I was lucky enough to chat with Epidiah Ravachol about his yearly event, Epimas! Epimas is really an amazing event and involves much of the indie gaming community, and Epidiah wanted to share the story behind it and how to participate with my readers. Check out our discussion below! –
What exactly is Epimas?
To begin with, Epimas is December 24th. My birthday.
It is also a long standing holiday tradition of giving and receiving gaming PDFs.
According to the stats on the original Epimas site, it’s been up since 2009. And that’s about as close to gospel as I can get, so I’m going to say that Epimas is a 7-year old holiday tradition. I remember walking with Nathan D. Paoletta and a bunch of other folks in NYC. I had just released Time & Temp that summer at GenCon and was just dipping my toes into my first ever PDF sales around that time. Digital books were still kind of an untested thing, even as recent as that. The first iPad hadn’t even hit the shelves yet. So selling PDFs was selling the experience of sitting at your desk and reading a book on your computer monitor. For this indie publisher, it was an exciting time. If people bought PDFs, then all sorts of barriers and costs associated with printing, warehousing and shipping would melt away. Where I was with the budget I had at the time, I needed those costs to melt away. So on that walk, Nathan and I hatched a plan to make it easier for folks to give the gift of gaming PDFs over the holidays.
How the plan is executed changes from year to year, because I don’t always remember how it works and I keep trying new gimmicks, but at its core, the Epimas sale where…
…as the customer:
You have from now until Dec. 23rd to buy game PDFs as gifts to be delivered to your friend, family member or assorted loved one on Dec. 24th.
You immediately receive copies of the game PDFs for free so you can read them over and be prepared to play them with your friend, family member or assorted loved one on Dec. 24th.
…as participating publishers:
We all contribute some game PDFs to the cause.
Everyone gets an equal share of the profits, regardless of the number or size of the games they contributed or of how well they sold.
That last bit was a lesson learned from Design Matters—a group of game designers and publishers assembled by Nathan and Kevin Allen, Jr. to sell at GenCon. The equal shares invest everyone in everyone else’s success.
I’ve grown overly fond of Epimas over the years. It can be a bit of a chore sometimes. It’s never been tremendously lucrative. And I regularly caution people against turning their own birthdays into deadlines. But it’s fun to see folks looking forward to it, sending gifts to friends, loved ones, and sometimes strangers they only know from the internet. And I personally like seeing the new games that pop up each time. It’s like a retrospective of cutting edge game design at the end of the year.
Why focus on PDFs? What benefit is there to focusing entirely on digital products?
They are cheap to warehouse, easy to deliver, and can be made on a moment’s notice. All these things make Epiclaus’s holiday so much smoother. They just make the logistics manageable.
Why did you choose for people to get a copy of the games they buy for someone else?
There’s two answers to this: the reason and the justification. I think both are a bit valid, though one may be a bit more valid than the other.
The reason is that folks are not used to buying PDFs for other folks as gifts. We want to cast a wide enough net to capture those who are buying primarily for themselves along with those buying for others. Because, let’s face it, indie roleplaying is a niche within a niche within a niche. Sears can sell tools by touting them as a gift for the handyperson on your list, and they’re going to reach an audience who are relieved because they know very little about tools but they have a handyperson on their list and won’t someone please sell them something to give that handyperson as a gift. We’re not going to be able to reach those audiences. We can say, “Gifts for the indie tabletop roleplayers on your list.” But if you’ve heard of Epimas at all, odds are you’re the indie tabletop roleplayer on someone else’s list.
But the justification is important, too! We justify it by saying you’ll need to read up on the games so you can be ready to play them with whoever got your gift on Epimas day. As per tradition. Just like you play Swords Without Master every Sunday morning, you’re going to play games on Epimas day. So you might as well come prepared.
How do you find people to provide games? Do you only do open calls, or do you seek people out? Are there any things you don’t intend to include in the collections?
There’s an open call every year somewhere around the end of November, beginning of December. I basically broadcast it on my most active social media accounts. These days, that’s G+ (https://plus.google.com/u/0/+EpidiahRavachol) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/Epidiah). If time is tight for me, which it typically is, the launch window can get fairly small. So keep your eyes peeled. I welcome all comers as long as they are cool with the equal profit sharing.
What is the most important thing about Epimas to you?
Honestly and truly, it’s just that people have fun with it. There’s a lot of things that I’d love for Epimas to be, but in the end, I’m all about folks having fun.
Today I had the opportunity to interview Fraser Simons about his new game, Young at Heart, available on DriveThruRPG. It sounds like really fascinating game about baseball narratives, and I think you’ll enjoy this quick interview with Fraser!
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Tell me a little about Young at Heart. What excites you about it?
The most exciting thing about Young at Heart for me, is the reflection in the mechanics of that primal duality between the pitcher and the batter in a baseball game, and how subjective the two main resources are that reinforce that throughout play. Everyone always interprets pride and heart differently, sometimes radically. And during the course of play, you’re using your scenes to vie for your particular resource as well as narrative control. You really get to know each other as players when you’re doing this because when I control the pitcher and I act in such a way that I’d generate heart or pride, I’m displaying to the other player(s) what I think that is. I’ve heard people think that the duality there was acting like an adult or a child, I’ve had people think it was toxic masculinity vs healthy reactions to the problems posed. Lots and lots of interesting stuff, and I really love learning about the other players at the table so it’s really exciting.
Can you tell me a little about the mechanics used in Young at Heart?
The primary mechanics of the game reflect what I would call the “spirit” of the baseball while completely side stepping actually simulating a game of it. Players are opposed to one another in that they each pick either Heart or Pride to go after during the course of play and are constantly vying for narrative control over one character, the pitcher. During the course of the game though, both teams need to spend resources in order to continue and get what they want – the procedures in place are the primary mechanics. They’re used to simulate both a specific kind of dramatic narrative based on the novel it was inspired by, as well as the pacing and emergent subjective commentary that the game is driving at.
Where did your inspirations come from for the game?
My inspiration was specifically from a book I’ve re-read many many times in my life, For Love of the Game. In fact, the “pre-loaded scenario” for the game could be used to specifically re-create the story if you wanted. But It was important to me that the game be about discovering more about the players at an individual level if the players wanted that kind of bleed in it. I also wanted people to be able to play any kind of sports narrative type story they would like easily. Things like Bull Durham, The Natural, and, with a few tweaks, even things like Remember the Titans or Coach Carter. It’s a very simple game so could be re-skinned for a lot of different things, in fact someone recently said they could use it for a Whiplash type of story, that’s been on my brain ever since!
What commonalities do you see in games like Young at Heart that are focused on sports (such as World Wide Wrestling), and more traditional RPGs that focus on fantasy or cyberpunk, etc.?
I had to take some time to think about this and I am a pretty new designer, so I may just not be as familiar with as many games and the mechanics behind them as others – but I can’t really find any commonalities. It’s play to find out what happens and it uses six-sided dice, other than that it’s doing it’s own thing, so far as I know or can think of. I’m sure there’s things out there that I’m not aware of that are similar, though!
The narrative in sports is often a legacy that spans generations. Do you think that Young at Heart touches on this, or possibly predicts a story that could go on?
You could definitely use the game to do this, in fact I give advice on making it episodic. Like, if you watch the newer show on Fox called Pitch, for example. You could do a game where the pitcher is like Ginny Baker, essentially playing each game as an episode of the show with the trials and tribulations and unique issues she goes through as the first woman to play in the MLB. I think that would be super interesting to play, as well as each session being a generational thing. — Thanks so much to Fraser for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you get the chance to check out Young at Heart on DriveThruRPG!
