What is THE VIOLET SANCTION, both as a product and as your vision?
i’m working on a zinequest game for kickstarter called THE VIOLET SANCTION, a cooperative urban fantasy adventure that takes place in seattle’s capitol hill neighborhood. it’s one of the epicenters of queer culture in the area, and it also happens to be my home. as a product, the game is a multiplayer choose-your-own-story style gamebook, divided into episodes. episodes, which are named after streets in the neighborhood, are non-linear, crossing paths with each other frequently, leading to a grand finale in the epilogue.
the game eschews dice, leveling, experience points, and most combat (there are social encounters, certainly). as a vision, THE VIOLET SANCTION is my first art project in a very long time, after years of processing life’s many traumas. a mid-life crisis, transitioning to nonbinary, escaping a job that was devouring me; this game is more than just a reincarnation of my artistic spirit, it is a manifesto for social change, for art, for evolution. i’m new to this whole process, but i’m hopeful in ways i haven’t been in ages.
This sounds like such a fascinating project! How do you handle resolution of any conflict or social encounters in lieu of dice?
the gamebooks express the setting and obstacles similarly to
an adventure game, with a lot of the puzzles requiring specific actions at the
right places. this can include dialogue choices, magic being cast, classic
inventory puzzles, etc., but the charm of the system really comes from the
cards. every character has their own customized deck, which are written on,
manipulated, and sometime removed. a various points, the game queries cards in
hand or on the table, then directs you to the next scene accordingly.
my favorite example is the 9 of hearts, which signifies the
9 lives of the cat-human shapeshifter class. as they “lose” lives,
pips are shaded in or crossed out. rumor has it that cats on their last life
share a drink at a speakeasy hidden down a dark alley…
other scenes are resolved by playing cards from your hand to
determine outcomes, and one character class can even trade cards with other
players. however, cards are never randomly drawn, instead it’s a strategy
puzzle of figuring out what goes where and how.
As a nonbinary person, I’m always curious how other nonbinary people’s identity has influenced their design. How do you feel your transition to nonbinary identity has influenced the design and flavor of THE VIOLET SANCTION?
being nonbinary absolutely affects my writing and design. the game is largely de-gendered, with the exception of a few specific characters, like death herself, which was chosen intentionally. using THE VIOLET SANCTION as a platform for dismantling the gender binary and helping to solidify new language was incredibly important to the overall design. identifying as queer in general impacts the type of subjects i choose to tackle.
all art is politics, and education, and i think visibility for the queer spectrum is vital to our future. i spent my entire adolescence being told that my sexuality shouldn’t define me, that it was only a part of who i was, but then was simultaneously told i was a very small percentage of the population. as i’ve grown older and wiser, i meet people like me everywhere i go. i want the next generation to hear these stories and be able to do better for themselves.
What is The Watching Book, both as a product and as your vision?
The
Watching Book is a diegetic setting zine told as the journal of oracles. It
presents the religion, culture, and rituals of a fictional people through the
eyes of the women who guide them. Accompanying the zine is a short paperless,
gm-less rpg. In this, players take on the roll of children to enjoy a game of
mystery-solving and oral storytelling. Both the game and the zine are in-world
artifacts that can be used to enhance a campaign setting or be given directly
to players as found items during a game.
This zine is the second foray into the world of Soothsayer, my boardgame from 2019. The project started as a gift for my wife, and consequently the world is built around centering the lives and accomplishments of lgbt characters. By using different viewpoint characters throughout, I also get the chance to examine the ways in which the same ritual can take on different meaning to different people, even within the same group. I really wanted the world built by these games to explore real faith in fantasy by leaving some questions unanswered.
This sounds very cool! What are some of the ways you set boundaries and encourage creativity, either mechanically or otherwise, for players in The Watching Book?
