Stars by Ethan R (https://www.flickr.com/photos/etharooni/3884801617/) CC-BY-ND-2.0
Tell me a little about Poor Amongst the Stars. What excites you about it?
The possibilities. There are twentyish questions asked during creation of the generational ship and at least three suggested answers for each question. Not taking into account player creativity, that’s 3486784401 possible ships, each subtly but importantly different.
So while the book does encourage you to select from a limited list of answers the players are not actually that restricted in the scenario creation. I’m pleased that I was able to find so many options for ways to describe how the characters are trapped aboard ship and what that cage feels like.
How did you figure out the questions?
I originally started with a more technical approach, describing the ship in mechanical/physical way; how long is it in meters, how big are the cabins, what scientific instruments does it carry. I quickly realised that this approach was not compatible with Malandros. What matters more is how the ship feels and how it influences play. So I started from the point of view of an unimportant person on this ship and built the questions to give context to their life rather than just measurements. For example, I don’t ask you how big the ship is, I ask you how does its size feel to the characters; is it cramped, cozy, spacious or nearly empty?
ISS by Daniel Lombraña González (https://www.flickr.com/photos/teleyinex/6977215423/) CC-BY-SA-2.0
What about the questions makes the creations interesting? How do they spur creativity?
The questions and prompted answers themselves don’t make the creations interesting. That comes from players and their creativity is spurred from a lack explanation. The prompted answers never tell you why the ship is as chosen. In selecting an option, the players are partially forced to consider why they are picking that option and to consider what history the ship has that resulted in this current condition. For example, if the players decide that the ship’s crew are segregated from the passengers a lot of the story detail will come from expanding the reasons why. In my test game, the players decided that the crew slept in a virtual reality to keep them in a pseudo-stasis to preserve their precious skills and knowledge.
Where did you get your inspirations for the Poor Amongst the Stars?
I was thinking about writing a setting for Malandros and had the thought that a science fiction would be an interesting diversion from the original Imperial Brazil setting. Another author had already tackled a colony style setting so when the idea of a generational ship fell out of my brain it interested me. Fiction that influenced me during writing included: Macross Frontier, Cities in Flight, WALL-E, Dark Star and Red Dwarf.
What are a few examples of scenarios for the setting?
I wouldn’t say the book has any pre-generated scenarios. With Malandros, the scenarios are created by the characters relationships with themselves and the constraints the ship puts on a person’s ability to improve their standard of living. The book does have a short section on episode themes for the game master to apply if they feel the need to inject an external stimulus.
Crab Nebula by NASA GSFC (https://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/33735105264) CC-BY-2.0
Tell me a little about Kids on Bikes. What excites you about it? Doug:Kids on Bikes is a narrative-driven story telling game set in your favorite 80’s movie or TV show. We like to say that it takes place in a town small enough that everyone knows each other (for better and for worse) and in a time before cell phones could take videos of monster. The GM acts more like a facilitator, and the players are really the ones telling the story.
One of the things that excites me about Kids on Bikes is the way that the game starts! The town and character creation, especially the rumors and the questions about the relationships between the characters, helps to start the game even as you’re creating the world you’ll be playing in. Stories often start to emerge and tensions start to become clear there in pretty cool, open-ended ways!
What was the motivation for putting together Kids on Bikes? What about the concept put your hearts into it?
D:Stranger Things! Two summers ago, like most of America, I’d just binge-watched the first season, and I posted on Facebook, “Okay – who wants to make this a game?” Jon responded, and we got rolling on it. But even more than that, I grew up as an AD&D player. I had a paladin, a wild mage, and a few classes I created myself, and seeing D&D played on the show really made me want to replicate that in some streamlined way – but also to pay homage to the wonderful 80s tropes that I grew up on.
How do you approach violence and violent content in Kids on Bikes?
D: Personally, I play games for escapism, so violence for me in games has to be one of two things: either absurd, cartoonish, and completely divorced from reality like it is in D&D – or nonexistent. Kids on Bikes is super close to reality, which is something that I love about it, but that also means that the violence in it is supposed to be terrifying. In the rulebook, when we talk about combat, one of our statements is that there’s no such thing as “safe” violence in Kids on Bikes. And our first step in creating the world of the game is having all of the players establish what they want to see and what they don’t want to see. Ultimately, Kids on Bikes is a framework for players to create what they want within it, but it’s definitely a framework that discourages casual violence.
Tell me about the design process. How did you start mechanically? What has changed since the game’s inception?
D: We started with thinking about making a game that felt like AD&D but streamlined. I had a bunch of ideas that complicated things, and Jon was really great at saying things like, “Yeah, THAC0 was a thing…but maybe that’s not in anything anymore for a good reason.” As we went, we kept streamlining and streamlining to keep the focus on the story. That’s something that Jon is really, really good at…and that I’m learning from him!
Another thing that was probably the main aspect of the design at the start was the notion of duality. We love the idea of inversions and balancing acts that happens in so many of these things from the 80s, the way that the villain is some corrupted version of the good guy or the way that every negative is a positive and, usually, vice versa. In our initial creation, we kept asking ourselves, “Great… What balances that? What’s its counterpoint?”
What is your focus audience for Kids on Bikes, and why? Is it a nostalgia product, considering the timeline restriction, or something different?
D: Our audience is new and experienced RPG players. It’s an easy enough to pick up game that even folks who’ve never rolled a d12 before can jump in and get rolling, but we think the opportunity for narrative is rich enough that it can appeal to people who love narrative games and have played a bunch of them. I don’t think of it as, first and foremost, a nostalgia product; I think of the time restriction as a way to complicate what, in the modern day, would be easy solutions and drive the narrative. Like, if a current high school stumbles upon a cult, they shoot some quick cell phone video, they post it to Snapchat, and it’s a scandal. 30 years ago, though, they have to convince people that it’s really a thing. That’s the kind of space I’d want to tell stories in right now, so that’s the kind of engine we made. That said, there’s for sure a nostalgia element to pretty much everything I design, so I think that influences the kinds of stories I want to tell.
