CUTE!! Thought Eater Tournament

New entries for the Thought Eater DIY RPG Essay Tournament.

Again: these are not by me--they're by a pair of anonymous DIY RPG peeps who were both assigned to write about: Cute: the Uses of Cute, Anything You Have To Say About Cute.

Anybody reading is eligible to vote for which one you like best and voting will be cut off once all the votes for all the first round Thought Eater essays are up...

First One

If you like this one better, send an email with the Subject "CUTE1" to zakzsmith AT hawt mayle or vote on Google +. Don't put anything else in the email, I won't read it.

In a Fourth-Edition-era podcast, one of the game developers complained about his character's lame Figurine of Wondrous Power, the "Pearl Sea Horse." The devs ribbed each other about how this magic item managed to get published. At the time, I thought, wow, this dev team needs more perspectives. I know plenty of players who would love that sea horse.

The Pearl Seahorse was one of the few cute elements that slipped into a very macho edition. The 4e designers avoided anything cute or whimsical as if they were afraid of D&D backsliding into My Little Pony - as if they wanted to make the statement that D&D was a grown-up, serious, spiky fantasy game. In doing so, 4e missed a cue from the most influential grown-up serious spiky fantasist of our time, George R R Martin, who literally started Game of Thrones by giving every character a puppy.

Brain stirrers

There's something about the fantasy of acquiring money: the desire is so strong, and the payoff is so sweet, that it's as if the smell of gold reaches straight into the brain, bypassing reason and decision making, to stir the grey matter to action. That's a major reason why the old school D&D treasure hunt is such a heady brew. Even in 5e, where you don't get XP for GP and there's virtually nothing to spend your money on, many players - myself included - rapaciously hunt down every silver piece they can find. For these players, all that's necessary for a game is for the DM to say "there's money in this hole in the ground" and step back. The players will make their own game.

For a smaller subset of players - again including myself - the desire for cute things is as hardwired as the desire for money. For a brief period while playing through the 3e Red Hand of Doom module, acquiring an intelligent giant owl mount became more important to me than saving Elsir Vale. In the game I'm DMing now, the party cleric will do anything for the safety and comfort of her oracular otters.

If you're a DM lucky enough to have one of these - let's call them "cuteness sensitive" - players in your group, you have a powerful tool at your disposal to increase everyone's investment in your campaign world. All you have to do is introduce an animal, a kid, a unicorn, or a pseudodragon - in any capacity - and step back. The cuteness-sensitive players will be sucked into the narrative and pull the rest of the players along with them. They'll make their own game. They'll come up with plans to befriend this creature, protect that creature from those potential dangers, and, in general, save you a lot of work. (I spent my most recent D&D session assassinating a Fever-Dreaming Marlinko NPC because we'd heard that her orphanage charity was insufficiently charitable.)

Don't think of this as a lever to manipulate players but as a spring that generates gameplay, like the players' desire for money and mayhem. And it's an underused spring, because of the cuteness-negative DMs who think that everyone would be ashamed to ride a seahorse.

the cuteness rule

Now that I've made a case for the cute in D&D, I have to add a warning. Movies generally abide by a narrative rule about what you're allowed to do to cute things. This rule carries over to D&D. I DMed one game where some players intended to cut off a cow's legs to jam it, still living, through a sewer tunnel. A cuteness-positive player objected with real anger and nearly attacked the other characters. Beneath the anger was a sense of betrayal that I, as the DM, could countenance such a should-be-impossibility. On their side, the cow-threateners were perfectly aware of the narrative rule, and were titillated by the idea of breaking it.

The Cuteness Rule is this: don't kill or torture innocent things onscreen. Don't demonstrate a villain's evil by having him kill a baby, or introduce a little lost pseudodragon so that you can have a monster jump out and eat it before the players' eyes. You might make the players mad, but it will be an immersion-breaking anger at the DM. If the players have no hand in the death, it's not the players staking something valuable, it's the DM using an emotional trick to bludgeon them.

So does everything cute get a free pass? No sir. You can slaughter all the adorable little NPCs you want under the following exceptions to the Cuteness Rule:

You can kill combatants. A player buys a war dog. Even if he says it's a sweater-wearing war dachshund with one ear flopped over, and even if he loves his pretend dog, it's a combatant and he's offering it up as stakes every time he takes it into battle.

You can put cute things at risk. If Cruella de Vil gets her hands on some puppies, she's going to try to turn them into coats.  Cuteness-positive players will make a lot of sacrifices to stop her, including storming her house, which is good because Cruella's house is probably a great, creepy dungeon worth exploring. The important thing is not that the puppies live, it's that the players had a chance to save them. Even if the players try their best and fail, that's the game rules killing the puppies, not some jerk of a DM.

You can kill a killer bunny. Players will happily slaughter anything, no matter how cute, if it does a heel turn first. Carbuncles, for instance, look adorable but turn out to be dicks. Don't overuse this trick or players will write off everything cute as a probable villain.

You can do whatever you want if you're that good. (moldy old spoilers ahead) Atticus shoots a dog, Sophie chooses a kid. George R R Martin kills puppies. If you think you're good enough of a storyteller to turn a dead owl familiar into an emotionally transcendant moment, then do whatever you want. Otherwise, stick to the Cuteness Rule.


Second One

If you like this one better, send an email with the Subject "CUTE2" to zakzsmith AT hawt mayle or vote on Google +. Don't put anything else in the email, I won't read it.


Cute things. Cuteness. What is it? How does it work? How should you use it (and not use it)?

For me, thinking about “cute” starts out with its presumed evolutionary origin: finding things cute was “adaptive”. For those not into evolutionary lingo, what that means is that those mammals that found their babies adorable, rather than insufferable, did more to take care of them. With that care, more babies grew up, were successful, and reproduced - passing on the trait of finding things cute. Basically, cuteness creates an emotional connection. And we can use that for RPGs.

Now, what’s interesting is that the propensity to find certain traits cute doesn’t stop with your own babies, or even with your own species. Anything that shows similar traits reads as “cute”. Kittens. Puppies. Even cuttlefish with their big eyes and big “heads” compared to their bodies. Even though most cute features are visual, some are tactile - like being soft or fluffy.

So, cuteness is: A primarily visual way to make otherwise annoying or demanding things likeable.

What does that tell us for RPGs? First, if you want to make something cute, rely on visual description. It’s even better if you provide pictures. Either way, go for stereotypically babyish features: big head, large eyes, small nose, stubby limbs, being “soft”, being obviously playful, being confused/amazed by everyday things, and getting overly upset/scared by everyday things.

Basically, if you want to make something cute, think about a baby or a puppy, and make your thing more like one of those.

Okay, so what do you do with it? First, the obvious: you can use the emotional reaction to something cute to motivate the players to take care of something. Even something that would pragmatically be an eminently droppable burden. Want to give some teeth to the “protect the royal prince” mission? Make that kid freaking adorable.

Related is another pretty basic choice: make pets or companions a more enjoyable thing to have around. Players will emotionally connect more with cute imaginary creatures/children/ companions and like them better because of it.