The
Watching Book is more of a setting than a game in and of itself. But carrying
through from Soothsayer one of my design goals was to make sure to avoid
encouraging a “dark” look at the world. The problems faced within the
text are natural disasters, disagreements, or mysteries rather than acts of
intentional violence or hate. I primed the world to be not a utopia, but a
relatively peaceable sort of place where brutal content is very clearly
out of place and inappropriate. There are a lot of games and settings where
those topics can be explored, but this is not one of them.
As for
creativity, I stay away from explicitly answering any of the religious and
spiritual questions that exist about the world. Are the spirits actually real?
Are they real, but different than how most people interpret them? Readers and
players in the setting have room to develop their own opinions and explore
beliefs without being handed a yes or no answer within the text.
It’s lovely that this was inspired by your wife. In what other ways than the people is The Watching Book a queer game and product?
I made
sure that at every step of the way I tried to include people of different
outlooks and communities. Ezra, the artist, describes themself as a Queer
Jewitch Farmer. That’s a material way I’m using my work to give back; hiring
other LGBT people to work with me.
Additionally
I am happy to adopt a policy that’s gaining traction in the ttrpg community; as
part of the campaign I have included Community Copies of the zine. These are
donated copies from generous people that are available to anyone, no questions
asked. In this way I can make my zine a little more accessible to those having
a hard time.
What is Thistle and Hearth, both as a product and as your vision?
Thistle and Hearth is a game of belonging outside belonging that combines a dark fairytale aesthetic with the experience of growing up as a Lutheran in Minnesota. Inconvenient spirits, punishing winter, and mercurial fae challenge the community. True Names, vows, and acts of creation bring them comfort.
To be honest, the idea for Thistle and Hearth literally came to me in a dream. It was some sort of high-action romp, but the things that stuck with me were the aesthetic notes of deep forest, deep winter, and elk riders. These aesthetic notes weren’t really enough to turn into a game until I shared them with my co-designer, Natalie (@rpgnatalie). The most exciting thing about designing this game has to do with genre – a thing I love playing with in games and game design.
To me, a lot of the indie game space for the past decade has been in pursuit of genre. Apocalypse World gave an approachable toolkit for replicating specific fictional genres in games, leading to countless hacks. Dream Askew//Dream Apart followed a number of years later, using similar tools to subvert existing genres, rather than just replicating them. What Natalie and I have done with Thistle and Hearth is create a genre that exists nowhere else by making playbooks and motifs that assume archetypes for this genre-that-doesn’t-exist. People expect playbooks to rely on tropes, but we’ve created playbooks without the tropes, and it turns out that creates a really unique play experience.
A Thistlefolk by Mahar Mangahas.
It sounds like you’re bringing forward a very specific experience. How does the life of a Lutheran in Minnesota connect to dark fairytale aesthetic, and what are some examples of how players will experience this?
So the game is influenced by Aven’s experience growing up in a Lutheran community and Natalie’s experience in community with people who were part of the church. The way the church manifested was heavily influenced by the local climate – months of winter where it was too cold to go outside, with too little sunlight, where the climate becomes a thing you have to guard against in certain ways. The game has five motifs that determine the themes and forces that will be at play in your game, and each one reflects a different aspect of our experiences.
This is represented in the game very literally with the Winter motif, which brings scarcity to the community, and asks how do you make do with less than you need? This can also lead to tension between playbooks. For example, the Forged and the Morning Frost respectively represent a tension between repurposing what we have in order to get what we need, and making things that bring joy or beauty but may be a frivolous use of resources.
The church also often had an insular narrative – we didn’t necessarily think things that were outside of our community were bad, but we didn’t understand them, and there was a prominent narrative that we did not belong out there – in the cold, in the wider world, or, in Thistle and Hearth, in the Woods. A part of this was coping with the fact that we lived in a place where living is hard and grueling most of the time – by making the unfamiliar undesirable, we made the familiar desirable.
A ghost by Mahar Mangahas.
The Thistlefolk, our name for the fae, represent how power works sometimes in communities of faith. There are often people who you know little to nothing about but who either you as an individual or the wider community are beholden to – they hold power over you and their rules must be followed. Both the Thistlefolk and Family motifs explore questions over how power is distributed, and how it affects someone who is part of the community in ways that are not explicitly violent or economic.
