Tag: tabletop rpgs

Cortex Prime Featurette with Cam Banks on Cortex Prime

This interview is part of a series of interviews sponsored by Magic Vacuum Design Studio.

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Cam Banks on the current Cortex Prime project! Cam shares about the stretch-goal selection process, setting up the Kickstarter, and why he is choosing to make Cortex Prime! (Note: there’s a disclosure at the bottom of this post.)

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Tell me a little about Cortex Prime. What excites you about it?

Cortex Plus was my first ground-up system build for any published game. I’d messed around with rules from other games before, but when I went to develop Leverage and Smallville for MWP with the two design teams on those projects, I came with a desire to create the games I really wanted to play. So I stripped the Cortex System down to the bare bones and rebuilt it. Each time we designed a new Cortex Plus game, we took that same approach, trying to capture what was great about the license and adapt these rules to it. Now that the rights are back with me thanks to my MWP agreement, and I’m looking ahead to new games and the community creator program, I’m really keen to take what I’ve learned in the past ten years and incorporate all of those lessons into a singular, modular set of rules that anyone can tinker with.

It has all the things I like most: lots of dice of different sizes, descriptive and thematic traits, a game currency of points to spend to make things interesting, and a focus on letting the player choose when and how to screw up or to look awesome.


What are you bringing into Cortex Prime that’s different than Cortex Plus?

Cortex Plus was really something like four or even five different games all under the same system umbrella. Smallville, Leverage, Marvel Heroic, Firefly, and Dragon Brigade were different games even if some of the mechanics were common among them all. With Cortex Prime, there’s now just one game system but with a bunch of options. I want to make it a single unified toolkit, which it hasn’t been before, even with the Cortex Plus Hacker’s Guide.

How did you determine what content you’ll be focusing on in the main book, and what to include as stretch goals?
The stretch goals were where I was hoping a lot of settings and genre mashups would go, with expanded rules and developed archetypes or pathways mechanics or even just their own traits specific to the settings. In the Cortex Prime Game Handbook there’s a lot of advice and guidance for implementing genres using Cortex Prime, but I don’t have the space to do every possible combination of ideas. I want to see cool worlds by creators who aren’t me, and make those as integral to the experience of this game as anything else I do.

A more business-related question – how did you plan the Kickstarter backer levels, rewards, and so on?
I used a Kickstarter budget spreadsheet shared by my colleague Jeff Tidball (http://www.jefftidball.com/posts/budget-game-projects-well) and my own past experience managing Kickstarters and producing games at Atlas and MWP. I knew what I wanted to offer and kept it relatively simple. No dice, no T-shirts, nothing that I couldn’t put into a box and ship out at an affordable rate. I wanted to pay additional creators (and myself) a top standard rate, and fairly compensate artists and layout. In the end I found that I could manage the whole thing for $30K and that stretch goals were roughly $10K each, so that helped me come up with the various pledge levels and stretch goal numbers.

Where do you find inspiration for a genre-flexible game? How do you keep it rich without tying it to just one setting?

So much depends on trusting that players are able to put down some fairly straightforward and essential ideas for their character. Cortex has always used narrative and descriptive terms for things, and that’s where a lot of the flavor of a genre lives. The rest comes from knowing what rules best suit a genre and making sure those are part of the toolkit available to players and GMs.

What is your biggest hope for Cortex Prime and the Kickstarter itself, beyond funding and sales?

I hope that the creator community takes off, now that there’s going to be a definitive and straightforward set of rules to use in making new games. I’m hoping that Cortex Prime games scratch an itch for somebody, either a gamer or a designer, who then feels encouraged to use it. I also hope that lots of designers get the chance to create their own stuff who wouldn’t otherwise have that opportunity or a community that includes them.
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Thanks so much to Cam for the interview! It’s great to hear more about Cortex Prime, and I hope you will all check out the Kickstarter that’s running now!

Full disclosure: I’m a stretch goal for Cortex Prime (my Solarpunk setting I discussed in Episode 4 of Designer & Devourer!) and hope to do a continued series with my fellow designers. The interviews are funded, but still include my full dedication to getting good information about the projects for my readers!

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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.

Five or So Questions on The Quick

Today I have a great interview with the creators of The Quick, a Nordic noir ghost story RPG! It sounded really cool to me when I found it scrolling through Kickstarter, where it’s currently up, so I had to ask them some questions. Ville Takanen, Petri Leinonen, and Teemu Rantanen were a joy to interview. Check out the answers below!

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Tell me a little about The Quick. What excites you about it?
Ville: The Quick started as a twisted lovechild of the Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, True Detective and my earlier experiments with the New Weird. It was supposed to be a quick one-off experiment with those building blocks without any greater plans, but the first demo game we had turned out to be a massive success. The Quick let us combine the low-key – or almost magic realism like – touch on the supernatural seen on some of the newer Scandinavian new weird and the brutal storytelling of the new wave of Nordic detective stories.

