Tag: tabletop games

Five or So Questions on Rebel Crown

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Michael Dunn-O’Connor about Rebel Crown, which is currently on Kickstarter! Check out the responses to my questions below!

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Tell me a little about Rebel Crown. What excites you about it?

Rebel Crown is character-driven rpg with a player-facing campaign. Each character playbook focuses on a unique relationship with the claimant and gives that character a driving motivation to remain on this quest. The claimant is its own unique playbook, which thrives on sharing the spotlight with their allies and acting on their council. The campaign is driven by player choices: which factions to ally with and which holdings to pursue. As you group, you play to find out whether the claimant can take their throne and what sacrifices must be made along the way.

What are the various playbooks like, in a few examples of their abilities and how they interact with the game, and what power do they have in the narrative?

A lot of our design process started in the playbooks.  I tend to get the most out of campaigns where the characters are deeply connected to one another and have a shared commitment to a goal or objective.  Since the premise of a succession crisis lends itself to focusing on the relationship between a Claimant and their allies, that created an opening for us to create purposefully asymmetrical playbooks.  Most of that asymmetry has to do with the Claimant playbook.  There must be a Claimant at the table, and the other playbooks are sworn allies of the Claimant.  This playbook is at the heart of the campaign, but we didn’t want to make a game that follows the story of one player character at the exclusion of the others. So we made the Claimant’s player explicitly responsible for spotlight sharing and reinforced this responsibility through their XP triggers:

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The Claimant playbook triggers.

 The result has been that the Claimant is constantly pulling other characters into the scene to ask their advice, to request a sacrifice, to reward their loyalty. The other playbooks have XP triggers that reward them for taking initiative, to not wait until the Claimant asks for their advice or intercession. Here’s the Devoted:

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The Devoted playbook triggers.

The flow from these rewards has been really satisfying, and character motivation and relationship is constantly at the center of play.

The playbook special abilities reinforce character dynamics without being too restrictive (especially since special abilities may be chosen from other playbooks).

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The Idealist playbook triggers.

A sample of the Devoted’s special abilities suggests different approaches to protecting the Claimant (guarding them in battle, defending their name in a public forum, or engaging in duels on their behalf).  The Devoted is defined by their love of the claimant, but there are many ways a player might take action on that motivation.

To dig in deeper, in the case of the claimant in play, how does the game guide the player toward a just and moral leadership that would make their claim to power morally superior to the claims of the usurpers?

The moral righteousness of the Claimant’s quest is in many ways the core fruitful void of this system: it’s a driving question that the game can’t answer for you without closing off some of the explorations that make RPGs really compelling. However, we try to direct play toward this question in thoughtful ways.

One way is the way that each sortie generates Unrest for the retinue, and more destructive sorties produce significantly more Unrest. The sortie objectives push the retinue to gain new objectives and ingratiate themselves with powerful factions, but the consequences of this expansion often impact the common people of your holdings the most. Here are the Entanglements you might roll at the highest level of Unrest:

The Unrest rules.

Unrest provides a slow creep of consequences for the people your Claimant has sworn to protect and provide for. How they address these consequences is an unavoidable topic of play.

The playbook that most explicitly focuses on the question of just rule and moral leadership is the Idealist, who has allied with the Claimant because they believe it is a path to the greater good. The Idealist’s XP triggers put pressure on the Claimant to do the right thing even when it’s not expedient and encourage the Idealist to keep that question of moral leadership right at the forefront of play. 

Draft playbooks with some fun thematic details.

I note that you talk about expressing your heritage, background, or trauma. How are players supported within the game in regards to traumatic or triggering content, and also, speaking of heritages, are you involving sensitivity readers in the project?

Trauma is a term from Blades in the Dark that appears in many Forged in the Dark games. We replaced that mechanic with ‘Scars’. When a character’s Stress exceeds their limitations, they must choose whether to take one final action before collapsing or to pull themselves together and carry on. We both wanted to avoid the term Trauma given its specific meaning in the context of psychology, and we wanted to rework the mechanic to provide more player choice in the moment.

We’re working on integrating safety tools into the rules text. I’ve been influenced in this regard by playing with some folks through The Gauntlet’s community. We want to provide clear prompts on CATS (content, aim, subject matter, tone) that people could leverage when introducing the game to a group. We’ll also encourage the use of Lines & Veils and the X cards. When we run are games at Games on Demand, these are the tools we’ve used and we want to provide the same resources to folks running it on their own.

The design team is just Eric and me; we haven’t brought in outside readers, though our playtesters have given a lot of valuable feedback on how we can directly address the more problematic aspects of any fiction set in a feudal setting.

What does an average session look like, including the sorties you mention (a term some of my readers may be unfamiliar with)?

A typical session runs through three phases:Recon: In which the retinue (the Claimant and the allies) gather information about other factions and identify an objective.

The Sortie: The main ‘mission’ of the session. This could be an attack on an enemy faction, a diplomatic meeting, or an attempt to drive off wraiths from a vulnerable holding. The goal of a Sortie is typically to gain a new Holding (some property or asset) for the Claimant’s Domain, to strengthen relations with another faction, or to weaken an enemy faction in some way. The retinue may also seek to vassalize another faction, bringing them under the Claimant’s rule without seizing their Holdings.

