Tag: roleplaying games

Five or So Questions on Chernobyl, Mon Amour

Hi all! Thanks to friends on G+, I was able to get in touch with Juhana Pettersson to interview him about Chernobyl, Mon Amour, which is now on IndieGoGo! Chernobyl, Mon Amour is the English translation of Tšernobyl, Rakastettuni, which was published in 2016 by Juhana. The themes of the game sounded haunting and beautiful, and I wanted to hear more! Check out Juhana’s answers below.

BCS Note: It’s so odd but I never realized how beautiful Finnish is! Lovely to even read over without knowing the meanings.

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Cover art of a couple in front of a ferris wheel, with their skeletons highlighted in red. By Joel Sammallahti.

Tell me a little about Chernobyl, Mon Amour. What excites you about it?

It’s a very personal game for me, in some ways that are obvious and others less so. I visited Chernobyl with my wife and that certainly affected how I saw it. It was in the early summer, and the quiet, the light were beautiful. At the same time, the history of Chernobyl is horrible. I remember when I was a child, five years old, when the news of the radioactive cloud hit Finland. My parents were watching the tv news. I didn’t understand very much, but I sensed the fear and the panic. If you look at a visualization of how the radioactive particles traveled in the atmosphere after the accident, it seems as if they were almost willfully zooming straight for Lapland.

Something in that combination, the peace of Chernobyl as it is now and the terror of the story seemed like it could form the basis of an interesting roleplaying game.There’s also a book by a Belarusian journalist called Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl, which had an enormous effect on me. It collects the stories of individuals who were involved with the accident or its aftermath.

I like love stories in roleplaying games, but they seem very underrepresented in the games that have been published so far. The Romance Trilogy of games by Emily Care Boss is obviously a huge inspiration, but I think the roleplaying field could take more than what we have now.

As a less obvious thing, the game is also an attempt to communicate the specific roleplaying game culture in Helsinki, Finland, where I discovered roleplaying and still play. Through international contact I’ve come to believe that the community has some unique and interesting ideas about roleplaying, and I’ve struggled to express some of them here, especially relating to very freeform-style character based social play.

Juhana Pettersson
What struck the romantic tone in Chernobyl, and how do you bring it to forefront in the game?
I’ve always liked love stories in roleplaying games, both as a player and as the GM. I think they’re fun to play and very well adapted to the social situation of a tabletop game. A lot of a real life romance consists of talking, and talking happens to be the one thing that we can do in a tabletop game with minimal or no game mechanics.

I played my very first roleplaying game romance scenes when I was sixteen years old and just starting with Vampire: the Masquerade. Because we didn’t actually have much real life experience with love and relationships, these scenes tended to be kinda awkward and heartfelt. In retrospect, it almost feels like we were using the game to practice for real life. Later in life, there’s been a shift in content on what kind of relationship roleplaying works in the games I play in. They’ve become more about exploring things we don’t necessarily want to experience in real life and fictionalizing actual experience either for fun or to come to terms with it.

Because of this experience, I knew for a fact that romance in roleplaying games can be very good stuff. Since the selection of published material was so sparse, I figured it would work for a game book like this one. However, I also felt that when it came to pushing the theme, subtlety was not going to work. This is why I tried to put romance front and center and have everything orbit around it. The game has two themes, radioactivity and romance. The radioactivity theme is much more perverse, involving an essentially self-destructive impulse. Yet my intuition was that it would come easier to a lot of players.

Aged and detailed map of nuclear zones. By Miska Fredman.
How does the game work mechanically? Does romance interact with the mechanics?
In terms of game mechanics, Chernobyl, Mon Amour is an attempt to broaden the scope of what we consider game design. It has no real mechanics to speak of in the traditional sense. No stats, xp, combat rules. Instead, I’ve attempted to code the design into the world description, the character creation guidelines, the preparatory workshops and so on.

Fundamentally, I think the goal of game mechanics is to create a definite kind of experience. Following the rules you experience what the game wants to convey. Chernobyl, Mon Amour follows a similar kind of logic in that by doing what the book says you should do, you’ll have the experience. It’s just not facilitated by mechanics but instead by the other guidelines. In this sense, it shares a lot of the same thinking as Nordic Larp does. Instead of designing a game, the goal is to design a very particular social situation.

Because of this, I suspect that it’s also a little harder to run than most roleplaying games, and perhaps more limited in who can play it together. However, I’ve also found that this style can be appealing to many people who find more mechanics-oriented roleplaying games difficult to approach.



How did you playtest Chernobyl, Mon Amour, if you did playtest? If you did not, what makes you feel confident about the game succeeding?

I ran playtest games before and during the design and writing process. When I first had the idea, I wasn’t sure of its viability, so I ran games to try it out. After those, I felt more confident that I was able to make a game out of this. From a playtesting perspective, this is an unusual game. Often playtesting means making sure that the mechanics of the game work robustly, but this time there isn’t really any of that. Rather, playtesting is about the ideas and concepts, as well as the functionality of the exercises for creating the right social atmosphere with players. These are much more subjective in terms of whether they work or not, and more prone to confusion created by differences in basic cultural assumptions.

In terms of success, I see this as an experimental game. It’s an attempt to convey a culture and style of roleplaying in a format that should make it possible to replicate it. I hope people will find it interesting, good and worth trying but I have a suspicion that I will be surprised by what people will do with it. Which is of course great, and a part of the appeal of roleplaying games in general.

Kuva, a person with long brown hair and dark skin in a hoodie. By Joel Samallahti.

What kind of workshops do you include with the game, and what sort of content and safety mechanics do you have to help players in the intimate scenario?

At least in the Finnish roleplaying scene, using workshops in tabletop games is highly unusual. I’m not really aware of anybody else even suggesting it. However, in Nordic Larp they’re routine and extremely useful. I figured that if these social tools work in larp, why not in roleplaying games? And I’m under the impression that in other countries, there’s been successful experiments with this.

The goal of workshops in Chernobyl, Mon Amour is get the participants aligned with the subject matter of the game and become more comfortable with each other. Because of Finnish cultural characteristics, the exercises as they are now are pretty talky, and I was planning of adjusting them a little for the English version to take into account the fact that in my experiences, international players are better at this than Finns are.

As for safety, I take it seriously. I’ve had experiences in tabletop roleplaying games myself where I’ve felt that my personal boundaries have been crossed in a negative way. Roleplaying based on intimacy and trust is powerful stuff, and it means that sometimes things can go bad emotionally even if all the participants are doing their best to accommodate each others’ limits. The game as it exists now has some simple safety mechanics to help with these situations, but this is another thing I wanted to adjust for the international version to give participants more tools.