Teemu: To me, the atmosphere of Nordic Noir has always held a feeling of unseen forces and threats under the surface. What we are doing is manifesting these originally psychological themes in both more concrete and at the same time more symbolic form to the setting. In this way Nordic Noir and Ghost Stories are a perfect match, and I’m loving working to combine them into this cool setting.
(Yeah, when I watched the Millenium-trilogy, I was just waiting for it to turn into a supernatural horror movie)

Petri: I’m a game mechanics kind of guy, so I’m really excited to be creating something like this that takes these Story Game elements and combines them with a more traditional kind of a system. The end result, that I’m really excited about, is the nice coherent engine that drives the character stories forward in a way that fits our genre mashup extremely well.

What mechanics will we see in play the most often? 
Petri: Our base mechanic is pretty simple and revolves around the players having their characters accomplish what they set out to do if they really want to do it, the question always being more about what price they’re willing to pay for it. This base is supplemented by player moves (we’ve dipped a bit into the Powered by the Apocalypse pool, even if we’re not doing a PbtA game) that enforce the genre expectations -by making things like violence always a messy option or the closing a gate to a major Echo a very dangerous thing to do.

On the GM side, the most prominent mechanic probably is the Threat Track, which creates mechanical momentum to the story elements the players spend their effort investigating, pushing the story always forward. 

How have you developed the setting for The Quick? What have you done to make it rich?

Teemu: I think that the genre-aware approach has worked well on for us: The starting point has been a sort of mix between urban horror and magical realism. From that point, we started to think ‘Ok, so what central themes of Nordic Noir does this embody?’. And then begun building the game around these things. We feel we ended up with something cool, clearly matching the distinct feeling we want the setting to have. This genre-aim has also enriched the material, often taking it to complete new directions from where we have started.

What are the character types in the game? How do they integrate with the base mechanics?

Petri: We drew the character concepts or types from the stereotypes of Nordic Noir fiction and then gave them a spin so that they fit the ghost-hunter stories we’re creating. The seven concepts vary from the very mundane ones that can still play a bit of a Scully to our Mulders, to those concepts that make it clear from the start that there’s something strange happening. The concepts, ordered by their strangeness, are called Spook, Seeker, Old Soul, Bloodbound, Touched, Channel and Rogue Ops.

The concepts provide another layer for the character, giving them a perspective on the world. The system doesn’t have stats or skills, so instead of giving the character something like +1 to shooting or +5 to agility, each concept gives the character a power that will make things easier, and a flaw that pushes the characters to work as one of the Quick.

How has working on English and Finnish texts alike influenced your experience as designers and gamers? Do you find that it influences your design at all?

Ville: I actually find it easier to write in English. The Role-playing and Story Games lingo has in many cases originated from the American gaming community: being able to use the original terms instead of bickering on how it should be translated to Finnish helps us a lot when it comes to writing the game text. 
What is (for each of you) your favorite thing you’ve worked on in The Quick?
Petri: The Touched character concept is something I’ve really enjoyed working on. Probably because it’s been a long road to get to this point. We knew from the start it was something we needed to have it in the game, but it’s taken numerous iterations to get to this stage where it sings with both the mundane and the supernatural side of things (they can detect things from the Echoes others can’t). And still, represent a very classic archetype from the Scandinavian Noir stories (the person who is trying to get in touch of something they’ve lost by immersing themselves in the mystery).

Ville: Aside from the whole book? The track tech we are developing must be my favorite part. I was introduced to the ideas behind the tech by Petri’s PtbA hack “New Horizons/H+,” and I instantly knew they were the missing part we needed to have for the Quick. The threat tracks create an elegant mechanics for the storyteller to run mystery games, the way I had tried to run White Wolf games as a teenager. And the Harm track which puts the player in control of the character’s downward spiral, giving us a neat way to model the character’s kinda anti-“hero’s journey” found in many of Nordic Noir stories.

Teemu: The favorite thing I have worked on would probably be the Rogue Ops character concept. One thing that has really worked well in this project has been the way we have taken turns in writing items, each writer bringing their own perspective and ideas to the text and then passing it on. The Rogue Ops sort of started as an outside-the-box character idea I played in one of the early playtests. Since then every time someone developed it further, it was enriched in the process, so that when I returned to work on it there was so much better and versatile foundations to build on than there would have been if it would have just stayed with one writer.

And of course, I do find the idea of company men sneaking to save the world behind the backs of their corporate employers charming. It’s sort of like an environmental activist with the day job in the oil industry.

When it comes to the stories that will be told, what elements of the game do you hope will resonate with players?

Ville: The combination of Nordic detective story and new weird is a new and fresh take on the urban fantasy genre. The harsh and realistic take on violence, the bleak view of society and the low-fi supernatural create a unique platform to tell player stories.

We feel the way we have modeled the genre limitations, and possibilities to the game engine will help players to bring the things we love about the game to life.

For me, I hope that the main themes of the game, and way the Quick focuses around this with the player concepts and the moves provided by the engine, will resonate with players and let them create new and exciting stories of complex characters and scary ghost stories.

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Thanks to Ville, Petri, and Teemu for their responses! I hope y’all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out The Quick on Kickstarter, and share with your fellows! 

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

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Laying Bare Identity – Exposure in Turn

This is a post about my current project, Turn, which is a game about shapeshifters in small towns. See more posts about Turn on the Thoughty Turn tag.


