First off, I’m going to make a damn #TurnRPG hashtag, then we’re gonna talk about this precious gift of a game I have been working on since December 2013. And have I got some WORDS for you this evening, my friends, about Turn, and about large design projects, mental health, & “different.”
Turn is a slice-of-life supernatural roleplaying game about shapeshifters in small, rural towns who must find balance in their shifter identity and community with their fellows. I’m planning to Kickstart it at the end of October. tinyurl.com/turn-rpg-beta-2018
I’ve been really digging into it and I’m in the expand and explain part – I think the mechanics are solid, but trying to ensure people understand the mechanics is hard. I’ve been struggling through recovering from a brain injury, & until recently, sometimes my work was nonsense.
So a lot of this is revisiting old text, making sure it makes sense, revising it, and adding as much as I can to make it approachable to people who aren’t me. John helps with this – he’s my dev editor – but he can only do so much when I’m struggling personally with the work.
Turn is the biggest thing I’ve made and a large part of me *needs* it to succeed, to be appreciated. So I want everything to be perfect! Like, everything has to be exactly how it’s supposed to be written in my head. And that’s a pain in the ass, and doesn’t guarantee perfection.
So like today I’ve been asking for help figuring out a new title for the facilitator role because facilitator sounds boring and what I was using, Storyteller, is too associated with White Wolf (not why I was using it, but no one cares) and also doesn’t describe the role well.
Now I’m trying out Meddler, because I tried a whole bunch in text and it’s the only one I like next to Busybody but is slightly more teasing than mean like Busybody tends to be. And I listened to a bunch of people’s input, too, and felt kind of “eh yeah?” and like COME ON.
See, one thing that I need to really tell you here is that the longer your project, the more likely you are to hit a wall of mental health issues, new or old. They will fuck you UP. I love this game. I love it SO much. And I find myself poking at it all like “I should trash it.”
I’m working on this big, meaningful project and I’m getting engagement with input from people and all my big stupid brain can say is “Well I dunno, people haven’t said it’s visionary or anything, and these other people aren’t interested, so maybe it’s just awful.” This project!
And part of it is because it’s a big project, a lot of time and energy with (to date) little to no returns. Most of my projects seem futile because I don’t exactly swim in recognition, reviews, or funds as a result of them. But I still do them, and I’m still doing this. I’m especially still doing this.
If I was working on something smaller I could be done and stop torturing myself with the maybes and the whys. But it’s big. It matters. And mental illness just wants to dig in its claws and remind me that I’m not doing good enough. But I also know it’s because Turn is different.
I said it, I mean it. When I play Turn, it always feels different than other games. When I’ve been designing it, it feels different than other games. I haven’t played all games, and I’m not fucking gonna, but I do know that compared to the games I have played, Turn is different.
Maybe it’s because of the angle? Or because it’s quiet drama? Maybe it’s because I took away failure, and focused on consequences? Maybe it’s because this game isn’t designed to play like an adventure, but instead like everyday life that gets hard and troublesome but also loving?
And like, the biggest thing I struggle with while designing this game is that I want to maintain that “different.” Some people have looked at the mechanics without playing the game and said it was just copied from a bunch of places, but it’s not. It’s different. So it’s rough!
How do I keep my snowflake of a game from melting or getting mushed together and ruined? How do I present it to people in a way that highlights the difference? Worst of all, what if I AM wrong and my game’s actually just a boring facsimile of other games I don’t want it to be?
It’s a lot. I just want this game to be good and succeed and I want this weird experience I have when I play it to be replicable for people. I want to do a Kickstarter and not have it fail because I want people to be interested in it and excited for it. But I’m also very tired.
If it was smaller, maybe I’d care less. I didn’t have a mental illness, maybe I’d struggle less. If it felt samey, maybe it would matter less. But none of those things are so. It’s a mattering struggling caring mess. I’m mulling over every design decision like it’s life & death.
My final real point, I suppose, is that all of these things: bigness, mental health, difference, they are important to the game and the design process I’m experiencing, and I have to overcome the challenges. I love Turn so much, and I can’t let it fade away, I can’t risk that.
So if I kind of sound like a pain in the ass a lot right now, & for the foreseeable future, I want you to know that it’s only because I’m trying my best. I want to do my best. I want the game that I put out to be one you can pick up & have an amazing experience with. I’m trying.
Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
Tell me a little about Prism. What excites you about it?
Prism is a roleplaying game about relationships and conflict resolution set in an aquatic world. Instead of using dice, players will rely on predetermined levels of expertise to solve narrative conflicts, and interact with others. The rules rely less on crunch, and more on negotiations between players and the GM. I’m excited about it because in most games, characters are stuck on land, so it’s difficult to play characters that thrive in the water. I’m also excited about this project because it encourages sensuality and social combat.
What makes the aquatic environment different for characters, mechanically and narratively?
I am a huge fan of sealife, so it was important to integrate an underwater environment to Prism. I designed the game to give players an opportunity to play as merfolk, or humanoids that turn into tiny sea creatures. Since all six humanoids in the game are amphibious, it also means there can be unhindered underwater exploration. It also gave me the opportunity to draw plant folk with the attributes of a water lily, and merfolk with the qualities of a shark, wearing their own teeth as a necklace.
How do the negotiations work between players and the GM? What kind of power does each player hold at the table to influence the results of a conflict?
I’m not a huge fan of rolling dice with the exception being Lady Blackbird. I didn’t like how you could dump all your points into something you really want to excel at, roll poorly, and not get the results you want. So instead if a character doesn’t have enough expertise, the player can either agree to have their character succeed at a cost, or make a case that it takes more than one skill to resolve the conflict.
