I’ve been participating in a meme on Twitter about game design insight!
Also check out Ewen Cluney’s thread with links to other designer’s Twitter threads!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.
If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.
What’s important to me is to help support and improve our community, whether we mean by that the gaming community or the local Bay Area community. I want more new people to feel welcome, to try and enjoy our hobby; and I want gamers to have an exceptional experience — as I do every time — at Big Bad Con.
I started gaming as a teen and I have the hobby to thank for some of the best things in my life, starting with my friends and family but also extending to practical skills as a facilitator, speaker, project manager, writer, and so forth. I want others to reap the same joys and benefits I have.
I’ve been gaming since high school and love that BBC makes it so easy to play a variety of games and meet new people. Everyone’s just really excited to be there and committed to having a good time.
 |
| Table at Big Bad Con 2016 |
I started running one-day conventions for Good Omens over a decade ago. I remember the first one felt like it was my birthday, Christmas, and Thanksgiving all rolled up into one day. I love watching people game and enjoy their time together. Over the years though, my focus has shifted from creating a place where we play great games to creating a place where everyone feels welcome and safe playing great games.
But beyond the games there is another layer to BBC. It’s also a place where queerness and gender variance are accepted and even welcomed. I love that the community code of conduct is posted around the con. I feel safe there. I’m a trans woman and the BBC community has given me a place where both my hobby and identity feel welcome.
I offered to help out with BBC because I wanted to relieve some of the overhead for my friends, who were already devoting a ton of time and effort to make the con happen. It’s important to me that the good people who organize the con have support!
I love what Big Bad has become without sacrificing what it set out to do. From the beginning, we’ve been home to primarily indie and small press games, those games we collect and fall in love with but can’t get the damn home group to play. There’s no lack of confidence when I say Big Bad offers the best spread of RPGs on the west coast. Couple that with the welcoming atmosphere the con provides, arms outstretched to welcome every flavor of participant, and it’s a premiere convention, unmatched by any other I’ve attended.
Also, see Ryan in the booth. He truly is legendary. Is it even braggadocio if it’s so damn true?
It is very important to me to protect and nurture our community. We have a great cross section of people at Big Bad. Our diversity and inclusiveness is our strength.
 |
| Ryan may be the champion of the booth, but Nathan sure as heck makes it look good. |
SM: I am Shantih Moriarty, the chick who wanted board games. I harassed Sean earlier this year about having a proper board game track, and he said that would be great if someone would organise it.. And I grabbed Ezra :D.
I’ve been going to Big Bad Con for five years both as a player and a GM running games. Last year, I joined on as the head of marketing and the website — bringing my design, front-end web, and communications skills to the team. I decided to join on as I really love the Big Bad Con community, the staff, and all that they do to create a welcoming event that encourages creative play!
Editing the schedule can be so hard sometimes because after reading each and every game description, I have such a hard time deciding what to sign up for!
 |
| An off-kilter table at Big Bad Con 2016. 😉 |
RO: What am I most looking forward to? Honestly, it’s two things equally. First is the Tell Me About Your Character Booth, because I bought myself a championship belt I plan on wearing during my shift to hopefully draw more attention to the booth and what it’s there for in general. Second, and again, equally important to me, is that I’m running three games this year at Big Bad Con. Each of these games I am planning on running have the same THEME, but do not have the same setting. I want to see just how differently my groups of players play the same scenario (which can be explained upon request) but in three wildly different settings. Those settings are 1) A Sailor Moon-esque high school, 2) A Star Wars Padawan Training Facility, and 3) Xavier’s School For The Gifted from the X-Men universe. Those two sets of activities combined are what I’m more excited about.
Games on Demand is being expanded! The first BBC I attended I hadn’t signed up for any games and GoD games were the only games I got to play. They’re one of my favourite parts of gaming conventions and I’m really happy that BBC’s GoD is getting even bigger and better.