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Hey all, this took a little while to put together, but I have an interview with three of the freelancers from Shadowrun: Anarchy! Russell “Rusty” Zimmerman, O.C. Presley (“Opti”), and Patrick Goodman all took some time with me, which is super great. I wanted to learn a little more about the work that they did to put together the game, so I bugged them off and on for a while to get some fun stuff for you all to read! Enjoy!
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Tell me a little about you and your background, and your work on the project. What has your experience with games and design been thus far, and how did you end up working on Shadowrun: Anarchy? Within the project, what parts of the game did you work on – mechanics, flavor, etc.?
Patrick: I was born and raised in Texas. I’ve been gaming since I was fourteen, so 36 years and change now. Been playing Shadowrun since 1989, been writing for SR since 1999.
I wound up working on SR:Anarchy because, at about the time the very first noises of a rules-lighter version of SR was being talked about in the upper-management discussions at CGL, I was thinking, “I really wish we had a version of SR I could play with my kids.” They’d flipped through some of my SR books and kinda liked some of what they saw, but the rules were too much and the presentation really wasn’t kid-friendly.
So I talked with a few of the other freelancers, and we put together a pitch for a product we called Shadowrun Jr. Stripped Down, bare-basics rules, a kid’s view of the setting. Quick character generation, fast task resolution, and a path to grow into the bigger version of the game if they were interested.
When I sent the project presentation to Jason Hardy, the line developer, he wrote back and said, “You know, Loren Coleman wants to do a rules-light version of Shadowrun, This might be a good companion for that. How’d you like to be involved?” And I said, “I’m in.”
Still want to do Junior one of these days, but Anarchy is a much easier, much more kid-friendly engine, so I’m not in as quite a big a hurry as I was.
[on what he worked on] Flavor, mostly. Jason and Philip Lee did the rules drafts, but I did a lot of kibitzing on the side, along with Rusty and Opti. Rules would show up, we’d all say, “This doesn’t work” or “This rocks on toast” and helped push things so that they felt like Shadowrun within the new rules. I wrote two or three of the Contract Briefs, and ten of the sample characters (Bit-Bucket, Daktari, Fourth, Hawk, Raider, Razzle Dazzle, Strider, Thunder, Vector, and Wheezer). And now I’m working on the errata to fix the boo-boos.
Rusty: I’m Russell Zimmerman, and the short-form of my background is that I’ve been a Shadowrun freelancer since Attitude and Way of the Adept. Lately I’ve been leaning over to the fiction side of the fence, with stuff like Neat and Shaken (and that ongoing novel trilogy), and those recent anthologies.
On Anarchy, most of what we freelancers tackled were the sample characters and the scenarios/plot-hooks, officially, but we were also full of suggestions and comments when it came to stuff like chargen, partially because we also ran some playtests, but also specifically as a result of us, uh, genning all those chars (thirty of the buggers!). So officially we weren’t assigned any rules, but there are lots of little and not-so-little changes that were made because of us, which is always cool.
Personally, I tackled 10 of the pre-genned characters*, and 11 of the included scenarios**. I’m also the guy who handled the intro fic for the book, Synchronicity (which features several of those pre-gens). Oh! Plus I added the Cinematic Initiative option, which is how my buddies and I handle init in narrative games, so I was glad to see it added as an optional system here. I guess that counts as a contribution.
*(Coydog, Gentry, Hardpoint, Ms. Myth, Sledge, Kix, Ninetails, Shades, Tommy Q, and Wagon)
**(Food Fight, Snatch and Grab, Nerps Run, Data/Steel, Puyallup Problems, Urban Brawl, Assassin’s Greed, Cleaning House, Street Sweeper, Triad Take-Out, and Trucking With The Fae)
Opti: My writing name is O.C. Presley, and I live with my wife and 2 kids in Fort Worth, TX. Most of my work history previous has been in education and public speaking. My relevant background is that I started a Shadowrun podcast a few years ago called the Neo-Anarchist Podcast. It is an in-character telling of SR history, and I play the narrator, Opti.
I began writing for Shadowrun earlier this year, and my first published work was the Redmond Barrens chapter of the Seattle Sprawl box set, but I just had a short story published in the Shadowrun: Drawing Destiny Anthology. Anarchy marks the first time I have had any meaningful input on a game’s design, although my input was much more on the balance and fluff side than the core mechanics. Although I do have the honor of being the one to name it “Anarchy.” 🙂
I ended up working on Anarchy largely thanks to Patrick Goodman. He and I had been talking for some time about a kid-friendly version of Shadowrun, and our original pitch was for something along those lines. But as it turns out, Anarchy was already in the works, and Patrick let Jason Hardy, our line developer, know I was interested, and I got added onto the group.
Within Anarchy, along with Rusty and Patrick, I was responsible for about a third of the characters and a little over a third of the Mission Briefs. We all sort of chipped in on the other stuff, too, but only in a voluntary way. I think we all wanted Anarchy to be its best, so ideas were flowing around all the time. To Jason’s credit, a lot of our ideas were given consideration even though they were in areas we were not technically working on.
What kind of challenges did you encounter building a game to work alongside the core 5th edition material? How did you figure out what to change, and what to keep?
Patrick: The big trick, to me, was making sure that the experience felt like Shadowrun even though the system was clearly something completely different. That took some doing, especially since that’s so subjective. One person’s “feels like Shadowrun” can be very different from another person’s.
There’s a lot of guesswork and trial-and-error involved, especially in the beginning stages. Once you get the foundation working the way you think is right, the rest is just honing things to make sure they’re all in line with one another. You hit on something, and you try it out, and you get some other people to try it out, and see what happens.
Rusty: We wanted to walk the tightrope between streamlining/efficiency and Shadowrun/familiarity. That meant keeping the core mechanic of skill plus attribute, for instance, but narrowing down the number of attributes to try and make things simpler. Likewise, we leveraged SR5’s “Skill Groups” pretty hard as a way of slimming down the skill list while keeping some familiar Shadowrun sentiments in place.
I, personally, think we could have folded Plot Points into Edge as another way of simplifying gameplay while retaining a familiar name for something, but the third part of our tricksy-like-hobbitses balancing act was also that we were making a Cue System game, so that meant keeping some of those touchstones, that core narrative-game-engine that CGL has had such great prior success with, with Plot Points, cues, dispositions, and those type of things. So it wasn’t just a balancing act between trying to keep the Shadowrun feel while creating a narrative game, it was trying to do so while creating a Cue narrative game, rather than building something brand new from the ground up.
Opti:Well, much of that was out of my hands. However, when brainstorming early on, we all decided that it should feel like Shadowrun, and yet be easy to wrap your head around. One of the easiest ways to do that was to keep the D6 “hits” system in place for rolls. Also, no matter what Anarchy became, we knew it had to reflect the lore in the same way that the SR5 system did, just with different mechanics.
When creating content for the game, what did you use as guidance – previous Shadowrun fiction, reflections on current events, inspirations for mechanics from other games, and/or other sources?
Patrick: My biggest guide was, “What’s gone before? How do I make sure that this reflects this new ruleset we’re making, but also reflects the very rich and expansive game world we’ve been developing for the past 27 years?”
So, very much, previous SR fiction, including my own. Two of the pregen characters I submitted, Thunder and Wheezer, were from a story I did called “Thunderstruck.” I conferred with Rusty Zimmerman when I was working on Strider’s background, and she developed into a courier for his characters Jimmy Kincaid and Ms. Myth.
I think we all looked at current events as we worked, which I think really shows up in the diversity of the characters. That was one of Opti’s biggest pushes, and I think it reflects well on the game. We’ve got gender parity, metaracial parity, different ethnicities, and different sexual orientations.
And I’m way off on a tangent and a whole other discussion, so I’ll stop at “previous fiction” and “current events.”
