Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The Joy of GMing w Special Guest Wythe Marschall!
0 Plays2 seconds ago
In this episode, Casey Jones chats with the writer, anthropologist, and designer of the game Stillfleet, Wythe Marschall!
Listen as we explore:
- The jostles and joys of creating your own TTRPG
- Finding the perfect people to collaborate with on your passion project
- Play testing and fine-tuning a game system you come back to again and again
- Building in a post-apocalypse world with cartoon physics
Whether you’re a game designer, podcaster, or a creative of any kind, you’ll find delightful inspiration in this stimulating talk.
👉 Connect with Wythe on Linkedin!
🎲 Listen to his podcast, Why We Roll!
🧙♀️ Join his Discord to learn more!
And don’t forget:
• Subscribe & share your thoughts in a comment
• Follow Narrative Feats on Blusky and X
• Play a game with Casey on StartPlaying!
• Send your questions to NarrativeFeatsPodcast@gmail.com
🎶 Music by Tabletop Audio
🎵 Theme by RJ Pirchinello
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to The Joy of GMing
00:00:35
Speaker
Whether you're at a game table, in your comfiest chair reading a book, or listening at home, there's nothing like a great adventure story. but they don't happen by accident. Welcome to the Joy of GMing, a special interview series on the craft of great gaming.
00:00:50
Speaker
There's just something magic about sitting down to a good table with great friends, isn't there? If you're a lifelong gamer or a newbie rolling up your first character sheet, if you're a DM or a GM or just can't get enough tabletop talk in your day, this is the show for you.
00:01:07
Speaker
Each episode will bring you amazing guest speakers to talk about writing games and running them legends and lore of your favorite tabletop games, and oh-so-useful tricks of the trade.
00:01:19
Speaker
Hear some amazing stories, get inspired for your next game, and join us for an hour and a half or so of lively conversation. This sister series to Narrative Feats, the tabletop anthology, will be released between episodes of our ongoing, serialized show.
00:01:36
Speaker
We cover some making of and behind-the-scenes tidbits of our latest mod as well, so do stick around.
Meet the Guests: Casey Jones and Wythe Marshall
00:01:42
Speaker
I'm Casey Jones. Over the last dozen years, I've written and produced screenplays, children's animation for TV and film, graphic novels, stage plays, murder mysteries, and award-winning audio adventures.
00:01:56
Speaker
I've also been writing and running tabletop games for over 10 years. Join us as we dive deep into tabletop with experts in the field. Experts like our special guest today, Wythe Marshall, founder and lead game designer of Steel Fleet Studio.
00:02:12
Speaker
Wythe is an experienced writer, science communicator, and game designer. He created the RPG Steel Fleet, the underlying GRIT system, and the Steel Fleet Studio to blend two lifelong obsessions, leftist politics and tabletop role-playing games.
00:02:29
Speaker
He's the co-developer of Blister Critters by Anthony Grasso. Can't wait to talk about that. Wythe is currently working on a number of new books, including Peccaro, an early modern fantasy game.
00:02:41
Speaker
Wythe, hello. Welcome to the show. Hey, thanks so much for having me, Casey. It's really nice to to finally connect. Likewise.
Overview of Steel Fleet and GRIT System
00:02:47
Speaker
So first things first, do please tell our listeners about your flagship game Steel Fleet and the grit system that you designed.
00:02:56
Speaker
Yeah, sure. Stole Fleet is a super future political game. ah It is um the game I play the most and a lot of people are now playing it. And yeah, I've had a lot of fun making it. It's something that developed, like I think most people's first games, their heartbreaker projects or their passion projects that get them to launch a hobby business in games, whether really in story games or, you know, I think for board gamers, it's similar. It's something you develop for like 10 years to play with your friends.
00:03:23
Speaker
everyone has their version of, what is it, ah you know, Cones of Dunsinane, or if you're in D&D land, right, you're writing your mega dungeon that becomes like its own system. um For me, you know, i loved playing many versions of D&D and Vampire and Werewolf powered by the Apocalypse with Apocalypse World and Call of Cthulhu and other games like that. But I always wanted to find a system that felt, you know, right for me.
00:03:48
Speaker
So um I eventually was setting stories 100 million years in the future, humans have come and gone, and I developed this whole sort of mythology um and basically put the work into it that might have resulted in a sci-fi novel, but instead, you know, a sort of book about this world.
00:04:03
Speaker
um But the system is is, I think, what brought it together, which is um moving to using individual dice as scores. So there's a few other games that do this. I think our game does it really elegantly, and now people have used that system for their other games. Like we can talk about my buddy Tony did Blister Critters, which is a totally different setting, but same system.
00:04:21
Speaker
um But basically you have five scores. Each as it can be any, you know, of a number of different die types. And the actual different games could use different die types to kind of restrict how powerful you are. So still, you're pretty powerful.
00:04:32
Speaker
um So yeah, like a normal human would have straight D6s, we say, and normal of course is, you know, kind of a BS category, but you know, if you wanted to just represent does the random person you're talking to, are they good at a thing? They have a one in six chance of being good at a thing that is exceptional, that is worth rolling a die over. Otherwise roleplay, right? But if it's a cool, exciting scene, give them a one in six chance, even though they're, you know, John Smith, yeah the space merchant.
00:04:55
Speaker
um You have scores, you have two you have two of them are D6s, you have a D8, a D10, and a D12. And obviously D12 is like, wow, you're You're a badass, you're a space marine. um The whole conceit of the game though is while you were trained by the worshipful company of stealth leaders, these sort of space merchants who want you to go out and find alien and ancient artifacts and bring them back, they are obviously the bad guys, right? This is every sort of Kafka severance style company that is asking you to do things without telling you all the information that put you at risk without really paying you what you're worth.
00:05:28
Speaker
And that is really meant to be the loop of the game, is you go out and have all the fun of the picaresque tradition of D&D-style games, but set in space, of course. But also, you're actively fighting the company, and the company is interesting and has you know its own ideas, which aren't necessarily all 100%...
00:05:45
Speaker
hundred percent um you know, Trump level, like easy to reject. Some of them might be appealing and you might be complicit. So it's a game that isn't political in the sense it asks you to sort of be yourself, but in the far future, maybe you're a seven foot tall bug. You know, you can be a goofy like alien, um but you are a worker. You're doing a capitalism, right? And your bosses aren't necessarily evil as individuals, but they're part of a system that's not great. um And it allows you to have sort of a range of stories from very goofy and traditional dungeon crawls, you know, and hulks and space wrecks all the way to these epic campaigns we've played out where people try to overthrow world governments and,
00:06:22
Speaker
um start socialist revolutions and um some of them just become sort of complicit and try to you know, reform and maybe they just steal their own planet, right, and run away. And so we've had all kinds of outcomes and that really was the the project was like, what would my friends do if I created, you know, I made them powerful, but set them in a dangerous universe and then, you know, let them kind of have at it, um hacking apart a system of of power, right?
00:06:46
Speaker
So um the system, the mechanical system of the game is fun. the lore world sort of narrative system of the game is is is pretty fun, too, we think. And yeah, I'm really, really excited that after many years that game did come out. So that was the very beginning was like, oh man, people, my friends are telling me I should publish this. So how would that work? What would that look like? Right.
00:07:07
Speaker
Wonderful. How long have you been playing Still Fleet with other people, like starting from like the effective play tests of like, oh, I think we've really got something here. Since at least, I don't know, 2015, there's been some version, but we were playing for years before that um when it was more of a d twenty I would say now an OSR game. I don't think I called it that at the time. It was D&D, right? But we were, my friends and I, actually a couple friends who were playing in that campaign, but sort of drifted apart because they had kids. So we're we're still close as people, but we don't play games anymore. They don't really have time. right
00:07:40
Speaker
But they had helped me kind of rethink a lot of mechanics, which led me to eventually on my own develop, you know, the grit system. um The other key component, I should say, the grit system, which powers Steel Fleet, Blister Critters, and and now a number of other games we're working on, is you can burn points for narrative effects. So grit, you have a sort of willpower.
00:07:59
Speaker
All of your powers cost grit. You can always burn grit on any roll to boost it. You just have to do it in increments of three, three, six, and nine, and it just is is a flat plus three, plus six, plus nine. So you're rolling one die, you're adding zero, or if you really want to achieve something, you can add plus three, plus six, plus nine. You always fail on a one.
00:08:15
Speaker
So depending on your die type, you know, ive some people burn nine grit on a D12 and still fail because they roll a one, right? And that's going
Blister Critters: A Cartoony Twist
00:08:23
Speaker
to hurt. um So it's not eliminating dice rolling and randomness, but it's modulating it and making a more cinematic style of play, which is a term I like that other games have adopted.
00:08:33
Speaker
But yeah, I would say, so we've been working on it a while. The game kind of came out ah starting in 2019 as kind of, you know, Patreon and playtesting more publicly. out have a friend who has a narrative podcast, Fun City Ventures, which is really great, and they started playing it over the pandemic. So that was 2020, I guess.
00:08:50
Speaker
But yeah, we were playtesting it intensively, I would say, from especially 2017 to 2019, 2020. And then it sort of moved into like, okay, instead of Wythe's Notes or we're playtesting this new system more explicitly as a new system, now let's make a book.
00:09:04
Speaker
So it was different phases from home brewing something without the same system to, okay, I have a whole thing, but I wasn't thinking of publishing it to let's see what other people think who aren't our friends to, okay, I'll try to you know, make a book. Wonderful.
00:09:18
Speaker
If that makes sense. Yeah. No, it does. It does. You mentioned that the other game that i that I definitely want to talk about, Blister Critters, you said that that also uses the same system.
00:09:28
Speaker
Where did the idea for Ballister Critters come from and how did you start developing it with Anthony Grasso? So, Ballister Critters is all the idea of Tony Grasso. okay What I did with the help of the rest of the team, especially Ethan Gould, who's the lead artist on Still Fleet, the RPG, and in real life, one of my good friends, you know, we helped Tony, and especially I helped in the in the sense of the product design and writing some of the sort of GMing bits that you would want in a core rulebook, still keeping it very short. It's a hundred page book, so totally different than Still Fleet. It doesn't have lore, right? It's just...
00:10:02
Speaker
You've seen cartoons, right? It's a cartoon. That's the lore. It's a modern world cartoon. um Tony came with a fully baked idea. And since the system is a fully baked playable system, it was really marrying those two and figuring out, OK, well, it's not exactly the same as Stillfleet. You're not, you know, a space badass of whatever traditional D&D style classes, you know, the scout, the the healer. we We have our own sort of made up terms for these and we have a lot of psionics in Stillfleet, the health science.
00:10:29
Speaker
um But you're not any of those things. you're you know, a cartoon rat or a cartoon gerbil or pigeon or grizzly bear, whatever you want to be, you just have to be a foot tall. I play a roach usually or a squirrel.
00:10:41
Speaker
ah So, you know, what rules would make sense? What powers would those characters have? How do we avoid classes but still give you paths? You know, Tony had this idea of blisters, mutations. So he had a lot of He had a lot of clear design imperatives, but I think the exact mechanical marriage of his design imperatives, what he wanted to draw and what he was already sort of running at the table with his own homebrewed version of Still Fleet with his friends in Florida was different than what we ultimately printed because we wanted to print a product that was, of course, you know, really robust and play tested. And um like all our products, we just wanted to make sure it was super high quality and replayable. Yes. if the book you wouldn't just read, put on your shelf, which is fine. I buy those. i like them.
