Tag: tabletop rpgs

Five or So Questions with Vincent and Meguey Baker on Apocalypse World Second Edition!

I had the pleasure of interviewing Vincent and Meguey Baker about their new release and Kickstarter, Apocalypse World Second Edition. Apocalypse World itself came out in 2010, and has been used as the baseline for a ridiculous number of hacks over the past years since then, including Monsterhearts, Dungeon World, and Urban Shadows. The game itself is super fun, and can range from explosive, brutal action to intimate and sometimes disturbing. Second Edition is, I think, an exciting update!


Tell me a little bit about Apocalypse World 2nd Edition. What about this new release excites you?

Vincent: Meg and I have been playing Apocalypse World, and watching people play it, and hearing about their games, for a bunch of years now. Seven years, going back to the first playtest! It’s been fantastic, but along the way we’ve noticed that there are some rules in the game that rarely see play, and some other rules that tend to throw people off. We’ve been developing better rules to replace them for the last year or so, and figured that it was time to show them off.

The most exciting things to me in the new release are the new battle moves – they’re as much fun in play as you could hope for – and the new “threat map” approach to GM prep. It streamlines the old system of fronts. Fronts were kind of abstract, conceptual, and this new system is much more concrete and punchy.


Battle moves sound exciting! What pieces of the game do they interact with most: playbooks, fronts, etc.?

Vincent: The playbooks, same as the basic moves. And the harm rules, of course!

The original optional extended battle moves didn’t ever see much play. These new ones are still basically optional, but they have a lot more immediate grab and punch to them. I think that people will be eager to bring them into play.

Have there been changes to any of the playbooks? If so, I gotta ask, is there anything new and exciting with the Gunlugger (my favorite!)?

Vincent: Sure! First of all, there’s been a change to the lineup: the operator’s out, and the maestro d’ and quarantine are now in the basic set. The most-changed playbook is the driver, who inherited some of the operator’s best moves. Next most is the angel; we rewrote their whole system for medkits. After that, all of the playbooks got streamlined Hx rules and a cut of the operator’s gigs. I think that the gunlugger is, with the hocus, the least changed.

Meg: Changing the lineup meant looking at all of them with cross-hairs, sorting out what we wanted to reintegrate in new ways, and looking for places to contract and expand. The new battle moves and some of the other things we’re bringing in the second edition mean there’s pretty much nothing left untouched. Bloody fingerprints everywhere!


Apocalypse World has hugely shaped the indie scene in a lot of ways over the past years. Has any of the design that evolved from the original AW cycled back to inspire Second Edition?

Vincent: You know, not too much, no. We thought long and hard about this when we were starting: do we stick close to the original game, or do we try to write a new game, incorporating the insights of Monsterhearts, Dungeon World, Monster of the Week, and the rest? Ultimately we decided to stick close to the original.

Meg: Looking at all the games that have used Apocalypse World as their starting point was really helpful in clarifying that choice. Some of the stuff that’s been done is really inspiring and beautiful and creative, and I’m sure it will shape some of our designs going forward. There are undoubtedly some bits that have seeped in, but the biggest thing we came away with after doing a read-through of PbtA games is that we want Apocalypse World 2nd Edition to keep on being that useful, fruitful starting point.


What kind of practices did you use to playtest and reexamine new rules and tweaks to old rules?

Vincent: Reworking existing rules is pretty different for us than doing new design. The easiest were the new Hx rules. Once we had the idea to turn the process around, to have you ask for volunteers instead of deciding things for yourself, the new rules just fell into place. They were so obviously sharper and more streamlined that they needed only a quick test to confirm. The new angel kit rules were the same way.

Hardest were the new battle moves. We tried several approaches, each generally more elaborate than the originals, before these much simpler ones came to us. But even so, once we got the approach right, designing the moves themselves came easily, they were obviously an improvement, and we played with them basically just to confirm that we were right about them.

We didn’t do any formal external playtesting, but I leaked all the new material to my Patreon patrons. Some of them picked them up and played with them, and their feedback was further confirmation.

Meg: When you put it to absolute practicalities though, it looks a lot like: “Hey, I have an idea for some new rules for XYZ, can you make a couple characters quick and see how it works?’ or “Check out these new mechanics with me for a few minutes?” Lots of small spot-tests within the context of a game we know well, to make sure all the parts are clicking into place the way we want.

We also have a dedicated group of wonderful teens who play at our house every Friday, and when I say “here’s new barter rules; give them a shot and tell us what you think” they are generally happy to help. Some of them have been playtesting stuff with me for 7 years, and so I can hand them stuff and walk away knowing I’ll get decent feedback. It also is a great playtesting tool to be two rooms away and just listen for the flow of the game and the engagement level as much as for who says what and rolls how.

One last question: you have been working with Meguey on Apocalypse World in various forms for a long time! What does it take to create a vision as a team that is so coherent, and how do you think it reflects on the design in 2nd Edition?

Vincent: I’m not very good at it! It demands a lot of communication, but I struggle to communicate my ideas in sentences and explanations when what they are is game design.

When we’re working together on a project, I think that we both commit fully to the project’s creative success. Neither of us goes along with the other against the needs of the project, and neither of us sticks to our own ideas against the needs of the project either. We both bring our best work, patience, and attention, and let the project decide.

Meg: I think the biggest thing it takes is patience. Designing together is not always easy or simple; sometimes we disagree on a thing, or have trouble making clear to each other what we mean or why we’re excited about a particular part of the design. Patience and trust that we can work it out and come to a clear place to move forward is important.

An overlapping but not identical taste in art, music, background, movies, games, books etc etc to draw from is great, so we each can bring new insights and ways of looking at any particular design challenge. When we first started designing games together 20 years ago, I was fresh out of Emergency Medical Technician training. For years our combat systems looked like “Ok, Meg, they get hit here, with this kind of weapon. What happens?” I know way more about the odd things that people save than Vincent does, and he watches way more horror movies than I do. Lately we’ve both been reading a lot of books about various world-shifting events in US history – the arrival of De Soto, the adoption of horses by the Comanche, the 1918 flu epidemic, the dust bowl – so we’re steeped in a whole new batch of apocalyptic imagery.