Now, you can also twist it around on players. Trap or “gotcha” monsters can be more enticing if they are cute. I’d use this sparingly, though, especially if you intend to make cuteness matter elsewhere. Use it too much, and it’ll be just another thing for your callous players to ignore.

It gets more interesting when you consider the ways you can pervert cuteness without cheapening it. One classic example is using cuteness to force awkward or uncomfortable decisions. Zak S. recently used this technique with his horrible Jackelmen: they throw babies in spiked armor as a weapon. Players have to choose between saving the baby and taking damage, or dodging the babies and letting them die. Ouch. Arnold K. has “Feral Babies” - horrible little beasts that will attack you for real damage, but are otherwise normal human babies with parents and families and everything. How do you deal with that? Or what about the old chestnut of using dogs or pigs as totally expendable fodder? I bet if you were able to foster even a fraction of the protective feeling owners have for their real pets, you’d see much different decisions about risking them.

Cuteness can also help to create a feeling of weirdness and horror. The most obvious way is putting cute things at risk or doing them harm. This might genuinely upset people or come across as cheap, so use some care - but the whole point of cuteness is that it creates an instant emotional investment in something. You can use that emotional investment to make a real impact that’s hard to do otherwise.

If you want to get really nasty, make the creepy/weird thing cute in and of itself. Like a baby who makes neighbors’ heads explode with psychic outbursts. Or an adorable puppy that tears people apart on the full moon. This edges into the “awkward decisions” mentioned above, but the emotional conflict will also make any horror or weirdness genuinely more unsettling. Unless it devolves into over the top gross/shocking humor, but hey, that’s a fun game too. It might even be useful or interesting to provide situations where your players will clearly want or need to act against something cute. In the same way that occasionally playing an explicitly “evil” character can be fun and rewarding exactly because it lets you ignore usual constraints on actions, you and your players might enjoy making unfettered decisions about cute things - even if it’s a “wow that was so fucked up!” kind of enjoyment.

Contrariwise, you can present something that is actually bad, but is still just so darn cute. Such an approach will probably lead to more laughs than difficult decisions, but it will certainly make things memorable. The key difference from creating weirdness is that here the cute thing isn’t accidentally doing bad stuff. It’s more weird/horrible when you have something cute accidentally doing bad stuff, while it’s more funny when you have something bad that happens to be cute. Think Yzma in Emperor’s New Groove when she gets turned into a kitten.

So, what about how not to use cuteness? Well, no surprise here, but the worst thing you can do is use cuteness as an excuse to override player agency. Trying to force the players to act “cute” to enforce a certain aesthetic? Lame. Insisting that something in-game is cute when the players don’t seem to be treating it that way? Weak sauce.

Cuteness’s whole deal in real life is that it motivates behavior without any coercive power. That kitten can’t really make you do anything - it is literally entirely in your power - but gosh darn it if you don’t really want to take care of it.

This might actually be the most interesting implication of using cute in your games. RPGs tend to rely on pragmatic, concrete “levers” to motive action. Stuff like threats to safety or promises of reward - things that are easy to care about even when they’re imaginary. A lot of the things that motivate us very powerfully in real life - like sexual attraction, desire for glory and prestige, feelings of guilt or obligation - are really hard to use well in RPGs unless your players are really into it or. Cuteness, though,already “hijacks” behaviors, so it provides a lever that can be as compelling as the more concrete, pragmatic stuff.

As great as it is, you have to be judicious. If you make everything cute, or if cute stuff is always dangerous, then it starts losing its power. I recommend dangling potentially cute things sporadically, and once any of the players engage, play that cuteness to the hilt.

Cuteness is a shortcut to emotional engagement. We can take advantage of that shortcut by describing deeply ingrained visual cues and behaviors. That engagement produces richer decision making, which makes for more weirdness, horror, humor, and enjoyment. It’s a softer tool for our toolbox than the usual kinds of threat or reward. To keep its value, though, we want to stop short from forcing the resonance, or from diluting it by over-application.

Go forth and make your games adorable!

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Things That Don't Work (Thought Eater Tournament)

Next pair of entries rolled in for the Thought Eater DIY RPG Essay Tournament.

Here's the drill: these are not by me--they're by a pair of anonymous DIY RPG peeps who were both assigned to write about Some typical feature of RPGs or D&D that doesn't work for you in your game--how and why and whatever else you want to talk about.

Anybody reading is eligible to vote for which one you like best and voting will be cut off once all the votes for all the first round Thought Eater essays are up...

First One

If you like this one better, send an email with the Subject "FAIL1" to zakzsmith AT hawt mayle or vote on Google +. Don't put anything else in the email, I won't read it.


Binary Combat, Win or Die: Why Not Other Stuff?

A Dungeons & Dragons combat encounter, despite requiring dozens of dice rolls, has only a binary resolution. Either you die, or your enemies die. Looking through the 5th Edition Player’s Handbook, the word, ‘surrender’ doesn’t appear once within its 316 pages. The word, ‘flee’ shows up only in the context of mounts and the Command spell. Nowhere do the rules suggest that a conflict might end in anything other than death, and while the Dungeon Master’s Guide makes some effort to address this with the addition of chases, that only adds the possibility of two new outcomes: you escape or your enemies do.

So you might be thinking, ‘So what? Why doesn’t this work?’ The simple answer is that it means a story involving combat can only move forward one way. The party fights and wins until they don’t, at which point a new batch of intrepid heroes begins fighting and winning. Every encounter has to be engineered for success; doesn’t that sounds bland?

Interesting stories require failure. Someone fleeing for their life might break their leg sliding down a ravine, or get their pack torn off by a tree branch. A defeated hero might lose an arm or an eye. He might wake with an ailment, bestowed by the rats nibbling on his fingers or a mosquito helping itself to what little life he has left. Of course, not all failures should be negative. Fleeing heroes might also stumble into a cave and find a lost treasure, or be rescued by a new friend. Similarly a victorious hero should sometimes pay a price for his success. These sorts of things can be found in any story ever written, but they’re utterly absent from D&D. When we lose, it's generally game over. We roll up new characters and begin a new adventure. When we win, we win completely. We bear no battle wounds, and we bury no friends.

When you sit down at a gaming table, your prospects are limitless. You might wake a dragon and slay it, or unleash it upon an unsuspecting village. You might skip over the dragon completely and befriend a vampire. It’s what makes roleplaying games so special. Doesn’t combat deserve more than a handful of outcomes? We’ve got a table with fifty results for a wild magic surge, shouldn’t combat warrant at least that many?



Second One

If you like this one better, send an email with the Subject "FAIL2" to zakzsmith AT hawt mayle or vote on Google +. Don't put anything else in the email, I won't read it.


Individual initiative is a rule concept that has never worked for me.

The concept of initiative in RPGs is very old, being inherited from wargaming. Initiative is the means of determining the order of operations in situations where "time" is important (e.g. combat). Initiative is also important from the perspective of the GM, as it serves to prevent all the players from yelling at you (the GM) simultaneously.

There are many ways of determining initiative, but a common form that is almost ubiquitous in rules medium and rules heavy games is individual initiative. Individual initiative is where PCs, and sometimes individual NPCs, are given there own static initiative value for the sequence/scene.

