Tag: RPG

Five or So Questions with Evan Rowland on Noirlandia!

I have an interview today with Evan Rowland about Noirlandia, an RPG based on Questlandia involving a murder mystery! It sounds like a really fascinating game experience. Check out the answers below, and look for Noirlandia on Kickstarter!

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

Noirlandia is a one-shot, collaborative murder-mystery game in a fantastic setting. You use an actual corkboard, and the rules tell you how to pin up leads, connect them together with yarn, and combine your information to get answers on the case. As you work on the mystery, you learn more about the corruption of the unique city your group made, and put your character’s principles to the test.

I’m excited about the game for a lot of reasons! I love the worldbuilding elements – bringing a noir-style mystery to historic London, a colony of dragons, or a meteor mining outpost. I love creating the classic crime board – I’ve always been fascinated by them. And I love how the game emphasizes big political machinations. I’m hoping it can invoke some of the Chinatown feel!

Tell me about the crime board and how it factors into Noirlandia’s main gameplay. How do the players and mechanics interact with it?
To win a game of Noirlandia, you need to find 3 answers: Why was the victim murdered? Who did it? How was it pulled off? To get those answers, you need to assembles leads and form connections between them. The crime board is where that’s all assembled—an actual cork board where you pin up your leads, connections, and answers, divided between the 4 districts of your city.

Both leads and connections come from successful investigation rolls. A lead is a person, place, or object—it could be the victim’s therapist, an underground parking garage, or a stolen statuette. When you find a lead, you write it on a slip of paper or newsprint, and pin it to your board. When you find a connection, you can tie a string between any two leads—maybe the therapist stole the statuette!

Crime Board

To get answers on the case, you need to connect 3 leads together. But there are forces actively working against you – you might find your leads destroyed before you have a chance to use them!

The investigation sounds really cool. What can you tell me about character involvement in the investigation – do they factor into the plot? What about the characters matters to the investigation?

Each player controls one character participating in the investigation. They come from all walks of life—your character could be a writer, a hired gun, an aristocrat, a private eye, or a role unique to the setting you created. All the characters have one thing in common—a connection to the victim, whose death kicks off the mystery.

The story follows multiple threads, as each character tackles the case in their own way. Some games have the characters joining forces, while in others, paranoia or betrayal between characters leads to solitary investigations.

Your group might not be working together directly, but everyone’s progress on the case brings us closer to solving the crime. And Noirlandia is always cooperative on a player level, even when the characters are at odds.

Finally, in every story, characters see their defining principle put to the test. If your character’s guiding principle is, “tell no lie,” the mechanics will throw you into situations where you’ll either have to lie to a loved one or risk losing the thread of your investigation.

What kind of resources and research did you do to create the general “feel” of Noirlandia?

There’s a lot of noir to watch! I’ve combed through movies like The Maltese Falcon, Sunset Boulevard, and Chinatown to come up with mechanics around following the thread of a mystery, putting clues together, and dealing with societal corruption.

I’ve also been playing noir-influenced games like L.A. Noire, Grim Fandango, and Sam & Max Hit the Road. I’ve tried to make the world-building aspects of Noirlandia flexible enough to explore both serious and offbeat noir stories.

Grim Fandango

What do you think happens in Noirlandia – mechanically, socially, or otherwise – that helps to make the experience unique and exciting?

Mechanically speaking, I’m really happy with how the crime board is created and used. It both shows the leads that have been uncovered and the connections between them, and makes a kind of abstract map of the city.

Questlandia’s kingdom-building has become Noirlandia’s city-building, and the fantastic settings that result have been my favorite part of the game.

Noirlandia uses noir plots and pacing, but allows you to inject fresh ideas into the genre. It’s a great chance to shake up the familiar tropes and tell new kinds of stories within a murder-mystery framework. We have an amazing group of stretch goal writers who are creating space opera noir, queer vampire noir, medieval fantasy noir, and Nintendo noir. It’s been so exciting to see these settings come to life in the game!

Some Crime Board photos!

Thanks to Evan for the interview, and I hope you all get to check out Noirlandia on Kickstarter! It looks like a fun and unique experience, and I admit, I can’t resist a good mystery. 🙂

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This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Women with Initiative: Kathryn Hymes

Hello all! Today we’re featuring Kathryn Hymes, our Woman with Initiative for April!

Kathryn is one half of the indie design studio, Thorny Games. In the past year, the studio’s silent live action game Sign received an Honorable Mention from the Golden Cobra Challenge. Sign is a game following the journey of deaf children in 1970s Nicaragua. It’s received great reception at multiple events, including Metatopia and Dreamation, and will be featured at the upcoming Living Games conference. It’s always exciting to see designers approaching difficult topics and examining agency and experiences through the lens of gaming.

Kathryn’s current project is Dialect, which in her own words is

“…a game about language and how it dies. It’s a world-building game that follows the story of a community in isolation as seen through their language. We’ve run very successful playtests at Metatopia and Dreamation as well as with many local groups throughout the SF area.  My design partner and I have put a lot of time and heart into this game. Looking forward to Kickstarting in the late summer!”

She is also working on Xenolanguage, which is an introspective game based on one of her favorite sci-fi stories by Ted Chiang. In Xenolanguage, Kathryn explains

“…it’s five minutes in the future and we’ve just made first contact. You are a linguist tasked with deciphering an alien language. As you gain fluency, you begin to see the world differently.”

This in particular made me think of Magicians, a language learning RPG that teaches Korean. Using RPGs to help people learn and understand unfamiliar languages and cultural language coding is fascinating!

I had the opportunity to ask Kathryn some questions about her work and process. Check them out!

Why did you choose language as a focus for your current games?

Oh, man — language is so my jam. I read grammar books for fun as a kid (I was a fun kid). I studied math and language in school. It was a natural muse for game design. Language is a powerful and relatively-uncharted topic in gaming that is fundamental to so much — identity, culture and just being human.

Given it’s a passion, the ideas around it come very naturally. Dialect, a project I’m co-designing with Hakan Seyalioglu, started off as an idea about telling a story through building a language. In the past I’ve struggled with finishing projects just for the sake of it. Feeling compelled to make something because I really care about it gets me through the design slumps.

Language won’t be the focus forever, but for now I’m happy dancing in the space between a game-designer- linguist.

Could you talk a little about Sign and the research you did for the game?


Yes! Sign is a game about being understood. It’s a silent larp for 4-6 players in under 2 hours. It centers on deafness, play, and an emergent language that came from the hands of children. In Sign, players follow a small piece of the true story behind Nicaraguan Sign Language, which started life as an emergent language of deaf school children, and later became the official sign language of an entire country. In the game, players share the frustration and loneliness of not having a language and develop the tools to overcome it. Over the course of the game, they build their own form of communication through structure and freeform play. As a linguist, I’ve been moved by this story for a long time. I hope this game will help it spread!

My design partner and I have taken great care to make the game accessible, respectful, and fun to play. We’ve solicited and incorporated feedback from both the Deaf community and linguists specializing in sign language. This has meaningfully shaped the game. We believe Sign is an experience in empathy: It gives players a brief glimpse at how life changes when barriers to communication are raised, and what that means for people emotionally. The hope is that in addition to being a game, it can see a second life as an educational tool, spreading the word of what is one of the most remarkable linguistic phenomena of modern times.

How do you make games about language more engaging when they include elements like being unable to speak or having different languages without the game seeming forced?

Our brains are hard-wired for language – it’s something that makes us fundamentally human. This help it be naturally engaging. For example, what’s most unique about playing Sign is the arc of understanding. Players’ interactions during the first stages of the game are stilted and full of compromise. They don’t have language: they can’t be understood and it stings. Throughout the game, players define the words they need to communicate during recess and class time, and by the end, it’s incredible how much they can get across. We’ve also seen players hold onto their in-game language long after the game ends and use it with others to recall play. Words are just so sticky.

