I started writing Script Change, from what I can remember and what Google Drive tells me, in 2013. I had started playing indie games a while before, and earlier that year, I’d written about how I’d used the X-card in a game of Monsterhearts. With the X-card, though, I used a secondary card introduced by Kira Magrann called the O-card, effectively a way to encourage people to do the thing that you were enjoying.
I have a lot of feelings about safety mechanics, trigger warnings, and so on. I really appreciated the X-card. It gave me some new freedoms, I could try things I wasn’t familiar with. And the O-card was great, but I realized that I didn’t need it if people already knew what I was looking forward to, what I wasn’t sure about, and if I had something other than the X-card to show what way I thought the story could go.
Script Change has had many, many updates. Briefly, there was an applause function to encourage people to do things, but I felt it wasn’t genuine enough. Thinking it through, I really thought the core things in it – rewinding to redo scenes for whatever reason, pausing to take a break and get perspective, and fast-forwarding to get over things that are too much or that we just don’t want to bore ourselves with them – are more important than anything else. I’ve added some smaller things in the end, like the Wrap Meeting for debriefs, Instant Replay to reduce confusion, and the Highlight Reel to help keep people excited and enthusiastic for the game.
The biggest thing about Script Change is that it’s supposed to be flexible. It demands a conversation about consent, and about what people want in a game. It reminds people that games are not set in stone. We aren’t chipping into marble, here. We are telling a story as we go, and we can change things to make it more exciting, more fun, more of whatever we want – and less of what we don’t want.
Script Change is not the only content tool out there, and there is a lot to be said about doing what works best for you. But, it has been a labor of love for me, because I want people to play games that they enjoy! I want them to have experiences of a lifetime with the chance to pause and get ready for more, or even just a chill beer and pretzels night where the tonal shift can be easily fixed with a “rewind.”
I hope that you’ll check out Script Change and if nothing else, just see if you can glean something new from it. Most of all, I hope you have a hell of a good time playing some games. <3
Check out Episode 6 of Designer & Devourer (click the title of the blog post!)! I’ll be talking recent posts, upcoming stuff, and then unsolicited game design. The recipe this week will be zucchini bread. J Designer & Devourer Episode 6 on Patreon! I’m gonna try to catch all of the recent posts here after the recipe, but first, upcoming is an interview with Keith Stetson on Seco Creek Vigilance Committee, currently on Kickstarter. I also am working on an interview with Jack Berberette about his project for a Braille printer for gamers, currently on GoFundMe.
Posts recently done that are relevant to this podcast episode:
1.Move oven rack to low position so that tops of pans will be in center of oven. Heat oven to 350°F. Grease bottoms only of 2 (8×4-inch) loaf pans or 1 (9×5-inch) loaf pan with shortening or cooking spray.
2.In large bowl, stir zucchini, sugar, oil, vanilla and eggs until well mixed. Stir in remaining ingredients except nuts and raisins. Stir in nuts and raisins. Divide batter evenly between 8-inch pans or pour into 9-inch pan.
3.Bake 8-inch loaves 50 to 60 minutes, 9-inch loaf 1 hour 10 minutes to 1 hour 20 minutes, or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool in pans on cooling rack 10 minutes.
4.Loosen sides of loaves from pans; remove from pans and place top side up on cooling rack. Cool completely, about 2 hours, before slicing. Wrap tightly and store at room temperature up to 4 days, or refrigerate up to 10 days.
Posts since Episode 5:
Just Say No (content note: brief mentions of rape and sexual assault, violations of consent.)
Hey all! Today I have an interview with the fantastic Grant Howitt on his new game Spire, created alongside his cohorts Mary Hamilton and Chris Taylor from Rowan, Rook & Decard. Spire is currently on Kickstarter, and has some mad cool art. It’s got some themes I dig, so when Grant asked about an interview, I was stoked. Check out the responses below! —
Art by Adirian Stone
Tell me a little about Spire. What excites you about it?
Here’s the elevator pitch: you play a dark elf in a city ruled by high elves, and the high elves are cruel and uncaring and powerful and you’re downtrodden and your culture is being eroded, day by day, so you decide to fight back and subvert the high elf rule through shadow war and insurrection. It’s a storygame, in as much as it has a system which focuses more on abstraction than simulation, and we’ve tried to write it around making it as easy as possible to tell the sort of dark, desperate stories we envisage coming out of the setting.
The thing that’s exciting me now is, weirdly enough, the minutiae; after writing so many short games (or, like Unbound, games which don’t use setting at all) it’s wonderful to be able to really luxuriate in a world and poke around in its corners. I got to write a section detailing the different kinds of goats you get in the city of Spire, you know? And I don’t know if anyone will actually use that in their games, but I think that it all adds to the ecosystem of the thing, that it all supports itself. It’s been interesting to see how people have already taken to the setting.
