Interview: G.R. Michael on Best Case Scenario

 I was lucky enough to spend a few hours trading questions and answers with long-time colleague and absolute GLoG luminary G.R. Michael on Best Case Scenario, the skirmish RPG that will evoke SCP and XCOM and other media with acronym names. He's kickstarting as a zine, and I thought it was a good occasion to get in yet another interview. As with others, I am not claiming anything like impartiality.

Not pictured: the artist

Tradition dictates that I ask you how you got into RPGs. What drew you to them?

a fine, traditional question...
When I was a bairn, I understood that I needed to have a favorite blanket, a favorite teddy bear, and an imaginary friend. While I knew these things were a crock, I had seen firsthand how much delight adults took in me referencing them. Even at the tender age of four I felt a responsibility to keep the public amused. 

The imaginary friends were a real hit with my little sisters. They demanded more stories about them, and eventually about the characters of My Little Pony, which I obliged
(not the modern version, I'm old, I'm talking about the characters of the 1984 film)

I continued to spin yarns for them, then for my friends. For many years my cousins and I maintained a sprawling science-fantasy setting over long phone calls made after 7:00 p.m. EST (phone calls before that time would rack up the phone bill too fast). Dissatisfied with our loose... collaborative-storytelling, freeform RP (I feel silly applying these terms to literal child's play but I guess that's what it would technically be), I started to introduce rules. I wrote a bunch of "heartbreakers", which now languish at the veeeery bottom of my Google Docs folders.
After a few moderately successful campaigns, we discovered 5e right around its release in 2014. I became a 5e DM for five years. This was a dark time in my life.

Then I discovered the GLOG and the broader OSR sphere, which takes us to the modern day.

In a sentence — I've always been a storyteller Grins 
no, that's terrible... just come up with something clever and say I said it

BCS is an urban horror game, a genre that has enjoyed wide popularity. What's your relationship with the genre and how do you keep the horror fresh for players who are well-acquainted with it?

Horror is a modern genre — that is, like modern art or modern poetry, it was born from political and artistic movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries which formed in response to a growing cultural sense of alienation from a highly technological and increasingly deracinated and atomized world. I've chewed through Arthur Machen, most of Algernon Blackwood's spooky stories, M. R. James, Walter De La Mere, (here the author continued taking ghost story collections off the shelf and reading author names out of the indexes for some time)... One thing that unites their horror work (besides oogety spookety monsters and phantoms) is their focus on characters who are, you know, kind of boring everyday Joe Q. Public guys. If you wrote an M. R. James pastiche today, your characters would all be quaint caricatures of the middle-class of Edwardian England, but to him his characters were contemporary citizens, and the places they encountered unspeakable horror were contemporary seaside hotels or picturesque small towns just a little off the beaten path. I always tell people, Lovecraft wasn't writing "Lovecraftian Horror" he was writing bleeding-edge science fiction with bullshit (Italian race riots, industrial accidents, someone inventing air conditioning) ripped straight from the headlines. Stranger Things is a Stephen King pastiche, but Stephen King... actually King does write a lot of King pastiche, but he also wrote a lot of stories about contemporary citizens encountering unspeakable horrors in contemporary mountainside hotels or picturesque small towns just a little off the beaten path, usually with bullshit (ESP, mass shootings, CIA mind control experiments, delinquent youth) ripped straight from the headlines. Urban horror as a subgenre is, with its focus on bizarre things happening to normal everyday people (who don't deserve it, who are just victims of circumstance), the direct inheritor of the mainline tradition of horror. That's how I view it, and that's why I like it. Heck, I could probably ramble on for hours about what "horror" fiction inherited from "gothic" fiction, which of course was nothing but conventional contemporary (for the 18th and 19th century) people getting menaced by history... 

As for keeping the horror fresh, I read a lot of ghost stories and listen to a lot of spooky podcasts. Stick a haunted house from a short story written in 1905 by a lesbian in Australia into twenty-first-century Harrisburg, PA and people will think you're a genius. Collage is a modernist technique, you know. 