00:11:19
Speaker
But to me... I don't want to have a company that makes those. I want to make games where like you buy that book and then you run it. Maybe not every week. Maybe it's not your number one game. That's fine. It's not going to hurt our feelings, but it's it's fun enough where you're like, no, that was pretty fun, guys. Let's go back to that. yeah And I I will say that's something Tony brought from the beginning with Blister Critters that was different than Stillfleet, which I do a lot of one offs. I do a lot of one shots at at conventions, I run a lot of games on Discord to introduce people to the game.
00:11:44
Speaker
We also run campaigns. I've been playing Steel Fleet for years and years with people. Tony had this idea that that's not how cartoon shows work. They have seasons and sometimes kind of random seasons. um That's true. So, you know, he had this idea you'd play, yeah, like nine, 10 times, and then probably you'd want to do something different, either a different game or just a different cartoon animal.
00:12:04
Speaker
So he had ah he has a legacy system built in that was really elegant, which was, again, his invention of if you die, you can gift a character a higher die type or a single item. Interesting. Or may give them some information. So he had sort of this little list. It's very simple, but it's sort of these legacy rules for, oh, no, my critter has passed dying. Please take my MacGuffin. Yeah.
00:12:24
Speaker
And then the guy comes in and it looks exactly the same as the other guy, but he has like a fake mustache. You know, it's, it's a different color bear. Argle bar junior here for revenge. Exactly. Exactly. So, um, I liked incentivizing that it felt again, a way to make it different than this sort of Epic political labor, um, game and exploration, goofy, you know, alien stuff. It it felt like, okay, this is the rhythm, right. Of a, of a cartoon. Um,
00:12:46
Speaker
So yeah, he came in with a lot of ideas and that was only about a year and a half ago I'd say now. It only took a year to make the game, which is mind-blowing. I mean, he really is very very fast. That is impressive. um We're very fast at writing and editing, but in terms of art and layout, I mean he was just, you know, he he had art already, he had an idea, we agreed on a scope, we agreed on how it might work to launch on on Kickstarter, and then we started working on developing a quick start for PAX and and Flag in Ithaca, which is a smaller con we support. And we rolled it out and page in PAGE outside of Philadelphia. And we we played it at PAX and these smaller cons. People loved it. We ran the Kickstarter.
00:13:24
Speaker
people bought it and then we spent a bunch of time you know with the last mile issues in making this box set because he wanted to do you know we wanted to do we agreed on 100 page book keep it really small but also you could get a box set version that has a ton of play aids so not useless crap but like cards with so 48 cards a whole deck of cards with different monsters um and and npcs so they're beasts they're critters they're bliffs so sort of plastic think like more like toy story sort of living plastic entities blistered stuff bliffs um And by having those 48 cards alone, I mean, there's tons of other stuff in the box, but the book and the cards go together really nicely because... Nice. And I've done this, you know, cons, you pull them out and you show people on one side the thing they're seeing, the entity they're encountering, and they have to sort of assess...
00:14:07
Speaker
in their own cartoon way, like what what they want to get out of this situation. And then I have the stats in the back, right? So very simple. Other games do this. But for us, doing a box set was a really fun project and was definitely a way because he's you know coming out of this as an illustrator primarily. um Obviously, he writes as well.
00:14:24
Speaker
But we wanted to showcase the art. So um yeah, in one year, we went from idea to you could buy the box set at PAX a year later. So that was really, really fun.
Replayability and Narrative Flexibility
00:14:33
Speaker
That's an absolutely incredible timeline.
00:14:35
Speaker
I do want to circle back around to the topic of replayability as well as a season of stories because when it comes to game design, something that I have found utterly important is the enjoyment of that replayability because yeah you've got this...
00:14:56
Speaker
law of diminishing returns of like, it's the reason a joke is not as funny the second time you hear it. And with some ex with some very few exceptions, like watching your favorite film or rewatching your favorite TV show and things like that outside of like the, the creature comforts of like, yeah, this is one of my favorites, the enjoyment does diminish.
00:15:19
Speaker
When it comes to one of our games, for instance, Sladium games, like, replayability was at the absolute pinnacle of priority because I wanted to create something that had enough variety and enough options for you to take that you could play it on a Friday and like a week later come back play the same game and have enough of a different experience with the same rules and mechanics and world building to make it still feel fresh like it's a new experience in that same world and I wanted to ask you on behalf of our listeners how have you and Tony
00:16:02
Speaker
found that that sweet spot of replayability with something like Steel Fleet and Blister Critters. I mean, this is something we we think and talk about explicitly all the time, and we try to become more and more articulate in terms of thinking at these different levels. of So, you know, and in game design, designers talk about the exogenous experience, sort of not playing the game, but being the person who has to like be in the room and either be hungry or not hungry, tired or not tired, et etc.
00:16:28
Speaker
endogenous, which is you're playing the game, you're an avatar of like, can i if it's a game you can win, a finite game, then you're trying to win by some strategy. um If it's an infinite game, like a TTRPG, you know, what makes it fun for you? And then there's the diegetic, like what actually makes sense in the world of the game. So if one of the ways in which um to your question that this matters is like, if you played a 20th level in D&D and you're keeping track of time in the old Gary Gygax way or whatever, maybe you end up being 60 years old. And so a 60 year old 20th level paladin kind of just wants to fucking retire, you know? So that's like a, that's one where the diegetic actually sort of nudges upward and and hits the endogenous. Usually people make the decisions on that endogenous level of of, am I having fun as this particular avatar, this imagined persona, right?
00:17:13
Speaker
So to answer your question, I mean, I grew up, um my favorite thing, love like Forgotten Realms and Dark Sun and Call Cthulhu, et cetera, when Vampire came out. But the the ultimate to me was Planescape because you had the city sigil that could connect to anywhere you could imagine. I mean, there were all of these sort of universes based on this sort of bizarre alignment problematic thing of good and evil. But, you know, i um I got the idea, right? And it allowed you to set your game anywhere, but still be playing D&D. It also was very urban in a way. it was like this dense urban,
00:17:43
Speaker
felt sort of proto-industrial metropolis that connected to all these worlds. So in many ways, Steelfleet, I think, is just as an adult going back to that ideal. um And I'll get to Ballista Critters in a second. But I think what what I tried to do was come up with an excuse for, you know, where is it? What do you do that is fun? What is the loop? So, OK, you go out and you're a void miner. That's what we call characters in the game. okay if You're not PCs, you're void miners.
00:18:05
Speaker
Why? Well, you're going out to find alien ships or human ships from long gone civilizations and take useful stuff back. You're mining the void. um You're getting knowledge. The company is at a lower tech level than many of these civilizations. All of them more or less have murdered each other in the long past.
00:18:21
Speaker
Maybe some are still around. They would be very dangerous. So it's sort of in the same realm of sort of an alien type setting, but calling out a little more expressly some of these concepts, like in physics, the dark forest hypothesis, which, you know, the the Chinese novel, has the three body problem. And the second of those books it's called the the dark forest that, you know, if you encountered really advanced aliens, they would just instantly kill you because game theory would say, you know, any signal from any intelligent species is probably just going to lead to, you know, conflict. So you might as well, if you're more advanced, just go ahead, kill them, take their resources.
00:18:52
Speaker
Obviously, I don't believe that, right? I think that's a bad way to think. But if you believed that that was the case, what would you do? And if you inherited a universe in which that had played out on some scale, what would you do? So it allowed for that idea of infinite dungeons, infinite places to go, infinite worlds, infinite ships.
00:19:08
Speaker
You just needed a home base. So we created, um you know, I created the space station spindle as a place that has these time space gates, these portals called stiff works that connect to any number of habitable worlds and very advanced ships. And it seems like the alien aliens who built the space station that humans have now found um You know, it's it's set up, right, for humans. It's clearly some sort of honeypot, you know, and they don't know who made it. They've been trying to figure out and, you know, haven't gotten that far. But hey, for now, they're just using it to do a capitalism. They almost immediately sort of lose sight. And the archive, the group of scientists who are trying to figure it out, becomes, you know, this minor...
00:19:47
Speaker
rump, right? They're a relic of the past of of sort of the initial interest of these basically pirates who found the space station. um And then the the people running at the directorate, they become the bulk of the company, right? So you work for the directorate, you are an employee of the directorate, you have a rank and you go out and do void mining for them. And in in exchange, you get void guilders, right? You get money, the company's script.
00:20:07
Speaker
And that idea felt um pretty extensible. And when we playtested it, literally, I shit you not, it might have been the second game of the first playtest. They were like, we're going to find our own alien world, take everyone who's nice there and declare independence and never go back. Like they like without me saying anything like unbidden, they did a mutiny.
00:20:26
Speaker
They formed a union. They made their own company like game two. And I was like this. is rad. Like I'm making stuff up, they're making stuff up, and and that just never really stopped to be honest. So the book became in part so long and full of not lore in the sense of like long fictional accounts, but brief introductions to places you could go and then interesting plot things that could happen.
00:20:46
Speaker
Yeah, a litany of world building. Yeah, world building, but really narrative building, narrative structure building, where you're taking an initial narrative loop that's inherently fun, but also to me, the the whole idea goes back to that complicity and having been basically my whole life, you know, some by day white collar drone writing marketing crap I don't want to write or working in academia in a way that isn't fulfilling. I like teaching, but a lot of the rest of it isn't fulfilling.
00:21:07
Speaker
What is that experience like if you're doing it in space, you know, 100 million years from now and you're a space marine, right? it's It's a similar loop of you know that there's some other way to live, but you're not sure how to access it. You know you have talents and training, but you're not sure what to do with them. So let's make a fun, goofy adventure out of that.
00:21:22
Speaker
But it felt recognizable and it felt like people could. It was that 80-20 thing of they were familiar enough with the loop both from their own lives, but also from watching, you know, Alien or playing Warhammer 40k or whatever. And then it allowed them to do that jump to the sort of the Planescape level weird shit. You know, we call it the Escher-esque, the other dimensions. So there's not only all the alien worlds and ships, there's also the idea that probably there are other physical dimensions. You could travel through time.
00:21:46
Speaker
You can make it as soft sci-fi as you want, or you could stick to a very sort of alien inspired Alien, the movie franchise, you know, I only go on ships that are sort of realistic and I have to figure out the physics of that. As long as you sort of take on the one conceit of the stiff works, right? That there is some way to pinch time and space together.
00:22:04
Speaker
um We don't even use really fast and like travel other than that. So the ships are all moving around so systems and then they have to create you know a gate large enough to to to go through. So a little more like Dune, right? You're sort of teleporting between systems. um That allowed us to really extend the game and just see what people did and and what they came up with, from machine planets to a sort of a moon that's now cut in half with a demilitarized zone that's like partially run by the company, and the other part is is a socialist republic that's very sort of dark and sort of East Germany. and And so it's meant to be, you know, ah um a place you could go and have spy stories that aren't epic sci fi. They're sort of more quotidian spy, licoray style stuff. Jason Bourne, maybe ground and pound, you know, you're punching guys. So I think that that idea of infinite extensibility starting from a very common loop that people would get right away without even if you didn't know any of the lore, you would get the loop. Yeah, that felt like how to do that game.
