might identify with the supernatural entities – allowing for safety tools, special guidance, or otherwise?

The book makes it clear to avoid getting into too much detail unless you’re sure your players will appreciate it, and despite the general motif of “Life isn’t fair,” the general goal is that when the Player Characters are involved, things will usually get fixed up. It inherently gives a bit of hope for even a broken medical system, and focuses on the good people in that system. It’s something I’ve found cathartic, as someone who’s been given the runaround by insurance companies and hospitals

With it being a small book, I didn’t include a lot of full writeups for tools beyond that vague advice to make it a cooperative, positive experience, but I’m personally a strong supporter of systems like X cards and other safety tools, and definitely recommend them.

It’s awesome to have a game with no combat! What are a few exciting or compelling examples of experiences players have had with ECU?

In the one shot I’m running right now, the characters were going about their day to day when a Dragon more or less barged its way into the hospital, demanding treatment. Dragons are rare beings even in the open ended sort of world involved in this game, so there’s a bit of excitement and stress involved in making such a large, none-too-cooperative creature comfortable so they can diagnose its diseased wing, especially since experts on dragon anatomy aren’t really available.

And pity whomever ultimately has to ask them to pay the bill…

A photorealistic image of a person in a white shift inside a pentagram with candles at the points. The person is holding a book that flames are erupting from, as they appear to be casting a spell from it.

—

Thanks so much to Chris for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Eldritch Care Unit on DriveThruRPG or itchio 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.

—

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 Children of the Beast

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Nicholas Kitts on the game Children of the Beast, which is currently on Kickstarter! It’s a game that uses a phone app combined with a beautifully illustrated book to play stories about monster hunting! I loved the art so I had to know more! Check out the interview below.

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Three curved spines leading up to faces, under which there are tons of small faces in bonelike structure.

Tell me a little about Children of the Beast. What excites you about it?

Oh man, such an open-ended question. So, I played rpgs since I played 1st ed D&D with my dad in elementary school. And the thing I miss most about those years is a sense of wonder and exploration, about never being sure what was around the corner. Sure, some of that was just childish naivete, but man there magic in reading crappy black and white drawings of bizarre monsters like the flumph. Now I’ve played and read so many rpgs that I’m gotten pretty jaded, finding myself enjoying narrative rpgs more often if only because they offer something fresh.

So we wanted to focus on that aspect of exploration with Children of the Beast, I really wanted to bring something new to the table that people would have to play to discover. So I’m excited about people discovering things like fleshsmithing body parts, finding out they can speak to sentient slime, and learning that the tunnel they’re in is actually the insides of a giant worm. We actually try to hide a lot of mechanics so people learn as they go!

I’m also just excited about our aesthetic, which I’ve heard described as “grotesque, but oddly beautiful”, which is totally what we’re going for.

A monster pressed up against a tree that is growing around it, with its chest burst open and its ribs sticking out and entrails pouring onto the ground.

What is the core activity of play in Children of the Beast, and what are the characters like? How does the Hunter’s Blood impact the character’s experiences in game?

So your group gets to explore the wilds of the Warrens, it’s like a living landscape that constantly shifts and evolves, like mother nature on steroids. You’re intending to explore it as beast hunters, tracking down creatures that have contracted a mutating plague called the Corruption. However, as you learn more about the world it becomes obvious it’s not just a simple matter of tracking down and killing monsters. It’s a world full of characters and personalities affected by the Corruption and the Warrens, and you figure out how your character would react to all of it and develop. Of course, it can always be just about wanton murder, but it’s still an rpg, you can explore what parts of it you want.

The Hunter’s Blood is sort of a genetic thing that makes your characters immune to the Corruption and actually capable of hunting beasts. The public has a terrified respect of you, like if Cthulhu was your plumber or something. They will trust you to do your job but otherwise they want nothing to do with you, maybe even prefer you were dead. This can cause a lot of juicy interpersonal conflict as what you need to do becomes more complex, which I love, haha.

A slug like creature with a banded back and claws on its front where its short legs are, long spiny claws near its jaw, and an open mouth revealing an iridescent mouth spread wide and revealing multiple sets of teeth.

How did you come up with the various beasts and their designs, and how do you mechanize them in the game?

Man, how do we come up with monsters… It’s honestly a tricky question! I’ve probably come up with over half of the initial ideas, but working with a team means everyone kinda gets to put their little touch on things. Like the artists we work with sometimes just come up with cool ideas I never even thought of once they start sketching. The goblin, which is like this giant bone worm thing with a nest of skulls, is one that I love how it came out, even though in some ways it was quite different than what I initially imagined. A lot of my ideas have been initially seeded by dreams I had, so I don’t know how much that helps people, haha.

