Tag: tabletop

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Five or So Questions with Fraser Ronald on Swords Edge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are the fictional inspirations for Sword’s Edge? 

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

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

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

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

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Five or So Questions with John Adamus on Noir World

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Patreon Spotlight – James E. Shields

Today I’m trying something new, and not sure if it’ll recur, so let me know your thoughts.



James Shields has a cool Patreon through which he creates custom RPG Stock Illustrations. It’s been around for a couple of years, and involves his patrons giving feedback and input into what art is created. I interviewed James as well as asking him to provide information on his process. Check it out!

When I asked about James’ process, he responded:

So here is my ideal process. 

Somewhere there is an incredible independent creator with awesome RPG ideas but
without the budget to commission some of the illustrations they want. 

Somehow they learn about one of my Stock Art Patreon projects and jumps on board.
Every month I post and ask for ideas. 

Patrons are encouraged to comment on each others ideas to make the artwork more versatile. (Example: If the idea is for a Wild Elf with antlers, another patron may ask for moose antlers. If that’s good with the original patron, I roll with the adjusted idea.) They then vote on each other’s submissions by liking them on the post.

At the end of the month, I tally up all the submissions and votes. I then release a list of the upcoming art and the process starts all over again. On the 1st of month, patrons are charged their pledge level for each pack I released. After pledges clear, I send them links to the files for them to download at their convenience.

James also provided a FAQ:

What can I do if I can’t afford X amount 3 or 4 times a month?
Patreon allows you to set a cap, or maximum number of creations you want to support each month. You will receive the packs that your pledge covered. 

What if my submitted idea was in a pack that my pledge cap kept me from supporting? I give my patrons the illustration from their idea anyways.

How many ideas may I submit?
As many as you want. In the future I may set a limit, but only if submissions get unruly. 

Can’t I just get your art when you release it via Drivethru, RPGNow, TabletopLibrary, etc?
Yes. Yes, you can. The dilemma is -when-. Uploading stock art is time consuming, so
I don’t release very often. As of this writing, I am somewhere over a year and a half behind.My patrons get the artwork first. Long before anybody else.

What are the license restrictions?
Ohhh… these are fun. Actually, I’m pretty liberal as far as this is concerned.
You can use the artwork forever. You just can’t sell it as stock, posters, printable miniatures, or anything else where the artwork is the main product. You also can’t use it in offensive projects. Other than that, just create something awesome.

You should also let me have a copy. Well, that part’s not required, but I’m a gamer and
love to see where my art is used. 

Are there any restrictions to what ideas I may submit? 

Yes, but they aren’t a lot. I don’t illustrate nudity nor will I create provocative poses/images. I won’t draw images of intellectual property, though I will do images inspired by them.

Also, a question that hasn’t been asked that is totally viable- I’m not an independent game developer. Can I still support the project? 

Totally. There is nothing to stop people from submitting their RPG character for me to draw and them to see in printed RPG products. Totally cool. 

As of this writing I do have only one remaining Top Tier slot where I guarantee to draw one of their submissions every month. At $25, you can’t get my art at a better deal.

Last thing I can think of. You are completely welcome to pledge to support my project just to see it from a patron’s point of view and cancel your pledge as soon as you’ve seen as much as you’d like. Feel free to take and post any screenshots as a patron if you choose this route. I won’t be posting any artwork for another two weeks so there won’t be any charges during that time. 

Finally I asked James a few questions!

What is your background in creating art both for and not for RPGs?

My first intro to drawing RPG art was in my first roleplaying group as a teen. My parents convinced me to go to school beyond high school instead of trying to dive into drawing comics. After I graduated from the Art Institute of Dallas, I worked for a game company for a year and a half before they went bankrupt. Except for a few drawings here and there, that was the last I would create artwork for about 10 years. After my second deployment with the Marine Corps, my wife convinced me to use my artistic abilities for something, so I dove into freelancing. I didn’t really know what I was doing but I did know that I loved to create artwork like the ones I had been introduced to in my teens, and as I developed as a freelancer I began focusing more and more on roleplaying because they were the projects I loved. I know it’s not the smartest financial decision but these are the things I get excited about. Another artist pointed me towards Patreon and that’s where I got the idea to provide something for independent game developers that would be in between pure stock and fully commissioned. I’ve been freelancing for over 3 years now and I love it.

What mediums do you use for your art?

Hard lead pencil on cardstock for sketching, followed by Faber-Castell inks.
I then scan and color in Photoshop. Occasionally, I’ll paint digitally in Photoshop.

How do you respond when there isn’t a lot of patron engagement?

