Pinking It and Shrinking It With Stacy

If you've paid any attention to conversations about how to get the gaming scene to be more diverse, you've probably run into the following idea: The genres and subgenres that are popular in games right now are themselves patriarchal constructs and greater diversity requires abandoning grimdark aesthetics and, in some cases, violence itself because these are supposed to totes be boy things.

Now while we own and operate a lot of pinked and shrinked things here at casa D&D With Porn Stars, I have a lot to say about all the things that happen when people confuse an ethic with an aesthetic, but I figured it might be more interesting to talk to somebody who has actually taken on bringing more women into gaming as a conscious and continuous project (and had success with it, too)--namely Stacy Dellorfano of Contessa.

Zak: What I wanted to talk about is the idea of a "diversity aesthetics", like, in a nutshell: 

He's saying they should hire more diversely and market to YA readers. (Which: sure.) But this fits within a larger (and common) set of ideas: "adult" and grimdark aesthetics and people who are into them are associated with antidiversity, whereas "girlier" topics and aesthetics like romance and soap opera are allegedly signs of a commitment to modernity and diversity.

Like the whole "Dungeon World is FUN! Unlike scary gory LotFP" kind of thing.
I guess for you the starting point would be: do you feel like specific aesthetics are a way to bring in women to Contessa and your other projects?


Stacy: Yes and no. Yes, I think specific aesthetics are a way to bring women to pretty much any project, but no, I don't think the way it's commonly done is the way to do that. What I more often than not see in attempts to do that are male creators trying to focus group their way into understanding "what women want", which means they only end up getting the surface level of the complexity involved with being a woman, and their attempts show as being flat and 2-dimensional.

The specific aesthetics necessary is any genre, any setting, any style under the sun so long as it was created by a woman or had women working in equal or greater parts on the creative aspects of the property. That isn't to say women aren't interested in works done by men, but works done by women often act as a much more effective springboard in large part because it's so rare.

This is because of nuance. Nuance a dude asking a focus group of women what they want is never going to understand. The nuance of growing up as a girl with certain expectations laid at your feet and the terrifying prospect of embracing those expectations, rebelling against them, or pretending they don't exist. It's a shared experience most women have that men have no ability to understand.

Women bring that into the fiction they write and contribute to, which in turn makes it more accessible to women. We're speaking the same language. It doesn't matter if that language is in a romance novel or a grimdark series that doesn't have anywhere near a happy ending, like The Hunger Games. What matters is that the creative voice came from one of us.

There's plenty of evidence women like grimdark. The Hunger Games is a pretty good example of that. There's a series that's nothing but grimdark tragedy after tragedy with a great deal of violence, and it's loved by women because the hand of a female creator is obvious. Mad Max had a lot of the same qualities, even though the creative team that worked on it was a lot more mixed. Again, more grimdark and more violence, and women love it.


Zak: Do you ever see a specific property/game/plot concept and go: "This has got to end, the hobby will never grow if we keep making things like this?"

Stacy: Nope. By the time it ends up a property, game, or plot, it's passed through the hands of a whole lot of people. The end result is the victim of diversity issues, not the cause. The cause are all those people who handled it all the way to the end.

When I think that thought, it's often about how people treat one another. 


Zak: But are there aesthetics or genres that (regardless of who wrote them or specific plot points or characters) you see as encouraging a wider audience? Like for example it's a fact that women used to be a bigger % of the comics readership before superheroes dominated the industry.

Stacy: No. Women like a wide range of genres and aesthetics. There are a lot of stereotypes that disagree with me, but they're stereotypes. 


Zak: So is it your take that you change the people in charge and let the genre stuff sort itself out?


Stacy: Yeah, pretty close. Not just in charge, but all over the place. I think there can be diverse products in every genre just like there are women in every genre. 


Zak: Again, administrative and creative personnel aside, do you see a downside in pushing creators to address genres or subgenres or themes that historically women have been more into?


Stacy: Yes. It's the wrong thing to push for, period.

Now, to be clear, I'm not talking about someone requesting something they like from a creator they like who isn't already doing that thing. Wanting to see how your favorite comic book artists handle a genre they typically don't dip their toes into is a completely different beast than brazenly stating there are certain types of material more suited towards women. I don't have any problems with the first, but the latter is insulting.

When people push genres or sub-genres as the fix-it solution for gender inequality (or any other type of inequality), they might as well be pointing out there's a 'pink' part of the toy store and a 'blue' part of the toy store, and if you want to attract women you need to make sure to have a lot of the 'pink' stuff. Girls play with Barbies, boys play with Matchbox cars. Girls get romances, boys get action films. Girls are 'crafters', boys are 'makers', and so on and so on. It's insulting and inappropriate.

We are all - men and women alike - multi-faceted people with many interests across a wide spectrum of genres and subgenres. The stereotypes that exist are all surface-level sameness, and if you cater to them you'll get surface-level quality content. Women deserve quality content that isn't just surface-level, and the only way we're going to get that is through equality and diversity at all levels of creation.


Zak: Is there anything you've found does attract women specifically to Contessa events and other things you're involved in other than going "Hey we're women running this and this is specifically for you?"


Stacy: That's really all we do. Visible female leadership is an extraordinarily powerful tool for bringing women to the table. So is creating something that's specifically for the benefit of the women participating. It's really that simple. 


Zak: Is there a way a company making games can send a message that a game is "for the benefit of the women participating"? Right out on the cover or in the messaging?

Stacy: What I meant when I said "for the benefit of the women participating" means literally that we run the events we run at ConTessa so the women participating gain some sort of benefit. We treat events as if our target audience is ourselves, and ask our participants to run events they themselves would like to attend. That's about the only content guidance we really give.

