This week I have a bundle of reviews for you, my readers! As part of #33in28 for my 33rd birthday I’m reviewing 33 solo games in February, which has 28 days. Each week I’ll post a single review on Monday, then a collection of six reviews on the following Sunday. The remaining three reviews will be peppered in on the big review days or as solo posts! As these are Let’s check out what today has to offer…
This week I have a bundle of reviews for you, my readers! As part of #33in28 for my 33rd birthday I’m reviewing 33 solo games in February, which has 28 days. Each week I’ll post a single review on Monday, then a collection of six reviews on the following Sunday. The remaining three reviews will be peppered in on the big review days or as solo posts! As these are Let’s check out what today has to offer… *Edited 2/9/2021 to correct a name and fix some formatting.
Hey, friends, supporters, consumers, and colleagues. this one is a little important.
I hope the best came for you in major holidays for each culture and religion or lack thereof that came before this post, and the same wishes for you in the festivities (or lack thereof!) to come. Please stay safe in the continuance of COVID-19 and the many dangers all marginalized people face, and seek joy in every moment – even if it’s fleeting, it heals more than all the rest.
That being said, this is me. Beau Sheldon.
Me. 2020.
Content warnings for discussion of mental illness, physical disability, financial insecurity, gender identity, gender dysphoria, mention of hallucinations, mention of schizoaffective disorder, mentions of political and social issues in the United States, and details of creative dysfunction.
Thoughty remains! So does Script Change. I still hope to do some interviews, as mentioned, very periodically. I want to talk more about design, and about leadership in games. I want to talk about the things I personally enjoy in games, break them down, see if I can make them make sense. I hope when the worldsuck eases I’ll release more games, though I doubt anything I do solo will be as big and fancy as Turn. I’ll be separately supporting my partners with their projects. Oh yeah, and I’ll still be accepting guest blogs here when I can build up a larger fund for paying creators!
Times do change.
My first interviews were before Thoughty – on my previous and now defunct site that I ported here with Systir Productions & 616, and on Gaming as Women with attendees of a Gamerati game day and then Judy Bauerof all people. I kicked off Thoughty and Five or So Questions in 2014 as a continuation of the original blog, but only the interviews really stuck around.
Me in 2013 at Gen Con with F. Wes Schneider, Paizo’s then Editor-in-Chief, who I had interviewed for GAW.
I have done over three hundred interviews on Thoughty, about 250 of those being Five or So Question interviews. I have only had a few interviews fully fail to be completed due to scheduling, and one pulled by the creator. I’ve interviewed people about not just tabletop but also card, board, and video games, plus lonely solo games, huge collections of tabletop and live action games, their artwork, their design process, their Kickstarters, and more. I have had an exceptional opportunity to pick the brains of the most brilliant designers in tabletop games, from legacy designers like Ron Edwards to genius women designers like Dr. Jessica Hammer and Meguey Baker to groundbreaking modern designers like Jay Dragon and Rae Nedjadi. Many of these people I have grown to consider friends and colleagues, and I’m so grateful for the amazing things I’ve learned from them and shared with you.
I have been supported by my Patreon supporters primarily for these interviews, enough funds to pay for my website and a bill every so often, some busy months enough to help me pay medical expenses. I am incredibly grateful for my supporters, for everyone who has shared an interview, recommended a creator to reach out to, or praised my interviews, regardless of whether they supported me financially!
You may ask, if this is so great, why does the title say you’re ending interviews? What does this mean for Thoughty? Why has the site been so slow recently, anyway? Well, that’s what I’m gonna try to answer here. This is… a bit long. I’m still me, you know.
I am very lucky to have been able to interview Brandon O’Brien, fighting past the pandemic delays, about his amazing writing and game design work! While I am a few days delayed past his birthday, here’s the interview below talking about Brandon’s cool creations!
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Brandon O’Brien.
Hi Brandon and thank you for the interview! Tell me a little about yourself and your experience. What is your work like and where did you start your journey into games and writing?
Hi! I’m grateful for the opportunity to talk about my work!
My journey into games started fairly recently, when one of my writing colleagues mentioned Avery Alder’s Emerging Designers Mentorship to me in early 2018. At that point, I didn’t even really think that I wanted to make a game. It was just that I saw the link, and it made me think of a thing that I could make, and I was prepared to just put it in the back of my mind. But as time passed, the idea started looking more and more like a really interesting game, so at that point I wanted to make it, so I signed up. Since then, the tabletop game design community just kind of opened up a little bit. I started getting to know other creators, reading and playing their games and getting to know them, and it started to feel more welcoming, and that made me want to experiment more.
