Thousand Year Old Vampire is a multi-award winning game by Tim Hutchings currently available on itchio and in print at DriveThruRPG. It uses journaling and dice mechanics to guide the player through a solo roleplaying game about the subject – a Thousand Year Old Vampire (TYOV). The game has been widely popular, but I have a lot of thoughts to share!
Thousand Year Old Vampire
By Tim Hutchings
The General Idea
Genre Tags: solo, lonely, dice, journaling, roleplaying game Replayable? Yes! Actual Play Available? Examples included Length: Short or Long, Journaling (At your own pace)
Thousand Year Old Vampire is a multi-award winning game by Tim Hutchings currently available on itchio and in print at DriveThruRPG. It uses journaling and dice mechanics to guide the player through a solo roleplaying game about the subject – a Thousand Year Old Vampire (TYOV). The game has been widely popular, but I have a lot of thoughts to share!
As someone who initially interviewed Tim about the game, I’ve been fascinated with it from the start. I love games about characters who have superpowers like immortality or who are living over centuries, and media like that in general. This game explores that full tilt, including some really challenging topics.
The text includes warnings that you will encounter:
“themes of death, selfishness, and predation. Your character may be injured, victimized, trapped, or killed. Your character will murder and victimize people of all sorts, possibly including children, animals, loved ones, marginalized people, or themselves. You might find yourself exploring themes of imperialism, colonialism, or oppression. Characters might engage in self-harm or drug abuse. Illness, debilitation, and body horror may come into play. Your character may have their memories altered, they will certainly forget important things.
Some of this will emerge from the Prompts, some will emerge from the choices you make as a player.
This is a personal, challenging game for mature adults. Please play hard, but stay aware of yourself and your feelings. Some good thoughts about safety in solo games can be found in Appendix Three.” – Thousand Year Old Vampire
I love Thousand Year Old Vampire. Right now, I can’t play it.
The book is one of the most beautiful artifacts I’ve ever owned. The hardcover has gold riddling the marbled cover, and the interior is packed with images and a stunning, original layout that draws attention to the nature of this book as a well-used immortal’s journal, complete with the impression of things tucked into pages, taped into place, or scribbled into the margins. I love every time I open it, finding new gorgeous, character-building bits and pieces I missed the first four or five times I looked through. It’s sturdy, and while you can write in the book as you play, it may take some bravery to embellish the pages with your own scribbles of isolation and loneliness.
The mechanics are simple, using a d10 and d6 to select and narrow prompts and affect resolution, and the narrative mechanics of Memories and Experiences – the former the bucket for the latter, where multiple short written Experiences make up an arc of a Memory, of which you only have five total at a time. When you gain new Experiences, you lose Memories if you don’t have a space for them.
This mechanic makes so much sense to me when you consider the sheer number of prompts included to put a character through years of triumph and trauma, love and regret, camaraderie and loneliness. Imagine the number of experiences – real moments of eternal living – that a vampire would have in their endless life, how they might imagine ways of ending waking loneliness and sleeping suffering without their loved ones, regretting their deeds, wishing they could do greater ones! It is something that could be played equally passionately and dispassionately, engaging in the powerful prompts with the keen eye of a monster who only has more lives to take or instead with the weary heart of someone who has lived too long and only has longer to live. The possibilities! They are as endless as the days your vampire will sleep through and as engaging as the nights they hunt through.
I want to play this game so badly! It’s so well-written and executed, and the mechanics make so much sense for this immortal being who lives through hundreds of years of life and loss. But, as someone who struggles with memory loss, and during this time of isolation that has been very hard on me, I elected not to play it – right now. Thousand Year Old Vampire will remain on my to-play list until I get the courage to delve into its stunning pages and pen my own story of immortality, but if you want to dive in right now, don’t miss out!
Thousand Year Old Vampire is a lonely journaling vampire game by Tim Hutchings currently available on itchio and in print at DriveThruRPG. It is one of my favorite games I’m reviewing this month and I hope you’ll check it out soon!
This week I have a bundle of reviews for you, my readers! As part of #33in28 for my 33rd birthday I’m reviewing 33 solo games in February, which has 28 days. Each week I’ll post a single review on Monday, then a collection of six reviews on the following Sunday. The remaining three reviews will be peppered in on the big review days or as solo posts! As these are Let’s check out what today has to offer…
This week I have a bundle of reviews for you, my readers! As part of #33in28 for my 33rd birthday I’m reviewing 33 solo games in February, which has 28 days. Each week I’ll post a single review on Monday, then a collection of six reviews on the following Sunday. The remaining three reviews will be peppered in on the big review days or as solo posts! As these are Let’s check out what today has to offer… *Edited 2/9/2021 to correct a name and fix some formatting.
This is the first in my #33in28 reviews series for the month of February celebrating my birthday (I’m 33 on the 4th). I’ll do one individual review on Monday of each week, then a collection of the rest of the reviews that week on the following Sunday. Not all reviews will be the same length, but I’ll try to be thoughtful as always. I’m mixing in a few reviews of games I’m familiar with or that I just want to play, because I can (and as example reviews). Luckily I have good taste!
*This game is currently being funded through itch sales, so what I reviewed is not the final product, just what is available prior to the creator hitting their sales goal. Full disclosure: I will be editing the text and I have drawn art to be used for it, but this is the first time I’ve read the text myself.
A Greeblin’s Journey
The General Idea
Genre Tags: multiplayer (3+ players & facilitator), fantasy, tarot cards, heists, coins Replayable? Yes! Actual Play Available? Some examples in text Length: Short (One-shot)
The Review
Today I’m reviewing A Greeblin’s Journey by Thomas Novosel! A Greeblin’s Journey is a solo fantasy adventure game in zine format funding through itchio. I have played it with Thomas’s help before (handwriting for me, primarily, for a playtest) and I’m excited to check it out again!
The zine itself is well written and clearly laid out with a cute and fun cover piece by Thomas. I think the guidance at the start of the zine about themes you’ll encounter is really great, and is a good guideline for how to inform players about content so they can consent and play actively. Really a good starter.
