Table Talk - Interview with Jason Cordova

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[SPEAKER_00]: Hello and welcome to Table Talk, a show where I chat with other creators in the TTRPG space about how they run their tables.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Danger Dangers, the GM and host of Dien Dark, and joining us at the table today is an any award-winning podcast or game designer head of the Gauntlet TTRPG network and creator of games like Brindlewood Bay, Public Access, and The Between, Jason Cordova.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Hello.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Hey, Dan, how's it going?
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[SPEAKER_00]: going great.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for swinging by the chat with me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, thanks for having me to get us started.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Can you tell us just a little bit about your history with the TTRPG community, a little bit about what the gauntlet is and just some of who you are?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Sure, how far back do you want me to go?
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[SPEAKER_01]: I can give you my origin story in the hobby if you'd like but there's so many different entry points I guess.
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[SPEAKER_00]: the origin story sounds as good a place to start as any.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, sure.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I got into tabletop role-playing games when I was 10 years old and I'm gonna date myself here a little bit, but the very first role-playing game I ever played was the Marvel Superheroes role-playing game.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I was 10, this was like in the late 80s, and my dad would take me to this comic book shop in Oceanside, California.
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[SPEAKER_01]: and I saw this game on the on the shelf and I didn't really like know what it was.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It was like I don't really know what this means, but it's some kind of game when you play Superheroes and that's good enough for me, you know, and so my dad bought it for me and I'm not kidding.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I probably spent three months.
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[SPEAKER_01]: trying to process what any of it meant, I had no concept of what any of this was.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It was so alien to me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I didn't really know what D&D was, and obviously it's pre-internet, so there's like no easy way of finding out.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so I just was like really fascinated, but I had no idea what this was.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It all felt like a really high-level kind of thing that I was like, I was a smart kid, but I wasn't that smart.
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[SPEAKER_01]: but an older kid came over one time and knew what role-playing games were and was like, oh, I'll do this for you.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'll show you how it works.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He helped me make my character and then we just ran a little kind of one V1 game and I had made like a villain or something, some kind of like villain that controlled electricity because that was like the coolest thing I could think of, you know?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I remember actually, I really vividly remember this really distinct moment where this kid, whose name sat at that camera, remember anymore.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But he kind of set up the scene for me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And he was like, when now what do you do?
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[SPEAKER_01]: I think I was trying to break into a jewelry store or something.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I was like, what do you mean what do I do?
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[SPEAKER_01]: He's like, just what do you do?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I kind of like pot around for a little bit, you know?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I don't know.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then he kind of like walk me through it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And once I kind of realized that I could just like say anything.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I was basically off to the races at that point.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Like to me, I was like, oh, this is amazing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I did do it for a long time after that, all the way through high school and stuff.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Took a little break, but then kind of came back to it later.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I always think, like, you know, if you had told 10-year-old me that I would be professionally, like, you know, making role-playing games, you know, you would have totally believed it, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Who'd like, of course, that's like your destiny, obviously.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Which is so funny, because I think, like, if you had told 20-year-old me, that I wouldn't have believed it, you know?
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[SPEAKER_01]: because it was 40-year-old me that actually was able to start doing it as a job, so yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But that was kind of like, that's my origin story in the hobby.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I kind of took a big break in the 2000s.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I missed all of 305, Pathfinder.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I came back in 2013, kind of drawn back in by the NDRPG scene, and I found this community the gauntlet in Houston.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It was just an online G-plus community that organized
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[SPEAKER_01]: in person games, but it was kind of defunct like nobody was using it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so I just went on there one day and I was like, hey, I've got these games I want to try.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Does anybody want to play with me, you know?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And someone replied, they were like, yeah, they were like, I have access to my job's office space on Friday nights.