As for my writing, that’s a far longer story. I’ve been writing in some form since I was much younger, especially poetry, which eventually led me to performance poetry, and then I met other Caribbean science fiction and fantasy writers, like Karen Lord and Tobias Buckell, and I realised that this was something I could actually do, and other people wanted to read it. And since that point, I’ve been committed to creating all of these things, and I’ve found that they complement each other very well–good verse becomes a good game, a good science fiction or fantasy premise becomes a good game, a good mode of play can potentially become an interesting way to hold an audience’s attention. So experimenting with them all has been a lot of fun!
Tell me about a couple of your favorite works, both games and writing, and about your process for making those works into fully realized projects. What were the exciting parts of those processes? What was more challenging? Did your level of experience or background at the time help or hinder?
In terms of games, I’ve been eagerly working on a project called Soundclash, a Forged in the Dark game about making music in a world where music has been touched by magic and the music industry has changed as a result. I’m still on my way to finishing it, but the work is always really inspiring. I’ve enjoyed retooling parts of the system to fit music and musical performance, and the idea of a world where singing is your ‘combat’. I don’t think it’s perfect so far, and I have so much more to learn and ask, I think, but the process of learning and asking has been refreshing. That’s what excites me, to be honest. Funnily enough, I feel like it’s a small part of why I haven’t finished yet, combined with whatever level of fear is still there about making a whole big game. I’m intrigued to get closer to a sense of making the stakes of just performing a song the same as breaking into a stronghold or winning a fight.
I’m in a similar experiment with How To Unmake It In Anglia, a weird mystery story about finding a missing person in a world where every word you say or write instantly comes true. Narratively, a lot of it is a big experiment, asking a question about the world that changes the way that people speak in it and respond to words in it, and that has an effect on how I write their relationship to those words, too. But it’s also serial, so I’m trying to tell a long story but also make each part accessible and interesting and engaging, which is a slightly different state of mind than a whole novel.
I consider myself lucky, though. When you’re writing a story or a novel, you have an editor, someone who looks at your work and wants to help you get better at it. In my mentorship, Avery has been instrumental in a very similar role, helping me recalibrate how I even think about play. I consider that editing, in a way, and I’m really thankful to have people I can trust to see me through those stumbling blocks, especially on the gaming front.
Both with your writing and your design, what are some themes and ideas you have been exploring that you don’t see as much in the standard American fare? What are the things that you bring from your unique experience that you most love to share through these mediums?
If I’m being honest, I don’t think I’m doing much that isn’t in the space already. From my experience, science fiction writers and indie designers are asking some of the most interesting questions, and so many of them are important to the present. I think my work is really focused on the question of what people use to create the context in their world, especially when it’s art. In my writing, I’ve been confronting a lot of very specific things that seem distinct, but I feel like they fit really well. I only recently noticed that Soundclash has a lot in common with some of my stories, when it comes to asking the question of what art does and who it serves. Sometimes it’s also music, or sometimes it’s a robot, or sometimes it’s the very bodies and identities of a community’s artists, but my characters ask a lot what it means to make something in a world where the thing you make, or the person who makes it, can become a commodity, and that’s what Soundclash is trying to ask as well: when you just wanted to make music, how do you navigate a world where you have become a tool, a weapon, for the industry to exploit?
I’m also really interested in how we make things to heal within each other, which is also in that same idea-space. I wrote a small game last year called TheRefraction, which is played by writing poetry to each other. You can’t move from one stage of play to another unless you’ve shared your work and been shared with in turn. It’s also what influenced some of my Belonging Outside Belonging games, like Evokers’ Pact, where there are new moves that specifically emphasise how conflict and reconciliation between two or three people can impact entire groups, because at the time when I wrote them I was really thinking about how conflict isn’t often about one person making trouble, but about how two or three people misunderstand each other or talk over each other’s desires, and I wanted to find a way to ask players to think about what those misunderstandings are as part of play, and possibly challenge them to think about those things as they leave play, too.
The description of Evokers’ Pact by Brandon O’Brien.
