Wickedness, Fiction-First: An Interview With The Creator Of Wicked Ones
Hello there! You are reading the TEETH newsletter, written and compiled by the pseudo-chromatic Jim Rossignol and the quasi-occult Marsh Davies. This is a newsletter about table-top role-playing games: our own—that we’re publishing over here or and also here —with writing about work by some other lovely people whom we link to below. Want us to see your work? Get in touch!
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Hello, you.
Dune Update?
Links!
An interview with Ben ‘Wicked Ones’ Nielson.
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Hello, you.
BEHOLD: today we have a GIGANTIC interview with one of the most familiar Forged In The Dark TTRPG names, that of Ben Nielson. Ben was the creator of Wicked Ones, which is one of the most popular and broadly well known games based on that ruleset, and widely played in the community. Ben is also created Relic, a “teamwork versus titans” game which looks super interesting. I will say no more, as Mr Nielson has plenty to say for himself in the interview that follows!
In game-world our Tuesday night sessions have been restarted with Trophy Gold, which I will talk about in more detail at the end of the campaign, but suffice to say I am super excited about because it’s just such an interesting and potent ruleset, with some incredible settings (or Incursions, in their parlance.) We’ve already begun our descent into something horrible, and sticky.
And meanwhile in creativity-land, Marsh and I have been doing more incisive TEETH work, with a restructure of the huge amount of guff we’ve written and a layout of the worldbook from Marsh. More details on the Actual Books real soon! x
Dune Update?!
Following on from last time’s extra-special Dune tangent, we - quite coincidentally - came to play the Dune boardgame in all its re-issued 1979 version glory, courtesy of both Mojang’s Alex Wiltshire, who owns the game in question, and Playstation Access, who owned a space in which we were to play. Incredibly, that space was the same office in Bath where I started my writing career working for PC Gamer magazine. And we played the game of machiavellian space struggle where Comrade Gillen once sat writing about Deus Ex. What weird twenty-year loop that was! (For me, anyway.)
The game itself ran for over four hours, as you might expect with all six players at the table, and we began to regret choosing Sunday evening for our grand session. It played out near-perfectly, with the alliance-igniting worm appearance completely collapsing the starting dynamic of the game, in which the Guild nearly won in the opening moves, into three factions (Atreides/Bene Gesserit, CHOAM/Fremen, Emperor/Harkonnen.) This led to the Emperor - that’s me! - bankrolling the Harkonnen, who had been effectively pushed off world, to come back and crush the other factions in a series of brutal moves on the key locations of the game. It was so Dune that I imagined I found myself scraping a patina of sand from behind my ears. I would play it again in a shot.
I rate it QUITE GOOD, on the Quite Scale.
(But we played Cosmic Encounter, instead, of course.)
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LINKS!
Space games have been on our mind recently, so I was super interested to pick up Jack Harrison’s Orbital. We’ve played a couple of these diceless, moved-based RPGs over the past few years, and I have to say that I want to play more. This one is particularly intriguing, being about keeping a space-station sanctuary safe against a backdrop of interstellar war. It’s about creating your characters, and creating a community to safeguard (or otherwise!) It’s also very pretty.
I am so into this Spanish horror fantasy game, La Puerta de Ishtar, that I could cry (because it is in Spanish, and I am a lumpen one-language Anglo-Saxon oaf). It’s worth reading the linked thread for the full, translated description, but it’s essentially a fantasy-setting mythologisation of ancient Akkadian history, with all the horrible implications of godlike slave-kings of that era. Let’s hope for a full translation!
Mork Borg monster generator. “Lair: A blood-splattered, destroyed chicken coop.” And so on.
“… a general trend toward larger relative brain size in terrestrial vertebrates through geologic time, and the energetic efficiency of an upright posture in slow-moving, bipedal animals” The World Of Dinosauroids.
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BUY OUR GAMES THOUGH, PLEASE
Hello, yes, the TEETH games aren’t just on itch.io now, they’re also on the mighty DriveThruRPG, so if that’s your portal of choice then you can collect our games over there!
STRANGER & STRANGER, a 63-page, campaign-length adventure in which a group of hapless bumpkins attempt to save their village from abomination, while undergoing a series of grimly amusing mutations.
