Today I have an interview with Epidiah Ravachol about Wolfspell, hitting Kickstarter on January 21, 2019! I actually proofread the original Wolfspell released in Worlds Without Master, and I’ve been wishing for a fancy new version for ages – though the WWW version played amazing stories about wolves who were once human to start with. I’m super excited to get to interview Epidiah! I hope you like what he has to say below.
Note: The included art is not the art that will be on Wolfspell! There is new art being created by the same artist, Shel Kahn, for the project – that’s most of what the Kickstarter is for! —
Tell me a little about Wolfspell. What excites you about it?
You were there for the beginning of it, but for the sake of your readers, I’ll recap the Wolfspell origin story. I was writing the short story “One Winter’s Due” for the second issue of Worlds Without Master. That story is about two adventuring sisters who, along with a small band of family and friends, seek to turn themselves into wolves in order to mete out vengeance without violating oaths that they had taken. I am, obviously, not the first person to tell tales about humans turning into wolves. And this wasn’t even that fresh of a take on the subject, but what hooked into my brain at the time–the part I couldn’t shake loose when it came time to dream up a game for that same issue–was this idea of these (mostly) aging, well-traveled folk who have seen it all suddenly finding themselves experiencing the world anew through the mind, body, and in particular the senses of wolves. I mean, you would HAVE to play, right? How else would you learn how to be a wolf? You would run and wrestle with each other, pause to scent the wind, and howl just to hear your own, new, voice. Before that moment, you had lead a hard life of killing or thieving or peering into the forbidding dark, but now you are newly born.
I had a dice mechanic sitting in the back of my brain for quite a while, inspired by the Doctor Who roleplaying game from the 90s called Time Lord. In that game, you rolled two six-sided dice and subtract the lower from the higher, giving you a result from 0 to 5, where 1 is the most likely outcome. I really dug how that worked. I posted about it here shortly after the game was released. In Wolfspell I saw an opportunity to combine that mechanic with the spirit of the Swords Without Master tone dice. You roll two dice, one is your Wolf Die and the other your Blood Die, you subtract the lower from the higher, apply the result to a Apocalypse World style move, but the move is determined to some extent by which die is higher. If you rolled well on the Wolf Die, you can act and think in wolf ways. If you rolled well on the Blood Die, you can act and think in the ways you’ve been used to. But crucially, you need to roll poorly on the opposite die to avoid confusion. Rolling a 6 Blood only helps you if your Wolf isn’t also a 6.
One of Shel Kahn’s pieces from One Winter’s Due, a fiction piece included in Worlds Without Master.
You mention that the characters are typically aging. How relevant to the story do you think that is and why?
Oh, good! That’s a part of my assumptions I’ve left unexamined. Thank you for asking! Technically, the only way I enforce aging characters in the game is by the identifying phrases players select for their characters during pack creation. They imply, at least to me, folks we’ve been around and seen some shit. “Many have tested my sword-arm and now wait to mete vengeance upon me in the afterlife,” or “I am witness to stranger worlds than most. The arcane and preternatural are to me as wolves and weather are to the farmer,” and so forth. They are not all exclusively evocative of veteran adventures, but as a whole, they hint at a certain field of experience. But it’s not restrictive. A clever player seeking to play a young, fresh-faced thrillseeker could definitely pull it off.
For me, though, the aging bit is bound tightly to the central theme of rebirth. Witnessing the world anew through the scents and sounds of the wild has more meaning if you’ve already seen everything through the narrow scope of human vision.
Plus, I just dig stories about old folks. If you want to play young, attractive folk who transform into wolves to wrestle and groom their way through their sexual tension, you can certainly do that with Wolfspell, but there are many fine–damn fine–games out there that serve that purpose. Now if you want to play broken, old, world-weary rovers who shed their skin-tag-haunted flesh in favor of a lithesome, sinewy wolf bod to wrestle and groom their way through their sexual tension, well that field’s a bit smaller.
Well-managed tone is something many people recognize in your games, and in this game it feels especially stark to me – the tone of the game blossoms from the moment you start play. What do you think creates the particular tone of Wolfspell, and what makes it flourish?
That’s very kind of you to say! For Wolfspell’s sense of tone, I blame Apocalypse World. Or more specifically, the Read a Situation move in Apocalypse World. That thing it does where it says, “Here, here are the questions you are allowed to ask and we must answer,” is so quietly beautiful that I think I’ll be hacking it for the rest of my days. In Wolfspell you may Behold the World and drink it in through your senses. When you do this and roll Wolf, you get to ask specific questions about what your eyes, ears, nose, and instincts tell you–inviting lush description of the world around you. But when you roll Blood, your questions are of a more human nature, about who is in control, what do they want from you, where are you most advantaged–inviting a more analytical response. It limits how you think about the world to the part of you that is most in control at the moment. All of the moves do this in their own little way.
Also, I dig the way the tone presents itself to new players. The first time they roll to wrestle with the other wolves and someone rolls Blood and is awkwardly isolated by their inability to embrace their inner wolf. Or the first time someone howls and the others must howl along with them. Or the first time someone’s hurt…but no spoilers about that.
Or maybe it’s just this rule right here: “You are now wolves. Describe your coat, your size, your scent and your voice.” That’s the very moment the tone is set in most games.
The form factor for the game is interesting and very cool! Can you tell me about it, and why you chose it?
Wolfspell, like everything that appears in Worlds Without Master, is of the sword and sorcery genre (or sword and sorcery adjacent, but one of the superpowers of this particular genre is its ability to seamlessly welcome adjacent works into the fold). In the 70s rock, prog, and early metal bands would spend long hours in the back of van or bus traveling from gig to gig. To fend off boredom, they would pick cheap paperbacks off the racks wherever the had to fuel up or stop for the night. This was the vector of infection for the sword and sorcery and fantasy genres of fiction into these genres of music. They would read tales of adventure, peril and strange magics, and regurgitate them in song. They would see the covers to these books, illustrated in imagined realism, and demand the same for their albums. Shortly thereafter tabletop roleplaying games followed a similar path, drawing on both sources for inspiration. We’re all spokes on the same wheel, and I wanted to acknowledge that.