When you get an idea, how do you decide whether to make it into a piece of fiction or poetry, or a game?
Very rarely, things materialise one way in my brain, and I will get fixated on the notion that it has to exist in the medium I imagined it. A few games are like that. The Refraction was always going to be a game, because I wanted to make a poetry game, and once I knew what this one was, I didn’t want to give up on that. And that happens a little more often with fiction or poetry, too. I’ve spoken to other writers who agree that sometimes, when we decide to write a story, it’s actually because the idea in our head is something we would really like to read. That it’s kind of a craving for something, that we’re hungry for a certain kind of story, and we get fixated on finding it and consuming it because that’s what we’re in the mood for. And then a part of our brain goes, “well, you’ll have to write it yourself”. Like it’s a literal craving, but you can’t order it from a fast food place, so you make up your mind that you have to cook. That’s what a story feels like sometimes–It’s in this medium because I made up my mind that I want to read this, and want other people to find it like this.
But more often I have notes about a thing and have no idea what I want it to be. I have loads of notes on things that could be stories, but they could also be comic books, and the only reason they aren’t yet is because I can’t draw! Or there are nuggets of things that would make fascinating game mechanics, but I don’t have something meaningful to do with them yet, so they’re just waiting in a notepad app for me to find a way to make it important. Ideas are free. I have too many of them to use. So I try to be less rigid about them whenever possible, and consider how they can find value in another format if I’m struggling.
A lot of the RPG world can seem dominated by homogenous cultures and perspectives. What are some projects of yours where you’ve really had the opportunity to express your own culture and perspective, and how did you work through that creative process?
Culture is a difficult thing to try to parse in any medium, especially when you’re a Black diaspora creator working with cultural objects that may seem foreign to many other people. But I like exploring the cultural objects that I know because they’re the lens through which I make sense of the world and my place in it.
For instance, I’ve been really focused on a particular character in Trinidad and Tobago folklore called a lagahoo–a creature cursed to transform into a monstrous shape, but also to have a coffin chained to them, to drag it with them wherever they go. I’ve been fascinated by that image for a while now: why is this person so cursed? What could be in the coffin? And as I was processing certain parts of my work, my relationship to my culture, and even some of my own personal experiences, I began reevaluating the lagahoo, viewing it as an image of rage, of frustration, of righteous anger, someone for whom this curse is actually a kind of dark mission. That understanding shows up in my fiction and my poetry, but I struggled for a while to put that in game form.
So I put out a game, coincidentally called Lagahoo, which is a slight adaptation of the party game Werewolf with that added flavour, because that felt more interesting and more real to me. It (hopefully!) turns the game into a world where you know there are monsters lurking in the dark, preying on your community, but they’re not the things that turn into beasts with fangs and claws, they’re the ordinary people who hide their cruelty and their viciousness under cover of night. And the game doesn’t really care if you can tell. You just have to keep your community safe.
I want to experiment more with those perspectives. Folklore opens a really interesting window for us to reevaluate the modern world, not always through the mechanics of most fantasy stuff–like, it doesn’t always have to be violence or conflict, or the threat of loss. It can also be an opportunity to reconnect with history, or ask questions about what we think we know or trust. And Caribbean folklore is rich like that, so I want to play more with those characters and what they could teach us, while also using that opportunity to share that part of my culture with others.
With The Refraction, how did you integrate games and poetry to make a synthesis of the two? How have players responded, and what makes the game exciting to you?
I just really wanted to tinker with a game where playing was writing. I wanted to use play to hopefully make a safe space for folks who probably don’t write as often, or have never attempted writing a poem or may think that it’s hard or needs to exist a certain way, to be free to share among themselves and not feel like they need to do any one thing to write a poem. But I also wanted to use those fantasy tropes, of the downtrodden villagers who obviously have a lot to say and no force of power to speak out, as a prompt for those poems. I actually want to do much more with The Refraction, to create more of those play-spaces soon and give people more worlds and characters to inhabit and write from.
I believe people really like it! It’s one of my Itch games that people ask about and talk about the most. I wish folks would be willing to share their poems with me! But I won’t force it! I’m just grateful to make space for folks to write, and I hope it helps people discover something through writing the way poetry does for me. I really like poetry’s capacity to use space and brevity to tell a story, and how we communally attach personal depth to it because of its format. I can only hope that it’s encouraging people to tinker more with the form and maybe write their own things. And I want to make more opportunities just like it–where telling the story is not just making the world, but is about discovering how you feel and what you want to do about it, and gaining power from telling people. I mean, at its core, what is a roleplaying game but telling people that you’ve been moved to do something? And I’m beyond hype that I get to make room to do that, but they get to toy with writing among friends, without feeling judged.
