Today I have an interview with Dominique Dickey about their project, Tomorrow on Revelation III, which is currently on Kickstarter! This project seems really amazing and explores a lot of complex themes, so I hope you enjoy hearing about it! Check it out!
I’m excited for the opportunity to interview you about Tomorrow on Revelation III, which you’re launching on Kickstarter. It sounds fascinating! Before we talk in detail about the game, can you tell me a little about yourself and how you came to be designing this project?
DD: I’m Dominique Dickey! I’m a writer, editor, and consultant. I’ve previously worked as a freelancer on projects such as Thirsty Sword Lesbians, Sea of Legends, Lost Roads, and Pathfinder Lost Omens. You can also find my rpg TRIAL on itch.io: it’s a narrative game that explores race and the criminal justice system via the story of a murder trial, and was my first foray into games as a mechanism of social change.
Last summer, I had the idea for a game about farmers avoiding becoming obsolete on a space station. I was interested in themes of capitalism and finding meaning outside of labor. I also wanted to design a game about community-driven social change, and find a way to represent that change through game mechanics.
I spoke to my dear friend Charles Linton and realized that my initial premise was more suited for a one-shot than a campaign, as resolving the problem (making sure the space farmers had rights and protections) would break the game (by obliterating a core aspect of the setting). I also didn’t want it to become a game about making oneself necessary to the capitalist machine: what if the farmers’ profession actually does become obsolete, but they find value outside of their labor? The way I initially envisioned the game would not allow players to answer that question, or others like it.
From those discussions with Charlie, the game shifted to be about a group of people on a heavily stratified space station, all with different backgrounds and levels of privilege, working together to improve their collective circumstances. I was really excited by the idea of developing the eponymous station and its stratifications—this was my first time writing a game with a super concrete setting, and I wanted to create a rich and generative sandbox for players and GMs to enjoy.
The game has a really deep premise and I want to know more. How would you describe the game to a new player? What are the most important things you want players to know about Tomorrow on Revelation III?
DD: Our tagline is “a tabletop rpg about surviving and building community on a hyper-capitalist station,” which I think is a great overview.
Here are some important things about the game:
- Tomorrow on Revelation III uses phased gameplay, with downtime and mission phases, to support both slice-of-life storytelling and high-stakes efforts to change material circumstances in the face of adversity.
- The game deals with a lot of heavy content, but there is still joy and opportunities to make things better, even in inhospitable circumstances.
- I’m very interested in educational applications of gaming—TRIAL was designed to teach people about the inequities at the heart of the justice system. Tomorrow on Revelation III isn’t explicitly educational, but it equips players to have complicated conversations about capitalism and anti-capitalist solutions in a fun way.
- I love games that give me the opportunity to go to a coffee shop AND do a heist (in the same session!), so this game has that.
- A lot of the aesthetics and elements you’ll find in good old fashioned space rpgs are here, but frequently we transform or push back against these in some way.
- There’s a balance of players portraying individual characters and collaborating to represent the whole community, which is a roleplay element that I’m proud of having designed.
This sounds amazing! I’m interested in hearing more about phased play. What are the fundamental differences between the phases of play, and how do they change mechanically?
DD: The two phases are the downtime phase, and the mission phase. During the downtime phase, players can alleviate conditions, gather equipment or information, and build connections on different decks of the station. Each player should be the focus of at least one downtime phase scene. That said, if this kind of slice-of-life storytelling is your jam, the downtime phase can go on for as long as you want!. Mechanically, during the downtime phase players can take action without risk of failure. If you make any sort of skill check that requires a die roll, the result will either be a complete or qualified success.
I think the most innovative thing about the downtime phase is that players can embody the roles of NPCs. This is designed to make each character’s community ties feel more real to everyone at the table. It’s one thing to say “I have a spouse and a sibling on Deck E of the station.” It’s another thing to actually roleplay a scene with those characters, and loop other players at the table into that roleplay, so that each player feels bonded to the characters and invested in improving their lives. Allocating NPC roles to other players also takes pressure off of the GM, because the downtime phase is largely community focused—and that can mean juggling a lot of characters at once!
The mission phase will feel a lot more familiar to rpg players: each player roleplays as one designated character, dice are rolled for skill checks, and every die roll carries a risk of failure. This phase is when player characters work under adversarial conditions to improve life on the station.
