Tag: news

Hey all! Today I’ve got five or so questions with Michael Bacon about the game Dangerous Times, which is currently on Kickstarter! Hope that you like hearing about this game of journalism in the 1920s!

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Tell me about Dangerous Times. What excites you about it?

Dangerous Times is a small role-playing game for two or more players, published in zine form, with a focus on storytelling. It’s about reporters who risk their lives to expose corruption, crime and injustice, all in a version of 1920’s New York that’s just learned stage magic is real. So now magic is everywhere: children play with fire and levitation in the streets, wall street moguls consult soothsayers before making investments, crooks turn hypnotism and escape-artistry to devious purposes… and of course those who seek power are messing with things best left alone.

One of the aspects I’m most excited about is the history involved.

New York of the jazz age is a surprisingly modern time. Broadway is decorated with neon lights, cars fill the streets and the subway rumbles below. There’s even a budding intercontinental network of wires and radio waves used to share photographs and news around the world.

It’s not just the technology that makes the twenties modern, though: so many familiar social issues are present and cultural shifts are happening, often in ways that resonate with the current time.

I’d love it if players were able to engage with all this history, and find ways to incorporate it into their play. I’ve tried to encourage that in the design. So even though the problems they bump into involve the supernatural, I’ve attempted to make those plotlines echo historic reality. It turned out to be… not easy (I’m still not sure I’ve got it right), but at least surprisingly straight-forward. This makes sense, though, because this is the culture that produced so many of those genre-defining fantasy, horror and mystery stories; they couldn’t help but bring reality into the fantastical.

The 1920s were a complex time in New York! I know that many Black Americans and queer people were among those living in the city. What kind of research are you doing to ensure that you have appropriate representation of the history and the people of the era?

I’m glad you brought this up, because how people treated each other during this era has been a major focal point of my research.

I’ve been lucky enough to lean on the work of historians who’ve spent their entire careers studying aspects of this, exploring how specific conceptions of race, gender, sexuality and nationality influenced and were influenced by society at large. There’s even a page at the end of the zine dedicated to resources and references, so that players interested in learning more can know where to start.

Going into this I’d only known the broadest shapes of the era, and I was very excited to learn about ways society seemed to be expressing interest in diversity— this romantic idea that New Yorkers at large were going out to speakeasies, immigrant neighborhoods, jazz clubs, queer dances, and encountering all sorts of other lifestyles and backgrounds— but when I started doing the reading it turns out that these interactions served to reify existing hierarchies as much as they transgressed against them.

And then the years rush ahead through the Great Depression, WWII, and McCarthyism, all of which exacerbate expressions of social backlash and undermine tentative steps made towards civil progress.

All this is to say that the past is a different place, not a kinder one.

I have, however, made a serious effort to research and represent all the people living in the city, not just the ones in most easy reach. What this directly translates to is mention and often discussion of things like the black press, targeted enforcement of new immigration laws, police raids on cross-racial or queer dances, and so forth throughout the zine… though it’s difficult to fit all the nuance required within just 40 pages, especially when those pages also have to convey the core game mechanics and process of play.

One thing that drove me to set the game in the 1920s was this article talking about Harlem’s Hamilton Lodge Ball, where hundred of queer men and women annually danced in joyful defiance of prevailing gender and sexual norms. These events became a sensation, with thousands from all over the city showing up to observe and sometimes take part; notables in attendance include Nora Holt and Wallace Thurman, even the Vanderbilts and Astors. The newspapers at the time treat this with a range between shock and fascination, but I can’t help but smile when I picture it— twirling on the dance floor, fancy suits and gowns, and people from all over the city celebrating.

I’ve tried to make the game as much about players encountering and protecting this positive parts of life in the city, as it is about mystery, magic, and the dangers that are encroaching.

What kind of mechanics do you use in Dangerous Time for things like investigation, violence, and other things that might come up?

This is actually the area that’s seeing the most change, as I continue to playtest and refine what I’ve developed.

The setting and the mechanics are meant to reinforce each-other, but I’ve also tried to keep them out of the way of the real point, which is telling stories. So there’s some simple outcome randomization using six-sided die, but there’s also a mechanic in place that lets players spend this resource— credibility— to ignore the dice.

So for example this lets me keep reporters very squishy, only distinguishing between “healthy”, “injured”, and “dead”, because the transition between these states is almost always intentional.

The idea is that reporters sometimes exaggerate how dramatic a situation is for the sake of selling more papers, so when you spend credibility to succeed at something it actually means somebody, somewhere in this article that your building, was lying.