Thank you so much to Kathryn for answering questions and giving her time for this feature! You can reach Kathryn via the links and social media below if you’re interested in talking more about Sign, Dialect, or Xenolanguage, or whatever else caught your eye during the interview. Thanks for reading, and please remember to check out my Patreon if you’re interested in helping support more blog posts, interviews, and features on Thoughty blog!
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Kathryn Hymes Contact
Thorny Games Website
 

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Five or So Questions with Greg Stolze on Unknown Armies Third Edition

I have been lucky enough today to have an interview with Greg Stolze! Greg, by Cam Banks’ own words, is “the lead designer and writer of UA3 and co-creator of Unknown Armies since the dawn of gaming history. He’s also the charming gent in the KS video.” (I liked this description, so I stole it.) Greg answered some of my questions about the third edition of the well-known occult tabletop game, Unknown Armies. A little background from me about Unknown Armies: I have heard of the game hundreds of times, but never once looked it up. The Kickstarter popped up, and I clicked on it – and I actually watched the video!* – and I’m totally hooked. Hopefully I get the chance to play someday! In the meantime, let’s see what Greg had to say!

Tell me a little about Unknown Armies Third Edition. What excites you about it?

I think that the setting represents the feel of 2016 a lot better than UA2 did, and I hope that the revised rules incorporate more of what gaming, collectively, has moved towards in that time. Specifically, I think we’ve finally nailed down the issue of “It’s a neat setting, but what do you DO with it?” In UA2, we said “Whatever you want! Make up a plot framework that works for you and go from there.”

That worked for some groups, but with UA3 we backstop that a lot harder for everyone else. Instead of a pure sandbox (which is good for improvising GMs, less good for pre-planning GMs), we give you a sandbox in which the players themselves lay the rails. That way the GM knows where things are heading and can build ahead with some confidence that the PCs aren’t going to lose interest or get distracted. At the same time, we help GMs pace their duties—when do I want to be the PCs worst enemy (‘cause it’s a horror game) and when do I want to be the players’ biggest fan (‘cause it’s a collaborative story activity)? This can be confusing, and we’ve attempted to make it more clear.

I’m also excited that we were able to get some new voices into the setting. I always said I didn’t want to write something new for UA just to keep the pot stirred, but it took me a while to realized that getting help from other writers would be the easiest and best way to find new perspectives on it.

Could you share an example or two of rules that you are revising from UA2 to UA3 and what thought process went into those changes?

I think two obvious things are (1) eradicating the stats that were in the first versions — Body, Speed, Mind and Soul — and (2) including rules for building your own adeptery school.

Taking out the stats was part of a streamlining effort. When people told me about their UA characters, the things that they always talked about were their Do-It-Yourself Skills (renamed in UA3 as “Identities,” and now a little broader than Skills were in the previous editions) and how crazy their guy was. So I decided that, since no one’s bragging about their maxed out Mind score, it would make more sense upgrade the old Madness Meter into the newfangled Shock Gauge. As the Shock Gauge, it not only measures how vulnerable or tough you are in response to different mental strains, but also abilities that gauge how well you’ve adapted to the challenges you’ve faced. For example, if you’ve absorbed a lot of hits to your Unnatural gauge, your ability to hide from things is a bit better than the average person (because most Unnatural stuff, alas, makes people want to put their head under the covers). At the same time though, the character’s ability to notice things diminishes, because the other effect of seeing lots of crazy weird magick is that you start to doubt your perceptions.

As for building your own adept magick, I thought that would be something the fans would love to play around with, and it would be useful for freelancers. Originally, the costs for different effects were pretty much based around my gut feeling (or the instincts of whomever was writing it), so I just codified it to make the guidance clearer. If getting a charge is really hard and your taboo is really strict, then spells don’t cost many charges. If charging up is simple and your taboo isn’t that bad, then spells are far more expensive. Play balance is always something of a moving target, but at least this time we’ve got a better scope on it.

What elements of the setting & setting development are you really excited to see players and GMs get their hands on?

I’m pretty stoked with the way the Sleepers changed. Instead of a monolithic, top-down conspiracy of magick-hogs, you get something like a radicalized Alcoholics Anonymous, only for enchantment. These are not optimistic people who want to be top dog any more. These are folks who have been burned badly and don’t want to let anyone else make their same mistakes. From the outside, this can look abusive and controlling, but if a bad-acting adept is rampaging around, the new Sleepers are the group that aren’t going to consider recruiting and containing her (like TNI would) and they’re not going to dither about morals (the way Mak Attax might). They’re just going to clear their schedules and pull on their stomping boots.

What were some of the challenges you’ve encountered taking a game with a history and a pretty secure place in people’s minds and upgrading it in the ways you’ve mentioned, without the risk of losing the original concepts?

There are always people who want it to be “the same, but different.” And that’s not out of line! If I bought a game called “Vampire: the Requiem” and it wasn’t about vampires, I’d be pretty hacked off. But the balance between sameness and difference can be tricky to place and, no matter what you pick, someone’s going to wish you’d done it differently. For example, some fans have said, “Why did you take out mechanomancy, epideromancy, and our beloved dipsomancy?” But if I’d just revamped those schools, I’m certain that other fans would have said “Why are you just redoing stuff that’s already on our shelves? Where’s the new stuff?”

It can feel a little like people are saying “Why can’t you surprise me again, exactly the same way you did last time?” but, well, that’s not the way surprises work. Plus, it’s not exactly difficult to get one’s hands on the old material.

Where are you pulling inspiration from, if anywhere, mechanically, in theory, and in fiction or setting? 

I’m not sure if it’s a mechanical inspiration exactly, but I did look long and hard at Apocalypse World and the way it takes “GMing” — something I’d always just kind of pantsed my way through, based on instincts forged in the fires of a thousand pulp novels — and breaks it into a series of steps or tasks. The GM book has a lot of that: “When you are running the game, you need to do A, B and C, and the time to do C is not when you’re at the table in the middle of things.” A is pacing, B is rules handling, and C is generating antagonism. I’m very pleased with how it worked out to explicitly tell myself, when I was running my test game of UA3, that in-between sessions was “antagonism time” when I could look at each character and think “What is the worst thing I could throw at this one? What’s most likely to distract him or her from their goals?” But once we were in the middle of the session, I put away that mindset and switched to “How can I make this session, right now, the most fun for these players?”

The GM has always had to have this split consciousness, being in character as the PCs’ worst enemies while at the same time maintaining the setting and trying to keep the plot moving forward. The stories about antagonistic GMs who pull the classic “Rocks fall, everyone dies!” at the slightest deviation from their pre-planned plot is a symptom of a GM who has gotten these two jobs confused and is using the tool of moderating the session in service of pushing against the characters’ agenda. In UA3, it explicitly helps keep those jobs divided.

Thank you so much to Greg for answering my questions! This was a really interesting interview, and I’m excited to see and hear more about Unknown Armies Third Edition. Make sure to check out the Kickstarter and learn more about the game!



*I am a notorious non-video-watcher. I’ll read transcripts, but I’m easily distracted by videos longer than a minute or so, which means I normally skip KS videos except the projects I’m working on (like Ryan Macklin’s Katana’s & Trenchcoats, the subject of the Five or So interview Monday). The Unknown Armies video is badass, though, so I paid attention.

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Five or So Questions with Fandible on Longshot Campaigns and Numenera

I have an interview today with the cast of Fandible, talking about their upcoming longshot campaign of Numenera! I got the chance to ask them questions about why they chose to take on this longshot and what they’re getting from it. Here’s a bunch of words from the crew!

Our interviewees today are noted below with their initials – you can learn more about the cast on Fandible’s About page!
BC: Billy Coffing
DD: David Donnelly
JR: Jesus Rodriguez
DR: Daniel Rodriguez
AC: Angela Craft

Tell me a little bit about Fandible’s upcoming projects. What excites you about them?

Our upcoming project is the Longshot campaign for Numenera! This will be a new weekly podcast offering, a new actual play podcast episode posted every week in one story. After five years of playing a new game every week, we’re looking forward to the challenge of staying with one game week after week. We’ve played a few sessions of Numenera before, and have an intermittent game of The Strange that’s been ongoing for awhile, so we’re familiar with the system and the world, but this weekly campaign will let us dig into the game in a way we haven’t been able to with any of the other games we’ve played

What made you choose Numenera for this campaign beyond basic familiarity?

BC: It’s an interesting setting. We have never been a podcast for fantasy settings, and while Numenera can be described as fantasy, there is a unique element to it that is sci-fi and that called to me.

DD: For all of the systems that we’ve tried over the years, we’ve always gravitated towards ones with an economy that allows us (the players) to exercise some influence in the game beyond the actions of our characters. Numenera incorporates a system of experience points that facilitates that more than most other games, and encourages a mix between character advancement (increasing abilities, stats, etc.) and the myriad other uses it provides (such as “I happen to know this town” or “I’m exceptionally good at stabbing David’s character.”)