Honestly, I love the people. Now, if you know me, you’ll cough obscene words behind your hand when I say that, mostly referencing the waste of a male bovine, but it’s still true. Big Bad provides my favorite injection of beautiful humanity every single year. I find it invigorating. The vast majority of these attendees I only see once a year, in October, at the convention, and the truth of that is that it’s a shame. But if that’s what I can get, I’ll take it.
I think that’s why I love being at or near the reg desk. I love watching everybody come through, being the first to greet return attendees and meet newcomers. It’s like keeping two fingers on the pulse of the con and finding comfort in the steady flow.
This year, I think I’d like to actually sign up for a game. That’d be a first…ha!
I’m looking forward to seeing friends old and new.
Last year we introduced a convention-wide game reinforcing our shared values called Big Bad World. Everyone gets to pick a playbook when they get to the convention and gets experience points for doing nice things for each other. It’s a fun way to remind people that we are all together in this and playing to make a better community. I am really proud of what we are doing at BBC and it is totally a highlight of the year.
Last year, I co-produced and co-ran a “wide-con” game of the Warren with Jason Morningstar, Steve Segey, and Jeese Coombs — 4 GMs, 4 tables, 4 players per table all “playing to see what happens” in their Grand Warren rabbit society. I was thrilled see all the individual stories at each table of each rabbit clan and I was riveted by the larger Grand Warren story that was shaped as the action spilled out to the other tables! It was certainly an intense game with so much going on and honestly afterwards I was exhausted, but happily so! Unique play experiences such as this are what makes me keep coming back to Big Bad Con.
 |
| tiny kitties! |
For coordinators:
The other side of making our games run smoothly is addressing cancellations. When game cancellations happen, especially last minute, we look for replacement options for the players. Either other games they can get into, or replacement GMs to run the game (or something similar). We’re so fortunate to have a host of great GMs, many of which have stepped up in the last minute to run a game. And when players aren’t able to make a game, we post the opening to try and find another person to take their place. In the past that has been through a manual sign up sheet on the wall, but we’ve always found those sheets hard to navigate. Too many games, too small font, and no way to guarantee that if someone cancelled a game online, we’d update the sheets in time for someone else to see the opening. This year we’re going to keep open our digital sign ups throughout the con so players can see what’s open real time and sign up for games either from their mobile devices or from Kiosks at the registration desk.
As far as criteria, we mostly leave it to what GMs feel like running; however, we also create our own wish list of hot new games and perennial favourite titles, and if people ask us for suggestions, we draw from it. If there is something that really seems to be missing by the time we’re approaching online game signups, we recruit among a pool of GMs who are often willing to pitch in to run something new.
 |
| Fall of Magic in action. |
For anyone:
But to me the real reward that stays with me the rest of the year is playing and hanging out with great people and, the next time I see them, thinking “Oh, I know them, they’re so great to play with!” I keep relationships online, at game day events, at other conventions, and in regular campaigns.
Today I have an interview with Graham Walmsley on the new Kickstarter project, Cthulhu Dark. In spite of all of my misgivings about Lovecraftian themed games, I do still love the aesthetic and a lot of the elements – and Graham is pretty considerate about topics that matter most to me in the setting. Because of this, I’m excited to share this interview with you all!
—
Tell me a little about Cthulhu Dark. What excites you about it?
When you see Cthulhu Dark, the first thing you notice is how simple it is. But that’s not the thing that excites me. What excites me is how precise it is.
Take the Insight rule as an example. Your Insight starts at 1. Every time you see something that creeps you out, roll a die (that’s an “Insight roll”). If you get higher than your current Insight, your Insight increases by 1, until it reaches 6 and you lose your mind.
That sounds like a simple rule, but it’s designed very precisely. It means that your Insight increases fast at the start, then slower later. When it reaches 5, you’re on a knife edge, where every Insight Roll could send you over the edge but only if you roll a 6. (I did hours of thinking about probabilities for that rule.)
The whole game is like that. It looks simple, but it’s all perfectly engineered. And all of that feeds back into the game. Every so often, the dice throw out a little surprise that makes the story better.
That’s what excites me about the rules. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff that excites me about the project: the settings, my cowriters, the art, everything.
