story games – Page 10

“Wrong” Turn

So someone is playing Turn and I’m very excited about this, but they and a fellow player have both stated clearly that they don’t think they’re playing the game the way I want it to be played.

And like.

Andy Samberg as Jake Peralta strumming a guitar and screaming.

This is my favorite and most often used gif.

Okay, I would like people to play quiet dramas, and slice-of-life style stuff. That’d be cool. But quiet drama means different things to different people, and part of why I need playtests is to see what it means in people’s interpretations of different types of towns and stuff. Not every play of a game is going to be the same, and I accept that.

So like, I’m struggling because I don’t know exactly how they’re playing, and I don’t think it is “wrong” or anything, but I do think that the way they did setup and what themes they chose influenced the play, and that matters. But how do I even say that? Like, even if you’re playing the game slightly differently than I expected does not mean it’s not playing the way that is appropriate based on the way you’ve set up the town?

Like, here are the ways you can play Turn “wrong”:

play it in a city or suburb, or a place with a large population
don’t have shifters in it
appropriate culture to play it
violate the “don’t do this in Turn” section of the essays (re: content)
pretend it’s just a standard PbtA game and don’t engage the mechanics
ignore identity and community as aspects of the game
don’t emotionally engage with the narrative or subject matter

Lego Batman saying "no" over and over while flopping around Wayne Manor.

Yeah, I know, don’t tell people not to do what they want with your game. *eyeroll*

All of the other stuff is interpretations of my design, which I can’t control. Tempo, subject matter, etc. are all stuff that are different in a lot of games, like Fiasco can go anywhere from “wow, this is exciting!” to “wow, this is depressing!” to “wow, I am super confused” in one freaking session. Monsterhearts can go from dark and filled with examination of abuse and sexuality to a few kind-of-friends Scoobying around town trying to protect everyone. This is to say little of trad games like D&D and Shadowrun, which can run the tonal rollercoaster AND still let you explore the subjects the games promote.

There are tons of types of small towns, all with their individual leanings and themes and politics. Small towns can have microcultures that make surrounding towns look at them like they’re upsidedown in a teakettle, and that includes the way people deal with things there. It’s complex, and that’s why there are different themes and elements of the towns you create in Turn. The thing is, I haven’t played all of the combinations!

There are many ways you could combine all of the elements in Turn, and frankly, I don’t have 4 hours every day for the next mumblemumble years to test it out fully. That’s why I’m excited to see other people play it! Yes! Show me your thing you did with my thing! That sounds really weird but I don’t care!

Queen singing "I want it all, I want it all"

Tell meeeeeeeeee

Now, I’ll be real. There are a few things that bug me, and this is not a thing that this person did really because they highlighted at one point how my game was not doing this thing, but man, everyone calls it a Powered by the Apocalypse game.

I freaking. Okay. PbtA is a great system and has a purpose. Vincent and Meguey made a really amazing thing, and a lot of people have done amazing things with it. Turn is not a PbtA game. It’s inspired by it – and yes, I realize a lot of people think it’s the same thing to be inspired by a thing and actually a thing, but it is not – and I designed the game purposefully to go against PbtA principles I have seen reflected in related design. First, there’s no category of PbtA games. And second, here are commonalities between Turn and some games that are PbtA, and then some stuff that’s just Turn or not in Turn:

1) 2d6 (also you have a third die sometimes)

2) Move-like structure (you are rolling to resist rather than to take action)

3) Character sheets with personal information on them (you have two, one of which is sometimes swappable)

4) Stats with smaller numbers (you have 8, one for each sheet, and they’re absolute values)

5) Scaled results (you never fail in Turn, the results are to determine the consequences related to success)

6) No sex/intimacy move

7) No Hx, strings, etc.

8) Goals for Human and Beast that control advancement

9) Exposure tracked on relationships

10) Stress to measure turning from Human to Beast & etc.

This is not me saying “my game has nothing to do with PbtA,” this is me saying there are differences, they matter, and we need to stop saying everything is one kind of game because it happens to use a specific dice roll or has moves (which could be like feats), small stat numbers (like a ton of games), and scaled results (which I think was actually a thing in Shadowrun too, just not framed specifically this way?). Things are different! One thing is not necessarily the other thing! Like! Friends! We need to be a little more forgiving with definitions, or make some freakin’ new ones!

Tahani from The Good Place saying "and silently scream for the rest of time."

me.

Turn was originally conceived because I came home from playing my first session I can remember of Monsterhearts (this one*) and felt off about it. Something wasn’t right. It wasn’t hitting the right tone. I spent the next… really fucking long time… trying to figure out what that was, and meanwhile flipped numbers around, took out entire things, mentally threw out tons of material, and settled on what Turn is when John made me finally write it down because one of my greatest fears is that people will look at it and go “huh, oh, just another PbtA hack” and my fucking opus will be washed away into nothingness because some dingus can’t tell the difference between two different games that are wildly. fucking. different.

Sigh.

I’m a little…passionate today about this, and I think I always am, and always will be. But there’s reason for it. We use categories, especially manufactured ones, to scoop quality things into the trash all the time. Oh, it’s just another fantasy game. Oh, it’s just another PbtA hack. Oh, it’s just another Fate hack. Oh, I’ve seen so many games about zombies. Like come on. And the thing is, I rejected some of what I saw in PbtA work on purpose, and while some parts of mechanical structure remain, there are a lot of things I pulled from elsewhere conceptually.

I would never dare to call myself original, but when you don’t have your own ideas, storebought is fine, so long as you mix them up in a new way and it still fucking tastes good.

I want to share my game with people without having the ever-burning comparison to “oh but you’re not as good as Monsterhearts and AW and and and” screaming in my face every time. I know you don’t mean to do it, most of you, but it sure burns my biscuits that you think it’s fun to tell me how much what I have labored so extensively over is Just Like That Other Thing. That’s what this is. This isn’t categorical. My game is different enough that it is reminiscent of PbtA work, but in part because of how many other games you could find similarities to, it is not the same.

And that’s what I mean about people getting Turn wrong genuinely.

A shot from Big Hero 6 of the Aunt saying "I had a point."

I think.

It’s possible that I wouldn’t play Turn in the way you’re playing it, if you’re playing it and think you’re playing it differently than I intend. That’s like, good though? Because I am not every player. I am not able to imagine all possible ways my game could be played and executed beautifully, still exploring the concepts of identity and community while doing things with more passion and intensity, because the town they built makes more sense for that.

So basically, I want to hear about the ways people explore Turn. I might be surprised, or unsure, or need to think about how something goes. But if the game works? If it is telling those stories, asking those questions, and it’s enjoyable? Then you’re probably doing okay.

