Tag: worldbuilding

Many Questions on Dream Askew // Dream Apart

I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum about their Kickstarter project, Dream Askew // Dream Apart, two games about community and belonging as marginalized people. I hope you enjoy the interview and that you’ll check out the Kickstarter!

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A dark haired woman in a black shirt smiling at the camera.
Avery Alder


Tell me about the project of Dream Askew // Dream Apart. Why does this joint project matter to you as a creator?

Avery: While these two games tell stories of very different communities—Dream Askew is about a queer enclave amid the collapse of civilization, while Dream Apart is a fantastical-historical game of the shtetl—they’re also united in being games about marginalized people building a community for themselves against the odds, what we call games of belonging outside belonging.

For me, this project matters because telling stories about finding our collective power and learning how to live together in community matters. And I feel really proud about how we’ve merged those themes with the mechanics: power is distributed around the table, and rather than relying on chance, everything is driven by the choices that we make together.

A dark haired man in a light colored shirt smiling at the camera, in black and white.
Benjamin Rosenbaum

Benjamin: I love the games we’ve made, I’m excited about people playing them. I think this kind of in-person game can be a great space for learning and exploring, and I think it’s cool that these games celebrate the agency and struggle of communities with complicated relationships to the outside world, in settings that I think matter a lot.

What was your collaborative experience like on the project, and how did you handle complications or struggles of any kind?

A: Our collaboration gained momentum really slowly! Benjamin first wrote me about using the Dream Askew framework to create a game about Jewish shtetl life in 2014, and it wasn’t until 2017 that we committed to an active collaboration and co-development process. I’ve been really delighted by the ways that Benjamin’s innovations in Dream Apart have looped back to transform Dream Askew; key relationships are instrumental in defining the relationship web of the community, and they weren’t even in my original design!

B: It’s been amazing! Avery is brilliant, super nice, amazingly supportive, and has oodles of artistic integrity. She knows a tremendous amount about game design, community, and the technical praxis of creating and publishing games, and it’s been an enormous privilege to work with her. We’ve handled complications and struggles by talking through them, listening carefully to one another, and making decisions together — a process that has been strikingly full of fun and ease. I think our visions were very closely aligned from the beginning, and we also have very distinctive areas of expertise in the project. Each of us is the expert in our own game’s subject matter, so we tend to naturally defer to that expertise; and while I have a deep background as a writer and gamer, it’s my first professional game project, and Avery is one of my favorite game designers, so it’s been very easy to trust her judgement on game design and publication issues.

A yellow and green toned image with a collection of people gathered in a fallen city.
The Dream Askew cover.

Dream Askew

Tell me the core purpose of Dream Askew. What about it fuels your passion?

A: For me, the passion comes from building something that can be run at the drop of a hat, that tells meaningful stories, that’s legit fun to play, and that brings us closer to imagining possiblities for queer community.

I think the game is challenging in some ways! It requires players to take on a big creative load, and to jump into co-developing an apocalyptic world together. But for players who are up to the challenge, it’s a delight! The game uses lists and prompts to point players toward interesting dilemmas, and then gives them space to actually figure out how to handle them. That’s exciting! That’s what fuels my passion.

A sheet of paper labeled "Introducing the Hawker" with various lists of options for players to choose from, some already circled.
The Hawker playbook.

When you work on the project, what design elements do you keep as key priority?

A: I started work on Dream Askew in early 2013, when I was helping run a weekly, drop-in meetup group. It was queer-centering, but welcome to all who wanted to drop in and play something neat. I tried running Apocalypse World a couple times at those meetups, and it never quite worked: the sheets intimidated new players, the mechanics were slightly too dense to teach to new players in the short span of time we had each night, and the game always felt like it was cut too short. I designed Dream Askew to fit perfectly into that space: inviting, quick-paced, and perfect for weirdos. And that remains a priority. I want this to be a game that I can run at the drop of a hat for a gaggle of queers who’ve never played a roleplaying game before, and I want it to rock under those conditions.

An orange and brown toned image with angels - multi-winged creatures with eyes peeking through the wings and flaming halos - watching over people in a small neighborhood with tents and buildings.
The Dream Apart cover.

Dream Apart

Tell me the core purpose of Dream Apart. What about it fuels your passion?

B: What I really wanted was to capture the distinctive tone, setting, and underlying philosophy of Jewish fantasy and folklore, which differs from both the traditional high fantasy ethos of a titanic final battle between Good and Evil, and from the aimless-violent-vagabond ethos of sword & sorcery. I wanted to see characters who are rooted in community, in a deeply spiritual but also morally ambiguous world, a world in which evil is written with a small “e”: our own human failures of courage and compassion, rather than something alien and essentialized and external; characters who don’t wield triumphant violence to achieve their ends, but use wit, grit, and moxie to thrive in a world where they are likely to be always on the receiving end of violence; and just all the rich strangeness, cleverness, yearning, whimsy, irony, self-criticism, soul, and mystery of talmud, midrash, Yiddish folktales, and the literatures of the shtetl.

A sheet of paper labeled "Introducing the Klezmer" with various lists of options for players to choose from, some already circled.
The playbook for the Klezmer.

When you work on the project, what design elements do you keep as key priority?

B: I think the main priority is capturing that spirit described above; other priorities include making it an accessible game with elegantly simple mechanics, concise design, and very rich fiction, keeping players supported in story creation so they always have something to fall back upon and aren’t left hanging if the flow of creativity stutters, and supporting a social contract that centers everyone feeling safe and curious and excited and connected.

A black and white image of a sigil - the bottom half has three lines arranged like an A, with a half circle posed on top and multiple curved and straight lines emerging from it.
The sigil for Dream Askew.

Dream Askew

What have been some of the most vital elements of growth in Dream Askew over the past five years, mechanically and thematically?

A: Mechanically, there are two ways that the game has changed that I think are the most vital: the introduction of the community worksheet, and the introduction of key relationships for every character role. These two changes shift the story of Dream Askew in the direction of community, relationships under pressure, and questions of belonging. The game feels like it contains a deeper treatment of its themes, rather than a more aesthetic, surface-level treatment of what it means to belong to a queer enclave. Key relationships were a piece of the design that Benjamin first introduced into Dream Apart, which I was so excited to borrow back for the apocalypse.

Thematically, I think the biggest difference isn’t actually with the game, but with the real world that I’m going to be releasing the game into. The idea that apocalypse was a contemporary force which operated in waves at the margins of civilization, that the digital realm would factor into not only the collapse but also what came next… in 2013 this was closer to science fiction. In 2018 it feels startlingly timely to be talking about. I talk about this more in the design notes I’m releasing alongside the game, but I think it’s chilly how much more real the world of Dream Askew now feels for me and my friends.

The "The Outliers" book, black and white with a black and white illustration of queer, edgy characters, imposed over the faded cover of Dream Apart.
The Outliers zine, which is a stretch goal reached on the Kickstarter, includes additional game materials.

What elements of queerness speak the most to you personally, and to your experience in games, that you have brought forth in Dream Askew?

A: I think there’s a bit of misdirection at play in how Dream Askew portrays queerness. Character creation opens with a prompt to choose from a list of strange and unprecedented genders, and to think visually through physical descriptions and wardrobe combinations. Queerness feels like a flashy aesthetic project. And that’s definitely a real part of the game, one that it’s fun to play around with! But queerness is also the relationships you attempt to hold in balance, and it’s the fact that everyone has a different kind of lopsided power that both contributes to the community and also puts them at odds with it. The Iris is a potential healer, but also an unsettling psychic weirdo. The Hawker is a resourceful provider, but also a territorial profiteer. The Stitcher is an engineering genius, but also a strange recluse. The drama of the game comes from watching how these people who hold sway in the community tug its ideals and character back and forth.

A black and white image of a shape almost like a bell with two concentric circles in the top center, then a straight line on top of a triangle that has a Hebrew symbol "alef" in the center.
The Dream Apart sigil.

Dream Apart

What were some of the elements of Jewish fantasy and folklore that you personally felt deeply about including in Dream Apart, and how did you include them?

B: Most people are familiar with a kind of Sunday School version of the Hebrew Bible, in which the Divine is a kind of mathematically omniscient and omnipotent Santa Claus whose job it is to make everyone be good. A cursory glance at the world around you should make it clear that this doesn’t make much sense. In fact the story (or rather stories) that the texts suggest are much weirder. The God of the Tanakh is volatile, mysterious, numinous, and alien; the midrashim and the Kabbalah make this weirder still, with a fractured Divinity in exile from Itself, and a universe-altering magic inherent in the smallest human actions (it’s not that much of a stretch to say that in the Lurianic Kabbalah, when mom lights the candles Friday night she is literally healing a tiny bit of the sundered Godhead). The psychic maelstrom of Apocalypse World (and thus of Dream Askew) is the closest thing to this theology that I’ve found in any game; it feels a lot like what Moses encountered at that bush in Midian. Magic in games tends to feel like engineering at best, and more commonly like ordering from a menu at Denny’s. Gods are either absent, or they’re statted-up dispensers of plot tokens and buffs. I wanted a kind of magic that would be terrifying, wondrous, unsafe, inchoate. I also wanted it to be tied deeply into the story’s drama of moral agency, because so much of Jewish tradition is about wrestling with complex moral questions that have no easy answers. Temptation, solace, power at a price, rebuke, reconciliation, grudges, forgiveness, these things are not just part of the social drama, they’re also central to the meaning of the Unseen World. A demon that just wants to try and kill you is not nearly as interesting as a demon that wants you to betray yourself. A golem isn’t just a monster, it’s an allegory of freedom and servitude, the limits and risks of violent self-defense and of human knowledge. A dybbuk isn’t just a possessing spirit, it’s one with an agenda and unfinished business.