Lutheran communities often build their identity around shared histories, but these are not always true to what actually happened. In Thistle and Hearth, the dead can come back to speak their truths, and that may complicate the things that the community hold as sacred, or it can be used to reinforce this shared history. They can also function metaphorically as a representation of people who have left the community but still have a connection to it, and can demystify the unknown in ways that breaks down the in-group/out-group narrative.
Exploring genre, or the surpassing of genre, is something that fascinates me. How did you use the Belonging-Outside-Belonging system to develop this new genre and how does it influence play?
PbtA games use move-like-mechanics to establish what people do in the world, and the fictional consequences of acting in those ways. This is used to reinforce genre by recreating the paradigms of action found in therein. Belonging Outside Belonging games go a step further by codifying what kinds of action makes characters vulnerable, and what kinds of action allow them to advance their agenda.
In Thistle and Hearth we included moves and grouped them in ways that either subvert existing genre influences, or else completely ignore them in favor of something new. For example, one of the Forged’s weak moves is “lash out in anger.” In other genres, this would probably be a strong or regular move for a physical-strength oriented playbook like the Forged. In this game, and this genre, it is something that they do to show their vulnerability.
If moves and their categorization makeup one part of the genre of the game, another important mechanical aspect of genre is the motifs. Motifs (which might be called “situations” or “setting elements” in other BoB games) establish fictional powers in the world, and the players together control them and influence how they are used in play. The group’s collective experiences, while perhaps based on their existing cultural knowledge, create a new genre when combined together.
The Woods by Mahar Mangahas.
Without shared control of the motifs, it would be up to individuals in the group to understand, synthesize, and then reproduce for everyone else. That would be much, much harder, and it would be more likely for the player’s existing cultural knowledge to leak into their creation of the genre. The motifs may be familiar to players individually, but the game leads to play that explores how they connect to each other to define a fictional world. The space between the different motifs has a somewhat defined shape, but it is only through play that a group can discovers what fills the empty space.
In contrast to Dream Askew, the lists that players pick from to define motifs are quite broad in Thistle and Hearth. There is a tendency towards higher variation between the motifs from game to game. The genre that the players explore together can have a vastly different texture depending on the options they choose. In one playtest, the Thistlefolk hoarded secrets, so much so that they sent a member of their brethren into the community to steal a particularly juicy secret. In another, the Thistlefolk craved music and violence; we elaborated on them as extravagant party-throwers who could appear at the drop of a hat and stay for days, leaving little time for sleep or solitude.
Such a lovely title treatment! By Mahar Mangahas.
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Thank you SO much to Aven and Natalie for this interview!! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Thistle and Hearth on Kickstarter today!
I’ve got another great quick interview with Martin Lloyd, this time about the Big Book of Amazing Tales, currently on Kickstarter! It sounds like a great game resource for kids to add to your Amazing Tales collection. Check out Martin’s responses below!
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What is the Big Book of Amazing Tales, both as
a product and as your vision?
Some of the most fun I’ve had with Amazing Tales has been
playing games with the kids while on holiday, that’s when we’ve played out
campaigns, and the idea of the Big Book is to make it easy for other families
to do the same. So in the book I’m including four campaigns, one
for each of the settings in the book. So you’ll get…
A Dream of Trees – for the Deep Dark Wood setting
The Quest for the Dragon Crown – for the Magical Kingdoms setting
Captain Cadava’s Treasure – for the Pirate Seas setting
The Cryptid Conundrum – for the Adventure among the Stars setting
The Big Book of Amazing Tales should be seen as a companion
volume to Amazing Tales. Amazing Tales gives you all the tools you need to make
up amazing adventures with your kid and get them started on role-playing. The
Big Book of Amazing Tales is about providing you with some really great
campaigns that can take things to the next level.