For example, a Chameleon (has the ability to cast cantrips) wants to impress someone with a lavish meal, but doesn’t have enough expertise to do so. They could make argument that a fire cantrip (which requires the use of another skill) could help them cook the food more evenly.
What techniques did you use for the art in Prism, and how did you conceptualize the designs – did you do drafts of the illustrations, get inspirations from playtests, etc.?
Most of the artwork in the book are pinups. My goal was to draw sexy people and not sexy objects. The rest is either revamped artwork from back when Prism was a video game concept, or inspired by the comic that preceded the game (such as the symbols that represent the six realms). The artwork in the game either started out as a pencil sketches, a sketch on my phone (S Note), or were started from scratch using Adobe Animate.
What’s the most challenging (but promising!) part of putting Prism out there for the public, and how do you feel about the final product? What parts of it stick out to you as your favorite?
I wanted to make a game about relationships emotional intimacy, but that presented me with the challenge of making a game where a player can feel safe being vulnerable. I’ve mentioned elsewhere how consent is sometimes conveyed as a rigid negotiation. Where you add and remove filling from the sandwich, until it’s a sandwich no one involved wants to eat anymore. I tried to make Prism a game where you discuss consent from the beginning, and it remains a fluid conversation that continues during play. So, the sandwich starts off on the table, and anyone at any given time can say…you know, I usually really like this to be in my sandwich, but today I don’t have the appetite for it…or, my friend and I really want to add this to the sandwich, but we can change our mind if either of us want to.
I think the final product looks gorgeous. My favorite part is the Tea Party (character generation). It really takes you gently by the hand and walks you through the process.
I love the art <3
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Thanks so much to Whitney for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading about Prism and that you’ll check it out when it’s live on Kickstarter!
Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
Hi all! Today I have an interview with Tracy Barnett on Iron Edda Accelerated, which is currently on Kickstarter! I hope you enjoy hearing what they have to say about the project and that you’ll give the Kickstarter a look.
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Tell me a little about Iron Edda Accelerated. What excites you about it?
Ragnarok occurred in the form of 50 foot-tall, metal dwarven destroyers rising out of the ground. Humanity cried out to the gods for help, and Loki responded. “Here, take this thing (which I totally didn’t steal from the dwarves) and use it to bond the spirits of your bravest warriors to the bones of dead giants and y’all can make like Pacific Rim.” That’s the pitch I’ve used for Iron Edda since it first came out a few years ago. This new version uses the Fate framework found in Dresden Files Accelerated, meaning that every character is represented by a Destiny, a set of conditions and stunts which define what you can do in the world. It’s different than the previous version, and I’m thrilled with the design.
Iron Edda Accelerated represents a huge second chance for me. I Kickstarted the original Iron Edda game (War of Metal and Bone) about four years ago and I was never able to give it the time and attention it deserved. I mean that both as a game, and as a product. Last year around this time, I thought about what I could do to change the future of Iron Edda. I approached Encoded Designs, gave them the full rundown of the issues I’d had getting a marketing push for the original game, and pitched them the idea of a new version. They accepted and we started development. I got a chance to re-do things in a better way, with support from a publisher, rather than doing it all on my own.
Mechanically, this is the version of Iron Edda I’ve wanted to see all along. It’s funny, I was talking with a publishing friend at Origins last week and he was talking about how his games all have a five-year development cycle. I’ve unintentionally done that with Iron Edda Accelerated. The original draft which became this game was something I started five years ago for someone else’s Kickstarter. Now, five years on, I’ve learned enough about the world and I’ve improved as a designer to the point where I could make the game what I wanted it to be. That’s a lesson I’m going to keep with me.
What’s happening mechanically in Iron Edda Accelerated? What are the new fiddly bits?
The fiddly bits are legion with this design change. Fate Core is, in a lot of ways, an open template. You can make a lot of things happen by making new Extras and Stunts, which is what I did in the original Iron Edda. In the framework provided by Dresden Files Accelerated, everything is codified. Your core abilities are described by Conditions. Every condition has a finite number of uses before you have to undertake an action to recover them.
In mechanical terms, that means that you can’t, say, summon the bones of the dead giant who is bonded to your soul unless you mark a box of your Summon the Bones condition. In the original Iron Edda, there wasn’t anything like that. You called up the giant bones whenever you wanted. In Iron Edda Accelerated, you can do that five times (each time lasting a scene) before you have to indulge in your dead giant’s Worldly Desire to be able to recover boxes on your summoning condition track. If you want to push it, you can, but you then mark a condition called Abomination. You get the giant’s bones for a scene, then the giant takes over, using your body as it sees fit.
I guess the best way to say it is that everything has teeth now. There’s no use of power without a balancing influence or cost which you, as the player, have to be concerned with. Aside from making things mechanically more interesting, this also makes the fiction more interesting. Bonebonded have to content with their giants, Runescrbed with the power that will ultimately consume them, Seers with fate itself. There’s a push and pull for every destiny in Iron Edda Accelerated, and that’s so much more compelling to play.
That ties directly into your [next] question.
How has your path as a designer influenced the game in big ways – what are some places you can look at this new project and see the changes in you and the design?
When I wrote the first Iron Edda, there was a lot of stuff that I put in the game because it seemed to fit and because it seemed cool. Fate Core includes the idea of success at a cost, so I just left it in the hands of the players and GMs in the world to provide the negative sides of the fiction so playing a Bonebonded or a Seer would be interesting. As the years went by, I began trying to push for more of those complications in the games I ran because I thought it made for interesting fiction at the table.