I’ll have to let you know when I get to that. The Patreon has always had patrons submitting ideas, but I recently moved the discussion away from a Google doc submission form to discussions and votes via posts on the Patreon website and interaction has exploded. Patreon sent me a message at the end of the year to let me know that my Patreon was more engaged than 95% of any other Patreon project. To answer your question more directly, all it takes is one patron to submit an idea for each category and I have content for the next pack. Occasionally I draw my own ideas, but that is rare and now if I have an idea I’d like to illustrate myself, I include it in the votes. I think it was in December, my youngest child (age 6) was talking about alligators, except it kept coming out as ‘owl-igators’ and I knew I just HAD to draw it, so I posted it as a submission for patrons to vote on. If it wasn’t popular I wouldn’t draw it, but they loved the idea enough that I got to include it.

Cool! Thanks James! You can find James’ Patreon at Patreon.com/Jeshields. If his work sounds interesting to you, go ahead and give it a look!


James also has genre specific Patreon projects:
Purely black and white fantasy art – Patreon.com/JeFantasy
Purely black and white sci-fi art – Patreon.com/JeSciFi

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

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Thoughty: Talking Companions Tale with Laura Simpson

Check out my interview with Laura Simpson on Companions’ Tale, currently on Kickstarter!

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

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Town Beginnings in Turn

So +John W. Sheldon wrote a little about the Town Building rules* for my shapeshifter game, Turn, which I discussed recently. I wanted to include a brief rundown and some pictures of a sample town I built today! The pics are a little rough because they’re on a glass table with dry erase, but eh. Anyway!

The start of the town is this:

  • The name
  • The type of town (there’s a list to choose from)
  • The population
    and
  • The square miles of the town proper

Each town type comes with some themes, like tradition or poverty or something like that. Starting out from the town center, you can add themes, locations, events, and bloodlines. From those, you can add further locations, bloodlines, and events.

In the pictures, you’ll see I built the following town:

Westin
Industrial
Pop. 2000
Sq. Mi. 3

(You can tell it’s a low population town but it’s waaaay spread out.)

The options for themes for industrial towns include (but aren’t limited to) poverty, resentment, wealth, tradition, and waste. I added those!

I attached some locations, too, like the Mill, and Main Street, and from resentment, the Church.

Then I added the bloodlines, which are the families in the town, like the Blakes (tied to the Church), the Coopers (tied to Poverty), Tuckers (tied to Main St.), Westins (tied to the Mill), and the Lewis family (tied to wealth). These don’t all have to connect, but I did it for fun. 

Now there’s a whole town! It doesn’t represent locations, but you can see how different things might fit together and where trouble might start.

Hope you enjoy this glimpse!

*He’s written more posts, too!

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

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Creators in Need

To be added to next month’s list please respond to this survey by March 5, 2017, midnight, EST.

I recently posted on Google+ asking that game-related creators in hardship respond to my post with their various product sales pages or portfolios. I got quite a few responses, which is both great (lots of people to share about!) and bad (lots of hardship!).

I didn’t ask people why they needed help, but did say if they wanted to include information they could provide it. Please don’t judge people for not providing reasoning, or assume there is none. Some of us keep our hurts private. There is no particular order except those who responded first.

If you like the work of any of the people who I’ve shared information about below, and you have some money to spare, please take some time to support them! 

I will note: this is extremely guy heavy. If you are frustrated I did not include enough women and NB people in hardship, please keep in mind that I am not scouring the internet for these things. I need people to self identify their work and their needs for everything I do on this blog. I try to keep an eye out, but there is only so much I can do. I may be doing this on a more regular basis, so please look out for the next post. Also feel free to reshare this with your own links!

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Josh T. Jordan – Ginger Goat Games, Freelance
Josh is trying to pay off medical bills for family (wife and kids).
DriveThru RPG
LinkedIn

Tod Foley – Project Ubi
Tod Foley wants to hire artists for UbiquiCity.
Patreon

Craig Judd – Editor, Layout Artist, Graphic Designer, Manga Artist
Craig is working to meet needs and pay bills.
Portfolio Site

Brandon Williams – Arcanum Syndicate (Creator of Demon Gate)
Brandon is looking for collaboration as well as to bring in more talent for projects.
Arcanum Syndicate site


Michael McKensie – Graphic Artist
Michael is looking to move to games and graphic arts full time.
Portfolio Site

Lissi Leuterio – Animator, Storyboard Artist, and Illustrator (primarily 2D FX + boards)
Lissi is currently job hunting, and doing sporadic commissions work.
Tumblr
Patreon
Vimeo

Tom McGrenery – Writer and Editor
Tom notes “bills to pay and mouths to feed.” 
Portfolio Site

Max “Drunken Dwarf” Havic – Writer, Designer (Galaxy Incorporated)
Max has an upcoming Kickstarter.
DriveThru RPG

Chris Kentlea – RPG-Related Designer
Chris notes “always in need of a little help.”
Facebook

David Schirduan – Game Designer 
David is looking to catch up on medical bills.
Schirduans Site
If you enjoy David’s free work, please send a thank you or PayPal what you’d like to davidschirduan@gmail.com.