You can find the Turn playtest document here, and I’m happy to hear your thoughts. Just remember, feedback is important, but it’s even more important that you’re not a jerk about it.

*Shit, Turn is a year older than I thought.

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

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Patreon Spotlight: Kira Magrann

Hi all! I have a Patreon spotlight today and it’s on the designer and creator Kira Magrann, who makes some queer, experimental games that explore intimacy and cyberpunk themes, among other things.

kira, a dark haired femme person in a bomber style jacket with tigers on the chest

Kira Magrann

Bio via Kira:

Kira is a tabletop roleplaying game designer, queer NB cyborg, and snake mom living in Columbus, Ohio. She currently has a Patreon where she designs experimental games, a YouTube channel where she talks about game design, and she blogs a few times a month at Gnome Stew. With the support of her patrons she recently released a game about Lesbisnakes in wintertime titled A Cozy Den.

You can find Kira on Twitter: @kiranansi

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Kira, a femme person in a black and white flannel and jeans, kneeling not far from a large snake baring its fangs.

Kira and a big snake!

Tell me about yourself and your work. Who are you, and what does your work do?

I’m a queer cyborg game designer living in Columbus, Ohio. I’m a horror movie lover, snake mom, and I’m working on making my hair look like Major Kusanagi’s. My work, my game design work anyway, aims to educate, titillate, and inspire. When people play my games I want them to feel things and have learned something they didn’t know before. Hopefully the designs and concepts are also accessible enough to reach a diverse audience which is something I work hard at doing.

a series of images depicting different colored snakes with captions for high femme to stone butch, descriptors to identify characters, detailed with stats in the image text.

The identification stats for lesbisnakes in A Cozy Den, featuring a range from High Femme to Stone Butch.

details of the identification stats including presentation like lipstick, butch and femme aesthetics, and some details of how the scales of the lesbisnake impacts the presentation of the character.

Descriptions of the various stats in A Cozy Den, including presentation.

You’re a known activist and queer designer. How does your perspective regarding these things affect your design work and the work you do for your Patreon?

Gosh, well, being an activist and a queer designer means that basically all my work will have some aspects of those two parts of me in them. Everything I make is queer, or cyberpunk (emphasis on the punk), or related to queer or feminine monster metaphors. It’s a huge pool of inspiration to pull from, which means I can make games that are kind of like, combinations of these things, and maybe not like, 100% just one of them. So A Cozy Den, my game about lesbisnakes, is about half snake half lesbian mythical monster creatures who are trying to live together during the winter. It’s also a non-violent game and focuses on cozy stories and mechanics. It also uses lesbian terminology, your stats being derived from a scale of High Femme to Stone Butch. So that’s easily like, all three of my main interests in one game. This is how all my games go! I basically draw from what’s important to me in my personal life, and also the genres I’m inspired by and care a lot about.

three lesbisnakes - femme heads and torsos on snake bodies - communing.

Three lesbisnakes from A Cozy Den.

Tell me a little about A Cozy Den. What inspired you to write the game? What about it speaks to your design and you as a person?

A Cozy Den came about because I’ve been obsessed with snakes since I adopted my 8 year old corn snake Sol about a year and a half ago now. I basically read about them daily and am in all these FB groups in the snake community and just love them so much. I’ve actually loved snakes since I was a child but never really owned any until now (I’m 37!). I had recently learned that snakes den together, and it really humanized them, painted them in a more communal and cozy way.

I like finding ways that make snakes less scary for people, because I think that removing fear even in a small way toward an animal can make huge changes in a person’s life and in removing fear in the world in all kinds of ways. I’d also been really into lesbian lifestyle history at the time and watched this short documentary on lesbian communes, and suddenly it clicked… snake dens and lesbian communes are so similar in all these ways like, culturally. They’re outsiders, American culture is kind of afraid of them, and the communes in the 70s and 80s in particular were very purposeful outsider ways for lesbians to live outside of the norm in America.

“What’s a Den?” section of the A Cozy Den text.

So I basically just combined the two and was like, I can make a game that can teach simultaneously about two things I love: snakes and queer history. That is so typical of my design style. I’ll basically find all these connecting points with the many genres and things in the world I love, combine them into an interesting genre game setting, and somehow teach about them in the game. I’m queer and a snake lover too, so this game is very personal, very much about me and the things I love. I also wanted to experiment with mechanics, to see if I could make a pbta game without physical conflict as the main driver. I’m more and more interested in games that don’t have violence, and instead create different types of feelings or situations. So in A Cozy Den all the conflict is inter personal… can the characters get along with each other during the winter in a closed space? What does cozy look like in a tabletop game vs a video game? There’s a lot going on in this tiny weird game, and its very much how my design brain and personal brain work. I could talk about it for awhile lol.

The “Healing” section of A Cozy Den.

Your new videos have been well-received! How do you decide what to do videos about? What is your process for creating the videos?

So, my videos, basically I recently got obsessed with YouTube (you’re probably seeing a pattern here with my creative obsessions) and I was like, shit, I could do this. I’ve always wanted to learn more about video making and a lot of my personal media on my insta has been drifting toward video too. Whenever I want to get better at something, I get obsessed with it and do it until I get better. It’s worked ok so far although I wish I could stick with one thing it’d be easier lol.

My videos are about my design process and thoughts, so while I’m working on things throughout the week I try to note particular issues I’m having while writing or designing, or thoughts another youtube video or article made me have, and then I write those down. Then I pick one, and make a word document with a bunch of bullet points stream of conciousness style what I might like to talk about in that video topic. Then I’ll step away for a few hours or a day, come back to it and clean it up.

I’ve cleaned up my extra bedroom office so that the space behind me looks decent and I have windows in front of me for natural light, and I just use a very cheap tripod from amazon and my iphone for recording. Then I’ll record in about 50 second pieces (I’ve found smaller ones are easier to upload to dropbox for whatever reason), upload them to dropbox, download them to my computer (this usually takes hours) then edit them in a free editing program I have on my ubuntu computer called kdenlive. I don’t do anything fancy with the editing, just add music and text. Once that’s done I’ll upload to youtube!

A video from Kira’s YouTube on Playtest Process and Design Iteration.

There’s lots of tricks on youtube to get more traffic and stuff in like, the way you tag things and name stuff and put ending credits in… all those I learned from watching videos on youtube about how to do it. I want to get a little more vloggy with my videos in the future, play with cinematography more, but for right now I’m trying to get a rhythm and skill set to just make them regularly. I think of my youtube channel like a blog basically, like, what would I write about to the community on g+ or gnome stew, then instead of writing I just film it. I’m getting better! It’s still mostly an experiment.

What are some goals you have for your Patreon and your design practice in general?

