Tag: tabletop

Making an Anti-Fascist Game about War

The following is an essay by John W. Sheldon, someone you may know as the art director for Turn, or as the creator of Roar of Alliance, playtested at Big Bad Con and elsewhere.

A photo of a playmat on a table with cards laid out and stacked in various piles. The playmat has instructional text for the players to reference, and is titled Roar of Alliance.
The Roar of Alliance playmat, photo by John W. Sheldon.

My name is John W. Sheldon, and I’ve been working on a tabletop game called Roar of Alliance for a few years (I used to call it Armored Reckoning). The game is about crewing an Allied tank in an alt-history World War Two and fighting through waves Nazis to set things right. What could be more anti-fascist than that? Lots of stuff, it turns out. The problem is that Nazis aren’t the only fascists, and my game does some things that potentially support fascist ways of thinking. In the political climate of the United States in 2019, it is especially important that we be aware of these things and work to mitigate them as much as possible. I’m writing about my process here in the hopes that others might find a useful example in the steps I’ve taken, and so that people with more experience can point out ways I can further improve.

What My Game Does Wrong

How does a game about destroying Nazi tanks and blowing up their infantry risk supporting fascist modes of thought? One cornerstone of fascist ideology is that they (the fascists) are oppressed by an enemy that is numerous, pervasive, powerful, and simultaneously inferior (stupid, incompetent, or morally weak). Another cornerstone is that the only appropriate way to deal with that enemy is by force.

The rules of my game do specifically these things:

The enemies you face in Roar of Alliance are numerous (outnumbering the players in just about every engagement), dangerous (their vehicles are often more advanced and better armed), and lack intelligence (their actions are automated by simple if/then statements that they never deviate from). The only way players ever interact with these foes is via deadly force. You will lose the game if you do not destroy their vehicles and disperse their infantry.

So, in these ways at least, my game actually promotes a core set of fascist ideologies. Some of this is hard to avoid, given that the game doesn’t have anyone in a central directorial role to moderate portrayals of the enemy or to restrict player behaviors in direct contact with the enemy outside combat, therefore no character in the game is ever confronted by a Nazi outside the specific circumstance of combat. This is a conscious choice to make sure nobody at the table is ever tasked with portraying a Nazi, and it keeps torture* and certain other types of violent fantasy outside the scope of the game as written. Players also have some leeway in narrating the effects of their actions on the enemy: when enemy infantry are removed from the field, players can choose to narrate the enemy’s retreat or death, and players do the same for surviving crew of disabled enemy vehicles.

Since violence and a portrayal of the enemy as numerous and unintelligent are essential to the way the game functions, and I don’t want to scrap the whole thing and start over, how do I make sure the rest of the game refutes fascism?

Focusing on Diversity

An illustration of a woman in fatigues who stands on top of a busted tank, smoke pouring out of it.
by John W. Sheldon

I start with something nationalists and fascists hate: I make sure that every other aspect of the game supports and emphasizes diversity and demonstrates how it creates strength. This paragraph kicks off the rulebook:

This game is set during the 2nd World War in Europe, a time when even the historical victors were rife with bigoted beliefs and policies. You should not let those real world bigotries limit the characters you choose to portray and accept. People of all races and genders from six continents and countless backgrounds fought against fascism and Nazism in Europe, and your characters should reflect some of that diversity.

Moreover, players are asked to identify their character’s country of origin, to help emphasize the diversity of geographic origin of the people who challenge fascism. Some of these choices are informed at a basic level by the themes of the character archetypes the game offers. In particular, the Partisan archetype was a resident of Nazi-occupied territory and a resistance fighter before joining up with the crew, the Collateral is a member of a population oppressed by the Allies and nevertheless pressed into service against the Nazis (e.g., Black Americans or colonial subjects of the British Empire), and the Duty was someone who volunteered for the fight because they new defeating fascism and Nazism was the right thing to do.

For actually producing the game, I’m doing what I’d never recommend: I’m doing the rules writing, layout, and illustrations all myself. What this does mean is that I can make sure that all of the art upholds my stated dedication to multiple axes of diversity. The art within the rules documents already portrays people of multiple genders, races, and body types as members of the player tank crew. Additional art I’m working on will include crew members with visible disabilities, crew wearing items of non-European traditional dress, and different cultural grooming standards.

An illustration of a person with natural hair in fatigues who is loading a shell into a tank.
by John W. Sheldon

Part of my plan for taking the game to crowdfunding is to offer backers the opportunity to have their portraits included as the card back art for some of the character archetypes, and as the face cards in the crew deck. Since I believe the audience for my game (one about Tanks in World War Two) skews significantly male, white, able-bodied, and cis, simply offering all of these art opportunities on a first-come, first-served basis would further skew the art for my game towards a monolithic default. To maintain my dedication to diversity, I need to give up potential sources of revenue and pre-stack the art with diverse portraits. I’ll won’t be offering backer levels for the Jacks in the Crew Deck, or for half of the character archetypes. Instead, I’ll be creating those portraits before the crowdfunding campaign begins. The portraits for the Jacks will be portraits of non-binary volunteers, and those for the first half of the character archetypes will be of volunteers who are one or more of non-white, queer, or visibly disabled.

Heroes that Need Help

Most fascism thrives on mythologizing heroes as paragons of strength, capable of facing great hardship alone and without aid. The heroes of fascism also contain within them a paradox: the enemy they face is terrifying, but they never actually feel fear. Roar of Alliance refutes these mythologized ideas of heroism idea on multiple fronts. The very nature of combat in my game requires players to rely on one another at all times (no person can operate a tank single-handedly). The player characters also begin the game by admitting fear: one of the first tasks of the first session is to identify a fear your character has about the fighting to come.

During the game, player characters will take Stress (the game’s unified resource representing both physical toughness and mental resilience). Characters who max out their Stress during an engagement play out a Last Stand for significant effect, then leave the Crew (the player decides whether they have died or simply become unable for whatever reason to continue on as a tank crew member). While the characters have a limited set of resources called Motivations that the players can expend to avoid stress, the only way to actually recover Stress relies on spending time with the other characters between battles. Only by working together, by comforting one another, and by acknowledging their own dependence on others can characters reduce their Stress and gain new Motivations to help them engage in future battles.

An illustration of two soldiers are crowded by a campfire with a pot cooking food, and one soldier has placed their hand on the shoulder of the other.
by John W. Sheldon.

Every archetype has scene prompts that show them needing help, and the whole game requires players to rely extensively on one another. Even the player’s Crew is supported by a company of non-Crew characters that players will occasionally be called on to portray between battles. No lone strong hero, or even small group of heroes, can accomplish the monumental task the players are facing.

Humanizing the Enemy

Fascism dehumanizes its enemies, making it easier for its adherents to attack, belittle, and eventually exterminate those that oppose it. You can see this in language comparing enemies to animals, assigning them undesirable traits as a group, in racist and anti-Semitic propaganda images that exaggerate enemy features to cartoonish extremes, or even in recent online language where some members of right-leaning web forums call people who oppose them “NPCs” – implying that there is no real individual personhood in those that disagree with their fascist ideology.

In my quest to make the game as hostile as possible to fascist ideologies, I must design the game to humanize the enemies that players face. Everyone should be reminded that the Nazis and members of the Wehrmacht were not inhuman monsters – they were regular people who became willing to commit evil acts because of an abhorrent philosophy. Reminding players of this is important because dehumanizing even Nazis creates an easy defense for modern fascists and authoritarians to mount, in the form of a “but I do these good things over here, I’m not a complete monster” defense. Reminding people that Nazis were regular people, even while they did terrible things, reminds us that we must examine ourselves for the kinds of behavior they exhibited.