Perhaps the simplest and most important safety technique, if you can call it that, is to make sure that everybody really wants to play it together, that everybody wants to play a roleplaying game about romance and death in an emotionally raw way. Sort of “enthusiastic consent” of roleplaying games, if you like.

“Valokuva 2,” distant image of buildings and industrial structures. Juhana & Maria Pettersson.
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Thank you so much to Juhana for the interview! It was so cool to learn about Chernobyl, Mon Amour. I hope you will all go check out Chernobyl, Mon Amour on IndieGoGo and share this post with your friends!

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Loving Your Work

Earlier today I tweeted about a tweet by John Harper on the subject of loving your work and how it impacts others. For ease of access, I’m going to include the thread here, and then write the rest of the post. This is… a long post.

John’s post: 

Hey, creative friends. No matter what you feel inside, go ahead and tell everyone that you love your work and you’re excited to share it. Lie if you have to. Your enthusiasm will shine though and others will pick it up. Don’t do the bs self-effacing shit. It’s kind of awful.

My responses:

I don’t think that it’s best to lie about how you feel about your work. My suggestion, to meet some of this ask, is “I’m working on something that I want to love and be proud of, but I’m struggling with that. Can you help me find good things in it?”

I’m not great at this yet!

As someone with mental health disorders, it’s really freaking hard to not speak negatively of my own work, especially when my work rarely succeeds or gets recognition and ESPECIALLY when I try to speak well of it and instead it gets trashed or I lose followers because of that. 

It is far more encouraged for men, typically cis men, to praise their own work. The rest of us can get called egotistical, or have people say we’re over promoting/praising work more than it deserves.

I want to speak well of my work but I struggle with it constantly. 

I get what John is saying here and I appreciate the intent, but I also know that lying about your feelings can hurt you so you should work on how you express them more than how to hide them, & that being positive about your work doesn’t always bring good returns and that hurts. 

John’s method can work for many people, probably. But for me, that would be painful & harmful to me,  with my past luck as example, & would not be successful as an exercise. 

Just saying: nothing bad about John’s words for many people, but it’s okay if it’s not right for you.💜

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So, let me get the hard parts of this out of the way:

  • I’m not mad at John. I think he’s great and he’s been kind and honest with me in the few bits of time we’ve had together talking. We just don’t always agree, which he has always seemed to be cool about. I’m not arguing with him over this because I don’t see a point, it’s not like he’s bad or something.
  • I don’t personally think lying about your feelings is healthy. Some people can fake it to make it, and that’s great! But not all of us can, so I suggest if you do John’s method (which is totally fine!), be careful and respect your own needs. Performing self-love publicly sometimes needs to take a backseat to living and functioning, and I know that’s not a popular thing to say. It’s still true.
  • I know not all men benefit from the things I’m talking about here. I have many men I care a lot about who have struggled intensely with receiving recognition with their work, who struggle for people to value their work, and who have received negative responses to their promotion of their work. I know and love them, and I am not trying to belittle their experiences. Please understand that.

There we go. On to the meat of this post!

Description: Debbie Reynolds saying “Chins up! Boobs out!”
It’s okay to not love your work. 

It’s okay, even though it sucks. It’s hard to look at your hard drive at your projects, or down at your drawing tablet, or whatever your work happens to be, and feel that sinking disappointment in yourself. It can be related to success, or completely unrelated. It can be in spite of the love of your fans and friends, or it might be related to trying to meet their standards. It’s okay.

I’m going to say something that you’ve probably heard before, and I’m sorry to be repetitive. But let me try.

Your work is not what gives you value. There is no amount of work you can do that will make you valuable. You don’t deserve things based on what you’ve made, and it’s not about deserving in any case. You are valuable because you are. You are part of all of this world and your work may never be recognized but you mean something, you matter, and you are bigger in the scheme of things than your work ever could be.

Van Gogh could not have made Starry Night if he did not exist in the first place. You must be for any of your work to be, and you make your legacy, not the approval of other people.

Description: Freddie Mercury saying “Fuck everybody else!”

That being said.

I get it. I do. I look at my work sometimes and I scream inside (or sometimes outside) about its inadequacies. It’s failure. I lament loudly on Twitter that no one wants to interview me. I whine that I haven’t sold much of my work, and that no one posts about my work on social media or reviews it. I hurt. I hurt so much. I pour hours into my work and I hurt, and my work is no good. Nope. I hate it.

I bet you think that too, sometimes. And that’s okay.

The idea that you have to love your work for others to love it is probably not entirely what John was referring to, but I bet some people took it that way. Loving your work is not the only way to succeed and to make others love your work. It’s not! But there are things you should do. You know I love questions, so I’m going to give you some questions to ask yourself to make hating your work useful. (click thru for more!)

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Sorry, this is my favorite quote and is appropriate. Description: Andy Samberg as Jake Peralta saying “Eyes closed, head first, can’t lose.” 

This is an exercise to try to find out what you can do to solve your negative feelings about your work, or at least move past them. This is something I’ve actually done, and I found it helpful, so I’m not just bullshitting you. You’ll need at least 5 minutes per piece of work, potentially more like 10.

Go to look at a few pieces of your work that right now, you feel bad about. Yeah, it’ll suck. Just go. Take something to record your thoughts. Ready? Ask these questions about each piece of work, briefly. You can go back with details later.

  • How am I feeling while I look at this work? 
    • Do I feel disgust? 
    • Do I feel sad? 
    • Do I feel angry?
  • Do other people tell me they feel this way about them?
    • How do other people feel about them?
    • If you haven’t shown them to anyone, show them to someone after the exercise.
  • Why do these pieces make me feel this way? 
    • Is it because of their structure? 
      • How should they be structured? 
      • Can I change their structure? 
      • How? 
    • Do they look bad? 
      • How do I want them to look? 
      • Can I make them look that way? 
      • How?
    • Do they not function? 
      • Can I make them work? 
      • How? 
      • What tools do I need?
    • Do they relate to something negative in my life? 
      • Can I talk to someone about that? 
      • Can I change it to ease that connection? 
      • How?
    • Has someone said something bad about them? 
      • Were their complaints valid? 
      • Can I solve any valid issues the person presented? 
      • How?
    • Are they unfinished? 
      • Can I finish this? 
      • Do I need to? 
      • Can I set it aside officially and return sometime?
    • Are they not what I planned for them to be? 
      • What did I plan for them to be? 
      • Can I make changes to make them that? 
      • How?
    • Did they not give me the success I wanted?
      • What was the success I wanted? 
      • Do I need to rely on that success? 
      • Can I ask for help to find it?
    • Have I been too busy to work on them?
      • Do I want to make time to work on them? 
      • Can I make time to work on them? 
      • How?

