RPGs – Page 42 – Thoughty

Five or So Questions with Ian Williams on ACTION MOVIE WORLD!

SUNDAY EDITION!

I had an interview with Ian Williams on his game, ACTION MOVIE WORLD, which is currently on DriveThruRPG for purchase! It sounds like a really fun time!

Tell me a little about ACTION MOVIE WORLD. What excites you about it?

I got the bright idea to make an Apocalypse World engine game about a world where everything from action movies was real. I was working through the skeleton of this idea and my friend, Bret, says that I should make it a game where you’re playing the action movie actors, who are then playing the action movie heroes. That was all brilliant, so that’s the genesis of the game. I set it up so it was aggressively multi-genre; as an actor, you don’t just play one role in your career. You play in lots of movies, lots of characters. So I decided that you would have a character playbook based on what “type” of movie actor you are, a la any other *World game, but you’d combine it with a playbook for your current movie. That would give you moves which lasted only for the duration of a specific movie, 1-3 sessions.

So you end up with what I think it a pretty cool and flexible thing where you can just go nuts with as many genres as you can squeeze into your game. Do ninjas one night, cops the next, etc. So that’s exciting, but I also just genuinely love action movies, particularly the bad VHS fodder of the 80s and 90s. AMW is my way of deconstructing what makes them work as a medium before reconstructing it. It’s a love letter with a stamp on it labelled “Thinking of You”.

How does it work to combine the type and playbook – do you get separate moves or bonuses to stats?

Your actor playbook is basically like a character from any other Apocalypse engine game. Or, if someone doesn’t have that frame of reference, just a character in a RPG. So any moves or bonuses you get there are permanent. They’re essential to you, the actor, who translates those moves into a character for a movie.

Scripts (the name for the movie playbook) give you a move. You pick one from a list which is super genre specific. But those moves last for the duration of that one movie, only. Say you’re doing a ninja movie. You pick a move which lets you drop a smoke bomb and disappear. That’s yours until the movie ends–usually 1-3 sessions. So the combo of these two approaches lets you play both with and against type.

I’m a big fan of team mechanics. Can you talk a little about Camaraderie?

At the core of action movies, there’s this physical expression of emotions. Anger, love, fear, whatever. It’s always physical. That’s a main theme, that action heroes display their emotions in this physical, primal manner. And another main theme is that these movies are basically about friendships, even if it’s a friendship in the past, like with a lone POW escaping from Vietnam or something like that, where the soldier’s friends are left behind but are still the motivation.

Camaraderie measures the friendship between the characters. It goes up and down, as you either contribute to or betray this communal bond between pals. And you can use it to make a Camaraderie move, which is basically that moment in a movie where the friends get together and kick some ass while a guitar wails in the background. That move is super powerful and it’s not quite as distinctly “this is that and nothing more” as most of the other moves. It’s meant to be rolled when you do a cool thing with your buddies, even if it’s just a hi-five before fighting the bad guy. If you succeed on it, you get some cool doodads like doing mega damage to the movie’s villain or similar.

I love that you have a statement about inclusivity. Who are your favorite lady action heroes, and what do you think they’d play in AMW?

I love Michelle Yeoh on “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” alone, much less all of the other stuff she’s done. I think she’d be a Thespian or Gunfighter, in terms of playbooks. Lucy Lawless. I loved Xena. Definitely a Smartass, with a high +Muscles rating. And Cynthia Rothrock, who should be way more famous than she is and probably would be if she’d come on the scene today. Pugilist for her.

The game has leads and supporting characters. Can you give an example of a team with leads and supporting characters from a film, and how they’d play out in game?

It’s really any action movie you care to look at! That system with an invulnerable lead and supporting characters who die in droves is really about the idea that action movies are about the journey, not the ending. The ending is never in doubt: the hero’s going to win, most of his or her friends are going to be dead or maimed, serving to make the hero even more badass.

A really good example is “Alien” You’ve got Ripley and this cast of compelling, strong characters. And, one by one, the supporting cast are killed off. Ripley wins and she looks even cooler by virtue of the fact that her supporting cast was so strong. Textbook stuff, even though it’s also a horror movie (horror and action are two flavors which go well together).

In game, that would be Sigourney Weaver as the Lead in the movie “Alien”. Everyone else is supporting cast; they get experience when they die. The next movie the group plays is a Tom Skerritt movie. Skerrit’s the Lead, Weaver is supporting cast in that one. Eventually, Weaver gets to be Lead in another movie after everyone else has had a turn. The whole table is happy and buys three more copies of ACTION MOVIE WORLD to show their enthusiasm!

Make sure to check out ACTION MOVIE WORLD on DriveThruRPG now!

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

Five or So Questions with Jason Pitre on Sig!

Today I have an interview with Jason Pitre about Sig, his new expansion for his previously released game, Spark. It’s currently on Kickstarter!

Tell me about Sig. What excites you about it?

What is Sig? That questions has a lot more to it than you might think.

On the surface, Sig is an expansion for my previous game, the Spark RPG. It presents a vast new multiplanar fantasy setting to explore. It offers with mechanical refinements and new tools for storytelling. It’s even designed to encourage collaborative world building during play, as characters explore the infinite multiverse.

That’s not what the setting is really about though.

Sig is the platonic ideal of a city. Cities are actually rather strange places, when you think about them. Thousands of living, breathing souls crammed together in a small patch of land. Every city has some residents whose roots run deep, with generations upon generations residing in the same neighbourhoods. Other residents are newcomers, from near or from distant lands. Cities thrive based on the industriousness of their inhabitants, creating wonders of art, craft and ideas that spread on an international scale. Cities are hungry places, devouring obscene amounts of resources from the surrounding countryside. They are places where religions clash, where ethnic groups mix, and where languages change.

Sig is a lens through which I was able to delve deeply into what a city really means. It gave me a chance to explore how a cosmopolitan city functions and how the vast diversity of the world interacts. It’s a place to focus on those cast out by society, and those laden with privilege. It speaks of how immigration, community-building and gentrification will change the nature of neighbourhoods. Issues of class, of race, of sexuality and of gender identify are all part of the constant dialogue of the City Between.

This sounds fascinating! Can you tell me a little about the mechanical side of Sig? How does Sig tie into Spark, functionally?

So, in order to talk about the mechanics of Sig, I need to give a bit of a primer for the original core system of Spark. Spark was first, big project that I kickstarted back in 2013. It was a game about building worlds and challenging your beliefs within them. The two pillars of the game are those two key activities.

In Spark, you build worlds together. Each person names one of their favourite pieces of media; a book, game, comic, song or the like. Each person then identifies one thing about that media that really inspires them; perhaps the cosmopolitan markets of Babylon 5 or the sass of Rat Queens. As a group, you mix some of those inspirations to create facts about the world you are creating, until you have a solid framework. Those then get fleshed out by discussing the fundamental Beliefs of the setting; things like “Might makes right”, “The Emissaries are traitors” or “Love is stronger than anger”. These Beliefs inspire the various organizations that make up the world, and drive play. It’s a fun mini-game to build exciting settings that contain a little bit of everyone’s personal contributions. I even expanded that into a free product titled “A Spark in Fate Core”, which adapted that to Fate.

The rest of the game is about challenging, or confronting, your Beliefs. Like the setting itself, each character has three Beliefs. Over the course of a number of scenes, the player collaboratively establish scenes, collaborate to roleplay freely, and enter conflicts when people disagree on what should happen next. Each of these situations gives the characters the opportunities to discover evidence that refutes or supports their Beliefs, which provides a currency known as Influence. Players spend Influence to win conflicts they would otherwise lose, to avoid paying the price of victory for conflicts that they do indeed win, and to change the Beliefs of other characters.

