I’ve had some recent changes in my personal life, and they’ve reflected some changes in my professional life, too! As some people know, I have multiple romantic partners (I’m polyamorous), and that I work on game stuff and play games with my partners a lot. One of my partners is Thomas Novosel, who is a brilliant artist and game designer I met through Google+ a few years back. We’re dating, and we’re also working on some super rad game stuff.
Thomas Novosel, photo by Brie Beau Sheldon (c) 2019.
Thomas is in upstate New York, and he’s consulting with me on Turn’s border towns stretch goal that replaced the Mormon towns goal. This stretch goal is going to take a little longer to complete, but Thomas was part of the inspiration – I visited him in his town, on the northern US border, and realized there are a lot of stories to tell. He’s helping me get in touch with the local indigenous center (Akwesasne natives). This is hugely useful.
(P.S.: I’m still looking for a southern border consultant, preferably a person of color, from either side of the US southern border! Please use the contact page if you’re interested.)
Thomas and I have also made our own little game collective, called Assembludo (a mashup of assemblage+ludo for artistic mashup of game stuff, basically). It’s been really fun to work on so far, and we’re nearing having some projects ready to release! It’s hard figuring out how to fund projects, but in the meantime I’ve been helping Thomas get some game jam products out like The Heaven’s Prophet’s Tomb for the Pamphlet Dungeon, and he’s run his game Runaway Hirelings for me so I can get a better feel for his design sense. (Unsurprisingly, Runaway Hirelings was SUPER fun, very creative and adventurous, and plays in like 2 hours! It’s worth way more like $10!)
The other new projects we’re working on are even more exciting!
The first project we’re hoping to release as a joint effort as designers is called The Magic Hour, and it’s a short adventure for general fantasy campaigns with some custom creatures. It’s set in a small town in a rural fantasy land with a variety of characters in the town, where a mystery is occurring! People in the town have been disappearing, and no one can seem to figure out what’s happening!
The description I gave to John one of the creatures is “okapi with condor wings” and I’m excited to see them realized in the game. We’re both obviously working on this while juggling our regular jobs, freelance work, and individual projects, so it’s taking a little bit of time. But, we’re making good progress, and I think it’s a cute game adventure that encourages nonviolence, explores a small town, and has a little bit of silliness baked in. We’re both capable of seriousness and spookiness, but I think that’s something really wonderful about what Thomas and I have been working on – there’s just a little lightheartedness in every bit!
We have a few other ideas bouncing around. Like, Thomas is working on a King Arthur and the Round Table inspired knight game, A Knight Rode at Dawn, which looks absolutely fantastic and has been fun to follow and contribute to as he needs. I’m working on Flicker, something I started writing inspired by Thomas’s art before we started dating, which is a game about hope where you burn down tiny paper houses as you, a living flame, travel the darkening world to relight the sun. I love the game a lot, and it’s reignited by Thomas’s gentle encouragement.
Our big project, which could take a long while, is Little Green Dot, which is a game about a world populated by animals that live on little islands. It’s a world touched by folk legend and there’s a lot of thinking about our actions, what they mean now, and what they’ll mean years from now to our community, our family, our party, and ourselves. Animals are sometimes bigger or smaller than they’d be in our world, but they’re also able to use leaf-swords and acorn-caps and travel to become legends in their own right.
One of my favorite things that Thomas has written in our draft notes is this, about one of the character types that I wanted to have.
The squids and the turtles children would grow together but would always be upset and miss each other and grow apart as one went towards land. The Whale saw this and kissed the squids mantles, giving them a soft membrane of water from home to follow them onto land. Allowing them to go as far as they want, with their friends, while also taking their home with them.
Thomas Novosel, draft notes for Little Green Dot, 2019
There is a section below it where he elaborated that I read as he typed, and it made me cry!
Specific Feeling: Taking a stone from the farm with you into the city. A stone that you looked at and liked. But someone put it in your hand so that you didn’t have to pick it up.
Thomas Novosel, draft notes for Little Green Dot, 2019
This is the weirdest thing about designing with Thomas. He still is quite technical and focused on mechanics, like John is. And he’s highly artistic, like John is. But Thomas is much more of a feelsy person like me! So when he wrote this, especially as a farm kid who moved to the city and no one gave me something to carry with me, just punched me in the heart forever. It was one of our first design sessions and it remains one of my favorite things I’ve ever seen a person write about something they were designing.
We recently went to Lake Placid and had a picnic looking at nearby mountains. Few things make me miss living in rural areas more than spending time in the wilderness!
I think my work with Thomas has made me reflect on how I design a lot! Like, maybe I need to start putting myself first, and the game after. And maybe, I should not tell myself it’s stupid to think about how mechanics feel. We ignore it so often, how games feel, what they do to us emotionally when we take action or don’t, and how we feel when we roll a die or flip a card or enforce a mechanical rule. Feelings aren’t stupid. And just because we have to work at understanding them sometimes does not mean that we should dismiss them in design. Needless to say, I can’t wait to show you more from Assembludo in the future!
