What is Winter Harvest, both as a product and as your vision?
Winter Harvest is a small roleplaying game set in a small world. Players are woodland animals using the power of memories, food & community to thrive as the seasons turn. The game runs 4 sessions based on the seasons. Session 4 concludes the game with a real-life (and in-game) Midwinter Feast. Goals of Winter Harvest are to focus on domestic life within an inter-connected community, and to have each table develop custom lore for their home through invoking oral history that will be recorded by the Librarian. It should feel horizontal because no player “keeps” the role of facilitator/Storyteller, it rotates each session. The physical product will be a 20-30 page, black-and-white handmade zine with custom ink art of adorable animals at work and play, publishing around October 2020.
This sounds great – I love food, and I love woodland creatures! How did you develop the perfect mood for play to help encourage the interconnected nature the narrative demands?
Before jumping into play, a group beginning Winter Harvest will make two types of choices that set the stage for feeling that they are part of a close-knit and inter-reliant community. First, each player developing a character card will choose two professional skills. For example, if I were making a rabbit gardener character, I might choose skills like physical endurance and herbal knowledge. Any time I use my skills from my gardening job to confront a challenge, I’ll get bonuses to help the group resolve problems.
Defining what characters do day-to-day instantly sets the stage for relationships–my gardener character probably knows the cook quite well, for instance. Second, the table will have to reach a consensus on the key features that define their home in the Burrow, which sets the stage for understanding that protecting and caring for your shared space is essential to everyone’s wellbeing. Throughout play, these choices will interact with narrative decisions, including when players confront challenges stemming within the Burrow that have social causes and consequences each session.
A rotating facilitator role is so great. What does Winter Harvest do to help support the facilitators and bind together their unique perspectives?
Mechanically, regardless of a facilitator’s style or experience level, each will be physically writing in the same book as players invoke stories & legends to have a connected record evolve (which is why the role is also called The Librarian). Players can revisit stories that were invoked in past seasons to get powerful bonuses without spending a limited resource, which adds incentives to have past themes and stories brought up several times as the game progresses.
There’s no obligation for every person at the table to take a turn as facilitator, and hopefully taking on this role will feel voluntary and exciting rather than intimidating. Since Winter Harvest is a compact and quite simple game, it should not be time-consuming for facilitators to become familiar with the whole text. Running it requires no memorization or math. I’m very interested in thinking further about how the game can be designed to ensure that facilitators feel well-supported throughout!
Tell me a little about Red Rook Revolt. What excites you about it?
Well, that’s sorta like choosing between my babies. There are three things which really excite me. The first is the combat system, which is inspired by the game Hyper Light Drifter as well as Strike!: A game of heedless adventure! It uses a single d6 for every roll, almost every attack deals one damage, and people have very low hit HP. In playtests, it has given us fast, tactical, and dangerous combat. Melee attacks always hit, but expose you to danger, while ranged attacks can miss, and require you to spend Dark Power, which you get from melee attacks, which forces people in and out of dangerous situations and helps ensure more dynamic encounters.
Another thing that excites me is the memory and corruption system. For a long while, I struggled with making a cool way both to portray relationships and the creeping demonic corruption that happens once you start powering up the summoned demon in your gun. But I solved both, by having a system where you have specific memories with the other party members.
During each adventure, you can gain more, but you can also draw on those personal connections to keep away the demon’s whispers. If you fail, however, those memories can get twisted. Memories of your brother supporting you through hard times get reinterpreted to into memories of your bother being smothering or controlling. Memories of supporting your friends when they needed you become memories of your friends being needy and needing constant support, and so on. This isn’t necessarily permanent, but the fight against the demon is one of the central conflicts of the game.
The last thing I wanna mention here that excites me is the setting, which i am currently writing! I’m drawing on English and Roman history, and focusing down on a single empire and the rebellion happening there. That allows me do to more than just a cursory look at the place, and detail culture and religion to a greater extend, show some of the ways the rebellious areas differ in culture from the main empire, but also the ways they are the same, the things they share. Some central cultural concepts are birds as ancestors, and the actual, literal magic which is at work in most things of cultural significance, including community rituals and festivals, and a strong tradition of communal stews.