There are a number of mechanics I’ve been working with to make Turn the game I want it to be, but one of the most vital components of the game is a mechanic called exposure. Exposure is what happens when a shapeshifter’s identity is made evident to an NPC or the town itself. It is, in essence, more dangerous than any physical damage a shifter could take (which is why damage isn’t really A Thing in Turn), but also potentially very fruitful.

You start off with a character that people know, that people have impressions of. Everyone knows everyone in small towns. When you act unusual? People notice, especially the closer they are to you.

Who are you? Who do people think you are?

Exposure isn’t necessarily bad. There are risks – if the whole town finds out you’re a shapeshifter and doesn’t like you or you’ve hurt someone, admittedly torches and pitchforks may be in your future. However, if someone you love slowly discovers you’re secretly an otter part-time, they might be willing to accept you.

Shifters mark their exposure track when they use their abilities outside of their current form – like when someone who is in human form uses their beast abilities, or when someone in beast form uses their human abilities. Some beasts have flexibility in this, like trash pandas raccoons who can casually escape exposure:

In Plain Sight – You never generate exposure for being seen in beast form if there are no witnesses to your transformation.

…or those who have animal groups (herds, romps, flocks) who can avoid exposure to humans while in animal form – but risk exposure to their group:

Otters have romps!

Each instance of exposure is either marked positive or negative. Each space on the track has room for a + or -, and when the exposure is assigned, the players will mark appropriate to the experience. Eventually, they’ll reach the end of the track, and add up their positives and negatives – and from that, determine the path they’ll take when they resolve the exposure.

If they ignore resolving NPC exposure for too long, it can overflow into the town – gossip is a bitch – and lead to further complications. Every town has themes and bloodlines that interconnect, and events that can be dark, or happy, or simply mysterious. What rumors led to those events? Did someone get hurt because a shifter just didn’t “act right” and someone saw them slip-up? In small towns, deviance is always noticed.

“We don’t talk about that.” – 13 deaths.

The exposure mechanic is really important to the experience in Turn and I’m hoping that, as play happens, it will be as fruitful as I want it to be. Fingers crossed that when it’s revealed to more players, I get a positive result!

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Designer & Devourer Episode 4, Upcoming Interviews, Cortex, and Sun Tea

This week we cover upcoming interviews about The Quick and Cortex Prime, and my past and current work with Cortex products, as well as how to make sun tea!

My stretch goal at $45k – Solarpunk! A post-scarcity setting where powerful corporate interests seek to destabilize the fruits of progress and the heroes try to stop them – it’s not about what you don’t have, it’s about keeping what you do.
Sun Tea

Put 4 to 8 tea bags into a clean 2 quart or gallon glass container (4 teabags for a 2 quart container, 8 tea bags for a gallon container). Fill with water and cap. Place outside where the sunlight can strike the container for about 3 to 5 hours. Move the container if necessary to keep it in the sun. When the tea has reached its desired strength, remove from sun and put it in the refrigerator.

I add sugar and lemons, too! Lemons you add while it’s in the sun, and sugar you mix in while it’s still warm before refrigeration so it dissolves. Sugar is mostly to preference, anywhere from a half cup to a whole cup, in my experience. (Some people who LOVE sweet tea put in two cups!)

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.

Five or So Questions with Todd Nicholas on The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Todd Nicholas on the new game The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power (SCUP) which is currently on Kickstarter! It’s a Powered by the Apocalypse game of dark fantasy. Check out the answers below!

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Todd!
Tell me a little bit about The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power. What excites you about it?
Excellent and appropriately timed question! The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power (SCUP, for short) is a dark fantasy tabletop role-playing game by myself, Todd Nicholas, and my friend Thomas J. It is a hack of Apocalypse World that uses the core mechanics of that game to explore the kinds of political intrigue you would see in something like A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin, The First Law by Joe Abercrombie, Imperial Radch by Ann Leckie, and the TV show Vikings. We’re currently Kickstarting the game and it’s doing quite well, so we’re happy to finally get it into people’s hands. Tom and myself have been working on this game on and off for a number of years. We started because we had just played a game of Apocalypse World and we thought those mechanics might work well for a fantasy story about power, politics, and intrigue. We were never quite sure if we wanted to make SCUP a polished game that we put out into the world in physical form or just keep it something we passed around as a PDF, but there seemed to be enough interest in it that we decided to go ahead on it.

What excites me about SCUP is that I love that we’ve given players particularly powerful moves to affect their fictional world. The thing Tom and I spent the greatest amount of time on in the design of SCUP was the moves for character classes. We wanted people to be able to do big, dramatic things. For example, one class is called “The Beloved.” They’re sort of a preacher or prophet type. One of their moves lets them see and confront the inner demons of NPCs, permanently changing them in some way. The first time we actually had someone use this move at the table, and they were literally having a duel of wits with the manifestation of another character’s worst fears in an effort to help the character conquer them, we were incredibly stoked to be able to give players that sort of narrative agency. So yeah, that’s my answer. I like being able to watch people do bold things in our game that let them get their hands nice and dirty.

What have you done with SCUP to take the PbtA mechanics and make them really mesh with the fiction and framing?