When I read Dresden Files Accelerated it was around the same time I pitched a new version of Iron Edda to Encoded Designs. Something inside was telling me that the setup of conditions and linked stunts would be a great fit for Iron Edda and every time I’ve run or played it, that has borne out. I guess that speaks to the other side of experience as a game designer. There’s never a point where you need to stop learning. There is, however, a point at which I think it’s really valuable to begin to trust your design experience. I won’t ever claim I’m the best Fate designer or any BS like that. But I’ve got over fives years of experience working on Fate designs, and there are some designs that I know will work as I write them, playtest or no. That’s a huge thing to realize. So much of design work is fraught with insecurity. It feels really good to have moments where I see something work exactly as I intended it when I wrote it.
As a quick aside, one moment where I knew I’d gotten the flavor of the Seer right was during an online game a few months ago. The player who chose the Seer asked if they could summon a host of the dishonored dead to help them in a fight. There’s a stunt written for the Seer which does just that, but the player hadn’t seen it. Having someone new to the game and new to the rules ask to do a thing I’d already written was absolutely amazing. That’s what I call leveling up.
What was playtesting like with Iron Edda Accelerated? What were some of your better, and more challenging, experiences?
It’s funny; I think in a lot of ways I’ve been playtesting Iron Edda Accelerated ever since I made the first Iron Edda. By that I mean that I learned so much about how the game is supposed to run and how the world is supposed to be reflected from all of the sessions of War of Metal and Bone that I ran over the years. Iron Edda Accelerated is my best effort expression of that.
However, when I ran my first two sessions of the new system at Big Bad Con in 2017, they were near-disastrous. I was jet-lagged and sick, so when I got to the table, working with characters I’d written up on the flight out, everything just seemed off to me. It was like getting into a car you’re super familiar with and finding that someone has changed the location of all the controls. I tried to turn on the wipers and the headlights kicked on, y’know? But, those two sessions were necessary for me to learn the new layout and arrangement of things. A couple of months later at Acadecon I ran two of the best sessions of any Iron Edda game I’d ever run. I’d settled into the changes and everything worked the way I expected it to. Some of the mechanics needed tweaking, of course, but the game was what I wanted it to be. That felt good.
When you look at the work you’ve done, what are some of your favorite pieces of design, fiction, or even just experience had that you want to share with aspiring designers to show how good it can be?
Probably the best experience I’ve had in regards to gaming, especially running my own game, was at Origins in 2014. I was running the original Iron Edda at Games on Demand and I made the mistake I often made back then: I stayed up way too late, drank too much, and was hungover for my morning slot. I get there, and end up with a group of eight players. Six of them knew each other well and seemed to have good chemistry, so I just decided to roll with it. I explained to them how I was feeling and asked them to really bring it for that session. They did. It was a good, solid session with a lot of political intrigue and an honor duel to determine who the next Jarl would be. End of story, I thought at the time.
The next night, Saturday, I get to Games on Demand and the person organizing the tables asked me if I was okay with seven players. I looked at the table and the same group of six were sitting there, along with a friend of mine. I sat down with them and told them I was happy to see them. They asked me something I’ve not heard since at a convention: they wanted to keep playing the session from the previous day. They had their character sheets, I had all the notes I’d written, and my friend was happy to make a character to fit the continuing situation.
It was so gratifying to have an entire group of people want to come back and continue the story we’d begun the day before. I’ve had some amazing game sessions of Iron Edda since then, but nothing has topped that. Yet. I’m open to there being something even more gratifying in the future.
An August tradition, I suppose, is to respond to the prompts for RPGaDAY, and the 2018 prompts have a lot going on. I figured something I could do today is use one of them as a prompt for a blog post, because it’s something I’ve been thinking about, too.
Today’s prompt is How can players make a world seem real?
Character sheets from a game of Turn I’m currently playing.
I think this can be a bit of a personal thing, but one way to do it for me is to give everything reasoning and give everything a story. NPCs, events in game, etc. all should have some flavor to their existence. It ties directly into collaborative worldbuildimg. This has been really growing for me while working on Turn, a game where everyone has loads of narrative control, and while playing D&D with my partner Dillon.
I’ll talk about Dillon first, because it’s super exciting to me. I’m not naturally a huge D&D fan – honestly, it’s a big game and a lot of the fiction bums me out. But, in the game I’m playing with Dillon, we’ve been rewriting a lot of it. The mechanics mostly remain the same, tho were using house rules and I’m playing cosmic horror investigation type fiction instead of the average adventure. But the fiction!
Dillon let me be a part of the world building for the main setting. This is something I once did in a game run by my husband John, where I got to make up dieties and religions and contribute to the fiction for the different species. Dillon is letting me do much the same thing! Collaborative worldbuilding means I get to see things I’m interested in integrated into the world I’m playing in, which inherently makes it more real to me.
For example, we were building up my character’s family and Kelt, my PC, is half tiefling, half half-orc, and I was talking about Kelt’s dad being a cleric. I said how it felt to me, due to some of the other background stuff we’ve done for the game, that tieflings aren’t demonic, they’re more druidic, nature based.
You know, more mountain goat than Black Phillip. Photo by Brie Sheldon.
Dillon and I discussed it, and he liked the idea, so we changed the way teiflings work in the game to have them even physically be more based in nature with antlers and ram horns rather than demonic horns, and it suited their culture that we’d developed, too. Now I have more knowledge about my PC’s dad’s history, the world around him, and I have a personal touchstone because I got to be a part of it!