One last thing I wanted to mention about my work with Thomas is something he put in the Little Green Dot document. It sounds simple, but it’s really important:
The Love Contract If this game affects our relationship negatively, or starts hurting us. We will stop working on it, because we love each other very very much. And being in love is more important than fighting over work.
Thomas Novosel, signed by Beau and Thomas both in the Little Green Dot documents.
I look at it and I think, my gosh. How many of my relationships would be less rocky around our design experiences if I’d put this in there? What if I had put in a Friendship Contract or a Respect Contract in my projects I’ve worked on? How simple of an idea is it to just stop doing something that’s hurting you, or hurting the relationships that build up the game in the first place? It smacked me right in the forehead with its sense. So I signed it!
I love all of my partners very much. And I work with them all, to varying degrees! I think what I was missing this whole time wasn’t the right person to work with, it was the right attitude to go about working with. Considering that Thomas and I, and John and I, are very aware of how fickle the game market is and how we can’t ever expect success. I think we also know how precarious relationships can be when you’re working together. Like, yikes. With that in mind, I think prioritizing love is worth it.
Beau & Thomas at Lake Placid, by Brie Beau Sheldon (c) 2019.
Find out more about Thomas at thomas-novosel.com and find him on Twitter at @thomasanovosel. His itch.io hosts a number of his games & game materials as well (including fonts!), and is a good place to follow!
P.S. I go by Beau now, tho the full name is Brie Beau Sheldon. 🙂
P.P.S. – My work with John continues on Roar of Alliance – check him out on Twitter as @johnwsheldon and on Pluspora to follow his progress. He is also still my husband, thankfully. 🙂
P.P.S. I’m still with Dillon long-distance, too, and he is running some really cool games as an awesome DM, and makes some awesome creatures for his games! Keep up with him on Twitter as @Damn_It_Dillon!
Tell me a little about A Town Called Malice. What excites you about it?
Nordic Noir is a great genre. It refers to more than just an international import, it’s an approach to ensemble-style drama where characters of different backgrounds all deal with the same dramatic tension equally. The BBS series “Broadchurch” is a great example where everyone in the same small town comes to terms with a murder over multiple episodes, and the first run of “Twin Peaks” is the same way. From a game mechanics perspective, it’s something I hadn’t done before – my previously credits used the Powered by the Apocalypse engine. It’s excite to explore a new style of gameplay.
What are the characteristics of Nordic Noir and how do they show up in A Town Called Malice?
Nordic Noir is more character-driven, I find the tragedy or crime to be
solved becomes a prism to show the internal conflicts the characters are
experiencing. Both the original and US version of “The Killing” show
how multiple backgrounds are affected by a terrible death and as the series
progresses, we as an audience see the story go deeper beyond just the basic
“Whodunnit” type of mystery. By going with a story game format, (as
opposed to something more stat driven), it emphasized the relationships the
player were building within the narrative. That seemed more of the portrayal of
the genre.
How do you ensure the players are comfortable, while still unsettling
them as appropriate, in a Nordic Noir game?
We of course make sure to highlight appropriate safety measures and basic responsibility when dealing with both the horror and relationship elements. Because the players cooperate in building the narrative, they also lead the drama to the levels that best suit their gameplay tastes.
What are the characters like and how are characters built for the game?
Characters are guided by several things – Each role has a Personal Goal which should influence the player’s actions. These guidelines are intended to be neutral to how the player feels they’re best served. The Personal Goal of the “Criminal” role for example, is to “Gain the Advantage”. This can be interpreted by the player, and can be either a good or a bad trait depending on the situation. Gaining the advantage can be interpreted into helping the Law in solving the bigger problems of the Town for example.
Characters are also developed by the relationships they have with the other players at the table, through the use of Heit and Kult dice. These dice are placed in between the players at the table, representing the immediate relationship around them. Both players have input into that relationship, so a relationship can be a mixture of both good and bad feelings. This allows the players to expand on the overall narrative and determine what they need to personally overcome in order to succeed.
If players wanted to play the game and get the most out of it, how would you suggest they prepare for it?
I have really enjoyed watching players going deeper than
they normally would’ve in say, a straightforward dungeon crawl. I think people
will enjoy it most when they focus on the relationship aspects as much as
trying to overcome the supernatural threats to the Town – what does your
character feel? What do they need? How can they overcome these things together?
It’s a really different focus for me as a creator, and I’m glad to see people
get excited about the prospects of what Malice can be.
And for fun, what would you suggest as the ideal murder?
Wait. Who talked to you? I wasn’t there, no matter what you’ve heard! (laughs)
Hi all! Today I have an interview with Sophie Lagace, PK Sullivan, and Ed Turner about Fate of Cthulhu, which is currently on Kickstarter. I am impressed with some of the changes they’ve made to the Mythos and to Fate for the project, and I hope you do too! Check it out!
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Tell me a little about Fate of Cthulhu. What excites you about it?