Before I started writing I set myself some goals. One of
them was to include elements in the games that would bring the games alive in
the real world as well as the player’s imagination. So in the Quest for the
Dragon Crown there is a crown for the players to cut out, colour in and put
together when they find it. It doesn’t look like a conventional crown, but its
form is a clue to what it really does so having it right there in the players’
hands is important. One of the other goals is to include ‘moments of awesome’
for the players, to make sure they have those moments where their characters
get to do something amazing. You really will save the kingdom, slay the dragon,
stop the alien invasion and so on.
It’s also a chance for me to answer two of the questions
I’ve been asked most frequently since launching Amazing Tales. Namely – ‘How do
you use this game in a classroom?’, and ‘Can I use this game to help my kid
with some kind of problem?’. Although to be honest I won’t be the one doing the
answering. Baz Stevens, who is both a teacher and a game designer will be
answering the first question, and Lilly Smith who is a child therapist will be
answering the second.
As an ongoing product, how do you keep coming up for ideas for
Amazing Tales, and keep them fresh?
It really helps that Amazing Tales doesn’t have a fixed setting. So I’m not stuck trying to come up with five different fantasy adventures, or a new twist on space pirates or whatever. If I’m writing a pirate adventure I can make it the most piratey pirate adventure imaginable, a kind of Pirates of the Carribean in RPG form, and try and cram it full of as many pirate ideas as I can. I don’t need to worry about having used all the good stuff and then having to write another pirate campaign next week. * Once a month I publish a set of story seeds in the Amazing Tales newsletter, and those are always a good chance to really interrogate an idea. I pick a simple concept like ‘Temples’ and then try and come up with a set of ideas that do something interesting with that idea – stretching it in different directions. It’s a good practice.
And then there are the games I hear about people playing
with their kids. Often there will be a couple of sentences on Facebook that
sound brilliant, but that’s all there is. So it becomes a jumping off point for
new ideas. Someone posted the other day about an adventure involving a lost
circus in a forest. That’s about all I know, but it’s a great starting point.
An adventure about a lost circus in a forest, it almost doesn’t matter what
genre or system you’re playing – that’s a great place to start.
What
are some of your favorite things in the Big Book and what are they like for
players?
I’m really looking forward to some of the special extras. So in the Cryptid Conundrum, where the heroes need to crack the alien codes, there’ll be a decoder ring for the players to cut out and make. Now a lot of kids will probably make something like that at some point while growing up, but how many of them will get to use it to rescue the victims of an alien kidnapping? In a similar way that bit of research about kids being better at identifying logos than trees really bothers me. So A Dream of Trees will definitely include puzzles that require learning about trees, leaves, nuts and the like. Hopefully that will be enough to make kids a bit more excited by being outdoors, because playing outside is almost as important as role-playing 🙂
* Thinking about it, this is probably one of the reasons the Pirates of the Carribean sequels ended up the way they did…
Content Warning: There are allegations against Erika Shepherd for abusive behavior. I don’t have any links, but have been notified in private and respect the privacy of those raising the concerns, and I’m making this note as part of my policy against perpetrators of harm.
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Hi all, I have a few quick questions with answers from Erika Shepherd on Hearts of Magic: Threads Entangled! It looks like a really interesting game, I hope you like what Erika has to say!
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What is Hearts of Magic, both as a product and as your vision?
Hearts of Magic is a Firebrands Framework game about fey nobles, arcanist-bureaucrats, and anarchist witches vying for control of a magepunk fantasy city, getting in messy entanglements with eachother amid an undeclared magical war. It’s a story told against a backdrop of imperialism and class struggle, but it’s also a story about individuals finding ways to resist that system, and just maybe finding eachother instead.
It’s intended for one-shot play, with zero prep and an easy-to-learn ruleset you can pick up and play; while it has a set of factions and setting elements built in, it’s easy to adapt to other settings/factions, and flexible about how you portray your faction, without defining a lot of the worldbuilding.