Rusty: For me, I’d call it a 70/30 split between existing Shadowrun lore (which is something that’s always at the forefront of my decision-making process, respect for the existing material), and inspiration from game experiences (either with SR, or with narrative games). Shadowrun’s a game that’s just madly in love with crunch, and many Shadowrun fans are, too. Selling a narrative, rules-light (or rather, rules-medium, I’d say) game to those types of fans, you’ve got to really knock it out of the ballpark, and you’ve got to really sell them on it. Hopefully we did that, and folks are already having a good time with it, just in these last few weeks.
I tend to leave my current-events-reflections for longer pieces where I have a little more room to stretch out and make my own statement, like in some fiction or a stand-alone product (like some of the politicians in the Land of Promise e-book about Tir Tairngire); I can “fly under the radar” a little more in solo work, but also it feels like fans maybe accept a little more real-world stuff seeping into a book specifically about politics, or more intensely personal stuff like a novel, than they accept it in a rulebook. There’s more room to write about serious real-world stuff in projects where I’m not worrying about making sure 10 pre-genned characters are following the rules (while we’re constantly changing the rules). Mostly, my adventure hooks in here reference existing SR stuff — contacts these canon characters have had since the Beginner Box, characters from novels, that sort of thing — instead of real-life issues.
All that said, I did do most of my Anarchy work while traveling cross-country to take care of my mother during a sudden hospital stay. Her ICU nurse–in Corvalis Oregon, aka Tir Tairngire–was a great gal named Birdsong, who I totally stole for a friendly NPC. That Oregon trip totally got mined for one of my scenarios, so I did sneak in SOME real-life inspiration, I guess.
Opti: This one is huge for me. As a long time SR fan, I can’t help but use all of the existing lore as backdrop for new characters and adventures. The lore is, from my perspective, the strongest thing about Shadowrun. And yet, on the other hand, cyberpunk for me is best when it addresses, to varying degrees of directness, the culture we find ourselves in. And of course to fill in the spaces between, there isn’t any off-limits inspiration. Often, good writers are just people who can recycle some version the same stories that have been told for thousands of years.
Why use the Cue system? What made it “Shadowrun”? Patrick:Well, we had this ENnie-award-nominated, simple, narrative game system sitting around…seemed a shame to let it go to waste.
And what made it “Shadowrun” was a great deal of work. It had to be modified quite a bit from its origins in Cosmic Patrol and later implementation in Vanguard Universe.
Rusty:It wasn’t particularly Shadowrun to begin with, and we made some pretty big changes to make it Shadowrunnier ™, but the “why” for using it was pretty simple; it’s already CGL’s, it’s already an award-winning system, and it’s already well-received by fans for simpler, narrative, gameplay. So we already had this basic code or basic game engine, why not use it (but tweak it to make it suit us better), why would you want to start from the ground up, instead? The decision came from well above our pay-grade, but using Cue as a core system, starting with it and building from there, isn’t something I minded at all.
Opti: The decision to use the Cue system was another decision above my pay grade. Catalyst had found success in using the Cue system for other narrative games like Cosmic Patrol and Valiant, so when deciding to convert SR to a narrative mechanic, the Cue system was likely too inviting to pass up compared to creating an entirely new system. Having said that, the Cue system in Anarchy is a much different thing than either the Cosmic Patrol or Valiant version. It may be helpful to think of Cosmic Patrol as Cue 1.0, Valiant as Cue 1.5, and Anarchy as Cue 2.0. Or something.
How did you maintain the feeling and application of the different metahumans while using the streamlined system? Patrick:Again, a lot of work, though most of it was relatively simple. There was a lot of discussion about how to make sure trolls felt trolly and elves felt elfy. Rusty:Quite a lot of that comes down to the basic keywords associated with a character, not just the modified attributes that come into it directly or mechanically. Just like in a regular Shadowrun game, there’s more to being an elf than having a few stat modifiers, right? More to being an ork or a troll or a dwarf than the above average Strength or Body, isn’t there? There’s the role-playing opportunities, the various attitudes you’ll get from different factions in the setting, the background differences between a Tir-born elf and a Puyallup-brat, or a Tir-born human versus a round-eared Barrens-brat, for that matter, right? So yeah, a lot of it comes down to that metaracial tag right there at the top of the archetype or the character sheet; the weight that those three little letters ‘e-l-f’ have comes down to the stories being told, the flavor of the campaign, and all that — to me, at least — much more than it’s based on the spare attribute point or two you might have. Opti:We argued about it a lot. We went around and around internally about how to get this right, and to Jason Hardy’s credit, he listened a lot to Patrick, Rusty, and myself. We wanted it to be just right, and so we tested out many many different ways to represent the differences between the metas. In the end, I think we did ok, but as always, Trolls were the biggest pain.
Tell me a little about one of your favorite characters, locations, or elements of the game and why it is important to you as a creator.
Patrick:My favorite part of the game is the system itself. It’s quick and pretty clean, and dirt-simple to learn and to teach. My two oldest kids have been interested in SR for a while, but we’ve never been able to play because of the complexity and the adult language. Anarchy, though, is a Shadowrun that I can play with my children. We made a conscious effort to tone the language back, and as has been noted, the rules are short, quick, and easy.
Rusty: The easy answer for me is always Tir Tairngire, because it encapsulates — elves in Shadowrun, in totality, encapsulate — so much of what makes this fantasy-cyberpunk hybrid setting so…Shadowrun. On the one hand you’ve got narrative room for all this really unrealistic, highly stylized, fantasy stuff, with Princes and Paladins, fancy pseudo-plate-mail armor, swords and magic, this flowery neo-Celtic elven language, and these fantastic names right out of a fantasy novel. Right? You can stop there if you want, just scratch the surface, and play a character, perfectly in keeping with the setting, that drinks that Kool-Aid and buys into all that bullshit, and lives a perfectly happy life (by Shadowrun standards), and is basically, y’know, Straight Outta Westeros. It all fits the setting just fine, fits the canon just fine, and it’s a valid character, if you want to lean on that fantasy side.
But then if you dig a little deeper, you get the, I dunno, the chocolate core beneath the candy shell, or whatever, with this dystopic cyberpunk layer just beneath that top layer. And you can play an elf from a ghetto, for pete’s sake, how perfect is that? Or a human who’s well aware that the Tir’s Disney FantasyLand veneer is such bullshit, or an elf who bought into it all until they got some terrible order to mistreat an ork or a human, and they have this heel-face turn when they give up on that fascist — because it really is a flavor of fascism, no bones about it — Tir crap and realize how silly ducal ranks and royal blood and stuff are, in real life. Or you can ignore all of it, and just be some dude who happens to be an elf, some grease-under-his-nails mechanic or a burger-flipping high school kid who just happens to have great skin, pointy ears, and night-vision, who doesn’t buy into any of it, and doesn’t see what the big deal is, and maybe has this kind of super-metaracial-privilege working for him and doesn’t even think about it.
Elves in Shadowrun, and kind of their uber-personification with the Tirs, holds so much good and bad and in-between and real-life to me, man, I totally dig ’em. They can show you everything that’s great about the setting, and everything that’s terrible about the setting, and everything in between, sometimes even all in just one character.
Opti: In general, my favorite aspect of Shadowrun is the anarchist flavor to it. The idea that the powers that be in society are so corrupt that rebellion against them or flagrant breaking of their laws is actually good? That appeals to me. As a result, I wrote in a number of anarchist characters, and brought back the anarchist group Black Star in one of the adventures at the end. As I said earlier, this is one of those areas in which Shadowrun goes beyond simple escapism and offers a chance to explore being an outcast for standing against the corrupt system that “normal” people don’t see as corrupt.
As far as locations, beyond Seattle, I am really getting into thinking about the Confederated American States. For a long time, they have gotten a bad rep as racist, backwards people, and I think that is a little unfair to half of the US. I had some CAS stuff that didn’t make it into the final product, but I’d like to see the CAS come into focus sooner or later.