What kind of settings do you have as a part of, or in addition to, Cthulhu Dark? What in them shows the themes of the system?
Cthulhu Dark comes with four settings: London 1851, the dirty, stinking capital of the British Empire; Arkham 1692, Lovecraft’s city in a time of witch-hunts; Jaiwo 2017, modern-day West Africa; and Mumbai 2037, cyberpunk India.
Each of them comes with a scenario that showcases Cthulhu Dark‘s trademark style of bleak horror. But there’s something subtler going on too.
One of the main themes of Cthulhu Dark is: you play people with little power, investigating horror at the heart of the power. For example, in London 1851, you play thieves, beggars and other slum dwellers, investigating monsters within the aristocracy. That’s a deliberate choice: in other games, you’d be more likely to play aristocrats, investigating a horror in the slums. Cthulhu Dark switches that around. It means you play Investigators you wouldn’t usually play.
 |
| by Matteo Bocci, Mumbai 2037 |
How have you developed Cthulhu Dark – a lot of playtesting, revisions, new ideas?
Since the original two-page version of Cthulhu Dark, I’ve played it to death, and so have lots of others. It’s a robust, polished set of rules, so it didn’t need much revising.
What’s new is everything else in the book. There’s a section on how to use Cthulhu Dark‘s rules to full effect, with all the tips and tricks I’ve learned over the years. There’s a guide to Writing a Mystery, which takes you step-by-step through the process of writing a horror story to play, starting with the things you fear and ending with the finished mystery. And there’s a section on Playing A Mystery, which tells you how to play horror at the table, and another describing the Threats of the Mythos and how to use them in your game.
And then there’s the four settings above. There’s a lot of new stuff.
You know that this is well within my interests, so I have to ask – anything with the term “Cthulhu” in the title approaches the question of how mental health and “insanity” are handled. How did you approach this concept in Cthulhu Dark?
Instead of “insanity”, the new Cthulhu Dark talks about Insight. That’s your insight into the horror, the dark patterns behind the universe, the Mythos. Every time you see something that creeps you out, you roll to see whether your Insight increases.
To the outside world, your Insight looks like insanity. But you know better. You see things others don’t see. You understand things they don’t understand.
Cthulhu games haven’t always treated mental health well, but there’s no reason that they can’t. After all, Cthulhu is really the only genre that even includes mental health. You never think about mental health in a dungeon-crawling game, but you have to think about it in Cthulhu games. So, I think there’s the possibility of doing something really positive with mental health and Cthulhu gaming.
What sort of play does Cthulhu Dark do best? What can players expect when they sit down at a table?
Cthulhu Dark does bleak, mindbending horror. You can’t fight the Mythos: you can only run, hide or watch helplessly.
When you sit down to play Cthulhu Dark, expect your Investigator to spiral slowly down into darkness. Expect to be creeped out. Expect hyperpowerful creatures, which you cannot understand, let alone fight. Expect all that, then enjoy the ride.
 |
| by Matteo Bocci |
Thanks so much to Graham for the interview! I’m excited to see the final product, it sounds really great! Readers, remember to check out Cthulhu Dark on Kickstarter and share with your friends!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.
If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.
Hi y’all! Today I have an interview with Fraser Simons on a supplement to the cyberpunk game, The Veil, called Cascade. I talked to Fraser about Cascade, which is currently on Kickstarter, to see what’s new and interesting! Check it out. 🙂
—
Tell me a little about Cascade. What excites you about it?
What my cyberpunk needs to have in it because of this touchstone: depth, in a word. I want to have extrapolation from our present to look into the future and explore where we could be going. I want it to have commentary on the human condition and what makes us human. I want technologies to be represented as neutral, with its potential good and bad being explored, and how our relationship to it changes as we change because of our technology. It should pose questions to me that I need and want to answer; make me think. Make me feel. And it needs to be relevant; diverse and inclusive. And I think it also needs to continue to redefine the terms “cyber” and “punk” as these words change with our lives and our society. I think that is a major part of making relevant fiction, and if it is relevant it walks across the line from merely being entertainment to something else entirely.