It’s also, not to put too fine a point on it, *gay as hell*. An Oblique Discussion is explicitly and intentionally a game about, not being able to say out loud the thing you want to tell somebody, and As A Lesbian, it was important to me to put down in a game that feeling of, talking around something and hoping your were understood. It’s a game about fighting with your friends and allying with your rivals, but most of all, about falling in love with your enemies, and about how love (or something like it) can overcome the things that keep us apart and the systems that tear up our world.
The cover of Hearts of Magic, illustrated by Finn Carey.
What is the design process for a project like this with the ten games in one design, especially when trying to create these messy entanglements?
I have to give almost all the credit to Vincent and Meg Baker, for the overall design – Hearts of Magic started as a 1:1 reskin of Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands, and much of that design is still part of Hearts of Magic. I did, however, remove a couple of the Firebrands games, and added two of my own – Weaving a Spell and A Wizard’s Battle. With that said, I did have to think about the kinds of entanglements I was looking to create. This game is as much the story of The City as it is a story of the characters themselves, and I wanted to make sure to focus as much on the ways characters interact with The City as the ways characters interact with eachother.
In “A Chase”, for instance, I wanted to make sure to fill out the landscape of the city and the range of setting options, for the players, being sure to include a range of physical locations in the City to expand the range of whats possible, there (Like trains! Can’t have magepunk weird-fantasy without trains!). Another example is how A Wizard’s Battle makes sure to include as much about how a violent confrontation affects the City, potentially devastating the surrounding neighborhood.
With that said, the real core of the game is about the interactions between the player characters; by making Weaving A Spell focus closely on the intimacy of doing magic with another person for instance, by keeping the focus of the games on the relationships between the players and not just their factions, I wanted to make sure that there was more binding the players together than keeping them apart.
Sketch by Sasha Reneau.
What kinds of characters do we see in Hearts of Magic, and what are they likely to encounter mechanically in the various games?
The three factions of Hearts of Magic are the Lords and Ladies, the fey nobles whose families have controlled The City for generations and who hold their power with the magic of nature, promises, and prophecy; the Order, a bureaucratic empire of scholar-mages who use the might of empire to, supposedly, try and protect the world from the dangers of magic; and the Witches, anarchists trying to free the city from nobility and empire alike and teach Magic to the masses. Each faction has their own set of adjectives to describe the characters with, but aside from the faction description and the adjectives, very little about character creation is dictated by the book – you can explicitly be any kind of person you can imagine, certainly not limited to traditional fantasy archetypes. My favorite character I’ve played as is a noble Lady whose body is a musical instrument of glass, wood, and clockwork, and that’s pretty tame on the scale of what the game allows.
The ten games that make up Hearts of Magic are:
Solitaire (what were you doing? what have we heard about you?),
A Chase (do you have the nerve to pursue?),
A Conversation Over Food (at ease together, or a tense meal?),
A Dance (when the music ends, will I see you again?),
A Free-for-all (why do we fight, and what are the stakes?),
Meeting Sword to Sword (steel meets steel, gaze meets gaze – who will blink?),
An Oblique Discussion (how can I tell you the things I can not say?)
Stealing Time Together (alone, together, with a gentle “may I?”)
Weaving a Spell (how do the two of us make magic greater than either alone?)
A Wizard’s Battle (can you resist the full strength of my powers?)
The games are all played by taking turns choosing prompts, except for Solitaire, which you play by yourself quietly to establish some context for yourself, and A Conversation Over Food and An Oblique Discussion, which give you the choice between choosing a prompt or engaging in actual improvised conversation. A Chase and Meeting Sword To Sword involve coin-flips to determine the outcome, but all the other games let the players decide the outcomes, and even in the fights, your character’s fate is always in your own hands – only you can decide if your character’s life is on the line, or how badly they are hurt by their opponent’s blows.
What is the Deck of Many Names, both as a product and as your vision?
The
Deck of Many Names is a 120-card deck designed to help flesh out minor NPCs on
the fly during a game of Dungeons & Dragons (or similar fantasy games).
