The cover for The Map is not The Territory. Love it!
Thanks for joining me for an interview, Chris! I’m excited to hear about your project, The Map is not The Territory. What is your experience like in games that it led you to this project?
I’ve been noodling around the RPG industry in a variety of capacities since the mid-2000s, but I didn’t get serious about freelancing and publishing my own stuff until the tail end of 2014. Since then I’ve published a few things ‘the old-fashioned way’, and run four Kickstarters — three successful, one un. I think what specifically led me to this project though is less of my industry experience and more that running my RPG business as a side gig means I tend to make whatever I feel like making and hope it speaks to people. TMINT itself springs from my love of remixes, remakes and covers — I love the way different people can arrive at such wildly different creations even if you give them the same origin point.
In essence it’s a project motivated by my personal foibles when it comes to running a business and my personal tastes in creative media, to which I am personally contributing very little. The irony feels good.
Coordinating a big team of creators and being part of such a team can create a lot of challenges. What made you uniquely suited for this project and this team?
Like… as I mentioned above, this is a very personal project. It’s a thing I wanted to exist, so I decided to take the steps to make that happen. And in that sense I am the only person who could have originated this project, because it has its roots in things I enjoy and things I appreciate. I’m the only person with this particular combination of perspective, tastes, skills, and reach — therefore, I am uniquely suited to this project and this team because anyone else who did something similar would produce a different project with a different team.
But.
Everybody has a network and a perspective and some tastes. Skills can be learned, or skilled people can be hired. I like to remind people that if I ever do something that looks complex, it’s really just several simple things layered together. If I do something that looks difficult, at base it’s just several smaller, easier things combined into a greater whole. Anything I can do, can be done by someone else. Anybody could create this kind of project, and in that sense there is literally nothing that positions me as uniquely qualified to do so.
Which, I’d like to emphasize, is a good thing. Every human being is unique, and brings a unique perspective to their creations — which, full circle, is the whole point of TMINT. To highlight those unique perspectives by giving them a common origin and seeing how they grow outwards from there.
…of course, if you’re asking ‘do you have any excellent team management skills?’ the answer is ‘lol no I’m making this up as I go along’ — but I like to get the old philosophy degree out for an airing now and then.
The map by Dyson Logos that is at the center of the project.
What is The Map is not The Territory as a project, and what is the vision for the project? What from your prior experience helped you create it?
The Map is not The Territory is a project to show what a single origin point can look like when viewed through as many different lenses as possible. The vision is to bring together authors, game designers, scientists, and poets, and showcase the creativity which each individual brings to the basic concept. I want anyone into RPGs to find something they can use in there, whether it’s a dungeon quest, a whole other game, a world of adventure… something. I want people to flip through it and go ‘ooooh’.
Because I’ve been noodling around the RPG industry for years and running my own publisher for slightly fewer years, I’ve got experience with the practicalities of turning manuscripts into finished pdfs and printed books. I know how to budget and run a Kickstarter because I’ve run three successful ones (and if people want to know more about that, I do a public postmortem after every one). I’ve got all the skills needed to turn a concept into a reality. I, uh… just need the money.
For each of the 24 contributors, what is included in their contribution to the project? How did you determine the scope of the project – how long it should be, what it should cover, etc.?
Each contributor is going to write me 500-1000 words on a subject of their choice, inspired by the map, which will go alongside a customised version of the map. Some versions of the map are going to be almost the same as the original. Some are going to be wild.
I always wanted it to cover as many different interpretations of the map as possible — and to have those interpretations be as far from each other as possible — and I think we’ve hit a really good range. The sheer variety of responses when I asked for pitches was stunning, and I deliberately grabbed a selection each from ‘normal with a twist’, ‘kinda weird’, and ‘left field’ to make sure there was something for everyone.
The scope of the project was defined largely by the tension between two opposing forces: wanting to pay everyone a decent sum for their work on one hand, and what I could expect to sell it for on the other. (Down with capitalism.) I wanted to include as many authors as possible, so I just kept incrementing that number on my budget spreadsheet until I hit the balancing point between ‘will sell for about $15’ and ‘paying all the contributors okay money’.
My basic idea was that every interpretation of the map, plus the custom map, plus some art and/or layout flourishes, would sit on a double-page spread, making for a slim softcover. Once again, I was thinking about how much I could afford to pay each contributor without exploding my budget — you get 300-ish words per page, so 500 words plus a map can fit on one spread. My original idea was for a minimum of 32 pages, but with 24 contributors we’re looking at minimum 48 pages plus a few frontmatter odds and ends. I think some of the pitches I’ve received are going to run somewhat longer than that though, so the page count might go up.
Kickstarter takes a decent amount of risk out of the equation, but at the same time I didn’t put it on Kickstarter to see if it was workable — I put it on there because I already think it’s workable and I want it to succeed.
The map for Samantha Hancox-Li’s “The Luminous Depths.”
This seems like such a cool idea! So how did you find your amazing contributors? What did you look for in their ideas?
I put an open call for pitches out on Twitter and left it open for… two weeks? A month? I forget exactly. Some time. Anyway, I also specifically reached out to some marginalised creators and asked them for pitches directly because I’d heard that marginalised folk tend to self-select out of stuff like this. Once I had a nice Google sheet full of pitches, I extracted all the pitch details without looking at the names so I could do a proper blind pick.
Once I had all the pitches, I divided them into three broad categories: ‘dungeon crawl with a twist’, ‘something unusual’, and ‘highly weird’. Then I grabbed my (more or less) eight favourites in each category and that was the final 24.
I looked for slightly different things in each category. For the weird section I wanted properly out-there stuff — things which used the map in such a way that it was barely recognisable as a dungeon any more. The unusual section consists of things which are recognisable as roleplaying adventures but use the map in an interesting way or have a unique twist. And for the dungeon crawl section I wanted to see fresh elements which you don’t often see in other dungeons. And I got all of those things in spades! The scale of creativity in the pitches was amazing, and if I could make
What made you decide on the particular map that you’re using? What is unique about it?
I originally went to Dyson Logos’ page because I knew he was a very good dungeon cartographer. I was sort of half thinking to hire him, half thinking to consult his designs for inspiration. When I saw he was allowing people to use some of his maps for free, I immediately jumped on that. Quality stuff! For zero dollars! Then it was just a matter of sifting through his extensive back catalogue for just the right map. I eventually settled on the The Lost Temple of Aphosh the Haunted because it’s big enough to have a lot of encounters without being sprawling, and offers a mixture of natural and artificial terrain. I wanted something that people could project their own ideas onto and that had enough conceptual ‘hooks’ to work with without being prescriptive.
Map chosen, I emailed Dyson juuuust to make sure the plan was ok, he said yes, and here we are.
The mockup for the physical form of The Map is not The Territory.
Tell me a little about Brinkwood: Blood of Tyrants. What excites you about it?
Brinkwood is a Forged in the Dark game, a system I love working in. This is my second attempt at putting a hack of Blades together, and I’m excited to be working as part of a team now, as so many good ideas flow into the project from our consultants, playtesters, and others involved in the project.
The four-word pitch is “Robin Hood versus Vampires”, which I think, if that grabs your attention, this is a game you’ll be interested in. What excites me about it is the chance to build a game that has a lot of depth and longevity to it’s campaign level, without a lot of the baggage and book-keeping that typically goes into this sort of game. We’re putting a lot of work in to make it so that you have an evolving experience, starting from just a few bandits out in the woods, slowly building allies and relationships with other factions, many of whom who have been working at this a lot longer than you have, and slowly turning from a band, to a coalition, to a movement, to finally a true revolutionary force.
I’m probably most excited to bring in some of the real-world experience I’ve had in leftist organizing. In a lot of games or media about rebellion and revolution, the focus is on heroic individuals, rather than groups and movements. I think both narratives are valuable, and I wanted to include both in this game. In many ways, this game is about taking different groups who all share the same ideological goals, but differ in the details of how to accomplish said goals, which mirrors my experiences from 2016 onward. This isn’t a game where you try to get deeply opposed groups to work together, it’s about the smaller frictions of approach between groups that are incredibly committed to the same goals, and negotiating those competing approaches to try and build a successful rebellion.