A sheet of paper labeled "Welcome to the Shtetl" with various lists of options for players to choose from, some already circled, and a map of the Shtetl..
The sheet for the Shtetl for Dream Apart.

Were there any unique challenges for approaching the subjects of Jewish culture and beliefs that are not addressed often enough or respectfully enough in popular media?

B: To the extent that shtetl culture is addressed in popular media at all — think the musical-theater and cinematic versions of Fiddler on the Roof and Yentl — it tends to be in a sentimental, rose-and-sepia-tinted, elegiac frame, ignoring a lot of the complexities and real-world grittiness. Non-Jews are usually offscreen menaces (though to be fair, one of Tevye’s daughters does marry one); economics is flattened into a virtuous poverty; and in general, the viewer is encouraged to see the events as a kind of hagiographic ancestral origin story. (The original texts are grittier and sometimes queerer than their tamed stage & cinematic versions, too — there’s a good argument that Singer saw his Yentl, who keeps the name Anshel at the end of the story as opposed to putting a dress on and running off to America, as a trans man.) At one point Avery asked if we should find a more Yiddish-looking font for the Dream Apart playtest kit; I responded that I really liked using the same one we use for Askew, to get away from that coy sentimentality and ram home the point that this, too, was a gradual apocalypse, with — for its characters– the same apocalyptic immediacy.

A dark haired woman in a black shirt writing in a notebook while sitting at a table in a restaurant.
Avery writing notes.

One last…

Beyond basic structural elements, what are some pieces of Dream Askew // Dream Apart that are similar or contrasting – mechanically and thematically?

A: I think one of the most interesting contrasts—and one I haven’t talked about anywhere yet—is in how the two games approach supplemental reference materials. Since Dream Apart is historical, its reference materials need to offer up specific, tangible answers: here’s what that word means; here’s a plausible Russian surname from the era; here’s the river you’d walk alongside. Benjamin is working hard to make resources that feel thorough while remaining compact. On the other hand, Dream Askew is speculative and built upon a queer epistemology. Its reference materials need to do much the opposite, to reject a single definition in favour of pitching the question back to players in an encouraging way: that’s a great question, what do those words mean? My challenge is being exploratory and playful without coming across as hostile or opaque.

The book of Dream Askew // Dream Apart with the cover illustrations and white text over black cover, imposed over a faded image of the Dream Apart cover.
The Dream Askew // Dream Apart book and illustration.

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Thank you so much to Avery and Benjamin for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and will share it with others! Please check out the Kickstarter for Dream Askew // Dream Apart today!

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

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

Five or So Questions on Archives of the Sky

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Aaron Reed on Archives of the Sky, which is currently on Kickstarter! Archives of the Sky is a GMless game with collaborative story telling, set in the broader reaches of the universe where characters seek purpose in the epic galaxy. It seems pretty nifty, so please check out the interview below! You can also peek at at a play example here.

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Kickstarter video for Archives of the Sky.

Tell me a little about Archives of the Sky. What excites you about it?

Archives of the Sky is a tabletop storytelling game that uses epic science fiction as a stage for stories about very human conflicts and values. I love sci-fi and roleplaying, but most of the existing games I know of in the genre focus more on its external trappings: spaceships, laser guns, and so on. There are a few rare exceptions that focus on the more human, philosophical side of sci-fi– “Shock” by Joshua A.C. Newman is one of my favorites– but I wanted a system that also took inspiration from GM-less improvisational games like Microscope, Fiasco, and Downfall. After a lot of iteration and playtesting, Archives is the result.

What excites me about it is that it really evolved into a great vehicle for supporting a group of people to collaboratively create an amazing story together. The mechanics of the game really work to provide a structure for a plot, and to ensure that plot is based around a conflict between beliefs. The characters are then forced to resolve this dilemma somehow, which means they need to get down to the heart of why the believe the things they do and why they’re worth defending– and that tends to lead to some great roleplaying.


four people in a semi-circle around a table filled with index cards, paper, and writing instruments.
A group of people playing Archives of the Sky. Index card tents! yay!
How do you set up a game of Archives of the Sky – who has input into the story, the characters? – and how do plot hooks happen?


Everyone’s involved with setting up the world and telling the story– there’s a role called the Archivist to help facilitate, but everyone has equal creative authority. The first thing you do when you sit down to play is create a House together, a group of near-immortal wanderers who have been exploring the galaxy for thousands and thousands of years. You start by coming up with their core purpose, which becomes the game’s first value. This might be something like “We preserve life,” or “We learn truths,” or even something simpler like “We hunt” or “We sing.” It’s something this House has sworn to pursue as their highest calling.

The rules walk you through fleshing out the House a bit more, giving them a few more Values and figuring out their place in the galaxy, and then each player makes their own character, someone within the House. Characters each have their own personal Values, which may or may not line up with the House’s Values, or with each others’. These are the seeds of stories– think of Captain Kirk in the early Star Trek movies, who has sworn to uphold the Federation’s mission of peace, but will also “never forgive” the Klingons for the death of his son. Clearly, he’s going to have to face this conflict sooner or later. (Sentences starting “I always” or “I never” make great Values, by the way.)

Once the game begins, players take turns staging Scenes that advance the plot. Each scene is based around a Question which that player has about where the story is going. So if a mysterious transmission was detected in the previous scene, the next player might ask “Who sent the transmission?” as their Question– or might introduce a new complication by asking something like “Why can’t we find the source of the transmission?” Everyone then collaboratively plays a scene around answering the Question, both playing their character as well as making things happen in the story world (like a GM).



Some "trove" cards, created by the players to support storytelling - the words are machines, magnitude, nightfall, prisoners, absorbtion, decaying, and disturbance.
Some “trove” cards, created by the players to support storytelling.

What are the basic mechanics like for social and other conflicts, and how do they engage players emotionally?


Players have the option of resolving conflicts through roleplay, but there’s a mechanic that provides a bit of randomness and an uncertain outcome that can be used by any player who wants it. Another thing you do at the start of play is create a deck of index cards called the Trove, each one with a single word on it. (The rules encourage you to pull these words from your favorite sci-fi novels.) When you want to resolve an uncertain outcome, you can draw from the Trove and let the word inspire the outcome. What’s great about this is the interpretation can be anything you want: literal, metaphorical, even tangential. So the word “fire” might inspire one person to narrate a catastrophic explosion, while another might read it as the fire in someone’s eyes as they pull off a wild maneuver.

Where emotions come in is when the story gets to a Dilemma, a conflict between two Values. This is a situation where the characters need to decide on a course of action, but either decision would threaten one of the Values in play. Say the players have created a House with a core Value of staying hidden; but one of the characters has a personal value to protect the helpless, and the House has a chance to save a lot of lives by coming out of the shadows. Can that character convince the others to change their minds and go against their House’s highest value? Or will she find a way to live with betraying what she believes for a greater good? It’s not an easy decision, because any character who acts against a Value they believe in might have to Adapt at the end of the session, making a permanent change to their character.

An example of a Value, "We Always Show the Truth" with one in the background reading "We Record Tragedies."
An example of a Value, “We Always Show the Truth.”

What was your playtesting process like? Tell me about any realizations you had, and how you dealt with necessary changes.

I’ve been making digital games for a long time, but this is my first fully finished and released tabletop roleplaying game, and one of the things that surprised me was how much more playtesting and iteration tabletop takes. With digital games, you spend some amount of time thinking of ideas, a hellishly long amount of time programming them, and then some amount of time playtesting: ideally throughout the process, but often closer to the end. With tabletop, almost all of your iteration time is spent actually playing the game and seeing how it works, with a few hours here and there to think through problems people are having and revise the rules.

Archives morphed a lot as it went through close to twenty fairly significant revisions (i.e. not just tweaking wording) over about two years. It accumulated more and more rules as I tried to get all the parts to work the way I wanted them to. The downside was this is as you went through a game, you kept bumping into new rules, and needing to stop to explain them. Finally I sat down and counted up the number of individual rules and mechanics in the game, and there were something like 27 of them. I challenged myself to try to make a version of the game that had only 10 concepts that needed to be explained. I think the simpler version that came out of that was when I really cracked the code of how the game worked, and from then on everything was just refinement.

The biggest two realizations I had were A) the game was really about Values, not the plot events (in the original version, you did a lot of writing down plot points on cards, moving them around the table, taking special moves to revise them, etc.– in the final version, all that focus is placed on the Values in play instead). And B) A bunch of separate mechanics in older versions could be combined into the simple rule “Ask a question to begin a scene.” So at certain times of the game that’s a fixed question; at some times there are some questions that make more sense than others; but it’s only one rule to explain, and everything else follows naturally from that framing, which simplified things a lot.

How do you put the “epic” into the game, with mechanics, narrative, and structure?


I wanted all players to get involved in telling the story: contributing details to scenes, helping build the world, and so on, but in practice people were often afraid to contribute when it wasn’t their “turn” to stage a scene. So I added the concept of two meta-roles, called the Epic and the Intimate, that people take turns playing. Your job when you’re the Epic is to look for opportunities to make the story huge and awe-inspiring in scope… so if someone mentions a spaceship, you might jump in with “It’s three miles long and made from some incredibly black material that totally swallows up the starlight.” By contrast, the Intimate looks for moments to keep the focus on emotions and small human details: they can ask a player what their character is feeling at any time during a scene, or add small touches of detail, like a texture or a significant glance between two characters. This system works really well to give players “permission” to tweak the story, and having those two things to focus on help make the stories feel like the kind of sci-fi I want to emulate.
The Archives of the Sky cover, reading "Archives of the Sky, a tabletop storygame of galactic scope and human ideals, by Aaron A. Reed."
The Archives of the Sky cover.
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Thanks so much to Aaron for the interview! This was a real cool game to learn about. I hope you all enjoyed the interview and will check out the Archives of the Sky Kickstarter today!

