Today I have an interview with Epidiah Ravachol about Wolfspell, hitting Kickstarter on January 21, 2019! I actually proofread the original Wolfspell released in Worlds Without Master, and I’ve been wishing for a fancy new version for ages – though the WWW version played amazing stories about wolves who were once human to start with. I’m super excited to get to interview Epidiah! I hope you like what he has to say below.
Note: The included art is not the art that will be on Wolfspell! There is new art being created by the same artist, Shel Kahn, for the project – that’s most of what the Kickstarter is for! —
Tell me a little about Wolfspell. What excites you about it?
You were there for the beginning of it, but for the sake of your readers, I’ll recap the Wolfspell origin story. I was writing the short story “One Winter’s Due” for the second issue of Worlds Without Master. That story is about two adventuring sisters who, along with a small band of family and friends, seek to turn themselves into wolves in order to mete out vengeance without violating oaths that they had taken. I am, obviously, not the first person to tell tales about humans turning into wolves. And this wasn’t even that fresh of a take on the subject, but what hooked into my brain at the time–the part I couldn’t shake loose when it came time to dream up a game for that same issue–was this idea of these (mostly) aging, well-traveled folk who have seen it all suddenly finding themselves experiencing the world anew through the mind, body, and in particular the senses of wolves. I mean, you would HAVE to play, right? How else would you learn how to be a wolf? You would run and wrestle with each other, pause to scent the wind, and howl just to hear your own, new, voice. Before that moment, you had lead a hard life of killing or thieving or peering into the forbidding dark, but now you are newly born.
I had a dice mechanic sitting in the back of my brain for quite a while, inspired by the Doctor Who roleplaying game from the 90s called Time Lord. In that game, you rolled two six-sided dice and subtract the lower from the higher, giving you a result from 0 to 5, where 1 is the most likely outcome. I really dug how that worked. I posted about it here shortly after the game was released. In Wolfspell I saw an opportunity to combine that mechanic with the spirit of the Swords Without Master tone dice. You roll two dice, one is your Wolf Die and the other your Blood Die, you subtract the lower from the higher, apply the result to a Apocalypse World style move, but the move is determined to some extent by which die is higher. If you rolled well on the Wolf Die, you can act and think in wolf ways. If you rolled well on the Blood Die, you can act and think in the ways you’ve been used to. But crucially, you need to roll poorly on the opposite die to avoid confusion. Rolling a 6 Blood only helps you if your Wolf isn’t also a 6.
One of Shel Kahn’s pieces from One Winter’s Due, a fiction piece included in Worlds Without Master.
You mention that the characters are typically aging. How relevant to the story do you think that is and why?
Oh, good! That’s a part of my assumptions I’ve left unexamined. Thank you for asking! Technically, the only way I enforce aging characters in the game is by the identifying phrases players select for their characters during pack creation. They imply, at least to me, folks we’ve been around and seen some shit. “Many have tested my sword-arm and now wait to mete vengeance upon me in the afterlife,” or “I am witness to stranger worlds than most. The arcane and preternatural are to me as wolves and weather are to the farmer,” and so forth. They are not all exclusively evocative of veteran adventures, but as a whole, they hint at a certain field of experience. But it’s not restrictive. A clever player seeking to play a young, fresh-faced thrillseeker could definitely pull it off.
For me, though, the aging bit is bound tightly to the central theme of rebirth. Witnessing the world anew through the scents and sounds of the wild has more meaning if you’ve already seen everything through the narrow scope of human vision.
Plus, I just dig stories about old folks. If you want to play young, attractive folk who transform into wolves to wrestle and groom their way through their sexual tension, you can certainly do that with Wolfspell, but there are many fine–damn fine–games out there that serve that purpose. Now if you want to play broken, old, world-weary rovers who shed their skin-tag-haunted flesh in favor of a lithesome, sinewy wolf bod to wrestle and groom their way through their sexual tension, well that field’s a bit smaller.
Well-managed tone is something many people recognize in your games, and in this game it feels especially stark to me – the tone of the game blossoms from the moment you start play. What do you think creates the particular tone of Wolfspell, and what makes it flourish?
That’s very kind of you to say! For Wolfspell’s sense of tone, I blame Apocalypse World. Or more specifically, the Read a Situation move in Apocalypse World. That thing it does where it says, “Here, here are the questions you are allowed to ask and we must answer,” is so quietly beautiful that I think I’ll be hacking it for the rest of my days. In Wolfspell you may Behold the World and drink it in through your senses. When you do this and roll Wolf, you get to ask specific questions about what your eyes, ears, nose, and instincts tell you–inviting lush description of the world around you. But when you roll Blood, your questions are of a more human nature, about who is in control, what do they want from you, where are you most advantaged–inviting a more analytical response. It limits how you think about the world to the part of you that is most in control at the moment. All of the moves do this in their own little way.
Also, I dig the way the tone presents itself to new players. The first time they roll to wrestle with the other wolves and someone rolls Blood and is awkwardly isolated by their inability to embrace their inner wolf. Or the first time someone howls and the others must howl along with them. Or the first time someone’s hurt…but no spoilers about that.
Or maybe it’s just this rule right here: “You are now wolves. Describe your coat, your size, your scent and your voice.” That’s the very moment the tone is set in most games.
The form factor for the game is interesting and very cool! Can you tell me about it, and why you chose it?
Wolfspell, like everything that appears in Worlds Without Master, is of the sword and sorcery genre (or sword and sorcery adjacent, but one of the superpowers of this particular genre is its ability to seamlessly welcome adjacent works into the fold). In the 70s rock, prog, and early metal bands would spend long hours in the back of van or bus traveling from gig to gig. To fend off boredom, they would pick cheap paperbacks off the racks wherever the had to fuel up or stop for the night. This was the vector of infection for the sword and sorcery and fantasy genres of fiction into these genres of music. They would read tales of adventure, peril and strange magics, and regurgitate them in song. They would see the covers to these books, illustrated in imagined realism, and demand the same for their albums. Shortly thereafter tabletop roleplaying games followed a similar path, drawing on both sources for inspiration. We’re all spokes on the same wheel, and I wanted to acknowledge that.
Plus, how awesome would it be to show up at a con with a milk crate full of these puppies?
Another piece from Shel Kahn’s work on One Winter’s Due.
You’ve mentioned the struggles these characters face as they encounter inability to be wolf enough, and I wonder if you could talk a little about the parallel to that, or the opposition I guess. Do characters experience positive feelings more as they progress, finding pleasure or even joy in the experience? How does that happen?
When you revel in your wolfiness there’s an inherent reward of being able to explore the world through the mind and body of a different being. I mean, that’s why we’re all here, right? To roleplay as something else? The rules feed and reflect that by opening and restricting the paths before you. You act like a wolf, you gain Feral. Feral is the only real stat in the game. It is always added to your Wolf die. So the more Feral you gain, the better you get at rolling a Wolf result. And it feels good to cut loose at peak wolf! No stumbling over human concerns or anxieties. Embracing the wild and running with it! A wonderful way to build this Feral is to wrestle and groom with the pack, to celebrate the life of a wolf the way wolves do.