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[SPEAKER_01]: If we want in Houston, Friday is with nowhere conditioning after it's off for the weekend.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, let's do it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Let's go, let's go play the games there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And we did that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And we said we did it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We played like every Friday night and then it became every Friday and Wednesday.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Wednesday was like at a bar and then it became like every Friday, Wednesday and Sunday at my house.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And before you know it, we're running like 12 tables a week.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's kind of how the gauntlet got started and I released this version of the gauntlet.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then it became kind of an online thing podcast started happening all that kind of stuff.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Publishing came some years later, but that's basically it, yeah.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's amazing how those things snowball and how much of it really just takes the right kind of push.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That is awesome that you're able to revitalize and already existing kind of network and framework to jump off of.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it was like 10 people or something.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It was like for all practical purposes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It didn't really exist.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It was just like a logo and then like a group that never got around to do anything.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I was just looking for anything in Houston that wasn't pathfinder because at that time, all there was was pathfinder.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It was like nothing else.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You know, certainly nobody was playing in the RPGs.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so it was just like, I don't know, maybe maybe somebody here will answer this and they did.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It was great.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Now we are.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Were there any specific games that you were circling around and wanting to really dive into?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Because I know you were saying that like the Marvel Superhero TTRPG was what got you interested in it as a 10-year-old, outside of D&D and Pathfinder, what were those games that you were wanting to dablin?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you know, all through high school and stuff, I had played all the kind of like classic RPGs like vampire and shadow run and 2E was my addition of D&D and I played that probably most and then I kind of went away from it and I was like playing board games in the years that I wasn't playing role playing games.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Like German and European style strategy board games, you know, that was kind of my thing I to this day have written one of the most like well known sort of discourses about the game Puerto Rico, which we'd like to go into right now, but in a case what drew me back to the hobby is
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[SPEAKER_01]: These NDRPGs were kind of doing something that those German board games were doing, which is, if you play the game and follow the rules exactly, you will get this outcome.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You will have this good, consistent story outcome in this case.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I found that really appealing or something really appealing about that to me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You didn't have to house rule it, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: You didn't have to like change anything.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You just play it exactly.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's a slim rule set.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You change it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You just play it
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[SPEAKER_01]: fiasco is his most popular game.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Probably the one that people most will know.
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[SPEAKER_01]: At that time, it was a game called the Shabal-Hiri Roach.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I was really interested in of his.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The Shabal-Hiri Roach is a game that came out in like 2007 or eight, something like that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And it's about a group of college professors who they'll kind of hate each other, you know?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And one of them eats this
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[SPEAKER_01]: and they become filled with the like megalomaniacal god-like ambition of the roach, you know.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's the whole story.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The whole story is like you're playing these characters who are like kind of trying to outdo each other in academia, but then like this sort of love crafty and horror aspect gets kind of layered on top of it, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: That was a really big one for me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It would eventually be games like Apocalypse World, that was probably the most important game to me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Monster Hearts, Dungeon World was a huge one.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Dungeon World was kind of how I made my name in the hobby.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Just the things I would organize and write for Dungeon World.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, that was sort of, this was a lot of different things.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We were playing lots of different games back in those days.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I can definitely see the connective tissue between each of those big examples to things like Brindlewood Bay and public access.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Very clear A to Z line there for people who are less familiar with Brindlewood Bay, public access, the between, can you kind of just give a brief overview of some of your biggest name games to kind of lay out so that they can see the A to Z there of that progression.
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[SPEAKER_01]: sure.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, my most popular game by far is Brindlewood Bay.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I publish lots of games for prior to Brindlewood Bay.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I publish quite a few games, like trophy and some other games.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But Brindlewood Bay was the one that where I made my own name as a game designer.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And it's about a group of elderly women who investigate murder mysteries in their little New England town, Ola, murder she wrote.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But as they're investigating these murder mysteries, come to find out
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[SPEAKER_01]: Each of the mysteries is connected to this broader, a cult conspiracy, this kind of lovecraftian plot, and so they eventually have to confront that lovecraftian conspiracy and put a stop to it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so it's like this combination of like cozy, and it actually gets to be quite intense horror, actually.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's very, like, I don't really pull any punches in that regard.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So it's a kind of cozy, meets horror.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I like to say it's Murdershiro, meets HP Lovecraft,
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's my most popular game, and it also would be the foundation for all lot of my other games that would follow up.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Public access is a game that is about a group of young people in 2004 who all meet on a forum about this TV station that they remember from their childhood, but nobody else can remember it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Only the people on the forum remember it, and they all decide to
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[SPEAKER_01]: this public access television station that only they remember, even the people in the town don't remember it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And when they get there, they spend the summer doing this.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They also start running into other mysteries in the community.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so it's a game that is very much like analog horror meets
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[SPEAKER_01]: like urban legend type mysteries and it all kind of culminates in like this sort of what happened to the TV stations called TV Odyssey.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What happened to TV Odyssey, you know, like what is the deal with it?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And it's also got a lot of cosmic horror in it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It actually takes several genres of horror and kind of question, you know, kind of matches them together.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So that's public access.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then the between is a game about monster hunters in Victorian era London, directly inspired by the TV show Penny Dreadful, but it's kind of grown beyond that quite a lot.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, you play monster hunters in Victorian era London, basically have to hunt down serial killers and monsters in the streets of London, and eventually they learn that there's this sort of like criminal mastermind that's behind everything that's going on in London, and they have to confront that person.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So,
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[SPEAKER_01]: of the games I've altered by myself, those are the three I've co-authored several other games and published quite a few games as well.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There's a fun little kind of underlying connective tissue there, but in the ways that they're different, I really want to pick your brain about some of the unique mechanics of the game.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The thing that really jumped out to me, I looked into the between briefly, I found out about it a little bit too late.
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[SPEAKER_00]: for our purposes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Season one of our show is a Gothic horror set in the Korean event and I didn't discover the existence of the between until it was we were already like in the thick of it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But I really love the way that you have an A plot and B plot.
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[SPEAKER_00]: structurally in the main focus of it in jumping back and forth between solving the master the weak type plot while also having a thematically connected scene that helps build out the feel of the city of London.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Can you talk about that mechanic a little bit and what the impetus for that was?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so what you're referring to in the between is called the unseen, which is a little play on words, which will make sense here in a moment.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The unseen, it's actually really very, very novel role playing game mechanic.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There's nothing like it in the other game.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And there's still nothing like it except for similar things in my games.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The unseen, what it is is, so you have your hunters, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And they are, they're being angsty and gothic with each other.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They're out there investigating these monsters and killers and stuff.
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[SPEAKER_01]: at night to continue their hunts to do what they're doing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But then you have the unseen, which happens, and this is only during one phase of the game.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's not always, it's just like one certain like phase of the game.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But while they're out in London, like hunting the horrors of the streets of Victoria and our London, there's this other scene that's playing out at the same time that takes place somewhere else in the city on that same night.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And importantly, that scene has nothing to do with what
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[SPEAKER_01]: the hunters are doing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't have any direct story connection, but has a thematic connection, or it has a visual or aesthetic connection, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so the players will be, you'll be kind of jumping back and forth between the hunters and this unseen, and the players are narrating the unseen, the keeper doesn't do it, but the players do it, and they are tasked with, in addition to telling us the story of this other scene, they are also tasked with creating
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[SPEAKER_01]: a more like kind of a femoral or thematic connection between that scene and the hunter scenes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so for example, it might be the case that the unseen, we see like a person dying of consumption and the player describes this person like coughing blood into a ball, you know, something like that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so they describe the vivid red blood in the ball.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then in the later that player or another player might describe their hunter finding a ball.
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[SPEAKER_01]: of vivid red flowers, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so you've created this kind of interesting connection between the two of them.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And that's actually one of the ways you get experience in the game is by making those thematic connections, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's what the unseen is.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's spelled UNSCENE because it's not really a scene.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's an unseen, but it's also about the unseen people of London, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so it's really very novel in the hobby.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There's really nothing like it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It makes it feel like really, really cinematic, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Because you can imagine like some like a prestige TV show or something.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They'll often have this thing where they like cut away to like another group of people and you don't even know what the point of these people are.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And but then you kind of start to realize like, oh, they're just kind of like tell a different part of the story.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Are they trying to do something thematic here or something, you know?
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's kind of what it does.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I all of my games have this like kind of cinematic gameplay in them.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so yeah, that was that was one that I'm really proud of.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's such an interesting take and it feels very connected to the genre.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Definitely like it's at Prestige TV, feels very daytime soapy.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's a very unique way to impose sort of a soft time limit.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, when you're coming up with ideas from mechanics like these, are you pulling mostly wholesale from the genres you're trying to emulate?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Do the ideas that these mechanics come from a need to solve a problem?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Where do ideas like the unseen tend to come from?
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's always design goals for me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: When I start any new project, I always try to think about like, what are my big design goals, my big high concepts, my big like, whether it's genre emulation, which is a lot of what I do.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I love genre emulation and it'll put in games that's kind of my thing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Or whether, you know, I want to have this type of story, or I want to have this type of, you know, I always think about my design goals, or if I'm designing a playbook for a game, I might think about the design goals for that playbook.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I was trying to think about like what I want to accomplish and that kind of start from there and then start to think about like, well, okay, what mechanics might help reinforce this idea or make this idea happen.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So that's kind of where it comes from.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm also a very, very like iterative game designer.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I love to take my existing work and just...
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[SPEAKER_01]: change and massage and twist things around to make existing mechanics or existing ideas kind of work in a different context and so that's another thing I do too and so happily the more games I write and develop and continue to develop ideas they all just kind of feed on each other and they all kind of like you know help each other out so for example in the other game public access one of the big things you do in public access is the characters are trying to find
15:44.272 --> 15:59.293
[SPEAKER_01]: of this lost TV station right and I sat for a long time trying to figure out like well how do we do this like what does this look like at the table like how do we like quote unquote watch these VHS tapes at the table right and I settled on I was like oh
15:59.273 --> 16:01.135
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe there's an unseen idea here.
16:01.235 --> 16:04.138
[SPEAKER_01]: And so basically, the oddsy tapes are kind of like an unseen.
16:04.158 --> 16:07.121
[SPEAKER_01]: They're kind of structured the same, but they're not the same.
16:07.161 --> 16:13.007
[SPEAKER_01]: They're different types of stories, but they have this like separation because they are an episode of a TV show.
16:13.027 --> 16:15.089
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not the story of the characters, right?