And it reflects in that “everything has a reasoning, everything has a story” too – my character takes public transportation as we’re set in a near-industrial world, so Dillon had a newspaper I could read and gossip I could listen in on, but also he does something that’s important: when I suggest a frivolous detail for the scene, NPCs, etc., he considers it and often accepts it!
Like if I were to pass by someone and they rudely bump into me and I say,
“I bet they’re rushing off to a meeting with their mistress!”
Dillon runs with it, something like “actually, it’s his boyfriend and it’s their anniversary!”
I may never encounter that NPC again, but it feels real.
This is likewise with how Dillon’s treating Kelt’s dog, Orion, who is his familiar and tied to the Void (Kelt’s patron). It’s awesome when I play knowing that I’ll get to have my character deal with stuff like making sure Orion gets enough play time, or that his leash works in spite of his magical ability to phase through objects (lead lining helps!). Things like how Orion always wakes up to bark at the window-knocker and trolley actually make my in-game experience feel real!
So as a player, I engage back with these things, bring them up, ask questions, offer input. Making the world mine is part of the experience!
And this is all relevant to Turn. In Turn, I’ve tried to design some of this in. The worldbuilding you do with the town creation gives players deep engagement to the roots of the town and all its trappings, letting you understand the relationships and founding and themes before you start play, and you can add to it.
A town map from Turn.
You also have vignettes each session with NPCs and the town dealing with real life needs that can be stressful and risk exposure of your shifter identity, even if it’s just going to pick up milk at the farmer’s market or trying to have coffee with your cousin. When players are engaging with Turn, I’m hoping they’ll ask questions of the town and NPCs too, and give reason to things that might seem otherwise random.
As a player in Turn, I’ve been lucky enough to have all of these experiences. John is often my GM in games and in Turn he does a spectacular job executing these ideals I have for a “real” world. He is the source for my researching the Storyteller section of Turn, and will be consulting heavily on it.
I’m so lucky to have two partners who are such amazing GMs and who let me make the world real from the role of a player!
Hope you enjoyed the post today and that you find it useful!
Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
This is the last 46 hours for the game zine I’m curating and contributing to, Behind the Masc, which is currently on Kickstarter. I wanted to write a quick post to remind everyone!
Behind the Masc is a collaborative effort with a team of great creators: Eli Eaton, Patrick Lickman, Raiden Otto, Adrian Heise, Lemmo Pew, Alex McConnaughey, Lawrence Gullo, and Tracy Barnett. They’re all making something new and original for this project! And they’re all non-cisgender masculine people like me, across the spectrum.
To my knowledge, Behind the Masc is a first of its kind as a crowdfunding project in indie games focusing specifically on our goal of reenvisioning masculinity – especially one by entirely non-cisgender creators. We’re using historical and mythological archetypes to show our perspective on masculinity and do so while making cool game products that work with existing games like the Demi and Minotaur skins for Monsterhearts 2, the Apocalypse World Trickster playbook, and the D&D 5th Edition male Baccae character background and Sorcerer recreation.
We’ll also have standalone products with a Twine game about the protector and my audio-text game, Echoes, about the hero. It means a lot to me. Last night, I wrote the first draft of the text for Echoes and I’m really excited to make this game!
My only stretch goal for this project is a higher pay rate for the contributors at $3000. We’re not trending toward that on Kicktraq, but we’ve raised those numbers a bunch throughout this campaign! We can work toward it, with your help!
Behind the Masc is new, and niche, and I knew that going into this project. We’re a collection of creators that make cool things but might not otherwise be noticed – and that’s part of the point. I would love to see more people back the project and potentially raise the pay for the contributors, but I will say now that I’m grateful we’ve come so far, that we’ve funded, and that the community has shown enthusiasm for the project!
Please back the project on Kickstarter if you’re interested, or share it on social media if you’ve already backed/can’t back! Tell your friends and colleagues about it, post it to message boards and raise awareness! We have less than two days to raise funds, and I’d love you to have a copy in your hands when we fulfill. Thank you!!
Hi all! Today I have an interview with Bebarce El-Tayib on Power Outage, a superhero game for kids that’s currently on Kickstarter! Bebarce has given some excellent answers to my questions, so please check it out below!
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This is a logo that was announced post-launch!
Tell me a little about Power Outage v 1.4. What excites you about it?
Power Outage 1.4 is a large leap in a series I’ve been developing for the past 4 years. It’s a Super Hero themed tabletop roleplaying game designed to be played by kids and GMed by adults. This would be the first attempt at making the book something I’m comfortable with being available in Print.
It’s exciting to me for a ton of reasons aside from the fact that it’s probably the largest and longest running creative endeavor that I’ve ever taken on. But I would have to say that the biggest excitement comes from the scope of change between 1.3 to 1.4. It’s a monumental shift. There is a completely revised mechanic system, much greater resources for crafting your own adventures, and the biggest thing of all is the expansion of guidance to not only include differentiation, but also a focus on creating more accessible gaming tables. Plus its just the inherent potential of creating something that introduces a new generation to a hobby that I and many others love.
An example of the result of the Kickstarter funding on the character sheet.
When making games for kids, your point about a accessibility is super important. How do are you designing and developing Power Outage to be accessible, and why does it matter to you?