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

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

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

“Wrong” Turn

So someone is playing Turn and I’m very excited about this, but they and a fellow player have both stated clearly that they don’t think they’re playing the game the way I want it to be played.

And like.

Andy Samberg as Jake Peralta strumming a guitar and screaming.
This is my favorite and most often used gif.
Okay, I would like people to play quiet dramas, and slice-of-life style stuff. That’d be cool. But quiet drama means different things to different people, and part of why I need playtests is to see what it means in people’s interpretations of different types of towns and stuff. Not every play of a game is going to be the same, and I accept that.

So like, I’m struggling because I don’t know exactly how they’re playing, and I don’t think it is “wrong” or anything, but I do think that the way they did setup and what themes they chose influenced the play, and that matters. But how do I even say that? Like, even if you’re playing the game slightly differently than I expected does not mean it’s not playing the way that is appropriate based on the way you’ve set up the town?

Like, here are the ways you can play Turn “wrong”:

  • play it in a city or suburb, or a place with a large population
  • don’t have shifters in it
  • appropriate culture to play it
  • violate the “don’t do this in Turn” section of the essays (re: content)
  • pretend it’s just a standard PbtA game and don’t engage the mechanics
  • ignore identity and community as aspects of the game
  • don’t emotionally engage with the narrative or subject matter
Lego Batman saying "no" over and over while flopping around Wayne Manor.
Yeah, I know, don’t tell people not to do what they want with your game. *eyeroll*
All of the other stuff is interpretations of my design, which I can’t control. Tempo, subject matter, etc. are all stuff that are different in a lot of games, like Fiasco can go anywhere from “wow, this is exciting!” to “wow, this is depressing!” to “wow, I am super confused” in one freaking session. Monsterhearts can go from dark and filled with examination of abuse and sexuality to a few kind-of-friends Scoobying around town trying to protect everyone. This is to say little of trad games like D&D and Shadowrun, which can run the tonal rollercoaster AND still let you explore the subjects the games promote. 

There are tons of types of small towns, all with their individual leanings and themes and politics. Small towns can have microcultures that make surrounding towns look at them like they’re upsidedown in a teakettle, and that includes the way people deal with things there. It’s complex, and that’s why there are different themes and elements of the towns you create in Turn. The thing is, I haven’t played all of the combinations! 

There are many ways you could combine all of the elements in Turn, and frankly, I don’t have 4 hours every day for the next mumblemumble years to test it out fully. That’s why I’m excited to see other people play it! Yes! Show me your thing you did with my thing! That sounds really weird but I don’t care!
Queen singing "I want it all, I want it all"
Tell meeeeeeeeee
Now, I’ll be real. There are a few things that bug me, and this is not a thing that this person did really because they highlighted at one point how my game was not doing this thing, but man, everyone calls it a Powered by the Apocalypse game. 
I freaking. Okay. PbtA is a great system and has a purpose. Vincent and Meguey made a really amazing thing, and a lot of people have done amazing things with it. Turn is not a PbtA game. It’s inspired by it – and yes, I realize a lot of people think it’s the same thing to be inspired by a thing and actually a thing, but it is not – and I designed the game purposefully to go against PbtA principles I have seen reflected in related design. First, there’s no category of PbtA games. And second, here are commonalities between Turn and some games that are PbtA, and then some stuff that’s just Turn or not in Turn:
1) 2d6 (also you have a third die sometimes)
2) Move-like structure (you are rolling to resist rather than to take action)
3) Character sheets with personal information on them (you have two, one of which is sometimes swappable)
4) Stats with smaller numbers (you have 8, one for each sheet, and they’re absolute values)
5) Scaled results (you never fail in Turn, the results are to determine the consequences related to success)
6) No sex/intimacy move
7) No Hx, strings, etc.
8) Goals for Human and Beast that control advancement
9) Exposure tracked on relationships
10) Stress to measure turning from Human to Beast & etc.
This is not me saying “my game has nothing to do with PbtA,” this is me saying there are differences, they matter, and we need to stop saying everything is one kind of game because it happens to use a specific dice roll or has moves (which could be like feats), small stat numbers (like a ton of games), and scaled results (which I think was actually a thing in Shadowrun too, just not framed specifically this way?). Things are different! One thing is not necessarily the other thing! Like! Friends! We need to be a little more forgiving with definitions, or make some freakin’ new ones!
Tahani from The Good Place saying "and silently scream for the rest of time."
me.
Turn was originally conceived because I came home from playing my first session I can remember of Monsterhearts (this one*) and felt off about it. Something wasn’t right. It wasn’t hitting the right tone. I spent the next… really fucking long time… trying to figure out what that was, and meanwhile flipped numbers around, took out entire things, mentally threw out tons of material, and settled on what Turn is when John made me finally write it down because one of my greatest fears is that people will look at it and go “huh, oh, just another PbtA hack” and my fucking opus will be washed away into nothingness because some dingus can’t tell the difference between two different games that are wildly. fucking. different.
Sigh.
I’m a little…passionate today about this, and I think I always am, and always will be. But there’s reason for it. We use categories, especially manufactured ones, to scoop quality things into the trash all the time. Oh, it’s just another fantasy game. Oh, it’s just another PbtA hack. Oh, it’s just another Fate hack. Oh, I’ve seen so many games about zombies. Like come on. And the thing is, I rejected some of what I saw in PbtA work on purpose, and while some parts of mechanical structure remain, there are a lot of things I pulled from elsewhere conceptually. 
I would never dare to call myself original, but when you don’t have your own ideas, storebought is fine, so long as you mix them up in a new way and it still fucking tastes good.
I want to share my game with people without having the ever-burning comparison to “oh but you’re not as good as Monsterhearts and AW and and and” screaming in my face every time. I know you don’t mean to do it, most of you, but it sure burns my biscuits that you think it’s fun to tell me how much what I have labored so extensively over is Just Like That Other Thing. That’s what this is. This isn’t categorical. My game is different enough that it is reminiscent of PbtA work, but in part because of how many other games you could find similarities to, it is not the same. 
And that’s what I mean about people getting Turn wrong genuinely.
A shot from Big Hero 6 of the Aunt saying "I had a point."
I think.
It’s possible that I wouldn’t play Turn in the way you’re playing it, if you’re playing it and think you’re playing it differently than I intend. That’s like, good though? Because I am not every player. I am not able to imagine all possible ways my game could be played and executed beautifully, still exploring the concepts of identity and community while doing things with more passion and intensity, because the town they built makes more sense for that. 
So basically, I want to hear about the ways people explore Turn. I might be surprised, or unsure, or need to think about how something goes. But if the game works? If it is telling those stories, asking those questions, and it’s enjoyable? Then you’re probably doing okay. 
<3

*Shit, Turn is a year older than I thought.

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

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

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

Five or So Questions on Familiars of Terra

Hey all, I’ve got a great interview with Elizabeth Chaipraditkul on the new tabletop game Familiars of Terra, which is currently on Kickstarter! Liz got in touch and when I heard “familiars of Terra is a tabletop roleplay game set in a beautiful world where everyone has their own animal familiar” I knew many of you would be super amped to check it out. So here’s the interview!

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A dark skinned person with a beard, wearing a fancy shirt with a fur collar, with an animal that l can only describe as a poodle with wings. SO CUTE.
Tell me a little about Familiars of Terra. What excites you about it?
Familiars of Terra is a tabletop roleplay game set in Terra, a fantasy world in which every person has an animal familiar. As a heroic Seeker you travel the lands with your familiar healing the devastation of a war which left nations scared and people scattered. The game is all about exploration, adventure, and heroics. If you’re a fan of the Golden Compass or Pokemon you’ll probably enjoy our game.

What makes me most excited about Familiars of Terra is that it is a very positive game. Yes there was a war, yes your main job as a Seeker is to make sure something terrible like that never happens again, but behind all that is hope. Being a Seeker is about making the right choices when they matter most and when there are grey decisions – helping, healing, and thriving. I wanted to make a game that left people feeling good about themselves, that built them up, and also had a bunch of awesome animals in it. 🙂

What was the initial design and conception process like? If you just woke up one day and wrote it, what was the spark? If it took a longer road, how did you find your way?
After I finished WITCH I kinda needed a break from the dark. I love dark, dramatic games, but focusing so much on that type of world was really exhausting. You can’t live in shadows forever it isn’t healthy. So Familiars of Terra really came from a place of wanting to design something happy and uplifting. I wanted to write about heroes and cool animals. That’s where the game really began. From there I started testing different mechanics with dice and then eventually with cards – once we had the base system it took off from there. Funnily enough, I had a really clear picture in my mind of what Terra looked like right from the start, so the mechanics was where I had to invest a lot of development time.
Left to right: a person with a beard and mustache, a necklace with a big shiny gem in it, and a fancy shirt and collar in blue and beige; a dark skinned person with round pigtails, in a cream colored midriff shirt and beautiful facial jewelry; a white person with red hair wearing a brown vest with a fluffy collar over a light blue dress; a dark skinned person with dreadlocks, wearing a purple-ish scarf and a long green vest; and an indigenous-appearing person wearing a strappy vest, with organic lines down their cheek in red, carrying a large stick on their back.
When you say grey decisions, what do you mean by that, and how does it tie to the heart of the Seeker-familiar relationship?
By grey decisions, I guess I mean very real decisions. Life is really difficult with out any supernatural threats and the choices we make as humans are tough. In Terra I wanted to tackle real problems, but then in a fantasy world. You basically play a modern day hero and that means the decisions you’re faced with are realistically tough – we don’t have many true villains in the game, but we do have a lot of people who think differently than one another. We have people who hurt people to help themselves (or their families) and Seekers are often faced with greed. However, as a Seeker you fight for the greater good – you’re part of the generation that will heal the world. It’s your job to make the tough calls and practice radical empathy and creative problem solving. You’re faced with grey decisions, but you play hope :).
A person wearing flowing clothing with beautiful geometric patterns who has a red line across their cheeks and nose, carrying a harpoon-like weapon and standing beside a large deer with a saddle.