Next Steps

Is there more my game can do? Almost certainly. In fact, I’m extremely open to suggestions for additional ways to improve. You can get in touch with me on Twitter, Pluspora, or Mastodon if you want to give me some feedback.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in ways to make your own game hostile to fascist ideologies, check out these two essays that helped inform my own process.

*Despite everything pop culture tells us, torture does not work. It is immoral and wrong in every circumstance, and this would still be true even if it worked – which it categorically does not.

A photo of two rulebooks for Roar of Alliance, illustrated with tanks in orange-red and black.

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Five or So Questions on Beneath a Cursed Moon

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Michael “Karrius” Mazur about Beneath a Cursed Moon, a roleplaying game currently available on itch.io and DriveThruRPG. It sounds pretty cool, a game with investigation and monsters! I hope you enjoy what Michael’s got to say below!
 

Continue reading “Five or So Questions on Beneath a Cursed Moon”

Five or So Questions on METAL WORLD

Hi all, today I have an interview with Nick Zachariasen on METAL WORLD! It’s currently on DriveThru! I normally don’t include game pitches here, but the METAL WORLD pitch is so rad, I had to!

METAL WORLD takes the breadth of the heavy metal genre and throws it all into one game world. It doesn’t care how much sense something makes as long as it’s awesome. It has a demon-possessed lawman who rides a rocket-powered robot horse and carries a pair of 666-shooters. It has an undead ship made of the bones, sinews, and skin of the sailors it kills. Hell is a continent you can get guided tours of from the MegaDevil himself. The cherry on top? It has a volcano made of dragons, which shoots lava and more dragons when it erupts. The game system— including character building— are as loose as possible to allow your group to play the way you want.

With that in mind, check out Nick’s responses below!

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A very large muscular figure with antlers, dragon's feet, and a tail in thigh armor is holding a large bladed weapon while kneeling next to a smaller individual with colors in their hair and horns, breast ornaments, and a deer-skull headed spear, all surrounded by rocky landscape and colorful sky.
Boris Vallejo’s Kalevanpojat.

Tell me a little about METAL WORLD. What excites you about it?

The germ for the idea that became METAL WORLD came about when I looked at the Boris Vallejo painting Kalevanpojat (above). There’s this giant half-man/half-dragon thing posing like he’s trying to impress this only nominally-dressed woman who could not possibly be interested any less. She has an expression as if to say “Yeah, buddy, just get down the mountain, already. Three of whatever you are have passed through in the last half hour. They’re probably at the tavern.” I imagined what kind of world that must be for such a fantastic sight to leave her completely unfazed. Fast forward to after the premiere of Metalocalypse and I finally come up with the vague idea of a world of heavy metal in all its breadth. Of course, a couple weeks later I learn about Brütal Legend, which was sort of what I’d conceived spiritually but for the most part not even close aesthetically, although I did draw some inspiration from it all the same.

METAL WORLD, then, takes every kind of metal— whether basic, “classic” metal like Black Sabbath and Judas Priest or just about any subgenre you can think of like doom, black, pirate, or whatever— and throws it all into a blender so that you can have situations like a barbarian riding a nightmare steed charge a tank crewed by cyborgs and actually have a chance at winning! It’s everything Ronnie James Dio ever sang about. It’s anything you might see in a Dethklok video. It’s everything power metal sings about, with valiant heroes, fire, dragons, The Gods™, and all that. In short, METAL WORLD tries to bring everything awesome into one place without regard to piddly details like “Wait a minute, how does a region with this ecology sustain a tribe of human-hunting giants? They’d strip the population bare in months and then have no food source!”

 METAL WORLD ignores pesky things like so-called “continuity” or “travel time” unless it’s important for the overall story you’re telling with your group, and I think that’s what excites me most about METAL WORLD. I’m not aware of anything quite like it, where any play style your group could want is not just possible but encouraged so long as everyone’s on board, and the game actually mechanically encourages it with a rule set that’s just vague enough to be accommodating but specific enough to be playable while also having fun with its readers to keep from taking itself too seriously.

What are the mechanics of METAL WORLD like and how do they relate to the theme?

The mechanics try to be simple and stripped-down. You have five main stats, each named for a subgenre of heavy metal: Death (your health), Power (strength and “persuasion”), Prog (intelligence, perceptiveness, and actual persuasion), Speed (agility, reflexes, and overall coordination), and Thrash (combat ability). I kept it that simple because A) it keeps creation easy and B) on the eventual character sheet I can put each one at the point of a pentagram.

The design philosophy is that instead of worrying about how far you can move in a round, exactly how long a round is, and that sort of thing you see some other games get bogged down with, METAL WORLD tries to focus in the in-game exploits of the characters and what they bring about in the world around them. It didn’t grow out of a wargame and god-of-your-choice help me if it grows into one. METAL WORLD’s main concern is giving people a setting that facilitates telling an interactive story with evocative imagery. That’s one reason I don’t have classes; they pigeon-hole characters into a predefined type without allowing for a player’s creativity to show through.

You can have a band (METAL WORLD’s term for an adventuring party) containing traditional sword-and-sorcery fantasy characters like elves, humans, dwarves, and so forth alongside robots, cyborgs, Atlanteans, and METAL WORLD’s gnomes, which are a race of mad geneticists called ge-nomes— essentially, they’re a race of Bioshock-style Splicers. The environment contains everything from fantasy’s quasi-medieval environment to near-ish future tech and references galore to metal, its inspirations, and occasional random other things. You need complete freedom to be able to have that kind of spread in characters and environment, so METAL WORLD focuses a lot on group consensus as to the tone of the game, which means the Metal Lord (the GM) has very wide latitude of what to allow or to rein in if it proves unbalancing.

Another important thing I think bears mentioning about that latitude is that the guiding metric of METAL WORLD is “as ______ as it needs to be.” Because everything worries more about the story than thinking about ensuring you have enough provisions for the trip or how much you can carry, let’s say an invading army approaches. Your story is about the epic battle that ensues like the battle of Helm’s Deep, so the band and NPCs have plenty of time to prepare defenses and have a grand old siege ahead of them. Now say you have a story in mind where the focus is more on evacuating those who can’t fight and making a stand to buy time. That same army leaving from the same place will take less time to get to the same destination. In METAL WORLD, space actually dilates or contracts depending on the needs of the narrative, though no character is ever aware of this— it’s just a cognitive blind spot created by reality itself. Similarly, a character can carry as much as (s)he reasonably could.

Then you also have Metal points, which reflect the favor of The Gods™ like Fate Points in d6 Star Wars or bennies in Savage Worlds. They serve two purposes. First, they fuel magic use for those who know how to do that that as well as other effects, like maybe the powers of a magical item. More generally, though, they serve to allow characters to (usually) unconsciously generate special game effects depending on what they want to accomplish. You get them by doing particularly impressive things or just because the Metal Lord feels like it.

A cover for METAL WORLD: The Rough Cut with a note that all art is conceptual/placeholder. The cover is black with an orange volcano design and metallic silver text.

What kind of player characters exist in the game, and what are they like?

As I said before, you can make pretty much anything you can think of within reason and even perhaps a bit beyond. Your band can have an axe-wielding barbarian who rides a nightmare steed, a mad scientist who raises and otherwise experiments on the dead, a lizard man martial artist, a shroom-addled shaman who drives a wicked van with amazing scenery painted on its side, and a dwarf who’s replaced both of his hands with chainsaws. Mind you, all of these are among the sample characters I’ve created— the dwarf is named Angus Mac Chainsaw Hands. You truly are bounded only by your imagination and what the Metal Lord will allow. I haven’t statted minotaurs for use as PCs, for example, but if you want to play one, work with your group’s Metal Lord and figure out how to run one so it’s balanced with the rest of your group’s characters. Maybe you want to play something I haven’t even provided for yet at all. Make it up and work it out! Again, I want people to be able to create the most awesome things they can imagine so everyone can have fun with it.