Mechanically it depends. We often have mechanical ideas when we create a creature, but game development is a complicated beast, sometimes ideas just don’t work out in playtesting as well as you thought they would. We always try to bring something new to the table with each one, and that can sometimes be quite difficult to do without significantly increasing the scope of the project, haha.

But in general, we try to achieve at least two of three things:

Does it have a unique method of attacking?
Does it have a unique method of defense or an interesting weakness?
Does it have a unique twist, like with its senses or movement that changes how they would approach the creature?

#3 is obviously the trickiest, and can overlap a bit with the other two, but it’s just a guideline for making interesting creatures. Honestly doing a whole bunch of unique things can be terrible for a single creature design, as it loses focus and players will have difficulty understanding what they need to do.

A lizard-like character with tons of spines and spikes all over their body and tail with three weapons overhead as though they're juggling them.

How do you design a game with rich interpersonal narratives and the technological interface you use and still make it a safe place for people to play? What did you have to consider with content and people’s comfort levels, considering the artistic depiction of some of the monsters?

So this is actually something we think about a lot. We’ve been lucky to have a very diverse team over the years, and each one has helped give me a new perspective on things since I’m a pretty standard cis white guy.

We don’t find it necessary to really comment much on gender for example. A lot of “survival of the fittest” type games can often devolve into some pretty reductionist gender roles, but fact of the matter is this is a fantasy game, and we don’t need any of that cruft to make the world feel real. In the app, you can choose from a variety of icons for your gender and boy did we include a lot. Now being inclusionary is more than just saying “look, we included you!”, so we hope people find and enjoy the other ways in which we’ve worked to have a diverse world.

But in the end, we can be pretty gross at times. We just try to stick to more “body horror” type grossness, and we try not to revel in it either. I want you to feel surprised, not sick. The point of the game is to have fun, and if the themes of the game sound interesting to you than we hope you enjoy it. I admit I’m not entirely sure what to do if someone finds something we did objectionable, at least other than try to ignore it and hope it doesn’t play a prominent role. I’ve played in a lot of groups with a “rule of x” or something similar, where a subject or action can be cut out of the narrative, and I can only hope people feel comfortable doing that with our game. The app connects over the internet, but it needs a password for your campaign so we really intend for it only to be played with friends.

How does the game work using the phone app interface? How did that open your options with mechanics and design?

Designing a game with an app is like working with an angel and a demon.

On one hand, there have been many mechanics we cut or changed because they would have been incredibly awkward to use in the app. It’s actually because of this that we’ve been trying to have our tools be as flexible as possible, where the app doesn’t have to “know” everything for you to use something in game.

But having a sort of forced editor like that, where clean mechanics result in less work the programmers have to do, is something I’ve really appreciated over the years. Because many of the mechanics we did cut were in fact just awkward to begin with. The app also allows more advanced mechanics, like our wound system, to become possible. You gotta be careful though. If a mechanic is unplayable by hand it’s not really playable, especially for our game that doesn’t require the companion app. So for us, an “advanced mechanic” the app can help with is one that has a lot of simple steps, steps that can be reduced to only a few decisions when using the app. We’re actually still trying to streamline certain aspects of the wound system, as I’d like it to still be easier to play by hand.

A sunset landscape with a massive monster's beak-like face emerging from the ground.

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Awesome, thanks Nicholas! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Children of the Beast on Kickstarter!

Bestiary: Hillside Phimf

The people living in those flatlands, they don’t know true horror. They’ve never heard its sound. They’ve never had to run, run downhill to the flats and hope there ain’t just another hill to come, hearing the growls, hearing the scream, the baaaaaaah it roars, the sound of its four feet pounding unevenly behind you. In the hills, we know. The hills don’t have eyes. They have the phimf.
Tarnin Covalesky, woodsman

The Phimf is a large - some would say gargantuan - beast that has four cloven hooves like a goat, two short on the right and two long on the left, that make it easy for them to travel over hillsides, with a stout torso that’s heavily muscled and four gorilla arms and hands, as well as a ape-like face that’s long in the snout like a goat, and four pointed horns - perhaps the creature’s only point of pride. — This blessed image is of the Hillside Phimf by Thomas Novosel.