How do the mechanics tie in with your familiar and that relationship?

Actually, in Familiars of Terra you have one character sheet for two characters. Half your sheet is for your familiar and half your sheet is for yous Seeker. You can make checks with either and as a player it’s basically like playing one soul in two bodies. Also, familiars are always the one to fight! Humans are weak compared to familiars, so in order to protect their companions, familiars are always the one to get into a scuffle. We have lots of cool Combat Powers for you to pick and customize how your familiar fights. Finally, each familiar gets a legacy which is both story and mechanics. By following a story you create to your familiar’s epic destiny you earn cool new Traits which alter how your familiar looks, moves, and even fights.
How do players engage the mechanics to express empathy, and how do the familiars help with that?
A lot of our mechanics work by ‘defining’ things. You can buy Items and then in the moment when you want to use them – you define the item’s history and how it is used. This encourages player’s creativity and allows people to take different paths to problem solving. A lot of times you make a check and you’re done – you succeed or fail and sometimes that’s absolutely terrible when you’re trying to do something kind or empathetic. When I was creating Familiars of Terra I really wanted to make sure doing something empathetic or creative (or anything really) relied on more than that. By having a mechanical work around your character can use one check isn’t the end of empathy, it’s a challenge and an encouragement to use the items you have at your disposal to still reach your desired outcome.

Familiar-wise, even though familiars can fight, they definitely don’t have to. In fact, lots of familiar’s traits are based around healing, comforting, and empathizing. For example, you can have a comforting familiar who can calm situations and make people feel better in their presence – much how ‘mundane’ therapy dogs do as well :). 

A red-haired person in a green jacket and yellow dress reaching their hands up to the sky where cats with wings are flying, with the text “Familiars of Terra” over the background of a seaside sunset.
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Thanks to Liz for the great interview and for sharing Familiars of Terra with me and you all, my readers! I hope you enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out the Familiars of Terra Kickstarter and maybe help it reach its goal!  
P.S. – I tried to find out if it was okay to use “dark skinned” as a descriptor and I saw it used in some places where it seemed okay, but if it is not, please email contactbriecs at gmail and I will update the post as soon as possible. Thank you.

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Five or So Questions with James Mendez Hodez on 7th Sea: Khitai

Hi all! Today’s interview is with James Mendez Hodez on 7th Sea: Khitai, which is currently on Kickstarter. Khitai is a standalone RPG and is exploring beyond the boundaries of 7th Sea’s core setting, Théah. There is currently a free, 36-page quick-start on DriveThruRPG. Check out what James had to say below!

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This is so damn pretty regardless of anything else. Dang. By Shen Fei.

Tell me a little about 7th Sea: Khitai. What excites you about it?

The Khitai setting expands 7th Sea’s 17th-century swashbuckling fantasy to Asian, Oceanian, and Pacific settings. I’m excited to represent times, places, and legends close to my heart and my real-life ancestry, many of which have never appeared before in tabletop role-play. Khitai also ups the scale of the game’s heroism: one Hero can lead an outlaw gang in the marshes of Shenzhou, a slave revolt on the peninsula of Han, a pirate fleet in the islands of Tawalisi, or a samurai clan governing a warring state in Fuso. We get to stretch the boundaries of what a Hero looks like and how they can change the world.

I know in previous interviews we’ve spoken about your academic and personal expertise, but I’m curious what new you may have studied, played, or what kind of media you looked at to work on Khitai. What were some specific things you enjoyed reviewing as you’ve worked on the project? Tell me how they’re reflected, at least a little, in the game.

Khitai has brought a great deal of new media into my life. Here are a few inspirations that really stand out.

The Water Margin Classic, also known as Outlaws of the Marsh, is probably the single most significant influence on Asian swashbuckling adventure in general, and my vision of Khitai in particular. It’s one of Chinese literature’s Four Great Classical Novels alongside the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, and Dream of the Red Chamber. It’s about 108 martial heroes whose … eventful … lives drive them to join a bandit gang in the Chinese swamps, where they make trouble, rebel against the unjust government, and then ascend to positions of responsibility and authority in a new government.

I based indigenous Fusoese religion on The Song the Owl God Sang, a book of folk songs and stories compiled by a young woman of indigenous Japanese ancestry who mysteriously and tragically died hours after she completed it. Fusoese Kamuyru will reflect the sometimes-playful, sometimes-deadly kamuy who rule the land, animals, and humans’ relationships with the foregoing in Ainu thought.

To research Han, I started watching a K-drama called Slave Hunter because it’s set in seventeenth-century Joseon Korea, where somewhere from 10% to 33% of the population were slaves or serfs of some kind. I think I might have gotten more than I bargained for, because it’s sexy swashbuckling pseudo-historical nonsense in exactly the same genre as 7th Sea. I highly recommend it. Things I have learned so far about historical Korea:

  • only NPCs wear shirts
  • disguising yourself as a member of a completely different social class is trivially easy
  • all combat involves super jumps and/or backflips
  • hip hop is the most traditional Korean musical genre
  • the more complicated someone’s hat, the more likely they are to be evil.


Han sourcebook cover! By Shen Fei.

[Brie’s Note: As someone who is a big fan of some major K-pop/Korean hip-hop style bands, this amused me a lot actually.]

What are some challenging aspects of creating adventuring type games that travel over sea and in non-Western/Western-assumed settings, in regards to fictionally aiming it towards players and gathering interest?

Tropes define a great deal of Western popular media’s relationship with Asian material. Navigating and integrating those tropes into new stuff is tough because so many people have such different assumptions and feelings attached to those tropes. Let’s look at martial arts as an example. If we’re telling a swashbuckling story about Asia, we should of course include martial arts action. But gamers have different priorities about these topics: some players get really excited about fidelity to their understanding of realistic combat, others want to do unrealistic things on purpose, and many gamers are just tired of martial arts storylines because all too often, that’s all there is when it comes to Asian content. 
Still, Asians developing and excelling at martial arts has a strong basis in both military history and fiction, with characters like Preceptor Droṇa from the Indian epic Mahābhārata or places like the Shàolín Monastery. So we’re going to feature both realistic and unrealistic (but still well-sourced) martial arts action in Khitai; but what we can’t do is perpetuate the stereotype that martial arts are either a) peculiar to Asia and Khitai and not other continents, or b) assumed to be known by every individual Asian or Khitan you meet. Nearly every culture in history (and every culture in 7th Sea without exception) has practiced martial arts; fewer, but still many, have traditions of martial fiction as robust as China’s. Martial arts figure prominently in The Three Musketeers, Things Fall Apart, and The Summer Prince. America’s 52 hand blocks and Nigeria’s dambe are no less effective boxing systems than wing chun or karate. It’s okay for tropes (though not stereotypes) to inform and expand our storytelling. It’s not okay for them to limit us.
Naoko, a young Hero whose home was destroyed by bandits. By Charlie Creber.
What are heroes like in Khitai?
They’re complicated! To answer that question I want to revisit the Water Margin Classic’s 108 Stars of Destiny, the rebellious outlaws of Liángshān Marsh, because they represent a lot of the internal contradictions I hope to see in Khitan storytelling. They prize honor and loyalty, but they spend most of the story getting drunk and committing crimes for reasons ranging from revenge to boredom. They rebel against the corrupt government, but wind up in positions of authority in that government. This theme comes back again and again in Asian heroic literature: very often the individual who winds up with the job of “hero” isn’t very good at their job, and the one who winds up with the job of “villain” seems way better in comparison. 
Similarly, the arch-villain of the Mahābhārata, Prince Duryodhana, is a pretty bad guy; but his best friend, King Karṇa of Anga, is the most badass, loyal, and honorable warrior in the entire epic—he just winds up on the wrong side because he’s of mixed-caste parentage, and only Duryodhana is willing to look past it. In the final Battle of Kurukshetra, Karṇa’s chariot wheel gets stuck in a rut and he gets out to fix it, reminding the hero Prince Arjuna that attacking him while he’s coping with technical difficulties would violate the laws of honorable warfare. But Arjuna’s charioteer, Lord Kṛṣṇa—who is an avatar of Viṣṇu!—tells Arjuna to shoot Karṇa now because Karṇa’s harder than Arjuna and it’s the only way they’ll ever beat him. So the shining hero shoots the villain in the back, his head goes flying, and that’s how you win a land war in Asia. These are the kinds of problems the players will have to sort out. Or cause.
Agnivarsa sourcebook cover. Such drama! By Cassandre Bolan.
What has been your favorite part of working on Khitai, in any aspect of the project? 
The most exciting part of this project has been watching the creative team and the players—myself included—go from knowing nothing whatsoever about certain places and times in history to champing at the bit to play characters from there. John Wick has gone from doubting we could do Korea justice to posting excited links about Admiral I Sunsin on Facebook. I never knew about the Sultanate of Sulu and the Moro pirates until I started reading about them for background on the Kiwa Islands, and now I’m plotting what might be my first ever Renaissance faire costume. A little while ago, a fan posted a sea shanty she’d composed herself with reference to Théans sailing to Nagaja and seeing the elephants there. I get to watch 7th Sea‘s world grow larger and more colorful one player at a time.