Tell me more about integrating your organizing experience into the game. How does this come forth in play?
For my organizing experience, I think it comes out in play in two main ways, one subtle, and one not-so-subtle. On the subtle side, I think the interplay of the various campaign-level systems, be it your allied factions, their strength feeding into your strength, the sedition mechanics, and even the actions the GM takes as the “Vampire Lord” create a sort of test-kitchen effect, where players are put into the mind-space of organizers and revolutionaries. One of my favorite examples came in a recent game, where my players asked themselves first, not what they thought a community needed, but what they could do to find out what a community actually needed. I saw this problem crop up a lot in my organizing experience, with groups coming in with their own agenda, imposing solutions to what they thought were a community’s problems, without actually consulting said community. It was thrilling to see this very issue emerge organically, and for the pressures of the game system to guide my players to (what I believe to be) the correct choice for any organization: Ask people what they need first, don’t assume you know better, and then work with the community itself to provide mutual aid.
On the not-so-subtle side, we have the Conclave, a system whereby every few sessions, depending on the player’s actions, they will meet with the stakeholders in their rebellion. I was inspired in my own experience of meetings between different faction representatives (called “spokes”, both in anarchist organizing and in Brinkwood) to determine what goals to prioritize, what resources to allocate, etc. It’s a messy process in real life, and so far, when played out, it’s messy and dramatic in-game. To me, the most interesting conflicts are between people who both have the same goals and ideas, but differ only in their approach. It’s interesting for players to be in a space where they have to stake an opinion on the world, and actively make decisions about who-gets-what that actually impact the game’s world and their own relationships with one another and their NPC allies.
How are you building hope and the possibility of success into the game when mechanically Forged in the Dark mechanically can trend a little bleak?
We’ve done a lot of under-the-hood work on the Blades system to try and make things more hopeful and less bleak. The slow grind of vice, stress, and trauma tends to “wear down” PCs in Blades, and I’ve read a lot of reviews and analyses (some critical, some positive) of both Blades and, in some ways, Brinkwood‘s closer antecedent, Band of Blades. On the first level, I’ve changed how the stress grind works. For every resistance roll (Blades’s main mechanic for players to resist, or “cancel out” negative consequences), I’ve changed the math so that the range of stress goes from one to three, rather than from zero to six on a single roll. This means that most every action now carries a price, albeit a smaller, slower burn-down that, in my opinion, allows the players better control of how quickly their characters get into trouble.
Similarly, I’ve “split” the typical Blades sheet into two pieces, with the player character on one sheet, and the special abilities / archetype information on a separate “Mask” sheet. Players are free to choose between these masks on each Foray, and this allow players to be more flexible than they would in other systems (ie, play the mask of Violence if their character needs to be able to defend themselves, or play the mask of Lies if they need to deceive or socially manipulate their enemies). I’ve also “split” the stress track between Stress and Essence, so that players have access to more resources overall, but still have the tension of two slowly burning resources.
Lastly, in the reference documents we’ve prepared for players, we’ve put a lot of emphasis on giving the players all the tools they need to succeed, with advice on how to boost their rolls, their effectiveness, or what to spend and what to do. I think Blades can be an intimidating game to learn in some ways, and if you don’t have access to all the knowledge the game demands, it can become a lot more deadly or stressful than intended. We also state explicitly in our GM advice is that the GM is a co-conspirator and a player, and should remain on the PC’s side, giving advice on how to use the rules, how to spend resources, or how to navigate other more complicated aspects of the game to ensure the PCs know all of their options in a given situation. It amazes me how much less “aggressive” and more fun Blades becomes when you remember to do simple things like offer Devil’s Bargains, or remind players that they can resist any consequence you throw at them.
What is the world like that the characters exist in and that they’re encountering challenges in?
Brinkwood takes place in a castylpunk world, meaning it’s aesthetic is very much in line with stuff like Castlevania or similar properties, but with a punk intention brought to bear on it. So it’s medieval / gothic-esque, with lots of castles, gothic architecture, gloomy cities, sprawling manors, small villages, etc, but also alongside things like primitive firearms, smoke-belching factories, flesh-steamwork amalgamations, and other more anachronistic monstrosities and details. By saying this is a “punk” game, we mean that you aren’t here to admire the scenery or sympathize with oppressors, you are here to tear down systems of control and oppression, not to replicate or replace them.
What inspired the choice to split the character sheet into two parts, and what are some of the benefits that come with that design choice?
The inspiration came from a common problem I saw in some campaigns of Blades, as well as other games I ran. I found that often times, people would lose interest in the mechanical side of a character long before the character’s “story” had completed. By separating most of the mechanics out to a separate sheet, it allows people the freedom to “try out” different mechanical archetypes, and not shackle their character’s story development as closely to their mechanical development. Likewise, it allows interesting groups of characters to play together, without necessarily worrying that they’re “missing” a key archetype or ability.
Playgroups are free to experiment, try different types of Forays, and not feel pigeonholed into doing the same sort of thing over and over again. In a narrative sense, it helps contribute to the theme of “commonplace heroism,” your character isn’t exceptional by virtue of some in-born talent or ability, but by their willingness to take up the mantle of responsibility and take action.
Thank you very much for joining me to talk about Mnemonic! Before we talk too deeply about the game, I’d like to introduce you to my readers – your debutante, so to speak. What brought you to games? Why do you choose to design?
DP: I’ve been playing games since I was 10, when my friends and I would walk down the halls between class and talk through “roleplaying” stories in the Star Wars universe. We tinkered with the design ideas from video games like Gauntlet Legends and Legend of Zelda to imagine what other stories might look like. Sometimes those stories were capital s Stories; sometimes they were just aesthetic ideas, like “What if a game like Gauntlet but you’re all summoners conjuring big magic beasts?”
It wasn’t until high school that I touched a tabletop roleplaying game with mechanics and character creation. My group of friends played D&D every Friday for four years, because D&D was the game we knew. The Mnemonic setting came out of a play-by-post game twelve years ago, and it’s been growing steadily ever since.
LA: I started formal, written RPGs… sometime in middle or high school? Thereabouts. But I was introduced informally through improvisational dungeon crawling in (ugh) Boy Scouts. I tolerated entirely too many years of that, but at least I got this out of it. Next was, of all things, freeform forum RP in the GameFAQs Metroid Prime social message board. For formal systems, I got started with D&D, as many are, because it was the cultural monolith that people recognized.
I spent a long time reading Vampire: the Masquerade core books and sourcebooks in a bookstore nearby, but never played it because I didn’t have a group for it. D&D was interesting to theorycraft, but I never got a regular group for an extended campaign. Shadowrun was the next game I played seriously and the first I had a real extended campaign of. Shadowrun has a complicated relationship for me, one that I don’t have nearly enough time or space here to address. The much abbreviated explanation is that they made me aware that my TTRPGs could say something, mean something, be something, not just be the aesthetic trappings for a series of ever-escalating violent encounters.
NM: I played my first TTRPG at 14 in highschool – D&D, naturally – and my experience was so bad I didn’t play again until I was 19 or 20! Through Games Club at university I was introduced into Dark Heresy, Deadlands, Vampire: the Masquerade, and Legend of the Five Rings (they also tried hard to get me to give D&D and Pathfinder another chance but I never did, really). But we always ended up house-ruling our games to do the things we wanted them to do that they didn’t. Designing games from the ground up was the next step: something I’ve done for over a decade without ever imagining myself a ‘game designer’ or participating in TTRPG Twitter!
It’s only in the last year or two I’ve really called myself a “game designer” or thought of what I do as design, let alone dreamed I could do it as a job!
PP: I grew up reading more tabletop and wargaming books than “proper” literature: AD&D, L5R, Mechwarrior, Warhammer, and oWoD all introduced me to interesting possibilities that I could make my own rather than stories that were set in stone. This is interesting to me in retrospect, because this was the 80s in Vancouver, and that period was the height of the Satanic Panic. You’d think that my staunchly Catholic Filipino parents would have despised such books as works of the Devil, and would have then barred my older brothers from playing. Turns out that they didn’t mind because tabletop games meant that they got to play with friends. Brown kids in a very white section of town needed friends.