Look back at your “how?” responses. Which of these is 1) something you want to do, 2) something you can do (by yourself or with the help of others), and 3) something you think will make any difference in the way you feel about those pieces of work? If you have multiple things for one piece of work, put them as a bundle together.

Description: Taraji P. Hensen taking a picture with a phone camera captioned “you’re doing amazing, sweetie.”

Once you’ve figured a few out, look at your calendar and your current to-do list. Set aside a half hour in three days and then another half hour in a week to look at one of the items you think you can address, focusing on one set of questions and responses at each of these scheduled times. So maybe you think, “this drawing sketch doesn’t function the way I want, it doesn’t convey the emotion I’m looking for, but if I take it into Illustrator maybe I can strip out this section and draw in a new one.” You work on that.

Even if you just think about it for a while and write some notes, that’s okay! Keep setting aside just brief 15-30 minute appointments to address these questions, and work forward on execute the “how?” If you reach a hiccup or feel frustrated, seek support. Choose one or two people – only one or two – whose opinions on this project would be valid and you would trust. Tell them, “I’m struggling with solving this problem. Can you talk with me about it and tell me your positive and constructive thoughts?” Work from there to see if you can complete what you said you could do.

If you find that a piece of work doesn’t answer yes on any of those “something you want,” etc. questions, set it aside. Unless it is paid work, step away.

With other people’s projects, remember you’re satisfying them, not you. Contact the person you’re working with, and explain some of what you’re seeing, ask if they feel the same way. If they do, ask what options there are to address it (“someone said the draft of this NPC sounds like nonsense, can we look at it together and consider rewrites?”). If they don’t, just finish the project to what they ask. It might be hard or frustrating, but sometimes, we do paid work for no satisfaction. But, don’t hate that work – it’s over when it’s over. Archive the files, put it away, whatever you need to do: put it out of your mind. You’re done.

Description: Rosario Dawson as Claire Temple saying “Okay, I’m done.”

Here’s the thing: you might not love the work after you’ve worked on this. Make an effort to execute your “how?” and ask for help when you need it. After that, you might feel better. But, you might find out it’s not what you wanted. You can return to the questions, or with your own projects, you can set it aside until you want to jump back on that boat. Or you can toss it out. You are in control of it.

Now you know why you feel bad about it, and can try to do something about it. Just disliking your work and not knowing the reason can burn you up inside. And the best part is, sometimes, figuring out the why and whether you can fix it and how is the path to liking something, or for getting rid of something. Asking these questions and thinking about it practically puts more power in your hands to either do something or not do something, and neither decision is morally or ethically wrong.

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You might hate that exercise more than you hate your work, so that’s something. But really, friends, think about why you make things. Creation is power. Creation is beauty. When we make something, we put something into the world that otherwise wouldn’t exist. It’s amazing! So why wouldn’t we work? Why wouldn’t we make?

And we are the biggest part of that. We control the work, as much as is realistic. We control how we market it, we control how we consume it, we control how we engage with our work. This is a choice we make.

I just wanted to use this. Description: Pink text reading “baby bok CHOICE”

Speak up when you feel dissatisfied with your work if you want, but try to do it with purpose. I felt upset with Turn because people kept on calling it Powered by the Apocalypse, so I thought it through, and I made the changes I needed to do to make myself stop being angry and disappointed with it. A few word changes and it bloomed. I felt frustrated with Shoot to Kill, but after I realized it was because I felt ethically strained about it, so I am making changes to fix it. It sucks to think about why you dislike your work, why you’re frustrated, but it makes it possible to change it and feel better about it!

People will see your enthusiasm over your work, or even your constructive discussions and growth, and want to enjoy your product with you. It will encourage them and it will benefit you. It is hard to do, but I think it is a challenge any of you are up for.

Hating your work won’t make work better, and yeah, it might not make it worse either. But couldn’t loving it make it great?

Description: Terry Crews saying “You know Terry loves love.”

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Holstering Your Concepts

I have mentioned a few times that I’m working on a project that is based on the concept of the John Wick universe with assassins, etc., called Shoot to Kill. It’s a pervasive larp that I’m working on an augmented reality app for. I’ve been pretty excited about it! However, it’s being revamped. Here’s why.

(Content note: discussion of gun violence and mention of suicide.)

(This will contain my personal feelings on gun use. I honestly Do Not Care if you disagree. *shrug*)

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Description: A United States flag over an illustration of ships, with the words “knock knock. it’s the United States.”

Well, in case you’re unfamiliar with the United States, we have a fucking problem with guns. While there are recent events that are particularly notable examples, our incidences of mass shootings are common and significant. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.

I grew up in an environment with a lot of guns. Like, my dad, pap, and cousin owned probably nearly arsenals and my brother wasn’t far behind (I don’t keep track of how many they own these days). While my pap was shot twice (by someone else, once when he was a kid – in the eye – and once while hunting small game – in the dick, no lies), in our direct family I only know of one other incident of gun violence in my family, which was a different cousin who committed suicide.

I’m pointing this out because when I was growing up, guns were used “responsibly,” as in, we didn’t use them in unsafe ways, we were taught gun safety very early, etc. I shot a rifle for the first time when I was like 9. I actually own guns (that may be changing, I’m not sure). So these people misusing guns, they were not us, they weren’t responsible gun owners. 

But I totally grew up right next to some of the classic trash bags who own a shitton of guns and want to use them to hurt people. You can be “safe” with your guns all you fuckin’ want but when it comes to mass shootings, that’s not about how well you can avoid accidentally shooting someone. Like, let’s be real. Responsible gun ownership means shit right now. People are electing to go kill people, in public, en masse, with guns. For like, a whole host a reasons that are… okay nah. There’s no good reason.

Description: Andy Samberg as Jake Peralta pressing a button to speak to someone who has been arrested, saying “Cool motive! Still murder.”

(My official opinion on guns: it would be nice to have strongly regulated gun use for those who hunt and stuff, but otherwise, fuck it, we don’t freaking need them. If I’m wrong, you can shoot me later.)

How does this relate to games, you ask?

I was writing a game about shooting people in public.

I have thought about this so deeply. I’ve been thinking about it for a while. And I can’t make a game about shooting people in public.

I especially can’t make one that’s supposed to be actively played at conventions in-between other games. Like, there’s a whole host of problems with pervasive larps that involve finding other people in the first place.

So, the original game was, you’re professional assassins like in John Wick and you find people who are also playing the game and “shoot” them (originally just getting in touch with them and marking off their shots). There were gold coins, armor piercing rounds, and armor. It had (still has) varying levels of engagement, both performative and participative, with players becoming NPCs after they’re taken out. It seemed like it would be really fun. It also served an important purpose: getting people to meet new people and engage over something.