“A player should before they play take note of what they are comfortable with for themes, as the game’s story is meant to edge the line of victory through luck and will, and what it is like to need to move. The feelings associated with your bones requiring a change of space and life after an entire life of sitting comfortably alone.” – A Greeblin’s Journey, Thomas Novosel
This in particular really resonated with me, as someone who has been in one place for a long time, and who wants to go from one place to another. The elegance of this section’s explanation of the game to come is very true to my experience of play.
Another section that I really like is the description of Greeblins, which can be any kind of thing really, and this part in particular:
“While every Greeblin is different, and there is no core definition of what or who a Greeblin is, there is a feeling. Anyone can look at a Greeblin and sense that they are a Greeblin. Whether it be the way they communicate with others, or the way they look up at the natural world around them, or the curiosity they have with the constructions of civilization.” – A Greeblin’s Journey, Thomas Novosel
As the game states, a Greeblin doesn’t have a name. As someone who only recently acquired their name, I feel very Greeblin-like a lot of the time. This feels really queer in the design, though I honestly don’t know if Thomas intended it that way. Playing the game and coming to the end of the Greeblin’s story felt very reflective of many journeys, but as a queer person, I saw my own journey in it while experiencing a fantastical adventure, which is a great achievement of design.
Speaking of design, the game uses simple two die rolls and narrative prompts (which the game encourages you to replace if there is trouble with content) and then you journal your response to the prompt. I would call A Greeblin’s Journey a being game very much, because while you detail what you do, it’s about being a Greeblin and experiencing their journey. Each Chronicle of the story adds up to a goal of 21 to reach the end of your story, just like in Blackjack (card game). This allows you to time play effectively, but also paces the story well, and gives a chance of failure that is truly bittersweet considering my previous paragraph. It may take a second read to fully understand the mechanic since it’s not our standard fare, but the game does recommend one anyway to clearly understand the rules and play guidelines.
The mechanics include an Impetus die, determining what prompted the Greeblin to journal today, and the Topic die, which determines what they are writing about. There is also the Substitution, which allows you to swap a number you roll for a 1 to allow you to control the pacing of the game (a really smart mechanic, imo), and the Freebies, which are 2 free Impetus, allowing you to replace an Impetus roll with a different Impetus and set the score for it at 0.
I won’t spoil the prompts, but they’re quite evocative and inspire a lot of introspection about how the Greeblin interacts with the world, how you as the Greeblin feel about those things, and what matters to you on the journey. I admit that in my playthrough for the playtest I was blessed with Thomas’s dulcet tones reading aloud as he inscribed my responses to the prompts, but I still feel reading through it today that this is a truly fun, and very thoughtful, game for a solo player. Reading the prompts and responses aloud to yourself is genuinely enjoyable, and Thomas’s writing is flavorful and weird.
I created a Greeblin to demonstrate how flavorful it is, using only options (bolded) in the book. Here are how the prompts came out:
My Greeblin… has tattoos that move in the breeze, prizes their magic spoon, as its reflection shows what they desire, is coming from the tall forest with no stars or moons, and is going to the pink salt ocean and its salt towers.
Like, yes. This is my jam entirely. If Thomas hadn’t been designing this completely separate of me (I’ll edit in the future, but I had no input on design or writing aside from proofreading if he asked), I’d swear he put some of this in here just for my tastes. Tattoos that move in the breeze? I imagine my Greeblin with a pretty mermaid on their arm, though they’ve never seen the sea, who reaches out for passing dandelion puffs. I imagine a forest so bright that it blinds any stars or moons and the only reprieve is the shade, but the trees are so large there are many shadows to lurk in. The spoon shows them a real ocean, with stars overhead and dark skies making the sea look like blood. That ocean – it remains to be revealed, but the Greeblin has many imaginings of what it holds. They intend to lick the salt towers, as would be expected. Who wouldn’t?
A game for two players where they tell stories and play out scenes about the unusual The Man who stays in their cabin in the woods and alone… except for The Stag from the copse who wants to influence the world of man with magic. Whether this connection leads to a revelation or condemnation does truly depend on the cards. Crowdfund ends March 15, 2021!
My goal is $1000 by March 15, 2021 and with the following goals, I’ll provide more content! There’s also a number of rewards on the itch page to help me reach my goal!
$250 – Art by Thomas A. Novosel, fleshing out the interior sketches!
I’m excited to announce that Script Change has experienced a significant update with three more tools and a new layout! You can find the new free text version at briebeau.com/scriptchange and the PDF plus the handouts are still free with option to donate at briebeau.itch.io/script-change. I have raised the suggested donation to $5 because of the sheer amount of time and effort I have put into Script Change over the years, and the continued creation of new content. I hope that’s okay!
In 2021, I’ve added Bloopers & Outtakes, a formal wrap meeting structure, the Editor’s Notes with picks, squicks, and icks to help guide content and response, and Two Thumbs Up to help with quiet check-ins and for less verbal players. These changes have been developing for a while, and I’m so excited to release them for you all!
Note: For the time being, please use the previous revision’s handout to put out descriptions on the table for reference, as I need more time to do the layout work and nothing’s changed on it. Also, in the new Bloopers & Outtakes section, I managed to only write “bloopers” on each Reel listing, but I’ll fix this soon if I can. I apologize for missing it!
I hope you all are staying safe and celebrating any holidays you do while respecting COVID-19 guidelines! I want to share some fun and interesting games with you as part of the #Epimas2020 bundlethat I’m a part of. I hope you like what I share! The bundle ends in three days!
To tell you a little about Epimas, it is a created holiday season bundle run by Epidiah Ravachol, who I am lucky enough to have known and worked with over the years. The bundle was originally conceived as a way to share games with friends or new players and expand the hobby while maximizing use of the PDF format. You gave a bundle, you got a bundle. This year, it’s on itch.io and while the give/get format isn’t yet feasible on the platform, there are 69 designers contributing to this amazing bundle you can gift a friend or colleague to help them explore so many amazing games that soon, they’ll be inviting you to play them!