Sophie Lagace: It’s a take on Cthulhu I have not really seen before, where the heroes are seriously out-gunned and out-tentacled, but not hopeless. Maybe you can’t save humanity from an apocalypse, but you can save it from complete extinction, for example. It’s a game about fighting back even when you’re a tiny person against a monstrous evil, giving it all you got and having a chance to make a difference. I can seriously relate, these days.
Also, we acknowledge the glaring flaws in the source material and in H.P. Lovecraft himself, take the good, and reject the bad. I love critical examination of our faves rather than pretending everything is fine
PK Sullivan: This is the first genuinely hopeful take on the Cthulhu mythos that I’ve seen. That’s something really important to me. Sean Nittner reached out to me in July 2015 asking if I would be the lead designer for this Fate Cthulhu game that Evil Hat wanted to make. My first response was, “Me? Are you sure? I’m not a Cthulhu fan.” Ultimately I think that worked in my favor. Stephen took point on the mythos story while my job was to design a system that reinforced the themes of the mythos. But I need hope in my stories — I made that very clear early on — so Fate of Cthulhu started to lean more toward the good you can do in the timeline
It can still be a pyrrhic victory, or you can still completely screw things up and make the future worse but there’s always the chance, the possibility, the hope that things can be better. And ultimately that’s what you’re trying to achieve as a character: a better future.
Which is surprisingly easy to achieve when the timeline starts as dark as possible.
Ed Turner: Sophie and PK already adequately covered the joys of cosmic horror with a side of hope, so I’m going to be a bit more mechanics-focused: it’s corruption that excites me. As characters deal with phenomena related to the Great Old One, they’ll slowly be corrupted by the sheer wrongness of eldritch forces. Left unchecked, corruption takes the form of horrible mutations. You want claws and tentacles and dripping ichor and other body horror shenanigans? Eat your heart out. Maybe literally… corruption can do weird things.
I love corruption for so many reasons. It’s a way to convey the danger of these alien entities without falling back on tired and problematic notions of “madness.” It’s a way to give players actual hard consequences when things go awry—having a character die is almost never as interesting as having a character’s very humanity get twisted. But more than anything else, it’s a way to empower characters… as bad as corruption is, your new tentacles are also tools in your arsenal, a way you can use the Great Old One’s own malevolence against itself. It ties back to that all-important sense of hope: the worse things get for a character, the better they are able to fight back. As bad as the threat you’re facing is, it contains the seeds of its own destruction.
And of course it means your character can have tentacles. Nothing wrong with more tentacles. The heroes need to even out the tentacle playing-field.
Sophie Lagace
What is your role in the project, and what did you especially enjoy working on over the course of the project?
SL: I have had three roles. The project stretched on for nearly four years (with almost a year out of that devoted to the playtest rounds), so many things changed along the way. I started on quality control, a sort of sounding board for “Does this thing fit as a Fate game?” Eventually the project management work was rearranged across all Evil Hat products and Sean Nittner asked me to take over project management for this one. And as of almost a year ago, when Lenny Balsera didn’t have time to be Fate Line Developer, I have taken that on as well.
I tremendously enjoyed working (once again!) with top talent, and this will continue with our stretch goal collaborators. On a personal level, I had a flash of elation when, after compiling the mass of data from our beta playtest round, I suddenly realized that we had objective confirmation that we had addressed the problems revealed by the alpha round. We all had a vague, hopeful sense from the comments received that maybe we were on the right track, but it was great to get hard data
PK: I’m the lead designer and I love weird challenges in game design. The first four or five months of design was very collaborative. Sean, Sophie, Stephen, and I (wow, am I the only not-S on the original team?) had a bunch of Skype calls where we hashed out the parameters of the game, both fiction and mechanics. The thing we hit on was that the meat of this game would be in an ever-changing, non-deterministic timeline. Which is hella tricky because we have characters coming from the literal future who know the timeline as a matter of fact.
The first iteration of our timeline mechanisms pretty detached from any role play the characters made. At the conclusion of an event (more or less what we call an adventure) one of the players would get slapped with paradox and suffer terrible visions of the new future they’ve created. This involved a skill check against an epic difficulty that was almost sure to cost resources (Fate points, etc.), followed by rolling four Fate dice with modifiers based on how well that skill check went. If the player had been able to shake off time’s assault just fine, then they got to improve dice. If they blew that defense roll, then one of the dice was guaranteed to be a negative. The dice result became the new rating of the event the players had just completed (more or less how badly it screws humanity) and those dice rippled out to the other events in the timeline. This did two things: it gave the characters valuable information about the new state of the timeline and made sure no one could game the system for the best result.
Playtesters hated it
So I had to go back to the drawing board. I redesigned the timeline mechanisms so that the heroes and the squamous horrors of the void are competing on a track for changes to the timeline. As those rack up, ripples get made across the other events. But! Now it’s up to the GM to interpret what those ripples mean. This was a really clever solution to a problem I didn’t know we had. I was leaning too hard into the action element of the action-horror stories we set out to tell. By making the timeline changes a GM element, while giving them tools and guidance to convey those changes to the players in thematically appropriate ways, the uncertainty that players faced dramatically increased. Uncertainty is key to horror stories. We need to keep the players in a state of imperfect information, even if other Fate games rely on perfect information.