How do you handle topics like violence, sexual content, and so on in a game themed so wildly and intensely?

bviously, violence is going to be present given that heavy metal isn’t exactly known for diplomacy over tea and crumpets. I mean, Hell is a continent you can physically go to and get a guided tour of, possibly by the MegaDevil himself. As far as sexual content, I do make a note about that in the introduction when I mention the traditional scantily-clad women you’d see in the artwork of Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo & Julie Bell, and other fantasy staples who inspired much of METAL WORLD’s aesthetic. I tell people to play it up to their group’s taste. This game tries to encompass the breadth of metal in its entirety. Some of that will involve mature-audience content and if you end up playing those kind of things up to the point where they become ridiculous, that’s totally fine if you’re enjoying yourselves.

As you say, METAL WORLD is indeed wild and intense and I feel the form that takes should be subjective, determined by what you want out of it. It’s like how if you’re listening to metal and you want something dark and brooding you listen to doom metal while if you want something that fills you with a sort of positive energy, you’d listen to power metal. It’s clay in your hands. If you want to make that clay look like something you might not want your parents to see, what’s important is that it’s what you want, not what somebody else wants. When you get right down to it, that’s one of the classic themes of metal as a genre.

What is one of your favorite moments from playtesting or designing METAL WORLD so far, and why?

I honestly haven’t gotten to playtest METAL WORLD nearly as much as I’d like. I mean, having to work a full-time job will necessarily do that, especially when you have a family. That’s why I hope people run through some sessions on their own (via downloading METAL WORLD: The Rough Cut) and give me feedback so I know what makes sense to people who don’t already know what it’s supposed to mean.

That said, I guess I have a few— deviating from your question just a bit— favorite design moments. The first is when I was writing about skills. I mentioned meteorology and added a footnote (the work as a whole is peppered with them throughout as asides, whether for comedy or to clarify without disrupting flow) that the Meteorology skill also teaches you about space because that’s where meteors are. This game is at least 20% puns and that’s probably my worst/best. The one with the best result as far as the overall work is how I added a chapter between the world (the fourth) and the creatures (then the fifth) so that I could have Chapter 666: The Number of the Bestiary. That chapter lists some adventure hooks and an example of play, which I think it really needed. I think the ge-nomes are one of my most clever ideas, having come to me as one of those thoughts that pops into your head about 15 seconds or so after your head hits your pillow at night.

That said, though, I am aware of a moment from a friend of mine running a playtest session. Someone commented that METAL WORLD “reads like it was written by a madman with a law degree.” I don’t know what this person’s clue was, but apparently it caused “tear-inducing laughter” when my friend informed this person that it reads that way because it was written by a madman with a law degree!

The words METAL WORLD in metallic gradient silver text.
The METAL WORLD logo concept rough.

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Thanks so much to Nick for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out METAL WORLD on DriveThruRPG pay-what-you-want!

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Five or So Questions on Improv for Gamers

Hey all, I have an interview today with Karen Twelves about Improv for Gamers, a new book being released through Evil Hat that includes workshops and exercises to help any roleplayer or GM become better at improv! These workshops, like the one offered at Big Bad Con this October, promote fun, low-pressure environments to try out new skills for GMs, larpers, roleplayers, and more! Check out Karen’s answers to my questions below!

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Tell me a little about Improv for Gamers. What excites you about it?

I’ve always been excited about giving people a practice space to try out this improv stuff they’ve been hearing so much about. I’ve been playing tabletop rpgs since high school, and when I took my first improv class back in 2008, I was stunned by the obvious skill overlap. And also surprised that there weren’t more improv classes for roleplayers, especially being taught outside of conventions. It’s been super fun and rewarding to teach the Improv for Gamers workshops and give people some ideas and tools they can take back to their games. But what I’m most excited about right now is coming out with this book, because it gives people a bunch of exercises they can just pick up and play with friends in their living room.

What are a few of the skills you’ve picked up in improv and cover in the book that serve you the most often in gaming?

In both improv and gaming, you need to pay attention to what your fellow players are contributing to the story. If you’re not listening to how the story is shaping around you, you’re going to have a hard time navigating through it–to mix metaphors, all your subsequent ideas will be off-key. Active listening is required in order to say “Yes, and” to your partner, which is the act of honoring someone’s ideas and building on them. (There’s more to unpack with “Yes, and” about it not being a blank check, and nobody is actually beholden to accept every offer, so I prefer phrasing it as “Consider yes, and.”) But to build off an idea, you need to have actually heard it first. This is just as important in a game that weaves a narrative between characters as it is in a fight sequence where you’d want to keep tabs on what everyone is doing on their turn. So the book has a lot of great exercises that specifically practice paying attention to and acknowledging your partner. You might copy someone’s movements, repeat what they said, add a line to a shared story, create a cast of characters, or communicate through eye contact. But at the heart of all collaborative storytelling, you need to be listening.

A skill that I really love is handling invisible objects. You may have imaginary items in a larp, and you can also embody your character a bit at the table. Maybe you just mime your character polishing their glasses, or drinking a coffee. It’s a lot of fun. The book contains exercises that practice holding and using invisible objects, and it’s something that I still practice a lot in my improv troupes. It definitely came in handy during a larp where my healer character was asked to remove an invisible spear from someone’s leg and patch up the wound, and we had zero props.

How do you make this content approachable for new people and people not into the gaming scenes that favor improv?

When I teach the workshops I always stress that I’m not expecting anybody to be actors. It’s a practice space, so things might feel weird or be a little rough and that’s okay. Nobody’s going to walk out thinking “Cool, I’m perfect at this now!” And I repeat that a lot in the book–that the focus isn’t to be perfect, or funny, or entertaining, but to just try stretching this one specific muscle that the exercise is highlighting. There’s only a few exercises that are actually “scenes,” the majority are group games, so there’s less pressure to perform. There’s also some things that speak to GMs, like identifying when to switch from one scene to another, or how to quickly come up with some specific voices so your NPCs sound different. And that thread of “listen to each other and make people feel included” runs throughout all of it, which is a life skill, not an improv skill. But you can practice it through some fun improv exercises!

The improv for gamers cover with a traditional actor's mask and dice on the cover.
What are some practices and behaviors in games that you think could be improved using improv, and how do you address them in your workshops and book?

There are games where it makes sense to be protective of your character, and there are games when you could be more reckless with them. I definitely wanted my Pathfinder fighter to make it into double-digit levels! But my Blades in the Dark whisper? That game grinds characters down by design. They’re supposed to get hurt, physically and emotionally. Character death is definitely on the table. And if I’m in a one-shot game, I’ve only got this one story with this character, so I’m definitely going to take more narrative risks because I’ve got nothing to lose. There are so many improv exercises where you’re encouraged to get your character into trouble, or play someone without a lot of power or status. I’m not saying that the best way to play is to play to lose, but it’s a style that works well with a lot of games. And if it’s a style that’s kind of new to someone, I want to give them the opportunity to get into that mindset, take some risks, and have a lot of fun doing it.



What are some ways improv skills help with different roles in game, like GMs and players, and different types of play, like larping and tabletop?

Like I mentioned earlier, GMs have the daunting task of making sure everyone has an equitable amount of time in the spotlight, so you want to have a good sense of when you can put a pin in one scene and switch over to another. Improvisors develop a similar sense of knowing when to cut a scene so it ends on the right note. And during a show, that’s a shared responsibility–much like in a GM-less game, everyone should be conscious of when it’s time to see what a different character is up to.