One of the central questions of this game involves rolling to become human again at the end of it all. Here all the Feral you’ve collected will count against you. Will you return to civilization, your quest complete, or will you be lost forever to the call of the wild?
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Hell yes! Thank you Epidiah for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading and that you’ll follow Wolfspell and then check it out on Kickstarter on January 21!
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Hi all! Today I have an interview with Michael “Karrius” Mazur about Beneath a Cursed Moon, a roleplaying game currently available on itch.io and DriveThruRPG. It sounds pretty cool, a game with investigation and monsters! I hope you enjoy what Michael’s got to say below!
Hi all! Today I have an interview with Ryan Mather on the game FlipTales, which is currently on Kickstarter! It sounds like a fun experience, so check out what Ryan had to say below!
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Tell me a little about FlipTales. What excites you about it?
So the basics are that FlipTales is a super-accessible roleplaying game for all ages. you play as magical creatures going on adventures that feel like a mix between Disney and Miyazaki. It’s for 4-6 players, takes 30-60 minutes, and ages 10+. What most excites me about it is how easy it is for new players to dig into. I loved roleplaying so much because it gave me a chance to try out different identities and personalities. How’s it feel to play a femme character? How’s it feel to be a bully? Or to be introverted? It’s hard to find experiences that facilitate this kind of identity exploration through play. I always felt like TTRPGS were really powerful experiences, but so hard to get started. The community is focusing on accessibility more and more, and this is my attempt to contribute to that conversation.
I’ve seen some results in playtesting that I’m really excited about. Kids and grownups are able to play on equal footing because the mechanics are simple and story-focused. I’ve obsessively redesigned the rules so that people who have never played an RPG before can learn the basics in as little as 5 minutes (depending on how fast they read). I’ve watched players play their first game in one session, then write their own adventure in the next. I love the idea that we can enable all players to be not just consumers but also creators of games and settings.
Lastly, I’m excited about the beautiful art that Caroline Brewer has made for the game. It’s gender-neutral and age-agnostic, so all players can find something they connect to.
One more thing! Thanks to some generous backers, I’m able to use funds from the campaign to pay creators from underrepresented backgrounds to make stories for FlipTales. These stories already look like they are going to be a ton of fun to play. It makes me really excited to see what other stories people will come up with
How is the game “super-accessible,” and what did you do during design to make it that way?
I come from an industrial design background, so I was initially introduced to accessibility through the lens of usability. One of my first assignments was to design a toy for blind children, which led to me visiting a blind school and learning more about their students. When you design something to be usable for people who have some mismatch with their environment, it ends up being better for everyone. I’m borrowing the word “mismatch” from Kat Holmes, who does a lot of work in tech accessibility. I think it’s helpful to reframe “accessibility” from something that people with disabilities experience, to something that all people experience when they bump into a mismatch with their environment. For example, a person with vision loss will have a hard time reading text, but so will someone who has to glance quickly at their phone, or someone who just walked into a restaurant on a winter day and their glasses have fogged up.
So from that background, there are a number of things I’ve baked into the game so that all players can have a good time. Zero industry jargon. Straightforward instructions, with lots of visuals. Simple coins, simple character cards. Abilities and characters that are designed to appeal to players of all backgrounds. A format that requires zero preparation so that you don’t need experience or bountiful free time to have a game—and adventures that are as easy to write as they are to play!
My hope is that all these features combine to make an experience that feels straightforward to everyone. Of course, no game is ever finished, so I’m constantly playtesting and gathering feedback. Players’ feedback has driven design changes in every element of the game from the creatures and abilities, to how many stats the characters have, the colors of the coins, and how characters level up. I’ve deleted 75% of the game’s content over the course of development in order to hit a level of simplicity that worked consistently. I’m particularly interested in working with sensitivity readers to uncover mismatches that I can’t see on my own.
What is play like in FlipTales? What do you do and how does it function structurally?
Play in FlipTales consists of two main phases. The prompt, and freestyle. The wiz reads out a prompt and then players “freestyle” by taking turns suggesting ideas for what they would like to do. When players have an idea for what they would like to do, they flip their strength, magic, or smarts coins, depending on what’s most relevant. If they use a special ability they get extra coins. It’s a lot of storytelling and decision-making interspersed with coin flips. Since the rules are very light, players often will come up with their own mechanics to suit something they want to do in the game, like assist each other or give a friend an upgrade.
Who are you bringing on to design additional stories, and what are some of the ideas on the table for play from the stories?
So far, Sharang Biswas and Clio Yun-su Davis have been confirmed as guest writers. Sharang’s story is set in a kingdom where only boys are allowed to learn magic—your goal is to help a small girls’ school survive a visit from the superintendent. In Clio’s story, players try to stop a floral arrangement from reaching the empress of a neighboring nation, because an incompetent florist accidentally arranged the flowers to convey a very insulting message that could start a war. I’m really excited about both and am looking forward to finding more 🙂 I’m in the process of confirming a third writer.
What kind of characters are players able to play in the game, and how do the stories and accessibility make their narrative richer?
The creatures you can play as are Humanoid (magic shapeshifting human), Wingoid (bird), Arboroid (tree), Geoid (rock), Sauroid (snake in a wheelchair with cute little arms), Insectoid (any bug), Nucleoid (a single cellular organism), and Crustaceanoid (any crustacean!). There are sixteen abilities ranging from Scout to Fungus Lord to Elementalist to Assassin. They’re all on the kickstarter page if you want to check em out.
The stories all invite players to world-build and flesh out their character according to what they care about. Since FlipTales stories are all one-shots, the depth of the characters isn’t going to be anywhere near an episodic game. The richness in the storytelling happens as players try different combinations of creatures and abilities and hopefully get their feet wet writing their own adventures.
As a side note, if anyone reading this is interested in writing a FlipTales adventure, or would like to nominate a creator to write a story, feel free to reach out! As a part of the kickstarter, I’m providing funds for creators from under-represented backgrounds to make stories. You can also always submit a story through the website, which I’ll playtest for free and help refine if you need.
Hi all! Today I’ve got an interview with Miguel Ángel Espinoza about Nahual, a game currently on Kickstarter. It sounds really fascinating, and I asked about some of the parts of the game that were new to me, like how your characters run a small business! Check out the answers below!
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Tell me a little about Nahual. What excites you about it?
I’m mainly excited about being able to bring a Mexican game into existence, to be able to present my culture in this hobby that I am passionate about. I discovered role-playing games in 1994, and almost 25 years later I’m writing a game of my own. I wish I could go back and tell me from the past this is what I’ll be doing. That he doesn’t actually need to be american or work on TSR to make it happen.
I’m also excited about being able to base the game on Edgar Clements works. He’s a very talented artist and also a very generous creator. The ideas he came up with for his graphic novel capture perfectly this complicated culture that we are, heir to a cultural clash that to this day still has repercussions. We are neither Spanish, nor Indigenous… we are mestizo. And Clement’s way to represent that fusion of folklore and myths, is brilliant. The first time I read his work I felt joyous envy, and thought that it was perfect for a Mexican RPG. So here I am, making it happen. Couldn’t be more excited.