Downtime: In which the retinue recovers from injury and stress, engages in long terms projects, and trains their skills. Downtime abstracts weeks of time as the player character pursue their own interests, discuss their long-term priorities, and seek solace together from the difficult campaign.

The Domain sheet includes a calendar for players to track their Sorties, Seasons change every two Downtimes, providing a richer sense of time scale and place.

At the end of the session, players asses how they earned XP based on their playbook, and whether their character’s Beliefs and Drive changed based on the events of the session.

The creators, Michael and Eric.

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

Quick Shot on THE VIOLET SANCTION

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Cody Trotter from scaryridge creative house about THE VIOLET SANCTION, which is currently on Kickstarter for Zine Quest 2. It sounds very interesting! Check it out below!

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What is THE VIOLET SANCTION, both as a product and as your vision?

i’m working on a zinequest game for kickstarter called THE VIOLET SANCTION, a cooperative urban fantasy adventure that takes place in seattle’s capitol hill neighborhood. it’s one of the epicenters of queer culture in the area, and it also happens to be my home. as a product, the game is a multiplayer choose-your-own-story style gamebook, divided into episodes. episodes, which are named after streets in the neighborhood, are non-linear, crossing paths with each other frequently, leading to a grand finale in the epilogue.

the game eschews dice, leveling, experience points, and most combat (there are social encounters, certainly). as a vision, THE VIOLET SANCTION is my first art project in a very long time, after years of processing life’s many traumas. a mid-life crisis, transitioning to nonbinary, escaping a job that was devouring me; this game is more than just a reincarnation of my artistic spirit, it is a manifesto for social change, for art, for evolution. i’m new to this whole process, but i’m hopeful in ways i haven’t been in ages.

A person with short blond hair and purple sunglasses stands in front of an orange sun or circle while wearing a golden necklace, purple shirt with leopard print, and a brown cape with a fur collar.

This sounds like such a fascinating project! How do you handle resolution of any conflict or social encounters in lieu of dice?

the gamebooks express the setting and obstacles similarly to an adventure game, with a lot of the puzzles requiring specific actions at the right places. this can include dialogue choices, magic being cast, classic inventory puzzles, etc., but the charm of the system really comes from the cards. every character has their own customized deck, which are written on, manipulated, and sometime removed. a various points, the game queries cards in hand or on the table, then directs you to the next scene accordingly.

my favorite example is the 9 of hearts, which signifies the 9 lives of the cat-human shapeshifter class. as they “lose” lives, pips are shaded in or crossed out. rumor has it that cats on their last life share a drink at a speakeasy hidden down a dark alley…

other scenes are resolved by playing cards from your hand to determine outcomes, and one character class can even trade cards with other players. however, cards are never randomly drawn, instead it’s a strategy puzzle of figuring out what goes where and how.

As a nonbinary person, I’m always curious how other nonbinary people’s identity has influenced their design. How do you feel your transition to nonbinary identity has influenced the design and flavor of THE VIOLET SANCTION?

being nonbinary absolutely affects my writing and design. the game is largely de-gendered, with the exception of a few specific characters, like death herself, which was chosen intentionally. using THE VIOLET SANCTION as a platform for dismantling the gender binary and helping to solidify new language was incredibly important to the overall design. identifying as queer in general impacts the type of subjects i choose to tackle.

all art is politics, and education, and i think visibility for the queer spectrum is vital to our future. i spent my entire adolescence being told that my sexuality shouldn’t define me, that it was only a part of who i was, but then was simultaneously told i was a very small percentage of the population. as i’ve grown older and wiser, i meet people like me everywhere i go. i want the next generation to hear these stories and be able to do better for themselves. 

A purple and white cover with the title The Violet Sanction, displaying a city with columns in the foreground that are beginning to crumble and the silhouettes of people and a cat staring towards the viewer.

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Thanks so much for the interview Cody! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out THE VIOLET SANCTION on Kickstarter today!

Quick Shot on The Watching Book

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Sarah Rowan about The Watching Book, a project on Kickstarter for Zine Quest 2 right now! It seems really interesting and has a really romantic element behind its creation. Check out the interview below!

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What is The Watching Book, both as a product and as your vision?

The Watching Book is a diegetic setting zine told as the journal of oracles. It presents the religion, culture, and rituals of a fictional people through the eyes of the women who guide them. Accompanying the zine is a short paperless, gm-less rpg. In this, players take on the roll of children to enjoy a game of mystery-solving and oral storytelling. Both the game and the zine are in-world artifacts that can be used to enhance a campaign setting or be given directly to players as found items during a game. 

This zine is the second foray into the world of Soothsayer, my boardgame from 2019. The project started as a gift for my wife, and consequently the world is built around centering the lives and accomplishments of lgbt characters. By using different viewpoint characters throughout, I also get the chance to examine the ways in which the same ritual can take on different meaning to different people, even within the same group. I really wanted the world built by these games to explore real faith in fantasy by leaving some questions unanswered. 

The Watching Book cover in black and white styled like a leatherbound book with an eye that has a star for a pupil.

This sounds very cool! What are some of the ways you set boundaries and encourage creativity, either mechanically or otherwise, for players in The Watching Book?