What did you do to focus more on emergent play?
I have also hit on emergent themes when crafting the new playbooks. There is a move that defines the world around them as they make their way through it. For instance one playbook will be about defining counter-culture in the future, where the other will define other cultural things, like traditions, fashion, etc. As players have ideas of how this future differs from what they know now, they have these moves to insert them as they they go,and because it is also a move when they do so it will still propel the story forward. I wanted to make sure that if people were into the idea they could unravel the mysteries of this future in a manner unrelated to the questions everyone uses for experience. Showing them that their character is integral to defining the cyberpunk fiction they now inhabit.
Thanks Fraser! It was great to interview you again. I hope all of my readers liked learning about Cascade and will check it out on Kickstarter today!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.
If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.
Content note: brief mentions of rape and sexual assault, violations of consent.
French translation: http://ptgptb.fr/apprenez-a-dire-non
 |
| Cards from Archipelago, a game written by Mattijs Holter |
“Yes, and…”
10+ – Yes, and
7-9 – Yes, but
6- – No, but (or) No, and
Writer: Here’s this cool lady character I made for the show, she’s a security officer.
Random Creepy Executive: Yeah and she totally has sexual trauma that made her so cool.
W: Um… I… I guess so?
RCE: And what if there were rape gangs! That she had to run from!
W: If that’s what you think would be cool?
RCE: We’ll have an episode where she’ll have to relive it! It’ll be awesome!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.
If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.
If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.
In a last minute burst, I have an interview with Jeff Tidball about the project he’s currently publishing via Kickstarter, The White Box! It’s an unusual concept and when I saw it, I had to ask about it! See what Jeff has to say below.
—
Tell me a little about The White Box. What excites you about it?
I really, really like making games. For me, this has also become an enthusiasm for talking about the process of making games, which has lead to more and more teaching folks how to make games. The White Box is a very efficient way to spread that to a large number of people, over (what will hopefully be) a long period of time, if we can establish an evergreen place for it in retail stores.
Something I think we’ve seen more and more, in the last 10–20 years, are increasing non-formal educational opportunities for people who just want to learn to do some particular creative thing. They don’t want a degree, they just really like the idea of learning how to do a thing, and I think they also like thinking of themselves as people who could do that thing. We’ve seen an explosion of classes (in person, online, at retreats, during conventions…) about writing novels, composing screenplays, making documentaries, and — yes — designing games.
One of the non-obvious upsides of this interest in learning is that there’s a chance to do this teaching as something other than philanthropy. Am I going to get rich publishing The White Box? No. Neither is Jeremy (its author), or Gameplaywright, or Atlas Games. But it can become a self-sustaining thing. So, in addition to liking to talk and teach about gaming, I’m excited at having (with this Kickstarter’s apparent success) worked my way into a format for talking and teaching that’s financially sustainable,
What kind of components are inside The White Box, and why?
The one unusual thing we’ve got in that vein of componentry is a giant wooden cube in each color. They look great in the pictures, and I’m interested in seeing what they inspire in designers.
What we *don’t* have is also interesting. Earlier versions of the parts list included blank cards, and a blank game board. We had to cut down the list to make the box more affordable, because we were really invested in the idea that The White Box should be a no-brainer purchase for someone interested in design. We really didn’t want to lose them over price. In my design experience, cards are much better created on a printer (cut a sheet of office paper into nine pieces) and then sleeved. We can’t compete with the cheapness of that (and the reusability of the sleeves), and we’d be providing something worse than that anyway. So they went.
What was the biggest inspiration for The White Box and its specific components as a product, beyond seeing a need?
I can’t speak for Jeremy as to deeper inspirations, but I have done a fair amount of teaching — formal and informal — and mentoring in the area of game design, and I’m inspired by a love of creative pursuits generally, and game design in particular. I also love the entrepreneurial endeavor of bringing a game to market, and so teaching people how to make games that can succeed in a greater marketplace games is something that I dig, and that I think is valuable.
This is such an unusual product, and sounds like a challenge to prepare for a larger audience. How have you tested The White Box?