The PbtA system already does a nice job of focusing on close up character drama, but we have created a number of mechanics that really drive this home. In particular, we have focused on giving the MC moves to push social hierarchy in their toolbox of moves. They have a different set of moves to use against common PCs and noble PCs, for example. Additionally, characters may be in the employ of a Patron or may be called on by a Faction to fulfill a duty or obligation. We wanted to push the idea that this game is about reputation, information, hierarchy, and obligation using mechanics such as these. Mostly, though, we want people to have fun getting involved in intrigue between characters!

You mentioned “The Beloved.” Tell me about some of the playbooks – who are they? How do the moves help tell the story?

What we’ve really focused on in SCUP is playbook moves that really drive the narrative and give players a chance to do big things in the fiction. Because the game is about intrigue and power, many of the moves focus on things like getting and spreading information, or making big, dramatic things happen in the gameplay. For example, I played a game last night at Forge Midwest with some folks. There was an NPC named Faela that two PCs wanted alive, cause they needed information from her, and one PC was tasked to assassinate. That PC, playing the class The Black Hood, rolled her move Their Eyes Never Open, which allowed her to assassinate an NPC within her reach. She had already snuck into the Ziggurat where the NPC was, and succeeded at her roll, allowing her to kill the character. When the other two PCs reached her, they found her deceased, but one of them, playing the Bloodletter, took her body and rolled his move God Complex to attempt to bring her back to life, though she came back as something awful, barely able to provide the information he needed. Meanwhile, a player playing The Voice, an advisor to the high priestess who ruled the city, had been using her move An Ear at Each Door to have her network of spies to gather information on the Priestess’s enemies which she ultimately used to betray the Priestess and claim power for herself. These are the kinds of blood-opera moments we’re really hoping players use the moves to create in games of SCUP.

What elements of your fictional inspirations were the most important to your design? 

If you think about something like A Song of Ice and Fire, you think about the big things that George R.R. Martin makes happen in that world. Characters die, the world changes, relationships change, etc. As such, we wanted to make sure that the MC and players had a lot of power to affect the world in compelling ways. To give you an example, we have something we call “end of season moves,” which are triggered by the players when a campaign is nearing its conclusion. They give the players the ability to mechanize something like, say, the Red Wedding from A Storm of Swords. Most PCs wouldn’t just drop something that game changing on their players, but the end of season moves give them permission to, with the player’s input. 
Additionally, we thought very hard about the kinds of characters in the books we used as inspiration. The playbook of The Screw, for example, is very much based on Sand dan Glokta from The First Law while The Voice is modeled after Littlefinger from A Song of Ice and Fire and Wormtongue from Lord of the Rings. We wanted the players to feel like they had more options available to them than fighters, wizards, and rulers. We wanted them to have characters that were powerful in more subtle ways, more backroom ways, etc., which is often very important to political, dark fantasy.
What makes SCUP special to you, as a creator and gamer each?
SCUP is the first game I really started designing. I designed it with Tom so we could play something fun with our friends. Some of the campaigns we’ve done with SCUP have been some of my favorite gaming experiences, and the fact that something I created with my friend, on a lark, just to have some fun is going to be a real thing in the world that hopefully brings some fun to other people’s gaming table is genuinely humbling and astonishing to me.

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Thanks so much to Todd for the interview! I hope it was a good time, and I hope all of you enjoyed reading about it. Check out The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power on Kickstarter 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.

Five or So Questions with Burning Games on FAITH

Hi All! Today I have an interview with Burning Games on FAITH: The Sci-Fi RPG and Miniatures, which is currently on Kickstarter. FAITH is an Ennie-award winning RPG and this is the FAITH 2.0 version. Check out the interview below!

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Tell me a little about FAITH. What excites you about it?

What excites us about FAITH the most is its very essence. We made it as a statement on how we think RPGs should be, however risky that was. It’s an RPG with a card based mechanic that lets players be in control of their actions; it makes the humans a minor species, at the sidelines of the main plot-events; it introduces gods in a sci-fi setting as moral scales to test the very fabric of which characters are made; and it dives right into an ideological conflict between two powerful alien species, without leaving aside morality, politics, or economics.

The fact that people have trusted us and placed their faith in our game, pun intended, is something that we take very seriously and it’s the most potent source of excitement we can imagine. We look forward to continue to expand the game into something greater than we could have imagined when we first started, and we are grateful to everybody who supports us in this journey.

How do you integrate gods with a world of sci-fi and humanity? 


The five Gods of Faith are not the usual “omnipotent being” interpretation of deities. They are moral in nature, , and they can only interact with the world through their believers, by providing them with supernatural powers, thus shaping what actually happens in the universe by giving more power to those who follow one of the moral paths laid out by one of the Gods.

Living beings within the universe of Faith can’t really choose in which God they believe or which God they follow. It is each God itself who chooses certain people to grant powers, depending on their actual actions. Who you are and what you do determines whether one God or another will take notice of you and maybe grant you powers.

There’s little room in the way of “believing” in the Gods; when you see you have been granted a special power, you know that something’s definitely up. On the other end, Clark’s adage “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” may be applied, too. Within the lore of the game, there are people who question their nature and go on “Godseek” expeditions within the confines of the Labyrinth wormhole to try to uncover their mysteries. Similarly to how our A Garden in Hell campaign explores the origins of the Ravager, we plan to devote an entire campaign to this topic and we hope it will become an exciting perspective on Gods in a science fiction setting.