Plus, how awesome would it be to show up at a con with a milk crate full of these puppies?
Another piece from Shel Kahn’s work on One Winter’s Due.
You’ve mentioned the struggles these characters face as they encounter inability to be wolf enough, and I wonder if you could talk a little about the parallel to that, or the opposition I guess. Do characters experience positive feelings more as they progress, finding pleasure or even joy in the experience? How does that happen?
When you revel in your wolfiness there’s an inherent reward of being able to explore the world through the mind and body of a different being. I mean, that’s why we’re all here, right? To roleplay as something else? The rules feed and reflect that by opening and restricting the paths before you. You act like a wolf, you gain Feral. Feral is the only real stat in the game. It is always added to your Wolf die. So the more Feral you gain, the better you get at rolling a Wolf result. And it feels good to cut loose at peak wolf! No stumbling over human concerns or anxieties. Embracing the wild and running with it! A wonderful way to build this Feral is to wrestle and groom with the pack, to celebrate the life of a wolf the way wolves do.
One of the central questions of this game involves rolling to become human again at the end of it all. Here all the Feral you’ve collected will count against you. Will you return to civilization, your quest complete, or will you be lost forever to the call of the wild?
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Hell yes! Thank you Epidiah for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading and that you’ll follow Wolfspell and then check it out on Kickstarter on January 21!
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Hi all! Today I have an interview with Michael “Karrius” Mazur about Beneath a Cursed Moon, a roleplaying game currently available on itch.io and DriveThruRPG. It sounds pretty cool, a game with investigation and monsters! I hope you enjoy what Michael’s got to say below!
Taco Ninja Adventure is a card & dice game for 2-6 players, and it’s team based! It works for ages 10 and up, and has a bunch of fun art of various Taco Ninjas.
When I asked the creators at Turn Sideways Games to tell me about the product, this is what they shared:
In November of 2016, my little brother William asked me for help with a board game he was working on. He called it “Taco Ninja Adventure” and it’s based on a comic book series that he and his friends wrote. William and I have been developing Taco Ninja Adventure together over the past 2 years and it’s been a lot of fun and great bonding experience. The little man has a knack for coming up with taco and ninja based puns. We’re so excited that the Kickstarter is finally live and we want to share what we’ve been working on!
Taco Ninja Adventure is a team based, card and dice game that takes 15-20min for 2-6 players. It’s definitely inspired by King of Tokyo and Magic the Gathering, and designed to be a light weight game that is approachable for kids and fun for adults. We also put a lot of time and effort into finding an artist that fit the style of the game. Sol Azpiroz (@azpimar) has created some really amazing Taco Ninja artwork and we’re so lucky to be working with her. We’d love for you to check out our Kickstarter page to see it for yourselves!
Rusty, who contacted me about the game, has created a game that appears pretty simple, and the theme is silly and fun. On the Kickstarter, the cards and materials all look really nice and they included a clear How to Play section right on the page, plus gif and video options for the rules. The rules are even available in Italian!
Some of the upcoming stretch goals include an embroidered carrying bag and wooden trackers, and there are social media goals for higher production values (like writing haikus!). It looks like this project is on the right track for success, now that it’s funded, but reaching higher production values as stretch goals is always awesome, and it looks like a fun product for a reasonable price! If you think playing taco-headed ninjas with a team of other players sounds like a fun time, check out the Kickstarter today!
P.S. – The creators of Taco Ninja Adventure have shared social media posts promoting Turn in thanks for my posting this Behold, Products! This post will not be charged for on Patreon.
Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/thoughty. Tell your friends!
Hi all! Today I have an interview with Ryan Mather on the game FlipTales, which is currently on Kickstarter! It sounds like a fun experience, so check out what Ryan had to say below!
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Tell me a little about FlipTales. What excites you about it?
So the basics are that FlipTales is a super-accessible roleplaying game for all ages. you play as magical creatures going on adventures that feel like a mix between Disney and Miyazaki. It’s for 4-6 players, takes 30-60 minutes, and ages 10+. What most excites me about it is how easy it is for new players to dig into. I loved roleplaying so much because it gave me a chance to try out different identities and personalities. How’s it feel to play a femme character? How’s it feel to be a bully? Or to be introverted? It’s hard to find experiences that facilitate this kind of identity exploration through play. I always felt like TTRPGS were really powerful experiences, but so hard to get started. The community is focusing on accessibility more and more, and this is my attempt to contribute to that conversation.
I’ve seen some results in playtesting that I’m really excited about. Kids and grownups are able to play on equal footing because the mechanics are simple and story-focused. I’ve obsessively redesigned the rules so that people who have never played an RPG before can learn the basics in as little as 5 minutes (depending on how fast they read). I’ve watched players play their first game in one session, then write their own adventure in the next. I love the idea that we can enable all players to be not just consumers but also creators of games and settings.
Lastly, I’m excited about the beautiful art that Caroline Brewer has made for the game. It’s gender-neutral and age-agnostic, so all players can find something they connect to.
One more thing! Thanks to some generous backers, I’m able to use funds from the campaign to pay creators from underrepresented backgrounds to make stories for FlipTales. These stories already look like they are going to be a ton of fun to play. It makes me really excited to see what other stories people will come up with
How is the game “super-accessible,” and what did you do during design to make it that way?
I come from an industrial design background, so I was initially introduced to accessibility through the lens of usability. One of my first assignments was to design a toy for blind children, which led to me visiting a blind school and learning more about their students. When you design something to be usable for people who have some mismatch with their environment, it ends up being better for everyone. I’m borrowing the word “mismatch” from Kat Holmes, who does a lot of work in tech accessibility. I think it’s helpful to reframe “accessibility” from something that people with disabilities experience, to something that all people experience when they bump into a mismatch with their environment. For example, a person with vision loss will have a hard time reading text, but so will someone who has to glance quickly at their phone, or someone who just walked into a restaurant on a winter day and their glasses have fogged up.