Brandon O’Brien.
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Thank you so much to Brandon for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed this interview and that you’ll check out Brandon’s website and itchio!
I have been working on the Turn Kickstarter since October 2018, and it has been quite a challenge. The Behind the Masc Kickstarter went so smoothly, with so few issues! Turn, on the other hand, had production changes, shipping challenges, and was all complicated by my continued health issues, both mental and physical. The project was a mountain, in a range of mountains so high I have been struggling to overcome them.
My remaining responsibilities for the Kickstarter are fulfilling some books that have been returned, some of which never were returned but never reached the customer (hooray, shipping!); fulfilling the Snake and Cougar backers, which I’ve only just started on and it’s been a snail’s pace – I feel extreme guilt over this, tbh; and completing and releasing the stretch goals, which are nearly done except for the border town supplement which was a late addition and is now on the back burner until everything else is complete. We legit are doing the final edits on the stretch goals, putting the cover on and touching up art, this weekend! It’s just so much more work than it seems, even when you go in expecting to climb Everest.
The reality is, there are always taller mountains.
Not only have I encountered issues with my head injury recovery, but I’ve also dealt with recurring back problems, required pelvic rehabilitation therapy and treatment for digestive and dental issues, and also fought constantly with Medicaid – not to forget struggles with depression, my bipolar disorder, and PTSD. My immediate family has struggled too, and I never manage to be there for them. All of this while I’m still trying to figure out how to contribute to my household – at this point, I struggle pointlessly.
I have taken on editing jobs, sensitivity consultation roles, and small game design jobs, but I’ve had to step out of a few, and those I have finished like the code of conduct used in a number of Pacific Northwest game design playtest groups are ones I don’t really see the fruits of – though the financial benefits were enough to stress out Medicaid.
I’ve supported the Homunculus Assembly Line Kickstarter regularly and will be doing writing and design for it, and hopefully working closely with a partner will make it easier. It’s just a frustrating pattern that there’s work and work and it’s always more than it seems, always this bigger mountain, and when we get to the reward at the end, it’s always smaller. Turn has been out for a while now, and few people have really recognized that – this is not a complaint, this is a recognition that I haven’t reached out to podcasts or reviewers and sent out copies to try to get their attention, because I’m too damn tired.
I’m going somewhere with this, I swear.
The reality is there are ranges of mountains we climb over every day, and let’s be real, the privileged, able, rich people will be able to get over them so much more easily than the rest of us. But it’s easier to do it together, tied together with some rope for safety, trusting in each other. When we fall, we can help each other up.
And people do this for me every day – my partners, my friends, my colleagues. I know I can be a goddamn disaster, but I also know that my openness about my pain and struggles gives people the opportunity to support me and help me, whether it’s through bundles that get me to conventions or gifting me from my birthday wishlist or just a DM to make sure I eat a goddamn meal today.
The mountains are cold and lonely at times, and we will starve if we try to climb them alone. We don’t have to be some sort of superhumans, and we shouldn’t have to be. We should strive to support each other in a network of creators and consumers, loving and caring for one-another. We don’t have to cannibalize each other if we plan for the storms and listen to what wise people say.
That reward at the end won’t be as small if it’s shared between us and used to grow more and greater gardens. We can keep going! We just have to stick together, and find the beauty in the mountains together, and not turn back when it feels impossible.
This is what I’m telling myself, as I keep climbing. Will you tie your rope to me, and hold on tight as the winds blow?
I just wanted to do a brief post about Turn and identity, on this, our turning point to the second half of the Kickstarter. You can check out Turn’s Kickstarter at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/briecs/turn-a-tabletop-roleplaying-game. Content warning for discussion of mental health, depression, and mentions of binge drinking/alcoholism and suicidal ideation.
I want to talk about what it means to be two (or more) things in one person. I come at this from a couple of different axes, and some people have more. Mine are really tied to people’s perception for some of these, but others are truly just inherently who I am.
Let me try to separate them a little.