(deracinated means ripped up from the roots, not un-racialized)
(i know you know that, but you can never be sure with the reading public)

That's very well put. But it makes me think about maybe the most unique feature of BCS, that it's a skirmish game. By dint of being several armed operatives in a clandestine organization, the average BCS player character is a bit separate from John Q. Public.

ah! that's a good thot
High-speed operators operating clandestinely definitely aren't the same thing as, say, a teenaged girl attacked by a wicked clown one Hallowe'en night, or a bunch of gardening store employees in Japan failing to survive the end of the world as we know it, or a woman learning to move on after her husband disappeared while jogging through an underpass

But one thing that makes urban horror tick is... how to put this succinctly...

mm, I was searching for a quotation. I'll have to use my own words. One thing that makes urban horror tick is when characters are put into a situation for which they are grossly unsuited. A conflict between a brave barbarian and a venomous dinosaur is a fantasy story, a conflict between a clever detective and a cunning murderer is a mystery story, a conflict between two mismatched police officers and a city-wide drug ring is a buddy cop story, a conflict between an uptight mother in law who owns a milliner's shop and a neurotic young woman who just married the milliner's loser son is a comedy story.

When you have a conflict between a normal person and an incomprehensible threat which they could not possibly have prepared for, you've got yourself some horror. The PCs in Best Case Scenario being badasses out of a mid-aughts console shooter doesn't subvert that horror, but highlights it: normal people (even ones in body armor, carrying machine guns), get totally rolled by a haunted oil tanker that drives you insane and eats you
Being oo-rah badasses doesn't get them out of it. They're still subject to the, you know, weight of dead generations like a nightmare on their brains, or to the vampires who eat their brains.
Inadequacy is scary.

You've run and written for a lot of games with a more classic structure, where each player has just a single adventurer character in a continuous narrative. How did you approach making rules and procedures for squad-based skirmishes?

I think the first drafts of rules for Best Case Scenario were a blend of those for Albedo (a furry scifi roleplaying game from 1988, wherein you play as the captain of a small band of space marines), Boot Hill (specifically a hack from my friend Xenophon of Athens, who condensed the game into a very simple set of rules for shooting and being shot), and my vague memories of how Rebelstar: Tactical Command on the Gameboy Advance worked. The core of BCS, the meat of each session, is the constant risk of all Hell breaking loose and twenty people having a short but decisive gunfight in a civic library or a fish-canning factory, so I weigh all the rules based on how they'll serve to either push the situation closer to that point or get out of the way and allow it to reach that point on its own. The rules have changed a lot with testing (characters used to have three stats!), but they're in a good place now. Easy to apply, snappy to deploy.

oh, and the original impetus was to have a ruleset which would let me conveniently play Delta Green shotgun scenarios without the pain of Delta Green character creation or skill checks
that's an essential detail

In playtesting, how have players adjusted to controlling these PC fireteams?

They've taken to it really naturally. I ran the game for some line cooks who had never played anything except my version of GLOG before, and was surprised how little trouble it gave them. I was a little concerned, initially, that players might have trouble either keeping track of that many characters and their actions each turn, or roleplaying as multiple characters. But the rules are simple enough that the strategic level is never more than one or two interesting decisions ("a series of interesting decisions" being a good answer to the question "what is a game"), with no minor makework or bookkeeping to distract people. And by the nature of the game, it's not like each of your pawns needs a backstory on the level of a Vampire PC or something. The character concept (high-speed operator for a secret organization) is already set. Give them a cool name, a single quirk and a slap on the ass and set 'em loose to kill or be killed.

Any favorite PCs from playtesting?

John "Little Caesar" Schnatter, CO of OLIVE GARDEN. He died doing what he loved: going really really fast on a dirtbike and getting shot in the chest with a .50 BMG by a sniper 1.3 kilometers away.
Or Poisonous Cloud, a chaplain from an unnamed fireteam (this was really early in playtesting). The player had given him only an unsilenced machine pistol, so to get rid of some alien bikers guarding a suburban home he lured them into the back of a stolen panel van with the promise of meth and then he and the rest of the fireteam (also without silenced weapons) strangled them. In the struggle, a revolver went off, alerting the rest of the alien bikers. Then things really went to Hell...

RIP Little Caesar.

How far has BCS gone from the goal of running shotgun scenarios? To what extent is campaign play possible with such lethal rules and scenarios?

That's a question I'd be really interested in learning the answer to myself. I been running an open table game of sorts where players come and go and (in theory) slowly build up an institutional understanding of the nature of the supernatural threats they're facing, even when the individual footsoldiers of their organization die and are replaced. My other obligations (I run a lot of games) have kept me from utilizing that premise to its full extent. To my knowledge, none of the five or eight people who have run BCS have pulled the trigger on a full-length campaign, though there's no reason it couldn't be done. I have a real hum-dinger of an idea for one — a Narnia-style portal opens up linking the Bush-era U.S. to an alternate Australia in its equivalent of the end of the Pleistocene, and the organization swoops in to secure the oil and plutonium reserves while protecting the Jurassic Park-type enthusiastic scientists and jackass mineral rights speculators from their own stupidity and greed

but that's some foreshadowing for another time...