So from that background, there are a number of things I’ve baked into the game so that all players can have a good time. Zero industry jargon. Straightforward instructions, with lots of visuals. Simple coins, simple character cards. Abilities and characters that are designed to appeal to players of all backgrounds. A format that requires zero preparation so that you don’t need experience or bountiful free time to have a game—and adventures that are as easy to write as they are to play!
My hope is that all these features combine to make an experience that feels straightforward to everyone. Of course, no game is ever finished, so I’m constantly playtesting and gathering feedback. Players’ feedback has driven design changes in every element of the game from the creatures and abilities, to how many stats the characters have, the colors of the coins, and how characters level up. I’ve deleted 75% of the game’s content over the course of development in order to hit a level of simplicity that worked consistently. I’m particularly interested in working with sensitivity readers to uncover mismatches that I can’t see on my own.
What is play like in FlipTales? What do you do and how does it function structurally?
Play in FlipTales consists of two main phases. The prompt, and freestyle. The wiz reads out a prompt and then players “freestyle” by taking turns suggesting ideas for what they would like to do. When players have an idea for what they would like to do, they flip their strength, magic, or smarts coins, depending on what’s most relevant. If they use a special ability they get extra coins. It’s a lot of storytelling and decision-making interspersed with coin flips. Since the rules are very light, players often will come up with their own mechanics to suit something they want to do in the game, like assist each other or give a friend an upgrade.
Who are you bringing on to design additional stories, and what are some of the ideas on the table for play from the stories?
So far, Sharang Biswas and Clio Yun-su Davis have been confirmed as guest writers. Sharang’s story is set in a kingdom where only boys are allowed to learn magic—your goal is to help a small girls’ school survive a visit from the superintendent. In Clio’s story, players try to stop a floral arrangement from reaching the empress of a neighboring nation, because an incompetent florist accidentally arranged the flowers to convey a very insulting message that could start a war. I’m really excited about both and am looking forward to finding more 🙂 I’m in the process of confirming a third writer.
What kind of characters are players able to play in the game, and how do the stories and accessibility make their narrative richer?
The creatures you can play as are Humanoid (magic shapeshifting human), Wingoid (bird), Arboroid (tree), Geoid (rock), Sauroid (snake in a wheelchair with cute little arms), Insectoid (any bug), Nucleoid (a single cellular organism), and Crustaceanoid (any crustacean!). There are sixteen abilities ranging from Scout to Fungus Lord to Elementalist to Assassin. They’re all on the kickstarter page if you want to check em out.
The stories all invite players to world-build and flesh out their character according to what they care about. Since FlipTales stories are all one-shots, the depth of the characters isn’t going to be anywhere near an episodic game. The richness in the storytelling happens as players try different combinations of creatures and abilities and hopefully get their feet wet writing their own adventures.
As a side note, if anyone reading this is interested in writing a FlipTales adventure, or would like to nominate a creator to write a story, feel free to reach out! As a part of the kickstarter, I’m providing funds for creators from under-represented backgrounds to make stories. You can also always submit a story through the website, which I’ll playtest for free and help refine if you need.
Hi all, today I have an interview with Nick Zachariasen on METAL WORLD! It’s currently on DriveThru! I normally don’t include game pitches here, but the METAL WORLD pitch is so rad, I had to!
METAL WORLD takes the breadth of the heavy metal genre and throws it all into one game world. It doesn’t care how much sense something makes as long as it’s awesome. It has a demon-possessed lawman who rides a rocket-powered robot horse and carries a pair of 666-shooters. It has an undead ship made of the bones, sinews, and skin of the sailors it kills. Hell is a continent you can get guided tours of from the MegaDevil himself. The cherry on top? It has a volcano made of dragons, which shoots lava and more dragons when it erupts. The game system— including character building— are as loose as possible to allow your group to play the way you want.
With that in mind, check out Nick’s responses below! —
Boris Vallejo’s Kalevanpojat.
Tell me a little about METAL WORLD. What excites you about it?
The germ for the idea that became METAL WORLD came about when I looked at the Boris Vallejo painting Kalevanpojat (above). There’s this giant half-man/half-dragon thing posing like he’s trying to impress this only nominally-dressed woman who could not possibly be interested any less. She has an expression as if to say “Yeah, buddy, just get down the mountain, already. Three of whatever you are have passed through in the last half hour. They’re probably at the tavern.” I imagined what kind of world that must be for such a fantastic sight to leave her completely unfazed. Fast forward to after the premiere of Metalocalypse and I finally come up with the vague idea of a world of heavy metal in all its breadth. Of course, a couple weeks later I learn about Brütal Legend, which was sort of what I’d conceived spiritually but for the most part not even close aesthetically, although I did draw some inspiration from it all the same.
METAL WORLD, then, takes every kind of metal— whether basic, “classic” metal like Black Sabbath and Judas Priest or just about any subgenre you can think of like doom, black, pirate, or whatever— and throws it all into a blender so that you can have situations like a barbarian riding a nightmare steed charge a tank crewed by cyborgs and actually have a chance at winning! It’s everything Ronnie James Dio ever sang about. It’s anything you might see in a Dethklok video. It’s everything power metal sings about, with valiant heroes, fire, dragons, The Gods™, and all that. In short, METAL WORLD tries to bring everything awesome into one place without regard to piddly details like “Wait a minute, how does a region with this ecology sustain a tribe of human-hunting giants? They’d strip the population bare in months and then have no food source!”
METAL WORLD ignores pesky things like so-called “continuity” or “travel time” unless it’s important for the overall story you’re telling with your group, and I think that’s what excites me most about METAL WORLD. I’m not aware of anything quite like it, where any play style your group could want is not just possible but encouraged so long as everyone’s on board, and the game actually mechanically encourages it with a rule set that’s just vague enough to be accommodating but specific enough to be playable while also having fun with its readers to keep from taking itself too seriously.
What are the mechanics of METAL WORLD like and how do they relate to the theme?