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Thanks so much to Doug for the interview. I hope you all enjoyed reading it and that you’ll pedal your way over to Kickstarter with a few friends to catch the last few days ofKids on Bikes!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
This is so damn pretty regardless of anything else. Dang. By Shen Fei.
Tell me a little about 7th Sea: Khitai. What excites you about it?
The Khitai setting expands 7th Sea’s 17th-century swashbuckling fantasy to Asian, Oceanian, and Pacific settings. I’m excited to represent times, places, and legends close to my heart and my real-life ancestry, many of which have never appeared before in tabletop role-play. Khitai also ups the scale of the game’s heroism: one Hero can lead an outlaw gang in the marshes of Shenzhou, a slave revolt on the peninsula of Han, a pirate fleet in the islands of Tawalisi, or a samurai clan governing a warring state in Fuso. We get to stretch the boundaries of what a Hero looks like and how they can change the world.
I know in previousinterviews we’ve spoken about your academic and personal expertise, but I’m curious what new you may have studied, played, or what kind of media you looked at to work on Khitai. What were some specific things you enjoyed reviewing as you’ve worked on the project? Tell me how they’re reflected, at least a little, in the game.
Khitai has brought a great deal of new media into my life. Here are a few inspirations that really stand out.
The Water Margin Classic, also known as Outlaws of the Marsh, is probably the single most significant influence on Asian swashbuckling adventure in general, and my vision of Khitai in particular. It’s one of Chinese literature’s Four Great Classical Novels alongside the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, and Dream of the Red Chamber. It’s about 108 martial heroes whose … eventful … lives drive them to join a bandit gang in the Chinese swamps, where they make trouble, rebel against the unjust government, and then ascend to positions of responsibility and authority in a new government.
I based indigenous Fusoese religion on The Song the Owl God Sang, a book of folk songs and stories compiled by a young woman of indigenous Japanese ancestry who mysteriously and tragically died hours after she completed it. Fusoese Kamuyru will reflect the sometimes-playful, sometimes-deadly kamuy who rule the land, animals, and humans’ relationships with the foregoing in Ainu thought.
To research Han, I started watching a K-drama called Slave Hunter because it’s set in seventeenth-century Joseon Korea, where somewhere from 10% to 33% of the population were slaves or serfs of some kind. I think I might have gotten more than I bargained for, because it’s sexy swashbuckling pseudo-historical nonsense in exactly the same genre as 7th Sea. I highly recommend it. Things I have learned so far about historical Korea:
only NPCs wear shirts
disguising yourself as a member of a completely different social class is trivially easy
all combat involves super jumps and/or backflips
hip hop is the most traditional Korean musical genre
the more complicated someone’s hat, the more likely they are to be evil.
Han sourcebook cover!By Shen Fei.
[Brie’s Note: As someone who is a big fan of some major K-pop/Korean hip-hop style bands, this amused me a lot actually.]
What are some challenging aspects of creating adventuring type games that travel over sea and in non-Western/Western-assumed settings, in regards to fictionally aiming it towards players and gathering interest?
Tropes define a great deal of Western popular media’s relationship with Asian material. Navigating and integrating those tropes into new stuff is tough because so many people have such different assumptions and feelings attached to those tropes. Let’s look at martial arts as an example. If we’re telling a swashbuckling story about Asia, we should of course include martial arts action. But gamers have different priorities about these topics: some players get really excited about fidelity to their understanding of realistic combat, others want to do unrealistic things on purpose, and many gamers are just tired of martial arts storylines because all too often, that’s all there is when it comes to Asian content.
Still, Asians developing and excelling at martial arts has a strong basis in both military history and fiction, with characters like Preceptor Droṇa from the Indian epic Mahābhārata or places like the Shàolín Monastery. So we’re going to feature both realistic and unrealistic (but still well-sourced) martial arts action in Khitai; but what we can’t do is perpetuate the stereotype that martial arts are either a) peculiar to Asia and Khitai and not other continents, or b) assumed to be known by every individual Asian or Khitan you meet. Nearly every culture in history (and every culture in 7th Sea without exception) has practiced martial arts; fewer, but still many, have traditions of martial fiction as robust as China’s. Martial arts figure prominently in The Three Musketeers, Things Fall Apart, and The Summer Prince. America’s 52 hand blocks and Nigeria’s dambe are no less effective boxing systems than wing chun or karate. It’s okay for tropes (though not stereotypes) to inform and expand our storytelling. It’s not okay for them to limit us.
Naoko, a young Hero whose home was destroyed by bandits. By Charlie Creber.
What are heroes like in Khitai?
They’re complicated! To answer that question I want to revisit the Water Margin Classic’s 108 Stars of Destiny, the rebellious outlaws of Liángshān Marsh, because they represent a lot of the internal contradictions I hope to see in Khitan storytelling. They prize honor and loyalty, but they spend most of the story getting drunk and committing crimes for reasons ranging from revenge to boredom. They rebel against the corrupt government, but wind up in positions of authority in that government. This theme comes back again and again in Asian heroic literature: very often the individual who winds up with the job of “hero” isn’t very good at their job, and the one who winds up with the job of “villain” seems way better in comparison.
Similarly, the arch-villain of the Mahābhārata, Prince Duryodhana, is a pretty bad guy; but his best friend, King Karṇa of Anga, is the most badass, loyal, and honorable warrior in the entire epic—he just winds up on the wrong side because he’s of mixed-caste parentage, and only Duryodhana is willing to look past it. In the final Battle of Kurukshetra, Karṇa’s chariot wheel gets stuck in a rut and he gets out to fix it, reminding the hero Prince Arjuna that attacking him while he’s coping with technical difficulties would violate the laws of honorable warfare. But Arjuna’s charioteer, Lord Kṛṣṇa—who is an avatar of Viṣṇu!—tells Arjuna to shoot Karṇa now because Karṇa’s harder than Arjuna and it’s the only way they’ll ever beat him. So the shining hero shoots the villain in the back, his head goes flying, and that’s how you win a land war in Asia. These are the kinds of problems the players will have to sort out. Or cause.
