#I have no idea if John Harper was inspired by that for his RPG or not

[thevalicemultiverse]

(Valicer in the Dark) Wait...

-Guy called Immortal Emperor.

-Rules nation called the Imperium in a dark horrific world.

-Most powerful magic guy.

-There was a major catastrophe he was involved in/mitigated with said power.

This sounds...familiar.

In the distance: "It is the 41st Millennium..."

Victor: [puzzled] It's -- 847 by our calendar.

Alice: I think he's talking about another broken world similar to but not the same as ours -- did the sun blow up in that one too?

[thecoppercompendium]

for the tarot rpg ask game! The Fool, The Empress, The Hierophant, The Chariot, The Hanged Man, The Devil, The Tower, The Star, The Sun

Wow, that's a lot (to be clear I am not complaining)! Thanks for your interest! I've already answered The Chariot and The Star here, so I won't answer them a second time, but the rest are new!

The Fool – What do the earliest stages of work on a game look like for you? OR How did you get into game design?

I'm going to be greedy on this one and answer both parts, because… I want to, to be honest. The earliest stages of design vary quite a lot for me, but typically start with either a mechanic (say, exploding dice), a concept (a game set in an eldritch ocean) or a title (Summit). If I'm very lucky, I occasionally start with all three! From there, my first step is to define a few restrictions for myself, normally 1/2 for mechanics and gameplay and 1/2 for genre/vibes. For instance, with The Curse Lingers (which I'll come to in more detail) I started with the idea of it being based on nuclear waste warnings (vibes), that it would be multiplayer (gameplay), and that I wanted to use Caltrop Core for it (mechanics). These restrictions give me a direction to push the game in, even if I often end up ignoring some or all by the end of the process.

When it comes to how I got into game design… It was D&D 5e. My friends badgered me enough to DM for them that I read the entire PHB cover to cover in a day or so, then proceded to make some (very very bad) homebrew for the very first session I ever ran of any TTRPG. I do not recommend this in the least. While that campaign eventually petered out, my creation of homebrew did not, and in the last year and a half I've drifted further from 5e and began making stuff for other systems, as well as a few TTRPGs of my own.

The Empress — Where do your ideas come from? OR Do you seek out or avoid inspiration while working on an idea?

To be completely honest, I have little to no idea where my ideas come from. I have a colossal list of concepts on my phone, typically titles or bare-bones mechanical possibilities, but I can't pinpoint the source of many of them. Some spring from conversations with my friends, others crop up at 4am, probably as a result of sleep deprivation, still more sneak their way in after seeing some particularly cool art. I wish my inspiration for games was more consistent, but I'm definitely not going to be running out any time soon.

This is getting long, so continued under the cut.

The Hierophant — Who is a fellow game designer you’ve learned a lot from? OR What is a piece of popular wisdom about games you think is nonsense?

I can't nail down one particular game designer I've particularly learned from -- I tend to magpie from any and everything I read, taking inspiration from the mechanics and flavour that most appeal to me. In this vein, we have @rathayibacter for their excellent work on [BXLLET>, @prokopetz for his many many posts on game design, John Harper for Blades in the Dark, Spencer Campbell (Gila RPGs) for RUNE and Caro Asercion for Exquisite Biome and i'm sorry did you say street magic. I'm sure there's more that I've forgotten. I've recently joined @uktabletopindustrynetwork, and am learning a lot from everyone there, too.

The Hanged Man — What other creative pursuits do you have? OR What current trends in game design are you most interested in?

I've written a couple of first drafts for fantasy novels that I will come back to one day. My main creative passion has always been worldbuilding, so that inevitably gets built into my TTRPGs in some way if I can get away with it. I particularly love creating maps of the worlds I create. I've been working on a map for my fantasy world that I run D&D (at the moment at least) in since I started that first campaign, back in late 2019. I've included one small section of it here, a dimensional overlap between that world and the Far Realms known as The Wandering Isles, created using assets from Map Effects (it goes without saying you can use it for personal use if you like, but not for commercial use). I've made a bunch of others for towns and cities, but it's the overall world map that's taking the time -- the world keeps expanding on me.

The Devil — What motifs or mechanics do you just keep coming back to? OR What is a game you’ve enjoyed playing in the last year?

As it happens, I was thinking about this last night before reading back through these questions. Turns out every single one of my games so far has you fighting against time in some way: Summit drains your cards the more time it takes you to climb, I HAVE SOMEWHERE TO BE is literally about trying not to be late, the Curse Lingers has a curse mechanic that mutates you the longer you spend within a temple, and both of my current in-progress games have a clock that counts down in some way. I'm beginning to suspect this says something about me…

The Tower — Talk about about a game you tried to make that crashed and burned.

The very first game I tried to make after becoming disillusioned with D&D (during the OGL debarcle, as it happens, what a surprise) was tentatively named Cursed Fools. It was far too ambitious for a first game, used a deck of playing cards and had an interlocking system of Curse and Boon cards, as well as complex spellcasting, classes and a TONNE of elaborate worldbuilding. I do still like a lot of the mechanics I came up with for it, but odds are the game will never see the light of day in its original form. Since then I've continued to battle scope creep (my nemesis) but I've learned to begin with a smaller scale concept to mitigate.