This is the first year I can really participate in the bundle, and may be the last. I’ve wanted to be a part of Epimas since I first started in games years ago and saw it, because it demonstrates something I really love – games as a gift, as a way to grow the hobby, as a way to try new things, and as a way to spur new creation when inspiration strikes after checking out so many amazing games. I am so excited to be a part of it, so in the last few days of it, I wanted to recommend you check it out!
This year’s bundles are named in a trend with Santa’s reindeer, starting with the overarching Dunder & Blixem bundle, which covers all games offered in the bundle. The others are Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Dasher,Dancer, and Prancer, which break down the bundle into smaller bundles of games. I am in the Vixen bundle with Turn, alongside these others! Note that I haven’t played most of these games, but I’ve read the reviews and some of the text from a few and that’s how I’m compiling my notes.
Hi all! Today I have an interview with the creators of Into the Mother Lands, a new project being performed on and sponsored by Twitch and released on YouTube, developed using the Cortex Prime RPG system. You can keep up to date on the project through their Twitter or Discord, and until then, check out the responses from Tanya DePass (T.D.), B. Dave Walters (B.D.W.), and Gabe Hicks (G.H.) below!
Catch Into the Mother Lands, a Cortex Prime RPG actual play using a new sci-fi IP created by Tanya DePass, leading a team of veteran Black & POC creatives as they build the world and its stories together at twitch.tv/cypheroftyr, Sundays at 4pm Pacific/6pm Central/7pm Eastern/5pm Mountain time.
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What an amazing team, and with Tanya at the lead! For our readers who may be new to your work, could each of you introduce yourselves and talk about your experience and specialties that you’re bringing to the Into the Motherlands RPG?
B.D.W.: I say words about things! I have been playing games for about 30 years now. I’m the writer and co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons: A Darkened Wish and DM for the streaming series of the same name. I also have written for Werewolf the Apocalypse 5th Edition and some other unannounced World of Darkness projects.
I have also consulted on increasing diversity and inclusion in a number of well-known gaming properties.
T.D.: I’ve been a diversity & inclusion consultant in RPG’s for the last few years, have writing credits with Green Ronin, Paizo, Monte Cook Games, WotC and have been playing RPG’s since I could hold a D6.
G.H.: Hi, my name is Gabe Hicks! I’m a voice actor, streamer, and designer who works in digital and tabletop. I have written for MOBAs, worked with Paizo, Zweihander, a plethora of other companies and systems and narrative work and taking those experiences and working with different worlds is part of how my design and narrative process have helped me in building this world for Into the Motherlands RPG. It’s learning a little bit from each piece that I’ve done and considering how it all blends in the world together.
There is hype for Into the Motherlands already, but what are you most excited to explore? How does your use of streaming and your varied backgrounds impact your presentation of these exciting elements?
B.D.W.: I am most interested in being able to explore a sci-fi setting that’s not ultimately a bland retelling of the Westward Expansion! We have the privilege of painting an entirely new portrait of a civilization completely free from colonialism, and that has been an incredibly satisfying mental exercise. I can’t wait for you to see it!
TD: I’m excited to tell a story without colonization and slavery as part and parcel of the world’s lore and history. To see where our folks wind up and how their choices become a canon part of our world.
G.H.: I’m really excited to give a core premise for worlds and then see how people build onto them or build their own. There’s a lot here that we have to build up and create more and more, and it’s an opportunity not often given to really have a whole fresh start especially when it comes to world’s imagined specifically by people of color. With the different skill set and experiences of the team as a whole when it comes together it’s beautiful. We’re able to figure out and design a game that plays well in a show format but doesn’t have to be a show to be fun.
That sounds great! So tell me about Into the Motherlands. What is different about it from other sci-fi settings? How are you demonstrating the unique elements?
TD: It’s different in that we’re not going for super grim dark, it’s populated by a variety of cultures and does its best to invert a lot of tropes.
G.H.: We built this system with such a heavy emphasis on storytelling in a sci-fi setting. So many people try to make games that are combat in space without as much emphasis I’d like in story, world building, and creating entirely just new ideas rather than playing off tropes. Not to mention, when we do see these things there is almost never African inspiration tied into them.
What is it like debuting a game on Twitch? Are there unique challenges or benefits that come from this platform as your showcase?
TD: It’s hard because we discovered people will backseat literally anything, including a brand new system and even the production of the show. Benefits are that people can see it done real-time, but also you get to see the weird commentary and other things people are throwing around. For me, it’s hard because all these theories are so incredibly wrong, but you can’t stop playing to address it in chat.
G.H.: I honestly think I’m spoiled now with development. We get a chance to see LIVE what people are interested in, what people want to see more of, what people want to know more about and it honestly makes my job so much more interesting. It’s an opportunity to literally focus on the things people want and then create extra on top. This isn’t a circumstance where we have to wait and see what gets people interested during development. It’s such a fortunate thing.
Where did the inspiration for Into the Motherlands or your work on it come from? How have you workshopped ideas when you’re working to avoid colonialism? Does that come naturally to your team?
TD: We just talked, and decided there would be no colonialism, slavery etc. It’s not that hard and we didn’t need to workshop it. With an all Black & POC writing team, we just opted out off that, simply because Sci fi and fantasy don’t need those to tell a compelling story.
G.H.: It does come pretty naturally. It’s a team effort and that’s so clear when we sit down and work. Like Tanya said it was just a straight up choice, none of it. I’ve literally been reading into the different biomes and environments in Africa, the way flora and fauna interact, and how much variety there is in life. It’s been a never ending supply of inspiration and stuff to share.
What’s it like working on an inclusive and diverse team that’s got such varied perspectives? Does it feel more freeing to work in this way, and does it help on this specific project to be such a diverse team?
TD: Absolutely it’s more freeing. However, we assembled this talented team of Black & POC creatives not just to be ‘diverse’ but because everyone is super talented and capable. While it’s being pointed out that we’re an all Black & POC team, by us because for me (and maybe others) it’s the first time we’ve had that option. But it’s not the only thing about our group, game and show.
G.H.: It’s freeing. Someone always has a new perspective or an insight. IT’s not just one point of view but it’s like knowing we all have some different experiences in some of our similar views. I feel a bit like I have less to prove of myself, a bit like I can already say “These people get it.”. On this project especially, having a diverse team is huge part of why this game works as well as it does. It’s a testament to diversity being such a boon in creation.