What do players do in Nahual? What kind of characters do they play?
Players in Nahual play shapeshifting angel hunters. They inherited the power of the nahual, that allows them to transform into their totem animal and perform supernatural feats. But their knowledge is incomplete, because their ties to their ancestral indigenous culture were severed by the invading conquistadors and their armies of angels. So in present day struggle, they use this gifts to hunt down angels, to sell them as a commodity. They could be heroes or liberators, but instead all they manage to do is worry about putting food on the table, and live one day at a time.
You talk about being mestizo. How does that affect your design work in Nahual? How does it impact your role as a creator in regards to representing this story?
I’m not sure. All I know is that being mestizo, latino, gives me a certain point of view that has to do with the way I grew up. But it is not something I’m actively paying attention to, or trying to convey. I can see for example how I (and other Mexican players) connect to Edgar’s stories without much trouble, and how some English speaking audiences struggle to understand some aspects of those stories. There’s of course a cultural gap, it is just natural. So what I’m actually actively trying to do is build a bridge for those audiences, for them to cross that gap.
You ask how being mestizo impacts my role as creator, I don’t think it does in this particular case. Because these are our stories, I’m part of it and they are part of me. If I was writing a Euro-fantasy game, inspired by Tolkien and all its tropes, then I think me being mestizo would have an impact, I would be playing as the visitor team, a fish out of water. With Nahual I’m not, I’m the home team, I’m in my element.
I would love to hear more about the transformation, how it influences play, and the emotional context. How did you design a transformation that is progressive without becoming overpowered or confusing, and how do players react when they play this out in playtests?
The idea is that your character’s Totem Animal is really a reflection of your personality. So if you are bold and strong, and maybe violent, your animal will be a jaguar. If you’re sneaky, a bit of a trickster and a little carefree, your animal will be a possum. So, unlike in some classic shapeshifting tropes, when you transform in Nahual you are really becoming a heightened version of yourself, instead of something else.
The design process has been complicated, I had to find a way to convince players to transform—on my first iterations players were hesitant to do it, like they wanted to “save it” for the real moment, which may never comes. So I had to tweak my design and mechanics to not only enforce the transformation, but also tell characters this is something you’ll want to do, something cool, because the game is about that! However I still needed to represent this toll characters have to pay for not having complete knowledge of how this power works (that lost connection to their roots I’ve mentioned before), so I’ve tied the transformation to stress and traumas. To be honest though, I’m still playtesting this, looking for the right connection/combination between its parts to make it work best and be tied to the fiction.
About the progressive power of the transformation, it is inspired in Epyllion, functioning as the advancement system for the game. As with Epyllion ages, each stage of transformation has its own XP track and as you unlock advancements, you push thru to the next levels of transformation. So you get more powerful, but that only means the MC can now punch harder at you! Hahaha.
And as for player reactions, the transformation is my favorite part of the game, whenever each character transform for the first time I tell the player that for each person the feeling is different, and I ask them how for their character the perception of the world around them changes…and I always get awesome creative responses from players, and it helps them getting involved in the game. And what I love is that it is not really a mechanic is only players creating the fiction.
Tell me a little more about the changarro! How does it work, and how do players interact with it? Why do you feel it is important to Nahual?
When I first started working on the game I was trying to include almost everything Clement has on his comic books. And it was all over the place. So, when I got in touch with Mark Diaz Truman, from Magpie Games, he helped me realized I need to focus my design, to tighten it up and make it sharper. And it was a feeling I had already, he just put a name to it, and he called it “holding environment”. And what that means is, I need something to make the characters come together, and it is different for each game, depending on the type of fictions they tell. And for Nahual, it became clear to me I had to focus on the angelero trade, the hunting of angels, and the way to do it was to have the characters working together in a Changarro, were they team up to share the burdens of handling the business.
Once I decided that will be the focus of the game, the holding environment, I started to work on mechanics for how the dynamics of the changarro will be. And something was clear from the beginning, I wanted players to feel what it is like to try to keep a small business afloat to make a living, despite harsh circumstances. So the changarro mechanics are about that grind. About needing to take care of the business in a day to day basis, running out of product…so they’ll need to go hunting, and having a bunch of problems—for players to choose from—that will come knocking at their door. At first it sounds repetitive, but on all the play testing I’ve have the problems characters face are completely different, because they’re also tied to the character’s backstory and relationships between them and the barrio they live in.
So the changarro is the glue that keeps players together and that jumpstarts the action, and also is the engine that will avoid things to stagnate, because there’s always going to be product you’ll need to restock, neighbors that’ll stick their noses in, rivals that will try to take you out of business, unhappy clients, or a big company that wants to either buy you out or crush you.
I just wanted to do a brief post about Turn and identity, on this, our turning point to the second half of the Kickstarter. You can check out Turn’s Kickstarter at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/briecs/turn-a-tabletop-roleplaying-game. Content warning for discussion of mental health, depression, and mentions of binge drinking/alcoholism and suicidal ideation.
I want to talk about what it means to be two (or more) things in one person. I come at this from a couple of different axes, and some people have more. Mine are really tied to people’s perception for some of these, but others are truly just inherently who I am.
Let me try to separate them a little.
As far as perception, to many people, I’m a cis woman. In reality, I’m not. So I live with perceived-me as cis woman, and actual-me as not. As well, I’m not perceived as disabled, but in reality, I am. So I live as perceived-me and able, and actual-me as disabled. I also appear straight – I’m even in a perceived-straight relationship. But I’m not! I’m queer as hell. So, perceived-me and actual-me again at odds.
It goes deeper, I say, in a Morpheus voice.
I am actually both nonbinary and masculine. Simultaneously, most of the time, though in different amounts. This is big, and important. One of the biggest ones, though, is that I have bipolar disorder. Even when I am at the height of mania, my depression looms and can tug at me in moments when I’m sensitive, and vice versa. My mania (including hypomania) and depression, they’re a part of me, even when I’m incredibly well-medicated.
Around 2012, I entered into a mixed episode. (A slow slide.) This is when you’re kind of manic and depressed all at once! It is, shall we say, a bad time. It lasted years. Many of my readers knew me during this time period, through what I call The Dark Years, because I lost a lot of memories due to blackouts both from mania and from alcohol abuse. Not great.
However, I started working on Turn in 2013. This isn’t a coincidence. I don’t talk about this part of Turn very much because it’s still incredibly hard for me. I’ve been asked in a few interviews, and only went into it in detail relating to this specific subject on one, about why shapeshifters are great to tell stories about. There are tons of reasons – they’re fun, they can be used as a metaphor, they’re powerful and interesting. But shapeshifters – multiple identities in one body? I understand that, I live that.
From 2012 until a ways into 2015, I was what some people consider “crazy.” I was fighting with my mental illness, making tons of bad choices, but also continuing to grow my business, attending university, and so on. I was struggling between the intense, high, selfish, egotistical mania and the soul-sucking, exhausting, lonely, self-loathing depression. During all of this, I got to see that neither side – in me personally – existed without the other, that they fed into each other, interacted with each other, and that there were things I could do where both would work together, or where I could find a harmony. That eventual harmony did actually lead me to getting help, going on lithium, quitting binge drinking, and ending harmful relationships.