My work in Public Education as a technologist has me dealing with data often. Part of that involves creating considerations for Special Education, and managing Special Education Data. So when it comes to creating accomodations I realize the monumental task in front of me. As soon as I started I realized there was no end, so I’m tackling it from two fronts. In the book I have a section dedicated to Accessibility guidance. I broke the sections into 5 specific domains outside of general guidance. Physical, Communicative / Receptive, Behavioral, Cognitive, and Emotional. What I’m essentially doing is tackling the topic from a symptomatic approach, rather than a cause approach. Tthat limits me to an extent from the specificity inherent with conditions, but allows for the broadest spectrum of guidance. I have 2 directors of special education I’ve worked with helping to ensure that the information I’m providing is safe, sound, and that the terminology is effective.
Seperate from that I created a wiki called www.accessible-rpg.com It is currently under developed, and tailored primarily to children, but eventually I’d like it to become a free resource to people developing games or running tables, to create a more accessible gaming table. It’s a larger goal than Power Outage itself, and its only going to be successful with community involvement. That’s why it’s built in the wiki format. It has to be populated with information from the people who are directly effected. It has to be live, and continually changing. I plan on jumping right back into it once I’m done with the kickstarter, and pulling in as much guidance as I can get.
As to why it’s important to me, I could try to relate to work, or family members, or some forms of tangible relationships to be people I know that have disabilities, but in all honesty, it is something that we should ALL be working toward. Roleplaying games allow all of us to not only break free of the limitations we find in our every day lives, but express our real selves through our avatars. We bring our strengths and our perceived weaknesses and allow them to shape a world we actively create. The absolute NEED to make that process available to everyone is imperative. We need to be accessible. We need to be inclusive. We need to bring everyone to the table, and if we can’t, then we need to drag that table over to them.
What are the mechanics like in Power Outage? How do you encounter and overcome challenges?
So we’re working with kids. That takes “expectations” and throws them into the waste bin. So the idea behind Power Outage’s mechanics is in compartmentalizing game play so that kids can be playing their own individualized game while still contributing to the greater narrative. It’s taking the concept of differentiation from the classroom and applying it the gaming sphere.
What it boils down to is the idea that the game is more a guide then a hard set dogmatic codex that must be followed. GMs provided guidance to players based off of their capabilities, and to do this effectively, the mechanics have been made so that it’s easily accessible to everyone involved.
Characters have 4 attributes. IMPACT – which effects basic human characteristics POWER – which effects their super heroic capabilities OHMER – which is the stat that IMPACT and POWER compare againsts and YP – Yield Points – which is the point pool that Heroes have before deciding them must Yield or regroup. There is no death in Power Outage.
The 4 attributes covers a lot of types of conditions, but is a reduced amount of record keeping so that not only are kids able to focus more on roleplay and story elements, but so that GMs can more easily manage groups of kids who for instance may not be able to read yet, or add large sums.
In order to allow creative freedom for kids to make the heroes they want, Power tables are provided with effects are provided and grouped to Combat, Support, and Utlity. Kids work with the GM to determine what their heroes can do, and the GM helps match the power to an effect on the table. So if you’re doing 1d4 damage from up to 20 spaces away, it doesn’t matter if that effect comes from a flame torch, or a snow ball, or lightning bolt or psychic shock. In short, Power Outage provides the effect, and the hero provides the flavor.
One last thing I’ll mention is the CAPE system (Combat, Alternative, Puzzle, and Exploration) It’s a way to compartmentalize adventures so that you can cherry pick what you want for your play sessions. In the prewritten adventures (to be released, although one is included with the core book) it becomes a choose your own adventure mechanic. Do you prefer to not have violence in your session, Alternative Components match up to every Combat Component. Are puzzles too difficult? Move around them directly to exploration. It allows GMs to build adventures that pertain to the needs of their group.
All of this comes from the game kids want to play, rather than the game kids are forced to play. And it happens at all levels. From something as simple as the character sheets “Character image” section being enlarged because kids want more room to drawing their characters, to color/symbol coding Attributes so that a GM can easily say “Tell me the red number” or “Tell me the number with the boot symbol”
The five regions for playing in sound really fun! What are they like to play in? What exciting elements do they have in store?
So not only are the 5 regions different stylistic settings, the settings themselves allow for potentially uniquely suited playstyles as well.
The Atomnyy Zavod is a always night gothic soviet atomic punk city. It’s gritty, and confusing, and the some of the starker elements are only highlighted by the oddity of it’s semi-futuristic elements. You’ll see old-timey vehicles driving under nuclear battery powered street green glowing street lights. But this is the perfect setting for gritty noir mysteries. You’ll use Exploration and Puzzle solving components just as often if not more often then Combat/Alternative.
Shorai City is it’s opposite in many ways, with it’s soaring Neo-Japanese inspired towers, flying cars, and robotic servants. This city has become a gathering point for many big heroes and villains, and often becomes the setting for large confrontations. This setting is great for large Beat Em Up style baddies that hearken back to the Golden Era comic days. Villains include Mrs. Roboto and The Tempuritan.
The Overgrowth is by far the most expansive region of Outage. The product of Outages once barren but strange landscape, had tests done on it in the early stages of American involvement causing the worlds largest forrest to grow. That forrest however was both invasive, aggressive, and sentient. Still outpost seem to coexist within the Overgrowth. A musical troll city, a city of Outcast Powers (the name for people with Powers in Outage), and a School for Sandwich Magic are just a few examples of what is discovered, but certainly more mysteries lie within under the canopy. This setting is great for all sorts of Campy Adventures or Mythical Fantasy type games. One area might hold dragons, and the other might hold dinosaurs. Ancient civilizations come to light or scientific outposts. Villains include Treestache and Swagneto.