I'm trying to think about how you could translate that into a book cover, and I don't know that it's possible. A great deal of the benefit we get comes from being able to meet other people like you. A book cover or text isn't a human connection, so I don't think it really translates. 


Zak: So if Contessa were a game company making games, the only overt way to communicate female-friendliness would be by hoping the consumer knew it was female-run? Is that fair to say? There'd be no symbolic communication to the audience?


Stacy: I have a hard time answering this question because ConTess is in no way set up like a gaming company, and it wouldn't look anywhere near the same if it was a gaming company. It's obvious ConTessa is run by women because our work involves so much in-person and personal contact with the people we pull in to run events.

If I had a gaming company that made games, it would't be focused on getting more women into gaming. It'd be focused on getting more women into making games. 

Zak: ...and let the chips fall where they may after that, I assume?

Stacy: For the most part, yeah. I'd also do snazzy things like send my game out to places like ConTessa for playtesting and demo'ing, and make sure the crew I have on the ground representing the game are good people from diverse backgrounds.

But the product itself wouldn't ever be coded for boys or for girls. I have much more respect for all genders than to simplify someone's experience down to the shallowest of stereotypes.
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If you want to work with Stacy and Contessa at the 2016 Gen Con--click here!
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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.

Ken and Zak Talk About Stuff

Kenneth Hite was the first person in the mainstream RPG scene to recognize what we were trying to do with Vornheim--or at least the first one to say anything about it. When I heard that, I decided he must be a pretty sharp guy. When he came over and ran Night's Black Agents at our house I realized he was probably one of the sharpest guys in history. And definitely one of the sharpest about history.

For fans, the man needs no introduction--but I hope this interview will offer a window into at least one or two things about Ken you didn't already know. Those new to Ken just need to know he's the idea-factory behind Trail of Cthulhu, the horrible wartorn survival magic-poisoned LotFP setting Qelong, the bold and bizarre Day After Ragnarok alt-history setting and dozens of other excursions into well-researched wrongness.

When and how did you start with role-playing games?

I started playing with D&D before I ever played D&D -- in junior high, my pal Steve loaned me his AD&D MONSTER MANUAL, which came out before the other two books did. So all that summer I built monsters using rules I made up based on the numbers in the book, which is the kind of on-the-nose detail rightly rejected in a novel.

Anyhow, my friends and I started playing D&D that fall, from a combination of that book, the Basic set, and then AD&D, eventually settling into an AD&D campaign with me as the DM. A little TRAVELLER in church youth group, because the youth pastor had the Little Black Books. Then TOP SECRET (which Santa brought us as a misguided "family game night" game), then my one true love CALL OF CTHULHU, from the moment it came out in 1981.


When and how did you start as a professional in the industry?

So I moved to Chicago for grad school, and that meant I could go to GenCon for about $20 by running games for Chaosium -- back then, they badged you in, piled you like cordwood in a hotel room, and bought pizza most nights, so my cost was train fare and liquor. At this same time, I was doing a kind of "free-jazz" improv alternate history game with two history majors I met at the University of Chicago SF Club, Craig Neumeier and Mike Schiffer, and running my Monday campaign for them and some other SF Club people. At one of those GenCons, I bought (or traded for) GURPS TIME TRAVEL by Steve Jackson and John M. Ford, which included the "Infinite Worlds" campaign frame. Mike and Craig and I noticed that Steve Jackson Games had very clear submission guidelines and an unsupported alternate-history setting, and we had all these settings just sitting there. So we wrote a sample alternate history and an outline and sent it in as a proposal. Which went nowhere, except because I had a Chaosium badge, Steve Jackson couldn't dodge me asking about it every GenCon.

One of my players in that long-running CALL OF CTHULHU campaign eventually got a job at Iron Crown, and he got a playtest copy of the NEPHILIM rules from Chaosium, thought "who do I know who should see a game of magical historical conspiracy" and sent them to me for comment. I wrote about 11,000 words of back-sass and sent them to him, and he sent them to Chaosium and right about the same time that Steve Jackson finally looked at our proposal (and accepted it immediately) I got an email from Greg Stafford His Own Self asking me if he could use my playtest feedback in the rulebook, and what was the next book I wanted to write for the line? So in almost the same month in 1994 I had two RPG writing gigs. The rest was just keeping at it; I wound up as Line Developer for NEPHILIM before Chaosium's first or second bankruptcy, and wrote a bunch of books for Steve, and then White Wolf, and then I got hired to design two STAR TREK games back to back and here we are today. In about 1997 I decided to do it full time (or rather my wife Sheila decided she'd rather be married to a happy game writer than a grouchy insurance company tech), and one or two really dodgy years aside, it's pretty much kept the lights on ever since.



What is it about RPG people and the insurance business?

Insurance work is like fast food for people with college degrees. They need a ton of drones to process their hellish oceans of data. Or they did in the 1990s, anyhow, it's probably all done with big data in Bangalore now.




You're known for setting work that's informed by a lot of research--both in history and
in the genre--can you tell us anything about the process of turning research into fiction?

All I can do, really, is quote someone much better than me at the same trick. Tim Powers says that at a certain point you stop researching a novel and start uncovering a secret history of the world. The human brain is hard-wired to pattern-match -- it's how we saw fruit in the trees when we were monkeys, and it's how we see the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich now, and it's how Lovecraft or Powers or I build fiction out of suggestively shaped fact, except we're doing it on purpose. Start with the premise -- if DRACULA were a spy novel, what else would be true? and then start looking for weird little facts that fit the legend you're inventing. George Stoker being a sometime asset for the Foreign Office, for example; or a startling number of British Intelligence higher-ups dying suddenly the same year as a major earthquake in Romania; Bram Stoker cutting the final earthquake scene out of his novel literally just before it went to press. I knew the last of those three facts before I started, but when I looked for more they always seemed to appear, because my brain was seeing where unconnected facts -- about DRACULA, and earthquakes, and the history of British espionage -- could be connected.