Speaking of economy, however, the game also appeals to my desire to find and accumulate STUFF. Cyphers, shins (money) and good, old-fashioned dungeon crawling is all baked into the narrative. The game may be based on exploration and discovery, but I’m most excited to be the team accountant. (Didn’t buy rations in the last town? Let’s look up those starvation rules.)

JR: The world of Numenera fascinated me. With such a bizarre setting, it seemed a great opportunity to present my Player Characters with numerous strange creatures and characters that wouldn’t really come up in a more traditional roleplaying game. In many ways, it reminded me of another favorite setting of mine, Planescape. Unsurprisingly, also created by Monte Cook. Like Planescape, I hope to bring in material that may challenge the players physically but also mentally. Because in a world where technology is essentially magic, who can say that the person calling himself a wizard isn’t right?

DR: For me, my favorite thing about Numenera is the sheer weirdness of it, the whole ‘sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ thing. I gravitate naturally towards the weird, and Numenera does a great job of bringing the weird while keeping it approachable.

AC: I’m interested in games that let you explore different types of stories all in one setting. Think of Star Trek: on any given week, there might be a political negotiation, a war story, a goofy holodeck adventure, or a deconstruction of a modern sociological problem. Because in Numenera you’re exploring a world that is built on the leftovers of other civilizations, we can end up in a number of places that allow for different types of plot beats – in the sessions we’ve already played, my character has acted as a scientist, a spy, and a pirate. Few other games give that sort of flexibility in a single setting.

Why did you choose to run a long campaign? Do you think it will be more challenging or easier?

BC: Fans were interested in a long campaign, and we decided to listen to them. The most important thing for me was that we didn’t give up our one-shot games on Friday in order to do one continuous campaign. Thus it took a little while for us to figure out the logistics of this all.

DD: I voted for this campaign because it seemed like the easiest way for me to avoid responsibility by giving Jesus more work. The challenge for me will be minimal because the dice have conspired against me in every other game thus far, so I can focus solely on portraying a character that listeners will mourn when he is dead.

JR: We play many games in Fandible and although we have a few long running games, the long length of time between them makes each session feel more like one off stories that happen to be connected than one cohesive campaign. Numenera will present an opportunity to have the players play one cohesive long term story that doesn’t necessarily need me to think of stopping point at the end of each particular session. It will help me focus on the natural end of session or even stop it mid battle because I know we will be back rather quickly to finish it.

The downside of the short length of time between sessions is that I won’t have as much time to waste not thinking of the next part of story. With our other games, I can have months in between sessions. Plenty of time to hang back, sip a beer, and maybe spend 5 minutes thinking about a story point before continuing on working on my robot bartender idea. Now, I need to be a bit more focused on getting my loose ends tied together a bit quicker, because those players are going to need me to tell them what’s going on rather quickly.

DR: Well, the choice was made as a group, but I definitely approve of it, while we do have some long-running games (Hollow Earth Expedition and Unhallowed Metropolis both come to mind), this is the first one we’ve done with the full intention of making it a long-running game. I think the main challenge with it will be finding the right pace for growth with our characters, neither so fast that every session sees us becoming different, nor so slow that we stagnate for months on end.

AC: I have a terrible memory, so I really like that behind-the-scenes we’re going just a matter of weeks between Numenera sessions, rather than months. And because the episodes for the Longshot will be shorter than our normal format, the sessions are moving at a zippier pace. I agree with Dan that pacing character and story advancement overall is going to be the toughest balancing act for us, because this is a huge adjustment from how we’ve been playing together for the last five years.

What playstyles do you each have to contribute to the game?

BC: I’m funny. And I’m willing to have my character take a beating for the good of the story. Also, thus far, I’ve had the worst rolls in game so my ability to accept bad luck has been helpful to continuing the game.

DD: My contribution is the same now as it has always been: Completely forget what our objective is and have the players walk me through everything that’s happened in the last few hours.

JR: Utter and absolute insanity. Pants may or may not be required.

DR: I think I bring a general ‘old man grump’ combined with a willingness to play a character that could very well end up killing and eating his teammates that should endear me to both the audience and the rest of the group.

AC: I often end up playing “the straight man” to the insanity of the group, and I’ve had fun developing a character that thinks she’s the straight man again, but is really just rather unobservant 90% of the time. Yes, this gets her into plenty of trouble. But also makes everyone let their guard down for that 10% of the time when she is focused.

What do you hope to get out of this campaign, both short term and long term?

BC: Short term? I’m just looking to have a good time with an interesting setting. This is the same for any of our other games. Long term, I hope we get more fans who are interested in one continuous story every week. And hopefully those new fans will find an appreciation for our older stuff.

DD: Short term: More twitter followers. Long term: More people donating to our Patreon, finding me at a Con and challenging me to a duel. (I accept, pistols at dawn and settle your affairs, btw.)

JR: Short term, I expect a few laughs, a funny situation or two, and a chance to present some truly bizarre creatures. Long term, an epic story. Fantasy is not Fandible’s bag, but Numenera presented us with a chance to swing around our aversion to fantasy and give us a long term game in the vein of many group’s traditional D&D campaign. Truth is, I plan to have this game become a EPIC fantasy adventure. Just don’t tell my players. They must suspect nothing!

DR: Mostly the ability to play a were-hedgehog, which I believe is its own reward.

AC: My long term goal is definitely to keep Jesus from turning this into a epic fantasy quest! SCIENCE shall be your foil, sir. I’m also looking forward to having enough game sessions to really watch our characters grow and develop from the rough sketches we started with to fully developed people (were-hedgehog-people, in one case). Short term, the goal is to keep the group’s momentum going long enough to meet our long term goals!



What tools (tech and social) do you plan to use to handle keeping track of the events, keeping tone, and help with ensuring everyone has fun?
BC: David has been pushing for us all to be taking more notes. I’ve slowly been taking his excessive prodding to heart. Maybe I’ll even push for some sort of character journal to be posted on our website.

DD: Angela made everyone a binder, so I plan to use my training from 5th grade and stuffing all of my papers in there and hoping no one asks me to show my work.

JR: I have an Evernote account, a keyboard, and a will to use it. Besides that, I’ve got a Numenera bestiary I’ve started to bookmark with possible creatures my players may face at the most opportune (and inopportune) times.

DR: You mean, besides the half-dozen screens I have on me at any given time? Well, mostly the fabulous folders that Angela made for us because she’s our only grown-up. Other than that, it’s just a matter of being ourselves and talking openly among ourselves before and after each game about what we want to do with it. It’s worked pretty well for us so far!

AC: For all of Dan’s screens, we really are a rather low-tech group! Pen and paper is still the best note-taking tool at the table for us, since the battery will never run out and we’re less likely to be distracted by other apps when we should be rolling dice (guilty! But we say so much funny stuff the urge to live-tweet is too hard to resist!). And yes, my fabulous binders will hopefully keep all these notes in one place rather than spreading to every nook and cranny of my apartment, where the weekly games take place.


Sounds like this is going to be a fun project to listen to! Thank you all for reading, and to the cast for answering my questions! Thanks as well to Angela for wrangling the cast. Check out Fandible now!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Five or So Questions with Ryan Macklin on Katanas & Trenchcoats

I was really excited for this interview with Ryan Mackin about the upcoming Katanas & Trenchcoats release, which is currently kicking ass on Kickstarter. My favorite game is Shadowrun, specifically 3rd Edition, which is pretty heavy in the 90s aesthetic. I am lucky enough to be one of the writers that Ryan has accepted work from, which is super exciting, because I’ve wanted to be involved even from the earlier release of Katanas & Trenchcoats, Episode 1: Welcome to Darkest Vancouver! The video for the Kickstarter is really fun to watch, as well, so if you don’t check out the KS for any other reason, you’ll still get a laugh. 


Tell me a little about Katanas & Trenchcoats and the upcoming release. What excites you about it?

There’s a lot for me to be excited about, but if I had to pick one thing, it’s the jam band approach I have to making games. I have the most fun making games when I’m doing it with a crew—the Fate work I’ve done with Leonard Balsera (and later with Jack Graham on Transhumanity’s Fate), working on Leverage and Cortex Plus Action, the four Technocracy books that I developed for Mage: the Ascension, working with the editorial staff at Paizo, and so on.