Of course, I was too young to join any of their games. My first forays happened much later in high school, with close knit circles of friends from my school and with my younger brother plus some cousins. There was a long period where I was disillusioned from tabletop because a lot of my peers were cishet, male, and/or sexist – which led me to the new World of Darkness books, and had me making my own campaign on my own terms. Did a copious amount of kitbashing and homebrewing for WoD in particular, and I always got the same comments. “This is such a cool world!” “This doesn’t feel like WoD, but in a good way?” “Why don’t you make your own games?”
It’s been a pretty wild game design journey for me since last year. I don’t think I can answer why I design in so many words, but if I were to try… I think I design to find myself, and make more room for other people like me. There are always stories to be told, and each one of us brings something different to our tables. I like exploring the many things I can offer, both for my own pleasure and for anyone who may read my works and realize they could make their own things from the tools I can give them.
SP: I started playing Tabletop RPGs in 2015, but I’d been curious about it for much earlier, there was just no time. Mid 2014 was the beginning of my thesis year in college and I really wanted to finish college because at that point I was already about 5-6 years in University. When 2015 came, though, I was just about to enroll for my last semester when I was told that some of my units that I took in the University’s constituent campus were apparently not going to be credited. It meant that I’d need to retake some classes before going for my thesis. Funny circumstances, because that’s what gave me the time to actually get into games. I had a boyfriend at the time who had friends that were coming together for a D&D campaign which was how I got invited. They were taking up the same course (Library Sciences), so by majority, we agreed to meet at their college building (which was… the University Library). My college building was across the campus so I was often arriving just when everybody was settling in.
My first campaign was, in a word, chaotic. We were fifteen players, what can you do? But surprisingly, my DM was really good at it. So good, in fact, that I thought this was just… normal. I thought the normal table count was fifteen players and that any less was… just a little lonely. I was very wrong. I think having such a great DM at first also gave me very rose-colored lenses for every DM that I played under afterwards. There were lots of DMs that I experienced afterwards that were… not so great, but I thought “Oh, maybe my first DM is just exceptional.” Unfortunately, this mindset paved the way for me sort of… allowing myself to be thrown around under games and tables that were not so respectful of my boundaries with players and DMs that felt less than safe to be with. Exhausted, I broke away from that and later fell into a game design project that soared for a bit, but eventually also moved away from due to differences in direction and principles. It was here that I think where I really started. I met some great people from the Gamers and Gaming Meets, an organisation that hosts TTRPG events here in Manila. They helped me move towards design and expand my horizons.
I still remember when my friends took me to their place and showed me all sorts of TTRPG books and how the layout was done and how the mechanics were presented. The art, the themes, the dynamics all spoke so deeply to me and I was hooked ever since. I began creating games with ideas and themes that were close to me (plants, haha) and I’m now trying to explore making games that mean a lot to me. I’ll admit that while my first gaming experience wasn’t terrible, the ones that followed for a long time were exhausting and far from ideal. I want to make games that touch on ideas that are important to me, like the struggles of growing up in this country that seems to love making it hard for people like me (queer, non binary, not part of the upper class) to exist. I want to create games that inspire others to also make games so that their voices can also be heard.
Syn: Gaming had always been a thing for me – Mario, Sonic, Tetris, etc. – but tabletop games and design is a bit more recent for me. I started playing tabletop games somewhat seriously around 2016 and started DM’ing after some encouragement in 2017. It was a wild time learning how to handle all of that, but the further I progressed in learning how to DM and looking into the lore of these systems, the more questions I asked about why things were as they were. As I put those thoughts out into the world, the responses that came back were “Have you thought of designing a game?” I hadn’t. I thought I was just asking average questions that someone had surely thought about. They were, but the people who thought those things were, in fact, designers.
I asked about skill checks, dice rolls, worldbuilding, and kobolds and so much so that I ended up here, writing about this friggin’ exciting game.
Illustration by Sinta Posadas.
To follow that, I’d like to ask a little about your background. What are your areas of expertise, your storied histories? What makes you the designer to make Mnemonic and make it the perfect experience it’s meant to be?
DP: Mnemonic is the world I play in when I think about stories; it’s the universe of fantasy and magic that exists in my head, and most of the characters I create exist somewhere within that universe.
Mnemonic is a setting where memory has power, both as a life force for the world itself and as a source of magic. A lot of the setting’s ideas come from my own grapples with memory, things I remember from childhood that look a lot different in retrospect. Some things are happy remembrances; others, less happy. But giving people the space to explore that recontextualization is important to me.
I’m also White, which means I have a healthy load of unexamined biases when it comes to what stories can exist and what an imaginary world can look like. Would you believe me if I said I’m not the ideal person to tell stories in this setting? A lot of my design process for this world comes from a place of enabling players to tell stories that are personal to them, with as little White European Colonialist Bullshit as possible. For Mnemonic, this means asking questions to invite the player to bring themselves into the world. But I can’t do that alone.
For my first game in this setting, Cracks in the Mirror, I hired a sensitivity consultant to help me identify the spots where I was stumbling into presumptive or harmful tropes. They were immensely valuable in helping me realize everything in the previous paragraph, too.
For our Weaver’s Almanac, I wanted even more help, and not from people with the same unexamined biases as me. Which is why most of the members of our team are BIPOC.
LA: I’m a high-generation mixed-race Japanese American. The relation between memory and reality in Mnemonic is interesting to me because of a particular story I have about growing up. Whenever I went to visit my grandparents, they would have documentaries about the Japanese internment camps on the TV. I learned a key part of my heritage through passive absorption. They never addressed it directly until I was much older. It was just there, lingering in the background.
Part of the basic premise of Mnemonic as a broader world is that memories, and how they affected people differently, are lingering in the world. They affect it. Their impacts, not just by their objective truth but by how people feel about them and even by how people manipulate when those are looked back on, are real, in a way even more real than the idea of a thing that happened some time ago.
NM: I’m mixed-race Black Canadian. I’m very interested in the shifting negotiations, interpretations and the power of memories, particularly in the way different groups and cultures remember their histories. Worlds where those cultures and their histories come alive through the power of memory and of story – particularly collaborative story – are so compelling to me because they allow us agency in how our histories are told in ways that we so rarely are allowed in reality.
One of the reasons I find Mnemonic so compelling is because of how it leans into tools for telling stories, rather than simply telling them. For me part of designing games is about creating gaps for the players to fill and create their own stories and memories. Players are really the game designers, if you think about it – I can write this and that, but those stories are no longer mine the second someone else picks them up. All I’m doing, hopefully, is opening windows they might not have noticed, and asking “what do you see? And what does it remind you of?”
PP: I’m a queer Filipino woman born in the Philippines. My parents fled from an oppressive regime, full of dreams of a better future for them and their children in Canada. My memories of Canada as a child are beautiful flashes – some I can see, some I can taste, some I can feel, and some I can smell. What’s much sharper is the jarring sense I had with my family’s return to Manila. The past few years have been an intriguing yet at times painful study in turning back towards those feelings I had, and realizing, now, what my past self was wrestling with: displacement, confusion, never fitting in even if I was as “Filipino” as my peers. Then, of course, there are the extra tensions of me being polyamorous (and discovering it late, after years of thinking I was bisexual and had “bad, extra” feelings towards multiple people), me being a woman in a hypermasculine, Catholic society that will take every opportunity to tell you that you and your body are nothing without the approval of men, and me being the only daughter out of six children in a rather traditional Filpino family (thus making me someone both in constant need of protection, and also someone who was expected to put their dreams and ideas aside if they were offensive or improper to her brothers). People will constantly try to rewrite you in the hopes of fitting you into easily digestible parts for themselves. They’ll try to ignore the fact that you have your own stories, and your own desire to write it the way you want to.
And that brings me to why I was happy to join Dee in designing Mnemonic. This was one of the first games that was capable, with every word, of telling me, “Hey. I see you. This is a story for you, that you can make as you like. I am a game that respects you for you.” Memories are things that transform, shift, break apart, come back together, write, and revise themselves as we grow older with them. Bringing that sort of beautiful process into a game is something I’m really into.