This is so cool! By Shen Fei.

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Thanks so much to James for the interview! Remember to check out 7th Sea: Khitai on Kickstarter, and download the quick start on DriveThruRPG!

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Five or So Questions on New World Magischola: House Rivalry!

Hi all! Today I have an amazing interview with Maury Brown on the New World Magischola: House Rivalry board game! It’s currently on Kickstarter and just a really gorgeous project that sounds like a ton of fun. I hope you all enjoy reading Maury’s responses below:

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Tell me a little about New World Magischola House Rivalry. What excites you about it?

New World Magischola House Rivalry is our first foray into board/card games design and publishing. That’s both awesome and scary! When we decided two years ago to open a wizard school live roleplay experience in the United States, we realized that to do it the way we wanted to required us to write a whole new magical world that was specific to North America and its history. We wanted to be both respectful and inclusive of the many peoples and cultures — and magical traditions — of North America, and to also honor and engage thoughtfully with our fraught history of Colonialism. While we originally set out to design a larp, we ended up writing a world, and now we have an intellectual property that exists beyond the larp, with stories that can be told in many media, including board/card games, RPGs, books, and more. 

So for me, I’m excited because we are opening up the world of the Magimundi and the experience of going to wizard school in it to a lot more people than those who are able to attend our 4-day signature wizard school events. They get to experience at the table some of the fun, whimsy, and magical mayhem of Magischola by taking courses, joining clubs, and using conjures to improve their progress or hinder a rival’s. They get a feel of navigating school because you have to pass your courses with a B or better to get credit, and you earn more points for completion the higher your grade is. It’s definitely a competitive game, since only one House can take the Trophy, but there are lots of opportunities for roleplay and fun engagement with your friends around the table.

There are two other things I’m pretty excited about regarding House Rivalry:

1. The deliberate design choices to be inclusive in the playable characters. Of the original 6 PCs, 2 are people of color and also have Hispanic names: Martín Spinoza and Soledad Reyes. We also designed Jax Slager to be deliberately agender or nonbinary, and we ensured our art showed different ages and body types or sizes. It is very important to us to not fall into the same sorts of fantasy art that we often see in posters, games, and comics. This is a diverse and inclusive world, and we want everyone to imagine themselves as being part of it. We have to do that through the fiction and the artwork. Of the five House founders of New World Magischola, there are two women of color (Tituba and Marie Laveau), one white male (Étienne Brûle), one white female (Virginia Dare) and one indigenous nonbinary (Calisaylá). We paid homage to the diverse peoples who form the history of North America: indigenous peoples, people from Africa & West Indies, British, French, and Spanish. All too often people have a tendency to over-simplify our history and our fictions, rather than showing the tensions and the multiplicities within it, and we wanted to embrace that instead. The Magimundi is for everyone, even though it’s not a utopia.

2. I’m excited because this game is designed for mixed groups of gamers. All-too-often we can get into conflicts by identifying as *either* a “gamer” or a “hard-core gamer” or a “casual gamer” or a “non-gamer.” We, as a gaming community, can gatekeep in these ways, subtly asking “are you one of us?” One of the ways we do this is by designing games that are more complex and have a lot of rules to master, or that take a long time to learn. Some gamers look down on casual games as not being challenging enough, and even make fun of these games and the people who play them. It can be difficult to prove your credibility as a gamer, and some gamers don’t want to take the time to include newer gamers to their gaming groups. House Rivalry is designed as a bridge game. It’s complex enough that the more hard-core gamers have something they can do and enjoy. There are multiple strategies and different tactics to manage your resources, choose your actions, and use the variable player powers of your character and House. However, the game is easy-to-learn, and there are lots of party game elements, especially in the Clubs. What this makes House Rivalry really good for are mixed groups of gamers: the hard core and the casual and the in-between. It’s a great game to get people together and to play when you don’t have the time to teach a complicated new system, but you want some strategy. It blends luck and strategy in a way that feels satisfying to all levels of gamers. For me, getting different groups of gamers of varying abilities and credibilities around the table is a great aspect of the game, and one I’m most proud of and excited about.

MORE MAGICAL GOODNESS AFTER THE CUT:


Tasty tasty board game bits.

What were the greatest challenges mechanically for making a themed game that is appealing for mixed groups?

The greatest challenge was finding the balance between being easy-to-learn, but also having depth and strategies that are not necessarily apparent to the casual gamer. We know that frequent gamers prefer strategy and meaningful choices, which should mean that if you play well, you will win. Casual gamers are more tolerant of luck and randomness in a game; too much “swing” and a hardcore gamer will not want to play. One of the things that our developer, Mike Young, did so well was apply math to the game, figuring out the “worth” of each action, and balancing the effects of cards so that when you took a calculated risk, you got a calculated reward. Another thing is the balance of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Everyone has been to school in their lives, so they have some idea of how it works. You take classes (only so many at a time) and you study to improve your grade, or do extra work to finish the course faster. So the actions of Enroll and Study are pretty intuitive, and easy to pick up even for young players. The third action, Conjure, is when you use some resources in your hand to your advantage. This is where the hardcore gamers love to evaluate the different resources they have, and calculate the effects of them based on their turns and time. More casual gamers might choose a Conjure just because they like the art, or because they want to say “take that” to a rival. Either way, because the game is carefully balanced, the effects are going to be similar. A good player will be able to prioritize and stack these resources to greater effect, but a new player can just throw some spells and make things happen. 
We also designed the game with some party mechanics that each player has choice over playing. This is done with our Clubs, which were a new addition to Dylan’s game idea. About one-third of the Clubs include roleplaying party mechanics to earn (or lose!) House Points for the RP. These include singing while in Kokopelli’s Choir, whispering while in the secret society Obsidian Circle, and starting every utterance with “Wrong!” while you’re in Debate Club. Those who love this sort of thing enroll in those clubs and have a great time with it! Others have to catch them messing up, which is fun. If these active, party mechanics are not your jam, you’re not required to enroll in those clubs, and can instead get your club requirement through another club, such as Crossed Wands Club, where you manage your time and resources in a more traditional manner.

What we wanted was to hit the “sweet spot” where the casual gamers could learn to play quickly and have fun, and the hardcore gamers could see the layers and strategize toward victory at the same time. That means the game has to be seemingly simple and surprisingly complex, accessible as you learn, and then a later epiphany of “oh! I see how this works!” after playing a few times. The game introduces casual gamers to the concept of resource management and variable player powers, but moves along quickly with a series of rounds that include chance-based mechanics such as the Magischola deck, which keeps the hardcore strategists from necessarily running away with it in a mixed group. Definitely a tough balance, but our playtesting shows that we’ve done a pretty good job! (there’s a quote on our Father Geek review that sums this up rather nicely).

The school crest. They’ve got turtles, y’all.
How did you integrate the fiction and themes into the mechanics? Did you leave anything specific out that might feature in other formats?
Ha! Yes, the Magimundi is really deep, and there was no way to include all the elements into this game. One thing we had to leave out that I wish could have had more play is the presence of the House Founders of New World Magischola. It’s one of my favorite parts of the lore, and where the inclusive nature of the world and its engagement with North America’s Colonial past comes through. Otherwise, the game is 2-5 players because there are 5 houses of New World Magischola, and you play by House. We had to name the actions taken by the players to feel like something they would do in magic school. Enroll and Study are definitely school actions, but they’re also rather mundane. The third action was originally called “Dominate” but that didn’t feel very magical, and it also felt too punitive or hyper-competitive for the feel of the game. It took us a while to come up with Conjure, but that has the magical feel of casting spells or using the magical artifacts at your disposal, which either help you along magically, or hex your rivals. There are definitely some easter eggs on the cards for those who are more familiar with the world or the larp. Things like the Wendignado card, which is a reference to the tornado that hit our location during the inaugural larp — while students were in the woods casting elemental wind spells against a wendigo. Rather than call one of the cards “Sugar Rush,” it’s called “Hot Fudge in the Dining Hall,” which was a refrain in our third run as participants discovered the chocolatey goodness was available at every meal, and began to top everything with it. We had created a lot of creatures and lore, so the wizard courses are the actual NWM curriculum, as well as the clubs. The creatures expansion are all from our book, the Compendium of North American Cryptids & Magical Creatures. 
A photo from the New World Magischola larp, the inspiration behind the board game.
What motivated designing a board/card game for Magischola – why move away from roleplaying?
We realized that a lot of people loved the world we created, the lore we had built, and the creatures we’d imagined. We own this work as an intellectual property, so leveraging it into multiple media makes sense. We’re already at work on a collaborative storytelling board game, also set in the Magimundi, but with completely different play. We definitely aren’t moving away from roleplaying as a company! This game has a roleplaying element, the next one does to an even greater extent, and we have two (maybe three!) RPG scenarios coming out in 2018! The world is rich with opportunity so we wanted to have the chance to tell stories within it in a variety of ways. We also realized that we have a lot of fans who can’t attend the premium larp experiences, but want to interact with the world. It’s definitely been a challenge! We’re newcomers to the board game industry and trying to gain a foothold. But it’s a huge market, if we can successfully break in! We want others to know about the Magimundi!
Larpers at a Magischola event repping their house. 🙂
Tell me about the role of competitiveness in New World Magischola: House Rivalry. What made you choose to make a competitive game? How does it further the goals that you have for the game, and the stories you want to tell? 
This is a tough one! I consulted with Ben to answer this one, to talk through my feelings about it, because it’s complicated. One of the things people wanted from their magic school experience at New World Magischola larps, was the kind of fierce competition for House Points that they had seen in the Harry Potter books and films. While neither I nor my partner Ben Morrow are very competitive people (and our larp design is based around consent, cooperation, and relationships), our players were motivated by the competitive aspect of the First House Trophy. It drove a great deal of enthusiasm, creating an external motivation for taking an interest in their magic school classes and engaging in plot that could lead to a points reward. Also, getting recognition feels good, and the adrenaline rush that can come from healthy competition also feels good.