00:23:01
Speaker
i can I can tell you about Blister Crooters too. I mean, that was a totally different question, which actually is very interesting because Tony's idea was, well, it's inherently infinitely extensible. I don't want to speak for him. You could ask him, but um because it's cartoons, right? Everyone knows cartoons, which on the one hand is true. And I think that was one reason we loved, like I loved the idea when I pitched it to Ethan and everybody else and my wife, you know, gay.
00:23:20
Speaker
who's our production designer, and my buddy Aaron, who works for the Sun web development and and makes games, and Chris Pickett, who's doing another Grit System game and makes a podcast with me, um they all got the the idea right away too.
00:23:32
Speaker
Kind of Rin, Stimpy, or SpongeBob, but an RPG, make it actually good. um The thing that that sold me on it though was really getting in the weeds with Tony about, okay, but how dark is this? Because when he would run it, he would make it very light, sort of to me, low stakes. Like if you die, you just come back.
00:23:48
Speaker
It's just very sort of silly. When I run it, it's like The Walking Dead. It's like, okay, all the humans are gone, right? They all died in some climate apocalypse, and now we're all mutant animals who are intelligent. Love that premise. I'm going to run with that, right? I assume people aren't all good. So some of them are good, some of them are bad, and they form new factions.
00:24:03
Speaker
They don't have to mirror human civilization, but they have to be interesting and weird and have plots. And so I was doing this whole other kind of campaign. And so we realized in our play test that both ways were fun and that they would appeal to different players. So we actually wrote throughout the book, Tony and I wrote these things.
00:24:17
Speaker
So again, it's it's his idea. It's mostly his writing. I'm writing some of the mechanics with him. And then he and I wrote together these call outs that say gnarly or zany. So if it says gnarly, it's like Wife saying, guys, this is a record of what's going to happen in the near future, right? Humans are going to go extinct because climate disruption. Animals, because of weird pollution, they'll become intelligent.
00:24:34
Speaker
They're going to find all our crap, and they're going to be like, what what the hell is all this shit? You know, like, what what were they doing with their rulership of the Earth? um And they're going to have to make decisions, and it's going to be hard.
00:24:45
Speaker
Tony's version is, hey, it's a cartoon. It's zany. You can do anything you want. You want to blow up your hand into a big fist, you know, you've you by blowing air into your thumb? Great. And both work, and we try to kind of mechanicalize for both, if that makes sense. Or if if the mechanics seem to lean one way or the other, we would call it out briefly.
00:25:01
Speaker
So that nothing again is long in there. They're just little nudges, especially for GMs. I think to say you can do it either way. You might just want to make a choice because again, your players, what I found is even at cons right away, people will say, wait, can I read English? And I always say in my games, if you roll Noggin, you have a, in Stillfield it's called Reason, in Blister Critics it's called Noggin.
00:25:20
Speaker
So if you're a crow with D10 plus one Noggin, and you only need a five, let's say, to decipher the menu at an old Burger King, roll for it, right? You have a good chance. In Tony's game, he might just, I don't, again, I don't speak for him, but he might just say, yeah, of course, whatever, right? It doesn't matter.
00:25:34
Speaker
um I don't think either is good or bad. I just think my, I always tend to run these games that are a little more simulationist in terms of the social side. and a little less kind of wacky combat oriented and so i think to me i loved the world he implied and i actually loved his idea which is still very true you don't need lore you don't need a world because it is our world it is our earth so my campaigns have now been where i grew up atlanta so all set in atlanta places i know off the top of my head and then the same with philadelphia where it's been many times we run games there and New York.
00:26:04
Speaker
And he's run, of course, games set in essentially a version of Tallahassee. And, you know, you don't have to do it that way, but it's actually really fun. You know, one of the first things we got messaged by our friends in a guy in New Zealand, a guy in Australia was where are all the animals? Right? Because to them, they got the PDF and were like,
00:26:20
Speaker
I don't see the animals out that I see out my window. And that was this aha moment of like, yes, that is why the game works, because you can it has rules for making any animal you want. And they've started writing adventures in their milieu, in their ecology that they they know.
00:26:35
Speaker
There's malls all over the world, but they're all a little different. right There's stuff that humans made would be a little different. And of course the animals are going to be different. So you can mix it up. You could do anything you want. You could set it in space. But I actually have had so much fun with just sort of the most quotidian setting because the players will bring that complete just insanity.
00:26:54
Speaker
You know, what ah one con game at PAX this year, one guy said, OK, I'm a miniature bear. The next person said, OK, I'm also a bear. I'm actually a crab, but I think I'm a bear. Then every other person, of course, said, oh I'm a bear, not a bear, right?
00:27:07
Speaker
Why? i don't know. I didn't tell them. um They just decided that they were bear gang, right? They all believed they were bears, miniature grizzly bears. Only one of them was grizzly bear and he just wanted to be a stand-up comic. He didn't want to fight.
00:27:19
Speaker
it's It's been so much fun in terms of, you know, this is such a long-winded way to answer your question, but in Extensibility, I've just seen how people without any prompting get the joke of like, okay, humans are gone, I'm an animal, they they fill that in.
00:27:32
Speaker
And we we have to do very little to kind of help them see the contours of like that game. Other than, like I said, I think the the rails we added around how zany or how gnarly to use our terms, but just you know how silly versus how survivalist, right? You want to make it sort of Watership Down, right? Would be very gnarly.
00:27:50
Speaker
ah secret Rats of Nymh would be very gnarly. Secrets of Nymh more in the middle. And then, you know, Fern Gully or something is way over here. Right. And and again, it's all fun. It's all good. But those are conscious decisions that I would say actually took us some of the most time with both games is figuring out some of the not again, like realistic logic, not simulating physics. It was more narrative logic of like, why would a player wants to do X versus Y? if that makes sense And to your point, how to get them to do X, then Y, then you know, how to sort of breadcrumb.
00:28:18
Speaker
So, yeah, what my biggest takeaway is blister critters is so you've done the job of getting out of the player's way. so that there is essentially no wrong way to play it.
00:28:31
Speaker
And that's evidenced by the fact that they can dive in to a gnarly experience and focus on the the post-apocalypse elements of it, you know the striving to look for resources, the scrounging through Burger King menus and things like that, versus the zany, I'm going to inflate my hand like a large balloon and then smack someone with it to create a loud comic sound effect.
00:29:00
Speaker
And there is such overlap between the two of those that seems incongruous, but nevertheless, like the system and the world that you've built is open and available to both. And I think that i think that should be recognized because that's not the easiest thing to do.
00:29:20
Speaker
You know, sometimes design is additive. I mean, I think in general, good design game or not game related is subtractive. Generally, people try to do too much and they have to find the core. But once you have a strong core, I'll give you the example from for Blister Critters.
00:29:33
Speaker
You know, I was just running a lot of con games where I would at the end, there's this weird problem of like you only have two hours. So I could get a really nice arc up and down, but it would sort of just finally end. And it sort of missed that nice breather of like, we're all adults or maybe some kids, right? We've just kind of met, we've hung out and we're probably never gonna see each other again. But it's like, you almost want to acknowledge that.
00:29:52
Speaker
And there was so little time. So I started doing something with Blister Crudders, which I don't do with other games. And now I'm like, maybe I should just do the exact thing, but just adding the denouement of the end credit sequence. So I would stop, you know, we'd have the big ending and I'd make sure we had five minutes left and then say, okay, everyone's gonna go around.
00:30:06
Speaker
And the animation style completely changes. It is so much nicer. It is Japanese or Korean or Thai. It is is now a studio in East Asia that's been paid way more money than the guys animated the most of the show. So your character looks completely different. They were given the brief at the same time. So they've been working on in parallel.
00:30:23
Speaker
But so your character is still your character, but like drawn completely differently. So if you want to have rippling muscles or long flowing hair or whatever, And the song is like untranslated in Japanese and then the subtitles come up and it's all about, you know, rainbows falling from the sky and you know, it's just like not related to what just happened at all. no It could be the grossest, weirdest ending, but suddenly it's this incongruous, you know, she and we all know that sort of like jazzy, like just fun pop ending of every single anime.
00:30:48
Speaker
regardless again of tone. So you watch Evangelion and then the end music is like, oh, this doesn't really fit. So I ask people, you know, okay, what is your character doing in this credit sequence? So you can use that to sort of just tell a joke, just say something about your your character and kind of do that last little button of like what catharsis my character had.
00:31:07
Speaker
You can also actually meaningfully connect it to the plot and often people do. They'll have that last little aha that really feels like a nice denouement. And that has been some of the most fun, the the most gut bursting laughter has come from giving people that freedom by by saying this additive thing of, okay, now we're in the meta world of we know it's a cartoon Blister Critters and you're not your character. You're a player imagining the cartoon.
00:31:29
Speaker
and what happens next, right? So let's change the animation style to get you to break the fourth wall, to get you to see it as ah as a cartoon show, because for the last hour and 50 minutes, I've been asking you to see it as an RPG where you are the avatar of the little snake who could with a holding up a mop like a sword, you know?
00:31:44
Speaker
And so I think that ability to kind of step out and ask people to reframe something that's already in progress, it's a yes and, right? We're not contradicting, we're just reframing it. is a fun way that, again, it gets at actually some of the replayability thing too, because it allows you to to tack back and forth um more naturally because there is that solid core of the cartoon show still has this logic. It's still, you know, there's no humans, etc.
00:32:07
Speaker
I still care about my character, right? I'm not saying I hate my character. it's It's like, no, I love this little guy, but now I'm going to say, yes, they drew... The other studio drew him with inexplicable, like 80s metal hair, you know, so he's a snake with like long flowing rippling. Yeah, like Viking hair.
00:32:22
Speaker
um Doesn't make any sense. That's one idea. I mean, the other thing I'll i'll say is like with Stillfleet, again, to this question of extensibility and reframing, um we're doing now a new quick start. We're trying to raise money and figure out on the business side how to do with Ethan, the main artist, another round of core books and reprint these amazing books we just sold out of from the Kickstarter of the original Stillfleet core rulebook, which is gorgeous, but sort of expensive hardback. Thank you um But so we don't have a lot of, we have a lot of physical books for the adventurers, the gazetteers, but we don't have the core books. So, okay, we're gonna this nice quick start because this comic artist, cartoonist, Michael Cohen, whose company's called Arc Wolf, or Archangel Wolf Design, came to us and and he's a fan and had, you know, had this idea.
00:33:02
Speaker
And his idea was very different. It's closer to Blister Critters in some ways, but it's still core to Stillfleet, which is, well, what if this was a little bit more like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles adventure, but with all the logic, it's a yes and. So you work for the company,
00:33:13
Speaker
But the villains, the world, the setting, the the sort of thing he imagined is that, you know, there's a kind of partly alien bad guy who gets access to basically an advanced spaceship and uses it to sort of make himself a tyrant, you know, a ruler who is obsessed with nostalgic. Like he's he's just accessed. He's got all these old, essentially,
00:33:36
Speaker
you know, nanite encoded tapes of like 80s, 90s cartoon shows. And that's kind of, you know, rewired his brain where that's that's actually like the fiction in which he's chosen to believe. and And so he's made himself kind of look, we never say Shredder, but he's obviously meant to be Shredder.