As far as characters, I’ve always loved shamans, the Unseelie Court, and Harlequin. So far, I’ve only been able to write one of those, but we’ll see how things go once I get some more stuff under my belt. Jason keeps a pretty tight lid on Harly, lol.
What do you think, going forward, are the important things from Anarchy that you want to see grow, develop, and expand?
Patrick: I think the thing that stands out to me is that you can have adventures in the Sixth World without having to have a degree in advanced math to understand the rules. You can have fun without wasting most of the night trying to figure out the rules. I’d love to see that go on, and attract more people to the game.
Rusty: If I had my druthers, like five years from now or whatever when 6th edition gets worked on, if it was DruthersRun and it was all exactly what some freelancer named Russell wanted? One thing I’d absolutely love to keep from Anarchy would be some of the simplification. The abbreviated line of attributes, the streamlined list of broader skills. The simplicity of it, of just changing those options away from being so nit-picky and specialized. Getting away from this huge list of skills like SR5 has, where even just the list of skill groups is like a whole page, and where we’ve got a nitty-gritty specific skill for being this one type of mechanic, and one skill for jumping versus another skill for landing, and on and on and on. I’m becoming something of a minimalist in my grouchy almost-forty years, where I hate it any time a game system’s skill list gets longer, gets more specific, ever. Ever. I adore it when “I want to be the fighty guy” means picking like two or three skills, and being able to handle your job, instead of having to pick out five or six, and then also get two or three “every criminal needs these” skills, and then having to dive into gear and start off with all this must-have stuff, and on and on and on. If half of making your character is already handled by the core mechanic’s traps and must-have items, why not avoid and ignore all that, officially start everyone off with that stuff, and call it a day? Why complicate it, and leave all these pitfalls for new players?
So, yeah. I’m a total advocate of the simpler skills, the broader skills, this sort of…broad competence that basically every Anarchy character kind of ends up with. I dig it. Make it faster and easier to just jump in and start telling stories and slinging dice, and I’m a happy dude.
Opti: Well, a lot of that depends on how Anarchy is received. As of now, we are thinking Anarchy will be a one-off, and its system is so flexible that any sourcebook from SR past or present will be able to function as an Anarchy sourcebook as well. Having said that, if people begin demanding further Anarchy products, letting Jason Hardy at Catalyst know your feelings is the quickest way to make that happen!
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Wow, thank you so much to Patrick, Opti, and Rusty so much for the interview! Special kudos to Rusty for helping me coordinate with all of these busy schedules. It was really awesome to hear more about the project and what Anarchy means to the team and Shadowrun in general. I hope everyone enjoyed reading! I, for one, am REALLY hoping for more Shadowrun material, especially for a narrative based game like Anarchy! Speaking of which, here’s the DriveThruRPG link!
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I recently came across a Twitter post about The Republic, a game by Ashton McAllan, Vincent Baker, and Mark Redacted. When I read a little about it, I knew I had to talk to the creators, and Ashton was cool enough to give me some of her time! The Republic is available for purchase and looks really fascinating. Check out the interview below!
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Tell me a little about The Republic. What excites you about it?
The Republic is such a fun mix of disparate parts. It’s core themes are all focused around Social Justice and resisting oppressive governments, it’s got Avatar like fantastical element bending, and the default setting is this weird retrofuturist steampunk classical state. It was born out of Paul Czege’s #Threeforged competition where Mark Redacted, Vincent Baker and I ended up developing it together without knowing who we were working with which allowed for this really fun, creative, experimental combination of ideas, which I love. The fact that the game was already coming out of left field has meant that I’ve been able to do cool stuff as I’ve been developing it since that I might have been scared to do otherwise, like adding rules for playing with an audience or require characters be from marginalised group within their society. I don’t think I could have written a game with these important themes or a game with these experimental new dice mechanics if they weren’t all next to each other to balance things.
What led you to choosing the themes of social justice and others of that vein?
The social justice themes in the game actually arose in the original development during the Threeforged competition. My initial draft centered on the relationship between the elements and the Platonic solids that Plato describes in his Timaeus dialogue. After I submitted that it was passed on to Vincent and Mark anf the theme of Plato was extended into making the game about a version of the great theoretical nation-state that he describes in The Republic from which the game now takes its name. It focused on how the seemingly perfect Republic was in fact atrocious towards marginalised people within it and how it was up to a group of old, wise, respected citizens to go out and fix their society.
When I saw it I was over the moon because my stupid little idea about dice had been turned into something so cool and beautiful but during the voting period there was a lot of heated discussion about the legitimately problematic White Male Saviour narrative that that version of the game portrays.
I wasn’t allowed to join in that discussion because it would risk revealing that I worked on the game before voting closed and judging was done so I was stuck there being like “Yes! This has problems but it can also be something really cool!” So that really galvanized my desire to take the game further and refine it into something that was able to help people positively explore those social justice themes while still being fun and safe to play.
Once voting was over and everything was over Vincent reworked it to focus on the oppressed saving themselves and then I took that and continued work from there until now, changing a lot of things but trying to keep true to the game’s heart.
How did you settle on a setting and fictional positioning for a game? How does it support the themes?
Our default setting is a sort of steampunk alternate ancient Greece that evolved out of the way the Threeforged competition had us combining ideas from each other in interesting new ways and reflects the influences of Plato and Avatar The Last Airbender on the thematic and mechanical elements of the game. The text does, however, explicitly encourage GMs to feel free to run their games in alternate versions of the setting such as cyberpunk or solarpunk futures. All the game requires is that The Republic exists and that it oppresses and marginalises people.
One of the important things I did discover as I developed the game, however, is that it can be triggering and exhausting both as a developer, a player, and as a GM. To try and soften that I made sure to include a safeword mechanic in the text of the game and also added in distinct if abstract geographical regions to the game to allow players to functionally choose their level of interaction with the atrocity of The Republic itself. The World of The Republic always contains three main areas: The Metropoli which is the heart of the republic where players are most hounded by the oppression of the state but can also affect the most change, The Borderlands where the reach of The Republic is sparse and the players travel between towns helping folks deal with threats both from The Republic itself and from beyond it’s borders, and the Barbarous Wilds where players can choose to leave behind their institutional abuser and forge a new life beyond it’s reach. Partially I had to add these options for my own sanity when playtesting and having to repeatedly interrogate heavy topics but I hope they’re also helpful as a safety valve for players and GMs.
What are the mechanics like for the game? How do you go through play, and what informs the flow of the game?
I’m not sure if Vincent would agree but I would say it’s a Powered by the Apocalypse system but with more dice. GMs have forces which oppose the players, have goals, and resources to carry out those goals. Players describe the actions their characters take and roll dice to see if they’re successful, and if they’re not, the GM makes the situation more interesting.
The unique elements here are in the ways the dice work. There are five dice sizes mapped to five elements in accordance with Plato’s Timaeus dialogue. The player’s character is initially made up of any combination of ten of those dice they choose, the combination showing which of the elements are more or less present in the character. When players roll dice to take action the action will be aligned with an element, dice of that element are more likely to score successes for that action. Players may roll as many dice as they wish to try and score a required number of successes to complete the task but any unsuccessful dice become dead and no longer usable until they are restored to life through healing or rest, communion, and care. The game is about exhaustion, and the importance of managing that, internally, and as a group, in your fight. It also forces you to think about when is the time to fight, to run, to build, to observe, or to heal.
The mechanics also seek to honour our dead. When player characters are destroyed they choose one of a number of ends available to them based on the fiction and each of those leaves a legacy upon the game such as turning the tide against a threat or leaving some part of yourself in your companions, advancing their characters stats.
Considering the nature of the game’s themes and the new mechanics, what would you hope people get out of the game the most? What experiences and takeaways do you hope for?