The other HUGE thing we have going for us is that we are both creative artistic people in other places of our lives. So we don’t get offended when the other one gets caught by something and has to get up early or stay up late or block out time on the weekend for a personal project. We get that. We also have pretty decent boundaries on what is shared game design and what is our own projects. The Sundered Land is entirely Vincent, Playing Nature’s Year is entirely me, Apocalypse World is both of us. We read and playtest each other’s games, sure, but on our own projects we each have our own clear direction. With joint projects, we have to be in accord on the direction in order for it to move forward.



Thanks so much to Vincent and Meguey for the interview! It was great to hear about Apocalypse World 2nd Edition and I’m really looking forward to getting it in my hands! Check out the new edition coming up on Kickstarter, where Vincent and Meguey have been providing rich material for new backers already! 

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Five or So Questions with Eddy Webb on Pugmire

I was excited to have the chance to chat with Eddy Webb about his new game Pugmire, which is currently on Kickstarter. It sounds like such a cool and unique game. I hope you enjoy hearing about it, and check out the Kickstarter if you get the chance!

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

Pugmire is a tabletop roleplaying game I’ve been working on for a couple of years now. “Pugmire” is the name of the biggest kingdom in a world in which dogs have built a new society. They live in the ashes of our world far in the future, seeking adventure and redemption. Think Lord of the Rings meets Planet of the Apes, but with dogs.

It excites me for a couple of reasons. The first is that most of my career thus far has been crime and horror fiction and games, and the world of Pugmire allows me to not only have a little fun, but also tell different kinds of compelling and engaging stories. Secondly, though, it’s all mine. This is a world I’ve build from the ground up, and for the first time I can apply all the ideas and strategies I’ve learned over the past fourteen years of my career to something that I have complete control over. It’s very freeing to be able to reach out to people I know and trust, as well as work with brand new people, and work with them on great projects without having to worry about checking in with another group of people.


Can you tell me about the conception process you have used to develop the game, the world, and the fun characters you mention on the Kickstarter, like Yosha and Pan?

I’ve been developing the world off and on for a few years now. It all started over a Thanksgiving break. I had ruined my normal laptop, and was stuck in a small apartment with my two pugs and a Chromebook. The dogs were driving me nuts barking at invisible things, so I started writing down notes for a fantasy world in which dogs barked at invisible demons. I thought it was amusing, but put it aside.

About a year later, I was asked to write a short story for an anthology, and pulled up the world idea. I fleshed it out, and that became the first glimmers of Pugmire (and the first time I wrote Yosha and Pan). A number of people suggested I do more with it, and the idea of a tabletop RPG was high on the list (since it’s an area I’ve worked as a writer and designer for close to sixteen years). I pitched the idea to Richard Thomas at Onyx Path Publishing, he loved it, and it’s been in various stages of development pretty consistently since then!

I wanted to make sure that there were signature or “iconic” characters for people to gravitate to early on, and Yosha and Pan were definitely two I wanted to include. I used them as a good counterpoint to each other for the Gen Con promotional release we did — she is the voice of intelligence but a bit of sweet naivety, while Pan is the gruff, exaggerated voice of experience — and the dynamic just worked really well.

I’d love to hear some details about the mechanics. What is the base system you are working with, and if you’re doing any fun variations, could you tell me about them?
It’s d20 OGL, but it’s had a bit of an interesting journey. I started working on the system for Pugmire before D&D 5th Edition came out. When I got a chance to read it, however, I realized that a lot of where I wanted to take the system was already addressed in those rules. But the OGL for that edition wasn’t out until just a couple of weeks before we were ready to launch, so I rewrote the original (3rd edition) version of the rules to get closer to that.

But Pugmire is not just a clone of D&D. At each step, I’ve tweaked, streamlined, revised, and outright changed various parts of the rules to fit my vision of the game. People familiar with those rules will find a lot they recognize, and a lot that’s totally new.

Some small rules changes can have knock-on effects, and I used that style of design to help emphasize cooperation and action. For example, there are no experience points and no rules for currency — dogs gain a level after an interesting story, and they can roll to “remember” equipment they didn’t bring with them on the adventure. Additionally, there’s a brand-new mechanic called “Fortune” that allows players to reroll dice and affect the flow of the game, but it’s all in a bowl in the center of the table. Anyone can spend it, but they have to ask the group if it’s okay first. Little things like that, combined with the in-world ideology of “Be A Good Dog”, really help to get people thinking about cooperation and telling interesting stories.

What kind of stories do you think people can tell with Pugmire, and what kind of experience do you think they will get out of those?

After years of writing games that were very complex, dark, and full of terrible people doing terrible things, I wanted to write a game that was more heroic. But I just can’t get into bubble-gum fantasy where everyone is good just for the sake of being good. I still value characters and worlds with texture. As I started working on Pugmire, I realized that I could create a world where one group of players can have a lot of fun playing Corgis with battleaxes, while another group of players can dig into the religious ramifications of the edict “Be A Good Dog.” It works on a few different levels, sometimes simultaneously, which makes it a game that can scale quite well between light-hearted fun and poignant sadness.

Finally, what are your main inspirations for Pugmire and how do they see representation in the game?

I had a wide diversity of inspirations. Some, like Mouse Guard and Redwall are fairly obvious — talking animals that go off and have fantastic adventures! But others are more subtle. The early, slightly gonzo material in both Dungeons & Dragons and Gamma World were certainly inspirational to me, particularly that strange but compelling blend of genre fantasy and science fiction that manifest as Pugmire’s “magic.” Also, the not-quite-post-apocalyptic feel of Thundarr the Barbarian really influenced the feel of a fragmented society that looks to the past and gets some bits wrong. But really, my biggest inspiration are my dogs, past and present, who continue to delight, console, and infuriate me every day. I constantly try to imagine the adventure they think they’re having, and I try to bring them to the table.

