What is Harder They Fall, both as a product and as your vision?
My pitch for HTF is that it brings the tension and melodrama of an end-of-movie blockbuster battle to your table, with zero prep and simple rules. As a group, you build up the conflict that’s bought these two sides together, decide the individual strengths, oaths and doubts of each champion, and draw the battlefield on a sheet of paper. As you play you’re raising the tension in a very real way by setting up dominoes to be toppled over, while the value of the domino decides what choice of questions you have to ask the other players. This last thing is crucial: you’re constantly letting the other players make statements about your character and their place in the fiction, which is what lets it cross the divide from board game to story game.
As a product, it’s an intentional move away from the lavish production values and long list of stretch goals my previous kickstarters have had. I still want it to be a product that’s nice to look at, of course, but I’m aiming for a 20 page pamphlet with everything you need to play in it. Part of my goal for this campaign was to see if there’s a space for small-scale, short-run projects that are less psychologically demanding on the creator than your traditional blockbuster RPG kickstarters!
How did you come up with the idea of using dominos, and how did you playtest them to ensure it has the impact (literally) that you’d like?
Weirdly enough, it came from a Domino’s ad – a domino with 3 pips, their name and the slogan We Did It – captioned with “That’s a 6-, no you didn’t”. I ran the numbers, and realised that drawing a domino from a pool and counting the pips is very similar to rolling 2d6 (more precisely, it’s actually 2(d7-1)). As someone who’s mainly designed in the Apocalypse World format, that was immediately exciting!
When it came to play testing, the main concern was the dimensions – it needed to possible, but not common, for your chain of dominoes to contact and knock down one of their foes’. In play testing, I needed to test how far apart you could place your dominoes to chain them together, how many dominoes in a set vs how many turns there are in a game, that sort of thing. The main point of feedback was that it all hinged upon the toppling of the dominoes – a string of bad draws when setting them up could lead to all sorts of misfortune for the player involved, but so long as knocking them over was satisfying it all worked out.
Why do you feel the story game aspects – shared narrative control, storytelling – are so important to Harder They Fall? How do they feel tied together with the mechanics?
Fundamentally, this game is intended to set up a conflict that feels like it could be the climax of a campaign that you just happen to have not played. Part of that is building the sense that this narrative is alive, that it exists between all of you, and the shared narrative control is a big part of that. The other reason the shared narrative is important is to make sure that everyone’s involved in everyone else’s turns. When you take action, you make the initial statement of what your combatant is doing, but it’s your opponents that get the final say on what impact that has on the world.
This is all based on the setup in D. Vincent Baker’s Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands, which goes all-in with Vincent’s trademark lists of specific questions. That’s where this most strongly ties into the mechanics: when you draw a low-value domino (i.e. totalling 8 or less) you’ll be forced to ask a question with bad implications for your fighter if you play it to boost their efforts. You can escape that by playing it in one of your opponent’s chains, but that both boosts them mechanically and lets them define more of your character’s doubts, fears and conflicted loyalties. What I really love about this is that players who are mechanically minded and play to win, and players who are there to tell a good story, tend to end up engaging with the system equally and telling a great story as a result.
The towering dominoes over this city is such a fun image 🙂
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Thanks so much to Jay for the interview! I hope you’ll all check out Harder They Fall in its last few days on Kickstarter!
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Hey all, check out the Twitter account @NonbinaryTTRPGM to find out more about Nonbinary Tabletop RPG Month and maybe hop on the Discord to play some games with other nonbinary people! As a nonbinary person, it’s important for me to see recognition of people like me. It’s also important to me to find spaces for nonbinary people to have fun and be safe! Hopefully you’ll find something like that here. 🙂
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What is Atisi, both as a product and as your vision?
Atisi is a work of love and research — I’ve put a good effort in mixing the various cultures depicted in the book with something a game designer should never forget: playability. The best reference book would be meaningless in a gaming table if the material there is not able to make the players excited about it and eager to play. In other words, I’ve hit the books about sub-Saharan people, sought real life for inspiration, but I’ve also considered what fiction tells about all those, directly and indirectly. So, if one wants a simple answer, Atisi could be compared to Conan in Stygia, but it’s (a lot) more than that.
Consider this point: people in Atisi are not the Caucasian Eurocentric types. This, for once, is a change of paradigm when compared to standard sword & sorcery. The original book (Atisi was published in Portuguese powered by Barbarians of Lemuria system) was even used as a tool for teaching children about ethnics/racial diversity, so I believe I transcended the original goal — I wanted a fun campaign setting to play, but I’ve also got a kind of bridge able to bring people together. So, as a campaign setting for Dungeon World, Atisi is a book that goals beyond describing the world: it gives the Game Master tools to create her own setting, as the multitude of questions (each point of interest on the map — big enough to include lots of blanks to be filled later — has its own set of questions, for example) will help the gaming table make it unique. This means the playbooks, the moves, the magic items, the monsters, the people, and the landscape add together to make this an exquisite sword & sorcery campaign setting. And as Atisi (one of the insular realms of the setting, and focus to this book) is inspired by a fantastic Egypt, you’ll surely find a lot of adventure inside the mysterious pyramids that dot the place.
It’s 280-pages full of wonders for the Game Master and the players, and we have 70% of the basic goal funded already (at the time of writing this). I’m pretty sure we’ll fund this crowdfunding project soon and aim toward the first stretch goal.
I’d love to hear about your research. What are some of the things you’ve researched that you’re really enjoying putting forward in the text? Did anything surprise you?
At first it’s difficult to leave the castles and crusades behind, the knights in shining armor, the dragons… As we are all the fruit of our past experiences — and we are usually surrounded by Medievalish and Eurocentric settings — I had to approach everything with a clean mind. A blank canvas, to be honest. I was already familiar with the writings of Robert Ervin Howard, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Poul Anderson, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Jessica Amanda Salmonson (to name a few), so my sword & sorcery background was sound. What I needed was to focus on the people and their mythology.
What we call mythology, however, is another people’s religion — and I’ve learned a lot about Kemetism (a revival of Ancient Egyptian religion) and African religion (there’s a shamanic vibe in those, but it’s a lot more than that) — and I needed to respect that. This led me to many monsters of legend particular to Sub-Saharan Africa and I’ve tried the best to convey their spirit (even if I used different names).
Learning about the people, the culture, was also delightful. There’s such a vast amount of details that, together, creates a wonderful tapestry. There’s honor. There’s mutual respect. There’s a constant fight for survival. And those reflect today, as those values were never lost.
Yet I’m no Historian. So I grabbed some of my research and talked to some scholars (I dare to call them such, as this makes my writing journey a little more epic, don’t you agree?) to give me a better perspective of everything I was learning at the time: History and Sociology professionals were my best friends during those research phases of my work.
And I’m glad I’ve learned so much. It gave me a better notion of who I am, as I believe we only know about us when we learn about others.
Sample image by Brazilian artist Paloma Diniz.
How do you envision the material you’ve researched and developed will integrate with Dungeon World? How will it work together mechanically?
Not everything was “translated” into rules. After all, Ancient Worlds: Atisi is a game, not a treaty on those cultures. And another important thing: this is a fantasy world, not an exact replica of the reality (albeit real world sometimes is more fantastic than we can conceive at first, there are limits on what is “gameable”). So the heroes, the Player Characters, are larger than life, with abilities that mimic the legends, not the ordinary people (and, as a side note, I need to thank David Guyll and Melissa Fisher for the help in designing the playbooks — they were fantastic people to work with). Monsters of ancient tales are part of the landscape, old stories are forged once again and are transformed in tidbits of the lore of the places of the kingdoms of the land…
This means magical items and monsters, while inspired by Egyptian mythology, have their own tags and moves, becoming familiar to those used to Dungeon World. Even each point of interest becomes an adventure in itself (like a proto-dungeon starter), but none are set on stone as the related questions the GM may ask are able to turn Atisi into a unique setting for each gaming table.