I would say that any skills regarding character development are useful both at the table and in larping. There are so many tabletop games that have a line right on the character sheet for a defining belief or worldview, and you may even get a mechanical reward for expressing that belief in play. Similarly, regardless of what style of improv you’re doing (fast-paced comedy, thoughtful drama, or something in-between), it’s important to identify what matters to your character. That’s going to color their decisions in a scene. It doesn’t have to be something grand like “Blame the carpenter, not the tools,” your defining value could be “I love trains!” and that’s still going to lead to some really cool interactions. And whenever you’re feeling lost and not sure what your character would do, be it improv or gaming, you can fall back on that touchstone for guidance.

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Awesome, thanks so much, Karen, for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Improv for Gamers today!

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Five or So Questions on Scherzando!

Today I have an interview with Elizabeth and Amber Autumn on Scherzando! (skert. ‘san.do), which is currently on Kickstarter. In this fascinating game you play both the characters…and the soundtrack! Check out Elizabeth & Amber’s responses below for more.

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A diverse group of people around a table with instruments, paper, and tokens.

Tell me a little about Scherzando! What excites you about it?

Scherzando! is a diceless, gm-less story game in which you play characters with big dreams and strong feelings, plus the soundtrack of their world. It’s often been described as “Fiasco, but with music,” but we like to think that Scherzando! is less about grand ambitions causing tragedy and more about grand emotions bringing people together.

It’s exciting for all the obvious reasons—creating a game with a soundtrack as you go is really cool! It’s fun and dynamic, and people laugh a lot. But we’re equally excited about the less obvious features of the game. We love that the game lets players have a physical, embodied experience; that it’s an experience built around collaboration and communication; and, most of all, that it creates a space where players can feel comfortable creating music regardless of their previous musical experience. In response to our game concept, we get “but I don’t know anything about music” all the time, so it was a real goal of ours to create something that helped people feel that they didn’t need to know everything in order to make something or communicate something, and to create a safe space in the game for that to happen. Every time a player picks up an instrument and starts feeling out some sounds during the game, it feels like a victory for us, and every time they manage to successfully communicate an emotion with it, it feels like a victory for them. That’s a dynamic we’re exceptionally proud of.

We’re also excited about it because it’s our first game at this scale! It’s mind-blowing to have a book with all this art and all this support and to have this Kickstarter start off so well—it really does feel like being invited to sit at the grown-up table. But it feels good to know that our investments in time, effort, and money are paying off. The game has been in development for over a year and a half (or over two years depending on how you want to talk about it); no blood comes to mind, but there’ve certainly been sweat and tears, so finally getting to print it will be incredible.

What kind of music do people experience in the game? Where did you take inspiration from for the tunes?
Since players make their own music, there’s no specific style or genre that Scherzando! works best with. We encourage players to take inspiration from whatever they like in their own life, up to and including just copying pieces they like if they think it’ll get their point across. So what the music actually sounds like in a game depends on who’s playing, what kinds of music they spend most time with, and what kind of mood they’re in as they sit down to play.

One effect of this is that it turns music into a creative expression unique to the people sitting at your table. People bring in the music, styles, sounds, and methods of experimentation that make sense to them, that they would use outside the game, and that’s a way of bringing a part of their personality into the creative text in a direct, meaningful, and mechanically significant way. Having each player bring their own inspiration and style makes the session’s music a direct creative expression of who the players are.

Two femme-appearing people playing instruments on a porch surrounded by greenery.
How did you design the game, considering that it’s diceless and GMless AND uses music as a part of the game?
The game actually began neither diceless nor GMless—both of those got iterated out in the design process! The dice were adding needless complications, causing too much swing in the resolution mechanics, and making it significantly less accessible to anyone who didn’t already own a ton of dice. We dropped them at the recommendation of the incredible Avery Alder, who wrote Monsterhearts and Ribbon Drive (one of the only other music games on the market), and who was kind enough to give us some sage advice early on.

The GM role (which we called the “conductor,” because we thought it was cute) would rotate around the table to maintain the sense of a democratic story where everyone contributed, but we found pretty quickly that the conductor didn’t have much to do. The scene setup generally implied itself, and players turned out to be quite good at arbitrating how the NPCs and the universe would react to their actions in the most interesting way. Plus, the game includes an interjection mechanic which allows players to temporarily gain narration powers for either a bonus (if they’re adding a complication) or a penalty (if they’re adding a boon) at the end of the scene. The ability and incentive to add elements to a scene made the conductor role almost entirely obsolete.

Development began in its very early phases maybe two years ago, with a lot of research on historical music games and current music education techniques. We spent a lot of time working through the logistics of who was on the team for the project and who would be doing what, and trying to lay out a plan. Once we knew who was working on it, how we would do it, and that what we wanted to do hadn’t been done before, the next step was more research. We read books, played games, emailed musicians and educators, and eventually started throwing around ideas for how a system would work. We wrote up a list of core values that we wanted our game to embody, some of which have changed and shifted over the course of development, but some of which are still core to the game today! Then we designed a game around those values.

That game was completely broken and did not work at all.

The bulk of the process at that point was holding playtests, dozens of playtests, at cons and game stores and especially with our friends, with a different group of people every time. We took notes, and at the end of each test we discussed which items functioned and which needed to be changed or dropped, and adjusted the rulebook accordingly. Eventually we ended up with a system we felt good about, give or take minor details, and somewhere approaching that point we started doing the logistical work of commissioning art, reaching out to podcasts, and all the other publishing prep work necessary for a Kickstarter. From there, the actual changes to the game itself have mostly been tweaking numbers, revising stock setting choices, and other minor changes, most of which still require playtests to happen.

A person in armor playing drums and a person playing a keytar in a whirlwind.
This piece of art is mindblowing!
What resources do players need to participate in Sherzando, and what kind of skills are useful?
We like to bring a lot of small, cheap instruments to playtests, but they’re not a requirement—the game works just as well when players hum and tap on the table. The only physical items players need, besides the rules, are a) notecards and something to write with; b) six differently-colored/otherwise distinguishable tokens per player; and c) an opaque container per player that is capable of hiding the tokens within it. As far as skillsets are concerned, we maintain that musical experience really isn’t necessary (although it is fun to play with a group of musicians!); we find that the game runs most smoothly when players aren’t self-conscious about their musical or roleplaying “talent.” Earnestness and willingness to engage with a ridiculous story are probably the most important tools in the game.
Two people in period dress with white curly wig with music sheets scattered around them while they argue.
How do you hope players experience the game and what do you want people to take forward? What have you already seen taken forward in playtests?
One of the most exciting pieces of feedback we’ve ever received was really recently, when someone who had listened to our actual play on One Shot tweeted at us to say that she could see the players gradually learning to express themselves through music over the course of the game.

In addition to the “yes, you too can make music” lesson we’ve been harping on this whole time, we also hope players experience the game as an exciting way of adding meaning and tone to their stories in a way you can’t find anywhere else. There are all these connections between narrative and emotions and semiotics that we wanted to explore and link together, and we think being able to play through those links in a really direct way is new and refreshing and cool. We also hope players have fun! Not every game needs to be fun, but Scherzando! is, and we love seeing people get really animated during gameplay.

There are plenty of things we’ve seen people take forward from this: confidence, communication skills, and even sometimes a better understanding of a musical instrument. But we also hope that people take home a really good memory about a fun story they told with their friends, not only in words but in music.

the Scherzando logo
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Thank you so much to Elizabeth and Amber for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Scherzando! on Kickstarter today!

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Five or So Questions on Return to the Stars

Today I have an interview with Mark Sabalauskas on Return to the Stars, which is currently on Kickstarter! I’m contributing a solarpunk scenario for the game, but I’m really interviewing Mark because it’s a hopepunk game in a world that could really use some hope. So check it out, and see what Mark had to say below!