Thanks so much to Eddy for the great interview! I think Pugmire sounds like a great game for a variety of audiences. Make sure to check it out on Kickstarter!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Five or So Questions with Dabney Bailey on Tavern Tales!

Today I have an interview with Dabney Bailey on Tavern Tales, which is a really cool game that is currently on Kickstarter. When I played Tavern Tales last year, I ended up getting so entranced with my character that I started writing fiction blurbs on my G+ account. I love the game, and I hope you check it out on Kickstarter! (Also, this art is AMAZING!)



Tell me a little about Tavern Tales. What excites you about it?

For me, the most exciting thing about Tavern Tales is the sheer number of possibilities it offers. I built TT from the ground up to be as versatile and flexible as possible. The game bends to fit the needs of the players rather than the other way around.

The character creation system is incredibly flexible, allowing you to build virtually anything imaginable — I’m constantly being surprised by the builds my fans over at the forums come up with. In fact, just a few weeks ago, someone figured out how to create a gigantic fantasy robot that the whole party could pilot together. The possibilities truly are staggering.

Tell me a little bit about the character creation system. How did you build in flexibility, and what kind of characters can you make?

Most other RPGs tell you what you can and can’t play. They’ll give you a list of options like “This is the wizard class. If you’re a wizard, these are the only options available to you.”

Tavern Tales abandons this approach in favor of a more organic method where the players get to define their characters, rather than the game designer defining their character. Character options are divided into Themes, which represent archetypes like Thievery, Undeath, or Arcane. Then, it’s up to the player to pick and choose whatever options they want with no limits. If you want to be a conventional wizard, you can go full Arcane. If you want to be a magical necromancer, you could combine Arcane and Undeath in interesting ways.

Tavern Tales gives players the freedom and options to build the character they always wished they could play.

What kind of settings can you play in for Tavern Tales – is it just fantasy, or is there more to find?

It was originally designed to be a fantasy setting, but it’s flexible enough that it can easily be adapted to fit other settings. In fact, there’s a section of the rules that encourage you to reflavor your character options to fit whatever aesthetic you like.

I’m currently playing a sci-fi version of Tavern Tales and it the systems runs smoothly.


What was your process for creating the system, and what inspired you?

I think my inspiration was all of the character ideas I had in my head that I could never play. I started to get really frustrated by games that forced me to play certain characters in certain ways. So, I decided to build a game that would free me from the limitations that I had grown frustrated with. I built TT to be kind of like Legos. Rather than me building a complete toy and giving it to others to play with, I give players Legos and let players build whatever they want out of the pieces.


How can players get involved in the community for Tavern Tales, and what can they get out of it?

I released TT into open beta in April of 2014. Since then, the community has been instrumental in helping TT grow. I am a very verbal designer, so I’ll typically post new mechanic ideas to the forums to hold a public discussion before I implement anything. In fact, some of the ideas in the book came straight from fan suggestions. If anyone out there is interested in game development, I highly encourage you to join reddit.com/r/taverntales. We’d love to hear from you!

Thanks to Dabney for the interview, and I hope everyone checks out Tavern Tales on Kickstarter! 

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Upcoming Tavern Tales Interview!

Hey everyone!

Monday morning I’ll have a blog post coming out about Tavern Tales, which is currently on Kickstarter!

Tavern Tales is the game that I played that brought about Stories Here in Maelstrom Paramour (my G+ collection), and it is a really fun, customizable system. Dabney Bailey, the creator, is really fantastic. Keep an eye out for the interview!

In the meantime, here’s a cool piece of art, and here’s a link to the Reddit Tavern Tales discussion if you want to check it out!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Baby Bestiary – Behold, Products!

Hey all!

In a new feature, hopefully to continue, I want to draw attention to products I have enjoyed or products I think look cool, or even just products I’ve worked on and loved (regardless of my level of involvement). One of those projects is the Baby Bestiary, which is currently Kickstarting its Volume 2, and for which I am signed up to write for both the Kraken and the Satyr so I’m really hoping to see it kick. In the meantime, let me tell you a little about it!

The Bestiary is a lore book, not really a book full of rules and charts, but instead instructions on how to care for baby beasts, their history, and their habits. When I wrote for the first volume, I wrote for the Minotaur Calf and the Hippocampus Fry. For the Minotaur Calf, we learned of the importance of the constellations for the Minotaurs, and about their diets and the risks of being a beast with horns in a world that loves trophies. The Hippocampus Fry discussed mating habits of the grown Hippocampi, and the difference between Hippocampi from different climates. The new volume will include even more exciting creatures, like Gargoyles!

The project team is amazing, too. I’ve had the opportunity to work with them before, and again I’m impressed by the creativity of the writers on the new creatures. Not only will the new volume include the Satyr and Kraken that I’m working on (which I am incredibly excited about!), but it will include Ben Woerner’s (World of Dew) work on the Dragon Turtle, Gargoyle (seen above), Pertyon, and Enfield. There is also Elizabeth Chaipraditkul (WITCH) working on Lightning Lizards, Bugbears, and Orcs! The list of authors involved is incredible, and the art is fantastic.

Right now you can find the original Baby Bestiary, Volume 1 for sale on DriveThru RPG, and the Kickstarter for Baby Bestiary, Volume 2 (including a reprint of Volume 1) is still ongoing. Here’s to hoping that the product gets funded so I can write more about little critters for all of you to enjoy!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Five or So Questions with Nathan Paoletta on World Wide Wrestling: International Incident

Today I have an interview with Nathan Paoletta! He is releasing his supplement to the fantastic World Wide Wrestling RPG. World Wide Wrestling: International Incident sounds like a great follow-up to WWWRPG, which brought in over double its Kickstarter goal in September 2014. I interviewed Nathan about WWWRPG, and now I’m excited to see all of the info on the new supplement!

Tell me about your upcoming project. What excites you about it?