My Patreon is helping me become a better designer while simultaneously putting out content that I can’t make anywhere else. It’s a really unique opportunity to be able to explore whatever kinds of games my heart desires and not worry to terribly about the “sellability” of it, y’know? I think a lot of creators know what types of content really sells, something with fantasy fighters, something grimdark, something with skullduggery… basically new takes on the typical rpg stuff.

In order to create something truly new and different, it means that you’re taking a huge chance as a creator that no one in the rpg community will be interested in playing your weird stuff. So having this patreon to support me even a little monetarily helps me make those unique and innovative games. Also it is paying my bills! I’d love to get it up to 1500 a month, cause then it’d legit be like a part time job! But until then I’m scrambling to fill the extra money in with freelance work which to be honest is kind of overwhelming. It’s a dream to be able to live off my patreon. I think it’ll get there.

a sheet of paper titled Actions with various actions described for characters to take in A Cozy Den.

The Actions from A Cozy Den with some handwritten markup.

When do you experience the most joy, and the most satisfaction, while creating?

Wow this is a spectacular question and I’m not sure 100% how to answer it lol! The whole process for me is very joy inducing. I’m a hyper creative person and my imagination is always on overdrive, so coming up with the ideas is really fun. I also love to be critical, and I think editing is a critical skill, so basically the part where you’re taking the ideas and narrowing them and sculpting them into something more specific is also really satisfying. The act of writing is sometimes a little tedious, but when I get a flow going I disappear into the document for hours at a time and that flow feels really good, creatively.

I do really love collaborating, especially when I’m in charge of a project and can choose who else is on my team. I’m very proud to work with other marginalized creators and hire them to create art or other work like in A Cozy Den or RESISTOR. Sharing creative work is definitely scary, but I love creating artwork that people use or wear, so when people are getting the game and playing it I feel very accomplished and get this feeling of sympathetic joy. So I guess those are my favorite parts of creating, and the things that give me the most satisfaction in the process.

A sheet of paper titled Copperhead Lesbisnakes that includes various stats and details on the character in A Cozy Den.

A character sheet from A Cozy Den.

Patterns and colors for the various lesbisnakes in A Cozy Den based on their stats.

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Thank you so much to Kira for stopping in to talk about her Patreon, A Cozy Den, and her design! Please check out Kira’s work and share around this spotlight to show off the cool work she is doing.

You can find Kira on Twitter as @kiranansi and on YouTube, as well as through Patreon where she designs experimental games, and sometimes at Gnome Stew. Make sure to check out A Cozy Den, too!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Five or So Questions on Journey Away

I have an interview today with Jacob Kellogg on his game Journey Away, which is currently on Kickstarter. You might remember Jacob from his approachable theory article about complexity in game design – but don’t think his cool thoughts on games and design stop there! Journey Away is a game that I think is doing something fun and it’s got dice pools, which means I’m interested. Check out his responses below!

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Tell me a little about Journey Away. What excites you about it?

Well, one of the exciting parts of Journey Away is that it’s my first project that’s big enough to not be a Pay What You Want title; that feels like a threshold to me as a new designer. As for the game itself, I like that it feels like a different kind of experience than most RPGs. Fantasy is probably my favorite gaming genre, which can be problematic due to there being so many fantasy games out there already, but I think that the non-challenge-based mechanics really help this to bring something new to the hobby instead of just being another rehash. I feel good about that.

What made you go towards non-challenge-based mechanics? What about that is important to you?

The decision to use non-challenge-based mechanics was a convergence of two things. First, I had noticed that fighting monsters (and to a lesser extent, facing traps and hazards) was so common in fantasy gaming that it seemed to be treated as an inherent part of the genre. That struck me as odd, since to me “fantasy” is more about the setting. Second, as I started developing my own setting and premise for the game, it didn’t make sense that curious villagers would explore a magical world with wide-eyed wonder if doing so involved facing mortal danger on a daily basis. At the intersection of those two observations is the notion of non-challenge-based gameplay.

A scenic view of a forest, hills, and mountains, with trees peeking into view. Two people sit and look off a gentle cliff, one in a vest, long sleeved shirt, pants, and boots, and the other in a skirt, tights, waist cincher, shirt, and boots. The title text "Journey Away" is in gold.

The beautiful cover art for Journey Away. I finally learned how to do alt text properly, so full description is there.

How did you make fantasy interesting and different for Journey Away?

As I touched on above, I think part of what makes some people feel like fantasy is “done to death” is that it keeps getting done the same way each time. The dice may change and each setting might have its own quirk, but ultimately they’re almost always implemented as some variation of allocating attributes and skills for your best odds of success against a series of challenges. I think stripping that away offers something genuinely different. It’s like if someone has only ever seen pasta served with tomato sauce and they ask me how I’ll make pasta interesting and different, maybe I’ll give them some chicken lo mein or beef stroganoff.

Even so, I also wanted a reasonably original setting. I ended up with a world where magic is a recent addition, because that offers lots of great benefits, like having plenty of opportunity for discovery and adding a sense of wonder to any magical artifacts you might encounter. It also offers a nice solution to the common fantasy issue of “race”. People like to play fantastical beings, but there’s a lot of baggage with the traditional handling of races. What I get to do in Journey Away is say that everyone’s a human, and the new presence of magic causes some folks to be born with altered features. So if you want to play an “elf”, you can just say that you were born with pointy ears and give yourself the traits you want; or if you like tieflings, you can give yourself those features without having to introduce race-based prejudice into the game; or if you’re coming to fantasy gaming from some other background, you can easily adopt the features of a character you like (such as a sexy vampire or an anime catgirl) without having to find a race in a splatbook and convince the GM that the stats are balanced. The setting really offers a lot of freedom to everyone.

I love the idea of getting the magical features you want because of the flexibility of the world. So tell me, how do these work mechanically? How do you represent magic in the nuts and bolts?

Magic is handled the same way as any other feature of your character: you declare that something is true about your character, and assign a die size to it based on how significant or impactful you want it to be. It doesn’t matter whether that character trait is your experience with fishing, your cute demeanor, or the potency of some magical ability you have. For example, a friend gave her character animal-mind-reading powers with a d10. Then, whenever we rolled for a situation where that was helpful (like when trying to negotiate with someone), a d10 would be added to the player dice pool. If it could get in the way in a situation (like when surrounded by lots of creatures), then a d10 gets added to the complication pool.

What is the core of conflict and discovery in Journey Away?