As someone who grew up on a farm and has seen how farming has become devalued or hypercapitalized, I’m curious about your research into how that happened and how it could potentially proceed. What has your research process been like, and what are some ways it has influenced the game’s design?
DD: Our initial research focused on the resources that are necessary to survive in space. We spent a lot of time plotting out what the crop output needs to be to sustain the station and export product to other stations. Charles took point on doing the math to determine the station’s population and the size of the agricultural fields. We also read about farming in space, and decided on vertical aeroponic growth racks.
We’re both from California, which has an enormous agricultural sector fueled by an underserved migrant worker population. A small capitalist space station has some things in common with that, but also a lot of differences! So, some of our process entailed thinking about how the reality we were familiar with would be transformed to fit this setting.
There are a lot of insidious ways that growers in the current industry try to undercut even the smallest wage and rights improvements for workers. An example of this is IE AB 1066, the Phase-In Overtime for Agricultural Workers Act. By this law, farm workers will get overtime pay after working 8 hours a day or 40 hours a week. The old rule was that they got overtime pay after working 10 hours a day or 60 hours a week. In response to this legislation, a lot of growers cut their workers’ hours, rather than pay them the overtime. Charles and I looked at cases like this, in which those who own the means of production harm their workers, and asked ourselves how that would manifest on a space station.
In terms of design, so much of the research we did actually didn’t make it to the page. We don’t want readers to have to be farm experts, or supply chain logistics experts, in order to meaningfully engage with the game—but if someone does have that proficiency, then we’d love for them to be able to bring their experience to their roleplay. We tried to outline the guiding principles of the setting rather than info-dumping, so that players are empowered to make their own decisions about the more granular ways that capitalism operates on Revelation III.
There are also individual sentences in the book with hours of discussion and research behind them, because some of the details felt important to really nail.
That all sounds amazing and fascinating! What made you decide to set this off-Earth to explore the experience of these characters and communities? How did that impact the game and design?
DD: I’m currently a full-time student, and I’m fresh off of writing a thesis on speculative fiction, so the concept of cognitive estrangement has been rattling around in my brain. The idea originated from the work of Darko Suvin, and a brief summary is that speculative fiction shows us things that we recognize from our daily lives, but incorporates some element of defamiliarization. Setting something in space is a great example of this defamiliarization. Ultimately, what the defamiliarization does is that it gives the reader enough distance from their own life that they’re now able to interrogate things that they’d otherwise take for granted.
In my thesis, this comes up in the context of gender. Let’s say you were reading a story about aliens, and the author mentioned that the aliens experience gender in a totally weird and foreign way. This might obliquely cause you to question how we humans experience gender, if you’d previously taken the binary for granted.
Because of all this, I knew that Tomorrow on Revelation III needed to be set in space, in order to facilitate the kind of thinking and conversations I was looking to create with the game. The most insidious consequences of capitalism in the game are extrapolations of things that are happening right now, on Earth—but setting the game in space makes it feel just unfamiliar enough that we’re able to think critically about those things, rather than taking them for granted. This story taking place on a space station was one of the initially non-negotiable things that I proposed to Charles, because I saw it as the core of the idea. From there, we got to do a lot of fun research about what life in space would actually look like, and then bake the results of that research into the lore and mechanics.
One final question to top this off. In your experience working on the game and playing it, what are some play experiences you’ve had that really exemplify the stories you want to tell with the game? What has left you excited to see what can happen at future tables?
DD: In our playtests, I’ve been really excited about how smoothly character creation flows into the downtime phase, which in turn flows naturally into the mission phase. I’m eager to hear how other tables navigate the transition from collaborative worldbuilding, to discussion of the mechanical benefits of various downtime scenes, to roleplaying those scenes and later roleplaying the mission itself. I also look forward to seeing how groups make use of the community roleplay in the downtime phase—I want to hear about all the interesting NPCs that come up on the spot, and the ways that groups build out the world to suit the stories they’re trying to tell.
Something that also came up in a recent playtest was the balance between cozy and action-oriented play. In the same session, we had a sweet bonding scene set in an internet cafe, and set about executing an elaborate heist. I love being able to fold low-stakes and high-octane roleplay into the same game, and I’m excited to share that ability with our players!
Awesome! Thank you so much to Dominique for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Tomorrow on Revelation III on Kickstarter today!