The Watching Book is more of a setting than a game in and of itself. But carrying through from Soothsayer one of my design goals was to make sure to avoid encouraging a “dark” look at the world. The problems faced within the text are natural disasters, disagreements, or mysteries rather than acts of intentional violence or hate. I primed the world to be not a utopia, but a relatively peaceable sort of place where brutal content is very clearly out of place and inappropriate. There are a lot of games and settings where those topics can be explored, but this is not one of them. 

As for creativity, I stay away from explicitly answering any of the religious and spiritual questions that exist about the world. Are the spirits actually real? Are they real, but different than how most people interpret them? Readers and players in the setting have room to develop their own opinions and explore beliefs without being handed a yes or no answer within the text. 

A black and white illustration with four-point stars as a border and eight-point stars in the corners and centers. In the center is an oracle with long dark hair, a cape over a jacket with ornate eyes embroidered over the front, and a belt with pouches.

It’s lovely that this was inspired by your wife. In what other ways than the people is The Watching Book a queer game and product?

I made sure that at every step of the way I tried to include people of different outlooks and communities. Ezra, the artist, describes themself as a Queer Jewitch Farmer. That’s a material way I’m using my work to give back; hiring other LGBT people to work with me.

Additionally I am happy to adopt a policy that’s gaining traction in the ttrpg community; as part of the campaign I have included Community Copies of the zine. These are donated copies from generous people that are available to anyone, no questions asked. In this way I can make my zine a little more accessible to those having a hard time. 

A black and white illustration of a round fortification with a wall around it, surrounded by almost diamond-shaped towers with symbols on top of them.

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Thanks so much for the interview Sarah! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out The Watching Book on Kickstarter today!

Quick Shot on The Last Place on Earth

I have a quick few questions with Eli Seitz on The Last Place on Earth, a Zine Quest 2 project on Kickstarter! Check out the responses below.

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A map illustration titled The Last Place on Earth, 1910-1913, showing a mountain range and a series of circles depicting the travels of Robert F. Scott and Company.

What is The Last Place on Earth, both as a product and as your vision?

The Last Place on Earth is a tabletop role playing game inspired by the Heroic Age of Exploration and by Robert F Scott’s fatal 1912 expedition to the South Pole. It’s a game about the hardships of Antarctic exploration and the arrogance of men who believe that they can or must overcome nature. It’s designed as a one or two shot experience with black and white zine of rules accompanied by archival photos and an illustrated map of the route to use a play aid.

This sounds like an intensive research project! What kind of research have you been doing for the project, and how have you found that research to be useful in designing the game?

My research started with a much broader scope as I was interested in a game about historical exploring. I was reading about mountain climbing which had a lot of juicy material: harsh environments, bad equipment, improper safety procedures, great scenery, but almost all that history engages in indigenous erasure. As a white designer, it is not my place to write that game so I turned my attention to the South Pole, and Scott’s Terra Nova expedition drawn in by the photographs and journal entries. The journal entries. 

A black and white photo of three men dressed in warm sweaters, pants, and boots in a small enclosed space on bunks, all journaling.

The journal entries are fascinating because they provide insight into the thought processes of the expedition members during their ill-fated march. We can read about the dynamics within the group and later what they want to be remembered in the history books. Journaling is included as a mechanic in the game as a form of monologuing, and as a stretch goal, I will be writing a solo RPG variant that relies on journaling extensively. In the end, the emotional arc of the expedition became the focal point, and the technical aspects of exploration were relegated to window dressing. The best gameplay comes from exploring the attitudes and relationships of these men at the end of the earth. 

I like the way you say “the arrogance of men who believe they can or must overcome nature.” Can you expand on this perspective and how it shapes your design and your approach to this project?

Beneath the mechanics and setting, the Last Place on Earth is about colonialism and masculinity. These men traveled to a place with temperatures of -45 degrees Fahrenheit and winds regularly over 100 miles an hour so that they could claim the glory of reaching the center of an uninhabited continent. This toxic mindset is just so deeply ingrained in their identities. For example, they viewed skis as children’s toys and barely used them instead they walked almost all of the 900 miles to the pole. It’s also apparent in their words. One of Scott’s last journal entries reads, “we have been to the Pole and we shall die like gentlemen. I regret only for the women we leave behind.” Or Lawrence Oates’ last words were, “I am just going outside and may be some time,” then he walked into a blizzard with no boots.

In the game, the characters are created to evoke the absurdity of these historical attitudes. During the game, the players explore how characters with this mentality deal with intense physical hardship, failure, and possibly even death. They form close bonds with fellow expedition members and see if they can weather the storm as their entire world is challenged. I hope that the critique offered by the game will lead players to think about their own beliefs on nationalism, masculinity, and the natural world.

A black and white photo of two people exiting an ice cavern filled with shadows. The cavern is shaped like a teardrop with icicles hanging down from the top. On the horizon, a black ship pushes through the ice.

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Thanks so much Eli for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out The Last Place on Earth on Kickstarter today! Also, take a look at Eli’s other ZineQuest project about rules, pomegranates, and arguing, Fruit of Law. 

Quick Shot on Thistle and Hearth

Hi all! I’m excited for this interview with Aven Elia McConnaughey and Natalie the Knife about Thistle and Hearth, which is on Kickstarter for Zine Quest 2! Check out the responses below!

