worldbuilding – Page 3

Five or So Questions on Princess World

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Kevin Petker about the game Princess World, which is currently on Kickstarter! The game has some fun beginnings – read all about it in the responses below!

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

Princess World, “A Game of Girls who Rule” is a Powered by the Apocalypse role-playing game about playing diverse Princesses from varied realms who are trying to work together, despite their differences, to address problems in their world. The most exciting thing about the game is that it was inspired by my daughter, she literally pitched it to me when she was three-and-a-half (She’s six now) and she’s been a great help in generating ideas and concepts for the game. Princess World is designed to be accessible and engaging to new players, particularly younger ones, and deals a lot with the power and meanings of words, and how phrases can be reinterpreted in different ways. Every character in the game is defined by four essential Truths, which are short narrative phrases; when players start to grasp how to use these Truths to expand the narrative power of their characters in the game, using them as springboards for their imagination. Seeing a player’s eyes light up when they think of a new way to use a Truth makes the whole game worthwhile for me.

The character playbooks with their Truths laid out on a table and an assortment of dice, pens, and a crown headband. — The Truths on the character playbooks.

I’m super curious about the Truths! What are the four Truths and how are they presented to players?

Truths are probably my favorite part of Princess World! Truths are the “powers and abilities” of each Princess, like if you’d list four special things a character in a story or book are good at or known for. Each archetype/playbook has a unique list of four Truths that the player must express about their character. Some are extrinsic to the character, like equipment or things and some are intrinsic to the character, like experiences or legacies, and some purposely blur the line, so that the player can decide.

These Truths are narrative statements, not just descriptive, that give the character options and abilities others probably don’t have access to. For example, a Fairy Princess’s player wouldn’t just say, “I have green hair.” There’s not much they can do with that in a story; it’s mainly just description. If, instead, they said, “My hair consists of the intertwined flowers of Spring.”, then we can think about all the various narrative ideas and options we can unpack from that. Maybe they can use the scent of their hair to calm others, or maybe they can cause other plants to thrive, or maybe they can call on powers of growth and renewal. We’d play to find out the creative options the player could come up with, based on that Truth.

Truths are usually written in the character’s favorite color, unless they’ve been deemed to be Unpleasant, in which case, they’re usually written in black. Before a player writes down a Truth, they express it to the table of players first, and the other players judge the Pleasantness or Unpleasantness of that Truth, before the player writes it down. Being Unpleasant, just means that the other players can immediately see how said Truth has the potential to cause problems for the character, though they could be bad or dangerous as well, but the player can still call on them!

If a Truth is judged to be Unpleasant, the player has the option to accept that trouble or to rephrase the Truth in a way to address any concerns. Most players seem to enjoy having potential trouble brewing for their characters as it can lead to interesting stories.

The Truths can be as direct or as flowery as the player desires, but they’re usually a single sentence. For example, there was a Skateboard Princess who expressed this: “I can’t digest normal food, I eat batteries.” and the table of players was astonished and intrigued. The player went on to explain, “I’m a robot!” Now, they could’ve just expressed the Truth as “I’m a robot.”, but the whole “I eat batteries.” was thought of something more in line with what one would read in a story about a robotic Skateboard Princesses!

As a nonbinary creator, I’d be lax if I didn’t think of kiddos like me – is there space for nonbinary or masculine players or characters in this world, or is it strictly about embracing the feminine “girl” power and identity? How are you framing gender identity for the princesses, with this answer in mind? By this I mean, are there princesses with different body types and presentations like in She-Ra?

I think it’s going to be very tough to overcome the assumption that “princess means girl” in Western culture, but that is not an assumption I make in Princess World; we say “Anyone can be a Princess.” I lean more towards my daughter’s interpretation of princess which is “Someone who is capable and competent, and also pretty cool.” Some of the playbooks lean towards the feminine side, for certain values of feminine, such as the Proper or Fairy Princess, but the player of such characters is not bound by that at all! There are self-defining Skateboard Princeses, rough and tumble Warrior Princesses, and characters that are free to blur the lines in any way the players wish, like the Shadow or Pauper Princess. In the actual text I tend to lean towards female (she/her) or gender inclusive (they/them) pronouns unless I’m talking about a specific character or person who has specified their pronouns.

For the player, if the gender of their character is important to them, they can work to include it in the Truths about their character; if it less of a factor in their interest in the character, it can be included in their descriptive details. In actual play, their have been girl, boy, neither, amalgamated, changing, and artificially gendered Princesses. It’s my goal that players can make character that reflect their desires and interests in what is cool or exciting. Variations in age, body shape, gender, orientation, and even species have all occurred in actual play of Princess World. For me, it’s really exciting to see the fantastic directions players take their character creation in, thinking both inside and outside the box of the archetype they’ve picked. The new She-Ra cartoon has definitely been a touch stone.

With all that being said, there is, in very early development, a playbook that is specifically called the Boy Princess; my daughter wanted that included (she generated the seed ideas for fourteen of the sixteen playbooks we’re working on) and I’m excited to see how players will interpret and expand on that concept!

The character name tents and character portraits for the Space Princess, Pirate Princess, and Shadow Princess, beside some tokens, pens, and index cards. — The character portrait is very important!

Awesome! The Boy Princess sounds my style. Speaking of style, I see that you’re using a system Powered by the Apocalypse. What led you to choose this system, and how have you modified it to suit your unique needs?

Well, I really fell in love with Apocalypse World when I was first introduced to it; it really mapped to my style of facilitating games and gave me words and structures to actually explain what I was doing. Also, it allowed for a very low level of pre-game preparation, something I’m really liking as I have less time to game. I feel that the PbtA approach worked really well for being a Weaver, what we call the “game master” in Princess World, as we stress that they are there to help the other players tell a story about their characters, not a story the Weaver makes up to put the princesses through; that collaboration between all the players, collectively creating the fiction of the narrative is what I find most satisfying in playing PbtA games.

For Princess World, I narrowed things down to four basic moves; all of which are ways of dealing with obstacles or problems that the characters face. Essentially: order things to do what you want, try to change their minds, evade things, fight things; they seem to cover all the ground I want for the players to explore when making choices for their characters. There’s a single auxiliary move that is dependent on how connected a Princess is to another Princess, using a currency we call Threads, which are statements about the characters’ relationships, written down on strips of paper and handed out to other players. As well, every Princess has a special knowledge move that reflect their unique perspective on Princess World, though other Princesses can use their Threads to tap into another Princess’s way of looking at things.

Apocalypse World, and many PbtA games, tend to be pretty loose on framing and pacing scenes; I’ve put a little more structure for that in Princess World, specifically using number of scenes to measure the difficulty or challenge of a situation; the more difficult a challenge is, the more scenes will be required to overcome or resolve it. I’m hoping this will make pacing of the story and sharing spotlight time easier for newer players to grasp and use.

There’s no lists of equipment or gear in Princess World, basically, if it makes sense for a Princess to have access to something, the Weaver is encouraged to say “Yes!”, especially if it’s something the player can narratively unpack from one of their Truths! Encouraging creativity and experimenting with ideas is strongly encouraged!

As a parent, being able to create a world for your kids to play in has got to be amazing. I can see some of this in the Truths, but what are the values and principles you’ve considered in design, and the emotional experiences, that you have made an effort to ensure come across in play?

Yes, it’s been amazing both from a design perspective and from a playing one. Sebastian, my son, has already played Princess World; he created the first Dragon Princess and did an amazing job with her, creating a monstrous Princess who was both scary and kind! Freya hasn’t played yet, but has done some basic role-playing with her cousins. All seem to have really enjoyed it and I’m looking forward to more games with them.

One of the core experiences I wanted to have in Princess World was for the players to have to grapple with the question of “What is important to my character?”, with the subtext asking, “What is important to me?” Many moves and options revolve around choosing to help yourself, to help others, or to help the greater world around you and that, often, you won’t have enough to do all three at once so you’ll need to make hard choices. I interviewed a lot of kids, aged 9-13, during the early development process and I wanted the game to reflect what that age group wanted in a game: that their characters had agency, that they could make important choices, and that their choices mattered; I’m really hoping that Princess World will provide that for players, both new and experienced. So far, it seems to be working.

Three children of varying ages and genders playing with the playsheets and associated documents from Princess World on a floral carpet in a small room, drawing characters and filling in character sheets. — Heck yeah playing on the floor!

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Thanks so much to Kevin for the interview and to the Weaver Princess, Freya, for being such an inspiration! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Princess World on Kickstarter today!

Five or So Questions on Rebel Crown

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Michael Dunn-O’Connor about Rebel Crown, which is currently on Kickstarter! Check out the responses to my questions below!

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Tell me a little about Rebel Crown. What excites you about it?

Rebel Crown is character-driven rpg with a player-facing campaign. Each character playbook focuses on a unique relationship with the claimant and gives that character a driving motivation to remain on this quest. The claimant is its own unique playbook, which thrives on sharing the spotlight with their allies and acting on their council. The campaign is driven by player choices: which factions to ally with and which holdings to pursue. As you group, you play to find out whether the claimant can take their throne and what sacrifices must be made along the way.

What are the various playbooks like, in a few examples of their abilities and how they interact with the game, and what power do they have in the narrative?

A lot of our design process started in the playbooks. I tend to get the most out of campaigns where the characters are deeply connected to one another and have a shared commitment to a goal or objective. Since the premise of a succession crisis lends itself to focusing on the relationship between a Claimant and their allies, that created an opening for us to create purposefully asymmetrical playbooks. Most of that asymmetry has to do with the Claimant playbook. There must be a Claimant at the table, and the other playbooks are sworn allies of the Claimant. This playbook is at the heart of the campaign, but we didn’t want to make a game that follows the story of one player character at the exclusion of the others. So we made the Claimant’s player explicitly responsible for spotlight sharing and reinforced this responsibility through their XP triggers:

The result has been that the Claimant is constantly pulling other characters into the scene to ask their advice, to request a sacrifice, to reward their loyalty. The other playbooks have XP triggers that reward them for taking initiative, to not wait until the Claimant asks for their advice or intercession. Here’s the Devoted:

The flow from these rewards has been really satisfying, and character motivation and relationship is constantly at the center of play.

