Tag: storytelling

Five or So Questions on Princess World

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Kevin Petker about the game Princess World, which is currently on Kickstarter! The game has some fun beginnings – read all about it in the responses below!

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Tell me a little about Princess World. What excites you about it?

Princess World, “A Game of Girls who Rule” is a Powered by the Apocalypse role-playing game about playing diverse Princesses from varied realms who are trying to work together, despite their differences, to address problems in their world.  The most exciting thing about the game is that it was inspired by my daughter, she literally pitched it to me when she was three-and-a-half (She’s six now) and she’s been a great help in generating ideas and concepts for the game.  Princess World is designed to be accessible and engaging to new players, particularly younger ones, and deals a lot with the power and meanings of words, and how phrases can be reinterpreted in different ways.  Every character in the game is defined by four essential Truths, which are short narrative phrases; when players start to grasp how to use these Truths to expand the narrative power of their characters in the game, using them as springboards for their imagination.  Seeing  a player’s eyes light up when they think of a new way to use a Truth makes the whole game worthwhile for me.

The character playbooks with their Truths laid out on a table and an assortment of dice, pens, and a crown headband.
The Truths on the character playbooks.

I’m super curious about the Truths! What are the four Truths and how are they presented to players?

Truths are probably my favorite part of Princess World!  Truths are the “powers and abilities” of each Princess, like if you’d list four special things a character in a story or book are good at or known for.  Each archetype/playbook has a unique list of four Truths that the player must express about their character.  Some are extrinsic to the character, like equipment or things and some are intrinsic to the character, like experiences or legacies, and some purposely blur the line, so that the player can decide. 

These Truths are narrative statements, not just descriptive, that give the character options and abilities others probably don’t have access to.  For example, a Fairy Princess’s player wouldn’t just say, “I have green hair.”  There’s not much they can do with that in a story; it’s mainly just description.  If, instead, they said, “My hair consists of the intertwined flowers of Spring.”, then we can think about all the various narrative ideas and options we can unpack from that.  Maybe they can use the scent of their hair to calm others, or maybe they can cause other plants to thrive, or maybe they can call on powers of growth and renewal.  We’d play to find out the creative options the player could come up with, based on that Truth. 

Truths are usually written in the character’s favorite color, unless they’ve been deemed to be Unpleasant, in which case, they’re usually written in black.  Before a player writes down a Truth, they express it to the table of players first, and the other players judge the Pleasantness or Unpleasantness of that Truth, before the player writes it down.  Being Unpleasant, just means that the other players can immediately see how said Truth has the potential to cause problems for the character, though they could be bad or dangerous as well, but the player can still call on them! 

If a Truth is judged to be Unpleasant, the player has the option to accept that trouble or to rephrase the Truth in a way to address any concerns.  Most players seem to enjoy having potential trouble brewing for their characters as it can lead to interesting stories.

The Truths can be as direct or as flowery as the player desires, but they’re usually a single sentence.  For example, there was a Skateboard Princess who expressed this: “I can’t digest normal food, I eat batteries.” and the table of players was astonished and intrigued.  The player went on to explain, “I’m a robot!”  Now, they could’ve just expressed the Truth as “I’m a robot.”, but the whole “I eat batteries.” was thought of something more in line with what one would read in a story about a robotic Skateboard Princesses! 

As a nonbinary creator, I’d be lax if I didn’t think of kiddos like me – is there space for nonbinary or masculine players or characters in this world, or is it strictly about embracing the feminine “girl” power and identity? How are you framing gender identity for the princesses, with this answer in mind? By this I mean, are there princesses with different body types and presentations like in She-Ra?

I think it’s going to be very tough to overcome the assumption that “princess means girl” in Western culture, but that is not an assumption I make in Princess World; we say “Anyone can be a Princess.”  I lean more towards my daughter’s interpretation of princess which is “Someone who is capable and competent, and also pretty cool.”  Some of the playbooks lean towards the feminine side, for certain values of feminine, such as the Proper or Fairy Princess, but the player of such characters is not bound by that at all!  There are self-defining Skateboard Princeses, rough and tumble Warrior Princesses, and characters that are free to blur the lines in any way the players wish, like the Shadow or Pauper Princess.  In the actual text I tend to lean towards female (she/her) or gender inclusive (they/them) pronouns unless I’m talking about a specific character or person who has specified their pronouns.

For the player, if the gender of their character is important to them, they can work to include it in the Truths about their character; if it less of a factor in their interest in the character, it can be included in their descriptive details.  In actual play, their have been girl, boy, neither, amalgamated, changing, and artificially gendered Princesses.  It’s my goal that players can make character that reflect their desires and interests in what is cool or exciting.  Variations in age, body shape, gender, orientation, and even species have all occurred in actual play of Princess World.  For me, it’s really exciting to see the fantastic directions players take their character creation in, thinking both inside and outside the box of the archetype they’ve picked.  The new She-Ra cartoon has definitely been a touch stone.

With all that being said, there is, in very early development, a playbook that is specifically called the Boy Princess; my daughter wanted that included (she generated the seed ideas for fourteen of the sixteen playbooks we’re working on) and I’m excited to see how players will interpret and expand on that concept!

The character name tents and character portraits for the Space Princess, Pirate Princess, and Shadow Princess, beside some tokens, pens, and index cards.
The character portrait is very important!

Awesome! The Boy Princess sounds my style. Speaking of style, I see that you’re using a system Powered by the Apocalypse. What led you to choose this system, and how have you modified it to suit your unique needs?

Well, I really fell in love with Apocalypse World when I was first introduced to it; it really mapped to my style of facilitating games and gave me words and structures to actually explain what I was doing.  Also, it allowed for a very low level of pre-game preparation, something I’m really liking as I have less time to game.  I feel that the PbtA approach worked really well for being a Weaver, what we call the “game master” in Princess World, as we stress that they are there to help the other players tell a story about their characters, not a story the Weaver makes up to put the princesses through; that collaboration between all the players, collectively creating the fiction of the narrative is what I find most satisfying in playing PbtA games.

For Princess World, I narrowed things down to four basic moves; all of which are ways of dealing with obstacles or problems that the characters face. Essentially: order things to do what you want, try to change their minds, evade things, fight things; they seem to cover all the ground I want for the players to explore when making choices for their characters.  There’s a single auxiliary move that is dependent on how connected a Princess is to another Princess, using a currency we call Threads, which are statements about the characters’ relationships, written down on strips of paper and handed out to other players.  As well, every Princess has a special knowledge move that reflect their unique perspective on Princess World, though other Princesses can use their Threads to tap into another Princess’s way of looking at things.

Apocalypse World, and many PbtA games, tend to be pretty loose on framing and pacing scenes; I’ve put a little more structure for that in Princess World, specifically using number of scenes to measure the difficulty or challenge of a situation; the more difficult a challenge is, the more scenes will be required to overcome or resolve it.  I’m hoping this will make pacing of the story and sharing spotlight time easier for newer players to grasp and use.

