Hi all! Today I have an interview with Nicolas Ronvel, a.k.a. Gulix, creator ofFacing the Titan, a game that just successfully funded on Kickstarter! The crowdfund may be passed, but you can still follow the Kickstarter and pick up the game upon release! It has amazing titans and I’m excited to feature some work from the French gaming community! Check out Nicolas’s responses below!
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Tell
me a little about Facing the Titan. What excites you about it?
Facing
the Titan is a GM-less RPG. It features a group of heroes, the Company, against
a gigantic being: the Titan. The Company’s fate is to defeat the Titan, and the
goal of the game is to tell that story. But it’s not a tactical game. In Facing
the Titan, the Companions will remember the past, share their memories, tell
each other their journeys and what they prepare for the grand finale. Then, and
only then, they will face the Titan. It’s a lively discussion game.
Facing
the Titan is my first “big” game. I wrote several micro-RPG over the
past few years. But this one is the first I push to get a full RPG that will
get a physical life through a book. It’s a big achievement for me. That’s what
excites me.
And I want to see Facing the Titan get its own life. I playtested it while always participating in the game. I want to see actual plays, to read stories from the game. I want to see how people use the game and maybe change it.
Since
Facing the Titan isn’t a tactical game, what are the mechanics and gameplay
like?
The mechanics of Facing the
Titan are based on those from Swords Without Master.
First, there are the Tones.
When, during the discussion, you want to be at the center of the attention, you
grab the dice (or someone give them to you), and you roll them. During each
Phase, one specific Tone is associated with each Dice. For example, in the
World Phase, you play with the Tones Ruins (Black Die) and Wonders (White Die).
The higher die tells you which Tone to use. And you frame what you say around
the Tone. You can use it for the subject you talk about, for the mood of your
story, the way you tell. It’s open to interpretation.
If you roll a Double, well,
the Titan steps in and you use one of its Tones. And special rules apply.
Then, there are the Motifs.
During play, you will record words, expressions, feelings, images other players
are saying. And when you got enough Motifs, the current Phase ends and you can
get to the next one (there are 5 Phases). The further you get in the game, the
more Echoes you will have to write as Motifs. Echoes are Motifs that recall a
previous Motifs, while being different. That will bring a common thread in the
game, with the end game reflecting ideas and themes seen all through the game.
Those are the Mechanics :
Tones and Motifs.
What kind of threats do the
Titans pose – what are they like, and how do people feel about them in the
fiction?
It depends on the Titan. Each one of them has a different story, a different stature in its Setting. And each one comes with a different Setting.
Generally, they pose a threat by their size. They crush villages, destroy buildings and wanders without even noticing it. But some are evil or malevolent. Some are causing damages knowingly.
The Titans are described briefly, because I wanted to give prompts, ideas. Not fully fledged creatures. So each group, each game will set what is the level of threats the Titan pose. The illustrator was chosen because of this. I didn’t want photorealistic pictures of the Titan. I wanted pictures describing them broadly but leaving a great place for the players imagination. Roger Heal managed to do that with great talent.
What is an average session like, in the
rise and fall of play?
First of all, a game of Facing the Titan is not prepared. Of course, you will need at least one person who knows the rules, but that’s all. As with Fiasco, we choose a Playset and go for it. Here, we choose a Titan, the associated Setting, and we go for it.
The first part of the game involves choosing the elements of the setting that you want to use. Then we really start the game.
The first Phase, the Companions Phase, allows us to create the characters, to start discovering them. This Phase is in two parts. We start in a disembodied way, and we tell the story of the successive entrances of our characters into a place that we have just defined. Then we play our characters. They haven’t been together for a long time, and they’re going to discuss the past.
The second Phase moves away from the characters to focus on the Titan. Who is it? What is it? What is it capable of? Through vignettes told like scenes from a movie, we will show it.
The third Phase goes back to the characters and their discussion. Through them, we will share about their travels and talk about the world.
The fourth Phase continues the discussion but changes the subject: what have we prepared to face the Titan?
Finally comes the last Phase of the game, the Clash Phase. In this one, a player will lose his character to play the Titan. Then, like a choreographed duel, the Titan then the Companions then the Titan again then… will take control of the story and narrate the duel. With the objective of making it epic, memorable and giving a beautiful exposure to all the characters.
Finally, the game ends with an Epilogue, where each player can tell what happens to his/her character.
This division into five Phases forces the story told and the scenario that will be created around the table, even if each game will turn out to be different by the choice of the Titan, the Setting and the ideas that the players will bring with them. Each Phase also offers different Tones. The dice roll will determine the tone to be used when speaking, and each Phase will have a very different theme.
What sort of media do you use as reference
to help inspire you while designing a game about something fantastical like the
Titans?
When I started working on the game, I didn’t have any graphic resources. Just ideas, images. Then as I went along, I accumulated images of gigantic creatures in various monster manuals, on the subreddit /r/ImaginaryBehemoths, in galleries on DeviantArt and ArtStation. I also used landscape images a lot. Nature and its power have inspired me for some of the most raw Titans.
Contrary to what some might think, I didn’t really take inspiration from Shadow of the Colossus. It hangs around in my subconscious, of course, but I had to use at most one fan art of the game in the process of creating of the game. The game was called Facing the Colossus at first. But I didn’t want to mention Shadow of the Colossus too much for the difference in the way the game was played (a group game against a solitaire game, a narrative game against a riddle game).
When I found Roger Heal and started receiving the first drafts of Titans, the game’s different worlds began to take shape. Some Settings have been extensively modified following details of his illustrations. Illustrations that were based on my concepts of Titans. There was a very interesting ping pong on that side.
Tell me a little about A Cool and Lonely Courage. What excites you about it?
Last summer I was discussing the role of women in World War
II with a friend, thinking about the courage which they had displayed and the
encouragement that can give to us today. The next evening on the flight home I
remembered a museum exhibit I had come across once about the women who worked
as spies in occupied France, and the germ of an idea for the game formed – I’ve
still got the half page of scribbled notes which are the underpinnings of the
game even now! I wanted to design a game with simple rules that would allow us
to tell emotionally complex stories.
I followed this up by several weeks research into the women
who served as part of the Special Operations Executive and I was rocked back on
my heels by their history. They came from all kinds of backgrounds and faced
incredible peril. A third of them were captured, tortured and executed, but
they performed a vital role in the liberation of France. The photo below
shows Violette Szabo, Noor Inayat Khan, Nancy Wake and Odette Sansom.
The four women the game is based on, Violette Szabo, Noor Inayat Khan, Nancy Wake, Odette Sansom.
I decided that I wanted the game to remember and honour the
women who had faced such dangers. I’ve put as much history as I can as examples
into the rules and made every effort to help the players understand the kind of
circumstances these real women found themselves in. I’ve been delighted that
many people have said afterwards that they want to find out more about these
spies, and I’ve included a book and film bibliography in the rules to help
people find our more.
The central mechanism of the game reflects the fates of war,
and gives a tremendous replay value to it. Every time that someone plays, very
different stories will result. Because the game is interested primarily in the
relationships these women had with the people around them, and tracks the
changing relationships during their time, it has the capability to be very
emotionally engaging – even shocking. As one player, new to story games, said
during a recent session “I can’t believe that I’m crying over someone that we
just made up in the last hour”.