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What is Thistle and Hearth, both as a product and as your vision?

Thistle and Hearth is a game of belonging outside belonging that combines a dark fairytale aesthetic with the experience of growing up as a Lutheran in Minnesota. Inconvenient spirits, punishing winter, and mercurial fae challenge the community. True Names, vows, and acts of creation bring them comfort.

To be honest, the idea for Thistle and Hearth literally came to me in a dream. It was some sort of high-action romp, but the things that stuck with me were the aesthetic notes of deep forest, deep winter, and elk riders. These aesthetic notes weren’t really enough to turn into a game until I shared them with my co-designer, Natalie (@rpgnatalie). The most exciting thing about designing this game has to do with genre – a thing I love playing with in games and game design.

To me, a lot of the indie game space for the past decade has been in pursuit of genre. Apocalypse World gave an approachable toolkit for replicating specific fictional genres in games, leading to countless hacks. Dream Askew//Dream Apart followed a number of years later, using similar tools to subvert existing genres, rather than just replicating them. What Natalie and I have done with Thistle and Hearth is create a genre that exists nowhere else by making playbooks and motifs that assume archetypes for this genre-that-doesn’t-exist. People expect playbooks to rely on tropes, but we’ve created playbooks without the tropes, and it turns out that creates a really unique play experience.

A bearded Thistlefolk illustrated in black linework and colored in blue-grey.
A Thistlefolk by Mahar Mangahas.

It sounds like you’re bringing forward a very specific experience. How does the life of a Lutheran in Minnesota connect to dark fairytale aesthetic, and what are some examples of how players will experience this?

So the game is influenced by Aven’s experience growing up in a Lutheran community and Natalie’s experience in community with people who were part of the church. The way the church manifested was heavily influenced by the local climate – months of winter where it was too cold to go outside, with too little sunlight, where the climate becomes a thing you have to guard against in certain ways. The game has five motifs that determine the themes and forces that will be at play in your game, and each one reflects a different aspect of our experiences.

This is represented in the game very literally with the Winter motif, which brings scarcity to the community, and asks how do you make do with less than you need? This can also lead to tension between playbooks. For example, the Forged and the Morning Frost respectively represent a tension between repurposing what we have in order to get what we need, and making things that bring joy or beauty but may be a frivolous use of resources.

The church also often had an insular narrative – we didn’t necessarily think things that were outside of our community were bad, but we didn’t understand them, and there was a prominent narrative that we did not belong out there – in the cold, in the wider world, or, in Thistle and Hearth, in the Woods. A part of this was coping with the fact that we lived in a place where living is hard and grueling most of the time – by making the unfamiliar undesirable, we made the familiar desirable.

A ghost with long hair and wispy petal-like layers surrounding them, accented by shafts of wheat.
A ghost by Mahar Mangahas.

The Thistlefolk, our name for the fae, represent how power works sometimes in communities of faith. There are often people who you know little to nothing about but who either you as an individual or the wider community are beholden to – they hold power over you and their rules must be followed. Both the Thistlefolk and Family motifs explore questions over how power is distributed, and how it affects someone who is part of the community in ways that are not explicitly violent or economic.

Lutheran communities often build their identity around shared histories, but these are not always true to what actually happened. In Thistle and Hearth, the dead can come back to speak their truths, and that may complicate the things that the community hold as sacred, or it can be used to reinforce this shared history. They can also function metaphorically as a representation of people who have left the community but still have a connection to it, and can demystify the unknown in ways that breaks down the in-group/out-group narrative.

Exploring genre, or the surpassing of genre, is something that fascinates me. How did you use the Belonging-Outside-Belonging system to develop this new genre and how does it influence play?

PbtA games use move-like-mechanics to establish what people do in the world, and the fictional consequences of acting in those ways. This is used to reinforce genre by recreating the paradigms of action found in therein. Belonging Outside Belonging games go a step further by codifying what kinds of action makes characters vulnerable, and what kinds of action allow them to advance their agenda.

In Thistle and Hearth we included moves and grouped them in ways that either subvert existing genre influences, or else completely ignore them in favor of something new. For example, one of the Forged’s weak moves is “lash out in anger.” In other genres, this would probably be a strong or regular move for a physical-strength oriented playbook like the Forged. In this game, and this genre, it is something that they do to show their vulnerability.

If moves and their categorization makeup one part of the genre of the game, another important mechanical aspect of genre is the motifs. Motifs (which might be called “situations” or “setting elements” in other BoB games) establish fictional powers in the world, and the players together control them and influence how they are used in play. The group’s collective experiences, while perhaps based on their existing cultural knowledge, create a new genre when combined together.

A barb-like flower that looks almost like a dragon with swirling petal or leaf-like wings.
The Woods by Mahar Mangahas.

Without shared control of the motifs, it would be up to individuals in the group to understand, synthesize, and then reproduce for everyone else. That would be much, much harder, and it would be more likely for the player’s existing cultural knowledge to leak into their creation of the genre. The motifs may be familiar to players individually, but the game leads to play that explores how they connect to each other to define a fictional world. The space between the different motifs has a somewhat defined shape, but it is only through play that a group can discovers what fills the empty space.

