Tag: story games

Rusted Swords & Nice Boys: Gender in Sleepaway

Today’s post is by me, Beau, and my husband and business partner, John W. Sheldon. We’re discussing the game Sleepaway by Jay Dragon, and the experiences we had during character creation with the gender options.

All photos in this post are by John W. Sheldon, copyright 2019. I hope you enjoy it!

Beau, on Nice Boys

It is no secret that exploring gender in roleplaying games is kind of a thing I do, This is part of how I got the courage to come out as nonbinary masculine, it’s part of how I discovered I was queer and what kind of queer I am, and it’s helped me develop my perception of self.

That’s not always been easy, though. In the heyday of online text-based roleplay, I could be whatever gender I want – and in Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings fandoms, androgynous characters weren’t as often rejected as they were in other spaces. When I moved to playing face-to-face tabletop RPGs, I do think I encountered some friction with me playing masculine characters or what I now understand were nonbinary (I didn’t have the word at the time), it wasn’t much more than I got for playing pretty or sexy characters or queer characters. But, none of it ever felt… right?

A small pink-topped mushroom beside a rock.

In most of my own designs, I’ve tried to let people write in their own genders, not be restricted by the words and definitions other people are giving them and use to control and oppress them. I mean, it’s not like being “genderfluid nonbinary masculine” like me is actually a thing to anyone else, either, but it’s the closest I’ve got (though I do use “nonbinary boy” as a shortcut these days). But, this isn’t perfect – sometimes people won’t explore without a little help, a little guidance, something to escort them along their way.

When Dream Askew originally was released, I heard about the alternate gender options, and I was so excited! But when I tried to play the game, it was like a square block in a triangle hole – nothing fit, and it was sharply clear. I couldn’t make sense of it – even if I could kind of conceive the genders in my head, I couldn’t make myself want to play those characters.

But when I tried to play [Dream Askew], it was like a square block in a triangle hole – nothing fit, and it was sharply clear. …Enter Sleepaway.

-Beau

Enter Sleepaway by Jay Dragon. This game has been in my to-play for a bit, and my game group – made up of myself (gendered as noted above), my husband John (agender, presents mostly masculine), and my two cis men friends Ed and TJ who are varying levels of into exploring gender and sexuality (no judgement! some of us are just comfortable where we are!). TJ is the one who actually brought the game to the table and is facilitating.

A character sheet and name plate from the game Sleepaway.

The setup is fun in general – I honestly need to make a strong note to Jay that the writing is just phenomenal, evocative, and powerful in this game. I did a lot of summer camps as a kid, both as camper and counselor, and had some very important and scary experiences while there. The game captures all of it so beautifully and richly that I feel like I could play it a thousand times and have a unique experience every time, and learn something new about myself and my characters each time, as well. It’s also respectful in regards to First Nations and indigenous people’s rights, specifically in how you name your camp and respect the land!

And that comes into the character creation with the gender options, and where this post came from. I was skimming over them originally, until I reached The Lifeguard playbook. The top option for gender is “Nice Boy.” Anyone who knows me knows that my primary character type is something approximate to the “himbo” – a hot masculine person who is considered to be not the smartest, but is generally nice and well-intentioned even if it doesn’t always work out. I like nice boys, and specifically the gender of “boy” (not meaning a child) is one I identify with. The more I read the specific list, the more I was hooked. I knew what it meant to be a Lighthouse in the Darkness, or to be Relatable. I felt so seen by these options – and I could see other people I know in it too.

A screenshot of text saying "Describe Your Gender:" with the options "Nice Boy, Wonder Woman, A Savior and a Saint, Eagle, Castle, Lighthouse in the Darkness, and Relatable."
The Lifeguard gender options.

During and after character build, the table talked extensively about the gender options, especially me and John. John rarely talks about gender – as an agender person, he’s often said it just never clicks with him! I asked him if he could write a little about his perspective, so he has below.

John, on Rusted Swords

I’ve mostly ignored gender in games. I recognize that as a supremely privileged thing to be able to do, but as a male, masculine-presenting person, nobody made it an issue for me if I didn’t make it one for myself. As an agender person, I never really had strong feelings about gender presentation in games either – I honestly never thought of gender until other people brought it up.

Playing classic games like D&D and Shadowrun growing up, gender was usually just a single letter on a character sheet, something I jotted down and almost immediately resumed ignoring. It didn’t mean anything to me, and at the time I didn’t understand that it could to anyone else. After all, it didn’t change any of the rules for my character, or restrict any of their actions. I won’t pretend that I and my play groups weren’t steeped in misogyny as a teen, but even if I put the “F” on my character sheet, I still got treated well because I was, as a player, perceived as a man.

Then I grew up a bit. I realized that, in contrast to my own experience, other people did have an internal experience of gender. Their internal gender experiences meant a lot to them, even. I struggle to apply a useful simile to the situation, but slowly realizing that I was agender was a bit like a person slowly coming to understand that they were colorblind: people were experiencing things and making a lot of decisions based on information that was absent for me.

Then I discovered a wave of independent tabletop RPGs that dared to fuck with gender. They made it something other than a binary toggle, and didn’t pretend it was necessarily tied to biological sex. Gender was queried as a way to ask about look and presentation, and there were lots of options! I was glad that other people had selections they could use to represent themselves, but I went right along basically ignoring the whole category of experience. I dutifully picked an option during character generation, usually just as a creative choice to help define the look of the character, then went on ignoring it in play as I always did.

I dutifully picked an option during character generation, usually just as a creative choice to help define the look of the character, then went on ignoring it in play as I always did.

-John

I even tried an early version of Avery Alder’s Dream Askew. Unlike the other indie titles I’d read which focused on presentation, Dream Askew gave pick lists for actual gender, but eschewed the standard selections in favor of evocative phrases. For me, this was actually a problem. With no internal experience or sense by which to judge these phrases, and no ready external indicators to associate with them, they just looked like a list of nonsense words. To me, they might as well have been an actual list of randomly-selected words. It took me out of the game and made the whole thing more difficult for me to engage with.

A picture of the character sheet showing the gender options for the Ropeskeeper, including Hermit, Sailor, Druid, Swamp Thing, Rusted Sword, A Fox, An Ancient Oak, and None of Your Business.

Then, last night, I played Sleepaway. Like Dream Askew, each character archetype has a list of options for gender, but there was something different about these. These were written with deep ties to a genre I knew. More than that: their names resonated with attitudes and behaviors I knew and recognized in myself. Instead of a list of words that meant nothing to me, I found myself using these signifiers to imagine different ways of being for these characters – they were presentation, behavior, and identity all in one. They were gender in a way I’d never understood or experienced it for myself.

I found myself using these signifiers to imagine different ways of being for these characters – they were presentation, behavior, and identity all in one. They were gender in a way I’d never understood or experienced it for myself.

-John

Is Jay Dragon a genius because they wrote “Rusted Sword” as an option for a character’s gender? Yes. I’m saying absolutely, definitely yes.

Sunset on a lake with a tree partially obscuring a starry yellow-purple sky.

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Thank you so much John for sharing your perspective on this! I think this has been so valuable to experience for me, and I think it’s a gorgeous piece of design. You can find Sleepaway here and if all goes well, I’ll update with our adventures at Camp Why-I-Otter!

Five or So Questions on the Curse of the House of Rookwood

Hi all, today I have an interview with Mike Addison about The Curse of the House of Rookwood, which is currently on Kickstarter and looking to hit some stretch goals! It sounds really interesting and explores family dynamics – check out Mike’s responses below!

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A black & white illustration that looks like a woodcutting featuring a tall white-haired man, a shorter dark haired man, a long-haired woman in a white dress, a very elderly man in front sitting, and a man in the back holding a stick of some kind adjusting something.

Tell me a little about The Curse of the House of Rookwood. What excites you about it?

Rookwood is a story game where you play a family with an ancient curse that grants them supernatural powers, but slowly transforms them into inhuman monsters.  Since you play as members of a family — parents, children, aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins — the game is packed with relationships that your characters value, but did not choose for themselves. The rules support this part of play by giving you tools to create interesting problems that complicate these relationships, and reward you for exploring them during play.  I spent the last year running the game for different groups at conventions, and it is exciting to see the different ways that players interpret “family” as a game/story concept. It can be funny, poignant, and sometimes a little bit intense, but it always seems to ring true because family is a common denominator for pretty much everyone.

A broken-down cemetery depicted in black and white linework.

How do the rules work to connect and structure the family, and complicate those relationships?

Family is defined in the rules on several levels.  First, during character creation, players collaborate to answer questions about their progenitor, their ancestor who brought the curse upon the family.  Their answers shape the current standing of the family, as well as what resources the family shares. Second, players define for themselves what family roles they want their characters to fulfill — parent, child, aunt, grandparent, etc.  It’s up to the players how their family is structured in terms of age, gender, and identity. 

Lastly, each player will choose a Skeleton for their character.  Skeletons are complications that strain a character’s relationship with another character.  This could be a dark secret that will harm the other character, a past mistake they want to reconcile, or an unequal relationship such as a need for approval or being overprotective. Each Skeleton has “bones” — scenes or events that might happen during play that players are rewarded for pursuing.  As a story arc comes to an end, players decide if their Skeletons have been resolved positively, which improves the family’s standing, or negatively, which hurts the family.

Family drama can be difficult for some players! How do you provide support for play to help ensure everyone has a safe experience?

Safety tools are really important, especially with an emotionally charged subject like family relationships. The rules include a section on safety tools, which we introduce upfront.  We recommend that players make use of Lines and Veils, as defined by Ron Edwards of Sex and Sorcery fame, as well as an X-card/O-card at the table.  References to learn more about these tools are included.