Tell me a little about this ideological conflict! What about it encouraged you to make it a major point of the game?

Similarly to forces of nature, the moral bearings rewarded by the Gods have ended up merging with certain civilisations, and shaping their progress and destiny. This means that there are species leaning towards the moral path set by some Gods, while others lean towards others, making them fundamentally different in their approach to cultural interaction both within their own civilisation and with other civilisations. This is the case of the Corvo and the Iz’kal, each leaning respectively to individualism or collectivism, and this is what sparks their constant conflict.

When two such species find each other, there are three options: they fight, they flee or they cooperate. Right now, the Corvo and the Iz’kal must cooperate if they want to avoid total anihilation: the Ravager, a powerful mutant species, is on a destruction sprue through the known universe. Of course, this doesn’t mean they don’t still have their conflicts, and they still fight clandestine, proxy wars to arrest each other’s development in anticipation to the defeat of the Ravager threat.

We made this conflict such an integral part of the setting because we believe it raises very interesting issues that are worth considering and discussing. Both these species have very different approaches to society, each with their rights and their wrongs, and thinking about alien societies can put things in perspectives that are not as apparent if one was to analyse the same issues in the real world.


How do the base mechanics of the cards work, and what do you think is expanded by including the miniatures?
The card mechanics are the aspect we are the most proud of. Many people are extremely skeptic about it at first, but after playing a couple of rounds most people gets it. We need to stress that we didn’t create this mechanic just to be different, or as a gimmick.

It is an honest to God attempt to make a game where the players are in charge of their efforts, as represented by the values of the cards they play. The hand of cards represents the stamina of each character, and, just like in real life, each character can choose when to make a big effort (playing a high card), and when to conserve energies (playing a low card, which often triggers a rule to draw a new card). As you run out of cards, your character gets exhausted and has more and more limited options.

A very common misconception is that people can just attempt banal actions to get rid of low cards. Because you only have the chance to play cards when you are contested, or, as we call it in Faith, confronted, there’s really no possibility for this. When you play your low cards, you will be putting yourself in danger.

Lastly, it’s important to mention that the cards are not proprietary: you can use any regular poker deck to play FAITH.

The miniatures do not change the core mechanics of the game. It’s just that it can be much more immersive for some people to play with a cool set of minis!


What are some of your favorite elements about the available species for play?

What we like the most are the different roleplaying possibilities that each of their civilisations bring to the table. If you are in the Corvosphere, you can basically do whatever you want, but nobody will look out for you. It’s like a cyberpunk jungle: each for their own, and only if you know how to get others to value your specific skillset you will manage to make a life for yourself. On the other hand of the spectrum, we have the Iz’kal state. There, all your basic needs are taken care of, but you can’t own anything, and you must comply with the state’s orders, which will use your skills for the benefit of the state. If you are in a Raag world, you’ll need to be very careful with your approach to technology and how you maintain it, and you may become a renowned scavenger. Lastly, if you are a human, you won’t be the center of the universe for a change. Humans in the universe of Faith have their work cut out for them: they must either bend their knee and serve the corvo; survive in the wasteland; or become part of the Human Front and seek the foundation of a free Earth.
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Thanks so much to Burning Games for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading and that you’ll check out FAITH: The Sci-Fi RPG and Miniatures on Kickstarter. Make sure to share the post if you think your friends might be interested in FAITH, too!

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.

Designer & Devourer Episode 1, 200wordRPG, Punch, and Upcoming Interviews



 ETA 4/16/2017: FYI, the recording for Designer & Devourer Episode 1 has had the hiss removed, so hopefully will be easier listening. Brie learned a skill!

https://www.patreon.com/posts/8779339

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New podcast, I think?

Note: This is my first time recording a larger piece and my first podcast, so please understand I’m new! I hope to use some music in the intros sometime in the future, possibly? But here’s it!


Designer & Devourer is a 15-30 minute audio episode with my thoughts on upcoming games, design, and game theory, plus a semi-relevant personal or internet-sourced recipe. This week I talk upcoming interviews on Thoughty, the #200wordRPG contest, and my Great Grandma’s punch recipe.

Check out Charon, my entry for the 200 Word RPG contest here on Google Drive.

ETA: forgot to include the links to the Kickstarters I mentioned!

FAITH
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/burninggames/faith-the-sci-fi-rpg-core-book-miniatures
The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wheeltreepress/the-sword-the-crown-and-the-unspeakable-power

Great Grandma’s Punch Recipe
a fun substitute for Ambrosia (according to a similar internet recipe!)

1 bottle ginger ale, 7Up, or Sprite
1 large can pineapple juice (not frozen)
1 small can frozen orange juice (don’t add water)

Pour into a large punch bowl and stir slowly until the orange juice is fully mixed in, adding lime sherbert or vanilla ice cream.
Top with maraschino cherries if desired, or an ice ring made with pineapple juice and cherries (use a silicone bundt cake mold!).

Thank you for checking out Designer & Devourer! Please share 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.