Background

The Hillside Phimf is a cryptid. The most elusive kind, that is, until you’re on a hillside at night. Then it’s just nearer than near, its hot breath just bristling your hair and its rage tenable, just behind you. It’s a perilous beast, and like none you’ve ever heard of. There are some who try to compare it to a sidehill gouger, but those beasts are sweet creatures in comparison to the giant Phimf.

It might sound the opposite of terrifying when it’s stuck to hillsides, but you’ll only think that until you spend some days in a region where there’s more sideways than straight. The creature walks on two short legs and two long ones, gripping the hillside, and reaching out with four arms to capture anyone caught unawares on the slope. It rarely goes hungry, and only ranges where dips and valleys make their home.

The screaming roar it makes seems to echo through the hillsides, but is never heard inside the thick-walled homes. The trees buffer its baahhhhing, its cry to the wind. The Phimf is said to be half gorilla, some sort of ape, with large grasping hands and fearful teeth, and half goat, with clopping hooves that find even steep cliffs no trouble at all. Where it comes from, no one knows, but we do know where it goes – ’round the hills, soon as dusk falls, and not stopping until its growls turn into satisfied grumbles from a good meal. If there’s no folk around to have a bite, it’s not afraid of partial cannibalism, eating everything from other goats to spare possums trying to find their way home in the night. All along it stalks the hills.

The Phimf has their weird goat eyes, rectangular pupils and wide, with a legendary ability to see in the dark. Bright lights shy them away, but if they’re hungry they’ll just eat the light. Goat gut’ll digest anything, so they say. They might yell while they do it, truth be told. Their bleating yells reveal squat, square teeth that crush more than shear. They batter on their chest with apelike hands that have long reach and strong grip.

The way to get at them, supposedly, is a crew with strong stomachs who can round it up onto the flat. Its strengths become weaknesses then as it’ll topple to the side, struggling between its short and long legs. It’s still grabby as all get out, but it’ll eat anything you put in front of it – even if that snack happens to be sleep-inducing or worse. No one knows for sure whether it’ll work, but someone had better do something to protect these hills.

Hillside Phimf for D&D 5e

Large cryptid, chaotic neutral

Armor Class
16

Hit Points
84(8d10+ 40)

Speed
40 ft.

All Posts

STR 14|+2

DEX 16|+3

CON 20|+5

INT 8|-1

WIS 10|0

CHA 7|-2

Proficiency Bonus
+4

Skills
Intimidation +8, Perception +2

Senses

Darkvision 120 ft., Passive Perception 10

Languages
None

Challenge
8 (3900 XP)

All Arms. The Phimf has four arms and is always counted as having reach in all directions, and cannot be flanked.

Actions

Multiattack.The Phimf makes two attacks: one with its bite and one with its hands. It can make both attacks against the same target.

Bite. Melee Weapon Attack: +10 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 33 (4d12 + 7) bludgeoning damage. If the target is a Medium or smaller creature, it is grappled (escape DC 17). Until this grapple ends, the target is restrained, and the Phimf can’t bite another target.

Grasping Hands. Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit: 11 (2d6 + 4) bludgeoning damage. If the target is a Medium or smaller creature, it is grappled (escape DC 17). Until this grapple ends, the target is restrained, and the Phimf can’t grab another target.

Disgusting Roar. The Hillside Phimf has eaten ungodly things and its stomach works hard to digest it. When the Phimf roars to frighten its prey, anyone caught in the 20ft. cone must make a DC 10 Constitution save or suffer nausea and dizziness for 1d4 rounds (Temporary Constitution & Dexterity Penalty of -2).

Facilitator Notes

Drives

Driven by unending hunger.
Driven to find the tastiest food the most easily.
Doggedly pursues anything that smells like food regardless of when it last ate.

Interactions & Reactions

The Phimf is almost never seen during the day, seeking caves, shadowed cliffsides, and abandoned houses or barns to hide in when the sun is out.
If attacked, the Phimf will only try to fight back or resist. It will never try to run away. At most, it will seek cover when the sun is rising.
The Phimf is always hungry, and has no restrictions on its diet.
The Phimf is a large – some would say gargantuan – beast that has four cloven hooves like a goat, two short on the right and two long on the left, that make it easy for them to travel over hillsides, with a stout torso that’s heavily muscled and four gorilla arms and hands, as well as a ape-like face that’s long in the snout like a goat, and four pointed horns – perhaps the creature’s only point of pride.

Other System Notes

The Hillside Phimf has 8 hit dice.
Grasping Hands equivalent damage: Maul or Heavy Two-Handed Weapon.
Bite equivalent damage: Greataxe – three attacks for each bite.