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Thank you so much to all three of those able to respond for this interview! I hope you all enjoyed this interview, and that you’ll check out Into the Mother Lands on Twitch each Sunday!
Catch Into the Mother Lands, a Cortex Prime RPG actual play using a new sci-fi IP created by Tanya DePass, leading a team of veteran Black & POC creatives as they build the world and its stories together at twitch.tv/cypheroftyr, Sundays at 4pm Pacific/6pm Central/7pm Eastern/5pm Mountain time.
Thank you very much for joining me to talk about Mnemonic! Before we talk too deeply about the game, I’d like to introduce you to my readers – your debutante, so to speak. What brought you to games? Why do you choose to design?
DP: I’ve been playing games since I was 10, when my friends and I would walk down the halls between class and talk through “roleplaying” stories in the Star Wars universe. We tinkered with the design ideas from video games like Gauntlet Legends and Legend of Zelda to imagine what other stories might look like. Sometimes those stories were capital s Stories; sometimes they were just aesthetic ideas, like “What if a game like Gauntlet but you’re all summoners conjuring big magic beasts?”
It wasn’t until high school that I touched a tabletop roleplaying game with mechanics and character creation. My group of friends played D&D every Friday for four years, because D&D was the game we knew. The Mnemonic setting came out of a play-by-post game twelve years ago, and it’s been growing steadily ever since.
LA: I started formal, written RPGs… sometime in middle or high school? Thereabouts. But I was introduced informally through improvisational dungeon crawling in (ugh) Boy Scouts. I tolerated entirely too many years of that, but at least I got this out of it. Next was, of all things, freeform forum RP in the GameFAQs Metroid Prime social message board. For formal systems, I got started with D&D, as many are, because it was the cultural monolith that people recognized.
I spent a long time reading Vampire: the Masquerade core books and sourcebooks in a bookstore nearby, but never played it because I didn’t have a group for it. D&D was interesting to theorycraft, but I never got a regular group for an extended campaign. Shadowrun was the next game I played seriously and the first I had a real extended campaign of. Shadowrun has a complicated relationship for me, one that I don’t have nearly enough time or space here to address. The much abbreviated explanation is that they made me aware that my TTRPGs could say something, mean something, be something, not just be the aesthetic trappings for a series of ever-escalating violent encounters.
NM: I played my first TTRPG at 14 in highschool – D&D, naturally – and my experience was so bad I didn’t play again until I was 19 or 20! Through Games Club at university I was introduced into Dark Heresy, Deadlands, Vampire: the Masquerade, and Legend of the Five Rings (they also tried hard to get me to give D&D and Pathfinder another chance but I never did, really). But we always ended up house-ruling our games to do the things we wanted them to do that they didn’t. Designing games from the ground up was the next step: something I’ve done for over a decade without ever imagining myself a ‘game designer’ or participating in TTRPG Twitter!
It’s only in the last year or two I’ve really called myself a “game designer” or thought of what I do as design, let alone dreamed I could do it as a job!
PP: I grew up reading more tabletop and wargaming books than “proper” literature: AD&D, L5R, Mechwarrior, Warhammer, and oWoD all introduced me to interesting possibilities that I could make my own rather than stories that were set in stone. This is interesting to me in retrospect, because this was the 80s in Vancouver, and that period was the height of the Satanic Panic. You’d think that my staunchly Catholic Filipino parents would have despised such books as works of the Devil, and would have then barred my older brothers from playing. Turns out that they didn’t mind because tabletop games meant that they got to play with friends. Brown kids in a very white section of town needed friends.
Of course, I was too young to join any of their games. My first forays happened much later in high school, with close knit circles of friends from my school and with my younger brother plus some cousins. There was a long period where I was disillusioned from tabletop because a lot of my peers were cishet, male, and/or sexist – which led me to the new World of Darkness books, and had me making my own campaign on my own terms. Did a copious amount of kitbashing and homebrewing for WoD in particular, and I always got the same comments. “This is such a cool world!” “This doesn’t feel like WoD, but in a good way?” “Why don’t you make your own games?”
It’s been a pretty wild game design journey for me since last year. I don’t think I can answer why I design in so many words, but if I were to try… I think I design to find myself, and make more room for other people like me. There are always stories to be told, and each one of us brings something different to our tables. I like exploring the many things I can offer, both for my own pleasure and for anyone who may read my works and realize they could make their own things from the tools I can give them.
SP: I started playing Tabletop RPGs in 2015, but I’d been curious about it for much earlier, there was just no time. Mid 2014 was the beginning of my thesis year in college and I really wanted to finish college because at that point I was already about 5-6 years in University. When 2015 came, though, I was just about to enroll for my last semester when I was told that some of my units that I took in the University’s constituent campus were apparently not going to be credited. It meant that I’d need to retake some classes before going for my thesis. Funny circumstances, because that’s what gave me the time to actually get into games. I had a boyfriend at the time who had friends that were coming together for a D&D campaign which was how I got invited. They were taking up the same course (Library Sciences), so by majority, we agreed to meet at their college building (which was… the University Library). My college building was across the campus so I was often arriving just when everybody was settling in.
My first campaign was, in a word, chaotic. We were fifteen players, what can you do? But surprisingly, my DM was really good at it. So good, in fact, that I thought this was just… normal. I thought the normal table count was fifteen players and that any less was… just a little lonely. I was very wrong. I think having such a great DM at first also gave me very rose-colored lenses for every DM that I played under afterwards. There were lots of DMs that I experienced afterwards that were… not so great, but I thought “Oh, maybe my first DM is just exceptional.” Unfortunately, this mindset paved the way for me sort of… allowing myself to be thrown around under games and tables that were not so respectful of my boundaries with players and DMs that felt less than safe to be with. Exhausted, I broke away from that and later fell into a game design project that soared for a bit, but eventually also moved away from due to differences in direction and principles. It was here that I think where I really started. I met some great people from the Gamers and Gaming Meets, an organisation that hosts TTRPG events here in Manila. They helped me move towards design and expand my horizons.