And there, you can see a burning light of hope.
I have always identified with shapeshifters, having a hidden identity of some kind with everyone most of my life. They are part of Turn, and are good to make stories about, because of what I said – they’re interesting, fun, powerful, and great metaphors for people to place upon themselves. But I would be lying if I didn’t say that the actual design of Turn wasn’t heavily influenced by my own conflicting identity.
I’ve had reason to think about it a lot over the Kickstarter, and while I personally struggle to find mental health support on Medicaid. The fear of falling back into those dark days is real, let me tell you. But, in thinking, I wanted to share that the design of shapeshifters in Turn, to have these different parts of their identity that they struggle between, that they must find balance within? That’s bred out of true hope.
Many people have different sides to them, and it’s hard to deal with it sometimes. When I think of when I was first conceiving the Struggles in Turn, the mechanics for how you resolve conflicts between your beast and human identities and their wants and needs when you take action, I thought of how every day when I was struggling with my mental health, I had to choose my consequences. Sometimes it meant I’d sacrifice face, sometimes I’d deal with physical fallout, and sometimes I’d have other worse consequences for whatever ridiculous shit I got up to that day. I couldn’t always predict them and sometimes I’d just end up with the whole mess (hello, 6-).
And it was also always about the drawbacks that my one part of me had pulling against the other. When I was more manic and just trying to slam down a conversation at a convention, my depressive side would push for me to say things that were self-deprecating. When I was a miserable mess and struggling from the edge of suicide, the mania would suggest self-destructive methods. It was kind of rough, honestly.
When I put these into Turn, though, I didn’t want all that bad shit coming with it. For me, I wanted shapeshifters to be something beautiful! I was okay with them having hard stuff they dealt with, but it wasn’t about either side of them being dark, or self-destructive, or harmful. They’re just both parts of the being with needs and wants that the shifters have to struggle to satisfy or meet, even if it’s hard, and the biggest aspect is that they’re just trying to show up the way everyone wants them to show up. That’s why exposure is a mechanic, because the real hard part of all of this is the world, not their identity. Shifters are good!
I want to talk more about shapeshifters being beautiful and good so I will soon, but this is getting a little long.
Basically, shapeshifters are whatever you want them to be in what they stand for or are a metaphor for. You can play them in a bunch of different ways! But the reason why their mechanics work the way they do is because I discovered through struggles with my bipolar disorder that these complex multi-faceted identities aren’t actually binary structures! Even my mania has some sadness, even my depression has some egotism. It’s not exactly a fun way to figure out how to design a game, but it’s a real one.
So the shapeshifters in Turn are complex. They are not all beast when they’re a beast, and they’re not all human when they’re a human. They’re a little bit of each, regardless of their form, in different amounts. And I thought about this intensely during throes of mania and depths of depression! So I can tell you with all honesty that there are no perfect metaphors. But I’ll tell you this: shapeshifters don’t have a special tweenie form like many shapeshifter versions do because I will never have a happy medium, and I had to find a way into the light without one. I think the story is stronger that way, and it’s a story I know how to tell.
If you liked reading about Turn and want to support it, the Kickstarter runs until November 30, so please consider backing it. If this resonated with you, please feel free to share your experiences with having a multi-faceted identity – you can even use the #turnrpg and #myturnID hashtags if you’d like. I know I’m not alone in being a person with many sides, and I appreciate the power of sharing our stories.
Until next time:
P.S. – If you’re a Patreon backer, let me know if you think I should charge for this post!
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What is Bastion, both as a product and as your vision?
Bastion is a gumbo of a lot of different element I love. Portions of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, mixed with Glenn Cook’s Black Company, mashed with a bit of Gamma World, boiled down in a melange Micheal Moorcock’s phantasmagoric Eternal Champion worlds, sautéed in a bit of the Green Lantern Corp, and strained through a cullender of Charles R. Saunders’ Imaro, you get Bastion.
It’s a big fangasmic mess of inspirations.
The original intent was to do a straight vanilla fantasy game with all the standard fantasy tropes. I wanted to see if I could do it with a straight face. Halfway through the process, I couldn’t take it anymore. I like my D&D fantasy, but trying to replicate it started making veins pop out of the side of my head. I was dissatisfied with the elements I created, so I flipped the script and went in another direction.
I brought a few people on board to help flesh out my outlines, and they added their secret sauce here and there and what you have is Bastion as it is at the moment.
What moves you about Afrocentric themes and their application in Bastion?
Afrocentric elements pop up in all my work. GODSEND Agenda, ATLANTIS: The Second Age, and even in HELLAS to a small extent. What you get when I add elements of Afrocentrism is me. It’s me searching and exploring a lost piece of my identity as I try to learn about Africa. American school systems teach you almost nothing about Africa and only express ideas of an unrefined and strange land filled with primitive people. I know that’s not the case, and I wanted to illustrate that in the books I produce.
Africa is BIG, I mean, REALLY BIG. You can fit almost every continent on earth inside the body of Africa. What I offer isn’t a legitimate mirror of any one African culture. I’ve taken elements of West African cultures (Akan, Yoruba) and made a fantasy game based on those components. Much like Lord of the Rings is an amalgam of Western European history/myth, I’ve done the same with Bastion. I hope what small efforts I’ve made entice others to dive deeper into the rich and varied cultures. Bastion is only a surface level exploration of Afrocentrism, but it’s up to the reader to go deeper.
How did you decide what elements of sword and sorcery really would shine through in the game, and what design choices made them hit the mark?
I love fantasy and the genre of sword and sorcery. It’s a hot mess of debate about what makes a piece “sword and sorcery.” A lot of people stick close to R.E. Howards Conan, but many people fail to mention the mind-blowing work of Clark Ashton Smith. I love the strange and sublime horror of sword and sorcery fantasy. The pyrrhic victories of the heroes, and the changes that cause in their souls. The peculiar and bitter cost of power it puts on the hero.
I hope I’ve brought all those essentials to Bastion, but I guess that’s for the consumer to say.
As I have my game Turn currently on Kickstarter, Tracy Barnett and J. Dymphna Coy were kind enough to ask me some questions. Check out my answers below!
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Tell us a little about Turn. What excites you about it?
Turn is a slice-of-life supernatural roleplaying game about shapeshifters in small towns, where the shifters try to seek balance between their beast and human identities while finding community with shifters and mundanes alike. It has relatively simple mechanics, a lovely town building system, and the play is quiet drama about life in small towns as a shifter.
I’m excited about Turn because it is the game I designed to satisfy myself! I was looking for a game that scratched a particular itch, and couldn’t find it in other games I played and learned about. But Turn has that play experience, it is the game I was looking for. I get to play out quiet scenes, intimacy that explores a range of emotions, have some fun and cheerful moments, and explore the identity of my character, and the game supports all of that.
What do you think of popular portrayals of rural life? How does your game differ from those (or not)?