In contrast to Dream Askew, the lists that players pick from to define motifs are quite broad in Thistle and Hearth. There is a tendency towards higher variation between the motifs from game to game. The genre that the players explore together can have a vastly different texture depending on the options they choose. In one playtest, the Thistlefolk hoarded secrets, so much so that they sent a member of their brethren into the community to steal a particularly juicy secret. In another, the Thistlefolk craved music and violence; we elaborated on them as extravagant party-throwers who could appear at the drop of a hat and stay for days, leaving little time for sleep or solitude.

A detailed header of ornate floral and leaf-like detail with a braided centerpiece going through a wreath over black and white text reading Thistle and Hearth. Below this, a curling and carefully detailed bundle of thistles makes up the footer.
Such a lovely title treatment! By Mahar Mangahas.

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Thank you SO much to Aven and Natalie for this interview!! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Thistle and Hearth on Kickstarter today!

(edited to add second interviewee, my bad)

Quick Shot on Winter Harvest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five or So Questions on Red Rook Revolt

Hi All! Today I have an interview with Magnus T. Hansen on Red Rook Revolt, which is currently on Kickstarter. Check out what Magnus has to say below!

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Tell me a little about Red Rook Revolt. What excites you about it?

Well, that’s sorta like choosing between my babies. There are three things which really excite me. The first is the combat system, which is inspired by the game Hyper Light Drifter as well as Strike!: A game of heedless adventure! It uses a single d6 for every roll, almost every attack deals one damage, and people have very low hit HP. In playtests, it has given us fast, tactical, and dangerous combat. Melee attacks always hit, but expose you to danger, while ranged attacks can miss, and require you to spend Dark Power, which you get from melee attacks, which forces people in and out of dangerous situations and helps ensure more dynamic encounters. 

Another thing that excites me is the memory and corruption system. For a long while, I struggled with making a cool way both to portray relationships and the creeping demonic corruption that happens once you start powering up the summoned demon in your gun. But I solved both, by having a system where you have specific memories with the other party members.

A color illustration of rebels in various red-highlighted outfits and carrying weapons climbing over various structures while they rally.

During each adventure, you can gain more, but you can also draw on those personal connections to keep away the demon’s whispers. If you fail, however, those memories can get twisted. Memories of your brother supporting you through hard times get reinterpreted to into memories of your bother being smothering or controlling. Memories of supporting your friends when they needed you become memories of your friends being needy and needing constant support, and so on. This isn’t necessarily permanent, but the fight against the demon is one of the central conflicts of the game.

The last thing I wanna mention here that excites me is the setting, which i am currently writing! I’m drawing on English and Roman history, and focusing down on a single empire and the rebellion happening there. That allows me do to more than just a cursory look at the place, and detail culture and religion to a greater extend, show some of the ways the rebellious areas differ in culture from the main empire, but also the ways they are the same, the things they share. Some central cultural concepts are birds as ancestors, and the actual, literal magic which is at work in most things of cultural significance, including community rituals and festivals, and a strong tradition of communal stews.

What inspired your interest in these cultures to build this specific story, and how are you building this story while being respectful to the cultures themselves?

To be clear, when I say I draw on British and Roman history, I mean mostly – but not entirely, as I’ll get to! – in terms of structure, in terms of how the empire works, how they extract resources from their conquered territory, how they justify their imperialism. That also helps answer the first part of your question: I needed empires to draw from for my evil empire. I had already decided on guns as an element, as the game started as a small combat engine and I didn’t want modern time, so 19th-century England was right there. As I worked on the culture and the history of the people of the empire, I had some ideas which resonated with Roman history, and the empire ended up as something like a Roman empire that had evolved into a modern empire, though more territorial.

I do use some roman culture – aspects of its religion and visual aesthetic, the importance of the Familias, the prevalence and importance of omens and minor magic. I have a friend working with me on some of the writing who knows his Roman history very well, so I’m not afraid to accidentally misrepresent it, though much of it isn’t what I’m using as inspiration. And while there are possibly some that would have issues with using, say, roman gods, I’m not doing that, just some aspects of how society was structured in antiquity. 

Tell me more about memories! How do the players typically respond to these when they play them out, and how do they interact with other parts of the game?

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able playtest this part of the game at the time of writing, so how players typically respond is unknown to me, but I will have the chance to playtest it soon!

I can talk about how they interact with other parts of the game, though! The memories represent the character’s relationships with each other, and during their adventures, they get strengthened and weakened.

The game is structured around a mix of downtime and adventuring. During the adventuring portions, the players get into battle and accrue corruption tokens as they draw on the dark magic of their demons. Afterward, they roll to determine if they get corrupted. If they fail, their friends have to help them, reminding them of their relationship with a memory; if that succeeds, the memory is simply exhausted from the emotional stress, and can’t be used for a while. Otherwise, it gets corrupted, twisted somehow, and the relationship weakens. Actions in battle and their willingness to win at all costs thus affect their relationships and their memories.

This, in a sense, forms the central conflict, and a central theme of the game: the importance of relationships, friendships and organization as you struggle for liberation, and resistance to forces that would separate you, make you try to fight the world alone with just you and your gun.  During downtime, exhaustion and (with more difficulty) corruption can be healed, as can physical wounds, and new memories can be made. Downtime, in a bigger way, ties into what adventures you go on, what battles you fight and so on, which feeds back into corruption and memory.