BLOOD COTILLION, a 45-page one-shot in which assassins dress-up in fluttering petticoats, attempt to infiltrate a society ball and murder the cultists therein. Think: Pride & Terminate with Extreme Prejudice.
NIGHT OF THE HOGMEN, a 23-page one-shot in which an assortment of travellers are forced to flee a massive horde of monstrous pig-creatures. It's name-your-own-price, so you can dive in without onerous financial risk!
They're all low prep, rules-lite and easy to get into. Hogmen is particularly ideal for newcomers! Please do check them out, and, if you are interested in supporting our exploits, please buy on itch, or now on DriveThruRPG!
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Interview (Teethterview? Perhaps that only worked the first time, if it worked at all.)
A Wicked Relic: Ben Nielson on forging games, outsider perspectives, and RPGs in the classroom.
Rossignol: Let's kick off with the fact that you are the author of a Forged In the Dark game! You published Wicked Ones, which our audience may or may not be familiar with (we'll fill them in!) and that this was one of the first wave of Forged In the Dark games we saw appear: can you tell me a bit about your own first encounter with Blades In the Dark? Why does that game system appeal to you? What did it mean to you personally and how was it a part of your tabletop experience? Why do you think the Forged In The Dark system had some much impact?
Nielson: I think the first time I came across Blades was while trying to design an economy system for another game I was tinkering with. I liked the idea of not specifically tracking exact amounts of currency characters had, such as giving them wealth levels, but I also liked the nice feel of spending something you earned. Through that search, I happened upon the Blades online SRD and read over their Coin system. That was enough to convince me to grab the book and put the seed in my head of maybe building a Forged in the Dark game.
Blades was really my first foray into fiction-first gaming - I hadn't played a PbtA game at that point or story games, not that there were all that many around. I think what appeals so strongly about Blades is the openness of that meta channel where there's a lot of communication that can happen between the players and GM about how the fiction is mapping back towards mechanics. That in itself was an interesting concept to wrap my head around and, as a player, was very freeing - the mechanics exist as kind of a net that catches the fiction. So you start with what's happening "on-screen" then try to find the mechanic that best fits that - you don't look towards your character sheet for inspiration on what to do, you look towards your imagination, touchstones, and the types of scenes you'd like to see play out.
Rossignol: I've seen you mention how Wicked Ones is the sort of "Dungeon Keeper" of Forged In the Dark RPGs - can you explain a bit about how you approached that? What sort of stuff in the game ended up capturing that classic game's "monsters versus the world" feel in your design? How have players responded to that?
Nileson: So the idea of "monsters versus the world" is kind of already deeply baked into FitD - playing as scoundrels in a boiler pot city you can't leave. You have to carve out your own little bit of it and there's going to be pushback no matter what you do. I'd had the concept of a "dungeon builder" RPG rolling around in my head forever, but as soon as I played Blades, it all clicked on how that might actually work at the table.
Of course, it wasn't nearly as simple as I thought it would be. In Blades, things can be pretty gray. You're a scoundrel, but you're not necessarily an evil human being. But in our fiction, you're playing as something evil. Now, not all monsters have to be evil in the fiction at your table - there can be orcs happily farming away in their village far away, but the tropes within "dungeon" fiction almost demand that you are evil. So that's the buy-in that players need to make, to buy into playing evil characters who have evil motivations. They're playing B-movie-esque villains and I really wanted them to lean into that.
One way we did this was through our added Dark Impulse mechanic. Each character has one and it's basically just the kind of trouble that they tend to get into. They might be reckless, or a bigmouth, or cruel, and so on. When the player plays into these traits outside of the group's normal plans, they're rewarded with a meta-currency called a Dark Heart that they can spend later to take +1d to a roll. So if they're cruel and they take a moment to swing the head of the mayor around in front of the villagers as their buddies run off, endangering themselves but leaning into that evilness, they get rewarded for that kind of "inefficient" gameplay. The GM can also compel them to act on their impulses when it really matches a scene - the GM might be the one to call for that, saying "This is a great way to be cruel here, just revelling in the fact you just chopped off their beloved mayor's head." When the GM compels you, it carries weight - you have to burn a resource called stress to suppress that compel and do the more efficient action. Or you play into it and take the +1d. Tying this all together is also the fact that when your stress runs out, unlike in normal Blades, you Go Feral and are instantly compelled to follow through on your Dark Impulse. So suddenly, in the middle of the scene, you must send the whole plan awry.