Sig runs off the same basic foundation, but adapts it somewhat. While the Spark RPG presents four character attributes (Body, Heart, Mind & Spark), Sig reduces them to two (Spark & Smoke). Sig cares less about how conflicts are won, and more about why they are engaged in. That’s why in Sig, there is explicit discussion of Heritage (ethnicity/species), of urban Factions (guilds) and of the Powers (gods) they serve. These social ties also give the characters more ability to call upon external support through political leverage and divine rituals. The most important NPCs are also expressions of those social ties, sharing heritage, factional loyalty and religious convictions with the PCs.

Can you give examples of stories we could tell with Sig?

The stories of Sig tend to be strangely personal and emotionally gripping dramas with a vast, bizarre multiverse in a backdrop.

One of my friends played a gender-fluid ghost sex-worker who appears to people as lost loved ones and was paid in memories. They aspired to become the god of Lost Children.
Another player was a half-giantess whose conflicted relationship with her massive mother and her frail father drove her.
A third was a bestial, massive man who taught the orphans of Sig, telling himself in the dark of night that his mother hadn’t abandoned him.

Now, there may have been homocidal godlings, raging kaiju, or dragon armies involved in some of those games, but the personal stories are what stay with me.

As someone creating an expansion for an original game, what suggestions do you have for other creators, based on your experience?

Expanding on existing games is tough, both for creative and logistical reasons.

First thing to keep track of is the fact that supplements only sell a fraction of what corebooks do. Even in the good old days of the TSR boxed sets, those expansions and settings barely paid for themselves. If you want to build an expansion, you have to be absolutely sure that the product is compelling.

You need to make sure that your expansion aligns with and supports your core game, keeping the content close enough to be familiar. Paradoxically, the expansion also needs to push boundaries, offering new mechanical systems and fictional ideals to work with. It needs to broaden the scope of play, or examine one specific facet of the core book in detail.

Expansions are difficult things to create, but a successful one can breathe new life into a game.

Thanks to Jason for the interview! Make sure to check out Sig on Kickstarter!

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

Five or So Questions with Mike Evans on Hubris

Today I have an interview with Mike Evans on his setting Hubris: A World of Visceral Adventure, currently on Kickstarter!

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

Hubris is a weird, horror fantasy setting that utilizes the Dungeon Crawl Classic rules. It’s a setting of horrific monsters, strange abandoned ruins, and terrifying gods that care little about the world. Players can be any of the classes from DCC, or they can dive into new races and classes in Hubris such as the mutant, murder machine, shadow dancer, alchemist, or blood witch (to name a few). I was inspired by horror movies such as The Thing, Tetzo Iron Man, Evil Dead, Pumpkinhead. RPGs that inspired me are Vornheim, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Cthulhu, Iron Kingdoms, and more. While writing the setting I had a constant flow of TOOL, A Perfect Circle, Slayer, Type o’ Negative, Cannibal Corpse, Anthrax, and White Zombie blasting on my stereo.

Hubris excites me because I wrote the setting how I would like a setting book to be: usable at the game table. It’s got horror, weirdness, and fantasy. The territories I’ve created have just enough fluff to give good flavor, but by and large they are a d100 random encounter chart and a d100 interesting locations chart. Each territory then has 5 or so locations I’ve created (with a paragraph of description) and 3-5 plot hooks/rumors. If you don’t like DCC or don’t want to use that ruleset, you don’t have to. The territories are largely system neutral and can be used with any mechanics. I’m also excited because the people who are helping bring Hubris to print. Alex Mayo is doing the layout, while David Lewis Johnson, Jez Gordon, Jason Sholtis, Jeremy Duncan, Doug Kovacs and Angie Groves (my wife) are doing art. It’s been great to connect and work with them.

What did you do to help guide your design process – structured templates, blog posting, etc.?

The biggest hurdle I had to overcome was HOW I wanted to do the territories as far as formatting goes. I played with several permutations, but I wasn’t happy with nothing. I ended up getting frustrated and put down the territories for about 2 months and went to work on the gods, patrons, spells, etc. Finally one day I was on a OSR blog and they were doing a list of random encounters that had location and encounters in one table… and it just felt right to separate them and create a d100 of each. Once that was done, boom- I was off writing again.

As far as other things- I kept an open mind to constructive criticism and valued the opinion of my peers, friends, and especially my wife. She was a good grounding… and she’s not a role-player so she offered a great perspective on things.

I put quite a bit of stuff up on my blog (https://wrathofzombie.wordpress.com/2013/07/09/the-hubris-campaign-setting-links-page/) for others to use and offer feedback and thoughts, and the more I did the larger the Hubris following became. The interesting thing is I originally didn’t intend to publish Hubris, but peeps seemed to dig it and I said fuck it.

As far as structured templates I used those quite a bit (and tried to emulate the formatting of DCC) for the patrons, spells, etc.

What would you say is one of the most unsettling thing you worked on in the book?

Easily the most unsettling thing I worked on was the Charred Maiden (https://wrathofzombie.wordpress.com/2013/10/31/hubris-the-charred-maiden-a-dcc-patron/). The patron was inspired by the burnt lady in American Horror Story the first season, Countess Barthory, nightmares, etc. I wanted the character description to be “real” so I researched what burn victims look like and read reports on how the body reacts to high temperatures, etc… Tried to capture that a bit in her writing, but I didn’t want to go too far.

Can you tell me a little about The Black Queen? She sounds awesome.

I love pictures. When I started developing ideas for Hubris I was just typing up random crazy words in Google that I had in my head and looking for art to inspire me. One piece I found was of the evil queen from Snow White (https://wrathofzombie.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/the-black-queen.jpg) and it just HIT me that I wanted something like her in my game. I wanted a strong character that could be a horrific ally or a formidable foe. I also thought it would be cool to link her to a game mechanic (patron bond to the Floating Island of Terror- https://wrathofzombie.wordpress.com/2013/08/09/hubris-the-floating-island-of-terror-a-dcc-patron/). Players can share that bond and that could create interesting situations.

The queen consumes nightmares, rules through fear, and is responsible for flintlock weaponry being distributed through Hubris.

Here’s a small piece about her” The Black Queen, a powerful sorcereress, sits high on her throne of bones and steam in her floating metal city, satiating her hunger on the nightmares of her subjects. The Black Queen governs and commands all who enter here; with the help of The Black Guard of Abhorrent Action, a group of devote followers of the Black Queen, it isn’t difficult.

As a designer, you get a different perspective on how games function (from my experience) – what is the best takeaway from a design perspective that you would like to see in a player’s toolkit?

I’d have to say that this is a two-fold desire. One- I hope people use the book at the table. It’s packed full of charts and tables to be used on the fly, and each territory (there are 10 of them) have two d100 tables. I want the players to say, “fuck it! We want to go into the Land of Perpetual Stone and Mire and explore!” and the GM can do a few simple die rolls and have a couple locations and encounters ready to spring. If they want to go deeper they can flip to the charts and use the die drop table to create a horrible ruin or the table to create the alter of an ancient and forgotten demigod…

The second is that it has been my experience that many authors fall in love with their own campaign settings, as they should as it’s their work… however it shouldn’t be treated as gospel. When I read some (not all) settings I get this sense of THIS IS HOW IT SHOULD BE PLAYED! DO NOT DEVIATE! And I say fuck it! DIY! Hubris is a toolkit; hack it, chop it, mutilate it and use what the hell you want. The map does not have a scale… I want the GM to decide the size of Hubris. Is it a REALLY dense island? Is it the size of Texas? Africa? Larger? Whatever- I don’t need to put something in there to sway your mind. I’m putting three versions of the map in the book. A map with no labels, one with labels, and one with a hexgrid overlay. Some GMs like hexcrawls and others don’t. I want people to play Hubris (or mine from it) what they want.

If someone uses just ONE idea from Hubris, then I’m happy.

Thanks Mike for the great interview! Make sure to check out Hubris: A World of Visceral Adventure on Kickstarter!

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

Five Or So Questions MORE with Brendan Conway on Masks!