The mechanics try to be simple and stripped-down. You have five main stats, each named for a subgenre of heavy metal: Death (your health), Power (strength and “persuasion”), Prog (intelligence, perceptiveness, and actual persuasion), Speed (agility, reflexes, and overall coordination), and Thrash (combat ability). I kept it that simple because A) it keeps creation easy and B) on the eventual character sheet I can put each one at the point of a pentagram.
The design philosophy is that instead of worrying about how far you can move in a round, exactly how long a round is, and that sort of thing you see some other games get bogged down with, METAL WORLD tries to focus in the in-game exploits of the characters and what they bring about in the world around them. It didn’t grow out of a wargame and god-of-your-choice help me if it grows into one. METAL WORLD’s main concern is giving people a setting that facilitates telling an interactive story with evocative imagery. That’s one reason I don’t have classes; they pigeon-hole characters into a predefined type without allowing for a player’s creativity to show through.
You can have a band (METAL WORLD’s term for an adventuring party) containing traditional sword-and-sorcery fantasy characters like elves, humans, dwarves, and so forth alongside robots, cyborgs, Atlanteans, and METAL WORLD’s gnomes, which are a race of mad geneticists called ge-nomes— essentially, they’re a race of Bioshock-style Splicers. The environment contains everything from fantasy’s quasi-medieval environment to near-ish future tech and references galore to metal, its inspirations, and occasional random other things. You need complete freedom to be able to have that kind of spread in characters and environment, so METAL WORLD focuses a lot on group consensus as to the tone of the game, which means the Metal Lord (the GM) has very wide latitude of what to allow or to rein in if it proves unbalancing.
Another important thing I think bears mentioning about that latitude is that the guiding metric of METAL WORLD is “as ______ as it needs to be.” Because everything worries more about the story than thinking about ensuring you have enough provisions for the trip or how much you can carry, let’s say an invading army approaches. Your story is about the epic battle that ensues like the battle of Helm’s Deep, so the band and NPCs have plenty of time to prepare defenses and have a grand old siege ahead of them. Now say you have a story in mind where the focus is more on evacuating those who can’t fight and making a stand to buy time. That same army leaving from the same place will take less time to get to the same destination. In METAL WORLD, space actually dilates or contracts depending on the needs of the narrative, though no character is ever aware of this— it’s just a cognitive blind spot created by reality itself. Similarly, a character can carry as much as (s)he reasonably could.
Then you also have Metal points, which reflect the favor of The Gods™ like Fate Points in d6 Star Wars or bennies in Savage Worlds. They serve two purposes. First, they fuel magic use for those who know how to do that that as well as other effects, like maybe the powers of a magical item. More generally, though, they serve to allow characters to (usually) unconsciously generate special game effects depending on what they want to accomplish. You get them by doing particularly impressive things or just because the Metal Lord feels like it.
What kind of player characters exist in the game, and what are they like?
As I said before, you can make pretty much anything you can think of within reason and even perhaps a bit beyond. Your band can have an axe-wielding barbarian who rides a nightmare steed, a mad scientist who raises and otherwise experiments on the dead, a lizard man martial artist, a shroom-addled shaman who drives a wicked van with amazing scenery painted on its side, and a dwarf who’s replaced both of his hands with chainsaws. Mind you, all of these are among the sample characters I’ve created— the dwarf is named Angus Mac Chainsaw Hands. You truly are bounded only by your imagination and what the Metal Lord will allow. I haven’t statted minotaurs for use as PCs, for example, but if you want to play one, work with your group’s Metal Lord and figure out how to run one so it’s balanced with the rest of your group’s characters. Maybe you want to play something I haven’t even provided for yet at all. Make it up and work it out! Again, I want people to be able to create the most awesome things they can imagine so everyone can have fun with it.
How do you handle topics like violence, sexual content, and so on in a game themed so wildly and intensely?
bviously, violence is going to be present given that heavy metal isn’t exactly known for diplomacy over tea and crumpets. I mean, Hell is a continent you can physically go to and get a guided tour of, possibly by the MegaDevil himself. As far as sexual content, I do make a note about that in the introduction when I mention the traditional scantily-clad women you’d see in the artwork of Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo & Julie Bell, and other fantasy staples who inspired much of METAL WORLD’s aesthetic. I tell people to play it up to their group’s taste. This game tries to encompass the breadth of metal in its entirety. Some of that will involve mature-audience content and if you end up playing those kind of things up to the point where they become ridiculous, that’s totally fine if you’re enjoying yourselves.
As you say, METAL WORLD is indeed wild and intense and I feel the form that takes should be subjective, determined by what you want out of it. It’s like how if you’re listening to metal and you want something dark and brooding you listen to doom metal while if you want something that fills you with a sort of positive energy, you’d listen to power metal. It’s clay in your hands. If you want to make that clay look like something you might not want your parents to see, what’s important is that it’s what you want, not what somebody else wants. When you get right down to it, that’s one of the classic themes of metal as a genre.
What is one of your favorite moments from playtesting or designing METAL WORLD so far, and why?
I honestly haven’t gotten to playtest METAL WORLD nearly as much as I’d like. I mean, having to work a full-time job will necessarily do that, especially when you have a family. That’s why I hope people run through some sessions on their own (via downloading METAL WORLD: The Rough Cut) and give me feedback so I know what makes sense to people who don’t already know what it’s supposed to mean.
That said, I guess I have a few— deviating from your question just a bit— favorite design moments. The first is when I was writing about skills. I mentioned meteorology and added a footnote (the work as a whole is peppered with them throughout as asides, whether for comedy or to clarify without disrupting flow) that the Meteorology skill also teaches you about space because that’s where meteors are. This game is at least 20% puns and that’s probably my worst/best. The one with the best result as far as the overall work is how I added a chapter between the world (the fourth) and the creatures (then the fifth) so that I could have Chapter 666: The Number of the Bestiary. That chapter lists some adventure hooks and an example of play, which I think it really needed. I think the ge-nomes are one of my most clever ideas, having come to me as one of those thoughts that pops into your head about 15 seconds or so after your head hits your pillow at night.
That said, though, I am aware of a moment from a friend of mine running a playtest session. Someone commented that METAL WORLD “reads like it was written by a madman with a law degree.” I don’t know what this person’s clue was, but apparently it caused “tear-inducing laughter” when my friend informed this person that it reads that way because it was written by a madman with a law degree!