I still remember when my friends took me to their place and showed me all sorts of TTRPG books and how the layout was done and how the mechanics were presented. The art, the themes, the dynamics all spoke so deeply to me and I was hooked ever since. I began creating games with ideas and themes that were close to me (plants, haha) and I’m now trying to explore making games that mean a lot to me. I’ll admit that while my first gaming experience wasn’t terrible, the ones that followed for a long time were exhausting and far from ideal. I want to make games that touch on ideas that are important to me, like the struggles of growing up in this country that seems to love making it hard for people like me (queer, non binary, not part of the upper class) to exist. I want to create games that inspire others to also make games so that their voices can also be heard.
Syn: Gaming had always been a thing for me – Mario, Sonic, Tetris, etc. – but tabletop games and design is a bit more recent for me. I started playing tabletop games somewhat seriously around 2016 and started DM’ing after some encouragement in 2017. It was a wild time learning how to handle all of that, but the further I progressed in learning how to DM and looking into the lore of these systems, the more questions I asked about why things were as they were. As I put those thoughts out into the world, the responses that came back were “Have you thought of designing a game?” I hadn’t. I thought I was just asking average questions that someone had surely thought about. They were, but the people who thought those things were, in fact, designers.
I asked about skill checks, dice rolls, worldbuilding, and kobolds and so much so that I ended up here, writing about this friggin’ exciting game.
To follow that, I’d like to ask a little about your background. What are your areas of expertise, your storied histories? What makes you the designer to make Mnemonic and make it the perfect experience it’s meant to be?
DP: Mnemonic is the world I play in when I think about stories; it’s the universe of fantasy and magic that exists in my head, and most of the characters I create exist somewhere within that universe.
Mnemonic is a setting where memory has power, both as a life force for the world itself and as a source of magic. A lot of the setting’s ideas come from my own grapples with memory, things I remember from childhood that look a lot different in retrospect. Some things are happy remembrances; others, less happy. But giving people the space to explore that recontextualization is important to me.
I’m also White, which means I have a healthy load of unexamined biases when it comes to what stories can exist and what an imaginary world can look like. Would you believe me if I said I’m not the ideal person to tell stories in this setting? A lot of my design process for this world comes from a place of enabling players to tell stories that are personal to them, with as little White European Colonialist Bullshit as possible. For Mnemonic, this means asking questions to invite the player to bring themselves into the world. But I can’t do that alone.
For my first game in this setting, Cracks in the Mirror, I hired a sensitivity consultant to help me identify the spots where I was stumbling into presumptive or harmful tropes. They were immensely valuable in helping me realize everything in the previous paragraph, too.
For our Weaver’s Almanac, I wanted even more help, and not from people with the same unexamined biases as me. Which is why most of the members of our team are BIPOC.
LA: I’m a high-generation mixed-race Japanese American. The relation between memory and reality in Mnemonic is interesting to me because of a particular story I have about growing up. Whenever I went to visit my grandparents, they would have documentaries about the Japanese internment camps on the TV. I learned a key part of my heritage through passive absorption. They never addressed it directly until I was much older. It was just there, lingering in the background.
Part of the basic premise of Mnemonic as a broader world is that memories, and how they affected people differently, are lingering in the world. They affect it. Their impacts, not just by their objective truth but by how people feel about them and even by how people manipulate when those are looked back on, are real, in a way even more real than the idea of a thing that happened some time ago.
NM: I’m mixed-race Black Canadian. I’m very interested in the shifting negotiations, interpretations and the power of memories, particularly in the way different groups and cultures remember their histories. Worlds where those cultures and their histories come alive through the power of memory and of story – particularly collaborative story – are so compelling to me because they allow us agency in how our histories are told in ways that we so rarely are allowed in reality.
One of the reasons I find Mnemonic so compelling is because of how it leans into tools for telling stories, rather than simply telling them. For me part of designing games is about creating gaps for the players to fill and create their own stories and memories. Players are really the game designers, if you think about it – I can write this and that, but those stories are no longer mine the second someone else picks them up. All I’m doing, hopefully, is opening windows they might not have noticed, and asking “what do you see? And what does it remind you of?”
PP: I’m a queer Filipino woman born in the Philippines. My parents fled from an oppressive regime, full of dreams of a better future for them and their children in Canada. My memories of Canada as a child are beautiful flashes – some I can see, some I can taste, some I can feel, and some I can smell. What’s much sharper is the jarring sense I had with my family’s return to Manila. The past few years have been an intriguing yet at times painful study in turning back towards those feelings I had, and realizing, now, what my past self was wrestling with: displacement, confusion, never fitting in even if I was as “Filipino” as my peers. Then, of course, there are the extra tensions of me being polyamorous (and discovering it late, after years of thinking I was bisexual and had “bad, extra” feelings towards multiple people), me being a woman in a hypermasculine, Catholic society that will take every opportunity to tell you that you and your body are nothing without the approval of men, and me being the only daughter out of six children in a rather traditional Filpino family (thus making me someone both in constant need of protection, and also someone who was expected to put their dreams and ideas aside if they were offensive or improper to her brothers). People will constantly try to rewrite you in the hopes of fitting you into easily digestible parts for themselves. They’ll try to ignore the fact that you have your own stories, and your own desire to write it the way you want to.
And that brings me to why I was happy to join Dee in designing Mnemonic. This was one of the first games that was capable, with every word, of telling me, “Hey. I see you. This is a story for you, that you can make as you like. I am a game that respects you for you.” Memories are things that transform, shift, break apart, come back together, write, and revise themselves as we grow older with them. Bringing that sort of beautiful process into a game is something I’m really into.
SP: I have always viewed Mnemonic with fascination. The dream-like feeling, the exploration of memory – that’s always what has drawn me to it. When I fully read it for the first time, I felt that idea of being able to become something – I don’t know exactly what, but the concept itself, to me, seemed necessary. As someone who often has to be A Certain One Thing in their daily life, it is comforting to have a game that exists that allows you to shift, be different, reform along with the memories that you explore in the game. I haven’t played it but I wish to someday.