16:15.469 --> 16:18.592
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's how I, a lot of my design goes that way.
16:18.752 --> 16:26.580
[SPEAKER_01]: I kind of start with design goals, and especially if I'm working in a, what I call a car from Rindalwood Design Space, I try to iterate on what's already there, you know?
16:26.763 --> 16:36.407
[SPEAKER_00]: Speaking of brindlewood, since that is the backbone of so many of your successive projects, can you unravel a little bit how the mystery solving mechanics of that game works?
16:36.427 --> 16:41.920
[SPEAKER_00]: Because that's another very unique take to the genre that I haven't seen in many other places.
16:41.900 --> 16:48.213
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and it's still holding up as pretty unique even, you know, several years after everyone would base been out.
16:48.373 --> 16:53.344
[SPEAKER_01]: There are a lot more CFB games out there, and there are games that do this mystery system, but it's still pretty unique to my games.
16:54.226 --> 16:57.412
[SPEAKER_01]: So the way it works is all these games are mystery games, right?
16:57.432 --> 16:59.757
[SPEAKER_01]: They all have like mysteries that you're trying to solve.
16:59.737 --> 17:08.270
[SPEAKER_01]: But importantly, none of these mysteries have canonical solutions, which is to say, I, as the keeper, don't know who did the murder.
17:08.730 --> 17:10.954
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know where the monster is.
17:10.974 --> 17:16.342
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know what happened to this like weird abandoned theme park.
17:16.422 --> 17:17.684
[SPEAKER_01]: Like I don't know the answer to it.
17:18.124 --> 17:21.489
[SPEAKER_01]: But the characters are going to investigate.
17:21.670 --> 17:22.932
[SPEAKER_01]: They're going to gather clues.
17:23.552 --> 17:25.255
[SPEAKER_01]: And when they have
17:25.235 --> 17:41.899
[SPEAKER_01]: they can have a conversation as players, and they engage in a process of deduction to say, well, here's what I think is going on, because QA and QB connect up to QD in this way, and so I think that means this, and so the answer is XYZ.
17:42.640 --> 17:47.968
[SPEAKER_01]: And at the table, it's like index cards and moving things around and you're making your solution, right?
17:48.589 --> 17:54.297
[SPEAKER_01]: But importantly, it's a player authored solution.
17:54.277 --> 17:56.359
[SPEAKER_01]: They all decide, okay, I think we've got a good theory here.
17:56.379 --> 17:57.460
[SPEAKER_01]: I think we know what happened here.
17:57.900 --> 18:00.943
[SPEAKER_01]: And then there's a mechanic you engaged to see if you're correct.
18:01.463 --> 18:04.786
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're correct, you get to go solve the mystery or resolve the problem.
18:05.367 --> 18:09.971
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you're not correct, the keeper hits you with a big bad reaction and you have to try again later.
18:10.091 --> 18:11.813
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's basically it.
18:11.833 --> 18:14.235
[SPEAKER_01]: It's really, really controversial when it first came out.
18:14.255 --> 18:16.497
[SPEAKER_01]: Like a lot of them were really hated this in the beginning.
18:16.517 --> 18:22.562
[SPEAKER_01]: I managed to get enough people around on board in the years since, but originally in 2020,
18:22.542 --> 18:29.591
[SPEAKER_01]: even though there had been a lot of like kind of organic group authored mystery games before Brenda Wood Bay, like Lovecraft as, and some other games.
18:30.172 --> 18:33.096
[SPEAKER_01]: Brenda Wood Bay is the first one that did it in a real particular way like this.
18:33.116 --> 18:35.339
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know, like Brenda Wood Bay just really owns it.
18:35.619 --> 18:37.001
[SPEAKER_01]: It kind of owns the whole idea, right?
18:37.302 --> 18:42.188
[SPEAKER_01]: It was really controversial at the time, but eventually I managed to convince enough people.
18:42.168 --> 18:51.204
[SPEAKER_01]: to build a whole business out of it to say, look, the power of tabletop role-playing games as a medium of entertainment.
18:51.705 --> 19:00.902
[SPEAKER_01]: The thing that tabletop role-playing games can do that literally no other medium of entertainment can do is collaborative storytelling and collaborative world-building.
19:00.882 --> 19:13.774
[SPEAKER_01]: we sit as a group and we create the worlds together, we create the story together, we do everything else, so let's create the mystery together too, you know, like that's essentially the philosophy behind it, right?
19:14.075 --> 19:24.785
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that idea is so fundamental to like everything we do in the gauntlet, it's really fundamental to my own game design, which is collaborative storytelling is the heart of our hobby.
19:24.825 --> 19:30.450
[SPEAKER_01]: And so my games try to harness and embrace that, you know, as much as possible.