Hi all! Today I’ve got an interview with Miguel Ángel Espinoza about Nahual, a game currently on Kickstarter. It sounds really fascinating, and I asked about some of the parts of the game that were new to me, like how your characters run a small business! Check out the answers below!
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Tell me a little about Nahual. What excites you about it?
I’m mainly excited about being able to bring a Mexican game into existence, to be able to present my culture in this hobby that I am passionate about. I discovered role-playing games in 1994, and almost 25 years later I’m writing a game of my own. I wish I could go back and tell me from the past this is what I’ll be doing. That he doesn’t actually need to be american or work on TSR to make it happen.
I’m also excited about being able to base the game on Edgar Clements works. He’s a very talented artist and also a very generous creator. The ideas he came up with for his graphic novel capture perfectly this complicated culture that we are, heir to a cultural clash that to this day still has repercussions. We are neither Spanish, nor Indigenous… we are mestizo. And Clement’s way to represent that fusion of folklore and myths, is brilliant. The first time I read his work I felt joyous envy, and thought that it was perfect for a Mexican RPG. So here I am, making it happen. Couldn’t be more excited.
What do players do in Nahual? What kind of characters do they play?
Players in Nahual play shapeshifting angel hunters. They inherited the power of the nahual, that allows them to transform into their totem animal and perform supernatural feats. But their knowledge is incomplete, because their ties to their ancestral indigenous culture were severed by the invading conquistadors and their armies of angels. So in present day struggle, they use this gifts to hunt down angels, to sell them as a commodity. They could be heroes or liberators, but instead all they manage to do is worry about putting food on the table, and live one day at a time.
You talk about being mestizo. How does that affect your design work in Nahual? How does it impact your role as a creator in regards to representing this story?
I’m not sure. All I know is that being mestizo, latino, gives me a certain point of view that has to do with the way I grew up. But it is not something I’m actively paying attention to, or trying to convey. I can see for example how I (and other Mexican players) connect to Edgar’s stories without much trouble, and how some English speaking audiences struggle to understand some aspects of those stories. There’s of course a cultural gap, it is just natural. So what I’m actually actively trying to do is build a bridge for those audiences, for them to cross that gap.
You ask how being mestizo impacts my role as creator, I don’t think it does in this particular case. Because these are our stories, I’m part of it and they are part of me. If I was writing a Euro-fantasy game, inspired by Tolkien and all its tropes, then I think me being mestizo would have an impact, I would be playing as the visitor team, a fish out of water. With Nahual I’m not, I’m the home team, I’m in my element.
I would love to hear more about the transformation, how it influences play, and the emotional context. How did you design a transformation that is progressive without becoming overpowered or confusing, and how do players react when they play this out in playtests?
The idea is that your character’s Totem Animal is really a reflection of your personality. So if you are bold and strong, and maybe violent, your animal will be a jaguar. If you’re sneaky, a bit of a trickster and a little carefree, your animal will be a possum. So, unlike in some classic shapeshifting tropes, when you transform in Nahual you are really becoming a heightened version of yourself, instead of something else.
The design process has been complicated, I had to find a way to convince players to transform—on my first iterations players were hesitant to do it, like they wanted to “save it” for the real moment, which may never comes. So I had to tweak my design and mechanics to not only enforce the transformation, but also tell characters this is something you’ll want to do, something cool, because the game is about that! However I still needed to represent this toll characters have to pay for not having complete knowledge of how this power works (that lost connection to their roots I’ve mentioned before), so I’ve tied the transformation to stress and traumas. To be honest though, I’m still playtesting this, looking for the right connection/combination between its parts to make it work best and be tied to the fiction.
About the progressive power of the transformation, it is inspired in Epyllion, functioning as the advancement system for the game. As with Epyllion ages, each stage of transformation has its own XP track and as you unlock advancements, you push thru to the next levels of transformation. So you get more powerful, but that only means the MC can now punch harder at you! Hahaha.
And as for player reactions, the transformation is my favorite part of the game, whenever each character transform for the first time I tell the player that for each person the feeling is different, and I ask them how for their character the perception of the world around them changes…and I always get awesome creative responses from players, and it helps them getting involved in the game. And what I love is that it is not really a mechanic is only players creating the fiction.
Tell me a little more about the changarro! How does it work, and how do players interact with it? Why do you feel it is important to Nahual?
When I first started working on the game I was trying to include almost everything Clement has on his comic books. And it was all over the place. So, when I got in touch with Mark Diaz Truman, from Magpie Games, he helped me realized I need to focus my design, to tighten it up and make it sharper. And it was a feeling I had already, he just put a name to it, and he called it “holding environment”. And what that means is, I need something to make the characters come together, and it is different for each game, depending on the type of fictions they tell. And for Nahual, it became clear to me I had to focus on the angelero trade, the hunting of angels, and the way to do it was to have the characters working together in a Changarro, were they team up to share the burdens of handling the business.
Once I decided that will be the focus of the game, the holding environment, I started to work on mechanics for how the dynamics of the changarro will be. And something was clear from the beginning, I wanted players to feel what it is like to try to keep a small business afloat to make a living, despite harsh circumstances. So the changarro mechanics are about that grind. About needing to take care of the business in a day to day basis, running out of product…so they’ll need to go hunting, and having a bunch of problems—for players to choose from—that will come knocking at their door. At first it sounds repetitive, but on all the play testing I’ve have the problems characters face are completely different, because they’re also tied to the character’s backstory and relationships between them and the barrio they live in.
So the changarro is the glue that keeps players together and that jumpstarts the action, and also is the engine that will avoid things to stagnate, because there’s always going to be product you’ll need to restock, neighbors that’ll stick their noses in, rivals that will try to take you out of business, unhappy clients, or a big company that wants to either buy you out or crush you.
I just wanted to do a brief post about Turn and identity, on this, our turning point to the second half of the Kickstarter. You can check out Turn’s Kickstarter at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/briecs/turn-a-tabletop-roleplaying-game. Content warning for discussion of mental health, depression, and mentions of binge drinking/alcoholism and suicidal ideation.