One of my favourite experiences during playtesting has been seeing some of my non-disabled heterosexual white cisgender male friends realise they have to play a character that is at least not one of those things which had never occurred to some of them. Seeing them play those characters and connect with them in ways that they might never have done so before has been amazing. I want the game to continue to create those experiences of intense empathy, I want it to help create solidarity amongst the marginalised, I want it to help us feel confident and comfortable with resisting oppression, and I want people to think about their characters in new ways when they look at the dice on the table.
That’s a big set of expectations but if we can achieve even some small measure of each of them I’m gonna be super jazzed.
— Thanks so much to Ashton for the interview! The Republic sounds like a fascinating game and I encourage you all to check out more about it if you get the chance!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
Today I chatted with Tod Foley on his new game Other Borders, which is currently available digitally on DriveThru RPG, RPGnow, and OpenGamingStore. It’s a DramaSystem based game and sounds pretty interesting! The print edition hits in December 2016. Check out the interview below!
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Tell me a little about Other Borders. What excites you about it?
Other Borders is a DramaSystem game of drugs, money and magic in the modern American southwest, originally conceived as an expansion for Tom McGrenery’s “Malandros”. The first thing that excited me about working on this project was the Malandros system itself – you might call it “the Malandros branch of DramaSystem”. Mechanically, it’s a simplified version of DS; there are no cards and fewer tokens. But it also has Character Types and Moves inspired by Vincent Baker’s PbtA (“Powered by the Apocalypse”) system. I really wanted to work on a setting that would embrace the genre of “magical realism” in a dramatic and spontaneous way, and Tom’s rules gave me that opportunity: the town of Entrelugares is a place where drug cartels and law enforcement come face to face with the powers of traditional magic. In fact to the best of my knowledge, it’s the first DramaSystem game to include rules for magic. That’s very exciting to me, and I’m looking forward to hearing all the trippy things people do with it.
What have you done with the Drama System mechanics that players might find new and interesting?
The Malandros branch uses the same definitions of scenes, scene types, and drama tokens as any other DramaSystem game, but adds procedural moves. These moves are written in a way that will be familiar to PbtA players, although only 1d6 is used: a total of 2 or less represents failure and/or a problem arising, 3-5 represents a partial success (often with a cost), while a total of 6+ represents a full success. And like PbtA games, there’s a list of GM Moves that are taken in response to low rolls and “what now” moments.
Other Borders also adds a statistic called “Poder” which represents your character’s magical power. Poder may be used to add a die to your pool, or to enhance the efficacy of certain magical moves. But I think the most interesting thing is the way this magic plays out: it’s different every time. Magic is highly personalized and unpredictable, because its effects are made up and narrated by the players themselves. There are four types of magic in the game: A class of “general magic” which is common and ceremonial, plus Brujeria (Sorcery/Dark Witchcraft), Chamanismo (Shamanic/Mestizo Magic), and Curanderismo (Healing Magic).
La Santa Muerte
What kind of research did you do for the project, since it is related to some fraught topics?
Most of the “magical realism” stuff was simply drawn from years of reading. Today magical realism is a recognized genre practiced by authors around the world, but its roots are Latin American, and many works in the genre were first written in Spanish. A particularly seminal work was “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez. My academic sources included the works of writers and literary critics such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Jüri Talvet and Wendy Faris. The criminal elements (cartels and gangs) are drawn mostly from television and movies, from “Weeds” to “Colors” to “Once Upon a Time in Mexico”, and from my studies on Santa Muerte. As for the fictional city of Entrelugares itself, it’s an amalgam of research data on real US/Mexican border towns such as Naco, Arizona and Nogales, New Mexico. But I’ve made it very dense, small and isolated, for dramatic effect. Such a place probably couldn’t exist in the real world, but it’s perfectly suitable for a movie or a telenovela.
What audience are you aiming for with Other Borders, and why?
You know what? I really wrote it to please myself, because Tom gave me a chance to do whatever I wanted to do. I love the genre, I love the culture and the people (I’m from the southwest and I live in a part of Las Vegas which is mostly Latino: El Dia de Muerte is a bigger holiday than Halloween in my neighborhood). But really, I guess the first thing I knew for sure was that I wanted to write magic for DramaSystem. Everything else followed from that.
How do you approach character and player interaction – PvP, collaborative, etc. – and how is that reflected in the mechanics and fiction?
As in all DS games, players are able to insert details (or themselves) into scenes pretty freely. If a conflict arises on the meta level, players can enter into a back-and-forth with Drama Tokens until the scene is settled one way or the other, and the GM Moves are there to keep things jumping even if the players don’t have any immediate ideas.
On the character level, enmity is a totally acceptable form of relationship: this is a TV show and sometimes it’s fun to play the bad guys – but “bad guy” is a relative term. The town of Entrelugares has many factions and character types: in addition to townspeople and immigrants there are smugglers, gangs, cartel bosses, cops, academics, new age hippies, and a variety of magical practitioners both light and dark. It’s possible to play a cooperative scenario like “townspeople banding together to rid the city of drug smugglers”, or a competitive scenario like “cops versus the cartel”. It’s all up to the group, and what they want to play. Because the game includes both modern weapons and powerful magic, if you get into combat it’s fairly easy to get debilitated (at least for a while), but the stress and harm rules are forgiving enough so that not a lot of characters will end up dying.
As far as action resolution mechanics go, the modifications Tom made for Malandros created a set of rules that makes it easier for characters to accomplish things on their own, compared to a traditional DS game like Hillfolk. This makes for a faster-paced “episode” with “hard cuts” to different locations, so characters can get more done in less time and this moves the plot along quickly. But of course, they are all tied to each other by direct relationships established in CharGen, and this (in addition to the Drama Token rules) guarantees that their paths must keep crossing in dramatic ways. Its very telenovela-like.
Anything else you want to add? Thank you for taking the time to interview me, Brie. It’s always a pleasure talking with you, and I hope you and your readers enjoy the game!
Encounter with the Magical Woman
— Thanks to Tod for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview, and if you want, check out Other Borders on the variousavailablesources!
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Hi All! I recently contacted Avery Alder about doing an interview for Monsterhearts 2, the second edition of Monsterhearts that is currently on Kickstarter, and she accepted! The original flavor of Monsterhearts is one of my favorite games and was one of my first steps into the story gaming culture and gaming style, and I’ve written about my experiences while playing it a little bit in the past. I hope you enjoy reading this interview with Avery!
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Tell me a little about Monsterhearts 2. What excites you about it?
Monsterhearts 2 is a game about the messy lives of teenage monsters, exploring what it means to have a body and desires that are changing without your permission. It’s written with a queer lens for understanding desire, though that doesn’t necessarily mean that every character you play is going to be queer. I think the project is really exciting for me personally because it’s an opportunity to focus on refining something I was already proud of. I published the first edition of Monsterhearts in 2012, and since then people have often told me how lucid and inspiring the text and design are. And looking back at it, I agree that it’s solid. But I also see all these ways that it could be tighter, that I could better contextualize the mechanics, that rough edges could be smoothed down. And so it’s exciting to have a chance to do that work.
I’ve played Monsterhearts quite a few times and the issue of attraction and asexuality has come up a lot. I saw in your new sneak-peek of the game you address this. Could you talk a little more about how you’re addressing it and the motivations behind it, for the readers who haven’t delved into the material yet?
Definitely! Monsterhearts explores what it means to have shifting, confusing desires. There are rules about turning people on and gaining power over them. The way those rules are designed intentionally challenges some of the dominant narratives that our culture has about how sexuality works – that it is fixed, that it is predictable, and that it is binary. I think challenging those narratives works out really well in play, too. It means that every session is surprising and feral.