I normally ask this at the end, but since you bring it up-- what are your hopes for any future works after fulfilling BCS? Are you hoping to start publishing regularly?

Good close personal real-life online friend Sam Sorenson, whose many wildly successful projects have almost definitely possibly been positively influenced by adjacency to me in some way, you know, maybe through animal magnetism, has told me I should participate in ZineQuest many times over the years, but this is the first time I've listened. So far all I've really had to do for this project is write RPG rules and lay them out in a .pdf, which is how I have fun on Wednesday nights anyway. Assuming the process of getting these rules printed out doesn't involve cutting off any fingers, I don't see why I wouldn't do this again in the future. I have an OSR superhero game sitting in the drafts that will knock everyone dead, literally, chaos and carnage, blood in the streets. I have a whole mess of hexcrawls, dungeons, campaigns and more... as with everything else in RPGs, the problem is that there are only so many days in a week and so many years in a lifetime. So, yes, definitely hoping to start publishing regularly. 

Awesome. What finally made you take the leap this year?

2026 is the Year of the Gamer.
Pass it on.

lol
Back to BCS. What advice would you give to new BCS DMs for creating good scenarios?

The zine'll have a whole section on this (as well as a bunch of missions for your gaming pleasure). If you have thirty minutes until the session starts and you have literally nothing ready: first find or think up a striking mental image, like "a human arm reaches out of the tide pool, then a second, then three more. then ten more, then a hundred more, as an inchoate mass of all the missing resort guests drags itself towards you like a titanic amoeba," or "a puppet wizard". Second, either find a blueprint of a building or take a screenshot of a field somewhere on Google Maps; both of those things will come with a scale and you can use them directly as a map. Third, write up a paragraph as a mission briefing, telling the players where they're going and giving them some ominous foreshadowing of the threat. Optimally you'd have time to stick in, you know, some NPCs to talk to, some clues lying around — but a location with a monster hiding in it will get you 80% of the way there.
The gunfighting rules will carry you mechanically. What you need to provide is that one compelling mental image.

A lot of urban horror games have some degree of investigation. How do you know how much rope and foreshadowing to give players in advance of when you expect the monster to jump out?

I suppose it'll depend on the group. For me, in a mission about investigating a monster (as opposed to doing some social infiltration, or just charging into a hostile location guns blazing), it's the ol' three beats. Have an initial warning, which leads a breadcrumb trail to a more significant scene, which leads a trail to a confrontation. Don't keep people waiting for too long, but don't rush a good tension building. One of the three missions mentioned on the Kickstarter page is actually all about this, actually (the other two are, of course, a social infiltration and a guns-blazing battle)

what's the justin alexande rule, the three clues? never feel like you're giving too many clues, players are terrible at interpreting clues. they need as many as you can think of.

I notice the art is being handled by the excellent Loch Eil. Pretty good, no?

Pretty good! We're strategizing some real bangers

What does that look like for the two of you?

deus ex parabola draws a picture in Microsoft Paint, and then Locheil draws something fantastical
here's the deus ex parabola prompt for the drawing on the kickstarter page 

Neat! What a pro. 

I'm not a very visual thinker, so I just put all my trust in Locheil
haven't been disappointed yet

I feel like we've covered a good amount of territory. As a parting treat, what's one of your RPG hot takes?

Everyone talks about, "we need more tactical options. We need more player tactics. Players need more options in tactical combat." Giving players more options will either 1. slow the game down further, because players need to make more decisions, or 2. not slow the game down, because there's one golden path that is always optimal. I say we need less tactical choice. I am anti-tactics.
this will be the subject of a STUNNING blogpost which will SWEEP the 2027 Bloggies

Looking forward to it. Thanks for taking the time to talk about Best Case Scenario, currently sitting at $1,187 on Kickstarter with still over two weeks to go I wish you luck in fulfilling your campaign.