Hillside Phimf for Monster of the Week

Monster: Devourer (motivation: to eat everything tasty)

Powers

All Arms: The Phimf has four arms and is always counted as having reach in all directions, and cannot be flanked.

Disgusting Roar: The Hillside Phimf has eaten ungodly things and its stomach works hard to digest it. When the Phimf roars to frighten its prey, anyone caught in the blast takes 1-harm close messy.

Teeth and Hands Attacks: Bite: 3-harm hand; Grasping Hands: 4-harm hand close.

Armor

Tough Skin: 1-armor.

Harm Capacity

12.

Weakness

Hunger & daylight: If the Phimf is tricked into eating something that could harm it, it takes harm more easily (no armor against ingestion). It also is weakened in daylight, but mostly in that it will cower and try to hide.

Five or So Questions on Thousand Year Old Vampire

Hello all, today I have an interview with Tim Hutchings on Thousand Year Old Vampire (TYOV), a single-player game coming up on Kickstarter! (Check out the Facebook event here!) The game sounds pretty interesting, exploring the life of a vampire in intimate and deep ways. You can see a playtest version here. Check out what Tim had to say!

Content Warning for discussion of memory loss, especially near the end of the interview.

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A vintage-appearing image of a vampire attacking a man

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.

A journal with leather binding and an abstract pattern, and stickers in various languages on it.

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.

A vintage style illustration person with an octopus arm for a head getting attacked by someone with a sword.

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.

A vintage illustration of a man in period clothing with a white curled wig, standing under an eclipse and a hillside with Egyptian-appearing monuments, while corpses lie on the ground.

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.

A vintage style illustration of a man tied down onto a wooden structure of some kind, bound.

—

Thanks so much, Tim, for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Thousand Year Old Vampire on Kickstarter when it’s live! In the meantime, you can RSVP on the Facebook event here.

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Quick Shot on Choose Your Own: Sci-Fi Stock Art

Hi all, I have a quick shot with James E. Shields today! James’ project, Choose Your Own: Sci-Fi Stock Art, is currently in its last days on Kickstarter and he’s just answered a few quick questions for me below.

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Choose Your Own: Sci-Fi Stock Art is a project that lets creators mix and match sci-fi stock art to create instant masterpieces for their tabletop roleplaying game.

A retro styled frame like that of a choose your own adventure book with images of science fiction characters, three people in power armor, saying "you're the star of the series! choose from all possible combinations!"

I love the “choose your own…” style of the art for the Kickstarter and all – I was a big fan of such books growing up.

What is Choose Your Own: Sci-Fi Stock Art, both as a product and as your vision?

As a product, it is hundreds of individual sci-fi art assets that can be mixed, flipped, rearranged and more to create custom images for roleplaying games.

As my vision, it is a continued effort to help independent RPG publishers bridge the gap between pure commissioned art and stock art. It’s my way of giving back to a community that has given so much to me.

How did you develop and decide on the various art assets that you’ve put together for the purposes of the Kickstarter?

I will be using a mix of existing assets as well as creating all new illustrations from ideas that backers submit. I’ll read through the pool of ideas and take those that inspire me. It’s going to be exciting because it will be the first time in a long time that I get to create a bunch of art based purely on inspiration instead of assigned ideas. It’s also really cool because I can have ideas that I think are good, but then I get submissions and it will blow my mind that I get paid to illustrate ideas like that.

A collection of game and product covers laid over each other.

A collection of covers.

What has been the best part of running the Kickstarter, and what have you learned for future projects?
The best part? Without a doubt, hands down, absolutely, it has been the response from the independent publishing community. I couldn’t ask for better support from the RPG community. The gratitude they express for creating this project is unparalleled. Every day for probably the first week, I’d have another voluntary offer to include their product as a reward for backing my project.

The amount of complimentary awards is so high that it is actually MORE than the value of my Kickstarter pledge levels!

I have learned, by accident, the value of symbiotic relationship in the RPG community. I began creating custom stock art as a way to express my thanks for publishers who have given me the best hobby ever. That act began friendships. I don’t have to try to sell a product to any of them. I just create something that my friends benefit from. Connecting through the shared experience of roleplaying games is what we should all strive for.

You listen and communicate with friends.

That is what will drive my next project.

A gif showing a static image of an alien with rotating backgrounds of a cantina and other settings.

I love the modular art! Very cool!

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Thanks so much, James, for the quick interview! I hope everyone will stop by the Choose Your Own: Sci-Fi Stock Art Kickstarter to see if something will meet their needs today!

This post is unpaid, but Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

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

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

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