This project (World Wide Wrestling: International Incident) is the first full-bore supplement to a game I’ve written. I’ve done micro-supplements and little settings and stuff like that, but this is going to be a whole complementary volume of background info and new rules that extend what the World Wide Wrestling RPG already offers to cover international iconic wrestling styles, as well as structural rules for some things I decided to leave out of WWWRPG originally. I guess I’m pumped about it because it’s a new thing for me to attempt, and also because it means I’ve been diving deeply into wrestling (particularly Japanese wrestling) to research it and just discovering all kinds of amazing stuff that excites me as a wrestling fan. Since I have the supplement in mind I pay attention to what I watch in a little different way, and I feel like I’m learning a lot more about these traditions than I would if I was “just” watching them, which is very cool. Learning is fun!

What are the biggest challenges you encountered in making a full size supplement for World Wide Wrestling?
Existential ones, for the most part. What “deserves” to be in a supplement, which is to say, what kind of new content is of enough value for players that its worth printing, binding, etc to make a thing? I’m balancing how to add new mechanical material such that it doesn’t invalidate extant content, as well as distill the insights of the WWWRPG community over the last year in order to fill some holes that keep on tripping people up. Because the mechanical framework already exists, it’s a lot of thinking about how to frame the new content, and a lot less writing of rules that I’m used to. Also, there’s 15 official Gimmicks already out for the game, and “balancing” the 6 new ones that are coming such that they don’t overlap with the older ones, and can still be played alongside them is a lot of work that I didn’t expect. I recently made a big spreadsheet of every Gimmick to compare the hard rules across all of them, because I realized that I was designing power creep into the new ones by accident! I had to zoom out and formally reframe them in context with what’s already out there.

What were some of the coolest tidbits of trivia you encountered while doing your research?

Getting introduced to the British wrestling that was broadcast on a show called World of Sport may be the biggest highlight – trivia-wise, the rules for those matches were esoteric by todays standards (much more like boxing), but it means the psychology in the ring could be very, very nuanced. There’s a ton of stuff on YouTube but yeah, watching old Marty Jones and Rollerball Rocco matches from the late 70s is just a joy and so different from todays style.

As a single trivia bit, I had no idea that this happened: Ric Flair (widely regarded as the greatest pro wrestler of all time) and Antonio Inoki (legendary founder of New Japan Pro Wrestling and, arguably, the Japanese “Strong Style”) wrestled in North Korea in 1995 in front of the largest crowd for a wrestling match EVER, 190,000 people. Muhammad Ali was there too. Here’s a great Sports Illustrated story about it.

What are some of the concepts you’re exploring mechanics-wise with the supplement?

The wrestling company itself, the promotion, as a character. This is present but pretty abstract in the core game, and in the supplement I’m adding a more structured way to measure the progress and growth of the company that the wrestlers all work for. It really highlights the tension between the performances and the effect that those performances have on everyone’s welfare, and I really like how that’s coming together. Part of this is a new system for what I’m calling “Mythic Moments,” which trigger on certain really good die rolls, and create these rare but memorable moments that can end up defining a character’s career. Those two things together give a sense of really building something together, I think.

The other big one is providing some more fine-grained structure for wrestling matches. The basic method of handing them works fine, but I think players who are educated in how pro wrestling works appreciate having some more nuanced mechanical ability to represent that knowledge in the game. I’m working on providing a couple of different methods to “zoom in” on a certain match and play it out by leveraging different aspects of your character to maximum advantage, for players who have mastered the core mechanical cycles of the game.

Finally, one of the surprising (to me) pieces of feedback I’ve received from the community is that wrestlers advance mechanically more quickly than some groups expect – I think there’s a community of players who come from experiences with year-long-campaign style games, and seeing their characters grow session to session feels rushed to them! So I’m adding some optional rules that actually slow advancement and provide more space for playing out extended stories and feuds, to accommodate that playstyle in a way that’s not just me saying “uh, play slower?” 🙂

Do you think this supplement will change gameplay in any significant way, and if so, how?

The goal isn’t to change gameplay fundamentally, but extend it to address more and varied aspects of wrestling! I hope that it encourages people to set their games in more diverse promotions and with more varied rosters, for sure. I think the new rules about the promotion growth as well as the Mythic Moments rules have enough obvious play value that people will start using them for long-term games (I hope!). The rest is generally “optional” in the sense of, if it’s providing an experience you want, you should use it, but adding it for the sake of adding it isn’t going to change much.

That said, my biggest prediction: I expect to see a lot more Luchadores in games at conventions!

With World Wide Wrestling, you have managed to catch a pretty big audience with a lot of passion. As an experienced designer and entrepreneur specifically in the game design industry, what are the things you look for when working on a project to help find your audience and are there ways you tailor the experience to their interests, and did you do that at all with WWW?

I’m a big believer that projects have different “fits” with the overall audience and culture. One of the benefits of experience is being able to discern that fit earlier in the design process, I think. Some work is clearly never going to have a wide appeal, other projects needs a certain pitch or skin or other orientation to make them more accessible that they otherwise would be. Most rarely (again, in my experience), a project just has a spark to it that all you need to do is cultivate. With World Wide Wrestling, I often feel like I’m just stoking the fire on it so that it stays hot, to mix some metaphors. The RPG+pro wrestling overlap audience is out there, and a lot of my job is maintaining awareness and trying to make sure the game remains in the conversation over time! For this supplement in particular, it’s a nice alignment of interests. I’m capitalizing on something I’m already interested in (non-US wrestling), reaching out to folks who are especially interested in those styles to maybe look at the game for the first time, and rewarding folks who are already fans with new content that, I think, will be a net positive to their game experiences.

Thanks to Nathan for the great interview! I can’t wait to see the final product, and I think World Wide Wrestling: International Incident is going to be a killer product.

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Five or So Questions with Alessandro Piroddi on The Name of God

I had the pleasure to interview Alessandro Piroddi about his upcoming game, The Name of God. The Name of God is coming soon on Kickstarter, and Alessandro has been kind enough to share his Kickstarter preview link with all of us so you can check it out ahead of time!

Tell me about The Name of God. What excites you about it?