 Anyone interested in picking up a copy of BCS, or at least in checking out some more disconcerting photo-edited images can check out the kickstarter here. I've always been really impressed with Michael's writing skills and creative vision (which he's demonstrated with surprising facility just now in the stifling genre of the interview), and I'm hoping that the success of this project will encourage him towards doing more sooner rather than later. It's $7 for a PDF and $15 for a printed copy, both very reasonable for the words written or for the art alone, let alone combined. Selfishly, I'd really like to see enough new backers to get over the line to the stretch goal which will expand the example scenarios into their own booklet. 

Interview: Hilander on The Valley of Lune

I got the chance to speak with friend of the blog Hilander the other day about the Cairn adventure he's kickstarting, the Valley of Lune. Fair warning, I like this guy and his work, and we have played in each other's games, so I'm not an unbiased interviewer, but it's not like I stand to gain from the success of this product or anything.

Pictured: the artist

How did you first get into RPGs? What's your "origin story?"

My older brother and I used to write miniature board games, often these journey-style games where you had to fight monsters and claim treasures.

"DnD" was strictly off the table though. According to Dad (a great guy by most counts) that was satanic.

Well college came around and I decided to find out for myself. As a player, I found it less Satanic and more dull. I was part of a group of eight, and we were playing 3.5. Unlike the combat, I didn't last very long there.

Then my siblings asked me to run a game, so they could experience it.

I thought 5e would save us, but our first campaign ended abortively. Our second game actually made it to a conclusion, but I was burnt out on the character-build, and rules balance, and combat crafting, etc.

I wanted a riskier, punchier, simpler game.

You've since written multiple systems, and Valley of Lune is written for Cairn. What have you learned about games in the time since that 5e campaign?

Systems are only half the story, and the less interesting one, I think.

The duty of a system is to stay in the background until play becomes uncertain, then resolve that uncertainty and fade into the background again.

"Who am I?" "What can I do?" "Do I kill the monster?" "ARE there monsters?" "What kind of scenarios are we dealing with?" These are essential questions, and a system should help answer them, but also leave a door open for other possibilities.

The more interesting half of the game is the scenarios characters have to deal with, and that half of the equation is one I've struggled with, a lot.

What kind of struggle?

Where do we find the right balance of story and game?

That is, how do we make an interesting situation in the world, while still making room for characters to play in that world and have multiple cool possible outcomes?

A question for the ages. How have you answered that question for this adventure?

For The Valley of Lune, I began with three assumptions: things have happened, things are happening, things will happen. The players enter a region with a lot of moving parts, and whether they act or not, the world is moving. They can shift the path of history, but it's not waiting for them.

 

 Can you risk spoiling the adventure a bit by giving an example?

 

Sure!

The Valley has strong themes of sleep and awakening. One of the factions that can be awoken is the Gearhearts, mechanical folk who come to life once the gears of the city are activated. These are living people, but the team that awakens them will be vital in framing how this faction perceives outsiders.

Are they viewed as an unthinking work force to be ruled over, or as fellow thinking beings with an existing claim to the city, their homeland?

The players will get to make their choice if they get there first, but take too long, and someone, or something, else may wake the Gearhearts. 
 

Very neat. Is theme an important consideration to your adventure design process?

 

Theme tends to come up as a secondary element.

Lune has been percolating in my head for a long time, but I think it started with my own childhood adventures in the rainy Pacific Northwest, and finding old bits of metal covered in moss.
Did I know it would be about Awakening? Not at all, but the theme kept coming back.

 

What other inspirations can you pinpoint for Lune?

 

I think there are echoes of the Hobbit here and there, as well as some Nausicaa. 

I've been listening to covers of the Majora's Mask soundtrack as I write. 

Can I say the moon itself inspired me? A major question found a sudden answer as I was pondering how to teach first graders the lunar cycle.
 

Do you think your teaching profession has given you any insights into better DMing or adventure writing?

 

I've read a lot of rough curriculum. These are books designed to help teachers run their classes, and they can be amazingly confusing.

When I'm teaching or running a game, I want a resource that is easy to reference, helpful, and with pages that are easy to decipher.

I hope that has found its way into the way I design adventures, but I know there's always room to grow.

 

Looking at a preview on kickstarter, I see you're using a combination of bullet point-like highlights with boxed text, which is not a combo I normally see. How did you decide to key the adventure in this way?

 

The style is intended as a layered system from the characters' perspective as they move through the scene.

The box test is what's immediately apparent, and the bulleted list contains further details when the players investigate, including secret information that isnt immediately apparent.

The goal is a smooth format that's easy for Referees to read and reference with minimal prep.