Of course, everything is already written and playtested: I’ve started this crowdfunding campaign with a set goal in mind and the backers are already receiving an “alpha” version of the book, so they can start playing right now, even before the campaign ends. This way, all mechanics are already interwoven with the setting, as one reinforces the other.
Hi y’all, I have an interview today with Joshua Fox, who you might recognize from Lovecraftesque, about Flotsam: Adrift Amongst the Stars, which is currently on Kickstarter! It seems like an interesting new game and Joshua’s track record with Lovecraftesque makes me excited to see what’s there! Let’s see what Joshua’s excited about:
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The art for Flotsam is so gorgeous!
Tell me a little about Flotsam: Adrift Amongst the Stars. What excites you about it?
Flotsam is a GMless game about outcasts, renegades and misfits living in the belly of a space station, in the shadow of a more prosperous society. It’s all about their everyday lives, interpersonal relationships and small scale drama, against a backdrop of poverty, social strife, gang conflict and supernatural weirdness. That’s the basics of the game. System-wise it’s kind of like a cross between Dream Askew and Hillfolk.
There’s two things about the game that excite me. First, I love stories about space and space stations, and I’m excited to offer a different take on the genre. Shows like Deep Space Nine and The Expanse give me all the genre trappings that push my buttons, but the bits I’m most curious about are the ordinary people lurking in the shadows, away from the epic political drama and space battles. What’s life like for a Belter union worker while grandiose plotting goes on? What does that Cardassian spy get up to when he’s not worrying about being assassinated? How do all those people relate to each other, and what little dramas take place in their lives? Flotsam answers those questions. It gives you an awesome science fiction setting, but zoomed in on the part of the story that usually gets skipped over.
The second thing – and if I was honest I’d have put this first, because it’s my personal quest – is that Flotsam is my take on how to do GMless gaming. It give you the best of both worlds. It lets you play one Primary character and explore their personal issues and relationships, really inhabit that character. It also lets you take the fullest possible part in building the setting and driving external threats forward, stuff I really enjoy as a GM. And of course I get the same back from my fellow players. That combination has given me some of my best gaming experiences. I’m particularly proud of how the system streamlines both sides of the game down to a level that makes it easy to juggle those two jobs.
Tell me a little about the core mechanics and how they relate to the setting. How does what players do mechanically translate to what happens in game?
Each player controls one Primary character and one Situation. A Situation is a constellation of threats and problems united by a theme, such as “the gangs” or “the spirits”. The setting is mostly encoded into the character Playbooks and Situation sheets, which are stacked with thematic details and setup questions to prime the game.
In any given moment of play, you’ll probably have two or more people playing their Primary character, and you’ll have at least one person playing their Situation. The interaction between those is pretty free-form most of the time, very much the “roleplaying is a conversation” approach. The game rules tell you when to step outside that freeform conversation, and that’s mostly mediated by decisions taken by people playing their Primary character.
If you want to inject some energy and threat into a scene that you’re in, you activate one of your character’s Weaknesses. Weaknesses can be external issues, like an enemy or rival, or they can be personal flaws, like the fact your character is arrogant and overconfident. When you activate a Weakness, you’re inviting the other players to make trouble for your character. In exchange, you get a Token which you can spend to power your Strengths. When you want to solve problems and put your character in the driving seat, you activate one of your character’s Strengths and spend a Token. Doing that gives you permission to narrate how your character competently does their thing, and blocks other characters from complicating what you do with new problems. And finally, if you keep your hands off those two mechanics, the Principles of the game encourage the other players to step back and let you have whatever interesting interaction is at the centre of the scene.
In other words, when you play your Primary character, you’re in control of pacing for the scene. Do you want to be put under pressure? Do you want to kick ass and take names? Do you want an intense, undisturbed conversation? You get to decide. With that said, you can’t just say and do whatever you like – if you ignore a problem in the fiction, or do something risky or challenging, that gives the other players permission to make trouble for you even though you didn’t activate a Weakness. But most of the time, the pacing of the scene is in your hands, with the default being the interpersonal interactions that the game is focused on.
The final piece of the puzzle is the XP system. This rewards you for having social and emotional interactions with another character, where you show them something of who you really are, and take the relationship out of its equilibrium. Every time you do that you earn Marks against your Relationship with that character, and when you accumulate enough Marks you rewrite the Relationship and improve your character. Together with those charged setup questions I mentioned before, this mechanic drives the game towards an overall focus on developing, evolving relationships.
This is such a pretty banner 🙂
How are you balancing these difficult concepts like poverty and gang conflict with the supernatural and sci fi elements? How do mechanics influence this?
Oh, wow. What a question! That’s a great question.
The game has a number of key themes, of which poverty is one, which are woven through the game. Each theme is threaded through the playbooks and the situations, in lots of small ways. So it’s difficult to disentangle how they’re handled, because it’s not like there’s a mechanic for poverty or something like that. But the game also brings each theme into sharper focus in individual playbooks and situations. For instance, for poverty, there’s a specific situation devoted to it, which means there will be one player whose job it is to think about how deprivation and want (and conversely wealth and privilege) impact on the community, ask questions about that and push that theme into the game. And there’s a particular playbook – the cast-off – that is all about what it’s like to live with economic precariousness, working different jobs to pay the bills.
The science fiction and supernatural elements are essentially handled in the same way. As to how they’re balanced with the more real-life serious elements – they’re not exactly distinct elements, if you see what I mean? The cast-off might be an ordinary human with mundane skills, or they could be an alien who has crash-landed on the station and is trying to parlay their unique skills to make a living down here. In one playtest game, my character was a trader up to his neck in debt, trying to stay afloat, but also happened to be a member of the race who built the station – and who had been driven off by humans. So his circumstances and the science fiction bits of the game intersected fairly heavily.
Now having said all that, it’s down to the players how they handle these themes. It’s totally possible for one group to de-emphasise a given theme, by choosing to pick up particular characters and situations. You drive the game in the direction you want to go. You could let the weirder elements come to the fore, or you could focus on the social problems of a place that lacks basic necessities, that happens to be on a space station. Either way the game’s principles push you to treat the characters like real people, to focus on their lives and relationships, and make them the centre of the story, not cool tech or weird phenomena.
Tell me about some of the Strengths and how they tie to the narrative and character development. What kind of Strengths can you have? What do they mean to the characters narratively?
Each Playbook has its own unique set of Strengths to choose from, which tie into the nature of the Playbook, and could be a skill, a resource, or a special ability. So if we take the Spider, who is a trader, criminal or spymaster, they can have straightforward abilities like “deception” which enables them to lie their way out of trouble; they can have resources like “connections (underworld)” which enable them to invent items or contacts that they need; and they can have interesting options that sort of sit between the two like “contingency plans” which allow them to invent a way out of a situation on the fly and say they planned it all along.
An example of weirder abilities are those of the Sybyl, who is a prophet with strange gifts; most of their Strengths have slightly cryptic names like “Dreamwalk” and “Thread of Fate”. The game doesn’t define what that means – we find out what your character can do in play, and in the process we might also find out what drawbacks or side effects those abilities come with.