00:33:52
Speaker
He's also obviously Trump, right? He's like a real crazy character on his own. um and you as void miners are encountering this for the company, the company's there because two guys have gone missing and you're just trying to figure out what's going on. But it's actually really fun because it feels both like still fleet, but almost like, say it's like a bridge into blister critters of the logic of the dungeon you're exploring. In this case, the, we call it the nostalgia tron is just so wacky, right? It's,
00:34:15
Speaker
it's very advanced sci-fi but it's programmed to feel it's almost like the worst escape room or laser tag thing ever where it's very dangerous um but made by someone who's you know it's like the joker right it's like the idea of like what if someone powerful um was also just crazy which i think again will feel very um Pertinent. Obvious, too pertinent, exactly, to our readers.
00:34:36
Speaker
So that that adventure is a good example to me of extending the game sort of sideways, where I think that's a fun one-off or two-off or three-off, separate from your main Steel Fleet game. Or if it's the only time you play Steel Fleet, I still think it's a good representation of that loop of,
00:34:51
Speaker
the company hasn't told you everything, but you do have fun powers, you are pretty powerful, and there is advanced alien tech and stuff that isn't sort of the company's fault, so it's actually just a cruel, dangerous future universe to explore.
00:35:03
Speaker
um But it has this added element of sort of the meta, of the characters in that you're playing and the situation in which you are sort of assumes that maybe if you're not exactly, you know, an elder millennial, then at least you're sort of aware of the the logic of of those kinds of you know, from Hanna-Barbera on sort of cartoons, and they still come out today, right? Anime, I think, is very similar in a lot of ways. Very heroic, and we're mocking that. We're mocking the heroic, but we're also really mocking the kind of person who would be so obsessed with it, um they would want to be the villain, and they would think sort of Skeletor, right, is like, who, who again, like always loses. Skeletor loses, Shredder loses, but this this guy, like that to him is just, yeah, he's the he's got the most abs, right? He's drawn with the most abs, so he's the the the guy to be.
00:35:44
Speaker
So I think a lot of this gets at the idea of extensibility being not necessarily like writing more campaign material for people to play, which is maybe fun. I don't know, maybe people want that. But for us, for us it's more, is there sort of a meta, is there a sideways step yeah that you could shuffle to open up the kinds of stories you could tell um and then let people envision, you know, if you wanted to make a kind campaign out of it, you could, but we're going to let you, we're going to give you a version you could probably run in a couple sessions. um And then just show that sort of satirical or or genre mixing approach where you can emphasize, sort of like the zany gnarly thing, more of that and make it more silly. Or you could play it more like regular Stillfleet where it's a little more about your character's relationship to their job and exploring just like wild alien ruins, which
00:36:31
Speaker
is a genre of TTRPG I just particularly like. and There's many, many games, I would say, from especially Numenera through Mothership. There's this, and and UVG, I think Ultraviolet Grasslands is the one that I most like, that I think is most sort of similar to Still Fleet and Vibe.
00:36:44
Speaker
um I hope that people would agree with that. I mean, and it's that I'm not trying to be, you know, i whatever. i don't know how that sounds, but it's it's a great game, and I really respect all those games. but i think You should be proud of your own kids. I think that's important.
00:36:56
Speaker
Yeah, but I think there's something fun about playing it straight, right? I don't think it has to be silly, but I like the idea that we're opening up this logical space of like, well, we know it's a game, so and we know we're making fun of certain tropes. What if we just like lean into that in a couple cases?
00:37:10
Speaker
yeah um I think the last thing we did, Kadida, was kind of the opposite, the spy world that I was describing by my friend Ian Dirk, who's a Cold War historian, media historian, and really great writer, and his idea was sort of the opposite. let's lean into the quiet, like...
00:37:23
Speaker
It is funny and dark and still epic, but it's not punching aliens with a power fist. It is, you know, you have it probably a desk job on this dangerous kind of Cold War planet city. And that was great. That was a totally different project to write that allowed me to lean into more of that hard sci-fi stuff.
00:37:41
Speaker
So, you know, again, i'm kind of you know, that there's a lot to say there, but I think, again, these ideas of genre and and levels of um fourth wall breaking or sort of levels of complicity and making fun of the genre with your players. Those are things to keep in mind that are different ways to extend a story besides just literally saying, okay, and then there's yet another bad guy like Dragon Ball Z style. There's always another bad guy. There's always another Arthurian knight standing in your way. The black knight, the plaid knight, the green knight, the reddish purple knight. Exactly. It sounds to me like something both Steel Fleet and Ballister Critters gets right.
00:38:20
Speaker
and is like the secret sauce of replayability is that you've given them ample material to explore, but also left them ample room to make their own stuff up.
Game Design Philosophy and Political Influence
00:38:33
Speaker
um I have found that like I'll admit that wasn't what I was consciously aiming for when I started writing mods in in a game system to play over and over and over again.
00:38:44
Speaker
But just through a background in improv and yes and, and like, inviting those opportunities of like, you're on this theme park planet. Oh, you want to get a job here? Sure.
00:38:57
Speaker
A robot drops out of the sky for you to interview for that job you want. And then suddenly they've got a key card of access to all the doors because now they're employees, you know, while still also,
00:39:08
Speaker
painting the picture and giving them the dimensions of the space that they're in with enough of its own tone and flavor and style that they can start to pick it up and say, okay, we're going to do things like this.
00:39:21
Speaker
We're going to use those cartoon physics that we enjoy so much so that a cockroach, a titmouse, a squirrel, and an actual bear can all get along on this cracked concrete road leading to a Burger King that hasn't had hot burgers in 374 years.
00:39:37
Speaker
You know, like that is, that is the good stuff. Replayability is so crucial, I think, especially for those smaller, more independent game systems, because, you know, like it's wonderful if you've spent three years putting together the art and the lore and the text and the the monster stat blocks, etc., ad nauseam of this thing.
00:40:06
Speaker
But if it is so elaborate and the story so niche that playing through it once gives you sort of the whole cake of what there is to offer,
00:40:18
Speaker
That's just going to sit on somebody's shelf and gather dust versus something like Stillfleet, where you have given them worlds to explore, a myriad of these different corporate assholes to reject or do the white resistance of, I'm going to do my job, but I'm going to do it in the laziest way possible.
00:40:40
Speaker
Yeah, laying down. Yeah. that still feels appealing and human and realistic. Like, I love the fact that your second playtest, they were like, okay, yeah, we're um we're not going to do this. We're going to go find a planet of the nice guys and just never leave.
00:40:58
Speaker
And that sounds very human to me. Oh, yeah. I mean, the story is, and and I think we could have done it better, to be fair. I don't want to come off as like, I think the Stilfy Coral book is a beautiful book that's super fun. I think the PDF is, like, if you read PDFs, like, it's it's worth getting for just all the weird ideas, even if it doesn't, it's not the kind of game you're going to play as written, right? but um But, I mean, I definitely think one of the reasons we're doing Enter the Nostalgatron, and that in parallel, eraron Ethan and I rather are working on a smaller full rulebook, and they'll all be sort of different on purpose. So that they, you know, that just in part because that's who we are as artists, we want to make it better every time, and it's going to be different every time. We're not Wizards of the Coast or whatever, right?
00:41:40
Speaker
um But, you know, one reason to do a smaller one anyway, whether it's as small as the comic book size Enter Nostalgatron or as big as probably about 100 page softback, more like Mothership or UVG, right, or Ballister Critters,
00:41:53
Speaker
for what we're calling the Voidminers Handbook, like our version of sort of, okay, here's the not much lore but all the rules and enough of the weirdness of the weird narrative structures. um One reason to do that is is just as you say, to really, really encourage people to make up their own stuff because um you definitely can and a lot of people do. But what I think that's been the biggest barrier with and the biggest learning from my first game, right, Still Fleet itself, the RPG, um now that we're working all these other games, you can sort of see it is You know, I write and teach about science fiction. And so obviously I wrote down all this stuff and we compressed it and cut it and compressed and cut it. And still it's like a 350 page book.
00:42:27
Speaker
So you don't need all that. You can learn the rules very briefly. You don't, you know, when people come to cons, they say, you don't need to learn anything ahead of time. You know, I'll give you a pregen. You can learn as you go. We just start playing. And it's more like you're saying the sort of improv of, okay, i'm describing a scenario. I'm asking, what do you do I slowly start working checks. Okay, well, let's see. Why don't you roll will to perceive to see if your character can really detect whether your boss is lying to you. You know, yeah like you have no thing to go on, but sure, I'll i'll let you roll for it just to get them to roll.
00:42:53
Speaker
um And I always give them something, and you know, it works like that just fine. But I think one of the issues is as a, that works fine if you're a GM and you're teaching people and they're patient or it's your friends or whatever.
00:43:03
Speaker
Or people want to do it on the podcast, they read through it, they're excited, they're the 10% of people who love your product. But for a lot of people who are walking by, they look at a big book and they're like, yeah, it looks lore-heavy or whatever they think. um you know And that's the biggest barrier is you want to get people to to try and see, oh, the rules are really simple. Oh, I can make up all my own stuff. Oh, it's mostly about how to make up my own stuff. Actually, that's what most of that is.
00:43:25
Speaker
um So it's both. To to your point, it's like it's ah it's a It's a fine line to walk because you can give people too much yeah in terms of product design where they're almost turned off and they don't feel as empowered to make up their own stuff. And I think that's where we're trying to walk it back and show with these smaller products.
00:43:41
Speaker
I mean, if you want to do modules that's written, we have those, right? We have the desert sand dune thing, which is totally different and about really ecology and fragile ecosystems and not doing a colonialism. And that's by my friend Aaron, HR.
00:43:55
Speaker
our tech expert web guy. And then we have Kadida, the spy spy planet by Ian Dirk. ah We have Enter the Nostalgia Tron by Michael Cohen coming out. That's, you know, very much this sort of TMNT, He-Man style adventure.
00:44:09
Speaker
um you You can do all that stuff, but you can also just get the the free quick start rules right now on itch or GTRPG or a website and just make up your own story and use those rules, right? And um not only would we not stop you, we would love to hear about it. Like we would love to know what what stories you're telling. Mm-hmm. And that's the game mode in which I always play as a gm is is hacking apart stuff. That's the most fun to me. So I, how could I fault right so someone else for for doing that?
00:44:33
Speaker
It's just that difference, like say, of of are you trying to make, you know, what are you trying to make? Do you know, do you know and could you articulate what the goal is when you set out? and And I think probably for most people, until you do it at least once, it's going to be hard yeah just because you're going to be so close to, i learned this term way after the fact that your heartbreaker project, right? your Your idea of like, oh, this is the story I've always wanted to tell. Yeah.
00:44:55
Speaker
And it's not the linear GM thing. It's not controlling the player's experience. But it is like you have a world in your head and you want to get it out. yeah um It was almost easier for me when I worked on Blister Critters as a second game because it wasn't my idea. And I could so clearly say, let me help my friend tell his story. And we're not going to put in any lore. And the book doesn't mention real places, right?
00:45:15
Speaker
Don't need anymore. He's got the lore. And we've done it. I mean, you know, and we have stuff. You can get a little zine I wrote about, you know, the Atlanta setting, all this stuff. But it's like, you don't need it. no You could also just... you could, again, pick up the free quick start and you could just play Blister Creators. You don't really need the book. The book is has much more in terms of rules. It's worth picking up. It's it's very small. But, um you know, it's I think to to your point, it's like I see a lot of books that um that don't quite have something there that's replayable or that's extensible or that's that useful. It might have some good ideas and some good writing and I as a GM and a game designer might sort of mine it for inspiration, but it doesn't have anything I'm going to use.