The sink is a geological anomoly. It is a peninsula on the south eastern coast of Outage. One end appears to be sinking steadily in the ocean while the other side of it emerges from the ground far inland, seemingly with intact ancient structures. At it’s tip, the sink features a floating shanty city of disreputable individuals known as The Scum. Under the ocean as the sink delves further into it’s depths lie ancient cities under the water, sealed off from the ocean that surrounds it (for now). This is a great city for acting a bit rebellious enjoying some not so squeaky mission, confronting morale dilemmas, or just outright exploration. Whether you’re in the muddy bayou, exploring submerged catacombs or getting into naval battles with or against pirates, it’s usually a nonstop adventure. Villains of note include The Boat Rocker and InstaGator.
Finally, Seward’s Refuge is central to the island continent. It is an American run scientific and military facility, that serves often as a waystation between regions, a central government, a barrier to the Overgrowth, and it’s Space Elevator even provides access to the stars. This region is great for multi-region adventures, political intrigue, science gone wrong, or incursion/spy missions. Villains of note include Agent Orangutan and General Specific.
Each region has areas that aren’t directly drawn out leaving exploration up to the imagination and creation of the GM. There is also a section in the book detailing potential other locations including Dimensional and Temporal options. It’s a huge sandbox that kids and adults can play in. You can build just about any game you want to in the world.
With all of the efforts that you have put in, do you have any hopes moving forward for Power Outage and even other games to become more accessible for kids?
Yes, I think you’ll see a lot more of this cropping up. There is a positive shift in the culture of gaming that not only lends to more voices being heard, but a general awareness of the roles we play in inclusiveness, accessibility, and security. A lot of people grew up with these games, and are looking to share it with their kids. In he end, getting families around the table and talking and gaming with each other was the seed that my game grew out of. And as we learn more and more how games effect the ability to understand and retain knowledge, to become flexible and willing to learn new things. It’s becoming an imperative.
What a nifty cover!
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Thank you so much to Bebarce for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Power Outage on Kickstarter today!
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Hello all! Many of you have likely seen me mention the methodology behind my design, destructive design, and I thought it was due time I broke the idea down a little bit. I thought approachable theory might be the best place to do it, because simple is good. I’ll talk about the origin of the methodology, how it’s applied, and what’s the difference between destructive design and hacking. I hope you enjoy the article!
Origins
Destructive design has existed informally, for sure, for a long time. From the first time someone took the time to examine a game’s design and use it to construct something new, the roots have been there. For me, personally, they’re rooted in the approach my dad taught me for repairing engines and similar things – I talked about this a little on [insert quest here].
My dad can take anything apart, put it back together, and fix the problems it had – his repair skills are legendary. He taught himself a lot of the skills necessary for it using the root of the mentality for destructive design. He would take things apart entirely – whole engines, down to the nuts and bolts – and put them back together. In the process, he could find the root of what wasn’t working just right, learn how the machine worked, and find opportunities to improve things. He taught me this when I was a young kid, and it stuck with me.
When I started in games, I kept finding games that were almost there, nearly right, but not quite what I needed. I wanted to fix it, and the only way I knew how to do that was to take it apart and put it back together. A common misconception is that my games and things I create with this method could be that they’re the put back together part – but that’s not how it works. I build something new – maybe making molds of ideas or pieces, but never copying right over – and try to make what I want to see, whether it’s like that other thing at all or not.
After all, my dad – an engineer – did that, too. He could take what he learned from those engines and build new designs for machines and tools. And it was pretty cool.
My dad also likes to fish. Photo by Bonnie Cousins.
Application
It maybe isn’t easy to do destructive design, depending on your approach, but the core ideas are simple:
Have a concept or mechanic
Break it down into its basest parts
Examine it in detail
Build it back up again and look for cracks and loose bolts in the process
Build something new from what you’ve learned
For an example, we’ll look at Struggles in Turn. Turn is a game about shapeshifters in small towns who must find balance between their human and beast identities. Struggles are what might otherwise be moves in a Powered by the Apocalypse game. There are just some slight changes, but they matter. Moves in Monsterhearts are one of the first parts that I broke down.
The “turn someone on” move from Monsterhearts.
Here are some of the base parts of moves*:
– Descriptive prompt (when you ____, roll with _____). – Requires die roll – Stats can be penalty or bonus – Success ladder (10+ succeed, 7-9 succeed at cost, 6- fail) – Narrative options – Mechanical options – Risk of failure
When I designed struggles, I started with a different set of assumptions based on what I learned here. First, I built the pieces back together and realized that one of the key elements of these moves was what I wanted to avoid: failure. In Turn, while it might take time and will have consequences, you always succeed at what you do. So I struck out “risk of failure.” Next, I wanted struggles to exclusively be something that happened when you were doing something that your opposed form didn’t want to do, or that it might resist, or in situations where you were trying to hold your opposed form back from doing something. When you look at Monsterhearts moves, they’re only when you’re actively doing something, and you’re assumed to want to do it. I decided to make you always rolling a penalty to these rolls, so I took out “stats can be penalty or bonus.”
The success ladder is just handy, and I did want to require a die roll. I also wanted to include mechanical and narrative options for any pick lists. But with the ladder now, the 6- wasn’t a failure – it was just a giant pile of consequences. You do want you want, but the ladder represented the severity of consequences for succeeding. The base parts of struggles are now like this*:
– Descriptive prompt (when you ____, roll with _____). – Requires die roll – Stats are penalty – Success ladder (10+ no or few consequences, 7-9 more consequences, 6- all consequences) – Narrative options – Mechanical options – Guaranteed success
The “mind your manners” struggle in Turn.