Some of these Strengths link to the Playbook’s Weaknesses, like the Thunder, who may have a gang at their beck and call (which is a Strength) but that gang might also be liars and schemers (a Weakness). And one fun mechanic I haven’t yet mentioned is the way that Weaknesses can turn into Strengths; so perhaps your character is paranoid and vengeful, which starts out as a Weakness that can get them into trouble, but later on you might spend a character upgrade to switch that to a Strength. Maybe you rename it to “it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you”, or something like that, and now you can spend it to be ready when things go south – rather like the Spider’s contingency plans. So we see how a character can come to understand and master their own flaws.
I think the key thing about Strengths is that, as long as you have a Token, they’re pretty much a guaranteed get-out-of-jail-free card. So that encourages and enables players to dig themselves into deep trouble, knowing that ultimately their character can get out of it. So we can tell stories about characters whose backs are against the wall, without the fear of a couple of botched dice rolls ending the story there. Similarly, your fellow players are free to push as hard as they like because they know you’ve got that option. It really puts the direction of the story in your hands.
What are the most important stories you’ve told with Flotsam so far, and what more are you hoping to see from players? How has seeing the game played influenced the design?
I’ll tell you about a couple of my favourite stories so far.
In one of them, Oscar (a gang leader) and Deacon (a political activist) forged a tense and interesting relationship. Deacon was a demagogue, telling anyone who would listen that they needed to overthrow the oppressive government of the Above. Meanwhile, Oscar was worried that Deacon could light a powder keg under their community and bring the wrath of the Above down on their heads. This was complicated by a romantic relationship between Oscar’s daughter and one of Deacon’s followers. The story saw Oscar choosing between all these competing concerns to decide whether to throw his weight behind the resistance movement, even though it meant putting his people and his family in danger.
Another story included Barter, a trader struggling to avoid the attention of some very scary creditors, and Scarlet, a runaway who worked any job from appliance repair to stealing artifacts. Life kind of had both of them on the ropes, but they – and the other characters in that game – had each others’ backs, coming through for each other when their lives seemed right on the verge of falling apart. When Scarlet’s makeshift home got burned down by a gang, Barter gave her food and shelter. When Barter was running out of excuses not to pay his debts, Scarlet helped him make the trade that kept him afloat. So that was a great heartwarming story about people pulling together in the face of adversity.
I’ll come to what more I’d like to see from players in a moment, but in terms of how playtesting has influenced design, it’s kind of a truism but it’s really reinforced the need to simplify. The original draft game had a lot more moving parts and custom moves. But when people are juggling a main character and a situation, flipping between a GM-style role and playing their character, and keeping track of all these relationships, simplicity is absolutely key, to ensure nobody is overwhelmed. So I’ve stripped it back to the simplest set of rules I can without losing the things that make the game tick. At the same time, I’ve put a lot of work into refining how the system is taught, which again comes down to the fact that everyone has to know the rules. With Lovecraftesque we created a printable teaching guide to help people grok the system without everyone needing to read the rules, and that’s the same approach I’ve taken here.
Finally, what has amazed and delighted me about playing this game is how it seems to unlock people’s creativity. It gives you just enough structure and starting prompts to make it really easy to create intriguing, flawed relationships and beautiful, evocative settings, each reflecting the whole group’s ideas and input. So I guess I’m looking forward to seeing even more of that, seeing what different groups come up with. One thing I’m excited for is the stretch goals I’ve got lined up – these will provide some pre-written setting material and charged relationships, and each puts a very different spin on the game, so I’m eager to see how people use that at the table.
I love the styling of the uniforms!
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Awesome! Thank you so much to Joshua for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Flotsam: Adrift Amongst the Stars on Kickstarter! Make sure to share the post so your friends can learn about it too!
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The Behind the Masc Zine Kickstarter is LIVE! This project is run by non-cis masculine creators and we’re making Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts playbooks, rich backgrounds for D&D characters, and some lovely art, too! Please check it out – we’ve got some awesome creators working on re-imaginings of masculinity!
This is my favorite of the images that Luka sent me for the post. It just punched into my heart somehow.
Tell me a little about the UVG. What excites you about it?
It says on the tin: an rpg sandbox inspired by psychedelic heavy metal, the Dying Earth genre, and Oregon Trail games.
But let’s break that down a bit.
You know Shelly’s Ozymandias, right? That sense of awe at a deep, vast time.
Then you’ve got the journeys of Odysseus or Xuanzang. That sense of wonder at an epic, vast space.
It’s all captured right there, in The Hobbit. The journey there and back again, through the bones of fallen civilizations. That stuff is exciting as all get out. Put on some slow, heavy music, crack open one of those stories, and you’re transported.
When I got into D&D – this fantasy that promises infinite worlds beyond time – I wanted that. I wanted wonder and awe. Instead, I got hexcrawls. Six mile hexes. Imagine running a hexcrawl of the Santiago de Compostella, say the Camino del Norte. That’s 800 km, or about 80 of those damned hexes. I tried to make something epic, but instead I got a slog.
So, I started tinkering with the format, with the goal of making these massive, awesome journeys feasible within my favorite role-playing game. At the completely mechanical level, I mixed a pointcrawl with the Oregon Trail to create tools a referee and players can use to experience of exploration and alien environments. So, you could say, it’s a caravan simulator.
Rules-wise it’s simple enough – I built on a stripped-down 5E D&D chassis, because that’s what I like, and it can slot into pretty much any D&D adjacent game with ease.
Content-wise, it’s now 80% done at a wee bit over 50k words and 25 major locations that take a caravan across six timezones on a three-month journey into a vast land of wizard cats, body-hopping spirits, multi-bodied abmortals, biomechanical monsters, mountains of bone, floating islands, crystal intelligences, and possibly the end of the world.
That was a little bit about the UVG, as for what excites me: I get to draw and paint and write and share this world of limitless possibility inspired by my favorite pastimes – and here’s the best part – over a hundred people care enough that they put down actual money where their likes are. This is intensely affirming for me as an artist.
I mean, come on – I write a world that is a literal rainbow of different colored lands, where shamans ride into the sky on chariots of fire from the tops of neon ziggurats and gunslingers possess their enemies with the bullets they shoot. It’s mad, and metal, and colorful. m/
The UVG cover update. I love the vivid brights against the darkness.
The setting looks truly psychedelic! When you’re putting the setting, art, and mechanics together, what about that colorful vibe is most important to the stories told in UVG?
I assume you’re asking, which is the most important to the stories that come out of the game – the setting, the art, or the mechanics?
First let’s clear up element zero: the players (and I always count the referee as a player unless otherwise specified) should not be assholes (is that getting beeped out?).
The referee, especially, shouldn’t be adversarial or invested in a given story or outcome. Their role isn’t to defeat the heroes, or tell the story of their own world, but to facilitate a weird and wonderful trip for the whole group (and yes, the acid pun is on purpose). Of course, dice and danger should slaughter individual characters mercilessly, but the referee should be impartial and all the random tables are there to also ensure the referee is unknowing – an unreliable guide, who simply doesn’t know in advance what is around the next hill.
Ok, but beyond that – it’s definitely art first, setting second, mechanics third. We’re human – visual monkeys – so a picture, whether painted in words or ink, is what grabs us.
Yes, you have giant walking beasts, yes, you have biomechanical horrors, yes, you have radiation ghosts. The art draws the players in and encourages them to imagine stuff that’s vivid and weird.
The setting itself is a layer cake of kitchen sinks, kitsch, cultural references, and random tables. That’s to drive home the high weirdness and possibilities — it’s not just about 14 types of polearm, but about roleplaying a wizard polymorphed into a lettuce being attacked by a dappled bunny rabbit (true rp story).
The last part are the mechanics. Frankly, the precise numbers are never all that important in a role-playing game — yes, a certain granularity and level of detail is fun. Having a +2 bonus or a +5 bonus feels different. But at the end of the day, dice, tables, and random effects are there to remove predictability (I’m repeating myself).