There aren’t a lot of popular portrayals of rural life, to be honest, and many portrayals are negative. See any depiction of West Virginia hillbillies for what I mean. Obviously that’s not the route I chose for writing about real rural life. There is one portrayal of rural life that doesn’t perfectly sync up with Turn but is not super far off, and that’s…Letterkenny.
For those unfamiliar, Letterkenny is a Canadian comedy set in the fictional small town of Letterkenny, population 5000. It follows a number of characters, but primarily Wayne and Katy, siblings who run a produce stand and farm, and their friends. There’s not an exceptional amount of violence in the show, but when there is violence, they show that it hurts and has consequences, which I value. Most of the show is just their day-to-day lives at the produce stand or the farm, time spent socializing between characters, and important events to the town like elections of local officials and the St. Patrick’s Day party.
The pacing is so simple, and there aren’t typically the biggest stakes, but they’re stakes that matter when push comes to shove. Relationships are vital, people comfort each other, and people learn. And there’s always chorin’ to do! So I love that, and a lot of that comes through in Turn for me.
What doesn’t come through is that there is no representation of the shifter aspect, so that’s definitely something different, and Letterkenny is also hilarious as heck, which Turn isn’t as much of. There’s definitely some goofing off in Turn and some funny moments, but I wouldn’t ever expect the banter of Letterkenny levels in Turn. And that’s okay! Turn’s meant for a more mixed bunch of emotions.
A Bear by Rhis Harris.
What do you find compelling about stories centered around shapeshifters?
Aside from like, it just being kind of cool to be able to turn into an animal and have superpowers and regeneration and wanting to explore what it means to have a body that’s functioning at peak rather than dwindling at minimum?
Well, shapeshifters are great for the metaphor. See, people ask me sometimes what the shapeshifters represent, and I did a podcast recently where they were like “oh, we thought it was about being the other!” when I had just described how some of the inspiration for the shapeshifters had been rooted in my experiences with bipolar disorder and mixed episodes. The thing is, I’m queer, I’m nonbinary, I have invisible disabilities, I have mental illnesses. I am other, in a lot of ways. So when people read into the shapeshifters a sense of other, that’s not unintentional.
But it also wasn’t always intentional. People read a lot from shapeshifters because the nature of their second identity, so different from their surface identity, and the nature of secrecy – these are things that the “other” experience, too, in many situations. We talk about going stealth as queer and gender nonconforming people, and passing, and so I see a lot of that too, but not just with queerness, not just with gender, not just with disability, not just with mental illness, or any other kind of other we are as humans.
Shapeshifters represent what you want them to represent, I think, which makes them an excellent narrative focus.
How are your experiences growing up in small towns reflected in Turn?
They are Turn. Honestly, it’s hard not to see it when I play. In things other people do (even people who aren’t from small towns!), in things I do, in the way the Town Manager pushes people together to fiddle with their secrets and relationships, in the map of the town. Even in games I haven’t participated in, some stuff is unmistakable as what I built into it.
My favorite bits are when people instinctively realize how long it’s going to take to drive to the other side of town or that the local store/hospital/police/whatever isn’t going to be as well staffed or supplied or that their family members are like, absolutely going to hear about this, and when we’re building the town and people are like “well obviously rowdiness goes real close to the town and connects directly to a bloodline” or something like that – not all of these things are “rules” but they’re small, rural town things that reflect in the game and I really do count some of that as my design, and the rest of it on the weird small town knowledge we culturally share.
When people expand to Italy or other countries like in the stretch goals, who knows! Maybe someone else’s experiences will shine through most!
The Overachiever by John W. Sheldon.
What’s the most compelling thing to you about focusing on the tension between a person’s animal and beast sides, rather than, say, violence?
So, violence for me is three things (sometimes combined, often separate): repulsive, spectacular, and catharsis. And it’s also in 99% of other games, movies, tv shows, books, and other media. It’s everywhere. Even in shapeshifter media, you will far more often find people exploring violence and brutality than you will find them exploring issues of identity. And that’s boring!
Like, don’t get me wrong, violence can be amazing to watch for a variety of reasons, and playing it out can be really incredible. But, violence is also all around us. Our world is violent. We’re constantly discussing it, experiencing it. And maybe, I guess, I wanted a game where you could do violence, but you had to fucking deal with it, too. So I did that. And it didn’t need to be explored so deeply? Like if you can do whatever you want with violence but just actually have to deal with consequences, not just take a potion and leave the bodies in the road, that conversation is already happening.
Digging into identity is more fascinating to me because majority culture is cool with dealing with exploring the identity of the average white cis man of privilege, but like, there’s a fucking lot of the rest of us. Using shapeshifters as our embodiment in the game when in rural, small towns you’ll immediately run into like bunches of other intersections. We’ve had queer characters, poor characters, characters with trauma.
You end up with these deep questions of self and community when you look face on at poverty, drug use, family struggles, loss, and so on. And when you’re struggling with yourself, you have a harder time addressing them – so you gotta try and work stuff out! It leads to these introspective, intimate, caring, emotional scenes! Like, we have – in our longest running game – a weekly tea party with our three characters who are trying to figure this shifter crap out, while one of them is trying to get their shit together, another is trying to come out as a gay man and keep his life, and one didn’t realize until just lately that they didn’t have their shit together. We play these out, and they’re wonderful, and also constantly at risk of running afoul of the hectic lives these shifters lead.
So I’d say it’s more interesting because it’s not what we’re doing every day, and because it opens opportunities to tell moments of stories we sometimes forget to tell. And a cougar, bison, and wolf having tea is just *chef’s kiss.* Moments I truly treasure!
Hi all, today I have an interview with Craig Campbell on Die Laughing, which is on Kickstarter right now! I hope you all enjoy reading what Craig has to say about this cinematic horror-comedy game in the responses below!
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Tell me a little about Die Laughing. What excites you about it?
Die Laughing is a short-play, GM-less RPG. Players portray characters in a horror-comedy movie and everyone’s going to die. It’s just a matter of when it happens and how funny you can make it. After your character is gone, you become a producer on the movie and continue to influence the story and the characters right up until the end.
I’m really stoked that Die Laughing finally came together. One of the problems with horror games where characters actually die, as opposed to “thriller/mood” type games, is, “what do I do after my character dies?” You can make a new character, play an NPC. What else? I’ve been working on this game off and on for over a decade. Every couple years I’d come back to the idea and try something different. Hitting on the “making a movie” angle finally made it gel for me. It came together pretty quickly over the past year or so, kind of in the background while working on other games. It’s a game that embodies horror and embraces that type of game experience, but with comedic elements and the “making a movie” idea to keep it from getting too heavy.
What were the inspirations for Die Laughing and how is the game the most similar and dissimilar to familiar materials?
I’m a big horror movie buff. This most recent iteration of the game, I hit on the idea of the game being about making a movie specifically, rather than just generally a horror story. That introduced a “director” role into gameplay and also a “producer” role that players could take on after their characters are dead. Making it a horror-comedy opened up the idea that it’s OKAY for your character to die…in fact, it’s kind of the point of the game. Your character is going to die and you’re going to make it funny and then you’re going to do this other cool thing for the rest of the game.