The first thing that excites me about tNoG is the same thing that blew my mind the first time I saw Vast & Starlit: a whole gmLess game with fully fleshed and coherent procedures all bundled in a handful of cards. It’s not unheard of today, but at the time it felt like doing the impossible. No GM, no books to study, no prep time, no sheets and dice and pencils; you sit down and play the game and it just all works. Kabum!

The second thing that I love about tNoG is the setting… I am a huge fan of a certain kind of dark-ish urban fantasy. When I think about books like Neil Gaiman‘s Neverwhere, Anansi Boys and American Gods, or any book from Jim Butcher‘s Dresden Files, the thing that intrigues me the most is the idea that everyday mundane people and actions might actually hide a hidden meaning, a secret knowledge.


What has been different for you in designing The Name of God than other games, considering it’s very different format?

Space constraints.

I wanted it to fit, in its original form, to slim format business cards. This meant a draconian control on word count. Every sentence had to deliver the intended meaning, setting flavour, procedural instructions, everything that was needed in very few words. And even the specific words used will often need to be scrutinised to find suitable synonyms, as using one expression instead of another would brake the line in the wrong place, occupying extra space. From there, going to poker-card format was actually a comfortable transition >_<

You said that dark, urban fantasy that has the idea of mundanes have a secret knowledge. How do you think that comes through in The Name of God?

In the game your character is an homeless person with no powers or any weird ability, and the rules simply end up framing this person in normal and ordinary scenes.
But then your personal Fetish (a sort of character template) asks you a couple of weird questions, very thematic and philosophical; stuff like “Why nobody is innocent?” or “What hunger keeps you awake?” This charges your perception of the character in a uniquely individual and personal way, making it feel more than just some random guy on the street.
And then the rules add to each scene you play a slightly bizarre detail; nothing mindblowing, and exactly because of this it tilts the picture and makes everything feel kind of off.
Finally, any of your actions might have a ritual meaning, simply because you feel like it… thus triggering the game mechanics.
It also helps that the Ritual Action rules effectively allow to cheat the game… where normally you would surely fail and cause damage, you can instead draw power and make one more step towards your final goal… at a price.
But truly, the game itself is a ritual: people looking at your table will see 3 to 4 friends chatting, then all of a sudden one says something weird like “I am the Winter! I do this and that, I am the Winter” and out of the blue the whole group starts chanting a mantra. Players look positively crazy when they play!

Structuring a Kickstarter for such a unique style of game may have presented some challenges. How did you make choices to structure the Kickstarter to ensure you could meet your goals and make backers happy?

Unfortunately in my “real life” I have no time, skills or extra help to manage logistics: printing, delivering, stocking. The choice of a PDF + Print on Demand solution seemed not only ideal, but practically the only viable one. Also, this is a nanogame, so I planned the whole project to be as small and sustainable as possible.
The game is already there, the artist graciously performed a good share of the graphical work upfront, I only need the money to pay off the rest of its work and send the final version of the files to the PoD service, then Bob’s your uncle. In that regard the existence of a website such as DriveThroughCards made everything very simple for me, and convenient for my backers: it’s a big online shop of renown fame, with solid production standards and a killer customer service that ships worldwide. Others might have slightly cheaper fees, or marginally better paper quality, but considering the whole package I believe this to be the best solution for both me and anyone interested in the game.

Also, the stretch goals are built in such a way that each one will add value to the whole project, but ultimately are not needed… if not even one is funded, the game will not suffer from it, while the more are funded the better the game becomes for everyone. Logistically speaking the workload for each guest designer is incredibly small. The main bottleneck will be the illustrations, but this only means that if worst comes to worst there will be a slight delay in the fulfillment of the project, nothing else.

What kind of stories do you think players will find when they play The Name of God? What do you think might surprise them?

So far I’ve seen all kinds of stories.
Some are quirky and over the top, surrealistic.
Others are humane and touching, others are dark and hurtful, others yet are light hearted and almost comical (in a weird kind of way). A few kind of remind of Todd McFarlane‘s Spawn stories, the first ones that were more down to earth.

For example I remember one game, one of the very first playtests, where the Winter produced a chilling (no pun intended) story of revenge, the Shadow went down as a deranged and very dark vigilante tale, and the Stars surprised everyone by pulling off a story of personal struggle and redemption with an unbelievably sweet and positive ending (as far as suicide goes).

The Winter was a middle aged woman. Cheated and abandoned by her husband, she methodically went on stalking him and his new happy family, stealing trinkets and mementoes, and finally getting into their happy house and killing their newborn infant child. The player (Pablo) commented that most of the horrible things he made his Fetish do where not planned, they just kind of happened because they felt right in the circumstance, and he was the first to be shocked by them.

The Shadows was an angry old man. He behaved like a vigilante, fighting the inner demons that plagued the periphery of his perception by beating drug dealers and pimps with a baseball bat. The player (Claudia) was consistently creeped out both by how her character’s actions failed to ensue a positive effect no matter how hard she tried (very powerful a scene with a prostitute she helped, as the girl freaked out because her pimp got smashed to a pulp before her eyes). And her ascension scene was epic, facing a small army of demon-children in a construction yard near a railway, finally throwing the character against an incoming train as a last enraged attack against his not-so-inner demons.

The Stars was a young guy with a drug problem. He faced prejudice and violence and temptation in order to win over the girl of his dreams, eventually risking his life to save her father, a man that until the very end had shown him only hatred and contempt. A touching moment happened when he put a gun to his own head, inviting the girl’s father to pull the trigger if that would solve his family problems and ensure the girl’s well being … and by turning this into a Ritual Action that, literally, sparked a light in the man’s heart, the scene ended up in tears and reconciliation. But the best part was the final ascension. The player (Alejandro) saw that there were no rules dictating when the ascension scene needed to take place, so he framed his character as old, in his house bathroom, looking at himself in the mirror and remembering a happy and fulfilling life with his beloved; she was now dead since a few months and he felt it was time to leave the mortal world behind and ascend, serenely, in his own bed, with the help of some pills and a good drink. It felt like real closure even to the other players. Beautiful.