Each card has a name, fantasy species, gender, rough age category, and quick
roleplay tidbit. When players engage an NPC who was originally a faceless bit
of background, you can just draw a card and immediately have enough information
to handle that unexpected bit of conversation. The deck is big enough that you
could generate two such NPCs every week for over two years before repeating
anybody.
I’ve seen big names like Matt Mercer suggest having a list of names prepped for the same purpose, but I thought the solution could be better. After all, with a prepared list of names (or online name generator), you’re still left having to decide details like gender on the fly. In addition to that being a bit of work, I’ve seen too many games where every such NPC turns out to be a human man. With the Deck of Many Names, you can skip some of those decisions while also ensuring that your array of NPCs includes a spectrum of genders, fantasy species, and age ranges. Basically, it’s a project meant to make D&D games both easier and more inclusive.
What kind of information about the characters are on the cards so you can easily reference it?
Each
card includes a name (given name only), gender (depicted on a spectrum), an age
category (young, middle, old), fantasy species, and a short bit of text
offering a quirk or other roleplaying cue.
The information is not extensive, because things like combat stats or personal history/occupation are likely to either not come up or already be established by the time you draw a card. For example, you may have just finished a combat against a group of bandits but your players surprised you by taking one captive to interrogate. You already know they’re a bandit and you’re done with their stats, but now you need to be able to play out a dialogue. Just draw a card and you’ve got their name and other relevant details. Or maybe you thought your players would just stop into the shop and get what they needed, but instead they try to start a relationship with the shopkeeper. You already know they’re a shopkeeper, but now you need those personal details that will enable a conversation; that’s what you get by drawing a card.
Of course, you can use these cards other times besides on the fly. Are you planning a campaign about an evil necromancer and don’t know how to decide their name, gender, etc? Draw a card. Do you need a starting point for creating your next PC? Draw a card and go from there. It really helps with a lot of things!
What kind of NPCs will we see in the deck, in background, ability, etc.?
You might draw a card and discover that the NPC in question is a younger human man named Abdul, or an older nonbinary gnome named Umpen, or a medium-aged tiefling named Osah. Each would also include a minor roleplay hook, like “can’t stop moving their hands when they talk,” or “uses verbal fillers a lot”. There are all sorts of combinations!
Hi All! I havea quick shot today with Michael Dunn-O’Connor about Goblinville, which isavailableonPDFand in print! Check out what it’s about below!
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What is Goblinville, both as a product and as your vision?
Goblinville is a character-driven dungeon crawler that works for short, punchy sessions and long campaigns. The town itself is the key source of adventure and improving it is a core part of character advancement. The requirement that all player characters are goblins has shifted the tone of play (compared to other fantasy adventure rpgs). All the characters are from the same community, so there is an assumed shared interest. And the community is in peril, in a way reinforced by the procedures of play. The resulting spirit of underdog collaboration makes it stand out from other games in an often fraught genre.
Finally, the element of fantasy adventure games that I most take issue with is the portrayal of heroic player characters killing and stealing from subhuman, monstrous enemies. Goblinville subverts this by casting the goblins as protagonists, with cares and motivations and a distinct society. It doesn’t guarantee thoughtful dissection of the genre, but it intentionally avoids reasserting the worst of its cliches.
What are the basic mechanics like in Goblinville and how do they support the character-driven focus?
The character-driven focus of Goblinville starts during Goblin creation, the first step of a new game. When each player is creating their goblin, the rules tell them to choose or roll for a few aspects of your character. These aspects give a lot of texture to the character (rather than being a set of numbers): your job, your boss, a formative experience, and a notable physical trait and personality trait.
Then, all the players pause. In turn, they introduce
their Goblin to the table. The other players ask questions and
discuss. Then they agree on a Title for that goblin: a unique moniker
that sets them apart from the rest of the town while affirming their place in
it. They also decide on an ‘Esteem Trait’ for that goblin. How do
they fit into the adventuring group, what sets them apart from the other
goblins at this table?