Still, every time I design stuff, I try to think of ethical issues or any way the game could be misused (this is why there’s like an entire two pages in the Turn essays about what you should really fucking not do with the game). This is because people can be stale bagels and also I’d rather not bring further harm into the world. So many people hurt people with games and otherwise already.

Yeah, I’m throwing a little Obamas in here. Description: Michelle Obama saying “When they go low, we go high!”

I’m revamping the game. I’m using the title Headshots because I’m going to try to subvert the violent/game standard use of the term for instead taking pictures of each other – taking “headshots” like in modeling. In this, the fiction will be that you are still professionals, but you’re doing reconnaissance instead of assassinating people. You’re finding people and identifying them to break their cover stories, and you can use trackers to break cover stories or fake passports to get new ones.

I’m hoping people still like it, and I’m planning to work on it more after I finish school. It sounds fun to me, and it has the elements I thought would be the most fun. I’ve retained the varying levels of participation, the ability to meet new people and engage with them, and the network of people in the fiction. I’m pretty happy about it, but I feel weird about the fact that some people might think I’m overreacting!

I’m not, tho. So like. Chill for a minute if you were getting those thoughts in your head.

Description: A picture of a parrot with the text “Alas, there is no fruit on my fuck tree.”

See, the reality is that game designers have just as much responsibility as every other creator to do their best to make ethical choices in design. I have talked about this before, and it goes beyond cultural appropriation and sexism and all. I don’t give a bit of a shit what people’s actual political beliefs are. It is very obvious that the use of guns in the US is not handled well, and that the casual attitude towards violence in media contributes to that.

And no, I’m not saying “violent video games and movies cause violent behavior.” No. What I’m saying is: if I make a game that could potentially make others (who are not playing a game but are in the place where it is being held) feel unsafe because I don’t consider the fact that we live in a society where there are active and persistent threats of violence using the method in my game? I’m not being responsible.

Responsibility is so, so important. We talk about responsible gun owners, right? They can’t solve this problem. But as creators, we can choose to be responsible. We can make products that people can engage with without harming themselves or others. We can make products that engage people in the activity that is enjoyable and provide a good fictional backdrop without doing something toxic or harmful.

I’m making this change because I have seen too many body counts, and because I want to be the best I can be. Let’s all think of the world and what we can do in it, and for it.

Be better.

Description: A picture of an angry possum with the words “Do no harm, take no shit, beg no man pardon.”

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Five or So Questions on CAPERS

Today I’ve got an interview with Craig Campbell on CAPERS, a super-powered roleplaying game set in the 1920s, which is currently on Kickstarter! Craig talks about the setting and the mechanics of the game in the following responses – check them out!

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CAPERS cover by Beth Varni.

Tell me a little about CAPERS. What excites you about it?

CAPERS is a super-powered RPG of 1920s gangsters. Players portray bootleggers and mobsters working to make their fortune and their mark during Prohibition in the U.S. And they have low-level superpowers. But so do their rivals and so do the feds. The game uses a press-your-luck playing card based mechanic. You might have a successful card flip but only be barely successful and opt to flip another card to try for a better success. But you might fail in the process.

I’m not a huge comics fan, but I am a superhero TV and movie fan. I love stories of people with extraordinary abilities in what is otherwise our normal world. There’s plenty of supers games out there set in the modern day (and plenty that are about HEROES), so I decided to explore a period in history from a less heroic angle. The Prohibition era has always interested me and I enjoy the romanticized movies and TV shows that tell stories set during that decade. So I thought it’d be fun to explore it in RPG form. There aren’t many RPGs that touch on the 1920 other than Call of Cthulhu stuff. And the majority of supers games fall in the comic book style, capes and cowls and all that. These two things make CAPERS pretty unique, but also familiar.

It’s become sort of a chocolate and peanut butter thing for me. I took two things I really dig (super-powered characters and the 1920s) and mashed them together to see what would happen. I feel it’s worked out pretty well.

A different kind of car chase by Beth Varni.
Where did you build your setting from? Did you use a lot of realistic resources or did you span out? 
The world of CAPERS is based on real-world history but with some liberties taken. Most notably, a small percentage of people started exhibiting extraordinary abilities shortly after the Great War (WWI). For the most part, the origin of these abilities is kept vague. However, there’s a chapter that brings science into the game setting, along with a largely not understood source for the powers.

A trio of primary backdrops have been developed for the game – New York, Chicago, and Atlantic City – along with a bit of info describing a handful of other cities. Much of what’s described there is based in real history, though some details have been changed and some new things have been added, wholly from my and other writers’ imaginations. A general overview provides context for the world. What are the new technologies of the era? What’s popular in entertainment? What is life like in the 1920s.

Several notable personalities of the era are present. Enoch “Nucky” Johnson and Al “Scarface” Capone are described in some detail and provided with stat blocks. However, given that the well-known personages of the time are largely Irish and Italian guys in their 20s-40s, historically, I’ve taken some liberties. Atlantic City’s Mayor Bader is a black woman. Charles “Lucky” Luciano has become Carla “Lucky” Luciano. And the hardcase DOJ agent making trouble for Capone in Chicago is Vanessa “Ness” Elliott rather than her real-world male counterpart. Additionally, a wider variety of characters of color, female characters, and LGBT characters are presented to round out the world. All in all, this is presented simply as “how this world is” though some of the animosities between different ethnicities remains for flavor, such as Capone’s largely Italian gang squaring off against Dean O’Banion’s largely Irish northside crew in Chicago.

Concussion beam in action by Beth Varni.
How do superpowers function in CAPERS? What makes them really pop?
First a bit on the game mechanic.

The game uses playing cards, rather than dice. Each player, and the GM, has their own deck (52 suit cards plus 2 jokers). Your character has six traits – Charisma, Agility, Perception, Expertise, Resilience, and Strength. Each trait is ranked from 1 to 3 (higher if you have the right powers). When you make a trait check, you look at the trait’s rank and that is your card count. If you have a skill appropriate to the trait check, your card count is increased by 1 .

To make your trait check you flip cards. You can flip as many cards as your card count but can stop at any time and take the most recent card flipped as your check. The pip count of the cards flipped (2, 3, 4, etc, on up to ace) determine success or failure, whilst the suit of the card determines the degree of success or failure, starting with clubs (lowest) and proceeding alphabetically to spades (highest). So, you might succeed, but barely, and choose to gamble for a better success by flipping another card… but risking failure.