The playbook special abilities reinforce character dynamics without being too restrictive (especially since special abilities may be chosen from other playbooks).

A sample of the Devoted’s special abilities suggests different approaches to protecting the Claimant (guarding them in battle, defending their name in a public forum, or engaging in duels on their behalf). The Devoted is defined by their love of the claimant, but there are many ways a player might take action on that motivation.

To dig in deeper, in the case of the claimant in play, how does the game guide the player toward a just and moral leadership that would make their claim to power morally superior to the claims of the usurpers?

The moral righteousness of the Claimant’s quest is in many ways the core fruitful void of this system: it’s a driving question that the game can’t answer for you without closing off some of the explorations that make RPGs really compelling. However, we try to direct play toward this question in thoughtful ways.

One way is the way that each sortie generates Unrest for the retinue, and more destructive sorties produce significantly more Unrest. The sortie objectives push the retinue to gain new objectives and ingratiate themselves with powerful factions, but the consequences of this expansion often impact the common people of your holdings the most. Here are the Entanglements you might roll at the highest level of Unrest:

Unrest provides a slow creep of consequences for the people your Claimant has sworn to protect and provide for. How they address these consequences is an unavoidable topic of play.

The playbook that most explicitly focuses on the question of just rule and moral leadership is the Idealist, who has allied with the Claimant because they believe it is a path to the greater good. The Idealist’s XP triggers put pressure on the Claimant to do the right thing even when it’s not expedient and encourage the Idealist to keep that question of moral leadership right at the forefront of play.

*Draft playbooks with some fun thematic details.*

I note that you talk about expressing your heritage, background, or trauma. How are players supported within the game in regards to traumatic or triggering content, and also, speaking of heritages, are you involving sensitivity readers in the project?

Trauma is a term from Blades in the Dark that appears in many Forged in the Dark games. We replaced that mechanic with ‘Scars’. When a character’s Stress exceeds their limitations, they must choose whether to take one final action before collapsing or to pull themselves together and carry on. We both wanted to avoid the term Trauma given its specific meaning in the context of psychology, and we wanted to rework the mechanic to provide more player choice in the moment.

We’re working on integrating safety tools into the rules text. I’ve been influenced in this regard by playing with some folks through The Gauntlet’s community. We want to provide clear prompts on CATS (content, aim, subject matter, tone) that people could leverage when introducing the game to a group. We’ll also encourage the use of Lines & Veils and the X cards. When we run are games at Games on Demand, these are the tools we’ve used and we want to provide the same resources to folks running it on their own.

The design team is just Eric and me; we haven’t brought in outside readers, though our playtesters have given a lot of valuable feedback on how we can directly address the more problematic aspects of any fiction set in a feudal setting.

What does an average session look like, including the sorties you mention (a term some of my readers may be unfamiliar with)?

A typical session runs through three phases:Recon: In which the retinue (the Claimant and the allies) gather information about other factions and identify an objective.

The Sortie: The main ‘mission’ of the session. This could be an attack on an enemy faction, a diplomatic meeting, or an attempt to drive off wraiths from a vulnerable holding. The goal of a Sortie is typically to gain a new Holding (some property or asset) for the Claimant’s Domain, to strengthen relations with another faction, or to weaken an enemy faction in some way. The retinue may also seek to vassalize another faction, bringing them under the Claimant’s rule without seizing their Holdings.

Downtime: In which the retinue recovers from injury and stress, engages in long terms projects, and trains their skills. Downtime abstracts weeks of time as the player character pursue their own interests, discuss their long-term priorities, and seek solace together from the difficult campaign.

The Domain sheet includes a calendar for players to track their Sorties, Seasons change every two Downtimes, providing a richer sense of time scale and place.

At the end of the session, players asses how they earned XP based on their playbook, and whether their character’s Beliefs and Drive changed based on the events of the session.

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Thanks so much to Michael for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Rebel Crown on Kickstarter today!

Quick Shot on Thistle and Hearth

Hi all! I’m excited for this interview with Aven Elia McConnaughey and Natalie the Knife about Thistle and Hearth, which is on Kickstarter for Zine Quest 2! Check out the responses below!

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What is Thistle and Hearth, both as a product and as your vision?

Thistle and Hearth is a game of belonging outside belonging that combines a dark fairytale aesthetic with the experience of growing up as a Lutheran in Minnesota. Inconvenient spirits, punishing winter, and mercurial fae challenge the community. True Names, vows, and acts of creation bring them comfort.

To be honest, the idea for Thistle and Hearth literally came to me in a dream. It was some sort of high-action romp, but the things that stuck with me were the aesthetic notes of deep forest, deep winter, and elk riders. These aesthetic notes weren’t really enough to turn into a game until I shared them with my co-designer, Natalie (@rpgnatalie). The most exciting thing about designing this game has to do with genre – a thing I love playing with in games and game design.

To me, a lot of the indie game space for the past decade has been in pursuit of genre. Apocalypse World gave an approachable toolkit for replicating specific fictional genres in games, leading to countless hacks. Dream Askew//Dream Apart followed a number of years later, using similar tools to subvert existing genres, rather than just replicating them. What Natalie and I have done with Thistle and Hearth is create a genre that exists nowhere else by making playbooks and motifs that assume archetypes for this genre-that-doesn’t-exist. People expect playbooks to rely on tropes, but we’ve created playbooks without the tropes, and it turns out that creates a really unique play experience.

A bearded Thistlefolk illustrated in black linework and colored in blue-grey. — *A Thistlefolk by Mahar Mangahas.*

It sounds like you’re bringing forward a very specific experience. How does the life of a Lutheran in Minnesota connect to dark fairytale aesthetic, and what are some examples of how players will experience this?

So the game is influenced by Aven’s experience growing up in a Lutheran community and Natalie’s experience in community with people who were part of the church. The way the church manifested was heavily influenced by the local climate – months of winter where it was too cold to go outside, with too little sunlight, where the climate becomes a thing you have to guard against in certain ways. The game has five motifs that determine the themes and forces that will be at play in your game, and each one reflects a different aspect of our experiences.

This is represented in the game very literally with the Winter motif, which brings scarcity to the community, and asks how do you make do with less than you need? This can also lead to tension between playbooks. For example, the Forged and the Morning Frost respectively represent a tension between repurposing what we have in order to get what we need, and making things that bring joy or beauty but may be a frivolous use of resources.

The church also often had an insular narrative – we didn’t necessarily think things that were outside of our community were bad, but we didn’t understand them, and there was a prominent narrative that we did not belong out there – in the cold, in the wider world, or, in Thistle and Hearth, in the Woods. A part of this was coping with the fact that we lived in a place where living is hard and grueling most of the time – by making the unfamiliar undesirable, we made the familiar desirable.

A ghost with long hair and wispy petal-like layers surrounding them, accented by shafts of wheat. — *A ghost by Mahar Mangahas.*

The Thistlefolk, our name for the fae, represent how power works sometimes in communities of faith. There are often people who you know little to nothing about but who either you as an individual or the wider community are beholden to – they hold power over you and their rules must be followed. Both the Thistlefolk and Family motifs explore questions over how power is distributed, and how it affects someone who is part of the community in ways that are not explicitly violent or economic.

Lutheran communities often build their identity around shared histories, but these are not always true to what actually happened. In Thistle and Hearth, the dead can come back to speak their truths, and that may complicate the things that the community hold as sacred, or it can be used to reinforce this shared history. They can also function metaphorically as a representation of people who have left the community but still have a connection to it, and can demystify the unknown in ways that breaks down the in-group/out-group narrative.

Exploring genre, or the surpassing of genre, is something that fascinates me. How did you use the Belonging-Outside-Belonging system to develop this new genre and how does it influence play?

PbtA games use move-like-mechanics to establish what people do in the world, and the fictional consequences of acting in those ways. This is used to reinforce genre by recreating the paradigms of action found in therein. Belonging Outside Belonging games go a step further by codifying what kinds of action makes characters vulnerable, and what kinds of action allow them to advance their agenda.

In Thistle and Hearth we included moves and grouped them in ways that either subvert existing genre influences, or else completely ignore them in favor of something new. For example, one of the Forged’s weak moves is “lash out in anger.” In other genres, this would probably be a strong or regular move for a physical-strength oriented playbook like the Forged. In this game, and this genre, it is something that they do to show their vulnerability.

If moves and their categorization makeup one part of the genre of the game, another important mechanical aspect of genre is the motifs. Motifs (which might be called “situations” or “setting elements” in other BoB games) establish fictional powers in the world, and the players together control them and influence how they are used in play. The group’s collective experiences, while perhaps based on their existing cultural knowledge, create a new genre when combined together.

A barb-like flower that looks almost like a dragon with swirling petal or leaf-like wings. — *The Woods by Mahar Mangahas.*

Without shared control of the motifs, it would be up to individuals in the group to understand, synthesize, and then reproduce for everyone else. That would be much, much harder, and it would be more likely for the player’s existing cultural knowledge to leak into their creation of the genre. The motifs may be familiar to players individually, but the game leads to play that explores how they connect to each other to define a fictional world. The space between the different motifs has a somewhat defined shape, but it is only through play that a group can discovers what fills the empty space.

In contrast to Dream Askew, the lists that players pick from to define motifs are quite broad in Thistle and Hearth. There is a tendency towards higher variation between the motifs from game to game. The genre that the players explore together can have a vastly different texture depending on the options they choose. In one playtest, the Thistlefolk hoarded secrets, so much so that they sent a member of their brethren into the community to steal a particularly juicy secret. In another, the Thistlefolk craved music and violence; we elaborated on them as extravagant party-throwers who could appear at the drop of a hat and stay for days, leaving little time for sleep or solitude.