Today I have an interview with Brendan Conway on his game Masks, currently on Kickstarter and smashing through stretch goals! Full disclosure, I am writing for one of the stretch goals if it gets hit (and it might by the time this is posted!). I interviewed Brendan about Masks last July, and he had a lot to say about it – and he has plenty to say today! Settle in, because one thing Brendan is definitely good at is words – and as we’ll see soon, superheroic teen tragedy.

What’s new with Masks since we talked about it last year? What’s the most exciting thing?
Masks has been changed, revised, edited, modified, and changed again. The core pieces are the same—shifting Labels, young superheroes, influence—but the specifics and the exact forms have changed heavily. The list of labels is down to five, and the basic moves have been refined and strengthened through lots of playtesting. Some mechanics didn’t make the cut, and I added other new mechanics. I’m proud of how the game does an even better job of hitting the sweet spot that I wanted, but with much tighter pieces and parts. A lot of the unnecessary kruft was scraped off through experimentation and play. As an example, when I read the old interview we did and I see what I typed about Influence, I cringe. Influence is much simpler now—it’s a binary thing now, where either you hold Influence over someone, or you don’t. If someone holds Influence over you, it means that you care about what they say and think. It has some mechanical effects, and it’s a signal to everybody involved that you care about their words—which matters a great deal when we’re looking at the fiction and figuring out if their words could change your labels, or could provoke you into doing something not-so-good.

But the change I’m most excited about is actually the solidification of a setting. Early on, I was extremely hesitant to actually push for a defined setting—I like Metropolis, I like Gotham, I like Marvel’s New York, and I wanted to let players make their own decision about which one to play in, instead of forcing them into one or the other. But Marissa Kelly and Mark Diaz Truman really pushed me on that point, and ultimately they were right. Not having any kind of definition to the setting made it harder for folks to dive on in, to have a strong starting point and focus on what the game’s really about.

So now, Masks is set in Halcyon City. It’s a big city, like New York, with plenty of superheroes and supervillains. It’s been the epicenter of the super-powered world for a while now. And most importantly, Halcyon City has seen three relatively well-defined generations of superheroes before now:
– The Golden Generation, the first full generation of superheroes to publically exist, lower-powered, fought in the war, largely black and white morality, many rough spots and dark parts that weren’t openly talked about at the time, but undeniably influential on everything that came after, with their statues littering the city. Many of them are dead or retired, now, but their influence still fills the city.
– The Silver Generation, much more powerful than the Golds, the first real cosmic superheroes, and the first superheroes to be much more devoted to fighting supervillains and strange monsters than crime or enemy combatants. They still carried on the black and white morality of the Golds, though. The Silvers are still largely around, and in positions of power and authority throughout Halcyon. When you see someone rocketing through the air to the scene of a giant monster attack, it’s probably a Silver.
– The Bronze Generation, children of the Silvers. They never quite got a foothold in the superhero community at large, because the Silvers were so prominent, taking up too much space at the top. The Bronzes filled in spaces where they could find them, becoming extradimensional explorers, street-level vigilantes, and government agents.They were the first cynical generation of supers, the first generation to really question the entire concept of superheroes and the morality of their parents.

When you meet any given adult in Masks, they’re going to be a part of one of the three generations. Different generations will act differently, hold different values and believes, make different moves. All of which is especially important to the PCs because they’re the next generation—the fourth generation of supers. Not yet defined, but with three prior generations bearing down on them, trying to tell them who to be and what to do.

Exact details of Halcyon City are left up to your group to decide, sure—I’m not interested in telling you where, exactly, city hall is located. But this setting has been plenty to give Masks a real flavor all its own, and to get everyone into the action much more quickly and easily. Plus, it means I get to doodle in my notebooks about supers from the different generations, which is really my ulterior motive.

Let’s talk a little about Labels. How do they work now?

There are five labels in the game—Danger, Freak, Mundane, Savior, and Superior. Each one can range from -2 to +3. The higher it is, the more it means that you see yourself in that light, and the more it will help you on its connected moves. For example, when you see yourself as a Danger (with a rating of +2), you’re going to be generally better at directly engaging threats than somebody who doesn’t see their self as dangerous at all.

Every label is still meant to be double-edged. Freak, for instance, is both about being unique, special, and powerful, and about being strange, weird, and abnormal. Savior is about being noble, protective, and defensive, and about being overly demanding, overprotective, stupidly noble.

That’s important because your labels shift when people with Influence over you tell you about the world or yourself. Someone saying that what you can do is amazing and incredible might actually raise your Freak, just as much as someone saying that you’re a bizarre mutant might raise your Freak.

Can you talk about a few examples of the major generational heroes?
Sure! I’ll have a few examples in the book, and we’re going to have a Deck of Villainy with a whole bunch of sample villains for use during play, but I also expect players to make up a bunch on the fly at their tables. Here are some examples of what I’m envisioning, though:

– Torpedo, the Explosive Man! A Golden generation hero with the ability to hurtle through the air at high speeds and slam into his targets with explosive force. Not very nuanced in his abilities, but he didn’t have to be in his time—he just pointed himself at “the bad guys,” and fired himself. One of the strange side effects of his power turned to be longevity—he wasn’t affected by the high speeds and explosions of his power because of some constancy in his body, and that makes him resistant to aging. So he’s actually still around and active to some extent, even though at this point, he really is not well-suited to the world around him.

– Starbright, a Silver generation heroine with cosmic powers from the stars themselves! She did some amazing things in her time, from fending off alien invasions to defeating giant monsters. She’s still active today, one of the leading heroes of the city and a major member of the Exemplars, one of Halcyon City’s oldest and leading superhero teams. She has strong feelings about what makes a hero, though, and has plenty of doubts about the kids she sees getting powers today.

– Mr. Everywhere, a Bronze generation “hero” (kinda). He’s got multiplication powers, so he can make copies of himself, and they’re all connected as part of a single mind. He turned that power, though, to secret agency activities. He singlehandedly can man an entire spy agency, and with copies of him undercover, he can learn information instantaneously. He’s risen to the top of an important organization in the metahuman world, FLAG, and while he’s still ultimately trying to act for the good, he’s most likely to interfere subtly, or by manipulating more direct players. They call him Mr. Everywhere because at this point, some think his copies are everywhere, spread out in every major city in the world.

– Perfection, a young Modern heroine who might be a bit too effective for her own good. Perfection, in her superhero guise, looks like an all gold metallic figure with no real identifying features. Her eyes burn blue, and her body is completely smooth. She’s tough and strong, capable of flight and even some forms of energy absorption, and she’s good at being a hero. Good enough to earn a lot of praise quickly. That means it’s gone to her head, though, and she hasn’t yet found her limits; it’s only a matter of time before she pushes herself too far, or butts heads with other young heroes.

And here are some villains:

– The Scarlet Songbird, a Golden generation roguish rascal of a villain. He was always all about theft, not about hurting anybody. He wore red and yellow, and carried his magic guitar. He’d play notes that could break walls, or put people to sleep, and he’s always have a catchy line or a wink for a pretty bystander. He was young for his generation, and he never went totally out of the action, but he was also never that big in the city. He tried retirement, but he got bored. So now he’s back out there with his guitar, trying one last time to earn a real reputation, even while he’s aged and out of date.

– Dr. Infinity, a Silver generation villain, considered such only because that’s when she first appeared in historical records. Dr. Infinity is an incredibly powerful time-traveling android, and she travels to dangerous time periods, hoping to cauterize what she calls “time-wounds.” She rarely spends the time to explain, considering those around her to be of lower intelligence, and she seems to keep returning to Halcyon City in these time periods—something in this time must make it particularly unstable in her eyes.

– The Spider, a Bronze generation villain. He exists, but he’s mostly rumors. Few have ever seen him. He’s known as the Spider for sitting at the center of a massive web of criminal enterprise that spans throughout Halcyon City. He’s one of the greatest crimelords Halcyon has ever seen, and no one even has his face on file—or if they do, they’re not sharing. Tangling with the Spider is bad news. He doesn’t fight like the other villains. He comes at you from an angle, where he can hurt you most.