If you swapped these two mechanics – put struggles in Monsterhearts and moves in Turn – the games would be radically different. Giving characters in Monsterhearts guaranteed success could end up with towns overrun with monstrous teens, meanwhile making it so the stats could be bonuses could make shifters in Turn even more dangerous. It would change tone, and alter how people play.
The process of breaking these things down is really exciting sometimes! It is good to see what’s lying beneath the surface, what’s grinding the gears – and when put into application, destructive design can be revealing and instructive.
*Not necessarily an exhaustive list.
Destructive Design versus Hacking
What’s the difference between destructive design and hacking? Well, they’re not mutually exclusive. In fact, plenty of people who hack games use destructive design. The real core differences are that with destructive design your goal is to create something notably different on a structural or conceptual level, while some hacks intend to be similar, matching structure and concepts but with different dressing – and destructive design is an active and purposeful process.
Destructive design can happen even on the smallest mechanical or narrative design level. Some people do it, but wouldn’t call it that, because we don’t always label how we do something. Meanwhile, I use the term because it helps me align my methods and do things with intent. A person could consider Turn to be a hack – and some people do – but I don’t, because I think that I used destructive design to change fundamental concepts and structure. Like all parts of game theory, though, people’s perspectives differ.
One of the most significant examples of destructive design is Turn, which is currently in production. Turn was born of playing Monsterhearts and finding it wasn’t quite hitting the nerve I wanted, and then sitting there with my ideas piled up for like four years before I finally wrote anything down. There’s definitely evidence of Monsterhearts in Turn, but it is a completely different beast.
Another example of destructive design by me is Script Change. It doesn’t seem like it would be one! It’s just a content and safety toolbox, right? Well, some could say Script Change was inspired by the X-card… except the inspiration was to break it down into concepts and try to make it what I wanted. After using the X-card for a while and talking to John Stavropolous and so on, I realized it was a great tool, but not the right one for me. I examined it, watched it in play, and then figured out what worked best for me.
Many of my works are destructive design – including Let Me Take a Selfie! All of the games inside come from the root of seeing other selfie games and wanting to see how I could use a mechanic I cared about to tell the stories I wanted to, but not by using the same methods as the other games. None of them are directly inspired, none of them are intended to be similar at all to other games – they just come from the root of “break down this idea and build it back up so I can build something new.”
Conclusion
Destructive design is a methodology – a concept, and a potential way to do game design. It is based on the idea of taking something apart to understand it better, and using that knowledge to make something different and more suited to your needs. I hope this article gives good explanation to it and helps others explore design from a perspective that might not always be tidy, but certainly gives opportunity to learn something new!
Thanks for reading! Check out other approachable theory articles here!
P.S. If you’d like to write an article for approachable theory, email Brie at contactbriecs@gmail.com with a one paragraph pitch, your name, and your pronouns.
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What is Harder They Fall, both as a product and as your vision?
My pitch for HTF is that it brings the tension and melodrama of an end-of-movie blockbuster battle to your table, with zero prep and simple rules. As a group, you build up the conflict that’s bought these two sides together, decide the individual strengths, oaths and doubts of each champion, and draw the battlefield on a sheet of paper. As you play you’re raising the tension in a very real way by setting up dominoes to be toppled over, while the value of the domino decides what choice of questions you have to ask the other players. This last thing is crucial: you’re constantly letting the other players make statements about your character and their place in the fiction, which is what lets it cross the divide from board game to story game.
As a product, it’s an intentional move away from the lavish production values and long list of stretch goals my previous kickstarters have had. I still want it to be a product that’s nice to look at, of course, but I’m aiming for a 20 page pamphlet with everything you need to play in it. Part of my goal for this campaign was to see if there’s a space for small-scale, short-run projects that are less psychologically demanding on the creator than your traditional blockbuster RPG kickstarters!
How did you come up with the idea of using dominos, and how did you playtest them to ensure it has the impact (literally) that you’d like?
Weirdly enough, it came from a Domino’s ad – a domino with 3 pips, their name and the slogan We Did It – captioned with “That’s a 6-, no you didn’t”. I ran the numbers, and realised that drawing a domino from a pool and counting the pips is very similar to rolling 2d6 (more precisely, it’s actually 2(d7-1)). As someone who’s mainly designed in the Apocalypse World format, that was immediately exciting!
When it came to play testing, the main concern was the dimensions – it needed to possible, but not common, for your chain of dominoes to contact and knock down one of their foes’. In play testing, I needed to test how far apart you could place your dominoes to chain them together, how many dominoes in a set vs how many turns there are in a game, that sort of thing. The main point of feedback was that it all hinged upon the toppling of the dominoes – a string of bad draws when setting them up could lead to all sorts of misfortune for the player involved, but so long as knocking them over was satisfying it all worked out.
Why do you feel the story game aspects – shared narrative control, storytelling – are so important to Harder They Fall? How do they feel tied together with the mechanics?
Fundamentally, this game is intended to set up a conflict that feels like it could be the climax of a campaign that you just happen to have not played. Part of that is building the sense that this narrative is alive, that it exists between all of you, and the shared narrative control is a big part of that. The other reason the shared narrative is important is to make sure that everyone’s involved in everyone else’s turns. When you take action, you make the initial statement of what your combatant is doing, but it’s your opponents that get the final say on what impact that has on the world.