It is this form that I've just had a very hard time making work for me as opposed to against me. I've a few specific issues all of which are exacerbated in grid-less, "theatre of the mind" combat. The following assumes grid-less combat happening in person (i.e. not online).

Individual initiative serves to atomize combat, with each players acting only when it is there turn. Because each players acts effectively independently, there is a decreased incentive for the non-acting players to pay attention. This tends to result in having to re-explain the entire situation at the start of each player's action. For example, one of my last 3.5 games which I ran in 2009 without a grid suffered greatly during combat. Given that 3.5 combat is slow in general, it was only slowed by having to re-describe the situation all over again every few minutes to my perennially distracted/distractable players.

Combat is supposed to be a dynamic experience, where the characters run and fight in the maelstrom of blades and body parts. Static initiative, a hallmark of individual initiative, only works against this. Given the slow-down caused by atomized combat, having the turn order of combat be static from the first round prevents this. Instead of characters jockeying for position in both time and space, they can really only control their spatial position. Yes, moves like "delaying" get around this, but this is ultimately artificial and doesn't allow for strong dynamism; an alternative would be allowing PCs to re-roll their initiative but I've found that to be an uncommonly written rule.

The atomization of combat also elevates the individual character over the party as whole. Each PC has the individual opportunity to act with almost no direct interaction with any other PC. While moves like "delaying" get around this, this is again ultimately artificial as individual initiative is incompatible with two or more characters acting simultaneously. Players are disincentivized from working together to solve problems. For example, it is weird and artificial to make it so players can use a rope together to tie up/trip opponents or work together to tackle or lift something heavy. This translates into an even less dynamic combat.

In contrast to individual initiative there is group initiative, an idea as old if not older than individual initiative. In a standard group initiative model, each side of the combat (PCs vs NPCs) roll a single die and which ever rolls highest goes first. This is then repeated after each side has acted, so that each round has a potentially different order. Traditionally, no bonuses are applied to this roll. During each sides turn, characters can act in whatever order they feel like, potentially breaking their actions up based on other characters choices. This system is extremely difficult to use for a grid-based combat scenario, but I find it ideal for grid-less combat.

Group initiative is an inherently more dynamic experience because the whole party acts simultaneously and because the order of combat is not set in stone at the beginning of the sequence/scene. Also, because everyone acts simultaneously, all players are inclined to pay attention and communicate with each other. Finally, I've found all these factors combine to dramatically increase the overall speed of a combat scene.

A technique I use to improve player attention is to rotate around the table who the "initiative roller" is; this approach pulls the table together and adds a fun "group" emotion. Everyone is in the combat together. This serves to elevate the group over the individual, which then improves the mid-combat roleplaying, and further improves the group cohesion. PCs are always in reference to each other as opposed to acting as a lone figure on a static board.

In terms of common rules I find individual initiative the hardest to implement and I've decided that it just doesn't work for me in general. While there are alternative forms of individual initiative (e.g. Feng Shui's shots system), they are not as common. In contrast, group initiative is an ideal alternative for preserving the dynamism and engagement of the players in combat scenarios. All of the players I've played since making group initiative my standard (6 years) have all agreed that for grid-less D&D-type games it really improves the flow. It does not surprise me that after two editions of being absent, group initiative was finally re-included as an optional rule in the 5th edition Dungeon Master's Guide.
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Wolf Hall and Impro! (Thought Eater Tournament)

Here we have the next pair of entries that rolled in for the Thought Eater DIY RPG Essay Tournament.

Again, these are not by me--they're by a pair of anonymous DIY RPG peeps who were both assigned this topic "Take a book that you have read and talk about how it influenced, or could influence, the games you run. But it can't be a fantasy book or a science fiction book. It can't be anything in a genre that D&D was designed to emulate".

Anybody reading is eligible to vote for which one you like best and voting will be cut off once all the votes for all the first round Thought Eater essays are up...

First One

If you like this one better, send an email with the Subject "Vote BOOK1" to zakzsmith AT hawt mayle or vote on Google +. Don't put anything else in the email, I won't read it.


Any good novel has something to teach RPGers, and I would rate Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall one of the best novel in English yet written in this century. It doesn’t have much to do with fantasy RPGs directly: a D&D campaign concerns itself with a small group of people who go adventuring in a world that wears medieval trappings but truly has a Bronze Age heart; Wolf Hall is about a single man who manages to drag England out of the feudal world and into modernity, without very much adventuring at all. One looks backward to play in an imagined past and the other endeavors to elucidate the actual present. But like any good novel of ambition, Wolf Hall is vast and contains multitudes--you will find your D&Dables if you search for them. You may not have to search very far.

Consider this extract, which has convinced me to revive the old-school practice of player characters gaining NPC followers as they level up. The context of the passage: Thomas Cromwell, born a blacksmith’s son and ruffian, has proven himself a brilliant lawyer, banker, and political operative, and thus has risen high in the court of King Henry VIII. (This is your zero-to-hero level progression.) Wealthy, shrewd, and feared by the old aristocracy, he ferrets out treason among the grumbling nobles of England. He does it with henchmen:

Even before the [House of] Commons convenes, his opponents meet to work out their tactics. Their meetings are not secret. Servants go in and out, and there are young men in the Cromwell household not too proud to put on an apron and bring in a platter of halibut or a joint of beef. The gentlemen of England apply for places in his household now, for their sons and nephews and wards... He takes it seriously, the trust placed in him; he takes gently from the hands of these noisy young persons their daggers, their pens, and he talks to them, finding out behind the passion and pride of young men of fifteen or twenty what they are really worth, what they value and would value under duress. You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, what they alone can do.

The process here described of gentlemen clamoring to get their heirs installed in Cromwell’s service is basically the way your AD&D fighter gains those followers who always show up right on schedule at level 9: she was once a lousy 1st-level nobody and became a 9th-level badass, and now a pack of schlubs shows up to serve her because they think she can show them how to be badasses, too.

There are good reasons why the idea of acquiring followers as a specific class feature did not survive into later editions of the game. It basically comes down to the followers being more nuisance than help: tracking their statistics is a pain, you need to pay them, and the level gap between them and the PCs just about guarantees a grisly death if the party ever actually takes them dungeoneering. In total it just seems like a bad deal compared to, say, the ability to create zombies or teleport (just a couple of the features open to a 9th-level wizard). Once third edition arrived, fully informed by new norms of meticulously detailed customization that frowned on any character who could be adequately summed up as a "2nd-level fighter," the notion of tracking a group of sufficiently statted followers seemed totally unmanageable.

The excerpt above from Wolf Hall, though, shows a way past some of these difficulties, with its admirable narrative compression. Forget giving your followers game statistics. Hilary Mantel does not in this passage carefully track the states of Cromwell’s followers; she doesn’t even give them names. It is enough for her to conjure up the idea of these followers--these "noisy young persons" with "their daggers, their pens" and their "passion and pride"--and then put them to work, carrying in the halibut and spying on the nobles.

