Tag: story games

PTSD, access to role-playing games, and the Luxton technique by P.H. Lee

This post was originally posted on G+ by P.H. Lee on August 28, 2017. It was a significant influence on updates to the Script Change RPG toolbox, and is an essential read in regards to addressing safety in the game community and at every game table. Lee has authorized me to post the text here in full since G+ is dying, which I greatly appreciate – it’s super valuable!

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Preamble

I have PTSD. About 6-7 years ago, more or less, various pan-RPG techniques to control triggering[1] content — The Veil and the X-Card, to name two of a vast diversity — became commonplace in the RPG circles that I played in. Around the same time, I stopped participating in role-playing games at meet-ups and conventions, or anywhere else that these techniques were promulgated. These three things (PTSD, X-Card, and my withdrawal from play) are related. I’m writing this essay to discuss the ways that these techniques cut off my access to role-playing games, and introduce know techniques that, I hope, will point to a way forward in terms of accessibility.

Conflicting Access Needs
Before I go further, I’d like to reference a term from the disability rights movement: conflicting access needs. Disabled people are extremely diverse and our disabilities are also extremely diverse. While an ideal world would have everyone’s access needs met at all times and in all circumstances, in many circumstances, with many disabilities, that is practically or fundamentally impossible.

An example, which I’m paraphrasing from Autistic blogger Mel Baggs: A group home for Autistic people have some occupants who constantly verbalize, and others who are hypersensitive to noise. The verbalizers have a reasonable access need to be allowed to verbalize. The hypersensitive have a reasonable access need for quiet. Both of these access needs are reasonable, but it is impossible to meet both of them in the same space.

For this essay, the point is that, while I’m describing ways that my (and others) access to role-playing games has been cut off, I want to acknowledge that the techniques in question were developed and promulgated — often by people with similar disabilities to mine — to meet a legitimate access need. That they cut off my (and others) access to role-playing games does not mean that they are inherently wrong, bad, or ableist.

I do not want this to turn into “X-Card (or The Veil, etc, etc) is bad” and, even more so, I do not want it to turn into “the people who propagate these techniques are bad.” That’s not my opinion and, also, it’s wrong. I am hoping that by writing this essay I can move the discussion of accessibility of RPGs for PTSD sufferers from “use this technique” to a conversation which can account for different players, different goals, different communities, and different access needs.

A Note on Personal Narrative

I’m going to use a personal narrative throughout this essay, because it is based on my own experiences of both role-playing games and PTSD. But I want to be clear: I am not speaking solely for myself in this. Simply from personal circumstances, I can attest that the problems I have are problems that are shared by a number of other people with triggered mental illnesses.

Likewise, there are people with triggered mental illnesses who have a very different experience — most importantly, there are people with triggered mental illnesses who find the X-Card, The Veil, etc. to be vital techniques for their access to role-playing games. I do not want to erase these people — they exist, and their experiences also matter.

Please do not take my use of personal narrative as evidence that I speak only for myself. I don’t. Likewise, please don’t take my speaking on this topic as someone with PTSD to assume that I speak for all people with triggered mental illness. I don’t.

The X-Card, the Veil, and all that

The X-Card, the Veil, and similar techniques have their roots in a section of Sex and Sorcery, a supplement for Sorcerer by Ron Edwards, where he (roughly paraphrasing) suggests a technique dealing with difficult sexual content in the game by “drawing a veil over it,” basically, describing it in loose terms and then moving on with play, rather than playing it out. This is included together with several other techniques, including actually playing it out and fading to black. From there, like many things from the Sorcerer supplements, it developed on the Forge forums as a more generalized technique that could be applicable to all games.

I first encountered The Veil as a universally applicable technique in the context of public play in the Pacific Northwest — I believe it comes out of the Go Play NW convention, but I could be mistaken. By the time it reached this form, it had mutated considerably — it was something that was invoked by a particular player, rather than a general technique for play, and it generally had the effect of erasing the content of play [2], rather than playing it out in a vague sense and then moving on. It became a widespread meta-technique[3], adopted at a lot of public play events.

Simultaneously [4], in the New York City play scene, John Stavropoulos developed the X-Card as a meta-technique. With the X-Card, the system is formalized. By “throwing the X-Card” (either a physical card marked with an X or just an invocation), a player stops play, and the offending material is erased, and play continues as if it had never happened.

The X-Card grew in popularity and was adopted throughout the indie-games public play culture. By the time that I had largely retreated from public play (~2013), it was fairly universal. Although I have not been in touch with public play culture since, it does not seem (from my outsider perspective) to have become any less widespread.

My Experience

My first reaction to The Veil as a meta-technique was simply “well, I don’t want to do that.” At the time, it was not generally regarded as a universal meta-rule, so that was the end of my encounter with it. However, as it grew in popularity, I began to be increasingly averse to it. I remember a particular event — I think it was at Indie Hurricane, although I could not guess at the year — where it was introduced as a generic rule for all pick-up games. I got a horrified, sinking feeling, my eyes started to flutter and my stomach twisted — familiar signs of a triggering [1] event. I cannot remember whether I then said to my players “I’d like not to use that for our game” or not — I cannot even remember if I ran my planned game or left the scene immediately. Poor memory often accompanies being exposed to triggers.

I tried playing a few games with the rule in place, thinking I could maybe get used to it. Even though, to my recollection, it was never invoked, those games left me an anxious wreck afterward.

I stopped going to convention events as often. I started going to local public play groups, but shortly thereafter the meta-rule spread there as well, and I stopped attending those as well.

I did not at the time understand why this was triggering to me. I’m not entirely sure I was conscious that I was being triggered — it seems obvious in retrospect but I think that at the time I was not able to recognize exactly what was going on.

I made several attempts to communicate my distress — I remember talking on separate occasions with John Stavropoulos and Avery Alder about it — but because I didn’t understand what was going on, I could not clearly explain my problems, let alone propose solutions. Obviously, my attempts at communication were unsuccessful [5].

The Veil was replaced by the X-Card, and the technique continued to spread. I continued to retreat from Indie RPG circles, although I continued to play with personal groups and in non Indie RPG spaces such as AmberCon NW.

As an aside, I should say that this inaccessibility was far from the sole reason I retreated from Indie RPG circles and that, also, I do not regret having done so. My retreat has allowed me to spend more time on fiction writing, on personal friends, and on campaign play of RPGs. All of these have benefitted me both personally and professionally.

The problem

Both the X-Card and The Veil (as practiced in the PNW at that time) have as their core concept that the correct default way to handle triggering material in a role-playing game is to excise the material from the fictional timeline and thereafter to continue play. This is a commonplace understanding of how triggers work — remove the trigger, problem now solved.

This is, for me, a disaster, because it replicates the environment of denial and powerlessness that caused my PTSD in the first place.

Fundamentally, any approach to triggering material that contains any element of “pretend it never happened” is emotionally disastrous for me, because it recapitulates the environment of denial and dismissal around my traumatic experiences. This is not limited to excising the material from play — it also includes attempts to dismiss, deny, or minimize it.

No technique that centers this approach can possibly be functional as an accommodation; furthermore, any game or community that uses a technique that centers this approach is necessarily inaccessible to me, because an environment that centers denial as a coping strategy for triggering material, is in and of itself, a traumatic trigger.

Centering status quo vs centering healing

Fundamentally, these meta-techniques center the status quo — the goal is to “deal with” the triggering event, or the triggered person, and then return to regular play as if the interruption had never happened. I submit that, due the nature of PTSD, this approach is fundamentally flawed.