DesignerandDevourerBrieCSbrianna.c.sheldon@gmail.com

Five or So Questions with Slade Stolar on Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers

Today Slade Stolar is back for an interview about this new project, Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers! It’s currently on Kickstarter and Slade and I nearly crossed emails contacting each other about it! It sounds like a fantastic adventure, and I’m excited to share Slade’s responses with you.

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Tell me a little about Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers. What excites you about it?


It would be weird to say “everything”, right? — I’ve had the core image of the game in my head for a long while. There are three thieves in ragged, dirt-smeared clothes running through smog-filled alleyways in a late-medieval city. They arrive at junction where there are government officers (some kind of police patrol) with lanterns and barking dogs cutting off their escape. The thieves get noticed. They grin slightly, and activate a device that turns them as immaterial as the smog. They drift away, making their escape.

After publishing The Indie Hack, and seeing how the core rules resonated with certain people, I wanted to write a game that could make that scene happen. I think I’ve done that.

The main components of the game that excite me are the relationship system, which revolves around the classical four humours (sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic, and choleric), and the proto-industrial setting, which revolves around all kinds of pseudo-science or non-science (trepanning, feng shui, astrology, numerology, etc.), and all of which are very real within the setting.

What kind of action can we see in the game – fast fights, stealth? How do the mechanics support it?

One of the great things about this game is that you tailor your experience based on the Patron of the characters. If you are looking for a stealthy game, perhaps your Patron wants valuable artwork stolen to complete her collection. If you’re itching for a fight, perhaps your Patron is a gang boss, who wants to muscle out rival gangs. Maybe you’ve got a Patron who wants notoriety and influence, and you end up doing a lot of socially focussed missions. The core mechanic is the same for all of these: with good dice rolls, you collect little chunks of narrative control called “details”, just as in our previous game, The Indie Hack. Once you’ve got a certain number in your favour, you succeed. But, if, along the way, you get some bad rolls and collect a certain number of details against you, you’re out of commission. The game ends up being quick and intense, as an extreme roll can grant up to two or three details out of a total of three to five. Because rolls are so important and dangerous, players will want to role-play up until a point of crisis before grabbing the dice. I would say, you can’t play this game slowly: it’s a crisis machine.

I’d like to hear more about the relationship system! How does it function, and what was the inspiration?


I think the inspiration was a few random mentions of this in Shakespeare. It was interesting to research this strange classical interpretation of psychology based on the liquids that flow in the body (and fits well with this setting based on pseudo-science and non-science). You have a primary humour that is your outward facade (maybe you’re melancholic, meaning reclusive and depressive, but cautious and prudent). As you interact more intimately with people, you show them other aspects of your personality, i.e., your secondary humours (maybe, in front of your fellow player characters you act sanguine, meaning smothering and judgemental, but joyful and optimistic); you make a list of these characters. Once you’ve written four people under a secondary humour, you have a bit of a crisis of personality (who am I, really?) and shift your primary humour over. It encourages you to think a bit about how we’re always performing our personality. I think it’s more dynamic and engaging than nature/demeanor (of Vampire) or alignment (of general fantasy games).

What are some setting elements you really love and how do they interact?

In terms of world-building, I really like the hierarchy I’ve set up (as a player, I’ll hate it and want to see it destroyed). In contrast to the typical fantasy setting, which has lots of monarchies, Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers is a mixed oligarchy, where a highly corrupt technocratic class rules the masses and the aristocracy has its own power system outside (often above) the law. The players are at the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder, and that’s why the accept the help of a Patron. The Patron helps them to feel powerful, by giving them alchemical powers, but only while performing these (often illegal) missions. The setting really feeds into the character motivations and the types of adventures that the players will go on. I want characters to take on the bureaucracy and lose. I want them to try to mingle with the high-society types and be humiliated. Other times, I want them to win.

In terms of mechanical moving parts, I like the “looking for trouble” tables; each district has random interesting happenings that can draw the players into larger conflicts or expose hidden parts of the setting.

You talked about the thieves and their adventures – what other types of characters and experiences would people often find in Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers?
I don’t know that I can answer this one, at least, any more than I could predict what a given group will do with a given game. Just to be clear, I’m okay with thieves of the Robin Hood type, but I’m guessing that your Patron doesn’t have that many scruples. A big part of this game is navigating a difficult moral path, although that sounds a bit dull. Basically, I want characters to experience hard decisions, pride, pain, shame, confusion, and split loyalties. I want them to do things that they wouldn’t do if it were their choice, and have to deal with the consequences just the same. At the end, as in much of Shakespeare, nearly everyone is dead. I want the characters to lead intense, dangerous, tragic lives.

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Thanks so much to Slade for the interview! I hope you’ve all liked what you’ve read, and that you’ll give the Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers Kickstarter a gander!

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Five or So Questions with Fraser Ronald on Swords Edge

Today I have an interview with Fraser Ronald on his current project, Sword’s Edge, which is on Kickstarter now! Fraser answered some of my questions about the updated, refined Sword’s Edge game below! 

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Tell me a little about Sword’s Edge. What excites you about it?