But there was this other dynamic that the first edition introduced, of unwittingly reinforcing another set of dominant narratives about sexuality – that everyone is sexual, and that everyone is equally available for sex. And I think that in designing the game the way that I did, I did a disservice to asexuals and to survivors of sexual trauma. I aligned myself with dominant narratives that erased and hurt them. Since 2012, I’ve had people bring that to my attention and I’ve sat with their criticism. I knew that the core of the game should stay the way it was, but that I needed to create space for these other stories as well. I’m still figuring out how to introduce these new mechanics into the game gracefully!
A subject near and dear to my heart is boundaries and safe experiences in games. You’ve written about it in Safe Hearts, and I’m interested to know more – what are your goals with your new chapter on the subject? How do you personally, as a creator, approach tough subjects while still allowing for the inherent mistakes in social interactions that are so common for teens?
Part of my approach in writing Safe Hearts (an essay from 2014 that’s being adapted into a chapter in the new book) was to establish priorities. It’s easy to over-simplify questions like “How do we take care of each other’s emotions while doing something emotionally vulnerable together?” It’s also easy to over-think them until you feel anxious and immobilized! And so my approach was to suggest a list of priorities: focus on this first, then focus on this if you have the capacity, and then finally this. The three concentric circles of priorities that the essay outlines are: first to ourselves, then to others at the table, then to the characters we’re portraying.
The text I wrote in that essay isn’t being revised very much as it makes its way into the new book. I feel like what I wrote on the subject in 2014 remains solid. Most of the revisions are just adjusting the way it flows to make it fit better as a chapter in a larger text.
Strings are a really interesting in-game currency. Can you tell me a little about what new you’re introducing for them and how you hope it will impact gameplay?
Strings are at the core of Monsterhearts. They tell a story about how power is unevenly and intimately distributed between characters. They represent the way that leverage is gained and used. The biggest change to Strings in the new edition is that they’ve been streamlined. This was really important, because in the first edition people would work to acquire Strings, but then they’d just sit there idle on the character sheet. The mechanics for actually spending Strings were a little too cumbersome for new players to grapple with, so they would get ignored. And other bits of the game (like the Manipulate an NPC move) directed players away from figuring out how to use the Strings economy. In the new version, the mechanics for spending Strings are more simple and more visible.
What do you hope to personally take away from your experience working on Monsterhearts 2, beyond satisfaction in a job well done?
I published the first edition of Monsterhearts while I was still figuring out where my place in queerness was. A year later I started coming to terms with being trans. And throughout that time, I started to gain recognition from wider audiences. Returning to write Monsterhearts 2 is exciting because I’m in a different place now personally. I’m a queer trans woman, I know my own politics better, and I’m excited to bring new voice and perspective to bear on this text.
Another thing I’m excited to take away from my experience working on Monsterhearts 2 is a better understanding of how to synthesize community feedback and incorporate it into a revision process. I’m holding four years of feedback in my brain. I put out a survey to learn more about people’s experiences and it garnered 766 responses. But at the same time, I’m the person most intimately acquainted with the game’s goals and pitfalls. How do you make sense of all that data, honour all that feedback, while still remaining confident in your own instincts and vision? I’m learning new skills.
For a game about queerness, Monsterhearts & Monsterhearts 2 could seem hard to approach for someone out of the queer community, and I’ve seen your work raise a lot of awareness for people like that. What do you think straight, cis people can gain by playing a game like Monsterhearts – or what would you hope they do?
I think that everyone has confusing, complicated memories about what it was like to be a teenager. And a huge part of Monsterhearts 2 is telling those sorts of stories, exploring those sorts of feelings. While queerness adds an important dimension, I think that everyone is able to bring their own life experiences to the table. And I hope that straight, cis people feel invited to engage with these themes and be challenged by them.
or like, I hope everyone plays Monsterhearts 2 and I hope it makes them gay.
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Thanks so much to Avery for the great interview! I really enjoyed talking with her and I hope you all enjoyed reading it. Check out Monsterhearts 2 on Kickstarter now, if it sounds like your kind of game!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
Tell me a little about your project. What excites you about it?
The world of Four Corners: Thieves of Sovereignty is one where what you believe about the world and your place in it gives you magical powers to control or embody at least one of eight elements: air, water, earth, fire, cloud, metal, glass, and lightning. You play a hypercompetent hero trying to make the world a better place, and standing a good chance at succeeding, eventually. The game uses FATE Core mechanics, with some adaptations, which allows for some fantastic storytelling. The book is intended to be welcoming of players of diverse genders, sexual orientations, and backgrounds, and I invite feedback from supporters of the kickstarter while the book undergoes graphic design and illustration.
What excites me about the kickstarter is sharing my world with a wider audience, hearing their feedback, and watching Tetra (the name of the setting) come alive through the skilled artistry of Elizabeth Porter.
Can you talk about the mechanical changes you made from the Fate Core mechanics, and why you made them?
Fate Core has mechanics for four different actions, including Attack and Create an Advantage, and a long list of nouns which are skills letting you do one to four of these types of actions. Fate Accelerated has a list of six adjectives from which you can choose how you approach any of the four actions. I wanted to find a middle ground between these two options, and wrote a list of twelve verbs, three for each type of action. One for taking the action in a physical context, one for a social context, and one for an intellectual context. For example, you can roll Fight to attack someone or something physically, Unnerve to attack someone’s reputation or social standing, or you can roll Confound to attack someone’s ideas or mental well-being. All twelve verbs are on the character sheet from the start, but not all at the same level of ability, to reflect that even the most competent of characters have some angles from which they are more comfortable coming at a situation than others.
Where did you get your inspiration for the setting and mechanics?
Like several other fantasy or speculative fiction worldbuilders have, I started with a “What if?” question. I feel strongly that the choices we make are influenced heavily by what we believe is possible and proper, but that many of us don’t consciously consider what beliefs we’re working under, and assume that other people’s beliefs are more similar to ours than they actually are. I started with the question of, “What if the things we considered possible and desirable came with some sort of obvious indicator?” I was studying the similarities and differences between Christian denominations when I started working on this setting, and there’s a Bible verse that says, “if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move.” and wondered what the world would be like if this was a regular practice? What if all people who held to a particular faith, philosophy or worldview moved mountains around as part of their daily routine? Then I sketched out details of thirteen different worldviews, and created mechanics for different magical powers each worldview made accessible to those who held to it.
How did you work to make the game approachable for diverse audiences?
I did a lot of reading and researching, over the past several years, on inclusive gaming, representation, cultural appropriation, and toxic tropes. I would love to guarantee that this meant none of my ignorances and biases made it into the text, but I know I can not. I welcome feedback.
I did strive to make sure that every culture I created was not just a thin stereotype of a culture in this world, but an outline including fashion, economy, government, values which are celebrated, birth and death rituals, and thoughts as to how both their magic and interactions with other cultures have influenced them over time.
While there are some cultures I wrote with assumptions about gender which cause the titles at the top of government structures to be gendered, every other military or government title (not coincidentally, the ones more likely to be held by player characters) is gender neutral. All of the sample names are presented as gender neutral. My example characters at the end of each nation write-up include one who has masculine pronouns, one who has feminine pronouns, and one who has the gender neutral singular they as a pronoun.
In two of the three empires, sexual orientation is not an in-world issue. The Ambrosian Empire is so regulated that all long-term relationships are formed by contract with clauses on intent, duration, and renegotiation. The Konung Empire is so filled with anarchy that alliances and betrayals don’t consider sexual orientation on more than the most personal level of mutual compatibility. The Utopian Empire has rules about who you can have children with, and I’m belatedly realizing I’m going to have to expand those rules to include adoption because sexual orientation is not properly a key factor for them, either.