Agnivarsa sourcebook cover. Such drama! By Cassandre Bolan.
What has been your favorite part of working on Khitai, in any aspect of the project?
The most exciting part of this project has been watching the creative team and the players—myself included—go from knowing nothing whatsoever about certain places and times in history to champing at the bit to play characters from there. John Wick has gone from doubting we could do Korea justice to posting excited links about Admiral I Sunsin on Facebook. I never knew about the Sultanate of Sulu and the Moro pirates until I started reading about them for background on the Kiwa Islands, and now I’m plotting what might be my first ever Renaissance faire costume. A little while ago, a fan posted a sea shanty she’d composed herself with reference to Théans sailing to Nagaja and seeing the elephants there. I get to watch 7th Sea‘s world grow larger and more colorful one player at a time.
Hi All! Got an idea today, so I wrote it down. Check out Boy Band: The Game, which will get a fancier version at some point, but until then, get ya grabby hands on it.
FYI, Some of my photos are a little shaky. I was in the middle of an allergic reaction for half of it, and honestly, no tripod when I’m not feeling well makes it lousy. I tried though!
This is, I think, the last installment about my experience at Big Bad Con 2017! —
Gif of selfies and friends <3 (featuring Tanya DePass, Misha Bushyager, and Nathan Black
My experience on Sunday at Big Bad Con was really great. I had a lot of positive experiences, and some really good emotional ones. The morning was mostly socializing – Tanya picked up some Jack in the Box for me, I visited people and talked about all sorts of stuff, and in the afternoon, I got to play games! (I know, gaming at a gaming con, who would have thought?
The first game I played was from my upcoming collection, Let Me Take a Selfie. The game is called Who Made Me Smile? and I played with Tanya DePass, Nathan Black, and Misha Bushyager. It was so fun! The general play is that we each write some three-sentence stories with different mood themes, and then take selfies after we read a selection of them.
Our stories and some selfies. 😀
After that, we talk about it, and take a “neutral” selfie. The most fun part for me is after that, when we look at other players’ selfies and the stories they read to guess which story was associated with which selfie. It’s fun to see how my friends express their emotions!
Google made this.
After that, you match up who guessed which selfie right, and everyone gets the chance to take selfies or write more stories. We didn’t have any need to write more stories, which you do if anyone doesn’t match anything right with another player, so instead we just took selfies together! I loved it so much.
It’s important to note that none of us see each other outside of the internet very much, so being able to share these stories and see the emotions people expressed in their selfies – including people who don’t normally take selfies – was such a great experience! I think everyone else had fun, and it’s something I really enjoyed. Also, it was so cool seeing people play my game!
LOTS more here, including Dialect!>>>
I got to play Dialect in the afternoon with Hakan Seyalioglu running, alongside Vivian Paul, Vera Vartanian, and Kristine Hassell. I honestly can’t get over how amazing this game was. Vera cried a hecka lot, in a positive feelsy way, so we must have been doing okay. 🙂 Dialect is a game about language, specifically the death of it, and to make that happen, you need to build it. It is fascinating to me how integrated the language is with the cultural and emotional development of the characters, honestly.
Dialect table setup.
We played a group of artificially intelligent robots left behind after humans departed from earth known as EIPS (Earth Inter-Planetary Surveillance, “eeps”). The general vibe ended up being that the planet was One Hot Mess and environmentally trash. So our job, we decided, was to do surveillance on the planet so that the humans could someday return. We were there a while, and as time passed, we got better at our jobs, so we ended up with idle time to do less rote things. One of the first words we made was a filler word – ona – that we often said while thinking, interrupting our own speech, and so on. We also developed friendship. These three things are the aspects in the game that we would go on to tie words and explanations to, as well as ourselves.
To me, Friendship was the most important aspect of the story. It came up constantly because our relationships were really deep. EIPS took friendship seriously, and were grateful for those they connected with. Initially, the connections were for maintenance – the EIPS bots would repair each other by linking to each other and doing updates and repairs. During that, they learned about each other, about compassion, and about caring. This is where they made friends – synckeeps. Their synckeeps were bots they really cared for – and our bots were all synckeeps.
I mean, seriously, just thinking about the game has me tearing up, jeez.
In Dialect, you have a character of your own which a card that guides the character’s identity. I was the Explorer, and I associated myself with Friendship – in the game, I tried to explore the breadth of human emotion with my limited artificial intelligence, and got quite far, I think. I played 244-L, known as Leon. Leon was a “life emulator” designed to replicate human existence with the safety of robotic structure. He looked …approximately human, and had human-like skin that could regenerate from pretty much any chemical or environmental exposure. He was the canary in the coal mine, so to speak. Leon’s creator had loved the idea of Ponce de León’s Fountain of Youth, and Leon was the realization of that – his body would keep regenerating, regardless of what happened. That was the plan, anyway.
Kristine played Jesse, the Jester, who was initially a data entry module. I think Jesse was associated with the surveillance of earth aspect. She was connected to data points all over the place until, as time passed, each one shut down and she was left alone with just us other models. While the settlement of bots was in the thousands, she was just herself. Because of this, she had learned sarcasm, which was her way of dealing with stress and isolation. She reviewed our daily reports for errors, and for so many years they had been static – eventually she started to copy and paste.
Next, there was the heart of our group – Spinner. AMZ013 was played by Vivian, who did a spectacular job making a lot of us feel really squishy. Spinner was a utility bot who had a broken wheel and so, obviously, Spinner spun and wobbled instead of going straight. Spinner was an incredibly interesting character who kept us on track, oddly enough, when the story got more challenging. Spinner was one of us who had a lot to do with how we spent our idle time (see later, “Uplink.”