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A group of people in varying styles and costumes, all of different genders, sizes, and races.

Tell me a little about Return to the Stars. What excites you about it?

Return to the Stars is an optimistic science fiction role playing game, powered by Fate.

I am excited to share a game with people where they can imagine having cool adventures in better future.

The direct inspiration was the sense of community that came from being surrounded by diverse, smart, and curious people at a Sci-Fi convention I attended. Hanging out with enthusiastic pop culture geeks was a real respite from much of the darkness in world. It occurred to me that the original Star Trek may have resonated because it provided a similar respite in the 60s, a very turbulent time.

So I created a game that combines the best parts of gamer and geek culture with science fiction exploration. Imagine if Chiana from Farscape was a genetically enhanced cosplayer, or Scotty was someone who loved hacking things to take to a Maker Faire.

The basic premise is that in a post-scarcity future hyperspace travel gave easy access to countless worlds, and humanity sorted itself into like-minded communities. One such society was the Convention Authority, founded to celebrate the now classical arts of science fiction, fantasy, and gaming.

One day, without warning, the stellar beacon that illuminated hyperspace went silent rendering galactic travel impossible. The systems of the Convention Authority stayed connected thanks to a replica fleet of early starships. Now, after more than a century of effort, a long-range exploration craft has been built. Its purpose: to return to the stars and reconnect the lost civilizations of humanity.

You play as one of a new generation of geeks — makers, genetically enhanced cosplayers, scientists, and pop culture enthusiasts setting out on an adventure of exploration and discovery.

What are some of the challenges of making a hopepunk type game, and how have you approached them?

Hopepunk is a subgenre centered around the idea that in the face of oppression and cynicism caring about things is an act of resistance. It is about being kind and also fighting against injustice.

One challenge was to balance hopepunk with other themes in the game. I addressed this by having a setting where long isolated civilizations are reconnecting. Around the table, this means the world being rediscovered “this week” can tell a unique story, giving you a chance to dive deeply into its themes.

Also, player characters come from a fairly utopian society. They could simply chose to stay in their post-scarcity paradise, complacent, sitting around a pool discussing seven centuries of anime and arguing if the 78th edition of D&D was the best, while robots serve them pina coladas. During character creation you have to create an aspect that explains why your character wants to leave this privilege behind. Why they are willing to put their comfort aside and risk their lives to explore and help the rest of humanity.

To encompass the full scope of hopepunk, Return‘s skill system had to players plenty of non-combat options–play can revolve around making and learning and sharing what you’ve learned, not just combat. Also, the mechanics for competitions and down-time tinkering give players ways to show off the the things their characters care about.

A dark skinned person in futuristic clothing demonstrating something on a floating touch screen to a pale-skinned person in different futuristic clothing with a metal arm.

Tell me a little more about the world. What kind of people are there? What sort of technology do they have access to?


Return to the Stars is set in the early 27th century, 600 years from now. During that time humanity spread through the Galaxy thanks to origami drives that fold hyperspace. 125 years ago, Stellar Beacon that illuminated hyperspace suddenly went silent, rendering galactic travel impossible. Now a limited form of interstellar travel has been discovered. Communication is limited to the speed of space travel, so players need to act on their own initiative, they can’t phone home for instructions.

You’ll travel from world to world, encountering a diverse array of human societies. There are no intelligent aliens in the setting, and digital life can’t travel through hyperspace. Stories exist to help people understand humanity, these choices are very intentional. Of course, you still have the option spinning a tale about a runaway AI on a particular planet.

Probably the most unique tech in the game is cosplay, which in the 27th century is the aptitude for self-presentation using costuming, genetic modification, posture, and movement. Because cosplay involves granular genetic control of your body it is a skill you can use to recover from physical consequences.

A pale skinned person and a dark skinned person are in a tech-heavy environment with glowing lights and other figures standing nearby. There is a glowing globe with hovering text "LOCATION SECTOR 68" and locations and pathways lit up on the globe's surface.

What’s the mechanical system like in Return to the Stars? How do players interact with the world?


Return to the Stars is powered by Fate, which is a proven indie game system that has been popular over the past decade. It is great for telling stories that are centered on who your character is and what they care about as opposed to what stuff they carry.
You characters have skills and stunts that let them bend the rules. But the heart of the system are aspects, short phrases that describe who your character is. You start a session with 3 Fate points, when you need a boost, and it makes sense, you can spend a Fate point to get a skill check bonus. On the other hand, if you chose, your aspects can complicate you life, earning a Fate point, so you can be awesome later. So if your character is a very curious science officer, they might tempted to wander off to investigate a strange screech, earning a Fate point, or they might spend a Fate point to be awesomely effective at solving a scientific mystery. In this way the game emulates the up and down beats of a story.

Return to the Stars comes with an adventure specially designed to teach the core concepts of the game. In playtests at many different conventions, new players have been up and running and having a good time after ten minutes of explanation.

My goal: if you love anime or games or science fiction or cosplay, and have thought about trying roleplaying games, you can get Return to the Stars, read it, and play.

If you already love games powered by Fate, I’ve added fun new subsystems: character arcs, props, downtime tinkering, and competitions. You can learn more about them on the Kickstarter. And, of course, there is a dedicated set of sci-fi skills and over 100 new stunts to mix things up!

At the center of it, what kind of stories do players tell in the game, and what do you wish to see the most?

Return to the Stars is designed to help players tell stories of sci-fi exploration and adventure. I hope players players take advantage of a game that can be as much about making, learning, and communicating as it is about punching space fascists. 
Ultimately, of course, the great thing about a tabletop role playing game is that people can bring their own interest and passions into the game, adding theme to the themes in the game: optimism, space opera, pop culture, and hopepunk.

Two people inside a spaceship flying through an asteroid belt

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Thank you so much to Mark for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading Mark’s responses and that you’ll check out Return to the Stars on Kickstarter today!



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approachable theory: Post-Consent Safety Paradigm

The approachable theory logo, with the text "approachable theory" and an image of two six-sided dice with one pip showing, with a curved line below it to make a smile. The dice are black with cyan for the pip and yellow with black for the pip.

Hi all! Today I have a post from J Dymphna Coy on the subject of post-consent safety paradigm. For some advance clarity, consent is basically whether or not we grant permission for people to do a given thing. And if you click here, you can find some references for the safety tools mentioned. Otherwise, I think you should be able to follow the article pretty well! 

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A few months ago, I attended a session at RightsCon about Sidewalks Toronto. Sidewalks Toronto is a project by Alphabet (i.e., Google) to build an entirely new neighborhood in the city of Toronto from the ground up. They want to create a so-called “Smart City,” which uses various electronic surveillance tools in order to allocate resources more efficiently.

Naturally, the attendees of a digital rights conference cast a somewhat skeptical eye at this development. But one of the things I kept hearing about was “informed consent.” The most common question was some version of the following: “How can we make sure that people have informed consent about what kind of data is being collected about them?”

Mark Surman of the Mozilla Foundation brought up an interesting point: the business model of Google (and virtually every other Silicon Valley company) is to collect as much data as possible and then decide what to do with it all later. How can we even have informed consent, he said, when even Google doesn’t know what we’re consenting to?

Ultimately, my conclusion from the session was this: consent is ultimately meaningless in the context of the information economy. We cannot place the burden upon the populace as individuals to protect itself from Big Data; we must collectively assert our rights as a society and place the duty upon megacorporations to not exploit us.

a graphic representation of an index card with an X on it
That’s all well and good, you might say, but what does it have to do with gaming?
The inimitable Jess Hammer once mentioned that the X-Card has been dubbed a safety tool when it should more properly be considered a consent tool. The observation stuck with me, and I’ve been tooling it around in my head ever since.

So what is the difference between consent and safety?

Consent* happens before a game begins, or during a game. It involves mechanisms for determining the content of a game, or whether the game will continue at all. The X-Card, cut-and-brake**, and lines and veils are all good examples of consent tools.

Safety happens during or after a game. It involves mechanisms for directly attending to the emotional well-being of the players. A well-done debrief is a safety technique. De-roling is a safety technique. Anything that requires that players provide care (rather than merely asking if care is necessary) is a safety technique.

This is not to say that consent tools are bad, or should not be used. Quite the opposite is true! But they should be regarded for what they are, and used in a way that complements safety tools.

So why should I bring up Google’s data collection practices in this context? Surely a put-upon LARP organizer who already has to deal with the utterly thankless task of running a game does not have anything in common with Silicon Valley megacorporations. After all, the power relations are completely different. We can negotiate consent with another player of a game in a way that we can’t with a company like Apple. I can walk up to my fellow player and say, “Hey Fred, please don’t include bananas in this game, I have terrible fructiphobia!” By contrast, the notion that would could just write a letter that read, “Dear Apple, Please remove line 52 of this iTunes agreement because I don’t like it!” and expect results from it is absurd.

I bring up the comparison because much like Sidewalk Labs, your fellow players of a game have no idea what’s going to happen, and therefore any consent-based paradigm has limited utility at best. I bring it up because I want to emphasize the importance of safety and care, and to make sure that we’re not glossing over these things as designers and communities.

I’m not a big fan of making up categories of things for its own sake, or of having self-important internet arguments, or crushing my community with the tyranny of small differences. But I’ve heard the common complaint for years that safety mechanics don’t quite do what they’re advertised, and I hope that making the distinction between consent and safety might make something clearer in at least one person’s head, and maybe even make games a little better for the people who play them.

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*It is perhaps worth noting that consent originated as a legal term. It’s designed to protect various parties from indemnity or liability. While legal protections are important, focusing on what technically legal is not necessarily the best way to give guidance on how to navigate ways to avoid hurting or exploiting the people around you.

**The OK check-in straddles the line between what I’m deeming as “safety” versus “consent.” It resembles safety insofar as it places the onus on the entire community to ensure that that all of the participants are OK, rather than on other mechanics that place the onus on the affected person to tell the other persons in the scene to stop. I’m calling it “consent” here because it primarily involves whether or not care is necessary, as opposed to actually providing said care for the most part. But like all categories, the point is not to get into nitty-gritty arguments about where the boundaries are, unless you find that sort of thing really exciting (I find it tedious).

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Thank you so much to Dymphna for the excellent article! I hope you’ve all learned something a little new today. 🙂

P.S. If you’d like to write an article for approachable theory, email Brie at contactbriecs@gmail.com with a one paragraph pitch, your name, and your pronouns.

Thoughty is 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.

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Five or So Questions on Amazing Tales

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Martin Lloyd on Amazing Tales, a roleplaying game that’s maybe a little more approachable for the kiddos of my readers than my normal fare! Feel free to check out some of the actual plays that exist for the game and the website, and check out Martin’s responses below!

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A black femme person using a keyboard and high tech tools and interfaces

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

Amazing Tales is a role-playing game for kids aged four and up. I wrote it to play with my daughter five years ago when she was four, and introduced my son to it at about the same age. We had so much fun playing it that I wanted to get it out there so other people could do the same. My first thoughts were to do it as a simple PDF download in the style of Lady Blackbird or Lasers and Feelings. But I was lucky enough to get a sabbatical from my job, and I decided to use that time to turn it into a full fledged book. I had a huge slice of luck when Iris Maertens agreed to do the artwork, that let me create the book I always wanted to make, packed with illustrations so kids can get inspired by it, and feel like it’s a book for them, even if they can’t read it.

Now 8 months have passed since release and I’m loving watching what happens as the game gets out into the real world. It is a huge kick to see people sharing pictures of themselves playing their first role-playing game with their kids, or pictures of their child’s first character sheet. One of my thoughts when I was writing the game is that as soon as role-players have kids they want to play role-playing games with them, but anticipate a wait of maybe ten years before they can. Amazing Tales gets that waiting period down to about four years, and that seems to be making a lot of parents very happy.

I am also delighted that Studio 2 have picked Amazing Tales up for distribution and an offset print run is happening. Amazing Tales is going to be in shops! For something that started out as a way to fill a rainy day it’s come a very long way.

a fantastical scene with mushrooms, a squirrel, a fairy, and a tower in the background, all very curvy and colorful
What are the mechanics like for conflict resolution in Amazing Tales? How did you make them approachable for kids?

I chose conflict resolution rather than task resolution for Amazing Tales, so unless you deliberately want to stretch stuff out to make it dramatic or climactic everything is handled by one roll, be it flying a spaceship, making friends with a talking monkey or exchanging cannon fire with a rival pirate ship. Characters in Amazing Tales are defined by four skills, and each skill has an associated dice. Either a D6, D8, D10 or D12. To use a skill you roll the relevant dice against a target number of three. The target number never varies. The only thing that changes is the size of the dice used.

Tests have two possible results, if you succeed, you succeed. If you fail, things get worse, but they don’t end. So the monster might catch you, but it won’t eat you. The GM – typically the parent – never rolls dice, which means they’re never playing ‘against’ their child.

I picked three as a target number because kids like succeeding, and I picked conflict rather than task resolution because it keeps the story moving. Watch how much stuff happens in the first two minutes of a kids’ cartoon show, that’s the attention span kids have. And that’s the kind of storytelling pace Amazing Tales aspires to. Tell some story, pose a challenge, choose an action, roll the dice, resolve and repeat.

What I’ve just described is a very very simple system and that simplicity is the key to making a game approachable for kids. I firmly believe that anyone’s enjoyment of a game increases when they know what they’re doing. We’ve all played games where we didn’t know the rules, someone told us to roll some dice, modified the result for reasons we couldn’t follow and then told us what happened. That sucks when you’re an adult, and it definitely sucks when you’re four. So Amazing Tales can be boiled down to ‘roll the dice for the thing you’re trying to do, if the result is three or more you succeeded’. Four year olds can understand that, they can repeat it back to you, or explain it to their grandparents and their friends.

In the early days of playing Amazing Tales I tried things like modifying the target number; providing magic items that gave +1 bonuses; or requiring multiple successes for difficult tasks, but I quickly realised that it made no difference to how much fun the kids were having. Young kids don’t understand probability, so why bring in things like modifiers? The only reasons for having different dice sizes for different skills are that one; kids love rolling dice, two; they like dice with interesting shapes and three; role-player parents can’t wait to introduce their kids to polyhedrals. To adults it’s clear that changing the dice size changes the odds, but that’s not why they’re there.

I have been pleasantly surprised by how happy older kids have been with these very simple rules. In my mind Amazing Tales was a game for kids aged about four to eight. In practice it turns out to be a game for kids aged between 3 and a half and ten. Seeing how well Amazing Tales works has also convinced me that most games for adults are unnecessarily complex.

A pirate on a ship with another ship in a distance, with an octopus on their arm that is holding a bottle
How did you approach providing a fictional background for the game that is welcoming to a diverse audience of children?

First off, Amazing Tales is absolutely a game for everyone. Iris and I worked hard to make sure that whatever your kid’s background there should be someone in the artwork that your they can recognise as relating to them. I don’t know if we nailed that, but it matters to us and we’ll keep trying in future projects.