Re: Pattern-matching: that's a lot how making a collage works. I have no idea if that's a question, just an observation. You get a certain density of ideas and some begin to rhyme and it makes a dream-logic.

Yeah, to some extent trying to explain any of this stuff in writing is like dancing about architecture, as Martin Mull put it. Once you've been doing sculptures long enough, you see the elephant emerge from the block of marble. I do especially like the metaphor of facts and fictions "rhyming," because that's very much what it feels like in the moment.

Last I knew you were playing Call of Cthulhu regularly at home--anything else?

I haven't actually been able to play CALL OF CTHULHU regularly for a while now -- one of my core players has a major Lovecraft allergy. We were playing NOBILIS at home, I think, when I ran NIGHT'S BLACK AGENTS for you; then I ran a CODA-system space game after building the setting with MICROSCOPE, and now I'm running UNKNOWN ARMIES set in the Old West. Each scenario occurs one year later than the last, so we get a good historical sweep out of it.


So do you set up your home campaign as a series of scenarios--almost like modules? Like Mission A then Mission B…?

My home campaign structures vary. Sometimes it's a fairly clear series of missions or modules; other times it's just sandboxing and I build (or co-build) emergent adventures around whatever trouble the players get into. In this campaign, it's kind of a hybrid of those two structures: I tell them which historical event that year their characters will realize contains UA weirdness and then build a sandbox inside it for them to play in.


How do you try out new stuff--with a home group or usually with designers?

It depends. Usually I'll play something with the designer or with some alpha GMs who I know from the convention circuit, but often I'll bring something back, like MICROSCOPE, and the home group will be interested in giving it a whirl. Metatopia is a game design convention, and I wind up alpha testing a lot of new games there as part of my Guest of Honor duties. My own new stuff is usually not a whole new system, but a subsystem -- when I was at Last Unicorn and Decipher we'd play parts of those games as we designed them. I ran a little 13TH AGE when I was developing the BESTIARY for it. I did run a full alpha playtest campaign of NIGHT'S BLACK AGENTS while I was designing it, just to make sure GUMSHOE could handle becoming a thriller game, and I think that worked pretty well. But mostly my home game is blowing off creative steam, not an extension of my work day.


Your schticks are history and horror: both of which have been controversial lately--at least on-line--it's been suggested that playing games where bad things happen is covertly a way to enjoy or encourage bad things happening to people in real life. What's your take on handling subjects in games people might consider difficult? 

I write games about what interests me, which includes, as you mention, history and horror and the broad overlap of the two. My general take is that people who worry about being influenced by horror or the past should avoid playing games about those things -- there are plenty of great fantasy or space games out there. Anyone who opens a game by me I expect to be interested in a game by me on the topic, so I write for them. I treat my audience as adults capable of differentiating between fiction and reality, and between villainy and self-help advice, and in 20-odd years of doing this, I can count the number of times I've been wrong on the fingers of one hand. One Norwegian guy on Usenet got way too interested in authoritarian early 20th century ideology because of my description of Wilhelmine Germany in GURPS ALTERNATE EARTHS, but I have to consider that a fringe case.


So you don't buy the significance of the "we're all unconsciously affected in subtle ways by bad ideas" thesis? Or do you just figure if you are it's your own fault?

"Unconsciously affected" is the kind of red flag phrase that just screams "no causal link" to me, especially with regard to putative grownups. So yeah, if you play a game I wrote set in the 1930s and come away more racist or sexist or Freudian or fascist or Stalinist, yes I think it's your fault, not mine or even Stalin's.


Can you run down what you've got that's out right now and what each thing is about?

I can hit some highlights, certainly. DAY AFTER RAGNAROK is my post-WWII post-apocalypse "submachine guns and sorcery" setting, currently available from Atomic Overmind for SAVAGE WORLDS, FATE, and HERO. Writing that involved destroying the world in 1945 except for the parts that looked like Conan and Professor Quatermass.

QELONG is my damp, horrible sandbox hexcrawl for our pal James Raggi at Lamentations of the Flame Princess. It's "fantasy fucking Cambodia," which if you know anything about the history is even worse than "fantasy fucking Vietnam," but I put enough spins on it (and invoked enough 20th century horror) to warrant keeping it in a secondary world, not just Solomon-Kane-ing it into the 17th century.

TRAIL OF CTHULHU is my adaptation of CALL OF CTHULHU to the GUMSHOE system; my most recent thing for that is the "Occult Paris" chapter of DREAMHOUNDS OF PARIS by Robin Laws.

I'm also writing a monthly PDF series for Pelgrane called KEN WRITES ABOUT STUFF. We're in the third series of KWAS now, and you can subscribe or buy the singles individually. I've done campaign frames like MOON DUST MEN about UFO crash recovery teams in 1978, and THE SCHOOL OF NIGHT in which you play Christopher Marlowe and his occult poet pals fighting demons and Spaniards in the 1590s, and TOMBHOUNDS OF EGYPT which is about crooked archaeologists in 1930s Egypt for TRAIL or any other GUMSHOE game. They might be GUMSHOE rules "Zooms" on historical magic like voodoo and goetia, or mind control or martial arts; or expansions for other GUMSHOE games like MUTANT CITY SPIES (my "S.H.I.E.L.D." expansion for MUTANT CITY BLUES) or XENO-ARCHAEOLOGY! for ASHEN STARS. Every other month so far has been a "Hideous Creature" from the Cthulhu Mythos, looked at from all different angles to let Keepers change up the too-familiar Deep Ones and such and put back the Lovecraftian mystery. And in some of them I just talk about stuff like the Nazi Bell project, or the Spear of Destiny, or Lilith.