That was the biggest challenge in the game and one I hope goes over well. Fred and some of the early readers have really responded to the condensed, concise Fate Core rules set I’ve put together for the game. The first stretch goal was to put that into the Fate Core SRD so people can build their own Fate games using those 50 pages of rules. That’s very flattering. I really hope people build tons of great games off this chassis I put together. It would be the greatest reward so far in my game design career.
ET: I got pulled into the project relatively late, to help get it ready for the second round of playtests, and after that I was part of the writing team. In practice, most of my energy went into the detail work: example text, spells and rituals, corruption stunts, things of that nature. Whenever you see a list of things, I probably had a hand in it. It’s not easy to pick a favorite part—by the time I started working on the project, the core of it had already come more-or-less together. It meant that I was given a wonderfully ghastly playground to explore.
Perhaps my favorite part was helping to finalize the timelines themselves. Stephen wrote some wonderful apocalypses, which are just an absolute delight to read; my job involved statting up the NPCs and horrible monsters that populate his world. In short, getting them ready for a GM to pick up and throw at their players, while still being as weird and scary as Stephen envisions. It’s a fun challenge.
Ed Turner
What are the unique challenges of a timey wimey affected game? You’ve talked about the timelines – what do those mean to the players?
SL: For one thing, it means being able to play some pretty unusual characters, whether by having corruption aspects and stunts, or by confronting temporal paradox. We had playtester groups who reported that some of their members played different versions of the same character, and that seemed to generate a lot of fun moments for them.
For another, it means that the heroes will be dealing with high stakes; for example, if you can’t change the timeline, you have not the possibility but the certitude that everyone you ever cared about will suffer a horrible, ah, fate.
Finally, the fact that a group can tackle any of the four key events in a timeline in any order in turn makes each story truly unique to that group. It’s likely that two gaming group taking on the same timeline and Great Old One will have a very different narrative, so replay value should be good.
ET: It means that players and GMs alike will be contending with an interesting juxtaposition of knowledge and uncertainty. The timeline gives players many, though not all, of the essential details about what they’ll encounter during an event, but their actions ripple forward, changing subsequent events. The knowledge they were so sure of at the outset grows less and less helpful as time goes on. And it gives the GM room to really mess with players’ expectations. Of course, that does also suggest part of the challenge: rationing out that change. PK pointed out earlier that uncertainty is key to horror stories, but uncertainty requires a solid baseline, otherwise things change so rapidly that they stop being unsettlingly wrong and start being pure static. In other words, the GM can’t mess with players’ expectations if things get so chaotic that the players don’t have any expectations anymore. Timelines, and the timeline track, help contain that chaos, so players will always know more-or-less what’s going to happen, but can be shocked by the details.
PK: The biggest challenge was finding a way to have timeline actually matter. We decided early on that a timeline would play a significant role in the game. That’s why the whole structure of Fate of Cthulhu is built around the timeline. When I started mucking about with possible timeline systems, I realized that for it to work it needed to do two contradictory things: the players have to know the timeline and the timeline has to change and shift. From there it was a tightrope to walk of having the changes be unpredictable and Lovecrafting while letting the players feel like they earned the changes to it.
How did you approach making an inclusive game in something that most marginalized consider volatile, the Lovecraftian mythos, both mechanically and in the fiction and in presentation of the game rules?
SL: It was clear from the first moment that to make this a game which Evil Hat could publish, we would have to face the true monsters in the Lovecraft story. It just would not have been compatible with our mission to gloss over racism, ableism, and other -isms.
It may be tacky but I’m going to toot my own horn here regarding the concept of sanity: I was the first to suggest a corruption mechanic and the high cost of facing the horrors being the slow transformation into a monster yourself. I’m very fond of RPGs that ask the question “What are you willing to sacrifice in order to succeed?” instead of just “Will you succeed?” I think it’s central to Fate, a game where PCs have lots of resources to draw on in order to achieve goals.
That said, I’m certain someone else would rapidly have come up with the corruption idea, but I felt good about being the one to pull it out of an evil hat.
ET: I think Sophie really hits the nail on the head: getting rid of the tired and thoughtless treatment of “sanity” pulls a lot of weight. I think it also helps to be absolutely explicit when we call out Lovecraft’s bigotry. It’s so commonly elided over, or dismissed as being a product of its time. And that’s no good… his writings often, and with varying levels of subtlety, other real-world groups, and that’s something we don’t want to lazily perpetuate.
And of course, we can’t forget the contributions of our sensitivity reader, Misha Bushyager. Sensitivity consultation is great idea in general, but on something like this, it’s invaluable.
PK Sullivan
How is Fate of Cthulhu different from other experiences in Fate, from your perspective? What do you hope people enjoy in the variation?