Smaller societies include the Wayfarers who have arranged marriages to promote traits they want in future generation, the Ice Guardians who have arranged Handfastings which teams up skills and strengths to create pairs of hands that work for the Guardians, and may or may not include sex between the two partners, and the Chosen Tribes, who do not have a concept like marriage, but have a strong concept of consent.
I am hoping everyone who sits down to play this game is able to see people like them, and create people like they want to be.
Tell me a little about the world of Four Corners. What kind of characters and environments do you see during play, and what kind of stories can you tell?
The world, with a few magical exceptions, has a technology level equal to ours about 2000 years ago. There is one main continent, with four corners. Three empires have split most of the continent between them, and kraken- magically giant squid- destroy any ship that goes too far from land. Each of the three empires want to take over the entire continent, but they are fairly equally balanced in power, and they are not the only ones fighting to have their worldview be either dominant, or at least independent.
You might choose to be a member of the unofficial shadow empire, gathering evidence for judges as to what really happened in the cases they preside over. You might choose to be a sorcerer of steam and clockwork obsessed with creating something no one ever has before, in a castle long ruined by warfare and anarchy. You might choose to be a weather mage, uninterested in fighting with your neighbours over when it should rain, instead living on shipboard with a captain choosing the day’s forecast. You might choose to be a functionally redundant bureaucrat in a city of over 500,000 residents, with certain wild animals given social precedence over yourself so that you have to give way to horses during court banquets, and you quietly pass messages on behalf of an estranged Empress who is said to value ability over bloodline. You might risk your life travelling across the country, arranging faked deaths and real marriages between clans who refuse to leave their conquered homelands. You might choose to join the Air Forces with a bunch of hedonistic dragonriders and fly against an enemy that has learned to craft arrowheads that can disenchant dragons, causing them to fall apart in mid-air. You might lead a rebellion against the conquering of your homeland, disavowed by your leaders and facing a hierarchy-worshipping army which has learned to work together to rain fire down from the skies. You might be a visionary, seeing a new way to relate to the elements, and upsetting every status quo by introducing a new religion, and a new sorcery.
I encourage stories where you think about what it means to make the world a better place, then step up and do something about it, whether through wit, diplomacy, battle, or magic. There are many places on Tetra where a hero is needed.
Today I have a brief interview with Marissa Kelly on the Bluebeard’s Bride RPG, currently on Kickstarter. I played an early version of Bluebeard’s Bride, and a second session as well, and really enjoyed it, so I hope you all enjoy reading about it and check out the Kickstarter.
From the Kickstarter:
Bluebeard’s Bride is an investigatory horror tabletop roleplaying game for 3-5 players, written and designed by Whitney “Strix” Beltrán, Marissa Kelly, and Sarah Richardson, and based on the Bluebeard fairy tale.
In this game you and your friends explore Bluebeard’s home as the Bride, creating your own beautifully tragic version of the dark fairy tale. Investigate rooms, discover the truth of what happened, experience the nightmarish phantasmagoria of this broken place, and decide whether or not you are a faithful or disloyal bride.
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The story of Bluebeard is not commonly known in modern fairy tales, and is definitely not a media favorite. What inspired you to use this specific fairy tale to make a game?
The idea came from Sarah and Strix at the Hacking as Women event. As their coach, I was excited to hear that the fairy tale lent itself so well to the PBtA framework. It seemed like a great way to frame an elegant horror game without getting bogged down by too many preconceived ideas about what the player experience should be.
Tell me a little about the design process. I played the game at an earlier stage, and a second time a while later, but I haven’t seen the final product. What iterations did you have to go through to make the game an experience true to your intentions?
The game has certainly gone through many iterations. A lot of trimming, gutting, and trial and error. One of the biggest changes we went through was shifting a large part of the game to a diceless mechanic. I felt we had been running up against a wall with the Maiden moves, but eventually (with the help of a wonderful group of playtesters) we found a solution. This shift feels to me like a nod to old ghost stories that influence so much horror we all know and love.
Bluebeard’s Bride has a tendency (in my experience) to touch on some really intense, and sometimes difficult, topics (including domestic abuse). What safety measures do you have in place for the game, and how are you preparing the game materials to address those things respectfully? Yep! This horror game can touch on all of those things, so the game has advice, tips, and rules for helping the players and Groundskeeper manage any real out-of-character conflicts that might arise. For example, we use a variant of the X-card developed by John Stavropoulos that promotes self-care and dispels the expectation that anyone at the table will have to be a mind reader.
How does Bluebeard’s Bride encourage the players to work together to tell a story, while allowing conflict between the parts of the Bride’s psyche? It helps that we trapped all the players in the body of one woman! We have made space for disagreement within the Bride’s own mind. If a player has the Bride act in a way that one player didn’t agree with, the Ring mechanic allows them to take control and guide her actions when it is their turn.
When all is said and done, what game elements do you think help the most to guide the story through horror and twisted narrative to its inevitable – and hopefully satisfying – conclusion? We have tools called Room Threats and Groundskeeper Moves that help guide the players through consistent bouts of horror. These Threats and Moves point at one of the cores of horror – that of personal, intimate fears. We also baked the conclusion of the fairy tale into the game so player’s choices will directly impact the telling of their tale. —
Thanks to Marissa for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading and get the chance to check out Bluebeard’s Bride on Kickstarter!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
Today’s interview is with Darren Watts for his project Golden Age Champions, a setting book for the Champions superheroic game using the generic Hero system. It’s currently on Kickstarter, waiting for you to check it out! Let’s see what Darren had to say about his project.
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Tell me a little about Golden Age Champions. What excites you about it?
Golden Age Champions is a setting book for Champions, the superhero game using the generic Hero System that’s been around in various editions since 1981. Specifically, it describes the Champions Universe (the modern version of which I co-wrote with Steve Long back in 2002) of 1938 to 1950, but more importantly it teaches GMs and players about the genre of Golden Age superheroing. We go into extensive discussion of the tropes, the styles of play, and the kinds of stories you can use these building blocks to tell at your table.
The Golden Age is at the same time similar and alien to fans of modern superheroing. Many of your favorite characters were created then: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain America. But the Golden versions of those characters aren’t exactly quite the same as the ones you know. Many of the assumptions we make about how superheroes “work” were set back then, but again there are plenty of concepts that will be brand new to today’s gamers and fans. There are hundreds of superheroes in the period you’ve never heard of, and some of them are downright boggling.
The book is also a lot about how to run historical long-term campaigns. I’ve run several for years at a time, starting well before the war and carrying all the way through and past it. How do superhumans go to war? How do simple characters grow and change over time? How do we play with these amazing, imagination-charged concepts that don’t quite fit modern sensibilities? Indeed, how do we address the differences between then and today; both the social ones (the unfortunately-all-too-common racism and sexism, the ever-present shadow of the war) and the more technical ones (why do these characters keep splitting up?) that make for rough gaming at today’s table?
For some background, can you tell me about the game system Golden Age Champions is a supplement for?
Champions runs on the Hero System, a generic point-buy system that first debuted in 1981 and originally created by Steve Peterson and George McDonald. It’s famously crunchy, but most of the crunch is in character creation. It’s designed with a great many “adjustable settings” so that it can simulate a wide range of genres and play styles. Most Hero books focus on a specific setting or genre, so it scores very high on the “simulationist” axis. There have been six editions over the years, and I was president of the company for the last two of them.
The Champions Universe is the long-running fictional superhero setting for Champions. It’s also the basis for the MMO Champions Online, who are the actual IP holders and our business partners. I’ve kind of been the keeper of continuity since I wrote most the 5th Ed Champions Universe back in 2002.
Tell me some exciting things about running long-term campaigns! What kind of information do you have in the book for GMs to make them happen?