So, what do the mechanics do in the UVG? They make long overland voyages reasonably playable and work to remind the players that their little caravan is alone in a vast, mind-boggling, huge realm … and that when things go wrong, they will have to eat their pack animals and leave their loot behind.
This is fascinating!
How did you develop the setting? Did you use media references, have you cycled through ideas? I’m curious about your process!
For years now I’ve been moving away from the idea of the referee as some all-knowing ‘world master’ or ‘game master’ who controls the game world.
The UVG started life as a remote and inaccessible region in a campaign I ran and co-created with a group of players, the Golden Goats, over a couple of years. That game ran entirely in the Rainbowlands, which became the ‘civilized’ launching point for the journey into the UVG.
We built the Rainbowlands collaboratively, with me as referee challenging my players to build it fast and loose at our first session, and then we progressively fleshed it out as new elements became relevant.
Please, don’t imagine this involved the writing of any kind of game fiction or prep outside of the session. We got together, unfurled a sheet of paper, scrawled on it with pencils, dribbled cheese and grease on it as we ate, and stuck post-its on the edges once we ran out of space. This became a living, and loose, document of the world.
After I moved away that campaign ended and I started up my patreon page to encourage myself to draw and write (that motivation and people voting with their wallets thing again). I flailed around for several months, before I figured out how to mix writing and art in a single package, and then … I held a vote.
I presented three or four options — existing worlds or mini-settings I had ready to write. The patrons chose the UVG and so the UVG it was. Patron preference substituted for a die roll to determine which world I fleshed out.
It turned out to be the best possible choice. Obviously I enjoyed and knew the world and it reminded me of fun times, but it was an especially good challenge, because the seed of the world was not just my imagination, but the collective creativity of a group of people who became friends through role-play.
For example, the sandbox starts with the magical mind-controlling cats in the Violet City. Trust me, that was not something I would have used without improv world-building!
As to my day-to-day creative process; well, it’s pretty simple. I get up in the morning, open up a word processor and write.
Of course, I slide back and forth through the text, revise and edit, but it’s essentially just me and the keyboard. I don’t refer to specific media or prior art (aside from what marinates in my head), but I do often refer to references on geology, biology, and other sciences, to harvest real-world, tactile details. It sounds better to say a portal is made of flaking schist, and sometimes you’ll play with a geologist, and they’ll take advantage of the effect of schistosity on rock masses in support columns.
The other thing that has a pretty large influence is some of the music I listen to. Genres and subgenres like psychedelia, space rock, stoner rock, and doom metal. I wrap all this up and call it “psychedelic metal”, to the dismay of some heavy metal music conservatives. I rarely refer to songs or albums directly, but I try to evoke the mood and feel of these genres — summed up perfectly by that chorus line from Truckin’ by the Grateful Dead
“Lately it occurs to me What a long strange trip it’s been.”
As for the art, well, sometimes a scene comes before the text, sometimes after. Usually after. And yes, I’m inspired by my favorite artists: Moebius, Frazetta, Corbusier, Pratt … well, another long story. Let’s say I’ll make a post on artists and music I connect with the UVG at some point. After another strange journey.
The bright yellow here just really grabbed my eye. I love the details and the rough edges!
How did you make UVG look so intense? What techniques did you use?
You mean the art? I use a mix of digital and traditional media — no surprises there, since every piece has to pass through processing before going into layout.
Most of the pieces starts as a blue pencil or graphite sketch, followed by inking. For inking I use a whole series of tools, depending on my mood and the mood I’m going for with the piece. Pens, gel pens, felt nib pens, markers, brush pens, and various regular brushes.
The contrasts are key here, between white space and figure, between thin lines and thick lines, between detail and emptiness, between light and dark. That’s all intensity is, really – contrast dialed up.
After I have the piece inked I ‘digitize’ it — which is a fancy way of saying I take a photo or a scan, bring it into Affinity Photo or Photoshop and roughly clean it up – remove vignettes, even out the lighting, drop all the colors, and ramp up the contrast to get rid of the pencils (more or less).
For the digital colors, I try to stay with the hand-drawn mood of my lines – so rough brushes, fast strokes, limited palette, stark contrasts. It’s a bit different when I work with water colors, poster colors, or colored inks – since I do the coloring at the same time as the inking. But, that’s about all there is to it.
don’t go for polished linework and perfect lines — I’ve become bored with the hyper-polished art styles that are so prevalent in fantasy and comics these days (gradient fills are something I particularly detest). I want it to keep that hand-drawn feel.
As for … how to get the artwork looking intense? You think it’s intense? I keep thinking it’s not there yet – I want it starker and better, but I estimate I’ve another 3–4 years of practice ahead of me before I reach the precise mood and style I want these days.
I find this exceptionally pretty because it reminds me of the desert, one of my favorite places in the world. The colors and style are very evocative!
What would you like to try on your next project, keeping in mind your experiences on UVG? What have you learned from it?
The next project? Or projects?
Overall, I’ve learned I need to be more uncompromising. I need to be tighter with my writing, more minimalist with my rules, richer with my content, less restrained with my art.
I’m going to try harder to explode the idea of pre-built, whole, unbreakable, static units: the setting, the character. I see this dominant approach in rpgs of all colors that tries to overdetermine every single aspect of every character and setting.
Characters and settings are built up, layer by layer, into these lovingly crafted, optimized, perfect bundles projecting the hopes and dreams of their players. But when I look at the great stories, from the Mahabharata to the Forever War, success is followed by failure, loss is the seed of victory. The arcs are dialectical, and sustain a creative tension.
Many of the players I game with love to test both their worlds and their characters to the breaking point and beyond. That moment, when a hero dives into the gullet of a leviathan with nothing but a sword, ready to die – that is epic right there. The player should be rewarded! Instead, the whole table groans. If he dies, they’re going to have to wait thirty minutes (or more!) for the player to build a new character.
At my game table, there is no wait. The building of the new character is a game – often collective – with input from all the players, and a lot of random rolls, long odds and weird effects. I want to bring that to other tables, other referees, other players. The deaths and failures of characters, villages, kingdoms, worlds, should be opportunities for fun, weird games.
So … I guess that’s the thread running through the Necropolis (working project title), the Voyages of the Black Obelisk (working project title), and Sixty-Six Heroes (working project title): life out of death.
Huh. That’s a simpler theme than I expected when I started writing this answer.
This is my second favorite of the images Luka shared – the calm, muted landscape with the bright, vivid rainbow is a great juxtaposition.
I have an interview today with Taylor Smith on Spell: The RPG which is going up for purchase after a successful Kickstarter! Check out what Taylor has to say about this clever magic RPG!
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I love the colorful cover by Nathalie Fourdraine!
Tell me a little about Spell: The RPG. What excites you about it?
Spell: The RPG is a little bit of everything I love about making games. At it’s most simple, it’s a tabletop roleplaying game that uses a handful of six-sided dice and letter tiles; players can resolve actions with simple rolls or they can create magic by spelling out what they want to cast with the letters. So, it has a neat gameplay gimmick—and I’ve loved gimmicks since Mouse Trap and the Jumanji board game’s red filter reader—and it’s easy to teach and learn…and its name is a pun. It was really important for me to encourage creativity in play for Spell and I think that’s what I’m most proud of.
What’s really been exciting about Spell: The RPG for me is its potential, both for players and myself. I’m so happy to say that Spell has been quite a few people’s first ever tabletop game and has changed a few minds about the hobby. I’m also regularly very pleasantly surprised by things I’ve seen players do with the system, either in their interpretation of the rules or when they hack and mod it for their own play groups. And then there’s the potential of what it represents for me, as a product: I’m publishing Spellbook Vol. 1 alongside Spell: The RPG, which contains five campaigns written by me and illustrated by five fantastic artists; Spellbook Vol. 2 will have another set of campaigns, but written by other creators. I’m so excited to see creators I personally admire telling stories with Spell that I never could’ve told.