A detailed header of ornate floral and leaf-like detail with a braided centerpiece going through a wreath over black and white text reading Thistle and Hearth. Below this, a curling and carefully detailed bundle of thistles makes up the footer. — *Such a lovely title treatment! By Mahar Mangahas.*

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Thank you SO much to Aven and Natalie for this interview!! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Thistle and Hearth on Kickstarter today!

(edited to add second interviewee, my bad)

Five or So Questions on BALIKBAYAN

I have an interview today with Rae Nedjadi on BALIKBAYAN: Returning Home, which is currently available on itch.io! This game sounds so fascinating, and Rae talked about some really deep thoughts with me. Check them out below!

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

BALIKBAYAN: Returning Home is a narrative tabletop role-playing game that gives everyone at the table equal creative opportunities!

Specifically it’s a story about Elementals, beings of Supernatural Filipino Folklore come to life. BALIKBAYAN takes place in the far future, in a Cyberpunk setting at the mercy of The Corp, that has enslaved the elementals through machinery.

Over the generations these machines have infused with the magic, so BALIKBAYAN is also about wielding machine-magic and using it to stay on the run, destroy the Corp, and rebirth Magic.

I’m excited about so many things about BALIKBAYAN, but I’m most excited about offering a creative playground for everyone to enjoy. I’ve never understood this boundary between science fiction and fantasy, technology and ritual, machine and magic. I wanted to offer people to play with these ideas, while also offering my own modern reimagining of Filipino folklore.

I’m really happy with the response, and how excited everyone is to enjoy Filipino games made by Filipino designers! I’m honestly hoping this will encourage more people to create their own games so we can have more creative voices in the community.

Another thing that excites me is the game system. BALIKBAYAN is a Belonging Outside Belonging game, which gives everyone more creative control. It’s different from your typical TTRPG experience, where only the Game Master controls most of the narrative.

A sheet with the title BALIKBAYAN and the book of BALIKBAYAN: Returning Home.

Many of my readers will be excited to hear about the Filipino roots of the game! What are some of the elements (themes, history, magic) of BALIKBAYAN that players will see that are very much Filipino?

The strongest and most apparent Filipino themes are present in the Playbooks themselves. Currently BALIKBAYAN has six playbooks: Tikbalang, Diwata, Saint, Aswang Santelmo, and the Duwende. I wanted to unapologetically use the original names for these beings of myth and legend.

I did this mainly because I come across a lot of Filipinos who are familiar with the folklore of other countries (most people who play D&D here know about elves, gnomes, and all that). But when I run a Filipino inspired game and lean into our roots, most of the people I know, living here in this country, don’t know much about our own myths. And often they use a western perspective when approaching these myths, which breaks my heart.

I will say though that I decided to personally interpretat the essence of these myths and legends. There are some problematic aspects of our folklore that reflects the centuries of colonization that still influences the Philippines to this day.

For example I wanted to take the Tikbalang and break it away from just being an anthropomorphic horse. Horses aren’t even a natural local animal here, and to this day they’re associated with the elite and privileged. Instead I wanted to lean into our shamanic and animism roots. The Tikbalang in BALIKBAYAN can change into any anthropomorphic animal form, and I wanted that fluidity to be an important aspect of the playbook. I also wanted to reflect how we often look to spiritual leaders in our community, and the Tikbalang is true to that.

I think the SAINT is another important one. Religion is a big thing here in the Philippines, for better and for worse. We have so many beautiful stories about Saints and the mystical miracles they embodied to protect communities. I wanted to acknowledge that, but once again honor our pre-colonial roots and have the SAINT be a playbook that interacts with Small Gods, in a Cyberpunk setting.

I could just go on and on about each playbook!

Sheets titled The Enslaved and The Corp, But That Was a Long Time Ago, and We Were Magic. The last sheet, We Were Magic, is in neon colors with black background.

In general I wanted to honor our folklore, but I wanted to respectfully bring it into the present and reflect our modern values, nuances, and struggles. Because I’m bi-racial, queer, and non-binary, I think that shows in the design. I put so much of myself, and my complex love for my country, into this game.

BALIKBAYAN also speaks to leaving behind our masters and becoming our own masters. I wanted this to reflect in the premise and creative setting, but also in the mechanics and narrative prompts.

Becoming our own masters is something I want to happen for Filipinos in general. We were colonized for centuries, and the scars still show. As a society, we haven’t done the collective and deeply emotional work to decolonize our perspectives, approaches, and values. In a way we are still bowing down to Masters that have long left us to rot, and it shows in our governance and social value systems.

I have faith that we can do the work. Many artists, teachers, and leaders are already helping their communities to do so. BALIKBAYAN is my own personal attempt to help along and honor that decolonization process.

BALIKBAYAN seems like a big step away from what we’ve seen from cyberpunk. How have you altered the standard cyberpunk setting to really make it yours and to do something different?

It’s funny, I really get this a lot! But to be perfectly honest, BALIKBAYAN simply embodies how I’ve always seen and engaged with Cyberpunk. For one thing, I’ve always gravitated more to portrayal of Cyberpunk themes in anime, especially from the 80s and 90s. I’ve always appreciated that lens more, and it really speaks to me.

I did want to make magic a big part of the game. This is again deeply personal. I believe magic and technology aren’t at odds with each other, and magic shouldn’t be regulated to fantasies chained to the past either. I was initially inspired by games like Shadowrun, but I didn’t like how the lore and system created this great divide between magic and technology. So in BALIKBAYAN I wanted to make that barrier non-existent.

I think the main issue with Cyberpunk as a genre is that we often see the aesthetic markers and surface indicators of the genre, but we ignore the important work that POC and queer creators have done in the space. They’ve given me the permission to define Cyberpunk on my own terms.

And in turn, I want to do the same for the people who will play BALIKBAYAN. The game asks you to bring about the rebirth of magic and to create a Revolution, but what that will actually entail is up to the players and is out of my hands. I believe Cyberpunk, and the Revolution it inspires, is a deeply personal experience.

Because I don’t think the world will change from one Revolution. I believe it will change, and has changed, from the series of ongoing neverending Revolutions that we bring to life.

A sheet titled DIWATA and details about playing different types of characters.

There is a lot of discussion about decolonizing games and how many major games are from a colonized perspective, so I really appreciate you talking about that! Does any of this translate to the actual mechanics you use in the game? What are the mechanics like?

I definitely feel that the decolonization process can be incredibly personal. For me it was in realizing that the games I used to love to run and play, namely Dungeons & Dragons and games like it, focused on violence, possession, taking things through strength, with a focus on exploring the “alien” and “exotic” and marveling at how “weird” it all was. This was reflected in the mechanics of the game too, I feel. As a Filipino, knowing that my own country was treated this way by its colonizers, it left a really bad taste in my mouth.

In BALIKBAYAN, the Belonging Outside of Belonging system favors narrative play that is entirely in the hands of the players. I also added a few mechanics that center on the decolonization process. First, each playbook asks the players to choose and build on a “human form” and a “true form”. Because the Elementals are on the run, this is basically what forms are “acceptable” versus what they truly look like. I wanted to leave it up to the players and each story what this means, how do they navigate this? Next the playbooks ask you to choose “What you hope for”. While the players are tasked to bring about the Rebirth of Magic (more on that in a bit), I also wanted to give the players a personal goal to help drive the story. In a way this reflects how I feel about the decolonization process: each path is unique, deeply personal. People can talk about what their decolonization process is like, but they cannot dictate to others what it SHOULD be like. Each of us interacts with different intersections of class, race, background, and so on. What the decolonization process is like in America is VERY different from what it is like in the Philippines, and so on. The individual hope reflects that, but it also asks each player to balance or find common ground with that hope and the rebirth of magic.

Which brings us to another mechanic I added. Originally I just liked the idea of having a sort of countdown mechanic, to give the players some structure or urgency to the story being told. There are two clocks running. The first clock is you start ON THE RUN, but can eventually end up CAPTURED by the Corp again. The second clock has you start at FADING, your magic is weak and dwindling compared to your ancestors, but you want to reach REBORN, with the magic being your own.

In my mind, decolonization is not about returning to what was before our colonizers came. That is in the past, and much of our history has been rewritten by those more powerful than us. When I think about what we’ve lost, what we could have been, it frustrates me. When I think of the privilege I enjoy because of my circumstances that are favored by a colonial mentality, I feel guilty and ill at ease. For example, I speak English well and that opened a lot of doors for me, when it shouldn’t have. I strongly feel that the way forward is in acknowledging the past, while building our own sense of worth and grace outside of our colonial mentality. In the Philippines we need to acknowledge that much of our systems and infrastructure are badly compromised by these centuries of colonization. We need to rebuild, to be reborn, to reclaim our own magic.

Sheets of paper titled Homecoming and Death or Rebirth, and We Create Our Fate in neon colors on a black and white image.

I’m nonbinary too, so I’m always fascinated to see how other nonbinary designers make games. How do you feel that your queerness, your nonbinary identity, being bi-racial, and these other personal aspects of yourself have impacted the design and presentation of BALIKBAYAN and the cyberpunk world within it?

To be honest, I used to really struggle with the idea of queer design, and what that looks like. I have to truly give credit to the community of indie designers who looked at my work and reflected on it, helping me see the queerness and nonbinary nature of my design. In BALIKBAYAN my nonbinary asserts itself by allowing the players to choose how active or passive they wish the story to flow. There are tools available, but I provide many examples that show how each game can be unique and flow completely differently. As a nonbinary, I believe in nuance and push away from the black and white. There are some cool mechanics tied to that (for example, even if you bring about the Rebirth of Magic, you have to answer the question “Which one of us runs away, and helps rebuild the Corp?”). Though I also have to say that also reflects my colonial pain, many of us resort to acting like our colonial masters in the way of rebirth and revolution (those dang intersections, right?).

But yes as a nonbinary designer, I come from a place of nuance and push that towards the forefront. I think that also gave me the sheer confidence to tackle the Cyberpunk genre. I grew up loving it, and like so many people like me (queer, POC, etc) I also felt disappointed by how so much of its core themes of revolution and self-acceptance were rewritten and downplayed. But I refuse to back down, and I’ll continue designing in these spaces and do my work to reclaim it along with other diverse artists.