Dylan’s initial idea for the game, long before he met Ben and me, was to capture the feel of being at magic school, and helping your House win the day. When he made his pitch to us, we knew that the competitive play for points was a motivating force for many of our players, and we thought that offering that kind of feeling through a board game would make the game feel like the magic school experience that they had read about, and had been waiting to experience for quite some time. Since the object of the game is to win the First House Trophy, this game is not the most ideal generator of stories, but it does share our world. Players can look at Jax Slager’s card and wonder about their story, and Jax does have a fairly big story waiting to be discovered in some of the other media that’s forecoming. Similarly, our magical creatures book can give players more info about the Ghost Helicoprion when they see its tooth whorl on a Conjure card. Ultimately, we wanted to entertain, and we’re hoping that our game’s content and artwork invites the curious to find out more about our magical world, and the stories within it. The *next* game, already in development, is very collaborative and storytelling-based, akin to Mice & Mystics.

What is your house, what’s your favorite spell, and why? 🙂

Now, I’m the organizer and designer! I can’t have a favorite House! But I will say that I test into Calisaylá, with Laveau close behind. Favorite spell? Hmmm. A young person at Gen Con created and cast a “Fair Wages” spell. I think that one is pretty awesome. If I could cast “Fair Wages” and “Universal Health Care” on everyone, I would. Otherwise, I really like Pàgakwàn (PAH-guh-kwahn), which is from the Algonquin, and creates a protective shield against physical attacks. 
Go check it out now!
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Thank you SO much to Maury for this fantastic(al) interview! I’m excited to see more from Magischola, and hope you’ll all check out the Kickstarter today! Share this interview with your friends, too, so more people can read and enjoy. <3 

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Five or So Questions with James Iles on Legacy: Life Among the Ruins

Today I’ve got an interview with James Iles on Legacy: Life Among the Ruins 2nd Edition. It’s currently on Kickstarter and I’m pretty amped about it! James had a lot of cool stuff to say about it and oh, my god, this art! There’s a quickstart here, btw. Check the responses out below!

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Tell me a little about Legacy: Life Among the Ruins. What excites you about it?

Legacy‘s about how people keep going after the world ends. It’s about the new communities and ways of living that spring up in a comprehensively changed land, and how people and societies evolve to adapt to the new environment. It’s a post-apocalyptic game that lets each group of players create an amazing world and then ruin it in a unique way. Then you dive into gameplay, with each player’s family of survivors dealing with the trials of surviving among the old world’s ruins while sending agents out into the wasteland to explore, make friends, and find the resources their family need to prosper. Your game zooms in to the drama of a few explorers scavenging for exotic technology in a flooded city, and zooms out to explore how a family seizes control of a town over the course of a few weeks. 
The game’s also episodic: the group can decide to draw a line under the current point in history, and move the clock forward some significant chunk of time – a year, a decade, or even a century according to the group’s taste. Then you tell the story of how the world changed over that time, how each player’s family has changed, and start exploring this new age. This gets at what really excites me about Legacy – the family is your fixed point as you travel further and further into the future, and you get to explore how they change over the generations, how they change the world around them, and explore how this new culture takes form in the post-apocalypse.

What inspired you to make a game about families, especially a post-apocalyptic story? 

Legacy started with the idea of taking a group far into the future over generations and seeing how they changed and grew over time. I was inspired by the Civilization series of games but thought that a tabletop RPG wanted to focus on a finer scale than nations and countries. At the same time, Quinn Murphy was talking a lot about the importance of community and how games often ignore it. These came together into the idea of families – dynasties that’d be your constant across the ages. I could have called them factions, or guilds, but I thought family was the best term for the ties between them. I wanted that feeling of belonging, of bonds that went beyond friendship and fealty. 
The post-apocalyptic theme came partly from wanting groups to start with a blank slate and expand outwards in whatever direction they liked, and partly because the post-apocalyptic games I’d been playing at the time – Tribe8 and Fallout – had a pretty big emphasis on forming new communities to face the wasteland together.

Tell me about the setting and themes of Legacy. What will we recognize? What do you think will feel new or unusual for players?


Legacy’s a game about exploration, adaptation and evolution. My day job’s an ecologist and disease biologist, and some of that has definitely bled in! The gist is that the world’s been changed by some kind of reality-warping event, and nothing works the same way anymore. You’ve survived because you’ve found or held onto some source of strength – the tech of the old world, a driving passion for justice, a new religion from the apocalypse’s fires. But that won’t be enough to go beyond survival and start thriving. To do that, you’ll need to explore and understand the new world, find things you can use to make your family stronger or deal with their frailties, and become something that can prosper here.

So there’s a lot of your standard post-apocalyptic tropes: the playbooks are based on common archetypes in post-apoc fiction, and your group can pretty easily make their own version of anything from Planet of the Apes to Mad Max. What Legacy does differently is let you move past the ruins, and ask how the society that people build in this new world has moved beyond their ancestors to create something new. One of the things that really got to me in the most recent Fallout game was that it’s more than 200 years after the bombs fell and it feels like it’s only been a few generations – there are still skeletons and trash lying everywhere, even in the settlements where people live, and it seems like there was a real lack of imagination about people’s ability to rebuild. I’m hoping with Legacy to avoid that trap, and give every group the tools to make a society that’s weird, wonderful, and evolved to fit the new world.

How does the time advancement work in game? Is there mechanical impact, or impact on the environment?

As Legacy‘s powered by Apocalypse World, it’s all done by moves! The simplest one is triggered when everyone feels like they’re done with the current time period. If someone raises the possibility of moving forward, everyone else either agrees or says one final thing they want to do. Once these are done, the group decides how far they want to go forward. This is completely according to the group’s taste – you might want to hop forward only a few years or go a century into the future to give yourselves license to really mix things up. 
Each player then rolls to see how their families prosper over that time, with the roll based on the balance between the family’s assets and weaknesses (more on that later). If they roll well, they get to pick a couple of good events that happen to them – maybe they go through a golden age and learn new tricks, or maybe they create a trading hub and gain some wealth. If they roll badly, they pick some bad events – maybe their family is absorbed by another, and they only break away and regain their own culture a few years before play resumes. Either way, these events change up the family in big ways, adding stat points, new moves, ties to other families and resources they can draw on. They also can change where each family lives, what guiding principles define them, and what resources, opportunities and dangers are lying out there in the wasteland. Finally, you alter the map, adding new features and expanding the safe portion of the wasteland according to the events picked.
There’s a special way to advance time – building a Wonder. These were directly inspired by Civilisation again: they’re grand projects that require you to invest lots of resources, but when they’re complete they permanently change the world. As soon as one’s complete, you zoom out to outline all the ways it’s changed the world. Each wonder has a custom table of good and bad effects that the other families go through, while the Wonder’s owner sits back and takes in the benefits. The Wonders in the book are a pretty eclectic bunch – there are things you physically build like The Capital or The Great Network, social efforts like Revolution and Total War, and even finding a new place to live with The Age of Discovery. Each one leaves its own mark on the world, giving a permanent benefit to whichever Family controls them.
How do resources work in Legacy, and do they translate over the episodes moving forward in time?
Legacy has a pretty simple resource system. Your family will have Surpluses of certain resources (e.g. Land or Morale) and a Need for others (e.g. Medicine or Trade), with the balance between those setting your family’s overall Mood. As your character takes action in the fiction you might gain surpluses from finding a cache of resources, lose a need by addressing its root problem, or trade surpluses with other families to deal with your needs. Each surplus helps define your family’s strengths and gives your character better gear; each need tells you what the family needs you to focus on, and gives your GM a stick to poke you with. Other than that they don’t take an active role, only kicking in when the balance between surpluses and needs goes past a certain extreme. Too many needs and your family falls into crisis; more surpluses than you know what to do with and you’re flush with resources and get some bonus for the rest of this age.

There are also consumable resources – Tech is the weird devices left over from the old world, and can be spent to boost your family’s chance of success or give characters a unique ability with limited uses. Data is your knowledge about the new world, and can be spent to boost your character’s actions or add new elements to the map. These flow more quickly in and out of your stock as your characters discover things out there in the world and use them to your advantage.

Finally, there are the treaties you have with other families and factions. These work a lot like Monsterhearts’ strings – you’ll have a stock of them for each other group, and can spend a point of Treaty to get a faction to do something for you or take their resources for yourself. You can freely give other people Treaty on you as a bargaining chip, but each Family playbook also has their own thing they can do to take treaty on others – the Enclave of Fallen Lore gets it when they show others how to use their technology properly, while the Servants of the One True Faith forgive others of their sins. That way you’re incentivised to keep getting out there and meddling in other people’s affairs so that you can call on their help when you need it.