The lesson here is that you do not need a tremendous amount of narrative detail to create rich interactions between the player characters and the world around them, nor do you need tightly balanced mechanics to make a class feature useful. All you need is a montage here and there. The purpose of gaining new class features is to get new tools to solve more challenging problems. Cromwell here faces a problem that an RPG party can probably recognize: his enemies are conspiring in secret and he needs to find out what they are up to. Within the context of the story, his solution to the problem--acquiring loyal young men who go out and infiltrate noble households--is more complicated and time-consuming than scrying with a crystal ball. But in Mantel’s literary montage he still accomplishes it in a paragraph. This is the novel writer’s equivalent of the DM saying, "Your followers report back in a week. Lord Dragofroth is meeting with the drow at Castle Gloomrock next Tuesday."


Second One

If you like this one better, send an email with the Subject "Vote BOOK2" to zakzsmith AT hawt mayle or vote on Google +. Don't put anything else in the email, I won't read it.

“Impro” by Keith Johnstone is a book about improvisational theater. It was brought to my attention in the context of martial arts and I am relating it to gaming. It is really relevant to any creative endeavor.
The book deals in two broad categories: social status and spontaneity. I want to focus on the later. I’m not going to get into a lot of details about exactly what the book says. You can read it yourself and I recommend that you do.

Here’s the synopsis: We are all already spontaneously creative and we are being so right now. Most of us have learned how to block it.

As adults, when faced with making a creative decision, we often block the first thing that comes to mind for many reasons, but some pretty common ones are: “It’s not original enough”, “It’s too weird”, and “It’s embarrassing”. The reasons for this are many, but here's a big one: Education teaches us to be critical, and to have criteria for what is original and creative. The problem is that those criteria are taught to us. They don’t come from ourselves.

The root of the word “original” is “origin”. For something to be original it has to originate from you. That’s all.

Whatever idea you have right now in your head is the most important idea for you right now.
What is it? What’s behind that idea? Where did it come from?

Roleplaying is something like reverse meditation. Instead of letting thoughts go you want to follow them to the end. See where they lead. It's like a stretch where you tighten the muscle before releasing it. It gives you a better awareness of what’s going on. It's working it out.

You can probably think of some weird shit. You probably do this all the time, waking or dreaming. Just let your mind wander a bit.

Take a minute right now and let your mind wander freely before you read on.

There! See! Put that shit in your games. Go ahead. It doesn’t have to make sense! Overexplaining shit kills it. As an audience we want to be surprised. The best way to surprise others is to surprise yourself. If you’re GMing don’t wait for the players to throw you a loop, throw yourself one. As a GM or player, sometimes just say the first thing that comes into your head.

Many of us are looking for excuses to transgress. To say or do something weird, off the wall, taboo. Maybe it’s sexual. Maybe it’s violent. Maybe it’s deeply philosophical. Maybe it’s about deep personal feelings. Maybe it's something really really nice.  Many of us are too embarrassed to say or do it. However, if we’re given a prompt it’s usually a lot easier.

What’s a prompt? A prompt is anything that invites us to say or do something. The prompt can’t come from ourselves. It has to come from someone else, or be random. Given that prompt we now feel at license to say or do all sorts of stuff, because, we can blame it on the prompt.
“I only said it because of the prompt.”
But really, you know, it’s you.

It’s like Truth or Dare. You want to do the Dare. You just need to blame it on the person daring you.
It can be helpful to have a prompt because, prompts tend to work. In theater this might be a prop, a mask, a costume, a line. In games this might be a die roll, a result from a random table, or an oracle (for more on oracles check out the Lone Wolf Roleplaying Google+ group). Prompts are great.

Remember a few moments ago when I said the prompt can't come from ourselves? I lied. You don't have to wait for someone to give you a prompt; you can give it to yourself. Eventually, do it without the prompt.

Roleplaying is a consequence free environment, relatively. If you’re not with a group that can let you do what you want you’re not with the right group. The worst thing that should happen is your character dies a horrible death, which really is not bad at all, and in some cases quite good. So go with that first idea and just see what happens. It’s your chance to explore your own thought process.
And don't be afraid to say or do something completely normal, if that's what you're thinking. Just see what's there. Something as simple as "I open the door" is ripe with possibilities.

If you’re a player play the role. The role is you. If you can become the role, then maybe you are not who you think you were. If you’re the GM go crazy. It’s still you. See where it goes. It’s a mythic wonderland. That’s the point. Have fun.
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Thought Eater Contest--Religion in Fantasy Games: Solve It

So here are the first two essays from the first two contestants in the Thought Eater DIY RPG Essay Tournament.

These are not by me--they're by a pair of anonymous DIY RPG peeps who were both assigned the topic "Religion in Fantasy Games: Solve It" and hope to win fame and fabulous prizes.

Anybody reading is eligible to vote for which one you like best and voting will be cut off once all the votes for all the first round Thought Eater essays are up...

First One

If you like this one better, send an email with the Subject "Vote RELIGION1" to zakzsmith AT hawt mayle or vote on Google +.

Gods Killed Religion

D&D has a problem with its gods. Because this is a world of monsters and magic, the gods themselves are written as active agents in the world. At higher levels they even become directly involved as NPCs, or enemies to be fought.

Leave that stuff to demon princes, arch-liches, and star-titans. Those beings can shake entire worlds, but they aren’t gods. Worshipping them has more in common with fealty than faith. If your god can really send a giant spider to eat you, or grant you magic powers, then faith doesn’t come into it. There’s no need for an ecclesiastical structure, you just do what the big glowing head and his super-soldiers say.

Picking a side might be of ideological interest, but it has little resemblance to religion.

Religion is showing up to mass every Sunday because otherwise you’ll be shunned by your neighbour. It’s a mandate to apply your law to everyone. It’s having a holy reason to chase that new family out of town.

Catholicism and Islam were at war for centuries, but nobody would actually say “Jesus Hates Muhammed, but maintains peaceful relations with Guru Nanak”.

D&D deals a lot with the very top and bottom levels. At the top, your deity is amazing and has all this power and influence. Maybe they’re imprisoned, or ruling on a distant plane, but they’re totally there. At the bottom, your character. You’ve got some powers directly from your deity. You wear their symbol, carry their weapon, and talk about them a lot. Maybe you hunt down their lost relics, which always carry power.

It’s a relationship that almost completely bypasses actual Religion. You might as well be a member of a particularly ideological order of wizards.

You can’t meaningfully use Religion in your game without tying it in with Culture. It’s the glue that strengthens a community, or creates barriers against those outside it.

And in many cases it serves as a justification to do something you wanted to do anyway.

Next time you're working Religion into a fantasy setting, forget the god. Don’t pick something symbolically perfect that character or region. Don't create a pantheon.

Instead create a load of hokey old nonsense and focus on how the people of your world use that to justify the things they always wanted to do. Soldiers serve the Mother of Peace by killing other soldiers. Healers serve the Bloody Maw by helping humanity grow. Industrialists fly the flag of the Golden Oak because technology the next logical step for nature.

The Faith is always secondary to what the faithful do with it. Two cultures, one enlightened and one violent, will both find a way to make the same religion work for their needs. Bend the rituals and faith to the needs and desires of the people.

Then go nuts with the disgusting rituals and silly costumes.



Second One

If you like this one better, send an email with the Subject "Vote RELIGION2" to zakzsmith AT hawt mayle or vote on Google +.