Once I have been triggered, I am in a traumatic experience. No amount of care or concern or comfort or accommodation can untrigger me. The question is not “how do we return Lee to the status quo?” or “how can we stop Lee from having a traumatic experience?” because those goals are impossible. The question is “what kind of traumatic experience is Lee going to have?” It can either be a damaging experience — one that reinforces the trigger and my PTSD — or it can be a healing experience — one that lets me recontextualize the trigger and its part of the trauma into my normal psyche.

Denial and social pressure to “return to normal” are damaging experiences.

Acknowledgement, empowerment, and story-building are healing experiences.

I believe that, in principle, good techniques for dealing with PTSD in role-playing games will avoid damaging experiences and center healing experiences.

The Luxton Technique

I didn’t post about my problems with X-Card, The Veil, etc for a long time because, among other factors, I did not have a proposed solution or alternative technique. All I could do was say “I’d rather have nothing than this,” but “no technique” is not particularly good rallying cry and it was not really a meaningful solution, just an attempt to get back to the somewhat-more-accessible-but-not-great status quo.

Until last year, I truly believed that there was no technique that would improve access to RPGs for some PTSD sufferers without also excluding PTSD sufferers like myself. But, last year, I played in a role-playing game at AmberCon NW that was specifically focused on traumatic experience and, particularly, centering the trauma of the players in the story we made. In that game, we used a particular technique — which I’d like to call the Luxton Technique after the GM of the game — which I found to be empowering, healing, and accessible to me.

It’s difficult for me to summarize all the parts of this that worked, but, roughly, the Luxton Technique includes:

* An honest discussion of potential traumatic triggers prior to play, in a supportive environment, with the understanding that there is no possible way to identify or discuss every conceivable trigger or trauma, and with no social pressure to disclose particulars of individual trauma.

* When, in play, a player encounters triggering material, they can, if they choose, talk about that to the other players. When they do this, the other players listen.

* As part of talking about it — and possibly the only thing that they need say — the player is given absolute fiat power over that material, expressed as a want or a need. For instance “I’d like to play [character name] for this scene” or “I need this to have a happy ending” or “I want this character to not be hurt right now” or “I need this character to not get away with this” or “By the end of play, this should not be a secret” or “I need to stop play and get a drink of water” or “I don’t have a specific request, I just wanted you to know.”

* A player does not need to use their traumatic experience to justify any requests or demands. We just do it.

* A player does not need to be the one to speak first. We keep an eye on each other and we are watchful for people who seem withdrawn or unfocused or upset. If we are worried about someone, we ask.

* We play towards accommodating that player’s requests.

It’s hard to overstate how much the Luxton Technique (or, really, set of techniques) helped us approach extremely difficult, extremely person material, both for the trauma survivors at the table and for the non-survivors. Rather than having our traumatic experiences — already a disjoint with reality — cause a disjoint in play, we were able to integrate them into play and tell a story about or, at least, at an angle to, our traumatic experiences, real and pretend.

Healing and RPGs

I am well aware that it sounds both pretentious and terrifying to talk about RPG play as a process by which one might legitimately heal from trauma. But I’d like to elaborate on that a little, because I think it’s important.

Fundamentally, a traumatic experience is an experience that is at a disjoint with the narrative of one’s life. Having PTSD means that your trauma exists out of time, out of place, and always in the present tense. A big part of recovering from PTSD, inasmuch as it is possible, is not about excising the trauma or your continued experience of it. Rather, it’s about integrating the trauma into normal memory and a normal narrative of your life.

A big part of that is story-telling, because a story is about incorporating disparate elements into a coherent narrative. And, for me, a big part of that story-telling has been role-playing games. In this essay, I present the choice as a binary — either a game can harm, or it can heal. That’s a lot of pressure to put on something as casual as a role-playing game! But, also, story-telling helps, and the story itself doesn’t need to be traumatic. Any story-telling experience can contribute, constructively, to healing, because PTSD sufferers need to be able to tell our own stories to the world and, more importantly, to ourselves. As an accessible storytelling medium, RPGs can’t be beat. They have been, and continue to be, a great help to me. In introducing these techniques, I am hoping that they can continue to be a help to others as well.

This is not limited to “heavy intense” sorts of stories that directly reference trauma. Ordinary RPGs can be stories about friends sticking together, or triumphing over evil, or just being clever and solving traps and puzzles, all of which have the potential to be healing narratives. Don’t think that I’m limiting the healing potential of RPGs to “serious” games or “serious” stories. I’m not.

It’s a reasonable reaction to say “I don’t want to do anything that heavy in my RPG!” or “I can’t be responsible for this!” And, obviously, don’t play in circumstances that you’re uncomfortable. But RPGs, and the people I’ve played them with, have given me so much healing. It’s wrong for me to dismiss, deny, or belittle that simply because games are a recreational activity. I hope that, in looking at problems of accessibility of RPGs, we can look to their potential to heal as much, if not more, than their potential to harm.

My hope (edited addition)

My hope is that this essay will start / continue a conversation where we look critically at our tools and techniques for RPG play. I hope that we can get to a place, as a community, where we understand that they are not one-size-fits-all and that we are able to take a look at what that means in terms of accessibility. I’d like for us to be able to make better-informed choices about accessibility and our RPG play, and the trade-offs that entails.

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[1] Because I have no alternative vocabulary, I’m going to use “triggering” in this essay to describe images, words, or ideas that trigger traumatic flashbacks, panic attacks, or other PTSD symptoms. I’m aware of the popular usage of “triggering” as a derisive term for an emotional reaction. I am not using it in that respect. Please, also, refrain from doing so in responses. Thanks.

[2] I’m not sure exactly when the pivot from “veil as not playing out blow-by-blow” to “veil as erasing the content from play” occurred. It might have been after this.

[3] I use the term “meta-technique” to mean “a role-playing game rule intended to be used with any game.” In some cases, it is “a role-playing game rule intended to be used with every game.”

[4] I am not sure about the historical relationship between the X-Card and the Veil. It’s possible that there was some inspiration. It’s also possible it was a parallel development.

[5] I do not want to cast any aspersions on John or Avery for our failure to communicate. Both of them listened as well as they could have to my concerns, even though I was unable to communicate them clearly. The failure was definitely on my end, and I want to thank both of them for their patience in waiting this long to hear my thoughts more clearly expressed.

Five or So Questions on Bite Me!

Today I have an interview with Becky Annison about Bite Me! a game about werewolf packs that’s currently on Kickstarter and sounds awesome! Check out what Becky has to say below.

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Tell me about Bite Me! What excites you about it?

Bite Me! is a game about the emotional life of a werewolf pack. So it has mechanics for superhuman action and also mechanics for emotional connection and dealing with the fall out of the violence in your life.

I love games that dive deep into a mess of pressure cooker relationships. A werewolf pack is my perfect setting for that. It has 4 essential elements:

  • the fear of losing control of the monster inside,
  • the created family who share something that sets them apart,
  • the threat of a violent end, and
  • people closer to their emotional states and less able to hide how they feel.

Bite Me! uses those elements to keep the drama and tension high whilst doing the work for you to make the characters and the players feel like they are part of a pack. I’ve taken some of my learning on organisational culture from my MBA and baked it into the game to really make that a powerful part of the experience.

It is also a Powered by the Apocalypse game and that excites me a lot for two reasons: first because PbtA is a powerful engine for creating this cascade of action which gets out of control fast, and control is a huge theme in the werewolf genre. But secondly because the playbooks and moves allow you to design a very precise gaming experience for a given setting or genre. So, this is absolutely a game with a big theme of control, but the moves and skins in Bite Me! allow a group to also explore sharing emotions, having heartfelt conversations and having relationships in the centre of a storm of violence.

Most of all this game excites me because it is absolutely the game I’d want someone to run for me.

Tell me more about using your MBA! What did you bring forward, and how did you apply it to the game?