As far as perception, to many people, I’m a cis woman. In reality, I’m not. So I live with perceived-me as cis woman, and actual-me as not. As well, I’m not perceived as disabled, but in reality, I am. So I live as perceived-me and able, and actual-me as disabled. I also appear straight – I’m even in a perceived-straight relationship. But I’m not! I’m queer as hell. So, perceived-me and actual-me again at odds.
It goes deeper, I say, in a Morpheus voice.
I am actually both nonbinary and masculine. Simultaneously, most of the time, though in different amounts. This is big, and important. One of the biggest ones, though, is that I have bipolar disorder. Even when I am at the height of mania, my depression looms and can tug at me in moments when I’m sensitive, and vice versa. My mania (including hypomania) and depression, they’re a part of me, even when I’m incredibly well-medicated.
Around 2012, I entered into a mixed episode. (A slow slide.) This is when you’re kind of manic and depressed all at once! It is, shall we say, a bad time. It lasted years. Many of my readers knew me during this time period, through what I call The Dark Years, because I lost a lot of memories due to blackouts both from mania and from alcohol abuse. Not great.
However, I started working on Turn in 2013. This isn’t a coincidence. I don’t talk about this part of Turn very much because it’s still incredibly hard for me. I’ve been asked in a few interviews, and only went into it in detail relating to this specific subject on one, about why shapeshifters are great to tell stories about. There are tons of reasons – they’re fun, they can be used as a metaphor, they’re powerful and interesting. But shapeshifters – multiple identities in one body? I understand that, I live that.
From 2012 until a ways into 2015, I was what some people consider “crazy.” I was fighting with my mental illness, making tons of bad choices, but also continuing to grow my business, attending university, and so on. I was struggling between the intense, high, selfish, egotistical mania and the soul-sucking, exhausting, lonely, self-loathing depression. During all of this, I got to see that neither side – in me personally – existed without the other, that they fed into each other, interacted with each other, and that there were things I could do where both would work together, or where I could find a harmony. That eventual harmony did actually lead me to getting help, going on lithium, quitting binge drinking, and ending harmful relationships.
And there, you can see a burning light of hope.
I have always identified with shapeshifters, having a hidden identity of some kind with everyone most of my life. They are part of Turn, and are good to make stories about, because of what I said – they’re interesting, fun, powerful, and great metaphors for people to place upon themselves. But I would be lying if I didn’t say that the actual design of Turn wasn’t heavily influenced by my own conflicting identity.
I’ve had reason to think about it a lot over the Kickstarter, and while I personally struggle to find mental health support on Medicaid. The fear of falling back into those dark days is real, let me tell you. But, in thinking, I wanted to share that the design of shapeshifters in Turn, to have these different parts of their identity that they struggle between, that they must find balance within? That’s bred out of true hope.
Many people have different sides to them, and it’s hard to deal with it sometimes. When I think of when I was first conceiving the Struggles in Turn, the mechanics for how you resolve conflicts between your beast and human identities and their wants and needs when you take action, I thought of how every day when I was struggling with my mental health, I had to choose my consequences. Sometimes it meant I’d sacrifice face, sometimes I’d deal with physical fallout, and sometimes I’d have other worse consequences for whatever ridiculous shit I got up to that day. I couldn’t always predict them and sometimes I’d just end up with the whole mess (hello, 6-).
And it was also always about the drawbacks that my one part of me had pulling against the other. When I was more manic and just trying to slam down a conversation at a convention, my depressive side would push for me to say things that were self-deprecating. When I was a miserable mess and struggling from the edge of suicide, the mania would suggest self-destructive methods. It was kind of rough, honestly.
When I put these into Turn, though, I didn’t want all that bad shit coming with it. For me, I wanted shapeshifters to be something beautiful! I was okay with them having hard stuff they dealt with, but it wasn’t about either side of them being dark, or self-destructive, or harmful. They’re just both parts of the being with needs and wants that the shifters have to struggle to satisfy or meet, even if it’s hard, and the biggest aspect is that they’re just trying to show up the way everyone wants them to show up. That’s why exposure is a mechanic, because the real hard part of all of this is the world, not their identity. Shifters are good!
I want to talk more about shapeshifters being beautiful and good so I will soon, but this is getting a little long.