A black and white illustration showing woman in a long dress shining a light toward the mantle of a very fancy fireplace in a ornate household.

What are the general activities of The Curse of the House of Rookwood – what do player characters encounter in play (such as monsters or situations), and how do they interact with it mechanically?

It depends on the Campaign Concept your group selects. You could be secret agents for the British Crown, employed to contain or eliminate supernatural threats.  You might play as high society dilettantes, plying your talents as supernatural communicators and hunters. Or you might even play a traveling troupe of entertainers, looking for your next gig.  Regardless what situation you place your family in, the core loop of play is trouble presented by the chronicler — a mystery, an adversary, and outright monstrous threat — and the family’s response to that threat.

Each family member has a finite amount of resources available to them to move the story in the direction they want.  They have Traits, which are a pool of six-sided dice, and Assets, which can be spent to gain some immediate guaranteed success, or to gain extra dice when a Trait roll goes wrong.  Like many rpgs, the game proceeds as a conversation. 

When the outcome of what a player wants to accomplish seems uncertain, the GM and the player work out a list of Risks, things that could go wrong, and Rewards, things that could go right.  The player chooses how many dice to roll from their pool — 1, 2, or 3 — and Assets to spend.  Any dice that roll 4 or higher count as a success, which are used one-for-one to cancel Risks or buy Rewards. 

Where it gets interesting is that the number of dice you roll reflects the amount of effort your character is putting forth in the fiction of the game.  One die is normal effort.  Two dice is extraordinary effort — if you roll any doubles, the effort is stressful and you lose a die from your pool.  Three dice is supernatural effort — you must call forth the gift of your curse.  If you roll doubles, not only do you lose a die, you also gain a new Mark of your curse.

A black and white illustration of a skeleton in a cloak covering their body with their back reflected behind them.

The descent into monstrosity could reflect any number of fears in metaphor. How is it represented in the game mechanically and narratively, and what does it mean to the characters?

As alluded to above, every time you use the power granted to you by your curse — calling forth crows to act as spies, wrapping shadows about you to conceal your movement, suffocating a foe with a billowing mist — you risk gaining a Mark of your curse.  Marks are outward, physical signs of your curse, but could also have an emotional or psychological element.  For instance, if you have the Curse of the Rookery, your Marks could be amber eyes of a crow, black feathers instead of hair, literal crow’s feet, or an uncontrollable urge to steal shiny things. Each character can gain a limited number of Marks.

Mechanically, Marks function as a story timer.  The last Mark on your character sheet is always “Lost to the Curse”. Using your power can give you a lot of narrative control over the story, but the more you use it, the closer you come to being completely lost. At that point, the character is gone from the story — transformed into a statue, a hideous bird monster hidden by the family in the attic, or lost in an endless void of shadows. 

Characters might struggle with identity as their bodies transform against their will, feel dread about suffering the same fate as a lost ancestor with a similar curse, or leave troubled relationships unresolved when they are lost. It’s tragic stuff. And though a character’s fate might be out of their control, it’s important to note that the player does have control over their story.  They choose their Skeleton and their Curse upfront, and they choose how the Marks of their curse manifest.

An image of the book for The Curse of the House of Rookwood in black and grey with very stylized block serif text and a cameo with a skeleton in clothes and with hair on the cover.

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Thanks so much to Mike for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out The Curse of the House of Rookwood on Kickstarter today!

Five or So Questions on BALIKBAYAN

I have an interview today with Rae Nedjadi on BALIKBAYAN: Returning Home, which is currently available on itch.io! This game sounds so fascinating, and Rae talked about some really deep thoughts with me. Check them out below!

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Tell me a little about BALIKBAYAN! What excites you about it?

BALIKBAYAN: Returning Home is a narrative tabletop role-playing game that gives everyone at the table equal creative opportunities! 

Specifically it’s a story about Elementals, beings of Supernatural Filipino Folklore come to life. BALIKBAYAN takes place in the far future, in a Cyberpunk setting at the mercy of The Corp, that has enslaved the elementals through machinery. 

Over the generations these machines have infused with the magic, so BALIKBAYAN is also about wielding machine-magic and using it to stay on the run, destroy the Corp, and rebirth Magic.

I’m excited about so many things about BALIKBAYAN, but I’m most excited about offering a creative playground for everyone to enjoy. I’ve never understood this boundary between science fiction and fantasy, technology and ritual, machine and magic. I wanted to offer people to play with these ideas, while also offering my own modern reimagining of Filipino folklore. 

I’m really happy with the response, and how excited everyone is to enjoy Filipino games made by Filipino designers! I’m honestly hoping this will encourage more people to create their own games so we can have more creative voices in the community.

Another thing that excites me is the game system. BALIKBAYAN is a Belonging Outside Belonging game, which gives everyone more creative control. It’s different from your typical TTRPG experience, where only the Game Master controls most of the narrative.

A sheet with the title BALIKBAYAN and the book of BALIKBAYAN: Returning Home.

Many of my readers will be excited to hear about the Filipino roots of the game! What are some of the elements (themes, history, magic) of BALIKBAYAN that players will see that are very much Filipino?

The strongest and most apparent Filipino themes are present in the Playbooks themselves. Currently BALIKBAYAN has six playbooks: Tikbalang, Diwata, Saint, Aswang Santelmo, and the Duwende. I wanted to unapologetically use the original names for these beings of myth and legend. 

I did this mainly because I come across a lot of Filipinos who are familiar with the folklore of other countries (most people who play D&D here know about elves, gnomes, and all that). But when I run a Filipino inspired game and lean into our roots, most of the people I know, living here in this country, don’t know much about our own myths. And often they use a western perspective when approaching these myths, which breaks my heart. 

I will say though that I decided to personally interpretat the essence of these myths and legends. There are some problematic aspects of our folklore that reflects the centuries of colonization that still influences the Philippines to this day.

For example I wanted to take the Tikbalang and break it away from just being an anthropomorphic horse. Horses aren’t even a natural local animal here, and to this day they’re associated with the elite and privileged. Instead I wanted to lean into our shamanic and animism roots. The Tikbalang in BALIKBAYAN can change into any anthropomorphic animal form, and I wanted that fluidity to be an important aspect of the playbook. I also wanted to reflect how we often look to spiritual leaders in our community, and the Tikbalang is true to that.

I think the SAINT is another important one. Religion is a big thing here in the Philippines, for better and for worse. We have so many beautiful stories about Saints and the mystical miracles they embodied to protect communities. I wanted to acknowledge that, but once again honor our pre-colonial roots and have the SAINT be a playbook that interacts with Small Gods, in a Cyberpunk setting.

I could just go on and on about each playbook!

Sheets titled The Enslaved and The Corp, But That Was a Long Time Ago, and We Were Magic. The last sheet, We Were Magic, is in neon colors with black background.

In general I wanted to honor our folklore, but I wanted to respectfully bring it into the present and reflect our modern values, nuances, and struggles. Because I’m bi-racial, queer, and non-binary, I think that shows in the design. I put so much of myself, and my complex love for my country, into this game.

BALIKBAYAN also speaks to leaving behind our masters and becoming our own masters. I wanted this to reflect in the premise and creative setting, but also in the mechanics and narrative prompts. 

Becoming our own masters is something I want to happen for Filipinos in general. We were colonized for centuries, and the scars still show. As a society, we haven’t done the collective and deeply emotional work to decolonize our perspectives, approaches, and values. In a way we are still bowing down to Masters that have long left us to rot, and it shows in our governance and social value systems. 

I have faith that we can do the work. Many artists, teachers, and leaders are already helping their communities to do so. BALIKBAYAN is my own personal attempt to help along and honor that decolonization process.

BALIKBAYAN seems like a big step away from what we’ve seen from cyberpunk. How have you altered the standard cyberpunk setting to really make it yours and to do something different?

It’s funny, I really get this a lot! But to be perfectly honest, BALIKBAYAN simply embodies how I’ve always seen and engaged with Cyberpunk. For one thing, I’ve always gravitated more to portrayal of Cyberpunk themes in anime, especially from the 80s and 90s. I’ve always appreciated that lens more, and it really speaks to me. 

I did want to make magic a big part of the game. This is again deeply personal. I believe magic and technology aren’t at odds with each other, and magic shouldn’t be regulated to fantasies chained to the past either. I was initially inspired by games like Shadowrun, but I didn’t like how the lore and system created this great divide between magic and technology. So in BALIKBAYAN I wanted to make that barrier non-existent.

I think the main issue with Cyberpunk as a genre is that we often see the aesthetic markers and surface indicators of the genre, but we ignore the important work that POC and queer creators have done in the space. They’ve given me the permission to define Cyberpunk on my own terms. 

And in turn, I want to do the same for the people who will play BALIKBAYAN. The game asks you to bring about the rebirth of magic and to create a Revolution, but what that will actually entail is up to the players and is out of my hands. I believe Cyberpunk, and the Revolution it inspires, is a deeply personal experience. 

Because I don’t think the world will change from one Revolution. I believe it will change, and has changed, from the series of ongoing neverending Revolutions that we bring to life.

A sheet titled DIWATA and details about playing different types of characters.

There is a lot of discussion about decolonizing games and how many major games are from a colonized perspective, so I really appreciate you talking about that! Does any of this translate to the actual mechanics you use in the game? What are the mechanics like?

I definitely feel that the decolonization process can be incredibly personal. For me it was in realizing that the games I used to love to run and play, namely Dungeons & Dragons and games like it, focused on violence, possession, taking things through strength, with a focus on exploring the “alien” and “exotic” and marveling at how “weird” it all was. This was reflected in the mechanics of the game too, I feel. As a Filipino, knowing that my own country was treated this way by its colonizers, it left a really bad taste in my mouth.

In BALIKBAYAN, the Belonging Outside of Belonging system favors narrative play that is entirely in the hands of the players. I also added a few mechanics that center on the decolonization process. First, each playbook asks the players to choose and build on a “human form” and a “true form”. Because the Elementals are on the run, this is basically what forms are “acceptable” versus what they truly look like. I wanted to leave it up to the players and each story what this means, how do they navigate this? Next the playbooks ask you to choose “What you hope for”. While the players are tasked to bring about the Rebirth of Magic (more on that in a bit), I also wanted to give the players a personal goal to help drive the story. In a way this reflects how I feel about the decolonization process: each path is unique, deeply personal. People can talk about what their decolonization process is like, but they cannot dictate to others what it SHOULD be like. Each of us interacts with different intersections of class, race, background, and so on. What the decolonization process is like in America is VERY different from what it is like in the Philippines, and so on. The individual hope reflects that, but it also asks each player to balance or find common ground with that hope and the rebirth of magic.

Which brings us to another mechanic I added. Originally I just liked the idea of having a sort of countdown mechanic, to give the players some structure or urgency to the story being told. There are two clocks running. The first clock is you start ON THE RUN, but can eventually end up CAPTURED by the Corp again. The second clock has you start at FADING, your magic is weak and dwindling compared to your ancestors, but you want to reach REBORN, with the magic being your own.

In my mind, decolonization is not about returning to what was before our colonizers came. That is in the past, and much of our history has been rewritten by those more powerful than us. When I think about what we’ve lost, what we could have been, it frustrates me. When I think of the privilege I enjoy because of my circumstances that are favored by a colonial mentality, I feel guilty and ill at ease. For example, I speak English well and that opened a lot of doors for me, when it shouldn’t have. I strongly feel that the way forward is in acknowledging the past, while building our own sense of worth and grace outside of our colonial mentality. In the Philippines we need to acknowledge that much of our systems and infrastructure are badly compromised by these centuries of colonization. We need to rebuild, to be reborn, to reclaim our own magic.

Sheets of paper titled Homecoming and Death or Rebirth, and We Create Our Fate in neon colors on a black and white image.

I’m nonbinary too, so I’m always fascinated to see how other nonbinary designers make games. How do you feel that your queerness, your nonbinary identity, being bi-racial, and these other personal aspects of yourself have impacted the design and presentation of BALIKBAYAN and the cyberpunk world within it?

To be honest, I used to really struggle with the idea of queer design, and what that looks like. I have to truly give credit to the community of indie designers who looked at my work and reflected on it, helping me see the queerness and nonbinary nature of my design. In BALIKBAYAN my nonbinary asserts itself by allowing the players to choose how active or passive they wish the story to flow. There are tools available, but I provide many examples that show how each game can be unique and flow completely differently. As a nonbinary, I believe in nuance and push away from the black and white. There are some cool mechanics tied to that (for example, even if you bring about the Rebirth of Magic, you have to answer the question “Which one of us runs away, and helps rebuild the Corp?”). Though I also have to say that also reflects my colonial pain, many of us resort to acting like our colonial masters in the way of rebirth and revolution (those dang intersections, right?).

But yes as a nonbinary designer, I come from a place of nuance and push that towards the forefront. I think that also gave me the sheer confidence to tackle the Cyberpunk genre. I grew up loving it, and like so many people like me (queer, POC, etc) I also felt disappointed by how so much of its core themes of revolution and self-acceptance were rewritten and downplayed. But I refuse to back down, and I’ll continue designing in these spaces and do my work to reclaim it along with other diverse artists.

The brightly colored BALIKBAYAN: Returning Home cover with a long haired person in pleather-looking clothes wearing a gas mask and the text of the title on the cover.

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Thank you so much to Rae for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out BALIKBAYAN: Returning Home on itch.io today!

Five or So Questions on Under Hollow Hills

I generally try not to be so under the wire, but life has been hectic lately! Here’s an interview.

Today I have an interview with Meguey and Vincent Baker about Under Hollow Hills, which is currently on Kickstarter! It’s a game about traveling performers and explores a new realm of Powered by the Apocalypse design. Check out what Vincent and Meguey had to say!

All art by Vincent, after Rackham.

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Tell me a little about Under Hollow Hills. What excites you about it?

Meg: Traveling together as a group, seeking audiences, dealing with a stuck wagon or a friend in trouble, showing up at birthday parties to just utterly dazzle a human child and leave them with a touch more wonder than before – that’s all real neat to me. What excites me most though, perhaps, is the core ethic of this game, of paying attention to how we are together when times are good and when times are bad. Fairies often get portrayed as either all sweetness and light or all threat and magical terror, and I’m excited to see MORE than that. We’re drawing on a lot of different fairy stories, and I look forward to the new stories that come from this.

VB: In Under Hollow Hills you play the performers and crew of a circus that travels through Fairyland and through the human world, through good times, bad times, and dangerous times. I’m excited about the tour of Fairyland that the game offers – but it’s like a working tour, not a tourist tour. You’re behind the scenes, you see what goes on in the Wolf King’s Court, you perform for audiences who think they’ve commanded you, but really you’re playing them. You see through the glamor to the mystery, if that makes sense!

I’m also excited by how much the game loves words. Metaphor, poetry, wordplay, puns, it’s a game that loves and plays with language.

The silhouettes of two smaller people carrying paper lanterns and packs.

There are a lot of fairy tales that people might be familiar with. Where are you pulling influence from, and what are some examples of the things you’re spinning of your own?

VB: Yeah! Meg’s history with fairies is older than mine. I think I started, these decades ago, with Alan Lee and Brian Froud’s book Faeries. For me my main sources have been Yeats’ Fairy Tales of Ireland, Sikes’ British Goblins, and Kirk & Lang’s The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies. These all mix collected stories and folklore with the speculations of their authors / editors, much in the mode of a bestiary or field guide. This is where the idea of fairy kinds comes from, I think, these marvelous old collections.

I’m also influenced by Shakespeare, by Norse myths, and by more contemporary fairy tales and fairy tellers like Francesca Lia Block, Tanith Lee, John Crowley, Jane Yolen, and even Jack Vance per Lyonesse.

That said, we’ve tried to keep our interpretations fresh and playful. In the playbooks, for instance, we always try to mix and cross influences, not narrow down. The Chieftain Mouse has elements of Reepicheep and Despereaux, and also of Rob Roy. The Crooked Wand harks back to the three old women who share an eye, and to Odin, and then to Yubaba from Spirited Away and Nora Cloud from Little, Big.

Meg: I had a beloved storytelling teacher in 4th grade, Janet Glantz, who gave me Nancy Arrowsmith’s 1977 Field Guide to the Little People, which leads off with “In high summer meadows, nestled in the moors, near old castles, or behind the kitchen stove—these are the places where the Little People may be found.”. If I had to point to one clear influence alone, it would be this book and this line. The earliest fairy-tales I remember are the ones in Olive Beaupre Miller’s 1928 edition of My Bookhouse books, particularly volume two, which has fairy tales from around the world, and the first book I remember reading for myself is Midsummer Night’s Dream, when I was about 6.

The Muppet Show, of course, and Labyrinth. I saw the 1962 movie Gypsy a surprising number of times as a kid, so the backstage parts of a traveling show were there, and when I was learning to walk and talk, my parents were crew in a Shakespearean diner theater company, which was of course FULL of fairies and actors and stage effects. I spent 8 years in the 1990s doing hair design and costuming for our local Hampshire County Shakespeare Company, too. Apples and trees, you know. Decades of thinking about the natural world in a way that invites the possibility of fairies also fit into the game design, and noticing the playfulness of bees, the enthusiasm of the berry bramble, or the determination of a stream. Then blending all of that so that there are layers on layers of influence, so players can bring their own influences to their unique portrayal of fairyland.

What is Under Hollow Hills like mechanically? It seems like it might function a little differently because of the types of stories you’re telling!

VB: It does!

The structure of the game is, you travel through fairyland and the human world, and everywhere you go, you put on a show. On the GM’s side, this means that between sessions, you prep up where the circus is going next. You don’t prep what’ll happen – there’s no way you could guess! – but just what the place is like, and who’s there. There’s a quick system for this, rules you follow in prep that help you decide who the audience is, what they want from the circus, and what they have to give the circus in return.

In play, then, you arrive at this new place, and you know that you’ll be performing here, but before you do, you want to get the lay of the land. As much as your audience here wants something from you, you want something from them too. So you introduce yourselves, enjoy your hosts’ hospitality, get people’s stories out of them, and meddle as you see fit. When you’re satisfied, then you plan your show and perform.

Planning and performing your show are distinct phases in the game, and they give you a lot of power. In your performance you can change the season of the place – “season” here includes mood, fortunes, history, even who rules and who’s ruled over. You can win from the audience what they have in plenty, or win from them what they hold most dear. You can also change the circus, switching up the performers’ jobs, welcoming new performers or bidding old ones goodbye, and opening the way forward from one world to the other.

Now this is the large view, the overall structure. Your character has cycles and structures of their own. Your capabilities include, yes, ways to get the lay of the land, and ways to plan a show and perform in it, but they also include your own angle on things. Ways to get what YOU want, whether you line up with the circus or not.

Meg: A lot of game mechanics are designed in terms of a linear progression, from point to point to future point. Under Hollow Hills mechanics cycle and spin, as we spiral through the seasons and through our own emotions and the characters’ emotional relationships with each other. Players may come back to things that feel familiar several times in the course of play, but from a different angle each time.

Leaves blowing in the wind.

I’m intrigued by the implicit theme of transience in these stories because of the traveling nature of the troupe and the temporary nature of performance. How does Under Hollow Hills address the concept and experience of transience by the characters, and naturally, players?