In my MBA I did a lot of work on how a culture can define an organisation even to the extent of eclipsing some pretty important things like strategy. I came to realise that culture is a powerful tool, but more than that – it already exists. It sits at the gaming table with us. And that got me thinking, if we have such a powerful thing sitting alongside us then shouldn’t we be using it? Shouldn’t we be designed games for it – to make sure that the culture doesn’t eat our carefully designed settings and systems.

I’ve designed this game with culture in mind. Deliberately using and establishing culture both in and out of character to replicate that sense of camaraderie that exists both in Packs and close gaming groups. Character advancement (in part) is tied to expressing and sharing culture as a Pack and every in-joke you share should make the game feel that much more gripping and heartfelt. One of my favourite things it when you experience a genuine moment of camaraderie at the gaming table. A moment that lights up your heart in a way that is shared with everyone else in your gaming group. I wanted to make a game that acknowledged and even facilitated that experience.

With such an emotional environment, considering the elements of family, struggle, and relationships, how do you handle safety and consent in the game?

I think that safety and consent is one of the hardest and most important conversations in our hobby right now. I recommend for Bite Me! a set of three different tools to help everyone at the gaming table take care of each other.

I like to start all my games by establishing a list of topics we agree not to bring into the game, a ‘Banned List’. This can be done anonymously or not as the needs of the players require and everyone including the MC is encouraged to use the opportunity to define what they want to keep out of the game. This allows players to veto things in advance. But of course you don’t always know in advance what stuff is going to come up in a game, and gaming is on ongoing exercise in consent. So we need tools to use during the game as well as before we start. In Bite Me! I recommend that groups investigate the X-card and your own Script Change techniques and I talk about how they might use one or both of those in a game. I think that the X-card is good for when someone who gets in real trouble and needs to shut down a piece of play quickly with no questions asked, and it can be used very effectively to remind people of the Banned List if someone forgets and accidentally references something on that list in the heat of the moment. Script Change is particularly amazing for when something needs to be adjusted in a game but everyone is either comfortable with more discussion or actively needs to discuss it and it gives better clarity over what the problematic element is and how best to deal with it.

When I started role-playing there were no discussions around safety techniques or any widely known tools. I don’t think we are at the end of figuring out safety because it always must be calibrated to the needs of the players in the game at the time and it is and should be an ongoing conversation. But I’m really glad we are having those conversations now and I’m always looking to see what the next advances in the discussion will be. But these are just tools. It would be great if we could roll them out like an encumbrance table or a bunch of Moves and have it all work like a smooth set of mechanics should do. Ultimately though games are conversations between real, warm human beings with all our messy emotions and culture and relationships. The tools are great – but they won’t work if we don’t prioritise the safety and comfort of our people at the gaming table, even over the fun of others.

In the written game text all I can do is encourage people to prioritise caring for each other and give them some tools. At my own gaming table I use these tools but I watch and listen, I check in with my players before, during and after tough scenes and I make it clear in the culture of my table that the people I sit with matter more than the game. I don’t get it perfect – messy human feelings will always be a work in progress. But we need to keep working on it.

A woman with tight braids and tattoos standing in front a forest filled with mist and wolves.

What are the important differences and similarities between werewolf media and Bite Me! as a game? What might players be excited to find in Bite Me! that they might not find elsewhere?

I consume quite a lot of werewolf media (unsurprisingly) and I love it. But as a gamer, every time I find a film or book that I love I’m always thinking – ‘what is it I’m really excited about here, and how can I put that into a game!’ The cool thing about gaming is getting to experience stories as an active participant, instead of a passive consumer. I’ve put a lot of what I love about Werewolves (and my interpretation of them) into this game. The mechanics get you experiencing the closeness of pack life, the knife edge of control and the temptation to become violent or dominant to get the job done. But the one thing I’m hoping all players will get is that flash of genuine and heartfelt camaraderie both in and out of character; in the moment when the pack puts its differences aside, when the pack member you hate saves you because you are pack, when the Alpha sacrifices their life for the good of the group. Those are the things I hope that gamers will get to feel instead of observe. In terms of werewolf lore e.g. the full moon’s influence, being bitten or born a werewolf, the effects of silver or wolfsbane etc – all these things are for the players to decide on at the table. There is so much wolf mythology out there and I’d like the players to pick and choose their favourite bits to play with. There is no ‘Becky’s Definitive Guide to Werewolves’ because what I love about the stories maybe very different to someone else and the core of the system is the story of the pack anything else should feed that dynamic.

Tell me about building a pack, and how you create that culture. How does this play out at the table? What are some fun results you’ve had in playtesting?

The pack has a playbook of its own which includes powerful Pack Moves. But you only get access to those Moves when you have accumulated enough Pack Pool, using the emotion-sharing Moves. The pack playbook is also where the players will agree and record their Culture and Traditions. Culture is the outward signifiers revealing who is in the pack and who is not. You might choose a certain style of clothing, slang wordsor rituals around food to show belonging. Displaying culture in scenes does two things, firstly it will make you feel more like a pack.

Secondly it will tick off your boxes to get you advancements for your character. Culture always emerges in social groups – in the ttrpg world we have our own cultural touchstones like D&D (even if we don’t all play it), we have our shared language and slang which often comes from the games. Bite Me! leverages the fact we do that anyway and channels it into the pack experience. If our gaming group is going to come up with some slang, then let’s do it in the game as well and make it feel like we are a pack. When I MC I make sure I’m using that slang in and out of character and addressing my players as my packmates even when I’m doing the admin around arranging sessions. In game play I usually find that one or two of the created words really stick and when people start using those words in and out of character you’ve hit the jackpot – completing the culture of cycle into and out from the game.

Tradition are also another aspect of pack culture but they are more like the laws of the pack, things that would incur a serious punishment if breached. They should be thorny, throw up moral dilemmas and create unstable situations. Examples might be ‘Never reveal yourself as a Wolf to a human’, ‘Never eat a human’, ‘Only Alpha’s may create Wolves’. Once the players have agreed what the rules are I then tell the MC to ask one more question ‘Which PC has broken a tradition and which PC is keeping their secret (for now)?’ This gives a couple of players the chance to start with an extra tense situation which will strongly inform their relationship.

One of the best examples I’ve seen of that is the pack who had the Tradition that ‘All relationships with humans must be disposable’, at the start of the game one of the characters had just married their human boyfriend and the youngest member of the Pack had seen an incriminating text message. Setting that up changed the entire trajectory of the relationship between them and it was very powerful as the younger packmate wrestled with the conflict of loyalty that it created

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Thanks so much to Becky for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Bite Me! on Kickstarter today!

Five or So Questions on Comrades

Today I have an interview with W.M. Akers about Comrades, a tabletop RPG currently on Kickstarter! W.M. Akers is also author of Westside, a mystery novel you can find on preorder. Check out the interview below!

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A red background with yellow text in all-caps saying "Comrades" beside a raised fist.

Tell me about Comrades. What excites you about it?

Comrades is a new RPG about life in the revolutionary underground. I’ve been working on it off and on since 2017 and I am just in love with it. I created it because I wanted to give people who fall anywhere on the left of the political spectrum a chance to engage with their history and remember how it feels to fight, body and soul, for a cause. 

The game is based on the Apocalypse World engine, which I love both because it’s so perfectly designed for depicting the dynamics of tightly-knit groups of adventurers and because it’s jaw-droppingly easy to teach. I designed this game for hardcore gamers and novices alike, and the Apocalypse World system is the best I’ve found for welcoming new players to the table. 

A red background with yellow text in all-caps saying "The Patron" next to a black outline of a black woman holding a drink.

How have you altered the AW engine to suit Comrades as a system?