Mad Martian One – Game Design (Ice Kingdoms)
Mad Martian are releasing content for Ice Kingdoms and looking to raise awareness. 
LuLu
CreateSpace
DriveThru RPG
Facebook

Ashton McAllan – Game Designer (The Republic)
Ashton’s using games as supplemental income and to support an out of work partner.
The Republic Site
DMs Guild

Moses Wildermuth – Editor, Creator (Gold & Glory, Ice Kingdoms, Mutazoids)
Moses has experienced a reduction in the income that allowed design work on the side.
Patreon


David Berg – Game Designer (Within My Clutches)
David is looking for financial support during some life stresses.
Shrike Design

Gennifer Bone – Artist
Gennifer is moving and aiming to reduce debts. 
Patreon
Blog

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Thank you to everyone who has read, and to those who shared their needs! Speaking up is a hard thing to do, but a good one. I hope you all have the opportunity to check out the sites and projects above, and enjoy what you find – and support the creators while you do!

Please share this widely! 

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Five or So Questions with Storybrewers Games on Alas for the Awful Sea

Today I have an interview with the creators of Alas for the Awful Sea, a PbtA game currently on Kickstarter noted as being about “why people hate, and what they fear.” I imagine you can see why I was excited to interview them! Hayley Gordon and Veronica Hendro (Vee) from Storybrewers Games answered my questions below!

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Tell me a little about Alas for the Awful Sea. What excites you about it?

Vee: Alas for the Awful Sea is a tabletop RPG about politics, folklore, and the human heart set in a rural 19th century UK town desperate to survive. You can read more about it on Kickstarter and our website. What excites me about it is the game’s focus on a grey moral landscape. The setting focuses on the toughness of daily life and the choices people make in order to survive.
Hayley: Damn it Vee, that’s also what excites me most! But I also get excited about the narrative focus of the game, and the way the Apocalypse World system allows us to zoom in on small moments, and ask questions of the world.

What were your goals for integrating setting and theme in Alas for the Awful Sea? What do you want to see mirrored between emotion and fiction?
Hayley: I was lucky, the setting and theme integrated itself! The themes in Alas really arose from what was happening historically at the time. Poverty, crime, and political turmoil characterised the rural experience in 1800s UK, especially in Wales, Scotland and Ireland. We’ve really tried to tease that out by incorporating conflicts as part of our recommended process for creating a story in the world of Alas. Emotionally, my aim is for players to experience the difficult and desperation these themes present, and the experience of navigating that. So the emotion sort of arises from the fiction directly.
Vee: I agree, and I’ll just add from my perspective of the art direction and design side of things that for me, what we wanted to achieve with the integration of setting and theme is encapsulated in the cover illustration of the book. The muted colours of the setting reflects and amplifies the internal struggles of the woman which is a strong theme in our book.
What have you done with Powered by the Apocalypse mechanics to make the game fit the game concept?
Hayley: The basic moves have remained fairly similar, although we have updated them to fit the theme and tone of the game. Mechanically, the theme comes through in Alas’ character sheets and custom moves. We were really excited to hit a stretch goal in the Kickstarter recently that will allow us to add “descriptors” – attributes like clansman and lover which will come with their own unique bond and custom moves. These have the potential to marry the theme and mechanics of the game even further. 
Vee: But I think, beyond the mechanics of the game and to the way stories are told in Alas, we changed the way an ‘adventure’ is plotted out. We adapted the idea of ‘fronts’ into ‘encounter families.’ Each family is centred around a central piece of the fiction, such as a person or place, but also a central conflict. Within the family sit individual encounters that GMs can draw on when they feel it is most appropriate.
What have you done for research for the setting and concept?
Hayley: I read a lot of history around the period, including 3rd party sources, but also journals which I found really useful for understanding the concerns of the time. My most exciting find however was a book of folktales published in the 19th century called The Wind and the Waves. The author had lived in the Hebrides, and had recorded many of the folktales in the form of stories that were told to him. He also writes in this amazing and very moving poetic style. If I could capture a small fraction of that pathos in Alas I would be stoked.
What are some of the stories you think can be told with Alas for the Awful Sea?
Hayley: At its heart, Alas is for telling stories about conflict between ideologies, and the tough choices this creates. It’s best for telling very personal stories with lots at stake to the individuals within them. It’s not great at telling the stories of heroes triumphing over evil, or of battles and large scale conflicts.
Vee: In terms of the specifics, the kind of things you might see include sea voyages, the ecosystems of small towns and rural areas, attempts to seek out or defend from the supernatural, conflicts between families or between the rich and the poor. But I’m sure those GMing Alas will invent amazing stories and ideas we never could have dreamed of!
Hayley: It’s more about the emotions and drive behind the story than exactly where it’s set and what happens with Alas I think.
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Thanks so much to Hayley and Vee for doing this interview! Make sure to check out Alas for the Awful Sea on Kickstarter now if this piqued your interest, and share the interview with your friends!