Meg: Playing with time and space is part of fairyland, as well as of stagecraft and performance. The magical thinking of childhood when summer never ends, and how it takes forever for a special event to arrive, and the way time moves oddly when you are fully engrossed in the current moment even as an adult, are all part of the game. All those can be tiny windows into fairyland, that may open only for a fleeting moment. We all change over time, in myriad ways. Major ways that come to mind are gender fluidity and variance and how that permeates Under Hollow Hills in reflection of the actual world we live in, and seasonal cycles as they affect all life on the planet. There’s a third, of course, which is mortality, and the questions around death that come up from the fay viewing it as a game and the mortals knowing that for them it is the biggest and most permanent change. Shifting through these moments smoothly takes practice.

As characters pass from moment to moment, in terms of Under Hollow Hills game design specifically, we built in ways to shift your character’s expression fluidly across their summer aspect and their winter aspect, and we recognize the impact people have on places (and vice versa) in the way that the Circus can move the place they perform towards different seasons. Illustrating the pinwheel of the seasons, choosing as a group how you move the circus and spaces through the pinwheel, helps convey the transient but also the cyclical nature of the game, and therefore of life. Movement is a basic part of the game.

Building a game where travel is intrinsically part of the story helps address some fictional issues in storytelling as well. Have you ever encountered a detective series you like, set in “a small country town” where there’s multiple mysteries and murders in each book? For heaven’s sake, get out of that town! It’s a hell-mouth! Making the circus mobile, building an interconnected group that is traveling together, with the inherent community needs and relationship complications that arise when people come to rely on each other, and when they are constantly encountering new groups of people wherever they go, allows for very different stories than having the characters in a fixed location.

Another topic that interests me is the diversity found in traveling troupes in history, and the prejudice with which they’ve been treated. A hard topic, I know, but have you addressed it at all in Under Hollow Hills, and why or why not?

VB: Not so hard a topic! Historically, traveling people, especially traveling performers, have been treated all different ways – with horrifying violence and racism, with glory and celebrity, with suspicion, with reverence – all different ways. Right now in the US, for instance, a lot of carnival workers are seasonal migrant workers, vulnerable to the US’ racist anti-immigrant policies and sentiments.

In Under Hollow Hills, we’re definitely presenting a romantic version of the traveling circus. When the circus travels, it’s usually easy. Where it arrives, it’s usually welcome. When you come into conflict with your audience, usually it’s a personal matter, a disagreement or personal animosity. It’s possible in the game for you to come into town to find a racist hate mob waiting for you with knives and clubs, but the way violence works in the game, it disarms even this kind of situation.

Our goal isn’t to examine real-world racism and violence, or even just the real-world difficulties of taking a show on the road. Those are different games, and ones we’d love to play!

The Under Hollow Hills Logo with the title Under Hollow Hills and the author's names above it presenting the title, "Meguey and Vincent Baker's," and two lightfooted individuals hanging off the letters in frilly dress, all in dark green.

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Thank you to Meg and Vincent both for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Under Hollow Hills on Kickstarter today!

Five or So Questions on DIE

Today I have an interview with Kieron Gillen about his new game, DIE! It’s based on his popular comic of the same name. This game has layers – layers! It sounds really cool so I hope you’ll check it out. See what Kieron has to say below.

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Tell me a little about DIE RPG. What excites you about it?

I’m going to circle around this before pouncing, as I’m terrible. Sorry.

In my day job, I write comics. My latest book can be basically paraphrased as “Goth Jumanji”. It’s a portal fantasy where kids who got dragged into a fantasy game as teenagers get dragged back as middle aged adults, and so acts as a device to compare teenage dreams with adult realities, explore the purposes of fantasy and do a warped conspiracy-addled history of the development of the RPG. As part of its typically over-researched development, I decided I wanted to do an RPG, in some form. The first arc is called “Fantasy Heartbreaker” which is my mea culpa about the whole endeavour. 

As such, the first thing excites me about the DIE RPG is that it’s not my day job. I am a puppy, running through long grass, on a summer day.

In a previous life, I used to be a game critic – mainly videogames, but I see all games as part of the same form. In terms of adaptations, I tend to believe the most interesting  allow you to replay the underlying structure of a narrative. The 1980s Alien spectrum game was about hunting down the alien aboard the ship, but it randomised which individual actually carried the chestburster. As such, it was interested in the possibilities inside the scenario of the movie rather than the specific example of the scenario played out in the movie. Re-enact the dramatic arc, sure, but find a way to make it your own – that’s how you make it live. I wanted to do something like that. I mean, I had a handful of other design goals, but that was my top line goal – create a structure which allows people to create their own personal version of the structure of the first arc of DIE.

A comic page from the comic DIE in which the Game Master presents the die and the concept of playing characters to the others gathered around.
A comic page from the DIE comic.

First the players get together and generate a social group of messy, flawed people. Who liked who? Who hated who? How has their life gone horribly awry? Each player makes one of these Persona. “Player” includes the GM. This is a pure piece of conceptual story game.

Secondly, when it’s decided this is an interesting group of people, everyone steps away from the table. When they step back to the table, they’re all in character as the Persona they generated. After the proper level of social chit-chat, the GM’s persona lobs a RPG on the table, and everyone starts playing, generating a character. Yes, you play someone playing an RPG. 

Thirdly, after that’s done, everyone around the table gets dragged into a fantasy world. They go through a psychodrama fantasy adventure based on all the Persona’s faults, dreams and issues. After overcoming them they then go home. Or not. That’s kind of the point.

So, yes, it’s a meta game, and how it moves between modes of modern play is key – the three levels are clearly inspired by the story game tradition, the nordic larp and something more traditional (though, really, a bit trindie). That’s the most obvious bit of flash, but the core of the game for me is that it how the game changes depending what persona you throw into the situation. There’s a lot of flexibility, but with sufficient scaffolding to head towards a conclusion with the details entirely up in the air.  In the current Beta, that’s designed to be in 1-4 sessions. That I’ve been playtesting it for so many games, and being delighted how it works with radically different persona, remains exciting. I’m running it, and I really don’t have a clue how it’ll end up.

I think you’re one of the first designers I’ve interviewed who has talked about meta with enthusiasm and I love it! What did you do while you were designing to bring out that meta – how could an experienced player or designer see the key lines, so to speak? – without making it hard to approach?

Now, I warn you. There’s a line which I think I got from the wonderful Natasha’s Dance, with a quote about the difference between 19th century German and Russian writers, which I’ll badly paraphrase. The former will work out a theory in advance, and then try and put it into practice, and the latter will write what they want, and then, almost as a game, work out a theory which fits what they’ve done. I can come across as a German, but I suspect I’m very much a Russian. So much of DIE’s core design was done by instinct, and then analysed to death, so now it tends to sound I had a grand plan. 

So much just came from looking at the nature of DIE. This is a game about messy people who get dragged into an RPG and transformed into fantasy heroes. They travel a world which is a warped version of their fantasies and fears. They have to all agree to go home to go home. Can they come to an agreement? And if so, at what cost?

Logically, you need…

1) A way to generate a group of messy people.

2) A fantasy world which speaks to the specific nature of those messy people

3) A set of core dramatic in-world rules which gather whatever group of messy people you create towards a satisfactory (or at least, interesting) conclusion.

A comic page from the DIE comic titled 1991 describing a character's sixteenth birthday and how they were going to celebrate specially. It depicts two girls walking together up to a house and being greeted by a cheerful woman with wavy hair.
From the DIE comic.

That you’re making a group of players instantly makes it Meta, and there’s just no turning back from it, and I lean into it as hard as I can. There’s a frisson and delight there. You’re people pretending to be people playing a role playing game. That just amuses me, and I tend to pursue it in the games I run. My standard con game of DIE has all the Persona playing people at the con they’re actually at, for example. Seeing what other people approach the idea is the best thing about actually releasing it – if someone had told me how much fun it was to see what people do with a structure you’ve created, I’d have done this years ago.

Not quite as much in the RPG in the Beta stage, but there’s a lot of the other kind of meta in DIE as well – the world itself is made up of elements that all went into the making of the RPG, from German Kriegspeil to Tolkien WW1 horror and more. It’s all about our fantasies, why we get lost in them and so on. A lot of that works its way into the game as well.

The DIE 2 cover with a person wearing an earring and leather jacket with a burning dragon on it and the words "PLAYER" on it who is holding a vape and brass knuckles and some kind of weapon. The red angular pattern of the unfolded d20 over it highlights the title DIE 2.

How do Personas work? I love this idea of layers of play, and I wonder how the mechanics here function! What really drives a Persona, and how does that punch through the layers of game?

The Persona’s are absolutely the thing which makes the game interesting, for me. It’s deliberately the rules-lite approach. It’s just a series of formalised (or less formalised questions) spinning off a given context.

In the Beta, I’ve narrowed it slightly to “You are friends who played an RPG as teenagers, and now have got back together years down the line to play a game.”  That narrowing of a certain shared history makes it easier to give a reliable “This will definitely work” for the later stages in the Beta, but I’ve ran it with completely different set ups too.

There’s a bunch of suggestions for useful angles of questions – “how did the group form? Was it around a shared social interest?” “Was it at school? What kind of school was it?” – which lead to more questions, about the specific nature of individuals (“What did you play in the RPG?” “How did you do in class?”) and their interactions (“Did you fancy any of the persona?” “Are any of you siblings?”). You then work out the gap – “How many years is it since you used to play?” “Why are you getting together to play a game now?” The Gamesmaster is also making a Persona at this stage, and the players are encouraged to ask questions to each other as well. 

There’s guidance in terms of whether to ask soft questions, hard questions or extremely hard framed questions depending on the tone and level of inter-group personal messiness you’re looking for. “Do you hate your brother” versus “Why do you hate your brother?” for example.

While this is happening, the Gamesmaster is noting all the information that’s relevant. Some of this is absolutely surface stuff (“He really like Harry Potter!”). Some of it is more deeply personal (“He has a really strained relationship with his husband.”) Some of it what I call the character’s core drive – the thing which they’re missing in their real life, and they’re looking for (“I always wanted to be an artist, and have never, ever pursued it.”) The latter is generally approached tangentially, but in a real way, it’s what the game is about – finding out how a group of people respond to being offered their desire… and then discovering what they may have to do to get it.

The players have huge freedom to invent whatever they want about the people’s real lives – this actually continues into the more traditional fantasy adventure. The Master asking the player about details of their persona’s life is a constant. Those details, and all the previous ones are then warped into the fantasy.

Part of the dichotomy of the game is that everything at the Persona level is almost entirely freeform and without classical RPG rules. Conversely, everything in the game is deliberately mechanistically neutral, with all characters being treated equally by the system, and all the persona’s character’s edges coming from in-world reasons. It’s a bit odd that I’ve come back to a hard (if light) simulationist core from a hefty narrativist tradition, but I figured in a game which is about the nature of reality (“Is this place real?”), if the rules already give you the answer (“No, it’s not real – only we get to roll the dice.”), it’s somewhat pointless.

Basically it’s kind of a Cartesian thing – the Persona level is very much mind and the character is the body, and the lack of a true connection between the two is interesting. The game’s more obviously meta in other ways (the “why are these people playing the game?” of it all) but I think this is the stuff which really interests me. A lot just is my love song to the RPG, in lots of different ways.

One of my current things is trying to find ways to write something akin to a Scenario – there’s an early take that we’ll be releasing in the back matter of DIE. It’s basically a more structured set of questions, so rather than being entirely freeform, you can create a social dynamic just by asking the questions. It’s a formalised version of my standard Con game – basically all the group are people who work in the comic industry. So one person is the publisher, another a creator, another a fan and so on. By hard framing questions, you generate a dynamic that gives a lot of space for player expression, but still can be meaningfully prepared for. It’s been fun. The question I most like basically goes like..

“Fan – you want to work in the industry. What job do you want to do?”

“I’d love to be a writer.”

“Writer – does the fan have any talent at all?”

That’s very much DIE at its hard-framing most, I stress. That whole scenario is wicked, but I want to do some other set approaches. I’m hoping the structure gives people enough to write their own, if they want.

A dragon with beams of light shining out of its mouth is surrounded by smoke as it faces off against a group of players. In the foreground, there is barbed wire.

One of the things that comes to mind while reading your responses is the subject of nostalgia – if I were playing a game with old friends, a game we’d played before, I’d expect to have some of that. Does nostalgia show up as a theme in the game? Is it something that was relevant for you as a designer?

Well, designer and a writer both. The first series I did as a comic writer was called Phonogram: Rue Britannia, this urban fantasy about magicians who use pop music (Phonomancers). It was used as an inspiration for the excellent LARP My Jam recently, which was a delight. Anyway – that first series was about – I quote – “Nostalgia, memory and history”. It’s how those things tangle together, and get in each other’s way.  So it’s always been there, and it’s certainly there in the DIE RPG.

What’s more there is a certain critique of nostalgia – it’s like how nostalgia can sicken. It’s not that time any more – what has changed with you? Worse, what hasn’t changed? How much have you failed to escape the person you were there, and the desires you had? I normally describe the comic as comparing these teenage dreams with adult realities, but transformed into an RPG it becomes about the two periods in the persona’s life. They were there. Now they are here. How has their live gone awry? What are they going to do about it?

Nostalgia turned creepy is certainly the another element. There’s one optional element in the design we call the Box Of Crap, which the GM drops on the table at the start of the Persona section of the game, claiming it’s the actual game that a bunch of kids were playing when they disappeared back in the 1990s. The box contains anything the GM collects – I suggest old RPG supplements, and the game dice as a useful minimum, but we cram in anything in there. I’ve included some of my own teenage RPG maps I drew, and character sheets, for example. If a group is okay with it, putting stuff from their own real life games in there is also a move, and very much fourth-wall blurring (as in, putting player nostalgia in the mix, as well as persona nostalgia). There’s not much with the box in the current beta rules, but in terms of stuff in the Arcana (i.e. what I’ll be releasing as optional weird rules) it’s basically used as a tarot deck during play as a device for inspiration.

I’m fascinated by the deeper fantasy world, since it reflects the Personas and the characters themselves. This is something that’s rarely codified, even if it’s alluded to in games. What is this like for the Master and the players to experience? What does it end up looking like to play in?

In terms of what it’s like to experience, what I’m trying to evoke is the experience of being listened to. 

What happens in the world riffs off what this persona a player has invented. Rather than a lot of games where narrative creation is direct (i.e. a player gets to define a world directly) DIE tends to primarily works as a once remove (a player invents and the GM twists and gives it back). The magical thing is that it’s both the big things the player are aware of (for example, if a player’s persona spends some time talking about how they’re closeted and are scared to come out, that may as well be an explicit ask for that to be a theme in the game) but also what they’re saying without being aware of (for example, a player’s persona making a joke about a random TV show they’ve binged watched, having elements of that show pop up in conjunction with their main theme). One of DIE’s core bits of GM advice is taking one of those big things the players want included and adding an element which the players may not actually have ever expected to be integrated. One core thing, and a twist, both of which show they were being listened to. It’s like being given a present, even when it’s horrific. Sometimes it’s really subtle, with just grace notes. Sometimes it’s just incredibly obvious – in a playtest where all the persona were people who met on a Buffy fanforum back in the day, I just downloaded the map of Sunnydale and went from there.

It’s always a way to externalise a persona’s problems and have them deal with it. It’s how DIE the comic works, and trying to get that explicitly in a game, and codify ways for players to make that work easily at the table was absolutely what I was aiming for. An early playtester noted that the DIE RPG is kind of a manual and mechanisation of how to create a Kieron Gillen Style Story, which made me nod in recognition. Trying to nail down specifically what the story does, so it can either be turned into mechanics or play guidelines was very much what I was trying to do.

It’s been lots of fun. I wish my designer friends had told me how much fun it was to see someone take a structure you’ve created and go and do awesome things with it, as I’d have done it years ago.

The DIE Beta cover with a long haired feminine person in an elaborate dress throwing their head back in response to some kind of impact as light erupts from a stone in their chest and forehead. The red angular pattern of the unfolded d20 over it highlights the title DIE.

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Thanks so much Kieron for the awesome interview! I hope you all liked it and that you’ll check out DIE today!

Homunculus Assembly Line Kickstarter!

Hi All!

It’s been a big week for me – yesterday, the Turn books arrived to ship out to backers after a bundle of effort, and today, I’ve launched Homunculus Assembly Line on Kickstarter, led by John W. Sheldon! John is my business partner at Daedalum AP and also did the art direction and some of the art on Turn, as well as the layout. We’re excited to get this project live and moving!

Homunculus Assembly Line is a really fun experimental zine project focused on RPG art that will include some RPG material written by yours truly and some written by John, and focus on several illustrations by skilled and fantastic artists in the RPG scene including Juan Ochoa, Evlyn Moreau, Sandy Jacobs-Tolle, Thomas Novosel, Alex Mayo, and John himself!

If rad art, supporting diverse artists, and trying something new in games sounds like your thing, check out Homunculus Assembly Line on Kickstarter today!

Five or So Questions on Magical Kitties Save the Day!

Hi All! Today I have an interview with Justin Alexander from Atlas Games on Magical Kitties Save the Day, which launches today on Kickstarter! It seems like a fun game for players of all ages, so check out Justin’s responses below!

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A Siamese cat riding on a horned blue and green dragon.

Tell me about Magical Kitties Saves the Day. What excites you about it?

What has me truly excited about Magical Kitties Save the Day is how much fun everyone has during our playtests. People are enthusiastic about trying the game. People are even more enthusiastic to try it again. As a game master, that kind of enthusiasm is infectious. And the world of Magical Kitties, based around just a few core principles, so endlessly varied and effortlessly rewarding to create in: Your magical kitties can be in your hometown. Or in the Old West. Or fighting aliens. Or living in a Martian colony. Or, really, anywhere.

Let me back up. In Magical Kitties everybody plays a kitty with a unique supernatural power. Every kitty has human. (Some humans believe that they own the kitties, but that’s clearly ridiculous.) Every human has a Problem. The kitties need to use their powers to solve their humans’ problems and save the day! On top of that, every hometown has Troubles. Troubles can be almost anything: Witches. Aliens. Hyper-intelligent raccoons. To run an adventure, all the GM has to do is take a Trouble and point it at a Problem. As the Trouble makes the Problem worse, the kitties have to fly into action! (Often literally.)

A grey cat with unusual markings with a blanket over its head and a stick with a feather on a string in front of it. Behind it, there are runes in the air.

How do players create their human characters and kitties?

You can either very deliberately craft your kitty or you can use the random character generators to discover your kitty. Either way, character creation is very fast, so it’s more about whether you have a specific vision or if you want to be surprised and challenged. You can also mix-and-match the approaches: Maybe you care a lot about what your kitty’s Magical Power is, but want to randomly generate your kitty’s Talent and Flaw and then figure out what your kitty’s personality is from that. You can do that!

Kitty’s attributes: They are Cute, Cunning, and Fierce. They also have Talents and Flaws, describing what they are particularly good at (being a talented actor or a keen sense of hearing) and also what gets them into trouble (like having a big mouth or being a scaredy cat). And, of course, they also each have a cool Magical Power — invisibility, telekinesis, technopathy, frost breath.