The brightly colored BALIKBAYAN: Returning Home cover with a long haired person in pleather-looking clothes wearing a gas mask and the text of the title on the cover.

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Thank you so much to Rae for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out BALIKBAYAN: Returning Home on itch.io today!

Five or So Questions on Under Hollow Hills

I generally try not to be so under the wire, but life has been hectic lately! Here’s an interview.

Today I have an interview with Meguey and Vincent Baker about Under Hollow Hills, which is currently on Kickstarter! It’s a game about traveling performers and explores a new realm of Powered by the Apocalypse design. Check out what Vincent and Meguey had to say!

All art by Vincent, after Rackham.

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Tell me a little about Under Hollow Hills. What excites you about it?

Meg: Traveling together as a group, seeking audiences, dealing with a stuck wagon or a friend in trouble, showing up at birthday parties to just utterly dazzle a human child and leave them with a touch more wonder than before – that’s all real neat to me. What excites me most though, perhaps, is the core ethic of this game, of paying attention to how we are together when times are good and when times are bad. Fairies often get portrayed as either all sweetness and light or all threat and magical terror, and I’m excited to see MORE than that. We’re drawing on a lot of different fairy stories, and I look forward to the new stories that come from this.

VB: In Under Hollow Hills you play the performers and crew of a circus that travels through Fairyland and through the human world, through good times, bad times, and dangerous times. I’m excited about the tour of Fairyland that the game offers – but it’s like a working tour, not a tourist tour. You’re behind the scenes, you see what goes on in the Wolf King’s Court, you perform for audiences who think they’ve commanded you, but really you’re playing them. You see through the glamor to the mystery, if that makes sense!

I’m also excited by how much the game loves words. Metaphor, poetry, wordplay, puns, it’s a game that loves and plays with language.

The silhouettes of two smaller people carrying paper lanterns and packs.

There are a lot of fairy tales that people might be familiar with. Where are you pulling influence from, and what are some examples of the things you’re spinning of your own?

VB: Yeah! Meg’s history with fairies is older than mine. I think I started, these decades ago, with Alan Lee and Brian Froud’s book Faeries. For me my main sources have been Yeats’ Fairy Tales of Ireland, Sikes’ British Goblins, and Kirk & Lang’s The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies. These all mix collected stories and folklore with the speculations of their authors / editors, much in the mode of a bestiary or field guide. This is where the idea of fairy kinds comes from, I think, these marvelous old collections.

I’m also influenced by Shakespeare, by Norse myths, and by more contemporary fairy tales and fairy tellers like Francesca Lia Block, Tanith Lee, John Crowley, Jane Yolen, and even Jack Vance per Lyonesse.

That said, we’ve tried to keep our interpretations fresh and playful. In the playbooks, for instance, we always try to mix and cross influences, not narrow down. The Chieftain Mouse has elements of Reepicheep and Despereaux, and also of Rob Roy. The Crooked Wand harks back to the three old women who share an eye, and to Odin, and then to Yubaba from Spirited Away and Nora Cloud from Little, Big.

Meg: I had a beloved storytelling teacher in 4th grade, Janet Glantz, who gave me Nancy Arrowsmith’s 1977 Field Guide to the Little People, which leads off with “In high summer meadows, nestled in the moors, near old castles, or behind the kitchen stove—these are the places where the Little People may be found.”. If I had to point to one clear influence alone, it would be this book and this line. The earliest fairy-tales I remember are the ones in Olive Beaupre Miller’s 1928 edition of My Bookhouse books, particularly volume two, which has fairy tales from around the world, and the first book I remember reading for myself is Midsummer Night’s Dream, when I was about 6.

The Muppet Show, of course, and Labyrinth. I saw the 1962 movie Gypsy a surprising number of times as a kid, so the backstage parts of a traveling show were there, and when I was learning to walk and talk, my parents were crew in a Shakespearean diner theater company, which was of course FULL of fairies and actors and stage effects. I spent 8 years in the 1990s doing hair design and costuming for our local Hampshire County Shakespeare Company, too. Apples and trees, you know. Decades of thinking about the natural world in a way that invites the possibility of fairies also fit into the game design, and noticing the playfulness of bees, the enthusiasm of the berry bramble, or the determination of a stream. Then blending all of that so that there are layers on layers of influence, so players can bring their own influences to their unique portrayal of fairyland.

What is Under Hollow Hills like mechanically? It seems like it might function a little differently because of the types of stories you’re telling!

VB: It does!

The structure of the game is, you travel through fairyland and the human world, and everywhere you go, you put on a show. On the GM’s side, this means that between sessions, you prep up where the circus is going next. You don’t prep what’ll happen – there’s no way you could guess! – but just what the place is like, and who’s there. There’s a quick system for this, rules you follow in prep that help you decide who the audience is, what they want from the circus, and what they have to give the circus in return.

In play, then, you arrive at this new place, and you know that you’ll be performing here, but before you do, you want to get the lay of the land. As much as your audience here wants something from you, you want something from them too. So you introduce yourselves, enjoy your hosts’ hospitality, get people’s stories out of them, and meddle as you see fit. When you’re satisfied, then you plan your show and perform.

Planning and performing your show are distinct phases in the game, and they give you a lot of power. In your performance you can change the season of the place – “season” here includes mood, fortunes, history, even who rules and who’s ruled over. You can win from the audience what they have in plenty, or win from them what they hold most dear. You can also change the circus, switching up the performers’ jobs, welcoming new performers or bidding old ones goodbye, and opening the way forward from one world to the other.

Now this is the large view, the overall structure. Your character has cycles and structures of their own. Your capabilities include, yes, ways to get the lay of the land, and ways to plan a show and perform in it, but they also include your own angle on things. Ways to get what YOU want, whether you line up with the circus or not.

Meg: A lot of game mechanics are designed in terms of a linear progression, from point to point to future point. Under Hollow Hills mechanics cycle and spin, as we spiral through the seasons and through our own emotions and the characters’ emotional relationships with each other. Players may come back to things that feel familiar several times in the course of play, but from a different angle each time.

I’m intrigued by the implicit theme of transience in these stories because of the traveling nature of the troupe and the temporary nature of performance. How does Under Hollow Hills address the concept and experience of transience by the characters, and naturally, players?

Meg: Playing with time and space is part of fairyland, as well as of stagecraft and performance. The magical thinking of childhood when summer never ends, and how it takes forever for a special event to arrive, and the way time moves oddly when you are fully engrossed in the current moment even as an adult, are all part of the game. All those can be tiny windows into fairyland, that may open only for a fleeting moment. We all change over time, in myriad ways. Major ways that come to mind are gender fluidity and variance and how that permeates Under Hollow Hills in reflection of the actual world we live in, and seasonal cycles as they affect all life on the planet. There’s a third, of course, which is mortality, and the questions around death that come up from the fay viewing it as a game and the mortals knowing that for them it is the biggest and most permanent change. Shifting through these moments smoothly takes practice.

As characters pass from moment to moment, in terms of Under Hollow Hills game design specifically, we built in ways to shift your character’s expression fluidly across their summer aspect and their winter aspect, and we recognize the impact people have on places (and vice versa) in the way that the Circus can move the place they perform towards different seasons. Illustrating the pinwheel of the seasons, choosing as a group how you move the circus and spaces through the pinwheel, helps convey the transient but also the cyclical nature of the game, and therefore of life. Movement is a basic part of the game.

Building a game where travel is intrinsically part of the story helps address some fictional issues in storytelling as well. Have you ever encountered a detective series you like, set in “a small country town” where there’s multiple mysteries and murders in each book? For heaven’s sake, get out of that town! It’s a hell-mouth! Making the circus mobile, building an interconnected group that is traveling together, with the inherent community needs and relationship complications that arise when people come to rely on each other, and when they are constantly encountering new groups of people wherever they go, allows for very different stories than having the characters in a fixed location.

Another topic that interests me is the diversity found in traveling troupes in history, and the prejudice with which they’ve been treated. A hard topic, I know, but have you addressed it at all in Under Hollow Hills, and why or why not?

VB: Not so hard a topic! Historically, traveling people, especially traveling performers, have been treated all different ways – with horrifying violence and racism, with glory and celebrity, with suspicion, with reverence – all different ways. Right now in the US, for instance, a lot of carnival workers are seasonal migrant workers, vulnerable to the US’ racist anti-immigrant policies and sentiments.

In Under Hollow Hills, we’re definitely presenting a romantic version of the traveling circus. When the circus travels, it’s usually easy. Where it arrives, it’s usually welcome. When you come into conflict with your audience, usually it’s a personal matter, a disagreement or personal animosity. It’s possible in the game for you to come into town to find a racist hate mob waiting for you with knives and clubs, but the way violence works in the game, it disarms even this kind of situation.

Our goal isn’t to examine real-world racism and violence, or even just the real-world difficulties of taking a show on the road. Those are different games, and ones we’d love to play!

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Thank you to Meg and Vincent both for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Under Hollow Hills on Kickstarter today!

Five or So Questions on DIE

Today I have an interview with Kieron Gillen about his new game, DIE! It’s based on his popular comic of the same name. This game has layers – layers! It sounds really cool so I hope you’ll check it out. See what Kieron has to say below.

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Tell me a little about DIE RPG. What excites you about it?

I’m going to circle around this before pouncing, as I’m terrible. Sorry.

In my day job, I write comics. My latest book can be basically paraphrased as “Goth Jumanji”. It’s a portal fantasy where kids who got dragged into a fantasy game as teenagers get dragged back as middle aged adults, and so acts as a device to compare teenage dreams with adult realities, explore the purposes of fantasy and do a warped conspiracy-addled history of the development of the RPG. As part of its typically over-researched development, I decided I wanted to do an RPG, in some form. The first arc is called “Fantasy Heartbreaker” which is my mea culpa about the whole endeavour.

As such, the first thing excites me about the DIE RPG is that it’s not my day job. I am a puppy, running through long grass, on a summer day.