Finally, Vera played IONI, ECR1147-C, a satellite who was never actually launched. IONI was our technical hub, kind of “in charge” of the situation – her archetype was the Ruler. She monitored all of the goings on, and made a lot of the big decisions. IONI, like Jesse, was pretty much the only one. We found out that IONI had been saying she received contact from the humans, but it turned out that for far too long she had been getting radio silence – what we knew as commfail, the word that described our sadness.
The first big event we had was that Jesse uncovered a discrepancy – a variance – in her reports. She couldn’t just copy and paste. She reported it to IONI, and IONI decided to investigate it with an expedition. As Leon was an explorer both emotionally and on the ground, he would go out on the expeditions with other EIPS units to test the environment. It beat him up pretty bad, and there was always a worry he wouldn’t come back. Because of this, we developed a way to say “good luck.”
When an EIPS unit says goodbye to someone, they send a datapacket to them with silly pictures and cute animals (cute cats, otters, etc.). While EIPS don’t entirely understand the point of all of it, the humans who made them were cheered by them, and they learned to enjoy them over time. Along with this, however, we needed an indication of them doing it, so we came through with . The bots with LED screens could simply flash the hearts, while those who were more anatomically human used their hands to make the heart (see picture).
This pic is super old but it demonstrates the point, yo.
(This was actually inspired by RPG_Dante (Bryant Stone) who I met at CONlorado. He signals to me when we part ways. I may have made everyone tear up with this because of how cute and sweet it is, which is a rare thing for a Brie.)
After Leon came back, it was determined that there was nothing evident in the outside that would explain the variance. We moved forward an age. Each age, you take one aspect and move it into the next circle set up on the table that represents the ages in the game. We chose Idle Time, which was changed into Overtime – we were working past our limits, longer than we had planned with no response from the humans, and running out of glint (our fuel). We were working overtime.
Kristine broke my heart with her character’s story and how she dealt with the loneliness and commfail that the characters experienced, as well as how she brought levity to the table. She was the first of us to express worry – known to us as 404. Her 404 was often founded, as Leon and Spinner got into a mess. There was a holiday known as “Uplink” where we would all power down and just socialize and be calm during a big storm that passed over our compound, and it took a lot of time and energy to give this space to us.
After the Uplink, Leon found Spinner. They hid in a closet and – in one of the most dick moves I’ve ever done in a game – Leon suggested that they might save glint if they put some of the others… out of commission. “Not everyone is necessary all of the time” is I think what was said, and the interaction was so painful, but Spinner agreed that it wasn’t an unreasonable plan. They planned to keep it secret, and had hid out of the range of IONIs base sensors, but they couldn’t get away from Jesse.
Jesse showed up and asked what was up, and in the process of trying to hide their discussion, Leon offered Jesse a can of “Pork nnnn beeens?” (Spinner noted it’s only $2.49) while trying to demonstrate that they were just getting rid of old cans. It didn’t work, and they spilled the (not pork and) beans. Jesse demanded answers in her 404, and Leon and Spinner responded. One of the biggest issues was that they suggested powering IONI down, even though she was their synckeep, and things got very complicated. After getting support from other EIPS, they gathered their courage and reported their thoughts to IONI, presenting themselves as in favor of Eco-Mode (which was a label for their faction, including those who agreed with them). IONI wasn’t happy, but was eventually convinced.
The age turned, and they began putting people into Eco-Mode. The first versions – periods of time where they disabled groups and later reenabled them – went okay, but over a lot of time, they ran into an event that made it harder to move forward: The Wipe. A huge sector of EIPS units were powered down, but when they were meant to go back online, there was nothing there. Their AI had been fully wiped. Unrecoverable. The commfail was immense. Going forward, the synckeeps struggled to stay together and powered on, but as those who had pursued Eco-Mode, some of them felt obligated to version.
Spinner was the first to get boxed up – literally – but was so well loved that the entire community came to wish him as he went into Eco-Mode, heavy with 404 that he might not return, and experiencing commfail at not having him near. This hit Jesse especially hard. Still, as Spinner left, he repeated our unity saying, “We are still here.”
Our aspect for Surveillance of Earth, in the last age, was changed to Survival.
Leon continued to do expeditions, and Jesse found another variance, so he pushed out one day to find out what was there. He was walking along with guidance and wishes of from Jesse and IONI because there were no other life emulators with him, just bots without AI doing utility tasks. There was a lot of interference, and he struggled to hear them while his vision was overwhelmed with environmental waste. His last messages repeated until it cut off – “404. 404. IONI? Jesse? 404. 404–“
IONI and Jesse struggled with the loss of their synckeeps, upset they couldn’t recover Leon because of the environment and their limited abilities. Eventually, they were the only ones powered on. In an act filled with commfail, IONI had Jesse power her down and send her last message out to the humans with the full archive. It was truly heartbeaking, honestly, I swear we were all near tears. Jesse, hugging her pork nnnn beeens, was alone.
After time, utility bots who had been surveying the landscape came across the body of Leon, who – after his skin had been burned away by sulfur waves – was now healed, but still deactivated. Jesse had him brought into IONI’s hangar, and then she brought in Spinner and set him up. She arranged little monitors for IONI, Leon, and Spinner, and played messages and videos. We faded to black.
In the dark, a message blinked on IONI’s status monitor.
“Archive received.”
Final table.
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HOLY CENA MY FEELS, Y’ALL.
This is one of the best game sessions, and games, I have ever played in my entire life. I’m still crying just thinking about it. It was an amazing experience. Great players, great facilitator, great game. I would love to play Dialect like 8 billion more times. SO good. *dies*
Afterwards, I hung out with the aforementioned Dante and had dinner. I told him about being the messenger of in our game, which I think he liked. We also discussed my new mechanic for Script Change, frame-by-frame, and his own project that sounds like a lot of fun. After Dante left, I talked with Kristine, Tomer Gurantz, and a few other people about Brooklyn 99 and The Good Place and it was a great way to finish out. My flight was early and I stayed up late but it was well worth it.