00:45:49
Speaker
There's other books where I almost don't. They're like not my thing, but then you have to respect them because they're so well designed. Like, for example, There's a guy named Justin who has a company called Severed that makes cool, like, Merc Borg and mothership sort of products, like dark, metal, scary fantasy and sci-fi stuff.
00:46:06
Speaker
And he wrote a book called Sickest Witch that's like a 100-page A5 adventure campaign for Merc Borg where you're teenage witches, and it's very dark. It's very gross. It's sort mocking fine art world.
00:46:17
Speaker
But it's basically a point crawl through a forest. So there's a map of a forest, and there's all these random places, and you could... play it sort of east to west, or you can just randomly, you know, the GM could just assign, like, okay, then this happens, then this happens.
00:46:28
Speaker
And they're not all connected, but they all have threads. Like, each of them each of the people you meet knows something about what's going on, but not everything. yeah And that, to me, felt like, wow, this is actually replayable. Because you can imagine a campaign where you play through it one way, and you don't even see half the shit.
00:46:42
Speaker
And then you almost just want to go back and explore that forest. Exactly. The wilted forest, he called it. So I thought, wow, what a cool book. I want to do something like this. Not... in this tone, not this system, but like this book, because each spread. So it's to be specific, each spread is a location. And that to me was a different way of getting at replayability more from that GMing side. But it was giving the GM a lot of tools in a small package, a good price, well illustrated, well written to just say, yeah, have some fun, like see what happens and then next time do it differently. Right.
00:47:13
Speaker
So there's many there's multiple ways to do Is all I'm saying. Yeah, I think one of the ways that game creators can help their projects, their books, their games access that replayability is to have the the ease of telling a complete story without hitting every quadrant of the game board. Like you mentioned with the forest, like you can have you know, ah an adventure here, an adventure there, an adventure in the third place, and have the the feeling and the impression of a full beginning, middle, and ending of a story.
00:47:48
Speaker
One of the things that i work with, and as this started from a point of mystery building, where following the three clue rule of for a given mystery point, I want them to be able to find it three different ways, whether it's something they smell, something they see, or something they learn from from talking to somebody.
00:48:08
Speaker
starting from there that taught me how to include things in the background that weren't necessarily important but like part of the scenery part of the vibe of the story we were telling that they could or could not leave alone and still have an enjoyable story And since I started that with like sci-fi mysteries, there's this one mod I've run easily a half a dozen times for the Doctor Who game that takes place in an art gallery with all these different wings and all these different pieces of art you can look at.
00:48:43
Speaker
And you don't have to check them all off a list in order to get the full story. Depending on where you put your focus, that is where you're going to find the tools that day to help you solve for X. And it doesn't have to be a mystery. It can just as easily be a hack-em, slash-em, let's kill things with the maximum amount of violence, blood spray, and gore, because I enjoy that as well, with something where you deliberately give it multiple access points.
00:49:12
Speaker
Every single map we use of the Sladium it has at least two and up to five different spots you can enter the maze or the arena, or the environment. And based on whichever one of those two to five you hit, that will affect what you run into first, what loot is nearby, and how fast you run into other things.
00:49:35
Speaker
And I think that's part of the key to replayability, is giving them options, but also making leaving them some redundancies, I think is the shorter way of saying that. You know, leaving them stuff that they can discover the next time.
00:49:48
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And i think I think to your point, I mean i really liked what you said, multiple points of access and the idea that you have a menu. And um it's almost like ah you know where my my wife and are huge foodies as well. That's kind of our other thing is is food. you know I work in food and medicine by day, and then we just for fun like folk do food other than games.
00:50:06
Speaker
And I think if you think about your best restaurant, I mean, if you took your friends there, even if you had a fairly large friend group, if it's depending on the kind of restaurant, there are restaurants that only serve one dish, but that's rare, right? Usually you wouldn't really be able to try everything, share everything family style. You might be able to engineer that, but especially if you only go with say, a friend.
00:50:23
Speaker
you're only going to order one thing at a time per experience. And that I think is the draw of that restaurant is that you want to go back yeah then maybe not the next day. Right. But you know, in a month yeah or two months or even, um, and if they're good enough, then they have enough people like that who are like, yeah, no, let's, let's, we haven't gone to that place in a while. We, I never tried the such and such, or they always come up to the bartender makes a new drink or something. Right.
00:50:42
Speaker
So you almost want menus where I think, um, you want both, right. You want, uh, to continue with that metaphor, the trust in the stability of their general staff, right? That they're going to serve you food that is delicious and no matter what it is. but then Exactly, consistency of sort of quality. But then you also want just ah a wide variety, maybe even a shifting variety. So with Stillfleet, for example, with Kadida, know, I'm running these games at cons where you're, i don't want spoil all of it, but you're going to find ah a certain plant. There's a list of 100 plants that grow in the demilitarized zone. and it's um It's a quantum-hontological demilitarized zone, meaning it's polluted by the hell signs, by psionics, so that it's basically like Zona, the zone from Stalker or, you know, Annihilation, the Southern Reads trilogy, right? So if you go there and you take the wrong step, it might look like a normal sort of bombed out, grown over wooded urban, you know, series of streets, but if you step wrong, you might just disappear into the past or the future or get sucked into, spaghettified into a miniature black hole. new um
00:51:39
Speaker
And so, you know, You have to explore it. You have to find this plant. There's a hundred plants. I'm having you roll at random. Every time you roll, you can add a plus one. You're trying to get a 100. But while you're doing that, there are other things that I have happening, including another group that's out there.
00:51:52
Speaker
And I've had players really focus on that other group, their rivals, who I'm not even going to say whether they're good or bad, quote unquote, and and what that would really mean. It kind of depends really on your politics. But there's other people. There's there's actually two groups of other people of entities who are intelligent who are out there.
00:52:07
Speaker
And whether you encounter them or not, and whether you spend time with them or run away from them or just kill them and move on is really up to the group. And I've had groups do it, maybe not every way, because most people aren't actually total scumbags I've found. But, um you know, generally some players just don't care that much about the other. group They're sort of more interested in their own thing. Yeah.
00:52:26
Speaker
And some other groups really want to know, like, wait, who else is out here with me? And so it takes you on a different kind of story with the same elements. But that level of randomization of how long it takes to find the thing and what path you take, as you're saying with a map or whatever.
00:52:40
Speaker
With this, it's a very abstract. I don't even really use a map. It's kind of like you're going north and more stuff gets weirder, right? you go south, it's a little safer. And then, you know, with a couple of groups and a couple goals for those groups, you can kind of titrate you know the experience or you can cut it off. You say, okay, we don't have a lot of time, so I'm not even going to introduce that other concept or i have plenty of time, so I'm goingnna see what happens when they encounter these other people.
00:53:01
Speaker
Do they talk, do they shoot? And I think, you know, that's one way to tell a mystery without having to have sort of a complicated noir backstory, which is very fun. And I will say that the book Kadida has two whole adventures that are very much that spy story of like, there's a whole complicated backstory that the players would have to figure out that's very satisfying.
00:53:19
Speaker
But I've been running these ones that are a lot simpler. You're out there looking for something... there's a political valence to what you're doing, you may not have all the information, do you care? And there's other people looking for it, and why are they looking for it? Do you care? And whether, you know, how you choose to answer that, it can play out in wildly different ways with the same sort of bare bones. And I think that's sort of It's not necessarily the same people would want to replay that scenario in that sense of replayability, but for you as the GM, it makes it more fun because you were honestly surprised. yeah um I'll say that's something with Intern Nostalgatron we're working on where we really want to make it fun enough that hopefully players would want to explore the Nostalgatron in full, but you don't have to really to probably arrive at some...
00:53:59
Speaker
endpoint and so you know that might mean that's that kind of tension of well you just have different friends that sort of reset the game right if you think of it like a video game because it's not a whole world it's not meant to be a whole world it's meant to be ah one-off you know sort of dungeon right it's not a mega dungeon it's it's a you know comic book sized book so i think there are tensions there and sometimes you don't ultimately you know that that's probably closer i would guess to and i haven't played it right but just having read sickest witch like or something like that sort of an osr dungeon crawl vibe wilderness crawl um you probably don't want to do the exact same thing multiple times to the same people as much as i think as a gm it gives you
00:54:37
Speaker
obvious tools, you could do it multiple times the same people if you wanted. It certainly helps if you're running with different groups. And I think if you mix it into a bigger world, because most of us have our homebrewed worlds, or if you're using a longer homebrewed you know campaign setting, um then those kinds of things slot in really nicely as modules. yeah and And ultimately, it comes down to your level of improv, right? Because some people just want to make up what they want to make up. yeah There's something I strive for when I'm running a game for a table of regular players, like steady regular players, versus ah like a one-off where I'm not going to see them again because I don't know those players yeah very well, if at all. But once I have an understanding of a repeat team,
00:55:19
Speaker
When I am setting up the mod for the day, I always go down the list of the characters that are playing that day and make sure that there is something that is going to appeal to each of them individually. Like to just grab Doctor Who as an example, I want to give Maeve someone to talk to so that she can crack the story and get to the bottom of things.
00:55:43
Speaker
I want to give Calamity some chaos. She can spill all over the keyboard and make a mess and just watch what happens. And I want to give the fixer, you know, those sci-fi issues to that require some ingenuity on his part and his usual brazen confidence. And if I just make sure ahead of time that all three of them are going to have something they want to do in the mix, then I've never seen them have a bad time.
00:56:11
Speaker
And like that requires so little prep work, especially I think in something as open as blister critters where you've got, you know, anywhere from three to half a dozen characters.
00:56:22
Speaker
And one is the cockroach and one is the titmouse and one is the squirrel and one is the actual bear. And all four of them may have different goals on that yellow brick road. But you can put road signs for all of them along the way.
00:56:38
Speaker
And they're going to have those strands of interest intersect and cross connect. And then you're off to the races because they're having conversations and they're making choices together. And they're talking in character. And things are just happening because of the chemical reactions. And it's just beautiful.
00:56:55
Speaker
I love it. yeah Yeah, it's something Tony brought in that, again, to give him credit for, and that's something we're trying to bring into the other games more explicitly, because I think it's something like think I like to think I do as a GM, but I wasn't writing down, and it's actually useful to bullet point, and right? I'm not talking about some long essay. No, no, no. Have the players build the world, right? Have the players say what's in the room.
00:57:16
Speaker
And the more you can have moments of that without it feeling boring or forced, you know, if if it's additive toward a story. So at the beginning, you can do more of it. And then as you're going, you're all following the thread of the story and you don't need as much.
00:57:27
Speaker
But one of the nice things about Blister Griders is you can actually roll noggin every time you enter a new area. Just generally, you know, it's a new place. And then you can try to find at least one useful piece of stuff. Stuff with a capital S is a term for basically human made things left behind. It could also be, you know, a twig.
00:57:43
Speaker
But yeah, usually it's it's like, okay, you know, I'm in the 99 cent store. I want to find, you know, a pencil. Okay, it's probably there. So that's easy. You just need a four or higher on your noggin check for for stuff rarity. You're searching for it.
00:57:56
Speaker
It allows everyone to kind of invoke that and once they get the rule, not everyone is going to spend every scene. Some people, you know, are hoarders, they're going to try to find at the loot. But some people really are using it not to find better and better stuff. You can only hold so much because you're a little guy. So you have stuff points, you can only have, yeah, um usually two or three objects on you. And you might, you know, have other, you know, you can bring it back to your burrow or just leave it where you found it. But, and I guess it it stays there. But I mean, generally, you just swap it out.