Basically, shapeshifters are whatever you want them to be in what they stand for or are a metaphor for. You can play them in a bunch of different ways! But the reason why their mechanics work the way they do is because I discovered through struggles with my bipolar disorder that these complex multi-faceted identities aren’t actually binary structures! Even my mania has some sadness, even my depression has some egotism. It’s not exactly a fun way to figure out how to design a game, but it’s a real one.
So the shapeshifters in Turn are complex. They are not all beast when they’re a beast, and they’re not all human when they’re a human. They’re a little bit of each, regardless of their form, in different amounts. And I thought about this intensely during throes of mania and depths of depression! So I can tell you with all honesty that there are no perfect metaphors. But I’ll tell you this: shapeshifters don’t have a special tweenie form like many shapeshifter versions do because I will never have a happy medium, and I had to find a way into the light without one. I think the story is stronger that way, and it’s a story I know how to tell.
If you liked reading about Turn and want to support it, the Kickstarter runs until November 30, so please consider backing it. If this resonated with you, please feel free to share your experiences with having a multi-faceted identity – you can even use the #turnrpg and #myturnID hashtags if you’d like. I know I’m not alone in being a person with many sides, and I appreciate the power of sharing our stories.
Until next time:
P.S. – If you’re a Patreon backer, let me know if you think I should charge for this post!
Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/thoughty. Tell your friends!
Turn is currently doing wonderfully, just short of funding and 21 days to go! We just announced international shipping, and I’m very excited for what is yet to come in stretch goals and work I do after the game is live!
But I need to talk about the future, because mine is uncertain.
As many people know, in November of 2018 I had a car accident. I fell asleep while driving my car in a parking garage and hit my head and wrenched my shoulder. When I went to the hospital, they said I had a mild concussion and shoulder sprain, and advised me to follow up with a doctor if I had any significant symptoms.
I was in grad school, so most of the symptoms of bad concussion issues were able to be dismissed as burnout, for me. I didn’t mean to do it, but I was cramming hard and desperate to get through school, while struggling with one challenging job and another job that really challenged my now-addled brain. By the time I was nearing finals in the next semester, I had been struggling with concussion symptoms – genuine brain injury symptoms – for months.
I found tons of typos in work I was reviewing – my own work, where typos were normally rare at worst. I was getting carsick while driving, and had gotten dizzy after seeing Black Panther, slipped and bumped my head in two places on my car door. The dizziness, nausea, and unfocused confusion were too much, so I went to the concussion clinic. They confirmed my fears, that it was worse than expected, and also that my delaying it had made recovery longer – and possibly less likely.
I did physical therapy from May to September, before I ran out of car insurance funds. I still do the exercises at home. I thought I was improving, and I have at least somewhat. But…
When preparing the Kickstarter for Turn, I let John take a look at the draft, and he pointed out many errors. The kind of thing that shouldn’t really be an issue for a functioning brain that’s working well, you know, like swapped words, nonsense sentence structure, and so on. Some of it seemed like gibberish. I didn’t even notice! He had to review it for me.
Reflecting on it, I reviewed a variety of my work. I read my recent submission to Return to the Stars, and how many confusing edits there had been, because I didn’t even recall the disorganized things I had written. I read my work on thatlittleitch, which is unedited, and how my sentence structure is even more confusing and inelegant than before the accident. Many things I have written, I have forgotten, or don’t recall clearly, and if they aren’t edited, they’re often confusing, especially if they are longer.
I had an appointment coming up with my concussion clinic doctor, who expressed that like we had known, my delayed treatment combined with comorbidity of a variety of my illnesses (fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, PTSD, bipolar) will make recovery harder. But, if I’m still having issues with confusion and language, it could be a greater concern. So, I was assigned speech therapy (alongside physical therapy for my shoulder, which hasn’t healed). I can’t have that appointment until December, because they don’t have space for me.
My doctor basically explained that this could continue to be a grueling process. They don’t know if I will ever be back to what I was before. They want to ensure I can continue working, but if speech therapy isn’t effective, we will run out of options pretty quickly. And even if it works, it’s a long process, with unreliable results.
What does this mean?
Turn may be my last large project. I can still fulfill the work, absolutely, but we baked in extra time for what is to be done. I have a freelance project to fulfill for Orun, which I’m going to be advising them may involve a little more editing than planned (but I hope not). But going forward, I may max out at 1000 words for a given project, or just take a lot more time, and I can only ask editors to do so much work.