That’s a long response to a short question! But in a nutshell I’m excited about the capacity of this game to give the players genuine emotional experiences and a new respect for the women who did this for real.
You mentioned your research. What kind of research did you do? How did you find the right sources?
When it comes to research, happily there are many books
available! Historians have done all the hard work in research or working as
biographers. I started by looking at some authors who have covered a number of
the women who worked with the SOE such as Rick Stroud who wrote ‘Lonely
Courage’ or Beryl E. Escort who wrote ‘The heroines of SOE: F Section: Britains
secret women in France’. I followed this up with more in depth biographies of
women such as Pearl Witherington and Nancy Wake.
I supplemented this real life history by looking into some
of the fiction based on these activities. I really enjoyed the young adult
novel ‘Codename Verity’ by Elizabeth Wein, and I was able to obtain a 1988 TV
series called ‘Wish me luck’ by Lavinia Warner and Jill Hyem.
A friend of mine is an amateur historian of World War II and he was able to give me a lot of additional context about the situation in occupied France too.
Did you reach out to the families of the women who you based the game on, whose likenesses you’re using, to gain their perspective or permission?
No, I didn’t attempt to reach out to any of the families – None of the public resources I had available referred to any family members much, and trying to track them down would have felt too stalker-y.
The pages within A Cool and Lonely Courage.
What happens in play of A Cool and Lonely Courage? What do players do, and what are their hard questions?
When it comes to playing A Cool and Lonely Courage, it goes
like this:
There are a series of questions which each player answers to
develop an initial view of their character – their background, how they speak
french, the reason they joined up, a strength discovered during training and a
weakness revealed by training. Whether they were going to be primarily a
courier or a radio operator. Their code name, and the name of the circuit
leader they would be working with in France (who is their first supporting
character).
As the play starts, the players have to picture themselves
in neighbouring cells, captured by the Nazis. They briefly introduce
themselves, and they start telling each other their stories…
Each player is dealt a hand of 6 cards, held face down.
There are going to be five chapters, and in each chapter
every player will have a scene. The chapters are arrival (meeting the
resistance), a mission with the resistance, an interlude which is a period of
quiet and getting to know people, the chapter where you are captured, and a
final chapter in prison.
As each player is going to have a scene they draw one of
their cards, and the suit determines whether the focus of the scene is one of
love, success, misfortune or death. The scenes will involve one or more
supporting characters, adding to a selection in front of each player or reusing
existing ones in later scenes. Other players take the role of the supporting
characters in the scene.
As the chapters progress it will be natural to revisit some
of the supporting characters and depending upon the fall of the cards you will
see relationships grow, deepen, fracture or sometimes be tragically ended by
death. Through playing out the scenes there is a real sense of personality in
the supporting characters… and when a spade is drawn and the players set a
scene where a lovely person has to die… that can feel really tough – but true
to the sense of the wartime story that is being told.
The conclusion is a real point of decision. Everyone has one
card left. They then secretly decide whether to keep that card for themselves
or donate it to another player. When these decisions are revealed, anyone with
two cards is rescued! Anyone with no cards is killed out of hand. Anyone with
one card is sent to the concentration camps and if your card is black you die
there, if it is red you survive.
Finally, in the epilogue, the players think about what
happened next to the survivors after the war. And who remembers those who died.
It is sometimes a little quiet at the conclusion of the game, as we think about the stories that have been told, and perhaps reflect upon the real women who the game is based upon.
Women working alongside Resistance fighters.
How do you support players who might find this kind of play overwhelming or upsetting once they’ve jumped into it?
One of the things that has always been important when
running the game is that everyone knows that there is an open door policy –
anyone can excuse themselves for the game for any reason. They might want a
break, or they might feel that they have to exit the game entirely. It is
important that people know that this is an option at the start of the game, and
that if during the game someone feels they have to step out it is important for
the rest of the table to reassure them that is perfectly fine, and it won’t
‘spoil the game’ for anyone else.
I’ve seen this used twice, once in a game that I was
facilitating and once in a game a different person was facilitating. In each
case it was easy to reassure the person that was fine, and they left with no
worries that it would impair anyone else’s fun.
Occasionally someone finds one particular thing that is
brought up somewhat upsetting, and the game rules discuss right up front using
Ron Edwards “lines and veils” or John Stavropoulos “X-card” mechanics to help
avoid troublesome areas up front or during play.
How do you feel sometimes knowing the end of the story can affect play and the experience of the game?
I think that knowing the end of the story actually plays
really well. Although it may not be fashionable, I really loved the movie
Titanic. We all know the ship sank, but it was interesting to see the stories
leading up to that point. Indeed, it lent a bitter-sweet aspect to some of the
stories. The same holds true in A Cool and Lonely Courage.
Knowing that these stories end in capture can make the sense of small moments of joy or victory shine like candles in the darkness. And of course, the very end of the story isn’t known. You know that you are all in prison, but there is the question about what you do with your final card… to keep it or to give it away, once you know everyone else’s stories. The final end of each character isn’t known until the epilogue!
Occupied France.
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Thanks so much to Alex for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out A Cool and Lonely Courage on Kickstarter today!
Note: As required by my standards, you’ll note that I asked Alex about whether he reached out to the families of any of those he’s writing this game based on. I understand Alex’s perspective, but as I have spoken of before, I care about whose stories we tell, so I wanted to ask to get that perspective.
Hi all! Today I’ve got an interview with Elizabeth Chaipraditkul about Afterlife, which is currently on Kickstarter! It sounds really fascinating, so check out what Liz has to say below!
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Tell me a little about Afterlife. What excites you about it?
So, here’s the elevator pitch taken right from our Kickstarter page:
Afterlife: Wandering Souls is a macabre fantasy game set in surreal plane known as the Tenebris. You take on the role of a Wanderer—someone who died, but didn’t end up in Heaven, Hell, or any other traditional afterlife. Devoid of any memories of your life on earth, you find yourself in an endless desert filled with gateways. Search different planes of existence for clues of your former life – or a semblance of one. Along the way you’ll encounter strange inhabitants, alien cultures, and other humans who’ve lost all hope and are bent on destroying you.
Afterlife is Alice in Wonderland meets What Dreams May Come set in a world inspired by the works of Guillermo del Torro, Hayao Miyazaki, and surrealist artists. *A few things really excite me about Afterlife: Wandering Souls (AWS) first, the concept of exploring forgotten memories has always called to me in rpgs. My favourite part of running games for people is having those poignant moments with players delving into their personal stories.Whatever type of game your playing – a sprawling adventure, a strange mystery, or a political nightmare – play is always heightened for me when characters have their own personal stories going on. In AWS you travel through strange worlds and get to experience a look into your character’s past. I love that!
On a more personal note I’m excited about this project, because it’s the work (for my company) that I am most proud of to date. I’ve learned a lot through my years of freelancing and I feel it’s culminated to this. One of the most important things I’ve learned is that you need a great team around you – and this project has the biggest team to date! When you have so many talented people working towards one goal – that excites me!
How does Afterlife work mechanically, just the basics, to demonstrate this surreal plane and the way you interact with it?