Last year’s Katanas & Trenchcoats, Episode 1: Welcome to Darkest Vancouver took that idea to a silly extreme—27 writers for 22 pages. And while that make for a rougher-than-normal development process, it was super fun to get that many minds playing with my silly idea of iconic ’90s gaming.

I’m talking with around a hundred writers now for this new edition Katanas & Trenchcoats—all fans or past contributors of the meta-genre, and all jazzed to make a bigger, badder version of K&T happen. That we’re going to make a more robust game in system and setting is also exciting, but I wouldn’t have as much fun doing that solo.

More of a logistical question, but: You have had some great teams in the past – how do you find people to work on projects with you, including on this project, who have the style, energy, and personality that work best?
In a word, slowly. In the early days, I didn’t form the team; I was brought on by another. That gave me connections with people (and hands-on training on team-style freelancing). The first time I lead of team of my own choosing was on Convention Book: N.W.O. for Mage: the Ascension. I talked with people I knew who were fans—some experienced writers, some newer—and convinced them to form a short-lived jam band.

My approach as a developer and as a publisher is honestly best described that way, as a jam band. When the team is small and nimble, like they were on the Mage books or Fate Core, I do a kickoff Hangouts session to get everyone talking to each other. This is great for getting ideas flowing, but just as important is the humanizing factor: each person hears a voice and ideally sees a face for everyone else. That way, when differences of opinion happen via email or document comments, it’s easier to remember the human being we’re talking with.

From there, I try to take the same philosophy I have as a GM to running a team: maybe I’m smart about something, but I’m not as smart as a team of a bunch of smart people (that may or may not include me). So I look for people who will surprise me with ideas. Some ideas are outright taken. Some are rejected, but the conversation about that rejection involves further articulation. And some ideas mutate into cool stuff because of the multiple viewpoints.

That’s why I put out a call for as broad a range of people as I could get for this Katanas & Trenchcoats book. Me and five other white dudes can come up with some really interesting stuff, but me and five (or in the case of K&T, dozens) people who don’t remotely share my background? I consistently find gold there.

What kind of content are you looking forward to bringing in the new edition? Can we expect any specific new rules or setting material?
Aside from a few tenets, there are no sacred cows. The setting is getting rebooted—I think of this full edition as the TV show that got spun off from a movie. The Darkest Cosmos expands to a full cosmology of otherworldly places and to more about Earth itself. Basically, take what was the Year One stuff, and blow it up like a beautiful, chaotic balloon.

The point isn’t the blow it up just for the sake of doing so, though. The reason I’m involving so many writers is to create a deliberate cacophony in one book, but one where if you want to follow a single thread holds a lot of potential.

As far as the system goes, the original was ha-ha-funny (and honestly quite playable for only a few pages of jokey rules), but in trying to build a different setting on top of it, my efforts constantly fell flat. So I went back to formula, and to notes I made that didn’t fit in the 22-page version of the game. I looked at what did work about the system—the basic die mechanics—and what I do and don’t like about games like Fate, Cortex Plus (specifically Action), Powered by the Apocalypse, and the various ’90s games I’ve enjoyed.

I’m dropping more specifics every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday during the Kickstarter campaign as updates.

What about this project really keeps you interested in working on it – material, background, rules?

I can boil it down to: (1) Getting to make the largest jam band I can for a setting each writer is excited to be a part of. (2) Threading the needle between making a bizarre, humorous setting and giving it dark, sinister vibe. (3) Making an adventure system that combines things I’ve liked elsewhere in a way that feels, well, “retromodern.”

That’s a pretty broad answer, but I don’t think I would be so interested in this project if it wasn’t ambitious. I certainly wouldn’t bother Kickstarting something less significant. Certainly if it wasn’t that broad, I wouldn’t have room for a few dozen writers to work with me on it.

Katanas & Trenchcoats really appeals to people who played games in and around the 90s – what about the game would interest modern and new players?
I see things like Supernatural and don’t really think the ’90s spirit has gone away. We still like stories of mystical weirdness. We still want to play out being unreal beings.

Folks who have enjoyed systems I’ve made in the past will be interested in this next iteration of adventure game rules, where I’m blending ideas from the systems I mentioned above. Take Fate’s idea of promising agency in any situation, but throw out fate points. Meld die mechanic ideas of World of Darkness, Cortex Plus, and Nephilim together into something that keeps you in a “this world is weird” frame of mind. Look at how GUMSHOE does knowledge stuff, and link that directly to dark forces giving you inspiration. Take the Powered by the Apocalypse idea of GMing, but with a direct and in-world need for the GM to use dice as well. Chew on how PbtA and Cortex Plus handle player-vs-player situations. I’m even cribbing some push-your-luck stuff from Mythender.

I’m taking the things I like that work together for this setting, throwing them in a blender with some Darkest Bananas, and making a gothy smoothie. That’s “retromodern”—something that would have astounded us in the ’90s and plays out interesting today.

And honestly, I always feel weird getting into deeper design talk about the game, because I’d rather people try to play it for what it is rather than try to pick out the “oh, that’s X from Fate” or whatever. But at this point, I’m probably always going to be in a shadow of successful things I’ve made before, so I just gotta embrace that. 🙂

Thanks to Ryan for the interview! This was a fun read and I am really looking forward seeing to Katanas & Trenchcoats: Retromodern Roleplaying in GM and player hands. Check out the Kickstarter to see what all Ryan is putting forward for the game!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Five or So Questions with James Mendez Hodes on Ironclaw: The Book of Horn & Ivory

I got the chance to interview James Mendez Hodes about his game currently on Kickstarter, Ironclaw: The Book of Horn & Ivory. We talk research and appropriation, and learn a little about the game mechanics. Enjoy, and don’t forget to check out Ironclaw’s Kickstarter page!

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

Ironclaw is a tabletop role-playing game set in a fantasy world populated by anthropomorphic animals like in Disney’s Robin Hood or Zootopia. It has published settings inspired by sixteenth-century Europe and sixth-century China; my project, the Book of Horn & Ivory, adds a new continent to the game world inspired by Africa and the Near East in the 1500s. While Ironclaw is a much more traditional RPG than I usually play—it has an elaborately detailed setting and a complex combat system—I find the process of creating and developing a player character really evocative and satisfying. Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve loved to learn about weird animals, so I relish the opportunity to play as a centipede boxer or a snake businesswoman or a bat janissary in a world where species differences matter. Ironclaw’s setting also features nations and religions clearly inspired by real-world analogues, so I get to geek out about history even in a fantasy setting where the other players don’t need to memorize realistic details.

What kind of research have you done to build the worlds in the game?

This book introduces four new regions, each representing a real-world country in Africa or the Near East. The Anatolian Caliphate is our Ottoman Empire, the Deltan Sulṭānate is our Egypt, the Pirate States are our Barbary Coast, and the Ọ̀yọ́ Union is our Yorùbáland. My undergraduate studies in African religion laid a lot of the groundwork for the religious traditions of these regions, especially Ọ̀yọ́’s. Before the rough draft went in last October, I read a great deal about Ottoman military history, so you can look forward to janissaries, giant cannons, galley warfare, expanded cavalry rules, and Ottoman rivals such as the Knights Hospitaller and Vlad the Impaler. I also found a fascinating book about Ottoman medicine, which you’ll see reflected in Anatolia’s cutting-edge hospitals. My next research subject will be jurisprudence, marriage, and inheritance law—the Game of Thrones stuff (except it will actually come out this year).

How are you approaching and represent cultural markers and inspiration without being appropriative?

Ironclaw has always upheld the principle that fantasy analogues of real-world things should be presented with the same respect and care you would afford to an academic paper or news article about that subject. For example, Horn & Ivory introduces a religion called Malachism which shares many signifiers with Islam, such as a caliph who combines spiritual and imperial authority, an emphasis on science and medicine, official tolerance of other religions within its territory, and some semi-formal prohibitions on practices the rest of the setting considers benign. The fact that we’ve made some changes, even large changes, doesn’t excuse stereotype, intentional or inadvertent; and as I’ve mentioned in the “how to play this game without being racist or Islamophobic” appendix to the book, the stakes tied to those kinds of negative stereotypes are frankly high for Muslims in the English-speaking world in general and the role-playing hobby in particular.

I’ve carried on the approach I’ve used for my other projects heavy with cultural signifiers such as AfroFuture, Thousand Arrows, and Scion. I start out by identifying the negative stereotypes that pose the most clear and present danger to the material with which I’m working and then designing “perpendicular” to those stereotypes. Because presenting the exact opposite of a given stereotype sometimes winds up reinforcing that stereotype (looking at you, Wakanda), I try to emphasize aspects of religions or cultures that haven’t appeared often in popular media. Signifiers with strong associations have to come from clearly written and sourced reading materials about the history or legendary of the culture, region, or religion I’m discussing. Finally, if I don’t come from a certain culture, I don’t get to decide whether my representation is appropriation or not; so the final product has to pass muster with a friend from that culture before it reaches the public. Ironclaw’s made mistakes in the past and I fully expect to get some of this book wrong, but I’m counting on the community to help point out my errors so I can learn from them, improve on them, and create something we can all be proud of.

What kind of mechanics do you use to model the non-human roles in Ironclaw?

Ironclaw characters have six fundamental traits, each of which gets a die size in character creation: Body, Speed, Mind, Will, Species, and Career. For some characters, Species is mostly a cosmetic or social choice, but I personally like to save a high die for Species because you get to roll it in your pool when you use your species’s strongest senses, when you’re in your species’s natural habitat, when you attack with your natural weapons, and when you use the three skills your species is best at.

For example, Lücius the gangster centipede gets his shiny d8 when he relies on his senses of sight or smell; when he grapples enemies or jabs them with his venomous forcipules; or uses the Climbing, Craft, or Tactics skills. Each species also starts the game with three Gifts, which are little packages of abilities; so Lucius has an Extra Two Hands, Prehensile Feet, and Venom. If you want to emphasize your species’s natural abilities further, you can learn atavistic Gifts as your character advances: so your otter character could hold their breath for an impossibly long time, or your mouse could burrow at incredible speeds.

Species also have distinct social positions, though: there are noble houses, dynasties, clans, and even religions associated with specific species. So if your social engineer countess plans to collect Gifts which give her bonuses with other nobles, she’s probably attached to her species’s Great House. Horn & Ivory also introduces a necromantic secret society whose ranks come mostly from scavenger species such as vultures and hyenas.

What experiences do you hope that players will get out of Ironclaw?

I hope this Ironclaw setting helps players who’ve been scared to engage with cultures outside their comfort zone do exactly that, the way Steal Away Jordan taught me I could have just as much fun in a game about American slavery and as I do in any other RPG. Moreover, I hope we can inspire other designers to represent cultures outside of the industry norms. This might be one of the first RPG books about these places and times, but I pray it won’t be the last.

Thanks to James for the interview! It was cool to learn about the new product James is bringing forward. Check Ironclaw: The Book of Horn & Ivory out on Kickstarter if you can!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Five or So Questions with Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor on Unbound

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor about their current game on Kickstarter, Unbound! I’ll confess to actually being pretty excited about this one – I’ll leave the explanation to the guys, but I will note that the art looks awesome and it sounds fun! Here’s what Grant and Chris had to say about Unbound!

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

GRANT AND CHRIS, SIMULTANEOUSLY: The most exciting thing about Unbound, for us at least, is the way that it rewards our GMing style – which is to say, extremely low prep, high improvisation. Neither of us like spending hours doing work for a game only to have the players walk in and make it up as they go along – so we thought “Why can’t we write a game that lets the GM act like another player?” So that’s kind of what we’ve come up with. There’s no setting, because we don’t like reading reams and reams of setting text (and we wanted it to be flexible), and at no point does the GM have to sit down and do anything arduous. Everything happens live, from the character creation to the world creation to the game-to-game running of the story as it advances forward. Everything happens in up-time.

Two of my favorite things to do in games are 1) punching things, and 2) jumping through windows. Can I do these things in Unbound, and if so, HOW?

GRANT: 100% on both counts. Punching things is an important and healthy part of any good game of Unbound, and jumping through windows has certainly come up in every game of it I’ve played. The combat is handled with a deck of playing cards per player, which they use to determine whether or not their attacks hit and also as hit points – when they’re out of cards, they’re out of the fight. We’ve found that representing health as a big stack of cards that players deal out of really visualises damage, and we’ve had people get quite upset when we attack them in combat because it feels so visceral. (I think the best role for punching is probably the Brawler, as they specialise in long, drawn-out melee when surrounded by too many enemies.)

We don’t have quite as many rules for jumping through windows as we do for punching, but we can certainly abstract the idea of a window (and you jumping through it) in our combat system by denoting an connection between two areas as challenging – so it becomes a sort of skill test to get through it without taking harm. Also we have a power called Kick In The Door, which means you inflict extra damage on the turn you enter a room, and I definitely think that could apply to windows, too.

How do you accommodate multiple settings while maintaining a consistent system feel?

GRANT: It’s been tricky! We’ve tied everything together with our pulpy battle system, I think, so that no matter where your game ends up it’ll still, essentially, be a game about a group of dangerous people going around 1) punching things and 2) jumping through windows. But, importantly, we’ve done our best to keep everything evocative and exciting, but not explicitly tied to one place, time or idea. So we have Deadeyes, say, as one of the roles – and Deadeyes are people who are good at ranged combat, but that covers everyone from fantasy elven archers to Wild West gunslingers to space-suited recon scouts to magic-missile toting wizards to a dude with a hawk to someone that, I dunno, uses a nightmare science device to create furious clones of himself that have a life measured in seconds and tear his enemies to shreds.

It’s been a real challenge to keep the abilities exciting whilst essentially setting-free, and I’m really proud of what we’ve managed to achieve. We’ve built something that draws players in with some cool effects and powers, but that they have to put their own mark on.

The traits – extra bonus powers that flavour your character’s actions in and out of combat – go a long way to helping people define whattheir setting is about, how magical or unreal it is, how gritty it is. If you get a group picking Captain and Mighty Weapon and Rage and Dirty Fighting, you can tell that they’re veering towards a different world from that of a group that chooses Transform and Shadows and and Fire and The Unnatural. So rather than trying to write different setting packs that make the game “Sci-Fi” or “Fantasy” or whatever, we give people the option to build their setting out of parts organically – Aura, a power that gives allies in the character’s area certain benefits has a different flavour in a technomagic sci-fi setting (protective amulets powered by silicon demons) to when it’s in a modern military thriller (shouted orders, small-unit tactics, self-sacrifice etc). But! We ARE doing setting packs for stretch goals in the Kickstarter, because we’re kind of excited to write some more specific rules.

There are a number of setting-neutral games out there – what makes Unbound different?

GRANT: Well, there’s the playing card thing! Pretty much everyone else uses dice. But aside from novelty, it gives each player a history of their character because we get them to write on the cards – lasting injuries, ongoing villains, lessons learned, stories experienced and so on. (We used to have people tear up cards when they went out of action because it felt really… squicky to do it, and that acted as a bonding experience. But it messed with the odds of the game too much to be a viable thing, so we’ve shelved that to use in something else.)

What else? I think it comes down to our world creation, as we mentioned above. When everyone sits down at the start of the adventure, no-one has to have an idea of what they’re playing – not even the GM. We’ve set it up so that everyone builds the setting together, and plots out future scenes together, and works out what’s going on in the world through a series of questions bound to character choices. Everything goes towards making a world that’s tied to these characters, and vice-versa – it’s a world as seen through the lens of people, not omnipotent creators, so it tends to generate more mysterious places and histories that people are eager to explore. (For example: we’ve got a Dirty Fighting power where you set an area on fire to give yourself an edge in battle, and if they choose it the player has to tell the GM what the most beautiful thing that their character’s ever destroyed is. And, like: what was it? Who did that affect? Does the character feel bad about it? Does the owner want revenge?)

While coordinating to design Unbound, how did you set priorities for the system functions (fiddly mechanics to social mechanics), and what did each of you bring to the table in regards to design skill and knowledge?

GRANT: We didn’t really set priorities, I guess? We decided, when I moved to the US in January 2015, that we should do some work on a game with each other over Skype to try and stay something approaching sane, and it ended up sticking; what started out as a weird dice system evolved over eight different iterations and hundreds of, if not a thousand, hours of work, into the thing you see today. (We’ve always had core, role, and trait, though – the three building blocks have always been the same.) A lot of the mechanical aspects of UNBOUND are combat related – almost all of them, really, with non-combat stuff being much broader and using a looser, more universal system tied around abstracted action and reaction more than the fine-tuned blow-by-blow of combat. Not that we’re not proud of the dramatic scene resolution, mind, we’ve got some great play out of that. But I’ve often found that mechanical specificity in social scenes can really knacker the pacing and flow, so I’d rather build something flexible than something where you have to run the numbers on a conversation to see if it’s a viable option.

In terms of design skill and knowledge, I’m definitely the writer of the two of us, so I’m in charge of putting all the words in the right order; we’ll hash out rough rules together in a shared document over voice chat, and then I’ll tighten up the wording and Chris will double check it. And, honestly, I think the biggest thing that I’ve got from Chris is a design safety net – where, in the past, I’ve built very safe, symmetrical systems in my games, this is the first time I’ve tried to make a serious game with lots of interlocking rules. He’s given me the opportunity to try something weird and interesting and to encourage me if it’s good, or tell me in no uncertain terms why it’s bad. We have a great working relationship. I reckon I’d probably be married to him if we fancied each other.

CHRIS: We didn’t set any hard and fast priorities when we began. I had a few goals that I wanted to reach. I wanted a combat system that gave me some chunky rules and combinations of actions and abilities. It had to feel fun as soon as you picked it up, but have an optional layer of complexity under that for me to get my teeth into. I’ve always loved really rules heavy combat systems for the sheer joy of sliding all of the mechanics and numbers in to place and making a character shine. Unbound also had to allow you to bring what you wanted to the table every game. From the social and skill based scenes, through combat, and even at the first moment you sit down and build a world with your friends. Everything had to provide a framework for that collaborative storytelling.

All of Unbound was written collaboratively which has given us the ability to lay out all sorts of rules that either went straight in the book, thrown away, or modified as we went on. I am certainly not a writer, I’m no where near the skill level Grant has. My talents lie more in the systems and mechanics of the game. So I’d make a new power, and it would be utilitarian. It functions and fits in a theme and performs its role. Grant then comes along and makes it sound like the best ability you’ve ever read and you simply have to have it for your character. We balance each other out nicely, when either of us wrote anything that wasn’t up to standard it got flagged in the document in a lurid red colour and a less than positive comment got attached. Writing together allowed Grant to make a game that maybe he wouldn’t have even tried writing before and to rein me in when I started making complicated tables out of everything.


Is there anything else you’d like to share?

GRANT: So what I think I’m really excited to see is what happens after this – and not just from us, but from other designers, too. I’ve not played anything quite like UNBOUND before, nor have I read anything quite like it, and while we’re drawing on a lot of good sources of inspiration for our mechanics, I’ve not seen this combination. But we’re just scratching the surface of what we can do with the systems we’ve created, and I can’t wait to see what happens when other people start getting their hands on it. As in: how can we play with marking cards? How can we play with the way that the GM builds a sort of character for themselves, out of adversaries, factions and twists? What can we do to mechanically track the progress of a saga throughout all the adventures within? We’ve done some great work on this but I’m buzzed to see what happens if people start picking up our design, our philosophies, and running with them. In video game terms: if UNBOUND is Assassin’s Creed, I want to see what our Shadow of Mordor is. I want to see if this can catch on and what that means for games in the future.

I’m really excited to see the final product of Unbound, and you can help make that happen! Check out the game on Kickstarter now to learn more about the game!


————————————————————————————————————–This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Five or So Questions with Josh Jordan and Caitlynn Belle on Singularity

Today I have an interview with Josh Jordan and Caitlynn Belle on their larp that is currently on Kickstarter, Singularity. There are only a few days left on the Kickstarter, but hopefully this interview will tell you a bit about the project and pique your interest!



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

Josh: Singularity is a larp for 4-6 players that emulates a dating game show set in the the transhuman future. I am excited about it for more than one reason. I like that it allows us to play an episode of a dating game show. I think that’s a fun format for a one-shot game that I haven’t seen before. I like it because setting it in the transhuman future allows me to play characters from a hugely diverse list of human and post-human people. And I like it because I think my co-designer, Caitlynn Belle, is particularly talented at making games about tense human relationships and explorations of personal identity.

What elements of transhumanism are brought forward strongest in Singularity?

Josh: In Singularity, characters are not necessarily human. Though most of them had human bodies when they were born, they now have a variety of physical forms. Basically, the characters exist in a universe where the human body is optional. You can choose your own body to match your sense of identity. Whether that’s an uplifted tortoise, a humanoid composed of pure electricity, an android, an abandoned planet, or something else entirely, you choose to define yourself, and you can conform your body to that identity.

Caitlynn: Mostly the idea of changing yourself and no longer needing to rely on standard conventions of what a human being is. We’ve purposefully kept the majority of the topic out of the game and focused on the technology to change who you are, to bring yourself more in line with the ideal soul within yourself.

When designing games about relationships, particularly larps, what do you think are the most important elements?

Josh: Player safety and comfort are the most important. Then of course, preparing and monitoring to make sure that the players are having fun. After that, being true to the theme of the game itself.

Caitlynn: Figuring out how a relationship actually works and trying to deliver the tools to help players convey that. We have a very romanticized version of how marriage or relationships work via the media we consume, and it’s important to try to transcend that and deliver a more honest experience. The core of a relationship is defined, I think, by how people work together and what they’re willing to go through and still stick it out. If you’re trying to make a game about how people interact with romance and sexuality, you have to take into account that they’re people, with their own quirks and hang-ups about love, sex, gender, ethics, and so on. It’s putting two personalities together and see where they stick and where they repel, and finding out what happens when they can’t make those things compatible.

Another important thing is safety, because a relationship is trust and love and carries certain connotations and baggage with it, and may sometimes elicit strong memories from players. You have to make sure people are ready.

Tell me a little about the structure of Singularity. How does the game flow?

Josh: Allow me to answer that by first showing you the Table of Contents. It follows the order of the game itself, so it should give you an idea of how the game flows.

Pre-Show Directions

  • Pitch
  • Setup
  • Rules

Screenplay

  • Opening
  • Round Table
  • Second Dates
  • Decision Debrief

During the pre-show directions, players talk about what the game is supposed to be and what they need to do to choose characters and prepare to play. They also talk about safety rules and boundaries, so that no player feels unsafe, and so that any player who begins to feel unsafe knows what to do. The players are there to support each other and make sure everyone is doing okay.

During the actual game, which the book calls the Screenplay section, the format is very much like an episode of a dating show, followed by a player debrief. The Host opens the show and introduces the characters. The Star meets all the Contestants at a round table group date. The Star takes each Contestant on a separate second date. Then the Star talks with the Host and makes her final decision of who to pursue a relationship with.

Caitlynn: One player takes on the role of host, facilitating the entire game, while everyone else plays contestants on a dating show. One is the star, and the others are trying to win their affection. There’s a round of introductions, then a first date, where everyone plays a scene in a nightclub or bar or somewhere and they discuss who they are and what matters to them.

After that, players work together to improvise stories about a second date, making it up on the fly. The host will try to interject and draw conflict out of it. Then, after about an hour of play, you’ve got these characters who have put everything about themselves on the table, who are excited that this person is into this thing, but are nervous because they’re opposed to that thing, and finally the star has to make a tough decision and decide who is important for them.

Does Singularity have any built-in safeguards for safe, respectful play?

Josh: Yes, the section of the book entitled “Rules” is all about safe, respectful play. Before the players get in character, they discuss which topics should be off-limits, expectations for physical touch during the game (SPOILER: There doesn’t need to be any physical touch during the game), three things they can do when they feel uncomfortable during the game, and what to do when they think another player looks uncomfortable.

Caitlynn: We talk a lot in the setup about safe practices and techniques – cut and brake, the door is always open, and so on. There’s a whole section dedicated to making sure people understand they’re free to walk away at any time and that we all exist as a group to make this a fun experience for all.

Despite the characters being a bit strange, they’re really just very surreal takes on identity and gender, so we talk about making sure you’re addressing those things respectfully and the role you have in making it work successfully for everyone. Safety and good times are huge concerns!

What do you think is the most valuable thing someone can get out of the experience in playing Singularity?

Josh: That’s a good question. I don’t want to limit what you get out of the game or tell you that if you don’t feel X, you’re not playing right. But I hope that by playing Singularity, you have at least a moment of empathy for people who struggle with identity issues in real life. Maybe you are like me and have always had a strong sense of who you are. That’s great, but not everyone is like that. Or maybe you have a sense of identity, but the society where you live doesn’t value you or your identity. Playing a game of Singularity can give you moments of empathy with people who are either A. still figuring out who their are or B. being told by their neighbors that their identity isn’t worth much.
TL;DR I hope you get out of it whatever you want, but our intent to explore issues of identity. Especially identity in the context of looking for romance.

Caitlynn: That these people exist. Trans, non-binary, queer, or what have you. They’re a part of our community, and even outside of that, a part of our society. The big goal with this game was to help characters find connections across differing creeds, cultures, ideas, identities, and genders, to show that even the people we hate or distrust, they’re still people. We’re all human in the end.


Thank you to Caitlynn and Josh for their responses, and make sure to check out Singularity on Kickstarter!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Five or So Questions with Fred Hicks on Evil Hat Crowdfunding

In the indie publishing scene, there are some companies trying out new business models for funding and production. One recent model is being implemented by Evil Hat, the company behind Fate Core and the Dresden Files RPG.  When Evil Hat’s most recent Kickstarter pulled in over 7 times its original goal, I knew I had to find out more. I spoke to one of the main guys at Evil Hat, Fred Hicks, who gave some insight into the company’s plans for using crowdfunding for game releases and supplements.

Tell me about the model for Evil Hat’s crowdfunding plans this year. What inspired the development, and what excites you about moving forward?

When we were reviewing how the company did financially in 2015 — good, stable, nothing to be worried about, but not particularly stellar when compared to our best years — we realized that we had fatigued a bit on running crowdfunds and then had let that conceal how much crowdfunding was a component of our budget in our best years.

We’re past the fatigue now, and based on past performance, we figure our good average number of big crowdfunds (not counting the ongoing Patreon) is two per year. With one in 2015, we decided 2016 would be where we play catch-up and aim to run at least three. (Honestly we could probably do four, but that fourth is for a card game and those can be a bit “grindy” if you don’t have a lot of fire and heat on them, so we need to do our big, definite fire-and-heat card game KS this year and see how that affects our audience & presence in the board & card game category. Also our fantastic backers might shoot us if we try to do four in one calendar year, so best to move that possibility to 2017, for now.)

The Kickstarter we’re running right now — ending in about 24 hours from the time I’m saying this, mid-day on February 10th — is Fate More: From Bits to Books. This is “Fate More Part 1”, which is to say we’ll be running a “Fate More Part 2” KS later. These could have been combined to make a single campaign, but we came to realize that we had two separate groups of things we wanted to do with a sequel-to-Fate-Core campaign, and getting the two halves to play well with each other in one campaign would have been tricky. (More on that in just a bit.)

There’s also a concern, I think, with making sure we don’t ask too much of our backers at one time, and that we avoid aiming too high on a “sequel” campaign. I’ve seen time and again that follow-up campaigns often don’t pull nearly as much as the original one, and Fate Core’s was positively stratospheric.

As it happens, Fate More: From Bits to Books (I’m gonna just start saying FM1 from here on out) has done really well vs. its goals — we’re reaching towards $60k right now, and will probably end at least in the mid-$60k range, if yesterday’s performance continues. But it’s not Fate Core’s $433k, and some folks in the middle of the campaign talked about how that wasn’t a success for Fate More. I heartily disagree! Our base funding goal for two books, and three additional books beyond that, have already been hit, and I was honestly only aiming at the first four books as reasonably-sure. We got there pretty early on. The remaining three books — hardcover compilations of Worlds from our Patreon project — were more of a question mark, a “do people actually want this sort of book?” query meant to be answered by the backers’ choices. And that means any range of possible answers are “correct” and good for our intended goals, whether that answer is “nope, don’t do the compilations” or “holy shit PLEASE DO THEM”.

So we’ve already been well past our victory conditions for the campaign for a few weeks now, back in the $35-40k range. 🙂

At any rate, FM1 is all about taking our digital stuff that’s ready to go to print, and getting it into print. This includes a few new releases, as well as pre-existing, already-released-in-digital content. I prioritized and ordered the stretch goals such that the new releases came first, and like I said, folks just blasted right through those. Folks like new. Plus, by focusing in on stuff which was ready or nearly-ready to go to press, we’d have a very short time period between the KS funding and getting those books shipped — we expect to have them in backer hands by June at the latest, with the titles hitting distribution early into Summer. In this sense, FM1 is “Fate Now”, the stuff that we’re focused on delivering to people in the present, that we want to see in print, on shelves, this year.

Fate More Part 2 (FM2) is the one that looks forward, to the future. It’ll have a stronger new-digital-content focus and will ask more questions that our backers will help us answer. FM2’s focus will be on kicking off new projects, and expanding the overall Fate Core line in some new directions. We’re still firming up exactly what that looks like (with some projects already underway, because it’s good to have something ready to give to backers at launch), so please forgive my vagueness here. 🙂 We’re aiming to make FM2 happen in the Summer.

But between those two campaigns is our April-or-May one, that may be the big one this year if we can reach the right people: we’re going to be crowdfunding the printing and expansion of the Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game. You can read more about it on our website — I’ve played and demo’d the game dozens of times, and it’s tense, fun, and really serves the Dresden Files fans well. We’re in the middle of getting art done for the cards, which is the main hold-up at this point, aside from the usual KS preparations — a campaign video, a teach video, polishing and editing the rulebook. This is probably the campaign I’m the most scared about — in a fun-scared sense — simply because I don’t know how big it could go, or how fast, or how well we’ll connect with the novels’ fans, backers, and boardgame fans. I’ve got a lot of hope, there. We’ve put out a series of solid card & board games over the past couple years, but we’re not really on the map yet. This one has a chance to put us on the map. Maybe even light the map on fire. We’ll see!


What are the biggest challenges you’ve encountered, from a business and marketing perspective, for promoting this project plan and getting the wheels on the ground, so to speak?

Expectations, possibly. Fate Core’s KS sets a high bar, and the Fate-focused backer-audience might be expecting us to clear that kind of crazy thing every time. But that KS was a special snowflake; I think Fate More’s performance is the calmer, saner, and more typical one between the two, and that’s just fine. But Fate Core’s KS is also why we have a 10,000-member mailing list we can promote the new Kickstarter to. So in that sense, we’re already well past finding our core audience, marketing-wise, for Fate stuff. And we got that audience back in 2013 for Fate Core because we’d spent ten years (!)building the Fate audience and community in the first place. So a lot of the challenges you’re talking about are really hurdles that we’ve cleared in the past.

There’s also a communications dimension to this sort of thing that’s a little challenging. I’m hugely transparent in how I run the business — Jeff Tidball would say (!)pathologically transparent, and that’s a fair cop — but that doesn’t mean that people automatically understand the business reasons and dynamics that go into parceling out the things we want to do (to push Fate forward) into two separate KS campaigns.

FM1 is heavily focused on print, but a lot of our audience is very digitally oriented, so I think some folks have felt a bit confused, and it was important to get out in front of that and both talk about how FM2 is going to be more for them,and make sure that to the extent FM1 has a digital component, that it is at least somewhat compelling to them.

I think I managed it, tho it wasn’t really until the announcement of our “Extra Goals” in the middle of the campaign (which focus on releasing more of our content into open licensing) that I really hit the right spectrum-breadth for our digital fans. It’s nuts: for a heavily print-focused campaign, half of our Fate More backers are only in at the digital tiers. But while they’re 50% of the population, they’re only about 15% of the revenue at last count; print is still king as far as money-making goes.

Can you talk a little bit about how this crowdfunding project plan meshes with the Patreon funding and development?

Patreon has been about funding the development of the Fate Worlds of Adventure content, but not the manufacture. The Patreon paid for the writing, editing, development, and the biggest cost, art. But that’s all it could cover. Putting that content into a physical book costs as much or more than all of those costs combined, at least at our scale. (Print on demand is another matter, but I’m often unsatisfied by print on demand for color interior books.)

So Fate More: From Bits to Books is the manufacture portion, as far as the Patreon content goes (it’s also the manufacture portion as far as some digital-only Fate Core KS content goes, with Do and Young Centurions). And there, we’ve chosen to go for compilation books, four worlds in each hardcover volume, rather than the individually printed softcover worlds we did for Secrets of Cats, Save Game, Aether Sea, and Romance in the Air haven’t managed to see sales strong enough to justify the relatively minor cost of printing them. I really love the format — $10 softcovers, 40ish to 60ish pages, full color interiors — but the market hasn’t really responded. Could be twofold, and the funded volume(s) from the KS will help us figure out if that’s a format-driven lack of interest (do our fans want more stuff in one book? do they want their color interiors to have hard covers?), or a general lack of interest in adventure/light setting content beyond the digital market.