That was a bit of a long first part of this answer, but it was really important for the players to buy into the fact that they are most certainly not the good guys and the adventurers coming to kill them are doing so for good reason. In addition to that, we also created a very simple light / neutral / dark system for factions that map to your typical fantasy factions. While there are certainly evil human factions and a faction of peaceful goblins, there is still a language barrier that separates all of them. Light factions speak the light tongue, neutral factions can speak one/both/neither, and dark factions (which the players are always monstrous races of) can speak the dark tongue - plus a small scattering of light tongue words for fun. There needed to be a divide there as playtesting showed that opening up that language channel between the PCs and their enemies created weird, non-dungeon-tropey gameplay. Of note, though, one of the callings (the Conniver) can take the Light Tongue as an ability to dip into that kind of gameplay if they'd like.
As a final answer to this is Dungeon Logic. As said above, you're not a kobold or whatever, you're a kobold that's evil enough to want to build a dungeon and raid the other factions for loot. You want to have a nefarious master plan and be the big bad evil ones. But dungeons are kind of not very logical - I mean, when we really think about them, especially in the context of our own reality, they just don't make a whole lot of sense. But they do have their own internal logic and we lay this out in a series of points called Dungeon Logic. When you don't follow Dungeon Logic, you risk calamity happening within your dungeon. Dungeon Logic points are things like small minions should be cannon fodder with more powerful creatures at the back of the dungeon, dungeons that are too nonsensical to live in drive the minions there crazy so you can't completely create forever-pathways that lead nowhere filled with traps, and the dungeon needs a steady in-flow of loot to keep everyone under you pacified. And you need all these creatures and minions and traps because you do have evil machinations, adventurers are definitely coming for you to try to rid the world of your evil, and they are very, very powerful so you can't fight them fair.
Rossignol: What was your experience of working with Forged In The Dark as a rule system? Did you find there were any complexities in retooling it for your game idea? What were the big lessons?
Nielson: This is a really big topic, but Wicked Ones is probably one of the furthest departures from the base FitD system of all of the FitD hacks I've seen. Some people have even complained about that, that it's like they have to relearn large parts of the system or they'll mix the mechanics up. A lot of people in our community have called it FitD 1.5 or a branch of FitD because the changes we've made have been so extensive. I think FitD was very finely tuned to the fiction in Blades and that designer part of me really wanted my game to recreate the monster fiction in a way satisfying to me. So aside from just making the game "monstery," I was also "fixing" parts of FitD that I didn't care for so much as a designer/player. One example of this is how resistances work - in base FitD, the stress loss can be really swingy and resistances are always guaranteed to work. In Wicked Ones, how effective the resistance is is based on the roll itself (you roll actions instead of attributes, another change) and the stress loss is far less swingy. We wanted players to have more control over that element - and I think it's because when you stress out and go feral as mentioned above. Another change there is that in base FitD, you can always so no to dying - we wanted to take that away. A failure on a resistance roll when the consequence is death means you die. Life is more brutal as a monster.
I could go through almost every mechanic in Wicked Ones and talk about how we've tinkered it to match the stories we want to play out and how that's made it diverge further and further from base FitD, but that would be...about as long as the book itself. I think the big lesson is that it's really hard to create a basic game framework without a lot of flavor already baked into it and as a hacker of that framework, it can sometimes be a bit of an uphill battle to wrestle the game into doing what you want it to. It's also hard to avoid golden cows in the system, things that almost everyone will assume are necessary for it to even function properly or be called FitD. I haven't seen a lot of FitD games without position/effect, for example. But the really interesting thing about that is that PbtA has already had this long conversation "What is a PbtA game?" and Harper himself has even come out to say that Blades in the Dark itself IS PbtA. We're all just building on each others' work in weird ways and if the label is useful and you feel like it applies, that's good. But the problem area there is that it can be misleading to potential customers - they definitely come into a FitD game with certain expectations (there's a crew element, open meta channel communication, large amounts of player agency, a strict cycle of play, etc.) and the less of those boxes you tick, the more confused they're going to be.