00:58:20
Speaker
And that I think is similar to, you know, Raider or something like that. But I think with with what Tony did was say, no, no, it's a role that like, I want the players to tell me what's there. I want them to draw the map. I want them to fill in. Yes, it's a CVS, but it's a ruined CVS in a cartoon show version of your hometown. So, you know, we've all we all know what a drugstore is like, but like you tell me like what's what is the color scheme that the manager was obsessed with? Like, so, oh, everything in here is hot pink, right? or whatever. And it's, ah you know, what is the interesting animal, the critter who lives here? I mean, maybe that's something Tony brings in. Okay, it's a miniature giraffe who is now running the CVS in the post-apocalypse as a sort of lemonade stand slash, like, gun store, right? I don't know. You know, you can you can do a lot with that as players, um and the GM can do a lot with that. And you can sort of, sometimes, if you have players who really want to add more and they're doing it in a way that's pushing the story forward, and let them.
00:59:10
Speaker
And if they're a little shyer, that's fine because you have some sort of probably plot and, you know, you you have some ideas. And so it doesn't take that away from you. And I think that's something that maybe GMs who aren't as used to improv as you as you and me and and Tony, etc.
00:59:23
Speaker
um Maybe they're a little afraid of letting players have power and not and they don't they're not seeing it that way. But I think if you... if you can ease it into it and and you have that confidence that like this is only going to help the story by by asking them what's in the room.
00:59:36
Speaker
um You could do with any system. I just I think Blister Critters is a book really nicely, concisely encapsulates that idea and and approaches it that way sort of at every level of sort of, yeah, you The GM is just helping kind of referee and move, keep it moving. But they're they're not the ones deciding what every single object is in the game world. That would just be ridiculous. right It really would, because then you're just writing a book.
00:59:58
Speaker
Yeah. So Wythe, you have this deep background in sci-fi, as well as the history and the anthropology of life sciences like agriculture and biomedicine. This is an absolutely fascinating set of all these different knowledge bases that you're drawing from.
01:00:16
Speaker
And you also make sure that your left-leaning Marxist views are present in your game design and your narratives. And I wanted to ask you, how do you go about incorporating all of those influences into your games?
01:00:33
Speaker
Yeah, that's a fair question. and i realize it might sound, I don't know how it sounds actually to other people in writing this kind of bios for like, Oh, like what's your thing, right? Fellow indie game person. um Cause you know, I mean, and and obviously that's not an awkward. Some people are like, I really like, you know, this one thing or my day job is unrelated, right? My day job is kind of unrelated, but in other ways, because I'm an anthropologist and historian at work in life science marketing generally. So I'm not doing primary research primarily is the way I get paid. Sometimes, you know, for a long time I was teaching college more or less continuously while doing other jobs, right? So freelance writing jobs or institutional you know writing jobs. um
01:01:12
Speaker
But, you know, the main way i was getting paid was essentially some form of of marketing or paid research. um So not related to games, but it was related in my head and it was about the future of living things. And you can find different ways in. So for me, that was my way in because I write about you know food and medicine. So that's how I'm thinking about my lens on the future of humans, the future of animals, the future of our living environment, the stuff we make, how food systems will look after some climate disruption.
01:01:43
Speaker
And that has led me to make games that are sort of about those topics, but I would say primarily that is not the thing driving my decisions. The decision, is i as I think I narrated, sort of when you just asked me to sort of introduce Stillfleet, it was, okay, i want to play space, far future D&D, but with a better system.
01:02:00
Speaker
And i I really thought a lot about and I think the main... successes are sort of, but sure, the mechanical system, I think, is the sound, for sure. We playtest it a lot. But also, really, that narrative structure of being complicit, being a worker who has some cool powers but has to go out and do things you're not excited about.
01:02:18
Speaker
And then you can change that and you can push back. And that I think was far more important than, okay, this is about food or medicine. But I will say in writing the book, people kept saying the same thing, which is, wow, you have a lot of goddamn descriptions of sci-fi, weird, made up foods.
01:02:33
Speaker
And to me, i didn't think of it. I was just like, oh, well, I guess I like writing that, you know, those kinds of phrases. So it's not that the book is super dense with fiction, but in little descriptions of things, they'll often just be a note about the food.
01:02:45
Speaker
um And that's because, you know, at that time, especially I was working more on the food side. Now I'm back working on the drug side. um But that's just where my mind is, right? So if I'm working all day thinking about food and sit down to write a game. Makes perfect sense. Okay, what do these aliens eat?
01:02:58
Speaker
it You know, so so yeah. So i think I think in that sense, the answer to your question, like when it comes to your day job, which is for me writing about the future of food and medicine, it just filters in naturally. And it's a fun, exciting way to take something that could be boring and that I don't think I'm always on the right side of at work.
01:03:13
Speaker
But hey, that's how I've been paying my bills and and turn it into something where I feel like um it's It's art you know of some kind. It's it's certainly satisfying. It allows me and my friends have fun. The other piece about politics is just something I'm passionate about, but I'm not, again, a professional organizer. And I don't know what, you know, I'm in the heart of the Imperial Corps, right? I'm in New York City.
01:03:32
Speaker
I'm an armchair academic, you know, aging hipster, Marxist, like many other, you know, there's a whole class of us just roaming around the streets of New York, sort of high off caffeine, just not sure what to do with ourselves because, you know,
01:03:43
Speaker
You know, the previous administration was pro-genocide and then Donald Trump got elected again. So sort of lose-lose, just like it's not a great look. um And we don't have a thriving left. You know, it's not like i mean, you know, AOC was pretty complicit in all the the first part of what I mentioned. And then everybody else has just kind of given up on elect roles. You know, there there isn't like some thriving.
01:04:03
Speaker
Outside, I guess, my district, Zora Mamdani, our assembly member, who's awesome, there's not really a lot of people who you could sort of say, okay, we're go go to go meeting and we're going to solve the problem. um It feels like we're still stuck in the same kind of new left woodshedding, housings, go into the ground thing that's been going on since...
01:04:22
Speaker
I guess, a generation at least before, right? for For Gen X, I think it was probably the same, which is why they sort of come off as this apolitical, selfish cohort, because, I mean, I'm speaking largely of coastal, middle class, you know,
01:04:37
Speaker
often white collar Americans. I'm sure it's different. Also, if you're from industrial background, you know, you're from a different background. but But speaking for myself, it just feels frustrating. And I think that's one reason to make games about it is to say, OK, well, what if what if we had more power? What if we didn't have any political power, but I had a space rifle?
01:04:54
Speaker
You know, what if ah what if it's a bunch of evil squirrels and they're all dumb and we are very smart crows and roaches and koalas? you know But they have all the shiny things.
01:05:06
Speaker
But they have the shiny things, but hey, we're we're able to trick them. So, you know, the what ifs can be as dumb as you want. They can be as smart as you want. You can spend a lot of time on it. You can say, no, this is just blowing off steam. We don't make games. I don't make games. And I know my friends don't because we we talk about this a lot um to teach people politics or tell them what to do with their lives. We're just we're just saying um in my head, at least when I say, OK, we make games.
01:05:28
Speaker
Really what we say is we make games that are weird, fun, and replayable. Those are the three things I recently been like. These are the the words that describe it. It may be darkly humorous as a fourth. But in terms of our our values, our standpoint, yeah, we're coming at it as basically socialists, right? Who are committed to humans should help other humans, you know, live better lives and also take care of, you know,
01:05:46
Speaker
non living non-humans and not destroy the earth, right? um We should share things better. you know I mean, I think there's a strain on a range, rather, a spectrum on our team of ideas about how that could work, but broadly it means, okay, we're not going to make games about this individualist Conan the Barbarian. You go kill goblins. You kill all the goblins, take all their gold, and become the king.
01:06:06
Speaker
Not because it's necessarily unfun or morally bad, although I i have some thoughts about that but it's more just like that's not our bag it's not where our brains go when we get off work and sit there to make games so i guess in both cases now that i've hopefully answered your question i think it just sort of filters in naturally and i think a lot of um framing it that way is about like i said articulating what you're doing and being conscious of it which maybe isn't even that important frankly to the end user but for us as creators as designers as artists And for me as a writer, right, where I'm really in the theoretical weeds coming from academia of like, you know, I'm i'm thinking a little bit about the role of games as luxury goods and is it political propaganda or not or whatever.
01:06:47
Speaker
I don't need to answer those questions. The player doesn't need to know that I've thought about that. But because i can't turn off that part of my brain, it's like I might as well admit that that is part of my process as a writer, if that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. No, it does make sense.
01:06:59
Speaker
And there are a couple of things that I want to point out that you've touched on. Number one, the things that the writer focuses on during their day job, during their life, start to crop up in their work.
01:07:15
Speaker
If you have your attention on politics and the climate and its current state and its deterioration, then it's entirely possible, if not likely, that those things will emerge in what you express, what you put out there.
01:07:29
Speaker
What I would like to say, though, to encourage our our writers out there of games and our designers of games, is that there is room at the table for all of these interests. Like if you and your wife love to make specialty meals and it turns out that sci-fi ah food gets mentioned in the flavor blocks of your ah of your storytelling, so be it.
01:07:55
Speaker
There will be someone out there that groks your style, that likes what you're putting down. And so if there is a voice inside that inhibits, that says, oh, no one's gonna wanna hear about the geopolitics of 18th century France.
01:08:11
Speaker
Au contraire, mon frere, you will find those people and they will be vocal supporters. Aton! um To borrow badly pronounced French. I think activating it for them, though. like i Can I shout out one example?
01:08:26
Speaker
um Not by me. Someone i've I've now come to admire as a game designer who we interviewed on our our show, Why We Roll, about indie RPG design is Kayla Dice McCrory, who made trans Transgender Deathmatch Legend.
Spotlight on Unique Games: Transgender Deathmatch Legend
01:08:38
Speaker
And she just came out with a hell of a title. Yeah. Psycho dungeon, which is awesome. And I want to I really want play. It's a really good idea for a system about, you know, basically almost like psychological plumbers, you know, so dreams, you know, your nightmares become real and you have, it's sort of like an inception paprika sort of thing, but like you need D and d heroes, because if you have a bad dream, like it, you have to have someone go in your mind, you know, jump in your brain and and solve it. Um, it's very Charlie Kaufman. It's very cool.
01:09:02
Speaker
But the, the new book is just a re you know, ah re I shouldn't say just, it's a reworking of Transgender Deathmatch Legends, Transgender Deathmatch Legend 2, and I finally read it, preparing to play it. It's so good because it's about wrestling, right? Ultimately, it's about pro wrestling, which I will say, like, I'm a snob. I grew up, we watched pro wrestling. was on.
01:09:19
Speaker
It's the ninety s but i know I never liked it, right? I was like watching David Lynch movies. So the idea that I should watch these sweaty guys, you know, duke it out. That book is the first time I've liked wrestling. Like, it like convinced me in just the way you're saying, like if someone's passion came through, but because it's about how you would create a wrestler and put on a persona and wear a mask and it sort of is almost like really thinking through, like if you were presenting yourself differently to the world, you know, and like how that would play out and what would be the risks, like bodily risks.