For my part as a publisher, I spent a lot of time worrying about whether the marketplace had any interest in a product like this, and trying to figure out how I could test the general idea to get a deeper sense before launching a Kickstarter that might fail.
Those concerns seem ridiculous now that we’ve raised five times our funding goal halfway through the campaign, but it’s impossible to know what will succeed and what will fail beforehand, which is *nervewracking*.
My publisher’s “testing” consisted of creating a graphic that looked as much as possible like the contents we were proposing — it’s more or less the same graphic we’re using as the Kickstarter feature image — and showing it to both designers and retailers. I asked things like, “Do you need one of these?” “Would you buy one?” “How much would you pay for one?” “Could you sell this?” “How much would be too much?” That’s the process that provided as much validation as we could get (without doing it for real), and led us to a $29.95 price point, as opposed to something higher.
What benefits do you think educational game products bring, particularly The White Box? Are there skills (ability to complete tasks), or traits (behaviors and trends in ideals)?
But I don’t think you can get all the way to an *understanding* that way, and (obviously) learning in that way doesn’t allow you to directly product anything. (Other, maybe, than notes.) To arrive at a deeper understanding, and to produce something, you have to sit down and make. And usually, you have to make iterations. Drafts of a novel, prototypes of a game, or even individual performances (or rehearsals) of a piece of music. And of course, in a creative pursuit like game design, to produce a thing is also the goal. So you deepen your understanding in the act of making.
But then you wind up going back to learning, as you hit walls, or as you seek feedback on the last thing you made. So, I think it’s cyclic. Learn, make, learn more, make again.
Circling back to The White Box, I’ll say this: I think the best thing a teacher — be it a person, a book, or whatever — can do is to encourage the making phase. If the teacher sees the learning as an end in and of itself, I think the whole enterprise is a little sad and incomplete. So part of the crucial thing about The White Box is that *the things inside of it encourage the making*. It’s not just a book of advice; it’s also a call to action. And I think those two things are both critical to the endeavor.
The White Box teaches skills, probably, except insofar as it takes excitement and investment to begin the process of learning (to trigger the process of making), and the way the essays approach game design — with enthusiasm and love — will hopefully engender those traits necessary to invest the time to learn the skills.
—
Thanks so much to Jeff for answering my questions! The White Box only has a couple more days on Kickstarter, so if you want in, check it out now!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.
If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.
Today I have an interview with Kevin Allen, Jr., creator of Trouble for Hire, which is a game about road warriors and is currently on Kickstarter! Road warriors are pretty cool, and Kevin was real cool about answering my questions. Check ’em out below!
—
Tell me a little about Trouble for Hire. What excites you about it?
I love this idea of one player, many GMs. Tell me a little more about these roles that the GM style players have – what keeps them involved? How much control do they have?
There were a couple design problems I was looking at when making trouble for hire that speak directly to this issue of control and how it engages your interest in the story and as a device of play. The big one was ‘how do you make a group roleplaying game about the strong silent loner?’ Wolverine is cool in comics, but when he comes to the gaming table he tends to fall flat. The answer I came to was character non-monogamy, allowing everyone at the table the chance to be Wolverine (or in this case, Mexican smuggler Ruben Carlos Ruiz). Once I resolved to have the main character change hands in play it made sense for the rest of the responsibilities to do so as well. Every role has tricks they can pull, situations they can create in the story, general abstract territories they each lord over. When you first start playing certain roles appear more useful or engaging than others (who would want to be unnamed background characters when you could be the big bad villain?) but you’ll quickly realize they all do cool tricks –tricks that the story is just begging you to pull off. They give you ideas for ways to tweak the narrative. Eventually you realize that the scene you’re playing would be greatly enriched by the addition of some unnamed background characters, perhaps the kind who will eventually turn into the big bad villain, but as yet their allegiances are unknown.