And of course credibility is important when figuring out the outcome of an adventure, because you might survive the big encounter only to find nobody believes what you’re printing, and then the world gets worse instead of better. Maybe dying for your ideals was the smarter choice.

Then there’s the investigation, which is where I’ve been doing a lot of iteration lately. I’ve been toying with different ways to have players encounter and build stories, but one piece I think I’ve finally got down is the start of everything— the staff meeting.

The latest version has the editor (the player who runs the game) stating a fact about the world and then questioning the other players about it.

So you open the meeting with “Rats and pigeons have been dying”, “Strange sounds drift through the air”, “Discarded bits of clothing keep turning up” and then start asking questions. Why are the rats dying?

Where are they finding the clothing? When are the sounds being heard?

Who told you about this? What does this other group say about it? Make it weirder! Do they contradict each-other?

These become the rumors players investigate, and with a little bit of work by the editor they get incorporated into and reshape the various archetypal plots written in the zine.

What are the kinds of experiences and actions players can have in Dangerous Times? What do they do, and what do they feel?

Mechanically and thematically, Dangerous Times is a game about determining truth, and working out how a bunch of truths all fit together into a narrative.

Players start the game by generating rumors and leads, then tell stories about how their reporters follow up on those leads. Dice rolling is used to give guidance during this process, letting players know when a scene should provide answers or raise more questions. They also make decisions about who pursues what leads, when to use magic or break laws during the investigation, when to split up and investigate more leads, or to focus on one lead together, reducing danger and increasing the chance it’ll pan out.

All the while players are accruing trouble, which eventually comes calling, and they’ll use their dice, skills, and other resources to get out of it— or they go out in a blaze of glory, getting one last epic moment before they fall.

Finally publication starts, and players have to take all these facts and rumors and fit them together into articles, coming up with witty headlines for bonus points. The paper’s credibility, circulation, and debts come together to influence decisions about what gets printed, and then the impacts of the publication on the world and the newspaper’s future are discussed.

Ideally players start out with interest and confusion, and as the story progresses they get that slow, awesome sense of the facts coming together. They feel pressure brewing as trouble builds up, and they make decisions about which risks are worth taking. When the trouble finally happens, they feel excitement and danger, but also in control— players are the ultimate arbiter over their character’s fate, and they’ll have to weigh when sacrifices are worthwhile. During publication they get to look back on the adventure, recapping all those feelings mixed together with hope, satisfaction, or regret.

Finally, in a game called Dangerous Times, I have to wonder, how do you plan to encourage safe and respectful play at the table?

The way tabletop gamers have thought critically on player safety, developing tools and methods to encourage everyone has a good time, is one of the things I like best about this hobby. Coming from video games, where the discussion really isn’t there yet, it’s like a breath of fresh air. So of course I’m happy to reference things like Lines & Veils and the X-card, so players new to the hobby or unfamiliar with these concepts can play with a safety net.

As to the design itself, well. Dangerous Times opens with a staff meeting, and there’s a note in the zine about using starting that off with a quick conversation about the things players do and don’t want to see. It’s my hope that this becomes a natural place to establish boundaries, proffer ideas, and flavor the tone of upcoming play. If someone mentions they find baseball boring but love ghost stories, the group can keep that in mind as they start building rumors and playing the game. With luck this normalizes the times when people need to draw boundaries, whether that’s to avoid deep-seated trauma or just because they’ve had a shitty day.

Addressing the other part of your question, one of the things I’ve been very careful with the plotlines inside the booklet is to keep them (hopefully, respectfully) adjacent to reality— players encounter history and fix fantasy. So there’s no rushing in and suddenly solving real-world injustices that persist into the present, at least in the booklet as written. I think it’s fine if players want to play that way, but it’s not the game I wanted to write. Instead I’ve provided supernatural and imaginary plots, noted parallels to real history, and tasked editors with “making the real unreal”— drawing inspiration from the real world, but making it into something everyone can feel comfortable playing with.

I’d be happy if the experience of playing can be informative and challenging, but first and foremost it has to be enjoyable. It’s my hope that the game can support both hard-hitting encounters with history as well as light-hearted escapism. Groups can and should play at their own comfort levels— the twenties were a terrible, dangerous time, but also one that could have promised a better future. If nothing else, playing in that space should be fun.

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Thanks so much to Michael for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Dangerous Times on Kickstarter today!