19:30.430 --> 19:43.851
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it definitely has its fan base, and I know that it's like sort of the divisiveness of it really kind of comes down to a personal preference over loose or more narratively structured games versus more hard-coded things.
19:43.971 --> 19:47.476
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and that's a whole 30-year- and get, you know, arguing in the hobby, right?
19:47.496 --> 19:48.017
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
19:47.997 --> 19:55.868
[SPEAKER_00]: And like that's a divide that's never going to be resolved within the community just because it is such a subjective matter of taste.
19:56.509 --> 20:09.246
[SPEAKER_00]: But one of the things as far as like the specific audience that the game appeals to one of the systems that I frequently see your work compared to is cited as like a direct descendant of the powered by the apocalypse systems.
20:09.226 --> 20:14.074
[SPEAKER_00]: Would you generally agree with that assessment and like what aspects of PBTA?
20:14.134 --> 20:19.724
[SPEAKER_00]: Would you say have informed your games and like where the overlap is with the common fan base?
20:20.385 --> 20:21.426
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, absolutely.
20:21.446 --> 20:25.032
[SPEAKER_01]: The gauntlet has been connected to part by the apocalypse for many years now.
20:25.052 --> 20:29.580
[SPEAKER_01]: I would argue nobody would know what part by the apocalypse was without.
20:29.560 --> 20:36.414
[SPEAKER_01]: That's very, it's like the gauntlet we were doing podcasts about we had a whole podcast about power by the Parkwebs like a podcast world was a big deal don't get me wrong.
20:36.434 --> 20:47.957
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a really really big deal But I don't think it would have left 2015 it would have been like what it was and it would have loved it But like we created a culture around power by the apocalypse right these are great games and I'm not taking credit for any of that
20:47.937 --> 20:51.902
[SPEAKER_01]: But I am taking credit for helping create this conversation around power by the apocalypse, right?
20:51.922 --> 20:53.844
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, it's a huge, huge part of what we do.
20:53.884 --> 20:56.327
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a huge, huge influence on my own game design.
20:56.787 --> 21:05.578
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't consider my games to be strictly speaking PBTA just like the same way that fortune that dark is kind of derived from PBTA, but it's not considered PBTA.
21:05.598 --> 21:07.140
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel the same way about car from run the wood.
21:07.480 --> 21:12.426
[SPEAKER_01]: The gauntlet owes its whole existence to these games because we were like,
21:12.406 --> 21:22.991
[SPEAKER_01]: playing Dungeon World, but we're playing Apocalypse World, but we're really playing a lot of monster hearts, and we were creating podcasts about them, and we were like giving as much as we were getting and vice versa, like it was a really nice situation.
21:23.632 --> 21:27.782
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the reason why it appealed is because
21:27.762 --> 21:35.412
[SPEAKER_01]: A more traditional game has what I would call, cheritably, a simulationist approach to things.
21:35.833 --> 21:46.987
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I'm gonna roll dice for every little interaction, every swing of the sword, every time I walk through a door, I'm gonna roll dice for everything, right?
21:47.007 --> 21:48.089
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's nothing wrong with that.
21:48.129 --> 21:49.711
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that's the hobby I came up in.
21:49.871 --> 21:52.775
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I get the appeal of it, especially if you really like that crunch.
21:52.795 --> 21:53.696
[SPEAKER_01]: You like all those numbers.
21:53.716 --> 21:55.018
[SPEAKER_01]: You like to do all that, that's fine.
21:54.998 --> 22:04.730
[SPEAKER_01]: There's lots of differences, but the big difference is that powered by the apocalypse says, what if we mostly just sat here and told a story to each other and we only rolled for the really big important parts?
22:05.131 --> 22:12.139
[SPEAKER_01]: And what if we only rolled once to resolve this whole scene instead of rolling 20 times, right?
22:12.440 --> 22:14.122
[SPEAKER_01]: Like to me, that's the main difference.
22:14.242 --> 22:20.550
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, I'm describing what my character's doing, the keeper or the MC or whoever tells me how they react, that we do some stuff, we do some stuff, we do some stuff.
22:20.530 --> 22:22.373
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, you just did a thing that triggered a move.
22:22.493 --> 22:22.793
[SPEAKER_01]: Cool.
22:23.114 --> 22:32.147
[SPEAKER_01]: We roll the dice because the move is triggered and then the move tells us how to narrate the scene and then we narrate the whole scene and we get the whole outcome right like you have a gunfight and apocalypse world.
22:32.167 --> 22:33.289
[SPEAKER_01]: That's one die roll, right?
22:33.790 --> 22:35.091
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's the major difference.
22:35.212 --> 22:39.518
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just like how much story do we want to tell?
22:39.498 --> 22:41.901
[SPEAKER_01]: every time we pick up the dice, right?