The entire primary mechanic is basically what I just described for magic: you give yourself traits to define your character, and assign die values based on how big of an impact you want them to be, with bigger dice having bigger impacts. Those traits then contribute dice to one pool when they’re helpful in a situation, or to another pool when they could get in the way. Circumstances can also contribute dice to both pools, but mostly to the complication pool. Both pools are rolled, and the players arrange the dice into pairs (one die from each pool). Pairs where the die from the player pool is higher generate beneficial developments, while pairs in which the complication die is higher generate complications. The player to the left of whoever rolled then narrates the majority development type (boons or complications), then passes to the player on the right of the one who rolled, and that player narrates the remaining developments. Of course, there will be structures in place to guide this narration with prompts for those who aren’t interested in or comfortable with absolute openness, but that’s the basic idea.

Conflict isn’t a major component of the intended emotional focus of the game. Instead, we’re framing the journey as primarily positive. Even the “bad” complications serve as an opportunity for fun moments, and the game is mainly about diving headlong into the wondrous unknown. This means that the game encourages forward movement, curiosity, and laughing together when things take unexpected turns. Journey Away very much presents the discovery of new things as a positive and joyful endeavor. I want to encourage a way of thinking: that things outside your current experience aren’t inherently bad and dangerous, but instead will enrich your life and make you glad you stepped outside the village to have a look.

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Thank you to Jacob for an excellent interview! I hope you all enjoyed learning about Journey Away and that you’ll travel on over to the Kickstarter to check it out today! Please share this interview widely!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Five or So Questions on The Sword and the Loves

Hi all, today I’ve got an interview with Antonio Amato from Mammut RPG on The Sword and the Loves, an Arthurian legends inspired game using mechanics adjusted from Archipelago, one of my favorite games, to fit the themes. It’s a lovely read and I wanted to let you all learn more about it! Enjoy Antonio’s interview below.

Full disclosure: I edited the English translation of the text.

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The cover and example of the Sword and the Loves cards and map, illustrated in black & white.

Tell me a little about The Sword and the Loves. What excites you about it?

I think that “The Sword and the Loves” is the game I wanted to play when I was a teenager and I discovered the Arthurian cycle and the stories of the knights of the Round Table. During the summer vacation, I read a book about King Arthur and his knights, and I instantly fell in love. Then a couple of years ago I discovered “Archipelago” and I immediately thought it would be the perfect game to tell those stories. I then started writing my Archipelago hack.

What are the key aspects of the mechanical structure in The Sword and the Loves that you think carry the emotional impact of the Arthurian legends?

Undoubtedly, the hopefulness and the bleakness. These are typical themes of the Arthurian legends that serve as a starting point for players to make the story more dramatic and to emphasize the role of the protagonist. This is a mechanic that I borrowed in part from “Love in the time of Seið”, a game that I always recommend to play.

A black and white illustration of a knight lying in bed, ill, while a femme person looks at them, dismayed.

How did you approach an era and themes that had complex perspectives regarding gender and agency?

It was not easy, I have to admit it. Through hopefulness and bleakness, I tried to give thickness to the archetypes (especially those most penalized by a vision of the women that was a product of its time). I also thought the game needs a change in perspective because I believe that embracing those stories (contextualising and renewing them) is a pure act of love. That’s why I decided to devote an archetype to a figure that owes much to Tolkien’s re-reading of the female figure: the wandering damsel.

Do you think you could elaborate just a little to the last question to explain some of what the wandering damsel is? I think that would be useful.

The wandering damsel is a homage to all those brave and free women we can read about on modern and contemporary novels. However, I didn’t want just to create a “female version” of the wandering knight, then I choose to develop a different type characterised by a strong connection to adventure, exploration, and freedom. While the wandering knight has a special relationship with his family, the “positive themes” of the wandering damsel are the valour and the gravitas, two virtues particularly appreciated in leaders. The archetype is inspired by Éowyn and Joan of Arc.

Illustrated cards representing the character archetypes, with the wandering damsel enlarged.

What about Archipelago and Love in the time of Seið fit with The Sword and the Loves so well mechanically and fictionally?

Archipelago (as well as Love in the time of Seið) is a story game in which the destiny of the characters is at the heart of the gaming experience. From the very first moment, I thought that The Sword and the Loves had to rely on such a structure. This allowed me to remain faithful to the literature of reference, while giving me sufficient freedom to change the game in the direction chosen by me. For example, the idea for the roles of guide and misleader come from Love in the time of Seið, even if with some little modifications.

A detailed black and white illustration of someone pulling a sword from an anvil.

You spoke of the hopefulness and the bleakness. How did you come up with these for each archetype? What do you think they will contribute most to play?

Hopefulness and bleakness are flags for players. You can use it to corroborate and consolidate the narration of other players or to play with the “dark side” of their characters. I based hopefulness and bleakness on the chivalric tradition related to the respective archetypes. So, for example, the hopefulness of the Wise Old Man is the tradition, while the bleakness is the hubris. I think that hopefulness and bleakness convey the right atmosphere among the players because they are seeds for the fiction.

The cover of The Sword and the Loves, which features an illustration of a femme person wearing a crown and holding up a sword, in front of a detailed landscape background.

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Thank you so much to Antonio for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed learning about The Sword and the Loves and that you’ll check it out soon!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Five or So Questions on Familiars of Terra

Hey all, I’ve got a great interview with Elizabeth Chaipraditkul on the new tabletop game Familiars of Terra, which is currently on Kickstarter! Liz got in touch and when I heard “familiars of Terra is a tabletop roleplay game set in a beautiful world where everyone has their own animal familiar” I knew many of you would be super amped to check it out. So here’s the interview!

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A dark skinned person with a beard, wearing a fancy shirt with a fur collar, with an animal that l can only describe as a poodle with wings. SO CUTE.

Tell me a little about Familiars of Terra. What excites you about it?

Familiars of Terra is a tabletop roleplay game set in Terra, a fantasy world in which every person has an animal familiar. As a heroic Seeker you travel the lands with your familiar healing the devastation of a war which left nations scared and people scattered. The game is all about exploration, adventure, and heroics. If you’re a fan of the Golden Compass or Pokemon you’ll probably enjoy our game.

What makes me most excited about Familiars of Terra is that it is a very positive game. Yes there was a war, yes your main job as a Seeker is to make sure something terrible like that never happens again, but behind all that is hope. Being a Seeker is about making the right choices when they matter most and when there are grey decisions – helping, healing, and thriving. I wanted to make a game that left people feeling good about themselves, that built them up, and also had a bunch of awesome animals in it. 🙂

What was the initial design and conception process like? If you just woke up one day and wrote it, what was the spark? If it took a longer road, how did you find your way?

After I finished WITCH I kinda needed a break from the dark. I love dark, dramatic games, but focusing so much on that type of world was really exhausting. You can’t live in shadows forever it isn’t healthy. So Familiars of Terra really came from a place of wanting to design something happy and uplifting. I wanted to write about heroes and cool animals. That’s where the game really began. From there I started testing different mechanics with dice and then eventually with cards – once we had the base system it took off from there. Funnily enough, I had a really clear picture in my mind of what Terra looked like right from the start, so the mechanics was where I had to invest a lot of development time.

Left to right: a person with a beard and mustache, a necklace with a big shiny gem in it, and a fancy shirt and collar in blue and beige; a dark skinned person with round pigtails, in a cream colored midriff shirt and beautiful facial jewelry; a white person with red hair wearing a brown vest with a fluffy collar over a light blue dress; a dark skinned person with dreadlocks, wearing a purple-ish scarf and a long green vest; and an indigenous-appearing person wearing a strappy vest, with organic lines down their cheek in red, carrying a large stick on their back.

When you say grey decisions, what do you mean by that, and how does it tie to the heart of the Seeker-familiar relationship?

By grey decisions, I guess I mean very real decisions. Life is really difficult with out any supernatural threats and the choices we make as humans are tough. In Terra I wanted to tackle real problems, but then in a fantasy world. You basically play a modern day hero and that means the decisions you’re faced with are realistically tough – we don’t have many true villains in the game, but we do have a lot of people who think differently than one another. We have people who hurt people to help themselves (or their families) and Seekers are often faced with greed. However, as a Seeker you fight for the greater good – you’re part of the generation that will heal the world. It’s your job to make the tough calls and practice radical empathy and creative problem solving. You’re faced with grey decisions, but you play hope :).

A person wearing flowing clothing with beautiful geometric patterns who has a red line across their cheeks and nose, carrying a harpoon-like weapon and standing beside a large deer with a saddle.

How do the mechanics tie in with your familiar and that relationship?

Actually, in Familiars of Terra you have one character sheet for two characters. Half your sheet is for your familiar and half your sheet is for yous Seeker. You can make checks with either and as a player it’s basically like playing one soul in two bodies. Also, familiars are always the one to fight! Humans are weak compared to familiars, so in order to protect their companions, familiars are always the one to get into a scuffle. We have lots of cool Combat Powers for you to pick and customize how your familiar fights. Finally, each familiar gets a legacy which is both story and mechanics. By following a story you create to your familiar’s epic destiny you earn cool new Traits which alter how your familiar looks, moves, and even fights.

How do players engage the mechanics to express empathy, and how do the familiars help with that?

A lot of our mechanics work by ‘defining’ things. You can buy Items and then in the moment when you want to use them – you define the item’s history and how it is used. This encourages player’s creativity and allows people to take different paths to problem solving. A lot of times you make a check and you’re done – you succeed or fail and sometimes that’s absolutely terrible when you’re trying to do something kind or empathetic. When I was creating Familiars of Terra I really wanted to make sure doing something empathetic or creative (or anything really) relied on more than that. By having a mechanical work around your character can use one check isn’t the end of empathy, it’s a challenge and an encouragement to use the items you have at your disposal to still reach your desired outcome.

Familiar-wise, even though familiars can fight, they definitely don’t have to. In fact, lots of familiar’s traits are based around healing, comforting, and empathizing. For example, you can have a comforting familiar who can calm situations and make people feel better in their presence – much how ‘mundane’ therapy dogs do as well :).

A red-haired person in a green jacket and yellow dress reaching their hands up to the sky where cats with wings are flying, with the text “Familiars of Terra” over the background of a seaside sunset.

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Thanks to Liz for the great interview and for sharing Familiars of Terra with me and you all, my readers! I hope you enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out the Familiars of Terra Kickstarter and maybe help it reach its goal!

P.S. – I tried to find out if it was okay to use “dark skinned” as a descriptor and I saw it used in some places where it seemed okay, but if it is not, please email contactbriecs at gmail and I will update the post as soon as possible. Thank you.

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

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Five or So Questions on Imp of the Perverse

I am legit delighted to say I’ve yet again had the chance for interview time with Nathan Paoletta, this time talking about his new game Imp of the Perverse, which is currently on Kickstarter. The game’s design has been percolating for a while, and I can’t wait for you all to hear more about the project. Check it out!

Note: Images are the collaborative work of Nathan and cartoonist/illustrator Marnie Galloway.

A dark red image with an illustration in black and white showing a monstrous imp wreathed in smoke, creeping behind a woman reading a book. The text reads, “IMP of the PERVERSE: A Psychological Horror Game of Monster Hunting in Jacksonian Gothic America. Quite nice, really.

Tell me a little about Imp of the Perverse. What excites you about it?

Imp of the Perverse is a psychological horror game of monster hunting in what I call “Jacksonian Gothic” America. Your protagonists are members of society in the historical 1830s or 1840s, but with a little extra – an Imp of the Perverse on their shoulders, impelling them to do terrible deeds. Only by hunting down those who have already given in to their Imps, and thus turned into literal monsters, can yours hope to rid themselves of their Imps and regain their humanity.

I’ve been working on this game for a long time! I recently uncovered my very first files of notes on the first ideas I had, and it’s dated 2006. I’ve always been a fan of the work of Edgar Allan Poe (hence the name of the game, of course) and the compelling nature of his work seemed very gameable to me once I started making games, but it took me a really long time and the experience of doing so many other games (carry. a game about war., Annalise, World Wide Wrestling, etc) to figure out the “in” into the stuff that resonates with me.

So now I’m excited to be so close to done with something that’s been on my mind for so long, and just really pleased with how the game has turned out! It reliably does the things that I personally like the most in tabletop – good solid hooks for characters with enough space to develop in play, clear direction in what you do, the opportunity to get deep into your characters head without demanding that as the only way to play, and specific GM tools for developing situations that you’re excited about, and then making decisions in play that all build to a fictional climax without depending entirely on personal storytelling skills. In fact, one of the sneaky goals of the game is to subtly teach players who may have never GMed before how to do it (or at least, how to do it in this game). One of the conceits is that if your character gives in to their Imp (a very possible but by no means inevitable state), you build the character as a new monster for the next hunt and take over the Editor (GM) role – I hope that players will be excited to do that when it comes up in long term play and feel like they have the foundation to do it even if they’ve never GMed before.

Image of the Kickstarter bits – quickplay cards, a clothbound hardcover, and a note on illustrated monsters and custom chapters! All of this is themed in red, dark red, black, and gold.

I have to ask about this transferable or shared GM role. What kind of powers do Editors hold, and how do they use them?

I think it’ll be familiar to most folks as a “traditional” GM kind of role. The Editor is in charge of coming up with the monster, setting up situations that challenge the protagonists, describing the world around them, playing NPCs, all that kind of stuff. This game is not Powered by the Apocalypse, but I absorbed many of the Agenda/Principle lessons from Apocalypse World, and do have a similar charge for the Editor in this game. Your job is to:

create monsters and put them in the same social context as the protagonist characters
construct a compelling, dark world full of challenge, doubt and wonder
engineer specific situations for each protagonist that dare them to embrace their darker self
demonstrate the consequences of the protagonists actions with integrity (in this order: integrity to the dark Gothic world, integrity to the characters development so far, integrity to the demands of the unfolding narrative, and ideally all three)

The game also asks the Editor to do specific prep (building the monster and the web of social relationships it influences). The goal here is two-fold: to give the Editor plenty to work with in play, so there’s always something to fall back to to keep the story going, and to draw them into investing in the world they’re preparing. The game shines when everyone is invested in what happens to these fictional characters, and prep is structured to make it as easy as possible for the Editor to do that.

As a player, you see the “effect” of the prep and the Editor’s agenda from the player side, and then when it’s your turn the game says “here are the tools the Editor you just played with used to make your game happen, and you saw how it went, so now it’s your turn to take them for a spin.” Obviously if it’s not within the players comfort zone there’s no artificial dictate that they MUST become the GM, but (again hopefully) by the time you get through a couple Chapters of play you’ll be able to see how it all works and maybe excited to try it out yourself!

How did you build and design the fiction of the game, especially ensuring you could integrate the imps without it seeming negatively garish or absurd?

The concept of “you play a character with an Imp on their shoulder pushing you to do perverse things” has been the central idea from the start, along with the idea that monsters should be unique to the perversity that spawned them, but developing the rest of the context took a long time. I knew I wanted to keep the realities of the historical time as the counterweight to the fantastical elements, but there were a lot of versions of doing that over the years. I had a key playtest that put me on the path to figuring it out – at the time, the characters were all part of a secret society of monster hunters who were recruited when their Imp appeared, and then kind of sent on a mission to hunt down the next monster. It worked to get everyone in the same place at the same time, but also felt very “you meet in a tavern” in a way that didn’t sit well at the table. We spent a lot of debrief time just kind of brainstorming about it, and someone made a comparison to the gravity well of a black hole, and the metaphor fell into place for me.

A series of symbols illustrated in maroon and white – a rose, a quill pen, a book, a gun, a compass, and a shovel.

A monster is the result of an Imp gaining the most power in the world of the living, and so when it appears everyone else who has an Imp can feel it, drawn to the perverse “gravity” it emanates. Implied by the dynamic of “when you know a monster appears, you know you have to do something about it” is that normal people CAN’T do anything to stop monsters, they’re too horrible and powerful, and the protagonists know this. And then, embedding the protagonists as well as the monster in a linked web of relationships gives the context for why they might care about this situation in particular, and have specific people they want to protect or save.

Beyond the basic concepts of Imps, monsters and the Shroud between worlds, one of the long-term mechanics is that the players build up the nature of their own gothic world through play. Between sessions, one of the things players can do is spend resources to establish facts about the Shroud and monsters. I want to provide the baseline fictional frame for “here’s what you do and why” and then see how different groups take that through the act of play, rather than build out a bunch of metaphysics for players to learn up front.

How do you handle a concept where the characters are continually tempted to do wrong, while they are hunting those who failed to resist the temptation? I’m really curious: what does morality look like in Imp of the Perverse?

One of the core rules is this: you are playing a historical character, but you are a modern person. We care about the actual concerns of the people playing at the table, not what we think other kinds of people might be worried about. So, perversity is always relative to something you actually think is wrong – for players, this is something that you should be interested in exploring and (possibly) overcoming, while for the Editor this is something that you want to see the protagonists destroy. The game doesn’t make overt moral judgements of what is and is not perverse, in that the development of individual perversities is totally freeform. But there are guidelines – it should be something that actually makes it hard to live a normal life, that the character sees the clear downsides of, but that is, well, tempting. Perversities are not superpowers, but they have both up and downsides. Then the mechanics provide specific moments where you choose whether it’s worth the temptation in order to get what you want right then in that moment. The game does give you permission to use whatever means necessary to destroy or deal with the monster, in that they are almost always worse than you, so in that way there is a bit of a moral statement of when violence is justified; but also, the means by which a monster is resolved can be very contextual to the individual monster and the nature of the protagonists, so it’s not ALWAYS a fight to the death.

There is also a bit of the morality of the era (or at least, my read of it) in how characters are built. For example, if you make a character who has a child out of wedlock, you’ll have the Scandalous Quality, or if your spouse is dead you’ll be Bereaved. These reflect the general sense of how people in your social circles view you, and have an equal ability to be used in play as more “positive” Qualities, but they do reflect a certain moral sense that centers on your family as the fundamental important thing in people’s lives – an important piece of embedding the characters in the society they’re a part of!

The words “IMP of the PERVERSE” in shimmering gold with filigree above and below.

You’ve been working on Imp of the Perverse for a long time (2006, right?)? What are some of your favorite moments of design and creation in that path that resonate with the game, and with you, today?

This is a great question, and a hard one because the arc of the design has basically been one of long gaps punctuated by short periods of focused progress, so it’s all kind of one amorphous blob of experience in my head. I’ll try to tease out some moments when I felt most satisfied that I was on the right track, because they stand out to me the most. First, when I decided to cut down the original idea of “play all kinds of different stories with these protagonists” down to “what if it’s just about hunting down the monsters in this world” (which was originally going to be one mini-game inside the larger game…) that was key to cutting the design space down to a manageable level. When I had the first playtests of the central die roll mechanic that tempts you towards perversity and saw it work, that was great. The game needed development to support that mechanic and fine-tune it, but I saw players engage with the critical decision point (do I or don’t I? is it worth it?) and that’s the beating heart of the game. The aforementioned playtest where we workshopped ourselves into the “perverse gravity” metaphor starting pulling the fictional frame together for me. I ran a long-term playtest around then where we got to see a protagonist fall to the Imp and then the player take up the Editor-ship, which worked great and let me go ahead and play on the other side to feel more of the player experience. Recently, I think one of the most gratifying moments I’ve had was at a convention game, where afterwards the players told me that they felt like they found it very easy to get into their characters and make principled decisions based on those characters. That was nice to hear as a GM of course, but also validation of the design goal of really putting players into the fictional world of their protagonists and giving them clear structure and direction for play through how the characters are made and interact.

And of course it is viscerally satisfying to see players defeat the horrible monsters I make that embody the things I really, truly want to see destroyed in the world!

Cover image, similar to the first of the image in the post: a dark red image with an illustration in black and white showing a monstrous imp wreathed in smoke, creeping behind a woman reading a book. The text reads, “IMP of the PERVERSE: A Psychological Horror Game of Monster Hunting in Jacksonian Gothic America.

Thank you so much to Nathan for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading about Imp of the Perverse and that you’ll check out the Kickstarter running right now!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

You Can Talk All You Want

On the subject of Cartel and the disclaimer I put on the interview:

I was enforcing my blog policies. I have a private policy that if I receive a complaint about a post and its not blatant trolling, I post a disclaimer with what happened. I’ve done it before. It’s never caused a mess before. But hey! You know my secret! I have policies I enforce!

Here’s the thing I want to be clear.

I am not saying whether someone is the right person to write anything, but I do think that people it impacts deserve to be heard. I am not saying whether a game should be made, but I do think it’s worthwhile to consider the perspectives of the people affected by the game if they are alive and accessible.

I repeatedly say that we should ask ourselves whose stories we tell, and I’ve talked about changing games entirely to reduce negative impact when considering social issues. I have absolutely asked whether a game is a net positive. I have asked people to explain how their perspective adds value to the product they’re making, and whether they have considered others’ experiences. I ask that we look at what we’re doing and why we do it. I don’t think that’s unreasonable, considering how people claim games are so important and impactful and useful for education.

I have not, however, led harassment campaigns, led my actions with the intent of causing financial or social harm to someone, or bombarded people significantly enough to cause them panic attacks and fear – that I know of. I have not told anyone they’re not valid, or said anyone should absolutely do or not do anything. If I have and don’t remember, I’m really fucking sorry. I am trying to be better.

I have no intention to cause harm or upset to anyone involved with this, and that includes anyone who objected to the development of the game.

I’m not saying anyone involved in this has done or is doing these things. I’m just responding to some of the accusations flung my way. I wasn’t given any time to investigate what has been brought up before the messages started flying.

When someone says to me that something being created offends or distresses them for a reason I find valid (and yes, “I find the depiction of a current violent and active conflict that is immediately relevant to me offensive” is a reason I consider valid), or if it is relevant to an ethical issue or something similar, I will put up a disclaimer. I notify the designer if appropriate, and investigate what I can to see if it’s a deeper issue.

There we go. Final notes:

– I have no responsibility to host debates on my blog.

– I have no intention to ever reveal the identity of a reporting party or to demand that they justify their position.

– I will continue my policy.

– I will not receive further messages about this with anything further than an archive button.

– I will not be investigating further because the information I found during the multi-platform messaging and searching has resulted in my decision to leave the post as-is.

Thanks!

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Five or So Questions on Cartel

Portrait of Mark Diaz Truman.

Note: Mexican gamers have messaged me to say that this game is offensive and glorifies murder and the drug trade. I’m following up on it and apologize for not researching better – I’m sorry. The interview is staying up for now, but with this disclaimer.

Today’s interview is with Mark Diaz Truman from Magpie Games, here to talk about Cartel, which is currently on Kickstarter! Cartel is a game about Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, in the complicated moral environment of the drug war. Check out Mark’s responses to my questions!

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Mexican man holding a large gun, surrounded by crates of drugs. Illustration by Andrew Thompson.

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

Cartel is a tabletop roleplaying game in which players portray bold narcos, naïve spouses, and dirty cops caught up the drama and violence of Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, trying to survive in a dangerous game of narcotics, money, and power. Cartel invokes crime fiction like Breaking Bad, The Wire, and El Mariachi, stories about ordinary people caught up in socioeconomic and cultural systems that push them to desperate places. There are no heroes in Cartel… but perhaps there aren’t any villains either. Either way, Cartel creates stories that are alternately tragic and darkly humorous, set against the backdrop of an eternal drug war.

I am excited to publish Cartel for so many reasons, but chief among them is the way that Cartel connects my love of crime fiction to my own heritage as a Mexican-America game designer. After a few years of designing games, I started having conversations with people in the community about representation. And as a Mexican-American designer, I had a terrifying thought: no one could look at my games and know anything about my life or my history or my family. I immediately had another disheartening thought: I have no idea what a Mexican-American game looks like.

Years later, while watching Breaking Bad, I finally got an idea: I wanted to write a game about the drug war from the people who really live inside of it. My people. Mexicans who wake up every day in what is effectively occupied territory, caught in the middle of the war between the law and the cartels. There are many Mexican stories to be told, but this is the one that spoke to me, that unified my love of tight, compelling mechanics with the kind of fiction I loved to watch and read.

But it’s also terrifying. Since there are so few “Mexican” games published within our community, Cartel has to do a lot of heavy lifting. I’ve spent the last three years honing the mechanics and experience, and I’m so proud now that it delivers both on the cultural experience I knew was possible and a gaming experience that I hope keeps folks coming back again and again.

Rear cover of the special edition book with a colorfully illustrated sugar skill on it. Coloring by Brooke Carnevale, Layout by Miguel Ángel Espinoza.

Considering your heritage and background, how have you approached writing those of native Mexican heritage, and intersecting identities like women, queer people, and biracial people? Class would also be pretty significant here, so I’m curious as well how you handled that.

For the most part, Cartel is about Mexican people, not Mexican- Americans. But those lines are blurry for Latinos. After all, the border crossed us. In my home state of New Mexico, for example, the land was colonized by the Spanish before it was annexed by the Americans. Who cares what borders the gringos try to put on us?

But… I also have to recognize my distance from the reality. I live in Albuquerque: 850 miles and a whole country away from Durango, MX, the setting for Cartel. Many people there live with the threat of narcoviolence every day, and I can’t expect to really understand their reality from reading a few books. I can do my research and know my own history, but I’ve needed help from folks like Miguel to get the details right. For example, the first draft of Cartel gave a large role to the local police… which I have since learned is pretty far off from how the world really works.

Issues like queerness and race are even more complicated once you cross the border. Much of my game is about class, the ways that your financial reality determines your available options, but I’ve tried to create room for folks to bring a variety of characters to the table to engage the systems. Ironically, the cartels can be very egalitarian; they don’t care if you’re gay or a woman if you’re effective at your job!

Image advertising the Cartel Quick Start, which can be downloaded here.

A game focused on drugs and the associated traumas like violence and oppression is pretty intense. How do you handle those topics in Cartel? Do you use any safety mechanics to support exploration of those aspects?

Yes, absolutely. I think that one of the best parts of Cartel is that it demands that everyone at the table take some time to discuss what they want from the game before they sit down to play it. No one signs up for a session of Cartel without some thought about the experience they are about to have! (I hope!)

In the full text, I plan to provide GM’s tools for working with safety at the table, ranging from how to have the first discussion to example safety mechanisms like the X-Card, etc. That said, I believe that those mechanics are primarily external to the game itself. Each group needs to figure out what is required for them to feel comfortable with the material, and that line is going to change a lot from group to group. I’ve found that it’s really hard for me to tell folks where that line should be.

That said, I’ve done a lot to structure the experience within the game’s mechanics, sometimes in really subtle ways. La Sicaria (The Enforcer), for example, is a character that I’ve spent a lot of time shaping to produce a specific experience. One major change to that playbook I made early in development was to make her a retired enforcer who came back to the game after some absence, adding some world-weary priming for anyone who picked up the character. That’s helped to structure the fiction in productive ways–way fewer psychokiller sicarias!–without limiting what any player brings to the table.

Character playbooks with stylized layout and illustrations, with La Sicaria in front. Illustrations by Mirco Pagnessi, Layout by Mark Diaz Truman and Miguel Ángel Espinoza.

What are the mechanical bits that you think express Cartel‘s narrative and the unique experience of the game?
I think there are three main places that Cartel is expressed through the mechanics: basic moves, stress moves, and playbooks.

The basic moves in Cartel work like any other Powered by the Apocalypse game, but they put a heavy emphasis on the conversation the players are having. There are four separate moves dedicated exclusively to talking or texting (pressure someone, justify yourself, get the truth, make an offer) and several others (size someone up, press your luck) that can be triggered verbally. That makes Cartel a game about conversations in the same way that Pulp Fiction is a movie about conversations: there is violence, but the camera lingers far longer on a good argument.

Stress moves invoke the entire stress engine, the bloody, beating heart of Cartel. Essentially, each player character in Cartel marks stress to avoid problems or keep themselves together in difficult situations. Eventually, that stress builds…and need to be released. It’s possible to just lose yourself in a substance to get through the day, but you might find yourself verbally abusing or shaming someone you care about or dishing out a beatdown to someone in a weaker position.Or if things get really bad… you’ll end up confessing your sins to a priest, cabrón.

Finally, the playbooks themselves contain a ton of Mexican culture and narrative that each playbook brings to the table. El Halcón has a pandilla (a crew), that comes along with him on odd jobs for the cartel, sort of like Badger and Skinny Pete followed Jesse around. The specific structure of that crew, their features and problems, is absolutely Mexican, rooted in the kinds of close relationships that exist between folks who work the street-level drug trade. I consider each playbook to be a challenge: how can I add a new facet of Mexico to the game with this character?

Cartel cover with large white text on the left, vertically arranged, over the bright pink colored cover. The picture of the Mexican man with the large gun and crates of drugs is the cover image. Illustration by Andrew Thompson, Layout by Miguel Ángel Espinoza.

How does the design of Cartel address challenging subjects – things like race, gender, and intersections of communities and cultures?

I’m honestly skeptical sometimes of my own ability to interrogate my games: I think a lot about what I’m trying to do, but it’s hard to simultaneously play the violin and say what playing the violin is supposed to mean! My hope is that, at some level, Cartel asks more questions than it answers about race, gender, and culture. Certainly Reddit threads like this one are a great start to the conversation about what games like Cartel are supposed to accomplish.

But I also think that Cartel issues a fundamental challenge to the gaming industry through its mere existence: it forces a mostly white audience to consider what it means to be Mexican, without the distance of metaphor or time. In many ways, my game design has been an effort to live up to that challenge, to take seriously the idea that white folks who might not have close relationships with Mexican people might sit down and play through a few days in their lives, not as a joke or a farce…but as a compelling drama. I think Cartel makes some white folks uncomfortable because it makes them realize how alien the experiences of their fellow humans can be, that they are more comfortable playing orcs than they are people of color.

To quote Junot Diaz:

Motherfuckers will read a book that’s one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they [white people] think we’re taking over.

I absolutely see Cartel in the tradition of indie games that includes Steal Away Jordan, Dog Eat Dog, and Monsterhearts, works that strove to expand what’s considered “normal” in our spaces by demanding that the narratives of the oppressed be given some time in the spotlight.

A woman holding a serious firearm looking into the trunk of a vehicle, from which someone’s arm is extended, by Andrew Thompson.

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Thank you so much to Mark for the interview! I hope you all got a kick out of the interview and that you’ll check out the Cartel Kickstarter today!

P.S:Some updates made at 12:03pm on 3/20/18 to correct the names of the artists in the subtitles. Very sorry to Brooke Carnevale, Miguel Ángel Espinoza, Mirco Pagnessi, Andrew Thompson, and Mark Diaz Truman for my errors – it sounds ridiculous but I’m new to doing proper subtitling. I apologize.

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Five or So Questions on Chernobyl, Mon Amour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Juhana Pettersson

What struck the romantic tone in Chernobyl, and how do you bring it to forefront in the game?

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

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

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

Aged and detailed map of nuclear zones. By Miska Fredman.

How does the game work mechanically? Does romance interact with the mechanics?

In terms of game mechanics, Chernobyl, Mon Amour is an attempt to broaden the scope of what we consider game design. It has no real mechanics to speak of in the traditional sense. No stats, xp, combat rules. Instead, I’ve attempted to code the design into the world description, the character creation guidelines, the preparatory workshops and so on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Valokuva 2,” distant image of buildings and industrial structures. Juhana & Maria Pettersson.

—

Thank you so much to Juhana for the interview! It was so cool to learn about Chernobyl, Mon Amour. I hope you will all go check out Chernobyl, Mon Amour on IndieGoGo and share this post with your friends!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Loving Your Work

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

John’s post:

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

My responses:

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

I’m not great at this yet!

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

Description: Debbie Reynolds saying “Chins up! Boobs out!”

It’s okay to not love your work.

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

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

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

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

Description: Freddie Mercury saying “Fuck everybody else!”

That being said.

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

How am I feeling while I look at this work?

Do I feel disgust?
Do I feel sad?
Do I feel angry?

Do other people tell me they feel this way about them?

How do other people feel about them?
If you haven’t shown them to anyone, show them to someone after the exercise.

Why do these pieces make me feel this way?

Is it because of their structure?

How should they be structured?
Can I change their structure?
How?

Do they look bad?

How do I want them to look?
Can I make them look that way?
How?

Do they not function?

Can I make them work?
How?
What tools do I need?

Do they relate to something negative in my life?

Can I talk to someone about that?
Can I change it to ease that connection?
How?

Has someone said something bad about them?

Were their complaints valid?
Can I solve any valid issues the person presented?
How?

Are they unfinished?

Can I finish this?
Do I need to?
Can I set it aside officially and return sometime?

Are they not what I planned for them to be?

What did I plan for them to be?
Can I make changes to make them that?
How?

Did they not give me the success I wanted?

What was the success I wanted?
Do I need to rely on that success?
Can I ask for help to find it?

Have I been too busy to work on them?

Do I want to make time to work on them?
Can I make time to work on them?
How?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Tag: story games

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