– Cygnus, a Modern generation villain. She’s concerned, first and foremost, with her image and her fame. She has an agent, someone who suggested to her that the name Cygnus would be a good brand to take on. She’s gone through a phase of trying to be a hero, and now she’s dipping into villainy, to see if it drives more attention her way.

How do you handle super-powered conflicts with villains and even between players?
The game is structured, like most Powered by the Apocalypse games, to work like a conversation, and conflicts are no different. Most of the moves that work when you’re yelling at your teammates, or chilling at headquarters, will still work when you’re in a fight. You can build up your teammate in the middle of a battle, just as you can when it’s you and them alone with some pizza. You can defend a teammate from a terrible robot, just as you can when someone insults them.

The one move that is distinctly aimed at superheroic action conflicts is “directly engage”. That lets you pummel threats, and gives them a shot back at you. Hitting and being hit most often manifests in dealing or marking conditions. There are five conditions in the game: Angry, Afraid, Guilty, Hopeless, and Insecure. Villains my have anywhere from one to all five of those conditions, depending upon how much of a threat they are. For PCs, marking a condition means that you’re going to be at a disadvantage on certain moves. You can clear it by taking some action tied to the condition, like fleeing from something difficult to clear Afraid. For NPCs, when they mark a condition they make a move from a list of possible options. That means NPCs are never static, and inflicting “damage” on an NPC will always lead to some new thing happening in the fiction.

Villains definitely go out of the fight when they’ve marked all their conditions and need to mark another, but they can always give up before then—it’s down to the GM to play the villains according to their drive, and to decide if it makes sense that they would give up. PCs go out of a fight when they’ve marked all their conditions and need to mark another, as well, but they might go out earlier as a result of the “take a powerful blow” move.

The one other move I’ll flag for conflicts—the one that comes closest to saying “We’re entering a battle now!”—is the team move. When your team enters battle together, the leader of your team rolls with some modifiers depending upon the situation. The move generates points of team for your team pool. PCs can use the team pool to help each other out during the fight, or to act selfishly and help themselves out. The key to this move, though, is that it signals, “Stuff is about to get serious!” It also means that the team has to tell you who their leader is, and that’s always a great source of tension and interest.

What has been your favorite playtest moment?
Oh dear. A LOT to choose from. I’m going to give a couple, because I can’t bring myself to choose just one. 🙂

– The team had found out that an evil giant warhammer was corrupting whoever was holding it, turning them into an enormous, brutish monster. They were desperate to take care of the situation by throwing the warhammer into a cement truck and solidifying the cement. One of their number, the Janus—a vigilante type—tried to do it, but rolled a miss, and it didn’t look good. The hammer might have taken him over, driven him to attack his teammates even. Except then, every single teammate spent a team out of the pool to help, and altogether it turned the miss into a hit. The scene became one where the entire team, all together, lifted up the hammer and threw it into the concrete truck, and I could see it all on the comic book panel. It was perfect.

– In a different playtest, we were in the section where we were filling in what happened when the team first came together. It’s one of the things you do during character creation, figuring out what the “Avengers moment” of the team was. And this group ultimately came up with a situation in which Dr. Noah—a villain they invented—had attacked a school with his Ark of Doom, a giant floating skyship. And he used his robotic Menagerie, a series of animal robots. Of course, they were in pairs. It was just…amazing. Creative, fun, delightful, and perfectly in keeping with the setting—not least because they talked a bit about how Dr. Noah was actually kind of washed-up, never taken seriously, and still desperately trying to get attention.

– In a third playtest, we had an epic confrontation with another kid, a bullied teen who had pulled out a summoning book and was about to bring a nightmarish creature into our reality. He thought it would help things, had convinced himself that this was the path to real heroism. They had to stop the summoning, and tried to do it by talking the teen down. It led to some great dramatic tension, yelling, and kind words, though ultimately he ran away in anger. In the process, they had to call upon the leading sorceress hero of Halcyon City, who did help them to stop the summoning…but afterward, she kidnapped one of the PCs who she deemed a danger, unable to control her powers. It was the perfect cliffhanger, leading into next issue. Loved it.

– Finally, it’s tough to condense my ongoing over-a-year-long playtest into any one specific awesome moment, but one of my favorites had to be when the team got into one giant action scene with each of them in a different part, not quite intersecting, but not separate. One of them had agreed to help her ne’er-do-well thief friends to steal something from a building, and in the midst of the heist, a strange blue armored time traveler appeared and attacked her to erase her from existence—she was the Nova, and apparently a threat to time itself. Meanwhile, the Outsider, another time traveler from the far future, was investigating because the thieves were trying to steal a probe from the Outsider’s own future. The Outsider was determined to stop it from happening. And then the Protege became involved when things got worse, ultimately engaging the blue-armored time traveler in battle and being thrown into a different future, where the world was destroyed. All the while, the Legacy was trying to free a family member from the Outsider’s ship, which was trying to dissect her to send biological samples back to the future. It was complicated, a mess, full of drama, and wonderful.

Sorry…I could keep going! Every playtest has had a couple of these moments, and the wonderful characters I’ve seen players come up with have always been awesome to watch.

Thanks Brendan! Make sure to check out Masks on Kickstarter right now!

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

Insanity in Horror and Lovecraftian RPGs

A friend who I don’t know if they want to be tagged was discussing mental illness and insanity mechanics in RPGs with Lovecraftian themes on G+, and I wanted to share my original response, and kind of give some more thoughts.

I honestly think that part of the experience of trauma and disconnection with reality that is represented by insanity mechanics in games is a combination of personal suffering brought on by the exposure to a greater existence and comprehension skewed by denial.

I don’t know if any of you have experienced real life paranoia or psychotic experiences. It is, from personal experience, completely terrifying. When it happened to me, I had to cope with the things that I knew for sure were not real only because of how unreal they were, and then the things that I could not tell if they were real because how very real they could be. I imagine that the true horror of Lovecraftian exposure would be that the things that definitely could not be real are actually definitely real, and knowing that, and feeling as though you cannot trust your own mind to tell the difference between what you see as “normal” or even “unusual” is now corrupted by the extreme and phantasmagoric. When the unreality is the new reality, what then is truly real?

For me, the experience of paranoia and psychosis may definitely have been unique to me, so I don’t mean to speak for everyone.

It was the oddest thing. I have some idea of what triggered the paranoia to seep in, but it’s not entirely clear. What I do know is that I woke up after a series of nightmares and found that the mere idea of walking outside the house was nearly impossible to grasp. I knew, I just knew that if I walked outside and, I knew would happen, someone would see me, and they would burst into flames. It’s completely irrational. It defies all logic and is impossible. But I knew it. It was true, and I was so frightened. It was even deeper than that, in that I knew people could hear what I was thinking. I could see in their minds what they thought of me, and how vile a creature I was. When I looked in the mirror I did not look like what I previously had thought I looked like, and until the episode ended, I couldn’t tell what was real and what I just knew.

The hallucinations I experienced were sometimes silly and simple. My cats talked to me and told me about games they wanted to design and screenplays they wanted to write. Others were not as good, like the movement out of the corner of my eye that became a car crashing into the side of my vehicle while I was driving. Others, they were unbelievable and I denied them, because they were things I knew couldn’t be real, but god, they felt real.

When I played Black Stars Rise, one of the breaks that was given to me was a card with a man of shadows who followed me. I laughed when I got it, because I knew that man. For literally my entire life, I have had experiences that lasted long periods of time when the shadow man followed me. He never hurt me, he never did anything to me, but he was there. Watching. It was something that was so startlingly real that I could perfectly imagine it in-game, and it made me think a lot about how we translate real-life phenomena into games.