SP: I have always viewed Mnemonic with fascination. The dream-like feeling, the exploration of memory – that’s always what has drawn me to it. When I fully read it for the first time, I felt that idea of being able to become something – I don’t know exactly what, but the concept itself, to me, seemed necessary. As someone who often has to be A Certain One Thing in their daily life, it is comforting to have a game that exists that allows you to shift, be different, reform along with the memories that you explore in the game. I haven’t played it but I wish to someday.
As for the art, I wasn’t actually expecting to do the art for the project. I thought I was going to do writing and then suddenly a discussion for artists was happening and… I decided to shoot my shot. And it happened! Before I knew it, I was designing art for the project.
Art has always been a complicated thing for me. I don’t talk about my art a lot because my feelings for my art and my skills are Difficult. I started making art when I was a tiny kid watching Powerpuff Girls in our living room back in my grandparent’s house in the countryside. I really took to it and enjoyed making drawing after drawing, filling one notebook after another. I was a hungry mind stuck in a small child’s body. I wanted to learn to make better art and I kept pushing myself so, so hard to as far as my small hands could possibly take me. Much like many of my peers, my skills were forever unrecognized by my mother (she raised me and my brother on her own) and I was constantly told to wake up and concentrate on more “money-making” pursuits. This constant push and pull made me hate my art but also made me unable to stop. My struggle with this continues to this day. My mother also still hasn’t recognized my skill and I don’t think she ever will. I don’t really want her approval anymore anyway, but I hope she knows she’s wrong. My art is going to be part of a kickstarter that will definitely touch hearts and also, bluntly, make money. I didn’t become a doctor like she wanted, but I’m sure the project will heal others in a different way.
Syn: I’m just a person with questions. Lots of them. So when you mix my innate curiosity about every single thing with my utter fascination with worldbuilding, I guess this was almost destined for me. I remember when I was asked to join the team. It felt surreal; I’m just a guy with questions about the worlds we build and the systems that support them.
When Dee asked me if I would like to build in a world of memory, I was still learning what it was that I wanted to do in the world of tabletop games and the stories I wanted to tell. I read the mechanics and a bit of the lore and it was just… obvious. The stories I want to tell are the kind where you dig into yourself and ask questions and deal with the challenges that come from those answers. Everything in Mnemonic speaks to that need.
An excerpt from The First Gathering written by Dee Pennyway, layout by Dee Pennyway. Click the picture to check out the draft (work in progress!)!
Cool! So, now that we know a little about you, tell me a little about Mnemonic. What excites you about it? What spurred its creation?
DP: Mnemonic emerged from a question I had in a play-by-post game a dozen years ago: If I have to spend Experience Points to use this ability, what do those Experience Points represent, and what does it mean to lose them? I settled into memory as a source of power, which evolved over the years into a world concept where the world itself has memories that exert themselves on occasion. I’ve played around with characters who lost their memories after abusing magic, characters who trapped unpleasant memories inside of powerful relics to try and forget traumatic events, characters who sang songs to resonate their own memories with the memories of others.
I’m pleased with the current version of the world that exists in my mind, which is that memory is inherently fluid, not something that can be spent or saved or stored but something that we engage with and observe on a constant basis. We remember things, we misremember things, we forget things…and the world does too. There’s something really neat to me about a world that remembers the things we do, even if no one else sees us do them. What memories does the world choose to hold onto, like keepsakes? What memories does the world try to forget?
Synxiec and I have talked about what happens when the world wants to forget somebody but can’t. Like a kind of cursed immortality. The story gets a lot heavier when we start exploring trauma as a world event, but it’s a thing my mind drifts to when I think about stories I want to tell in Mnemonic.
PP: I mentioned how Mnemonic is a game that spoke to me, and acknowledged me as someone full of stories that I wanted to tell. What excites me most about this project is the fact that by design, the emotions, intent, and player understanding of “memory” will change according to who joins you for a session. My first game had us exploring our gender identities, how we connected with other people, and how we viewed family and love. Being guided through the session with prompts and a constant reminder of “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to; respect the silence” felt magical. The thought of being able to expand upon these experiences for more players, this time as a member of the dev team, really excites me!
The other big thing that I’m looking forward to would be all of the subsystems that the Almanac will have, plus all the gameable lore that our team will be bringing to the table. As a designer who is extremely comfortable with either systems that use dice or systems that are purely narrative, playing around with fascinating card mechanics is uncharted territory. The things we have planned make me feel like I can both contribute well to the Almanac, and challenge myself to design for new things.
Syn: The thing that excites me about the game the most is a hard question. At first, it was the die. Each of them having a distinct purpose. Then as I looked more closely at it, I found what excited me the most: the questions. Did I mention I like asking questions? Because I really enjoy asking questions and Mnemonic’s challenges are unique in that respect. What game asks a question like “What lies do you tell yourself?” as part of character creation? These are the kind of foundational things that build worlds I like to explore and get lost in.
We’re not even going to talk about how every other thing this game gives you has safety built into it. I’ve already thought about the many stories I want to tell in this world of memory, but don’t tell Dee that. It’s a surprise.
Also, the people I get to work with are people I have so much respect for and many of them are people I just enjoy for their own sake. I’m happy to work with them.
NM: Unreliable narration, anti-canon and player-collaborated and -created game history, lore, and content are things I’m particularly invested in. Games are shared storytelling endeavors, after all – it makes it that much more enjoyable when everyone is empowered and able to contribute to communal worldbuilding rather than passively experiencing those worlds.
Mnemonic excites me in the way Dread and Trophy excite me: asking pointed questions of ourselves and others to build a shared world and a shared experience, as it pertains to memory – which is both a very personal thing and a communal one. Any time I’ve ever spent with friends, half the conversation is inevitably “remember that time?” Mnemonic, to me, is an entire game of that, and that excites me.
LA: The anti-canon nature of the setting is particularly cool to me because it more explicitly invites the players to make the world theirs. Most settings are fruitful not just for standing on their own, but for inviting players to be part of it, to participate actively. Mnemonic takes this a step further by saying that the instance the players are in is as true, as valid, as real, maybe even more real, than anything imagined by anyone else, up to and including the creators of the setting. It ties back to a core theme of the setting that the memories of something – the feelings and echoes and the ways they affect people – are more important than a theoretical objective truth. It’s about the experiences, both in-game and for the players.
The Tale of Five Strings lore piece (one of 26) and story arc, draft, by Synxiec with layout by Dee Pennyway.
When dealing with memory, we can encounter some bumps along the road. How is Mnemonic designed to respect player’s agency and consent, and allow them to control content to avoid any triggers, squicks, or undesirable unhappy times?
DP: Agency and consent are two of my biggest guiding targets in game design, and Mnemonic is no different. Everything in this game gives players permission to paint their own picture of the events, and character creation asks each player to name at least one boundary for something they will not include in the story, with some guiding language about how to best take care of not just their character’s needs, but the needs of everyone’s characters, and of every player at the table as well. I’ll drop the excerpt from that section here:
The Boundary
When we tell stories, we inevitably leave some details out, some rooms unexplored, some doors closed. We do this for our own safety and for the safety of those around us. What is a boundary you will not cross in this story? How close to it are you willing to wander before you turn away?
Your boundary can be something your character would want respected, or it can be something you care about personally. For example, Dee has a fear of heights, but their character does not. They might say, “I’d like to set a boundary on detailed descriptions of vertigo or other feelings of being up high. We can go to high places, but I as a player don’t want to experience that feeling in my imagination.”
You can set more than one boundary, and you can add more as the story progresses or as you think of them. If privacy is a concern, you may want to consider some form of anonymization, such as a shared digital document or a trusted facilitator.
Respecting boundaries is about more than just not crossing the line; it’s about knowing when a boundary needs to remain entirely outside the scope of the story, even in reference. If your character has a pet and you want to set a boundary around that pet’s safety, you may want to establish that as a convention of play: that this pet will never come to harm, and will never even be perceived to be in any danger, no matter the stakes of the scene.
Mnemonic doesn’t directly present players with descriptive content; instead, we ask questions that guide the players to the kinds of themes we want them to explore, in their own space and at their own comfort level. We also include language that makes it explicit that players are allowed to change any aspect of the story, whether it’s something that’s happening in the current scene or something that happened three sessions ago. I don’t want anyone to feel like they have to commit to a traumatic consequence of a piece of fiction they established before they recognized it would be a problem.
I take a lot of inspiration from Script Change on that, actually. The idea of being able to Rewind a scene to take a different approach was incredibly influential for me. I hope that players are able to build that kind of agency into their play groups when they play Mnemonic.
The other thing we do that I’m quietly excited about is how we handle “A thing happened in the mechanics that you don’t like.” If it’s something that happened because of the dice, you can…just reroll them. Dice are an abstraction, a story generator. There’s a ritual quality to rolling a die, but I want players to know that if the Fire Die says you set fire to the entire world, you can opt out of that outcome and roll again until you get you send up a bright signal to let your friends know where you are.
Your character also can’t be removed from the story without your consent, which seems like a small thing but so many of the biggest games out there have some form of “Game Over” scenario where my character can be taken away from me by a cruel GM, or fickle dice. In Mnemonic, the only way your character can die is if you make the decision for them to leave the story. We have mechanics for it. It’s a big deal. You can do it. No one else can do it for you.
That’s a lot of words to dance around the fact that at the end of the day, we can’t completely protect players, we can just offer tools and guidance. If you’re a player who experiences bleed in a significant way (where the events of the story affect you on a personal level in a way that lingers after the story ends), I’d encourage you to check in with yourself regularly; don’t feel like you have to choose the “heavy” answer to every question. This advice appears in just about every game I write now, so I’m gonna put it here too: Take care of yourself. Take care of each other.
Illustration by Sinta Posadas. (I love this one!)
It’s clear you’ve dug deeply into the world and what the action and reaction mean. What made you elect to use the mediums you do – cards, the particular art style, etc. – to represent the world to people and to have them interact with? How does the medium give meaning to the art?
DP: I want Mnemonic to be…hm, accessibility has its own connotations, and I have goals on that front as well but when it comes to the use of cards, what I’m aiming for is, “Can a person play this game with the things they already have”. And my family never played roleplaying games, but we did always have a deck of poker cards ready to go. And I know that a lot of general-purpose stores have decks available for less than $5, which means that if you don’t happen to have a deck at your home, you can probably find one even if you don’t have a “gaming store” near you. That was pretty important to me early on. That’s also why our dice are six-sided; I love polyhedral dice sets, but until very recently you couldn’t just go to Target and pick up a set.
The artwork is important here too, but for me it’s more about conveying the sense of “this is something that someone might have drawn or painted directly into their notebook while traveling.” Sin’s illustrations are wonderful and intimate, full of…I hesitate to tell people what they should be feeling when they look at these pieces, but I know that when I look at them I get a strong sense of “the person who painted this cares a lot about the subject.” And I hope that comes through.
We care a lot about the stories we’re telling. And I want players to care, too. About their stories, and about each other sitting around the table.
The Rain Die draft written by Dee Pennyway, layout by Dee Pennyway, illustration by Sinta Posadas.
As someone who has personally struggled with memory loss but also finds beauty in the ephemeral and has things they’d like to forget, I am genuinely curious how a session of Mnemonic plays out. What are an example or two of your experiences with the game and what did you take away – or leave behind?
DP: Mnemonic usually feels…weighted? I sometimes describe it as the feeling of holding your breath in anticipation, of choosing your words carefully in a space that allows you to do so.
We’ve been playing on the Actual Play twitch channel the past few weeks, and there are some things that I’ll hold onto forever, and at least one thing I wish I could take back (and probably would, if we were playing a longer-running series).
One thing I cherish is how readily everyone at the table takes ownership of the group’s well-being. Sean introduced his character, Warren, as a habitat for a community of rabbits, and after what was probably about a minute but what felt like only an instant, Synxiec announced that we were now, us, the storytellers, the players on stream, committed protectors of the bunnies. And like…yes, of course! Mnemonic, the game, is about being careful storytellers and recognizing when it’s your job as a player to look after the characters in your own story.
A thing I would change is that Misha introduced a piece of local folklore around a dragon living nearby, and it was super interesting–but then when I tied our first session together with my character’s closing scene, I used my own character’s backstory as a vehicle instead of connecting it to hers. It would have been a much more compelling story beat, and more personal to the entire group, and more meaningful to the town we were in, to make that moment about something someone else had introduced.
It was one of those things that I didn’t even think about until the next day, when it was already too late to go back and change. And the nice thing about Mnemonic is that if something like that happens in your home game, you can just…change it. You can go in next week with your group and say “Hey, this happened last time but I kinda want to retcon it to something else if that’s okay?” and then work out how the change might affect everybody, and the story you’re telling together.
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Thank you so much to the whole team for the interview, including those unable to participate because of life – see you next time! I hope all you readers enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Mnemonic: A Weaver’s Almanac on Kickstarter today!
Hey y’all, today I have something really good for you – Jay Dragon is here to talk about Wanderhome, which is currently blowing past goals on Kickstarter! This game of traveling animal-folk is so much more than just a walk through the meadow – check out Jay’s responses below.
The cover art of the roving animal-folk is by Sylvia Bi.
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What has your experience in games been like and how did you get into it?
I’ve been designing games since I was 12 years old for my summer camp The Wayfinder Experience. I ran my first game when I was 14, a largescale LARP with 50+ players, a full team of staff, and a production budget. I got into tabletop years later through Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition and Monsterhearts. I released my first largescale tabletop game, Sleepaway, on Kickstarter last year, where it would go on to win an ENnie and be nominated for two Indie Groundbreaker Awards.
Since then I’ve been designing games nearly continuously, and I’ve released more than two dozen projects of various sizes on my Itch.io page and on my Patreon. Wanderhome is my second solo Kickstarter, although it represents my fourth Kickstarter involvement, either as co-writer or project manager.
The Veteran by Letty Wilson, a sketch.
What projects do you think you’ve worked on that have led you to designing Wanderhome, which seems so new and exploratory?
Wanderhome is very much the culmination of a lot of the work I’ve been doing over the past year. As I become more comfortable with the No Dice, No Masters engine (often called Belonging Outside Belonging) through Sleepaway, I realized the sheer flexibility involved in the system. Projects of mine like Dungeon helped me realize that the structure that Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum had built, with tokens, moves, setting elements, and community worksheets, was intentionally an enormous well of unexplored design space. Wanderhome takes all the tools I’ve been futzing with – longer-form narrative games, modular structures, toolkits and other OSR principles, integrated safety mechanics (which I know we’ve talked about!), an enormous variety of options, and a general focus on prosody, lyricism, and art direction to give the game a tone that go beyond the normal RPG ruleset.
So, tell me a little about Wanderhome itself. What excites you about it? What makes it whole?
Wanderhome is a pastoral fantasy RPG about the peaceful world of Hæth and the folks who live there. You play as a group of traveling animal-folk (including but not limited to; a dancer who moves with the soul of the world, a caretaker for a gaggle of small and forgotten gods, a delivery-person who uses carrier moths to send letters by moonlight, a shepherd with a herd of bumblebees, a little kid with a big heart, and a veteran who has sworn to never draw their sword) as you go from place to place over the course of many seasons, helping people and making friends.
There’s a lot of things about it that excite me – it’s in a lot of ways everything I’ve wanted from a game for a while. I think right now I’m thinking a lot about the way it rejects so much of what we’re used to from RPGs in its genre. It focuses on the idea of a journey over a story, it lacks rules for failure (and in fact challenges the idea that failure exists), it’s designed for very longform play (you can play it for years or decades!) and it reimagines what play can be like.
Art by Jennie Lindberg of the Small and Forgotten Gods.
How did you come up with this concept that defies some of the norms we expect from RPGs, and that has already captured many enthusiastic fans?
Wanderhome came about towards the start of quarantine, when I was struggling with a lot of mental and physical health issues and a friend came by for a week to check up on me. While we were sitting together in the grass, I had a vision of a landscape that could exist in a world after all this. I sat down and sketched out how I’d want people to engage in the world, and figuring out basically a bounding limit of what playing the game is like – I didn’t care about failure, and I didn’t care about enormous success.
I concentrated most things you can do in the game as essentially a toolbox of window dressing, “idle animations” and basic tools you can use to unpack what’s happening. It uses the token system classic in Belonging Outside Belonging games to push and pull you in and out of your character’s comfort zone. I think it’s attracted a lot of attention because there’s not really anything like it – there’s some comparisons to games like Ryuutama, but to me that’s like night and day. I think people are clamoring for a game that proposes a world after COVID, after our global trauma, and tries to figure out ways to heal – even if it’s not always going perfectly.
I definitely want to talk more at some point with you about electing not to have rules for failure since I’m a fan, but first I want to talk about your choice to do extremely long campaign play as an option. Why allow such long engagement with the same campaign potentially the same characters? How does the design support the different lengths of play?
I’ve been captivated since I was a little kid by those tabletop RPG campaigns that have been meeting for 20+ years. Generally those groups aren’t actually playing whatever game they originally set out to play – they’ve been messing with the system for so long that it’s become something deeply personal and totally new. When I got into Indie TTRPGs, I fell in love with so much of those games, but I found myself missing the dream of that long, long play. It’s not that I needed every campaign to last that long, but the idea of playing a game for so long that I’ve completely reshaped it into my own is so appealing. I think of a lot of my game designs as being about teaching the players how to write the game and make it their own.
The moment I started working on Wanderhome I was so struck by the idea of a game that, if you spent enough time with it, could become another feature in the landscape of your life. When you play Wanderhome for long enough, you eventually have to give up your characters and make new ones, but that’s intentional. If you play it for decades and decades, it stops being about the people, but the shared world you’ve all made. The episodic structure of Wanderhome, along with the sheer variety of options, means that shorter journeys feel natural and easy, while also giving you the sense of what more is out there, if you just kept on traveling.
More amazing work by Lettie Wilson, this time a few character types.
Everything I have seen out of Wanderhome and everything you’ve said here has made me envision the vibe that you give off when we’ve chatted – calm and quietly investigatory, but with the chance at any time to run off with an idea and a half drawn map that’ll be fully drawn by morning. Tell me, what are a few example scenes you’ve had or envisioned for the game, and how do your mechanics support that type of play?
As I designed Wanderhome, I was constantly making note of the sorts of scenes I wanted people to have, and possible landscapes where that could happen. Many of the things you can do in Wanderhome came directly from the lists of ways I wanted players to navigate the world – leaving offerings to small and forgotten gods, opening up about their feelings, taking time to tell the other players about the beauty of a sunset or the path a butterfly travels through the air. Ultimately though, I worked hard to keep Wanderhome from making confident statements about what you feel. I wanted to create the space in the game for you to fill in your own meaning, and treat the mechanics as more of an interface to engage with the world than a prescriptive set of laws that dictate the world itself.
I apologize if this is the first some of you may be hearing of my current health status, but the quarantine has made communicating really difficult. Please watch this video and feel free to reach out, but do not feel any obligation to give platitudes. Things have been rough but I’m doing my best! <3
Hey y’all, today I have an interview with Liam Ginty at Sandy Pug Games about the Ghibli-inspired Monster Care Squad, a tabletop adventure of healing Monsters and solving local problems in the gentle, unique world of Ald-Amura! Check out the responses below.
CW for animal harm in the illustrations, it’s tastefully done (and not done by the Monster Care Squad), and done to demonstrate the nature of the Monster Care Squad in the game.
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Thanks for agreeing to the interview! It’s exciting to see you on a new project, but for those new to your work, how did you come into games and design?
Of course! Always love to chat with y’all. I’ve been making games for about 6 or 7 years now in some shape or form – I started out making print and play board games and trying to sell them at conventions and such. That didn’t quite work out, and so I pivoted to making TTRPGs, primarily supplements for games like Fate or Apocalypse World. About 2 years ago me and a friend had a sort of funny idea for a game called Orc Stabr, this one page game where you played as a gang of orcs hunting a wild and powerful Beast. The campaign had a $20 goal and raised 17,500% of that by the end, which I think might be a KS record? Anyway, that success kinda allowed me to build Sandy Pug Games to what it is today – still very small, but big enough that I can pull a lot of people into bigger and more complicated projects.
THE SandyPug dog inspired by Pumba, the real dog.
What have you learned in previous projects that you think you’re bringing forward to Monster Care Squad?
Definitely the no.1 thing is my experience with crowdfunders and co-op working. The Roleplayer’s Guide To Heists was a project we ran last year with the San Jenaro Co-Op that was kind of the first experiment into co-op based games development, and it was such a huge success that it’s laid the foundations for everything I’ll be doing moving forward. Making games is just so much more fun when you’re doing it with a crowd of great people, and there’s really nothing like having a discord full of talented and creative artists all building something together. It’s a real joy.
Adventurers adventuring!
Tell me a little about Monster Care Squad. What excites you about it?
It has to be designing a game that allows for those big epic showdowns you have at the end of a session, but without the violence and blood that usually comes with that. The game is designed so that every session should build up to this glorious crescendo where you face down against this wounded, massive Monster, and make it better again. The kind of storytelling you can do within that structure just makes me so excited to see what people come up with. There’s also the artwork, I think basically everybody is thinking the same thing, right? Leafie, our illustrator, is just a wizard, she’s unstoppable. I can’t wait to see what she does with the world.
The Monster Care Squad has arrived to help this Monster in need!
Considering tabletop RPG history, what brought you to the choice of focusing on caring for monsters?
Well, I think you hit the nail on the head right there. Games are always about killin’ stuff! I’m not judging that, particularly. I think action, combat, violence, all of these are tools and narratively powerful ones that work as effective shorthand for other, deeper, conflicts, and TTRPGs can do a great job at letting you tell those stories, but an oversaturation of those stories does kinda make the scene a little bland, at least in my opinion. Healing specifically was looked at cause when you get down to it, there’s very little mechanical difference between dealing damage and healing, the numbers are just flipped! It gets a lil more complicated than that when you expand the philosophy past the pure numbers, but once that clicked for me, Healing as the players’ main verb suddenly blossomed into all these possibilities.
This creature as a Bauvur. The description reads, “A peaceful mountain spirit who gently tends to the flora and fauna of the snowy mountains of the Tinar mountain range. His shiny white coat allows him to become invisible around snow which enables the monster to escape dangerous situations unnoticed.”
What sort of monsters will players see in the game, and what challenges do they face upon encountering them?
Ald-Amura is a big place, and we say Monsters can really be anything – some of them are massive, city-sized behemoths that blot out the sun with gargantuan wings made of the wind and the clouds themselves. Some are like little fairies, barely visible unless you know where to look. Variety is the real key to a game like this, where every session revolves around building up a Monster and its capabilities and its needs, so we’re casting a pretty wide net. I’m sure a lot of people can see some of our obvious influences – Shadow of the Colossus, Monster Hunter, Studio Ghibli – but some of our writers are also calling from legends and myths from their own cultures, and I’ve been such a big fan of strange monsters in media and history, we have a kind of bottomless well to work with.
First and foremost we want every Monster to be beautiful, powerful, and awe-inspiring. From the smallest to the largest, from the wisest to the wildest, each of these beings should immediately scream “Important, Precious, Ancient”. We want you to wonder what this Monster can do, what it has seen, what it would be like to live alongside it for generations. We also kinda want you to fall in love with them and wanna heal them, so cute is often a word we throw in the pot. Leafie also has her own instincts when it comes to creating Monsters that I think I’d struggle to put into words, but I think anyone who sees the art knows what I mean. They all have a certain Leafie-ness that I think makes the world super unique.
I know you always have something more up your sleeve. What’s this I hear about a grant for other creatives? Tell me all about it!
Yes! The Ald-Amura Historical Society Grant is a big, big deal for us at SPG. The 101 is that we’ve put aside a percent of our KS funds to a grant we’re awarding people looking to make fan works, or hacks, or art that’s inspired by Monster Care Squad (yes, you don’t even have to set your work *in* Ald-Amura). We have a label for these works (“Legends Of Ald-Amura”) and an official looking stamp plus some art asset sharing, but there’s no requirement to use those if you don’t want to. You can sell your creation, share it, or keep it private. People can request up to $300 for their project, no (or, well, very few anyway) strings attached. It’s maybe one of the most exciting things we’ve ever gotten to do at SPG.
When we announced Monster Care Squad, I’d say a half dozen people DM’d me asking me for details, asking if they could work on the game, asking if they could make fan games or telling me about similar projects they have that they were thinking of porting to the setting. It was kind of overwhelming! This is the first time anyone has responded to a project SPG has done like this, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that community is all we have these days, and fostering that community is never a mistake. I wanted to give back a little of the endless support I’ve gotten from the TTRPG industry (and the wider art world in general), and anyone that knows me, knows how important I feel financial support is to a community.
Thus, the grant was born. I guess you could see it as a reaction to things like the DMsGuild taking 50% of creatives’ money from them – that just seems backwards to me. There needs to be a more equitable paradigm between publishers and people making content for their worlds and settings, and this seems like one small thing we can do to try and shift that balance. It’s an experiment, turning the theory and discussions the community have been having for a while now into praxis.
Note: Today seems pretty packed with pics because this particular style of design and art appeals to me a lot, so please excuse this indulgence.
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Tell me a little about yourself and your work. What’s your background like and how has it led you to Dissident Whispers?
My name is Jeremy and I did the layout for ‘Hopebringer’ and ‘Rhemati’s Spring’ for DW. I’ve been tabletop gaming for around 6-7 years and creating stuff for around 3 years. I am a Warden (moderator) on the Mothership discord and active in a few others. One day “Silver Goat” posted up a request seeking volunteers for a BLM project, as a mixed race man (black and white if it matters) who lives in a rural area I had been struggling to find my place in the protests, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to get involved.
The interior of Dissident Whispers, on the pages for Hopebringer, showing a diagram of an arena.
What other projects have you worked on that you’ve brought forward knowledge to working on Dissident Whispers?
I have been working on writing and laying out a Mothership Hack called Gordinaak for way to long, and recently released a very dumb nega tower called ‘Why is there a Wizards Tower in this Dump?’ on Itch with my writing partner.
Tell me about Dissident Whispers. What kicked off such a project concept and how did it come together? What’s the pitch?
Dissident Whispers is a collaborative compilation of adventures for various systems. For me, it all started when I saw a message on Exalted Funeral’s Discord looking for volunteers to do various pieces for a project. As we were talking about logistics the projects founder, Silver Goat, mentioned posting on the Mothership Discord. It just so happened that I warden there (moderate) so I reached out to Sean Mccoy about it and then it just kinda took off. As far as a pitch goes I’m pretty terrible at that so I guess it’s a book with a bunch of dungeons and adventures so anyone who plays games needs it.
The interior of Dissident Whispers showing the Mirstone Manor adventure – on one page, a detailed map, and on the other, an unusual pink creature.
How is planning the content of such a project impacted by the increased focus on inclusivity and a specific message?
I think for everyone involved it was different, some people made things that were topical while others did stuff that was standard adventure fare. For instance one of the adventure’s I did layout for, Hopebringer, was very stick it to the man and defeat the oppressors.
What are some examples of the adventures in Dissident Whispers that players will have to dig into?
There are soooooo many, I did the layout for Hopebringer, and Rhemati’s Spring, both very different, both system agnostic. There are some really interesting ones for Mork Borg, and I actually played one for Mothership called Ghost Ship, on the night we finished everything, which was amazing.
The interior of Dissident Whispers, focusing on the College of Acoustic Ministration, showing alien creatures and men with lobster hands.
What were some of the best parts of working on this project and putting together the collection for players to experience?
My favorite part was probably watching a flood of talented people get involved, one day it was a few people then the next the discord exploded. It was just amazing watching everything develop and how cohesive everyone was moving as a unit. I’m still in awe of what was accomplished.
The interior of Dissident Whispers showing the Snake Temple Abduction adventure, with a beautiful illustration on the right page in blue and white and a simple but useful map in blue and white on the left, along with the guiding text.
The images for the book are by Janna Heidersdorf (Illustration) and Jen McCleary (Layout). (update 7/37/202)
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Sharang Biswas, for the Medici Group.
I appreciate you taking time for the interview, Sharang! Would you share with me a little about you and your experience? How did you end up in games doing the kind of work that you’re enthusiastic about?
I’m a game designer, interactive artist, and writer currently based in NYC. I started formally learning game design under Mary Flanagan at Dartmouth (though I studied engineering), and then went to ITP at Tisch School of the Arts at NYU to get a Masters in Interactive Design. Since then I’ve made numerous games, won an IndieCade, 2 IGDN, and a Golden Cobra Award, exhibited my games at galleries and art museums, mounted interactive theatre productions at various venues, and given a bunch of talks at conferences and universities. I’m also currently on the faculty at both Fordham University and Bard College.
I’m actually pretty enthusiastic about many different kinds of work, so I try and keep myself being by doing different stuff all the time. My major project right now is co-editing Honey & Hot Wax: An Anthology of Erotic Art Games with Lucian Kahn. I’ve been into the idea of procedure and process for a while, and about how mundane actions, when placed in a game context, can convey artistic meaning. I explored this in my games Feast & Verdure, and out of that line of inquiry came the thought: “Can games use sex acts as game mechanics, where the acts themselves are not the sole goal of the game?”. From that arose the idea of the book, though Lucian & I expanded the scope to also include games that discuss sex, sexuality, and related topics, without the use of sex acts between players or characters.
Lucian and I were very keen to make this project come to life in a way that uplifts artists and game designers, and so we decided to apply for a grant from the Effing Foundation for Sex-Positivity. We received two consecutive grants, and are basically using all the money to pay the creators involved!
That’s so fantastic to hear! Honey & Hot Wax sounds really brilliant, and also like a unique challenge. One curiosity I have is how you handled ensuring that the games in the collection use consent and are responsible, considering how sex can be. What was your approach to safety and boundaries?
It is my firm belief that art can and should discuss difficult topics–art is one of the ways people, both as individuals and as societies, make sense of the world. However, such art needs to be practiced with care and sensitivity, and as such, Lucian and I were very concerned about issues of consent and safety in the games included in the anthology. To begin with, when we were soliciting proposals, we took a very broad definition of what sex is, and relied on the Effing Foundation’s definitions of “sex-positivity” and “inclusivity” (which you can read here). This was to ensure that everyone was on the same page regarding the goals of our project, and what sorts of depictions of sexuality we would be considering.
Once the finalists were selected, we commissioned Maury Brown for an entirely separate chapter on consent and safety in LARP and TTRPG, to act as a general set of guidelines when playing any of the games in the collection (or indeed, any roleplaying game at all). In the rules for their games, each game designer also included their own sections regarding safety and consent practices, to uniquely address the idiosyncrasies of the experience they were creating.
Additionally, each game was thoroughly vetted by Lucian, myself, Cat Tobin from Pelgrane Press, and Kit Stubbs from the Effing Foundation, a diverse set of eyes to ensure that the games all represented the values we wanted to promote, and that consent language was clear. As director of the Effing Foundation, Kit, in particular, offered valuable insights concerning such matters!
Finally, we were very serious about the playtesting requirement for each of our accepted games; holes and gaps in rules are hard to predict without playtesting. Running my own game with a trusted friend, for example, showed me places where I could clarify language about safety!
Of course, and unfortunately, no safety mechanics can handle every eventuality, or account for bad actors. It is in the nature of participatory, non-linear stories to defy our expectations and predictions, so to all the players of our games, we ask you to exercise judgment and pay attention to your own boundaries!
The Honey & Hot Wax cover.
Is this the first game you’ve applied for grants for? It sounds like you’re pretty great at it! What did that process entail and how do you think it’s impacted how the games are designed?
Grants, like most sorts of applications in this world, are partially about luck, so “being great at it” doesn’t mean as much as one might think! But this isn’t the first grant I’ve received to make game-like work, and hopefully won’t be the last!
When Lucian and I sent in our proposal to the Effing Foundation, we were very clear about what the grant-funding would be used for: paying the folks involved in the project a fair amount. This was paramount. All our funding went to the writers and designers involved in the book.
The creation of any kind of art requires time and space. Time and space are luxuries reserved for those with money. Good art is impossible to make (consistently, at least) if an artist is forever worried about where their next rent check is coming from. As such, Lucian and I were hoping to do our small part in supporting and uplifting indie designers. At the very least, we’ve managed to create a space where artists who might otherwise not be able to make games about risque topics, have the ability to do so, and in a way that’s financially viable!
It might be good to note here that in addition to support from the grant, each designer is also receiving royalties, and a portion of sales is also going towards charitable causes that promote sex-positivity and sex-education!
The Sleepover by Julia Ellingboe and Kat Jones.
It is great to hear that everyone is being well-paid and that you and Lucian are working to support charitable works! What do you enjoy about working on larger projects like this with lots of collaborators? How does it contrast with how you enjoy working on individual projects, and how that affects your design? (note: please feel free to give examples of your specific projects!)
I really enjoy working on group projects. Most of the work I’m proudest of is in collaboration with others. However, I wouldn’t call this a “group project” per se. Lucian and I were editors and curators of other people’s work. It was their designs…we just helped them. Granted Lucian and I have games in the book as well, but each of those was an individual work (albeit, with help from others). The book wasn’t really a group project in the same was as some of my bigger, interactive theatre pieces, for example.
For example, when Nick O’Leary and I made the Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance LARP for the Museum of the Moving Image, it truly was collaborative, both with each other and the museum education department. We went back and forth with each other for ideas, to refine mechanics, to flesh out bits and to write content. None of that really for H&HW.
Feeding Lucy, written by Jonaya Kemper.
What are some lessons you’ve learned through design over time that you think your particular path is the only way you would have learned them – as in, if I hadn’t done x, I would never have learned y?
Lol, I feel that’s a weird line of thinking. Who knows what I would or would not have learned under different circumstances or different decisions? Besides, I think looking at other people’s paths is at best an exercise in inspiration. Stories of paths taken ALWAYS leave out some aspect of luck or privilege, and few can ever emulate the advice given in these sorts of tellings.
Maybe the only truth that I can say that has a high probability of working for others is 1) constantly making stuff and pushing yourself to try things you haven’t done before is how you learn and improve; and 2) being kind to people is not only the nice thing to do but more advantageous for you in the long run!
What are some of your favorite projects you’ve worked on in games and what makes them stand out amongst the rest? How were you able to put your unique experiences into play while designing them?
Hmm… this is a fun question because it made me look back on my work, and turns out, I’ve made a fair amount of stuff!
I wrote an interactive fiction piece for Sub-Q magazine called “The Book of Chroma“. That I’m quite proud of. The concept–gay priests– was actually my first idea for my submission to Honey & Hot Wax, but I couldn’t get a LARP version to work…glad it worked ut here though. It’s also my first IF piece with a significant puzzle component! I also added a sort of Indic feel to the fantasy religion I made up, because many such religions tend towards a Christian feel…
I was just nominated for an IGDN award for my short game “An Elegy From the Hive Witches“, making it the third time in a row I’ve been nominated for the Most Innovative category (hopefully it’ll also be my third win!) Looking back on the game, I really did enjoy it. It’s vaguely anti-colonial, uses words and language as game mechanics, stuff I’m really interested in!
Pass the Sugar, Please, written by Clio Yun-su Davis.
In Honey & Hot Wax, what are some of the specific pieces that you’re particularly looking forward to seeing people talk about and seeing the impact on the design landscape from? Were there any you learned from?
I mean, Clio Davis’ “Pas the Sugar, Please” has already generated conversations, after it got picked up by Intramersive Productions as an interactive theatre piece, so that’s great. Otherwise, I thinkLucian and I curated a decent selection of game, each of which has something new and interesting to offer to the gaming landscape. Lol, obviously, I’d love it if people talk about my game and how (queer) sex can be more normalized in culture!
You can now find the Script Change RPG Toolbox translated into Korean at this link, which is so exciting! I’ve also added some new language to the Script Change page to help with anyone else interested in using Script Change in their game or in translating the text!
What is Crescendo Giocoso Ritornello, as a project and as your vision?
Crescendo Giocoso Ritornello is the second anthology of chamber larps written by the Italian Chamber Orchestra, the community of roleplaying enthusiasts of Laiv.it. We are doing our best to make it a wonderful book with twelve interesting games, but to us it’s so much more than that. Three years ago we created the first Crescendo Giocoso, thanks to our community and our backers on Kickstarter. It was an incredible experience, kind of similar to Pavarotti & Friends: my games and the games of Italian game designers who I esteem, developed to be accessible to a wider public, from different countries and backgrounds.
It turned out to be the show of confidence our community needed in order to focus on our own way of designing games. With a format that worked for us as a starting base, we were able to start organising conventions not only to play games, but to write them together. Our player friends became authors and the same Italian Chamber Orchestra that was born as a joke became real, going from nine authors to almost thirty. Bigger communities of Italian larpers started to get interested in chamber larp and people from all around the world got to know our way of playing.
So in a way Crescendo Giocoso Ritornello as a book is the end point of a journey (we like to say “a grand tour”) made of writing workshops, online chats, conventions, sleepless nights on graphics and texts. In another way, we hope it could be a new starting point for our community, a demonstration that there’s people out there willing to hear our voices as game designers and that “anyone can cook” as in Pixar’s Ratatouille.
What are some of the themes players will see in the different larps in Crescendo Giocoso Ritornello?
In terms of settings, players are spoiled for choice: from the Bronze Age to the Italian Years of Lead passing through XVIII° century Venice and fantasy worlds. Alzh & Imer is about a love story between tow elderly people, one of them afflicted by Alzheimer’s, and Pantheon Club is about social pressure: each player is invited to anonymously put into play a personal “silence” (something you don’t speak about with everyone, because you’re afraid to be judged) and someone else is going to play a Greek Deity who shares or hates this same silence. The truth is we put emphasis on game mechanics above all, so players will pull colored strings to create an imaginary village or scotch tape to build a prison without actual walls, they will play in complete darkness or utter silence, they will play in the same room or in different ones, they will create scene in reverse chronological order or play the same character in different moments of life. There’s only one fixed point: everyone in the gaming group is going to play and have fun. We’ve got nothing against game masters, I’ve been one for my entire life, but my days of watching one of my larps from outside, maybe to step in and just tell the epilogue in the end, are over: I want to play with my friends and as an author I’m not going to ask someone else to just stare at the others as they play. Sharing all this experiences and putting so many heads together has been a great way to explore very different ideas and everyone can find a complete list of previews for all the scenarios on our Laiv.it website here.
The layout of this playlist looks *chef’s kiss* glorious.
The concept of the Italian Chamber Orchestra and coming together to write each of the scenarios is really brilliant and feels very collaborative. How do you work together and address disagreements, conflicts, or even just overrunning enthusiasm in such an environment?
To me the keys are transparence and dialogue. We try to create the ideal environment from the very beginning: even if a hotel with all the comforts would be awesome, we prefer to rent a house and take care of things ourselves, as a group. Maria is in charge of the logistics, but everyone brings something to eat and there are no assigned rooms. Everyone knows that we put authors first in every convention: we ask players which game they’d prefer to play of course, but we also make sure to tell them that is only a preference and they could end up in another game instead. A game is written by a person who deserves space and respect, as well as a player has the right to know what they are going to play. So, when we invited our players to become authors, we found a very sensible and open-minded audience. In order to share this way of doing things with newcomers, in our writing workshops we split up people who already know each other or who have similar experiences in order to create more diverse bands.
The starting points for every collective game in LarpJam is the Crescendo Giocoso model, so we don’t have to discuss which kind of game we’re going to create, and a theme chosen by the director of the band. The director has no special creative control outside of it, they are just a veteran author with the task of coordinating work after the workshop, in order to make sure the draft is ready before the deadline of the next playtesting convention. Everyone can get involved as much or as little as they want: do you want to join in LarpJam to share ideas and then not write a single line of text in the next months? No problem, just tell it to your band. Writing a game, as well as publishing Crescendo Giocoso Ritornello, is a way of giving voice to our creativity and the feeling of being heard is essential. We do our best to create a free space where people can be honest without being judged and where conflict is an healthy part of the process.
A note: Thoughty always welcomes Italian interviewees, even as my interview style will be changing soon, and interviewees from all around the world – of all races! Even if we need to find a translator, I’m interested in helping you tell your stories. <3