Pretty much everything I’ve been working on is going to be more limited, require more oversight. It’s exhausting to imagine, and I feel broken. This is part of why Turn has felt so desperate to me – what if I never make something amazing again? What if this it? And while I do my best to ensure I have good editing, the process will be harder. I don’t know if I can put myself through a super hard process every time I want to make something. And I don’t know if I’ll ever get better.
So, this is basically just a post to explain the situation. It’s me trying to find a way to say “hey, my brain is damaged, and I may never be the same again, so I hope you don’t desert me, and I hope you understand that I am doing the best I can.”
I’m trying. But, after this Kickstarter, things may be different. Er, well, they will be different – I just don’t know how. I hope you’ll stick with me.
Love to you all <3
Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/thoughty. Tell your friends!
First off, I’m going to make a damn #TurnRPG hashtag, then we’re gonna talk about this precious gift of a game I have been working on since December 2013. And have I got some WORDS for you this evening, my friends, about Turn, and about large design projects, mental health, & “different.”
Turn is a slice-of-life supernatural roleplaying game about shapeshifters in small, rural towns who must find balance in their shifter identity and community with their fellows. I’m planning to Kickstart it at the end of October. tinyurl.com/turn-rpg-beta-2018
I’ve been really digging into it and I’m in the expand and explain part – I think the mechanics are solid, but trying to ensure people understand the mechanics is hard. I’ve been struggling through recovering from a brain injury, & until recently, sometimes my work was nonsense.
So a lot of this is revisiting old text, making sure it makes sense, revising it, and adding as much as I can to make it approachable to people who aren’t me. John helps with this – he’s my dev editor – but he can only do so much when I’m struggling personally with the work.
Turn is the biggest thing I’ve made and a large part of me *needs* it to succeed, to be appreciated. So I want everything to be perfect! Like, everything has to be exactly how it’s supposed to be written in my head. And that’s a pain in the ass, and doesn’t guarantee perfection.
So like today I’ve been asking for help figuring out a new title for the facilitator role because facilitator sounds boring and what I was using, Storyteller, is too associated with White Wolf (not why I was using it, but no one cares) and also doesn’t describe the role well.
Now I’m trying out Meddler, because I tried a whole bunch in text and it’s the only one I like next to Busybody but is slightly more teasing than mean like Busybody tends to be. And I listened to a bunch of people’s input, too, and felt kind of “eh yeah?” and like COME ON.
See, one thing that I need to really tell you here is that the longer your project, the more likely you are to hit a wall of mental health issues, new or old. They will fuck you UP. I love this game. I love it SO much. And I find myself poking at it all like “I should trash it.”
I’m working on this big, meaningful project and I’m getting engagement with input from people and all my big stupid brain can say is “Well I dunno, people haven’t said it’s visionary or anything, and these other people aren’t interested, so maybe it’s just awful.” This project!
And part of it is because it’s a big project, a lot of time and energy with (to date) little to no returns. Most of my projects seem futile because I don’t exactly swim in recognition, reviews, or funds as a result of them. But I still do them, and I’m still doing this. I’m especially still doing this.
If I was working on something smaller I could be done and stop torturing myself with the maybes and the whys. But it’s big. It matters. And mental illness just wants to dig in its claws and remind me that I’m not doing good enough. But I also know it’s because Turn is different.
I said it, I mean it. When I play Turn, it always feels different than other games. When I’ve been designing it, it feels different than other games. I haven’t played all games, and I’m not fucking gonna, but I do know that compared to the games I have played, Turn is different.
Maybe it’s because of the angle? Or because it’s quiet drama? Maybe it’s because I took away failure, and focused on consequences? Maybe it’s because this game isn’t designed to play like an adventure, but instead like everyday life that gets hard and troublesome but also loving?
And like, the biggest thing I struggle with while designing this game is that I want to maintain that “different.” Some people have looked at the mechanics without playing the game and said it was just copied from a bunch of places, but it’s not. It’s different. So it’s rough!
How do I keep my snowflake of a game from melting or getting mushed together and ruined? How do I present it to people in a way that highlights the difference? Worst of all, what if I AM wrong and my game’s actually just a boring facsimile of other games I don’t want it to be?
It’s a lot. I just want this game to be good and succeed and I want this weird experience I have when I play it to be replicable for people. I want to do a Kickstarter and not have it fail because I want people to be interested in it and excited for it. But I’m also very tired.