Where did you pull from for the setting – from media and from your own experiences in games and otherwise?
We’ve drawn inspiration from all sorts of places. Off the top of my head: Unknown Armies, Perdido Street Station, Gormenghast, Necromunda, and Dredd have all been influential. I’ve also been fascinated by depictions of Kowloon Walled City, in terms of how humans can rebuild and repurpose spaces in desperate times for their own ends. (Something about the idea of building something in a space meant for something else really fascinates me.) As far as the look and feel of the thing goes, we’ve looked to the Brutalist movement of the 1960’s/70’s to inspire our architecture; lots of harsh lines, big angular shapes, jutting concrete.
We’ve also drawn heavily on our love for cyberpunk – Neuromancer is one of my favourite novels – to inspire us, but we’ve replaced technology with religion. A lot of the game is about control over religion, and in a fantasy world where clerics can perform actual provable miracles, you start veering into cyberpunk territory pretty quickly.
Art by Adirian Stone
What are the benefits to a D10 system for this kind of game? How does it make the action appropriate to the themes and setting?
It’s the one we settled on, really. We wrote no fewer than fifteen systems for Spire, trying to find one that was smooth enough to run without getting in the way but granular enough for us to write specific rules for characters, gods, etc; we had a playing card system, we used D20s, we used D6 pools, and so on, and so on. We tried everything. As we went through our first playtests, though, it became pretty clear to me that the system we were using wasn’t working, and I wanted something with more streamlined rules that the GM could run without really thinking about it.
The reason we ended up with a D10 system is that we didn’t want to, and couldn’t really, write rules for every single thing in the city. We wanted to leave a lot of it up to the GM to determine, because everyone’s game is different; and therefore rather than writing a comprehensive and perhaps unwieldy ruleset, we opted for something that GMs can grok really easily and then get on with the business of telling stories.
How do you see stress working out in playtests? What emotional experiences do the players have with it, and how does that match your intent with the design?
Honestly, I’d like to see more characters going mad and dying, but we seem to have quite lucky players. Stress is interesting; it rewires everything bad that can happen to you into a single number, so there’s kind of a floating badness behind a character with high stress – a high potential for something going really wrong. One thing we’ve tried to do is make sure that fallout, especially severe fallout, pushes the story forwards rather than stopping it. We don’t want to punish people for pushing their characters past the breaking point by removing them from the story; we wanted to reward them with more story, but not necessarily a nice story.
As far as concrete examples go… we had one character use his sacred rope to bind a door shut so no-one could open it (and thus escape from the massacre inside that the players had set up to assassinate a corrupt bishop), and as he watched blood pool under the gap, he developed a lasting phobia of doors. We had another group summon, and then sacrifice, a river god to power a ritual, and in seeing the river god come to earth our Azurite (a type of trader-priest) went utterly mad. I gave him the option of surviving if he betrayed his friends on behalf of the new god, and to the player’s credit, he immediately launched himself off the side of Spire and crashing down into the docks below than risk staying alive a minute longer. Those two really stand out for me.
Layout by Alina Sandu
What is the most challenging thing you’ve encountered with the path of design to funding? Have you had to rethink a rule shortly before the Kickstarter, and if so, how do you resolve that?
We’re rethinking and tweaking rules all the time; we invented an entire class (the Firebrand) about a fortnight before the campaign began because I felt like we needed to give players some more room to manoeuvre. Luckily, by now, we’ve got a feeling for the system and setting which means that we can intuit rules fairly easily now without the need for extensive testing.
We actually rewrote the equipment rules earlier this week; in the quick-start rules they use a level system, and if the level of your item is higher than the level of the area you’re in, you get an extra dice to roll… and I dunno, it worked, it just didn’t sing to me. It wasn’t doing what we wanted with equipment, which was to use it to help portray the character who’s carrying it. So now we’ve scrapped the level system and switched to a more narrative thing, where (non-weapon/armour) equipment is either mundane and it just lets you do the thing, or it’s special and you name a positive and negative aspect about it that marks it out from every other item of its kind in Spire. It gets players thinking more about their equipment choices and pushing the story forward to their specialties, which I like.
Who are some of the characters you’ve seen in play, NPCs or PCs, that you think embody The Spire as a story and setting?
We’ve had a hired killer who packed it all in and joined the community-focused church of the light side of the moon; we’ve had a towering glamazon with an Amy Winehouse beehive and a sacred hyena chained to her wrist; a rough-and-tumble Knight of the North Docks (think a sort of feudal mafia) whose player decided that all Knights are in fact women wearing giant codpieces and dressing up as men, and more power to her because that’s a brilliant idea; a Firebrand espousing Marxist ideals; and one guy who, when he was held at gunpoint, about to be sacrificed to a hungry god of vengeance, managed to convince the ritual leader that there was a better life for her with him – and the pair of them ran away and now live unhappily above a pub.
Map by Tim Wilkinson Lewis
How does religion work mechanically, at least in a vague sense, in Spire? I’m curious about the application!
Each class has a Refresh ability which they use to remove stress – and in the case of religious characters, this is tied to their faith. The Lahjan, moon-clerics, remove stress when they help people who can’t help themselves; the Carrion-Priests remove it when they complete a hunt; and so on. We’ve also got a few additional abilities tied to minor faiths – not minor in the sense of power, but minor in the sense that we didn’t feel that there was enough material to build a whole class around them. Anyone who fits the prerequisites can access these abilities, and with them they get an additional Refresh ability.
In terms of what it does in-game; at low levels, many of the miracles are coincidental or limited in their scope (so you can heal people for a bit, or summon a flock of crows, or buy access to a proficiency you don’t have) and later on they ramp up to some real weirdness, like turning into moonlight or a massive hyena or a crowd or an idea. (The Firebrand, as I mentioned earlier, gets access to divine powers but only really at high levels; due to the loose way that reality works in Spire, and in our setting, the more successful they get, the more power they start generating from the faith that people place in them until they can enchant improvised weapons by touching them.)
Art by Adirian Stone
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Thanks so much to Grant for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading about Spire and that you’ll check out the Kickstarter as it’s rounding up to finish soon!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
Hello! Today I have an interview with Ross Cowman and Mo Golden on Night Forest, which is currently on Kickstarter. The game looks fascinating and I’ve heard really cool stories about it, so I hope you enjoy what they have to say!
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Tell me a little about Night Forest. What excites you about it?
Ross: Night Forest is a ritual game where we play wandering memories. It is a practice in self reflection, embodiment, and deep witnessing.
Mo: As for what is exciting, one thing for me is our collaboration and the meeting of our two disciplines and perspectives. I think it is a jumping off point for more interdisciplinary collaboration.
Ross: Yeah! Totally. I feel like watching your work in expressive arts has really inspired me to pay more attention to transitions and the process of immersion. This had a big impact on my work Fall of Magic and it is great to be able to now design something together.
What inspired you to make a game about memories, especially ones that can be forgotten?
Mo: There’s so much that happens in our lives that we forget. By working with embodiment and evocative images, we can often retrieve what has been forgotten, which is really powerful and inspiring to me. Night Forest offers an opportunity to look at what we remember and what is lost.
Ross: We wanted to create a space where people could share things about themselves that they don’t normally have cause to share. There is something precious about these rarely visited memories.
Why do players use a candle to signify their lasting memory? Is their physical presence otherwise important? (Along that, do you think this could play remotely?)
Ross: The candle does a lot of work in Night Forest, it creates an intimate space, it constrains your movement, it requires care and is actually kind of a burden. Becoming forgotten is a relief of that responsibility and also of the responsibility of having to share and explore your memories. Now you just listen.
Mo: The flame is alive and has to be cared for. It slows us down and focuses us. I wonder if it could be played remotely… My concern with that has less to do with the candle and more to do with moving around. Movement and having a physical experience are central to this game. I would be curious to see how that could work virtually.
How do you see players interact with each other when they share their memories, and do you see much variety in the memories they share?
Mo: There’s a ton of variety, which is cool to watch. Even with the same card, there are infinite possibilities. It’s a very personal and intimate experience, yet somehow really accessible. There’s a tenderness I see in people while they’re sharing.
Ross: There is a lot of listening and smiling and serious looks. For me it has been a reminder of how much we can still communicate without our voices. How much we can connect with just our faces and our energy.
How did you design the content of the cards, as well as the appearance, and make them seem coherent and consistent?
Ross: The cards and images are designed to pull at each other. Contrast is a source of energy in nature, and it is the same with our imaginations.
Mo: I loved illustrating the cards. It was like swimming through a dream, making associations and letting myself be surprised by my pen. The choice to use black paper and metallic ink was so that the image would shine in candle light. The over all aesthetic takes players into a dark, wooded, magical place… even if they’re looking at the cards in an office building in the middle of the day.
So, would you mind giving me a brief pitch for your Patreon? Tell me about some of your creations. My Patreon is what I use to fund my endeavors and gather attention for the games I make: a lot of great people there give me incredible feedback and promote my games, and the financial support I get helps take some of the stress off my living requirements, so all in all Patreon is what’s keeping my work going right now! I create small, short-ish games about sex, kink, communication, and connecting to others.
My game “A Real Game” won an award at GenCon! That and Our Radios are Dying are probably what people know of me best. It’s a game about taking an actual printed copy of the game and interacting with the pages, sometimes transforming or modifying them, as the game itself becomes sentient and speaks to you, unsure of its right to exist. It’s certainly gained the most attention, with a lot of different interpretations, which is always interesting to see!
Our Radios are Dying is a game about two space lesbians who got separated from their spaceship and are now drifting through space with only an hour left before they die. They have nothing else to do but talk about their relationship and their problems and who they are. You play it by sitting on rolling office chairs and actually spinning and floating around on them, as if moving through space, and I quite like it.
Kirigami Dominatrix Display Simulator is a game about domme-ing a sheet of paper. You take on the role of an alien dominatrix and do kinky things to the paper using common stationary tools, using this to immerse yourself in and symbolize BDSM play. I think it’s my most clever game, and it’s informed a lot of the rest of what I do.
Screenshot from inside Kirigami Dominatrix Display Simulator.
I’ve read Kirigami Dominatrix Display Simulator, and it’s a freaking fantastic game. I loved the design, and the use of paper and scissors and other modification of the paper is a gorgeous idea. It also includes some extra rules on how to simulate BDSM and orgasms in other games, which I loved, and it’s one of the most innovative and respectful games I’ve seen involving sex.
Tell me a little about your process for creating games. Do you brainstorm? Do you use any specific techniques? Is it pure Caitie goodness? How do you do it? Typically I think of something I wish I saw in games or a particularly trope or idea I want to fiddle with, and I’ll just keep that idea floating around in the back of my head. At the same time, I’ll think of characters or situations or plots that I like and keep those floating around in the back of my head as well. At some point, there’s a marriage, and then I make a game!
Sometimes two ideas click instantly, sometimes it takes forever. There’s stuff on my computer that’s been waiting years to get used, and maybe it never well. Eventually they work though, and I write out what I think is the best part of that system, slowly building up ideas while daydreaming at work. Then once I have it written out, I mercilessly edit and cut everything I can until it’s distilled down into what I think is the simplest and most fun version of that idea possible.
One of her better known games, bugfuck, is about bugs fucking. Like, for real. It’s amazing.
What is your background in games? How did you become a designer?
I grew up around people that were roleplaying and I never understood it, but I always wanted to figure it out and play. I did a little bit in middle school, but then sort of got into it proper in high school. I kept trying different games and different ways to play because I got bored after a while of just playing only one game, and so I got experienced with different mechanics and different playstyles. As I played with more people and as I started to dig into the indie publishing scene, I tried to make houserules that I wished were in the games I played – and then eventually after years of that, I had a more defined sense of how I liked to roleplay, but didn’t find very many games that experimented with it, so I made my own!
What helps you decide the medium to use for your games, the mechanics, and so on?
Basically editing. I slap together a game that I think will accomplish what I want, and after exploring it some, I realize it doesn’t do what I want at all, and then I search for what will. The first drafts of most of my games are very traditionally game-y: dice, character sheets, processes. It’s by seeing how those ideas don’t allow me to achieve the story I want that I open myself up to what does. It’s just ruthlessly cutting everything away until I only have the barest idea left.
What do you do to draw in more players and customers?
Oh, I wish I knew. advertise monthly or bi-monthly on social media, I enter a lot of contests, I get hired to do Kickstarter stuff and so on, eventually hoping that people will recognize my name and like what I do and seek me out. I just design a lot and spread out a lot and try to be as visible as I can.
How would you define your “brand” as a designer?
I angle for weird, sad, beautiful, and sexy, pick maybe 2 or 3. It’s just stuff I like to see in stories. Strange things and strange stories are fascinating to me and I love seeing games with quirky mechanics and ideas. I like and aim for stories that feature hot sex or heartbreak or life-affirming beauty or just invasive weirdness, so that’s what I try to make!
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Thanks so much to Caitlynn for the interview and the opportunity to check out her process and work! Up next Caitlynn will be releasing a game in #Feminism 2nd Edition, and has been doing work on a fair number of Kickstarters, so keep an eye out for her name when a new product comes out! Remember to check out her Patreon to support her work and her website for more games!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
This is going to be a little more colloquial than normal, so bear with me. On playtesting in general, I’ve got some Feels™, but later on in the post there’s some more about my recent work on Turn.
I took this of a bison at a local park. 😀
On playtesting while designing in general:
Monkeys on pogo sticks, playtesting is hard. While it is somewhat easier being a player in a playtest for Turn, being a Storyteller is exhausting. Now, it’s not the game. It’s not the players! I’m just an amateur GM and I struggle a lot with it. In both cases (player & storyteller) in playtests, I’m doing double-or-more duty of storytelling/playing and analyzing the ruleset and how it interacts with the players and itself and how the game functions as a whole oh and also I have to worry about how to fix things and where to clarify wording in the main document and ohmYGOD!
BUT. This is really an important part of the design and development process. Not all games need playtested, but many truly benefit from it, and Turn needs this a lot because it is a complicated game with many interlocking pieces and concepts, and for me, it must be perfect.
And like, here’s the deal. I have three major documents in which I maintain Turn’s text – two public facing for players (one for internal playtests, one for external playtests), and one private. When I make an update (which I typically do live), I update all of them. I use comments in the private document if I can’t make immediate documents, and add identical text when I can to each document.
This is essential for my process. I have memory issues that make even taking brief notes difficult because they may be meaningless to me later, so if it’s simple stuff, I change it as soon as possible. I design in-process, on the fly. I can’t rely on future Brie. I need to make the game now, not later. So when I say running and playing these playtests are challenging, it is not simply the act of those things, it is those things and actively designing and critiquing my own work.
I have tried to make games without doing this. I can’t. When I playtest face to face, if I don’t have my tablet at hand, I struggle to fix the things that need updated at a later date. I can play and even storytell, to a degree, while I am making edits. I let players have some chatter while I make notes, or take a quick break. I can roleplay sometimes while I’m trying to determine how a mechanic might impact play, and can sometimes start using it while playing or running instead of waiting to try it later.
I don’t know what I will do if I ever do an even bigger, more complicated game than Turn, but this is my reality right now. I wonder if other people experience this. Do you take notes? Do you edit and change rules on the fly? Can you put off changes until later? I don’t know how weird this is.
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Beast archetype: Otter
In playtesting Turn specifically, I’ve made some minor changes. The core mechanic has not been adjusted. The secondary and tertiary mechanics and structures, some text and interaction, have been fiddled with. I wanted to just go over some basic stuff.
Firstly, in combat, which I talked about on Twitter this week, I’ve finalized the basics. Shifters vs. small groups of humans is simple – shifters call the shots entirely. Any degree of violence, any amount of harm – but there are other consequences. For shifters vs. groups of humans (4+), it gets more complicated. Shifters can flee, if they want. They could sacrifice themselves for the good of others. Or… they can kill everyone. Everyone. But, that’s all the options they get.
For shifter-to-shifter combat, I’ve added an assortment of options based on the beast archetype that the player has. If they have specifically chosen powers on the beast archetype, they may impact the combat. Then, they pick from a Consequences list to apply to their opponent. It worked alright in my first experience with it, though I did end up clarifying some wording.
Second, I had to clarify some elements of the core nature of Turn. Here is an excerpt from the current Turn document explaining the nature of shapeshifters in game and the stories that have freedom to be told:
How Shapeshifters Work While there are some details players will fine-tune in their game, there are a few items of note for how shifters work in Turn. The most important things to note are that:
There is no concrete origin pre-defined. Shifters are not from any real-world cultural, religious, or scientific background. The designer of Turn asks that, unless you are of a particular culture or religion that has shifter backgrounds, you do not use that background for your game.
If there is magic in Turn, it’s unknown and invisible to mundanes. There are also no external entities that hunt shifters, as that would violate the nature of the individual secrets of shifters and the premise of Turn.
Shifters are assumed to be effectively invulnerable, and any real injuries heal rapidly enough that it doesn’t matter. They have the natural bodily functions of their human and beast forms, however.
Shifters have super strength and super senses appropriate to their available forms – scent, sight, etc.
Shifters live the length of their longest lived form, and age at that speed.
Some of this is not like, totally loved by some people, and to be honest, that’s whatever for me. No one has to play the game, like the game, or even acknowledge it. It’s mine, and this is the game I want to see played. The things that I realized were issues the most are things like: are shifters invulnerable? is there magic? can there be threatening external entities? (yes, maybe, no.)
There are reasons for all of these. Shifters are invulnerable because 1) it’s cool, and 2) physical threats, even things like aging, are not the dangers in this game. For the use of magic, sure! If you want to! But visible magic would be the death of all secrets, exposure would be rampant. So yes: magic is cool, but it should not be a function of the world that is free to mundanes.
The last one – the external entities – are because of a deeper issue in Turn that I hope doesn’t fall to pieces when it gets wider distribution. Turn is not about external threats – not outside the town. The threats are within the town, those close to the PC shifters. It’s about internal threats – themselves, their beasts, their desires and needs. It didn’t strike me until someone wanted to include it, though I had considered the possibility very early in conception. But once I saw it, I had a very harsh emotional and thoughtful response, and had to really dig down at the problem.
Another thing that I’ve run into is people just really not grokking small, rural towns. There are things in small towns, especially USian towns, that are really common, and players have had a little trouble accepting them. The weird one I ran into most recently was the fact that virtually everyone drives in small-town rural US. One player from Scotland stated that he didn’t drive at all, and didn’t even have a license, and I was startled – this was not a thing I had considered at all! But it’s true – especially in places like where I grew up, in small, rural towns, not driving is incredibly rare and also very inconvenient. It was bizarre.
Another I’ve encountered is some people’s very significant resistance towards playing religious characters and an aim to frame religious groups as bad. This is problematic. I’m personally agnostic, but I grew up Brethren, and religion is very common in the US, and can be very passionate in rural places. It’s not inherently bad, either. Frankly, having atheists and agnostics, secular people, in small towns like where I grew up? Not common. And people give them a strong side-eye, frankly. So, this is something I’ll be covering, along with the infrastructure of many small towns, in some of the additional text for the game.
No red pandas yet. Be patient. They are cute and fuzzy still.
I also have been getting some minor grumps from people that my beasts are too focused on the US, particularly places near where I live, and that I’m not making an effort to expand my game, which, please take this as kindly as it can be said: fuck off. I have spoken before in many different places, including this blog, about my attitude towards writing what you don’t know and do know. I have only lived in rural Pennsylvania. I’m writing what I’m familiar with right now.
Also, keep in mind, this game is barely in beta. I have a lot of plans for the future for how I can expand it, make it more accessible and more welcoming to players unlike me and who have different experiences. But holy sweet Cena, stop getting mad because I haven’t started writing about small neighborhoods in Canada or rural China. This is a slow process, and you must understand that I am not trying to deny the possibility of those things – I just don’t know them, and I do my best to not bullshit my way to telling stories that aren’t mine.
Anyway.
It’s been very challenging and very revealing, showing me both ignorance on my part, the part of players, and areas where I frankly just need more time and experimentation. But the core of the game stands strong, and I am still passionate about the future of Turn.
Thank you for reading! <3
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
Recently, I participated in a game on Twitter with Caitlynn Belle (@weirdcaitie). She had a weird picture, and for a month, I made daily guesses to what that picture was of. I sadly lost (I believe it was in part on a technicality due to legume furries, but that’s neither here nor there), and had to make a game.
Hi all, I had the chance to speak to Danielle Lauzon about her work at John Wick Presents, and wanted to share with you what she had to say. Danielle is a staff developer and design lead for the 7th Sea live-action roleplaying game, which is at Gen Con this year and should have a few spots left!. Danielle shared with me some of her background, too, so get to know her below!
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Danielle Lauzon
Tell me a little about yourself! What is your background in games, non-game work, and what do you love about what you do?
I’ve been playing RPGs since I was a kid. First trying to get my older brother to let me play AD&D or Magic: The Gathering with him, and then playing Nintendo with my mom. I finally got someone to play a tabletop with me in high school, which is also where I was introduced to Vampire: The Masquerade. When I got to college, I played in my first larp, and well, I’ve been playing pretty much whatever I can get my hands on ever since. I have played in, run, and organized games on every level from small table-tops to large larp events.
I have a Master’s degree in Animal Nutrition and worked as a neuroscientist for the past eight years, until I slowly transitioned to writing for games full time. I had originally wanted to go to Veterinary School, but when faced with a decision between Graduate School and Vet School, I jumped at research. I loved it, except no one told me that if I wanted to really practice my degree, I’d have to move to the Midwest. Let’s talk about how when I lived in Dallas, the place was too cold and dry for me. Anyway, I made due and put my research capabilities to work anyway. The rest I learned as I went. Now I use my degree to tell my friends why the new fad diet they are on is probably no good for them.
To say that I love what I do now is pretty much an understatement. My hobby has become my life, and it’s pretty damned cool. I get into high level game design discussions with people, and they actually take what I say with gravity. I get to go to larps all across the country as research for my job. I mean, other than the isolation of working from home as a fully fledged extrovert, it’s pretty cool.
It isn’t all fun and games though. Deadlines cause a lot of stress, and anyone who has ever written can tell you that writing every day is really a job.
What is happening with the 7th Sea larp? You have a broad plan for it, and I’d love to hear more.
Oh man, I’m so excited about the 7th Sea larp. We’re looking to create a multi-chapter Chronicle that can run for several years. Our goal is to create a meta-plot that incorporates the actions of individuals in different cities to steer it and give it life through over-arcing Stories. These Stories will be high level decisions that generally take place between games, something like inviting an important character into town, or directing troop movements. This isn’t something the characters do immediately, but their immediate support will go towards influencing the outcome of the Story. Some Stories will only be locally focused, but many will tie into that overarching meta-plot.
For the basic gameplay, we’re marrying some American Freeform/Nordic styles with some of 7th Sea Second Edition’s player facing action. I.E. the players mediate actions between themselves as much as they can. And when it comes to characters taking actions against Game Master threats or characters, they simply do, just like in the tabletop. The indecision comes from how the other players may react to what you do, or how your actions push the story forward, and not from whether or not you can do a thing. Of course you can do the thing, you’re a Hero!
As far as setting, I’ll have to refrain from saying too much, other than it’s going to be set mostly in Theah. Though, characters from other areas of Terra may be allowed in the future.
What exactly does a staff developer do in a games company? What is rewarding about it?
You ever wonder how a game book goes from a seed of thought in someone’s head to that beautiful 208 page, full-color supplement sitting in your hands? Well, that’s what I do. Developers in general take the seed of an idea, figure out how it looks in book form, outline the book including giving direction on themes, moods, and overarching story. Then I hire writers to take my ideas and direction and make them into chapters. Then I work with an editor to polish that writing. Then I work with the layout artist to make sure that stuff looks good on the physical page. I work with the art director to make sure the art they ask for fits the themes and mood of the book. Mostly, I’m like a project manager, I take the book from project to project and work with the person doing the work to make sure it fits the vision. If there’s a hole that needs filling, I write it. If there’s a question about the project, I answer it. If there’s feedback from the thousands of Kickstarter backers, I go through and incorporate it into the book, or cry about how I can’t rewrite the whole book to accommodate it.
As a staff developer, I do this for multiple books at a time. I also get to wear the unofficial hat of “Theah expert” here at John Wick Presents. Which really just means that I know where to find that piece of information about what year Eisen tried to invade Ussura and failed miserably.
What’s rewarding about it? Well, these books are like my babies. I get to see them out in the world, and people exclaiming over parts they love, and lamenting on how I cut out their sacred cows from the First Edition. (Something I’ll admit gives me great joy.) But really? I get to work with so many talented people each time I develop one of these books. I get an insight into so many different people’s writing styles and thought processes, and then I get to take the best parts of that and teach them to everyone else. Everyone learns, grows, and as I do more and work with these same people, I get to see them grow as professionals. That is by far the most rewarding part of my job.
What challenges do you encounter working over multiple projects and just keeping it all together?
Oh man, there are all sorts of challenges associated with it. The first being that it’s really hard to switch gears in a single day. I try to schedule stuff so that I can work on something different each day, but sometimes a lot of things come up in one day. I have two methods. The first is bullet journaling, where I make a monthly and daily task list and try to keep up with it as best I can. The other is spreadsheets. I keep project deadlines and schedules in spreadsheets so I don’t lose track. Between that and google calendar, which sends reminders for me (yay!), I am keeping it together. For the most part. Though sometimes things slip through the cracks. :/
Are there specific techniques, software, habits, and/or methods you use to go through the larp design process and separately, the development process?
Google Docs is a great invention that lets me share working projects with other people to get input. Larp writing is a collaborative process, no matter what anyone says. And beyond just converting rules into something larpable, I’m always coming up with scenarios for running the actual larps. And that need collaboration. The same is true with development. I use Dropbox and Google Drive the most for collaborative work, and word or excel files for stuff I keep locally.
As far as habits? Man, that one’s harder. I try to work when I can. Some days I get really distracted, or I can’t concentrate. On those days I make lists of stuff that need to get done to help me organize myself. I may make shopping list for larp props, and I might crowdsource questions I’m having problems solving on my own. Other days, I put my nose to the grindstone and write, edit, and create.
Have you ever had your background education and experience lead to a “whoa, this does not work!” moment when doing development work?
Never directly. I’ve had some moments where I think “science doesn’t work like this” and I might correct something small. For the most part, working with 7th Sea, I don’t have to worry about that. They weren’t known for their scientific genius so much during the Renaissance. Especially not in the fields of nutrition or neuroscience.
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Thanks so much to Danielle for answering questions and sharing so much about her work with me. Remember to check Gen Con schedules for the 7th Sea larp and watch for more from John Wick Presents!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
Today I have an interview with Robin Laws on his new game,The Yellow King. The Yellow King is currently on Kickstarter, and looks absolutely fascinating. I asked Robin some questions about how he’ll be handling content and how the mechanics flow with fiction – check out his responses below!
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Books and slipcover
Tell me a little about The Yellow King. What excites you about it?
The four slim stories that make up Robert W. Chambers’ King in Yellow cycle offer a rich, elegantly creepy starting point for an ambitious new game of literary horror. We’re used to seeing his work through the lens of Lovecraft, who championed these stories, and later expanders of the Mythos like August Derleth. Tackled on their own, they present an shockingly contemporary set of themes. Central to the stories are a visual symbols and a work of art that, once you are exposed to them, break you down and change you. In this game I take that a step further and explore the idea that reality itself is coming apart.
I’ve always come at Lovecraftian themes and cosmic horror as a whole from a diagonal, because the themes of “insanity” and “breakdowns” are ones I’m intimately familiar with. How do you address this in The Yellow King? What are you including in the game to both carry the gravity of the impact of cosmic horror, and are you examining real-life trauma parallels?