What I love about Sword’s Edge is how it allows for evocative and strong characters while trying to lower the amount of work required by GMs so that they can focus on facilitating the story. The characters are built out of ideas and descriptions, so it’s as easy as “tell me about the character you want to play,” write down the response, take a bunch of descriptions out of that and you have your character. For the GM, it’s very easy to run improvisational games – which is my preferred method – by boiling down most mechanical obstacles to a few choices guided by a couple of tables. There’s no dice rolling for the GM, and the mechanics are simple enough that one can spend one’s time helping to keep the story moving.

Players get invested in characters that work mechanically pretty much how they described them narratively, and the GM gets to spend their time helping those characters be awesome, sometimes by creating really challenging obstacles, and other times creating scenes where they get to show their uber competence.

What are the origins of Sword’s Edge mechanically? What got the game going at the start, and what are important elements of the game in it’s final form?

Sword’s Edge is really an amalgam of ideas from a bunch of different games. Its nearest relation is PDQ by Chad Underkoffler by way of Jaws of the Six Serpents by Tim Gray. This was the game that led me to design Sword Noir, which was the direct ancestor of Sword’s Edge. Along with PDQ, I would say that important influences came from the Shadow of Yesterday by Clinton R. Nixon; Fate 3.0 by Rob Donoghue, Fred Hicks, and Leonard Balsera; Lady Blackbird by John Harper, and Old School Hack by Kirin Robinson. These all had impact on the designs of Sword Noir and Kiss My Axe, which had Sword’s Edge at their core and through which Sword’s Edge developed.

There are a few keys in my mind to Sword’s Edge. The use of descriptive Qualities to create characters allows players to pretty much play whatever they can imagine. That only players roll dice helps remove one task from the GM and a very abstract action system further allows all activities to run through the same mechanics – there are no sub-systems in Sword’s Edge. Finally, the Initiative system really changes how one approaches actions as once a character has Initiative, it is necessary to take a risk to seize that Initiative. Only as an active character can one affect change, so Initiative is super important and can lead to some risky actions as PCs try to seize it from tough opponents.

What are the fictional inspirations for Sword’s Edge? 

Because Sword’s Edge is a generic RPG, it’s not really rooted in fiction, however the stretch goal is for “Lawless Heaven,” my homage to Korean action cinema. I’ve been enamoured of Korean action movies since I saw Nowhere to Hide in 1999. Since then, Korean movies have continued to improve and are now some of the best on the planet. Recent years have seen some insanely great action and crime movies, like Man from Nowhere and A Bittersweet Life. Then there are the neo-noirs, like Oldboy and The Yellow Sea. These are absolutely riveting movies. So “Lawless Heaven” tries to boil down the experience of a Korean actioner into a one-shot, specifically built to be run at conventions. It includes a discussion of using it as either then beginning or part of an ongoing campaign, but the scenes presented are for a single adventure arc.
Some of the example characters appear to be Asian (1). How did you prepare to write about non-Canadian characters, fictions, and backgrounds? Did you find it challenging?
The characters on the Kickstarter page are from “Lawless Heaven,” so they are Korean. The action is set in the industrial city of Ulsan, which is home to a Hyundai Motors car factory and the largest shipyard in the world, owned by Hyundai Heavy Industries. In the adventure, I try to introduce some interesting aspects of Korean culture – like the lack of firearms in general and the prevalence in certain areas of drinking tents or pojangmacha – but the story is designed so that it would be easy to set it elsewhere.

On a more Kickstarter-level question, how have you worked to integrate your past products into the release of this product, while still ensuring Sword’s Edge gets priority in attention?

Having two successful Kickstarters under my belt allowed me to approach the whole process with a little less concern and stress. Also, for backers, I have a record of meeting my commitments and delivering promises product, so I think that improves the chance people will be willing to put their money down.
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Thank you Fraser for answering my questions! I hope you all enjoyed reading and that you’ll check out Sword’s Edge on Kickstarter!

[(1 – Brie here!) This originally said Chinese in this question because I wasn’t sure based on the pictures and Googled last names. I try really hard to be better at this judgment, but the images aren’t very clear – I have no better excuse. I changed it so that it is clearer to my readers, but wanted to let you know that I did fuck up, and I’ll try to do better next time.]

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Five or So Questions with John Adamus on Noir World

Today I have an interview with designer and well-known editor John Adamus on his new RPG product, Noir World, which is on Kickstarter right now! Having known John on Twitter & face to face for a fair amount of time now, I know that an incredible amount of work has gone into this game, and I wanted to talk about his final product. See his responses below!

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Tell me a little about Noir World. What excites you about it?

Noir World is a collaborative Apocalypse World hack where everyone gets together to create a Movie using film noir archetypes, dealing with the terrible outcomes of their emotional decisions. The game uses a variety of film and television techniques to express film noir and character development to give people a chance to be both player and GM, ideally letting people tell whatever kind of story they want. 
What excites me most about this is that people are going to get to tell these stories using a framework that prizes agency and decisions. You get to make whatever character you want in whatever way you want, and there’s enough modular elements (you pick the time period, you build the City) so that everyone gets to help this Movie happen. This is a game built on collaboration and empowerment.


What were your inspirations, and guidance in development, for the themes and fiction of Noir World? 