 

What do you like about Cairn's guidelines for creating an overland adventure space?

 

Humans navigate by Routes and Landmarks, and that's what Cairn focuses on. It puts the interesting things along pathways of one sort or another, and overlaps the paths to create intersections and decision points.

It just works.

Do I think hexes are bad? Not at all, but this recipe works for me. 

What feeling do you hope players in a Lune game will come away with? What will they be gushing to their friends about?

 Something I'm still fine tuning is the character descriptions, because I really want characters in this game to be that focus. Who is here, what do they want from outsiders? What would push them to fight? What can they bargain with?

It's an area I really want to shine, because characters and their connections to players are what I most remember from the games I've enjoyed.

After fulfilling Valley of Lune, do you have any other publishing plans? Any ideas cooking in your head?

There are a few ideas actually, an island chain with a hidden city "megadungeon" is somewhere out there, and a forest of nightmares grown from the bones of a dead goddess, along with the home of the Dwarrow.

The dream is a chain of adventure locations long enough to feel something like the Hobbit, adventuring through a series of locations on some grand quest. 

 Ambitious! I hope you get the change to see at least a few of these through. 

Finally, do you have any RPG hot takes?

Nope.

 I've been racking my brain all day, and I can't settle on a single one. [Editor's note: boo! hiss!]

Call someone today and invite them over to play your favorite game.
That's all I've got folks. Take the risk, play the game, enjoy life. 

Always the uniter. Thanks for agreeing to be interviewed.

There's currently just seven days left to jump on the kickstarter, which has already exceeded its goal by $218 as of the time of publishing. You can pick up a pdf of the adventure for just $5, or also get the physical PDF for $12. Personally, I think those prices are very generous, and I know very few people who approach Hilander for breadth of skill-- his rules are well-considered and properly composed, his art is charming, and his layout shows great understanding of how a book or zine can aid those who want to use it. If you have a few bucks, you basically can't go wrong with a Hilander adventure. And if you don't play Cairn, I'm sure as a reader of this blog that you know how to convert things easily. You do it all the time, you're a pro, you know good work when you see it, and you know a good deal when your favorite blogger shills it out to you. Go in peace.

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.

Interview: Patrick Stuart of False Machine

Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess, auteurs of the independent RPG scene, are kickstarting their latest adventure module, Demon-Bone Sarcophagus. Check it out! Only nine days to go. To promote this endeavor, Stuart has agreed to answer some questions I had about his process, as well as about the variety of strange and prepossessing topics he covers on his blog, False Machine.

Picture: me approaching an interview with an indie gaming luminary

 -Regarding Gawain and the Green Knight, what are your thoughts on Tolkien’s translation, and what was different in how you approached it? [Editor's note: Tolkien's is a very commonly used translation of that particular poem. I was being presumptuous in assuming Stuart, who translated the same poem, had studied it, but not aggressively so.]

Ah I haven't actually read Tolkien's translation so can't compare. I would assume that his is a 'real' translation and that he had a complete knowledge of the old-english/early modern dialect it was written in before he started and so he could do the whole thing in his head. In my case it was more a transliteration where I had a facing text version with modern english on one side and the original on the other. I would assume that Tolkien and I had a very different tone, I mean a cathlic tory academic from the mid 20th century and a ruined Gen-X/Millenial from the late 20th century will have veeeeery different outlooks and cultural referents

-How do the gaming products you publish differ from the sorts of games you like to run?

I almost never run games any more. For me it takes nearly as much energy to run a game as to write something and most of the communities I was a part of where I would find players I have since drifted away from.

I had a problem when I was running with depth and complexity. I wanted everything to have as many meaningful, real options as possible and for places to have as much texture as possible but the sheer amount of invention and especially bookkeeping and trying to keep up with everything that had happened ultimately lead to me flaming out after 10 or 20 sessions. I feel like I am not that great a long-term dungeon master.

What I play in is generally whatever people I know and like want to run, assuming they are on a UK/Europe time schedule as I am too old to be hoisting myself out of bed at strange hours.

When I was running I think the games were meant to be either experiments, or they headed towards attempts at the depth, complexity and attempted originality of what I *try* to create. Maybe its that that made them unworkable for me! Its hard to invent, sustain AND run that shit at the same time.

-When making dungeons and writing adventures, what most commonly changes through editing and playtesting?