The other way to look at this question is to think about what kids want in a game beyond a confirmation that it’s for them. Young kids don’t have the same breadth of cultural references to draw on that grown ups do. So when I was thinking about the settings to include in the book I tried to pick things that small kids would be familiar with from a very young age. I ended up with four settings, the Deep Dark Wood (think talking animals and fairies), Magical Kingdoms Long Ago (think King Arthur), The Pirate Seas (pirates) and Adventures Beyond the Stars (space). I thought about doing super-heroes, but left it out because my kids knew the names of super heroes, but had no idea what kind of stories they might appear in. In retrospect I think that was a mistake, there are plenty of kids out there playing Amazing Tales as super-heroes.

The settings themselves are quite vague. They’re really collections of prompts and ideas to get parents and kids making up worlds together. It’s up to you whether the deep dark wood is full of monsters or full of friendly animals, but the setting gives you a jumping off point to get started. What’s important is that parent and child can start from a shared idea of a wood, fairies that are small, have wings and can do magic, and animals that can talk. The settings include suggested skills, suggested plots and lots of ideas for parents to work with and artwork to inspire the kids. From there it’s up to the parents to work with their child to create something that will work for both of them.

I also wanted to write a game where that made good on role-playing games’ key promise – that you can be anything and do anything. That’s one of the reasons there’s a picture of King Tyrannosneak in the book even though he doesn’t fit in any of the settings. He’s a character my son came up with when he was five. He’s a giant robot t-rex, with four arms, which he needs because he has two swords and two shields. He’s also a ninja. When you tell kids their characters can be anything they want they take you at your word, and Amazing Tales supports that.

A winged archer in a sparkling wood
How did you play-test the game to make sure kids could understand it? Were there any specific experiences you had that you learned from?
Making sure kids could understand it wasn’t the hard part. Kids seem to get the game very quickly indeed. The character generation section includes a quick script – a list of questions to ask your child to walk them through the process. By the end of that kids are usually completely into the game, and it only takes a few minutes.

I was more concerned about making the game easy for parents to understand. I’d love non-gamer parents to consider Amazing Tales as something for their kids, so I tried to get as much advice for first time gamers and first time GMs into the book as I could. It’s also why I shot some actual play videos, just so people can see how it’s done. Amazing Tales also suggests that you don’t do much (or any) preparation for a game, it works well if you just improvise as you go. That’s a challenge for parents who haven’t done any kind of improvisational story telling before, so again I tried to pack in the advice.

A few experiences from play-tests do stand out though. One was with a friend of my daughter, a lovely five year old girl who elected to play a princess. At the first sign of trouble she announced ‘I stab it in the face with my dagger’, which was both fair enough, and rather jarring. Kids, it turns out, come out with this kind of thing all the time. This led to my including a section in the book on non bloodthirsty ways of resolving combats. I’m not a fan of my kids describing graphic violence, so I try to keep lethal encounters to a minimum when I run games. There are plenty of other ways to have fights end, with enemies running away, surrendering, begging for mercy, bursting into tears and so on. Evil robots, animated shadows, skeletons, those kinds of things are also great for heroes to fight their way through without having to worry too much about the morality of the situation.

Another thing that stands out happened when I was testing out the space setting. I had vaguely assumed that kids who want to play aliens would want some kind of star-trek kind of alien, a humanoid, with weird coloured skin and one or two distinguishing features. But no. At least in the test games I ran kids who played aliens launched into a competition to be the weirdest, most out there alien they could be. Tentacles galore, mouths on their feet, dozens of eyes…

And one last thing I noticed across a lot of the play-tests was that kids often like to copy each other’s characters. They’ll want to be the same kind of hero, then they’ll pick the same skills, describe their characters in the same way and so on. It’s doesn’t create a problem the way having a party of three wizards would in D&D, it’s just what they like to do. 

A t-rex with two shields and two swords and armor in a desert wasteland
King Tyrannosneak!
I love King Tyrannosneak! As a designer, what are the important parts of those kind of imagined characters that you see across the age range – what do you see when people get to be creative with your game that you treasure knowing about? 
I love that kids get to live out their fantasies, and that they get to do it at an age before their fantasies have been neatly organised into recognisable tropes by mass media. I can see in my own kids that as they consume more media their characters start to reflect that. My son loved Reepicheep in the Narnia books, and suddenly he’s playing a Pirate Mouse. But before that starts to happen kids come up with the most incredible stuff, hang glider piloting gnomes with poisonous noses, pirates with laser eyes and pet tigers, that kind of thing. A few years back my kids came up with a pair of knights/super heroes called ‘Key-man’ and ‘Crasher Girl’. Key-man had a sword which fired keys at things, which was obviously a useful weapon but also instantly unlocked doors. Crasher Girl was just great at crashing through things, I think she had rocket boots too.

So I hope that one of the things kids will get out of playing Amazing Tales is the idea that they can create new stuff and colour outside the lines.

Not that there’s anything wrong with more derivative characters. I know of a little girl who’s out there fighting the Clone Wars with a character who’s skills are ‘being a queen’, ‘shooting blasters’, ‘knowing things’ and ‘piloting spaceships’. I loved hearing about her, because her idea of being a queen involves saving the galaxy with laser guns, brains and charisma, which sounds like a good thing to learn when you’re growing up.

The last thing, and perhaps the thing that makes me happiest is all the stories from people who’ve found playing games with their kids to be a fulfilling experience. Because Amazing Tales puts most of the cognitive load on the parent everyone playing is really engaged. Anyone who’s tried to spend lots of time with small children knows how tedious it can get. They can play snakes and ladders twenty times in a row, they don’t get bored of the same (very short) story book again and again, and they value your attention so highly that getting you to read that book again is the most important thing in their world. Amazing Tales is different because it makes the parents do some brain work, and then it becomes a real joint activity. I think kids can tell when their parents are really engaged, and I think parents find that rewarding too. So seeing all these parents find a new activity that they can do with their kids that they both genuinely enjoy – that’s been great.

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Awesome, thanks so much Martin for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Amazing Tales on DriveThru!
 

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Five or So Questions on Entromancy

Hi all, today I have an interview with M.S. Farzan about Entromancy: A Cyberpunk Fantasy RPG, which is currently on Kickstarter! I hope you’ll find something interesting in the responses below!

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An illustrated masculine appearing person with facial hair holding a gun

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

I am super excited about Entromancy because it represents the realization of a dream: participating in a shared cyberpunk fantasy world with other fans of d20 tabletop games. When I wrote the first novel in the Entromancy series a couple of years ago, I was inspired by my experience playing and GMing for tabletop RPGs, and it’s been an amazing process translating that enthusiasm from the novel back into a game that we can all play.
How did you translate the novel into a mechanical structure like a game without sacrificing the narrative or overcomplicating things?

Great question! Building the world for the novel was a four-year process of scribbling notes, creating characters, and revising systems, in much the same way that one would approach making a game. It was important to me to have, for example, a magic system that was not only internally consistent, but that would also be plausible within the framework of a roleplaying game. Creating the RPG from the novel hasn’t exactly been “easy,” but a lot of things have translated well into mechanics because of that early structural decision. The core concept of magic, for instance, still draws from the same resource, a renewable element called “ceridium,” as in the book, but we’ve had to reconfigure most of the iconic spells that appear in the book (while building out a ton more) so that they make sense in a balanced, TTRPG imagining of the world.
character archetypes from the game in sketched illustration with bright colors overlaid
I love the idea of the Terramancer. What are they like in play? How do they function?

The Terramancer is based on Alina Hadzic, one of the main characters of the novel series and an all-around all-star. She’s a former baseball relief pitcher with powerful earth magic to boot, and represents another area in which we’ve had to work to build mechanics that make sense for a game, rather than just a book.