The roles offer players a great deal of control. They are more about enabling fun storytelling than putting boundaries on what you can and can’t do. There’s plenty of overlap between the roles and any big important game thing (like initiating challenges where dice get rolled, or advancing the turn rotation) are backed up across many players. It’s less you only get to play with this corner of the sandbox and more you can play with the whole sandbox, but you have to look at it through these particular tinted glasses.
 |
| Sweet line art by Amy Houser. |
 |
| More gorgeous line art by Amy Houser. |
—
Thanks so much to Kevin for answering my questions and sharing about Trouble for Hire, and thanks to Nathan Paoletta for hooking up the interview! Please take a minute to check out Trouble for Hire on Kickstarter today, and share this post around!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.
If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.
Hi all! Paul Stefko (Patreon) from Nothing Ventured Games is a good friend of mine, a fantastic designer, and a fellow blogger! He also is a bangin’ GM and ran Shadowrun: Anarchy for +John W. Sheldon and me a little while ago. I had a great time! Since I don’t typically run games, and Paul knows a lot about being a GM and how GM mechanics worked, I asked him to do a brief guest blog. I hope you enjoy it!
—
 |
| This pic is so wonderfully Paul, I can’t even. |
I picked up the Prototype edition of Shadowrun Anarchy on the last day of Gen Con 2016. I was intrigued by the idea of a slimmed down, narrative-focused take on the Shadowrun setting. And the price was certainly right at $5. (In fact, it was the last $5 of my discretionary “ooh, shiny” money.)
I had chosen to pass on Shadowrun 5th Edition because it wasn’t really different enough from the 4th Edition I had already invested a lot in. Anarchy certainly was different, but not so much that it felt like a complete disconnect from Shadowrun’s past. It had familiar features like dice pools, Edge, and karma, and of course all the orcs and trolls and magic of the Sixth World.
But at its core, Shadowrun Anarchy is still an implementation of Catalyst’s Cue system, which is far more narrative than the stalwartly traditional mainline Shadowrun. What would it be like at the table? The Cue system features round-robin narration, a currency of plot points to let players shift outcomes in their favor, and a pared down adventure set-up called Contract Briefs.
The session was fun, and the rules acquitted themselves well enough, but there were a few places where I felt the system rub up against its own rough edges. By default, Anarchy plays out as a series of “narrations” — each player has a chance to describe how the scene progresses until their character performs some action that requires a roll. All the GM does is set the scene’s initial conditions and play NPCs (including rolling for them in opposition to the player’s action, when appropriate).
This style of narration requires the players to be both comfortable with and adept at framing their own scenes and setting themselves up for interesting opposition. My players were fairly comfortable with this paradigm, but I still noted they were not really pushing the scenes very far or very hard. At the time, I chalked this up to being unfamiliar with the mechanics beyond just the narration system, but I think now that I was relying too much on the back-and-forth of a traditional GM role. They were asking questions and looking to me for the answers rather than just declaring what happened next, and I was too quick to jump in with additional scene details.
This is probably going to be the biggest source of friction for most gamers, as the rest of Anarchy is actually a pretty standard set of action resolution rules. Once you get to a point in the scene where the outcome of an interesting action is in doubt, the way you roll the dice and count successes is going to feel familiar to most gamers. But getting to that point is the more interesting and less obvious part, and unfortunately, even the full Anarchy rules don’t give a lot of advice on how to manage your narrations.
Still, I had a lot of fun running, the players had fun playing, and we decided to give it another try. The second session went just as well, but again, I felt like I was running it too “trad” precisely because the rules didn’t provide enough direction to run it any other way. When I get Anarchy back to the table again, I definitely plan to push harder in the direction of player narration, encouraging the players to drive the scenes ahead even farther before with get down to resolving an action.
I think the key to Anarchy is in its name: it wants a little less authority and a little more freedom to push boundaries. I’m looking forward to finding out what that feels like.
—
Thanks so much Paul for sharing your thoughts and experiences with Shadowrun: Anarchy as a GM! Check out Paul’s blog and Patreon for games, design talk, and more!
Patreon proceeds for this post will be distributed to Paul for his contribution to the blog. Thanks for your support!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.
If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.