All of these stay with you as you move forwards in time, although they can change their context – Surplus: Transport means something different when a horse and cart is state of the art compared to a few centuries down the line when everyone’s riding jet bikes.

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Thanks so much to James for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed learning about Legacy: Life Among the Ruins and that you’ll share around the interview when you check out the Kickstarter today! 

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Five or So Questions with Grant Howitt on Spire

Hey all! Today I have an interview with the fantastic Grant Howitt on his new game Spire, created alongside his cohorts Mary Hamilton and Chris Taylor from Rowan, Rook & Decard. Spire is currently on Kickstarter, and has some mad cool art. It’s got some themes I dig, so when Grant asked about an interview, I was stoked. Check out the responses below!


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Art by Adirian Stone

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

Here’s the elevator pitch: you play a dark elf in a city ruled by high elves, and the high elves are cruel and uncaring and powerful and you’re downtrodden and your culture is being eroded, day by day, so you decide to fight back and subvert the high elf rule through shadow war and insurrection. It’s a storygame, in as much as it has a system which focuses more on abstraction than simulation, and we’ve tried to write it around making it as easy as possible to tell the sort of dark, desperate stories we envisage coming out of the setting.

The thing that’s exciting me now is, weirdly enough, the minutiae; after writing so many short games (or, like Unbound, games which don’t use setting at all) it’s wonderful to be able to really luxuriate in a world and poke around in its corners. I got to write a section detailing the different kinds of goats you get in the city of Spire, you know? And I don’t know if anyone will actually use that in their games, but I think that it all adds to the ecosystem of the thing, that it all supports itself. It’s been interesting to see how people have already taken to the setting.

Where did you pull from for the setting – from media and from your own experiences in games and otherwise?

We’ve drawn inspiration from all sorts of places. Off the top of my head: Unknown Armies, Perdido Street Station, Gormenghast, Necromunda, and Dredd have all been influential. I’ve also been fascinated by depictions of Kowloon Walled City, in terms of how humans can rebuild and repurpose spaces in desperate times for their own ends. (Something about the idea of building something in a space meant for something else really fascinates me.) As far as the look and feel of the thing goes, we’ve looked to the Brutalist movement of the 1960’s/70’s to inspire our architecture; lots of harsh lines, big angular shapes, jutting concrete. 
We’ve also drawn heavily on our love for cyberpunk – Neuromancer is one of my favourite novels – to inspire us, but we’ve replaced technology with religion. A lot of the game is about control over religion, and in a fantasy world where clerics can perform actual provable miracles, you start veering into cyberpunk territory pretty quickly. 
Art by Adirian Stone

What are the benefits to a D10 system for this kind of game? How does it make the action appropriate to the themes and setting?
It’s the one we settled on, really. We wrote no fewer than fifteen systems for Spire, trying to find one that was smooth enough to run without getting in the way but granular enough for us to write specific rules for characters, gods, etc; we had a playing card system, we used D20s, we used D6 pools, and so on, and so on. We tried everything. As we went through our first playtests, though, it became pretty clear to me that the system we were using wasn’t working, and I wanted something with more streamlined rules that the GM could run without really thinking about it.

The reason we ended up with a D10 system is that we didn’t want to, and couldn’t really, write rules for every single thing in the city. We wanted to leave a lot of it up to the GM to determine, because everyone’s game is different; and therefore rather than writing a comprehensive and perhaps unwieldy ruleset, we opted for something that GMs can grok really easily and then get on with the business of telling stories.

How do you see stress working out in playtests? What emotional experiences do the players have with it, and how does that match your intent with the design?


Honestly, I’d like to see more characters going mad and dying, but we seem to have quite lucky players. Stress is interesting; it rewires everything bad that can happen to you into a single number, so there’s kind of a floating badness behind a character with high stress – a high potential for something going really wrong. One thing we’ve tried to do is make sure that fallout, especially severe fallout, pushes the story forwards rather than stopping it. We don’t want to punish people for pushing their characters past the breaking point by removing them from the story; we wanted to reward them with more story, but not necessarily a nice story.

As far as concrete examples go… we had one character use his sacred rope to bind a door shut so no-one could open it (and thus escape from the massacre inside that the players had set up to assassinate a corrupt bishop), and as he watched blood pool under the gap, he developed a lasting phobia of doors. We had another group summon, and then sacrifice, a river god to power a ritual, and in seeing the river god come to earth our Azurite (a type of trader-priest) went utterly mad. I gave him the option of surviving if he betrayed his friends on behalf of the new god, and to the player’s credit, he immediately launched himself off the side of Spire and crashing down into the docks below than risk staying alive a minute longer. Those two really stand out for me.

Layout by Alina Sandu
What is the most challenging thing you’ve encountered with the path of design to funding? Have you had to rethink a rule shortly before the Kickstarter, and if so, how do you resolve that? 
We’re rethinking and tweaking rules all the time; we invented an entire class (the Firebrand) about a fortnight before the campaign began because I felt like we needed to give players some more room to manoeuvre. Luckily, by now, we’ve got a feeling for the system and setting which means that we can intuit rules fairly easily now without the need for extensive testing.

We actually rewrote the equipment rules earlier this week; in the quick-start rules they use a level system, and if the level of your item is higher than the level of the area you’re in, you get an extra dice to roll… and I dunno, it worked, it just didn’t sing to me. It wasn’t doing what we wanted with equipment, which was to use it to help portray the character who’s carrying it. So now we’ve scrapped the level system and switched to a more narrative thing, where (non-weapon/armour) equipment is either mundane and it just lets you do the thing, or it’s special and you name a positive and negative aspect about it that marks it out from every other item of its kind in Spire. It gets players thinking more about their equipment choices and pushing the story forward to their specialties, which I like.


Who are some of the characters you’ve seen in play, NPCs or PCs, that you think embody The Spire as a story and setting?

We’ve had a hired killer who packed it all in and joined the community-focused church of the light side of the moon; we’ve had a towering glamazon with an Amy Winehouse beehive and a sacred hyena chained to her wrist; a rough-and-tumble Knight of the North Docks (think a sort of feudal mafia) whose player decided that all Knights are in fact women wearing giant codpieces and dressing up as men, and more power to her because that’s a brilliant idea; a Firebrand espousing Marxist ideals; and one guy who, when he was held at gunpoint, about to be sacrificed to a hungry god of vengeance, managed to convince the ritual leader that there was a better life for her with him – and the pair of them ran away and now live unhappily above a pub. 
Map by Tim Wilkinson Lewis
How does religion work mechanically, at least in a vague sense, in Spire? I’m curious about the application!

Each class has a Refresh ability which they use to remove stress – and in the case of religious characters, this is tied to their faith. The Lahjan, moon-clerics, remove stress when they help people who can’t help themselves; the Carrion-Priests remove it when they complete a hunt; and so on. We’ve also got a few additional abilities tied to minor faiths – not minor in the sense of power, but minor in the sense that we didn’t feel that there was enough material to build a whole class around them. Anyone who fits the prerequisites can access these abilities, and with them they get an additional Refresh ability.

In terms of what it does in-game; at low levels, many of the miracles are coincidental or limited in their scope (so you can heal people for a bit, or summon a flock of crows, or buy access to a proficiency you don’t have) and later on they ramp up to some real weirdness, like turning into moonlight or a massive hyena or a crowd or an idea. (The Firebrand, as I mentioned earlier, gets access to divine powers but only really at high levels; due to the loose way that reality works in Spire, and in our setting, the more successful they get, the more power they start generating from the faith that people place in them until they can enchant improvised weapons by touching them.)

Art by Adirian Stone
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Thanks so much to Grant for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading about Spire and that you’ll check out the Kickstarter as it’s rounding up to finish soon!

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Behold, Products! A GM’s Tarot Guide: NPC Generation by Allie Bustion

A few months ago I found Allie Buston’s A GM’s Guide: NPC Generation so I asked a few questions (as I do). Here’s what Allie had to say, and some pictures to support it!
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Tell me about your NPC tarot generation. What excites you about it?

Well, there’s a lot of ways to generate NPCs. Tables and dice rolling, making them like PCs, pre-gens in books. But all of these, for me, end up feeling flat and two-dimensional when you’re trying to make a bunch and fill a world. So this all started with a game of Vampire the Masquerade 20th. I had my deck sitting in front of me and decided to pull a card. And suddenly, my NPCs had motivations and methods to them that helped round them out! That’s the most exciting part for me: I can quickly figure out interesting NPCs and my players get a more interesting and immersive world with people in it instead of flat cutouts.

How do you interpret the cards for characters? Is it themes, or pulled from tarot lore?

A lot of interpretation is based on what the situation calls for. I use both the Archeon tarot and Golden Thread and both have pretty good guides for meanings. For instance, one of the first times I tried this, I made an NPC in V20. I had no ideas for him and he was basically a plot hook but I wanted him to be interesting. I pulled the Six of Wands inverted, Eight of Words, and the Fool for past, present, and potential future then cards for sources of these where it was needed and a plan for the future and present. He turned out to be a well-intentioned jock with a troubled home life that kept being in the wrong place at the wrong time but found by the right people that allowed himself to run with what life handed him. Way more than what a table could have ever given me and so much to work with in play.

You’ve mentioned that you’re working on GM tools. What are you currently doing on that project?

For the GM tools project that expands on this whole idea, I’m testing out spreads I theorized to make sure they actually work and making graphics for everything. It’s been pushed to the backburner a bit admittedly.