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Religion should feel somewhat familiar to have an impact. For every cultist, priest or inquisitor, the referee should consider different ways people can react to religion and pick or roll one.

Utter zealot, someone who believes in the deity but not the dogma, utter non-believer (explicit magic comes the self, not gods), someone who participates in rituals due to habit and tradition, someone who believes due to tradition, someone deeply sympathetic who does push the faith, someone deeply sympathetic who does not push the faith, militant atheist or opponent of religion, someone who does not care, a member of minor branch or cult with a doctrinal difference insignificant to outsiders.

The trappings - doctrine, visuals, temples, churches - can be as freakish or banal as one wants, according to the campaign setting. The characters make the religion.

The referee should especially use characters that make them or their group uncertain. For atheists, this might be the good-hearted character who does or does not prosetylise, while for a deeply religious group, it might be the elder participating due to tradition and habit, with no faith. If inquisitors are hunting and burning witches, some of them ought to be wicked, others innocent. Some high priests ought to be sincere in their faith, while others just do their job since they get benefits, and neither of these should be by default more good or evil than the other. The referee should add the characters they find most disturbing.

The referee will, in this way, be able to show religion from several angles at once. This, if one honestly, will widen their own perspective on religion and give their players the opportunity for the same, while making the campaign world more complex and hence more interesting. Maybe there will even be discussion about religion, which is often interesting and illuminating.

Roleplaying is a fine tool for understanding others and the world. If religion is not interesting to the group, then this attention would be better placed elsewhere. Maybe social justice issues and issues of free speech? The same principles hold.
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Don't Run A Game Like This I Won't Play It

1. Vice has a tech sub-blog called Motherboard
2. Motherboard has a (science) fiction section called Terraform
3. I have a short story that just went up there today
4. Skip the introduction.
5. They pay alright, as people who give you money for fiction go.
6. This story is totally fucked up.
7. I hope you like it.

Old School Design and Room In the Margins

More accidental D&D talk from Rem Koolhaas' SMLXL.

In this section Koolhaas is talking about being assigned to assess whether an old Jeremy Bentham-inspired 19th century prison--the Koepel--aka the Arnhem panopticon--was still usable considering modern-day attitudes toward incarceration and rehabilitation:

Margin

Perhaps the most important and least recognized difference between traditional [1882] and contemporary architecture is revealed in the way a hypermonumental, space-wasting building like the Arnhem panopticon proves flexible, while modern architecture is based on a deterministic coincidence between form and program, its purpose no longer an abstraction like »moral improvement« but a literal inventory of all the details of daily life.

Flexibility is not the exhaustive anticipation of all possible changes. Most changes are unpredictable. Bentham could never have imagined the present use of the Koepel. Flexibility is the creation of margin – excess capacity that enables different and even opposite interpretations an uses. Because Bentham's ideological purity could only be realized at the cost of a spacial surplus (Zak's note: the idea was a big golfball with cells on the rim and guards in the center with lots of empty space in the middle), the Koepel is such a margin. New architecture, lacking this kind of excess, is doomed to a permanent state of alteration if it is to adjust to even minor ideological or practical changes…The history of prison building has become a sequence of short-lived ideals that were challenged, faltered, and then failed. Near the end of the 20th century, this sequence becomes almost comic – like an accelerated movie. It has become impossible to build a prison that is not, at the moment of its completion, out-of-date.

Lots of room...

...for other things

Basically, the old building had extra space in it. It was an inefficient design, and that's why it's proved useful for over 130 years. That unused space translated into flexibility.

Aside from being a useful parable about how the ideas attending a thing's creation aren't necessarily the only ones that thing can express, it's also a story about durable design. Anyone familiar with the old rhetoric of focused game design ("The game is about what the rules are about") can see where this is headed.

The classic counter-example is the incredibly shambolic and old-school Call of Cthulhu, a perfect storm of traditional-game design Shouldn't-Works:

-Clunky: Up until very recently it was still basically just Chaosium Basic Role-Playing (D&Dish stats + Plus a couple more + Plus a bolted-on skill percentile skill system including some hybrid shoot skill plus dodge chance combat system) + Percentile Sanity Stat + Percentile Cthulhu mythos stat

-Wasteful: Plus 90% of the 200+ page huge hardcover book is stuff you never use in any given session.

-Empty center: Plus the insanities (the defining feature of the game) are on a barely-described chart that take up a quarter-page.

-Terrible examples: The published adventures are notorious for being railroady.

Focused design wonks have no idea what to do with this game, which has been successful in a wide variety of campaigns for most of the history of RPGing and has barely bee altered edition-to-edition.

Yesterday I ran a Call of Cthulhu game that, instead of being about neuraesthenic aesthetes confronting eldritch library horror was instead about a crew of modern cops on the edge trying to clean up a city that likes being dirty. Here is a list of the changes I made to the way we usually run things:

1. Players have to choose the 'Police' career

2. That's all

Lots of room

This game has Margin. And it's not like I had to write up things either, like I would with modern supposed-to-be-generic systems. Because the core of the game is simply "What describes things that exist in this place and time?" rather than "What is genre-appropriate?" Cthulhu characters exist in a world that still has a lot of things that, thematically, aren't horror-specific like cars and botany. And it grasps that you'd like to be able to play lots of sessions--either lots of different kinds of games, or lots of the same campaign but with evolving roles and situations, so it needs to weigh things players can do close to equally. Other trad systems think the same way--D&D, Warhammer, even FASERIP can all drift away from their default modes with barely an effort.

Just as no prison can keep up with the state-of-the-art in locking people up, no game can (or should) be able to anticipate exactly what a random one-billionth of the world's population wants to do around a table on any given Sunday.

Next time you ask "Hey what system would you use to run a game of roller-skating magic girls in the 94th century who do combat by proton-strangulation?" and someone says "D&D"--that's why. It's not because they don't know any better, it's because it'll work.

And, unlike Bentham's prison: it was designed that way on purpose.
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But Does He Still Hate Fun? An Interview With James Raggi

Considering it started (1) as no more than a pretext to publish D&D adventures, James Raggi's Lamentations of the Flame Princess gets talked about an awful lot. This is probably because while the art still manages to provoke more conservative competitors in the indie RPG scene to dismiss it as an exercise in shock value, LotFP keeps showing a willingness to bankroll some of the most out-there content in DIY RPGing, including stuff from Kenneth Hite, Vincent Baker, Patrick Stuart, Geoffrey McKinney, Jeff Rients, Scrap Princess, Kelvin Green and Zzarchov Kowalski (also: me) all under the pretext of making weird-horror adventures set in the age of exploration.

So, at the risk of going all late-era-White-Dwarf, I've decided to interview one of my own publishers...

LotFP puts out two kinds of products--supplements for the default 1600s setting, and books like Vornheim and Carcosa which are kind of their own worlds. Why is that?

The 1600s Real World Earth idea just kind of happened along the way. It wasn't an intentional plan, and originally I thought it was incompatible with the game. But then I made the decision to jettison the original setting I'd been using since 1990 or thereabouts and go Real World Earth and it fits wonderfully.