In a previous life, I used to be a game critic – mainly videogames, but I see all games as part of the same form. In terms of adaptations, I tend to believe the most interesting allow you to replay the underlying structure of a narrative. The 1980s Alien spectrum game was about hunting down the alien aboard the ship, but it randomised which individual actually carried the chestburster. As such, it was interested in the possibilities inside the scenario of the movie rather than the specific example of the scenario played out in the movie. Re-enact the dramatic arc, sure, but find a way to make it your own – that’s how you make it live. I wanted to do something like that. I mean, I had a handful of other design goals, but that was my top line goal – create a structure which allows people to create their own personal version of the structure of the first arc of DIE.

A comic page from the comic DIE in which the Game Master presents the die and the concept of playing characters to the others gathered around. — A comic page from the DIE comic.

First the players get together and generate a social group of messy, flawed people. Who liked who? Who hated who? How has their life gone horribly awry? Each player makes one of these Persona. “Player” includes the GM. This is a pure piece of conceptual story game.

Secondly, when it’s decided this is an interesting group of people, everyone steps away from the table. When they step back to the table, they’re all in character as the Persona they generated. After the proper level of social chit-chat, the GM’s persona lobs a RPG on the table, and everyone starts playing, generating a character. Yes, you play someone playing an RPG.

Thirdly, after that’s done, everyone around the table gets dragged into a fantasy world. They go through a psychodrama fantasy adventure based on all the Persona’s faults, dreams and issues. After overcoming them they then go home. Or not. That’s kind of the point.

So, yes, it’s a meta game, and how it moves between modes of modern play is key – the three levels are clearly inspired by the story game tradition, the nordic larp and something more traditional (though, really, a bit trindie). That’s the most obvious bit of flash, but the core of the game for me is that it how the game changes depending what persona you throw into the situation. There’s a lot of flexibility, but with sufficient scaffolding to head towards a conclusion with the details entirely up in the air. In the current Beta, that’s designed to be in 1-4 sessions. That I’ve been playtesting it for so many games, and being delighted how it works with radically different persona, remains exciting. I’m running it, and I really don’t have a clue how it’ll end up.

I think you’re one of the first designers I’ve interviewed who has talked about meta with enthusiasm and I love it! What did you do while you were designing to bring out that meta – how could an experienced player or designer see the key lines, so to speak? – without making it hard to approach?

Now, I warn you. There’s a line which I think I got from the wonderful Natasha’s Dance, with a quote about the difference between 19th century German and Russian writers, which I’ll badly paraphrase. The former will work out a theory in advance, and then try and put it into practice, and the latter will write what they want, and then, almost as a game, work out a theory which fits what they’ve done. I can come across as a German, but I suspect I’m very much a Russian. So much of DIE’s core design was done by instinct, and then analysed to death, so now it tends to sound I had a grand plan.

So much just came from looking at the nature of DIE. This is a game about messy people who get dragged into an RPG and transformed into fantasy heroes. They travel a world which is a warped version of their fantasies and fears. They have to all agree to go home to go home. Can they come to an agreement? And if so, at what cost?

Logically, you need…

1) A way to generate a group of messy people.

2) A fantasy world which speaks to the specific nature of those messy people

3) A set of core dramatic in-world rules which gather whatever group of messy people you create towards a satisfactory (or at least, interesting) conclusion.

A comic page from the DIE comic titled 1991 describing a character's sixteenth birthday and how they were going to celebrate specially. It depicts two girls walking together up to a house and being greeted by a cheerful woman with wavy hair. — From the DIE comic.

That you’re making a group of players instantly makes it Meta, and there’s just no turning back from it, and I lean into it as hard as I can. There’s a frisson and delight there. You’re people pretending to be people playing a role playing game. That just amuses me, and I tend to pursue it in the games I run. My standard con game of DIE has all the Persona playing people at the con they’re actually at, for example. Seeing what other people approach the idea is the best thing about actually releasing it – if someone had told me how much fun it was to see what people do with a structure you’ve created, I’d have done this years ago.

Not quite as much in the RPG in the Beta stage, but there’s a lot of the other kind of meta in DIE as well – the world itself is made up of elements that all went into the making of the RPG, from German Kriegspeil to Tolkien WW1 horror and more. It’s all about our fantasies, why we get lost in them and so on. A lot of that works its way into the game as well.

The DIE 2 cover with a person wearing an earring and leather jacket with a burning dragon on it and the words "PLAYER" on it who is holding a vape and brass knuckles and some kind of weapon. The red angular pattern of the unfolded d20 over it highlights the title DIE 2.

How do Personas work? I love this idea of layers of play, and I wonder how the mechanics here function! What really drives a Persona, and how does that punch through the layers of game?

The Persona’s are absolutely the thing which makes the game interesting, for me. It’s deliberately the rules-lite approach. It’s just a series of formalised (or less formalised questions) spinning off a given context.

In the Beta, I’ve narrowed it slightly to “You are friends who played an RPG as teenagers, and now have got back together years down the line to play a game.” That narrowing of a certain shared history makes it easier to give a reliable “This will definitely work” for the later stages in the Beta, but I’ve ran it with completely different set ups too.

There’s a bunch of suggestions for useful angles of questions – “how did the group form? Was it around a shared social interest?” “Was it at school? What kind of school was it?” – which lead to more questions, about the specific nature of individuals (“What did you play in the RPG?” “How did you do in class?”) and their interactions (“Did you fancy any of the persona?” “Are any of you siblings?”). You then work out the gap – “How many years is it since you used to play?” “Why are you getting together to play a game now?” The Gamesmaster is also making a Persona at this stage, and the players are encouraged to ask questions to each other as well.

There’s guidance in terms of whether to ask soft questions, hard questions or extremely hard framed questions depending on the tone and level of inter-group personal messiness you’re looking for. “Do you hate your brother” versus “Why do you hate your brother?” for example.

While this is happening, the Gamesmaster is noting all the information that’s relevant. Some of this is absolutely surface stuff (“He really like Harry Potter!”). Some of it is more deeply personal (“He has a really strained relationship with his husband.”) Some of it what I call the character’s core drive – the thing which they’re missing in their real life, and they’re looking for (“I always wanted to be an artist, and have never, ever pursued it.”) The latter is generally approached tangentially, but in a real way, it’s what the game is about – finding out how a group of people respond to being offered their desire… and then discovering what they may have to do to get it.

The players have huge freedom to invent whatever they want about the people’s real lives – this actually continues into the more traditional fantasy adventure. The Master asking the player about details of their persona’s life is a constant. Those details, and all the previous ones are then warped into the fantasy.

Part of the dichotomy of the game is that everything at the Persona level is almost entirely freeform and without classical RPG rules. Conversely, everything in the game is deliberately mechanistically neutral, with all characters being treated equally by the system, and all the persona’s character’s edges coming from in-world reasons. It’s a bit odd that I’ve come back to a hard (if light) simulationist core from a hefty narrativist tradition, but I figured in a game which is about the nature of reality (“Is this place real?”), if the rules already give you the answer (“No, it’s not real – only we get to roll the dice.”), it’s somewhat pointless.

Basically it’s kind of a Cartesian thing – the Persona level is very much mind and the character is the body, and the lack of a true connection between the two is interesting. The game’s more obviously meta in other ways (the “why are these people playing the game?” of it all) but I think this is the stuff which really interests me. A lot just is my love song to the RPG, in lots of different ways.

One of my current things is trying to find ways to write something akin to a Scenario – there’s an early take that we’ll be releasing in the back matter of DIE. It’s basically a more structured set of questions, so rather than being entirely freeform, you can create a social dynamic just by asking the questions. It’s a formalised version of my standard Con game – basically all the group are people who work in the comic industry. So one person is the publisher, another a creator, another a fan and so on. By hard framing questions, you generate a dynamic that gives a lot of space for player expression, but still can be meaningfully prepared for. It’s been fun. The question I most like basically goes like..

“Fan – you want to work in the industry. What job do you want to do?”

“I’d love to be a writer.”

“Writer – does the fan have any talent at all?”

That’s very much DIE at its hard-framing most, I stress. That whole scenario is wicked, but I want to do some other set approaches. I’m hoping the structure gives people enough to write their own, if they want.

A dragon with beams of light shining out of its mouth is surrounded by smoke as it faces off against a group of players. In the foreground, there is barbed wire.

One of the things that comes to mind while reading your responses is the subject of nostalgia – if I were playing a game with old friends, a game we’d played before, I’d expect to have some of that. Does nostalgia show up as a theme in the game? Is it something that was relevant for you as a designer?

Well, designer and a writer both. The first series I did as a comic writer was called Phonogram: Rue Britannia, this urban fantasy about magicians who use pop music (Phonomancers). It was used as an inspiration for the excellent LARP My Jam recently, which was a delight. Anyway – that first series was about – I quote – “Nostalgia, memory and history”. It’s how those things tangle together, and get in each other’s way. So it’s always been there, and it’s certainly there in the DIE RPG.

What’s more there is a certain critique of nostalgia – it’s like how nostalgia can sicken. It’s not that time any more – what has changed with you? Worse, what hasn’t changed? How much have you failed to escape the person you were there, and the desires you had? I normally describe the comic as comparing these teenage dreams with adult realities, but transformed into an RPG it becomes about the two periods in the persona’s life. They were there. Now they are here. How has their live gone awry? What are they going to do about it?

Nostalgia turned creepy is certainly the another element. There’s one optional element in the design we call the Box Of Crap, which the GM drops on the table at the start of the Persona section of the game, claiming it’s the actual game that a bunch of kids were playing when they disappeared back in the 1990s. The box contains anything the GM collects – I suggest old RPG supplements, and the game dice as a useful minimum, but we cram in anything in there. I’ve included some of my own teenage RPG maps I drew, and character sheets, for example. If a group is okay with it, putting stuff from their own real life games in there is also a move, and very much fourth-wall blurring (as in, putting player nostalgia in the mix, as well as persona nostalgia). There’s not much with the box in the current beta rules, but in terms of stuff in the Arcana (i.e. what I’ll be releasing as optional weird rules) it’s basically used as a tarot deck during play as a device for inspiration.