These Titles and Traits are the most important part of a
character, because they are the only (limited) source of bonus dice for a
roll. Rolls in Goblinville are always full of compromise; getting to add
a die for a relevant Trait or Title (and drop your lowest result) lets you
mitigate those compromises.
At the end of a session, every player shares their goblin’s
defining moment. This could be a notable accomplishment, a new insight, or a
significant struggle. The other players at the table grant them a new
Title based on their actions. Traits can change over time in a similar
way.
The result of these design choices is that advancement
(gaining and changing Titles/ Traits) is linked to what is important to your
character in the fiction, and to your character’s dynamic with the rest of the
group. Every session ends with: how did you (as players) see my
character change? And the answer matters, because it’s tied to the dice
mechanics that come up every time the goblins take a risky action.
What is one of the most important ways you show goblins to be different than the standard portrayal, beyond their role as protagonists?
The humanizing details of being a goblin in Goblinville seep
in through play. The first things that become clear are the
character aspects in goblin creation. You have a job and a boss.
You have traits that goblins notice about you and a reputation (for good or
ill). You are part of a community. At the beginning of a session,
you also commit to an outlook and a goal. You have motivations that are
distinct from the other goblins. The prompts don’t push you toward
creating a stereotypical goblin, every prompt suggests that your character has
an inner life and relationships.
Some players still initially play up greedy or bloodthirsty goblins. And this is maybe a style of play that folks are looking for. Where this tends to become more nuanced is related to the improvement of Goblinville itself. Character specific advancement is fairly limited. You can only have three Traits and three Titles at a time. You can advance in rank a few times, but the added benefits are marginal. The most meaningful advancement over time comes from ‘unlocking’ new locations in town. To do this you need to find missing goblins, or convince goblins with a particular expertise to join your community. You need to repair broken equipment or go adventuring to find alternatives. The game repeatedly rewards you for caring about and investing in the town where you live. There is no reward for being greedy, selfish, or “evil”.
Content Warning: Since this article was posted, multiple individuals have come forward with statements credibly addressing Swordsfall a.k.a. Brandon Dixon’s abuse of power and violation of consent. With respect to their shared experiences, I am putting a note on this article to ensure that their voices are heard and future readers are aware. Many statements are not public so I’ve only linked to the public statement. Please do not direct any harassment to the survivors who have raised these concerns.
What is Swordsfall’s Tikor, both as a product and as your vision?
Swordsfall is almost like a platform. It encompasses the setting book, “Welcome to Tikor”, a RPG, a comic book and even novels. So it’s truly a world that I can use to do all sorts of creative projects with. As fans start to find favorite characters and place, I want to be able to go to those things and do EVEN more. The setting book is my way of opening the door to that world.
How do you consider Swordsfall and Tikor to be special in their content and design?
Well, no one else is
really doing Afrofuturism like I am. It’s why I’m saying its part of the
Afropunk sub-genre. It has it’s own style. That punk style. But instead of
being anti-capitalism, it’s anti-colonialism. Or really, a world re-imagined
where that was never a factor. Then you have the art. T’umo Mere has a style of
his own. His art is bold, striking and dripping in real African lore. He’s from
Botswana so he’s been happy to dig into his own culture and the ones around him
for source material.
What were some choices you made in the art and presentation of Swordsfall and Tikor to show the values and style of the setting?
A couple of big things we’re focusing on are color and patterns. African cultures have almost used color to tell a story. You’re never going to a picture where everyone is draped in black. Those colors and what they mean are important, and we’re making sure they’re in Swordsfall. The other big thing in African cultures are patterns. Different cultures had their own symbols and patterns, but almost all had them. And they meant something. It could be mundane, it could be a call to a spirit. But the combination of colors and patterns often told a story. And Tikor will have that as well.
What is By Aecer’s Light!, both as a product and as your vision?
By Aecer’s Light! is me ‘small scale testing’ a creative project on my ‘someday-maybe’ list of creative projects. I’ve done a few freelancer-for-hire projects and wondered what would a ‘By Mad Jay’ project look like. This Kickstarter is the result of me crafting and running a series of one-shot con sessions using some of the unusual pieces of fantasy, Burning Wheel fantasy in particular. The Roden, which are rat-folk. Wolfen, think fantasy bipedal wolves and a Rakshasi, but jaguar instead of tiger and the absence of a great Elven presence. Wild success for me would be that folks are happy with the zines they backed and find them useful. I break even (at least) and getting to work with fantastic folks like Julia Ellingboe, Kurt Komoda, Johnstone Metzger, Nathan Paoletta and the father of Roden, Peter Tierney.
All of those sound very cool! You talk about your awesome collaborations, but first I want to know, what are you doing in your setting design that is something you see as truly your dream brought to light?
I’m a sucker for outsider stories. The X-Men, Samurai Champloo, Farscape, these are stories about outsider groups. The Roden(Rat folk), Wolfen, the Dark(Spite) Elf, and the Rakshashi are all outsiders. There aren’t many, if any, iconic characters or stories about these fantasy peoples. We’re free to explore and collaboratively make our own.
By Kurt Komoda.
What can backers expect in the By Aecer’s Light! release and what does it bring hope for in the future?
In the By Aecer’s Light! release players will have a starter setting to begin playing in and Roden and Wolfen as playable ‘races’. There will be immediate conflicts ready to go and room for the players to grow, define, make their own outsider stories. Hopefully, the future brings more playable lore in this ‘after the Elves’ setting.
What is Bastion, both as a product and as your vision?
Bastion is a gumbo of a lot of different element I love. Portions of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, mixed with Glenn Cook’s Black Company, mashed with a bit of Gamma World, boiled down in a melange Micheal Moorcock’s phantasmagoric Eternal Champion worlds, sautéed in a bit of the Green Lantern Corp, and strained through a cullender of Charles R. Saunders’ Imaro, you get Bastion.
It’s a big fangasmic mess of inspirations.
The original intent was to do a straight vanilla fantasy game with all the standard fantasy tropes. I wanted to see if I could do it with a straight face. Halfway through the process, I couldn’t take it anymore. I like my D&D fantasy, but trying to replicate it started making veins pop out of the side of my head. I was dissatisfied with the elements I created, so I flipped the script and went in another direction.
I brought a few people on board to help flesh out my outlines, and they added their secret sauce here and there and what you have is Bastion as it is at the moment.
What moves you about Afrocentric themes and their application in Bastion?
Afrocentric elements pop up in all my work. GODSEND Agenda, ATLANTIS: The Second Age, and even in HELLAS to a small extent. What you get when I add elements of Afrocentrism is me. It’s me searching and exploring a lost piece of my identity as I try to learn about Africa. American school systems teach you almost nothing about Africa and only express ideas of an unrefined and strange land filled with primitive people. I know that’s not the case, and I wanted to illustrate that in the books I produce.
Africa is BIG, I mean, REALLY BIG. You can fit almost every continent on earth inside the body of Africa. What I offer isn’t a legitimate mirror of any one African culture. I’ve taken elements of West African cultures (Akan, Yoruba) and made a fantasy game based on those components. Much like Lord of the Rings is an amalgam of Western European history/myth, I’ve done the same with Bastion. I hope what small efforts I’ve made entice others to dive deeper into the rich and varied cultures. Bastion is only a surface level exploration of Afrocentrism, but it’s up to the reader to go deeper.
How did you decide what elements of sword and sorcery really would shine through in the game, and what design choices made them hit the mark?
I love fantasy and the genre of sword and sorcery. It’s a hot mess of debate about what makes a piece “sword and sorcery.” A lot of people stick close to R.E. Howards Conan, but many people fail to mention the mind-blowing work of Clark Ashton Smith. I love the strange and sublime horror of sword and sorcery fantasy. The pyrrhic victories of the heroes, and the changes that cause in their souls. The peculiar and bitter cost of power it puts on the hero.
I hope I’ve brought all those essentials to Bastion, but I guess that’s for the consumer to say.