It can or may be very easy for someone with good mental health or less extreme mental health issues to portray mental illness in a character and portray something like mental illness in a character. For me, when I am having a bad time of it, even something like receiving the paranoia or hallucinations cards in Eldrich Horror makes me anxious, and watching other players portray characters who are “insane” or “mad” can be very difficult.

Working to comprehend the differences between natural chemical imbalances, trauma-induced chemical imbalances, and otherworldly trauma mental impacts is something that I think needs to be worked on. Some games have approached it (one in particular, Lovecraftesque, I consulted on), and others have chosen to avoid it altogether, and I’m not condemning any specific game or way of handling it.

However, we really do need to understand that part of what is experienced in Lovecraftian RPGs is trauma. It is not simply the otherworldly experience, or the defiance of reality. While I agree with myself in my original statement up near the top, I honestly don’t think that encompasses the entire experience. Traumatic events in RPGs are often either dismissed or responded to with extremes, like flashbacks or violent outbursts. While those things can be response to trauma, they are not the only response to trauma. Sometimes it results in having triggers, where certain things cause an emotional response – anything from anxiety, to a panic attack, to a physiological response, to rage, to violence. I personally discourage people from playing characters who respond to trauma with extreme responses unless they are willing to play it respectfully. I don’t like to see players doing the comedy crazy. If you play a mentally ill character, it should not be for laughs, because those are _real people_ you are mocking. And that is my only real problem with insanity mechanics: they separate us from understanding the differences between the impacts of otherworldly exposure.

Here are the three ways of portraying characters in horror or Lovecraftian RPGs with complicated mental and/or emotional states that I think make sense:

Characters who start out as having a mental illness or mental difference: these are characters who have depression or bipolar disorder or obsessive compulsive disorder or even autism. Their behavior may seem abnormal to other characters and that’s okay, if you’re playing it with respect it can add a lot to the story, because, like in my case, how would I know whether what I was seeing is a hallucination or a delusion or if it was actually real? Is the obsession with researching and cataloging unnatural events really influence by an unnatural power, or is it a natural compulsion? These are things you can explore, but I definitely advise doing at least a little bit of research before you do it, or taking the time to think about how you would feel if someone had these issues was there.

Characters who have experienced trauma and as a result have mental or emotional response: these are characters who, whether in the course of game or as part of their background have had a traumatic experience either directly related or indirectly related to the horrific subjects at hand. This is a point that is extremely delicate. Post-traumatic stress can be represented in so many different ways, and there are a few important things to think about. One, you need to make sure that it ties together. The behavior is not necessarily logical, but you don’t want someone who was kidnapped by a cult to have panic attacks because they are in open spaces, unless you have more detailed justification. There are certain words or experiences that might trigger someone’s issues with PTSD or trauma, like with victims of sexual assault, but that trauma can present in multiple ways: shutting down and not responding, panicking, emotional response (crying or distress), or in some cases, yes, violence. The final response is not nearly as common as we see represented. Trauma responses are something that definitely have their place in horror and Lovecraftian games, but they should be handled with care. You never know who shares the table, and who you might hurt.

Finally, characters who experience otherworldly trauma: these characters, in my opinion, are somewhat different than the previous category because they have a different type of experience that actually may be stacked on top of typical trauma. The otherworldly trauma is kind of like a combination of the previous two, where you experience something so unreal, so disconnected from your reality, that you now question your very existence, and it consumes you. This is the kind of thing where a character might see into the void, and when they return, they are no longer the same. Maybe their behavior will be unusual, or they respond irrationally to normal stimuli, but they are not “crazy” nor have they experienced what we normally would explain as “trauma”, because it’s not a natural trauma. It is something that they may not be able to explain or even understand themselves. This also needs to be treated carefully because it can infringe upon both of the other types of character behavior and representation. Be mindful of what natural responses to trauma and mental illness people have, and try to show yours as different. Perhaps they do have hallucinations, but because they have seen the reality of the void, they don’t react as though they are troubled by them because they are confused and it is unnatural, but instead they have a reaction of discontent and frustration – less “Is this real? What do I do?” and more “Why do you plague me? I wish you weren’t real.”

This is not a perfect way to do it, I know. I think it’s just one of the ways to look at the situation and a way that people can think in more detail about the themes we work with in horror and especially things like Lovecraftian fiction in games. If you choose to play a character who has been scarred by their experiences, think very carefully about how you’re doing it, why you’re doing it, and how best you can represent it without making other people feel like you’re treating them like a joke or like something to be feared. Even the mad have feelings, and darkness only gets darker when you lose trust in those around you.

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

Five or So Questions with Phil Lewis on Wrath of the Autarch!

Today I’m interviewing Phil Lewis about Wrath of the Autarch, now on Kickstarter! This boardgame-inspired RPG sounds super fun, so check out the interview below!

Tell me about Wrath of the Autarch. What excites you about it?
Kingdom building games have always been in my blood. The idea of collaboratively telling the story of a society through the lens of the important leaders is really exciting! I also like exploring this space between boardgames and role-playing games. Wrath of the Autarch takes elements of boardgame design and uses them to create challenge in a more traditional role-playing game space. I really like that!

What are the key elements of boardgaming you wanted to highlight, and how did you bring them in?
The primary one is an action economy. There is only so much time to do what you need to do! I wanted the players to feel a time pressure that builds over the course of the campaign. The Empire is growing in strength and the Autarch is coming!

That action economy works at many time scales. The Stronghold players must finish a certain number of challenge scenes each season of time, or the Autarch player gains more benefits. Each season of time, the Stronghold players only accomplish one large goal, so they have to choose what they think is the most important.

I also used an abstract dice mechanic to handle resources. It was inspired by boardgames such as Kingsburg. The Stronghold players use six sided dice at the beginning of each season to build developments for their society. Multiple colors of dice are used, each mapping to a type of resource (like food or ore). Based on results of rolls, there are tough choices – do you build the development you really want, even if it might not be the best use of your resources that season? Or do you get as much as you possibly can, optimizing all of your rolls and trades, even if those developments may not have an immediate benefit.

What was the hardest part of integrating the two modes – boardgame and TTRPG?
Tabletop role-playing games have many unspoken procedures. There’s this shared history that is frequently leveraged to make tabletop role-playing games work. Boardgames don’t really have that. So there’s some extra work in trying to make some of those procedures explicit.

There’s also a challenge in harnessing the creativity that comes out of role-playing games and placing it into an action economy like Wrath of the Autarch has.

Threats sound interesting! Tell me a little about them.
Threats are the way that drama emerges in the game! At the end of each session, there’s a chance for badness. Regions that your society controls might have threats. Factions that you’re friends with could have threats as well.

Threats generally have a type (like diplomacy, infiltration, skirmish, warfare) as well as a difficulty. They’re a great chance for the Autarch player to reincorporate all of the drama from the Stronghold’s past into the storyline! Did something happen between an emissary from the Stronghold and the leader of a faction a few seasons ago? Maybe that has snowballed into a bigger issue! Maybe they demand aid, or perhaps there are disagreements over customs or religions.

The Stronghold players can choose to ignore threats, but that usually has other consequences for the Stronghold. Regions might not be able to produce resources. Factions may start to dislike the Stronghold.

Finally, the Autarch player has schemes at their disposal. Schemes are like super threats! Each year, the Autarch player may choose a number of schemes to unleash. They grow in intensity over the campaign, finally culminating in all out attacks by the Autarch!

I’m going to give you a tough one: what is the ideal player for Wrath of the Autarch?

That’s a really good question! I’ll answer it this way: I designed this as a game I could play with my friends. Our usual game group is made up of older people with jobs and children. Almost invariably, a few people can’t make it each week. Wrath of the Autarch is troupe based and episodic so that if a few people can’t make it, it’s not a problem. The story can continue!

