{"id":1382,"date":"2019-06-20T15:59:46","date_gmt":"2019-06-20T19:59:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/briebeau.com\/thoughty\/?p=1382"},"modified":"2021-11-16T00:38:44","modified_gmt":"2021-11-16T05:38:44","slug":"five-or-so-questions-on-children-of-the-beast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/briebeau.com\/thoughty\/2019\/06\/five-or-so-questions-on-children-of-the-beast\/","title":{"rendered":"Five or So Questions on Children of the Beast"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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

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\"Three<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Tell me a little about Children of the Beast. What excites you about it?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

So\nwe wanted to focus on that aspect of exploration with Children of the Beast, I\nreally wanted to bring something new to the table that people would have to\nplay to discover. So I’m excited about people discovering things like\nfleshsmithing body parts, finding out they can speak to sentient slime, and\nlearning that the tunnel they’re in is actually the insides of a giant worm. We\nactually try to hide a lot of mechanics so people learn as they go! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

\"A<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

What is the core activity of play in Children of the Beast, and what are the characters like? How does the Hunter\u2019s Blood impact the character\u2019s experiences in game?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

The\nHunter’s Blood is sort of a genetic thing that makes your characters immune to\nthe Corruption and actually capable of hunting beasts. The public has a\nterrified respect of you, like if Cthulhu was your plumber or something. They\nwill trust you to do your job but otherwise they want nothing to do with you,\nmaybe even prefer you were dead. This can cause a lot of juicy interpersonal\nconflict as what you need to do becomes more complex, which I love, haha.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

How did you come up with the various beasts and their designs, and how do you mechanize them in the game?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

Mechanically\nit depends. We often have mechanical ideas when we create a creature, but game\ndevelopment is a complicated beast, sometimes ideas just don’t work out in\nplaytesting as well as you thought they would. We always try to bring something\nnew to the table with each one, and that can sometimes be quite difficult to do\nwithout significantly increasing the scope of the project, haha. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But\nin general, we try to achieve at least two of three things: <\/p>\n\n\n\n