It’s sort of a hybrid of a traditional RPG and a story game like Fiasco. You have a character sheet with four traits and a few cool capabilities that sort of bend the rules. But there’s no GM. Instead, there’s an act/scene structure that generates random scenes that everyone roleplays to move the story forward. But these are just prompts. The “director” of each scene helps set the stage, but the players with characters in that scene propel everything. A dice mechanic resolves general success/failure of your character in the scene, rather than for every action. The game has a little bit of this and that from a lot of horror RPGs and a LOT of horror movies, all kind of bent and twisted with some humor.
How does Die Laughing work mechanically?
During each scene in Die Laughing, one of the characters is the lead character (and that changes from scene to scene). That character’s player decides who will be in the scene with their character. One of the players portrays the director, setting their character aside temporarily to help set up and guide the scene (that also changes from scene to scene). Everyone in the scene plays the scene out. Sometimes the monster attacks during the scene. Sometimes it doesn’t.
At the end of each scene, everyone with a character in the scene makes a trait check by rolling their dice pool to determine whether their character succeeds in the scene or not. Then everyone narrates that success or failure for their character, thus pushing the story forward. As the game goes along, your dice pool decreases based on the results of those trait checks. This decrease is a countdown to your character’s death. When you run out of dice, your character dies and you narrate their death.
In addition to the director and producer stuff, there’s a unique rule for each monster that influences your involvement in the game after your character is gone.
What kind of horrors do the players encounter in Die Laughing? How do you ensure players are having a good time and not encountering subject matter that makes them feel alienated or afraid in a not-fun way?
The narrative, relatively open nature of the game allows the players to basically take it as far as they want. The monster is defined for the game you’re playing, but that’s not to say there couldn’t be multiple monsters or that the monsters could mutate or…well, whatever you want. I’ve played games where the violence was cartoony. I’ve played games where there were gory descriptions of things.
That said, any game — horror games in particular — can go too far. That is addressed in the book, encouraging players to be clear in what they expect from the game. The simple version is presented as a “movie rating system.” Everyone agrees the game will be PG, PG-13, or R-rated and plays appropriately. The book also points out some common sense…if you even remotely THINK that a particular subject would make ANYONE uncomfortable or hurt them, just don’t do it. Finally, the book points out there are a variety of other safety tools, such as the X-card, and information on those can be found easily online. Pick the one that is most fitting to your group.
You mention special rules for monsters post-kicking-it. When you die, what happens?
This is a little “extra” that gives players whose characters are gone something to do. It varies from monster to monster. For example, with the Mad Slasher with Weird Weapons, when your character is dead, you get to describe the moment when your character’s corpse is found at an inopportune time, like you see in so many slasher movies when everything hits the fan at the end. There’s a trait check that happens there that can weaken the character finding the body. With the Sexy Vampire, your character doesn’t die, but rather gets turned into a sexy vampire. And you can insert them as an NPC into scenes throughout the rest of the game.
Tell me a little about Dinosaur Princesses. What excites you about it? Dana: What is there not to be excited about? First, Dinosaur Princesses is also a colouring book—actually colouring and drawing is one of the most important parts of gameplay, in my opinion. One of the first things you do is draw and/or colour your dinosaur princess. As part of that, what I think is really great about the game is that it taps into the limitless and boundless imagination that we had a kids. The colouring and drawing parts are great at breaking down barriers that we often have as adults which tell us to reign in our creativity to make it fit within certain perimeters of consistency and probability; it gives permission to just have fun. It is meant to be able to be played by kids, but I think it really shines when adults play it.
Dinosaur Princesses is also very friendly to folx who are completely new to table-top RPGs. When I have run it, I have often had a high percentage of folx who have never played a ttrpg before. The system is very rules-lite, so players have very little stress worrying about system mastery. It’s also so fun and easy to run that it acted as a gateway to get me to finally get over my extreme social anxiety and be able to run the game myself!
Finally, I think of it as a queer game. Princesses are explicitly stated to be of any gender. “Dinosaur” is also a pretty open descriptor; you can be a t-rex or velociraptor, but your dinosaur can also be a cat or train. It’s subtly stating that what we see as rigid boxes, descriptors, or roles are actually malleable and able to be questioned. One can take those boxes and, if they want, subvert them to express other identities—and that is totally an acceptable and good thing to do. It’s a freeing experience.
What were the inspirations for Dinosaur Princesses, and how did you come to the point of making a game plus coloring book from those inspirations?
Hamish: The main inspiration for Dinosaur Princesses are the kids of a couple of my best friends in New Zealand. At the time, their favourite things were Dinosaurs and Princesses, and my friends were joking about finding a game they would both like. I said I’d write it and a few months later they playtested the first version! They were 4 & 6 at the time, so that’ll probably be my youngest playtesters for a long time! Beyond the origin story, I had a lot of discussions with those same friends about the kind of things that the game could do that other games don’t. The idea of the central mechanics being cooperation and problem solving came out of those discussions.
(Following on from Dana’s comment about it being a queer game) One of the fundamental design principles is that the rules should provide enough structure to help children tell stories that feel like an after school cartoon–with all weird and wonderful characters that involves!–and that, within the confines of a game about cooperative problem solving, the rules should never block them from imagining who they wanted to be while they play. I didn’t want an 8 year old telling their younger sibling that they couldn’t play a cat or a dragon or whatever because it’s “against the rules.”
Dana: I can tell the story about how it became a colouring book! Hamish was already working on it, but I didn’t know much about it at the time. We were in a small bar in Wellington, NZ a couple years back and he was telling a friend about the game. He said he wanted the rules book to look like a kids book and that he was also thinking of the character sheets as something for people to draw and colour on. I made the logical leap and (probably) shouted, “THE RULES BOOK SHOULD *BE* A COLOURING BOOK!!!!!!”. I guess that was my first touch on the game. I didn’t really start working on it actively until earlier this year.
What are the mechanics like in the game, and how do players interact with each other and the world?
Hamish: Dinosaur Princesses uses an opposed dice pool mechanic which is set up so that if a Dinosaur Princess tries to do something on their own, the odds are against them. After they assemble their dice pool, they ask their friends, the other Dinosaur Princesses, the most important question in the game, “Will you help me?” Then their friends build dice pools and hopefully overcome the problem together! Dinosaur Princesses has a GM who rolls the opposing dice pool, but it’s a very low-prep role that brings in a lot of the Powered by the Apocalypse ethos of encouraging player participation in worldbuilding and player-driven narratives. The players come up with the story together at the table.
[Brie Note: The collaboration encouragement here is SO GREAT.]
How do players choose their Dinosaur Princess, and what do they use to assemble their dice pool?
Dana: Players have a character sheet, some of which of have colouring-book style line art of typical dinos (t-rex, triceratops, etc) and some of which have the picture space blanks so folx can draw their own. Players decide on what type of dinosaur they will be—there is an example list in case someone has a hard time coming up with one. However, it’s important to note that we use “dinosaur” in a loose sort of way; I have played a cat and platypus “dinosaur”! Similarly, players then choose what type of princess they will be. This can be any sort of profession-like thing, such as doctor, aquanaut, news caster, and so forth.
They assemble their dice pool by describing how they use their strengths as a dinosaur and as a princess to help their friends. The mechanic is set up so that if a Dinosaur Princess tries to do something on their own, the odds are against them. It’s important that the player starting dice pool asks their friends, the other Dinosaur Princesses, the most important question in the game, “Will you help me?”
Hamish: There are sample lists of types of dinosaurs and princesses in the book and on the character sheets, but they’re supposed to be inspirational, not restrictive. Players are encouraged to be as inventive and imaginative as they like in choosing who they will play.
What kind of stories do you tell in Dinosaur Princesses? How do you keep it interesting?
Dana: The sorts of stories being told in the game are as unique as the Dinosaur Princesses that the players create at the table. The world-building and story plot directly grows from that foundation. I have had games where the plot revolved around the Dinosaur Princesses trying to find their Houses & Humans game miniatures, and I have had games where the Dinosaur Princesses rode around town on the monorailasaurus to try to uncover the mystery of the queen’s roving teapot. I have had games that took place in an abandoned mall and ones that took place in space. It really is a game where everyone’s boundless imagination shapes play! Hamish: Dinosaur Princesses is designed to be played as a one shot, it takes about 2 hours to play a game, and it draws on the creativity of everyone at the table; so it spreads the cognitive load of coming up with new stuff and people can usually keep the ideas coming over the short length of play.
Content Warning for discussion of memory loss, especially near the end of the interview. —
Tell me a little about Thousand Year Old Vampire. What excites you about it?
Well, first let me say that I don’t often get excited about things I make. I get nervous, nauseous, pent up. I used to joke about the “sweat test”; if I wasn’t sweating when I showed something to someone I wasn’t sufficiently invested in the project or the showing. This came out of the time when I was showing art in galleries, and it has something to do with the way I made and thought about art at the time. It still applies to a lot of games I make, but in a different way–the games I make are personal, or visceral, or difficult in ways that my art never was. Now I sweat because I’m making a machine that people play with, and if the manual for that machine is unclear people will break it or maybe even get hurt. There’s not a lot of room for excitement in any of this.
But I’m excited about Thousand Year Old Vampire in a way that leaves me quietly alarmed at myself. I’ve worked on this game differently than other games, with the biggest difference being that a reaching back to my old studio process. When I made a thing in the studio it was a quick, fraught process during which I could ingest or enjoy or experience the thing I was making it as it was made; the actual “artwork” was a shell left behind after this work was done. Game making is different in that you need people or systems to test things; there’s a space of time between the making and the experiencing of it. Because TYOV is a solo game it’s making was a self-contained process, I wrote and played and wrote and played in a closed system. It was fast and amazing and it’s how I want to be.
And it produced a game I am excited for and proud of. I’ve played this game so many times, and the prompts consistently produce a different experience with every go. And at least once during each game something happens that makes my innards churn, something unexpected and awful and it’s like I’m not controlling a character but being betrayed by one. I’m not a “let me tell you about my character” kind of person, but TYOV has gotten me excited enough to write game summaries on the Facebooks.
This is the journal in the PDF, which is gorgeous.
What is the motivation for a single-player game like this? As someone who loves lonely games and making them, I must ask: why is this game good alone?
I love your phrasing of “lonely games”! It’s perfect. For me, there were a couple of reasons to make a solo game. Maybe more than a couple.
Solo games are a weird design space. I have a print out of A Real Game by Aura Belle that I’ve been sitting on for a year, I’m so excited about it I can’t bear to play it. Every game I make is about communication and bodies in space; a framework for people pushing at each other to find play. Other players change the game space for each other with a constant barrage of gentle tugs which keep each other engaged and off-center—this is awesome and good but what if we didn’t do that?
A non-social game is tricksy and strange. How can you operate in the “story game” space and not have it be a choose your own adventure book? The game prompts in Thousand Year Old Vampire make you look inward for responses, you are building something between you and the machine of the game without any other conscious actors in the room. There’s no “yes and” here, oh mortal. And without other people in the room watching I can do things that I might not do otherwise when I ask questions and give horrific answers.
And the solo play echoes the subject of the game itself. You play a vampire who sees everything they love turn to dust. Your character is alone, you are alone, the two states echo each other. One play option is to keep a diary as you play. Journaling is a usually a thing you do alone. One of my objectives as a designer is to have the system and the setting inextricably bound together, so solo play works.
That said, I don’t see any reason that a person can’t play it with others. Why not share a pool of Characters and let the prompt reactions affect the world that the players occupy? The system is simple enough that players can do this if they want, and I’m sure some will—there’s been a remarkable amount of pushback over the idea of a solo game being a thing at all.
And practically speaking: I’m a lonely guy. Making a game I can play and iterate on my own is helpful. It echoes the prevalence of solo rules in wargame design—I’m the kind of person that can’t get people together to play things, so I’ll make the sort of things I can enjoy on my own.
Finally: I had a conversation with Jackson Tegu, who has a solo experience called I Was Once Like You, that helped me think about the solo play-ness of TYOV. In the friendly discussion-like thing we were doing I came up with “Petit Guignol” as a term that I thought fit TYOV. It literally means “tiny puppet” in French and has a direct connection to the “Grand Guignol” which was a style of bloody, horrifying, naturalist theater developed in the 1890s. As I play TYOV I sometimes play with scale in my mind, imagining the scenes happen in the space between my arms as I update the character sheet on a keyboard. It’s a play space I don’t think I can imagine with other people in the room, it’s tiny and close and personal. Anyways, there’s that.
Tell me about the design process. The way you handle moving through the prompts is simple but clever, and you have these memories and experiences that are created. How did you develop these aspects of the game?
My design process is a sham. I stare into space until my unconscious gets bored and gives me something that I can think about, and then maybe that becomes a game, or a joke, or an artwork. My games are not the product of rigorous engagement with discourse, they are random stuff that vaguely imitates a category of thing which I understand exists in the world. These are the “Sunday painter” equivalent of game design, if that Sunday painter just really liked wearing smocks and berets but never bothered to go to a museum.
I don’t design these games so much as find them laying around my brain-house. I pick them up and wipe the muck off, maybe paint them a different color to assuage a conscience that demands at least a semblance of effort, then I scribble my name on them and puff up with self-satisfaction.
But a serious aside: I don’t read a lot of games, and I do this on purpose. I’m more likely to solve a problem in a useful way if I’m not clouded up with other people’s solutions for similar issues. This is a good methodology unless you’re building bridges or stuff where people can die. This builds on my greatest strength, which is that I’m pretty dumb.
Occasionally these magical brain-gift games might need some rough corners polished up. With TYOV I had to figure out a way to progress through the prompt sequence so as to maximize replayability. (You, dear reader, haven’t played this game, so super quick summary: You roll some dice and slowly advance along a list of prompts which you answer about how your vampire continues its existence. If you land on the same prompt number more than once, there are second and third tier prompts you encounter. The game ends when you reach the end of the list.) By using a d6 subtracted from a d10, it created the possibility of skipping entries, of going backwards, and of landing on the same entry number more than once. This meant that rare and super rare results could easily be baked into the chart structure—you have the same chance of landing on any given number as you progress through the prompts, but there are diminished chances of landing on a number twice and getting the second-tier prompt. Landing on a number a third time usually happens once per game, and those rare third-tier prompts can be world-changing.
The tiered prompt system naturally evolved into a mini-story arc system. I can make the player introduce a self-contained Character or situation with a first-tier prompt, and in the second-tier prompt them interact with what they created in a new way. It’s perfectly fine if they never hit that second tier prompt, they won’t for most entries, but if they do it will naturally make a little story. It’s so satisfying and it’s all part of the same system, no additional rules are needed to support it.
One aspect of TYOV I’ve been thinking hard about is player safety. What are appropriate safety tools for solo play? What tools allow us to think terrible, soul souring thoughts but then put them behind us? I’m a fan of X-card-like thinking, and was around Portland while Jay Sylvano and Tayler Stokes were working on their own support signals systems. Stokes later developed the affirmative consent-based support flower, and is giving me guidance on my solo safety thinking.
One of my imperatives as a designer is getting rid of non-vital things. This is practical because additional complexity usually makes a game less fluid and harder to learn. If I can get by with three rules that’s great, but if I’m going to have eight then I might as well have a hundred. Not that there’s much wrong with games that have a hundred rules, I like those too. I’ve recently been converted to Combat Commander, of all things.
Something I threw out of TYOV are rules about tracking time. At one point I had a system in place for tracking the date. I mean, if the game is called Thousand Year Old Vampire then you want to know when a thousand years go by, right? But there was no benefit to tracking the actual year, it was easier to allow the player to just let the passage of time be loosely tracked in their answers to the prompts. Maybe an arc of prompts happens over a year in your head, maybe a whole generation goes by—the game works regardless. The only rule about time is “every once in a while strike out mortal Characters who have probably died of old age.”
Finally, I should acknowledge the importance of Burning Wheel and Freemarket to Thousand Year Old Vampire. Writing good Beliefs in Burning Wheel is a skill, and the idea of tying character goals mechanically to the game was mind-blowing. Freemarket has Belief-like-ish Memories, which are something that have game mechanical effects AND can be manipulated as part of play. Both of these mechanics had outsized influence on the way I thought about Memories in TYOV.
Memories in TYOV are everything that your vampire is. You have a limited number of Memories, and every Memory is made up of a limited number of Experiences. Every Prompt you encounter generates a new Experience which is tagged onto the end of a new Memory. Eventually you run out of space for Memories, so you older Memories to a Diary. You can and will lose our Diary, along with all the Memories in it, and it’s awful. But the Diary is just a stopgap anyways, as you are forced to forget things to make room for new Experiences.
Eventually you have an ancient, creaky vampire who doesn’t remember that he was once a Roman emperor, or that they used to live on a glacier, or that he fell in love two hundred years ago. But they at least know how to use a computer and are wrestling with the fact that the hook-up site they used to find victims was just shut down and how will they eat now? This design goal was crystallized when I read “The Vampire” by Ben Passmore in Now 3 put out by Fantagraphic Books. It’s a heartbreaking, sad story in which you see the vampire as a deprotagonized system of habits. It’s great.
What has the development of this game been like, from original inspiration to the speed of production?
This game flowed out quickly and mostly easily. My pal Jessie Rainbow I were playtesting and iterating the game over weeks instead of months. The game is built from a story games mindset and there aren’t any ridiculously novel mechanics that need to be explained; I hand the rules over to a playtester and they understand them immediately and the game works.
The game works and a year of refinement to get it five percent better isn’t worth it. It’s done, and like an artwork it might be slightly flawed but that’s part of the thing itself. I don’t necessarily want an extruded, sanitized perfect thing; instead I have, like an artwork, a piece that becomes a record of it’s own making. If I work on this game another year it won’t get better, it’ll just get different—2019 Tim will have different priorities than I do right now and all that’s going to happen is that TYOV will torque around to reflect that. I might as well let 2018 Tim have his moment and give 2019 Tim new things to worry over.
In regards to the themes of mortality and memory, as well as with aspects of queerness in some of the prompts, how do you relate to TYOV? How is it meaningful to you?
This is hard to talk about. I think I need to break this question down into three very separate categories: My understanding of evil, personas shifting over time, and a vampire-shaped momento mori.
The game is twined up in my own ideas of person-scaled evil which is based on my experience of social predators, thoughtlessly selfish idiots, and rich people exerting power over others. This evil is written into the “Why did you do that awful thing you did?” type prompts, which assign an evil deed which must be justified. There’s an important subtext in the game which I never say out loud: As the vampire is writing in their diary are they telling the truth? But the evil is about the wickedness that people do to each other, and this is my chance to pick out a version of it that I seldom see represented.
Completely unrelated to the themes around evil are the ideas of shifting identities. Over the centuries the vampire will be reinventing themselves so they can fit in with the societies shifting around them. As a cishet white guy I’m outside of the dialogues that happen around LGBTQA+ folks, but I see folks change over time and it’s exciting. A related prompt might draw attention to ingrained societal mores that can now be abandoned because the culture of your mortal years is centuries dead. I can gently make a space for this even if I don’t have that experience, with the understanding that my understanding isn’t necessarily another’s understanding of the space that needs to be made. Like I said before, this becomes a portrait of 2018 Tim thinking through difficult issues using creative work—this isn’t Truth with a capital T.
The shifting personas of the vampire are probably the most personally resonant aspect of the game for me. I have some pretty distinct phases in my life where I was having to be markedly different people. In NYC I used to exhibit art with a gallery owned by the son of billionaires. I’d get taken to a dinner that might cost more than I made in a week then go back to my home which had holes in the floor which I could see my neighbors through. I remember hanging drywall in the morning and meeting a Rockefeller descendant later that night; he got noticeably upset that I had a scratch on the back of my hand then shut me out when I said it happened “at work.” I learned that I had to keep these worlds very, very separate. And it went both ways, I found myself being reminded of the experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas telling a story about how no one in his Brooklyn neighborhood believed him when he told them he was teaching at NYU.
Now I’m a guy with a kid living in a suburban neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. I’m not the same person that I was five years ago in New York. I can’t be the same person, that guy couldn’t live this life.
Which leads me to my final bit: I did things that sound wonderful and which I can’t remember, I apparently did things that are terrible which I am glad I forgot. These moments are lost until someone else remembers them for me or I happen upon some chance evidence. My memory is going, and it’s awful—there’s a much more exciting version of me which is being forgotten. I can see my brain failing in other ways; sometimes I leave out a word when I’m writing now. I bet I did it within the text of this interview.
This loss of skill, of memory, of personality are reflected in the way the game has you lose or edit memories. Eventually I’ll die and be forgotten in turn, but at least I’ll have this self-reflection on mortality outlive me for a bit.