Presentation and complexity, re-statement and making things that seemed obvious to me much more explicit. When making something so many of its tricks and interrelationships seem utterly obvious to me and then when readers and playtesters get a hold of it they are utterly confused, and then I am shocked and confused in turn. Generally page count rises as I need to make more space to make more ideas more explicit and to explain things more directly to the reader and DM. You could technically run an adventure from one of my early draughts but I think most people would have trouble with it and there is deep context which most people could only work out from a very deep reading.

Other than that, whenever I have worked with other people, from Scrap to other collaborators, they have had a meaningful effect on elements of the finished product of course but since those are all different interactions, more personal and often remembered poorly by me I don't think I can comment too much.

-Reading your recent blog posts about the long-running Horus Heresy series, I can’t help but think about your current undertaking to write a cycle of modules themed around the elements. This is a project that you have already dedicated years to. What do you think is gained in writing a trilogy of adventures, rather than three separate adventures?

Well the element cycle will be a quadrilogy because there are generally four elements (depending on how you count them). Broken Fire Regime will be three books because that's how many it will take to do the whole thing! (Even then there is the possibility that we may need to break down the central book into two parts). The 'trilogy' aspect was simply a matter of practicality and keeping myself sane. Producing the whole thing as one huge book or even as one huge project .. well it did lead to breakdowns and meltdowns, failures and delays, I was looking for a publisher for this for AGES and several fell through. Eventually I hit upon the idea of doing it myself (ourselves) and breaking it down into three parts so that each block of work, design and playtesting was manageable. I knew we had some DCO remastered and could handle that so doing something of the same volume of work, *again* was possible.

That's really the main reason, simple practicality and producibility of the work we had already done.

I think that's perhaps not the original intent of your question - let me think about it...

Well in very long 'epic' *stories* we get to find out a lot about people as they are embedded in a world and about the long complex evolutions of a character and personality, as well as getting a glimpse into the deeper social and historical structures of that world.

I suppose with very long adventure sequences then something similar might happen with players interacting with deeper structures which might be invisible in shorter play? Like the difference between going on holiday in a greek village and living in a greek village for 30 years and the change in the way you might think of the people and systems around you. From "wow this is a nice tavern" to "Stavros hasn't been the same since his son didn't come home from University and moved away, but it was always his dream for his children to do better than him, now the kid is moving back he must feel like a failure but the economy is going badly for everyone.."

-You’ve posted “challenges” like the Crypt of the OSR, where you encourage people to unearth old OSR blogs, or the Dungeon Poem challenge, where you asked people to try their hand at making an “artpunk” dungeon with a particular map. Both of these have had enthusiastic responses. What do you hope comes out of these challenges? What do you hope to do with these community-facing calls to action?

I think there have been a few 'challenges' that no-one really cared about but those are forgotten now...

Well there is a tag on my blog called 'do my work for me' - 'community' posts, especially posts where the community is asked to talk about the community, often have a big response *if they catch on*, people just really like talking about stuff they know and arguing about social networks etc, plus general cultural conversations are accessible to anyone.

I think in part I was calling back to the glory days of G+ where there would be huge thread challenges and entire hex maps created by 'gygaxian democracy'. The Fallen titan was also good at this during the heyday of the blogosphere, there were big epic arguments, conversations and mutual challenges about a whole range of things.

The nice or pro-social side of it is that people get introduced to each other, creators encounter each other, some might get a boost in interest, people who might be into those creators of aesthetics get to discover them and.. well everyone just generally feels a little bit better about life? Its social contact and I suppose that's what it does.

-Finally, a selfish question: can we expect you to write about LichJammer again at any point in the future?

I am very sorry but probably no. If things go ok you can expect a few years with a lot of releases as stuff I have been working on for ages finally flowers. Once Broken Fire Regime is done I will probably take a brief break from the elements and research the next one. I have a range of one-book-projects and possibilities but Lichejammer isn't one of them.

UNLESS you can somehow persuade a shitload of people to nag me about LicheJammer and how amazing it is and how everyone wants to buy it in which case I will resent you but it might actually move it into the 'possible future projects' list. [Editor's note: everyone please help alienate me in the eyes of Patrick Stuart]

PEACE

Much thanks to Patrick Stuart for entertaining my questions, especially the tenuous or odd ones. Again, you can find the kickstarter for Demon-Bone Sarcophagus here. I think it's well worth checking out.

(Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Stuart or any part of this kickstarter in any way. I am not being paid to promote his products. I have sometimes interacted with his blog in minor ways.)