Awesome! Please make sure to keep an eye out for the upcoming Kickstarter and check out the KS preview page. Thank you to Alessandro for the interview, and I am looking forward to seeing the final product!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Five or So Questions with Elizabeth Chaipraditkul on WITCH

Today I am super lucky because I got to interview Elizabeth Chaipraditkul about WITCH! You’re super lucky, too, because I have some pictures and her awesome answers here for you to enjoy! AND, guess what? WITCH is on preorder for release in February in the Angry Hamster Publishing shop. Let’s get to it!

Tell me a little bit about WITCH. What excites you about it?

So, WITCH: Fated Souls is a modern dark fantasy role play game where you play a member of the Fated, someone who has sold their soul to a demon for power. When I started to write WITCH it was something I just had to do, when I started writing I figured even if no one else read the game at least it would be out of my head. I always loved dark games – gothic horror, haunted exploration, anything occult. Games that allowed me to make a character I could fall in love with, that haunted me, even when I was awake. I wanted to make a game based on the heroine in every one of my dreams. A setting where she could live, flourish, and fight her demons (internally and externally). I wanted to make a game that everyone could play who felt the same way, who had formed similar people in their minds – stretching them, shaping them over the years. When I see my game it’s not as horror-filled as I thought it would be, but there is still something about it that’s mysterious, dark, and filled with adventure. I feel I accomplished my goal, that is exciting.

The crunchy mechanics side of me is excited about the magic system for WITCH. I am always frustrated with games that limit my magical power in odd numeric ways. Like only having five spell slots or only having enough mana for three spells. Realistically, in these games the idea is that there is a point where your character is tried and can’t cast any more. But I never found that much fun and the idea that my power was capped (even if that meant I was just tired) bothered me. In WITCH you can cast your magic as much as you’d like. However, each time you do your chance to critically fail/botch increases. So, out of character, you get to live that exhaustion with your character. Are you going to gamble casting another spell, you can do it, but what if you botch? Worse yet, what if you have cast your magic so many times that you cause an Eternity Chasm (extra horrible botch), a catastrophic event that rips through all space & time.

What sort of inspiration did you use for the horror and occult imagery and feel of the game?
When I was thinking of how I wanted my game to look and feel I wanted it to be like Charmed, if it had met Hellraiser early on and was corrupted by it. American Horror Story: Coven, while it came out after I was almost done development for the game, definitely captures the look and feel I was going for.

I am a very visual person. So, from the moment I started writing I was pinning images that fueled my writing. Art gives me energy. Images can tell such an amazing story and were endless inspiration for me.

I am also a huge fan of buying crappy old books from the thrift store. There are a lot of random occult tidbits I was able to pull out of the books to weave into my game. It was important that WITCH, was far enough removed from reality as to be its own thing, but still have recognizable elements. For example, we have rituals in the game, rituals are an important part of any type of occult game. Saying that, they are totally made up and I’ve tried to stay away from anything that is practiced. I did make sure though that there was enough symbol for them to feel real and give a good play experience.



I want to know, what happens when you create an Eternity Chasm – what can be the impact of this rip?


Pretty much anything that is end-game horrible. For example, you could open a hole into an alternate dimension filled with evil replicas of yourself who invade the world looking to kill you. It could also do something like write every trace of you out of existence. So you have to play through the moments of your life as they are erased one by one. When an Eternity Chasm happens, it normally means your character is going to die or become unplayable (it is almost impossible for one to happen unless you are insanely reckless). However, like with all things in WITCH, it should be an excuse to further the story. I feel huge events like this should never be an excuse to just kill a character. It needs to add drama and play to the game. Having a strong, player driven story is so important, especially in WITCH.

What kind of encounters could players find in WITCH?

Exploration and adventure are huge themes in our game. Sure, you sold your soul and it sucks, but your life isn’t over. One huge trade-off is that you get to explore a magical world, which is pretty damn amazing. In our world there are different forces at work that Fated will meet. There is the Quiet, an all encompassing nothingness that is eating away parts of reality. As you get close to the Quiet you’ll hear voices, voices asking you to follow them. There are also hunters to contend with. People who hate you for the simple fact that you have sold your soul. And much more! 

We also have a lot of adventures that players can stumble upon by mistake, opening the wrong door, or messing up with their magic. For example, in our Planar Guide you’ll find a plane totally inhabited by puppets whose strings stretch high into the sky. Or you can visit a plane with no land and an ever expanding ocean. Dark finned figures lurk just below the surface of the water waiting for you to succumb to exhaustion.

How do you approach more sensitive topics in WITCH – do you have realistic, or possibly intimate, horrors?

There is a lot of different ways to represent horror in our game. In WITCH a lot of horror comes from the character realizing what they are capable of and willing to do for power. How they cope with the deals they make with their demon and how they (hopefully) triumph. Demons play a huge role in our game, because each Fated has so much interaction with theirs. While every demon is different there are some that take sincere delight in emotionally torturing their Fated, that is not for everyone.

What affects people is very personal to each person and group you are playing with. In WITCH we advise GMs, in the GM chapter, to speak to their players about what they are comfortable with before the game begins. I personally feel this makes playing fun and safe for all players.

In the text itself, while we do have a few grisly scenes, I have stayed away from sexual violence. I preferred to have intimacy and sex shown in a positive light. Likewise, we have some nudity in the book and our Devil’s Deck. I feel being naked is pretty natural and normal, it doesn’t have to mean sex (or violence).

Awesome! Thanks to Elizabeth for the excellent interview and for the gorgeous art to share! You can find find more about WITCH on Angry Hamster Publishing’s WITCH page and preorder options in their shop.


This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Playtesting Bluebeard’s Bride with Sarah Richardson!

Yesterday I had the pleasure of playing a session of Bluebeard’s Bride with Emily Care Boss, Hannah Shaffer, and J Li, with the fantastic Sarah Richardson as our GM. (Note: this was an amazing group to play with. WOW.) Sarah Richardson, Marissa Kelly, and Whitney Beltrán are the creators of  Bluebeard’s Bride and I was very excited to get into my second playtest of this gorgeous game.