What was the inspiration for the clever main mechanic, and how does it work when someone decides to cast a spell?
About five years ago, I was co-running a larp and only tinkering with game mechanics at the time. After a rousing game of Scrabble, I got it stuck in my head to make an RPG using Scrabble tiles. The idea percolated, incomplete, until I was working on a piece of someone else’s game—a system meant to represent basic human motivations. That mechanic, which would evolve into the Impulses, wasn’t used for that other game, so I recycled it as a core game engine; I remembered the letter tiles and then plugged these two orphaned mechanics together.
The way these pieces work are complementary: basic tasks are accomplished with the twelve Impulses, which are motivation-oriented stats; players roll a number of six-sided dice equal to the Impulse they’d like to act on to accomplish a goal (to get through a locked door, maybe use Daring to burst in spells blazing, Force to break the door down, Reason to think through how the door might be dismantled, Style to make the best entrance, or Calm to just knock) and the results are compared against a difficulty.
To cast a spell, the player states their goal, rolls an Impulse, sums the results, and then draws that many random letter tiles. As the player tries to spell a word with the tiles, the character is sifting through glyphs of the universal language to rearrange reality. If a word is spelled (and adequately justified) the spell is successfully cast. If the spell is in conflict with someone else, like a baddie, they get a chance to defend, so there’s a fairness of rolled stats vs rolled stats with modifiers for how fitting the spell is for the situation. Players can spend Potential points in the moment to save spells they like and then reuse them later without having to spell them over again. There’s no “mana” or “slots,” so characters always have access to new, strange magic, as well as their own repertoire of custom spells they build over time.
A collection of the tiles used for “casting” in Spell!
What are the campaigns like – adventures, mysteries, etc.? How did you create unique and interesting campaigns?
Spell: The RPG is functionally “setting neutral,” meaning it can be played in any world in any era, so I’ve also included Spellbook Vol. 1, which is a collection of five campaign supplements. I tried to represent a variety of options for how play could look and invited players to hack and modify the game as they’d like for their own games. For example, Magic Moon Warrior is a monster-fighting magic girl adventure to the moon and includes some modified rules for transformation spells; Wakeful in Reverie has rules for only being able to use spells while lucid dreaming, as the story straddles the line of waking and sleep; Godqueen, which can be played as a GM-all/any campaign, has the players in the role of a pantheon guiding a civilization throughout history. Spell can support a serious ongoing campaign with longterm character growth and story progression or provide the minimum necessary structure for an absolutely wacky one-shot.
I believe in players’ ability to invent and create, so instead of providing a definitive lore, I wanted to make tools players could build their own world and stories with. Spell is written with goals of creativity and potential in mind, so even during the most daunting campaigns, there is agency in the ability for players to create their own magic. There’s also always an element of physical play involved—the actual rearranging of letters—which I think helps players feel collaborative and imaginative. The name of the game is literally a pun, so humor is absolutely welcome. Maybe a player wants a powerful spell to extinguish a raging inferno and while looking at their letters, they realize they can spell “cats.” The group can share a laugh, maybe a welcome reprieve from the intense situation, as they imagine a horde of kitty firefighters; they could even discuss this option in character! Maybe they go with that one or they spell something else, diving back into the action, but that moment of silliness and play still happens.
The characters on this cover already gained my interest!
Tell me about Impulses. What do they mean to the characters, and how are they set up – default values, gained over time, etc.?
Impulses are goal-oriented stats that both provide the math for rolls to be made, as well as help shape the character’s personality and methodology. The twelve Impulses are: Calm, Daring, Feeling, Focus, Force, Grit, Hope, Reason, Renown, Scheme, Style, and Trust. The player assigns twelve points between them at character creation; some will likely start at zero, but that doesn’t mean the character doesn’t experience that Impulse, they just can’t rely on it to inspire action. For example, a character with zero Calm is still capable of being calm, they just can’t pull on that part of themselves enough to effectively diffuse a chaotic situation, but maybe they use Grit to weather it. Characters gain Potential points, which are like experience, but you get them at the start of a session and you can spend them in the moment; these points are used to both keep spells and to increase Impulses.
Impulses are important to me, especially in trying to make them intuitive. While a player is assigning points to their character sheet, they have to think both about what the character can do, but also what the character is like, how they view the world, and how they meet their challenges. By using more common words, the idea is that a player could say something like, “My character just really hopes this is going to work out,” so that means they’re using Hope. Impulses also represent fields of knowledge from their past experiences related to that Impulse. For another example, if a character is Daring and skydiving is their main outlet for it, they’ll have the skills and experience associated with skydiving; if their thrill is on the stage, they’d have skills and experience related to their performances. The goal is, after filling in Impulses, the player has a holistic character with a lot of potential for inferred experiences and abilities.
These characters in this illustration by Christina Gardner look so fun!
How do you think the narrative control players have in the game will support a healthy play environment? What sort of supportive tools for the narrative are you including or recommending to go along with Spell: The RPG, since it’s such a freely flowing game?
I describe Spell: The RPG, in the book, as “light-hearted” and encourage players to use a setting that’s supportive and thinks magic is neat, though there are notes about more grimdark interpretations—with disclaimers about consent for those themes ahead of time. With that setting as a backdrop, it’s been my experience that the collaborative, creative, and just a bit silly process of rearranging letters, especially physical tiles, really helps the game feel like “play.” The party works together, but so too do the players in a very tactile way; it creates an environment of everyone wanting everyone else to succeed, not just be the best or coolest individual.
In addition to regular comments throughout the rules and settings, like “this can be heavy, so make sure to talk about it first,” the Game Moderator section (I’m using “moderator” instead of “master” because I believe a GM is a facilitator and a player, not a tyrant in a gross power dynamic) includes steps for conflict resolution, a summary of the lines and veils system, and a summary of your own Script Change system. These tools are super important to me and I’ve been using them in my own games. While Spell: The RPG is outwardly positive, it’s perfectly capable of including many, very different themes and content. Even simply the opportunity to spell swear words or slurs from random letters can disrupt the game for players, so guidance on these elements is also included. The rules also make specific mention that characters, as adventurers, are not at all limited in their gender, ethnicity, or background. Additionally, there’s a note on disabilities:
There are no mechanical “flaws” designed for Spell: The RPG. Impulses represent a character’s motivation, so no disability will make them less capable of adventure. The respectful inclusion of physical and mental disabilities as roleplaying cues or context for actions is certainly encouraged, but there are no one-size-fits-all modifiers to apply.
This intention is also reflected in the cover art (by Nathalie Fourdraine), which prominently features a variety of body types, gender and cultural representation, and the inclusion of a character with a hearing aid and a character with an athletic prosthetic leg. For the all the interior art of Spellbook Vol. 1, finding Own Voices illustrators was key and an open discussion of diversity in the characters was vital. My hope is to have Spell create a comfortable and inclusive foundation that players can play within—whatever those games may be—and feel like that foundation supports them, their identity, and their goals for play.
As a final note, I’d like to include that I love hearing from players, their experiences, and their feedback. I try to stay as open and accessible as possible myself. My contact info is included in the books, so both positive and negative comments will be heard.
I love the cute characters here by Leigh Luna!