And that's why with my current project, Relic (heavily inspired by Shadow of the Colossus), we've left the FitD label behind, taken a lot of the lessons we've learned developing Wicked Ones, and are building our own in-house system. We look at Free League as the model for us moving forward. I think that hackable systems are really easily accessible for new designers and really help avoid some common pitfalls they might make, but (at least for me) they're also something that you kind of grow out of as you want your games to better produce the results at the table that you want. So we're building our own system that, I mean it is Forged in the Dark in a sense - it's an extension of our work with Wicked Ones. And that was based on Blades, which is a PbtA game. So is Wicked Ones PbtA? Is our next game Relic FitD and PbtA? These labels start to get really confusing and not so useful. It was very freeing to lose those labels and just design without those certain expectations.
Rossignol: Just as an aside, do you get any time for PC gaming now? (My day job is still in the PC gaming world, so it's fun when there's cross-pollination of concepts like this.)
Nielson: Yeah, I try to make time for PC gaming but it's interesting. As a roleplaying gamer, I like trying new stuff - that also kind of feeds my designer brain a bit, I guess. But as a PC gamer, I just stick to the stuff I love. I tend towards grand strategy stuff like Europa Universalis, CKII, Civilization. Occasionally, I'll dip into a new game in that strategy genre that grabs me - I recently grabbed Hero's Hour, which is a kind of remake of Heroes of Might & Magic with an 8-bit aesthetic. It was good fun. I mean, the game Wicked Ones itself was inspired by the PC game Dungeon Keeper and I even had the chance to partner with Brightrock Games and make a campaign setting based on their DK spiritual successor War for the Overworld. That's up on DTRPG right now and all proceeds go to benefit Child's Play charity, so that was a cool experience. Legend of Keepers has been fun in a similar vein to Wicked Ones as well.
Also, occasionally a rogue-like will come along and just eat all of my free time for a week or two - I'm looking right at you, Hades. Had to uninstall it, it was so addictive.
Rossignol: Do you find that you pick up inspiration and ideas from stuff outside TTRPGs and then find yourself figuring out how they'd work at the tabletop? What sort of stuff sparks your interest?
Nielson: All the time - I think every designer does. I mean, we all steal from books, TV, and so on. That's the obvious stuff. Another obvious one, but I have a notepad app on my phone that's just full of random quickly typed things that occur while I'm on the subway because I saw some handbag and it made me think of something or a little drawing of a titan concept (I can't draw - at all) that a building inspired me to do. I think a lot of creatives do that kind of thing - you need a place to dump those at-the-moment thoughts. For me, that's Google Keep and it's just this chaotic mess of notes, half thoughts, pictures, and other stuff that's fun to go back through and harvest ideas from - or wonder what the hell I was thinking.
Beyond that, I have two young daughters - 3 and 6 years old. Reading their storybooks, simple stories or simplified versions of classics, is really great inspiration on how to cut right to the impactful moments in the story. I think it also kind of gives a bit of insight that for each player, their character arcs are playing out in these kind of complex ways but a thought struck me at one point while reading these stories that in a roleplaying game, most of the other players are just getting that simplified version of your character usually. They don't always get your full arcs or the things that are important for your character. Not to avoid the current topic of Wicked Ones and talk about my next game too much, but in Relic characters earn advancements through filling out story arcs. They define a broad theme they want to pursue, then at the end of each session they identify one moment that pushed that arc forward. It's really retrospective and the character arcs grow in ways that the players themselves might not have even intended, but it's also a nice way to simplify the story down to a digestible version for the other players at the table to really enjoy. When you complete that arc you're on, the other players get it - they saw you go through it and talk about it at the end of each session. In your head, you're getting the full-on Disney movie version of Cinderella, but the other players can at least keep up and get the complete, but simplified Little Golden Books version of it. And just the act of saying it out loud, they'll get invested and interested in your character more, too, since they know what's going on with them.
Just another note here on having kids - I watch a LOT of kids movies these days and have just absolutely exhausted the Disney catalogue. Moana has made its way into my top 10 all-time favourite movies and I always use it as a grounding point while designing character mechanics. I try to imagine characters from that movie (and a few others, The Walking Dead and Firefly characters are really tropey and good for this, too) and then map them to the mechanics I've laid out and see how they feel. It's a bit hard, and strange, to think about how deeply that movie has stuck with me as a design influence.