I’m fascinated by the deeper fantasy world, since it reflects the Personas and the characters themselves. This is something that’s rarely codified, even if it’s alluded to in games. What is this like for the Master and the players to experience? What does it end up looking like to play in?

In terms of what it’s like to experience, what I’m trying to evoke is the experience of being listened to.

What happens in the world riffs off what this persona a player has invented. Rather than a lot of games where narrative creation is direct (i.e. a player gets to define a world directly) DIE tends to primarily works as a once remove (a player invents and the GM twists and gives it back). The magical thing is that it’s both the big things the player are aware of (for example, if a player’s persona spends some time talking about how they’re closeted and are scared to come out, that may as well be an explicit ask for that to be a theme in the game) but also what they’re saying without being aware of (for example, a player’s persona making a joke about a random TV show they’ve binged watched, having elements of that show pop up in conjunction with their main theme). One of DIE’s core bits of GM advice is taking one of those big things the players want included and adding an element which the players may not actually have ever expected to be integrated. One core thing, and a twist, both of which show they were being listened to. It’s like being given a present, even when it’s horrific. Sometimes it’s really subtle, with just grace notes. Sometimes it’s just incredibly obvious – in a playtest where all the persona were people who met on a Buffy fanforum back in the day, I just downloaded the map of Sunnydale and went from there.

It’s always a way to externalise a persona’s problems and have them deal with it. It’s how DIE the comic works, and trying to get that explicitly in a game, and codify ways for players to make that work easily at the table was absolutely what I was aiming for. An early playtester noted that the DIE RPG is kind of a manual and mechanisation of how to create a Kieron Gillen Style Story, which made me nod in recognition. Trying to nail down specifically what the story does, so it can either be turned into mechanics or play guidelines was very much what I was trying to do.

It’s been lots of fun. I wish my designer friends had told me how much fun it was to see someone take a structure you’ve created and go and do awesome things with it, as I’d have done it years ago.

The DIE Beta cover with a long haired feminine person in an elaborate dress throwing their head back in response to some kind of impact as light erupts from a stone in their chest and forehead. The red angular pattern of the unfolded d20 over it highlights the title DIE.

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Thanks so much Kieron for the awesome interview! I hope you all liked it and that you’ll check out DIE today!

Five or So Questions on Hit the Streets

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Rich Rogers about Hit the Streets: Defend the Block, which is currently on Kickstarter! Rich had a lot of nifty stuff to say about the game, so check it out below!

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Tell me a little about Hit the Streets: Defend the Block. What excites you about it?

Hit the Streets: Defend the Block (HtS:DtB) is a tabletop RPG about street-level supers. A game series of Hts:DtB will have the entire group working together to make up their team of Super-Powered Beings, drawing out a simple map of the neighborhood where they live and work, and dreaming up their rivals and threats to their neighborhood.

What excites me about HtS:DtB is how well it plays at the table, allowing players to exist in the space of shows like Luke Cage and Daredevil, or to tell stories like you might read in Spiderman or Spider Gwen comics. I also love how the game pushes characters to expend or lose their Spark, a resource similar to Hit Points that represents their will to struggle and fight the good fight. That loss of Spark then sets up scenes where those characters have to regain that resource by doing positive things for the community or forging tighter bonds with their team. It has such a nice flow of emotional scenes to action and conflict and back again.

A person with a ponytail and a red mask in a red and black superhero costume and scarf who is drawing a purple-handled weapon from over their shoulder.

Nice! How did you find the right vibe for the game, considering how widely superheroes are interpreted in different mediums and styles? What is the right style for Hit the Streets?

Hit the Streets: Defend the Block came from a need for something that would fit in a new living campaign that I began with Lowell Francis and Jim Crocker this year called Gauntlet Comics, which is for the Gauntlet community (https://www.gauntlet-rpg.com/ ) as you’d suspect. See, I pitched them the concept of a shared GM setting called New Gauntlet City where each of us, and other GMs who wanted to join in, would run games set in this comic book universe. We have a city map with only a few neighborhoods defined, and we’ve been adding neighborhoods and characters to the map and wiki as we play. New GMs have jumped in, like Alexi Sargeant and Chris Newton, it’s been a real blast to see the world evolve, to create new characters and see different players’ spin on them.

Of course, there’s lots of Masks: A New Generation happening in Gauntlet Comics and I’ve loved those games, but I like to run a different RPG system each month for this series. Last October as I prepared for Gauntlet Comics, I sat down and pored over the hundreds of Supers RPGs that I have on PDF and created a list of “Want to GM” games. When I looked over the games on my list, I didn’t see anything that would work in a single neighborhood, that would deal with smaller scope problems that I saw on shows like Luke Cage‘s Harlem or Daredevil’s Hell’s Kitchen on Netflix, or Black Lightning‘s Freeland on the CW. I’d tried out the RPG Icons, which had most of what I wanted, but it was a bit heavy of a system for my tastes.

I’d been running an RPG: 1%er – The Outlaw Biker Game, from Creepy Doll Studios (a.k.a. Robert Nolan) for a couple of years for the Gauntlet and loved the sessions we’d had. I even hacked it for Star Wars and called it 1%er Swoop Gang (Kark yeah!) and it was so thrilling and fun to run and play. There was this yummy mix of thrilling action and connection between the characters and their community that I enjoyed. I started wondering if this simple but clever d6-based system would be the right chassis for a street-level supers game.

I started calling it 1%er Supers and put it on the Gauntlet calendar. Playtested an early version in November and December of last year, and it was solid. It needed some more bits, like a neighborhood-creation system as well as a few rules tweaks, but the vibe was spot on. Eventually, I renamed 1%er Supers to Hit the Streets: Defend the Block (hat tips to Patrick Knowles and Alex Prinz for that name) That vibe, to finally answer your question, is a bare knuckles game where the Super-Powered Beings (I don’t call them superheroes) have day jobs, they have connections to people in their neighborhood, and they have to fight to keep the people they love safe.

They can’t just topple an alien invasion and walk away from the wreckage. They’d have to LIVE in the wreckage. Hit the Streets: Defend the Block characters have to make choices about how to deal with threats to their neighborhood, and punching it isn’t always the best answer. Of course, it’s comics, so punching is the best answer sometimes. Usually once per game session. But the fights in HtS:DtB are super quick, often one or two die rolls, then it’s dealing with the aftermath.

A person with long dark hair stares deeply at the viewer while stretching out their arms, which turn into black, sharpened points. They are wearing a purple jumpsuit with knee pads and heavy boots. There are some of the dark spikes poking out of the ground.

Tell me more about Spark and how it interacts with other mechanical bits. What are the core mechanics of the game like? Do different players use it differently?

Spark is the “killer app” of Hit the Streets: Defend the Block. It’s a reskin of a mechanic in 1%er – The Outlaw Biker Game. Your Spark represents your character’s will to fight. It’s the strength of their body as well as their mental resolve. You can spend Spark to add dice to an important roll. You can throw a Spark to another player to help them on a roll of their own. But you have to keep a close eye on that Spark because in big conflicts, the hits that your character takes reduce your Spark.

When you run out, your character is “out of the crime-fighting game”. Maybe they’re in the hospital. They might be locked up in jail. Perhaps, they’re dead (that’s up to the player). They aren’t out of the game if the player wants to bring them back in, but you have to regain their Spark somehow.

How do you do it? Help to rebuild your community with works of charity or help to fight crime as a regular everyday citizen. Or you can call upon your team, the other player characters, and bond with them, share what’s important, ask for their help, or tell them how they’re important and how they make the world better, worth fighting for. Once you regain some Spark, you can don the mask and get out there again!

How do you support players in engaging with things that could be difficult to address like threats to home and family and trauma?

When I started writing Hit the Streets: Defend the Block, I made a decision to have it reflect the ways I most enjoy gaming, which is with an engaged and safe group of friends. To that end, the book starts with an excellent discussion of the X Card safety tool written by my late friend Paul Edson who was also my developmental editor. The game stresses that the safety tool is only part of the process, that each participant needs to look out for their fellow players, check in, and proceed with best intentions while remaining aware that we are here to have fun.

The GM section covers Roses and Thorns, my feedback tool of choice. This is another powerful tool to ensure safety, giving voice to players after a session on areas of the game that may have been sketchy. Of course, my preference is the use of the X Card up front, but a Thorn that mentions the content is a nice fail-safe.

One important factor to Hts:DtB is that it isn’t supposed to be a grind of a game. There are lighter moments in the game with Refresh scenes where the player characters take the opportunity to perform charity work to improve their neighborhood and help out their neighbors. Also, there are bonding scenes where player characters strengthen their connection to one another to lift themselves up to continue the fight.

What are some of the threats these superpowered characters encounter in their experiences, and how does it go down mechanically with some different threats?

During the first session, the playgroup works together to not only draw out their neighborhood, but they talk about the threats to their home, whether it’s financial, corruption, or otherwise. Then, they create a group of Rivals, these are GM-played characters (GMCs) who are opposed to the player characters. They aren’t black and white villains, they are rivals. Sometimes they seem villainous to the players, but the GM should ensure they have a motivation. Also, the rivalry is messy. At least one player character has a personal relationship of some kind with a member of the rival team, the rivals have something the PCs lack, and the PCs have some way to thwart their rivals when they need it. That sets up a nice opposition between the team and the world.

Mechanically, your characters will face down threats and conflicts by declaring their intention, then they look through their character’s details to pull from different areas, like the mode of their approach, the stat they’re leaning on, if they’re fulfilling their team role, what powers, if any, are in play, then adding in Spark from their own pool or from anyone who’s trying to help. That builds their die pool of six-sided dice that they roll against a GM declared difficulty. In most conflicts, it’s a single roll to bring things to a resolution. The system is quick and has a nice bite when things are on the line.