There are a lot of assumptions one makes when gaming, and people really don't go for the "Medieval" part of standard fantasy while at the same time having tons of medieval trappings in their games. It just made sense to bring the game-world closer in line to the assumptions most people make when setting up and playing these games. 1600s Europe is post-Reformation, post-DaVinci, at least a Galilean understanding of the heavens, there are still kings and queens and swords but also parliaments and capitalism and if you mean France then you can just bloody well say France instead of inventing fantasyland Parisia.

This also works well for releasing things for use by other people, because often their settings are Hyborian-style mishmashes and approximations of real-world societies, so if I say "France" that's easy to translate to their home setting than trying to translate my fictional mishmash Frankland to their different kind of mishmash Parisia.

This also helps establish LotFP stuff as distinct from everyone else, because a lot of D&D "content" is rather incompatible with a historical setting, so it's that much easier to get rid of orcs and beholders and not use elves and suddenly LotFP stuff still works with, but isn't interchangeable with, other games. It has its own identity which is absolutely crucial to establish when there are over a hundred "clone" games out there which in some quarters have the reputation of being mere cut-and-paste chicanery anyway.

It's a gradual thing though, as you get "legacy" releases like Vornheim which came about before the switch so it's full of elves and dwarfs and some of my old adventures have that stuff and there's Qelong which is clearly inspired by something real-world but it's obviously not...

Things like Carcosa and A Red & Pleasant Land, those still work because they are "someplace else." I can run 1625 England with Carcosa existing as-is and who cares? It's so many light-years away. For Red & Pleasant Land I just ignore the "Quiet Side" details and just say it's my world, as-is, on the other side of the looking glass. Easy.

It gets a little more difficult when people are still sending me stuff with "D&D" content though. I hope I'm not talking out of turn but it's a current concern and so the perfect example: Veins of the Earth (2) is a brilliant, original vision of the interior of the Earth with a lot of emphasis on just how alien and strange it is down there. But it came to me with a whole lot of Greyhawk-legacy stuff in it. References to gnolls and orcs and a not-so-disguised version of the drow, things like that. But if you wipe that all out, keeping just the original creations (and maybe keeping adaptations of less-known, certainly not iconic ideas), you have a work that is much more powerful as its own creation, and also something that works even better in a wider variety of campaigns easier. It'll fit, as-is, with no tinkering necessary, equally well within a historical Earth setting or Greyhawk or the Warhammer world or Dark Sun or whatever world you've made up for your own use.

I've got enough on my plate that I can now be quite picky about picking new projects that don't use Tolkien or Greyhawk setting elements, and either fit in with the historical Earth setting, or at the very least don't work against it, and if you think that's a silly attitude to take, you luckily have a million billion other people publishing stuff that might be more to your taste.

For the slow learners--why did you originally design the LotFP game to be so much like old editions of D&D?

It was just a continuation of what I played. If I was a hardcore Traveller player, LotFP would be a 2d6 system with lifepath character generation, and if I was a hardcore Runequest player, LotFP would be BRP. It just so happens that I started with D&D and of course there'd be periods where I played other games, but it always came back to D&D. There's something about the simplicity of the stat blocks and the entire process of play that works for me, so why not just go with that?

But that's just the core mechanics, and as time goes on it's drifting further and further away from baseline understood D&D concepts. People for some reason treat the rulebook as "the game" rather than the adventures and supplements (which to me is the real content), so the next printing of the Rules & Magic book will be making some important changes (getting rid of demihumans and Clerics as things in LotFP, for starters) to make it clear to people and further establish LotFP as having its own identity.

Would it basically be fair to say LotFP was published as a game in order to make it easier to make and sell adventures--which were your real interest at the time?

That was indeed the case, yes. My goals of market penetration and profiting from it were a bit hampered by releasing only supplementary material for games not necessarily being promoted as much as they could.

Of course once I decided to do it, it becomes a real project and not just something to just fart out as quickly as possible. And every few years I need to do a new printing and LotFP is a living game so it's time to go to work again instead of just reprinting.

    

Although LotFP is still very similar to it's D&D roots, most of your actual rules modifications seem like they've been well-received and sometimes picked up in more mainstream products. (3) Were these things you thought up while writing the original edition or imports from your home game?

Rules modifications are first conceived of when writing for publication, and then those new rules are introduced in play to see if they work or to figure out how they need to be changed before going to press. Before the first edition of LotFP I used Labyrinth Lord and Basic Fantasy RPG (depending on timeframe) by-the-book, as I recall. When I ran AD&D 1e starting in 2006, the intent was to go by-the-book, but fuck me, I don't think that's possible with 1e so it ended up being mostly "Basic rules with AD&D ornaments" (races, classes, spells, that sort of thing).

Early in the whole DIY D&D scene, you published a stupid, hyperbolic essay called "I hate fun"-- this pissed off people off--mostly stupid people, but still, people. Considering how much fun we've all had playing LotFP modules in the past 5 years or so, have you changed your stance on fun?

Fun still sucks.

It's just the view of gaming as doing all this stuff that's so grand. Be anyone! Do amazing things! Save the day! Isn't this all so cool!

Well, no, actually, it isn't.

The physical laws of the universe break every time some beardy guy in a robe wiggles his fingers? That weird looking animal over there is smarter than you are and also breaks the laws of physics AND it wants to murder the fuck out of you? You're seeking that shit out? Jesus Christ that's not a setup for feeling cool and doing awesome things, that's a total horror show. That would be like realizing you're in Nightmare on Elm Street movie and deciding to take a handful of Xanax to go visit Mr. Dream-Dude. What idiot would ever do that?

And if you actually survive doing this and become successful in killing all sorts of bizarre threats, you're not Big Cool Hero, you're somewhere between Rambo (from the first movie, when even the most unaware couldn't pretend he's awesome action hero) and that guy that shot the lion. You're all fucked up in the head.

So anything that increases the COOOOOLLLL AAAWWEEESSOOOMMMEEEE EEMMPPOOOWWWERRRMMEENNTTT features of gaming just don't agree with me, and that's what Leading Brand Role-Playing Games push as fun, so I hate Leading Brand Fun. ("I Hate Leading Brand Fun" isn't so catchy a title though.) I prefer presenting things that highlight the hell that this sort of adventuring would really be, not as a form of criticism of the more cheery game styles, but because to me the decisions characters make in horror movies are more interesting to see and think about than the decisions characters make in action movies.

Of course when I run games, the more fucked-up and gross and totally screwed things are in-game, the more everyone around the table is laughing. I'm a total failure.

(Now, things that are actually fun and cool in real life make for horrible gaming. "Get laid a lot and between orgasms go golfing or rock-climbing or knit or watch Seinfeld or whatever it is you like to do!" isn't something you want to sit around pretending to do, you want to actually do it. Or, since gaming is so cool, you could play a game where your characters are playing a role-playing game, because then you'd be doing it AND pretending to do it AT THE SAME TIME.)

So when you say "I hate fun" did you really mean more "I hate wish-fulfillment in games"?

It's not that I hate wish-fulfillment in games as a concept, I just hate it as a default assumption. If people play wish-fulfillment D&D, I don't care, but if a rulebook is pushing the idea that the whole game is to make everyone feel awesome and special, I gag, and if that seems to be the industry standard across major game lines, it's time to go to war.