Preview of the text!

Could you expand a little on what the GM tools do – what the purpose of the spreads are?

The GM tools are just meant as an alternative to tables and things found in GM guides and supplementary materials. Or something you can use in conjunction. It’s like having multiple methods to solving the same math problem. The spreads cover things from NPC and World generation to Stars Without Number-style GM turns to figuring out what to do for a session. Like I said, just different ways to solve the math problem.

What would an example be of a spread you would use for a GM?

One spread I really liked and that kind of surprised me with how well it worked out. It’s a four-card spread for one-shots. It gives so much potential information for a world very quickly. I used it to help a friend make a Dungeon World one-shot that turned out pretty well. I want to test it more but it pleased me so much.

How have you tested the tools – have you used them in different games, with different people, etc.?

Most of my testing has been a mix of practical testing in games and theoretical testing of how things might work. The practical testing has been in different systems and games: Vampire, Dungeon World, Monsterhearts, and some D&D. The groups haven’t been as diverse as I’d hope but I’ll keep using these and testing.

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Thanks so much to Allie for answering my questions, and being understanding for the delay on posting this! Make sure to check out A GM’s Tarot Guide: NPC Generation on DriveThru, as well as looking out for Allie online:

Patreon

DriveThru

Ich.io

Website

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Five or So Questions with James D’Amato on Dungeon Dome

I have an interview today with James D’Amato from ONE SHOT who is talking about his current project, Dungeon Dome, which is currently on Kickstarter. Dungeon Dome is an unusual project – an actual play project with… gladiators? Let James tell us more!

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Tell me a little about Dungeon Dome! What excites you about it?

The Dungeon Dome is a new actual play project that I’m hoping to produce through Kickstarter. The basic Idea is D&D meets professional wrestling. Players take on the role of fantasy gladiators fighting for wealth and glory in an arena full of deadly traps.

There is a lot that excites me about this project. Actual Play is rapidly becoming a major part of the RPG landscape. Shows like The Adventure Zone, Critical Role, and to a lesser extent my own ONE SHOT have shown that you can indeed export the experience of RPGs to a mass audience. So far, actual play games have been traditional, just putting a mic or camera in front of a normal game. I’ve reached a point with my audience where I feel comfortable messing with the formula.

The Dungeon Dome is the type of campaign that wouldn’t really work without an audience. The players are disconnected, the story is primarily moved through one type of play, PVP is usually only fun for the winning parties, and the only person playing who experiences the whole thing is the DM. With an audience, these disconnected stories play out in a way that other people can experience. Having people observe play heightens the drama inherent to combat. The PVP element is fun win or lose because in wrestling a lose can be as beneficial to a character as a win. I can also use competitive challenges that would feel out of place in a traditional game.

I’m also folding in mechanics that allow the audience to actively participate in the game. By cheering on the team they support that can grant that team special abilities to use in the game. This is a chance for me to experiment with the form of observed play, a style I think we will see more of in design over the next few years.

Also, on a more personal note, if The Dungeon Dome funds, it will allow me to pursue game design and performance gaming full time. That would be rad!

How have you developed the initial project – setting, concept, and so on?

I drew inspiration from a few places. Primarily the WWE and Yuri on Ice.

For the past few years I have been lightly getting back into wrestling. I watched a little when I was 10, but I wasn’t a die hard fan, eventually I grew out of it. However, a lot of the podcasters I listen to are huge wrestling fans, and there are a surprising number of wrestling fans in nerdy spaces. More accurately it surprised me initially. Now the parallels between wrestling, superhero comics, LARP, and improv are glaringly obvious to me. I guess I was pretty mired in the perception of wrestling as “low art” which is really stupid.

Anyway, after watching some matches I saw a lot of things that I could appreciate, and a lot of things that frustrated me. There is still a lot of old fashioned misogyny and toxic masculinity in big company wrestling. To the point that I can’t really watch it regularly. I see that it has merit, and understand what people enjoy, but there is a lot that grates on me. I also don’t see enough of the kind of theatrical experimentation in televised wrestling. Like, Lucha Underground comes really close but I want really wild storytelling. I want to see Shakespeare plays told through wrestling matches. Mainstream wrestling, understandably, was not going to do that.

Competition is one of the main levers in traditional games. Crunch games really show off the wargaming DNA in RPGs, and war gaming is really competitive. People who know my work know I don’t feature a ton of tactical, crunchy games. I think ONE SHOT, for the most part, doesn’t lend itself to those games. Yuri on Ice, among other things, is a really good sports story. You love almost everyone in it, they are all driven and fierce, and in the end only one of them can win. Even as a written thing it had beautiful, surprising highs and lows. It was so good it made me long for competition drama at the table.

The Dungeon Dome became a way for me to explore competitive games, sports narratives, and the things I like in wrestling.

One final note, after I started work on this I discovered X Crawl through the podcast. It was another attempt at arena Dungeon Punk competition. It was neat there there were similar ideas in game design. We’re in slightly different places but I want to give them a nod.

What tech will you be using to bring Dungeon Dome to the people in accessible ways?

ONE SHOT has a production studio in Chicago outfitted with a four camera setup, good audio equipment, and decent lighting. I think we have one of the best-looking setups on twitch, at least for the space we can afford. I really wanted to have solid audio quality be cause it was important to me that folks be able to hear us clearly. We’re exporting all of our episodes to backers as podcasts as well, so folk how prefer/need to listen don’t need to bother with video files.

Ideally, I want to have some sort of replay transcript, but this might have to be a down the road priority. It bothers me that hearing impaired listeners don’t have access to so much of what we do. Stuff like subtitles and transcripts are a priority if we go far enough over our funding.

Elaborate a little on your reasons for liking actual play. What are your personal reasons for liking it, and your reasons as a creator? How do you think it’s influencing the heart of games?

Actual play excites me for so many reasons. The best way to grow the roleplaying hobby has always been to show people how much fun it is. The problem has always been that the experience of an RPG is difficult to show off. Games usually serve smaller groups, and explaining them has a “you had to be there” element for a lot of people. With actual play, people can actually be there. It’s experiencing RPGs second hand, but you still get to experience them. It completely changes the way the hobby grows.

On a personal and somewhat selfish level, games are the form of artistic expression that works best for me. I have Dyslexia and ADD as a result, I write very slowly. On top of that, just about everything I produce takes a lot of editing. I love storytelling, but writing has a major prohibitive barrier for me. A ton of traditional storytelling mediums require heavy writing: novels, films, TV, plays, ect. For someone in my position, that sucks.

Stories in games flow naturally for me. The improvisational nature of gaming drops all of those barriers. The performance aspect plays to one of my other strengths. At the table I feel confident and excited, it feels effortless. At times it feels like my ADD is an asset more than a liability. Actual play means that a games are viable performance space. Thanks to actual play my creative outlet is a career. I cannot express how huge that is.

How do you handle tone and support players when it comes to content in a game that’s effectively live? What happens when there is a “no”?


This is something that Kat (my best friend and business partner) and I have talked about this. Right now the plan is to just have an X Card. So far we haven’t run into X Card issues. The Dungeon Dome falls into a much more cartoony depiction of violence and triggering subjects. However you never know. Like, if a player has a phobia and a monster exhibits qualities of that phobia we’ll be in a tough spot. Especially if the monster is audience submitted. Thankfully games are flexible, so you can make changes on the fly.

For those who are curious, if an X Card shows up, we will say we have an X Card and explain what it means to the stream. Normally, you don’t do this. You don’t call attention to that sort of thing to protect the player. ONE SHOT is in a different position than normal games though. People look up to the network as community leaders. So If we get an X Card I want to show the audience how it is used. I want players advocating for X Card at their tables to be able to point to us and say “ONE SHOT does it.” We won’t force people to tell us why we need to change what we are changing, just show of that it is happening and the method we’re using to organize it.


Last thing – tell me about these audience participation mechanics. How do they work? Just how much can one person influence the game?
Boy howdy this is a good question! The Dungeon Dome is part performance, part live playtest. I fully expect The way The Dungeon Dome operates episode 1 of season one to be different than the way it works episode 15. We will testing out, adding, and changing audience participation mechanics throughout Season 1 if we fund.

Right now we have a few ways we know the audience can influence the story:

Backers can buy the right to directly collaborate with me on monsters, traps, items, and NPCs that will show up in The Dungeon Dome and directly affect matches, the overall story, and the game’s world.

During streams the audience can grant the team or performer they support Inspiration (a D&D 5e mechanic.) Normally inspiration is something the DM awards, but I have taken it completely out of my hands. I won’t be able to do it even if I want to.

In The Dungeon Dome games I ran before the Kickstarter, folks did this by spamming the chat with team hashtags. Now we are Twitch Affiliates, so we have access to Bits and Cheer. These are a gamified currency Twitch uses to allow a viewing audience to tip streamers. For The Dungeon Dome it could be a more effective and noticeable way for folks to influence the stream live.

Also in the pre-KS Dungeon Dome if a character dropped below 0 HP the audience could vote whether that character succeeded or failed on their Death Save. 3 failures would kill a character permanently. The audience still has this power and I think it’s pretty buck wild how much this could change the story.

That’s what we know. I fully expect to create more avenues for interaction but I need to experiment in order to find them.

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Thanks so much to James for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading and that you’ll check out Dungeon Dome on Kickstarter today!

note: Thoughty is on hiatus until probably July 31, 2017. Hopefully this interview, and past ones, are enough to re-read if you miss me. <3

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

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

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