The basics of Afterlife’s mechanics are rolling a pool of d6’s and getting the number of successes required by the Challenge set by your GM. Around those base mechanics we’ve built in a lot of cool systems that help reflect the setting you’re playing in. For example, each Wanderer has an Approach which is a martial item that can warp and shape based on their personality. The more players define what their Approach does the more unique it becomes – but also mechanically it gives them a bonus to their checks. We also have something called Death Marks – which are tattoo-like markings on a Wanderer’s skin. Each Death Mark is linked to a memory the player helped develop during character creation and each gives a special mechanical benefit. Throughout the game people unlock their Death Marks by interacting with their memories.
What do you do to support players with the potentially difficult subjects that come up in game, considering the references like What Dreams May Come?
We encourage GMs to have an open and honest conversation about what player’s expectations are of the game before they start, along with going over themes that the players aren’t comfortable with. For public games where you might not know each other well or convention spaces we suggest GMs use safety tools like the X-card which can be easier for players to interact with when they don’t know everyone well. Afterlife is all about strange exploration and (OC) enjoying all the drama that comes with experiencing past memories and bringing them into play. To paraphrase what we’ve written in the corebook – Afterlife is a game where you play a dead planar traveler with magical powers searching through alien worlds for memories – arguing someone should re-live traumatic memories they’re not comfortable with because it is realistic is just obtuse.
Memories seem really important in Afterlife! How do players interact with their memories mechanically and in the story itself?
Within the game we have a mechanics called ‘naming a fragment’ whereby you as a player see something that you’d like to have relate back to your past life and denote its importance to your GM. When this happens you GM uses that person, place, or thing you named to create a small side scene for you known as a Break. During a Break your character goes into a catatonic-like state and they re-live a memory of their past life. When your Wanderer comes to, they have a better idea of who they once were and what their memories mean to them. Aside from getting some awesome play out of naming a fragment, it also has mechanical benefits. One of the best ones is unlocking a Death Mark, which gives you a cool power and also means you’re one step closer to the end of your Wanderer’s journey.
What are the alien worlds like and what influence do characters have on the world around them?
In Afterlife: Wandering Souls the alien worlds are known as Limbos. Each is strange and often macabre. For example, we have a Limbo in the book known as the Drowned Lands filled with shipwrecks, ghosts of the dead, and strange sea creatures. In another Limbo we have is a giant wall of roses under a rolling grey sky – daring to look into one of the roses could spell doom for your Wanderer as they contain memories of the living world.
Characters are encouraged to be active participants in the Limbos they visit. Without interacting with the world around them, they are unable to find memories of their past lives and therefore risk falling into Stagnation (a loss of hope). To put it in the simplest terms – Wanderers are encouraged to be the stereotypical adventurers getting embroiled in plots, going on adventures, and interacting with NPCs. The amount of influence a Wanderer wields is based on how they interact with the Limbo itself – if people like them, if they are helpful, if they can do something of us.
I’ve had some recent changes in my personal life, and they’ve reflected some changes in my professional life, too! As some people know, I have multiple romantic partners (I’m polyamorous), and that I work on game stuff and play games with my partners a lot. One of my partners is Thomas Novosel, who is a brilliant artist and game designer I met through Google+ a few years back. We’re dating, and we’re also working on some super rad game stuff.
Thomas Novosel, photo by Brie Beau Sheldon (c) 2019.
Thomas is in upstate New York, and he’s consulting with me on Turn’s border towns stretch goal that replaced the Mormon towns goal. This stretch goal is going to take a little longer to complete, but Thomas was part of the inspiration – I visited him in his town, on the northern US border, and realized there are a lot of stories to tell. He’s helping me get in touch with the local indigenous center (Akwesasne natives). This is hugely useful.
(P.S.: I’m still looking for a southern border consultant, preferably a person of color, from either side of the US southern border! Please use the contact page if you’re interested.)
Thomas and I have also made our own little game collective, called Assembludo (a mashup of assemblage+ludo for artistic mashup of game stuff, basically). It’s been really fun to work on so far, and we’re nearing having some projects ready to release! It’s hard figuring out how to fund projects, but in the meantime I’ve been helping Thomas get some game jam products out like The Heaven’s Prophet’s Tomb for the Pamphlet Dungeon, and he’s run his game Runaway Hirelings for me so I can get a better feel for his design sense. (Unsurprisingly, Runaway Hirelings was SUPER fun, very creative and adventurous, and plays in like 2 hours! It’s worth way more like $10!)
The other new projects we’re working on are even more exciting!
The first project we’re hoping to release as a joint effort as designers is called The Magic Hour, and it’s a short adventure for general fantasy campaigns with some custom creatures. It’s set in a small town in a rural fantasy land with a variety of characters in the town, where a mystery is occurring! People in the town have been disappearing, and no one can seem to figure out what’s happening!
The description I gave to John one of the creatures is “okapi with condor wings” and I’m excited to see them realized in the game. We’re both obviously working on this while juggling our regular jobs, freelance work, and individual projects, so it’s taking a little bit of time. But, we’re making good progress, and I think it’s a cute game adventure that encourages nonviolence, explores a small town, and has a little bit of silliness baked in. We’re both capable of seriousness and spookiness, but I think that’s something really wonderful about what Thomas and I have been working on – there’s just a little lightheartedness in every bit!
We have a few other ideas bouncing around. Like, Thomas is working on a King Arthur and the Round Table inspired knight game, A Knight Rode at Dawn, which looks absolutely fantastic and has been fun to follow and contribute to as he needs. I’m working on Flicker, something I started writing inspired by Thomas’s art before we started dating, which is a game about hope where you burn down tiny paper houses as you, a living flame, travel the darkening world to relight the sun. I love the game a lot, and it’s reignited by Thomas’s gentle encouragement.
Our big project, which could take a long while, is Little Green Dot, which is a game about a world populated by animals that live on little islands. It’s a world touched by folk legend and there’s a lot of thinking about our actions, what they mean now, and what they’ll mean years from now to our community, our family, our party, and ourselves. Animals are sometimes bigger or smaller than they’d be in our world, but they’re also able to use leaf-swords and acorn-caps and travel to become legends in their own right.
One of my favorite things that Thomas has written in our draft notes is this, about one of the character types that I wanted to have.
The squids and the turtles children would grow together but would always be upset and miss each other and grow apart as one went towards land. The Whale saw this and kissed the squids mantles, giving them a soft membrane of water from home to follow them onto land. Allowing them to go as far as they want, with their friends, while also taking their home with them.
Thomas Novosel, draft notes for Little Green Dot, 2019
There is a section below it where he elaborated that I read as he typed, and it made me cry!
Specific Feeling: Taking a stone from the farm with you into the city. A stone that you looked at and liked. But someone put it in your hand so that you didn’t have to pick it up.
Thomas Novosel, draft notes for Little Green Dot, 2019
This is the weirdest thing about designing with Thomas. He still is quite technical and focused on mechanics, like John is. And he’s highly artistic, like John is. But Thomas is much more of a feelsy person like me! So when he wrote this, especially as a farm kid who moved to the city and no one gave me something to carry with me, just punched me in the heart forever. It was one of our first design sessions and it remains one of my favorite things I’ve ever seen a person write about something they were designing.
We recently went to Lake Placid and had a picnic looking at nearby mountains. Few things make me miss living in rural areas more than spending time in the wilderness!
I think my work with Thomas has made me reflect on how I design a lot! Like, maybe I need to start putting myself first, and the game after. And maybe, I should not tell myself it’s stupid to think about how mechanics feel. We ignore it so often, how games feel, what they do to us emotionally when we take action or don’t, and how we feel when we roll a die or flip a card or enforce a mechanical rule. Feelings aren’t stupid. And just because we have to work at understanding them sometimes does not mean that we should dismiss them in design. Needless to say, I can’t wait to show you more from Assembludo in the future!
One last thing I wanted to mention about my work with Thomas is something he put in the Little Green Dot document. It sounds simple, but it’s really important:
The Love Contract If this game affects our relationship negatively, or starts hurting us. We will stop working on it, because we love each other very very much. And being in love is more important than fighting over work.
Thomas Novosel, signed by Beau and Thomas both in the Little Green Dot documents.
I look at it and I think, my gosh. How many of my relationships would be less rocky around our design experiences if I’d put this in there? What if I had put in a Friendship Contract or a Respect Contract in my projects I’ve worked on? How simple of an idea is it to just stop doing something that’s hurting you, or hurting the relationships that build up the game in the first place? It smacked me right in the forehead with its sense. So I signed it!
I love all of my partners very much. And I work with them all, to varying degrees! I think what I was missing this whole time wasn’t the right person to work with, it was the right attitude to go about working with. Considering that Thomas and I, and John and I, are very aware of how fickle the game market is and how we can’t ever expect success. I think we also know how precarious relationships can be when you’re working together. Like, yikes. With that in mind, I think prioritizing love is worth it.
Beau & Thomas at Lake Placid, by Brie Beau Sheldon (c) 2019.
Find out more about Thomas at thomas-novosel.com and find him on Twitter at @thomasanovosel. His itch.io hosts a number of his games & game materials as well (including fonts!), and is a good place to follow!
P.S. I go by Beau now, tho the full name is Brie Beau Sheldon. 🙂
P.P.S. – My work with John continues on Roar of Alliance – check him out on Twitter as @johnwsheldon and on Pluspora to follow his progress. He is also still my husband, thankfully. 🙂
P.P.S. I’m still with Dillon long-distance, too, and he is running some really cool games as an awesome DM, and makes some awesome creatures for his games! Keep up with him on Twitter as @Damn_It_Dillon!
Tell me a little about A Town Called Malice. What excites you about it?
Nordic Noir is a great genre. It refers to more than just an international import, it’s an approach to ensemble-style drama where characters of different backgrounds all deal with the same dramatic tension equally. The BBS series “Broadchurch” is a great example where everyone in the same small town comes to terms with a murder over multiple episodes, and the first run of “Twin Peaks” is the same way. From a game mechanics perspective, it’s something I hadn’t done before – my previously credits used the Powered by the Apocalypse engine. It’s excite to explore a new style of gameplay.
What are the characteristics of Nordic Noir and how do they show up in A Town Called Malice?
Nordic Noir is more character-driven, I find the tragedy or crime to be
solved becomes a prism to show the internal conflicts the characters are
experiencing. Both the original and US version of “The Killing” show
how multiple backgrounds are affected by a terrible death and as the series
progresses, we as an audience see the story go deeper beyond just the basic
“Whodunnit” type of mystery. By going with a story game format, (as
opposed to something more stat driven), it emphasized the relationships the
player were building within the narrative. That seemed more of the portrayal of
the genre.
How do you ensure the players are comfortable, while still unsettling
them as appropriate, in a Nordic Noir game?
We of course make sure to highlight appropriate safety measures and basic responsibility when dealing with both the horror and relationship elements. Because the players cooperate in building the narrative, they also lead the drama to the levels that best suit their gameplay tastes.
What are the characters like and how are characters built for the game?
Characters are guided by several things – Each role has a Personal Goal which should influence the player’s actions. These guidelines are intended to be neutral to how the player feels they’re best served. The Personal Goal of the “Criminal” role for example, is to “Gain the Advantage”. This can be interpreted by the player, and can be either a good or a bad trait depending on the situation. Gaining the advantage can be interpreted into helping the Law in solving the bigger problems of the Town for example.
Characters are also developed by the relationships they have with the other players at the table, through the use of Heit and Kult dice. These dice are placed in between the players at the table, representing the immediate relationship around them. Both players have input into that relationship, so a relationship can be a mixture of both good and bad feelings. This allows the players to expand on the overall narrative and determine what they need to personally overcome in order to succeed.
If players wanted to play the game and get the most out of it, how would you suggest they prepare for it?
I have really enjoyed watching players going deeper than
they normally would’ve in say, a straightforward dungeon crawl. I think people
will enjoy it most when they focus on the relationship aspects as much as
trying to overcome the supernatural threats to the Town – what does your
character feel? What do they need? How can they overcome these things together?
It’s a really different focus for me as a creator, and I’m glad to see people
get excited about the prospects of what Malice can be.
And for fun, what would you suggest as the ideal murder?
Wait. Who talked to you? I wasn’t there, no matter what you’ve heard! (laughs)
Hi all! Today I have an interview with Sophie Lagace, PK Sullivan, and Ed Turner about Fate of Cthulhu, which is currently on Kickstarter. I am impressed with some of the changes they’ve made to the Mythos and to Fate for the project, and I hope you do too! Check it out!
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Tell me a little about Fate of Cthulhu. What excites you about it?
Sophie Lagace: It’s a take on Cthulhu I have not really seen before, where the heroes are seriously out-gunned and out-tentacled, but not hopeless. Maybe you can’t save humanity from an apocalypse, but you can save it from complete extinction, for example. It’s a game about fighting back even when you’re a tiny person against a monstrous evil, giving it all you got and having a chance to make a difference. I can seriously relate, these days.
Also, we acknowledge the glaring flaws in the source material and in H.P. Lovecraft himself, take the good, and reject the bad. I love critical examination of our faves rather than pretending everything is fine
PK Sullivan: This is the first genuinely hopeful take on the Cthulhu mythos that I’ve seen. That’s something really important to me. Sean Nittner reached out to me in July 2015 asking if I would be the lead designer for this Fate Cthulhu game that Evil Hat wanted to make. My first response was, “Me? Are you sure? I’m not a Cthulhu fan.” Ultimately I think that worked in my favor. Stephen took point on the mythos story while my job was to design a system that reinforced the themes of the mythos. But I need hope in my stories — I made that very clear early on — so Fate of Cthulhu started to lean more toward the good you can do in the timeline
It can still be a pyrrhic victory, or you can still completely screw things up and make the future worse but there’s always the chance, the possibility, the hope that things can be better. And ultimately that’s what you’re trying to achieve as a character: a better future.
Which is surprisingly easy to achieve when the timeline starts as dark as possible.
Ed Turner: Sophie and PK already adequately covered the joys of cosmic horror with a side of hope, so I’m going to be a bit more mechanics-focused: it’s corruption that excites me. As characters deal with phenomena related to the Great Old One, they’ll slowly be corrupted by the sheer wrongness of eldritch forces. Left unchecked, corruption takes the form of horrible mutations. You want claws and tentacles and dripping ichor and other body horror shenanigans? Eat your heart out. Maybe literally… corruption can do weird things.
I love corruption for so many reasons. It’s a way to convey the danger of these alien entities without falling back on tired and problematic notions of “madness.” It’s a way to give players actual hard consequences when things go awry—having a character die is almost never as interesting as having a character’s very humanity get twisted. But more than anything else, it’s a way to empower characters… as bad as corruption is, your new tentacles are also tools in your arsenal, a way you can use the Great Old One’s own malevolence against itself. It ties back to that all-important sense of hope: the worse things get for a character, the better they are able to fight back. As bad as the threat you’re facing is, it contains the seeds of its own destruction.
And of course it means your character can have tentacles. Nothing wrong with more tentacles. The heroes need to even out the tentacle playing-field.
Sophie Lagace
What is your role in the project, and what did you especially enjoy working on over the course of the project?
SL: I have had three roles. The project stretched on for nearly four years (with almost a year out of that devoted to the playtest rounds), so many things changed along the way. I started on quality control, a sort of sounding board for “Does this thing fit as a Fate game?” Eventually the project management work was rearranged across all Evil Hat products and Sean Nittner asked me to take over project management for this one. And as of almost a year ago, when Lenny Balsera didn’t have time to be Fate Line Developer, I have taken that on as well.
I tremendously enjoyed working (once again!) with top talent, and this will continue with our stretch goal collaborators. On a personal level, I had a flash of elation when, after compiling the mass of data from our beta playtest round, I suddenly realized that we had objective confirmation that we had addressed the problems revealed by the alpha round. We all had a vague, hopeful sense from the comments received that maybe we were on the right track, but it was great to get hard data
PK: I’m the lead designer and I love weird challenges in game design. The first four or five months of design was very collaborative. Sean, Sophie, Stephen, and I (wow, am I the only not-S on the original team?) had a bunch of Skype calls where we hashed out the parameters of the game, both fiction and mechanics. The thing we hit on was that the meat of this game would be in an ever-changing, non-deterministic timeline. Which is hella tricky because we have characters coming from the literal future who know the timeline as a matter of fact.
The first iteration of our timeline mechanisms pretty detached from any role play the characters made. At the conclusion of an event (more or less what we call an adventure) one of the players would get slapped with paradox and suffer terrible visions of the new future they’ve created. This involved a skill check against an epic difficulty that was almost sure to cost resources (Fate points, etc.), followed by rolling four Fate dice with modifiers based on how well that skill check went. If the player had been able to shake off time’s assault just fine, then they got to improve dice. If they blew that defense roll, then one of the dice was guaranteed to be a negative. The dice result became the new rating of the event the players had just completed (more or less how badly it screws humanity) and those dice rippled out to the other events in the timeline. This did two things: it gave the characters valuable information about the new state of the timeline and made sure no one could game the system for the best result.
Playtesters hated it
So I had to go back to the drawing board. I redesigned the timeline mechanisms so that the heroes and the squamous horrors of the void are competing on a track for changes to the timeline. As those rack up, ripples get made across the other events. But! Now it’s up to the GM to interpret what those ripples mean. This was a really clever solution to a problem I didn’t know we had. I was leaning too hard into the action element of the action-horror stories we set out to tell. By making the timeline changes a GM element, while giving them tools and guidance to convey those changes to the players in thematically appropriate ways, the uncertainty that players faced dramatically increased. Uncertainty is key to horror stories. We need to keep the players in a state of imperfect information, even if other Fate games rely on perfect information.
That was the biggest challenge in the game and one I hope goes over well. Fred and some of the early readers have really responded to the condensed, concise Fate Core rules set I’ve put together for the game. The first stretch goal was to put that into the Fate Core SRD so people can build their own Fate games using those 50 pages of rules. That’s very flattering. I really hope people build tons of great games off this chassis I put together. It would be the greatest reward so far in my game design career.
ET: I got pulled into the project relatively late, to help get it ready for the second round of playtests, and after that I was part of the writing team. In practice, most of my energy went into the detail work: example text, spells and rituals, corruption stunts, things of that nature. Whenever you see a list of things, I probably had a hand in it. It’s not easy to pick a favorite part—by the time I started working on the project, the core of it had already come more-or-less together. It meant that I was given a wonderfully ghastly playground to explore.
Perhaps my favorite part was helping to finalize the timelines themselves. Stephen wrote some wonderful apocalypses, which are just an absolute delight to read; my job involved statting up the NPCs and horrible monsters that populate his world. In short, getting them ready for a GM to pick up and throw at their players, while still being as weird and scary as Stephen envisions. It’s a fun challenge.
Ed Turner
What are the unique challenges of a timey wimey affected game? You’ve talked about the timelines – what do those mean to the players?
SL: For one thing, it means being able to play some pretty unusual characters, whether by having corruption aspects and stunts, or by confronting temporal paradox. We had playtester groups who reported that some of their members played different versions of the same character, and that seemed to generate a lot of fun moments for them.
For another, it means that the heroes will be dealing with high stakes; for example, if you can’t change the timeline, you have not the possibility but the certitude that everyone you ever cared about will suffer a horrible, ah, fate.
Finally, the fact that a group can tackle any of the four key events in a timeline in any order in turn makes each story truly unique to that group. It’s likely that two gaming group taking on the same timeline and Great Old One will have a very different narrative, so replay value should be good.
ET: It means that players and GMs alike will be contending with an interesting juxtaposition of knowledge and uncertainty. The timeline gives players many, though not all, of the essential details about what they’ll encounter during an event, but their actions ripple forward, changing subsequent events. The knowledge they were so sure of at the outset grows less and less helpful as time goes on. And it gives the GM room to really mess with players’ expectations. Of course, that does also suggest part of the challenge: rationing out that change. PK pointed out earlier that uncertainty is key to horror stories, but uncertainty requires a solid baseline, otherwise things change so rapidly that they stop being unsettlingly wrong and start being pure static. In other words, the GM can’t mess with players’ expectations if things get so chaotic that the players don’t have any expectations anymore. Timelines, and the timeline track, help contain that chaos, so players will always know more-or-less what’s going to happen, but can be shocked by the details.
PK: The biggest challenge was finding a way to have timeline actually matter. We decided early on that a timeline would play a significant role in the game. That’s why the whole structure of Fate of Cthulhu is built around the timeline. When I started mucking about with possible timeline systems, I realized that for it to work it needed to do two contradictory things: the players have to know the timeline and the timeline has to change and shift. From there it was a tightrope to walk of having the changes be unpredictable and Lovecrafting while letting the players feel like they earned the changes to it.
How did you approach making an inclusive game in something that most marginalized consider volatile, the Lovecraftian mythos, both mechanically and in the fiction and in presentation of the game rules?
SL: It was clear from the first moment that to make this a game which Evil Hat could publish, we would have to face the true monsters in the Lovecraft story. It just would not have been compatible with our mission to gloss over racism, ableism, and other -isms.
It may be tacky but I’m going to toot my own horn here regarding the concept of sanity: I was the first to suggest a corruption mechanic and the high cost of facing the horrors being the slow transformation into a monster yourself. I’m very fond of RPGs that ask the question “What are you willing to sacrifice in order to succeed?” instead of just “Will you succeed?” I think it’s central to Fate, a game where PCs have lots of resources to draw on in order to achieve goals.
That said, I’m certain someone else would rapidly have come up with the corruption idea, but I felt good about being the one to pull it out of an evil hat.
ET: I think Sophie really hits the nail on the head: getting rid of the tired and thoughtless treatment of “sanity” pulls a lot of weight. I think it also helps to be absolutely explicit when we call out Lovecraft’s bigotry. It’s so commonly elided over, or dismissed as being a product of its time. And that’s no good… his writings often, and with varying levels of subtlety, other real-world groups, and that’s something we don’t want to lazily perpetuate.
And of course, we can’t forget the contributions of our sensitivity reader, Misha Bushyager. Sensitivity consultation is great idea in general, but on something like this, it’s invaluable.
PK Sullivan
How is Fate of Cthulhu different from other experiences in Fate, from your perspective? What do you hope people enjoy in the variation?
SL: I think it puts in doubt whether you will achieve success like no other Fate game we’ve released before. Also, there are not that many role-playing games that provide mechanical support to allow time travel and changing the future, and I don’t know of any other based on the Fate engine. In fact, most time-travel RPGs I know of have a lighter tone: TimeWatch (Pelgrane Press), Doctor Who (FASA, Cubicle 7), Time & Temp (Dig a Thousand Holes Publishing), etc.. On the other hand, Fate of Cthulhu can have funny moments, but it’s not meant to be played for laughs
ET: The timelines give the game a very strong narrative superstructure; there is a very clearly defined end point that you are building to: eventually the moment of the Great Old One’s rise will arrive, and it’s on you to be ready for it. It means there’s a grand finale always on the horizon, which gives the campaign an ongoing sense of pace… the characters might not know what the best next step is, but it’s impossible for them to lose sight of their greater goal. It’s not the very first Fate game to do something like this; Uprising has a built-in narrative arc leading to an end point. But Fate of Cthulhu pushes the concept even further, diving really deep into the short, focused campaign concept. I also hope that people take advantage of the focused, relatively brief campaign by going through multiple apocalypses. Not only by re-trying a timeline, hoping to get a better result with the next iteration, but by trying out the variety of timelines in the book and coming out as stretch goals from the Kickstarter.
PK: Most Fate games have characters change laterally, sometimes gaining in power but only in small doses. Because a given campaign is really just four adventures — four events on the timeline — and a denouement in the form of the final event Rise of the Great Old One, we actually put advancement on the fast track. PCs get a new skill every milestone. But… that’s tempered by the corruption mechanisms. This is the only Fate game I know of where you can end up in a mechanically reinforced spiral of self-destruction. Corruption stunts offer you great power but at the cost of further corruption. Not to mention many of the horrors you’ll face can push you down that path, as well. It’s another interesting dichotomy where characters can get very powerful very fast but also just wind up taking themselves right out of play by getting too dark.
One last question! If you could be in the Fate of Cthulhu world, what would you most want to do and see? What would be the wildest adventure you could want?
PK: Is it a cop out to say I don’t want to go there? We made the worst future! Futures! There are five of them! They’re all completely terrible. War, plague, famine, pestilence, and unending subjugation await anyone who lives long enough to see the future. If I had to be someone in Fate of Cthulhu, I think I’d want to be a modern day mystic. Maybe someone who has visions of the future. Being haunted by nightmarish visions of things yet to be is about the most chill thing you can be in this world.
SL: I’m with PK! But I would want to see success in avoiding a cataclysm, righting things to the point where humanity can build a better future. So, ++++ on the timeline!
ET: Yeah, there’s definitely no great place in the Fate of Cthulhu world. But I dunno, I think the Dagon timeline might be pretty okay? I mean, assuming you survive the horrible transformation into a Deep One. Sure, you’d suffer eternal subservience to a giant paranoid fish-monster at the bottom of the ocean, but you’d get to breathe underwater, and that’s pretty cool. That’s about as good a trade-off as a Great Old One is going to offer.
I have an interview today with L A Wilga and James Lader on the new roleplaying game Sundown, which is currently on Kickstarter! It sounds like a really interesting new game and I’m excited for it. Check out the interview below, and the Kickstarter too!
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Sundown’s cover art by Mayara Sampaio.
Tell me a little about Sundown. What excites you about it?
L A: So, Sundown is a rules light tabletop roleplaying game. It’s set in a pre-industrial frontier where, instead of magic, we have “science.” Science is the intersection of two things. Wonders: inventions that just make everyone’s life easier, and changing: the art of taking someone and reshaping their flesh. In fewer words, engineering and biology
There are two main facets to the game: surviving the wild, with fauna just as changed and dangerous as the folk, and surviving the politics, with a power struggle in every town and a populace that needs you but doesn’t want you.
I certainly get excited to face down giant winged frogs and angry murderbirds, my pink undershave flowing in the wind, but I find catharsis in the politics. You have to navigate finding work, getting paid, finding a place to stay, making friends, and avoiding the authorities as someone disdained by most of society. It’s an experience I think most in our queer rpg community will recognize.
It’s kind of like a cyberpunk game with the punk aesthetic, the politics, and the transhumanism, but if you took away its technology and sent it to the West Marches.
J L: I’m really excited about how much control you have over your body in Sundown. Changes are probably my favorite part of our game, because as a trans man, being able to reshape your body on a whim is the ultimate fantasy. And I’m sure other people think that’s super cool too.
The other thing I’m excited about is intentionally including politics in the premise. Social strife is the lifeblood of this game, where more of the people are monsters than the fiends. I really like that the direction of your career can be toppling the ruling class in Cragsmouth, or becoming a thief-assassin who saves themselves at all costs. You make your way through Sundown by surviving how best you can, and it really mirrors to me how to navigate a world where a lot of the power isn’t yours.
You talk about the Changing. How does Changing work, and are there any special benefits or consequences from it?
L A: This is a good question, because people tend to assume that you just drink a potion and seconds later you have claws or something.
Changes are made by a scientist specialized in changing, and in a laboratory devoted to changing. You get stuffed into an egg-like pod with the changing agents and a medium called lungwater that keeps you alive for the weeks or months your changes take. Breaking down flesh and building it back up takes a lot of time and energy. When you break out of your egg, you’re ravenously hungry, everything is too bright, and you just want to go back to sleep.
Changing agents are derived from plants and animals out in the wild that have already been observed to do… something to people. Indigoji turns your skin purple, for instance. Modern changes were discovered by blending random assortments together and logging the resulting effect on humans, not all of them consenting test subjects.
J L: Changing is arduous. It really does mirror the transition process in the real world, but it’s less limited. It’s expensive to get access to changes. Special equipment and making sure you don’t die in stasis isn’t cheap. The time cost, too, matters. And some changes can stress your body. It’s not a perfect science, and you can end up with additional things that identify you as a changeling, like black nails when you asked for super strength.
We also did name the pods where Changes happen eggs. That’s not a very subtle metaphor I think. If people know you’re a changeling, too, they’ll treat you very different. The best reaction you can expect in most of Sundown is mild disdain, which is very real. So if people know you’re a changeling, that alone is a consequence.
This was labeled frogbeast, which I think is such a fun name!
How do your identities as queer and trans (or queer/trans identities in general) reflect in the broader world beyond the Changing? Do they relate to Wonders, or even to the politics?
L A: We didn’t really use wonders to say anything about queerness or transness, they’re kinda just neat things, like goggles that let you see at night. We definitely do intend, though, for guns to be a symbol of the class war. Did we mention there’s guns? They’re more like railguns than gunpowder guns. They use a fictional material called floatstone.
There is this wonder called pitch, though. It’s a black syrup thing that’s injected, and it knits your body back together after some nasty injuries. The catch, though, is if you use too much, you run the risk of becoming a pitchblood. Basically, your blood is replaced with pitch. You lose twenty years off your life, but you’re near invincible. I think some folk can sympathize with that sort of deal-with-the-devil transformation?
Beau’s Note: This specific one reminds me of my own experiences with lithium as someone with bipolar disorder, to be honest.
L A, continued: The politics is really where our queerness comes through. For one, if you have any sort of visible change, which includes things like colored hair, over half of the people in Sundown won’t really want anything to do with you. Not to mention you’re already othered because of your profession. The isolationists of Sundown really don’t like outsiders doing their work for them. Too bad they need drifters like you for things like translation, bounty hunting, and trailblazing.
J L: Definitely. The otherism experienced in Sundown based on being a drifter is pretty much a direct metaphor for how it feels to be disdained and desired. Very much as a queer person it’s easy to feel consumed and discarded at the earliest opportunity, and since you’re a travelling contractor, it’s even more direct.
I think, honestly, the other parts of the system also show some of the good parts of being queer, too. When you create your character, for example, your character is rooted in the people at your table. One of the traits that embodies who you are is defined by your relationship to another character at the table. Drifters often are building an intentional community, a network of people who know where the good work is, who you should work with on what jobs, where it’s safe to travel, and sharing stories of your best exploits. I think that really reflects how queer and trans folx band together to keep each other safe and loved in a world that is otherwise hostile to them.
James Lader.
How are things like changing and wonders, and those politics you discuss, mechanized or formalized in the game?
J L: So all of these things involve infamy, which is the currency we use in Sundown. Infamy isn’t coin, though, it’s a representation of your influence in the area, and how well people know you. The more infamy you have garnered, the more leverage you have. Political action that earns infamy takes place during heats, the jobs drifters take on every month. You might slay fiends, debate a public official, steal from a guild, or lead an uprising.
Getting wonders and changes requires you to spend your infamy to obtain them. Some wonders are special and rare enough to use your downtime between heats as well as your infamy to obtain them. Changes always take downtime, and usually cost infamy.
One of the neat things about infamy is that you only have so much influence you can gain, and once you use that leverage, it’s gone. You have to think carefully about what you want to achieve and use that influence wisely.
L A: Ok so James mentioned heats. That’s basically an adventure, and downtime is the time between them. We intend for downtime to be played kind of like play-by-post between sessions
When you make improvements to your character that involve big investments of time, like learning a new skill or rebuilding your fleshy prison, you do that during your downtime. Spending your infamy on changes is just one of the things you can spend your downtime on.
J L:Downtime is when most of your character improvements can happen, so you have to choose really carefully what you want to spend your time on between jobs. Sundown is a hard place to be and choosing to better your traits or gain cat ears can be life or death. It’s really tricky because you can also only get so many things before not having any more infamy to gain.
What have you done with the game to support players in exploring these relatively serious subjects, including consent and safety mechanics and other aspects of your design?
J L: One of the first sections of the book is a consent tool we developed based on our stress mechanic. Stress is sort of a measure of your character’s health, and it worked really well to measure how safe a topic was for the players.
We also reinforce throughout the book to be mindful of others at the table, to use additional safety and consent tools you might be more familiar with, and to check in with your fellow players.
These are really hard topics and not everyone wants certain themes in the game, and we went out of our way to remind people to check in, and check often.
L A: Regarding serious subjects, I wrote from my own experience as a poor queer person, and I think the queerphobia and classism and Sundown really reflect that
For the experiences I haven’t lived, we took on two non-white sensitivity editors. Their input was invaluable for fleshing out the cultures that have made their way to Sundown in a respectful manner.
Even though I’m disabled too, James has far more lived experience in that regard. The section on disabled drifters in the intro section is entirely his doing.
Every time there’s a “make sure you check in with your fellow players” regarding a marginalized identity, all four of us had a hand in it.
Full disclosure: I was given a free review copy and I think James is pretty rad.
Photos in this review are by Brie Beau Sheldon.
The book itself, The Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide, by James D’Amato.
I approached the review in a weird fashion, to try to get a full perspective. The book itself is basically a tool to help you build the background of your character for RPG play. Some elements of it seem to trend towards games with levels, but I think this could be used for most roleplaying. It uses die rolls for randomizers at times, but also a lot of it is pick lists and freewriting to flesh out the character.
The way I approached this was to have three separate sessions of exercises (there are so many included in the book)! with three different people, and each of them had their own individual characters, while I kept the same character through the whole test. Each of the character had varying levels of previous information – mine, for example, was made up on the spot! I also spent a fair amount of time looking at the book
The book itself has a fun orange, black, and greenish color scheme and is relatively well organized. I will note there are a few spaces where the text contrast is not as comfortable for me to read, but aside from that, the book is pretty clear to follow and read.
The biggest comment I’d have about this book? The questions were often wonderfully open. I am not good with constraints on my creativity – I like a lot of free space to wonder along. There is guidance for a lot of the questions, plus the random rolls, but enough of the questions allowed me to explore where I wanted to go.
I really appreciate James’s thoughtfulness in providing subjects that range from death to relationships to magical objects and places – it feels like there’d be something here for basically everybody! Special love for the “Damn Merlinials” exercise, too. The exercises vary in complexity, with some including random rolls resulting in skipping forward sections, and others just simple fill-in-the-blanks, and some even have a combination of methods to answer all of the questions.
Overall, I think that it’s really useful tool for someone who wants to create deep, complex characters with a lot of history, flavor, and support for their perspectives and beliefs.
A note on pronouns: One thing that I didn’t like in the book is that all of it uses he or she pronouns, even when it’s quite clunky. This was also noted by all three of the other players I tested with. I do know, however, that James didn’t want this in the book and he even consulted with me on how to address it, and I wrote a statement to his publisher. I appreciate James’s intent a lot and wish his publisher had followed it. I bring this up because I know I have many nonbinary readers and the use of binary pronouns from one of our own can feel a little jarring, and I want you to know that James had the best intentions, but couldn’t push it through. That’s basically the only major issue I ran into with this book though!
I’m including the full text of the responses to the prompts I played through, but they only include the answers to the questions – for those you’ll need to get your own copy of the Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide by James D’Amato on Amazon or at Barnes & Noble!
My products are temporarily on reverse sale to gear up for tax time I’ve increased the prices by a very nice percentage – hopefully to help me get through this year’s taxes! Buy all of the products for a cool nice $69 – yes, that’s more expensive. Just like taxes!
My goal for the sale is $420. I will not use it for blazing it, just to give a boost to my funds to pay taxes owed. It runs until 4/1/19!
The following is an essay by John W. Sheldon, someone you may know as the art director for Turn, or as the creator of Roar of Alliance, playtested at Big Bad Con and elsewhere.
The Roar of Alliance playmat, photo by John W. Sheldon.