22:42.442 --> 22:46.868
[SPEAKER_01]: And PBTA is not pure narrative story gaming.
22:46.908 --> 22:49.031
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not like, I wouldn't even say it's rules light.
22:49.131 --> 22:50.893
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just rules precise.
22:51.354 --> 22:53.096
[SPEAKER_00]: It's focused on a different scope.
22:53.116 --> 22:53.877
[SPEAKER_01]: It has a different scope.
22:54.058 --> 22:55.560
[SPEAKER_01]: And it says, you know what?
22:55.860 --> 22:57.783
[SPEAKER_01]: The GM is still an important part of this process.
22:58.003 --> 23:04.852
[SPEAKER_01]: Dice is still an important part of this process, rules are still a part of this process, but just not so much like we're gonna just we're gonna just scale it back a little bit.
23:04.872 --> 23:08.577
[SPEAKER_01]: And just focus on storytelling more than we are on the simulation part of it.
23:08.557 --> 23:09.939
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think that's the major difference.
23:09.959 --> 23:11.382
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's what appealed to me about it.
23:11.702 --> 23:14.708
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't get it there for a STEMing like I read a podcast world.
23:14.768 --> 23:17.993
[SPEAKER_01]: The first edition of a podcast world is famously a really hard book to read.
23:18.815 --> 23:20.017
[SPEAKER_01]: It's really hard to understand.
23:20.057 --> 23:29.974
[SPEAKER_01]: They improved upon it a lot into me and I haven't looked at the three materials yet, but I didn't quite get it and I got Dungeon World and I didn't even really get Dungeon World either because that was not a very well-written book either.
23:29.954 --> 23:56.974
[SPEAKER_01]: But, you know, people in the community would like, you know, somebody wrote this like beginner's guide to dungeon world document and kind of explained it in more like practical terms like what was going on and that's when I was like, oh, I get it now and I just was I immediately locked in and so that's the appeal for me it's more about like how to be just a little bit more storytelling and a little bit less dice rolling that's that's the main appeal there's other things going on obviously, but that's that's kind of the high level thing I would say.
23:56.954 --> 23:58.216
[SPEAKER_00]: that makes a lot of sense.
23:58.336 --> 24:01.441
[SPEAKER_00]: They tend to be a lot more genre specific in their focus.
24:01.481 --> 24:05.347
[SPEAKER_01]: They're very, very genre emulation is a big deal in VVGA's face, yeah.
24:05.367 --> 24:05.747
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
24:05.767 --> 24:12.858
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, approaching it from that wider scope, I feel like gives a lot more flexibility to get more specific.
24:13.179 --> 24:13.820
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
24:13.840 --> 24:14.741
[SPEAKER_01]: Because you have to think about it.
24:14.761 --> 24:22.573
[SPEAKER_01]: Like when it gets to like genre emulation especially, you want to have a lot of individual freedom.
24:22.553 --> 24:41.625
[SPEAKER_01]: you want to be able to like go into all the places that genre want you to go and a more universal system or like a D20 type system it kind of does like one type of thing really well and it's got its structures but if you want to like go into like a different type of storytelling or you want to do something that's not covered by those rules.
24:41.605 --> 24:43.408
[SPEAKER_01]: You kind of need some flexibility there, right?
24:43.548 --> 24:49.517
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, pbt8 creates this nice, like, just enough rules framework to be able to tell these different kinds of stories.
24:49.817 --> 24:54.023
[SPEAKER_01]: But importantly, you couldn't just have a generic pbt8 game, right?
24:54.244 --> 24:57.408
[SPEAKER_01]: I can't take a apocalypse world and run some other story in a apocalypse.
24:57.428 --> 24:58.710
[SPEAKER_01]: A apocalypse world does one thing.
24:58.790 --> 25:01.594
[SPEAKER_01]: It does post-apocalyptic, bad, next-style stories.
25:01.614 --> 25:02.736
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what it does.
25:02.716 --> 25:08.067
[SPEAKER_01]: So PVA games are also really tailored to do what they do.
25:08.087 --> 25:10.271
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, they tell their one type of story.
25:10.512 --> 25:15.121
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's also good that they're rules like that way because, you know, you can't be learning a 300 page rule book for every.
25:15.181 --> 25:17.967
[SPEAKER_01]: Every weird niche thing you want to do, right?
25:17.987 --> 25:18.548
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah.
25:18.528 --> 25:35.237
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely, and that kind of harkens back to one of the things that you said earlier on in this interview about what kind of really drew you in when you were looking into and branching out with other systems was systems that were very structurally tailored for a very specific outcome and purpose.
25:35.217 --> 25:36.639
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what drew me back to the hobby.
25:36.719 --> 25:37.481
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it really was.
25:37.501 --> 25:44.052
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, there's this game that I'm I'm certain your listeners probably want to have heard of because even people in my spaces haven't really heard of it.
25:44.292 --> 25:45.975
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, it's called my life with Master.
25:46.035 --> 25:50.262
[SPEAKER_01]: And my life with Master by Paul Saga is an incredible bit of game design.
25:50.542 --> 25:53.327
[SPEAKER_01]: I think everyone who's interested in games on should read it.
25:53.307 --> 26:13.881
[SPEAKER_01]: If you play a group of like Igor or Renfield type servants of a master, a Dracula or Dr. Frankenstein type entity type person and this game tells one story the story is always the same and the character's change but the basic story arc is always the same the master is
26:13.861 --> 26:28.104
[SPEAKER_01]: cool to the servants, the servants go out into the village and they make emotional connections with people in the village and then that gives them the strength and the fortitude to eventually overthrow the master and be happy at the end.
26:28.584 --> 26:30.367
[SPEAKER_01]: That's every game of my life with master.
26:30.407 --> 26:32.090
[SPEAKER_01]: They always end that way.
26:32.611 --> 26:36.477
[SPEAKER_01]: And what I love about this game is the rules
26:36.457 --> 26:39.120
[SPEAKER_01]: work so that that's always the story you get.
26:39.160 --> 26:41.342
[SPEAKER_01]: You always get that story.
26:41.762 --> 26:50.791
[SPEAKER_01]: The rules are like laser etched to produce these particular narrative beats, these particular emotions, and this outcome of overthrowing the master.
26:50.851 --> 26:51.551
[SPEAKER_01]: It's always the same.
26:52.192 --> 26:55.775
[SPEAKER_01]: And people listen to this might be like, well, that sounds very prescriptive, but that sounds very narrow.
26:56.156 --> 27:02.802
[SPEAKER_01]: And my response to it is
27:02.782 --> 27:04.506
[SPEAKER_01]: depth versus width.
27:05.067 --> 27:05.950
[SPEAKER_01]: And here's what I mean by that.
27:06.631 --> 27:12.706
[SPEAKER_01]: The promise in the 90s especially of roleplay games was you can be anything.
27:12.946 --> 27:13.929
[SPEAKER_01]: You can do anything.
27:14.229 --> 27:15.252
[SPEAKER_01]: You can be any character.
27:15.272 --> 27:16.394
[SPEAKER_01]: You can tell any story.
27:16.434 --> 27:17.076
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the width.
27:17.878 --> 27:17.938
[SPEAKER_01]: And
27:17.918 --> 27:19.380
[SPEAKER_01]: And you can, in a lot of cases.
27:19.861 --> 27:24.848
[SPEAKER_01]: But the problem with that is it depends on so many factors.
27:25.269 --> 27:28.334
[SPEAKER_01]: Like the GM has to have prepared at a really high level.
27:28.554 --> 27:30.056
[SPEAKER_01]: There's just a lot that has to go on there.
27:30.096 --> 27:40.011
[SPEAKER_01]: And in any case, you're probably hand-weighting a lot of the rules because the rules aren't supporting you to tell the story of all these wide possibilities, right?
27:39.991 --> 27:42.194
[SPEAKER_01]: the depth approach, this is what I embrace.
27:42.615 --> 28:01.543
[SPEAKER_01]: What if we had a really, really narrowly tailored rule set that limits the type of story you can tell but allows you to go really deep into that story, deep in the emotion, like let you really like get into it like as if you were creating like a really good TV show or movie, not just you know.
28:01.523 --> 28:03.045
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the difference to me.
28:03.365 --> 28:04.706
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a big, big part of it for me.
28:04.827 --> 28:09.351
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I was drawn to this idea that you can have a slim rule set.
28:09.592 --> 28:11.373
[SPEAKER_01]: My left-of-masters not a long game.
28:11.413 --> 28:12.655
[SPEAKER_01]: You can read it in a half an hour.
28:12.675 --> 28:17.780
[SPEAKER_01]: A slim rule set finally tuned to tell one story.
28:18.261 --> 28:23.747
[SPEAKER_01]: But within that one story, you can have an incredible depth and incredible range of experience.
28:23.847 --> 28:25.428
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's just super appealing to me.
28:25.508 --> 28:28.592
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I'm not saying that's the better way or the best way, but it's what I like.
28:28.972 --> 28:30.754
[SPEAKER_01]: And my games are not as like,
28:30.734 --> 28:34.839
[SPEAKER_01]: Narrow is my half a master, but you can see components at it, right?
28:34.899 --> 28:39.264
[SPEAKER_01]: Like in the between, the characters each have like their own like little backstory.
28:39.464 --> 28:44.030
[SPEAKER_01]: This kind of guided with prompts and over the course of the campaign, you kind of do a new prompt and you tell your backstory.