Along with the regular approach to a challenge, the GM has some neat little tools to play with that difficulty to amp up conflicts. They can set two difficulties for a challenge. The first is a lower, “get it done” target number. The second is a higher difficulty with an even more comprehensive victory or with adding benefits (something as simple as “you’ll look awesome doing it” or something more tangible like “and they won’t be able to fix their security system any time soon”). That gives the player a bit of a tactical risk-reward decision to make as they build their die pool. It’s really fun to see folks consider how much to push towards the big win.

Last, but not least, is the Big Threat or Big Bad. This how HtS:DtB models a conflict with a major foe or an extended stressful conflict (like a large fire burning down the block, a torrential rainstorm, open warfare between gangs on the streets, whatever is most interesting to the group). The GM sets a Total Threat Difficulty, a very high target number. Any player who decides to have their character tackle the threat can slowly winnow it down, but as long as that threat still has muscle (the total number of successes needed hasn’t been met or exceeded), each attempt is at best a mixed success and things will continue to escalate. The Total Threat Difficulty often ends up with player characters in dire straights, hurt, and paying the price for their victories, which then leads to Refresh scenes where they work back up their Spark. It’s a lovely cycle of play.

A white-haired, white-skinned person with a green snake tattoo wrapped around their wrist is playing a purple and translucent guitar giving off waves of energy. They are wearing a skeleton long-sleeved tee, dark pants, and brown shoes.

—

Thanks so much to Rich for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Hit the Streets: Defend the Block on Kickstarter today!

Five or So Questions on Children of the Beast

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Nicholas Kitts on the game Children of the Beast, which is currently on Kickstarter! It’s a game that uses a phone app combined with a beautifully illustrated book to play stories about monster hunting! I loved the art so I had to know more! Check out the interview below.

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Three curved spines leading up to faces, under which there are tons of small faces in bonelike structure.

Tell me a little about Children of the Beast. What excites you about it?

Oh man, such an open-ended question. So, I played rpgs since I played 1st ed D&D with my dad in elementary school. And the thing I miss most about those years is a sense of wonder and exploration, about never being sure what was around the corner. Sure, some of that was just childish naivete, but man there magic in reading crappy black and white drawings of bizarre monsters like the flumph. Now I’ve played and read so many rpgs that I’m gotten pretty jaded, finding myself enjoying narrative rpgs more often if only because they offer something fresh.

So we wanted to focus on that aspect of exploration with Children of the Beast, I really wanted to bring something new to the table that people would have to play to discover. So I’m excited about people discovering things like fleshsmithing body parts, finding out they can speak to sentient slime, and learning that the tunnel they’re in is actually the insides of a giant worm. We actually try to hide a lot of mechanics so people learn as they go!

I’m also just excited about our aesthetic, which I’ve heard described as “grotesque, but oddly beautiful”, which is totally what we’re going for.

A monster pressed up against a tree that is growing around it, with its chest burst open and its ribs sticking out and entrails pouring onto the ground.

What is the core activity of play in Children of the Beast, and what are the characters like? How does the Hunter’s Blood impact the character’s experiences in game?

So your group gets to explore the wilds of the Warrens, it’s like a living landscape that constantly shifts and evolves, like mother nature on steroids. You’re intending to explore it as beast hunters, tracking down creatures that have contracted a mutating plague called the Corruption. However, as you learn more about the world it becomes obvious it’s not just a simple matter of tracking down and killing monsters. It’s a world full of characters and personalities affected by the Corruption and the Warrens, and you figure out how your character would react to all of it and develop. Of course, it can always be just about wanton murder, but it’s still an rpg, you can explore what parts of it you want.

The Hunter’s Blood is sort of a genetic thing that makes your characters immune to the Corruption and actually capable of hunting beasts. The public has a terrified respect of you, like if Cthulhu was your plumber or something. They will trust you to do your job but otherwise they want nothing to do with you, maybe even prefer you were dead. This can cause a lot of juicy interpersonal conflict as what you need to do becomes more complex, which I love, haha.

A slug like creature with a banded back and claws on its front where its short legs are, long spiny claws near its jaw, and an open mouth revealing an iridescent mouth spread wide and revealing multiple sets of teeth.

How did you come up with the various beasts and their designs, and how do you mechanize them in the game?

Man, how do we come up with monsters… It’s honestly a tricky question! I’ve probably come up with over half of the initial ideas, but working with a team means everyone kinda gets to put their little touch on things. Like the artists we work with sometimes just come up with cool ideas I never even thought of once they start sketching. The goblin, which is like this giant bone worm thing with a nest of skulls, is one that I love how it came out, even though in some ways it was quite different than what I initially imagined. A lot of my ideas have been initially seeded by dreams I had, so I don’t know how much that helps people, haha.

Mechanically it depends. We often have mechanical ideas when we create a creature, but game development is a complicated beast, sometimes ideas just don’t work out in playtesting as well as you thought they would. We always try to bring something new to the table with each one, and that can sometimes be quite difficult to do without significantly increasing the scope of the project, haha.

But in general, we try to achieve at least two of three things:

Does it have a unique method of attacking?
Does it have a unique method of defense or an interesting weakness?
Does it have a unique twist, like with its senses or movement that changes how they would approach the creature?

#3 is obviously the trickiest, and can overlap a bit with the other two, but it’s just a guideline for making interesting creatures. Honestly doing a whole bunch of unique things can be terrible for a single creature design, as it loses focus and players will have difficulty understanding what they need to do.

A lizard-like character with tons of spines and spikes all over their body and tail with three weapons overhead as though they're juggling them.

How do you design a game with rich interpersonal narratives and the technological interface you use and still make it a safe place for people to play? What did you have to consider with content and people’s comfort levels, considering the artistic depiction of some of the monsters?

So this is actually something we think about a lot. We’ve been lucky to have a very diverse team over the years, and each one has helped give me a new perspective on things since I’m a pretty standard cis white guy.

We don’t find it necessary to really comment much on gender for example. A lot of “survival of the fittest” type games can often devolve into some pretty reductionist gender roles, but fact of the matter is this is a fantasy game, and we don’t need any of that cruft to make the world feel real. In the app, you can choose from a variety of icons for your gender and boy did we include a lot. Now being inclusionary is more than just saying “look, we included you!”, so we hope people find and enjoy the other ways in which we’ve worked to have a diverse world.

But in the end, we can be pretty gross at times. We just try to stick to more “body horror” type grossness, and we try not to revel in it either. I want you to feel surprised, not sick. The point of the game is to have fun, and if the themes of the game sound interesting to you than we hope you enjoy it. I admit I’m not entirely sure what to do if someone finds something we did objectionable, at least other than try to ignore it and hope it doesn’t play a prominent role. I’ve played in a lot of groups with a “rule of x” or something similar, where a subject or action can be cut out of the narrative, and I can only hope people feel comfortable doing that with our game. The app connects over the internet, but it needs a password for your campaign so we really intend for it only to be played with friends.

How does the game work using the phone app interface? How did that open your options with mechanics and design?

Designing a game with an app is like working with an angel and a demon.

On one hand, there have been many mechanics we cut or changed because they would have been incredibly awkward to use in the app. It’s actually because of this that we’ve been trying to have our tools be as flexible as possible, where the app doesn’t have to “know” everything for you to use something in game.

But having a sort of forced editor like that, where clean mechanics result in less work the programmers have to do, is something I’ve really appreciated over the years. Because many of the mechanics we did cut were in fact just awkward to begin with. The app also allows more advanced mechanics, like our wound system, to become possible. You gotta be careful though. If a mechanic is unplayable by hand it’s not really playable, especially for our game that doesn’t require the companion app. So for us, an “advanced mechanic” the app can help with is one that has a lot of simple steps, steps that can be reduced to only a few decisions when using the app. We’re actually still trying to streamline certain aspects of the wound system, as I’d like it to still be easier to play by hand.

A sunset landscape with a massive monster's beak-like face emerging from the ground.

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Awesome, thanks Nicholas! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Children of the Beast on Kickstarter!

Five or So Questions on Dust Wardens

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Nora Blake on Dust Wardens, which is currently on Kickstarter! It sounds awesome and promotes a lot of values I appreciate, so I hope you like the responses below!

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Tell me a little about Dust Wardens. What excites you about it?

This is a game I’ve been working on in one form or another for almost two years; it’s technically a hack of a game that doesn’t exist (anymore). I think the most pressing influence is Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle and the way it talks about bonds between people and places and things (words like karass, wampeter, and granfalloon do not appear in this book, but honestly they might as well!). Those themes have stuck with me for a long time and are really important to me, especially as someone with almost no ties to, for example, blood family. It’s nice to think about my connections to the world and which connections are really mine.

The Dust Wardens Kickstarter image that has brown lettering overrun with various plants, skeletal remains, and bugs saying Dust Wardens.

The game focuses a lot on relationships, and this is mechanized in Vows. How do Vows work and what do they mean to the players?

Essentially, Vows are promises; specifically, they should be “I will” statements that drive you toward action. I’ve seen them end up as anything from things like “when the time comes I will give you my moonlight” to “I’ll always hold the pieces together when you feel broken”. They help to define your relationships through a lens of action and devotion, which are very important to me. I’m the type of girl to make big romantic promises with an inside context only the two of us know.

Polyamory and queerness feature heavily in Dust Wardens. I’d really love to hear more about this! How did you prioritize including it, and how do these elements affect the gameplay?

I talk at length about polyamory and queerness in the text itself, and how pivotal these things are to it. The world of dust wardens is a dangerous one, and humanity exists on the fringes of life on the planet. There is no bastion of “civilization” or state controlling their lives or coming to save them. On a more somber note this is how it can feel sometimes to be a queer trans person in the world doing my best to build my own pockets of community in a wider, more dangerous world. I won’t call it a metaphor, but it’s an applicable framework.

Why did you elect not to use playbooks, and how does this enrich the game for players of different backgrounds?

To be honest I thought about using playbooks a few times in the course of development but I never found any that really felt right. I have no idea how I would sort dust wardens into categories. It’s something I might revisit someday, but as it stands I like that things are more freeform. All I’ve ever wanted is for you to be able to make yourself in this game and play the game with someone on a date.