My name is John W. Sheldon, and I’ve been working on a tabletop game called Roar of Alliance for a few years (I used to call it Armored Reckoning). The game is about crewing an Allied tank in an alt-history World War Two and fighting through waves Nazis to set things right. What could be more anti-fascist than that? Lots of stuff, it turns out. The problem is that Nazis aren’t the only fascists, and my game does some things that potentially support fascist ways of thinking. In the political climate of the United States in 2019, it is especially important that we be aware of these things and work to mitigate them as much as possible. I’m writing about my process here in the hopes that others might find a useful example in the steps I’ve taken, and so that people with more experience can point out ways I can further improve.
What My Game Does Wrong
How does a game about destroying Nazi tanks and blowing up their infantry risk supporting fascist modes of thought? One cornerstone of fascist ideology is that they (the fascists) are oppressed by an enemy that is numerous, pervasive, powerful, and simultaneously inferior (stupid, incompetent, or morally weak). Another cornerstone is that the only appropriate way to deal with that enemy is by force.
The rules of my game do specifically these things:
The enemies you face in Roar of Alliance are numerous (outnumbering the players in just about every engagement), dangerous (their vehicles are often more advanced and better armed), and lack intelligence (their actions are automated by simple if/then statements that they never deviate from). The only way players ever interact with these foes is via deadly force. You will lose the game if you do not destroy their vehicles and disperse their infantry.
So, in these ways at least, my game actually promotes a core set of fascist ideologies. Some of this is hard to avoid, given that the game doesn’t have anyone in a central directorial role to moderate portrayals of the enemy or to restrict player behaviors in direct contact with the enemy outside combat, therefore no character in the game is ever confronted by a Nazi outside the specific circumstance of combat. This is a conscious choice to make sure nobody at the table is ever tasked with portraying a Nazi, and it keeps torture* and certain other types of violent fantasy outside the scope of the game as written. Players also have some leeway in narrating the effects of their actions on the enemy: when enemy infantry are removed from the field, players can choose to narrate the enemy’s retreat or death, and players do the same for surviving crew of disabled enemy vehicles.
Since violence and a portrayal of the enemy as numerous and unintelligent are essential to the way the game functions, and I don’t want to scrap the whole thing and start over, how do I make sure the rest of the game refutes fascism?
Focusing on Diversity
by John W. Sheldon
I start with something nationalists and fascists hate: I make sure that every other aspect of the game supports and emphasizes diversity and demonstrates how it creates strength. This paragraph kicks off the rulebook:
This game is set during the 2nd World War in Europe, a time when even the historical victors were rife with bigoted beliefs and policies. You should not let those real world bigotries limit the characters you choose to portray and accept. People of all races and genders from six continents and countless backgrounds fought against fascism and Nazism in Europe, and your characters should reflect some of that diversity.
Moreover, players are asked to identify their character’s country of origin, to help emphasize the diversity of geographic origin of the people who challenge fascism. Some of these choices are informed at a basic level by the themes of the character archetypes the game offers. In particular, the Partisan archetype was a resident of Nazi-occupied territory and a resistance fighter before joining up with the crew, the Collateral is a member of a population oppressed by the Allies and nevertheless pressed into service against the Nazis (e.g., Black Americans or colonial subjects of the British Empire), and the Duty was someone who volunteered for the fight because they new defeating fascism and Nazism was the right thing to do.
For actually producing the game, I’m doing what I’d never recommend: I’m doing the rules writing, layout, and illustrations all myself. What this does mean is that I can make sure that all of the art upholds my stated dedication to multiple axes of diversity. The art within the rules documents already portrays people of multiple genders, races, and body types as members of the player tank crew. Additional art I’m working on will include crew members with visible disabilities, crew wearing items of non-European traditional dress, and different cultural grooming standards.
by John W. Sheldon
Part of my plan for taking the game to crowdfunding is to offer backers the opportunity to have their portraits included as the card back art for some of the character archetypes, and as the face cards in the crew deck. Since I believe the audience for my game (one about Tanks in World War Two) skews significantly male, white, able-bodied, and cis, simply offering all of these art opportunities on a first-come, first-served basis would further skew the art for my game towards a monolithic default. To maintain my dedication to diversity, I need to give up potential sources of revenue and pre-stack the art with diverse portraits. I’ll won’t be offering backer levels for the Jacks in the Crew Deck, or for half of the character archetypes. Instead, I’ll be creating those portraits before the crowdfunding campaign begins. The portraits for the Jacks will be portraits of non-binary volunteers, and those for the first half of the character archetypes will be of volunteers who are one or more of non-white, queer, or visibly disabled.
Heroes that Need Help
Most fascism thrives on mythologizing heroes as paragons of strength, capable of facing great hardship alone and without aid. The heroes of fascism also contain within them a paradox: the enemy they face is terrifying, but they never actually feel fear. Roar of Alliance refutes these mythologized ideas of heroism idea on multiple fronts. The very nature of combat in my game requires players to rely on one another at all times (no person can operate a tank single-handedly). The player characters also begin the game by admitting fear: one of the first tasks of the first session is to identify a fear your character has about the fighting to come.
During the game, player characters will take Stress (the game’s unified resource representing both physical toughness and mental resilience). Characters who max out their Stress during an engagement play out a Last Stand for significant effect, then leave the Crew (the player decides whether they have died or simply become unable for whatever reason to continue on as a tank crew member). While the characters have a limited set of resources called Motivations that the players can expend to avoid stress, the only way to actually recover Stress relies on spending time with the other characters between battles. Only by working together, by comforting one another, and by acknowledging their own dependence on others can characters reduce their Stress and gain new Motivations to help them engage in future battles.
by John W. Sheldon.
Every archetype has scene prompts that show them needing help, and the whole game requires players to rely extensively on one another. Even the player’s Crew is supported by a company of non-Crew characters that players will occasionally be called on to portray between battles. No lone strong hero, or even small group of heroes, can accomplish the monumental task the players are facing.
Humanizing the Enemy
Fascism dehumanizes its enemies, making it easier for its adherents to attack, belittle, and eventually exterminate those that oppose it. You can see this in language comparing enemies to animals, assigning them undesirable traits as a group, in racist and anti-Semitic propaganda images that exaggerate enemy features to cartoonish extremes, or even in recent online language where some members of right-leaning web forums call people who oppose them “NPCs” – implying that there is no real individual personhood in those that disagree with their fascist ideology.
In my quest to make the game as hostile as possible to fascist ideologies, I must design the game to humanize the enemies that players face. Everyone should be reminded that the Nazis and members of the Wehrmacht were not inhuman monsters – they were regular people who became willing to commit evil acts because of an abhorrent philosophy. Reminding players of this is important because dehumanizing even Nazis creates an easy defense for modern fascists and authoritarians to mount, in the form of a “but I do these good things over here, I’m not a complete monster” defense. Reminding people that Nazis were regular people, even while they did terrible things, reminds us that we must examine ourselves for the kinds of behavior they exhibited.
Next Steps
Is there more my game can do? Almost certainly. In fact, I’m extremely open to suggestions for additional ways to improve. You can get in touch with me on Twitter, Pluspora, or Mastodon if you want to give me some feedback.
In the meantime, if you’re interested in ways to make your own game hostile to fascist ideologies, check out these twoessays that helped inform my own process.
*Despite everything pop culture tells us, torture does not work. It is immoral and wrong in every circumstance, and this would still be true even if it worked – which it categorically does not.