If it was smaller, maybe I’d care less. I didn’t have a mental illness, maybe I’d struggle less. If it felt samey, maybe it would matter less. But none of those things are so. It’s a mattering struggling caring mess. I’m mulling over every design decision like it’s life & death.
My final real point, I suppose, is that all of these things: bigness, mental health, difference, they are important to the game and the design process I’m experiencing, and I have to overcome the challenges. I love Turn so much, and I can’t let it fade away, I can’t risk that.
So if I kind of sound like a pain in the ass a lot right now, & for the foreseeable future, I want you to know that it’s only because I’m trying my best. I want to do my best. I want the game that I put out to be one you can pick up & have an amazing experience with. I’m trying.
Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
I wrote this for school, but I wanted to post it here so others could use it, also, example of how I’d like to use games to explain concepts of leadership and development. -Brie The illustrations on this page are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by John W. Sheldon.
The best way for me to understand the different types of power was to put it into perspective of a fantasy roleplaying game. This might sound lazy, but it helps me remember it better and gives me perspectives.
Did I list druids here? Of course not – their power is more fluid in nature and depends on their interpretation of their magic, at least partially. I would consider them to have something like reward/referant. They’re a weird cookie.
Some of the main archetypes or roles in tabletop fantasy games are paladins, clerics, fighters, wizards, rangers, rogues, and bards. They each have different ways of moving about the game and taking actions, and have different abilities. When reading over the types of power initially probably four years ago, the following role assignments stuck out to me:
Paladins have legitimate power. Legitimate power is “the authority granted from a formal position in an organization” (Daft, p. 370). Paladins are typically given a role of power from their chosen deity, and can occupy a position in a church, as well. They are literally assigned power. With this, they can take actions themselves, as well as call others to action. To use this power, a paladin (or someone in real life) could call back to their own authority and speak to how their actions reflect the intentions of that authority.
Clerics have reward power. Reward power is “the authority to bestow rewards on other people” (Daft, p. 371). Clerics are also religiously-based, and can give people healing or blessings with deific magic. They have the ability to reward people for heroism through those blessings and through healing and recovery. A cleric (or someone in real life) might use reward power by promising that if a certain goal is met, there would be monetary, emotional, or needs-based reward.
Sassy fighter is sassy – and coercive.
Fighters have coercive power. Coercive power is “the authority to punish or recommend punishment” (Daft, p. 371). Fighters are typically combat based and often brutal and violent. Their typical modus operandi is to go punishment first. (Shoot first, ask questions later.) Their work is mostly done with threats! Fighters (or people in real life) could use coercive power by promising retribution should people not follow their orders and satisfy their goal requirements, and follow up on it if there is failure.
Rangers and wizards have expert power. Rogues also have this power. Expert power is “the authority resulting from a leader’s special knowledge or skill” (Daft, p. 371). Both wizards and rangers are experts in their fields, with deep knowledge of whatever it is they do. Wizards are academics, while rangers are more on-the-ground and experience based, and very skilled. Rogues have many skills but are more jack-of-all-trades in a lot of cases, which makes them have a lot of generalized authority because they know at least a little bit about almost everything. These type of archetypes (or people in real life) can use their power by explaining the facts and support behind the requested actions and goal-focus, and use their knowledge to propel action.
Rogues know where it’s at (in your safe, that is).
Bards have referent power. Referent power is “authority based on personality characteristics that command followers’ attention, respect, and admiration so that they want to emulate the leader” (Daft, p.372). Bards are charisma based (mechanically and conceptually) and can guide people however they see fit. A bard (or person in real life) could use their power by speaking to ideals and behaviors that they hold and ensuring that others know the value of those, inspiring them to act to also carry those goals and behaviors into their work and personal life.
Legitimate, reward, and coercive power are hard power because they are all about control. If you do this, I give you or take away this. If you don’t do this, the whole authority will know you defied them. They are concrete things that immediately threaten or promise things, or simply force authority on people, and that makes them almost immovable. Soft power like expert power and referent power are explanatory and guiding instead of forcing, and therefore can lead people towards success or goal-meeting without making them feel like they have no choice or making them feel like they have to do something instead of wanting to do something, because it makes sense or satisfies some higher-level need.
What kind of power would a dragon have compared to a barbarian? It depends on the dragon, frankly.