More directly: The biggest fans are people who like kingdom building games, either video games (like Crusader Kings or even Civilization) or role-playing games (like Birthright or Ars Magica) or even boardgames. During playtests, players who aren’t as into those games still have fun setting up scenes, playing characters, exploring relationships. But it’s really going to hit all the right notes for someone who likes to think about the long term strategy of their kingdom.

Thanks, Phil, for the interview! You can find more about Wrath of the Autarch on Kickstarter!

Five or So Questions with Becky Annison and Josh Fox on Lovecraftesque

I interviewed Becky Annison and Josh Fox about their new game, Lovecraftesque! It’s currently on Kickstarter and looks awesome!

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

J: Lovecraftesque is a storygame of brooding, cosmic horror. It recreates the rhythm and style of Lovecraft’s stories, and gives you the tools to collaboratively create monsters and other horrors that feel like they could have come from Lovecraft’s notebook.

B: I really enjoy the typical model of a Lovecraft story – the single protagonist getting deeper and deeper into a terrible mystery only to find they are already doomed. But the majority of Lovecraft RPGs focus on a party of investigators instead of the lonely protagonist. What excites me is how Lovecraftesque takes the story back to that lone protagonist. I love the fact that the rotating roles in the game mean that everyone is trying to doom that character in their own way.

J: For me, this is the GMless mystery game I’ve always wanted to play in. I love the fact that I get to put my own stamp on the story, while getting the uncertainty and suspense of not knowing what’s going to happen. And the game’s rules mean you still get the coherence and direction you’d normally get from a GM, without the need to break the atmosphere to discuss what’s really going on.

Lovecraft and associated mythos are, historically, kind of problematic. What have you done as creators in regards to problems like sexism, racism, and ableism?
B: Lovecraft is very problematic and we are approaching that openly. We have done a number of things to try and de-toxify Lovecraft. I think there are 3 main areas we have worked on this.

Firstly we wanted out art to be as diverse as possible and part of the reason we chose Robin Scott was for the amazingly inclusive art in her Urban Tarot series.

Secondly we’ve put a lot of thought and guidance into how to create a good safety culture at the table. We encourage players to agree up front their approaches to sexism, racism and abelism and ensure everyone’s views are heard.

J: The setup phase of the game includes a step in which players can ban specific themes or elements, and we’ve included a prompt to consider banning in-character racism and racist themes.

B: Lastly we’ve written two guidance sections in the game text, one on mental health and one on racism. In those we explore the stereotypes in Lovecrafts’ work and give practical guidance to ensure people don’t unconsciously replicate them.

J: The mental health side is handled a bit differently. It’s fair to say we encourage people to omit racism entirely from the game, and we don’t think that will hurt the story in the slightest. By contrast the effect of the horror on the human mind is an important theme of Lovecraftian tales.

We’ve analysed the different ways that the horror can impact on someone’s mind or their behaviour, giving you a set of options for a respectful portrayal that steers well clear of the stereotype of the horror driving people “mad”. The key thing is to portray a character, not a collection of symptoms.

How do you envision a typical session of Lovecraftesque?

B: This is a story game in which the players rotate the role of a single protagonist and share out narration. Everyone creates clues and then secretly leaps to a conclusion about what those clues mean. A typical session should have people inventing clues, building on each other’s details layer by layer and dripping atmosphere and tension into every scene.

But my favourite bit is when the players leap to conclusions secretly. Because at the end you not only have a finale which feels like it was planned all along, but you have a the fun of comparing theories at the end of the game.

J: As you near the end of the game, the protagonist begins what we call the Journey into Darkness, where they travel to an old, dark or sinister location where they’ll confront the horror. It’s one of my favourite bits of the game – you ramp up the tension and shift the game’s gears from “I’m sure all this can be explained rationally” to a scene of stark, alien horror.

The Final Horror is the apex of that journey, where all those theories you’ve been building are finally resolved. And there’s always a bleak epilogue where you see what happens after the story ends.

Which Lovecraftian works did you pull from the most for the themes in Lovecraftesque?

B: Our biggest influence was Graham Walmsley’s Stealing Cthulhu which does an inspiring job of deconstructing Lovecraft’s stories, breaking down their rhythm and structure. His work focuses on a smaller number of key stories which we have expanded on. But we’ve also looked at the following in more detail: The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow Over Innmouth, The Whisperer in Darkness, the Haunter of the Dark, At the Mountains of Madness, Cool Air and Pickmans’ Model.

J: I’d add the Colour Out of Space and the Call of Cthulhu to that list.

B: I’d be hard pressed to pick a favourite but I do love The Whisperer in Darkness.

J: For me it’s the Colour Out of Space. It’s such a great example of Lovecraft’s weird blending of the themes of what we’d now call science fiction with a classic horror tale.

If you were to set up the ideal environment for a session of Lovecraftesque, what would you have there? (Props, music, location, etc.)
J: Atmosphere is key for Lovecraftesque, and a lot of the game’s mechanics are targeted on building tension. The gaming environment should support this. Low-key, instrumental music played at a low volume. Ideally play at night (we did one of our playtests on a dark and stormy evening and scared the bejeesus out of each other). You can even turn the lights down or use candles, since the game doesn’t require much in the way of rules look-up.

If I had absolute freedom to choose any venue, I’d choose an old house, old enough to creak and sigh a little. It would be in the countryside, far from any main road or settlement. It would have old paintings on the walls and a fire crackling in the corner.

B: My favourite place for playing Lovecraftesque is our own dining room. We are lucky enough to have a oak panelled dining room which is dark, intimate and atmospheric.

Five or So Questions with Jacob Wood on Psi-punk: Worlds Edge Arena!

Today I have an interview with Jacob Wood about his Kickstarter, Psi-punk: World’s Edge Arena!

Tell me about Psi-punk: Worlds Edge Arena. What excites you about it?

World’s Edge Arena is the second sourcebook for Psi-punk, a Fudge-compatible cyberpunk RPG. It introduces players to the city of punta Arenas, Chile, where characters compete in a televised bloodsport known as the World’s Edge Arena.

Players form teams and face two qualifying rounds against psychicly-controlled, cybernetically-enhanced predators such as wolves, eagles, bears, and komodo dragons. If they survive the qualifiers, they enter a single elimination tournament against seven other teams and battle for fame and fortune. Also, just to keep things interesting, the layout and terrain of the Arena shifts and changes between matches so every fight is new and exciting.

World’s Edge Arena is televised globally and has a huge fan base. Players can tap into their excitement and approval by means of a Fan favor mechanic which gives them an edge in combat.

The huge success of the Arena draws thousands of people to the formerly-small city. An influx of outside wealth and culture has created a rift between old traditions and new customs. The setting explores what it’s like for people who live in the town and the conflicts that arise because of its sudden population explosion.

To me, the most exciting thing about the book is that it gives both plaayers and GMs a lot of hooks to really get invested in the setting. It would be simple to play an entire campaign set in and around the area–there’s downtime between matches at the Arena, and there’s plenty to do around town. For groups who are fond of combat, the Arena itself offers a lot of diversity. For those who like to mix in intrigue and traditional cyberpunk-style street running, it offers a lot of that too.

How does the Fan Favor mechanic work, and what do you think it puts into the game?

Fan Favor is pretty simple: do something awesome and you gain Favor, do something shameful and you lose it. The book has a chart with a few examples of ways to gain and lose Favor. For example:

Incapacitate or kill a wounded opponent: +1 Favor
Incapacitate or kill an uninjured opponent: +2
Victory against overwhelming odds: +2
Heal a creature during combat: -1
Execute an incapacitated opponent: -2

Fan Favor is accumulated on a team level, so everyone contributes to the team’s pool. Anyone may spend some of their team’s favor to do something cool, such as:

Add +1 to a roll: -1 Favor
Re-roll and take the better result: -2 Favor
Force an opponent to re-roll and take the worse result: -3 Favor

Favor rolls over between matches, and GMs are welcome to start opposing teams with some Favor of their own. From my experience running Psi-punk, re-rolling dice in Fudge has the potential to alter the course of a conflict and makes for some pretty exciting gameplay. The mechanic also gives a trackable meta-game element which players can use to get an idea of just how great they’re doing–it’s like unlocking achievements or levelling up, but without any pre-set goals.