The Sun — Talk about a game you’ve made that you’re proud of.

This is the bit where I talk about The Curse Lingers (TCL), the most insane thing I've decided to do (so far at least). As I mentioned earlier, TCL is a Caltrop Core game about nuclear waste warnings. In it, players take on the roles of the Keepers of the Temples, many years after an unspecified apocalypse. These Temples are cursed by a Relic, with each curse having specific triggers. Keepers delve into Temples to cleanse and claim these Relics, entering fragments of the Old World, our world, in order to do so.

I'm incredibly proud of the mechanics I developed to bring the feel to the game I wanted, using a variation on clocks (which I know from Blades in the Dark) as well as a health mechanic called Mutation, where a Keeper grows more powerful the closer they come to death. I'm proud of how the Temples and even the 4 included Keeper classes are all based on actual nuclear waste warning suggestions. What I'm most proud of, however, is how long it took me to make. I decided to create a TTRPG for Free RPG Day this year, and this became TCL. What I neglected to mention was that I decided this a week before Free RPG Day. I made the entire 28-page game, including formatting, within that week. It was one of the most exhausting and rewarding things I have ever done. I hope to not do something that insane again,

Thanks a tonne for the ask, and thanks to @che-bur-ashka / @wildwoodsgames for stealing/creating the ask game!

[swipestream]

Gnome Stew Notables – Jabari Weathers

About Jabari in their own words: Jabari Weathers is an illustrator and game designer who currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland. They also are (apparently) under suspicion of being a goblin princet from beyond the veil. In order to keep up their glamor, they make art and narrative games for themselves.

You can help them maintain their human facade by checking out their artwork at jmwillustration.com and their game design work at lunarveil.press. If you wish to follow along with their more anecdotal adventures, they can be found on instagram (jmwillustration) and twitter (JabariWeathers).

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your work? What project are you most proud of?

Hi Tracy, thanks for inviting me to do this with you! I’m a black, nonbinary scifi fantasy illustrator by day, and tabletop rpg/narrative game designer by night. I live in Baltimore and attended art school here (at MICA). Soon after I found myself making so many tarot cards for roleplaying game publishers. The work I’m most proud of in that regard is, in fact, split between making the 7th Sea Sortè deck art, and the Bluebeard’s Bride Tarot of Servants art. Both projects put together took 8 months for me to make the art for, which kind of scares me. As far as my game design work, I’m working on an epistolary game called A Dire Situation, which is essentially a really perverse game of telephone inspired by Dangerous Liaisons and other acidic period piece dramas. It’s a good time. You can follow my artwork at jmwillustration.com, my (announced) game design work at lunarveil.press, and me at twitter.com/JabariWeathers and instagram.com/jmwillustration~

What themes do you like to emphasize in game work?

Existential tension, often the questions of identity and knowing who you are. I’m in a few different professional and creative circles that I simultaneously feel indebted to as far as my taste in media and interests, and feel not immediately welcome in, having to have carved a niche for myself within scifi/fantasy illustration and game design. I often try to find ways to take the kind of performative tension I feel as a POC in both circles and fold that into game design terms. It’s sort of like journaling. There’s a mechanic in A Dire Situation where everyone chooses a secret for another person’s character, but you don’t know what secret has been chosen for you specifically, even though your *character* is understood to be aware of the secret and you as a player get to see all of the available secrets that are in play at the table. The result is nobody is quite who they themselves think they are, and you end up having to question a lot about the entity you’re stepping into for the evening. I like trying to get people to question their fictional personas, anyway!

How did you get into games? Who did you try to emulate in your career?

Actually I got into games through my mom, who played DnD when she was younger and never stopped consuming speculative fiction. She kinda just passed the genre interest on to me. I also grew up with cousins who played a LOT of video games with me, and eventually made my way toward titles that valued a kind of emergent design that tabletop RPGs are especially well suited for (for example, Thief, Deus Ex [I grew up with Invisible War and Deadly Shadows and played the earlier games in late high school and early college], Morrowind). In high school, my religion teacher (I went to an all boys Catholic high school), was really my first longstanding GM with 3.5, but I had been reading the books for a solid amount of time before that point. I don’t know if I tried to emulate any one person in my game design upon starting, but I did try to chase the same kind of player choice that Looking Glass Studios baked into their digital work (which they pulled from tabletop games in a lot of ways), as well as their interdisciplinary approach to game design. Look at Thief: The Dark Project against it’s contemporaries and you can tell that it was made by people interested in things outside of the industry that it was making an impact on. I love how Looking glass trusts it’s players and doesn’t hold their hand, instead giving them tools to let the experience emerge. I also love how their games had such odd and idiosyncratic approaches that really challenged the player. I still chase both things in the social landscape that tabletop RPGs create, and I really hope I make something that’s half as inspiring as that Looking Glass ethos was for me!