There’s no lists of equipment or gear in Princess World, basically, if it makes sense for a Princess to have access to something, the Weaver is encouraged to say “Yes!”, especially if it’s something the player can narratively unpack from one of their Truths!  Encouraging creativity and experimenting with ideas is strongly encouraged!

As a parent, being able to create a world for your kids to play in has got to be amazing. I can see some of this in the Truths, but what are the values and principles you’ve considered in design, and the emotional experiences, that you have made an effort to ensure come across in play?

Yes, it’s been amazing both from a design perspective and from a playing one.  Sebastian, my son, has already played Princess World; he created the first Dragon Princess and did an amazing job with her, creating a monstrous Princess who was both scary and kind!  Freya hasn’t played yet, but has done some basic role-playing with her cousins.  All seem to have really enjoyed it and I’m looking forward to more games with them.

One of the core experiences I wanted to have in Princess World was for the players to have to grapple with the question of “What is important to my character?”, with the subtext asking, “What is important to me?” Many moves and options revolve around choosing to help yourself, to help others, or to help the greater world around you and that, often, you won’t have enough to do all three at once so you’ll need to make hard choices.  I interviewed a lot of kids, aged 9-13, during the early development process and I wanted the game to reflect what that age group wanted in a game: that their characters had agency, that they could make important choices, and that their choices mattered; I’m really hoping that Princess World will provide that for players, both new and experienced.  So far, it seems to be working.

Three children of varying ages and genders playing with the playsheets and associated documents from Princess World on a floral carpet in a small room, drawing characters and filling in character sheets.
Heck yeah playing on the floor!

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Thanks so much to Kevin for the interview and to the Weaver Princess, Freya, for being such an inspiration! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Princess World on Kickstarter today!

Quick Shot on Winter Harvest

Hey all! Today’s Quick Shot is with Kate Jeanne about Winter Harvest, which is currently on Kickstarter for Zine Quest 2! It sounds really interesting and reminds me of some tales from my childhood!

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What is Winter Harvest, both as a product and as your vision?

Winter Harvest is a small roleplaying game set in a small world. Players are woodland animals using the power of memories, food & community to thrive as the seasons turn. The game runs 4 sessions based on the seasons. Session 4 concludes the game with a real-life (and in-game) Midwinter Feast. Goals of Winter Harvest are to focus on domestic life within an inter-connected community, and to have each table develop custom lore for their home through invoking oral history that will be recorded by the Librarian. It should feel horizontal because no player “keeps” the role of facilitator/Storyteller, it rotates each session. The physical product will be a 20-30 page, black-and-white handmade zine with custom ink art of adorable animals at work and play, publishing around October 2020.

The Winter Harvest cover with animals gathered together in the forest in the snow around a fire. There is a fox, a squirrel, two mice, and a bear.

This sounds great – I love food, and I love woodland creatures! How did you develop the perfect mood for play to help encourage the interconnected nature the narrative demands?

Before jumping into play, a group beginning Winter Harvest will make two types of choices that set the stage for feeling that they are part of a close-knit and inter-reliant community. First, each player developing a character card will choose two professional skills. For example, if I were making a rabbit gardener character, I might choose skills like physical endurance and herbal knowledge. Any time I use my skills from my gardening job to confront a challenge, I’ll get bonuses to help the group resolve problems.

Defining what characters do day-to-day instantly sets the stage for relationships–my gardener character probably knows the cook quite well, for instance. Second, the table will have to reach a consensus on the key features that define their home in the Burrow, which sets the stage for understanding that protecting and caring for your shared space is essential to everyone’s wellbeing. Throughout play, these choices will interact with narrative decisions, including when players confront challenges stemming within the Burrow that have social causes and consequences each session. 

A black and white illustration of a beaver and a possum using an anvil and a bellows.

A rotating facilitator role is so great. What does Winter Harvest do to help support the facilitators and bind together their unique perspectives?

Mechanically, regardless of a facilitator’s style or experience level, each will be physically writing in the same book as players invoke stories & legends to have a connected record evolve (which is why the role is also called The Librarian). Players can revisit stories that were invoked in past seasons to get powerful bonuses without spending a limited resource, which adds incentives to have past themes and stories brought up several times as the game progresses.

There’s no obligation for every person at the table to take a turn as facilitator, and hopefully taking on this role will feel voluntary and exciting rather than intimidating. Since Winter Harvest is a compact and quite simple game, it should not be  time-consuming for facilitators to become familiar with the whole text. Running it requires no memorization or math. I’m very interested in thinking further about how the game can be designed to ensure that facilitators feel well-supported throughout! 

A promotional image for Winter Harvest with the leatherbound Winter Harvest Book opened to the front page inside, surrounded by a wooden container, books with dice on top, lovely fabrics, and succulents. The text reads #ZineQuest February 13th-23rd.

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Thanks so much to Kate for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Winter Harvest on Kickstarter today!

Quick Shot on Big Book of Amazing Tales

I’ve got another great quick interview with Martin Lloyd, this time about the Big Book of Amazing Tales, currently on Kickstarter! It sounds like a great game resource for kids to add to your Amazing Tales collection. Check out Martin’s responses below!

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Two kids sitting at a table with an adult with character sheets and dice in front of them. The one kid has their hand raised triumphantly.

What is the Big Book of Amazing Tales, both as a product and as your vision?

Some of the most fun I’ve had with Amazing Tales has been playing games with the kids while on holiday, that’s when we’ve played out campaigns, and the idea of the Big Book is to make it easy for other families to do the same.   So in the book I’m including four campaigns, one for each of the settings in the book. So you’ll get…

  • A Dream of Trees – for the Deep Dark Wood setting
  • The Quest for the Dragon Crown – for the Magical Kingdoms setting
  • Captain Cadava’s Treasure – for the Pirate Seas setting
  • The Cryptid Conundrum – for the Adventure among the Stars setting

The Big Book of Amazing Tales should be seen as a companion volume to Amazing Tales. Amazing Tales gives you all the tools you need to make up amazing adventures with your kid and get them started on role-playing. The Big Book of Amazing Tales is about providing you with some really great campaigns that can take things to the next level. 

Before I started writing I set myself some goals. One of them was to include elements in the games that would bring the games alive in the real world as well as the player’s imagination. So in the Quest for the Dragon Crown there is a crown for the players to cut out, colour in and put together when they find it. It doesn’t look like a conventional crown, but its form is a clue to what it really does so having it right there in the players’ hands is important. One of the other goals is to include ‘moments of awesome’ for the players, to make sure they have those moments where their characters get to do something amazing. You really will save the kingdom, slay the dragon, stop the alien invasion and so on. 

It’s also a chance for me to answer two of the questions I’ve been asked most frequently since launching Amazing Tales. Namely – ‘How do you use this game in a classroom?’, and ‘Can I use this game to help my kid with some kind of problem?’. Although to be honest I won’t be the one doing the answering. Baz Stevens, who is both a teacher and a game designer will be answering the first question, and Lilly Smith who is a child therapist will be answering the second.  

Dice lying on a character sheet with a character illustration.

As an ongoing product, how do you keep coming up for ideas for Amazing Tales, and keep them fresh?

It really helps that Amazing Tales doesn’t have a fixed setting. So I’m not stuck trying to come up with five different fantasy adventures, or a new twist on space pirates or whatever. If I’m writing a pirate adventure I can make it the most piratey pirate adventure imaginable, a kind of Pirates of the Carribean in RPG form, and try and cram it full of as many pirate ideas as I can. I don’t need to worry about having used all the good stuff and then having to write another pirate campaign next week. * Once a month I publish a set of story seeds in the Amazing Tales newsletter, and those are always a good chance to really interrogate an idea. I pick a simple concept like ‘Temples’ and then try and come up with a set of ideas that do something interesting with that idea – stretching it in different directions. It’s a good practice. 

And then there are the games I hear about people playing with their kids. Often there will be a couple of sentences on Facebook that sound brilliant, but that’s all there is. So it becomes a jumping off point for new ideas. Someone posted the other day about an adventure involving a lost circus in a forest. That’s about all I know, but it’s a great starting point. An adventure about a lost circus in a forest, it almost doesn’t matter what genre or system you’re playing – that’s a great place to start. 

What are some of your favorite things in the Big Book and what are they like for players?

I’m really looking forward to some of the special extras. So in the Cryptid Conundrum, where the heroes need to crack the alien codes, there’ll be a decoder ring for the players to cut out and make. Now a lot of kids will probably make something like that at some point while growing up, but how many of them will get to use it to rescue the victims of an alien kidnapping? In a similar way that bit of research about kids being better at identifying logos than trees really bothers me. So A Dream of Trees will definitely include puzzles that require learning about trees, leaves, nuts and the like. Hopefully that will be enough to make kids a bit more excited by being outdoors, because playing outside is almost as important as role-playing 🙂

* Thinking about it, this is probably one of the reasons the Pirates of the Carribean sequels ended up the way they did…

Two pirates dressed in fancy pirate regalia discovering treasure inside a seaside cave.

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Thank you so much Martin for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out the Big Book of Amazing Tales on Kickstarter today!

Five or So Questions on Under Hollow Hills

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

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

All art by Vincent, after Rackham.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VB: It does!

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

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

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

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

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

Leaves blowing in the wind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five or So Questions on DIE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Logically, you need…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’d love to be a writer.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five or So Questions on Afterlife

Hi all! Today I’ve got an interview with Elizabeth Chaipraditkul about Afterlife, which is currently on Kickstarter! It sounds really fascinating, so check out what Liz has to say below!

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

So, here’s the elevator pitch taken right from our Kickstarter page: 

Afterlife: Wandering Souls is a macabre fantasy game set in surreal plane known as the Tenebris. You take on the role of a Wanderer—someone who died, but didn’t end up in Heaven, Hell, or any other traditional afterlife.  Devoid of any memories of your life on earth, you find yourself in an endless desert filled with gateways. Search different planes of existence for clues of your former life – or a semblance of one. Along the way you’ll encounter strange inhabitants, alien cultures, and other humans who’ve lost all hope and are bent on destroying you. 

Afterlife is Alice in Wonderland meets What Dreams May Come set in a world inspired by the works of Guillermo del Torro, Hayao Miyazaki, and surrealist artists. *A few things really excite me about Afterlife: Wandering Souls (AWS) first, the concept of exploring forgotten memories has always called to me in rpgs. My favourite part of running games for people is having those poignant moments with players delving into their personal stories.Whatever type of game your playing – a sprawling adventure, a strange mystery, or a political nightmare – play is always heightened for me when characters have their own personal stories going on. In AWS you travel through strange worlds and get to experience a look into your character’s past. I love that!

On a more personal note I’m excited about this project, because it’s the work (for my company) that I am most proud of to date. I’ve learned a lot through my years of freelancing and I feel it’s culminated to this. One of the most important things I’ve learned is that you need a great team around you – and this project has the biggest team to date! When you have so many talented people working towards one goal – that excites me! 

A person with dreadlocks, a beard, and tattooed skin and halo of crystals and light holds a shattered gem in their hands while reality seems to swirl and bubble around them. The text "Afterlife: Wandering Souls" is at the bottom of the image.

How does Afterlife work mechanically, just the basics, to demonstrate this surreal plane and the way you interact with it?

The basics of Afterlife’s mechanics are rolling a pool of d6’s and getting the number of successes required by the Challenge set by your GM. Around those base mechanics we’ve built in a lot of cool systems that help reflect the setting you’re playing in. For example, each Wanderer has an Approach which is a martial item that can warp and shape based on their personality. The more players define what their Approach does the more unique it becomes – but also mechanically it gives them a bonus to their checks. We also have something called Death Marks – which are tattoo-like markings on a Wanderer’s skin. Each Death Mark is linked to a memory the player helped develop during character creation and each gives a special mechanical benefit. Throughout the game people unlock their Death Marks by interacting with their memories.

What do you do to support players with the potentially difficult subjects that come up in game, considering the references like What Dreams May Come?

We encourage GMs to have an open and honest conversation about what player’s expectations are of the game before they start, along with going over themes that the players aren’t comfortable with. For public games where you might not know each other well or convention spaces we suggest GMs use safety tools like the X-card which can be easier for players to interact with when they don’t know everyone well. Afterlife is all about strange exploration and (OC) enjoying all the drama that comes with experiencing past memories and bringing them into play. To paraphrase what we’ve written in the corebook – Afterlife is a game where you play a dead planar traveler with magical powers searching through alien worlds for memories – arguing someone should re-live traumatic memories they’re not comfortable with because it is realistic is just obtuse. 

A person with tattooed skin and a gem on their forehead holds a crow-like bird with one yellow eye and one red eye in their hands while reality seems to swirl and bubble around them. The text "Afterlife: Wandering Souls" is in the center of the image.

Memories seem really important in Afterlife! How do players interact with their memories mechanically and in the story itself?

Within the game we have a mechanics called ‘naming a fragment’ whereby you as a player see something that you’d like to have relate back to your past life and denote its importance to your GM. When this happens you GM uses that person, place, or thing you named to create a small side scene for you known as a Break. During a Break your character goes into a catatonic-like state and they re-live a memory of their past life. When your Wanderer comes to, they have a better idea of who they once were and what their memories mean to them. Aside from getting some awesome play out of naming a fragment, it also has mechanical benefits. One of the best ones is unlocking a Death Mark, which gives you a cool power and also means you’re one step closer to the end of your Wanderer’s journey.

What are the alien worlds like and what influence do characters have on the world around them?

In Afterlife: Wandering Souls the alien worlds are known as Limbos. Each is strange and often macabre. For example, we have a Limbo in the book known as the Drowned Lands filled with shipwrecks, ghosts of the dead, and strange sea creatures. In another Limbo we have is a giant wall of roses under a rolling grey sky – daring to look into one of the roses could spell doom for your Wanderer as they contain memories of the living world. 

Characters are encouraged to be active participants in the Limbos they visit. Without interacting with the world around them, they are unable to find memories of their past lives and therefore risk falling into Stagnation (a loss of hope). To put it in the simplest terms – Wanderers are encouraged to be the stereotypical adventurers getting embroiled in plots, going on adventures, and interacting with NPCs. The amount of influence a Wanderer wields is based on how they interact with the Limbo itself – if people like them, if they are helpful, if they can do something of us.

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Awesome! Thanks so much Liz for the interview! I hope you all liked it and that you’ll check out Afterlife on Kickstarter today!

Five or So Questions on Fate of Cthulhu

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Sophie Lagace, PK Sullivan, and Ed Turner about Fate of Cthulhu, which is currently on Kickstarter. I am impressed with some of the changes they’ve made to the Mythos and to Fate for the project, and I hope you do too! Check it out!

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Purple and blue monstrous entities writhing in the background behind the FATE OF CTHULHU title card.

Tell me a little about Fate of Cthulhu. What excites you about it?

Sophie Lagace:  It’s a take on Cthulhu I have not really seen before, where the heroes are seriously out-gunned and out-tentacled, but not hopeless. Maybe you can’t save humanity from an apocalypse, but you can save it from complete extinction, for example. It’s a game about fighting back even when you’re a tiny person against a monstrous evil, giving it all you got and having a chance to make a difference. I can seriously relate, these days.

Also, we acknowledge the glaring flaws in the source material and in H.P. Lovecraft himself, take the good, and reject the bad. I love critical examination of our faves rather than pretending everything is fine

PK Sullivan:  This is the first genuinely hopeful take on the Cthulhu mythos that I’ve seen. That’s something really important to me. Sean Nittner reached out to me in July 2015 asking if I would be the lead designer for this Fate Cthulhu game that Evil Hat wanted to make. My first response was, “Me? Are you sure? I’m not a Cthulhu fan.” Ultimately I think that worked in my favor. Stephen took point on the mythos story while my job was to design a system that reinforced the themes of the mythos. But I need hope in my stories — I made that very clear early on — so Fate of Cthulhu started to lean more toward the good you can do in the timeline

It can still be a pyrrhic victory, or you can still completely screw things up and make the future worse but there’s always the chance, the possibility, the hope that things can be better. And ultimately that’s what you’re trying to achieve as a character: a better future.

Which is surprisingly easy to achieve when the timeline starts as dark as possible.

Ed Turner: Sophie and PK already adequately covered the joys of cosmic horror with a side of hope, so I’m going to be a bit more mechanics-focused: it’s corruption that excites me. As characters deal with phenomena related to the Great Old One, they’ll slowly be corrupted by the sheer wrongness of eldritch forces. Left unchecked, corruption takes the form of horrible mutations. You want claws and tentacles and dripping ichor and other body horror shenanigans? Eat your heart out. Maybe literally… corruption can do weird things.

I love corruption for so many reasons. It’s a way to convey the danger of these alien entities without falling back on tired and problematic notions of “madness.” It’s a way to give players actual hard consequences when things go awry—having a character die is almost never as interesting as having a character’s very humanity get twisted. But more than anything else, it’s a way to empower characters… as bad as corruption is, your new tentacles are also tools in your arsenal, a way you can use the Great Old One’s own malevolence against itself. It ties back to that all-important sense of hope: the worse things get for a character, the better they are able to fight back. As bad as the threat you’re facing is, it contains the seeds of its own destruction.

And of course it means your character can have tentacles. Nothing wrong with more tentacles. The heroes need to even out the tentacle playing-field.

A woman in a wide brimmed hat with long, dark hair in a black and white image.
Sophie Lagace

What is your role in the project, and what did you especially enjoy working on over the course of the project?

SL: I have had three roles. The project stretched on for nearly four years (with almost a year out of that devoted to the playtest rounds), so many things changed along the way. I started on quality control, a sort of sounding board for “Does this thing fit as a Fate game?” Eventually the project management work was rearranged across all Evil Hat products and Sean Nittner asked me to take over project management for this one. And as of almost a year ago, when Lenny Balsera didn’t have time to be Fate Line Developer, I have taken that on as well.

I tremendously enjoyed working (once again!) with top talent, and this will continue with our stretch goal collaborators. On a personal level, I had a flash of elation when, after compiling the mass of data from our beta playtest round, I suddenly realized that we had objective confirmation that we had addressed the problems revealed by the alpha round. We all had a vague, hopeful sense from the comments received that maybe we were on the right track, but it was great to get hard data

PK: I’m the lead designer and I love weird challenges in game design. The first four or five months of design was very collaborative. Sean, Sophie, Stephen, and I (wow, am I the only not-S on the original team?) had a bunch of Skype calls where we hashed out the parameters of the game, both fiction and mechanics. The thing we hit on was that the meat of this game would be in an ever-changing, non-deterministic timeline. Which is hella tricky because we have characters coming from the literal future who know the timeline as a matter of fact.

The first iteration of our timeline mechanisms pretty detached from any role play the characters made. At the conclusion of an event (more or less what we call an adventure) one of the players would get slapped with paradox and suffer terrible visions of the new future they’ve created. This involved a skill check against an epic difficulty that was almost sure to cost resources (Fate points, etc.), followed by rolling four Fate dice with modifiers based on how well that skill check went. If the player had been able to shake off time’s assault just fine, then they got to improve dice. If they blew that defense roll, then one of the dice was guaranteed to be a negative. The dice result became the new rating of the event the players had just completed (more or less how badly it screws humanity) and those dice rippled out to the other events in the timeline. This did two things: it gave the characters valuable information about the new state of the timeline and made sure no one could game the system for the best result.

Playtesters hated it

So I had to go back to the drawing board. I redesigned the timeline mechanisms so that the heroes and the squamous horrors of the void are competing on a track for changes to the timeline. As those rack up, ripples get made across the other events. But! Now it’s up to the GM to interpret what those ripples mean. This was a really clever solution to a problem I didn’t know we had. I was leaning too hard into the action element of the action-horror stories we set out to tell. By making the timeline changes a GM element, while giving them tools and guidance to convey those changes to the players in thematically appropriate ways, the uncertainty that players faced dramatically increased. Uncertainty is key to horror stories. We need to keep the players in a state of imperfect information, even if other Fate games rely on perfect information.

That was the biggest challenge in the game and one I hope goes over well. Fred and some of the early readers have really responded to the condensed, concise Fate Core rules set I’ve put together for the game. The first stretch goal was to put that into the Fate Core SRD so people can build their own Fate games using those 50 pages of rules. That’s very flattering. I really hope people build tons of great games off this chassis I put together. It would be the greatest reward so far in my game design career.

ET: I got pulled into the project relatively late, to help get it ready for the second round of playtests, and after that I was part of the writing team. In practice, most of my energy went into the detail work: example text, spells and rituals, corruption stunts, things of that nature. Whenever you see a list of things, I probably had a hand in it. It’s not easy to pick a favorite part—by the time I started working on the project, the core of it had already come more-or-less together. It meant that I was given a wonderfully ghastly playground to explore.

Perhaps my favorite part was helping to finalize the timelines themselves. Stephen wrote some wonderful apocalypses, which are just an absolute delight to read; my job involved statting up the NPCs and horrible monsters that populate his world. In short, getting them ready for a GM to pick up and throw at their players, while still being as weird and scary as Stephen envisions. It’s a fun challenge.

A dark haired man in a collared shirt on a brown background.
Ed Turner

What are the unique challenges of a timey wimey affected game? You’ve talked about the timelines – what do those mean to the players?

SL: For one thing, it means being able to play some pretty unusual characters, whether by having corruption aspects and stunts, or by confronting temporal paradox. We had playtester groups who reported that some of their members played different versions of the same character, and that seemed to generate a lot of fun moments for them.

For another, it means that the heroes will be dealing with high stakes; for example, if you can’t change the timeline, you have not the possibility but the certitude that everyone you ever cared about will suffer a horrible, ah, fate.

Finally, the fact that a group can tackle any of the four key events in a timeline in any order in turn makes each story truly unique to that group. It’s likely that two gaming group taking on the same timeline and Great Old One will have a very different narrative, so replay value should be good.

ET: It means that players and GMs alike will be contending with an interesting juxtaposition of knowledge and uncertainty. The timeline gives players many, though not all, of the essential details about what they’ll encounter during an event, but their actions ripple forward, changing subsequent events. The knowledge they were so sure of at the outset grows less and less helpful as time goes on. And it gives the GM room to really mess with players’ expectations.
Of course, that does also suggest part of the challenge: rationing out that change. PK pointed out earlier that uncertainty is key to horror stories, but uncertainty requires a solid baseline, otherwise things change so rapidly that they stop being unsettlingly wrong and start being pure static. In other words, the GM can’t mess with players’ expectations if things get so chaotic that the players don’t have any expectations anymore. Timelines, and the timeline track, help contain that chaos, so players will always know more-or-less what’s going to happen, but can be shocked by the details.

PK: The biggest challenge was finding a way to have timeline actually matter. We decided early on that a timeline would play a significant role in the game. That’s why the whole structure of Fate of Cthulhu is built around the timeline. When I started mucking about with possible timeline systems, I realized that for it to work it needed to do two contradictory things: the players have to know the timeline and the timeline has to change and shift. From there it was a tightrope to walk of having the changes be unpredictable and Lovecrafting while letting the players feel like they earned the changes to it.

How did you approach making an inclusive game in something that most marginalized consider volatile, the Lovecraftian mythos, both mechanically and in the fiction and in presentation of the game rules?

SL: It was clear from the first moment that to make this a game which Evil Hat could publish, we would have to face the true monsters in the Lovecraft story. It just would not have been compatible with our mission to gloss over racism, ableism, and other -isms.

It may be tacky but I’m going to toot my own horn here regarding the concept of sanity: I was the first to suggest a corruption mechanic and the high cost of facing the horrors being the slow transformation into a monster yourself. I’m very fond of RPGs that ask the question “What are you willing to sacrifice in order to succeed?” instead of just “Will you succeed?” I think it’s central to Fate, a game where PCs have lots of resources to draw on in order to achieve goals.

That said, I’m certain someone else would rapidly have come up with the corruption idea, but I felt good about being the one to pull it out of an evil hat.

ET: I think Sophie really hits the nail on the head: getting rid of the tired and thoughtless treatment of “sanity” pulls a lot of weight. I think it also helps to be absolutely explicit when we call out Lovecraft’s bigotry. It’s so commonly elided over, or dismissed as being a product of its time. And that’s no good… his writings often, and with varying levels of subtlety, other real-world groups, and that’s something we don’t want to lazily perpetuate.

And of course, we can’t forget the contributions of our sensitivity reader, Misha Bushyager. Sensitivity consultation is great idea in general, but on something like this, it’s invaluable.

A bearded man in a cap and black jacket, looking to the side and smiling.
PK Sullivan

How is Fate of Cthulhu different from other experiences in Fate, from your perspective? What do you hope people enjoy in the variation?

SL: I think it puts in doubt whether you will achieve success like no other Fate game we’ve released before. Also, there are not that many role-playing games that provide mechanical support to allow time travel and changing the future, and I don’t know of any other based on the Fate engine. In fact, most time-travel RPGs I know of have a lighter tone: TimeWatch (Pelgrane Press), Doctor Who (FASA, Cubicle 7), Time & Temp (Dig a Thousand Holes Publishing), etc.. On the other hand, Fate of Cthulhu can have funny moments, but it’s not meant to be played for laughs

ET: The timelines give the game a very strong narrative superstructure; there is a very clearly defined end point that you are building to: eventually the moment of the Great Old One’s rise will arrive, and it’s on you to be ready for it. It means there’s a grand finale always on the horizon, which gives the campaign an ongoing sense of pace… the characters might not know what the best next step is, but it’s impossible for them to lose sight of their greater goal. It’s not the very first Fate game to do something like this; Uprising has a built-in narrative arc leading to an end point. But Fate of Cthulhu pushes the concept even further, diving really deep into the short, focused campaign concept. I also hope that people take advantage of the focused, relatively brief campaign by going through multiple apocalypses. Not only by re-trying a timeline, hoping to get a better result with the next iteration, but by trying out the variety of timelines in the book and coming out as stretch goals from the Kickstarter.

PK: Most Fate games have characters change laterally, sometimes gaining in power but only in small doses. Because a given campaign is really just four adventures — four events on the timeline — and a denouement in the form of the final event Rise of the Great Old One, we actually put advancement on the fast track. PCs get a new skill every milestone. But… that’s tempered by the corruption mechanisms. This is the only Fate game I know of where you can end up in a mechanically reinforced spiral of self-destruction. Corruption stunts offer you great power but at the cost of further corruption. Not to mention many of the horrors you’ll face can push you down that path, as well. It’s another interesting dichotomy where characters can get very powerful very fast but also just wind up taking themselves right out of play by getting too dark.

One last question! If you could be in the Fate of Cthulhu world, what would you most want to do and see? What would be the wildest adventure you could want?

PK: Is it a cop out to say I don’t want to go there? We made the worst future! Futures! There are five of them! They’re all completely terrible. War, plague, famine, pestilence, and unending subjugation await anyone who lives long enough to see the future. If I had to be someone in Fate of Cthulhu, I think I’d want to be a modern day mystic. Maybe someone who has visions of the future. Being haunted by nightmarish visions of things yet to be is about the most chill thing you can be in this world.

SL: I’m with PK! But I would want to see success in avoiding a cataclysm, righting things to the point where humanity can build a better future. So, ++++ on the timeline!

ET: Yeah, there’s definitely no great place in the Fate of Cthulhu world. But I dunno, I think the Dagon timeline might be pretty okay? I mean, assuming you survive the horrible transformation into a Deep One. Sure, you’d suffer eternal subservience to a giant paranoid fish-monster at the bottom of the ocean, but you’d get to breathe underwater, and that’s pretty cool. That’s about as good a trade-off as a Great Old One is going to offer.

Old ones encroaching on a city, all tinged in green, passing a billboard that's been vandalized with anarchy symbols, and someone riding past on a motorcycle with a helmet and rifle. The title FATE OF CTHULHU is on the image with the subtitle "The stars are right for Great Cthulhu's Return. It's up to you to make them wrong again."

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Awesome! Thank you so much to Sophie, PK, and Ed for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Fate of Cthulhu on Kickstarter today!

Behold, Products! The Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide

P.S. Sorry for the borked links earlier, I still haven’t mastered WordPress.

I recently had the pleasure to read and review James D’Amato’s Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide, which is currently available online for purchase! James contacted me for the interview, but in true Beau fashion I took forever to review it (sorry!).

Full disclosure: I was given a free review copy and I think James is pretty rad.

Photos in this review are by Brie Beau Sheldon.

A book with a black cover and orange and pale green text that says The Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide.
The book itself, The Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide, by James D’Amato.

I approached the review in a weird fashion, to try to get a full perspective. The book itself is basically a tool to help you build the background of your character for RPG play. Some elements of it seem to trend towards games with levels, but I think this could be used for most roleplaying. It uses die rolls for randomizers at times, but also a lot of it is pick lists and freewriting to flesh out the character.

The way I approached this was to have three separate sessions of exercises (there are so many included in the book)! with three different people, and each of them had their own individual characters, while I kept the same character through the whole test. Each of the character had varying levels of previous information – mine, for example, was made up on the spot! I also spent a fair amount of time looking at the book

The interior of a book, on a section titled Old Haunts.

The book itself has a fun orange, black, and greenish color scheme and is relatively well organized. I will note there are a few spaces where the text contrast is not as comfortable for me to read, but aside from that, the book is pretty clear to follow and read.

The biggest comment I’d have about this book? The questions were often wonderfully open. I am not good with constraints on my creativity – I like a lot of free space to wonder along. There is guidance for a lot of the questions, plus the random rolls, but enough of the questions allowed me to explore where I wanted to go.

The inside of a book with the section title Pocket Dimension.

I really appreciate James’s thoughtfulness in providing subjects that range from death to relationships to magical objects and places – it feels like there’d be something here for basically everybody! Special love for the “Damn Merlinials” exercise, too. The exercises vary in complexity, with some including random rolls resulting in skipping forward sections, and others just simple fill-in-the-blanks, and some even have a combination of methods to answer all of the questions.

Overall, I think that it’s really useful tool for someone who wants to create deep, complex characters with a lot of history, flavor, and support for their perspectives and beliefs.

The inside of a book with the section title Magic Mirrors.

A note on pronouns: One thing that I didn’t like in the book is that all of it uses he or she pronouns, even when it’s quite clunky. This was also noted by all three of the other players I tested with. I do know, however, that James didn’t want this in the book and he even consulted with me on how to address it, and I wrote a statement to his publisher. I appreciate James’s intent a lot and wish his publisher had followed it. I bring this up because I know I have many nonbinary readers and the use of binary pronouns from one of our own can feel a little jarring, and I want you to know that James had the best intentions, but couldn’t push it through. That’s basically the only major issue I ran into with this book though!

I’m including the full text of the responses to the prompts I played through, but they only include the answers to the questions – for those you’ll need to get your own copy of the Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide by James D’Amato on Amazon or at Barnes & Noble!

Continue reading “Behold, Products! The Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide”

Revealed in Turn

We recently posted an update about Turn’s progress, and it’s going pretty well! We may soon be closing pre-orders (which are still open here!) if all goes well with layout, and we are pushing on thru with the stretch goals. I wanted to talk a little about Turn in playtesting, and a big thing that happened recently in our longest-run playtest.

A buff colored kitten on a soft bed, with its toes in focus.
Just a picture of a cat to start us off right.

Some people may have heard me talk on Twitter about my character Beau Taggart, who is a professional hunter, the game’s Late Bloomer, a Cougar, and super gay. In his early character background during character generation, we established that Beau had turned for the first time only recently, about six months ago (as required for the Late Bloomer role). When he turned for the first time, he his truck had just been hit by a drunk driver while he was driving down a winding back road.

He got out of the car to check on the driver, but the driver was behaving aggressively, and tried to punch him. Beau knew something felt wrong, but he was scared and panicked, and responded by hitting the guy back. He didn’t know that his body had started to turn, that his super strength had grown. The hit was so hard it broke the guy’s neck, and while Beau was realizing with horror he’d killed a man, he also turned into a cougar for the first time.

Jake Peralta from Brooklyn 99 saying "Now that I have the taste for blood, I can't stop murdering!"
This gif is not an accurate representation of Beau. It’s just funny!

His animal instincts kicked in – he hid the body, and ate some of it, leaving his claw and teeth marks on it, desperately hungry in light of the force turn. In his panic, he was found by Camellia, a fellow shapeshifter (Overachiever, Bison) who helped him get back to human form, and over time, he learned better how to calm down. He didn’t tell Camellia, or anyone else, about the drunk driver, harboring his accidental crime as yet another secret.

Not many Turn characters have super tragic backstories, and this one isn’t even all that bad (sometimes people accidentally kill people, and those are small town secrets I’ve heard), but I knew there was a risk of it being an element when people played so I built a character with a high risk background to see how fast we could ramp up to exposure. It still took over a year at our slow playing pace – which is ideal. If we were playing weekly, it would happen more quickly, but it paces out well.

How did I plan this out? Well, I knew the number of exposure marks for towns and town characters, I knew the average number of scenes per session (5-8), how many of those typically risk exposure (4-7), and how many sessions each character is generally in (3-6). I knew that having a higher risk background meant that I would end up on the higher range of everything, and that Beau was starting with a generally positive reputation as a Late Bloomer.

That doesn’t mean I was ready for the exposure to hit max!

Jake Peralta from Brooklyn 99 being asked "Are you crying?" and responding "No. That's eyeball sweat."

Turn has ten marks on the exposure track for the town. You can get positive or negative marks, based on the type of interaction that causes them. You take the marks when you’ve done something that might cause someone to suspect your shifter identity – it can be behavioral, it can be physical, etc. Something like slipping up and saying you spent all night in the woods, or maybe your eyes shine oddly in a photograph.

Beau’s track grew and grew over time, including his town character (TC) tracks, which are separate. One TC of his was Diego, his best friend who knew everything but this secret. Early on in the campaign, I played Beau to slowly reveal his identity as a shifter to Diego, purposefully planning positive encounters. He managed to do so successfully, which was good, because Beau was truly in love with Diego. They later became partners, but it was still pretty quiet, because the town was relatively conservative in that regard. Their own professional hunter in love with his buddy? Beau wasn’t sure they could handle it.

Jack Nicholson saying "You can't handle the truth!"

There are three results you can get when you become fully exposed to a TC or the town itself: reviled, which is the lowest result, and results either in a toxic and risky relationship with the TC or you getting run out of town or dealing with violence; revealed, which is the middling result and means you may risk comforts, safety, or gossip but you’ll be able to stay in town; and known, which is the best result, and means you’re accepted in the town or by the TC.

With Diego, Beau got known, so he was able to get together with Diego, stay friends and more, and not have any risk increased from it. Over time Beau had some more positive and some more negative interactions with people in the town, just like you do – simple things that cause conflict last longer in people’s minds than we thing. It was pretty balanced. But, rumors arose when a body was found in the woods that it turned out matched the drunk driver, whose car was found, too.

This combined with Beau acting out of sorts because he found out who his birth mother was and it led to a spectacular new ability – the ability to turn into a Raven, as well! These events combined led to an exposure roll, which is 2d6 plus the exposure track, added up based on the +’s and -‘s on the track, and a + for any known TCs. I rolled poorly, but had enough based on the roll, the track, and Diego, I got the middling result – revealed. That meant no immediate danger, but it meant time had come to face facts.

Griffin McElroy saying "And let's just have a full blown panic attack together!"

The rumors spread faster than Beau could do anything for, and before he could even come clean to his closest friends (Camellia and Iris, his cousin and coworker), the cops were at Camellia’s door looking for Beau. He managed to tell Diego what happened, and Diego supported him, but he was going to have to deal with the police at some point. He decided to turn himself in. Meanwhile, on the in-fiction Facebook, his fellow townspeople were spreading memes of the Cougar Killer, claiming he’d murdered the man and mutilated the bodies. This is something that would eventually die out without the police arresting him, but in the moment it was challenging!

A little bit of coordination led to him having enough time to sneak past the deputy posted at Camellia’s (where his truck was*) to tell Camellia and Iris what was going on, then turn himself in with some legal support obtained by Camellia. He confessed to fighting with the guy, but stopped short of admitting to murder. The cops didn’t have enough evidence to keep him. In the end, Beau will still live in Cauldron Springs, unable to leave easily because of the ties that hold him there, and hopefully happy with Diego (because that cat’s outta the bag).

a Cougar, by Cecilia Ferri
This cat, specifically. a Cougar, by Cecilia Ferri

But, once you’re brought in for something this serious, it’s hard for people to drop their suspicions. Combining it with Beau becoming obviously out as queer since Diego went with him to the police station, Beau’s once stellar social standing is pretty decreased. He’ll be able to survive, but he’s not who he once was to these townspeople – many of them will go on believing he actually murdered someone, others will simply struggle with his identity especially when tied with the stigma of being questioned for murder.

So basically it all worked out? Like this is exactly how this sort of result should be narratively. Maybe some people might choose to have the shifter identity be the forefront and have it be more fantastical, some people might want to diminish the fantasy even further, and either is okay – just keeping in mind that people rarely want to believe the most fantastical things, even though they’ll often use fantastical things as metaphor or illusion for the reality.

The pacing for the exposure to max out worked perfectly, the narrative surrounding it hit all the right notes, and all I did was start with some trouble baked in, like so many characters do. It meant a lot to me to play this character** and have it play out so true to what I designed. The game works, it works really good, and it tells the stories I want to be told.

I can’t ask for more, honestly.

I’m curious, what have you worked on in games that you played out in playtesting or just when you released the game that made you have that, like, damn, I did it! moment? A moment with the math lining up just right, or the narrative tone hitting the right button? Share it in the comments, and please share this on social media to talk about those moments of design success!

*Beau constantly forgot his truck at Camellia’s, where he often went to have tea to calm down and to hang out, then turned into a cougar to hit the woods. It actually became a feature on the map! Oops.

**Who some might have guessed was a test run for my chosen name

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Five or So Questions on Dangerous Times

Hey all! Today I’ve got five or so questions with Michael Bacon about the game Dangerous Times, which is currently on Kickstarter! Hope that you like hearing about this game of journalism in the 1920s!

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An illustration of a newspaper for Dangerous Times, Volume 1, Friday March 9, 1923, Established 1887. Heading reads "Muckrakers and Magic in Old New York!" and the subtitle reads "Historic Urban Fantasy RPG."

Tell me about Dangerous Times. What excites you about it?

Dangerous Times is a small role-playing game for two or more players, published in zine form, with a focus on storytelling. It’s about reporters who risk their lives to expose corruption, crime and injustice, all in a version of 1920’s New York that’s just learned stage magic is real. So now magic is everywhere: children play with fire and levitation in the streets, wall street moguls consult soothsayers before making investments, crooks turn hypnotism and escape-artistry to devious purposes… and of course those who seek power are messing with things best left alone.

One of the aspects I’m most excited about is the history involved.

New York of the jazz age is a surprisingly modern time. Broadway is decorated with neon lights, cars fill the streets and the subway rumbles below. There’s even a budding intercontinental network of wires and radio waves used to share photographs and news around the world.

It’s not just the technology that makes the twenties modern, though: so many familiar social issues are present and cultural shifts are happening, often in ways that resonate with the current time.

I’d love it if players were able to engage with all this history, and find ways to incorporate it into their play. I’ve tried to encourage that in the design. So even though the problems they bump into involve the supernatural, I’ve attempted to make those plotlines echo historic reality. It turned out to be… not easy (I’m still not sure I’ve got it right), but at least surprisingly straight-forward. This makes sense, though, because this is the culture that produced so many of those genre-defining fantasy, horror and mystery stories; they couldn’t help but bring reality into the fantastical.

The New York City skyline with the text "New York City in the Roaring Twenties."

The 1920s were a complex time in New York! I know that many Black Americans and queer people were among those living in the city. What kind of research are you doing to ensure that you have appropriate representation of the history and the people of the era?

I’m glad you brought this up, because how people treated each other during this era has been a major focal point of my research.

I’ve been lucky enough to lean on the work of historians who’ve spent their entire careers studying aspects of this, exploring how specific conceptions of race, gender, sexuality and nationality influenced and were influenced by society at large. There’s even a page at the end of the zine dedicated to resources and references, so that players interested in learning more can know where to start.

Going into this I’d only known the broadest shapes of the era, and I was very excited to learn about ways society seemed to be expressing interest in diversity— this romantic idea that New Yorkers at large were going out to speakeasies, immigrant neighborhoods, jazz clubs, queer dances, and encountering all sorts of other lifestyles and backgrounds— but when I started doing the reading it turns out that these interactions served to reify existing hierarchies as much as they transgressed against them.

And then the years rush ahead through the Great Depression, WWII, and McCarthyism, all of which exacerbate expressions of social backlash and undermine tentative steps made towards civil progress.

All this is to say that the past is a different place, not a kinder one.

I have, however, made a serious effort to research and represent all the people living in the city, not just the ones in most easy reach. What this directly translates to is mention and often discussion of things like the black press, targeted enforcement of new immigration laws, police raids on cross-racial or queer dances, and so forth throughout the zine… though it’s difficult to fit all the nuance required within just 40 pages, especially when those pages also have to convey the core game mechanics and process of play.

One thing that drove me to set the game in the 1920s was this article talking about Harlem’s Hamilton Lodge Ball, where hundred of queer men and women annually danced in joyful defiance of prevailing gender and sexual norms. These events became a sensation, with thousands from all over the city showing up to observe and sometimes take part; notables in attendance include Nora Holt and Wallace Thurman, even the Vanderbilts and Astors. The newspapers at the time treat this with a range between shock and fascination, but I can’t help but smile when I picture it— twirling on the dance floor, fancy suits and gowns, and people from all over the city celebrating.

I’ve tried to make the game as much about players encountering and protecting this positive parts of life in the city, as it is about mystery, magic, and the dangers that are encroaching.

What kind of mechanics do you use in Dangerous Time for things like investigation, violence, and other things that might come up?

This is actually the area that’s seeing the most change, as I continue to playtest and refine what I’ve developed.

The setting and the mechanics are meant to reinforce each-other, but I’ve also tried to keep them out of the way of the real point, which is telling stories. So there’s some simple outcome randomization using six-sided die, but there’s also a mechanic in place that lets players spend this resource— credibility— to ignore the dice.

So for example this lets me keep reporters very squishy, only distinguishing between “healthy”, “injured”, and “dead”, because the transition between these states is almost always intentional.

The idea is that reporters sometimes exaggerate how dramatic a situation is for the sake of selling more papers, so when you spend credibility to succeed at something it actually means somebody, somewhere in this article that your building, was lying.

And of course credibility is important when figuring out the outcome of an adventure, because you might survive the big encounter only to find nobody believes what you’re printing, and then the world gets worse instead of better. Maybe dying for your ideals was the smarter choice.

Then there’s the investigation, which is where I’ve been doing a lot of iteration lately. I’ve been toying with different ways to have players encounter and build stories, but one piece I think I’ve finally got down is the start of everything— the staff meeting.

The latest version has the editor (the player who runs the game) stating a fact about the world and then questioning the other players about it.

So you open the meeting with “Rats and pigeons have been dying”, “Strange sounds drift through the air”, “Discarded bits of clothing keep turning up” and then start asking questions. Why are the rats dying?

Where are they finding the clothing? When are the sounds being heard?

Who told you about this? What does this other group say about it? Make it weirder! Do they contradict each-other?

These become the rumors players investigate, and with a little bit of work by the editor they get incorporated into and reshape the various archetypal plots written in the zine.

An illustration of an individual in a trenchcoat covertly walking. The text reads "You weren't planning to dodge bullets and mad cultists today, but it seems every two-bit crook knows a little magic now. It's up to your own wits and magic tricks to get this story printed. Who knows? Enough readers and you might just change the world."

What are the kinds of experiences and actions players can have in Dangerous Times? What do they do, and what do they feel?

Mechanically and thematically, Dangerous Times is a game about determining truth, and working out how a bunch of truths all fit together into a narrative.

Players start the game by generating rumors and leads, then tell stories about how their reporters follow up on those leads. Dice rolling is used to give guidance during this process, letting players know when a scene should provide answers or raise more questions. They also make decisions about who pursues what leads, when to use magic or break laws during the investigation, when to split up and investigate more leads, or to focus on one lead together, reducing danger and increasing the chance it’ll pan out.

All the while players are accruing trouble, which eventually comes calling, and they’ll use their dice, skills, and other resources to get out of it— or they go out in a blaze of glory, getting one last epic moment before they fall.

Finally publication starts, and players have to take all these facts and rumors and fit them together into articles, coming up with witty headlines for bonus points. The paper’s credibility, circulation, and debts come together to influence decisions about what gets printed, and then the impacts of the publication on the world and the newspaper’s future are discussed.

Ideally players start out with interest and confusion, and as the story progresses they get that slow, awesome sense of the facts coming together. They feel pressure brewing as trouble builds up, and they make decisions about which risks are worth taking. When the trouble finally happens, they feel excitement and danger, but also in control— players are the ultimate arbiter over their character’s fate, and they’ll have to weigh when sacrifices are worthwhile. During publication they get to look back on the adventure, recapping all those feelings mixed together with hope, satisfaction, or regret.

Finally, in a game called Dangerous Times, I have to wonder, how do you plan to encourage safe and respectful play at the table?

The way tabletop gamers have thought critically on player safety, developing tools and methods to encourage everyone has a good time, is one of the things I like best about this hobby. Coming from video games, where the discussion really isn’t there yet, it’s like a breath of fresh air. So of course I’m happy to reference things like Lines & Veils and the X-card, so players new to the hobby or unfamiliar with these concepts can play with a safety net.

As to the design itself, well. Dangerous Times opens with a staff meeting, and there’s a note in the zine about using starting that off with a quick conversation about the things players do and don’t want to see. It’s my hope that this becomes a natural place to establish boundaries, proffer ideas, and flavor the tone of upcoming play. If someone mentions they find baseball boring but love ghost stories, the group can keep that in mind as they start building rumors and playing the game. With luck this normalizes the times when people need to draw boundaries, whether that’s to avoid deep-seated trauma or just because they’ve had a shitty day.

Addressing the other part of your question, one of the things I’ve been very careful with the plotlines inside the booklet is to keep them (hopefully, respectfully) adjacent to reality— players encounter history and fix fantasy. So there’s no rushing in and suddenly solving real-world injustices that persist into the present, at least in the booklet as written. I think it’s fine if players want to play that way, but it’s not the game I wanted to write. Instead I’ve provided supernatural and imaginary plots, noted parallels to real history, and tasked editors with “making the real unreal”— drawing inspiration from the real world, but making it into something everyone can feel comfortable playing with.

I’d be happy if the experience of playing can be informative and challenging, but first and foremost it has to be enjoyable. It’s my hope that the game can support both hard-hitting encounters with history as well as light-hearted escapism. Groups can and should play at their own comfort levels— the twenties were a terrible, dangerous time, but also one that could have promised a better future. If nothing else, playing in that space should be fun.

An illustration of a medium with cards in front of them, with swirling spectres behind them. The text reads "Based on real history, but with real magic...This is a world where magicians' tricks actually work, and the secrets behind them have just been published worldwide. Anyone can dabble in magic, and those of a villainous bent are more dangerous than ever before."

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Thanks so much to Michael for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Dangerous Times on Kickstarter today!