I also live in Japan and being outside of western culture provides quite a different perspective on society. Studying Japanese to a high fluency level and just forming thoughts in that other language, which has a very, very different word order and style of expression than English, has this passive influence on me that I can't really point to anything specifically and say "That's because I speak Japanese and live in Japan." but I'm sure that the influence is there. Also weathering the pandemic here while still being connected back home (originally from Missouri) and watching how the society you live in drastically changes the approach to these kinds of disasters was impactful. I think a lot about that when designing regions, cultures, and settlements... I could walk into a grocery store right now, in 2022, and (despite whatever anyone's thoughts on the pandemic and whatever are...let's put that aside, but...) every single person in that grocery store will be wearing a mask. 100% - I would bet any amount of money on that. Society has a huge influence on how we deal with adversity and experiencing a different society firsthand can be pretty impactful.
Rossignol: You and I are both of a generation where D&D was pretty much the default experience for tabletop gamers starting out, but I am not sure that's quite as true for people now? D&D clearly still dominates both the market and cultural consciousness, but one member of our regular group played Blades In The Dark as their first RPG, and has never (so far!) touched a D&D game, and - anecdotally at least - I have started to encounter others whose first RPG was Call of Cthulhu or Honey Heist. Do you think that default entry point is changing? And if you met someone who wanted to explore TTRPGs as a newbie, what would you recommend they play or read? What do you hand to people now?
Nielson: Yep, I cut my teeth on DND 3.5. The other big one there was my next step in Vampire: The Masquerade. I think on that point, D&D is still an entry point for so many - and even more numbers-wise (but not % wise) now - because of Critical Role, actual plays, streams, etc. The D&D Youtube community is huge and it just brings it massive amounts of people - which is great, I think. But at my/our? entry point, well for me that was about 2001. It was right before geek culture started getting cool - Star Wars had come out and that was pretty cool and LotR busted things open, then we got the flood of comic book movies and suddenly it was cool to be geeky.
That obviously led to an explosion in TTRPG development... there wasn't nearly as many games as there are today and it's never been as easy as it is now to publish. Back in our day, you needed physical books that required a real print-run to make. Even pirating stuff online was hard then - and a generation before impossible. I remember pirating the 3.5e splatbooks as a poor college kid - scanned copies of them. I think you couldn't even buy them in any digital format. So you know, access to this stuff is easier than ever and being geeky is cooler than it's ever been. But I also think that knowledge, as a GM, has taught a lot of us that introducing new players via D&D is a terrible way to bring them into the hobby. It's going to lock them into that bubble of endless content and community that's already out there for D&D, so GMs make strides to bring people in via stuff they think is cool. And what's really nice is that fiction-first or narrativist/story games and such are often way easier for new players to grab onto.
For many years, I taught English as a second language here in Japan. I do full-time TTRPG dev now, but I ran my own English school for about seven years (and more teaching before that). In the last few years of running my school, I started developing TTRPGs so the conversation in class would sometimes turn towards that but TTRPGs aren't so big here and almost nobody can even conceptualize what it is, even when explained. So I would run my students a small demo. I find that Japanese are pretty rules-abiding people - not to stereotype too much, but there's just not a lot of rulebreaking going on here, not much crime. So what I liked to do was use a super basic FitD-lite type system. You are Strong, Smart, Fast.. you get 1d, 2d, and 3d to assign. They assign them, then I tell them - "You're sitting outside a museum at night and the local gang boss has demanded that you bring him a certain painting from inside. You know there are guards inside and you know that if you don't get that painting, that gang boss is going to come after your family. What do you do?" And I just throw them right into it. It's a great way to practice language learning, but it's fascinating to see these 50 year old businessmen, 19 year old college kids, mid-30s housewives, etc. etc., all different kinds of people just pick up the concept and run with it. There's no real mechanics, just the dice rolls telling you success/partial success/failure and the story moving forward and they all tend to love it. They start out REALLY adverse to breaking the rules and being the criminal, but slowly slip into the role and think on whether they're doing it for the crime or for the safety of their family. Without fail, it almost always ends with them getting caught and thrown into the back of a police car or something and we end the session with, "Okay, how are you going to escape from these police?"