I can’t wait to go back to Big Bad Con! I had such a good time and it was really amazing.
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
This will be probably a three-post report because I’m trying to break down my panels and games pretty detailed, so I wanted to warn you ahead of time. These will be paid posts! Thank you for your support. 🙂
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Me on my flight in, very tired.
Overall Con Thoughts
Big Bad Con is the best con I have ever attended. I don’t say this to like, make other cons look bad, that’s not the point. I came out of Big Bad Con feeling much more positive about the experience than any of my previous con experiences, I didn’t get hurt while I was there, I felt safe and comfortable throughout the con, and I was able to play the games I wanted, see people I wanted, navigate registration super smoothly, make it through my panels with a lot of encouragement from the audience and fellow panelists, and I felt supported coming to the con after a death in the family.
The con also seemed very diverse, compared to what I expected or maybe what I’m used to, I don’t know – I saw a ton of androgynous-styled people, I know of many trans people who attended, there were more people of color that I interacted with than is my norm, and so on. It was awesome.
The rooms were great, local food options were tasty and at least accessible to me (I went out to dinner 3 times and had no real issues getting to the restaurants), and the food at the hotel was good so I didn’t get stuck if I was too sore to walk. I will note that the panel room was super chilly and that could be worked on.
I played two games that I really enjoyed, met so many new people in an environment where I wasn’t feeling pressured to rush, and it was just really great. Sean Nittner and the entire incredible staff (who talk about Big Bad Con here) made it a great experience for me. I honestly really want to go back and I don’t know how I’ll make it happen, but it would be worth it.
Note: My experience is only my experience, and others may feel differently. For example, Stephanie Bryant expressed that being the only woman in a large crowd of people outside Games on Demand was awkward and uncomfortable. This is something that could use review – for me this is a consistent Games on Demand issue but my experience isn’t universal.
more!
>>>
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Hazy!
Friday
I arrived at OAK airport around noonish on Friday, and Jeremy Tidwell was kind enough to pick me up and transport me to the hotel. The hotel is pretty nice! I had some minor room issues, but they were quickly resolved, and I got to meet Jeremy Kostiew FINALLY (his beard is gorgeous, fyi) and forgot how hugs work, as well as getting say hi to James Mendez Hodez, who I’m interviewing right now also.
I got to hang out with Mickey Schulz, Lex Larson, Misha Bushyager, and Rachel Beck. I loved talking with them and having a space where I could get settled into the con after the long flights. Also got to meet Tanya DePass, my roomie, who is awesome. Later I got to meet Sandy Jacobs-Tolle, who is really nice! I screwed around a lot but also spent a significant amount of time talking games culture, current work, and so on.
I noticed that there is a huge trend of people just really feeling like there’s no safe space for them. We talk about this online a lot, but in person, we were just really venting it out. We have to fight our way through just to be able to play. The number of people who said “I don’t play at tables with people I don’t know so I don’t game at cons” was significant, and heartbreaking. I know this feeling, and it’s just not fucking fair.
Later I went out to dinner with Tracy Barnett and some of the others. We discussed games a lot, but also some really challenging personal experiences from growing up, our own baggage, and how it influences our play styles, our gaming, and our lives. I had a few conversations like this over the weekend and was reminded that gaming is an incredibly human hobby.
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I was on the You Don’t Look Like a Geek panel with Kristine Hassell, Tanya, and Jahmal Brown. I admit it was weird (but good) to be the only white person on a panel. The experiences that the others shared we’re very far from my own, but I felt really lucky to be there as a part of it.
I was, to my knowledge, the only non-cis person on the panel, which is part of why I was there, plus my orientation queerness and disability. Those don’t all seem super visible, and in narrower communities like indie games they don’t seem remarkable, but those things still can fall into the category of weirdo for a lot of geeks.
Thankfully Big Bad Con had made steps to welcome people like me. Like Metatopia, all-gender bathrooms made a difference for me, so much.
We talked a lot about things that made us feel unwelcome or out of place. I am the only one who actually uses “geek” as a label for myself much, and it’s not a constant for me. We discussed ways to make geek environments more welcoming for people like us, how to handle exclusionary behavior, and also (my favorite) what benefits we had from being nonstandard geeks, much of which centered on finding others like us.
I liked when Jay talked about being a veteran and how when he had gone to basic training everyone had to be in it together, and how that’s how he participates in games: everyone is in it together, and they should try to find common ground. I will note this can be challenging (sometimes more for some than others), it’s a good intent. It’s relevant to the discussions that happened here and elsewhere about those behavior you will allow at a table, and why you would let people like racists stick around.
On the subject of being white, I was reminded how much white people contribute to ostracizing and distancing people of color from the community. That’s bad, and something I hope to continue working on.
I personally spoke a little about forgiveness and moving forward in geekdom. We have a hard tendency to hold tight to people’s mistakes, which is understandable. But when someone has apologized, even if they’ve demonstrated change and tried to make up for it, we so rarely give them forgiveness or allow things to move forward. They can continue to be pariahs, treated with disrespect, and so on. It hurts me to see that, and my heart ached when someone from the audience came to thank me for talking about it because they had messed up in the past and they feel like they can’t do enough to make up for it. That sucks! If you continue to be treated like a bad person even after you’ve apologized and made changes, the motivations to keep trying get fewer every day. This sticks with me.
That being said, we discussed the nature of exclusion and inclusion where keeping racist, sexist, homophobic, and other bigots in your space excludes people of color, women and trans and nonbinary people, queer people, and other marginalized people from your space. Even if they’re still at the table, they are likely uncomfortable and may have already checked out. This subject came up A LOT at my panels.
John Brieger caught up to me after the panel to talk about his current project and ask for my thoughts on his safety mechanics. It was fun to meet him and the others I caught up with, but my exhaustion and medication caught up with me and I hit the sheets early.