01:09:51
Speaker
And so it's a really carefully worded, thoughtful book that uses interesting mechanics with cards that is a fun, playable, really fighting. It's a combat centric RPG, but it's about wrestling, which is not a topic I liked before reading the book that now I'm like, I want to be a wrestler. what I mean? Like it's, um, so I think to your point, like if
Podcast 'Why We Roll' and Historical Game Design
01:10:08
Speaker
you take your passion and can distill it into a fun narrative loop, It's not writing lore. It's making a thing that people can do with it.
01:10:15
Speaker
It's activating it, if that makes sense. But yes, I completely agree. It's a good way of it to you. Yeah, anything you're into that isn't, like, fascist, I support making a game out of. Like, anything. Fishing. Yes. There's fun fishing RPGs. You know, I don't want to go fishing IRL. There's not room at the table for more fascism.
01:10:29
Speaker
Thank you. No, we got enough we got to enough for our without that. Actually, and you and again, that's just really, that's Warhammer or whatever, right? That's like D&D, really, if you think about it. Exactly. You mentioned your game design podcast, Why We Roll. Can you tell our listeners more about that?
01:10:43
Speaker
Yeah, sure. My buddy Chris Pickett, who is creating a game using the GRIT system, very modified, taking it in different directions again, very much OSR adjacent, we say. So it's again, not D20, but it sort of has this black and white medieval horror feel game called Dance Macabre.
01:11:02
Speaker
in which death just stops in the middle of the 14th centuries, the middle of the 1300s, right after the the ah Black Death in Europe. um The game is set in Constantinople. So this is also when the Ottomans are about to definitively kind of take over Eastern Europe.
01:11:17
Speaker
And they end up making a deal with the Byzantines. and They're kind of co-ruling Eastern Europe and you're in Constantinople because death stops. And when you die, you just come back as a mutant. So it's I, again,
01:11:27
Speaker
play it. It's like zombie apocalypse. It's like walking dead, but you are in 1390 in Constantinople and you are a pilgrim. You are a poor person who must go out into the world and bring back quintessence items from before the fall that have the ability to bring true death.
01:11:42
Speaker
So Constantinople has, it's also amazing. Cause I was really pressing Christmas. We were working on the game. chris had all these good ideas, but I was like, how does it work though? Like it's so, I like that it's a MacGuffin, but like you gotta give the reader something.
01:11:54
Speaker
This is all to answer your question. Chris is my co-host. Chris wanted to do a podcast and I wanted to do a podcast. So we joined forces, made a podcast about how we were designing our games and how we we were like, wait, let's just ask other designers how they design their games. That's all. That's all it is. It's car talk, but for TTRPG design, that's what we say, or it indie TTRPG design.
01:12:10
Speaker
um But I just want to say for Dance Macabre, our first fantasy game that is coming out later this year, we, um you know, I press them on. OK, how does the contestants work? And they said, they came back to me and said, okay, I've thought it all that. It is the people who rule each city are the cantica. So your canticum, which means choir in Latin.
01:12:30
Speaker
And we have the equivalent terms in Arabic. And we're we're working with now a PhD scholar who actually knows medieval Greek and we're finding people know medieval Arabic. That's the hard part, it turns out when you set a book in realistically, like what would they have actually said and written 1390.
01:12:45
Speaker
um But basically when you have to sing at these objects, and when you sing at them, then you can actually see this distinct glow. And that is the that's the only magic in the game, right? Other than the weird mutants. So the mutant drawings are great. It's sort of inspired by shows like Berserk or manga, I should say, like Berserk and this very dark, very bio or just just horrible apocalypse tentacles, mutants everywhere. But like you're a normal person with a sword, you're trying to go get interesting items from the waist. So it has a very D&D like vibe, but the people giving your jobs
01:13:16
Speaker
are the choir masters of the great cities of Western Europe. Sorry, Westerns or Asia, not Europe's a mess, but you know, that that area, Anatolia, whatever. And so the idea of singing as this magic was like, oh, this is it. Now the game, like now the game loop is complete. You go get stuff, you bring it back and you sing at it.
01:13:33
Speaker
So it's not about gold. It's about living a good life and being able to die without coming back as a horror. And how much that would matter to people to have to just keep going, to be able to defend the farms, you know, have walls, lots, you know, Constantinople's these concentric rings of walls.
01:13:48
Speaker
So um that just gives you a sense. I say all that to introduce my friend Chris, because I thought, um you know, here's someone who clearly is there. They are a tattoo artist by date and they're an amazing artist, but they're also a really good writer. And it turns out really good a historian, like in the way that I do not get paid to teach art.
01:14:04
Speaker
about you know bioengineering, but i I know a good bit about it from my academic studies and just from reading that kind of sci-fi and like Googling stuff. um They have that relationship, like they are not paid to teach the history of um broadly, you know, that the Mediterranean world, the Christian and Islamic world, at you know, in the late medieval.
01:14:23
Speaker
But they know, like, so much. And so making a game with them is fun because it's about, you know, I get to learn all this stuff, all these stories that I wouldn't have known. So um the show is great because we just take that same enthusiasm where it started from us asking questions about each other's games and and asking other people and people like Kayla.
01:14:40
Speaker
we've We've had on a ah whole range. Tony, obviously we've had on Tony a couple times to talk about blister critters, both very early and then at PAX. So the second time we had him on was when it it came out and it was it was really wonderful to to just be able to revisit. So we're doing actually that right now for the sort of second, third, fourth round of of emails of just like, hey, do you want to come back on? do You have a new thing or like let's play through. We just played through Another friend, Chris, introduced me to Eric Silver, Multitude, and Join the Party is is his show, actual play show.
01:15:11
Speaker
He wrote a game that's a Model UN game. So you're playing like nations dealing with transnational crises, but it's very goofy because it's there's no mechanic, there's no rolling. You just have to argue and convince people.
01:15:23
Speaker
And it is very silly and fun. It's not, you know, to me, it's it's kind of a world building game, right? it's It's something you do as a one off. And it was really great to ask him about his design goals, because I know, you know, it is is right. It's a political game inherently, but he wanted to make this very widely appealing like party game.
01:15:41
Speaker
I mean, not to and that's not a knock. like It is an indie RPG. It is playable as an RPG, but it is it is contoured more like a party game where you have sort of set phases and you probably do it once because I mean, you could do it a bunch times, I guess. You could just keep having, you know, issues that your nations come together and resolve. um But, you know, that was the kind of that was the that's the kind of way in as you ask people, like, why why did you want to make just the same question you're asking Why that genre or how did you approach mechanically the issue of you know political but you wanted to be funny or whatever right um and people often surprise you not only with their thoughtfulness but their sort of backstories and um kind of getting back to the idea of your day jobs everyone has some past some interesting lived history and they yeah find different ways of articulating that at the level of mechanical design and of to some degree world building but i more and more i'm sort of less interested in like the specifics of your imagined world and more like
01:16:37
Speaker
what affordances, to use a game design term, do you
Encouragement for Aspiring Game Designers
01:16:40
Speaker
give players? Like what props do you give players to interact with? So what can they roll? What can they do? Doesn't have to be rolling. It could be cards. It could be no mechanic at all. But like, what is it you want them to do and why?
01:16:51
Speaker
So that's that's just to give you a little bit of flavor. And again, shout out, Chris. We've also had on, you know, again, the the artist, he's another good writer, Ethan Gould, he's the artist of Stillfleet and is making a game called The Sun Times Kingdom, again, using the grid system. It's a high fantasy game. It's very radically vitalist. Everyone is a spellcaster. And when you die, you come back as a talking skeleton who doesn't remember your previous life.
01:17:13
Speaker
And it's great. it's It's a very, very different game because I feel like I just can never predict what Ethan's to say. So I get to ask a good friend questions about a game I'm working on and I don't know the answer, like genuinely. So that's when, honestly, I never got podcasting in that sense. Like I listen to podcasts all day, but I'm not going to do a podcast. But once I started doing it, it's like I think that it's the same. i would like to actually ask you, do you find this to be the case that Just the surprise, the delightful surprise of having people on and being like, wow, what an interesting way to think about that. That's not what I would have said, you know, is like the reason to doing Yeah.
01:17:46
Speaker
I mean, that is, that is part of the reason, like the ingredients, the purpose, the thematic ingredients of the joy of GMing are to learn more from as many different perspectives as we can get our hands on, but also to encourage.
01:18:02
Speaker
because I can design a game. I can put a mod together. I can generate a good time. But i also want to show others who might not feel confident, who might not think they can because they haven't done it before. Like, I know there is the the speed bump to creativity of, well, I haven't done that before. Right.
01:18:26
Speaker
And i want to I want to smooth out that speed bump as much as possible so that people... can express themselves and create the experience that they want to share with other people.
01:18:39
Speaker
Because a game, as much if not more so than any book or film or play, like those are created from one source and then people just sort of absorb it. They watch, they listen, they read.
01:18:54
Speaker
But with a game, there is collaboration. You are giving over the reins at several points throughout the the hour or four hours you've got with these people so that they can put things in the direction that that appeals to them, that they can contribute to a story that is out of my hands as the dungeon maestro, that is not in my control.
01:19:19
Speaker
And handing over that license, that creative license to do things a little differently, to give you the opportunity to blow the werewolf away with your enchanted gun versus you know pulling out the dagger, setting it on fire, and stabbing it in the eye. You can do both of those things.
01:19:37
Speaker
We've got characters that enjoy both of those things, and that's fine, and that's wonderful. I would not have thought to include a gunslinger in Barovia any more than I would have necessarily thought to include a suicidally confident rabbit man in a game of particularly violent D&D.
01:19:57
Speaker
However, both of these things have cropped up, And the players have had a marvelous time because we said, yes, we want you here. We want you to do these things that you want to do.
01:20:08
Speaker
And the results have been delightful. Yeah, I think so much of it is exactly what you're saying, is the joy of being surprised as a GM, and that is is somewhat similar, it's analogous to when you were talking about game design. Even if the end result you feel like you could explain and kind of theorize, how someone got there, right, is often just some totally wild, just other story that you couldn't have known because it's about their...
01:20:34
Speaker
their brain, their their past. And I think as an anthropologist, right, i I didn't go into making games to do an anthropology of games. I just wanted to make games that are fun and if anything, keep doing kind of a study of future goopy science stuff.
01:20:49
Speaker
And those are sort of two separate, somewhat related stories. but But I do think there's an element to these kinds of shows like yours yours and mine, where you're asking people about their lives that gets into that these kinds of cultural and social questions around how people not just make games in the narrow sense of indie RPGs, which is such a tiny corner of the world, but, you know, enjoy play as a category of human activity and how they come to do things like improv, right? Which has actually, you improv all the time, I find at work, right? You have to make crap up and pretend to know things and just just to get along and sometimes, you know,
01:21:22
Speaker
not get in trouble. Yeah, I did that. I totally did that. um Let me just, ah I'll get it to you after lunch and you spend all lunch writing that email or whatever. You know, there's there's a way in which there, these are actually dimensions of our lives that D&D type games allow us to examine a different way.
01:21:37
Speaker
And it is, it is the nice to have this, again, that meta dimension of, okay, you have someone on a podcast and you can ask them directly something that it wouldn't really fit in the
Games as Cultural Tools
01:21:45
Speaker
story. It doesn't really make sense as a GM to,
01:21:47
Speaker
ask your players directly, what are you feeling right now and why? I mean, you know, why in the past? Why did you make this character? Just, you know, just have fun. Just tell the story. But then you can step back later and say, oh, yeah, why did you make the bunny man? You know, whats where did that come from? is What's the inspiration? um So so that I think both are fun pleasures. Yeah.