What inspired your interest in these cultures to build this specific story, and how are you building this story while being respectful to the cultures themselves?
To be clear, when I say I draw on British and Roman history, I mean mostly – but not entirely, as I’ll get to! – in terms of structure, in terms of how the empire works, how they extract resources from their conquered territory, how they justify their imperialism. That also helps answer the first part of your question: I needed empires to draw from for my evil empire. I had already decided on guns as an element, as the game started as a small combat engine and I didn’t want modern time, so 19th-century England was right there. As I worked on the culture and the history of the people of the empire, I had some ideas which resonated with Roman history, and the empire ended up as something like a Roman empire that had evolved into a modern empire, though more territorial.
I do use some roman culture – aspects of its religion and visual aesthetic, the importance of the Familias, the prevalence and importance of omens and minor magic. I have a friend working with me on some of the writing who knows his Roman history very well, so I’m not afraid to accidentally misrepresent it, though much of it isn’t what I’m using as inspiration. And while there are possibly some that would have issues with using, say, roman gods, I’m not doing that, just some aspects of how society was structured in antiquity.
Tell me more about memories! How do the players typically respond to these when they play them out, and how do they interact with other parts of the game?
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able playtest this part of the game at the time of writing, so how players typically respond is unknown to me, but I will have the chance to playtest it soon!
I can talk about how they interact with other parts of the game, though! The memories represent the character’s relationships with each other, and during their adventures, they get strengthened and weakened.
The game is structured around a mix of downtime and adventuring. During the adventuring portions, the players get into battle and accrue corruption tokens as they draw on the dark magic of their demons. Afterward, they roll to determine if they get corrupted. If they fail, their friends have to help them, reminding them of their relationship with a memory; if that succeeds, the memory is simply exhausted from the emotional stress, and can’t be used for a while. Otherwise, it gets corrupted, twisted somehow, and the relationship weakens. Actions in battle and their willingness to win at all costs thus affect their relationships and their memories.
This, in a sense, forms the central conflict, and a central theme of the game: the importance of relationships, friendships and organization as you struggle for liberation, and resistance to forces that would separate you, make you try to fight the world alone with just you and your gun. During downtime, exhaustion and (with more difficulty) corruption can be healed, as can physical wounds, and new memories can be made. Downtime, in a bigger way, ties into what adventures you go on, what battles you fight and so on, which feeds back into corruption and memory.
What is the general activity of the game – like what do the players mostly do in each session, or are they intended to do? How does the game support these actions?
The general activity of the game is fighting imperialist scum. You play as members of the red rook commune, which is under attack from the cruel Imperium Alarum, and throughout the game, you keep the pressure on to prevent them from turning their full attention towards the commune. You sabotage railways, distribute propaganda, organize general strikes, assassinate generals, and lead battles against the enemy. When things go wrong and the empire turns their full might upon the Red Rook Commune, you man the barricades and drive back the invaders! In between hectic fights and missions, you rest at the commune and rebuild your strength. This is when you heal and reaffirm your friendships.
As for how the game supports these actions, it is built around that structure of mission/rest/mission with the first result of failure being an attack on the red rook commune. If you aren’t putting the pressure on the empire, they will attack your home and deny you the chance to heal and rest.
What made you elect to use Hyper Light Drifter and Strike! As inspirations for design, and how have you differed from them?
I didn’t so much choose to use hyper light drifter as an inspiration as the other way around: the appeal of Hyper Light Drifter’s smooth, flowing combat rhythms is what inspired me to start working on what would become Red Rook Revolt. Hyper Light Drifter is a video game with an incredible combat loop, and I wanted to capture that particular loop, that particular flow, in a tabletop game, something, quick, smooth, and tactical.
That’s why I turned to Strike! for inspiration for the combat. That game uses a single D6 for combat, rolling on a table of hits, misses, and critical hits, and It goes rather fast for that reason. Strike, of course, also has a lot of other things going on, but I liked that particular idea and I took inspiration from that in designing my combat system and combined it with the things I liked and wanted to replicate from Hyper Light Drifter.
What is Campfire Memories, both as a product and as your vision?