Today I have an interview about the game Axon Punk: Overdrive, which is currently on Kickstarter. Colin Kyle , the lead designer, answered some of my questions about this cyberpunk, hip hop game set in 2085 megacities! Check them out below.
—
Tell me a little about Axon Punk: Overdrive. What excites you about it?
I am so excited about Axon Punk for many reasons. The top thing I’d say is that I get to work with so many interesting and different people. I originally began the game with my brother two years ago for fun and to help us get through some tough times, calling ourselves the Wrong Brothers. When we decided to get really serious about the game, we reached out for help. One of the key people that responded to us was Keisha Howard, who is the leader and founder of the Sugar Gamers and is working on a similar cyberpunk game called Project Violatea. Because of our shared love of games, sci-fi, music, storytelling, and many other things, Keisha began collaborating with us to refine, polish, and share Axon Punk with the world. Since Keisha joined the project, we’ve expanded the team to include a huge range of people – artists, musicians, writers, game designers, and people too hip for labels – that all add their own perspectives to the game. Managing a team of almost a dozen people across the continent, split primarily between Chicago, IL, and Dallas, TX, has had its challenges but it is absolutely worth it. Because we have this team and explicitly incorporate ideas from different perspectives in the game, we are putting together something that is exciting, authentic, immersive, and greater that I ever hoped it could be.
What themes of cyberpunk and hip hop are you aiming to bring together in Axon Punk, and how do they conflict and come together?
One of the foundational themes of hip hop that we wanted to stress above almost all else is the sense of community and connectedness. Hip hop frequently focuses on uplifting people and bringing them together to survive inequality, poverty, and systemic oppression. While cyberpunk absolutely supports the “us vs. them” themes in hip hop, cyberpunk stories often follow disillusioned loners who are isolated by technology and society. We deliberately inverted that trope and built a world where you can only hope to survive by working in groups and depending on your neighbors. Focusing so much on the communities in the megacities in which the characters live gives our cyberpunk a great grassroots feel that players really connect with. In Axon Punk, your motivation during play is to help your neighbors, build your community, and try to change conditions in the megacities for the better.
What are the base mechanics in Axon Punk like, and how do they support the themes?
 |
| The United Church of Tupac |
What inspired you to combine hip hop and classic cyberpunk?
We were also heavily inspired by the work of Saul Williams, who blends hip hop, poetry, and cyberpunk into beautiful, raw, and socially progressive music. Deltron 3030 and the Gorillaz were also hugely influential. From a visual and thematic viewpoint, we drew immense inspiration from the anime series Samurai Champloo, which expertly mashes up feudal Japan with hip hop, and Cowboy Bebop, which combines space bounty hunters with jazz.
How did you playtest and work on the game early on to develop the concepts?
Splitting the development process between these two approaches was quite challenging. We had to rework many parts of the game repeatedly until we found the right balance that worked for both styles of play. As difficult as it was, this development process was extremely beneficial and we would not have created such a robust, immersive, and authentic game without it.
For example, constantly running games for new people at cons forced me to have very streamlined rules and play materials. I wanted a big hip hop influence in the game from the beginning, but running at cons limited my ability to dig into the flavor and setting during a game and things started off pretty generic cyberpunk publicly. Having the campaign playtest, on the other hand, let us stew over ideas and playtest things that I was not comfortable exposing to random people at a con. The world that we developed in that at-home campaign is what ultimately lead to the final setting and rules of Axon Punk. It took a lot of deliberation to take our personal campaign setting, which was full of hip hop influence, and make it the default world for the game (as opposed to something more generic or “crowd friendly”). But, because we had this successful campaign where we were able to flesh out ideas for things like “The United Church of Tupac” for months at a time, we had the confidence to really embrace and push the hip hop influence in the game publicly. We started asking for help, adding team members like the Sugar Gamers, refining the rules, playtesting at cons using the hip hop inspired communities in the game, and haven’t looked back for one moment since.
—
Thanks so much to Colin for answering my questions about Axon Punk: Overdrive! Please take a minute to check out the Kickstarter if the interview piqued your interest, and share the interview with anyone you think might like it!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.
If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.