It's good fun and great language learning, but the real takeaway is that fiction first is just easier for new people. Just tell me what the character does and the GM/mechanics will figure out what that means mechanically. You don't look at your list of class abilities for inspiration (i.e. limitation, really) on what to do, you think about that character and what it can do and then just say that you do it. That's an easy entry into the hobby.
Rossignol: The other thing that I have been encountering a lot of the past few years is GMs, generally old school folk, saying that they just don't have time to prep stuff anymore, but I feel like the current generation of games is so low-prep that this isn't really as much of a concern, do you feel like that? Is that a thing games should aim for, do you think?
Nielson: This answer is going to be short, I guess. I don't prep at all because I like to find out what story the players are going to tell me. I'm their audience more than their storyteller. I like being that kind of GM. Others don't, they want to weave grand tales that players participate in - and some players want to be part of those grand tales instead of making the grand tale themselves. Some players are find with semi-cohesive stories or figuring out why something happened later or just letting a detail hang and never get explained. Go back and watch the TV show LOST... some players can play in that kind of campaign where it just hurtles forward and doesn't always make sense and some stuff gets mentioned and never touched on again and everyone's okay with it because it's fun. Others need to wrap it up all nicely. Lots of different players, lots of different kinds of games - none of it is right or wrong.
For me, I don't prep. That part's not fun for me and I really want the players to tell me cool stories. I also make games for myself - and that's an important point, I think. I'm really selfish in that way. I don't want to make something to appease an audience or just make some money (I'd be churning out D&D 5e content if I did). I just want to make the game that I want to play.
Rossignol: Can you tell us a bit about the current Kickstarter for Wicked Ones? Can you tell us about Undead Awakening? How does it change the experience?
Nielson: The current Kickstarter is really just a nice, big exclamation point at the end of the years we've spent with Wicked Ones. We get to go back and do it right - we went digital/POD only release the first time to minimize risk, but now we get to make a beautiful book with lots of cool stuff that we want to see. That's really what it's about. It's cool other people also want that cool stuff, but like the answer above - this Kickstarter is really a huge self-indulgence. I needed this closure.
Undead Awakening was written by Cass Rea, who joined me about 1/3 the way through the WO process. He wanted to get involved and make something extra for the original Kickstarter, so he thought some Undead Playbooks and and undead mode would be cool. That ballooned into this entirely different game, with a really new gameplay experience. In Wicked Ones, the focus is on your dungeon and each player is working together to build up that dungeon and pursue a Master Plan that you all decide on together. It focuses it into one campaign arc and everyone generally works towards that. In Undead Awakening, it's kind of like Army of Darkness but you're the army leaders. You've risen, a generational awakening of the undead menace, and you're set out to crush humanity in a faster paced campaign (6-8 sessions vs. 16 session for WO). You grow in power faster and the whole thing just has this crazy forward momentum. Dark Impulses mentioned above have been reworked into a shared set of undead impulses - Reverie, Hunger, and Torment. Reverie is your past life coming back into the scene - you see a picture on the wall that makes you remember that you were a mother once, taking you out of the moment while you narrate some flashback or it affects the scene in some way. Hunger is chompin on some brains - that's obvious. Torment is toying around with your prey... we felt that undead shared these by and large.
The coolest thing we implemented in Undead Awakening is a system to spend stress to create opportunity for yourself, to explain why humans do the dumb things they do in movies. UA is meant to be more like a horror movie, really. So as a quick example, I was once playing as this creepy, lurker undead waiting out in a forest. We wanted to get into a town, but it was well guarded - they knew the undead were closing in. We needed some way to open it up, so I spent my stress and told the GM - "There's a couple of young lovers and they're sneaking out of town for some time in the forest..." Pretty typical, tropey scene. The GM makes a roll to see exactly how good the circumstances were for me - perfect. So I do my creepy lurker thing, kill the guy and have his girlfriend run screaming away. The guards are now running out into the forest while the other PCs are heading into town with some zombies in tow from the other direction.