Campfire Memories is GM-less one-shot game about families going on a difficult camping trip and then looking back on the experiences fondly later. It’s going up on Kickstarter as a Zine Quest project from Feb 4 through 16. I want this game to be an accessible, light way for people to get talking. In addition to the camping problems in the fiction, it usually brings up real anecdotes from the player’s own trips, which is perfect! Interestingly, after talking with my editor, the safety tool we settled on is the Luxton Technique from your website!
My experiences camping as a kid always had a fair share of troubles to encounter! What sort of troubles do players in Campfire Memories encounter that make their time difficult?
The complications in Campfire Memories are best framed as man-vs-nature obstacles. These can take the form of broken gear, bad weather, animal encounters, or other things. The important part is that they pit the characters against their environment, not each other. Characters can, of course, get upset with each other but that becomes more of a sub-plot than the focus of the game. When a player has their turn setting a scene, it’s the job of the player to their left to come up with the complication.
What do you do, mechanically or otherwise, to provide structure to the camping trip and story for the players and keep them engaged?
There are a couple mechanical widgets that keep players engaged in the game. Players all take turns setting scenes and creating complications. In my experience, most folks are super excited for the chance to do one of those. Also, characters are built with a goal, the kinds of experiences they want to have on their trip. This provides a lot of direction for players to push their characters in during camping scenes. The goal comes back into the play during the reflection phase, as the characters look back on their trip!
I have been working on the Turn Kickstarter since October 2018, and it has been quite a challenge. The Behind the Masc Kickstarter went so smoothly, with so few issues! Turn, on the other hand, had production changes, shipping challenges, and was all complicated by my continued health issues, both mental and physical. The project was a mountain, in a range of mountains so high I have been struggling to overcome them.
My remaining responsibilities for the Kickstarter are fulfilling some books that have been returned, some of which never were returned but never reached the customer (hooray, shipping!); fulfilling the Snake and Cougar backers, which I’ve only just started on and it’s been a snail’s pace – I feel extreme guilt over this, tbh; and completing and releasing the stretch goals, which are nearly done except for the border town supplement which was a late addition and is now on the back burner until everything else is complete. We legit are doing the final edits on the stretch goals, putting the cover on and touching up art, this weekend! It’s just so much more work than it seems, even when you go in expecting to climb Everest.
The reality is, there are always taller mountains.
Not only have I encountered issues with my head injury recovery, but I’ve also dealt with recurring back problems, required pelvic rehabilitation therapy and treatment for digestive and dental issues, and also fought constantly with Medicaid – not to forget struggles with depression, my bipolar disorder, and PTSD. My immediate family has struggled too, and I never manage to be there for them. All of this while I’m still trying to figure out how to contribute to my household – at this point, I struggle pointlessly.
I have taken on editing jobs, sensitivity consultation roles, and small game design jobs, but I’ve had to step out of a few, and those I have finished like the code of conduct used in a number of Pacific Northwest game design playtest groups are ones I don’t really see the fruits of – though the financial benefits were enough to stress out Medicaid.
I’ve supported the Homunculus Assembly Line Kickstarter regularly and will be doing writing and design for it, and hopefully working closely with a partner will make it easier. It’s just a frustrating pattern that there’s work and work and it’s always more than it seems, always this bigger mountain, and when we get to the reward at the end, it’s always smaller. Turn has been out for a while now, and few people have really recognized that – this is not a complaint, this is a recognition that I haven’t reached out to podcasts or reviewers and sent out copies to try to get their attention, because I’m too damn tired.
I’m going somewhere with this, I swear.
The reality is there are ranges of mountains we climb over every day, and let’s be real, the privileged, able, rich people will be able to get over them so much more easily than the rest of us. But it’s easier to do it together, tied together with some rope for safety, trusting in each other. When we fall, we can help each other up.
And people do this for me every day – my partners, my friends, my colleagues. I know I can be a goddamn disaster, but I also know that my openness about my pain and struggles gives people the opportunity to support me and help me, whether it’s through bundles that get me to conventions or gifting me from my birthday wishlist or just a DM to make sure I eat a goddamn meal today.
The mountains are cold and lonely at times, and we will starve if we try to climb them alone. We don’t have to be some sort of superhumans, and we shouldn’t have to be. We should strive to support each other in a network of creators and consumers, loving and caring for one-another. We don’t have to cannibalize each other if we plan for the storms and listen to what wise people say.
That reward at the end won’t be as small if it’s shared between us and used to grow more and greater gardens. We can keep going! We just have to stick together, and find the beauty in the mountains together, and not turn back when it feels impossible.
This is what I’m telling myself, as I keep climbing. Will you tie your rope to me, and hold on tight as the winds blow?
Tell me a little about Last Fleet.
What excites you about it?
The elevator pitch for Last Fleet
is that you’re brave pilots, officers, engineers, politicians and journalists
aboard a rag-tag fleet, fleeing from the implacable inhuman adversary that
destroyed your civilisation. The game focuses on action, intrigue and drama in
a high-pressure situation.
The game delivers the experience I
got when I first watched Battlestar Galactica (the noughties reboot). I
remember the incredible sense of pressure, an exhausted fleet and characters
both on the edge of collapse, the high stakes, and the explosive action. I remember
the simmering political tensions between different factions. I remember how
everyone was under constant suspicion of maybe being a secret traitor, and
sometimes people even suspected themselves. And I remember how all of this was
demonstrated through personal conversations between friends, family members,
lovers, and rivals. That’s what the game is designed to do.
Also, I just flipping love the bad guys in this game. The Corax are a hive mind, an immense extradimensional fungus network that live in the tenebrium, the realm outside normal space that FTL ships travel through. When the Corax fleet attacks, it’s by extruding these huge fungus tendrils out of a dimensional rift and then launching swarms of spore ships.They’re able to absorb their victims’ genetic material and also the information content of their brain, enabling them to create an exact copy of the victim, memories and all, but who is actually a flesh puppet for the Corax. And so, if you lose a fight to the Corax, rather than just getting killing you’re typically paralysed and dragged off to be deconstructed in a biological cauldron. The next time we see you, you won’t be you anymore. Which is pretty horrible.
How does the game mechanically approach
the Battlestar-style relationship environment?
A key part BSG is obviously the
political environment: a military hierarchy, the presence of elected officials
whose interests are only partly aligned with the military, and other factions
such as Zarek’s people, Baltar’s cult, the union and others. I’ve baked that
into the game setup, so that whether you create a setting yourself or use one
out of the box, you’ll generate groups whose agendas will push against fleet
unity. That’s then reinforced by the Call for Aid move, which enables players
to get certain benefits that they can’t get anywhere else – like access to rare
equipment, or the ability to perform an action at a larger scale – often in
exchange for tying themselves more closely to that faction.
Of course, like most PBTA games,
Last Fleet also comes with a set of charged relationships between the player
characters, to get things going. These are handled fairly loosely initially,
just little seeds of friendship or rivalry or a grudge or suspicion. But then
the game’s core mechanic reinforces that. The nub of it is that you can
voluntarily ramp up pressure on your character in exchange for bonuses to your
die rolls – an effect that allows you to succeed at almost any roll, if you
wish. But to get that pressure down, you have to take actions that generate
interesting relationship drama.
There’s three ways to do it:
You can Let Loose, indulging a vice and losing control. Let Loose is an easy, almost-guaranteed way to reduce pressure, but it also automatically puts you in tricky situations: even on a hit you’ll do something you otherwise wouldn’t like revealing a secret, making a promise, or falling into another character’s arms.
You can Reach Out, sharing a hope or a dream or a fear or suchlike. Reach Out reduces pressure by strengthening relationships – but then everyone who you build a relationship with has a bit of that pressure invested in them, so if something should happen to them, the pressure comes rushing back all at once.
You can hit Breaking Point, allowing the pressure to come to a head and then doing something foolish or dangerous. Breaking Point is a bit like getting Marked in Night Witches, in that initially it’s evocative and fun, but do it too many times and you’ll come to a sticky end.
So between all of the above stuff, you get a pretty rich stewpot of political, social and emotional drama.
That potential result with the enemy changing you instead of death sounds really intense – what is the effect of this on the game, and on the players?
That potential
result with the enemy changing you instead of death sounds really intense –
what is the effect of this on the game, and on the players?
It’s not something
I’d typically expect to happen to player characters. The game’s principles
encourage you to build up interesting NPCs and make the players care about
them, partly so you can “kill their darlings” later on. Or better yet
turn them into baddies.
If it does happen
to a player character, you have two options: bring them back as an NPC, or give
them the Sleeper Agent move. Sleeper Agent is a start-of-session move, which
generates bad stuff that your character has secretly been doing off-screen.
Even you, the player, don’t know what it is. How well you roll tells us how bad
it is, how much evidence there is to implicate you, and how much chance you
have to stop it.
Incidentally you can start as a Sleeper Agent by taking the Scorpio playbook.
What do players typically do in
Last Fleet to occupy their time – are there adventures with strange worlds, or
are they more likely to be negotiating in a dramatic scene?
It really depends a lot on what
roles and playbooks are chosen. The roles include soldier types to engineers to
more political characters. The playbooks are slightly more personality-based,
but each one will colour the type of play you’re likely to see, with playbooks
like Gemini bringing in skulduggery, or Scorpio bringing in intrigue, or Pisces
bringing in the supernatural.
There’s always a lot of stuff going
on in Last Fleet, which could include things like:
– Dealing with a tense stand-off
between civilians and the military, or between other political factions
– Handling the results of mass
panic: protests, riots, or other civil disobedience
– Addressing practical problems
like mechanical breakdown or resource shortages
– Investigating suspicious stuff,
which could turn out to be political, or could turn out to be enemy
infiltration
– Handling the fallout from the
above – bomb threats, sabotage, poisoned food supplies, etc
– Battling the enemy, whether in
tense space dogfights or holding off boarding actions
Whichever roles and playbooks are
chosen, the above will be going on at some level, but the emphasis and the
approach to problem-solving will vary massively. So you could get more
politicking, crisis management, investigation, scouting/away missions, or
battle scenes. All interleaved with the interpersonal drama generated by the
pressure system.
How do you control the level of
violence in the game for players to ensure they’re not veering into
monstrosity?
Last Fleet is the first game I’ve
written where violence is explicitly coded into the rules, because the war-time
setting makes it inevitable. Nevertheless in my experience, violence in play is
typically instigated by the enemy who, by definition, are implacable – intent
on humanity’s destruction or (as the canonical bad guys, the Corax have it)
borg-style absorption. Indeed the nature of the setting makes this almost
inevitable. Desperately trying to fend off waves of enemy fighters, protect
civilian ships, hold off boarders, and so on. So there’s violence, but it’s
mostly defensive in nature or (Night Witches-style) action aimed at destroying
military targets.
But violence is a thing that can
get more extreme if an enemy, particularly an enemy infiltrator, is captured.
We see that in the source material as the characters are so desperate to win
the war that they’re prepared to torture or kill in cold blood to get their
way. All I can say here is that the game provides absolutely no benefit to
doing this. The only interrogation moves are in no way enhanced by putting the
target under duress, except perhaps emotional duress (by using the move
“call them on their shit”).
Even so, something about the
setting is likely to make some players go there, let’s face it. My games always
contain a section discussing safety (not yet written for Last Fleet) and
war-time issues like violence and torture would be front-and-centre for an
initial discussion around lines and veils. Every game I’ve run to date has
banned torture from the game before the first scene is played, for instance.
That is what I’d recommend unless a group is keen to explore this very dark
territory.
There
is one particular playbook, Capricorn, who is a risk in this regard. They are
explicitly set up as a character who is willing to do anything to defeat the
enemy, with moves that hard code in collateral damage, for instance. In this
case play is focused on the social and personal consequences of this behaviour:
if you’re lucky you steady the fleet, if you’re unlucky you can cause more
damage than the enemy, and spark panic. In a way the story of the Capricorn
playbook is “can you avoid becoming a monster”, and obviously there’s
a chance that the answer is “no”.
Tell me a little bit about The Last Stand of the Dream Guard. What excites you about it?
The Last Stand of the Dream Guard
is a tragedy that takes place over a single night. The dream guard are toy like
creatures that exist in the dreamlands, the place where we go when we dream. They’ve
been fighting a war against The Nightmares and have all but lost. The adventure
uses player prompts and cues to build the detail and drama for what will be the
final battle of the war and the effect this will have on the few remaining
members of the Dream Guard who will fight it.
What engages me most about the adventure is who the characters will face a battle that will almost certainly lead to their death. Will seek solace in the nobility of their actions, retreat into a cynical fatalism or adopt an angry denial of their circumstances.
One of the Nightmares from The Last Stand of the Dream Guard.
What are The Nightmares and what threats do they present?
The Nightmares are the darkness
of humanity given form. Humans visit the dreamlands when they sleep, with the
dreamlands changing and being changed with each dream. Every human nightmare
left a little mark of evil on the dreamlands that accumulated and aggregated.
The nightmare are creatures of such hate that they bring only violence and
destruction where they go. The longer a nightmare “lives” the larger,
stronger and more cunning it gets. They are an existential threat to the
toylike native inhabitants of the dreamlands and should they be victorious
human dreams will be always tainted by their presence.
A page from Character Creation The Last Stand of the Dream Guard.
Why is death so ever-present and so likely for these characters? Is it preventable, and if so, how?
The Dream Guard have been losing this war since it started. The Nightmares seem to be endless and all attempts at negotiation have failed. The survivors of the Dream Guard have retreated to their last standing holdout where The Nightmares have surrounded them and put them under siege. They know it is only a matter of time before the assault begins. What hope and how forlorn it is is part of the story setup by the players and the story leader. Should they choose to, then perhaps the war could be won but they most hold out until dawn. Mechanically, the three phases of combat have been designed to be highly challenging and would require exquisite luck to pass through unscathed.
The first phase of play sounds intriguing!
How do players mechanically interact with the world and each other – what are the basic mechanics like? What are these phases of combat?
The adventure uses the 6d6 2nd Edition rules set. The basic mechanic is building a dice pool using which of the character’s advantages are best suited for the task at hand. The main body of the adventure takes place over one night that is divided into 6 phases. 3 of these character interaction phases where the story is progressed through prompts, cues and questions asked by the story leader. The other three phases are combat when the nightmares attack the hold out with increasing strength and threat.
What sort of support is there to help players approach these elements that might be very frightening or stressful in play?
The adventure doesn’t include specific advice on this, so I would recommend that the story leader and the players work together to select the safety tools they feel most comfortable using.
Today I’m starting a bundle to support the awesome Aven, a great game designer and one of the people who makes Big Bad Con a great space for people like me, in this coming new year – check out work from Aven, me, Meguey Baker, Paul Czege, and many other amazing creators, and do something good to help Aven out!
I released a new game today on itch.io and I hope you’ll check it out! My Patreon patrons at patreon.com/thoughty get a free copy of the game for download!
Today’s post is by me, Beau, and my husband and business partner, John W. Sheldon. We’re discussing the game Sleepaway by Jay Dragon, and the experiences we had during character creation with the gender options.
All photos in this post are by John W. Sheldon, copyright 2019. I hope you enjoy it!
Beau, on Nice Boys
It is no secret that exploring gender in roleplaying games is kind ofa thingI do, This is part of how I got the courage to come out as nonbinary masculine, it’s part of how I discovered I was queer and what kind of queer I am, and it’s helped me develop my perception of self.
That’s not always been easy, though. In the heyday of online text-based roleplay, I could be whatever gender I want – and in Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings fandoms, androgynous characters weren’t as often rejected as they were in other spaces. When I moved to playing face-to-face tabletop RPGs, I do think I encountered some friction with me playing masculine characters or what I now understand were nonbinary (I didn’t have the word at the time), it wasn’t much more than I got for playing pretty or sexy characters or queer characters. But, none of it ever felt… right?
In most of my own designs, I’ve tried to let people write in their own genders, not be restricted by the words and definitions other people are giving them and use to control and oppress them. I mean, it’s not like being “genderfluid nonbinary masculine” like me is actually a thing to anyone else, either, but it’s the closest I’ve got (though I do use “nonbinary boy” as a shortcut these days). But, this isn’t perfect – sometimes people won’t explore without a little help, a little guidance, something to escort them along their way.
When Dream Askew originally was released, I heard about the alternate gender options, and I was so excited! But when I tried to play the game, it was like a square block in a triangle hole – nothing fit, and it was sharply clear. I couldn’t make sense of it – even if I could kind of conceive the genders in my head, I couldn’t make myself want to play those characters.
But when I tried to play [Dream Askew], it was like a square block in a triangle hole – nothing fit, and it was sharply clear. …Enter Sleepaway.
-Beau
Enter Sleepaway by Jay Dragon. This game has been in my to-play for a bit, and my game group – made up of myself (gendered as noted above), my husband John (agender, presents mostly masculine), and my two cis men friends Ed and TJ who are varying levels of into exploring gender and sexuality (no judgement! some of us are just comfortable where we are!). TJ is the one who actually brought the game to the table and is facilitating.
The setup is fun in general – I honestly need to make a strong note to Jay that the writing is just phenomenal, evocative, and powerful in this game. I did a lot of summer camps as a kid, both as camper and counselor, and had some very important and scary experiences while there. The game captures all of it so beautifully and richly that I feel like I could play it a thousand times and have a unique experience every time, and learn something new about myself and my characters each time, as well. It’s also respectful in regards to First Nations and indigenous people’s rights, specifically in how you name your camp and respect the land!
And that comes into the character creation with the gender options, and where this post came from. I was skimming over them originally, until I reached The Lifeguard playbook. The top option for gender is “Nice Boy.” Anyone who knows me knows that my primary character type is something approximate to the “himbo” – a hot masculine person who is considered to be not the smartest, but is generally nice and well-intentioned even if it doesn’t always work out. I like nice boys, and specifically the gender of “boy” (not meaning a child) is one I identify with. The more I read the specific list, the more I was hooked. I knew what it meant to be a Lighthouse in the Darkness, or to be Relatable. I felt so seen by these options – and I could see other people I know in it too.
The Lifeguard gender options.
During and after character build, the table talked extensively about the gender options, especially me and John. John rarely talks about gender – as an agender person, he’s often said it just never clicks with him! I asked him if he could write a little about his perspective, so he has below.
John, on Rusted Swords
I’ve mostly ignored gender in games. I recognize that as a
supremely privileged thing to be able to do, but as a male,
masculine-presenting person, nobody made it an issue for me if I didn’t make it
one for myself. As an agender person, I never really had strong feelings about
gender presentation in games either – I honestly never thought of gender until
other people brought it up.
Playing classic games like D&D and Shadowrun growing up,
gender was usually just a single letter on a character sheet, something I
jotted down and almost immediately resumed ignoring. It didn’t mean anything
to me, and at the time I didn’t understand that it could to anyone else. After
all, it didn’t change any of the rules for my character, or restrict any of
their actions. I won’t pretend that I and my play groups weren’t steeped in
misogyny as a teen, but even if I put the “F” on my character sheet,
I still got treated well because I was, as a player, perceived as a man.
Then I grew up a bit. I realized that, in contrast to my own
experience, other people did have an internal experience of gender.
Their internal gender experiences meant a lot to them, even. I struggle to
apply a useful simile to the situation, but slowly realizing that I was agender
was a bit like a person slowly coming to understand that they were colorblind:
people were experiencing things and making a lot of decisions based on
information that was absent for me.
Then I discovered a wave of independent tabletop RPGs that
dared to fuck with gender. They made it something other than a binary toggle,
and didn’t pretend it was necessarily tied to biological sex. Gender was
queried as a way to ask about look and presentation, and there were lots of
options! I was glad that other people had selections they could use to
represent themselves, but I went right along basically ignoring the whole
category of experience. I dutifully picked an option during character
generation, usually just as a creative choice to help define the look of the
character, then went on ignoring it in play as I always did.
I dutifully picked an option during character generation, usually just as a creative choice to help define the look of the character, then went on ignoring it in play as I always did.
-John
I even tried an early version of Avery Alder’s Dream Askew.
Unlike the other indie titles I’d read which focused on presentation, Dream
Askew gave pick lists for actual gender, but eschewed the standard selections
in favor of evocative phrases. For me, this was actually a problem. With no
internal experience or sense by which to judge these phrases, and no ready
external indicators to associate with them, they just looked like a list of
nonsense words. To me, they might as well have been an actual list of
randomly-selected words. It took me out of the game and made the whole thing
more difficult for me to engage with.
Then, last night, I played Sleepaway. Like Dream Askew, each
character archetype has a list of options for gender, but there was something
different about these. These were written with deep ties to a genre I knew.