On that same note, I'm doing a column (in English) for FENIX magazine in Sweden, usually either a setting, a campaign frame, or a mini-RPG. A bunch of those have been collected in three volumes of THE BEST OF FENIX (all in English), which should be available in PDF at least by now.

Hell, you can still buy my SUPPRESSED TRANSMISSION collections in PDF from Steve Jackson Games, which were me doing the same thing as KWAS, only much faster and younger and crazier. My Mekons era, not my Waco Brothers era.

You can also pick up most of my GURPS work from SJG, of which I most highly recommend GURPS HORROR 4th edition, which contains virtually all the good advice from my long-ago guide to running horror games, NIGHTMARES OF MINE, plus decades of good advice I've learned since or recycled from the earlier two editions of GURPS HORROR. Only about a quarter of it is GURPS rules or stats, and in the post-D20 age I don't want anyone saying GURPS stat blocks are too much work.

You know all about NIGHT'S BLACK AGENTS, of course, and the Big New Thing for that is THE DRACULA DOSSIER, which is a massive improvisational, collaborative campaign based on the premise I mentioned above -- that DRACULA isn't a novel, but the after-action report of a failed 1894 attempt to recruit Dracula as an asset for British Intelligence. It includes DRACULA UNREDACTED, which is Stoker's full first draft "unredacted" by me and by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, and annotated by three generations of MI6 analysts trying to figure out if "Operation Edom" really ended in 1894 and discovering that nope, it's still trying to run Dracula as an operative in the War on Terror. So all the weird stuff in Stoker plus those annotations leads to over 200 encounters -- NPCs and organizations that might be innocent or part of Edom or minions of Dracula, locations and objects that might be innocuous or deadly dangerous, all depending on how the players approach them and how the Director puts them into the game. The DIRECTOR'S HANDBOOK combines all those various versions, plus some possible Capstone climactic endings, plus some campaign frames to add Cthulhu or undead Nazis if you want, and the overarching blueprint to help you shape your campaign the way you and the players want it to go.

Ok, Bram Stoker's Dracula: I gotta ask you. The prose in that book just puts me to sleep every damn time, aside from one or two passages in the beginning when Dracula first shows up, it seems so deadened and attenuated. Aside from the invention of Dracula himself (who's a great villain, obviously) what are you seeing that I'm not?

It may just be a stylistic preference: I like 19th century prose better than many people (although I don't possess the Dickens appreciation gene, so it's not like my taste is bulletproof here). I genuinely enjoy the narrative elisions created by Stoker manipulating the epistolary form -- so much so that I've written a whole game about them, in fact. The structure of the novel is bloody brilliant -- I feel very bad about deforming it in DRACULA UNREDACTED. Dracula's appearance in London is also wonderfully suspenseful and terrifying, and the thematic and character contrasts between the hunters' Christianity and reason vs. Dracula's diabolical animalism in the novel keep paying off. Finally, of course, as a cultural window into the late Victorian mind it's just plain unsurpassed as a historical document.


Is it generally true that the more alt-history a setting is, the more you like it, or are you also into less-grounded things like Traveller or Toon or 40k?

I find it easier to buy mentally into settings connected to something real, usually history or legend or geography -- this preference holds in fiction, too. I prefer secret history to secondary world fantasy novels, for instance, and that holds for RPGs even moreso because the setting is so much more important there than in a novel. Even my homebrew D&D setting in high school was a heavily modded "fantasy fucking Byzantine Empire." That said, I like adding magic or myth or weird science or superpowers to the alt-history or secret-history setting -- even a straight history game is more fun for me with time travel in it. I liked the TRAVELLER setting well enough, though when I ran TRAVELLER I redesigned it for greater astropolitical plausibility (at least to me). I've never played WARHAMMER of any stripe because I didn't do it when I was thirteen (because it didn't exist then) so I missed the WH recruitment window. I can imagine playing one good afternoon's worth of TOON, but why?


What are you working on now?

We're still doing the rest of the stretch goals for THE DRACULA DOSSIER right now; I'm finishing my polish on THE EDOM FILES, which is a connection of adventures in Operation Edom's history from 1877 to the 21st century; Gar is finishing the EDOM FIELD MANUAL, which is a vampire-hunting manual disguised as a streamlined NBA starter kit or vice versa; then I get to watch 36 or so Dracula movies for THE THRILL OF DRACULA, a book about adopting and altering Dracula for your game using the movies as examples.

I'm also writing a big expansion for the MOON DUST MEN campaign frame that we're going to spread out over a couple of KWAS issues, and will probably involve writing some dogfighting rules I will need to playtest, and I'm getting started on the GUMSHOE adaptation of DELTA GREEN, called THE FALL OF DELTA GREEN. You play DELTA GREEN agents during its heyday as an authorized anti-Mythos operation: the 1960s. So it's back to Cambodia for me, then.


I had a lot of fun playing your Qelong setting for LotFP--especially fighting lotus monks--do you get to play all the things you write? If not--do you ever wish you did?

I don't have time to play all the things I write, and in fairness if I did, I'd probably squander a bunch of it hanging out with my wife and cat instead. Sometimes I'll write a scene or a mechanic and I'd like to run it or play it out, sure, but it's more fun to play stuff I haven't written yet. I get surprised more often, that way, anyhow.


It seems like setting stuff is mostly your thing--are you happy to let other people handle
the mechanics, or do you get ideas for fiddling with that end of things that you'd like
to publish?

I don't really consider myself a soup-to-nuts system guy, although I learned an awful lot about mechanics designing two back-to-back STAR TREK RPGs with different mechanics, and then reviewing games from all over the design spectrum for a decade for my column "Out of the Box." When I write for GURPS or SAVAGE WORLDS part of the fun is coming up with (or repurposing) mechanics to fit the setting or story, just like I did for NIGHT'S BLACK AGENTS or even QELONG. If I get a really good idea for a mechanic I can usually either put it in KWAS if it's GUMSHOE-able, write a mini-game around it for FENIX, or shop-talk it at Metatopia, so I keep the urge pretty much under control.


You consulted on D&D 5--was there anything that surprised you about that process?

I was most surprised to be asked, actually. Like you say, I'm better known -- and better -- as a setting guy, and they didn't ask about that. But I did cut my teeth on D&D, and I've played every edition except 2nd, so I had some notions. Everyone at Wizards was very nice and professional, as they have been ever since they laid me off back in 2001 after buying the box I came in.

Are there any developments in games outside your own sphere you're excited about?

I'm crazy excited about the new technologies in tabletop wargames. First, the card-driven rules that Mark Herman invented in 1994 have finally come into their own in the last decade, mostly from GMT. That really lowers complexity while keeping flavor and feel strong. GMT is also cracking the very tough nut of the counter-insurgency wargame, with Volko Ruhnke leading the way. If we can get a real breakthrough in tactical game design the way we have in strategic games, that segment will go nuts. We may have already gotten it; I get so few chances to play wargames that I mostly concentrate on strategic stuff.


What wargames do you like? Whats your history with that?

Right now I'm very excited about the GMT counter-insurgency series and the strategic-level card-driven games in general, like I said. FIRE IN THE LAKE and NO RETREAT! are two great examples of what I'm talking about. I still play WASHINGTON'S WAR (nee WE THE PEOPLE) and love it. I started playing hex-and-counter wargames before they had hexes -- my dad bought the first GETTYSBURG game from Avalon Hill back when the board had squares, and he taught me to play it so he'd have someone to play. I played GETTYSBURG and a lot of other old AH grand-tactical games and then got very into PANZERBLITZ and its sequels, which led me down the hyper-tactical rabbit-hole of SQUAD LEADER and ASL which wound up killing my wargame interest for a while (that and STAR FLEET BATTLES -- take four hours to play 1/32 of a second!). Later I found RUSSIAN CAMPAIGN which got me into the operational and strategic scale stuff and that has stuck with me ever since. (I played a lot of WAR AT SEA in college, too, but not before or since.)

If you could give one piece of advice to wannabe RPG writers, what would it be?

Make your name by producing good work for a system with a lot of players. In my day, you had to get hired to write for D&D or RUNEQUEST or the new hotness; now, virtually every system you care to name is either open or the license is ridiculously friendly. Write what you want to play now, don't bother to fix what you think is wrong with whatever system hurt you in 8th grade. Between PDFs, POD publishing, Kickstarter, and the whole indie-DIY ecology, you can be a real life RPG writer from the jump. Make sure you hire (or sweat-equity) a really good artist and layout person so your work doesn't look bad, and make sure you've read enough good writing that you can tell that your work isn't bad. People say to hire an editor, and although I never have, I got very lucky and was edited very well and brutally my first day out by Susan Pinsonneault. Since she's not in the game biz anymore, you should probably hire someone.


If you could give one piece of advice to the RPG industry as a whole--assuming they'd take it--what would it be?

They seem, mostly driven in good Marxist fashion by the changing means of production, to be finally taking my advice, which I've been offering since about 2005. Which is: stop thinking of games as insanely expensive, hard to sell magazines that have to keep going forever. Think of them as small press books, which in fact they are. Not every novel is a series; not every game needs splats and expansions. Most don't. Or if they do, the aforementioned crowd of DIY types will do it, and do it from a place of obsession, not a place of needing to fill a hole in the lineup. Maybe publish a game that can support a "trilogy." Maybe not. But don't push it. Publish what you would rather eat ramen than not publish, because you'll be eating ramen either way.

Damn, good point! Thank you for your time, Ken!

And now, a word from our sponsor...

Only 22 of 3000 copies left at the LotFP webstore

Why Break!! Will Probably Be Amazing

Reynaldo Madriñan is a familiar face in DIY D&D circles--he runs a campaign that's Nintendo on top but pure old-school under the hood. Every session I've ever played with him--in Kenneth Hite's Qelong or his own Bavovania setting--has been a blast.

He's currently working on publishing a project called Break!! with a fantastic anime-style artist named Grey Wizard that really shows a different side to the OSR/ DIY RPG revolution. It promises all the color and frenzy without the pointless mechanization or soap-opera knee-hugging that've plagued so many previous attempts at the genre.  So I asked them about it....

-Rey: In one sentence: What is Break!!?

Pretty much the game I’ve wanted since I was 9 years old and realized that regular D&D had no way to play robot characters.

-Grey: In one sentence: What is Break!! ?

A tabletop game but also the love-child of an instruction manual, a game guide and concept art book.

-Grey or Rey whoever feels like it: Why is it called Break!! ?

R: I took the name from an old joke my friends and I made about the Guilty Gear video games: ‘The game works because everyone is broken.’ In most fighting games, you have a couple of standard characters and one or two off-the-wall ones that change up the game. Guilty Gear is full of over-the-top, colorful, dynamic characters. There is no boring one, and that’s how I want BREAK!! to feel.

G: Rey has always called it BREAK!! I never really challenged it as I liked the powerful simplicity of it. I am also a fan of Rey’s use of double exclamation marks as a bit of textual branding. I guess it was a working title that kinda stuck. I can’t see it changing now as we’ve become very attached to it… but we should probably force ourselves to consider alternatives.

-Rey: You're doing all the rules and writing Grey's doing the art--is that right?