I want to talk about what it means to be two (or more) things in one person. I come at this from a couple of different axes, and some people have more. Mine are really tied to people’s perception for some of these, but others are truly just inherently who I am.
Let me try to separate them a little.
As far as perception, to many people, I’m a cis woman. In reality, I’m not. So I live with perceived-me as cis woman, and actual-me as not. As well, I’m not perceived as disabled, but in reality, I am. So I live as perceived-me and able, and actual-me as disabled. I also appear straight – I’m even in a perceived-straight relationship. But I’m not! I’m queer as hell. So, perceived-me and actual-me again at odds.
It goes deeper, I say, in a Morpheus voice.
I am actually both nonbinary and masculine. Simultaneously, most of the time, though in different amounts. This is big, and important. One of the biggest ones, though, is that I have bipolar disorder. Even when I am at the height of mania, my depression looms and can tug at me in moments when I’m sensitive, and vice versa. My mania (including hypomania) and depression, they’re a part of me, even when I’m incredibly well-medicated.
Around 2012, I entered into a mixed episode. (A slow slide.) This is when you’re kind of manic and depressed all at once! It is, shall we say, a bad time. It lasted years. Many of my readers knew me during this time period, through what I call The Dark Years, because I lost a lot of memories due to blackouts both from mania and from alcohol abuse. Not great.
However, I started working on Turn in 2013. This isn’t a coincidence. I don’t talk about this part of Turn very much because it’s still incredibly hard for me. I’ve been asked in a few interviews, and only went into it in detail relating to this specific subject on one, about why shapeshifters are great to tell stories about. There are tons of reasons – they’re fun, they can be used as a metaphor, they’re powerful and interesting. But shapeshifters – multiple identities in one body? I understand that, I live that.
From 2012 until a ways into 2015, I was what some people consider “crazy.” I was fighting with my mental illness, making tons of bad choices, but also continuing to grow my business, attending university, and so on. I was struggling between the intense, high, selfish, egotistical mania and the soul-sucking, exhausting, lonely, self-loathing depression. During all of this, I got to see that neither side – in me personally – existed without the other, that they fed into each other, interacted with each other, and that there were things I could do where both would work together, or where I could find a harmony. That eventual harmony did actually lead me to getting help, going on lithium, quitting binge drinking, and ending harmful relationships.
And there, you can see a burning light of hope.
I have always identified with shapeshifters, having a hidden identity of some kind with everyone most of my life. They are part of Turn, and are good to make stories about, because of what I said – they’re interesting, fun, powerful, and great metaphors for people to place upon themselves. But I would be lying if I didn’t say that the actual design of Turn wasn’t heavily influenced by my own conflicting identity.
I’ve had reason to think about it a lot over the Kickstarter, and while I personally struggle to find mental health support on Medicaid. The fear of falling back into those dark days is real, let me tell you. But, in thinking, I wanted to share that the design of shapeshifters in Turn, to have these different parts of their identity that they struggle between, that they must find balance within? That’s bred out of true hope.
Many people have different sides to them, and it’s hard to deal with it sometimes. When I think of when I was first conceiving the Struggles in Turn, the mechanics for how you resolve conflicts between your beast and human identities and their wants and needs when you take action, I thought of how every day when I was struggling with my mental health, I had to choose my consequences. Sometimes it meant I’d sacrifice face, sometimes I’d deal with physical fallout, and sometimes I’d have other worse consequences for whatever ridiculous shit I got up to that day. I couldn’t always predict them and sometimes I’d just end up with the whole mess (hello, 6-).
And it was also always about the drawbacks that my one part of me had pulling against the other. When I was more manic and just trying to slam down a conversation at a convention, my depressive side would push for me to say things that were self-deprecating. When I was a miserable mess and struggling from the edge of suicide, the mania would suggest self-destructive methods. It was kind of rough, honestly.
When I put these into Turn, though, I didn’t want all that bad shit coming with it. For me, I wanted shapeshifters to be something beautiful! I was okay with them having hard stuff they dealt with, but it wasn’t about either side of them being dark, or self-destructive, or harmful. They’re just both parts of the being with needs and wants that the shifters have to struggle to satisfy or meet, even if it’s hard, and the biggest aspect is that they’re just trying to show up the way everyone wants them to show up. That’s why exposure is a mechanic, because the real hard part of all of this is the world, not their identity. Shifters are good!
I want to talk more about shapeshifters being beautiful and good so I will soon, but this is getting a little long.
Basically, shapeshifters are whatever you want them to be in what they stand for or are a metaphor for. You can play them in a bunch of different ways! But the reason why their mechanics work the way they do is because I discovered through struggles with my bipolar disorder that these complex multi-faceted identities aren’t actually binary structures! Even my mania has some sadness, even my depression has some egotism. It’s not exactly a fun way to figure out how to design a game, but it’s a real one.
So the shapeshifters in Turn are complex. They are not all beast when they’re a beast, and they’re not all human when they’re a human. They’re a little bit of each, regardless of their form, in different amounts. And I thought about this intensely during throes of mania and depths of depression! So I can tell you with all honesty that there are no perfect metaphors. But I’ll tell you this: shapeshifters don’t have a special tweenie form like many shapeshifter versions do because I will never have a happy medium, and I had to find a way into the light without one. I think the story is stronger that way, and it’s a story I know how to tell.
If you liked reading about Turn and want to support it, the Kickstarter runs until November 30, so please consider backing it. If this resonated with you, please feel free to share your experiences with having a multi-faceted identity – you can even use the #turnrpg and #myturnID hashtags if you’d like. I know I’m not alone in being a person with many sides, and I appreciate the power of sharing our stories.
Until next time:
P.S. – If you’re a Patreon backer, let me know if you think I should charge for this post!
Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/thoughty. Tell your friends!
What is Bastion, both as a product and as your vision?
Bastion is a gumbo of a lot of different element I love. Portions of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, mixed with Glenn Cook’s Black Company, mashed with a bit of Gamma World, boiled down in a melange Micheal Moorcock’s phantasmagoric Eternal Champion worlds, sautéed in a bit of the Green Lantern Corp, and strained through a cullender of Charles R. Saunders’ Imaro, you get Bastion.
It’s a big fangasmic mess of inspirations.
The original intent was to do a straight vanilla fantasy game with all the standard fantasy tropes. I wanted to see if I could do it with a straight face. Halfway through the process, I couldn’t take it anymore. I like my D&D fantasy, but trying to replicate it started making veins pop out of the side of my head. I was dissatisfied with the elements I created, so I flipped the script and went in another direction.
I brought a few people on board to help flesh out my outlines, and they added their secret sauce here and there and what you have is Bastion as it is at the moment.
What moves you about Afrocentric themes and their application in Bastion?
Afrocentric elements pop up in all my work. GODSEND Agenda, ATLANTIS: The Second Age, and even in HELLAS to a small extent. What you get when I add elements of Afrocentrism is me. It’s me searching and exploring a lost piece of my identity as I try to learn about Africa. American school systems teach you almost nothing about Africa and only express ideas of an unrefined and strange land filled with primitive people. I know that’s not the case, and I wanted to illustrate that in the books I produce.
Africa is BIG, I mean, REALLY BIG. You can fit almost every continent on earth inside the body of Africa. What I offer isn’t a legitimate mirror of any one African culture. I’ve taken elements of West African cultures (Akan, Yoruba) and made a fantasy game based on those components. Much like Lord of the Rings is an amalgam of Western European history/myth, I’ve done the same with Bastion. I hope what small efforts I’ve made entice others to dive deeper into the rich and varied cultures. Bastion is only a surface level exploration of Afrocentrism, but it’s up to the reader to go deeper.
How did you decide what elements of sword and sorcery really would shine through in the game, and what design choices made them hit the mark?
I love fantasy and the genre of sword and sorcery. It’s a hot mess of debate about what makes a piece “sword and sorcery.” A lot of people stick close to R.E. Howards Conan, but many people fail to mention the mind-blowing work of Clark Ashton Smith. I love the strange and sublime horror of sword and sorcery fantasy. The pyrrhic victories of the heroes, and the changes that cause in their souls. The peculiar and bitter cost of power it puts on the hero.
I hope I’ve brought all those essentials to Bastion, but I guess that’s for the consumer to say.
Hey all, I have an interview today with Karen Twelves about Improv for Gamers, a new book being released through Evil Hat that includes workshops and exercises to help any roleplayer or GM become better at improv! These workshops, like the one offered at Big Bad Con this October, promote fun, low-pressure environments to try out new skills for GMs, larpers, roleplayers, and more! Check out Karen’s answers to my questions below!
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Tell me a little about Improv for Gamers. What excites you about it?
I’ve always been excited about giving people a practice space to try out this improv stuff they’ve been hearing so much about. I’ve been playing tabletop rpgs since high school, and when I took my first improv class back in 2008, I was stunned by the obvious skill overlap. And also surprised that there weren’t more improv classes for roleplayers, especially being taught outside of conventions. It’s been super fun and rewarding to teach the Improv for Gamers workshops and give people some ideas and tools they can take back to their games. But what I’m most excited about right now is coming out with this book, because it gives people a bunch of exercises they can just pick up and play with friends in their living room.
What are a few of the skills you’ve picked up in improv and cover in the book that serve you the most often in gaming?
In both improv and gaming, you need to pay attention to what your fellow players are contributing to the story. If you’re not listening to how the story is shaping around you, you’re going to have a hard time navigating through it–to mix metaphors, all your subsequent ideas will be off-key. Active listening is required in order to say “Yes, and” to your partner, which is the act of honoring someone’s ideas and building on them. (There’s more to unpack with “Yes, and” about it not being a blank check, and nobody is actually beholden to accept every offer, so I prefer phrasing it as “Consider yes, and.”) But to build off an idea, you need to have actually heard it first. This is just as important in a game that weaves a narrative between characters as it is in a fight sequence where you’d want to keep tabs on what everyone is doing on their turn. So the book has a lot of great exercises that specifically practice paying attention to and acknowledging your partner. You might copy someone’s movements, repeat what they said, add a line to a shared story, create a cast of characters, or communicate through eye contact. But at the heart of all collaborative storytelling, you need to be listening.
A skill that I really love is handling invisible objects. You may have imaginary items in a larp, and you can also embody your character a bit at the table. Maybe you just mime your character polishing their glasses, or drinking a coffee. It’s a lot of fun. The book contains exercises that practice holding and using invisible objects, and it’s something that I still practice a lot in my improv troupes. It definitely came in handy during a larp where my healer character was asked to remove an invisible spear from someone’s leg and patch up the wound, and we had zero props.
How do you make this content approachable for new people and people not into the gaming scenes that favor improv?
When I teach the workshops I always stress that I’m not expecting anybody to be actors. It’s a practice space, so things might feel weird or be a little rough and that’s okay. Nobody’s going to walk out thinking “Cool, I’m perfect at this now!” And I repeat that a lot in the book–that the focus isn’t to be perfect, or funny, or entertaining, but to just try stretching this one specific muscle that the exercise is highlighting. There’s only a few exercises that are actually “scenes,” the majority are group games, so there’s less pressure to perform. There’s also some things that speak to GMs, like identifying when to switch from one scene to another, or how to quickly come up with some specific voices so your NPCs sound different. And that thread of “listen to each other and make people feel included” runs throughout all of it, which is a life skill, not an improv skill. But you can practice it through some fun improv exercises!
What are some practices and behaviors in games that you think could be improved using improv, and how do you address them in your workshops and book?
There are games where it makes sense to be protective of your character, and there are games when you could be more reckless with them. I definitely wanted my Pathfinder fighter to make it into double-digit levels! But my Blades in the Dark whisper? That game grinds characters down by design. They’re supposed to get hurt, physically and emotionally. Character death is definitely on the table. And if I’m in a one-shot game, I’ve only got this one story with this character, so I’m definitely going to take more narrative risks because I’ve got nothing to lose. There are so many improv exercises where you’re encouraged to get your character into trouble, or play someone without a lot of power or status. I’m not saying that the best way to play is to play to lose, but it’s a style that works well with a lot of games. And if it’s a style that’s kind of new to someone, I want to give them the opportunity to get into that mindset, take some risks, and have a lot of fun doing it.