The thing about this is that the scene is player driven. We have this functionality in Wicked Ones to some extent, the ability for players to add information through mechanics. But it's more deeply ingrained in UA, that horror movie tropes create the "Oh no, don't open the door!" scene so we've focused on it a lot more mechanically as a gameplay driver. The cool part about it is that this is the players building the fiction on the fly - they're coming up with prompts they want to play off of because they have a scene in mind. They don't need to wait for the GM to feed them something and there's a structure for it, so it's not just asking the GM for a freebie. Spend your stress, if it's a really beneficial situation the GM can make a roll to see how beneficial it is for you, and it just happens. The GM has a veto power on anything nonsensical but is encouraged to go along with what the players want to do most of the time since they're the ones telling the awesome story.
Rossignol: What do you think are the biggest challenges for creators using Kickstarter right now? Is there anything you've learned you'd want to share with other creators?
Nielson: I could write forever about this, but I kind of don't want to if you don't mind. You can ask me about it again at some other point and I'm an open book, but this is a very, very long topic. In short, you need a mailing list and/or a Discord server, you need people to get on it, and you need to build hype before you launch your campaign. That's the key. Any way that you can get people to willingly sign up to be notified of the thing that just went live will increase its chances of success. It's obvious, but there it is. Every single time you talk about your game, link your Discord or website that has a very clear box where people can enter their e-mail address to get notified.
Challenge-wise, fulfilling physical stuff is a nightmare right now because of shipping times. Drivethrurpg is a godsend for new creators - use their print-on-demand options. Don't try to print and fulfil anything yourself the first time, just focus on finishing your project and offload that stress onto DTRPG. Don't make your first project your magnum opus, make it something you really want to do but can move on from when it's done.
Rossignol: Let's talk about gaming as a hobby: are you running with a regular group? Do you play face to face or digital? Do you get time to play much aside from testing your own games? What have you played and what do you want to play? (We're just getting back to a backlog of stuff we want to play now!) Tell us what you find exciting in the TTRPG space right now.
I run a weekly playtest game of Relic online. I haven't played in a face to face game in about two years, and just a one-shot then. Before that was about 4 years prior. And unfortunately, no, I don't get much time to play other than testing right now. Once Wicked Ones and Undead Awakening are completely behind us, I'll settle into a 2 games/week schedule again and use the second slot to do some Relic one-shot testing of specific things or slipping into other games as a player to try out systems I'm into or wanna see what's up with them mechanically.
I really want to play well-run OSR by a GM that is great at it, and I mean like fantasy OSR stuff. I'd also like to try out Mothership - and speaking of which, I want to play the Alien RPG because everyone raves about how well it captures the feel. These are all games I know I would enjoy and are really clear to see how I'd feel playing them just by reading the rules. I'd also really like to play in a game of Wildsea and Savage Union. Wildsea comes really close mechanically to stuff I work on. These are all kind of the post-FitD games I think, where like the post-PbtA games learned their lessons and made stuff, a huge chunk of designers engaged with FitD and then moved on from it to do their own iterations. Savage Union seems stylistically cool and I want to see how they made the Quest d20 system meatier. Speaking of mech stuff, I want to play in a Lancer campaign because I actually really liked D&D 4e's combat mini-game and I think splitting "mech fighting" and "other mechanics" is the perfect way to implement a separate combat system. It's always weird when combat has one set of rules and everything else another and the wall between the two (initiative, etc.), but the fiction in Lancer is the perfect reason to do such a thing. So giving that a try would be neat.
I want to do some solo games - I haven't had a chance to do a full game of Artefact or its follow-up Bucket of Bolts. Of course Thousand Year Old Vampire is on my list, but I feel like that game would suck me in. I studied humanities in university with a big focus on renaissance / reformation / restoration history and seen other people say how much TYOV will lead you down a Wikipedia hole... I feel like I would disappear down that hole for far, far too long.
I also want to play Wanderhome, a game that's so far outside of my wheelhouse (mechanically) that I'm not even sure what it would be like as an experience, but that game, the art, and especially the writing are beautiful. I've read that book several times now and go to it for creative inspiration a lot. It's just joyful to read... but to play? I don't know. I can't quite wrap my mind around what playing it would feel like. So I'd like to play that.
Yeah, this last one's a tough question to give a good answer to because there's just so much awesome stuff out there and it's all so mechanically different these days, better capturing the feel of the genre they're going for.
Rossignol: Thanks for your time.
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More soon! x