I tinkered with a lot of different changes to the AW engine, and found during playtesting that the simpler I kept things, the better the game played. There are a few basic moves deliberately crafted to evoke the revolutionary atmosphere of Comrades—”Start Something,” for instance, which gives players a way to incite a crowd to riot, protest, or strike. Any other changes I made were designed to make the system easier to teach and understand. 

I’ve also created an optional system for structuring the campaign, Pathways to Revolution, which allows parties to advance along one or more of five tracks, each of which represents a different approach to making a revolution. Each level offers advantages, culminating in an opportunity to seize power in the method best suited to the group. 

What gave you the idea for Comrades, and what are some steps you’ve taken in design to make it happen?

I’ve been obsessed with leftist history since I was in high school. The Russian Revoluton, the Spanish Civil War, the guerrilla movements of the ’60s and ’70s… I am fascinated by the way that the ideals of those on the left collide with reality, and the endless tragedies that result when their dreams are destroyed by infighting, cynicism, or simple bad luck. I wanted to make a game that dramatized the infighting and quixotic daring common to revolutionary movements throughout history, and to give players the chance to express their own frustrations with modern politics in a fun, constructive way. Because of its emphasis on the dynamics of tightly-knit groups, the AW engine was a natural fit.

A red background with yellow text in all-caps saying "The Mystic" beside a black outline of a bearded man in a loose shirt.

Tell me more about Pathways to Revolution. It sounds fascinating! What sort of experiences do players have in these tracks, and what kinds of tracks are there?

There are five tracks: Force, Organization, Zealotry, Mayhem, and Fellowship. Each one correlates to one of the game’s five stats, and each is designed to give players the opportunity to make a revolution in their own way. 

If the party is interested in forging a legitimate path to power, they may pursue Organization, which provides logistical bonuses while making the party more acceptable to the mainstream. At the fifth rank of that Pathway, they can call for elections and attempt to win power democratically. If they prefer to rely on the support of the mob, they’ll rise through Zealotry, which eventually gives them the opportunity to win power via a series of massive, wild demonstrations. In most campaigns, of course, different factions within each party will want to pursue different pathways—creating the tensions inherent in any revolutionary movement. 

I designed these both to reflect the wide variety of real-life revolutions, and to give players more than one way to “win” the game. Because there are bloodless ways to gain power, players who choose to pursue a more violent Pathway—like Force or Mayhem—must reckon with the consequences of that choice.

A red background with yellow text in all-caps saying "The Thug" next to a black outline of a woman holding a baseball bat.

How have you elected to handle and frame violence as a part of the game, and what do you feel is important about that?

Violence is a part of Comrades, just as it is for nearly every roleplaying game. Because this game takes place in a more realistic setting than most RPGs, it was intensely important to me that it be presented in a responsible way. Players are free to do whatever think necessary to achieve their goals, but the GM is instructed to make this “a game of consequences, in which violence solves little and no death—even that of a villain—goes unmourned.”

I believe that all violence is abhorrent and all life is sacred, and while I think it’s okay to act out violent situations in gameplay, it has to be done with thought and care. I hope that the rules I’ve written will empower GM and players to do just that.

A red background with a raised fist in yellow.

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Thanks so much to W.M. Akers for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Comrades on Kickstarter today!

Five or So Questions on Jinkies!

Today I’ve got an interview with Toby Strauss on the new game Jinkies! Jinkies! is currently on Kickstarter and is very Scooby-inspired, so I’m excited! I hope you like what Toby has to say below.

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

First off, I was beside myself with happiness when you spelled Jinkies! with the exclamation point.  During my research, I was amused that the original 1969 “Scooby Doo, Where are You!” used an exclamation point, and not a question mark, on the title card.  Isn’t that odd?  But I love it.  There’s a certain energy to the (incorrect) punctuation that I find kitschy and charming.  I couldn’t not use it for the game.

Jinkies! is a powered by the apocalypse adventure game based on the Hannah-Barbara cartoons from around 50 years ago.  If you’ve ever seen Scooby Doo, Josie and the Pussycats, Jabberjaw, or Dune Buggy, you’re on the right track.  Like Monsterhearts or Dungeon World, the players can choose from playbooks based on the archetypes from the shows.  These characters go on adventures, unmasking bad guys and ne’er do wells pretending to be nefarious monsters.

One of the things that I’m especially excited about is how Jinkies! handles clues.  Visual clues and puzzles are really hard to do right in tabletop RPGs.  Most of the time, the GM drops the “path critical” clues in the laps of the players just to move things along.  I really puzzled over how to handle clues until I realized something important: Hannah Barbara cartoons aren’t about the mystery.  The mystery is just a setting.  The cartoons are really about the adventure, the creepy suspect, and the wacky gang.  Jinkies! approaches clues with the mindset that it is the adventure, not the clue, that’s important.  This means that the bad guy for a given module can change from playthrough to playthrough, but I think that’s ok.  This is why I used PbtA for my mechanics.  Players and GMs in Jinkies! are just playing to find out.

Another thing that I love about Jinkies! is that there is no combat in the game.  Interestingly, combat was in the very first draft of the game . . . and it was a disaster.  The playtesters overwhelmingly rejected it; the genre is nonviolent by design and combat just didn’t feel right.  Instead of swords and hitpoints, Jinkies! turns on scares and “fear” points.  Its a great system that makes the world feel scary and dangerous without misplaced violence.  I’m proud of how it turned out! 

How do the mechanics work to result in scares and fear points, and what do those do?

If you watch one of the old Hannah-Barbara mystery cartoons, you’ll notice that no one gets hurt.  Instead, there’s a sort of asymmetrical nonviolence between the protagonists and the antagonist.  The protagonists act through ensnarement and logic–capture the bad guy and explain the crime.  The antagonist acts through fear–if the kids are scared enough, they’ll run away and let the bad guy finish his misdeeds.

I tried to mirror this in Jinkies!  The player characters “assault” the bad guy by 1) finding clues, and 2) setting and triggering a trap for the bad guy. They cannot inflict fear points on the bad guy, but the bad guy can inflict fear on the player characters.

Fear works a lot like HP, but it is only inflicted by the bad guy, and it leads to fainting from fear, not physical harm.  So let’s say the ghost pirate flies right through Joe the Leader.    That’s pretty scary!  Joe takes a point of fear.

There are a number of ways that fear can be mitigated.  Several playbooks have the ability to avoid taking earned fear points (“Joe, using his inner strength, shrugs off the ghostly attack!”).  The “weird one” playbook (think Shaggy from Scooby Doo) not only gets fear mitigation, he can use fear to fuel unique abilities.  The weird one in these shows is always afraid–I couldn’t help but give him fear fueled powers!

When it all comes together, its a surprisingly seamless experience.  No one seems to miss combat and the asymmetrical nature of the game is almost invisible when the game is played.

A purple and white panda with a milkshake necklace and the text "Jinkies!"
Purple Pandalot, the mascot for Jinkies! by Lil Chan.

What was playtesting like for this game, with the elements of it being so cartoonish?

A lot of my inspirations are obscure and probably unknown to many of my players–but almost everyone has seen something with Scooby Doo in it.  The original cartoon aired way back in 1969 and there have been dozens of spin-offs, movies, and sequels–not to mention the lasting power of syndication.  That ubiquity has made Jinkies! accessible to almost everyone who has played the game.  The vast majority of my play testers have very naturally leaned into the cartoony roots of Jinkies! with little prompting.

I can only think of a single play test where the game didn’t feel like a cartoon.  The players decided play the game really straight.  They even decided that their animal mascot was not magical and could not talk!  It felt like Dragnet, or maybe a Nancy Drew mystery.  It wasn’t a bad experience, but it also wasn’t a funny one.

That play test was early in my process and I did a bit of soul searching to try and figure out how to “fix” what had gone wrong.  It just didn’t feel right.  In the end, though, I didn’t change very much.  Most people who sign up to play Jinkies! are looking for a light-hearted, cartoony mystery adventure.  My game isn’t going to be all things to all people, and that’s ok.  Better to focus on making it the best at what it is!

How are you changing PbtA fundamentals to suit the different tone and themes, like rewriting basic moves and so on?

Interesting questions!

If a player came to Jinkies! from another PbtA game they would find the mechanics familiar.  Jinkies! is still very much a “play to find out” game.  There are basic moves, playbook moves, and animator moves.  Jinkies! uses 2D6 for its randomizer.  Very PbtA in the fundamentals.

I diverge pretty heavily in the moves themselves.  PbtA was developed for a very blood-thirsty setting, after all–and Jinkies! is based on a family-friendly cartoon!  I excised ALL combat moves and added heavily to the investigative moves.  I also changed the Animator moves, hewing closer to the genre than Apocalypse World moves could.

I also break with most PbtA on principles.  One of the guiding principles of Dungeon World, for example, is “think dangerously.”  The world of Jinkies! is sometimes scary, but it is never dangerous.  I’ve rewritten the principle as “think comedically.”  Another principle I changed is saying your moves out loud.  This is a big no-no in most PbtA games but I actively encourage it.  The Hannah-Barbara formula practically requires naming your moves.  When Velma tosses Scooby a treat, she doesn’t just give him a knowing nod, she inquires “will you do the task for a Scooby Snack?”  Scooby snack, in this case, is TOTALLY a move, and the verbal component is a very important (and cartoony) part of creating the feel the game is after.

What are you doing in regards to guiding table content safety, since there’s a lot of ways this could go a little gonzo or maybe just hit an unseen button of discomfort?

To the safety question: every RPG carries risks (bleed, content and trauma triggers, etc).  Jinkies! is no different.  In fact, I would argue that the risks of things going sideways are greater in Jinkies! than in D&D.  First, it’s a comedy game.  Comedy is, by definition, transgressive–and those transgressions can cut in surprisingly deep ways.  Second, there is a certain subtext to the “teenagers with a wacky sidekick solving mysteries” genre that is off-color.  The “Shaggy Busted” episode of “Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law” does a great job of poking fun at this subtext, if any of your readers are curious.  Its fun and its funny, but it is also emotionally dangerous waters.

I’ve attempted to have my cake and eat it too by baking in two presets for content control, “normal” and “Behind the Music.”  I certainly don’t object to sex or drugs being in the game–so long as everyone at the table is comfortable with it.  This way the players must actively choose the “blue” version of the game, and it prompts a lines and veils-type conversation.  

Second, I recommend the use of an X card system.  Even in a game where boundaries have been drawn ahead of time, things can get messy fast.  I find that X cards are indispensable safety tools.  Finally, I explicitly instruct against gameplay that I find to be irredeemably offensive, like racism or misogyny.  For example, a common trope in 1970s Hannah Barbara cartoons is the villain kidnapping a woman.  This is lazy storytelling, its sexist, and it makes the game suck for the player who has been removed from gameplay.  Bigotry has no place at my table or in my game.

—

Thanks so much to Toby for the great interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Jinkies! on Kickstarter today!

Beep is live on itchio!

The cover!

My game Beep which I made after being inspired by the #sadmechjam, the loss of Opportunity, and my own disability is now live!

Check it out here at briebeau.itch.io/beep or back my Patreon.com/Thoughty to get it for free!

Official Statement on Perpetrators of Harm

I have puzzled for days on how to make this statement, so I hope this ends up being good enough. The Twitter statement was brief and to the point, but this needs to address some things more specifically. I do appreciate your patience.

Content Warning: Sexual assault, sexual harassment, harassment, grooming, threats, doxxing, rape, missing stairs, abuse of authority.

It starts out bad.

There was recently a statement released by Mandy Morbid and two others, Jennifer and Hannah, all ex-partners of Zak Smith (a.k.a Zak Sabbath, a.k.a. IHitItWithMyAxe, a.k.a. dndwithpornstars). The statement described domestic and sexual abuse by Zak towards the women in some detail (link here, content warning for domestic and sexual abuse, ableism). It was followed up by a statement by Vivka Grey reporting similar issues (link here, content warnings for domestic and sexual abuse, toxic objectification).

The internet in indie and OSR gaming erupted. It spilled elsewhere, too. Zak has been a troublesome member of our community for some time – people have been reporting his harassing, threatening behavior for around a decade, including many marginalized people who were pushed out of the community by the bad behavior or by backlash after reporting. Some people were pushing to excise him immediately, others wanted his story. Some of us got caught up in community in-fighting that served to muddy the waters, but I think it’s beginning to clear.

I will give full disclosure that, by my experiences, Zak has made my life more difficult. The actions of his supporters have done so, as well, including some people who will go on without ever apologizing or making up for it, I know that. I don’t trust a lot of people because of Zak. I think his actions have threatened my professional career and they have been part of the impetus for the clinical acute paranoia and trauma triggers I suffered that partially led to me having to leave my rather lucrative corporate job in 2015. Yes, I was vulnerable in the first place. That doesn’t mean that making it worse through ill behavior was a kind and loving thing to do.

That means it is easier for me to make a statement that I will not publish articles supporting his work, that I will not go to conventions that support his work. However, Zak is not the only missing stair in our community (link to blog post about what missing stairs are, content warning for sexual assault and rape). There are people I used to work for who have done harm too, and one of those has been public since around the Harassment in Indie Games series I did in 2017, but I didn’t make a public statement. I should have.

It gets worse.

Matthew McFarland, someone who I have interviewed for Thoughty and who I have worked for while doing the Demon: Interface project, is a serial predator. Cheyenne Grimes came out about this in 2018 to IGDN (link to Cheyenne’s recent post, content warning for sexual assault and trauma), and the investigation that occurred then is being re-investigated because at the time, Michelle Lyons-McFarland was IGDN president. When Matt was removed from RPG.net as mod, reportedly Michelle was still a mod and helped to prevent further survivors from speaking up. Some of those survivors like Luka Carroll have spoken up publicly (link here, updated link here, content warning for grooming and assault and specifically noting relation to trans individuals as targets.)

I am angry about this. I am bitter that this entire situation occurred, that Matt could keep doing harm, that it was covered up, that people were ever harmed at all. I am angry I ever promoted Matt, or considered him a friend. The thing is, Matt is not the only person I have had an experience like this with.

There is a situation some people find themselves in where they know secrets. These secrets are very important, and if they confessed them, maybe someone could be protected. But if they confess them, maybe someone could be hurt very badly. This is the peril of knowing about missing stairs in the community, and knowing on behalf of their survivors or yourself. I know about multiples of these and until I am authorized to do so by the survivors or those currently affected, I won’t release the information. I made that choice. It still feels absolutely vile. I am angry about it every single day.

In for a band aid, surgery later.

That’s part of why I have taken on some specific rules that I talked about on Twitter.

  • Understand forgiveness is hard and complicated.
  • Work toward it anyway.
  • Don’t harass, doxx, or threaten anyone for any reason ever.
  • Take care of yourself.
  • Take care of each other.
  • Remember that infighting is what bad actors want.
  • Center the survivors.
  • Try to love, if you can.

Sounds harder than anything right now, honestly. But, I’m trying. With these comes people making statements, and sometimes those statements are less than great. I’m not linking to the good ones or the bad ones. I don’t have that time.

What I do have time to do is give my statement. The official Thoughty word, as it were, here on the blog, not just on Twitter. This is what I can do right now. What I will do going forward, a bit, but it’s a now. How do we fix our fractured community? How do we build bridges between indie and OSR and trad when somehow they’ve all been blown up by this? How do we deal with the fact that there are missing stairs everywhere, and they mostly remain some charismatic fuckers? I can’t tell you that.

I can tell you to learn about DARVO, the way abusers behave when called out (link here, content warning for discussion of abuse and trauma), and when someone is an asshole, don’t blame it on the internet. I can tell you to practice apologizing well. I can tell you to check those rules I just shared and follow them. And I can tell you this:

I love you. Even if you fuck up, I will love you. All I ever ask of you is to try to be better. If you are doing bad things, stop doing them. Apologize. Try to make up for it. Don’t hurt the people any more than you already have. If you’re not doing anything bad, keep an eye out for the things that might make you slip up. We all fuck up. Thoughty isn’t a site only to promote and praise the perfect, but we had better do a damn good exercise in trying if we want to make the world stay alive for tomorrow. I expect you to be better. Every chance you get.

The Official Thoughty Statement

Thoughty supports survivors of abuse and harassment and believes them.

This platform is not a space for anyone who perpetrates acts of harassment, abuse, or violence, especially against marginalized individuals. Thoughty will not post to promote or endorse these perpetrators on the main site or on social media.

I will not attend or endorse conventions without an effective and enforced code of conduct, and if I know a known perpetrator is a guest, I will not attend or endorse.

Thoughty can and will refuse any and all submissions for interviews, features, reviews, or endorsement if there is a publicly or privately known allegation of abuse or harassment that I can in any way reference.* If I am made aware of an allegation after posting an article, I will assess whether it is safe to contact the accused to let them know they can appeal, and whether it is or not, I will take the post down or post a warning at the top of the post based on the perspective of the survivor if I am able to obtain it.

I reserve the right to take down posts or apply warnings at the top for any reason, even beyond this, because the safety of my readers is paramount.

If you are aware of a post I have up that supports a perpetrator of harm in our community, please notify me using my content form and I will assess it as appropriate. Please understand I am running the site on my own, so things may take time, but they will be resolved to the best of my ability.

Thank you for your time and attention on this big post! And thank you for taking this in, and moving forward for the better. Believe survivors!

*ETA 2/16/19 5:31pm – changed “confirm” to “reference.” The former is not what I meant. I just mean I need to know what the allegation is.

Five or So Questions on The Playmaker Awards

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Richard Williams, who hosts The Playmaker Awards and is running a Kickstarter focused on them! This sounds like a fascinating initiative and I hope you’ll all check out the interview below and the awards themselves!

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A pair of cards thanking Sean Nittner for his work at Big Bad Con with a Thank You note from Sean.
This is so cute!

Tell me a little about The Playmaker Awards. What excites you about them?

The Playmakers are a set of awards not for great rpg designers, game-runners or even players, but rather for the people who work hard doing the admin and scudwork creating spaces for others to play roleplaying games.

So this might be someone who runs a convention, or the rpg track at a convention, someone who keeps a local meetup or open gaming group going. It could be in-person or online. Or it could be an entirely different way of creating space for others unique to them.

I think we often under-value and underestimate the time and labour that goes into these roles. Or just don’t think much of it at all. When I’m heading to an rpg event I’m going there to game and that’s where my focus is, and of course I’m aware that people organised stuff so that there’d be a room and table and chairs and other players, but I don’t see that effort. I just have the end-result presented to me so I can game and enjoy myself.

But I don’t think that any of these playmakers do it for the recognition; I expect most of them consider it a sign that they’re doing a good job if the public don’t see all the effort behind the scenes – that they have as seamless and smooth as an experience as possible. But that just makes it more important that these playmakers do get recognised by others, because they’re not going to put themselves forward and yet their effort is so critical to the hobby. I played my first game at a local convention. I rely on them, both to play new games and to keep in touch with people who I only otherwise see online. What would this hobby be without them? A shadow of what it is, to be certain.

As to what excites me about the Playmaker awards: every stage of it so far. When I asked for nominations I was fascinated to see who would be put forward. When I contacted people to tell them they had won, some of them were bemused to win an award they’d never heard of, but some others – I don’t know – I think it might just have come at a time when they really needed that kind of appreciation. Announcing them was exciting as well, to see word spread. And now I’m into interviewing some of them for the Playmaker zine kickstarter, which really is a privilege for me; these folk spend so much time working for others in the hobby already, it’s very generous of them to spend more time so I can find out more about what they do and why they do it.

How are you determining who fits the category to be nominated or win?

I tried to describe as best I could the folk I wanted nominated and then I’ve trusted the people who took the time to reply to one of my posts with a nomination. My basic criteria was whether someone created space for others to play. I specifically excluded rpg design-work – I think we have a variety of different ways already of recognising great designers – and game-runners (such as DMs/GMs) and players as they are the ones who get to sit down and play.

In my mind, the most obvious candidates are con organisers – the many folk who I’ve seen standing behind a desk or walking through the con who’ve given up their weekend (and I don’t know how many hours before) so that _other people_ can play. However, I also wanted the awards to go further. I don’t know what play spaces are out there today, nor what’s involved in organising them, and so keeping the nominations more open was another means of discovery.

What is the judging process like and how do you decide winners?

I knew I definitely wasn’t the person to judge or rank the level of contribution made by each nominee. And what would the benefit be of saying that this playmaker who runs the rpg track of a massive convention is more or less deserving than this other playmaker who has been running a small rpg club all by themselves for twenty years? What criteria would make sense to use? What other factors would you consider? If I’m not the right person to judge, who is?

I saw the judging process as a big minefield and ultimately antithetical to my overall goal of both recognising their efforts and building a network of goodwill in this time of separation and fragmentation. So, in essence, I pushed the judging process to the nominators as well. If someone else thought you met the criteria and thought enough of you to nominate you then – assuming I could contact you and you were the person broadly doing what you were being nominated for – then you were a playmaker in my book.

The final judge I should mention was the playmaker themselves. My first question for all of the winners was whether they accepted (and, in fact, one of them didn’t). I wanted to make sure that everyone was comfortable, both the people nominating and the people being nominated.

And I feel trusting folk and being led by their nominations worked. While I did go back to a few nominators to get more details on their nomination, I haven’t rejected anyone for being outside of the scope of the awards and I’ve included a bunch of playmakers who I perhaps wouldn’t have heard of if I had been more restrictive.

A card thanking the Gauntlet with quotes from their supporters.

What do you think the benefit is of an awards process for playmakers?

I think it’s different for the individual and the hobby as a whole.

For the hobby, I feel that awards help define its values. I previously did annual awards for the London Indie RPG meetup and I had an award for most played game but also one for most played designer because I didn’t want someone to miss out because they’d produced a batch of fun games rather than a single one.  I also had an award for most popular game runner, partly as a thank you but also to encourage others to run games as well. Finally, I included special awards that were at my discetion and went to anyone who’d brought something a bit special to the group during the year such as coming in costume or fulfilling a vow to run a certain game for someone. I think it showed that we as a group valued those who brought that little extra joy to our lives.

Similarly with the Playmakers, by having such an award and by having others support and endorse it shows that creating space for others to play is a service that we value and appreciate. Just as certain holidays remind us to thank significant people in our lives and events like GMs Day remind us to thank those who run our games, so too the Playmakers reminds us and gives us the opportunity to thank these folk as well.

As to what benefit there is to the individual? To be honest, from the beginning I knew I couldn’t provide much. I did want to give each of the Playmakers something more than just a ‘thank you’ and a blogpost, something to make the award a little more substantial, to show my own sense of gratitude and so I settled on a $20 DriveThru voucher figuring that, as the Playmakers spend so much time for others enjoyment that it’d be nice for them to buy something for themselves. At a friend’s recommendation I reached out to OneBookShelf (who are the people behind DriveThru) and they very generously agreed to sponsor 25% of the total, so I put in $15 and they made it up to $20. I knew that, depending on the response rate, by advertising the voucher while nominations were open I was essentially writing a blank cheque, but the awards were not so popular as to put me in financial difficulty!