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Thank you so much, Taylor, for the great interview! I hope you all enjoyed learning about Spell: the RPG and will check out the newly released materials when they come out! In the meantime, check out Taylor’s new work on Drip!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
Hi all! Today I’ve got some answers from Misha Bushyager, Eloy Lasanta, and Jerry D. Grayson of New Agenda Publishing on what they’re working on, what they want to do, and what New Agenda Publishing means to them. They released a quick start this week for Orun and I wanted to highlight them while I could!
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Tell me a little about New Agenda Publishing. What excites you about it?
Misha Bushyager
Misha: For me it was a chance to be the change I wanted to see. Too often when women or PoC or queer people ask for diversity, we get told to make our own thing if we want to see it, so this is us doing that, specifically calling out that it’s what we’re doing.
Eloy Lasanta
Eloy: My answer is pretty much the same. I love to create games and stories, but we are using New Agenda as more than just another game company. We have a platform through which to help new voices, many of which are from marginalized communities really tell their own stories, ones very different from what’s already out there. I wanna be a part of that.
Jerry Grayson.
Jerry: Being marginalized is the same as being invisible. Being invisible makes you easily discarded or trivialized. I’ve always been told I can have a seat at the hobby table, but it’s difficult when there is no chair. My agenda is to help provide enough chairs at the table for everyone. I’ve found my place, I’ve hit my stride, and I’ve achieved a slight amount of success. I want to play all that forward and help anyone, doesn’t matter color, creed, or orientation find a spot in the hobby. I want everyone to feel welcome and comfortable in their skin.
What excites me about New Agenda Publishing? The chance to amplify and execute ideas I believe in. To show that so-called minorities have just as much to offer to the hobby and industry as anyone else. To prove that varied backgrounds bring diverse ideas to the table and create something more significant than the individual creators. I’m excited to share a byline or credit with people of different colors and genders that want to make games.
What are the core goals of New Agenda? What is your mission?
Our core goals are to help designers from underrepresented populations successfully create games. This to us means more than just writing them. We want them to be able to find artists, and other writers and editors and distributors. We want to mentor people on both the creative side of games, but also the business side. We want to show them how to market, how to run a Kickstarter, how to work with a printer, all the nuts and bolts that get their games into the hands of players. Right now, we’re putting together all the foundations and structure for us to be able to do this.
How are you finding appropriate projects to publish and what are your criteria?
We decided early on that the first thing we did should be a flagship project that showed we could work together and that highlighted each of our strengths. We’re three very different people, all creative but with different backgrounds and skill sets. After we each separately came up with a list of ideas we narrowed it down to the couple of things we had in common and what is now call Orun is what emerged.
Going forward, we plan to put out a call for designers interested in either publishing mentorship or contributing to one of our existing properties. We’re refining the criteria but at the moment it’s: a new designer (one that hasn’t published a game before, contest entries don’t count) with a concrete idea of what they want to produce, and the follow through to help make it a reality That belongs to one or more of the following categories Person of Color Female or Non-binary Trans* Queer
The Orun core book cover.
What oversight will you have of products your publish to make sure they meet your standards? How will you handle conflicts?
The great part about this new venture is that we all have experience in what we’re doing. We all have quite a few projects under our belts, but now we’re putting our collective abilities together to make something greater than the whole. If you’ve checked out any of our projects in the past, you’ll see that we already have incredibly high standards for our products so sticking to that is key.
As for conflicts, I think the thing to understand is that we certainly didn’t jump into New Agenda Publishing lightly. It is a company founded on mutual respect for each other opinions and skills, and we’ve already shown that we can handle conflicts internally with communication. We all come from different gaming backgrounds so we already knew we wouldn’t agree on every matter, but we have learned to find middle ground that pleases everyone on a few occasions. Other times, we’ll defer to the person most experienced or most excited about a particular concept. Conflicts are key to learning how you’ll work together, and thus far, I’m excited!
If you wouldn’t mind, what are each of your personal goals for New Agenda Publishing, both near and far reaching?
Misha: Near term I want to have a successful launch of Orun to prove we can take a project from soup to nuts and still want to work together. We’re three big personalities but so far we’ve meshed well and I can’t wait to see what else come out of our collaboration. Longer term, I want us to become a place where people aren’t afraid to pitch us their ideas, trusting us to help them nurture their ideas to completion, and hopefully success.
Eloy: I’m never one to build go small. I speak my mind, I push myself creatively, and I try to bring others along and make sure others are doing the same. With New Agenda, I see the next step in my own personal goals of advocating and encourage the industry to continue to grow and evolve. Specifically, I see New Agenda Publishing becoming one of the few big RPG companies within the next few years. We’re starting small but our plan is to surge with activity as soon as everything is off the ground. Oh man, I really can’t wait!
Jerry: Near – I want to make games that bring everyone to the table. My Questing Beast is making something so excellent and inclusive that everyone wants to participate. To do this, I need the best and the brightest creative talents out there, and I believe many are not yet discovered. I can’t do this alone, I don’t want to do this alone, and I refuse to do this alone. The well is a lot deeper than any of us can imagine and the world is full of people that want to create and play the game. I want to touch them all.
Far-Reaching – I want to build a community that’s inclusive, sprawling and informed. For the longest time, many in the community have felt left out, underserved, and disenfranchised. The hobby community is like a huge quilt made up of many colors, textures, and points of origin. I want the community I play in to reflect that. I’m not one monolithic culture, and the hobby community isn’t either. Let’s celebrate what makes us different in a positive way. Ultimately, I want us all under that quilt snuggling and keeping warm together.
I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum about their Kickstarter project, Dream Askew // Dream Apart, two games about community and belonging as marginalized people. I hope you enjoy the interview and that you’ll check out the Kickstarter!
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Avery Alder
Tell me about the project of Dream Askew // Dream Apart. Why does this joint project matter to you as a creator? Avery: While these two games tell stories of very different communities—Dream Askew is about a queer enclave amid the collapse of civilization, while Dream Apart is a fantastical-historical game of the shtetl—they’re also united in being games about marginalized people building a community for themselves against the odds, what we call games of belonging outside belonging.
For me, this project matters because telling stories about finding our collective power and learning how to live together in community matters. And I feel really proud about how we’ve merged those themes with the mechanics: power is distributed around the table, and rather than relying on chance, everything is driven by the choices that we make together.
Benjamin Rosenbaum
Benjamin: I love the games we’ve made, I’m excited about people playing them. I think this kind of in-person game can be a great space for learning and exploring, and I think it’s cool that these games celebrate the agency and struggle of communities with complicated relationships to the outside world, in settings that I think matter a lot.
What was your collaborative experience like on the project, and how did you handle complications or struggles of any kind?
A: Our collaboration gained momentum really slowly! Benjamin first wrote me about using the Dream Askew framework to create a game about Jewish shtetl life in 2014, and it wasn’t until 2017 that we committed to an active collaboration and co-development process. I’ve been really delighted by the ways that Benjamin’s innovations in Dream Apart have looped back to transform Dream Askew; key relationships are instrumental in defining the relationship web of the community, and they weren’t even in my original design!
B: It’s been amazing! Avery is brilliant, super nice, amazingly supportive, and has oodles of artistic integrity. She knows a tremendous amount about game design, community, and the technical praxis of creating and publishing games, and it’s been an enormous privilege to work with her. We’ve handled complications and struggles by talking through them, listening carefully to one another, and making decisions together — a process that has been strikingly full of fun and ease. I think our visions were very closely aligned from the beginning, and we also have very distinctive areas of expertise in the project. Each of us is the expert in our own game’s subject matter, so we tend to naturally defer to that expertise; and while I have a deep background as a writer and gamer, it’s my first professional game project, and Avery is one of my favorite game designers, so it’s been very easy to trust her judgement on game design and publication issues.
The Dream Askew cover.