As for the art, I wasn’t actually expecting to do the art for the project. I thought I was going to do writing and then suddenly a discussion for artists was happening and… I decided to shoot my shot. And it happened! Before I knew it, I was designing art for the project.
Art has always been a complicated thing for me. I don’t talk about my art a lot because my feelings for my art and my skills are Difficult. I started making art when I was a tiny kid watching Powerpuff Girls in our living room back in my grandparent’s house in the countryside. I really took to it and enjoyed making drawing after drawing, filling one notebook after another. I was a hungry mind stuck in a small child’s body. I wanted to learn to make better art and I kept pushing myself so, so hard to as far as my small hands could possibly take me. Much like many of my peers, my skills were forever unrecognized by my mother (she raised me and my brother on her own) and I was constantly told to wake up and concentrate on more “money-making” pursuits. This constant push and pull made me hate my art but also made me unable to stop. My struggle with this continues to this day. My mother also still hasn’t recognized my skill and I don’t think she ever will. I don’t really want her approval anymore anyway, but I hope she knows she’s wrong. My art is going to be part of a kickstarter that will definitely touch hearts and also, bluntly, make money. I didn’t become a doctor like she wanted, but I’m sure the project will heal others in a different way.
Syn: I’m just a person with questions. Lots of them. So when you mix my innate curiosity about every single thing with my utter fascination with worldbuilding, I guess this was almost destined for me. I remember when I was asked to join the team. It felt surreal; I’m just a guy with questions about the worlds we build and the systems that support them.
When Dee asked me if I would like to build in a world of memory, I was still learning what it was that I wanted to do in the world of tabletop games and the stories I wanted to tell. I read the mechanics and a bit of the lore and it was just… obvious. The stories I want to tell are the kind where you dig into yourself and ask questions and deal with the challenges that come from those answers. Everything in Mnemonic speaks to that need.
Cool! So, now that we know a little about you, tell me a little about Mnemonic. What excites you about it? What spurred its creation?
DP: Mnemonic emerged from a question I had in a play-by-post game a dozen years ago: If I have to spend Experience Points to use this ability, what do those Experience Points represent, and what does it mean to lose them? I settled into memory as a source of power, which evolved over the years into a world concept where the world itself has memories that exert themselves on occasion. I’ve played around with characters who lost their memories after abusing magic, characters who trapped unpleasant memories inside of powerful relics to try and forget traumatic events, characters who sang songs to resonate their own memories with the memories of others.
I’m pleased with the current version of the world that exists in my mind, which is that memory is inherently fluid, not something that can be spent or saved or stored but something that we engage with and observe on a constant basis. We remember things, we misremember things, we forget things…and the world does too. There’s something really neat to me about a world that remembers the things we do, even if no one else sees us do them. What memories does the world choose to hold onto, like keepsakes? What memories does the world try to forget?
Synxiec and I have talked about what happens when the world wants to forget somebody but can’t. Like a kind of cursed immortality. The story gets a lot heavier when we start exploring trauma as a world event, but it’s a thing my mind drifts to when I think about stories I want to tell in Mnemonic.
PP: I mentioned how Mnemonic is a game that spoke to me, and acknowledged me as someone full of stories that I wanted to tell. What excites me most about this project is the fact that by design, the emotions, intent, and player understanding of “memory” will change according to who joins you for a session. My first game had us exploring our gender identities, how we connected with other people, and how we viewed family and love. Being guided through the session with prompts and a constant reminder of “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to; respect the silence” felt magical. The thought of being able to expand upon these experiences for more players, this time as a member of the dev team, really excites me!
The other big thing that I’m looking forward to would be all of the subsystems that the Almanac will have, plus all the gameable lore that our team will be bringing to the table. As a designer who is extremely comfortable with either systems that use dice or systems that are purely narrative, playing around with fascinating card mechanics is uncharted territory. The things we have planned make me feel like I can both contribute well to the Almanac, and challenge myself to design for new things.
Syn: The thing that excites me about the game the most is a hard question. At first, it was the die. Each of them having a distinct purpose. Then as I looked more closely at it, I found what excited me the most: the questions. Did I mention I like asking questions? Because I really enjoy asking questions and Mnemonic’s challenges are unique in that respect. What game asks a question like “What lies do you tell yourself?” as part of character creation? These are the kind of foundational things that build worlds I like to explore and get lost in.
We’re not even going to talk about how every other thing this game gives you has safety built into it. I’ve already thought about the many stories I want to tell in this world of memory, but don’t tell Dee that. It’s a surprise.
Also, the people I get to work with are people I have so much respect for and many of them are people I just enjoy for their own sake. I’m happy to work with them.
NM: Unreliable narration, anti-canon and player-collaborated and -created game history, lore, and content are things I’m particularly invested in. Games are shared storytelling endeavors, after all – it makes it that much more enjoyable when everyone is empowered and able to contribute to communal worldbuilding rather than passively experiencing those worlds.
Mnemonic excites me in the way Dread and Trophy excite me: asking pointed questions of ourselves and others to build a shared world and a shared experience, as it pertains to memory – which is both a very personal thing and a communal one. Any time I’ve ever spent with friends, half the conversation is inevitably “remember that time?” Mnemonic, to me, is an entire game of that, and that excites me.
LA: The anti-canon nature of the setting is particularly cool to me because it more explicitly invites the players to make the world theirs. Most settings are fruitful not just for standing on their own, but for inviting players to be part of it, to participate actively. Mnemonic takes this a step further by saying that the instance the players are in is as true, as valid, as real, maybe even more real, than anything imagined by anyone else, up to and including the creators of the setting. It ties back to a core theme of the setting that the memories of something – the feelings and echoes and the ways they affect people – are more important than a theoretical objective truth. It’s about the experiences, both in-game and for the players.
When dealing with memory, we can encounter some bumps along the road. How is Mnemonic designed to respect player’s agency and consent, and allow them to control content to avoid any triggers, squicks, or undesirable unhappy times?