Up front for people interested in this game: First off, this game is still in development and has not been released. Everything in this has the possibility of changing. It is not a game for kids. It often contains very twisted material, including seriously NSFW and graphic descriptions. This review will cover some sexual content (I’ll try to keep it relatively vague), generally creepy stuff, and violence against women.

Bluebeard’s Bride has a really awesome initial setup. It’s currently based on Apocalypse Word mechanics, but it’s quite far removed from that material. The game is about the story of Bluebeard, a fairy tale that has seen many different interpretations. The core of the story is that a woman marries a man with a blue beard, and instructs her that she can explore his whole castle except one room, then leaves for business. Eventually she opens that room, and finds that it is full of the corpses of Bluebeard’s previous wives. Bluebeard finds out that she’s opened the door, and kills her (in some versions she is rescued, but the regular story results in her death). How this plays out in the game and how it ends is something you’ll just have to find out through play! My two experiences with this game have been quite different, so it is one of the few games that is kind of encapsulated in one specific story that has a ridiculous amount of replayability.

The general idea in this game is that there is one bride, and the players play different parts of her psyche. The playbooks we used were the Animus (physicality, masculine bravado, and independence), the Fatale (sex, sensuality, and intrigue), the Virgin (innocence, exploration, and critique), and the Witch (transgression, magic, and power). There is also a playbook called the Mother, but we didn’t try that out.

The playbooks are one of my favorite things. They include six sections: Wedding Preparations, Sisterly Bonds, Token Tracks, Stats, Burdens, and the Trauma Track. I don’t want to overcomplicate this review so I’ll just talk about my favorite things: the Wedding Preparations and the Burdens. Wedding preparations are basically character generation. There are questions about whether you trust your husband or not (I didn’t), what gift did you give him (a stag’s head and the knife I used to cut it off with, to demonstrate my power), and then a question about the physical appearance of the bride, with a second question about the way other people influence her appearance. This was a fascinating exercise.

The Burdens are basically playbook specific moves. I am a huge fan of these. The Animus has one presently (though this could change) that involves investigating objects by breaking them. This was so my thing. I was super excited to play it.

Okay, I do have to mention the other playbook sections: Sisterly Bonds are relationships between you and the other Sisters (pieces of the bride’s psyche). To my knowledge there is not a specific mechanic. The Token Tracks are Faithfulness and Disloyalty tracks that are marked when you exit rooms to help determine some of the details of the end game mechanics. Stats are self-explanatory. The Trauma Track is effectively harm. I can’t remember exactly what happens when your Trauma Track reaches max, but it’s called “shattering” so that’s pretty cool. 🙂

The play involves passing around a ring from player to player in no specific order (the player with the ring chooses who it passes to for the most part). There are moves for investigation, supporting or interfering with other Sisters, and some other really good ones – my favorites are shivering from fear, which is typically called on when the GM sees you get really creeped out (this is an awesome body language thing to me), and dirty yourself with violence, because yesssss.

There is a cool thing where you leave a room and you have choose a token kind of representing what you discovered, which I think is cool because it makes you reevaluate everything having to do with that room. There are also a few instances where the game asks you what the scariest thing or most horrible thing that could happen is. I love how it gives players the agency to terrify themselves.

Agency is actually something really important to me in games. Bluebeard’s Bride actually, imo, does a pretty good job with it. First of all, I don’t know if the other creators do this, but Sarah did get in touch with players in advance and allow us to flag any major triggers. This is hugely appreciated for me, because the game is filled with a lot of really upsetting things. She also allowed use of an X-card in game. On top of that, Sarah is an incredibly perceptive GM, which I think helps a lot. If you plan to run horror games, I think that it is way valuable to have a good read on body language.

Another part of the agency is that how the players approach the materials – like in other AW games – tends to influence the type of horror and danger, as well as the severity. This allowed us to take things in worse directions for some subjects, and better directions for others. When the game asks “what is the worst thing that could happen here?” the GM can see by our responses what is really working, and where buttons could further be pushed.

Also! I liked that this game has a very elegant way of violating perception. Like, when we play games, they are fiction, and we can have our characters experience stuff like hallucinations – particularly popular in horror. This, however, is a story where we are expecting bad stuff to happen and when the horrific stuff happens it’s very easy to assume that it’s actually happening! Because the game is contextually horrific, seeing horrific things is very easy to accept as reality. This is able to be turned over its head by the GM revealing the mundanity. It’s very cool because it has this element of “this could be real, but it could also not be real, but what is real?!” while still keeping a great flow to the story.

Beyond the mechanics!

The session was SO fun. I am just going to cherry pick some stuff, because while the story changes with every session in a lot of ways, I want to leave a lot more mystery regarding the structure.

In one scene, while the bride was investigating the bathroom, a mosaic on the ceiling depicting a standing man and woman changed by looking into the water in the bath below into the man strangling the woman. While the bride was examining this, a shade of some sort came from behind her, and began to strangle her and shoved her into the water. Upon waking, the bride discovered no markings or other indications that it had happened, except that she was now lying in the bathtub. While examining herself in the mirror, the shade came behind her, and when she tried to attack it, it grabbed her shoulder, and seemed to physically break something. The pain continued throughout the session.

In another scene, the bride was examining some locks of hair and the Witch tried to divine whether they were from violence. The response was for the walls and ceiling to start bleeding, and blood to pour over the bride. When she tried to wipe it off, her skin peeled off as she touched it, coming off in ribbons. When she screamed for help, the maid arrived, and there was nothing happening at all. Instead of the locks of hair on the dresser in front of her, there was a large, wooden dildo. The scene that followed with the generally creepy maid involved a disturbing kinda BDSM scene where the bride was somewhat involved, as well as a second maid.