Tell me about the creatures in your bestiary – which ones are the scariest?
The Arena has a sizable bestiary filled with augmented predators. During matches, these animals are controlled by humans with the mind control power, so they think and reason like expert strategists but have all of the natural (and cybernetically-enhanced) abilities of a normal creature. The beasts are clone, so there’s a near-infinite supply of them, and they represent the largest and fiercest animals of their species.

A couple of my favorite examples are:

Coyotes augmented with sonarkinesis so they can unleash a howl that literally damages their opponents.
Black panthers with the ability to dim the lighting near them, which gives them an even greater stealth advantage.
Wolves with a frost breath attack capable of freezing multiple opponents.
Komodo dragons… because they’re komodo dragons.

How do you emulate the changing layout and terrain?

One of the key aspects of the Psi-punk setting is technology built on emulating psionic powers. This tech is known as magic, and magic devices can perform a huge variety of tricks based on what they’re programmed to do.

The World’s Edge Arena is built with a device capable of using a power known as control animate to terraform the arena’s terrain. As a televised broadcast, the Arena is set up like a season of a TV show. Each season has one terrain theme–jungle, desert, tundra, mountains, grasslands, etc.–and every episode (that is, every fight) takes place in that one terrain. It influences the types of beasts from the bestiary who will fight during that season and has a huge impact on how the human warriors interact with their environment.
To keep things from getting stale or from someone gaining the upper hand by studying the environment, the arena changes shape between episodes. During one match a player may have discovered a helpful cave to hide in or a particularly large tree to climb, but when they get to their next match they’ll need to explore all over again.

The specifics about how things change are intentionally left vague so the GM and players can decide on that themselves. I’m a really big fan of players being able to ask questions like “Is there a tree I can climb to get a height advantage?” and the GM can make that call. it creates an environment where the players get to have a say in what’s happening around them.

In creating the game and prepping it for backers, what is the coolest experience you’ve had?

While running the game at a local convention for a group of people new to Psi-punk, I got to see how different people and different personalities interact with the setting and the mechanics. In particular, there was one character who was a skilled hacker but was a total coward when it comes to physical combat. Instead of the player spending all of his time running and hiding and generally not feeling like he belonged in a combat arena, he tapped into his hacker skills to generate Fan Favor for his team.

Every Arena match is televised and even people in the live audience watch the matches on enormous view screens. This player hacked the camera feeds to close in on all of the cool things his teammates were doing to ensure the audience saw the best and most favorable footage. He also hacked the feeds to try to counteract the team’s blunders.

The approach struck me as a really creative way to get a non-combat character involved with the fight in a way that could help his team, and I incorporated that tactic in the rules to make sure I called it out as a viable option.

Thanks Jacob! Make sure to check out the Kickstarter, running now!

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

Five or So Questions with Oliver Shead on Infected!

I interviewed Oliver Shead about his new game, Infected!, currently on Kickstarter!

Tell me a little bit about Infected! What excites you about it?

Infected! is a zombie setting placed after the outbreak. It’s around five years on, and the infected have been all-but wiped out after years of brutal quarantines, outright warfare and anarchy. There is now a chance for humanity to rebuild society – or to tear it down.

To be honest I’ve had a lot of people tell me that zombie settings have been done to (un)death, and when I first started this setting I would have agreed with them.

However, after quite a long time playtesting it and re-working it, I found the setting had changed. It was no longer just a story of crazed survivors clinging together and killing zombies. Instead, it’s a living, breathing world that has evolved to still work in many ways. That’s the funny part – a lot of it is kind of normal, in a Dark-Ages style of normal.

I get excited when I think of the cultures that evolve in the wake of this sort of an event, as well as the political entities, and the countless ways they can interact. For instance, there are governments that still exist, holding a tenuous web of power over wide geographic zones. However, without much of a standing army, they are reduced to a sort of feudalistic-loyalty system, and some will resort to almost any measures to maintain that control – including having overseers who couple as standover men, commanding the loyalties of local factions – all the while with the risk of the infected looming in the background…like a particularly dangerous pest that refuses to go away.

Basically, it’s the richness of the setting that interests me. I think any setting should really inspire you to play it, and make you dream of some of the intense scenarios you can concoct as a Narrator or Player.

Infected! has a classless system. How do you handle experience and advancement?

It’s done with a point-buy system. Basically, when you get experience, you can save it up to improve higher stats, or spend it more quickly to improve lower stats. I feel it quite accurately represents how people actually learn – a little bit at a time, rather than by suddenly jumping up to a new range of abilities. We ultimately leave it up to the Narrator’s discretion as to what is permitted to be advanced, and by how much – with guidelines that stats should go up a bit at a time, not all in one go, and should represent what characters are learning and applying themselves to as they go. So if you never use Athletics, for example, it should not go up unless you start attempting to work the Skill.

Can you give me a brief description of the type of characters people would play in Infected!?

Ooh, this is a great question!

Really, they can play anyone they want. I personally love to see real characters. Not muscle-bound, gun-toting Rambos, but rather deep, varied and interesting people. People who are ultimately flawed, and who all face their horrors in countless different ways. In a zombie setting, many people instantly assume that everything is about fighting and killing, but in fact the Immersion RPG system supports characters doing far more than that. We have had players in our games who almost never fired a shot. Their characters were all about discussion, statescraft, the controlling and manipulation of people, commanding groups, and so forth. Because of the lethality of the system, groups of relatively normal people are still a tremendous threat if they wish to be, so the use of your diplomatic skills is in many cases far more important than your fighting skills. Try fighting your way through ten armed men… talking, on the other hand? That’s a real possibility.

Also, with the setting being quite dynamic and “alive” with trade routes, even highways, and societies ebbing and flowing along these channels as they always have (ultimately, it would be quite difficult to survive in complete fortress mode), there is the real possibility of players running characters like dedicated traders, scrap merchants, snake-oil salesmen, travelling shows, gypsies, spies, informants, farmers, soldiers… really, the gamut of usual societal roles.

I personally love unusual characters with detailed histories. They are shaped by their pasts. They may be scarred by them. But they are surviving in their own ways.

Can you tell me about the infrastructure and logistics in the Infected! setting? (anything from politics to how they handle power and water!)

Great question! However, the answer to this really varies greatly from location to location. One of the great things about the real world, is that there are just so many exceptions to every rule! It’s almost impossible to generalise – when you do, you miss out on so much of the quirky, odd, different and outright bizarre things in the world. That being said, I’ll now generalise as best I can!

By and large, the logistics are reduced to a 3rd or 4th world level. Because a fairly substantial portion of society is still alive and functioning, the need for supplies, water, sanitation and equipment is paramount. No society can survive without a steady stream of resources coming in and going out – few could be completely self-sufficient.

There are communities left in the ruins that range from a few lonely hold-outs, to burgeoning cities of ten thousand people or more. But no matter their size, their positions, strategy and very lives depend on a few basics – fresh water being one of the most critical. The loss of a functioning water system in the cities means that people rapidly shift to those areas that water can be readily found. Some townships use pumps (usually man-powered, as diesel is in short supply for powerful generators). Others use the most age-old method there is: the bucket.

This also creates other issues. Sanitation of river water is dodgy at the best of times. Some years on, much of the pollution has eased off from the waterways, but even so, it is an easy way to gain a nasty disease (or even the nasty disease). As such, most people at least try to boil their water before drinking it, or use other methods of purifying it, like tying cotton over the water spout, or making rudimentary carbon filters.