DP: Agency and consent are two of my biggest guiding targets in game design, and Mnemonic is no different. Everything in this game gives players permission to paint their own picture of the events, and character creation asks each player to name at least one boundary for something they will not include in the story, with some guiding language about how to best take care of not just their character’s needs, but the needs of everyone’s characters, and of every player at the table as well. I’ll drop the excerpt from that section here:
The Boundary
When we tell stories, we inevitably leave some details out, some rooms unexplored, some doors closed. We do this for our own safety and for the safety of those around us. What is a boundary you will not cross in this story? How close to it are you willing to wander before you turn away?
Your boundary can be something your character would want respected, or it can be something you care about personally. For example, Dee has a fear of heights, but their character does not. They might say, “I’d like to set a boundary on detailed descriptions of vertigo or other feelings of being up high. We can go to high places, but I as a player don’t want to experience that feeling in my imagination.”
You can set more than one boundary, and you can add more as the story progresses or as you think of them. If privacy is a concern, you may want to consider some form of anonymization, such as a shared digital document or a trusted facilitator.
Respecting boundaries is about more than just not crossing the line; it’s about knowing when a boundary needs to remain entirely outside the scope of the story, even in reference. If your character has a pet and you want to set a boundary around that pet’s safety, you may want to establish that as a convention of play: that this pet will never come to harm, and will never even be perceived to be in any danger, no matter the stakes of the scene.
Mnemonic doesn’t directly present players with descriptive content; instead, we ask questions that guide the players to the kinds of themes we want them to explore, in their own space and at their own comfort level. We also include language that makes it explicit that players are allowed to change any aspect of the story, whether it’s something that’s happening in the current scene or something that happened three sessions ago. I don’t want anyone to feel like they have to commit to a traumatic consequence of a piece of fiction they established before they recognized it would be a problem.
I take a lot of inspiration from Script Change on that, actually. The idea of being able to Rewind a scene to take a different approach was incredibly influential for me. I hope that players are able to build that kind of agency into their play groups when they play Mnemonic.
The other thing we do that I’m quietly excited about is how we handle “A thing happened in the mechanics that you don’t like.” If it’s something that happened because of the dice, you can…just reroll them. Dice are an abstraction, a story generator. There’s a ritual quality to rolling a die, but I want players to know that if the Fire Die says you set fire to the entire world, you can opt out of that outcome and roll again until you get you send up a bright signal to let your friends know where you are.
Your character also can’t be removed from the story without your consent, which seems like a small thing but so many of the biggest games out there have some form of “Game Over” scenario where my character can be taken away from me by a cruel GM, or fickle dice. In Mnemonic, the only way your character can die is if you make the decision for them to leave the story. We have mechanics for it. It’s a big deal. You can do it. No one else can do it for you.
That’s a lot of words to dance around the fact that at the end of the day, we can’t completely protect players, we can just offer tools and guidance. If you’re a player who experiences bleed in a significant way (where the events of the story affect you on a personal level in a way that lingers after the story ends), I’d encourage you to check in with yourself regularly; don’t feel like you have to choose the “heavy” answer to every question. This advice appears in just about every game I write now, so I’m gonna put it here too: Take care of yourself. Take care of each other.
It’s clear you’ve dug deeply into the world and what the action and reaction mean. What made you elect to use the mediums you do – cards, the particular art style, etc. – to represent the world to people and to have them interact with? How does the medium give meaning to the art?
DP: I want Mnemonic to be…hm, accessibility has its own connotations, and I have goals on that front as well but when it comes to the use of cards, what I’m aiming for is, “Can a person play this game with the things they already have”. And my family never played roleplaying games, but we did always have a deck of poker cards ready to go. And I know that a lot of general-purpose stores have decks available for less than $5, which means that if you don’t happen to have a deck at your home, you can probably find one even if you don’t have a “gaming store” near you. That was pretty important to me early on. That’s also why our dice are six-sided; I love polyhedral dice sets, but until very recently you couldn’t just go to Target and pick up a set.
The artwork is important here too, but for me it’s more about conveying the sense of “this is something that someone might have drawn or painted directly into their notebook while traveling.” Sin’s illustrations are wonderful and intimate, full of…I hesitate to tell people what they should be feeling when they look at these pieces, but I know that when I look at them I get a strong sense of “the person who painted this cares a lot about the subject.” And I hope that comes through.
We care a lot about the stories we’re telling. And I want players to care, too. About their stories, and about each other sitting around the table.
As someone who has personally struggled with memory loss but also finds beauty in the ephemeral and has things they’d like to forget, I am genuinely curious how a session of Mnemonic plays out. What are an example or two of your experiences with the game and what did you take away – or leave behind?
DP: Mnemonic usually feels…weighted? I sometimes describe it as the feeling of holding your breath in anticipation, of choosing your words carefully in a space that allows you to do so.
We’ve been playing on the Actual Play twitch channel the past few weeks, and there are some things that I’ll hold onto forever, and at least one thing I wish I could take back (and probably would, if we were playing a longer-running series).
One thing I cherish is how readily everyone at the table takes ownership of the group’s well-being. Sean introduced his character, Warren, as a habitat for a community of rabbits, and after what was probably about a minute but what felt like only an instant, Synxiec announced that we were now, us, the storytellers, the players on stream, committed protectors of the bunnies. And like…yes, of course! Mnemonic, the game, is about being careful storytellers and recognizing when it’s your job as a player to look after the characters in your own story.
A thing I would change is that Misha introduced a piece of local folklore around a dragon living nearby, and it was super interesting–but then when I tied our first session together with my character’s closing scene, I used my own character’s backstory as a vehicle instead of connecting it to hers. It would have been a much more compelling story beat, and more personal to the entire group, and more meaningful to the town we were in, to make that moment about something someone else had introduced.
It was one of those things that I didn’t even think about until the next day, when it was already too late to go back and change. And the nice thing about Mnemonic is that if something like that happens in your home game, you can just…change it. You can go in next week with your group and say “Hey, this happened last time but I kinda want to retcon it to something else if that’s okay?” and then work out how the change might affect everybody, and the story you’re telling together.
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Thank you so much to the whole team for the interview, including those unable to participate because of life – see you next time! I hope all you readers enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Mnemonic: A Weaver’s Almanac on Kickstarter today!