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

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Five or So Questions with Elizabeth Chaipraditkul on The Monster

Today I have an interview with Elizabeth Chaipraditkul about her current project, The Monster, which is on Kickstarter! The Monster is an illustrated novel with a haunted house tucked inside. Check out more below!

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Tell me a little about The Monster. What excites you about it?

I was a really weird kid and while going through old stuff of mine my mom kept I came across a whole slew of books I created between the ages of seven and eight. I typed up and illustrated all these stories and then got my teachers to take them to the school library so they could be sewn together.

The Monster is one of these stories. Reading it back as an adult it’s obvious writing was a way for me to deal with a lot of things and this story is mainly about sexuality, fear, and death. I thought it would be fun to re-write this story as an adult and get someone to illustrate it. And since I am now a big gamer, we’re also turning the story into a system-neutral giant gameable dungeon. Gennifer Bone is the amazing illustrator who will be making the new image and Glynn Seal of Monkey Blood Designs will be making the maps.

In the end, the book we will produce with the Kickstarter will have the original story, a new story, and an epic map with room descriptions to explore.

What are the type of stories you would like players to tell in the dungeon?

There is a lot you could do in the dungeon. The first, and I guess most obvious, would be a dungeon crawl – killing a bunch of monsters and getting the heck out of there. However, the dungeon is essentially one huge and weird haunted house map, so there are a lot possibility for play. It could set the scene for a really intense Monsterhearts pay session – teenage drama in a house that is trying to kill the players. Or it could be a place your coterie of vampires have to explore in Vampire the Masquerade maybe a few local neonates have gone missing and the Prince sends in the players to investigate. The red thread through all these stories is gonna be exploration and the fun is gonna be seeing what is behind every door of the house.

What are some ways you explored those topics – sexuality, fear, and death – in The Monster?

I’ve always seen the written word as something you can play around with and try out things that may seem strange or exciting. In the monster I explore the themes of sexuality, death, and fear in a few rather funny ways. When the children are faced with the monster chasing them, in fear for his mortal life one of the boys reminiscences about home and the smell of his mother’s cooking. As a kid a played with the idea of death and what I would think of just before my life was snatched away from me – apparently my mom was a great cook.

Likewise, in the story I toy with the ideas of sexuality and death, two concepts that have always been tied to one another in literature (albeit more elegantly than what my eight year old self could produce). I wrote about the fear of bodily exposure and what that meant to a little girl who was scared.

What are you doing with the dungeon to make it system-neutral while still packing a good punch?

What we aim to do is give GMs a lot of information about each room – weird things their players can find, experience, and speak to. Since the dungeon is designed to be system neutral, we are gonna make sure there is enough information for GMs to use. We’ll also include a lot of random generators for the rooms (at least one for each) so the dungeon is repayable and strange. For example, we have a limb removal generator, roll 1d4, and one of your limbs falls off – perfectly intact and still moving – good luck getting it reattached.


What sort of new story are you hoping to tell to accompany the original, and what themes does it bring forth?

Mainly, I’d like to delve into all the information I put on each page. The original story jumps from one place to another in the truly hectic style of a kid and I would like to add some continuity. Like at one point in the story a young boy’s arm falls off – it just falls off and that is about it. I’d like to go into why and how.

Also, the original story is quite comical which was totally unintentional, but as an adult you just have to read it and chuckle. I’d like to add some real horror to the story, while still keeping the soul of the old story.

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Awesome! Thanks so much Liz for answering my questions about The Monster. If the project sounds interesting to you, my readers, please check it out on Kickstarter!

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

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Five or So Questions with Chris Longhurst on Pigsmoke

Today I have an interview with Chris Longhurst about the new Powered by the Apocalypse wizard school game, Pigsmoke! Pigsmoke is currently in its last few days on Kickstarter. Check out the interview below.