G: Broadly correct. Rey is the game designer, I am the art department. Although it feels less binary than that. We don’t follow a traditional waterfall process (write, layout, commission art) its more a scruffy, iterative collaboration.

R: Yeah, what Grey said. Most of the time I’ll write a thing, Grey will look over it and make suggestions (good ones, I should add) and then I’ll go back, tweak it and he’ll draw stuff from it he thinks looks cool. He’s had plenty of great suggestions too - neither of us have enough of an ego to balk at the others critique, either. Or maybe we do have big egos, just really resilient ones.

-Rey: We already have Exalted and some translations of Japanese games--how is Break!! different?

Exalted (at least the one I ran) is a wonderful, clunky mess, kind of like a Shonen Jump version of Rifts. I feel like BREAK!! is more cohesive because it’s just Grey and I, but it probably looks very similar from the outside. I feel like Exalted, though tonally and stylistically separated from Vampire and other White Wolf games, is still very structurally similar. Your character really is much of the setting there, their inner turmoil is at the forefront.

BREAK!! at its core, is a game about adventuring in a world that’s much larger than you are yet still managing to make a difference. It’s architecture comes from stuff like Stormbringer, Warhammer Fantasy and, naturally D&D. Your character is still very important, but they are designed to be your means of interacting with the game’s setting (or whatever the GM puts in front of you that day) and it makes the two games feel very different while actually playing.

Clearly both games can do both those things without much issue, but the focus is different.

As for the Japanese games that have been translated, many are very precise and granular rulesets. You play them to get a very specific kind of experience, to emulate a kind of show you like or to get battles scripted just so.  BREAK!! is a much looser, more customizable game, with a more relaxed system - I’ve taken some cues from these Japanese games (especially implementing a flexible, but clear rules procedure) but it’s still quite distant from them.

-Rey: What's "anime-influenced" mean for you in terms of the rules or background?

Seeing as many Final Fantasy tropes, for instance, were derived from D&D, are there any practical differences?

The style of Anime/Manga that influences BREAK!! has a very permissive aesthetic. If it were more realistic, a lot of the things I am trying to squeeze in there would look silly (in a bad way). I also think that while Japanese Fantasy has been clearly influenced by D&D, it’s gone in it’s own direction, enough that it’s worth mining for inspiration. 

-Grey: What are some artists or works that influenced your conception of Break!! ?

Cel shaded animation is a big influence on my art. The practical limitations of hand-drawn animation meant you got these atmospheric, painterly backgrounds with crisp, simple characters on top. There’s something about that combination that I love. I hope, that if they squint, readers might think BREAK!! is based on some obscure animated show.

The game has also clearly been influenced video games as well, but there’s other stuff mixed into the DNA too, including, of course, my early exposure to 80s fantasy artists. There will be a few affectionate references to particularly influential works scattered throughout the book.

Of course, Rey’s setting has been inspirational too. He’d matured it over several years of play in his home game but has been gracious enough to let me interpret/add to it. There was something about what he’d written that made me want to draw it!

For the books layouts I’ve gone for a minimal/modernist approach. This seems to be a fairly atypical route for the RPG market but I think it’s unobtrusive style creates clarity and lets the content (words and art) breathe.

-Rey: Will the characters have more wuxia-style powers than in traditional D&D? If so--are combats going to take longer than in a typical D&D game or does it play about the same?

R: Some will! Like one Calling is very much based around old chanbara movies and wuxia style abilities, but it’s not the primary focus. There are Sword in the Stone style wizards, fighters who are a bit too brave for their own good, She-Ra/Sailor Moon hybrids, even one type that’s basically a competent but relatively mundane character with an exceptionally well stocked backpack.

Combats are quick and comparable to D&D, but there might be a lot of variance in the length of battle depending on the circumstances. Fighting a group of well armed mooks is going to be short and ugly but fighting really, really big monsters might take more time since it’s a mini-dungeon mixed with a boss battle.

G: The combat stunt system, weapon abilities and battlefield conditions will also colour the combat experience.

Grey: So the graphic design in the manual looks light-years ahead of any RPG I've seen lately in terms of user-friendliness--are there any ideas or guidelines that you used to make this work?

Thanks, that’s nice to hear.

I’ve applied a few HCI principles to the design, which I am familiar with because of my day job. Not all are relevant to printed books, but many are: readability, know your user, be task orientated, anticipate needs, be consistent, etc. At a high level this has affected they way we have structured the book and it’s content. I’m hoping cross-fertilizing in this way will yield more interesting results than building on the perceived wisdom. As this is my foray into RPG book design I am also unacquainted with the perceived wisdom!

The BREAK!! core rules are effectively a reference book, so I see navigation as key to usability. A reader will need to jump to a specific page, and then quickly locate the desired extract. This has been the primary objective of the graphic design.

With regard to finding the right page, there are a few things I’m trying. Sections and sub sections titles will be visible in the margins (similar to a dictionary). Additionally, every section (and sub-section) will be clearly numbered for easy location and cross referencing (like a legal document). Lastly, sections will be colour coded, as a secondary cue to the numbers, so when flipping fast you will still know where you are.

Once you’ve found the right page you’ll need to find the right segment. One of the big ideas was to distill the content into three ‘types’ based on their function to the user, and then to visually distinguish them from one another. Firstly, there’s descriptive flavour to set the tone or inspire with illuminating examples. Secondly, the mechanical rules presented in simple bulleted sentences. Finally, when needed, direct interaction with the user to discuss customisation or interpretation of the rules. This way a reader can quickly identify which block of text is the relevant one. A new player that wants to get the gist of a calling can simply read the flavour text while a GM might want to refer to the crunchy section to refresh his memory or absorb the GM tip.

The art should provide visual landmarks too, to help the reader orientate themselves and provide an alternative way to recall a rule or ability (rather than having to remembering the title or section number).

Also, while good clear writing is great, information can sometimes be conveyed in more succinct ways, such as flowcharts, icons or diagrams. A simple one-page flowchart can explain a complex non-linear process much more effectively than reams of prose. I’m always trying to identify when I can employ one of these methods.

What I’m really looking forward to is a digital edition of the rules, there’s a lot more potential to make the book more usable. I want to be more ambitious than a hyperlinked PDF.

-Rey: How does magic work in the setting?

R: Well, I had this really elaborate magic system worked out that I subsequently discarded one night in a fit of pique. The system is much more simple now. At this point, every character Calling has about 16 or so elective abilities to pick from as you go up in Rank. Caster and Gestalt type characters have magic abilities built into this list - these abilities have supernatural qualities or do crazy shit, but they also affect your character’s allegiance score with cosmic forces of Light and/or Dark.

Allegiance is both bad and good - swinging too far to one side can be inconvenient, naturally.

Rey: How do Allegiance scores work? Do they change how you play you character?

Every time you pick a Magic Ability, you get a Light or Dark Allegiance point depending on which end of the spectrum the ability is associated. Player characters can accrue around 6 or so elective abilities from Rank 1 to Rank 10, this gives them a choice to either select a mix or max out one or the other. Once you have 3 on one end you gain a ‘Gift’, which is some sort of transformative blessing from cosmic things on that spectrum. Light might give you eyes in the back of your head or patches of reflective crystal on your skin that reveals all lies. Dark could grant you a second soul that lives in your hand or filaments that writhe under your skin and occasionally burst out to defend you. I’ve tried to make sure these all have a good and bad aspect to them - you’ll hand over a bit of what you are to these alien energies in order to draw power from them.

If you manage a total of 6 on either end, you change further. At some point, there should be rules about Apotheosis but I don’t want to get too ahead of myself.

Allegiance Points also have an effect on certain items and locations in game. The Sword of Aken will not unsheathe for anyone who does not have a significant Light Allegiance, the Four-Masked Asura of Jie will not speak to anyone with insufficient Dark Allegiance. The Grey Door will only open for one who has no points of Allegiance whatsoever. Naturally, Game Masters are encouraged to make up their own versions of these things.

One thing I try to stress is it’s not a good versus evil thing so much as two immense organisms of living energy drafting people into a war that they can’t really understand. The people of the game’s world tend to anthropomorphize them, but it’s just as common for them to be seen as a simple energy source. They generally don’t affect your character’s personality, but they do change how they work mechanically and how NPC’s react to them, so it’s up to each player to reflect on how that affects their character in the fiction.

Are there any other characteristics or mechanics like that which are outside what D&D players would expect?

R: Modifiers in general are much simpler and have a lower impact than they do in most forms of D&D as much of the game functions under a “roll under” mechanic.

Some Magic has different sorts of limitations on use than the standard Vancian stuff. One powerful attack spell hurts you a bit if you try to use it more than once in a battle, summoning certain creatures a repeatedly increases the chance that they might break free of your control and turn against you, that kind of thing.

I mentioned this earlier, but fighting very large monsters in BREAK!! is very different from fighting them in D&D - it’s a much rarer and more involved experience, too. You’ll need to move around the surface of the monster to get to the best strategic point.

Getting hurt and dying is very different than it is in D&D. It involves little Legend of Zelda style Hearts and an Injury Table. You have a few hearts for every dangerous situation, which refill whenever you enter a new fight or tight spot. You lose 1-3 hearts whenever you get hit, once they’re all gone you suffer a more permanent injury. These Injuries will make things more difficult for you, or may even kill you. So though the risk of death is still there, but this replenishing system means you’re not deterred from entering a battle because you got mauled early on.

It’s also much more common to recruit enemies and even monsters in BREAK!! than most other RPGs, I think. There are even a host of pets and companions listed in the Equipment section. Followers in general are more precious than the are in D&D.

There’s a ton of stuff actually. There’s plenty of familiar things in the game so people can get into it pretty quickly, but of course there will be lots to distinguish it and keep people engaged.

Grey: Is there a specific tone you're trying to hit?

There are actually a few in BREAK!! We wanted to create a unique tone for each of the specific areas of the game world. The Wistful Dark is melancholic but hopeful, the Blazing Garden is wondrous and bombastic, the Buried Kingdoms grotty but humorous, etc. However the core book has a prevailing fun, bright, energetic vibe. We will hopefully get to better exploit the individual region themes in follow-up splatbooks.

Grey and Rey: How does the collaboration work--does Rey just write stuff and then Grey draws what Rey asks for or is there a more complex back-and-forth?

G: The project started organically when I idly suggested if Rey wrote an RPG then I’d do all the drawings. Then we just both started doing stuff. The process is basically like this: We share work with each other, get feedback, then develop it until we are both happy with the end result. I think it’s fair to say we are making it all up as we go along, but the fact that we don’t have a deadline has meant the process has been fun and experimental thus far. What I think is especially interesting is that we’ve developed the art in tandem with the rules right from the start, rather than waiting to the end when all the creative decisions are resolved. Lots of good stuff has come out of our meanderings and our ability to riff off each others stuff. This is what’s so great about DIY, it allows you to be inefficient and play around. We’ve been drifting along like this for a while but now we’re entering a new phase, with a more solidified design we can be more productive and get it finished. 

R: Yeah, it’s like Grey said - we do everything from Google Docs so he would make all these suggestions that show up in bright pink and I used to joke he was dumping pepto bismol all over my hard work!

I will steadily click along at my own pace (usually 30 Mins - 2 hours of writing every day) but he is now keeping me focused on the stuff we need done, rather than what strikes my fancy at the time.