More recently, I’ve been owing a lot of the recent game design lessons learned to Marissa Kelly, Sarah Richardson and Whitney Beltran from Bluebeard’s Bride, and John Harper’s work on Blades in the Dark. The former is such an amazing study in how to get horror and tension to emerge, and how to bake unusual ceremony into a game. A lot of people are intimidated by it when they are used to simulationist style games, and many admirers of Bluebeard’s Bride also label it as “simple” mechanically, but there is *so* much happening in the social and emotional landscape of that game, so much that gets mechanized so eloquently. Every piece of vocabulary that the players (including the Groundskeeper) use is calibrated perfectly to the theme and discussions Bluebeard’s is meant to provoke. Blades does a wondrous amount of things with a swashbuckling setup by letting players pick the details of their abilities and tools on the fly, but making *everything* a resource management game. When some of those resources aren’t just ‘coin’ or ‘inventory’ but are ‘stress’, it becomes evocative in a game that I wish a lot of other action/adventure RPGs would be. Both also have a remarkable relationship to violence that ends up more nuanced than what I think the common examples of games present show to those not entrenched in the game community. I’ve been studying these both *very* closely, and trying to digest the things they’ve brought to my game brain rather deeply.

Do you have any advice for others getting into the industry?

Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there, and do so in person! I try to go to events because I meet people and make fast friends when in the flesh, and those are friendships I really cherish and feel enriched by. Also, don’t underestimate how much you as (not a designer) are valuable to game design! A lot of my best game design ideas come from me essentially abstracting the anxieties of my day to day life doing freelance and being worried about the world into game mechanics and procedures, or finding the particular joys of the media I consume and turning that into a game. A Dire Situation started as an attempt to capture the unique feeling of watching people read things they shouldn’t have access to, which I always enjoy seeing in films. Get weird with your ideas, someone will cherish it and you’ll get to know yourself better through that, and don’t be afraid to share yourself before you’re ‘polished enough’. This industry is so young, and I think a lot of people curtail the considerable wisdom they can bring to it because they aren’t established, but that’s the way that communities grow best, when people exert the best of themselves in the truest way they know.

What do you think the most important things in gaming are right now?

That’s a huge question, and I’m afraid of my answer being too succinct to pin down a lot of the things that I think are valuable and important that are shifting in this medium and the community that fosters it. Right now, there’s a generation of designers and gamers that are pushing to be *way* more inclusive in this medium, which is amazing because it’s such an empathy builder. With that, we’re seeing a lot of games that are reflecting that wider spectrum of experiences and needs at a higher frequency, and seeing that it’s getting good and wide reception. Games like Bluebeard’s Bride, Star Crossed, Mutants in the Night, and BFF:Best Friends Forever are challenging questions of who’s stories are told, who’s perspectives are shared and what kind of exchange do we expect from such a social medium. As things move forward, I think that kind of willingness and encouragement to lean into new experiences without apologizing to established patterns of play and design is going to only help this community grow faster and stronger, even with the anticipated challenges. This medium is showing very explicitly that Joy isn’t just killing goblins, and Pain isn’t just the threat of being killed by goblins, and that kind of emotional honesty is pulling the industry into it’s teenage years.

This also comes with a greater call for accountability in our community as far as social safety. There’s a lot more discussion of missing stairs, safe tables, and supportive gatherings than I felt just a decade ago as a teenager. A lot of conduct has been pulled rather painfully into the light, a lot of social patterns are under intense scrutiny at our tables and in this industry, and I think that’s rightly so. Being in this world, much as I love it, can be so quietly, exhaustively bracing, and the people that make up this industry should feel able to assert what makes them feel safe and when they are threatened. People are actively doing this in games and in the community, and that’s amazing.

What’s your most meaningful gaming experience?

Generally, one that has enough trust to get uncomfortable. One where I can lean into the vulnerabilities of characters, and embolden fellow players to do the same. I look for kind of emotionally intense, bracing media, and I love feeling that way (or provoking that feeling) in a game. I want my assumptions shaken up a little bit, and, assuming it’s navigated compassionately and safely, I value going to dark places in games. It pulls a lot of the horror and strife of my actual world into perspective. I generally like my fantasy to reflect my reality and give me the vocabulary and process to make it better, or at least see it more clearly. There’s nothing wrong with lighter fare, but this is what will get my attention reliably.

What’s the most important change you could see occurring in the industry?

More than a few, but paying freelancers livable wages (even if it means shrinking the density of content) is the big one. There’s tons of ways to unpack this, and tons of reasons that workloads are overweighed and underpaid, many being unintentional for the majority of the market. In some ways, that’s made it even harder to check. The flipside is that I’ve had ADs in the industry say things along the lines of “artists take (RPG work) on as a hobby, nobody is doing this for full time work” and that sentiment really blew my mind. So many really talented artists spending so much time, money and effort perfecting craft and that’s a sentiment that’s we might be competing against when trying to navigate to a workable and healthy architecture of work. I think there’s a lot of wanting to do better on the business end, especially in indie RPGs, but the whole industry needs to (and is trying to) go through that learning process. The continued challenge to stick with those better principles I think is an instrumental change to the community’s sustainability.

Anything else you want to add?

When practicing magic, make sure to add salt!

And thank you for your time, Tracy!

  Gnome Stew Notables – Jabari Weathers published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames