Interview: Archon's Court on Owe My Soul to the Company Store

Friend of the blog Archon's Court recently published his excellent Mothership module, Owe My Soul to the Company Store, as a zine on Itch. I thought it would be interesting to conduct a short interview with the luminary/wunderkind on the process of making such a thing. This is not a review or anything, just a conversation I thought was interesting.

art by Locheil

What is Owe My Soul to the Company Store and what was your goal in writing it?

Owe My Soul to the Company Store is an adventure for Mothership, set on a failing colony staffed, in part, with human minds loaded into insectoid "labor bodies". My goal was to take a kind of adventure I really enjoy running - a faction-heavy city sandbox - and see if I could manage to write one for public consumption.

You’ve written other zines before. Has the process of this one been significantly different?

Absolutely - this is the first one of my zines to be an adventure (instead of a system), the first one to use someone else's third party license, and so on, but the main difference was that this is the most heavily edited of them. My earlier two were written like a blogpost - I made something up, wrote it down, and shipped it. Owe My Soul was fully restructured and rewritten twice, along with all manner of additions and cuts in between those.

Did you know you were going to be editing that heavily beforehand? How did that impact the writing process?

I knew I was going to edit this one more heavily (I hired an editor, after all!) but I wasn't expecting to run through it as many times as I did. I didn't have a good structure - earlier versions of the zine used the Wants->Has->Obstacles framing for NPCs (or, in one attempt, just described them in prose), but that required too much GM improvisation when you're juggling up to 16 people at a time. Same thing with the colony itself - playtesting showed that even though the adventure isn't about clearing rooms, I needed to have the rooms to provide context to player action. 

If I was writing something with a commonly-set structure, like a dungeoncrawl, it wouldn't've needed as much sawing - the zine contents stayed just about the same the whole way through, it was just the way they were presented.

Sam Sorensen is a proven editing hand. How did you communicate with him to figure out the best way to lay out information on the page?

The first thing I did, before I started writing, was outline how I wanted to spend space - a page of 5.5"x8.5" fits, to the best of my knowledge, about 500 words if you just pack it with text. So, I blocked it out in 500 word pieces - one page for each character+map, a two-page spread for the introduction, and so on.

It fits together as well as it does because I was stringent about that inventory, and because "layout" and "editing" were nonlinear - when I got completed pages back from him they usually came with recommendations for cuts or additions to make or use space as the layout revealed it. 

The zone descriptions at the top of each map page, the author's footnotes, some of the rooms, and a couple minor NPCs were added during layout in order to fit holes in the structure. If I had just written a manuscript, handed it to him, and said "make this be laid out", some of the pages would've been half-empty! 

a work-in-progress illustration by Locheil

What’s the process of playtesting like?

I'm an advocate for immediate playtesting. Write out the parts of your adventure that you need, just like you were writing your GM notes, and then get to the table. Whenever you need to improvise some piece of information - you need a particular NPC to exist as a response to the PCs, you need to figure out the security of some building or another that they try to break into, whatever, write it down. You probably won't add all of them into the final text verbatim, but you've kind of "proven" that they're useful because you needed them.

In Owe My Soul's case, "Jacket" Morse, one of the minor NPCs, exists because I needed somebody to torment the players a couple sessions into the playtest campaign, and later realized that he should stick around.

Did you run all the playtests?

Unfortunately so. I think it's a useful tool to have your game run by someone else, but the eyes of an editor also test to make sure the adventure "actually makes any sense", and without the organizational difficulty.

The premise of the adventure, where humans are forked into these labor bodies, is great for the “working class horror” of Mothership. What’s your initial process for turning ideas in adventures?

Stapling more ideas to it! The starting point of Owe My Soul wasn't the labor bodies, it was a prompt on a community Discord - "a city that should never have been built" - and the image of a couple Commercial Security agents standing around a crowded spaceport. 

From there, almost everything was stolen - being forked for work is a common trope in transhuman SF, the complex is on Callisto because a friend of mine happened to have recently said "no one ever does anything with Callisto", the sealed ACHILLES laboratory is based off of an article I read about WW1 chemical weapons development labs, on and on and on. 

This doesn't get you an adventure, but it gets you a premise - once you have a premise, you find a structure, and you write out the premise according to that structure. Some premises work well as dungeoncrawls, others as regional hexcrawls, others as mysteries, and so on.

Well, I guess most of the OSR premises are one premise - "here's a map with things and people in it".

I'm looking through the PDF now, and-- to phrase this as a question-- Isn't Locheil such a powerhouse artist?

Absolutely! The whole color scheme and visual v i b e of the zine branches off of a couple early pieces of his. I'd be overjoyed to work with him again, but he's in the Ph.D. mines.

One part of the zine that stands out to me is the little lines of text at the bottom of some pages. They're usually supplemental information or reflections on the page's content. How did you come up with those?

They're a common Mothership affectation - you can see them in A Pound of Flesh and Gradient Descent, for instance, fulfilling about the same purpose. A lot of the text in Owe My Soul's was actually scrap - bits of lore and tone-building text that was removed earlier for brevity's sake but got to live again when I had space to use.

Once you write something you can, probably, always find a use for it someday - even as I wound the zine up I still benefited from snatching bits of text from the first draft and the year-and-a-half old blogpost that set out the premise.

Any lessons that this has taught you about design?

Sometimes being "game"-y isn't that bad. The clearest and most useful NPC presentation for this project, the one I ended up with after all those edits, spends about half its word count on explicit quests and rewards - since it's easier to use those to figure out what the character wants than to do the reverse and write quests based on desires.

What’s in the future for Archon’s Court?

Next year I'll be back to grinding at some of my long-term blogpost series - post some regional hexcrawls for my megastructure setting, if I'm lucky. In 2026 I bet I'll run another Kickstarter, but as of now I don't know what it'll actually... be.