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

Pigsmoke is a game about playing jaded academics at a magical college — an amalgamation of Harry Potter and The Thick Of It, to use two cultural touchstones that everyone probably knows about.

What excites me about Pigsmoke — or any game, really — is the potential of the stories it helps you tell. And Pigsmoke is, as far as I know, breaking new ground by telling stories about the lives of academics under impossible demands. Like, ‘magic school’ RPGs are plentiful but you’re always playing the students, and RPGs where you play wizards are plentiful, and RPGs where you play academics are… Ars Magica. But Pigsmoke sits in a neat little intersection between all those that none of them really explore.

Also it’s PbtA, and I’m a huge fan of PbtA as a system.

What have you done with the PbtA system to make it suit the concept and themes of Pigsmoke?

I haven’t done much with the PbtA system, at least not mechanically — there’s a system for tracking time-consuming actions that acts as a limit on how quickly you can do certain things, and I’ve replaced ‘+1 forward’ with a system of advantage and disadvantage stolen pretty much entirely from 5th edition D&D — but I’ve completely replaced all the basic moves to more accurately simulate the life of an academic in a black comedy about bureaucracy. (Imagine a lengthy digression here about how in PbtA the fiction is the mechanics, so changing the fictional triggers and outcomes of the basic moves is changing the mechanics of the game…)

For example, let’s say you want someone to do you a favour. There are no moves for simply asking someone for a favour; if you want someone to do you a solid you either have to butter them up (with the schmooze move), or shout at them until they do what you want (with the scathe move). In fact if you do just ask someone for a favour, that’s likely to trigger an MC move and those are almost always bad for you.

As a result, in the world of Pigsmoke it’s impossible to have a straightforward conversation and exchange of favours. You have to lie to people or intimidate them, and then deal with the complex social tangles those actions generate.

Unless you’re the Networker, which is a playbook built around just being able to ask people for favours, or in the Department of Mindbending, which contains several moves for simply compelling obedience. But in those cases you’ve specifically chosen to be that sort of character doing that sort of thing.

How does magic conceptually and mechanically work and integrate in Pigsmoke?

Conceptually magic in Pigsmoke is vague as anything — it’s meant to be defined as necessary by each group. All that’s required for Pigsmoke to function is a) that magic is something that can be researched and studied in an academic setting and b) that it’s something that can be taught to other people. For other questions about the nature of magic — for example ‘Can anyone learn it, or only the gifted?’ — the real question is ‘Is this relevant to the game right now?’ If no, it’s not important. If yes, make the decision at the table and that’s how it works in that game.

Mechanically, all characters have a Sorcery stat and (except the Fake) access to the cast a spell move. When you use your magic to solve a problem you roll cast a spell and on a hit the problem’s solved — at a greater or lesser cost. If the magic you’re using is outside your department’s specialty, you roll at disadvantage. On top of that the department playbooks have various moves which address specific use of magic — maintaining a mob of walking dead if you’re with Life and Death, predicting the future for Foresight, and so on.

If you’re familiar with Masks you can probably see the influence of the ‘don’t sweat the details’ way that system handles superpowers, which was a strong inspiration for this approach.

What is the fiction of Pigsmoke like?

Goofy.

I mean, it doesn’t have to be that way — the fiction of Pigsmoke is wide open for definition at the table and has room for black, black comedy or even totally serious play if the group is up for it — but pretty much all the prompts in the book lean goofy because that’s the kind of game I run.

Who do you hope will enjoy Pigsmoke and what have you done to make it inclusive for more audiences?

Well naturally I hope everyone enjoys Pigsmoke. I wrote it using singular they instead of he or she, tried to keep explicitly gendered options out of the playbooks (and made sure that the sample names span as many nationalities as I could think of), and I’ll be paying special attention to the characters depicted in the art — I want a good mix of genders, ethnicities, body types, able-bodied vs not, etc. My intent is that anyone should be able to look at this book and see someone at least a little bit like them.

That said, as a hetero-cis white man I’m not really the best at judging this sort of thing — so I’ve hired Katherine Cross (https://twitter.com/Quinnae_Moon) to do a diversity consult for me, and write some additional material about marginalisation and academia so that those issues aren’t just quietly swept under the rug. She’s agreed to do the job but I haven’t seen what she’s written yet, so I can’t really tell you much more than that.

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Thanks so much to Chris for the interview! If you’ve liked reading the interview and have an interest, check out Pigsmoke on Kickstarter right away – only a few days left!

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

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.