When you remove the Lovecraftian overlay from Chambers, it ceases to be cosmic horror and, especially in YKRPG’s take on him, becomes what we’re calling reality horror. Lovecraft proposes that when you really see humankind’s absolute insignificance in a vast and utterly random universe, the mind cracks, plunging you into insanity. The King in Yellow cycle by contrast focuses on an idea, an artistic expression, that can rewrite people’s personalities and sense of reality—but can also change objective reality itself.
This allows me to lean away from the idea that the characters are becoming literally mentally ill, or that sanity is a resource you lose over time. There are no insane cultists, but rather people who have been altered or compelled by the exposure to the play The King in Yellow or the sight of the Yellow Sign.
As characters you encounter Mental Hazards, rolling your Composure ability to resist them or take a lesser effect. Rather than losing Sanity or Stability points you get Shock cards, which you try to get rid of as play continues. When you have 3 Shock cards, your character loses her bearings and leaves play, to be replaced by another.
In framing the text, particularly of the Shock cards, I’m steering away from the real life terminology of mental illness. So there’s no Shock card that tells you you’ve suddenly developed, say, paranoid schizophrenia or clinical depression. Nor is there an indication that becoming mentally ill turns people evil or violent.
Now it’s entirely possible that folks who struggle with mental health issues either directly or through the experiences of the people around them still won’t want to explore reality horror at the gaming table. And if it’s not fun, you shouldn’t do it. But a great function of pop culture is as a vehicle to safely process life’s horrors and traumas through a protective veil of outlandishness and the fantastic. Godzilla movies help audiences come at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 9/11 reverberated through comics and spy movies. SF TV shows or a movie like Get Out can get at racial hierarchies in a disarming and metaphorical way. When constructing the treatment of trauma in YKRPG I aspire for it to work in a like fashion.
Ultimately though it all comes down to personal tastes and limits, which can differ even for one person over time. What you might be into at one point in your life could be too close too the knuckle in another.
Aftermath interiors
What are the elements of the new combat system, and how do they influence player interaction with the setting?
Combat is fast and player-facing, meaning that each player rolls only once and the GM never rolls anything, just establishes a difficulty for the foe at hand and modifiers for the situation.
Before starting you decide what your goal is—which might be to kill your foes, but could also be capturing one of them and running away, driving them off, getting through them, and so on. If your Fighting roll fails to overcome the opponent’s difficulty, which varies based on your objective, you take on either a minor or major Injury card. Even as victor you might take a minor Injury if you decline to pay a toll in Athletics, Health or Fighting points. Like the Shock cards Injuries have various ongoing effects, and conditions allowing you to discard them. These often require you to do something in the narrative. Here’s an example (note that the published versions will look much better than my primitive graphic design abilities allow for):
Example Injury
As with Shocks, having 3 Injuries in hand requires you to permanently retire your character.
Tell me a little about each of the books. What makes them unique in theme, and what were their inspirations?
Like two of the Chambers stories, Paris takes place in the City of Lights in 1895. It gives you your classic historical horror experience of interacting with the rich details and personalities of a classic time period, in this case the Belle Epoque, as you deal with supernatural menace.
The Wars follows one of the stories in my collection New Tales of the Yellow Sign by setting itself in a fractured timeline caused by the influence of the play. It’s 1947 and the Continental War rages across Europe. Characters play a squad of soldiers whose military assignments draw them into weird mysteries. They must duck not only monsters from Carcosa but bizarre Jules Verne war machines.
Aftermath, again based on a story from NTYS, proposes that the bizarre then-future described in “Repairer of Reputations” was the basis of an actual reality. A century after the events described in that story, you play revolutionaries in an alternate present who have just toppled the tyrannical and supernaturally-backed Castaigne regime in America. Your investigations confront you with eerie holdovers of the old regime. At the same time you choose a way to help rebuild your nation, involving yourself in post-revolutionary politics.
Finally, This is Normal Now is our modern day, with an emphasis on the glittering, the new, and a horrific spin on contemporary trends. It brings the cycle back to basics, and in full campaign mode, leads you to connect and wrap up the big arc resolving the parallels between your characters from the four settings.
Four books, so many stories to tell!
I’m somewhat familiar with GUMSHOE, and I know that there is a lot of mutability, but it can be challenging to really hammer out the best final decisions. What has your development process been like for The Yellow King? Did you have any moments of clarity that you appreciated?
The key revelation where mechanics are concerned came from
the desire to take the Problem and Edge cards from the GUMSHOE One-2-One engine from in Cthulhu Confidential and translate them back into multiplayer GUMSHOE.
a longstanding Pelgrane goal of making combat player-facing, as discussed above
Since then it’s been a matter of refinement, which is ongoing as I move from the preview draft backers get as soon as they join to a version ready for out-of-house playtest.
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Thanks so much to Robin for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading about what’s coming withThe Yellow King! Make sure to check it out on Kickstarter & tell your friends!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