Before I crashed out, I was gifted a pocket size Script Change card by Tomer Gurantz! I received a lot of good comments about Script Change this weekend, and on Sunday spoke with Dante (Bryant Stone) about adding a new mechanic to it. It’ll be coming soon as one of the optional mechanics. 😀
Front of the fancy pocket card. 😀
And backsies! 😀
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That was Friday! It was REALLY packed somehow, even though I wasn’t actually that really busy. I am still processing a lot of what happened before I left for the con (work crises, loss of a family member, etc.), but I honestly have a lot of love for Big Bad Con. I had heard so much good stuff about it, I thought it would disappoint, but nope. 😀
Saturday (with two panels) and Sunday (with two games and talk on Script Change) coming soon! Thank you for reading!
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Today I have an interview with Eloy Lasanta on his continued project, AMP: Year Four. It’s currently on Kickstarter and has a legacy over the past years of AMP: Years One, Two, and Three. Check out what Eloy has to say below!
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Tell me a little about AMP: Year Four. What excites you about it?
What excites me about it? First off, it’s the continuation of an ongoing story within the game line, and it’s the penultimate book (since I began with a five year plan). With every book, I’ve been adding more player options and really upping the ante story wise.
This time, we are adding magic to the setting, something we’ve been hinting at for a while and the fans have really wanted. I love that we’re able to deliver to them in an epic way that will change the setting forever.
Tell me about the origin of AMP. What sits in the soul of the game? Where did it come from?
The origins of AMP are pretty humble. I always wanted to do a superhero RPG and I started getting ideas. It was important to me to check out as many other superhero RPGs around to make sure my ideas weren’t just parallel development. So I spent about a good year playing as many as I could, and discovered that my idea has a niche to fill!
In comes AMP: Year One, where I decided to detail what happens when superpowers hit our society. A few other games did broad strokes, but I wanted the development of the setting to be intimate, so we lay out each month, giving dates and important events, that players can jump off of to start their own stories. I also took that opportunity to tell my own stories as well. There are character running around in the AMP setting that are doing some amazing things, changing the world for better or worse, and it’s been an honor to see so many people engaged with the story we are telling as well.
The soul of the game is that it is not really a superhero game. It’s a game about people with superpowers. Everyone is a person, not some caricature, not some cape-wearing vigilante. They are faced with real threats and problems from society, the government, other AMPs, the dead! So many things to contend with, and yet they need to make sure they keep their heads on straight.
In AMP: Year Four, it’s the Year of Invasion. What does this mean at the table?
Throughout the storyline, we’ve had a lot of ups and downs in terms of tone and subject matter. During Year 2, it got kind of bleak, leading to a group of AMPs literally leaving Earth. They blinked and were just gone, but no one knew where they went. This group, the Orphans, have returned in Year 4, however, and are waging all-out war on Earth.
At the table, this means a few things. The Orphans have returned with the ultimate power in their hands… magic! This is new to the AMP gameline, as we’ve been centered on scientific and Earthly abilities up to this point. That also means that there is a new player option called the Rebel Orphan, making them playable if a player so chooses. The timeline for Year 4 deals with the invasion, the climactic battles that take place, and what happens when old enemies and new friends must all come together to fight a threat capable of destroying everyone.
What are some of the challenges of doing a series of games that span years? Is consistency an issue, or maybe variety?
Consistency is definitely an issue. We don’t want power creep in the books, but we also want to give something new every time. Any new game material we come up with follows its own ruleset, but also fits nicely within what is established already. Energy beams from your eyes, martial arts, power suits, and now magic all have their own inner workings, but are purchased the same and work within the same rules. It’s a tough way to do it, but it’s important. I’ve seen some games treat every power like it’s own subsystem, and that can be very annoying and often broken really fast.
Variety is a thing too. I, and the AMP writing team, have worked hard to have a consistent story to tell, but gamers aren’t the patient type. They want that new rule NOW, even if it doesn’t make sense in context. That’s the best part about being deep into the setting now, we’ve introduced things that just weren’t there in Year One.
Year One was just AMPs, because no one knew about them quite yet. Year Two added rules for playing normal people, and a new power, Gadgeteering. This let you play a Batman-esque characters and made sense for the setting, because this was humanity’s first response to knowledge of AMPs. Year Three bumped up the dial to 11, when both sides became more powerful. AMPs began developing mutations, and normals developed power suits. On their heels, we also introduced a new player option called the Twice Born, people returned from the dead, and really heralds of the magic that was to come.
What are your favorite new mechanical and flavorful things coming from AMP: Year Four? Tell me what you’re looking forward to sharing!
As mentioned, the inclusion of Rebel Orphans as a player option is going to be fun! As is now having magic, which is something the fans have wanted for a bit. We’re working with a couple version of it, but it’s looking awesome so far. Also, the new core powers for AMPs are getting a magical touch. Even if you don’t want magic per se, you can now pick magic-inspired powers like Mother Nature or War. I’m very excited for those.
Hi all! I’m running on short notice with this post, but wanted to still get the word out there. Dave Silva contacted me about his Kickstarter, Metahumans Rising, and I asked him a few quick questions. Check them out!
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What is Metahumans Rising, both as a product and as your vision?
Metahumans Rising is a tabletop role-playing game inspired by iconic superhero stories. It is a self-contained core book with everything you need to get started including character creation, how to generate your powers, build threats, and a GM’s chapter including 8 Simple Heroes, a host of villains ranging from streetgangs all the way up to a cybernetically enhanced genetically engineered dragon, and an introductory adventure that pits your characters against a new gang along with a full super villain team.
As for Metahumans Rising’ s vision, we wanted to recreate the feel of comic books. Because the medium is so diverse, we approached character creation differently. Before even making characters everyone begins by establishing the Campaign Scope. Here everyone contributes in designing the overall tone and feel of the world the characters will inhabit. Because why a hero was doing something was just as important as being able to lob bolts of energy or fly, the next part of character creation involves establishing motivations, why are you a hero, what pushes you. The last part of of character creation is actually a team origin where the players work together to explain how they joined forces.