What is the general activity of the game – like what do the players mostly do in each session, or are they intended to do? How does the game support these actions?

The general activity of the game is fighting imperialist scum. You play as members of the red rook commune, which is under attack from the cruel Imperium Alarum, and throughout the game, you keep the pressure on to prevent them from turning their full attention towards the commune. You sabotage railways, distribute propaganda, organize general strikes, assassinate generals, and lead battles against the enemy. When things go wrong and the empire turns their full might upon the Red Rook Commune, you man the barricades and drive back the invaders! In between hectic fights and missions, you rest at the commune and rebuild your strength. This is when you heal and reaffirm your friendships.

As for how the game supports these actions, it is built around that structure of mission/rest/mission with the first result of failure being an attack on the red rook commune. If you aren’t putting the pressure on the empire, they will attack your home and deny you the chance to heal and rest. 

What made you elect to use Hyper Light Drifter and Strike! As inspirations for design, and how have you differed from them?

I didn’t so much choose to use hyper light drifter as an inspiration as the other way around: the appeal of Hyper Light Drifter’s smooth, flowing combat rhythms is what inspired me to start working on what would become Red Rook Revolt. Hyper Light Drifter is a video game with an incredible combat loop, and I wanted to capture that particular loop, that particular flow, in a tabletop game, something, quick, smooth, and tactical.

That’s why I turned to Strike! for inspiration for the combat. That game uses a single D6 for combat, rolling on a table of hits, misses, and critical hits, and It goes rather fast for that reason. Strike, of course, also has a lot of other things going on, but I liked that particular idea and I took inspiration from that in designing my combat system and combined it with the things I liked and wanted to replicate from Hyper Light Drifter. 

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Thanks so much Magnus for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Red Rook Revolt on Kickstarter today!

Quick Shot on Campfire Memories

Hi all, today I have an interview with Matt Bohnhoff on Campfire Memories, which is currently on Kickstarter for Zine Quest 2! Check out the interesting responses from Matt below!

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What is Campfire Memories, both as a product and as your vision?

Campfire Memories is GM-less one-shot game about families going on a difficult camping trip and then looking back on the experiences fondly later. It’s going up on Kickstarter as a Zine Quest project from Feb 4 through 16. I want this game to be an accessible, light way for people to get talking. In addition to the camping problems in the fiction, it usually brings up real anecdotes from the player’s own trips, which is perfect! Interestingly, after talking with my editor, the safety tool we settled on is the Luxton Technique from your website!

An interior view of the Campfire Memories book with lovely cartoonish art and larger print.

My experiences camping as a kid always had a fair share of troubles to encounter! What sort of troubles do players in Campfire Memories encounter that make their time difficult?

The complications in Campfire Memories are best framed as man-vs-nature obstacles. These can take the form of broken gear, bad weather, animal encounters, or other things. The important part is that they pit the characters against their environment, not each other. Characters can, of course, get upset with each other but that becomes more of a sub-plot than the focus of the game. When a player has their turn setting a scene, it’s the job of the player to their left to come up with the complication.

The exterior of Campfire Memories with the cartoon illustrations of a family canoeing and the logo.

What do you do, mechanically or otherwise, to provide structure to the camping trip and story for the players and keep them engaged?

There are a couple mechanical widgets that keep players engaged in the game. Players all take turns setting scenes and creating complications. In my experience, most folks are super excited for the chance to do one of those. Also, characters are built with a goal, the kinds of experiences they want to have on their trip. This provides a lot of direction for players to push their characters in during camping scenes. The goal comes back into the play during the reflection phase, as the characters look back on their trip!

The Campfire Memories logo designed to look like a sign for a forest park, surrounded by trees and blue skies, with the tagline "familial bonding through recreational hardship."

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Thanks so much Matt for the interview! I hope all my readers enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check Campfire Memories out on Kickstarter for Zine Quest 2 today!

Mountains, Gandalf

Dark mountains under a stark cloudy sky, clouding over a large field.

I have been working on the Turn Kickstarter since October 2018, and it has been quite a challenge. The Behind the Masc Kickstarter went so smoothly, with so few issues! Turn, on the other hand, had production changes, shipping challenges, and was all complicated by my continued health issues, both mental and physical. The project was a mountain, in a range of mountains so high I have been struggling to overcome them.

My remaining responsibilities for the Kickstarter are fulfilling some books that have been returned, some of which never were returned but never reached the customer (hooray, shipping!); fulfilling the Snake and Cougar backers, which I’ve only just started on and it’s been a snail’s pace – I feel extreme guilt over this, tbh; and completing and releasing the stretch goals, which are nearly done except for the border town supplement which was a late addition and is now on the back burner until everything else is complete. We legit are doing the final edits on the stretch goals, putting the cover on and touching up art, this weekend! It’s just so much more work than it seems, even when you go in expecting to climb Everest.

The reality is, there are always taller mountains.

Dark mountains under a stark cloudy sky, clouding over a large field.

Not only have I encountered issues with my head injury recovery, but I’ve also dealt with recurring back problems, required pelvic rehabilitation therapy and treatment for digestive and dental issues, and also fought constantly with Medicaid – not to forget struggles with depression, my bipolar disorder, and PTSD. My immediate family has struggled too, and I never manage to be there for them. All of this while I’m still trying to figure out how to contribute to my household – at this point, I struggle pointlessly.

I have taken on editing jobs, sensitivity consultation roles, and small game design jobs, but I’ve had to step out of a few, and those I have finished like the code of conduct used in a number of Pacific Northwest game design playtest groups are ones I don’t really see the fruits of – though the financial benefits were enough to stress out Medicaid.

I’ve supported the Homunculus Assembly Line Kickstarter regularly and will be doing writing and design for it, and hopefully working closely with a partner will make it easier. It’s just a frustrating pattern that there’s work and work and it’s always more than it seems, always this bigger mountain, and when we get to the reward at the end, it’s always smaller. Turn has been out for a while now, and few people have really recognized that – this is not a complaint, this is a recognition that I haven’t reached out to podcasts or reviewers and sent out copies to try to get their attention, because I’m too damn tired.

I’m going somewhere with this, I swear.

The reality is there are ranges of mountains we climb over every day, and let’s be real, the privileged, able, rich people will be able to get over them so much more easily than the rest of us. But it’s easier to do it together, tied together with some rope for safety, trusting in each other. When we fall, we can help each other up.

And people do this for me every day – my partners, my friends, my colleagues. I know I can be a goddamn disaster, but I also know that my openness about my pain and struggles gives people the opportunity to support me and help me, whether it’s through bundles that get me to conventions or gifting me from my birthday wishlist or just a DM to make sure I eat a goddamn meal today.

Winter tree branches obscuring a frozen lake and mountains in the distance.

The mountains are cold and lonely at times, and we will starve if we try to climb them alone. We don’t have to be some sort of superhumans, and we shouldn’t have to be. We should strive to support each other in a network of creators and consumers, loving and caring for one-another. We don’t have to cannibalize each other if we plan for the storms and listen to what wise people say.

That reward at the end won’t be as small if it’s shared between us and used to grow more and greater gardens. We can keep going! We just have to stick together, and find the beauty in the mountains together, and not turn back when it feels impossible.

This is what I’m telling myself, as I keep climbing. Will you tie your rope to me, and hold on tight as the winds blow?

Mountains under a blue sky behind a winter field.

Five or So Questions on Last Fleet

Hi all! Today I’ve got an interview with Josh Fox about Last Fleet, which is currently on Kickstarter! Check out Josh’s responses below to learn more about the game!

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An illustration of a bearded person standing holding a blue crystal, staring out a window at the sky expectantly.

Tell me a little about Last Fleet. What excites you about it?

The elevator pitch for Last Fleet is that you’re brave pilots, officers, engineers, politicians and journalists aboard a rag-tag fleet, fleeing from the implacable inhuman adversary that destroyed your civilisation. The game focuses on action, intrigue and drama in a high-pressure situation.

The game delivers the experience I got when I first watched Battlestar Galactica (the noughties reboot). I remember the incredible sense of pressure, an exhausted fleet and characters both on the edge of collapse, the high stakes, and the explosive action. I remember the simmering political tensions between different factions. I remember how everyone was under constant suspicion of maybe being a secret traitor, and sometimes people even suspected themselves. And I remember how all of this was demonstrated through personal conversations between friends, family members, lovers, and rivals. That’s what the game is designed to do.

Also, I just flipping love the bad guys in this game. The Corax are a hive mind, an immense extradimensional fungus network that live in the tenebrium, the realm outside normal space that FTL ships travel through. When the Corax fleet attacks, it’s by extruding these huge fungus tendrils out of a dimensional rift and then launching swarms of spore ships.They’re able to absorb their victims’ genetic material and also the information content of their brain, enabling them to create an exact copy of the victim, memories and all, but who is actually a flesh puppet for the Corax. And so, if you lose a fight to the Corax, rather than just getting killing you’re typically paralysed and dragged off to be deconstructed in a biological cauldron. The next time we see you, you won’t be you anymore. Which is pretty horrible.

The Last Fleet cover image with a large mass covering the top of the image and an opening surrounded by tendrils and filled with pink light and debris spilling out. On the left of the image, four hexagons display different characters including an engineer, civilian, pilot, and commander. The title, Last Fleet, is in all caps in white letters at the top inside a white pointed box.

How does the game mechanically approach the Battlestar-style relationship environment?

A key part BSG is obviously the political environment: a military hierarchy, the presence of elected officials whose interests are only partly aligned with the military, and other factions such as Zarek’s people, Baltar’s cult, the union and others. I’ve baked that into the game setup, so that whether you create a setting yourself or use one out of the box, you’ll generate groups whose agendas will push against fleet unity. That’s then reinforced by the Call for Aid move, which enables players to get certain benefits that they can’t get anywhere else – like access to rare equipment, or the ability to perform an action at a larger scale – often in exchange for tying themselves more closely to that faction.

Of course, like most PBTA games, Last Fleet also comes with a set of charged relationships between the player characters, to get things going. These are handled fairly loosely initially, just little seeds of friendship or rivalry or a grudge or suspicion. But then the game’s core mechanic reinforces that. The nub of it is that you can voluntarily ramp up pressure on your character in exchange for bonuses to your die rolls – an effect that allows you to succeed at almost any roll, if you wish. But to get that pressure down, you have to take actions that generate interesting relationship drama.

There’s three ways to do it:

  • You can Let Loose, indulging a vice and losing control. Let Loose is an easy, almost-guaranteed way to reduce pressure, but it also automatically puts you in tricky situations: even on a hit you’ll do something you otherwise wouldn’t like revealing a secret, making a promise, or falling into another character’s arms.
  • You can Reach Out, sharing a hope or a dream or a fear or suchlike. Reach Out reduces pressure by strengthening relationships – but then everyone who you build a relationship with has a bit of that pressure invested in them, so if something should happen to them, the pressure comes rushing back all at once.
  • You can hit Breaking Point, allowing the pressure to come to a head and then doing something foolish or dangerous. Breaking Point is a bit like getting Marked in Night Witches, in that initially it’s evocative and fun, but do it too many times and you’ll come to a sticky end.

So between all of the above stuff, you get a pretty rich stewpot of political, social and emotional drama.

Two people in casual clothing look at each other in sadness as one hands the other a set of identification tags. In the foreground, there is a photograph of three people embracing and hugging next to pens in a cup, a set of glasses, and a decanter.

That potential result with the enemy changing you instead of death sounds really intense – what is the effect of this on the game, and on the players?

That potential result with the enemy changing you instead of death sounds really intense – what is the effect of this on the game, and on the players?

It’s not something I’d typically expect to happen to player characters. The game’s principles encourage you to build up interesting NPCs and make the players care about them, partly so you can “kill their darlings” later on. Or better yet turn them into baddies.

If it does happen to a player character, you have two options: bring them back as an NPC, or give them the Sleeper Agent move. Sleeper Agent is a start-of-session move, which generates bad stuff that your character has secretly been doing off-screen. Even you, the player, don’t know what it is. How well you roll tells us how bad it is, how much evidence there is to implicate you, and how much chance you have to stop it.

Incidentally you can start as a Sleeper Agent by taking the Scorpio playbook.

An illustration depicts a woman in a battle uniform giving directions in a fiery battle.

What do players typically do in Last Fleet to occupy their time – are there adventures with strange worlds, or are they more likely to be negotiating in a dramatic scene?

It really depends a lot on what roles and playbooks are chosen. The roles include soldier types to engineers to more political characters. The playbooks are slightly more personality-based, but each one will colour the type of play you’re likely to see, with playbooks like Gemini bringing in skulduggery, or Scorpio bringing in intrigue, or Pisces bringing in the supernatural.

There’s always a lot of stuff going on in Last Fleet, which could include things like:

– Dealing with a tense stand-off between civilians and the military, or between other political factions

– Handling the results of mass panic: protests, riots, or other civil disobedience

– Addressing practical problems like mechanical breakdown or resource shortages

– Investigating suspicious stuff, which could turn out to be political, or could turn out to be enemy infiltration

– Handling the fallout from the above – bomb threats, sabotage, poisoned food supplies, etc

– Battling the enemy, whether in tense space dogfights or holding off boarding actions

Whichever roles and playbooks are chosen, the above will be going on at some level, but the emphasis and the approach to problem-solving will vary massively. So you could get more politicking, crisis management, investigation, scouting/away missions, or battle scenes. All interleaved with the interpersonal drama generated by the pressure system.

An illustration of a soldier leaning against an alien shape with pink growths on it.

How do you control the level of violence in the game for players to ensure they’re not veering into monstrosity?

Last Fleet is the first game I’ve written where violence is explicitly coded into the rules, because the war-time setting makes it inevitable. Nevertheless in my experience, violence in play is typically instigated by the enemy who, by definition, are implacable – intent on humanity’s destruction or (as the canonical bad guys, the Corax have it) borg-style absorption. Indeed the nature of the setting makes this almost inevitable. Desperately trying to fend off waves of enemy fighters, protect civilian ships, hold off boarders, and so on. So there’s violence, but it’s mostly defensive in nature or (Night Witches-style) action aimed at destroying military targets.

But violence is a thing that can get more extreme if an enemy, particularly an enemy infiltrator, is captured. We see that in the source material as the characters are so desperate to win the war that they’re prepared to torture or kill in cold blood to get their way. All I can say here is that the game provides absolutely no benefit to doing this. The only interrogation moves are in no way enhanced by putting the target under duress, except perhaps emotional duress (by using the move “call them on their shit”).

Even so, something about the setting is likely to make some players go there, let’s face it. My games always contain a section discussing safety (not yet written for Last Fleet) and war-time issues like violence and torture would be front-and-centre for an initial discussion around lines and veils. Every game I’ve run to date has banned torture from the game before the first scene is played, for instance. That is what I’d recommend unless a group is keen to explore this very dark territory.

There is one particular playbook, Capricorn, who is a risk in this regard. They are explicitly set up as a character who is willing to do anything to defeat the enemy, with moves that hard code in collateral damage, for instance. In this case play is focused on the social and personal consequences of this behaviour: if you’re lucky you steady the fleet, if you’re unlucky you can cause more damage than the enemy, and spark panic. In a way the story of the Capricorn playbook is “can you avoid becoming a monster”, and obviously there’s a chance that the answer is “no”.

A person in green and orange clothing with safety gear on welding metal parts.

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Thanks so much to Josh for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Last Fleet on Kickstarter today!