I was fully prepared that when I started reaching out to the winners that the general response from them would be ‘Errr… thanks, I guess… who are you again?’ (and I did get that a couple of times!) But actually it was far better than I expected. Most of these folk who are so generous with their time working for other people were equally generous with me, and interested to see who else were receiving awards.

And in a few cases, just winning the award struck something deeper. I don’t know what stage each of them are in the hobby or in their lives, but I do know from my personal experience that there are harder moments. Times when I reevaluate whether my time and effort is actually benefitting anyone else or even noticed. I think in maybe a couple of cases this award has come through at one of those more reflective times and been all the more appreciated because of it.

In all, I think in some cases the best thing that has come out of it for the winner is the nomination. When I asked for nominations I didn’t really expect anything more than ‘Person A for doing Thing B’, but some of the nominations are far more detailed and far more thoughtful. And I think it’s this personal message from someone a playmaker has helped can be the greatest benefit.

Recognition cards for Réka Korcsmáros about her online RPG community and including a thank you from her.

How would you encourage playmakers to act and what would you encourage them to do to make them a more likely candidate for the awards?

Just to keep doing what they’re doing! If they’re still enjoying it then keep at it, or change it up or take a break if it’s just become a labour.

I don’t intend the awards to change anything about what the winners do, rather I’m really hoping that it will inspire others to do the same. I did originally think that the awards would end with simply announcing the winners, but further it progressed the more I realised that this would be a disservice to the concept. The nominations have been great but they’re only a tiny glimpse of the Playmakers’ stories.

To that end, as part of Kickstarter’s ZineQuest initiative in February, I’ll be crowdfunding a collection of new interviews some of the Playmakers, getting into more detail about what they do, why they do it and what they need to do it better.

It’s been great to give these folks an award and a thank you, but it has been so much more interesting to dig deeper. I hope that the final product will be a unique perspective on the state of public rpg play today and that hearing their stories will inspire others to do the same.

—

Thank you so much to Richard for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading it and that you’ll check out The Playmaker Awards and the Kickstarter!

Thoughty is supported by the community at ko-fi.com/Thoughty. To be featured on Thoughty, check out the contact page!

Five or So Questions on Kiss Her Before the World Ends

ETA: Sorry, now with links! Blogger borked.

Hey all, today I have an interview with Alice Grizzle, who has a really cool name and made an even cooler game: Kiss Her Before the World Ends. I’ve heard nothing but praise for it and her design since its recent release, so check out what Alice has to say!

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Tell me a little about Kiss Her Before the World Ends. What excites you about it?

Kiss Her Before the World Ends excites me because it prioritizes how the PC’s feel and allows space for all players. My main goal when creating the game was to create a game that encourages romance while still letting everyone play characters like themselves. Be the ace, pan, aromantic, polyam, etc. I think it achieves that.

There are so many games about being a badass, that focus on violence. I wanted to make a game about being vulnerable in front of other people. My hope is that people will see games like mine and realize that relationships and romance can be the centerpiece for your game. Tabletop games have the same ability to be about anything that every form of media has.

Alice Grizzle, designer.

What do players typically do and experience in a standard session of Kiss Her Before the World Ends? What did you do in the design to allow or encourage players to play inclusively, whether they are playing characters like themselves or choosing to play characters unlike themselves?

Kiss Her is an emotional game, stressful even at times which is by design. The use of a timer puts a lot of pressure on the players to say what they have to say before they’re no longer able to do so. It simulates the same pressure the characters feel really well.

During the design process I had to think of broad definitions for things like what it means to want Intimacy. That’s hard enough to quantify, especially while still being inclusive to ace and aromantic folks. I settled on “Intimacy is the desire for closeness” which is open to lots of interpretations. All the definitions for the types of Needs are equally interpretable.

What are the mechanics like in Kiss Her and how do players engage them?

The two main mechanics in Kiss Her Before the World Ends, the ones that control the flow of the game and what the game is about, are Needs and the timer. Needs are the things people want and they come in 4 types: Intimacy Needs, Empathy Needs, Escapism Needs, and Validation Needs. The main focus of the game is the characters negotiating how to get what they want while also fulfilling each other’s Needs. At certain points in play the players will clear Needs that they’ve resolved and replace them with new ones. Priorities change as the end draws closer.

The timer is the outside world collapsing around them. It is what pushes the characters forward, and hopefully towards each other. It also controls the pace of the game. Scenes can end whenever the players feel like they should, but none can go past the length of the timer.

What do you like best about the game and how it plays, from a design standpoint?

Probably the different types of Needs. Those four types and the definitions for them really feel like they incapsulate a huge part of what it is we as people want from our relationships. I feel like they push players into immediately playing interesting, conflicted characters.

I would say I also really like how we’ve formated it primarily with mobile viewing in mind. It encourages spontaneous play in a way that you just can’t do if your game is a full book. I seriously think that books almost always being the default way we present our games is to our own detriment. Games should be presented in the way that makes them most accessible and encourages players to play in the ways you want them too.

Two feminine figures, one lit in sparkling pink from the galaxy-like background, the other silhouetted, moving towards each other as though they are about to kiss. The title is in capitalized white text: "Kiss Her Before the World Ends".
This cover is super gorgeous, and looks great in the mobile format. The book itself is designed to work great on mobile, which has gained a lot of praise from those who have bought the game to play!

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Thanks so much for the interview, Alice! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Kiss Her Before the World Ends today!

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Five or So Questions on Wolfspell

Today I have an interview with Epidiah Ravachol about Wolfspell, hitting Kickstarter on January 21, 2019! I actually proofread the original Wolfspell released in Worlds Without Master, and I’ve been wishing for a fancy new version for ages – though the WWW version played amazing stories about wolves who were once human to start with. I’m super excited to get to interview Epidiah! I hope you like what he has to say below.

Note: The included art is not the art that will be on Wolfspell! There is new art being created by the same artist, Shel Kahn, for the project – that’s most of what the Kickstarter is for!
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Tell me a little about Wolfspell. What excites you about it?

You were there for the beginning of it, but for the sake of your readers, I’ll recap the Wolfspell origin story. I was writing the short story “One Winter’s Due” for the second issue of Worlds Without Master. That story is about two adventuring sisters who, along with a small band of family and friends, seek to turn themselves into wolves in order to mete out vengeance without violating oaths that they had taken. I am, obviously, not the first person to tell tales about humans turning into wolves. And this wasn’t even that fresh of a take on the subject, but what hooked into my brain at the time–the part I couldn’t shake loose when it came time to dream up a game for that same issue–was this idea of these (mostly) aging, well-traveled folk who have seen it all suddenly finding themselves experiencing the world anew through the mind, body, and in particular the senses of wolves. I mean, you would HAVE to play, right? How else would you learn how to be a wolf? You would run and wrestle with each other, pause to scent the wind, and howl just to hear your own, new, voice. Before that moment, you had lead a hard life of killing or thieving or peering into the forbidding dark, but now you are newly born.

I had a dice mechanic sitting in the back of my brain for quite a while, inspired by the Doctor Who roleplaying game from the 90s called Time Lord. In that game, you rolled two six-sided dice and subtract the lower from the higher, giving you a result from 0 to 5, where 1 is the most likely outcome. I really dug how that worked. I posted about it here shortly after the game was released. In Wolfspell I saw an opportunity to combine that mechanic with the spirit of the Swords Without Master tone dice. You roll two dice, one is your Wolf Die and the other your Blood Die, you subtract the lower from the higher, apply the result to a Apocalypse World style move, but the move is determined to some extent by which die is higher. If you rolled well on the Wolf Die, you can act and think in wolf ways. If you rolled well on the Blood Die, you can act and think in the ways you’ve been used to. But crucially, you need to roll poorly on the opposite die to avoid confusion. Rolling a 6 Blood only helps you if your Wolf isn’t also a 6.


A snowy scene with a carved stone. In front of the stone are five swords stabbed into the snow with two crows resting on them. In the snow, there are human and wolf footprints.
One of Shel Kahn’s pieces from One Winter’s Due,
a fiction piece included in Worlds Without Master.

You mention that the characters are typically aging. How relevant to the story do you think that is and why?

Oh, good! That’s a part of my assumptions I’ve left unexamined. Thank you for asking! Technically, the only way I enforce aging characters in the game is by the identifying phrases players select for their characters during pack creation. They imply, at least to me, folks we’ve been around and seen some shit. “Many have tested my sword-arm and now wait to mete vengeance upon me in the afterlife,” or “I am witness to stranger worlds than most. The arcane and preternatural are to me as wolves and weather are to the farmer,” and so forth. They are not all exclusively evocative of veteran adventures, but as a whole, they hint at a certain field of experience. But it’s not restrictive. A clever player seeking to play a young, fresh-faced thrillseeker could definitely pull it off.
For me, though, the aging bit is bound tightly to the central theme of rebirth. Witnessing the world anew through the scents and sounds of the wild has more meaning if you’ve already seen everything through the narrow scope of human vision.

Plus, I just dig stories about old folks. If you want to play young, attractive folk who transform into wolves to wrestle and groom their way through their sexual tension, you can certainly do that with Wolfspell, but there are many fine–damn fine–games out there that serve that purpose. Now if you want to play broken, old, world-weary rovers who shed their skin-tag-haunted flesh in favor of a lithesome, sinewy wolf bod to wrestle and groom their way through their sexual tension, well that field’s a bit smaller.

Well-managed tone is something many people recognize in your games, and in this game it feels especially stark to me – the tone of the game blossoms from the moment you start play. What do you think creates the particular tone of Wolfspell, and what makes it flourish?

That’s very kind of you to say! For Wolfspell’s sense of tone, I blame Apocalypse World. Or more specifically, the Read a Situation move in Apocalypse World. That thing it does where it says, “Here, here are the questions you are allowed to ask and we must answer,” is so quietly beautiful that I think I’ll be hacking it for the rest of my days. In Wolfspell you may Behold the World and drink it in through your senses. When you do this and roll Wolf, you get to ask specific questions about what your eyes, ears, nose, and instincts tell you–inviting lush description of the world around you. But when you roll Blood, your questions are of a more human nature, about who is in control, what do they want from you, where are you most advantaged–inviting a more analytical response. It limits how you think about the world to the part of you that is most in control at the moment. All of the moves do this in their own little way.

Also, I dig the way the tone presents itself to new players. The first time they roll to wrestle with the other wolves and someone rolls Blood and is awkwardly isolated by their inability to embrace their inner wolf. Or the first time someone howls and the others must howl along with them. Or the first time someone’s hurt…but no spoilers about that.

Or maybe it’s just this rule right here: “You are now wolves. Describe your coat, your size, your scent and your voice.” That’s the very moment the tone is set in most games.



The form factor for the game is interesting and very cool! Can you tell me about it, and why you chose it? 

Wolfspell, like everything that appears in Worlds Without Master, is of the sword and sorcery genre (or sword and sorcery adjacent, but one of the superpowers of this particular genre is its ability to seamlessly welcome adjacent works into the fold). In the 70s rock, prog, and early metal bands would spend long hours in the back of van or bus traveling from gig to gig. To fend off boredom, they would pick cheap paperbacks off the racks wherever the had to fuel up or stop for the night. This was the vector of infection for the sword and sorcery and fantasy genres of fiction into these genres of music. They would read tales of adventure, peril and strange magics, and regurgitate them in song. They would see the covers to these books, illustrated in imagined realism, and demand the same for their albums. Shortly thereafter tabletop roleplaying games followed a similar path, drawing on both sources for inspiration. We’re all spokes on the same wheel, and I wanted to acknowledge that.

Plus, how awesome would it be to show up at a con with a milk crate full of these puppies?

Another piece from Shel Kahn’s work on One Winter’s Due.
You’ve mentioned the struggles these characters face as they encounter inability to be wolf enough, and I wonder if you could talk a little about the parallel to that, or the opposition I guess. Do characters experience positive feelings more as they progress, finding pleasure or even joy in the experience? How does that happen? 
When you revel in your wolfiness there’s an inherent reward of being able to explore the world through the mind and body of a different being. I mean, that’s why we’re all here, right? To roleplay as something else? The rules feed and reflect that by opening and restricting the paths before you. You act like a wolf, you gain Feral. Feral is the only real stat in the game. It is always added to your Wolf die. So the more Feral you gain, the better you get at rolling a Wolf result. And it feels good to cut loose at peak wolf! No stumbling over human concerns or anxieties. Embracing the wild and running with it! A wonderful way to build this Feral is to wrestle and groom with the pack, to celebrate the life of a wolf the way wolves do.

One of the central questions of this game involves rolling to become human again at the end of it all. Here all the Feral you’ve collected will count against you. Will you return to civilization, your quest complete, or will you be lost forever to the call of the wild?

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Hell yes! Thank you Epidiah for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading and that you’ll follow Wolfspell and then check it out on Kickstarter on January 21!


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Turn in Final Days

Turn is in its final days on Kickstarter!

The project ends near midnight on November 30th. As I look at it now, I wish I had left in an extra day or two, because we may be coming up short of some of the stretch goals. But, I’m glad that we’ve come so far!

Right now we are looking at Meguey Baker’s Smeed Hill stretch goal,

Smeed Hill will explore a town cut in half by closing mills, then closing schools, and now empty storefronts on Main Street and overgrown houses in the hills. There are still opportunities, but also needs that have yet to be met. Meguey has proposed adding a squirrel and a skunk to the available beast archetypes, wonderful new additions to a small town!

Like the other stretch goals, Smeed Hill will introduce some local NPCs to help your story along, a new town type, new beast archetypes, and a new or altered human role.

It sounds like a wonderful town!

We’re also in the running for the 525 backers challenge I issued last night! If we reach 525 backers, I’ll release The Confidante,

You don’t ask for much in life, just for some peace and quiet, and for people to listen to you once in a while. Well, nobody seems in on that plan, so you spend most of your days hearing pieces of everybody’s secrets, even through walls. And yet, no one listens when you cry “wolf!” Though, maybe that’s a good thing.

Just a sneak peek!

For the stretch goals that we don’t reach, I still hope to pursue them in the future, it just depends on whether I can get the funds together, because I still want to pay people fairly! I want to release Gerrit’s Halver, Germany ($18k) and Jaye Foster’s Harmouth, South Devon ($20k), and my own work-in-progress, a Moose, which has been a secret goal for $20k for a while. What it means if we don’t reach them is that they will take more time, and be dependent on things like future sales and success.

a bearded man using a tablet and a clipboard while on the phone
Much like the Overachiever, I’ll be juggling a lot trying to make it happen.

However, hope ain’t just a theme for way stations! We still have over 50 hours to make every bit of this happen that we can. So share, support as you can, and continue to have enthusiasm for Turn! If you can back, that’s just swell. If not, raising awareness – especially on different social media and sites – makes a huge difference to Turn’s success!

Thank you SO much for any support you have given and any you continue to give! 

Check out Turn on Kickstarter today!

Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/thoughty. Tell your friends!

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

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, follow the instructions on the Contact page.