This is all based on the setup in D. Vincent Baker’s Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands, which goes all-in with Vincent’s trademark lists of specific questions. That’s where this most strongly ties into the mechanics: when you draw a low-value domino (i.e. totalling 8 or less) you’ll be forced to ask a question with bad implications for your fighter if you play it to boost their efforts. You can escape that by playing it in one of your opponent’s chains, but that both boosts them mechanically and lets them define more of your character’s doubts, fears and conflicted loyalties. What I really love about this is that players who are mechanically minded and play to win, and players who are there to tell a good story, tend to end up engaging with the system equally and telling a great story as a result.
The towering dominoes over this city is such a fun image 🙂
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Thanks so much to Jay for the interview! I hope you’ll all check out Harder They Fall in its last few days on Kickstarter!
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Hey all, check out the Twitter account @NonbinaryTTRPGM to find out more about Nonbinary Tabletop RPG Month and maybe hop on the Discord to play some games with other nonbinary people! As a nonbinary person, it’s important for me to see recognition of people like me. It’s also important to me to find spaces for nonbinary people to have fun and be safe! Hopefully you’ll find something like that here. 🙂
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What is Atisi, both as a product and as your vision?
Atisi is a work of love and research — I’ve put a good effort in mixing the various cultures depicted in the book with something a game designer should never forget: playability. The best reference book would be meaningless in a gaming table if the material there is not able to make the players excited about it and eager to play. In other words, I’ve hit the books about sub-Saharan people, sought real life for inspiration, but I’ve also considered what fiction tells about all those, directly and indirectly. So, if one wants a simple answer, Atisi could be compared to Conan in Stygia, but it’s (a lot) more than that.
Consider this point: people in Atisi are not the Caucasian Eurocentric types. This, for once, is a change of paradigm when compared to standard sword & sorcery. The original book (Atisi was published in Portuguese powered by Barbarians of Lemuria system) was even used as a tool for teaching children about ethnics/racial diversity, so I believe I transcended the original goal — I wanted a fun campaign setting to play, but I’ve also got a kind of bridge able to bring people together. So, as a campaign setting for Dungeon World, Atisi is a book that goals beyond describing the world: it gives the Game Master tools to create her own setting, as the multitude of questions (each point of interest on the map — big enough to include lots of blanks to be filled later — has its own set of questions, for example) will help the gaming table make it unique. This means the playbooks, the moves, the magic items, the monsters, the people, and the landscape add together to make this an exquisite sword & sorcery campaign setting. And as Atisi (one of the insular realms of the setting, and focus to this book) is inspired by a fantastic Egypt, you’ll surely find a lot of adventure inside the mysterious pyramids that dot the place.
It’s 280-pages full of wonders for the Game Master and the players, and we have 70% of the basic goal funded already (at the time of writing this). I’m pretty sure we’ll fund this crowdfunding project soon and aim toward the first stretch goal.
I’d love to hear about your research. What are some of the things you’ve researched that you’re really enjoying putting forward in the text? Did anything surprise you?
At first it’s difficult to leave the castles and crusades behind, the knights in shining armor, the dragons… As we are all the fruit of our past experiences — and we are usually surrounded by Medievalish and Eurocentric settings — I had to approach everything with a clean mind. A blank canvas, to be honest. I was already familiar with the writings of Robert Ervin Howard, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Poul Anderson, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Jessica Amanda Salmonson (to name a few), so my sword & sorcery background was sound. What I needed was to focus on the people and their mythology.
What we call mythology, however, is another people’s religion — and I’ve learned a lot about Kemetism (a revival of Ancient Egyptian religion) and African religion (there’s a shamanic vibe in those, but it’s a lot more than that) — and I needed to respect that. This led me to many monsters of legend particular to Sub-Saharan Africa and I’ve tried the best to convey their spirit (even if I used different names).
Learning about the people, the culture, was also delightful. There’s such a vast amount of details that, together, creates a wonderful tapestry. There’s honor. There’s mutual respect. There’s a constant fight for survival. And those reflect today, as those values were never lost.
Yet I’m no Historian. So I grabbed some of my research and talked to some scholars (I dare to call them such, as this makes my writing journey a little more epic, don’t you agree?) to give me a better perspective of everything I was learning at the time: History and Sociology professionals were my best friends during those research phases of my work.
And I’m glad I’ve learned so much. It gave me a better notion of who I am, as I believe we only know about us when we learn about others.
Sample image by Brazilian artist Paloma Diniz.
How do you envision the material you’ve researched and developed will integrate with Dungeon World? How will it work together mechanically?
Not everything was “translated” into rules. After all, Ancient Worlds: Atisi is a game, not a treaty on those cultures. And another important thing: this is a fantasy world, not an exact replica of the reality (albeit real world sometimes is more fantastic than we can conceive at first, there are limits on what is “gameable”). So the heroes, the Player Characters, are larger than life, with abilities that mimic the legends, not the ordinary people (and, as a side note, I need to thank David Guyll and Melissa Fisher for the help in designing the playbooks — they were fantastic people to work with). Monsters of ancient tales are part of the landscape, old stories are forged once again and are transformed in tidbits of the lore of the places of the kingdoms of the land…
This means magical items and monsters, while inspired by Egyptian mythology, have their own tags and moves, becoming familiar to those used to Dungeon World. Even each point of interest becomes an adventure in itself (like a proto-dungeon starter), but none are set on stone as the related questions the GM may ask are able to turn Atisi into a unique setting for each gaming table.
Of course, everything is already written and playtested: I’ve started this crowdfunding campaign with a set goal in mind and the backers are already receiving an “alpha” version of the book, so they can start playing right now, even before the campaign ends. This way, all mechanics are already interwoven with the setting, as one reinforces the other.