Grey and Rey: If someone already is happily playing a D&D campaign are there any rules or ideas that are in Break!! that you don't think are anywhere else that they might want to take a look at?

R: I think the Stunt and Trick rules click nicely into D&D and similar games. All the little rules for Adventurer Downtime (I.E, what your characters do between proper sessions) would fit in as well. They cover stuff like crafting items, looking for adventure hooks, investigating a particular interest, flirting with NPCs, starting crap because you’re bored or just relaxing since you messed up your arm during that last fight. Nothing too complicated of course, and it all leads to you having more to work with when you come back for the next game.

Rey:

What are the classes?

We use the term ‘Callings’ because, although similar conceptually, has broader use in the game (I think it’s also slightly clearer for new kids too). There is a form of soft classification among the callings. The non-magical types are Warriors and Specialists. Casters are totally focused on Magic. Gestalts can choose from some magic and non-magic abilities. Genera are old style ‘Race as Class’ types, but reserved for things that don’t work well as regular character species.

So the callings are:

Warriors

Champion - Courage/Bravado and aggressive action based fighting type.

Raider (Warrior) - Mobility and precision based fighting type.

Specialists

Factotum - Knows/Has the right stuff skill type.

Sneak - Sneaky/Acrobatic/Stabby skill type.

Gestalts

Battle Princess - Protective/Healing Mage-Warrior type.

Murder Princess - Destructive/Berserking Mage-Warrior type.

Casters

Sage - Helpful/Hexing/Practical Wizard type.

Heretic - Bad News Summoning/Sealing Wizard type.

Genera

Fairy - Diminutive Support/Trickster Magic type.

War-Mechanoid - Hunter Killer Mecha type

Obake Mystic - Shape-Changing Magic type.

Immortal - End Boss in training type.

Some of these will be available in a play test document. The other Callings will follow in the full book, and I love making them so expect me to come up with a new one here and there for fun. Some on the blog, some in the books.

Can you tell us any more about the default setting?

R: The Sun-Machine is broken. Day and night are geographic features, rather than temporal ones. The world is broken up into four main regions.

The Wistful Dark is on the Night side of the world. It is a place filled with abandoned cities, strange old temples, luminescent fungal forests, and terrifying monsters that prey on those stuck in the Shadowed Lands. The fortunate build cities around pieces of the broken sun (Called Star Shards) and engage in unfortunate politics. Others collect in the dark places around the mournful song of the Hollow Queen.

The Blazing Garden is on the Day side of the world. The most intact and functioning piece of the Sun Machine hovers above the great City of Aeon and illuminates half the world. It is filled with immense creatures fed by the constant light, overgrown jungles, and orphaned technology. Regulus, the Emperor of Sol, moves to conquer this region and an alliance of others moves to oppose him.

The Twilight Meridian lies in the divide, and is mostly sea. Naval and Skyship are more common in this region for reasons of necessity. On the Seven Holy Isles eager warlords clash as often as philosophers trade eager barbs. The Galvanus Peninsula provides a haven for both trade and piracy. The Metal Continent holds the secrets of the world before, as well as many of its horrors.

The Buried Kingdom has never seen the Sun-Machine or the Night Sky, and feels no great loss for either. Here Old Dwarven Industry combats a New Goblin Order for control of the rails and the expansive tunnels that run through it. Forbidden ruins rest among the stone, and the Unterkin hide from those who would exploit their gifts. All speak of a place called “Promise”, which is said to be even further beneath the rock at their feet.

G: It’s worth noting that we’re not revealing too much of the history/lore in the book, as absorbing long expositions are dull (and restrictive) but the great thing about having it all figured out is that you have a solid foundation for the all the books concepts. It functions like an editorial/visual styleguide or an author’s character backstory, you don’t ‘see’ it in it’s naked form but it’s there in the background ensuring everything is internally consistent and connected. Players, if they’re inclined, might be able to piece the mythos together themselves as a meta-objective.

R: I find it much more interesting to tell the story of an RPG’s setting through adventure elements, items, and other in-game stuff. Your background info should give just give a taste, and leave the rest for the players to find out (assuming they care) or for the Game Master to invent.

Rey:

How deep are the magic and advancement going to be in the first book? Is this like modern-D&D-level deep or are you starting small?

It’s a little different from D&D. Character’s core competencies get better as they grow in Rank, but the elective abilities you choose will broaden the scope of your character rather than pump up the numbers or damage you can do. I also try to make sure the abilities that you can get early on scale in some way so they are still useful even when compared to the more potent ones you acquire later on. I want people to be adding to a repertoire rather than simply replacing one method with the next big thing.

Otherwise progression is pretty similar, you go from a mostly competent greenhorn to potentially god-fighting heroic type. Ranks go from 1-10 for characters in the core book, with 11-15 being proposed as a totally different kind of epic style progression coming later. Really tough monsters and antagonists can go up to rank 20.

-Grey and Rey: Have you playtested it? Anything fun happen during that?

R: I have playtested a bunch as the game has evolved. I think my favorite parts have always been how excited people have been over their abilities or how good the art looks - or how happy they are that there is something called a Battle Princess, but there has been some fun specific stuff too.

One character who stocked up on treats managed to convince the minions of a warlord to abandon their posts for candy. We had a Chib Sage who was quiet and thoughtful throughout the whole game go on a kamikaze run against an enemy armed with explosives and through sheer luck managed to survive the resulting kaboom. One Champion lured a powerful Skeleton Knight onto a steep ledge and kicked him off it before he mauled her, saving the day. That last one was kind of hilarious in context, another player joked she had finished everything before the “Boss Music” had a chance to play.

Thank you Rey, thank you Grey, and now, a word from our sponsor:

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