Power is another interesting one. In some areas, there are still power plants functioning – though they are highly prized commodities. Hydro-electric dams tend to be the most valued of all – an infinite power source at your fingertips. Despite this, most communities are without anything but the most rudimentary power supply. Lamps and candles are far more numerous. Working electricity is also a status symbol – only the greatest, richest political entity has access to as much power as they need. Just as only such groups have manufacturing of complicated items – like guns and bullets, or the refining of petrol.

This brings in the political entities of the world. It’s a multi-layered situation. At the local level, many towns and communities band together out of mutual protection. Often they decide that having a government is a bad idea – they can handle things much better on their own! Most governments are fractured, splintered things, just vestiges of their former glories. However, they still have many resources garnered from those who remain under their sway. And many make use of “overseers” – those who watch, and observe…and sometimes take precipitate action to ensure loyalty is kept. Many are nothing more than glorified assassins, enforcing loyalty.

Really, the question of power comes down to knowing who will back you. It’s a game of chicken. If you revolt against a more powerful group, then do you have enough support from other communities to see the revolt through? Or will they leave you in the lurch, even team up against you when the government soldiers arrive, and then seek to split the spoils?

Besides, most communities are all-but on their own anyway. So how important is it if a government claims them?

Then again, rival governments can attack and destroy communities, simply because they’re part of the other side.

Ideally, what do you want players to experience when they play Infected!?

I would like them to experience a rich world, with the opportunity to really experience the adventures and the horrors of this new dark age. I would like them to make characters that live and breathe, and to have deep campaigns that are about so much more than zombie killing! I would very much love for the societies to shine through. The bizarre new cultures and trends.

And that being said… I would also love them to feel the gut-churning, cold-sweat fear of realising the Infected are hunting them – and then truly discovering what that terror would be like.

Thanks to Oliver for the interview! Make sure to check out Infected! on Kickstarter!

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

Five or So Questions with Moyra Turkington on War Birds

Today I have an interview with Moyra Turkington of Unruly Designs talking about her amazing project, War Birds, currently on Kickstarter.

Tell me a little about War Birds. What excites you about it?

War Birds is a gigantic passion project for me, and so just about everything about it gets me excited. J

It was going on twelve years ago that I was in a discussion about what makes a flying ace a flying ace (It’s generally five aerial kills, but rules vary based on country). I did what all internet era folks do and looked it up on Wikipedia. There I found a list of flying aces of World War II and in it was a name that sparked immediate interest: Lydia Litvak. A female flying ace??!! How on earth didn’t I know about that? The link was red though (there was no bio page for her) so I started feverously searching the internet. Not only was she a flying ace, she was a flying ace way back in WWII! The White Lily of Stalingrad – part of the 586th Fighter Regiment of the Air Defense Force of the Soviet Union, and there were others, lots and lots of others that flew with her!

This started a very long fascination for me about WWII and history in general – about what women did and really what we were and are. The more I read, the more I wanted to know. When I was in school and they taught the history of Women and War, it was an addendum – one story. Rosie the Riveter, the middle class white woman who came to work in the factories to free a man to fight and through that, heralded a new era of economic independence for women. But that’s an extremely narrow story, and not an entirely true one.

The stories I read were about women who served on the front lines as nurses and as ambulance drivers, snipers and tankers, spies and code-breakers! And of course I read about the prisoners and POWs and civilian women whohad the war come down on their heads. As I read, a much fuller multiplicity of women’s experience in the era started to unfold before me. I started to think about how we choose whose stories get told, and how we determine who the heroes are. I started thinking of the hardships of women on the home front, I started thinking about the courage of women in war zones. And I started thinking that I had to do something to make that story wider. To let other women experience the joy I had in finding out that we were always greater than I’d been taught we were.

And larp and freeform is a fantastic way to give people access to that experience. To become it, to feel it thumping in your chest. To really understand the courage, the compassion, and the resilience of the women whose shoulders we stand on.

And that’s just one of the things I love about this project.

When Against the Grain is happening, how does the structure and any mechanization of the game promote the vibe of the game and interaction between players?
The aim in Against the Grain was to create a story that was emotionally engaging and satisfying to play, that also acted as an exploratory model of how intersectional bias works. The game isn’t just about a moment in history where a bunch of random racists decided to launch a hate strike. It’s about everyday people that are a complex product of an unequal and unfair system, that have real struggles and who think they’re just doing what they need to survive. And it’s about how they will end up marginalizing others for what they think is their own survival. It’s about how what we want and think we need is often in direct opposition with equality because we’ve never been taught to find a better way.

To support that, in designing the structure of the game I contextualized the characters to help modern players feel like they could advocate for their character goals — even when they strongly disagree with them — to allow them to play functionally and in doing so, to create a situation of dramatic tension. I carefully calibrated the characters into a position of scarcity to ensure that the game wouldn’t result in easy answers, and I encouraged embodiment and emotional investment in that scarcity with physical mechanics that keep the pressure on. I borrowed on Nordic larp techniques to put tools in the facilitator’s hands to ensure the players could not escape the pressures and social context of their world. Perhaps most importantly in a game with particularly difficult subject matter, I framed the whole game in a context of transparency, safety and community to help players approach the game vulnerably and take as much away from the experience as possible.

You have some amazing stretch goals, and some great goals already hit. When looking for creators and authors for games, what did you look for, and what did you expect from them in theme and development?
I looked for passion — people that were really excited about the stories of women in the era, and people who could really connect with the goals of the project. I also tried my best to look for diversity across multiple axis points: in designers, in games, in the stories we were telling and who and how they were being represented. The base framework I put down in front of the designers was this: each game should explore a story about an experience or contribution that was real for women in WWII. The game should explore what opportunities the war provided to the women involved and also to look at the costs of the opportunity. The game should illustrate how it affected who the women were, how society’s view of them changed, what they could do, and what they could become.

What is your favorite moment in the experience of creation, research, and application of the games in War Birds?

Favorites are too hard! I’ll have to give you a few:

As a designer, the eureka moment of figuring out how Against the Grain was going to work and then watching playtest group after playtest group engage with it vulnerably and meaningfully, and tell me about the power of the experience. This was despite the fact that I thought there was a good chance that no one would choose to play the game due to its difficult subject matter. It taught me that big design risks really are worth taking.
As a creator, the moment I played We Were WASP at Fastaval. I was deep in gleeful research for an British Air Transport Auxiliary game called Spitfire Sisters when I saw the preview in the Fastaval program. I had an insecure, frustrated, competitive response to seeing it there, as creators sometimes do. But after being powerfully moved by playing the game, I had to let all of that go. I asked Ann that very night if she would consider submitting We Were WASP to the anthology, because she’d gone and written the game I wanted to write, and done it better than me. It made me totally recalibrate how I defined success on the project, and the project is 1000% better for it.
As a curator, the moment I read the first draft of Kira’s Mobilize. Including Ann was easy, because her game was already complete and my experience in play was proof it was the right decision. Kira was the first person I asked to write a game from scratch. I saw Kira talking on social media about _Coming Out Under Fire,_ a book I had on my (way too long) research list. It was clear that she was a right fit for the team by her approach to the history. I approached her to write a game and she committed right away. I always had faith she would do well, but tend to hold my breath when a thing so close to my heart is in someone else’s hands. The day I got her first draft I rushed home to read it, and it was great! The experience taught me that I can and should approach people to collaborate in creative projects, and it allowed me to get to a new level of trust in giving control away.

Finally, what do you hope people get out of playing the games presented in the War Birds Kickstarter?
I’m ambitious in my hope.

First and foremost, I want them to have great play experiences! I hope they connect with the games and the stories they’ll be telling, and I hope they serve as compelling communal experiences with their fellow players. I want the games to help them engage with history: I hope that play will expand the story of what women are and do and allow players to see the women that enabled the core infrastructure of the war through their work both at home and on the front and have a new appreciation for why it was important. And I hope the games are all thought provoking in their individual ways and individual themes. I hope they help us appreciate how hard we have fought to get here we are, and how far we still have left to go.

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

Tag: RPGs

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