Dream Askew
Tell me the core purpose of Dream Askew. What about it fuels your passion?
A: For me, the passion comes from building something that can be run at the drop of a hat, that tells meaningful stories, that’s legit fun to play, and that brings us closer to imagining possiblities for queer community.
I think the game is challenging in some ways! It requires players to take on a big creative load, and to jump into co-developing an apocalyptic world together. But for players who are up to the challenge, it’s a delight! The game uses lists and prompts to point players toward interesting dilemmas, and then gives them space to actually figure out how to handle them. That’s exciting! That’s what fuels my passion.
The Hawker playbook.
When you work on the project, what design elements do you keep as key priority?
A: I started work on Dream Askew in early 2013, when I was helping run a weekly, drop-in meetup group. It was queer-centering, but welcome to all who wanted to drop in and play something neat. I tried running Apocalypse World a couple times at those meetups, and it never quite worked: the sheets intimidated new players, the mechanics were slightly too dense to teach to new players in the short span of time we had each night, and the game always felt like it was cut too short. I designed Dream Askew to fit perfectly into that space: inviting, quick-paced, and perfect for weirdos. And that remains a priority. I want this to be a game that I can run at the drop of a hat for a gaggle of queers who’ve never played a roleplaying game before, and I want it to rock under those conditions.
The Dream Apart cover.
Dream Apart
Tell me the core purpose of Dream Apart. What about it fuels your passion?
B: What I really wanted was to capture the distinctive tone, setting, and underlying philosophy of Jewish fantasy and folklore, which differs from both the traditional high fantasy ethos of a titanic final battle between Good and Evil, and from the aimless-violent-vagabond ethos of sword & sorcery. I wanted to see characters who are rooted in community, in a deeply spiritual but also morally ambiguous world, a world in which evil is written with a small “e”: our own human failures of courage and compassion, rather than something alien and essentialized and external; characters who don’t wield triumphant violence to achieve their ends, but use wit, grit, and moxie to thrive in a world where they are likely to be always on the receiving end of violence; and just all the rich strangeness, cleverness, yearning, whimsy, irony, self-criticism, soul, and mystery of talmud, midrash, Yiddish folktales, and the literatures of the shtetl.
The playbook for the Klezmer.
When you work on the project, what design elements do you keep as key priority?
B: I think the main priority is capturing that spirit described above; other priorities include making it an accessible game with elegantly simple mechanics, concise design, and very rich fiction, keeping players supported in story creation so they always have something to fall back upon and aren’t left hanging if the flow of creativity stutters, and supporting a social contract that centers everyone feeling safe and curious and excited and connected.
The sigil for Dream Askew.
Dream Askew
What have been some of the most vital elements of growth in Dream Askew over the past five years, mechanically and thematically?
A: Mechanically, there are two ways that the game has changed that I think are the most vital: the introduction of the community worksheet, and the introduction of key relationships for every character role. These two changes shift the story of Dream Askew in the direction of community, relationships under pressure, and questions of belonging. The game feels like it contains a deeper treatment of its themes, rather than a more aesthetic, surface-level treatment of what it means to belong to a queer enclave. Key relationships were a piece of the design that Benjamin first introduced into Dream Apart, which I was so excited to borrow back for the apocalypse.
Thematically, I think the biggest difference isn’t actually with the game, but with the real world that I’m going to be releasing the game into. The idea that apocalypse was a contemporary force which operated in waves at the margins of civilization, that the digital realm would factor into not only the collapse but also what came next… in 2013 this was closer to science fiction. In 2018 it feels startlingly timely to be talking about. I talk about this more in the design notes I’m releasing alongside the game, but I think it’s chilly how much more real the world of Dream Askew now feels for me and my friends.
The Outliers zine, which is a stretch goal reached on the Kickstarter, includes additional game materials.
What elements of queerness speak the most to you personally, and to your experience in games, that you have brought forth in Dream Askew?
A: I think there’s a bit of misdirection at play in how Dream Askew portrays queerness. Character creation opens with a prompt to choose from a list of strange and unprecedented genders, and to think visually through physical descriptions and wardrobe combinations. Queerness feels like a flashy aesthetic project. And that’s definitely a real part of the game, one that it’s fun to play around with! But queerness is also the relationships you attempt to hold in balance, and it’s the fact that everyone has a different kind of lopsided power that both contributes to the community and also puts them at odds with it. The Iris is a potential healer, but also an unsettling psychic weirdo. The Hawker is a resourceful provider, but also a territorial profiteer. The Stitcher is an engineering genius, but also a strange recluse. The drama of the game comes from watching how these people who hold sway in the community tug its ideals and character back and forth.
The Dream Apart sigil.
Dream Apart
What were some of the elements of Jewish fantasy and folklore that you personally felt deeply about including in Dream Apart, and how did you include them?
B: Most people are familiar with a kind of Sunday School version of the Hebrew Bible, in which the Divine is a kind of mathematically omniscient and omnipotent Santa Claus whose job it is to make everyone be good. A cursory glance at the world around you should make it clear that this doesn’t make much sense. In fact the story (or rather stories) that the texts suggest are much weirder. The God of the Tanakh is volatile, mysterious, numinous, and alien; the midrashim and the Kabbalah make this weirder still, with a fractured Divinity in exile from Itself, and a universe-altering magic inherent in the smallest human actions (it’s not that much of a stretch to say that in the Lurianic Kabbalah, when mom lights the candles Friday night she is literally healing a tiny bit of the sundered Godhead). The psychic maelstrom of Apocalypse World (and thus of Dream Askew) is the closest thing to this theology that I’ve found in any game; it feels a lot like what Moses encountered at that bush in Midian. Magic in games tends to feel like engineering at best, and more commonly like ordering from a menu at Denny’s. Gods are either absent, or they’re statted-up dispensers of plot tokens and buffs. I wanted a kind of magic that would be terrifying, wondrous, unsafe, inchoate. I also wanted it to be tied deeply into the story’s drama of moral agency, because so much of Jewish tradition is about wrestling with complex moral questions that have no easy answers. Temptation, solace, power at a price, rebuke, reconciliation, grudges, forgiveness, these things are not just part of the social drama, they’re also central to the meaning of the Unseen World. A demon that just wants to try and kill you is not nearly as interesting as a demon that wants you to betray yourself. A golem isn’t just a monster, it’s an allegory of freedom and servitude, the limits and risks of violent self-defense and of human knowledge. A dybbuk isn’t just a possessing spirit, it’s one with an agenda and unfinished business.
The sheet for the Shtetl for Dream Apart.
Were there any unique challenges for approaching the subjects of Jewish culture and beliefs that are not addressed often enough or respectfully enough in popular media?
B: To the extent that shtetl culture is addressed in popular media at all — think the musical-theater and cinematic versions of Fiddler on the Roof and Yentl — it tends to be in a sentimental, rose-and-sepia-tinted, elegiac frame, ignoring a lot of the complexities and real-world grittiness. Non-Jews are usually offscreen menaces (though to be fair, one of Tevye’s daughters does marry one); economics is flattened into a virtuous poverty; and in general, the viewer is encouraged to see the events as a kind of hagiographic ancestral origin story. (The original texts are grittier and sometimes queerer than their tamed stage & cinematic versions, too — there’s a good argument that Singer saw his Yentl, who keeps the name Anshel at the end of the story as opposed to putting a dress on and running off to America, as a trans man.) At one point Avery asked if we should find a more Yiddish-looking font for the Dream Apart playtest kit; I responded that I really liked using the same one we use for Askew, to get away from that coy sentimentality and ram home the point that this, too, was a gradual apocalypse, with — for its characters– the same apocalyptic immediacy.
Avery writing notes.
One last…
Beyond basic structural elements, what are some pieces of Dream Askew // Dream Apart that are similar or contrasting – mechanically and thematically?
A: I think one of the most interesting contrasts—and one I haven’t talked about anywhere yet—is in how the two games approach supplemental reference materials. Since Dream Apart is historical, its reference materials need to offer up specific, tangible answers: here’s what that word means; here’s a plausible Russian surname from the era; here’s the river you’d walk alongside. Benjamin is working hard to make resources that feel thorough while remaining compact. On the other hand, Dream Askew is speculative and built upon a queer epistemology. Its reference materials need to do much the opposite, to reject a single definition in favour of pitching the question back to players in an encouraging way: that’s a great question, what do those words mean? My challenge is being exploratory and playful without coming across as hostile or opaque.
The Dream Askew // Dream Apart book and illustration.
June is Pride month, which is when we recognize the adversity queer people face and overcome, marked especially by remembering the Stonewall riots. When police raided a bar where queer people were gathered – trans people, gay and lesbian people, bisexuals, and all – the patience of queer New Yorkers ran out. Martha P. Johnson, a black transgender sex worker, is credited with initiating the riot as response to police aggression**. A number of other black people and people of color headed up the rejection of prejudice in power, alongside many queer resistors. Pride matters. When we talk about resistance and the pursuit of freedom, we should look to the best parts and most important parts of Pride.
Those parts are the people. So, as a gamer, I’m a people. I wanted to offer a way to connect with other queer people, and to have an easier way to frame who I am as a queer person – while showing how it matters to things I love.
This video includes a series of questions that I’ve responded to below. If you’re a queer gamer or queer person-who-plays-games, please consider answering these questions in your preferred format – video, social media, blog – and use the hashtag #IAmQueerGames.
This is supported by my Patreon at Patreon.com/briecs, as part of my community outreach and efforts in recognizing diverse creators. Thank you for watching! Here we go!
1) Who are you? I’m Brie Sheldon, formal game designer, journalist, and editor. I run a site called Thoughty were I talk game design and do interviews, supported by my Patreon. I’m a graduate of leadership studies and creator of Leading with Class, using games to teach leadership, which is supported by Patreon.com/leadingwithclass.
2) What are your pronouns?
I use either they/them or he/him, whichever is easier and makes more sense.
3) What’s your queer, in a few words?
I’m genderfluid nonbinary-masculine, queer in orientation.
4) What are your intersections and chosen labels? On the marginalized side, I’m disabled and have mental health stuff. For privileges, I’m white, well educated, and married to a cisgender man with a decent paying job and live in a safe neighborhood. On the fun end, I’m polyamorous, a gamer, and an artist.
5) What’s your gender (or lack thereof) and what does it mean to you? I describe my gender as genderfluid nonbinary-masculine because my gender identity – the inside part of me – fluctuates between nonbinary androgynous and nonbinary masculine, where I am never a man but I have some masculinity. I call myself a boy a lot because the soft masculinity that I associate with boyness is basically where I am then.
My gender is very important to me. I struggled with it for 24 years before coming out on a small scale and 26 before I told my family. It’s who I am and I love to live it freely.
6) What’s your orientation and what does it mean to you? I am queer, and I call myself queer because it makes the most sense to me. Being a fluid person and being non-cisgender, I fluctuate a lot on how I define my relationships, but basically I’m attracted to people of pretty much every gender. My attraction is different with different people – sometimes romantic, sometimes sexual, sometimes both, or sometimes aesthetic or none at all, and I also have a lot of platonic attraction. It’s all important to me! I feel a lot of feelings, and they find homes in many different places.
7) How do you present yourself, and how do you want to present yourself, including clothes, makeup, body mods, and anything else? My ideal presentation is moving between soft masculine and edgy androgyny, but both with boobs. I like my boobs and hate that having them decreases my masculinity, and my androgyny. I wish that I could be those things and still have boobs, and still wear makeup – which I do enjoy. I like wearing masculine or more unisex clothes – I could live in simple jeans, ballcaps, and tee shirts – but I super dig getting to wear those alongside low cut tops and stuff. It suits me.
I’m not planning on getting any further body mods than my piercings and tattoos – except more tattoos. Gender affirmation and hormones aren’t what will make me whole, from what I know.
8) What’s this got to do with games – gender, queerness, Pride? Games have a good dose of queerness in them already once you realize how easily you can put on another gender and orientation and have it be the identity you perform for a session, event, or campaign. If you think you’ve never touched queerness, think of how many times you’ve played a character of a different gender or who was attracted to a gender you aren’t. It doesn’t make you queer, but it shows how you can connect those things.
Gender and orientation are so tied to our experiences at the table because they’re tied to our real lives. Mechanics and settings in games can encourage queerness, and safe environments encourage engagement with identity questions – when we’re playing a game, it is a safety buffer. It’s a way to explore with training wheels. And when the wheels come off, we can tell stories we want to be told, since good media for us is so hard to find.
We must tell our own stories. We can make them rich and interactive for queer and not-queer people alike. It’s an amazing medium to dig into both queer reality and queer fantasy, and it gives us a unique power to frame the mechanics of the worlds we play in when we design queer games – how we handle violence, how we handle sex, how we handle stigma. The control it gives us to realize queerness is really important.
9) When do you remember being queer in game the earliest? What does it tell you about games and queerness?
Honestly, it started when I was playing Harry Potter text based roleplay when I was in my early teens. I started playing androgynous characters – very clumsily – and exploring who my characters could be attracted to. In my mid-teens I played some androgynous characters in D&D and flirted with the ideas of queer characters like lesbians and gay men, and even pansexuality.
But it was not well executed. We need games that support queerness and identity questioning, where it’s okay to explore these things and encouraged to explore them, and done with support in the text and community. Games can’t hold these spaces alone, they need support from those making them and playing them who know about queer culture and life.
10) What can cis straight people do to help?
Listen. Look at your life, look at your choices. If you’ve fucked up, apologize and don’t do it again. Remember that kink isn’t inherently queer. Donate money and time where you can. Honor our history. Hire queer creators. Support sex workers. Don’t write about us without doing research and consulting us. Use people’s proper pronouns. Be better than you ever have been.
Share a message with other queer gamers, both out and not, about the future.
Things are a hot damn mess right now, but we can make it through. Pride month is a big deal but it’s not the only month of the year we need to raise our voices, support each other, and keep moving forward. No queer person is alone in their queerness – we can find ways to work together. We need to recognize black queer people, queer people of color, trans and nonbinary people, bisexual and pansexual people, queer Jewish and Muslim people, and asexual and aromantic people.
Don’t forget that sex workers, disabled people, and people with mental illnesses are queer people sometimes, too. We need to remember we are in this together. Don’t let the pressure from privileged bigots crush you. And if you are still keeping private – it’s okay. We’ll be here when you’re ready.
Final Thoughts
I’m doing this because I want to see queer people in games be recognized and welcome them, as well as talk about why these things are important. I want to highlight the diversity in games that is so often brushed under the rug. I also want to open up the floor for queer voices. If I can do that for even one person, make just one person be heard? Yeah, I’ll like that.
This post is supported by Patreon.com/briecs patrons like you! Please feel free to support my work there or donate through the donation links in the description.
Note: In my video, I state that Marsha P. Johnson (a black trans woman) was the one who started the riot at Stonewall. According to this tweet: https://twitter.com/BlackFemmeinism/s…, the riot was started by Stormé DeLarverie, a Black Butch lesbian, and Marsha P Johnson & Sylvia Rivera (a Latinx trans woman) founded & organized PRIDE. I apologize for any errors – finding consistent information was pretty challenging.