Hey y’all, today I have an interview with Liam Ginty at Sandy Pug Games about the Ghibli-inspired Monster Care Squad, a tabletop adventure of healing Monsters and solving local problems in the gentle, unique world of Ald-Amura! Check out the responses below.
CW for animal harm in the illustrations, it’s tastefully done (and not done by the Monster Care Squad), and done to demonstrate the nature of the Monster Care Squad in the game.
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Thanks for agreeing to the interview! It’s exciting to see you on a new project, but for those new to your work, how did you come into games and design?
Of course! Always love to chat with y’all. I’ve been making games for about 6 or 7 years now in some shape or form – I started out making print and play board games and trying to sell them at conventions and such. That didn’t quite work out, and so I pivoted to making TTRPGs, primarily supplements for games like Fate or Apocalypse World. About 2 years ago me and a friend had a sort of funny idea for a game called Orc Stabr, this one page game where you played as a gang of orcs hunting a wild and powerful Beast. The campaign had a $20 goal and raised 17,500% of that by the end, which I think might be a KS record? Anyway, that success kinda allowed me to build Sandy Pug Games to what it is today – still very small, but big enough that I can pull a lot of people into bigger and more complicated projects.
What have you learned in previous projects that you think you’re bringing forward to Monster Care Squad?
Definitely the no.1 thing is my experience with crowdfunders and co-op working. The Roleplayer’s Guide To Heists was a project we ran last year with the San Jenaro Co-Op that was kind of the first experiment into co-op based games development, and it was such a huge success that it’s laid the foundations for everything I’ll be doing moving forward. Making games is just so much more fun when you’re doing it with a crowd of great people, and there’s really nothing like having a discord full of talented and creative artists all building something together. It’s a real joy.
Tell me a little about Monster Care Squad. What excites you about it?
It has to be designing a game that allows for those big epic showdowns you have at the end of a session, but without the violence and blood that usually comes with that. The game is designed so that every session should build up to this glorious crescendo where you face down against this wounded, massive Monster, and make it better again. The kind of storytelling you can do within that structure just makes me so excited to see what people come up with. There’s also the artwork, I think basically everybody is thinking the same thing, right? Leafie, our illustrator, is just a wizard, she’s unstoppable. I can’t wait to see what she does with the world.
Considering tabletop RPG history, what brought you to the choice of focusing on caring for monsters?
Well, I think you hit the nail on the head right there. Games are always about killin’ stuff! I’m not judging that, particularly. I think action, combat, violence, all of these are tools and narratively powerful ones that work as effective shorthand for other, deeper, conflicts, and TTRPGs can do a great job at letting you tell those stories, but an oversaturation of those stories does kinda make the scene a little bland, at least in my opinion. Healing specifically was looked at cause when you get down to it, there’s very little mechanical difference between dealing damage and healing, the numbers are just flipped! It gets a lil more complicated than that when you expand the philosophy past the pure numbers, but once that clicked for me, Healing as the players’ main verb suddenly blossomed into all these possibilities.
What sort of monsters will players see in the game, and what challenges do they face upon encountering them?
Ald-Amura is a big place, and we say Monsters can really be anything – some of them are massive, city-sized behemoths that blot out the sun with gargantuan wings made of the wind and the clouds themselves. Some are like little fairies, barely visible unless you know where to look. Variety is the real key to a game like this, where every session revolves around building up a Monster and its capabilities and its needs, so we’re casting a pretty wide net. I’m sure a lot of people can see some of our obvious influences – Shadow of the Colossus, Monster Hunter, Studio Ghibli – but some of our writers are also calling from legends and myths from their own cultures, and I’ve been such a big fan of strange monsters in media and history, we have a kind of bottomless well to work with.
First and foremost we want every Monster to be beautiful, powerful, and awe-inspiring. From the smallest to the largest, from the wisest to the wildest, each of these beings should immediately scream “Important, Precious, Ancient”. We want you to wonder what this Monster can do, what it has seen, what it would be like to live alongside it for generations. We also kinda want you to fall in love with them and wanna heal them, so cute is often a word we throw in the pot. Leafie also has her own instincts when it comes to creating Monsters that I think I’d struggle to put into words, but I think anyone who sees the art knows what I mean. They all have a certain Leafie-ness that I think makes the world super unique.
I know you always have something more up your sleeve. What’s this I hear about a grant for other creatives? Tell me all about it!
Yes! The Ald-Amura Historical Society Grant is a big, big deal for us at SPG. The 101 is that we’ve put aside a percent of our KS funds to a grant we’re awarding people looking to make fan works, or hacks, or art that’s inspired by Monster Care Squad (yes, you don’t even have to set your work *in* Ald-Amura). We have a label for these works (“Legends Of Ald-Amura”) and an official looking stamp plus some art asset sharing, but there’s no requirement to use those if you don’t want to. You can sell your creation, share it, or keep it private. People can request up to $300 for their project, no (or, well, very few anyway) strings attached. It’s maybe one of the most exciting things we’ve ever gotten to do at SPG.
When we announced Monster Care Squad, I’d say a half dozen people DM’d me asking me for details, asking if they could work on the game, asking if they could make fan games or telling me about similar projects they have that they were thinking of porting to the setting. It was kind of overwhelming! This is the first time anyone has responded to a project SPG has done like this, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that community is all we have these days, and fostering that community is never a mistake. I wanted to give back a little of the endless support I’ve gotten from the TTRPG industry (and the wider art world in general), and anyone that knows me, knows how important I feel financial support is to a community.
Thus, the grant was born. I guess you could see it as a reaction to things like the DMsGuild taking 50% of creatives’ money from them – that just seems backwards to me. There needs to be a more equitable paradigm between publishers and people making content for their worlds and settings, and this seems like one small thing we can do to try and shift that balance. It’s an experiment, turning the theory and discussions the community have been having for a while now into praxis.
A new sale on itchio of my games! The Wouldn’t It Be Nice? sale hopefully will cover any of my COVID-19 testing costs and related expenses. Wouldn’t that be nice? $40 for all my games on PDF!
Runs the length of a quarantine so get it while it’s good 😉