When your players go "that was fun" do you just look away, toward the horizon?

Nah, I just realize I need to kick it into overdrive and create such hell the next session that nobody would dare tell me they had any fun! (4)

LotFP has been pretty successful compared to the average cottage old school RPG publisher--why do you think that is?

It had to be. I made it clear up front that my goal was to live off of doing this. That's a hell of a thing to have said before releasing the first official product in our little (not so little now) space of the gaming scene in 2009, especially since that first adventure was pretty much print-on-demand, printed on the home laser printer and then bound and trimmed by hand.

Another thing I've done is look at how professional companies treat their products and bring them to market and emulate them, and not use the small press/part-timers as a business model. Make the books look as good as possible, provide lots of 'support' material like adventures and settings, get them into wider distribution networks so you can get the books in front of people instead of the people always needing to come to you, and not being afraid to say I WANT YOUR FUCKING MONEY.

Also the fact that my releases aren't connected in any way allows people to jump in at any time. It's not a unified game line requiring mass purchases to be able to make sense of it all. Whatever book looks cool to you, you don't need to have any of the other books (except maybe a rulebook, not even necessarily my rulebook) to use it to the fullest.

These days I think the success is due to the fact that people know that whatever LotFP releases, it'll be something wild and different and probably in some ways irresponsible, but at the same the catalog has generally been pretty strong so there's the expectation that it'll also be pretty good.

Are Frog God, Sine Nomine and LotFP serving three separate, overlapping niches or is the market of DIY D&D stuff just expanding period?

My impression is that Frog God is concentrating on Pathfinder these days and their Swords & Wizardry releases are simply adaptations of the things they were already doing for Pathfinder. Maybe I'm just out of the loop but if I'm that wrong it does mean the OSR scene really is that much bigger and disparate than I thought, which would be a good thing. It's not good to be a little incestuous bubble. Maybe when the next version of Swords & Wizardry (that's the one that's going to have the pastel cover with all the ponies, right?) (5) is ready things will shift a bit. We'll see.

Kevin Crawford is a workhorse. I really wish I could just bang out the wordcount that he does. It's intimidating as hell. It's funny though, the less I'm interested in one of his projects, the more impressed I am with it. I don't do domain games, but I think An Echo, Resounding is absolutely amazing in concept and execution. I don't do one-on-one gaming at all but Scarlet Heroes is an inspired work. I found Silent Legions rather dry and uninspiring, but no wonder, because that sort of thing is what I already do and I don't do it that way.

But my impression is that Stars Without Number is his most popular game (it keeps getting more supplements, that means something, yes?), and I don't hear a lot of about what people are doing with it, so that to me indicates a bigger scene for these types of games than one might initially assume. Either that or SWN purchasers are just collectors but that seems like an odd choice for collectors to swarm to.

People love to complain about your stupid sales gimmicks and say they'll backfire but they always work. What's up with that?

Gimmicks? Or good salesmanship?

Whatever gets people's attention, you know? I don't want to sit around waiting for people to discover LotFP. When I release something I want everybody to know about it. People selling stuff need to be less ashamed about the selling stuff part.

Your own modules have a distinctly Weird Tales vibe, with a grounding in alternate history. Do you feel more like a writer or publisher these days?

I feel like a publisher more these days just because my (latest) Magnum Opus, the damn Referee book, isn't finished yet and it's been in the works for ages and keeps growing in the middle and then I release a book by some guy who basically makes me drop everything to pack orders for a solid month and managing artists and other writers and reading a 400 page draft someone wrote and I'd rather just see a finished book but nobody else is going to do it right so it's all up to me now, isn't it?

Once the dam breaks on my projects and they're released people will once again think I'm a brilliant writer and I can swim through all the awards I'll get like Scrooge McDuck in his money bin.

The stuff you and Rafael Chandler have written has garnered a lot of criticism for its goregrind aesthetic, yet the same people seem to have no complaints about the same aesthetic when it's in horror movies or heavy metal videos. Are these conservative critics breathtakingly ignorant of the outside world or do they just stick to being freaked out by RPGs because they're scared of taking on media that millions of progressives and feminists enjoy and defend?

I think it's just easier for these people to avoid certain movies and certain types of music, but they're knee-deep in the RPG scene and here it is and they can't avoid it and they don't understand why anybody would do this sort of thing and they don't understand why anybody would enjoy this sort of thing and they've never had to really think about it because of how easily they could just avoid it in other media.

Their attitude is just a consequence of intellectual isolation with a gross intolerance of any taste contrary to their own. It could not possibly be an intentional effort to influence public opinion concerning the expression of imagination by people in a creative field for the purpose of disappearing any work they don't approve of, could it? Nah, nobody involved in gaming is that evil.

Gimme three overlooked LotFP releases that you didn't write and tell me what they're about.

Scenic Dunnsmouth. It's a village in a swamp that's under threat, but before the session begins you randomly generate the village and the threats and how severe the threats are. To me this thing is as groundbreaking procedurally as Vornheim. The random aspects to constructing the adventure can be adapted to so many more situations, and the way we set the book up so you can print out only those households that exist in your particular version of Dunnsmouth, and all that really creepy Jez art, this is really a first-class release that should have crossover appeal outside of our scene. (6)

The Idea from Space. Two competing factions of people under the control of alien entities (one physical, one cerebral) fighting it out on a small island. It's a stranger kind of Red Nails, and the Xaxus concept is just killer. I think this one gets overlooked a bit because it's so short and therefore loading it up with fancy production values didn't make sense and the author isn't super-active on everybody's friends list or circles or whatever. But it really is good.

Coming up with three is hard because I've been lucky in that pretty much everything else has either found an audience or is a smaller thing that wasn't expected to blow up big or anything so I wouldn't call them overlooked.

LotFP is about as "card-carrying OSR" as you can get, yet Kai Tave, an RPGnet moderator, claimed "card-carrying OSR" people all hate younger gamers because they don't understand THAC0. Yet LotFP (like most, if not all, OSR games) doesn't use THAC0 at all and LotFP products have been enthusiastically embraced by younger gamers --including ones barely old enough to read. What's wrong with Kai Tave? Dropped headfirst on the floor as a child or something else?

If I'm being charitable, I could say he's just grasping for any straw that would give some sort of appearance of objectivity when it's just a matter of "I don't like this." In the same way I don't like a band and I feel the need to articulate it beyond "I don't like this" and I'll come up with any reason to "objectively" prove that a band sucks. "Oh god, look at the shoes they're wearing in their promo photo, it's a clear sign this band just doesn't care about what they're doing at all!" mmhmm.

If I'm being uncharitable, I'd say he's just a stupid cunt.

Oh great, you called someone a cunt. I can see the bloglines now, "Raggi uses misogynist slur!". Is there someone you'd like to call a dick so we can even out?

Nobody cares about being called a dick. It's general-audiences advice, "Don't be a dick." It's so toothless that calling Superman a dick is now some sort of internet in-joke. I think being called a jerk is more hurtful at this point than being called a dick. 