When it comes to humans, the most important thing is their Problem. Again, players are empowered to customize their own Problems. But we also include a generator that combines an emotion — like sad, angry, scared — with a source, things like money, illness, family, friends, work/school, and so forth. This is ultimately a creative seed, and so you need to make it specific to your human (and your kitty).

So if a human is scared about money, for example, that might mean they’ve fallen behind on their mortgage payments and they don’t know what to do. Or maybe they owe money to dangerous monsters. If they’re angry about money, on the other hand, then maybe someone has stolen something from them and they’re furious about it.

A robot with purple lighting in its head and clamp arms, plus two tentacle robot limbs coming out of its chest.

What’s the mechanical structure of Magical Kitties Save the Day, especially in regards to dealing with Troubles and Problems?

The core mechanic of Magical Kitties is a streamlined dice pool system that effortlessly creates degrees of success:

  • Failure
  • Success, but…
  • Success
  • Success, and…
  • Super success!

Each degree has some generic structure to outcomes. For example, on a Success, but… the kitty will succeed, but also:

  • A foe uses its reaction.
  • You suffer an Owie.
  • You get into a sticky situation.
  • You are unable to act for some time.
  • You have one fewer die in your next pool.
  • The GM forces your flaw.
  • Something else that’s creative.

By moving beyond a simply binary of success and failure, the game inherently encourages both game masters and players to engage deeply with the outcome of any action resolution. Young players, in particular, get really engaged by the results.

Problems have a Severity and Troubles have an Intensity. Both measure how difficulty it is to solve or overcome them. As Problems and Troubles are resolved, the story of your magical kitties will slowly come to an end… or you can have new Trouble come to town.

This sounds like a really lighthearted game, but I admit some of the Problems you mentioned hit nerves for me as a player. How are you supporting players in encountering topics that might be a little bit, uh, Problematic?

One of the reasons we’ve embraced the Source + Emotion method of generating problems is that it isn’t providing specific problems. That specific problem is still coming from the player. If you ask a six-year-old what “money + sad” or “friends + angry” means, you won’t get the same kinds of problems you will if you ask a twelve-year-old or twenty-four-year old that question.And since we’re not pushing a specific problem into the playing space, the players generally self-control for what they’re comfortable exploring through play without even really thinking about it.

Three cats clamber on trees and look down into a clearing in which there is a crashed ship of some kind.

Magical Kitties is framed as an all-ages game. What have you done to make the game approachable for people of different ages, backgrounds, and abilities?

In working on Magical Kitties I’ve personally done a lot of research into age-appropriate cognition. The results are frequently surprising! For example, character creation uses d6-as-percentile tables. I initially thought that might be a difficult concept for our target age range and was looking at alternatives, but it turns out that specific exercise if used in Grade 2 curriculums.

Our creative team for Magical Kitties is already diverse, and making it even more diverse as we bring more creators onboard is a priority for me. Bringing all of these different viewpoints into the Magical Kitties universe is making that universe bigger and more exciting in every way possible. If there’s one thing we’ve discovered, it’s that the love of kitties is about as universal as you can get! Kitties and the people who love them can be found everywhere.

I also believe that Magical Kitties can be an opportunity for people who have never played a roleplaying game before to discover a whole new hobby. We think reaching out to all-new audiences is really important in terms of making sure that all voices get to be part of our conversation. To that end, Magical Kitties includes a lot of tools for new players: There’ll be a solo play scenario, for example, so that within literally moments of cracking open the box you can start playing the game for the first time. And there’ll be a My First Adventure book for first-time GMs, taking them step-by-step through running their first scenario.

Magical Kitties are for everybody!

A light colored kitten plays inside a protective bubble while a dark red kitty climbs on top of it playfully, with green foliage in the background.

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Thanks so much to Justin for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Magical Kitties Save the Day on Kickstarter today!

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Five or So Questions on Sleepaway

Hi y’all, I have an interview with Jay Dragon about Sleepaway, which is currently up on Kickstarter! Jay had some really interesting things to say about Sleepaway. I hope you enjoy the responses below!

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The Sleepaway book cover with a person in a yellow raincoat who has a red tree growing out of their chest and wolves running towards the red blooe on their white tee shirt. One of their eyes is wide open and they have thumbpins in a circle around them, while a forest is in the background. The text "Sleepaway" is in white outlined text.

Tell me about Sleepaway. What excites you about it?

Sleepaway is a Belonging Outside Belonging game about a group of summer camp counselors protecting their children from a nightmarish monster. It is born from both my complex and intense relationship with the summer camp I work at, and my own thoughts and reflections on my childhood. It’s secretly a very autobiographical work, with themes ranging from my own friendships to important places from my teenage years to certain experiences I’ve had with my mental illnesses. I’m also really excited about the design space – it manages to merge the collaborative GM role of Belonging Outside Belonging games with a bizarre structure that resembles a “ghost GM” (as I’ve facetiously referred to it to friends). Horror is a genre with a narrative arc, and building an arc and a “Legacy Games” -esque framework into Belonging Outside Belonging becomes a really fascinating intersection of design space.

A person in a lace and floral top in a car, wearing a floral crown.
Jay Dragon.

That sounds really cool! I remember summer camps being the height of complex emotions as a kid. How do you approach the emotions and excitement of those environments with care?

I think that care and compassion are the most important part of Sleepaway to me. An early and immediate concern is making sure that the campers have narrative weight and independence, that they’re not just extensions of the staff’s emotional journeys. I think it’s really important that the campers get to have their own life paths, and that as a counselor in the game you can support their endeavors but you’re not in a position to fix them and you can’t protect them from everything.

Being a queer summer camp counselor is so complicated because you see kids going through things you’ve been through yourself, and no matter how much you want to help them, you know they’re on a journey of self-discovery that they need to engage in on their own. The game has ways for the kids to go off and engage with each other without the players interacting, and ways to put down the counselor characters and play out the campers interacting in an abstracted, ritualized way.

A campfire scene in sepia and black with kids all around a campfire deep in the woods.

What are the mechanics like in Sleepaway? How do players engage with the fiction?

The beating heart of Sleepaway is the Belonging Outside Belonging system by Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum. Players pick up and pass around setting elements that represent locations and forces within the setting, while building a web of interpersonal relationships. Periodically, players end up invoking the Lindworm, which results in a moment of tension as everyone closes their eyes and a card is picked from a deck, causing horrific events to happen. My favorite mechanical moment in Sleepaway is the Lindworm – there’s a purposeful decision that players never have the chance to roleplay as the Lindworm, and the Lindworm is treated as an outside entity outside the game itself.

As you play the game, you can also end up developing a corkboard of motifs, characters, items, and locations that are tethered together, which at the end of a campaign you unravel in order to defeat the Lindworm. It, along with Rituals (moments when you put the traditional structure of the rules aside to enter into a new fictive space that abstracts a moment of play that wouldn’t normally get space to show up) really show my camp LARP origins! I think bodies are always implicated in all games, and I really love the way a tabletop game can challenge and shift the way that engagement can occur.

A rocky cliffside with trees on the top by a body of water.

The Belonging Outside Belonging system is really intriguing. How does it suit Sleepaway in regards to player interaction? What types of design choices did you have to make with the system to make it suit your vision?

I’ve rapidly fallen in love with Belonging Outside Belonging since I started working within it. It’s one of those systems that can transform game design into poetry, just through it’s invitation to play. The move “Ask: Why won’t your character just fuck off?” is both one of my favorite ones to use in play and also one of my favorites to be asked! Belonging Outside Belonging allows for a game that integrates less on the characters and more on their relationships with one another and the land.

I wanted the game to reflect my own experiences roleplaying at The Wayfinder Experience (my LARP Summer Camp) while growing up. This meant the game is really rooted in developing a complex relationship to the land. At The Wayfinder Experience, we always thank the land before engaging in play, and I’ve always missed that sensibility in regards to tabletop. Belonging Outside Belonging games allows me to build a game where the players are all collaboratively representing a world that is just as much a living breathing identity as any individual player, and can in some ways exist outside the players as a sense beyond us.

A mockup of the Sleepaway text with a campfire scene in sepia and black with kids all around a campfire deep in the woods. The text Sleepaway is in white.

What is the Lindworm, and how does it work? How does it interact with the fiction?

The Lindworm is the monster of the summer camp, the thing that hangs in the background of everything. It represents cycles of trauma, abusive people, and the ways in which the outside world can hurt us beyond our control. The Lindworm isn’t a character in the game, nor is it a setting element or anything else that any one player is responsible. The closest you get is that one player secretly channels the Lindworm during the session, but they are never referred to as actually roleplaying as the monster. There’s some things that shouldn’t be roleplayed as or sympathized with.

At the start of each session, both to set the tone and protect the space, you invite the Lindworm to play. I wanted the sense that the Lindworm was an actual creature that hovers over the game itself, but also by inviting it you’re able to ensure the safety of the space, because it’s not actually there. Over the course of the game, the Lindworm’s channeler makes secret decisions for it, playing cards from a deck to determine how everyone (themself included) are in danger.

The Lindworm acts callously, infallibly, and unrelatably – it will casually murder important characters and destroy everything the players have built. The horror of the Lindworm comes from knowing that its actions can happen to anyone, but due to the way Belonging Outside Belonging works as a system, the Lindworm is always invited to act upon the group, and the group as a whole interprets the Lindworm. As a collaborative horror game, the fear comes from a collective desire to be afraid and to build horror together, inviting the Lindworm like a tabletop version of Bloody Mary to play with before putting it back where it began.

A corkboard with tons of playing cards, index cards, and notes on it with string tying the thumbtacks together.

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Awesome! Thank you so much Jay for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Sleepaway on Kickstarter today!

Five or So Questions with San Jenaro Co-Op

I’m very excited to share this big interview with you today! It’s an interview with the San Jenaro Co-Op about their Short Games Digest, Volume 1, which sold over 100 copies on its first day released! They also have a Kickstarter coming out on June 15, 2019 for the Roleplayer’s Guide to Heists! Today you’ll get to hear from Liam Ginty (L.G.), Ken Rountree (KR), Chris Falco (CF), Olivia Hill (OH), Galen Evans (GE), Magnus Hansen (MH), and Dyer Rose (DR)! Hope you like what they have to say!

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The cover of Quarterly San Jenaro Game Digest Volume 1 Summer 2019 with three characters of a variety of genders, one with a second set of eyes and a smart suit, the other two with armor and fancy tech.

Q: Tell me about Short Games Digest and your role on the project! What excites you about it?

L.G.: I’m a writer and one of the mentors heading up the Short Games Digest. SGD is a collection of shortish TTRPGs made by a variety of designers both new and old that serves as our flagship project for getting new writers published in the industry. I really love the collaborative process of the project – everyone chipping in to create something better than any one of us could, I also really enjoy reading everyone’s games – some first time designers have made some really excellent work and it’s been a joy watching some folx grow so fast and so much over the course of the volume.
KR: I’m a writer for the first two Short Games Digests. Specifically, I wrote “The Gods Play Dice” for the first volume, and am working on something heavily cat related for the second volume. The SGD is my first time writing for roleplaying at all. I’m excited because I feel we are a group of friends with a common goal rather than a traditional roleplaying company. We don’t just care about the games we make individually, we support each other in making each other’s games. The awesome mentoring and editing teams made the impossible into the achievable.

CF: I’m also a writer for it, and personally, I find the lower barrier of entry combined with the community surrounding it to be the best part. Games can be anywhere from short to long, freeform to mechanics-heavy, and it allows for a diverse number of writing styles and experience levels to go into it.

OH: I write and do some layout work for the Short Games Digest. I’m excited to see so many new names moving from repeatedly saying they want to make a game to being able to say, “I’ve made a game.” It’s really great seeing the diverse approaches the various creators have taken to this project, and all the different ways they’ve creatively answered the completely strange questions posed as part of the design process. It’s also amazing seeing creators excited to build something for the collective benefit, and not just a crapshoot of “will my game be the next D&D?” I like the idea of using the act of building games as a method of building community.

GE: I wrote my first game, “Yesterday’s Tomorrow, Today” for Short Games Digest Vol.1 and served as one of the community editors. The idea of a project of so many cool games and settings and mechanics is very exciting and I am proud I am a part of it, but the most exciting bit is being a part of a co-op with such a diverse and talented membership. Getting to collaborate with this group and work to produce really amazing and ethical work in this space is a joy.

Spaceships and asteroids pass overhead while a person with rad hair in a spacesuit shoots at a Martian.
Art from Yesterday’s Tomorrow, Today.

Rad! So what kind of content do we see in Short Games Digest, and how did you work together to make this content happen?

GE: You can expect to find over 10 RPGs, all less than 30 pages, with their own unique systems and settings. Do you want a OSR rogue-like game of brutality? Check out “Clerics”. Do you want a expressive dungeon diving game? “The Great Instrument” should be right up your alley, do you want a action packed fast moving space opera? “Yesterday’s Tomorrow, Today!” is a action packed fast moving space opera. Do you just want a expressive game of courtly romantic queer love? Try out Filamina Young’s “Lonely Knights” and have a blast.

As to how we made it come together, Liam Ginty did a lot of the organizing work, and handed out to everyone a prompt to start writing, we all chatted about concepts together, but started work writing a game, Olivia handed out a design doc to help us prepare our work for layout, and we requested Dyer to make art for our games, During the process, myself, and the rest of the editing team would receive works in progress, add comments and offer tweaks and suggestions. It was a very natural process. In many ways, the game was the baby of whomever was authoring it, with the rest of the co-op acting as support and sounding boards.

MH: One of the wonderful things is the vast array of different content you get in the SGD. I made a weird fantasy dungeon crawler unlike anything i’d made before, and when i needed to fill up another page of space for layout reasons, I got to make a short, 1-page larp for two, as well, a game about lying to your friend – two incredibly different games. And there are so many others, like the game about lonely and very queer knights, or a game about competing for a good position in a new dimension you’ve found yourself in. That said, even though we have a wide variety of games, the strangeness of some themes, and the page constraints do mean the games have a tendency towards the experimental, the new, the interesting. And our community is very inclusive, so there’s quite a bit of Queer content in there as well.

Once I finished a script, people commented on it, and helped me turn my ideas into a cohesive whole, and Galen edited it into readability. Not to mention that Dyer Rose provided the (very pretty!) pictures. It means that even though The Great Instrument is my game, it’s not just the wholly-formed child of my mind. There’s a bit of Galen’s editing style there, there’s Dyer’s visual style, and of course, the creativity of whoever gave me the theme “War In Heaven (Celestial Mecha)”

A person has their hands posed in front of them and is communing with gods while a bearded person writes in a large book.

What’s it like being part of a co-op, and how do you do things like dividing responsibilities and sharing creative loads?

GE: It’s a blast! It is like having a group of friends who are all driving towards the same overall goal. We are still figuring out a lot of things as we go, but as one of the “new blood” in the TTRPG publishing scene, it has been great to have mentors like Olivia, Filamina, Magnus, and Liam. as they offer overall strategies, they give us a free hand to execute what needs to be done. Everyone is very respectful and honest about their capabilities, capacity and needs and it makes for a wonderful collaboration environment.

CF: It’s pretty cool, and gives you a lot of opportunity and ability to get yourself some experience that you might not have managed otherwise. The “prompt” system of the SGD itself means you always have a direction to aim for so you’re not just wondering what your next little game should be. Responsibilities are mostly divided into the organizers and then everyone else; the organizers say what needs to be done, and then everyone else claims what duties they want. It might sound a little unorganized, put that way, but it works out pretty well (and in a given project it might be a little more specific than that).

DR: It’s been a real blessing to get involved with these folx and form this co-op, everyone is supportive, kind and understanding (people first!) and everyone has something to offer. We complement one another’s skills well while helping to improve or teach completely new skills to others with interest.

Responsibilities are all completely voluntary, from beginning to end. Even the process of choosing to take the lead and pitch a project. For instance, let’s say someone comes in and is like “Hey! I got this idea I think is really cool! *explains project* Is anyone interested in getting in on that?” and if there is interest at that point you put a call out for people to sign up, you put together a contract that delineates things like share splitting/remuneration and any other important bits. And the people who want to work on the project sign up as a writer, artist, editor, layout, and whatever else the project might need.

At the moment, creative loads have all seemed to be managed by the people on their end, and how much they volunteer to take on. As an artist, I get a few prompts and when I’m getting my way through those, if there is still time, I’ll reach out for anyone else that needs art. Everyone knows I am but one man and can’t necessarily do art for everyone and that’s okay (again: people first.).

KR: Everyone is supportive and filled with awesome beans! We signed up for specific roles in the beginning and generally stick to them, but people step up when something outside of their expertise pops up all the time. There’s a lot of anxiety involved with a lot of newer people creating games when they maybe hadn’t published anything AT ALL before. I think we all have a good instinct on when to give constructive criticism and when somebody is just looking for some validation. As silly as it might sound to a certain type of human, someone saying, “Hey, you’re doing great. You’re going to create a game and it’s going to be cool af,” is valuable.

OH: It’s really nice because this isn’t a primary gig for any of us, so it’s something easy to step into and step out of as the time and energy arise or fall. If you need to step away for a couple of weeks, you can do that. If you’ve got time on your hands and want to pick up some slack, you can do that. It’s like Marx said, from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs. We’re all individuals with different situations. I’ve been in gaming development projects before where one person’s situation got in the way of the whole project moving forward. With this model, those same hurdles happen, but we’re more open to step in and say, “Hey, can I get that for you?” In the end, it makes for a much, much smoother development.

A blue and white blueprint diagram with yellow notes about where to drill and whether to use dynamite and the heading The Roleplayer's Guide to Heists, a collection of 25 capers for any tabletop RPG from the San Jenaro Co-Op.

How does being a part of the co-op positively influence projects like the Digest, and how does it complicate it?

GE: It democratizes the work and makes it far easier to create the hype train. Also it works as an incentive to do work, As a new TTRPG designer, I’m not sure when i would have gotten off of my butt to make my game if it was not for the Digest and the timeline, and even if I had gotten off of my butt and made my game, I still don’t know layout, or how to best market an indie RPG, I would just be yet another person out there with their own system, instead thanks to the help of the co-op I can say that I am a published game designer 🙂 because of the hard work of everyone else, I am able to live my dream, and all it costs me is helping others live theirs. Where it does become complicated is in project management, we have a huge and diverse group of collaborators and there is a bit of a wrangling cats issue, however, because we have so many people it is often easy to distribute needed work to someone else if things fall through.

DR: Positively influencing projects? Man, honestly I have to say how does it not? Okay that’s your second question, and I have one of those, but seriously… It’s just absolutely amazing. You have so many kind and creative people that are all trying to not only succeed, but help you succeed, they are always there if you need a second, third, fourth set of eyes on a project, they are there to fill in gaps and knowledge, and teach you those skills if you want. And they are there to encourage you, having a constant hype train around your lil project, your lil 4 page game or your illustration is such an awesome driving force to keep going. It’s infectious, everyone is so excited, not just for themselves, but everyone else. As for the issues, Galen kinda touched on that above me here, but the main issue I notice is something we are looking into at the moment, where currently are tasks are all kind of spread across some discord rooms and Google Sheets, and it can be a bit chaotic at time. But we haven’t run into any real complications with that, currently have someone designing some work flow stuff on trello, so i expect that chaos to be toned down a lot before we get to a point where its a problem.

KR: When I first started in the Co-Op, I missed the deadline for my game due to life circumstances. I was so used to the normal boss based business model that knots formed in my stomach. I apologized seventy three point five times, and said some very self-deprecating things. But everyone was supportive and understanding. I was so used to people screaming at me over minor things from places I had worked, and here everyone was being super cool and supportive. I worked harder and came out with what I consider a high quality game. If I was working in a traditional model, I may have been fired or worse. But not only did I finish the first game, I’m completing a second as well as a microgame for volume 2.

CF: The Co-op model is honestly perfect for something like the games digest, since it allows so many different people to all just write in their own style without trying to blend everything together. If someone has a problem, it’s easy to say “No big deal, put it in the next volume” and still have plenty of games in it so we don’t need to worry about it. As others already mentioned, everyone’s really friendly and supportive, which helps people get comfortable in writing their games in the first place, too.

What is something in the Digest that you just cannot wait for people to see, whether it’s because of the work you or someone else did or just because it’s cool?

GE: Aside from all of Dyer’s amazing art you mean? It’s really hard to pick just one thing, there are so many cool things packed into this digest and I know there is something in it for everyone, so I guess I will talk about my own game, “Yesterday’s Tomorrow, Today” the thing i am really excited for people to see and try out is the game plotting mechanic I call “That Cosmic Swing” which endeavors to keep action going and keep the pace of game frenetic and fun by removing any delineation between narrative and structured time that many games have. When I run games I often have an issue of getting things moving while wrangling players, and I have come up with hacks and ideas to keep things moving and get the story going and I took those ideas and formalized them as one of the key components of the game, and to be honest, I think its super slick…  

DR: Oh man. I honestly have to say, just like every last game in that book. It’s bringing in so many unique voices and design philosophies, so many unique systems that each one is its own unique treasure in its own way. Just seeing the WIPs and Write Ups in discord has left me hungering to get a copy of this into my hands, and I’ve already seen most everything in it!! I will say I think the thing I’m most excited about, to narrow that down abit more, is the number of people in this book that will be able to say for the first time “I have a published game” that’s SO COOL, especially for someone that had NO IDEA they’d be able to have that happen 3 months ago.

KR: Doogans and Dogans. That’s all I’ll say for myself. The Tony Hawk inspired RPG by CF fills me with joy just by it existing.

A red border of raccoon heads around a raccoon head with the words San Jenaro Co-Op making the eyes of the racoon with the O's in Co-Op.
I love this logo!

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Thank you so much to the San Jenaro Co-Op for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Short Games Digest Volume 1 today! Watch out for the Roleplayer’s Guide to Heists Kickstarter mid-June!

Five or So Questions on moonflower

Hi All! I have an interview today with Sangjun Park about moonflower, which is on Kickstarter now! Sangjun made a video about how the game works, and I’ll update this post with the Kickstarter link when it’s live! Until then, check out the interview below!

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

moonflower is a story game about a journey to the Moon, set in a dreamlike world in which a sweet and alien flower is blooming. The main characters are called the Pilgrims, who are seeking the Gardeners, who live on the Moon, for help that they may or may not be able to provide. moonflower is a simple GM-less game designed exclusively for one-shots, each session taking around 3.5 to 5 hours.

It’s not a game where players have to fight monsters or race against time. The end of every moonflower story is defined before any session starts – the Pilgrims reach the Moon and meet the Gardeners. However, the focus is on the journey itself. As the story goes, the players must sacrifice their inner selves and compromise with their circumstances. It is, by design, impossible for a Pilgrim to achieve their goal without having compromised. Either they will have changed from how they started the journey, or they will have inflicted changes on others.

What excites me about this game is that moonflower places strong emphasis on the process, rather than the result. By rules, every Pilgrim finds success, but that is shaped by the context, which is the decisions and choices the Pilgrim made to get there. The game uses tarot cards to guide the story instead of a single facilitator. Each major arcana card (upright or inverse) has a story hook associated with it and players draw five every Chapter. Three are used as the actual story hooks and players briefly discuss how they interact with each other. And I’ve designed the game so that story hook combinations almost always demand a tough choice.

So even though moonflower is a short game and the end state is always the same (except the potential epilogue, of course), it creates a wide variety of stories.

Another thing, outside the game, is that moonflower is a game produced by a team of Korean artists. It’s also the first Korean TTRPG that is being brought to the English-speaking part of the community. This is an honor, but it is also very frightening!

How does moonflower’s use of tarot cards help players explore the story?

moonflower has its own reading of tarot cards, unique to the game. For example, The Tower being drawn may suggest that a great, physical disaster happens within the story. The Empress, on the other hand, would suggest that the Pilgrims encounter a being of unfathomable wisdom in a hostile setting. For another, there’s The Devil, which suggests that a life-or-death decision must be made urgently. Each individually is just a story hook, but in moonflower, players briefly discuss how they will come together before a major scene starts. So with those three, one of the Pilgrims may have fallen sick and must be treated with a rare medical fruit, but it grows on a fragile and sacred tree. As they climb it, a branch snaps and centuries of growth is lost – and the ancient creature that’s been guarding it comes to question the Pilgrims whether their well-being was so important to risk the sacred tree.

That’s simply one way of interpreting those three cards among many. The main story driver is the 22 major arcana cards. Whether they are drawn upright or inverse matters, so that’s 44 story hooks that can be combined in units of three. I’m not very good at math, but I think that leads to a very big number of potential stories. But the important thing is that the cards’ stories keep driving the characters toward points where they must choose something.

Another thing is that moonflower’s tarot reading is deeply intertwined with the setting. The Tower, which traditionally hints at catastrophic change, is interpreted to mean a literal collapse of a great tree (and trees are a big part of the setting). That’s a literal take at the image. However, players may have decided during the Dreams phase that an elder tree grows from the burial ground of an ancestor, in which case a tree’s fall is more than just literal in the story.

It seems like the idea of change and sacrifice is really vital to the game. Why did you choose to explore these themes?

This is a rather personal issue, but let’s talk about fun bits before we get to that. moonflower initially started as an exercise in rapid game design. I asked people to give me three game design ingredients and forced myself to make a game based on them in 72 hours. The very first version of moonflower is fondly remembered, the way one remembers adolescent years. Since then, I’ve refined the core game idea and experimented with it over six months.

Since it started as an exercise in rapid game design, I did not have the luxury of fine-tuning themes. Though, after the work was done, I looked back and wondered why moonflower seemed to say something. Then I noticed that it’s about change, sacrifice, and – most importantly – compromise. The first version of moonflower was drafted when I had been working for a rather prestigious organization as a translator. Until then, I had been sailing smoothly along that career path, but I hit a wall while working on that project. The stress was intense and the hours I had to put in were unreasonable, but I told myself I had to do it because the pay was beyond acceptable. I had little free time and I was drained of any kind of energy when I got home, but money was good.

It turned out that I had been thinking about compromises without a break back then. Am I doing this for the money? The prestige? The ability to tell my distant relatives that I’m doing something “serious” with my education? What if I went the other way? How would I afford the lifestyle that I was enjoying? And most importantly – is this what I wanted to do when I first decided to work with words?

At the end, I realized that compromising on things is necessary to keep going in life. It’s not failure – it’s just another kind of change.

I read before that any kind of media that says anything at all is propaganda. moonflower is propaganda in the sense that it says refusing to change and compromise may hurt. It’s propaganda aimed at myself. Fun propaganda to play with friends, though!

If that was too personal, I apologize.

Bringing Korean games to English-speaking audiences

Fortunately I had been working as a translator for a long while, so bringing moonflower to English has been somewhat convenient. For one thing, there was no need to clarify with the author about intent or motive. The most challenging part was not actually about the language, but about audiences. The Korean TTRPG community is thriving, but it’s truth that it’s less active on the game design side of things compared to the English-speaking counterpart. moonflower is its own thing – the only game comparable to it available in Korean is Polaris by P.H. Lee – and, at first, I’ve seen rather negative feedback on it, saying it’s “bad Polaris with flowers”. I figured it was because the game was a bad rip-off. But by chance I shared an early version in English and I actually got a praise on that exact point, that it’s like Polaris in many positive ways. Of course, different peoples, different cultures, different tastes, and all that. But it was puzzling to see something like that in first person. Working on this game in both Korean and English, I tried hard not to prioritize one audience over the other. This is quite difficult, actually!

The challenge itself is also the benefit, I think. The bilingual nature of moonflower meant it could attract diverse perspectives. Different experiences lead to different interpretations and they all have contributed to moonflower’s growth as a game. Had I been working on moonflower exclusively in one language, I would not have had half the conversations about it. Then moonflower would only be half as good.

What do you feel is the most valuable part of focusing on the journey in moonflower?

The journey in moonflower is both literal and symbolic – the Pilgrims are walking on a path toward the Moon, which is both a physical and emotional place. This leads to metaphorical stories rather smoothly. In some games, going to the Moon might involve three-stage rocket launches, but more likely it will involve deciding what the trials and crossroads mean.

The journey from the start to the end is always different. The same tarot card may mean radically different things depending on when they come up. This is because the journey up until that point gives each card a different context. But, then again, people who play moonflower again (or read the Voice of the Forest table before) may know what to expect. I think it’s kinda like taking a journey along a known route, in real life. One knows what will be where, but no sight is ever the same. A familiar landmark along the way from home to work might evoke different feelings depending on things like what happened that day or something mundane like weather and time of the day.

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Thanks so much Sangjun for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out moonflower on Kickstarter now!