I divide my inspirations into 2 camps: films noir like The Big Sleep, The Third Man, Night of the Hunter and TV shows with detectives like the Nero Wolfe mysteries; Murder, She Wrote; Magnum PI; Remington Steele. I make the distinction because they’re two ends of a range from serious (the films) to far less so (television), though they all have a lot of the same DNA when it comes to storytelling components and methods. While the material covers completely different subjects, that all becomes somewhat superficial when you look past the crime-of-the-week or the good-guy-bad-guy-binary and look at how characters relate to each other and how what happens in the story affects those relationships. Taking any of the source material and finding that emotional mechanism informed a lot how the game got onto the page.

Especially early on, this meant I could sift through material not because it featured the same actors or the same plot, but because it represented certain emotional choices or consequences – X amount of shows and movies involve betraying a lover or revealing at least one person’s intimate secrets, for instance, and it kept the design process very rooted in how I wanted the game and ultimately the players to feel when playing. Everything from the art to the example text spawned from locking down the idea that feelings and relationships are at the heart of the game. 

What are the archetypes in Noir World, and what are some aspects you like about them?

There are 20 Roles a player can choose from in Noir World, from the expected ones like The Good Cop or The Dirty Cop or The Fatale to ones that maybe don’t come up a lot like The Disgraced Doctor or The Musician. What excited me about fleshing them out and making them available for play was that I got to put my own spin on these tropes, which was often giving them small touches of pop culture or referencing something that’s slightly anachronistic or unexpected so that no Role feels “stuck” being played a certain way. For The Career Criminal, I got a chance to make references to Leverage, and The Gambler has quite a few mentions of the Kenny Rogers song. At first I was worried these small nods to non-noir would pull people out of the play experience, but I’ve found the opposite to be true: it makes them laugh while keeping them connected to what’s going on.

I love how open and adaptable the Roles turned out to be. One of the big issues for me with the source material is that it’s very phobic and bigoted, there’s sexism and racism overt and otherwise, and that’s not something I wanted to mechanize or condone in play, so I’m really proud that the Roles can be played by any person in any way they way want even if it wouldn’t be “true to film noir”. I want it to be more true to the player’s wants and interests than condoning 70-year-old social conventions. We can do better.

How did you take Apocalypse World/Powered by the Apocalypse mechanics and make them work with the cinematic, somewhat gritty world of noir stories?

I took it all apart. I had to. I seldom play a game without houserules, mainly because a lot of games have a lot of moving parts, and I don’t want to stop to consult a book when an idea pops in my head. This led to a lot of deconstructing and questioning how and why the rules are what they are, then going backwards to the games one generation removed and continuing to question mechanics like “why do we roll dice when X happens?” “why do we always look at the GM at that moment?” and then asking myself if I wanted to make a game that kept doing stuff like that. When I found out that I didn’t want to do the same thing, or just file off all the serial numbers with a re-skin of what was already there, I realized I didn’t have to come at this like a game designer first and a film/TV/story nerd second, I could reverse that.

So I put the focus on the story elements: how plot gets made, how characters take actions, how characters interact and then I put game design on top. It was both easier (because I kept the focus on the story structure) and harder (because game mechanics are popular and re-used because they’re familiar and easy) but I think I struck a balance where the game is about telling stories that feel very baked in genre and give players enormous creative freedom and permission while having mechanics that don’t get in the way because they’re neither particularly complex or numerous. The focus stays on the story, which lets the story go in whatever direction the group feels it needs to.

In what way do you think Noir World really captures your favorite things about the noir genre, and puts them in the hands of players and Directors to make a good film?

Film noir is about being faced with terrible choices that you know will have some awful consequences, making the choice and then finding out there are consequences worse than what you thought. You didn’t just lose your job and your marriage, you’ve been convicted of murder because your mistress gave you up to the cops. The severity of consequences and the natural downward evolution of consequences, in a worsening spiral make for really interesting and tragic characters. I don’t think it would be as much fun to have a terrible character that just kept having worse and worse things happen to them if they had limited or no agency in those events. In Noir World, a Role gets themselves into that position and then has to deal with things, it’s the very emotional version of “Make your bed, now lie in it.” People are invested in and have a hand in their own emotional rollercoaster, which I think is what makes the experience connect with people in an active way – it’s their choices and what happens because they were pro-active, rather than just reacting to a GM saying something like “since you rolled a 12, this happens.”

I don’t like games where the players can’t get creative except in some non-meaningful way. The game where we’re all knights and the only thing that could distinguish us might be our weapons or whether or not someone speaks in a funny voice does not have long term appeal to me. The characters don’t feel like anything more than plot-tools for the GM to use, and that’s not how I want to spend my gaming nights, especially if the GM had a bad day at work and the adventure gets boring or long-winded. Noir is about choice and consequence, so to me that screams “agency” and “empowering players to be creative.” A lot of the best games I’ve seen have players who are normally very hesitant to take a leadership role or a very decisive position, because this game is a permission slip to say what happens and people will help each other to get where they need to be, because everyone should have a voice at the table, and everyone should have the opportunity to develop and use their agency in non-selfish ways to work together to tell a great story.

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Awesome! Thanks so much, John, for giving us some info about Noir World! I hope you all will check it out on Kickstarter, and share the interview for others to read!

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