Each superpower has a standard effect, the thing it does or effect it generates most of the time. Each power also comes with a variety of boosts. You choose which ones you want when your character gains a power and gain more boosts as you increase a power’s level. Each boost makes the standard effect better or more versatile, provides an alternate standard effect, or provides something else your character can do related to that power. However, each boost you use in a turn reduces the card count of whatever you’re trying to do by one. You can stick with your standard effect and not suffer card count reduction OR you can use several boosts to gain other cool stuff but reduce the chances of success on your action for that turn.

It’s a “press your luck” system. The combination of trait check mechanic and boost use makes the system a balancing act for each character each turn. More power equals reduced chance of success. Less power means greater chance of success. You also have a sense of what cards remain in your deck, so that colors your choices as well. Players have found the system very engaging. You’re making active choices whenever you’re flipping cards, not just rolling a die and looking at the number.

On the street by Beth Varni.
What were challenges you encountered trying to emulate both a unique time and place and a very trope-heavy genre?
Combining a specific time period and a trope-heavy genre can easily become overwhelming. The first thing I did was make a conscious decision that CAPERS is not a superhero game. It’s not a supervillain game. It’s not even a supers game really. It’s a gangsters game where the gangsters and law enforcement HAPPEN to have superpowers at their disposal.

Once I focused in on the gangster game, it became a question of what tropes of supers were appropriate and which weren’t. I wrestled with a number of powers I thought were cool, but ultimately ended up being too complicated for a game that is, at its core, a stylized cops and robbers game. I also scaled back the POWER of the superpowers. There’s no mind control. That’s a power that becomes to easily abused unless you give the target ways to get out from under the influence. And if you make that readily available, mind control loses its “cool factor.” There’s no magnetism control either. It’s just too darn versatile compared to the other powers in the game. There’s a reason Magneto makes such a formidable foe even on his own.

So, too, I looked at other tropes of comic book stories and developed my own take on them (or had another designer help with that). A 1930s version of super-science. An explanation for where powers come from. Alternate Earths and planar travel. Super-prisons. That stuff is in the game, but it’s all optional.


There are a lot of chances for something to fail, even though it’s got a lot of chances to win. What makes failing in CAPERS interesting? 

I’m a big fan of failure in RPGs. They add drama, insert complexity, and turn the story on a dime. That said, I don’t want every failure to be a huge narrative-laden thing that slows the pacing down. In CAPERS, you can succeed with a complication (a mini-failure), fail with a special bonus to help you next time, straight up fail (with no additional effect), or botch. Each type of failure has its place and helps the story in a different way. Complications add interesting tidbits that make the encounter more fun. Failure with a bonus later incentivizes the player to take further risks. Straight failure keeps the pacing moving. And of course, botches make for the best stories, especially when the characters ultimately succeed later, overcoming the botch.

The playing card mechanic requires the players to make choices on whether they keep the card they have or flip another and take a chance. A player who succeeds with a complication may choose to suffer that complication just because the group needs a success, even if it’s minimal. A player who fails with a bonus later may take that failure because they’ve suddenly come up with a cool idea for their character’s action next turn and want that bonus to come into play for their big risk.

How failure plays a role in a character’s actions is in the player’s hands a fair amount of the time. It’s not entirely at the whim of the random. It’s my hope that this provides for a more memorable story for the players.

CAPERS is coming from Craig’s company, Nerdburger Games!
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Thanks so much to Craig for the interview! CAPERS looks pretty cool and I hope you’ve all enjoyed learning about it, and that you’ll check it out on Kickstarter today!

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Playing Nice in Monsterhearts

There are a few things I know about my game playing preferences, but one is that I don’t have a lot of energy for negativity and meanness.

Description: JD from Scrubs “[thinking] at that very moment, I fear I had divulged too much.”

This is something that can be challenged by Monsterhearts. For the uninitiated, Monsterhearts is a Powered by the Apocalypse game about teenage monsters. It’s riddled with sex and darkness, and almost everyone I know loves it.

I enjoy the game, despite some of my quibbles, but I often hit a roadblock when a strain of negative energy slides in. I have absolutely been a contributor or creator of this, and it’s actually something I really dislike about myself. The first time I played Monsterhearts I found it kind of exhilarating, and I pushed myself too far – I ended up using an X-card on myself. I have played some nasty characters in the game, and I’m honestly not proud of it.

I have even made two Monsterhearts Skins – the Medusa and the Rusalka – and the Rusalka is definitely toxic. But it’s said as much, clearly, and not about meanness. The Medusa is really about concepts of purity, honestly, so not very much so. Still, when I played the Rusalka, they were a passionate and intense person who just wanted to love people – not hurt them, not on purpose. And that was a play choice, obviously.

Sometimes people are okay with playing dark characters, mean characters, what have you – but I don’t. Hell, I feel guilty if I even play a snarky one. I do it, but I feel gross afterwards a lot of the time. I don’t like playing villains, and almost all of my characters drift towards niceness these days. I think it’s because I’ve been hurt a lot, and because the world is so brutal, but I move away from catty, sarcastic jerks these days.

Example: I really didn’t like Jessica Jones much. Description: Jessica Jones looking pissed with the text #bitch the fuck you just said to me.

It has gotten to the point that sometimes reading other people’s actual-plays of Monsterhearts because there’s so much abuse. Like, there’s actual abuse sometimes, but there’s also various types of trauma, there’s cheating, and just a meanness, in so many people’s play. I know not all Monsterhearts is like this, but I just have the bad luck of seeing some of the bad stuff.

And no, most of the time I won’t bring this up during the game, or possibly even after. I don’t like ruining people’s fun and I have been shut down before about how “that’s how teenagers are” so I dodge.

Description: Cardi B saying “I’m being nice to you. Have I stabbed you? No.”

What this means is that I don’t enjoy engaging with Monsterhearts much of the time, which sucks, because it was a formative game for me. All of this is going to the point that: Playing nice in Monsterhearts makes it a better game for me.

Right now, I’m playing a wonderful game of Monsterhearts 2 with Kit la Touche, Dillon Conlan (my partner), and Eric Duncan set in the fictional Alder Creek, which we’ve subtitled Our Sweet Boys. We’re all playing men or masc centered characters, and we’re all like… weirdly polite. The characters are Tucker Ulrey (Werewolf), Silas Schowalter (Ghoul), and Nix (Hollow).

Their backgrounds are a little wonky, but we’ve discovered in play that aside from Silas generally being cranky – he’s dead, after all – we all tend towards like, just decency and politeness. Nix is kind of pre-programmed that way but models a lot of his behaviors off of Tucker, who is just a sweet darn puppy. Tucker is respectful and polite, though a little hesitant and gullible at times.

Description: a pug with a bandanna sitting awkwardly, with the word “heck” in small, lowercase black text.

It’s funny because in spite of this, we still have drama. There’s drama from the NPCs, who are not always nice, but are nicer because we are nice. There’s still challenge and spoopy stuff happening, but we’ve found that the theme of the game – as Kit said – is less “what’s going to happen next?” and more “what are we going to do about it?”

It’s still a game with teeth, but we’re not (always) the ones biting.

I think that it’s renewed some of my interest in Monsterhearts, and while I could write For Ever about my thoughts on the subject, the biggest thing I’ve come away with is that I think we’re technically playing the game wrong.

A lot about Monsterhearts in the text comes down to how there will be hurt and there will be trauma and yet, I feel like we’re weirdly building an environment where when that does happen, we’re playing characters that might be able to work through it. Yeah, I figure there’s gonna be violence and etc., but we might end up growing up and being better because of it – not more damaged. We’re like… good-ish, or something? With good intentions? And wanting to be nice sometimes?

Description: Sam Winchester from Supernatural hugging someone and saying “Too precious for this world.”

Basically, I like the idea of having to encounter bad things in a situation where I’m not also a problematic bundle of jerk. Monsterhearts, in my experience, can bring out bad stuff in me. This specific session feels different, and I had a weird thought while discussing it with the other players and Kit.

Kit and I have recently spent a fair amount of time playing my shapershifter game Turn, and the first non-D&D game Dillon has played was Turn. The vibe in Turn is so massively different that I know it’s definitely realigned my preference for play. I go quieter, I feel more happy when I’m playing someone who doesn’t just want to hurt people, and I feel happier when I have at least one other player I feel love with. I think it says something interesting that the only one of us to approach snarkiness really is Eric, who hasn’t played Turn.

I just wonder sometimes how much playing one game can change our perspective. I know that, at the start of my time playing, Monsterhearts changed mine. I’m wondering now – has Turn changed it, too?

No matter what it might be, I’m glad. The sessions we’ve had so far in Alder Creek have had a sweetness, a more caring environment, and I’m more invested in a Monsterhearts game than I’ve ever been.

Description: Jensen Ackles giving two thumbs up.

<3

P.S. – I’ve found I enjoy Monsterhearts far more when I play with Script Change over the X-card. Changes the tone, I guess. It’s nice!

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Death in RPGs – Let Me Live (revised 2/17/18)

Hi all!

I recorded this recently and had to make some updates, but now it’s a new video on a new URL: https://youtu.be/Uluvyh64_P8

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You’re getting dumped by your catgirl girlfriend

My friend Caitlynn Belle has an excellent game, “you must break up with your werewolf boyfriend” and I have hacked it!

Here is: “You’re getting dumped by your catgirl girlfriend”

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KIK0zVT817AUr9yWRZxBSKc12M0gW-xEfI6RCBA4iSE/edit?usp=drivesdk

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Quick Shot on Fate Accessories Kickstarter

Hey all, got together with Fred Hicks real quick to ask him a bit about the Fate Accessories Kickstarter that’s currently running. See what he had to say, and check out the Kickstarter too!

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Dice with matching Fate points.

What is the Fate Accessories Kickstarter about, both as a product and as your vision?

The Fate Accessories Kickstarter is a follow-up to our 2014 Kickstarter for Fate Dice that launched that whole line (now 11 catalog entries deep) and breathed new life into the whole Fudge Dice thing. In the years since the Fate Dice have continued to be a real tentpole for us in terms of revenue, but our initial stock from that run has been dwindling. We’ve sunk profits from the line into reprinting the most of the stuff that’s getting low or even ran out (in the past several months we’ve gotten reprints rolling for the Antiquity, Eldritch, Centurion, and Vampire sets), but we also want to expand the line with more dice offerings in new styles and quantities, as well as launch a new line of Fate Point tokens that are color-coordinated with an existing (or to-be-funded) set. We’ve got a bunch of potentials waiting in the wings that we really want to show people, get their thoughts on, and get their help expanding the catalog. 
Infernal dice style.
What have been some of the challenges approaching reprinting and expanding – both creatively and from a business perspective?
I’ll answer this backwards. 🙂
Dice are expensive, not on an individual scale, but on a manufacturing-run scale. When we get dice made it’s a 5000 unit minimum order with the folks we have our primary die mold with, so that means for any one packaged dice item it’ll cost us in the low 5-digits (think $10k-$15k range) to get another run made. Our original runs that were Kickstarter-funded in 2014 were manufactured at around 8000 units each, but as we approached 2018 most of them were down to around 1000 units or less. They’ve been a good supporting pole of our company’s revenue stream, so letting multiple catalog entries run dry just wasn’t an option.

So we looked at the most popular ones based on the last few years of data and made sure to get reprints of those rolling. Our Core Dice had already sold out, but the iridescent material we use there is a bit more difficult to source, which increases the minimum print quantity, so we decided to leave that one be (especially given something I’m about to get to below). We also decided we’d let our two licensed sets, Winter Knight and Atomic Robo dice, run their course without a reprint. I love the sets, but I also like the idea of not needing to pay royalties on our dice sales. We’d already brought back the Antiquity one, so that meant Vampire, Centurion, and Eldritch Fate Dice needed the reprint.

Of course that meant that the dice money we could have spent on developing and releasing new sets was spent on reprints… which brings us to our first Kickstarter of the year. Given that it had been four years since our first Fate Dice kickstarter, we felt it was a good time to turn to our fans again and ask for some help funding an expanded line.

Creatively, tho, man, that’s the more difficult part of all this. There are only so many materials styles and distinctly-different colors you can offer before there starts being some kind of overlap. And honestly that’s not something we came to terms with as much as we should’ve before we launched. We faltered a bit in our first week of the Kickstarter because we didn’t make a good enough case that we were offering enough new and different, despite it feeling really obvious to us how things were different even if they fell in the broad categories of “green” or “blue” or “purple.” But recently (just yesterday at the time I write this) we started off our second week of the KS with a reshuffling of our stretch goals to put the new and different more visibly and more close at hand, which seems to be working as we’re getting a new surge of interest.

This was made possible in part because we’re bringing a new dice construction method to the party: layered dice, where different colors of material are injected in sequence, letting you produce dice that have a striped or gradient effect depending on what colors and sequence you choose. Of course, that triples the difficulty in color selection, but does let you produce some dice that definitely don’t look like any others we currently have.

Malachite dice design.
How do you choose what products are the right ones to bring back or newly develop – what ones really called for the action, and which ones are you most excited about?
I’ve already talked about some of the decision making that went into deciding what we brought back, so I’ll focus on new development here.

We knew we wanted to get into the Fate Point token space. Campaign Coins did a great set of metal Fate tokens, and those are still out there if you can find them, but we didn’t want to get into metals manufacture. That left us with the idea of creating a line of Fate Points tokens that use the same material as an associated set of dice; if we get the chance to expand the line further, we’ll do more tokens in more styles to match other sets we’ve had done (or will have done). That’s the other baseline goal of the Kickstarter, to make a new accessories line of Fate Points possible.

We’ve also prior to the Kickstarter begun an effort to make sure there are single player packs of Fate Dice out there — ones that contain 4 dice instead of 12 — as we’ve been hearing over the past few years that there are folks who want to buy a specific, single style of dice rather than a 3-style pack. As a dice addict I don’t really understand that line of thinking, but I know my biases are not universal! So that’s what gave birth to our Fire and Midnight Fate Dice single-player sets at $6 each. Our layered dice will also come in that kind of packaging, in part because they’re a little more expensive to make, so that lets us price them at $8 per set — a 12-die set of all layered dice would need a price a lot higher than the $15 we normally charge for 12-die sets.

New materials styles and new construction methods tend to play into our choices of what to develop as well. Another set we had made without Kickstarter backing is our Frost Dice 12-die set that we released a year or so back. That came about because our manufacturer told us about a “matte” finish that could be applied to translucent dice, which give them a frozen-liquid appearance. It’s an attractive set. Obviously the layered dice from our Kickstarter stretch goals also arose from access to a new construction method. To a great extent what can be done in manufacturing tends to drive the creative side of this more than the reverse — what methods can be used act as a fruitful constraint on the creativity.

As far as what I’m most excited about from the Kickstarter? Besides the Fate Points, it’s definitely those layered dice. Have a look. 🙂

Aquatic dice design.
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Thanks, Fred, for a great chat! Make sure you all check out the Fate Accessories Kickstarter to see what Fred &co have to offer!

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Power IRL Powered by D&D

I wrote this for school, but I wanted to post it here so others could use it, also, example of how I’d like to use games to explain concepts of leadership and development. -Brie

The illustrations on this page are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by John W. Sheldon.

The best way for me to understand the different types of power was to put it into perspective of a fantasy roleplaying game. This might sound lazy, but it helps me remember it better and gives me perspectives.

Did I list druids here? Of course not – their power is more fluid in nature and depends on their interpretation of their magic, at least partially. I would consider them to have something like reward/referant. They’re a weird cookie.
Some of the main archetypes or roles in tabletop fantasy games are paladins, clerics, fighters, wizards, rangers, rogues, and bards. They each have different ways of moving about the game and taking actions, and have different abilities. When reading over the types of power initially probably four years ago, the following role assignments stuck out to me:

Paladins have legitimate power. Legitimate power is “the authority granted from a formal position in an organization” (Daft, p. 370). Paladins are typically given a role of power from their chosen deity, and can occupy a position in a church, as well. They are literally assigned power. With this, they can take actions themselves, as well as call others to action. To use this power, a paladin (or someone in real life) could call back to their own authority and speak to how their actions reflect the intentions of that authority.

Clerics have reward power. Reward power is “the authority to bestow rewards on other people” (Daft, p. 371). Clerics are also religiously-based, and can give people healing or blessings with deific magic. They have the ability to reward people for heroism through those blessings and through healing and recovery. A cleric (or someone in real life) might use reward power by promising that if a certain goal is met, there would be monetary, emotional, or needs-based reward.

Sassy fighter is sassy – and coercive.
Fighters have coercive power. Coercive power is “the authority to punish or recommend punishment” (Daft, p. 371). Fighters are typically combat based and often brutal and violent. Their typical modus operandi is to go punishment first. (Shoot first, ask questions later.) Their work is mostly done with threats! Fighters (or people in real life) could use coercive power by promising retribution should people not follow their orders and satisfy their goal requirements, and follow up on it if there is failure.

Rangers and wizards have expert power. Rogues also have this power. Expert power is “the authority resulting from a leader’s special knowledge or skill” (Daft, p. 371). Both wizards and rangers are experts in their fields, with deep knowledge of whatever it is they do. Wizards are academics, while rangers are more on-the-ground and experience based, and very skilled. Rogues have many skills but are more jack-of-all-trades in a lot of cases, which makes them have a lot of generalized authority because they know at least a little bit about almost everything. These type of archetypes (or people in real life) can use their power by explaining the facts and support behind the requested actions and goal-focus, and use their knowledge to propel action. 

Rogues know where it’s at (in your safe, that is).
Bards have referent power. Referent power is “authority based on personality characteristics that command followers’ attention, respect, and admiration so that they want to emulate the leader” (Daft, p.372). Bards are charisma based (mechanically and conceptually) and can guide people however they see fit. A bard (or person in real life) could use their power by speaking to ideals and behaviors that they hold and ensuring that others know the value of those, inspiring them to act to also carry those goals and behaviors into their work and personal life.

Legitimate, reward, and coercive power are hard power because they are all about control. If you do this, I give you or take away this. If you don’t do this, the whole authority will know you defied them. They are concrete things that immediately threaten or promise things, or simply force authority on people, and that makes them almost immovable. Soft power like expert power and referent power are explanatory and guiding instead of forcing, and therefore can lead people towards success or goal-meeting without making them feel like they have no choice or making them feel like they have to do something instead of wanting to do something, because it makes sense or satisfies some higher-level need.

What kind of power would a dragon have compared to a barbarian? It depends on the dragon, frankly.
Daft, R.L. (2015). The leadership experience. (6th ed.). Stamford,CT: Cengage Learning.

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Five or So Questions on Faerie Fire

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Shannon Campbell from Astrolago Press about the new bestiary currently on Kickstarter, Faerie Fire, which is compatible with Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. Shannon is the creator alongside Dillon MacPherson and Malcolm Wilson. The Kickstarter runs until the morning of February 7, 2018. Check out Shannon’s answers below!

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The Conglomadog by Kory Bing
Tell me a little about Faerie Fire. What excites you about it?
Faerie Fire is a collaboration between myself and two of my gamemasters: Dillon MacPherson and Malcolm Wilson. The three of us are friends and colleagues and we’re all very passionate about tabletop gaming–we’re active homebrewers, Dillon and Malcolm especially. 
There’s loads of things that excite me tremendously about Faerie Fire: the fact that it’s full of items and creatures that the three of us have enjoyed so much in our own campaigns, and now we get to share them with everyone; the list of incredible illustrators that I’m so grateful to have had the chance to work with; and the fact that it’s entirely up to our own creative vision what goes in the book. AND THE AESTHETIC IS KEY. I’m super stoked to get to work on such a vibrant, colourful project. We wanted to make a really wild book that felt a little bit sexy, a little bit dangerous–but at the same time super inclusive.

What was the inspiration for Faerie Fire, and how did you start compiling and creating all of this content together?

To start, a lot of it was homebrew we had developed for our own campaig
ns. Dillon and Malcolm have known each other for a decade and as they were both game designers and avid game masters, they were constantly developing and exchanging new content. They’d always wanted to make a tabletop compendium of their own, and the success in recent years of similar projects spurred them on. I’m a writer and narrative designer in video games but I’ve also had experience as an editor on various print publications–including Bones of the Coast, a Kickstarter-funded comics anthology I helmed in 2016, and The Underground: A Sam & Fuzzy RPG, a tabletop system & setting I edited a couple of years ago.

Right away it seemed clear to me that we should do something aggressive and bold–that it wasn’t enough to just produce content that was the same flavour as the vanilla stuff already widely available. We were spending a lot of time in the fairy realm in a campaign that Malcolm was GMing and it seemed like there was a lot of content there to explore and develop–and it quickly became clear that anything we made for the Wilds would be anything but vanilla.

Pox and Pilfer by Amy T. Falcone
Why did you choose to use 5e as your base? Is any of the material flexible to use in other systems, even just the flavor?

Dillon and Malcolm have been playing for 10 years but I only came onto tabletop games with D&D 4th edition, which I played for about a year before 5e came out. After that I went through a handful of systems–but I kept coming back to 5e. I like long-form storytelling and character-driven stories, and 5e is just the right combination of intuitive and versatile–and it’s so, so homebrew friendly. Pretty much every 5e campaign I played ended up having homebrew added before too long: custom player races and classes, new magic items, weird hybrid monsters–and everyone I played with was always happy to go off book. 5e feels like a robust and elegant toolset.

One of the things we’d really like to do with Faerie Fire is make it Fate-compliant as well (I’m a huge fan of Fate Accelerated)–whether this is done as a stretch goal, or as a side hobby over the next year, is hard to say. We think that the style and aesthetic of Faerie Fire would readily fit into a lot of systems and worlds–though the mechanics would obviously need to be adapted a little. And, of course, the fast-paced, glamorous, brilliant setting of Faerie Fire would make it a perfect fit for one of my favourite impromptu systems: All Outta Bubblegum.

How did you choose artists for the project to capture the aesthetic you were looking for? What was your search like?
I come from a comics background, and for five years I ran a curated comics festival called VanCAF that put me in touch with a large network of artists, so I quickly compiled a shortlist of talent that I thought would be a great fit for the project. We had an open submissions process, as well, where artists could pitch monster ideas for us to collaborate on–but in the end we only selected a handful of artists that way.

The vision was for Faerie Fire to be vivid and stylish and bold and glamourous, but I also wanted it to be non-binary and queer. It seemed to me that if we approached it as an art book as well as a supplemental, then it might provide an opportunity for people who have otherwise felt excluded from gaming to discover how incredible these worlds could be. To that end, we wanted to collaborate with diverse creators. My own connections were very LGTBQ+ representative, and feeds like @sffpocartists on Twitter and the #drawingwhileblack and #latinxartists hashtags provided a bounty of skill & talent that made it incredibly easy to discover new names I might not have been introduced to otherwise.

Tell me a little about the design process. How did you flesh out the creatures? What did you do to make sure everything was consistent thematically and mechanically?

The design process was a little bit different from artist to artist–some artists preferred to be assigned a creature, in which case they’d give us some requests (flowers! or feathers!) and tell us what they hated to draw, and we’d build them a custom creature that played to their strengths. Other artists had their own idea for a creature, so we’d get them to run it by us and then cross-reference it to all the other monsters going into the book to make sure that it was unique. We’d send back design notes, if necessary, but otherwise we wanted to give the artists as much autonomy as possible.

Making sure that each monster is unique involves, basically, a lot of spreadsheets. We have cross-references for creature type, whether they’re humanoid or not, sentient or not–whether they have damage resistances or vulnerabilities, whether they can be used as a familiar or a mount. The book runs the whole gamut. Dillon and Malcolm design the stat blocks between the two of them and each of them reviews the other’s work–I come in at the last to give the final review, whip up the lore, and make sure everything looks hunky dory from there. As the art comes in we review it and, if there’s anything that doesn’t quite sync up with the lore & stats we’ve developed, or if the artist has surprised us with something we weren’t quite expecting, we’ll tweak the written content one last time to make sure it gets the most out of the art and doesn’t introduce any confusing inconsistencies.

The book is designed around the a chaotic Fairy plane, home of the fey. While not all the creatures originated there, they’ve all been affected by it, and that shapes their powers and design. We’ve also introduced the Plane of the Living Light, a neon-inspired plane that kind of bumps up against the Wilds–those with special sensitivities can see into it, and certain creatures can channel its living energy through them. Everything in the book, therefore, has been touched by one of these two things: either chaotic fey magics, or the pulsing, energizing Living Light.

Because the aesthetic ranges from the cyberpunky Neon Noir to the fun colours and friendly animals of certain beloved 90s stationery, there’s a wide range of creatures: some are monstrous, some are sexy, some are friendly–some are just plain weird. Each and every one of them is an original creation.

To finish off, what are a few of your favorite items and creatures in the text, and why?

My favourite probably comes down to two or three different creatures: there’s the Kapny (which is going to be drawn by Jemma Salume), dryad-like creatures that live in the husks of trees burned by wildfire; I’m also a huge fan of the Cawillopard (drawn by Desirae Salmark), a tall, giraffe-like creature whose head can’t be seen for the weeping willow branches that trail down its neck; it has a symbiotic relationship with glittering spiders that live in its branches. When you’re under its expansive canopy, the spiders make it look like the night sky shining above you. Pretty! But also creepy, depending on your particular phobia. And, lastly, I’m a big fan of our “cover girl”, Sepal: she’s the warden of the fey prison, where all the prisoners are transformed into flowers and shrubs for the duration of their imprisonment. She keeps a disciplined, well-manicured garden, and she’s a fierce and cunning member of the fairy nobility; though she mostly prefers to stay out of the various squabbles and underhanded politics of the court, it’d be pretty stupid to underestimate her–she literally grows her own army. Yuko Ota drew Sepal for the cover of the book and the interior illustration of her, as well.

Jesse Turner is drawing all our items as we speak and each time he turns in a new one, it’s even more fantastic than the last. I’m most looking forward to seeing the finished art for the Comet’s Tail: a magical flail that looks something like a glowing comet, and allows the wielder to cast Minute Meteor. 

The Wayfarer by Jesse Turner
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Thanks so much to Shannon for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and will check out Faerie Fire, a 5e supplemental on Kickstarter – don’t miss out, the Kickstarter ends February 7!

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