What are some ways improv skills help with different roles in game, like GMs and players, and different types of play, like larping and tabletop?
Like I mentioned earlier, GMs have the daunting task of making sure everyone has an equitable amount of time in the spotlight, so you want to have a good sense of when you can put a pin in one scene and switch over to another. Improvisors develop a similar sense of knowing when to cut a scene so it ends on the right note. And during a show, that’s a shared responsibility–much like in a GM-less game, everyone should be conscious of when it’s time to see what a different character is up to.
I would say that any skills regarding character development are useful both at the table and in larping. There are so many tabletop games that have a line right on the character sheet for a defining belief or worldview, and you may even get a mechanical reward for expressing that belief in play. Similarly, regardless of what style of improv you’re doing (fast-paced comedy, thoughtful drama, or something in-between), it’s important to identify what matters to your character. That’s going to color their decisions in a scene. It doesn’t have to be something grand like “Blame the carpenter, not the tools,” your defining value could be “I love trains!” and that’s still going to lead to some really cool interactions. And whenever you’re feeling lost and not sure what your character would do, be it improv or gaming, you can fall back on that touchstone for guidance.
— Awesome, thanks so much, Karen, for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Improv for Gamers today!
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Hi all, today I have an interview with Craig Campbell on Die Laughing, which is on Kickstarter right now! I hope you all enjoy reading what Craig has to say about this cinematic horror-comedy game in the responses below!
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Tell me a little about Die Laughing. What excites you about it?
Die Laughing is a short-play, GM-less RPG. Players portray characters in a horror-comedy movie and everyone’s going to die. It’s just a matter of when it happens and how funny you can make it. After your character is gone, you become a producer on the movie and continue to influence the story and the characters right up until the end.
I’m really stoked that Die Laughing finally came together. One of the problems with horror games where characters actually die, as opposed to “thriller/mood” type games, is, “what do I do after my character dies?” You can make a new character, play an NPC. What else? I’ve been working on this game off and on for over a decade. Every couple years I’d come back to the idea and try something different. Hitting on the “making a movie” angle finally made it gel for me. It came together pretty quickly over the past year or so, kind of in the background while working on other games. It’s a game that embodies horror and embraces that type of game experience, but with comedic elements and the “making a movie” idea to keep it from getting too heavy.
What were the inspirations for Die Laughing and how is the game the most similar and dissimilar to familiar materials?
I’m a big horror movie buff. This most recent iteration of the game, I hit on the idea of the game being about making a movie specifically, rather than just generally a horror story. That introduced a “director” role into gameplay and also a “producer” role that players could take on after their characters are dead. Making it a horror-comedy opened up the idea that it’s OKAY for your character to die…in fact, it’s kind of the point of the game. Your character is going to die and you’re going to make it funny and then you’re going to do this other cool thing for the rest of the game.
It’s sort of a hybrid of a traditional RPG and a story game like Fiasco. You have a character sheet with four traits and a few cool capabilities that sort of bend the rules. But there’s no GM. Instead, there’s an act/scene structure that generates random scenes that everyone roleplays to move the story forward. But these are just prompts. The “director” of each scene helps set the stage, but the players with characters in that scene propel everything. A dice mechanic resolves general success/failure of your character in the scene, rather than for every action. The game has a little bit of this and that from a lot of horror RPGs and a LOT of horror movies, all kind of bent and twisted with some humor.
How does Die Laughing work mechanically?
During each scene in Die Laughing, one of the characters is the lead character (and that changes from scene to scene). That character’s player decides who will be in the scene with their character. One of the players portrays the director, setting their character aside temporarily to help set up and guide the scene (that also changes from scene to scene). Everyone in the scene plays the scene out. Sometimes the monster attacks during the scene. Sometimes it doesn’t.
At the end of each scene, everyone with a character in the scene makes a trait check by rolling their dice pool to determine whether their character succeeds in the scene or not. Then everyone narrates that success or failure for their character, thus pushing the story forward. As the game goes along, your dice pool decreases based on the results of those trait checks. This decrease is a countdown to your character’s death. When you run out of dice, your character dies and you narrate their death.
In addition to the director and producer stuff, there’s a unique rule for each monster that influences your involvement in the game after your character is gone.
What kind of horrors do the players encounter in Die Laughing? How do you ensure players are having a good time and not encountering subject matter that makes them feel alienated or afraid in a not-fun way?
The narrative, relatively open nature of the game allows the players to basically take it as far as they want. The monster is defined for the game you’re playing, but that’s not to say there couldn’t be multiple monsters or that the monsters could mutate or…well, whatever you want. I’ve played games where the violence was cartoony. I’ve played games where there were gory descriptions of things.
That said, any game — horror games in particular — can go too far. That is addressed in the book, encouraging players to be clear in what they expect from the game. The simple version is presented as a “movie rating system.” Everyone agrees the game will be PG, PG-13, or R-rated and plays appropriately. The book also points out some common sense…if you even remotely THINK that a particular subject would make ANYONE uncomfortable or hurt them, just don’t do it. Finally, the book points out there are a variety of other safety tools, such as the X-card, and information on those can be found easily online. Pick the one that is most fitting to your group.
You mention special rules for monsters post-kicking-it. When you die, what happens?
This is a little “extra” that gives players whose characters are gone something to do. It varies from monster to monster. For example, with the Mad Slasher with Weird Weapons, when your character is dead, you get to describe the moment when your character’s corpse is found at an inopportune time, like you see in so many slasher movies when everything hits the fan at the end. There’s a trait check that happens there that can weaken the character finding the body. With the Sexy Vampire, your character doesn’t die, but rather gets turned into a sexy vampire. And you can insert them as an NPC into scenes throughout the rest of the game.