SL: I think it puts in doubt whether you will achieve success like no other Fate game we’ve released before. Also, there are not that many role-playing games that provide mechanical support to allow time travel and changing the future, and I don’t know of any other based on the Fate engine. In fact, most time-travel RPGs I know of have a lighter tone: TimeWatch (Pelgrane Press), Doctor Who (FASA, Cubicle 7), Time & Temp (Dig a Thousand Holes Publishing), etc.. On the other hand, Fate of Cthulhu can have funny moments, but it’s not meant to be played for laughs
ET: The timelines give the game a very strong narrative superstructure; there is a very clearly defined end point that you are building to: eventually the moment of the Great Old One’s rise will arrive, and it’s on you to be ready for it. It means there’s a grand finale always on the horizon, which gives the campaign an ongoing sense of pace… the characters might not know what the best next step is, but it’s impossible for them to lose sight of their greater goal. It’s not the very first Fate game to do something like this; Uprising has a built-in narrative arc leading to an end point. But Fate of Cthulhu pushes the concept even further, diving really deep into the short, focused campaign concept. I also hope that people take advantage of the focused, relatively brief campaign by going through multiple apocalypses. Not only by re-trying a timeline, hoping to get a better result with the next iteration, but by trying out the variety of timelines in the book and coming out as stretch goals from the Kickstarter.
PK: Most Fate games have characters change laterally, sometimes gaining in power but only in small doses. Because a given campaign is really just four adventures — four events on the timeline — and a denouement in the form of the final event Rise of the Great Old One, we actually put advancement on the fast track. PCs get a new skill every milestone. But… that’s tempered by the corruption mechanisms. This is the only Fate game I know of where you can end up in a mechanically reinforced spiral of self-destruction. Corruption stunts offer you great power but at the cost of further corruption. Not to mention many of the horrors you’ll face can push you down that path, as well. It’s another interesting dichotomy where characters can get very powerful very fast but also just wind up taking themselves right out of play by getting too dark.
One last question! If you could be in the Fate of Cthulhu world, what would you most want to do and see? What would be the wildest adventure you could want?
PK: Is it a cop out to say I don’t want to go there? We made the worst future! Futures! There are five of them! They’re all completely terrible. War, plague, famine, pestilence, and unending subjugation await anyone who lives long enough to see the future. If I had to be someone in Fate of Cthulhu, I think I’d want to be a modern day mystic. Maybe someone who has visions of the future. Being haunted by nightmarish visions of things yet to be is about the most chill thing you can be in this world.
SL: I’m with PK! But I would want to see success in avoiding a cataclysm, righting things to the point where humanity can build a better future. So, ++++ on the timeline!
ET: Yeah, there’s definitely no great place in the Fate of Cthulhu world. But I dunno, I think the Dagon timeline might be pretty okay? I mean, assuming you survive the horrible transformation into a Deep One. Sure, you’d suffer eternal subservience to a giant paranoid fish-monster at the bottom of the ocean, but you’d get to breathe underwater, and that’s pretty cool. That’s about as good a trade-off as a Great Old One is going to offer.
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”.
I have an interview today with L A Wilga and James Lader on the new roleplaying game Sundown, which is currently on Kickstarter! It sounds like a really interesting new game and I’m excited for it. Check out the interview below, and the Kickstarter too!
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Sundown’s cover art by Mayara Sampaio.
Tell me a little about Sundown. What excites you about it?
L A: So, Sundown is a rules light tabletop roleplaying game. It’s set in a pre-industrial frontier where, instead of magic, we have “science.” Science is the intersection of two things. Wonders: inventions that just make everyone’s life easier, and changing: the art of taking someone and reshaping their flesh. In fewer words, engineering and biology
There are two main facets to the game: surviving the wild, with fauna just as changed and dangerous as the folk, and surviving the politics, with a power struggle in every town and a populace that needs you but doesn’t want you.
I certainly get excited to face down giant winged frogs and angry murderbirds, my pink undershave flowing in the wind, but I find catharsis in the politics. You have to navigate finding work, getting paid, finding a place to stay, making friends, and avoiding the authorities as someone disdained by most of society. It’s an experience I think most in our queer rpg community will recognize.
It’s kind of like a cyberpunk game with the punk aesthetic, the politics, and the transhumanism, but if you took away its technology and sent it to the West Marches.
J L: I’m really excited about how much control you have over your body in Sundown. Changes are probably my favorite part of our game, because as a trans man, being able to reshape your body on a whim is the ultimate fantasy. And I’m sure other people think that’s super cool too.
The other thing I’m excited about is intentionally including politics in the premise. Social strife is the lifeblood of this game, where more of the people are monsters than the fiends. I really like that the direction of your career can be toppling the ruling class in Cragsmouth, or becoming a thief-assassin who saves themselves at all costs. You make your way through Sundown by surviving how best you can, and it really mirrors to me how to navigate a world where a lot of the power isn’t yours.
You talk about the Changing. How does Changing work, and are there any special benefits or consequences from it?
L A: This is a good question, because people tend to assume that you just drink a potion and seconds later you have claws or something.