Later, the bride went into the dining room to discover a huge banquet of food, all of which smelled just like what her mother cooked at home. A third maid offered her a small pie, all the while talking about how the bride shouldn’t each very much. The bride eventually dug in and ate a little bit of everything, and by then the other two maids had arrived and they started shaming her, talking about how Bluebeard didn’t like chubby girls. Since the Animus (me) was in charge of the character at that point, that resulted in a little violence – the bride hauled off and punched one of the maids, and then two of them held her while that maid punched her in the stomach. When they left, the bride was so full of rage at everything – the maids, Bluebeard, and especially her mother for forcing her to do this – that she shattered a ton of the now-bare plates. That led to another discovery…

The ending scene was incredibly dramatic, and super fucked up, but it was great! The whole exploration of both the house, Bluebeard’s character, and the bride herself was fascinating. I fully recommend checking Bluebeard’s Bride out soon – playtests are currently rare, but I think it will soon be coming to us all on Kickstarter. I, for one, am hella excited!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Supernatural Evil vs. Real Evil: When Reality Bites

As a fan of many varieties of fiction and genre books, films, television shows, and games, I have seen a fair share of villains. Bad guys are, actually, one of my favorite things. Without villains, where would be heroes? Without evil, is there actual “good”? It’s a big question. The one thing that keeps coming back to me, however, time and again is the question of what is more frightening, more evil: supernatural villainy, or villains who could step out of the next corner shop?

Starting with my earliest exposures to the good vs. evil storylines, I watched a lot of cartoons. Cartoons are, for the most part, about unreality. The characters are not supposed to be super realistic or like anything you might encounter. In Disney alone, there are Maleficent (Sleeping Beauty), Ursula (The Little Mermaid), and the Evil Stepmother (Snow White) – they are all frightening to children and adult understanding of their motives definitely show that they are fucked up and evil, but for me, they are not nearly so frightening as Frollo (The Hunchback of Notre Dame). There is a supernatural element to the Hunchback cartoon film, but Frollo is all too real. He is a man very dedicated to his religion, who sees beautiful women as vain and condemns their sexuality, and he considers himself better and more pure than those around him (which, imo, is terrifyingly real).

I was around 4 or 5 when I saw my first Stephen King films. Thank you television for doing re-runs, and thank you parents for leaving me alone with the television. I saw, in a sweet double-feature, IT and Carrie. They are both pretty well-done films, and completely compelling for a kid who loved ghost stories. I still have nightmares about those movies, but they are two very different types of nightmares. With IT, it is the standard “holy crap evil clown”, teleporting, monster-morphing scary that is easily expected. With Carrie, it is so much different. For me, the villain of the movie is not Carrie, or even the cruel teenagers. It’s Carrie’s abusive mother. See, in IT, the clown is a scary villain, yeah, but even at that age I knew that those things weren’t real. Abusive parents, though, were something I could definitely imagine (and had been witness to).

Further on we go – scary movies with werewolves and vampires and ghosts, right up next to Law & Order, CSI, and the serial killer shows and documentaries I latched on to. No matter how many nightmares I had about monsters, it never compared to the constant anxiety I felt day after day knowing that there were real people out there who were, from my perspective, far more evil than their paranormal peers.

One of my favorite book stories is, no surprise, Harry Potter. In the books, the biggest villain, the embodiment of evil, is Voldemort (Or He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named for those of you who like to use extra words). He’s a torturer, murderer, son of a rapist (love potions are not consent, FYI), and straight up asshole who is willing to murder everyone who doesn’t fit his ideal concept of humanity. There are multiple descriptions of the shitty stuff he does, and the shitty stuff his followers do. And yet, they do not scare me anywhere near as much as Dolores Umbridge. Anyone who has read the books knows how awful Umbridge is. She constantly, as a human who is not supernaturally altered in any way, chooses to do harm and induce suffering on anyone she doesn’t deem worth or doesn’t like. She’s racist (and advocates for awful things against half-human or non-human species), and revels in the pain of others. Torturing children is shown to bring her actual pleasure and satisfaction. She is, in many ways, the perfect example of someone who would claim to have “just been doing their job” when all shit hits the fan, but who secretly really got off on doing awful things in the name of her cause – and the cause, in this case, seems to just be a convenient excuse.

I think that it is easy to see why realistic villains are more terrifying than supernatural villains (in most cases! There are always exceptions!). Bellatrix Lestrange is pretty fucked up and terrifying, but there is no way she compares to the Bitch of Buchenwald (Ilse Koch, from the Buchenwald concentration camp during WWII, Google with great care). Knowing that there are real killers, torturers, and rapists out in the world is way worse to me than the fantastical idea that vampires might suck my blood.

In games, we can always use fantastical monsters. That’s something that is super common in RPGs – hell, in a lot of games we play the monsters! But when running a horror game, the choice between real horror and fantastical horror is a very careful decision. Some GMs might know their groups well and be able to run it without a question. Others might need to really talk to their players and make sure it’s okay.

If you want to run a horror game with a realistic villain, but you don’t want to spoil the whole plot for your players, there are a lot of ways to get the information you need. The first is to have a boundaries discussion. Ask your players, “If you were playing a realistic game, what kind of bad guys, type of violence, and other content are you comfortable with and not comfortable with?” Give them the floor, and then feel free to bring up specific items, including ones you specifically don’t plan to use in the game. Examples of stuff that might come up: rape, harm to children, domestic abuse, torture, sexualized violence, stalking, harm to animals. None of these are things people should feel bad about vetoing, and it’s important not to shame players or try to bargain or bribe them. It’s more fun when people want to play the game without caveats.

Other options that are great are, like I mentioned in my previous post, using consent and content tools like the X-Card and Script Change. The biggest thing to do, though, is to talk with your players and ensure that they’re cool with moving forward.

It isn’t a bad idea to talk about this with your players when you are using supernatural villains as well. While we have seen that in the Netflix TV show, Daredevil, Wilson Fisk is an amazing villain without any supernatural ability, the new show on Netflix, Jessica Jones, the character Killgrave (known as the Purple Man in comics) has supernatural abilities and he’s simply chilling to see on screen, and his abilities are truly some of the worst.

There is a lot to gain by finding what really makes your heart pound, and your hair stand up on end, and it’s often fun to pursue it. Still, there is no reason that a person should be put in a place in a game where they can’t escape or stop the source of their distress. Players deserve to have a good time, even if that means they’re quaking in their boots!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.