Well, the first thing you have to do is get great players! Or teach them to be great, I suppose, but I’ve been very lucky over the years. Then, you have to get them invested in the setting, which needs to be both deep enough to hold their interest and yet open enough that they have room to contribute and take some ownership. In this case I follow Ken Hite’s truism, “nothing is as interesting as the real world.” World War II is such a fascinating period, and I try very hard to bring it alive for the players. In my campaigns we have a very strong sense of time and place, moving month by month through the war and letting the great narrative of the actual history inform everything we do.
With superheroes in particular, you have to be careful. Players coming to a GA setting are presumably at least somewhat interested in the war itself from a historical basis, which means among other things they want the setting to remain based in the historical reality. They want to see Pearl Harbor, D-Day, Berlin, etc. and participate in it all on some level. But with characters who are too powerful, there’s also a strong pull to the question of “why didn’t Superman and Green Lantern and the Spectre, etc., all just fly to Tokyo on December 8th and stomp it flat, and while they’re at it take out Berlin on the 9th?” The tension created by those answers is interesting and fertile, I think.
How did you approach the sometimes-tough topics of racism and sexism in the era? Did you address any other issues like homophobia?
Well, I stay aware that I’m telling superhero stories, and so most of my characters are broad and the heroes in particular are idealized. But on the other hand I don’t want to ignore the range of people’s experiences or to whitewash history. My game includes female characters who show considerably more agency and breadth than most period comics (Wonder Woman as a notable exception!), and I have heroes who are POCs which were vanishingly rare in the period. As idealized heroes, we kind of default to an ahistorical sense of social justice because that’s just nicer to play. However, we do talk about the sexism and particularly the racism that motivated a lot of the horror on all sides of the war (and the US was a terrible offender itself- one of the sample heroes is a nisei from California who is fighting for a country who is currently imprisoning his family.) As superhero stories do, we can also talk in grand allegory- the Atlanteans are terribly prejudiced against airbreathers, and “lander” is one of the nastiest words in their vocabularies. I haven’t specifically talked much about homophobia in the book, but one character is clearly gay and again, in this idealized setting, his teammates know and help him keep it from becoming public.
[Blogger note: POC stands for people of color, just in case you didn’t know!]
Can you offer some of the concepts you think will be new to gamers and fans today, to help players and GMs understand what they might be getting into?
I’m not sure there’s anything “brand new” in either the rules or setting- I’m trying to reintroduce a quite old thing, actually, as far as the genre goes. If you’ve never been exposed to the sheer joy in goofy creativity of the period comics, then I hope to show you what’s lovable about it. Comics at the time were initially intended for small children, and it took publishers a few years to realize the size of their adult audience- Captain Marvel was the best selling periodical at military PX’s, beating out magazines like Time and Life!
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Golden Age Championssounds pretty cool! There’s a lot to think about in the world of superheroes, and it looks like Darren has done a fair amount of that. Check out the game on Kickstarter, and share this interview to spread the word if you like it!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
Today I have an interview with Ben Robbins on the game Follow, which is currently on Kickstarter. You may have heard about Followon Google+ or other blog posts, but I hope you’ll find something interesting in his responses below. Enjoy!
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Tell me a little about Follow. What excites you about it?
Follow is a deceptively simple game: you pick a quest, make a group of characters to tackle it, then play and see what happens. The quests provided cover a variety of stories, from slaying a dragon, to colonizing a planet, to getting a candidate elected — anything where people are working together to accomplish a goal.
I sit down and play with random groups all the time — many strangers and many people who have no experience with this kind of game — so I’m keenly aware of the challenges of teaching games and getting people on the same fictional page. I made Follow to be a game you could whip out when you wanted to just sit down and get straight to the good stuff. I wanted it to reduce the barrier between wanting to play and actually doing it.
People have joked that getting our characters to work together in the quest reflects what’s happening at the table — trying to get the players to work together to play a game — and they’re exactly right.
Can you tell me about the mechanical and structural setup for a standard game of Follow?
Quest templates provide the framework for your game. You pick one and that walks you through setting up your situation, establishing what makes your quest difficult, and creating the fellowship of characters that will try to tackle it.
Play centers around challenges. Each is a chapter of the quest and establishes the next step the fellowship needs to take to move closer to their goal. We play scenes to see how the fellowship deals with the challenge (and each other) and at the end of each challenge we draw stones to see whether we succeeded or failed, plus any fallout to the fellowship. We might lose characters or even be betrayed by someone in the fellowship.
What about Kingdom and Microscope prepared you for designing Follow, and what do you think is really different about the game?
I play my own games over and over again, both before and after I release them, so I really get to know all their strengths and weaknesses. I try not to harbor any illusions about them.
Because I play pickup games a lot, I’m very focused on the game as a set of instructions that someone at the table is trying to process and execute in real-time. Anything that slows that process down or requires a lot of page flipping or causes confusion can really kill the fun. Microscope is conceptually a very unusual game, but put a lot of work into making the process of play easy and intuitive. Simple actually takes a lot more work than complex.
Thematically, Follow shares some similarities to Kingdom. I love Kingdom, and it makes incredibly good stories at the table, but I’d be the first to admit that there are a lot of rules to absorb for a one-shot. There’s a pay-off but there’s definitely a learning curve. With Follow I tried a very different approach to capture the “united but divided” feeling of Kingdom but make it much simpler and easier to play.
How did you go about designing the game for replayability? It’s a huge challenge. What keeps players from getting bored or feeling like they’re just running over the same ground?
Replayability is a huge priority for me. I really can’t overstate that. Every time you learn a new game, you spend minutes or hours just processing rules. Playtime is precious and rare, so if you don’t play that game a bunch you’re getting a minimal return on that time investment.
To maximize replayability, I start with a structural concept instead of something specific to a setting or genre. Microscope makes histories. It doesn’t matter if it’s science fiction or a zombie apocalypse or the Wild West. Kingdom is about communities. Any kind of community works, because the game focuses on how people interact and influence their community, rather than a particular type of organization. Same with Follow: “Working together to accomplish a goal” applies to a vast range of situations.
The trick (I think) is to really drill down to the heart of the structure or pattern you’re modeling. If you get that right, it works. Like the power/perspective/touchstone breakdown in Kingdom: once you see that distinction you start to notice it in organizations all around you. I want my model to feel like something that’s true, rather than an artifact of the game.
Do you have any mechanics or tools in place to help guide content and keep players comfortable as part of Follow?
When I started running Story Games Seattle back in 2010 and really started gaming with strangers all the time, I included an abbreviated version of Lines & Veils from Ron Edwards’ game Sorcerer as part of the welcome spiel at the start of every meetup. We’ve done that ever since, though we recently switched from calling it “the Veil” to “the X” (as in, “let’s X that out”), partially to eliminate some confusion about how we differed from the original Veil concept but also to make the phrase more similar to the X-card, which had gained a lot of popularity — they’re not exactly identical, but if you’ve used one you’ll go “ah, got it!” when you encounter the other.
An important part of the X is that it is *not* part of the rules of the game. It trumps the rules of any game you’re playing. That’s a very important distinction, because we’ve seen cases where players mistakenly thought they couldn’t X something out because of a particular game they were in. So I think the proper place for these kind of overarching “social contract” rules is sidebars that explain that, and also encourage using them in *any* game you play.
Honestly I think we’ve only scratched the surface of this kind of communication & consent in role-playing games. We’re way behind where we should be after decades of role-playing. And as a designer I’m a little concerned that if I codify something it will be antiquated or even seem counterproductive to me by the time the game is a year old. It’s not such a big deal to have out-dated mechanics for stabbing dragons in your game, but giving out-dated advice about how to handle player discomfort is potentially much more serious. At least that’s how I see it. It’s a discussion and exploration that’s happening right now. The technology is evolving as we speak.
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Thanks so much to Ben for participating in the interview! I hope you all check outFollow on Kickstarter, and that you enjoyed reading Ben’s responses.
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