More than that: their names resonated with attitudes and behaviors I knew and
recognized in myself. Instead of a list of words that meant nothing to me, I
found myself using these signifiers to imagine different ways of being for
these characters – they were presentation, behavior, and identity all in one.
They were gender in a way I’d never understood or experienced it
for myself.
I found myself using these signifiers to imagine different ways of being for these characters – they were presentation, behavior, and identity all in one. They were gender in a way I’d never understood or experienced it for myself.
-John
Is Jay Dragon a genius because they wrote “Rusted Sword” as an option for a character’s gender? Yes. I’m saying absolutely, definitely yes.
—
Thank you so much John for sharing your perspective on this! I think this has been so valuable to experience for me, and I think it’s a gorgeous piece of design. You can find Sleepaway here and if all goes well, I’ll update with our adventures at Camp Why-I-Otter!
Content Warning: Mention of suicidal ideation, self harm, online harassment, face to face harassment, reference to racism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism.
Photos by Brie Beau Sheldon Copyright 2019.
The games “community” or “industry” – I’ve taken to calling it a “scene” because lordy, the drama – is constantly full of nightmarish amounts of discourse, especially of late. This happens. We have stuff to discuss, which I get. We got a lot of shit going on.
However, there’s some stuff I need to address because I have been in the indie scene specifically since around 2012 and some particular behaviors I’ve seen of late are not acceptable. Here are a few things I have heard of or seen happening that I, as a person in this community who tries to promote the good works of others, don’t want to see:
the purposeful triggering of others with legitimately triggering material or falsified/exaggerated materials for any reason
public naming of marginalized individuals in a manner that put them at risk for harassment, as well as outright doxxing of individuals for assumed (and falsified) differing political views
the goading or bullying of others to pressure them into making public statements or engaging in public or private social discourse with people who may or may not have greater social power than them
the further growth of a culture of fear for marginalized people in the name of “art” by implying, outright stating, or falsifying the bigoted or fascist perspectives of people or organizations with power in the scene
the reinstatement of typically men who have done harm into positions of power or the passive acceptance of their continued control of organizations or social groups in spite of their lack of repentance and lack of changed behavior, especially in light of continued bad behavior
the brushing under the rug of bad behavior and bad management at conventions and organizations that particularly affects marginalized people (like people of color, Black people, disabled people, and queer people) for reasons unclear
These are just like, the tip of the iceberg. This is just what I can remember right now, without doing excessive research. This is just the stuff that recently has been sticking in my craw. And you know what, I’m a white person! I have a safe place to live and some security. There are people in less privileged positions who are at greater risk and have probably encountered far more issues than me, been hit far harder with discourse sticks, and who have fewer places to escape to.
I am ashamed of this scene right now, for the actions I’ve seen in the past few months. These kinds of behaviors are not acceptable, they’re incredibly harmful, and we are extremely lucky that no one has died because of it yet – and I am not being an extremist when I say this. I have been in communities that lost people because of discourse. I have been, because of this scene, pushed to self harm and suicidal ideation.
At the start of this year, we dealt with a massive, horrific trauma as an industry,* and it’s still ongoing. We are scarred and constantly bleeding from reopened wounds. We are cruel to each other in ways that are so unnecessary! We do not need to hurt each other like this.
*I’m referring to what some people call our “Me Too” moment that doesn’t even come close to covering all of the predators in our industry.
I am begging, as this year comes to a close, that we try harder to do better. Look at your life, look at your choices – what harm have you done, and how can you undo it? How can you instead do good going forward? Do better, and operate with care and passion and love, not vindictiveness, siloed group secretiveness, and desires to keep yourself and your favorites elevated at the cost of the wellbeing of others.
We could blossom. We could grow, and flourish, and become something more amazing than we’ve ever been, but we will not if people start turning inward, hurting themselves in self-loathing and desperation, abused by their own fellows and afraid of falling short or worse, doing well enough that people demand more of them.
I am not a perfect person. I have fucked up so colossally and terribly, and I have tried to make amends and become better. I am still trying. I’m asking you to try with me. We can operate with hindsight. We can develop some foresight, even, with just the slightest bit of introspection, into how we could improve.
I will do better. Please hold my hand and do it with me.