What do you think are some of the key items leading to continued success with both this Kickstarter and your products related to Fate in general?

It’s those ten years I mentioned earlier. We started growing the Fate community — almost accidentally, but we were doing it! — just past the turn of the century. During that time up to 2013, there wasn’t any Evil Hat originated for-pay Fate book; just Spirit of the Century and, eventually, the Dresden Files RPG, following an earlier-edition digital-only free PDF generic version.

By the time we got ten years deep we had plenty of pent up demand in the community for a core, setting-free Fate book. And that gave us momentum enough to make the Fate Core KS huge and then carry past that into the market at large.

Being able to get out there with Fate-related stuff, like our Fate Dice line, has really helped too, in terms of smoothing out the company’s revenue stream. Fate Dice sell very steadily and fill in some of the gaps that book-driven releases can’t.

And there’s the Patreon, which has let us produce a steady stream of digital releases even in years where we put out very few physical products (hello, 2015).

We’ve continued our commitment to open content too, which has helped create some Fate focused opportunities for third party publishers out there.

And finally, when we run our KSes, we have our eye on creating products that outlive their Kickstarters.

For one, it’s easy to fall into a trap where the Kickstarter is such a good deal, nobody’s really motivated to seek out the product without the Kickstarter involved. We don’t do early bird specials in the reward tiers, or really any kind of discounting on the products; we sell them at the price they’d sell for in a gamestore. That preserves good retailer relations and makes sure we don’t undercut the value of our product.

We also make sure to focus on producing excess inventory we can sell in distribution, but funded by the campaign; that makes sure we’re in a fairly low risk footing when it comes to the post-KS discovery of whether or not we reached 25% or 100% of our potential audience through the campaign. There’s no way to really assess that aside from shipping your stuff and hoping it sells. Smart budgeting: it’s a thing.

With Fate Core, I managed to size our printables such that I printed roughly double of what the Kickstarter population demanded of each product (tho sometimes that multiplier was higher simply b/c there’s a minimum number of copies I wanted to print of any one given thing so I can spread it around usefully in distro). So that meant I ended up shipping up to half of what I printed, and had half left over to sell through distro, with the KS’s funding of each print goal covering the total print cost of that item.

Worked out pretty well — and concentrated and excited enough of our audience that we’ve even had to go into reprintings of Core and Accelerated in the time since the KS.


How have you worked internally with your teams to really build a solid concept of how this program will work and get them all on board? After all, if you can’t get your people on it, getting customers on it could be even harder.

I presume I am not the smartest guy in the room, and surround myself with people who are smarter than me in their areas of specialty. I make sure to learn from every mistake and listen to my smartfolks’ advice, especially when they’re telling me that I’m doing something wrong or that we need to shift focus. One of the earliest bits of advice I got from Chris Hanrahan, the first smart person I brought on board, was something he told me to do during the Fate Core KS’s insane explosion of activity and funding: get a project manager.

That brought in Sean Nittner, and Sean proceded to make sure we got our shit organized. That let me continue to pursue the things I do best for the business, while someone else was entirely focused on making sure that projects happened, that vision was defined and examined up front on every project, and then communicated to each projectmember at kickoff. And let me tell you, compared to me on that sort of thing, Sean is a super genius and I am… somewhere around a field mouse in terms of intellect. The guy gets how to make a team work on a level I never really did. If I’d been clever enough to get him on board five years earlier, the Dresden Files RPG probably would have come out in 2008 instead of 2010.

At any rate, it means that I don’t have to examine (and be responsible for) process; I can focus on implementation. And so can everyone else. Project managers, like editors, are worth their weight in gold. No, gold’s too cheap. Platinum? Something radioactive? I dunno. A lot.

Chris and Sean have made more recommendations since — including bringing on Carrie Harris as our head of marketing, another soooper genius — and I’ve done my best to follow every one of them. It’s too bad these folks don’t play a sport like they help me run the company, because they’d be at the top of their game and making bank.

(Lest you think I’m leaving him out, Rob Donoghue, my co-founder, remains involved as well, but with life distractions and a day job and so forth his job at Evil Hat is more about safeguarding the soul of the company and making sure we keep in mind what we should do along all the stuff we’re figuring out we can do. That, and nothing I’ve ever done with Evil Hat would’ve been possible without his support and encouragement. You know. Little things.)

Anyway, vis a vis your question, I think what all that amounts to is that I’ve focused on working with these guys to make sure we really have our shit together at the top/leadership level of the company. Poor leaders make for unhappy or unengaged or confused freelancers and that’s a recipe for poor products and a general lack of enthusiasm.

Plus, I pay people on time, very quickly, and at the time they get their work done rather than making them wait for when the thing they wrote (or whatever) sees publication. Because that’s just the right damn thing to do. 🙂 (Note from Brie: This is true! Evil Hat pays on time, quickly, and fair wages. A+!)

Is there anything else you’d like to share about this project that would give people insight into the spirit of the idea?

Insight into the spirit, hmm. Well, going into this, I knew we were taking on a challenge of sorts. The Fate audience is growing, but it’s probably really composed of several smaller overlapping groups divided up (tho “divided” really feels like an over-strong word there) into clusters around preferred product formats, preferred product types. I knew we weren’t aiming the campaign at all of those clusters equally. I tried to touch on each of them — something for the digital fans, the open content fans, etc — but it was primarily for the folks looking to put some new books on their gaming shelves, the bibliophiles. I’m really proud of how it has performed given that challenge, because it’s clear that the fans who weren’t as well-served were still quite willing to show up and lend their support. It’s my hope that Summer’s Fate More 2, the future-directions-focused one, shifts the balance around a bit and satisfies those who weren’t as engaged by this one. FM1 gave us a great start to 2016; FM2 will come around in time to give us a big boost through the rest of the year and heading into 2017. If they all work out pretty well, we may have a solid pattern for us to repeat in the years beyond as our catalog continues to grow. Lots of question marks ahead: I’m excited to start answering them, with a little help from the fans. 🙂


Thanks so much to Fred (and Evil Hat!) for sharing the perspective and plans for Evil Hat‘s future with crowdfunding! There is a lot here that could be valuable for new developers and publishers, so I hope everyone enjoys it. You can find more on Evil Hat’s games on their website, and Fred’s regular thoughts on gaming and development on his blog. 

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Women with Initiative: Cheyenne Wall-Grimes


Today I have a profile on Cheyenne Wall-Grimes, a designer from Glittercats Fine Amusements. Cheyenne has designed some really great games, including Fool’s Journey, a storytelling game that uses tarot cards to guide you, and Laser Kittens, which is currently on Kickstarter! Her answers to the questions below tell us a little about her history with Glittercats and her games. 


What led you to start designing games, and how did you found Glittercats?

I got into it totally by accident! When you hang out with other game designers, it’s tough not to riff off of each other. I had been play testing games for a year or so and when you get into that kind of mindset, it’s easy to fall down the rabbit hole of “Hey, does this game exist? No? Then let’s make it happen!”

Glittercats already existed, actually. My partner, Stentor Danielson, had formed the company when he began working on board games. He was really one of my biggest inspirations for getting into game design. He is so good with rules and mechanics. We came up with Laser Kittens and he asked me to join on. I couldn’t say no!

What is Laser Kittens all about and what was your favorite part of development?

Laser Kittens is a GMless storytelling game where you play a group of kittens in a foster home, Knoll St. School for Wayward Kittens. You learn valuable lessons about how to become and great cat and how to control your lasers. The game is terribly silly and full of chaos.

As much fun as it was to be influenced by all the amazing foster kittens we had, play testing is my favorite. It has been really amazing watching friends and strangers alike get into being tiny balls of fluff, making hilarious decisions about how they interact with the world around them.

What do you do outside of game design, and does any of it influence your choices in design?

Currently, I’m a barista by day. I’ve had so many jobs, my biggest being a theatrical stage manager. I’m a crazy extrovert and I absolutely love people. So, making games that bring people face to face and have them create a life and world together is really my bag.

Thanks, Cheyenne, for talking with me today!

You can reach Cheyenne via Twitter @CheyWallGrimes and @playglittercats, as well as on Facebook as PlayGlittercats. The Glittercats Fine Amusements blog has more on Cheyenne’s work with Stentor.

Don’t forget to check out the Laser Kittens Kickstarter – it sounds like a great time!
 

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.