The Dust Wardens cover art by Anna Landin that shows three people, two darker skinned with red and brown hair and one paler with blonde hair, dressed in mostly utilitarian clothing with tattoos and simple jewelry, standing beside a car that's well-worn and has plants growing on it. The ground and asphalt below them is broken and cracked. — Dust Wardens cover art by Anna Landin.

The choice of using cards as a mechanic is really cool! How do the card mechanics differ from traditional PbtA type mechanics, and how do they better support Dust Wardens as a game?

The tools we use in play have an immense impact on tone and impression. I think about the Quiet Year a lot and how the map is such an integral piece of its tone. Originally this game used playing cards, and had a much stronger Americana theming, but as time went on I began to want something better than America. I’m sure part of that is from thinking about hope a lot more these days. A better tomorrow is out there, even if it’s on the other side of an apocalypse. The world of dust wardens isn’t there yet, but it’s on its way.

—

Thank you so much Nora for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Dust Wardens on Kickstarter today!

Five or So Questions on Grimmerspace

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Rone Barton on Grimmerspace, which is currently on Kickstarter! It sounds pretty cool so I hope you enjoy Rone’s responses below!

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

Grimmerspace is a Starfinder compatible sci-fi horror setting. It allows you to game through a gritty brand of sci-fi wherein the concepts are mind-bending and terror is outright palpable. I’m darkly zealous for the chance to raise the bar on these two genres that Brundlefly together so harmoniously.

While success in all genres hinges on achieving certain desired instant reactions from an audience, such as romcoms that always end with one lover leaving the other for good but it all gets turned around because of an impassioned and revealing speech that leaves us misty and full of hope for a more positive tomorrow, or a tearjerker that absolutely requires our investment in the story’s characters enough that we genuinely find it sad when the crops die and the family bloodhound contracts dropsy, the horror genre is actually more like the humor genre in that there is a binary pass-fail with no shades of gray between. You somehow conjure a primal fright or a laugh or you do not. And there is the expectation to create that effect many times in a row, which is demanding. But if you fail to deliver memorable terror or a symphony of giggles, it just wasn’t that good, was it?

Grimmerspace is a chance to pull upon ten thousand threads of speculative wonderment and dread from films, books, TV shows, graphic novels, daydreams, and true life experiences from my past leading all the way back to childhood and then tangle them together to form a web that traps your imagination. It’s an artistic holy mission to create something next level for gamers. That’s ambitious sounding, but that’s who I’ve always been. If brass rings were five feet off the ground we wouldn’t ever mention them.

In a dark office, a creature with a rounded head, large eyes and nose, and sharp small teeth in a large mouth sits with blood dripping down its chest. — The MinoThunk from the Abattoir 8 adventure, available from DriveThruRPG for free.

What does horror mean in Grimmerspace? What do players encounter that can shake them to the core, giving them memories turned to nightmares?

Horror is as widely sourced in our science fiction setting as it is in any Earth-based fiction. While you could play a game that’s entirely along tonal lines of say, Alien or Event Horizon, those films merely scratch the surface of the dread storytelling possibilities we left in the GM’s toolbox.

Grimmerspace horror is like any horror fiction that ever shook you, regardless of where it was originally set. We’ve excised the quivering heart of such tales and placed them on distant worlds and in the cold and deadly space between them, and woven science fiction inextricably throughout them.

Lou Agresta and I identified fifteen subgenres of horror we’re working with in Grimmerspace, and when Iron GM Games designs an adventure we look at which subgenres were present and then label them according right up front so GMs will know what they’re in for, be it any particular combination of the following horror subgenres: Apocalyptic, Body, Comedy, Cosmic, Crime, Dark Fantasy, Erotic, Gothic, Occult/Religious, Psychological, Rural, Splatter, Surreal, Survival, and War.

You don’t find horror merely in having beasts and monsters, and the darkest natures of people on display. It’s in how you frame a scene. That’s where the terror comes from. An excerpt from my essay About Horror in Grimmerspace (which is what I hand out to our writers to orient themselves in my idea of storytelling) goes like this:

A vampire skulking around a gloomy castle in D&D can provide fun at the gaming table, sure. But do you find that vampire inherently scary? In D&D, a vampire is usually just viewed as a potential level drainer and you already have a pretty good idea of how to kill the thing (if not, you’ve really got to step out of the sensory deprivation tank). However, if a GM had a flair for inspiring dread or put in a solid amount of work, they could make that vampire the most chilling encounter the players ever experienced. That same GM could also spend that very same effort to make Keep on the Borderlands scary, right? But that’s a lot to ask from a GM. Grimmerspace is there to make it easy by offering the recipe for effective horror right there on the page, so just follow our suggested directions.
Let’s get back to that vampire (not that there are traditional vampires in Grimmerspace). What if we wanted to make a vampire that was actually scary? How about one that, once surrounded by a party, spins growling to face each of the PCs one by one in preternaturally quick jerks that cause one NPC ally’s dead lover – dangling by his/her neck in the vampire’s maw – to sway like a broken mouse? The vampire isn’t all that scary on its own. But the dominance of its prowess certainly is. The loss of a loved one is. The NPC couldn’t save the lover… the person who just before had so much light in their eyes is now but a sad, limp prop who only moves when their devourer makes them move, and in a horrid way you’ve never before imagined. Humans are supposed to be exalted beings but clearly, we are animal prey just like any other beast of the field. Ta-da. Genuine discomfort!
Our adventures can’t be horror just because maybe you saw a corpse or spines removed from bodies. Not that these gruesome sights don’t help establish horror. They most certainly do. But horror also has to be baked into the plot itself, not superimposed ala “Well… maybe this could be scary if we made the monsters gooier.”
About Horror in Grimmerspace by Rone Barton

A humanoid large creature stands on a metal structure in an industrial environment. They have a metal-looking vest with wiring and red light and for arms, the lower halves are each a pair of circular saws. — The Butcher from the Abbatoir 8 adventure, available on DriveThruRPG for free.

Very cool! When you talk about a horror sandbox, just how big is that box? If someone’s hanging by the tether of their spacesuit, what are some examples of horrors they might witness before they feel the sudden jerk of the limit?

That sandbox is as wide as a galaxy and then some, and rife with locales that each engender particular blends of horror subgenre. This particular question offers a serious challenge to my desire to be pithy because you have me wanting to essay here. Worry not, I’ve been court ordered not to.

There are remote planets all around the less explored edge of the G-Rim, and each of them has individual characteristics that make it unforgettable and unique. The ineffable locha trees of Paravesh that exude chaos itself. That which lies dormant under the sands of Tarmire but will come alive with your sweat. That which beckons to and changes you on the ocean world of Sensica V. The City of Morn promises the chance to speak to the dead, but Grimmerspace is a ravenous place that often takes more in return than is deserved.

And while unthinkable threats in remote zones are solid choices, we’re not limited to them. For instance, the planet of Attien Prime is studded in eight mega-arcologies, each reaching from the ground to well past the clouds and each huge enough to house a billion person nation. That set-up precludes certain types of horror tales because a blade-wielding maniac with the Friday the 13^th ch-ch-ch-ah-ah-ah soundtrack playing behind him would be taken down in a heartbeat by a law enforcement drone. But there are horror stories that ideally pop off in overcrowded places. In a tightly contained realm full of rich and poor, segregated into separate cities and work areas, you can imagine how any outbreak or revolt could turn into something quite ugly. All those people packed in with no way out. All of that bubbling resentment or screaming panic. So while you won’t see the lone and wordless slaughter lovin’ maniac in the woods who proves so effective in rural horror, you might witness a swarm of mayhem gush across a city like a tsunami wave of blood ala World War Z. One minute of that might have you wishing you were taking your chances back at Camp Hockey Mask.

Now, what horrors might you find in the killing space between the stars of the G-Rim? Well, we’ve made space less empty than most would like. There are things that can get you out there. Things outside your ship. Things within it. Thing is, Grimmerspace offers heroism in the face of all of that horror. Our heroes have been through too much to let the monsters win, and they battle on even if it costs them their sanity or their life. Same goes for the villains. One example, there’s a predator that floats through interstellar space on cosmic wind, waiting to feed upon the energy of the passing ships it ensnares. However, the Shung Corsairium, a deeply evil and dangerous pirate organization, capture and weaponize these creatures, using them to immobilize other ships in electro-absorptive netting.

All of this to say that when you first experience things that go bump in the night or that scratch at the ship’s hull, it ought to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. But like Ash and the Evil Dead, eventually, you’ll been pushed past the edge and you resign yourself to fight back until you’re strong enough to overpower your monsters. Our setting is grim, to be sure. And horror can certainly be disempowering. But in Grimmerspace you can and likely will become the very thing that makes the boogeyman lose sleep at night. Fear is something to be confronted. It asks you questions that you can answer if you try hard enough. Fear can be beaten.

Finally, how does Grimmerspace work within, or defy, the confines of the Starfinder mechanical structure? How might players who like Starfinder be drawn in, and how might they be pleasantly surprised by new elements?

Horror gaming is often best served with a narrative touch, and so our challenge at Iron GM Games is to gently add that touch to Starfinder which is an inherently crunchy system.

We offer tips throughout our adventures for how to convey and maximize the effect of horror. How NPCs are developed and used is a major part of this. Foreshadowing. Explaining the nature of why things frighten us and why we want them to. An optional sanity system that is ideal for the cosmic horror subgenre (or any other subgenre in my opinion). There are so many more tricks up our sleeves than what I’m alluding to, but when the book release, you will see what we’ve done. You will see and despair. The darkness will come for you and you will become the darkness. But hey, in a FUN way!

A cast of characters with various degrees of alien or technological advancements on their bodies with purple lightning in the background and the text "Grimmerspace" and "Funded" emblazoned on the piece.

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Thank you to Rone for the great interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Grimmerspace on Kickstarter today!

Tag: worldbuilding

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