Like all other character classes in Entromancy, the Terramancer has two archetypes to choose from, which are specific advancement paths for their talents or spells. When you play as a Terramancer, you can choose to be either an Arcane Pitcher or a Nature’s Harbinger, and can add spells from your chosen archetype to suit your play style. The Arcane Pitcher is formidable at range and has spells to empower its returning projectile weapon, the ceridium orb, while the Nature’s Harbinger can support the group with buff spells, healing, and the ability to summon beasts. Both archetypes benefit from a shared Terramancer feat list that allows you to further enhance your character’s abilities and combat prowess.

a character dressed in heavy gear, carrying and reading a gadget shaped like a handheld system
What’s magic like in the narrative, and how do you make it happen mechanically? Is either particularly explosive, or can it be sly?

In the 2020s, green researchers discovered the ability to synthesize ceridium, a renewable energy source that, over time, was found to also power burgeoning schools of magic. These schools are collectively known as “mancy,” and ceridium, while stable, has been proven to expose a genetic mutation among certain populations. This mutation – the “underrace gene” – results in phenotypic variation among carriers of the gene, giving rise to new races of people known colloquially as “underraces” or “aurics.”

It’s posited that ceridium is a synthesization of “blue orichalcum,” a once naturally-occurring element that was depleted by humankind centuries ago. The connection between ceridium and blue orichalcum is unproven, but would explain why most civilizations have a cultural memory of things like magic, spellcasting, and fantastic races and creatures.

In Entromancy, most spells are dependent upon the availability and use of ceridium, and range from the infiltration-focused shadowmancy of the NIGHT Agent to the utility-enhancing spells of the Technomancer.

a character dressed in a cowboy hat and longcoat
What does a d20 system bring to the table to make this specific setting and playstyle flourish?
We love 5th Edition, and find it to be a wonderful springboard for the type of game that we want to share with everyone. We’ve done a lot to streamline the game systems to place an emphasis on meaningful action and storytelling, while building out other systems to support a cyberpunk world that incorporates intrigue, espionage, hacking, and cybernetics. So anyone who’s familiar with 5th Edition or other d20 systems will be instantly familiar with how the core mechanic works, and will also notice the areas in which Entromancy is different, in terms of character creation and progression, spellcasting, equipment, and more.
There are a lot of great game systems out there, and in fact, the first few iterations of Entromancy were based on a proprietary game system that we were developing. Early in the game’s development, we decided instead to utilize 5th Edition as a framework as it felt a natural fit for the game that we wanted to make. Over time, Entromancy grew into the d20 core mechanic and, through development and playtesting, we have been able to identify more and more areas where we’ve been able to streamline, make adjustments, and create our own game that feels authentic to the original fiction.

the Entromancy logo of a neon colored outline of a structure an the text "Entromancy: A Cyberpunk Fantasy RPG" above the text "funded in the first two days" and "available now on Kickstarter

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Thank you to M.S. Farzan for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Entromancy: A Cyberpunk Fantasy RPG on Kickstarter today!

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Turn, Bigness, Mental Health, and “Different”

First off, I’m going to make a damn #TurnRPG hashtag, then we’re gonna talk about this precious gift of a game I have been working on since December 2013. And have I got some WORDS for you this evening, my friends, about Turn, and about large design projects, mental health, & “different.”

a yellow bird on a branch with its beak open with a bunch of As in the background like yelling

Turn is a slice-of-life supernatural roleplaying game about shapeshifters in small, rural towns who must find balance in their shifter identity and community with their fellows. I’m planning to Kickstart it at the end of October. tinyurl.com/turn-rpg-beta-2018

I’ve been really digging into it and I’m in the expand and explain part – I think the mechanics are solid, but trying to ensure people understand the mechanics is hard. I’ve been struggling through recovering from a brain injury, & until recently, sometimes my work was nonsense.

So a lot of this is revisiting old text, making sure it makes sense, revising it, and adding as much as I can to make it approachable to people who aren’t me. John helps with this – he’s my dev editor – but he can only do so much when I’m struggling personally with the work.

Turn is the biggest thing I’ve made and a large part of me *needs* it to succeed, to be appreciated. So I want everything to be perfect! Like, everything has to be exactly how it’s supposed to be written in my head. And that’s a pain in the ass, and doesn’t guarantee perfection.

A picture of Diana as a child in Wonder Woman with a tumblr post posted over it that says "me, logically: it's never gonna happen. the tiny hopeful goblin in my brain: but what if it did"

So like today I’ve been asking for help figuring out a new title for the facilitator role because facilitator sounds boring and what I was using, Storyteller, is too associated with White Wolf (not why I was using it, but no one cares) and also doesn’t describe the role well.

Now I’m trying out Meddler, because I tried a whole bunch in text and it’s the only one I like next to Busybody but is slightly more teasing than mean like Busybody tends to be. And I listened to a bunch of people’s input, too, and felt kind of “eh yeah?” and like COME ON.

See, one thing that I need to really tell you here is that the longer your project, the more likely you are to hit a wall of mental health issues, new or old. They will fuck you UP. I love this game. I love it SO much. And I find myself poking at it all like “I should trash it.”

I’m working on this big, meaningful project and I’m getting engagement with input from people and all my big stupid brain can say is “Well I dunno, people haven’t said it’s visionary or anything, and these other people aren’t interested, so maybe it’s just awful.” This project!

Keegan Key saying "I mean, I spent the majority of it in a deep fog, in a profound depression."

And part of it is because it’s a big project, a lot of time and energy with (to date) little to no returns. Most of my projects seem futile because I don’t exactly swim in recognition, reviews, or funds as a result of them. But I still do them, and I’m still doing this. I’m especially still doing this.

If I was working on something smaller I could be done and stop torturing myself with the maybes and the whys. But it’s big. It matters. And mental illness just wants to dig in its claws and remind me that I’m not doing good enough. But I also know it’s because Turn is different.

Jaylah from Star Trek Beyond yelling in preparation of a fight.

I said it, I mean it. When I play Turn, it always feels different than other games. When I’ve been designing it, it feels different than other games. I haven’t played all games, and I’m not fucking gonna, but I do know that compared to the games I have played, Turn is different.

Maybe it’s because of the angle? Or because it’s quiet drama? Maybe it’s because I took away failure, and focused on consequences? Maybe it’s because this game isn’t designed to play like an adventure, but instead like everyday life that gets hard and troublesome but also loving?

Mad Max pointing towards one of the bikers in recognition.

And like, the biggest thing I struggle with while designing this game is that I want to maintain that “different.” Some people have looked at the mechanics without playing the game and said it was just copied from a bunch of places, but it’s not. It’s different. So it’s rough!

How do I keep my snowflake of a game from melting or getting mushed together and ruined? How do I present it to people in a way that highlights the difference? Worst of all, what if I AM wrong and my game’s actually just a boring facsimile of other games I don’t want it to be?

It’s a lot. I just want this game to be good and succeed and I want this weird experience I have when I play it to be replicable for people. I want to do a Kickstarter and not have it fail because I want people to be interested in it and excited for it. But I’m also very tired.

If it was smaller, maybe I’d care less. I didn’t have a mental illness, maybe I’d struggle less. If it felt samey, maybe it would matter less. But none of those things are so. It’s a mattering struggling caring mess. I’m mulling over every design decision like it’s life & death.

My final real point, I suppose, is that all of these things: bigness, mental health, difference, they are important to the game and the design process I’m experiencing, and I have to overcome the challenges. I love Turn so much, and I can’t let it fade away, I can’t risk that.

So if I kind of sound like a pain in the ass a lot right now, & for the foreseeable future, I want you to know that it’s only because I’m trying my best. I want to do my best. I want the game that I put out to be one you can pick up & have an amazing experience with. I’m trying.

Andy Samberg as Jake Peralta on Brooklyn 99, in workout clothes. Someone asks " Are you crying?" and he responds "No. That's eyeball sweat."

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