This last step acts as a kind of love letter to the GM regarding the types of stories the players want to see. The character creation process is designed to be inclusive and cooperative. In game play character motivations serve as a vehicle for player agency, allowing them to add elements to the story on the fly. Doing this, also increases the hero’s ability to go beyond their limits and because of how motivations alter the story it’s easy to share the spotlight.
How do the mechanics work for threats in the game, considering the scale goes all the way up to asteroids?
In virtually every medium superheroes face any number of threats from other powerful beings to storms and earthquakes to the aforementioned planet killing meteors. The Open Action System, the engine that Metahumans Rising is based on, uses a basic philosophy of you roll when it’s appropriate and roll what’s appropriate.
In a disaster, the players describe how their Heroes would mitigate the threat, whatever it might be, raw power or a talent, whatever makes sense in the narrative. They roll based on the actions they’ve described. Disasters have a Basic Value and dice based on their scale. The GM makes an opposed roll for the disaster and then we figure out how things shake out. It will take multiple actions to overcome most disasters. So the heroes are not doomed for one bad roll and if things do go poorly it means the GM can up the stakes. Disasters can also serve as complications while other things are happening, such as trying to fight a giant sea monster in the middle of a hurricane.
Tell me about some of your favorite powers in the game, and how they work in play. Why are they your favorite? What is the most fun about them?
Metahumans Rising allows players to create their own powers, and there have been some interesting ones. Out of the signature characters, my favorite hero’s power is probably Nox’s Shadow Control. She is able to generate fields of darkness, and blades of shadows. This also allows her to fly on waves of darkness and fade into shadows making her extremely hard to see. When you add in Willpower, it leaves her with a ton of possibilities. In convention games players have created everything from shadow cages to her own dark mecha to fight along her side.
Of the powers other people have made, one of the coolest was Copycat, when the character touched someone they mimicked their appearance and powers. This let them stand toe to toe with some tough customers. Unfortunately, it happened automatically, this lead to being turned into a giant slug at one point, not to mention a number of identity issues.
On the other end of the spectrum, one of the funniest has to be the “Spank ray” used by a Nannybot from the future. It was a tractor beam that could emit painful levels of force when administering discipline. The Nannybot’s inhibitor chip had been removed alloeing it could fight crime between babysitting for other team members.
Of course, those powers just scratch the surface of what is possible.
I started writing Script Change, from what I can remember and what Google Drive tells me, in 2013. I had started playing indie games a while before, and earlier that year, I’d written about how I’d used the X-card in a game of Monsterhearts. With the X-card, though, I used a secondary card introduced by Kira Magrann called the O-card, effectively a way to encourage people to do the thing that you were enjoying.
I have a lot of feelings about safety mechanics, trigger warnings, and so on. I really appreciated the X-card. It gave me some new freedoms, I could try things I wasn’t familiar with. And the O-card was great, but I realized that I didn’t need it if people already knew what I was looking forward to, what I wasn’t sure about, and if I had something other than the X-card to show what way I thought the story could go.
Script Change has had many, many updates. Briefly, there was an applause function to encourage people to do things, but I felt it wasn’t genuine enough. Thinking it through, I really thought the core things in it – rewinding to redo scenes for whatever reason, pausing to take a break and get perspective, and fast-forwarding to get over things that are too much or that we just don’t want to bore ourselves with them – are more important than anything else. I’ve added some smaller things in the end, like the Wrap Meeting for debriefs, Instant Replay to reduce confusion, and the Highlight Reel to help keep people excited and enthusiastic for the game.
The biggest thing about Script Change is that it’s supposed to be flexible. It demands a conversation about consent, and about what people want in a game. It reminds people that games are not set in stone. We aren’t chipping into marble, here. We are telling a story as we go, and we can change things to make it more exciting, more fun, more of whatever we want – and less of what we don’t want.
Script Change is not the only content tool out there, and there is a lot to be said about doing what works best for you. But, it has been a labor of love for me, because I want people to play games that they enjoy! I want them to have experiences of a lifetime with the chance to pause and get ready for more, or even just a chill beer and pretzels night where the tonal shift can be easily fixed with a “rewind.”
I hope that you’ll check out Script Change and if nothing else, just see if you can glean something new from it. Most of all, I hope you have a hell of a good time playing some games. <3
Tell me about your Braille printer project. What excites you about it?
One of the things I’ve learned, after starting on this project, is that electronic equipment, learning materials, books, and more are beyond expensive for the visually impaired. The braille embossing printer, for example, is normally $3,500 to $4,000 dollars (it just happens to be on sale right now). The bottom of the line printer is normally 2 grand! I’m sure I’m not alone when I say, “I can’t afford that!”
I translated (with some tweaks) The Black Hack RPG. The Black Hack is a FANTASTIC game system created by David Black. The game has been streamlined to a 6″X9″ booklet with about 20 pages, give or take. A brilliant system put out there under the Open Gaming License.
Anyway, the braille translation weighs in at about 80 pages. Now if you went to an office store and had an 80 page book printed and spiral bound it would cost $5 – $8 bucks tops. I reached out to a few companies and they wanted over $200 to make 4 copies of the book (spiral bound)! Now let me put this in perspective…while the printing equipment is expensive, the paper only costs 3 cents per page, and no ink is used in printing braille. Their material cost is about $1.75 if you include the spiral binding and thick front and back covers. It would only take about 30 minutes to print all four books and let’s ad in another 30 minutes to clamp on the spiral binding. Even if the person was making $15.00 an hour and we add in the $7 for the four books….the total cost is $22. AND…this is a “non-profit”, braille printing company…other places had comparable prices.
What is so exciting about the printer, is that I will be able to print a duplex page for about 3 cents. This means that I will be able to afford printing a lot of things for free, or at cost depending on what’s being printed. The Black Hack braille book, for example, I wouldn’t charge anything but the few stamps it takes to mail it.
ALSO, and this is freaking awesome, the printer will print 8 levels of tactile graphics and comes with a full suite a translation and graphic design software. This means that I can translate D&D 5e character sheets, Pathfinder Character sheets…any character sheet in to braille with tactile squares where the values are placed (Ability scores, hit points, etc.). The plan is to glue felt into the squares and then print out number chips with Velcro on the back so visually impaired players can fully and independently manage their character sheet.
I can also printout dice labels and transform regular polyhedral dice into braille dice. I’m currently doing that but I have to, dot by dot, use a slate and style to create the numbers, then modge-podge them to each side of the die. With printed stickers, I could cut the out, slap them on then spray a poly protective coating. This would cut my time drastically and afford me the ability to make a bunch more sets which I give away for free!
With the graphics capabilities of the printer, we can even add in tactile dungeon maps for the GM. How freaking cool would it be for a visually impaired GM to be able to actually feel AND read a map of a dungeon?!
What excites me more than anything though is the thought of being able to have the equipment to put a game book in the hands of a blind player. Giving them the same excitement of flipping through spell lists in that frantic time before your initiative comes up…just like a sighted player. Enabling gaming independence so a visually impaired player can experience the full range of activities a sighted player does.
LOL…I didn’t realize just how excited I am about the printer until I typed all of that out. I’m very passionate about helping people and this printer will allow me to do wonderful things for the visually impaired community.
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What motivated you to translate into Braille?
I was talking with my visually impaired gaming buddy one day. He has several World of Darkness Books, Changeling, etc. So I asked him one day what equipment he had at home, and basically he has a computer (without a braille reader because it’s expensive) and an iPhone. (Here’s a link to a braille reader so you can see what they do…they are nifty devices but are SUPER expensive).
I brought up the books and asked how he “read” them…the answer broke my heart. He’s never “seen” nor “read” a page of those books…he has an awesome gaming group that reads things to him from the book. I do want to say however, that this guy is a masterful GM and remembers EVERYTHING he hears and can point you to pages in the book from memory….he blows my mind :).
Sorry…back to what I was saying, I asked him if he talked to other visually impaired people that were interested in tabletop roleplaying. He told me that he has had several people ask about how to get into it but had to explain to them that they needed a sighted player to take them in because there were no gaming materials accessible to them. That’s when my furnace lit and I KNEW that something ha to be done. So I reached out to him and another friend and the project has taken off since then.
I remember vividly my first gaming session…the magic that it instilled in me. I still carry that spark with me today and I’m almost 50. I want the visually impaired to be able to experience that as well…but with a feeling of independence. I want them to enjoy flipping through page after page planning their next move, how to design their character, to argue rules LOL!
That’s why I’m doing what I’m doing…and why getting these translation out there is so important. Have you tested this with any gamers who would find it useful, by putting the game in their hands?
LOL…this is the magic question. The answer is no because I don’t have a way yet to print the materials in braille. So for anyone reading this DONATE AND HELP SPREAD THE WORD! 🙂
What type of games are you interested in translating? Are you sticking to traditional games, or would you be branching out into indie games like Dungeon World or OSR products like Lamentations of the Flame Princess?
That’s a great question and the short answer is ALL of them! Gamers are a very diverse group, so I’m hoping that we will be able to translate all sorts of RPGs. I love OSR games but I also love really cool things the indie designers are coming out with like Dreamchasers. I would love to see Savage Worlds, Tunnels & Trolls, D&D 5e, Gamma World, and more translated. But for now, I’m working with some indie game designers to translate their games (4 projects are in the works) as proofs of concepts. Once we have that process really fine tuned, I would like to put together a translation team and start taking on bigger projects….books from the heavy hitters like WotC, Paizo, and Green Ronin. The thing we have to be careful of is making sure we work directly with the companies so that we adhere to Intellectual Property policies.
I’ve already translated The Black Hack by David Black, and I’m working on another Black Hack game called Kaigaku by Jacob Ross…this is a Samurai fantasy game!
How do you want to get the translations to people – is the hope to put them in game stores, or sell them online?
To start, we are raising funds for a braille embossing printer that will print not only duplex pages, but also tactile graphics. For games that are free, I’ll print them for free or at cost and only charge shipping. If a game designer wants to make a braille version of their game available, I’ll print it for them at cost and they can sell it to the customer. My ultimate dream is to raise enough awareness that places like DriveThru RPG have contracts set up with braille translators and printing houses so that braille books will be one of the options when purchasing from their site. Same goes for the industry heavy hitters!
If any game designers are reading this please reach out to me! Let’s blow open the doors of tabletop roleplaying games for the visually impaired!
What do you think you would do for games that have supplementary materials like cards or dice or playmats – is that a someday goal?
Well starting out I’m focusing on books and dice….basically using those as projects to raise awareness for game designers out there to see the need for accessible materials. But my end game is to raise awareness to the level where designing for the visually impaired becomes a normal part of the game design process, to include but not limited to dice, cards, playmates, character sheets, dice boxes. deck boxes, etc. What I want the gaming industry to realize is that there are a lot of gamers and potential gamers in the visually impaired community…and they need to be an equal consideration when games are designed. I was floored that in this day and age, there is almost a complete void of gaming materials for the visually impaired. How in the world did we overlook an entire demographic who would TOTALLY embrace tabletop gaming, if simply provided the materials to do so.
I turn 50 in less than a year, and I have been gaming since I was twelve…it’s a huge part of what shaped me into who I am today. I am dedicated to planting the seed that will grow into a thriving piece of the gaming industry. Come hell or high water, I’m going to make the gaming community aware of this need and will give every ounce of energy I have to seeing that need met.
Get ready gaming world, the doors of tabletop gaming are going to be blown wide open for the visually impaired…just wait!
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Thanks so much to Jack for answering my questions and for his awesome initiative! According to the GoFundMe, the printer itself has been ordered, but Jack is aiming to get a 3D printer to print out dice as well, so go check it out! Keep up with what’s going on with DOTS on their Facebook group, too!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