Cunt is pretty much the last general-use insult that makes anybody gasp anymore. People forget that you used to have to pay to hear any swearing in media, and now it's everywhere and now all these shits and fucks are basically punctuation instead of anything powerful.

Cunt still has the power that proper swearing used to have, and minimizing its impact by trying to "even it out" with penis-word insults which don't have any power behind them at all just sells it short.

If people want to make a big deal of it, that's fine, it helps the word retain its power. If they want to pretend it's an insult to women, they can, but it's just as wrong as pretending that calling someone a dick is an insult to men. The insult is to Kai Tave. He's the one being degraded because he's the stupid cunt. Women in general are just fine.

Regarding your at-home group: are they guinea pigs for these LotFP adventures? Do they die like flies?

Of course they're guinea pigs. Things have to be played before they're published and that's the most convenient group of test subjects. They don't die like flies though. When pretty much every adventure is a Raggi adventure, you start thinking differently. Some might say you go mad. But it's the kind of mad that helps you survive because you know you're in hell and not in any sort of sane, kind world.

What is the make-up of your home group--men, women, young, old? I heard you had a Finnish porn star in your group, too.

I haven't played for a bit while I've been getting some things squared away, but there was a core group of four, one woman, all quite younger than me (one very much so), with a revolving door of guest players. When I get back things into gear I'll be doing a fresh recruiting drive because I like a regular group of at least six (in Vaasa I had more than that every week!) and we'll see who shows up. I haven't done a from-scratch player recruitment for four years or so.

The porn star was in the group years ago, she's since moved away.

Other than LotFP stuff and people who've written for LotFP, whose work is impressing you in the RPG scene?

That's tough, since if I like what I see I try to hire a person. My RPG purchases are full of Chandler and Zzarchov and Patrick & Scrap and Hite. I'm really just as likely to back a Kickstarter from someone I've never heard of that seems like they have an interesting idea as I am buying something from someone whose name I recognize.

Of the LotFP adventures, what percentage do you think fall solidly into "screw the players" territory?

Only Fuck For Satan, but if you get an adventure called Fuck For Satan expecting everything to be above board, then I'll probably enjoy the following blog post about how all your players died quickly for no reason.

Death Frost Doom (7) was your first relatively large success--do you think it was different than the later adventures you wrote in any important ways?

I'd like to think that all the adventures I write are different from the others in important ways. But Death Frost Doom was the first look anybody really had at Full Frontal Raggi and my focus of Dungeon As Hostile Hellhole. That the atmosphere called for more serious oppressive tone and less of me having a bit of fun in places or dealing with crazy time/space effects and all that probably helped.

What are some interesting historical eras nobody's done much with in RPGs?

It's not any specific time period that's lacking, it's variety within the time periods. There are lots of Western RPGs, so you can say the late 1800s is an era that's been covered a lot in RPGs...but there isn't a lot of variety. Why not late 1800s Africa and go all Heart of Darkness or concentrate on the British Raj?

You do all this yourself--have you considered hiring a full-time employee?

My yearly actual pre-tax take-home pay is barely into five figures (so much would-be profit instead goes to making the next books even more awesome and unsold stock is counted as an "asset" for tax purposes) and my "office" is the corner of the living room and so much of this two-room apartment looks like a warehouse. My "success" is relative - the year before LotFP opened as a business the only place I had to sleep was somebody's floor. Now I can afford to spend a couple hundred euros to travel for a weekend and catch a band and stay in a decent hotel every once in awhile while living in an apartment in a nice part of town sleeping in a real bed I paid half for in an apartment I'm paying my share of rent for. The next big upgrade will be getting an apartment with an extra room I can use as a dedicated office/storage area, which will help productivity, because when the wife is home and hanging about (and she has an irregular work schedule) I'm not exactly in a writing or editing frame of mind.

Even if the money was available, hiring an actual employee in Finland is a hugely daunting idea (I'm scared shitless of the labor laws here, very strong compared to Georgia, my primary US residence as an adult and what I'm used to..."at-will" employment sure looks better when you're a small business owner than when you're a schlub employee, let me tell you) and I can't think of any gamer whose face I'd want to see on a daily basis anyway and if they're not a gamer what exactly am I  going to pay them to do? The logistics (legal and "are you working on outside commissions on my dime?") of hiring someone long-distance on a full-time basis are way beyond my meager business knowledge.

What's coming up and in what order?

Oh bloody hell, I don't know. LotFP releases seem to be stuck in time vortexes. Vortices? Beyond the Vornheim reprint (8), the order is a complete crapshoot.

Broodmother Sky Fortress (Jeff Rients of the Gameblog with MacLean art), Towers Two (Brockie (9) /Bittman with Jeremy Duncan art), World of the Lost (Rafael Chandler with Benedict art), and England Upturn'd (Barry Blatt with Richardson art) are just waiting for art to be completed and inserted into layout and they would be done.

I'm working on the Ref book and the next Rules & Magic printing and once those are done I can finish up my next adventure Covered in Sick.

I guess Veins of the Earth (Patrick Stuart with Scrap Princess art) is the next thing closest to having final writing in, and then that can move to layout.

Other major projects (not counting shorter-form adventures) in the works include the second edition of Cursed Chateau (Maliszewski), The Shadows Lengthen in Carcosa (McKinney), The Combing of Hairy Nook (Keigh - I have text on this but waiting for his shorter adventure to get done first so I can see how people react to his style and see if there should be greater editorial input for the longer form adventure), Strange Distant Strand (Curtis), the Viking Amazon thing (YOU!), William Shakespeare's The King in Yellow (Dorward), plus there are a couple of historical sourcebooks and an undersea supplement that I don't think have had any ground broken on them so best leave them unnamed right now.

I'm sure I've forgotten something and am about to get angry emails about someone's project laying fallow.

Certain things get bottlenecked and we're in a stretch where nothing has been released for nine months now and it looks like I've taken on "too much" but... well, if people hit their deadlines then it would look like a well-oiled machine and things wouldn't be all bunched up, but when they don't hit their deadlines, what do I do? Dump 'em and start over from scratch (delays) or just keep on with the people that were my first choice to do the awesome job (delays)? That's the part of being publisher I hate the most...

Truth is, good stuff doesn't get shit out on demand or to a set schedule. We can accept that truth while aiming for elite and superior work (and occasionally even succeed in achieving it in a final product) or we can settle for an on-time and workmanlike assembly-line product.

I'm rather aim for the moon and miss it than aim at the ground and act pleased with myself that I hit it.

Footnotes:

(1) Like most old-school games.
(2) Scrap Princess and False Patrick's spelunking neo-underdark nightmare, currently in the works.
(3) 5th edition D&D f'rinstance.
(4) For the record, I like fun and hate wish-fulfillment fantasies, but it's not my interview.
(5) This is a joke about how the next S&W edition being put together by our pal Stacy Dellorfano's all-female team .
(6) Useful discussion of Scenic Dunnsmouth here--if you can't read it, write to me and ask to join my Google+ RPG circles.
(7) The first edition, before I got involved with it.
(8) This happened between when the interview was recorded and now.
(9) That is, the late Dave Brockie--of Gwar.