Changes are made by a scientist specialized in changing, and in a laboratory devoted to changing. You get stuffed into an egg-like pod with the changing agents and a medium called lungwater that keeps you alive for the weeks or months your changes take. Breaking down flesh and building it back up takes a lot of time and energy. When you break out of your egg, you’re ravenously hungry, everything is too bright, and you just want to go back to sleep.
Changing agents are derived from plants and animals out in the wild that have already been observed to do… something to people. Indigoji turns your skin purple, for instance. Modern changes were discovered by blending random assortments together and logging the resulting effect on humans, not all of them consenting test subjects.
J L: Changing is arduous. It really does mirror the transition process in the real world, but it’s less limited. It’s expensive to get access to changes. Special equipment and making sure you don’t die in stasis isn’t cheap. The time cost, too, matters. And some changes can stress your body. It’s not a perfect science, and you can end up with additional things that identify you as a changeling, like black nails when you asked for super strength.
We also did name the pods where Changes happen eggs. That’s not a very subtle metaphor I think. If people know you’re a changeling, too, they’ll treat you very different. The best reaction you can expect in most of Sundown is mild disdain, which is very real. So if people know you’re a changeling, that alone is a consequence.
This was labeled frogbeast, which I think is such a fun name!
How do your identities as queer and trans (or queer/trans identities in general) reflect in the broader world beyond the Changing? Do they relate to Wonders, or even to the politics?
L A: We didn’t really use wonders to say anything about queerness or transness, they’re kinda just neat things, like goggles that let you see at night. We definitely do intend, though, for guns to be a symbol of the class war. Did we mention there’s guns? They’re more like railguns than gunpowder guns. They use a fictional material called floatstone.
There is this wonder called pitch, though. It’s a black syrup thing that’s injected, and it knits your body back together after some nasty injuries. The catch, though, is if you use too much, you run the risk of becoming a pitchblood. Basically, your blood is replaced with pitch. You lose twenty years off your life, but you’re near invincible. I think some folk can sympathize with that sort of deal-with-the-devil transformation?
Beau’s Note: This specific one reminds me of my own experiences with lithium as someone with bipolar disorder, to be honest.
L A, continued: The politics is really where our queerness comes through. For one, if you have any sort of visible change, which includes things like colored hair, over half of the people in Sundown won’t really want anything to do with you. Not to mention you’re already othered because of your profession. The isolationists of Sundown really don’t like outsiders doing their work for them. Too bad they need drifters like you for things like translation, bounty hunting, and trailblazing.
J L: Definitely. The otherism experienced in Sundown based on being a drifter is pretty much a direct metaphor for how it feels to be disdained and desired. Very much as a queer person it’s easy to feel consumed and discarded at the earliest opportunity, and since you’re a travelling contractor, it’s even more direct.
I think, honestly, the other parts of the system also show some of the good parts of being queer, too. When you create your character, for example, your character is rooted in the people at your table. One of the traits that embodies who you are is defined by your relationship to another character at the table. Drifters often are building an intentional community, a network of people who know where the good work is, who you should work with on what jobs, where it’s safe to travel, and sharing stories of your best exploits. I think that really reflects how queer and trans folx band together to keep each other safe and loved in a world that is otherwise hostile to them.
James Lader.
How are things like changing and wonders, and those politics you discuss, mechanized or formalized in the game?
J L: So all of these things involve infamy, which is the currency we use in Sundown. Infamy isn’t coin, though, it’s a representation of your influence in the area, and how well people know you. The more infamy you have garnered, the more leverage you have. Political action that earns infamy takes place during heats, the jobs drifters take on every month. You might slay fiends, debate a public official, steal from a guild, or lead an uprising.
Getting wonders and changes requires you to spend your infamy to obtain them. Some wonders are special and rare enough to use your downtime between heats as well as your infamy to obtain them. Changes always take downtime, and usually cost infamy.
One of the neat things about infamy is that you only have so much influence you can gain, and once you use that leverage, it’s gone. You have to think carefully about what you want to achieve and use that influence wisely.
L A: Ok so James mentioned heats. That’s basically an adventure, and downtime is the time between them. We intend for downtime to be played kind of like play-by-post between sessions
When you make improvements to your character that involve big investments of time, like learning a new skill or rebuilding your fleshy prison, you do that during your downtime. Spending your infamy on changes is just one of the things you can spend your downtime on.
J L:Downtime is when most of your character improvements can happen, so you have to choose really carefully what you want to spend your time on between jobs. Sundown is a hard place to be and choosing to better your traits or gain cat ears can be life or death. It’s really tricky because you can also only get so many things before not having any more infamy to gain.
What have you done with the game to support players in exploring these relatively serious subjects, including consent and safety mechanics and other aspects of your design?
J L: One of the first sections of the book is a consent tool we developed based on our stress mechanic. Stress is sort of a measure of your character’s health, and it worked really well to measure how safe a topic was for the players.
We also reinforce throughout the book to be mindful of others at the table, to use additional safety and consent tools you might be more familiar with, and to check in with your fellow players.
These are really hard topics and not everyone wants certain themes in the game, and we went out of our way to remind people to check in, and check often.
L A: Regarding serious subjects, I wrote from my own experience as a poor queer person, and I think the queerphobia and classism and Sundown really reflect that
For the experiences I haven’t lived, we took on two non-white sensitivity editors. Their input was invaluable for fleshing out the cultures that have made their way to Sundown in a respectful manner.
Even though I’m disabled too, James has far more lived experience in that regard. The section on disabled drifters in the intro section is entirely his doing.
Every time there’s a “make sure you check in with your fellow players” regarding a marginalized identity, all four of us had a hand in it.
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.
Full disclosure: I was given a free review copy and I think James is pretty rad.
Photos in this review are by Brie Beau Sheldon.
The book itself, The Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide, by James D’Amato.
I approached the review in a weird fashion, to try to get a full perspective. The book itself is basically a tool to help you build the background of your character for RPG play. Some elements of it seem to trend towards games with levels, but I think this could be used for most roleplaying. It uses die rolls for randomizers at times, but also a lot of it is pick lists and freewriting to flesh out the character.
The way I approached this was to have three separate sessions of exercises (there are so many included in the book)! with three different people, and each of them had their own individual characters, while I kept the same character through the whole test. Each of the character had varying levels of previous information – mine, for example, was made up on the spot! I also spent a fair amount of time looking at the book
The book itself has a fun orange, black, and greenish color scheme and is relatively well organized. I will note there are a few spaces where the text contrast is not as comfortable for me to read, but aside from that, the book is pretty clear to follow and read.
The biggest comment I’d have about this book? The questions were often wonderfully open. I am not good with constraints on my creativity – I like a lot of free space to wonder along. There is guidance for a lot of the questions, plus the random rolls, but enough of the questions allowed me to explore where I wanted to go.
I really appreciate James’s thoughtfulness in providing subjects that range from death to relationships to magical objects and places – it feels like there’d be something here for basically everybody! Special love for the “Damn Merlinials” exercise, too. The exercises vary in complexity, with some including random rolls resulting in skipping forward sections, and others just simple fill-in-the-blanks, and some even have a combination of methods to answer all of the questions.
Overall, I think that it’s really useful tool for someone who wants to create deep, complex characters with a lot of history, flavor, and support for their perspectives and beliefs.
A note on pronouns: One thing that I didn’t like in the book is that all of it uses he or she pronouns, even when it’s quite clunky. This was also noted by all three of the other players I tested with. I do know, however, that James didn’t want this in the book and he even consulted with me on how to address it, and I wrote a statement to his publisher. I appreciate James’s intent a lot and wish his publisher had followed it. I bring this up because I know I have many nonbinary readers and the use of binary pronouns from one of our own can feel a little jarring, and I want you to know that James had the best intentions, but couldn’t push it through. That’s basically the only major issue I ran into with this book though!
I’m including the full text of the responses to the prompts I played through, but they only include the answers to the questions – for those you’ll need to get your own copy of the Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide by James D’Amato on Amazon or at Barnes & Noble!
My products are temporarily on reverse sale to gear up for tax time I’ve increased the prices by a very nice percentage – hopefully to help me get through this year’s taxes! Buy all of the products for a cool nice $69 – yes, that’s more expensive. Just like taxes!
My goal for the sale is $420. I will not use it for blazing it, just to give a boost to my funds to pay taxes owed. It runs until 4/1/19!
We recently posted an update about Turn’s progress, and it’s going pretty well! We may soon be closing pre-orders (which are still open here!) if all goes well with layout, and we are pushing on thru with the
stretch goals. I wanted to talk a little about Turn in playtesting, and a
big thing that happened recently in our longest-run playtest.
Just a picture of a cat to start us off right.
Some people may have heard me talk on Twitter about my character Beau Taggart, who is a professional hunter, the game’s Late Bloomer, a Cougar, and super gay. In his early character background during character generation, we established that Beau had turned for the first time only recently, about six months ago (as required for the Late Bloomer role). When he turned for the first time, he his truck had just been hit by a drunk driver while he was driving down a winding back road.
He got out of the car to check on the driver, but the driver was behaving aggressively, and tried to punch him. Beau knew something felt wrong, but he was scared and panicked, and responded by hitting the guy back. He didn’t know that his body had started to turn, that his super strength had grown. The hit was so hard it broke the guy’s neck, and while Beau was realizing with horror he’d killed a man, he also turned into a cougar for the first time.
This gif is not an accurate representation of Beau. It’s just funny!
His animal instincts kicked in – he hid the body, and ate some of it, leaving his claw and teeth marks on it, desperately hungry in light of the force turn. In his panic, he was found by Camellia, a fellow shapeshifter (Overachiever, Bison) who helped him get back to human form, and over time, he learned better how to calm down. He didn’t tell Camellia, or anyone else, about the drunk driver, harboring his accidental crime as yet another secret.
Not many Turn characters have super tragic backstories, and this one isn’t even all that bad (sometimes people accidentally kill people, and those are small town secrets I’ve heard), but I knew there was a risk of it being an element when people played so I built a character with a high risk background to see how fast we could ramp up to exposure. It still took over a year at our slow playing pace – which is ideal. If we were playing weekly, it would happen more quickly, but it paces out well.
How did I plan this out? Well, I knew the number of exposure marks for towns and town characters, I knew the average number of scenes per session (5-8), how many of those typically risk exposure (4-7), and how many sessions each character is generally in (3-6). I knew that having a higher risk background meant that I would end up on the higher range of everything, and that Beau was starting with a generally positive reputation as a Late Bloomer.
That doesn’t mean I was ready for the exposure to hit max!
Turn has ten marks on the exposure track for the town. You can get positive or negative marks, based on the type of interaction that causes them. You take the marks when you’ve done something that might cause someone to suspect your shifter identity – it can be behavioral, it can be physical, etc. Something like slipping up and saying you spent all night in the woods, or maybe your eyes shine oddly in a photograph.
Beau’s track grew and grew over time, including his town character (TC) tracks, which are separate. One TC of his was Diego, his best friend who knew everything but this secret. Early on in the campaign, I played Beau to slowly reveal his identity as a shifter to Diego, purposefully planning positive encounters. He managed to do so successfully, which was good, because Beau was truly in love with Diego. They later became partners, but it was still pretty quiet, because the town was relatively conservative in that regard. Their own professional hunter in love with his buddy? Beau wasn’t sure they could handle it.
There are three results you can get when you become fully exposed to a TC or the town itself: reviled, which is the lowest result, and results either in a toxic and risky relationship with the TC or you getting run out of town or dealing with violence; revealed, which is the middling result and means you may risk comforts, safety, or gossip but you’ll be able to stay in town; and known, which is the best result, and means you’re accepted in the town or by the TC.
With Diego, Beau got known, so he was able to get together with Diego, stay friends and more, and not have any risk increased from it. Over time Beau had some more positive and some more negative interactions with people in the town, just like you do – simple things that cause conflict last longer in people’s minds than we thing. It was pretty balanced. But, rumors arose when a body was found in the woods that it turned out matched the drunk driver, whose car was found, too.
This combined with Beau acting out of sorts because he found out who his birth mother was and it led to a spectacular new ability – the ability to turn into a Raven, as well! These events combined led to an exposure roll, which is 2d6 plus the exposure track, added up based on the +’s and -‘s on the track, and a + for any known TCs. I rolled poorly, but had enough based on the roll, the track, and Diego, I got the middling result – revealed. That meant no immediate danger, but it meant time had come to face facts.
The rumors spread faster than Beau could do anything for, and before he could even come clean to his closest friends (Camellia and Iris, his cousin and coworker), the cops were at Camellia’s door looking for Beau. He managed to tell Diego what happened, and Diego supported him, but he was going to have to deal with the police at some point. He decided to turn himself in. Meanwhile, on the in-fiction Facebook, his fellow townspeople were spreading memes of the Cougar Killer, claiming he’d murdered the man and mutilated the bodies. This is something that would eventually die out without the police arresting him, but in the moment it was challenging!
A little bit of coordination led to him having enough time to sneak past the deputy posted at Camellia’s (where his truck was*) to tell Camellia and Iris what was going on, then turn himself in with some legal support obtained by Camellia. He confessed to fighting with the guy, but stopped short of admitting to murder. The cops didn’t have enough evidence to keep him. In the end, Beau will still live in Cauldron Springs, unable to leave easily because of the ties that hold him there, and hopefully happy with Diego (because that cat’s outta the bag).
This cat, specifically. a Cougar, by Cecilia Ferri
But, once you’re brought in for something this serious, it’s hard for people to drop their suspicions. Combining it with Beau becoming obviously out as queer since Diego went with him to the police station, Beau’s once stellar social standing is pretty decreased. He’ll be able to survive, but he’s not who he once was to these townspeople – many of them will go on believing he actually murdered someone, others will simply struggle with his identity especially when tied with the stigma of being questioned for murder.
So basically it all worked out? Like this is exactly how this sort of result should be narratively. Maybe some people might choose to have the shifter identity be the forefront and have it be more fantastical, some people might want to diminish the fantasy even further, and either is okay – just keeping in mind that people rarely want to believe the most fantastical things, even though they’ll often use fantastical things as metaphor or illusion for the reality.
The pacing for the exposure to max out worked perfectly, the narrative surrounding it hit all the right notes, and all I did was start with some trouble baked in, like so many characters do. It meant a lot to me to play this character** and have it play out so true to what I designed. The game works, it works really good, and it tells the stories I want to be told.
I can’t ask for more, honestly.
I’m curious, what have you worked on in games that you played out in playtesting or just when you released the game that made you have that, like, damn, I did it! moment? A moment with the math lining up just right, or the narrative tone hitting the right button? Share it in the comments, and please share this on social media to talk about those moments of design success!
*Beau constantly forgot his truck at Camellia’s, where he often went to have tea to calm down and to hang out, then turned into a cougar to hit the woods. It actually became a feature on the map! Oops.
**Who some might have guessed was a test run for my chosen name