01:22:05
Speaker
Yeah. That feels like the behind the scenes bonus features on the DVD, you know, um the scenes where you get to talk with the director or the screenwriter or the costume designer. and get their input about like where they thought where they thought up that idea, where it where they just made the decision that X was important.
01:22:24
Speaker
This platform, which I am grateful for, gives me that opportunity because when we point out the weird and random and sometimes work-related places that our creativity springs from,
01:22:40
Speaker
I think that gives listeners or can give listeners permission to do the same. Yeah. Especially if that has not occurred to them yet. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Permission. I think, I think that's a really good point you've made about, um, you don't need, i mean, uh, Logan Dean, who's a game designer consultant who's, worked with us, uh,
01:23:01
Speaker
It always says, you know, you don't need like, yeah, man, just do it. Like you don't need permission. You don't need to ask anyone like before you publish something, which it didn't in a weird way. On the one hand, I feel like, oh, I knew that.
01:23:12
Speaker
But on the on the other hand, i actually do feel i feel like I need a permission. I feel like i'm a very confident person. I'm a literally a professional writer. I get paid to write things about the future now, not games, but also I've been jamming since I was 12. So there was no reason a priori that having played all these games continuously, more or less,
01:23:26
Speaker
um except during college when I was like trying to be cool. So I didn't play for like four years, but you know, pretty much continuously playing these games, GMing, writing stuff down. I could have at any point started writing them more professionally and tried to do that. um But I thought you did need permission. I needed friends to really tell me like, it's okay. Like if you publish this, no one's going to think it's weird.
01:23:45
Speaker
No one's going to be mad. Like you don't like, just don't lose all your money. But like, if you don't make a lot of money, that's fine. Like you have a job, like who, who cares? Right. um It's a little different if you're talking about starting a business. I mean, each of these, and but you can go stepwise. And I think, sure especially if you're just not, if you put money aside and this is just ah an activity about you know expressing yourself, I do think as a form of expression, games are actually well suited because they allow for those meta relationships. And actually think,
01:24:12
Speaker
That is important well put because we no longer live in modernity. We live in post-modernity, right? so um you know, famously, I think I want to say Umberto Eco said that, you know, you can't say I love you sincerely anymore. You have to kind of say, I love you so much because if you're married, right, you say, I love you to your wife. he's like Yeah, whatever.
01:24:30
Speaker
we We live in an era of the insincere and of the meta textual and the relational and there's infinite regresses. So it's almost like games allow you to do that. If I just go to my friends and I say, We should become space marines and overthrow the world state. You know, yeah, whatever. But if I make a game about it, then we can goof off and have fun. And we probably won't actually do that. But it allows us to maybe, maybe think, you know, 5% differently about our actual political activities. Maybe not. That's maybe still hypothesis. That's a whole other discussion. But, you know, that that's the idea. You can have a different relationship to games because they are tools for for improv, for storytelling, for for philip philosophy as a group.
01:25:08
Speaker
They're gonna be different every time. um ah Infinite games, I mean, and and they're not the same as that monodirectional, you know, which again, I love movies, right? i love Nosferatu was an awesome movie. I love sitting there for two hours and just be this is so weird. You know, Roger Eggers makes these movies for people of, you know, this is a movie for people from the eighteen hundreds and it works.
01:25:28
Speaker
ah But but it's it's not, I have no control And it doesn't, in that way, it doesn't change. It changes me in some some level, but it doesn't allow for that to engagement. i think games allow people who have something they want to express whether it's about their- platform and a place to express it. With with friends and maybe with strangers, right? Again, baby steps, whatever, but let's say you're shy, then okay, start with your friends, right? And it allows you to get it out and get it down on paper and refine it. I do think there's better and worse systems and writing and all that stuff, but that stuff matters less, I think, than just, right, to your point, the the feeling, the confidence to just say, yeah, I know kind of ways in which I wanna have fun with friends.
01:26:09
Speaker
And the the fact that it is a little structured, I think is that the the the grit that makes the oyster. Because I think if you just said to your adult friends, again, it's that sincerity problem. If you said, let's just have fun and tell stories, guys, with no...
01:26:23
Speaker
game elements. I don't think i like a lot of people would struggle with that. They would struggle to get out of themselves and and relax and do it and have fun. Not saying everyone, but again, most people I think need that game element. They're like, give me a, you know, what are the rules?
01:26:36
Speaker
Right. And so you you, it's not that the rules matter. It's the rules allow them to get over, get past themselves. that makes sense. Well, it's not just the rule system. It's also the element of risk, like without the die involved, then the answer is just always yes.
01:26:51
Speaker
You know, and having that element of risk where you can fall flat on your face, where you can roll in that one and your hand is sweaty and you lose the sword you've been hanging on to because it just flies right out of your hand.
01:27:05
Speaker
That is something you then have to that is something that you then have to work around. That forces you to improvise and put you in your seat of like, oh crap, I wasn't expecting that to happen.
01:27:17
Speaker
And that room for surprise, that room for not something to be anticipated and like actually provide you with the stimulus of surprise and oh, that didn't work the exact way I thought it would.
01:27:33
Speaker
encourages those muscles of resourcefulness. And I think that is part of what makes gaining essential. Yeah,
Engagement and Community Support
01:27:40
Speaker
exactly. and And I think constraint in art, and I think giving yourself constraint, especially if you're new, is it's not, yeah you know, it's vital. It's absolutely vital to the craft and it's vital to getting out of your you know, prefrontal cortex, you know, anxiety of of that sort of, I have to, and my Cartesian harmonculus has to write the ultimate GM, you know, experience um in this like linear fashion. And it allows you to come at those
01:28:10
Speaker
sideways, strange, unconscious thoughts and and get them on paper by having some sort of constraint to work within. Okay, well, for this game, i'm going to have, you know, every player writes down three phrases and those go, know, just make up sort of categories. um I need a table. a I start with that now. Okay, I need a table of, okay, rooms in the Dementorium and I need D6 kinds of hellhounds.
01:28:33
Speaker
Well, I mean, you know, I don't know. i might take, you know, if it's sitting in some notebook, I have a couple of game notebooks out. It's like, I might come back to that a month from now and be like, I don't even really know what I meant. But it says I need D6 Hellhounds. So I got it, you know, and I think that can be very freeing as a writer and very freeing for a different part your brain to be like, oh you know, you know what kind of hellhounds this this naughty table needs.
01:28:54
Speaker
Whereas, you know, sometimes if you're on the spot, um again, different people have different levels of sort of comfort with improv. But as a designer, you might you might on the spot not have the perfect idea for a story at any point.
01:29:05
Speaker
Devolving it to the dice is absolutely what you're saying. It increases the the epic level, the catharsis, because it's truly unknown to both the GM and the player, whether you drop the sword or slay the dragon or whatever. um But even as a designer, sometimes you can do the same thing. right You could say, I don't know what I'm goingnna do with this, but I'm going craft the you know different elements. I'm going to I'm gonna figure it out. And I've often now, I'll have an inkling of an idea for let's say an adventure for for still fleet or blister critters and I'll literally like not think of it all. I'll think of a bit of it and then try to sleep on it and often I'll find in a day or two, you know,
01:29:40
Speaker
sort of inner voice that isn't your little imagined Cartesian homunculus of yourself. You know, it's some other part of you. It's still you that says, no, no, no you you know what happens next. You know, you know what the eagle wanted all along.
01:29:53
Speaker
And that that to me is the joy of of game design and the joy of GMing is is working with all of your creative parts, not just the creative part you can consciously call upon, which is powerful, but it's not the whole show, right?
01:30:05
Speaker
It's not absolutely right. So Wythe, how can our listeners get in touch with you and where can they support you? We are everywhere. So Stillfleet Studio is the company and you can find us at stillfleet.com or at Stillfleet on all social media.
01:30:19
Speaker
ah Pretty much. We're not active anymore on Twitter and we're just sort of beginning to figure out what to do with short form videos. so There's not a lot of videos currently at this taping on TikTok, but we we do have, you know, at Stillfleet. We're pretty active on Blue Sky, Instagram. We're very active on Discord.
01:30:34
Speaker
You can come on down, join our Discord, stillfleet.discord.com is the perm invite. And if you want to find any of our products, they're on the website. um You can also check out PDFs at, you know, itch and DTRPG. Again, just look for Stool Fleet. We're there.
01:30:47
Speaker
And in person, we're usually at the big cons. We're in New York City. Maybe eventually we'll be in Philadelphia. But, you know, we're in the Northeast and we go every year to PAX. That's probably the best place to, like, come hang out. um Or if you're in New York, you know, you can contact me at Discord.
01:31:01
Speaker
Yeah, I really encourage people to right now, if you had to do one thing, you know, check out stillfleet.com slash enter. That's the link for our next product, which is enter the nostalgiatron with Michael Cohen, which likes say is our new quick start that is comic book themed, cartoon themed, still, still fleet. It has the rules. It has four pregens. Um, it has this whole, uh, the nostalgia, this whole techno dungeon floating castle. Um, and it's really gorgeous and is just super fun to have worked on. Um, so looking forward to, uh,
01:31:33
Speaker
We're going that live on Backer Kids soon. I don't know when this episode is going to air, but check out stillfleet.com slash enter. In any event, we'll take you there. um And in the meantime, you know, we have other games coming out. If you like fantasy, we have the two fantasy games I mentioned, the Dots Macabre and the Sometimes Kingdom. So sort of low fantasy, high fantasy, different, completely different vibes, you know, black and white anime versus um extremely colorful multimedia, just really gorgeous, fine art, vital, you know, topsy turvies is one word to use, sort of portal fantasy.
01:32:01
Speaker
um And so, you know, again, they're they're different artists, different games, but the system is really fun. And I encourage everyone to, if you liked any of this, just um if you want to check out the games, there there are free quick starts. So you can always just get the quick start.
01:32:13
Speaker
And if you want to get a print copy of Enter the Nostalgatron, that is also an excellent way to for for cheap, you know. ah Try out the system, see if you like it. And yeah, I hope even if you play something else that you have an awesome time playing games with your friends because that's what matters here. so Truly.
01:32:30
Speaker
Thank you so much, Wythe. I have truly enjoyed talking with you and hearing you expound on all of the ingredients of your creation and the method and the the path of discovery that it took to create not only Steelfleet but also Blister Critters. I think that's that's that's really really fascinating. Thank you again. Thank you so much.
01:32:54
Speaker
Thanks, Casey. I've really enjoyed it. we'll have to you know If you ever want to come on Why We Roll or something, we'll we'll be happy to chat with you as well. and Sincerely, i'd be happy to. And finally, to our listeners, another big thank you for sharing your precious time with us. If you feel it's been well spent, please share the joy of GMing with your friends. We're looking to enjoy themselves. You can email your questions for me and our future guests to narrativefeetspodcast at gmail.com.
01:33:20
Speaker
And if you'd like me to run a game for you or take my workshop on character voices, reach out on startplaying.games. Leave a review, rate the show, follow us on Blue Sky, TikTok, and YouTube at Narrative Feets and wherever you get your podcasts. Don't forget to join our Discord.
01:33:36
Speaker
Links to everything for us and for Wife in the doobly-doo. From all of us, I'm Casey Jones. There's exciting things to come, my friends. I'm glad you're along for the ride.