28:44.450 --> 28:48.635
[SPEAKER_01]: And every time you play a certain character type, you're always going to have kind of a similar backstory.
28:48.695 --> 28:50.437
[SPEAKER_01]: The big narrative beats are going to be the same.
28:50.978 --> 28:57.065
[SPEAKER_01]: But that structure gives you a lot of opportunity to like go really deep in that backstory, right?
28:57.085 --> 28:59.728
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's a sort of
28:59.708 --> 29:03.479
[SPEAKER_00]: That's such a helpful way to frame it.
29:03.920 --> 29:05.865
[SPEAKER_00]: I really love the thought process behind that.
29:05.945 --> 29:09.275
[SPEAKER_00]: And I, you definitely sold me on wanting to check out my life with Master.
29:09.295 --> 29:14.730
[SPEAKER_01]: It's almost like I've been doing RPG podcasts for 11 years.
29:14.710 --> 29:15.931
[SPEAKER_01]: But no, I'm glad.
29:15.992 --> 29:16.873
[SPEAKER_01]: I think people should take a look at it.
29:16.913 --> 29:17.974
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a brilliant bit of design.
29:17.994 --> 29:22.419
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd actually won the Diana Jones award because it really is truly like game changer.
29:22.479 --> 29:33.212
[SPEAKER_01]: Like it's probably, if you had to make a list of the ten most important role playing games of the last 30 years, it would be one of them because it did something that no other game had done up to that point.
29:33.332 --> 29:35.375
[SPEAKER_01]: It said, what if we just told one story?
29:35.915 --> 29:38.018
[SPEAKER_01]: Those real game changer, real real big deal.
29:37.998 --> 29:38.960
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, absolutely.
29:39.000 --> 29:46.914
[SPEAKER_00]: To pivot slightly, but also piggyback on what you just said about your experience in doing TTRPG podcasting.
29:47.234 --> 29:52.243
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you tell us a little bit about some of the shows that you've done and some of the discussions that go on there?
29:52.477 --> 29:58.443
[SPEAKER_01]: we started with the gauntlet podcast back in 2015 and that was our sort of like community podcast.
29:58.463 --> 30:05.670
[SPEAKER_01]: And in that podcast, we were basically every episode we were talking about this particular strand of NDRPGs, right?
30:05.871 --> 30:14.820
[SPEAKER_01]: And we were highlighting games that no one was talking about that we had just discovered in some little corner of the internet and we were playing them and we were that was important.
30:14.840 --> 30:16.982
[SPEAKER_01]: We were playing them and then we were talking about them.
30:16.962 --> 30:20.068
[SPEAKER_01]: We were also, at a certain point, we were running a big community calendar as well.
30:20.590 --> 30:24.317
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we also kind of did a lot of our kind of community talk there as well.
30:24.738 --> 30:25.680
[SPEAKER_01]: That was the got the podcast.
30:25.740 --> 30:31.051
[SPEAKER_01]: And then later on, we produced shows one just about part by the apocalypse games called plus one forward.
30:31.111 --> 30:33.857
[SPEAKER_01]: I was a producer on that, but I didn't, I would edit and host it.
30:33.837 --> 30:37.784
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I hosted a Dutch and World podcast called to certain realities.
30:38.184 --> 30:48.302
[SPEAKER_01]: We haven't recorded a new episode in that since 2018, but my co-host and I are still teaching people how to play Dungeon World to this day because I can see the download numbers and I get the questions and emails, so I know we are.
30:48.322 --> 30:57.898
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's always very weird because it's like, in episode 35, you said XYZ and I'm always like, dude, I recorded episode 35 like seven years ago.
30:57.918 --> 30:58.900
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't remember.
30:58.880 --> 31:00.983
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know what you're talking about.
31:01.043 --> 31:07.392
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I love that you're excited and you, but I can't help you because I'm not gonna go listen to that episode to figure out what you're asking.
31:07.412 --> 31:12.479
[SPEAKER_01]: The active podcast that I do right now, there's fear of a black dragon, which is my most popular podcast.
31:12.900 --> 31:19.209
[SPEAKER_01]: In that one, my co-host Tom and I, we take a look at an old school or OSR adventure module, one of us plays it.
31:19.870 --> 31:22.233
[SPEAKER_01]: We do look a little review of it and what we like to what we did like.
31:22.534 --> 31:26.119
[SPEAKER_01]: But then we talk about a topic that's kind of like,
31:26.099 --> 31:31.144
[SPEAKER_01]: We're looking at this OSR stuff through the lens of story gamers.
31:31.744 --> 31:35.768
[SPEAKER_01]: We kind of like are helping bring the clans together at a certain sense in our show, right?
31:36.289 --> 31:36.950
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's a lot of fun.
31:37.010 --> 31:39.092
[SPEAKER_01]: We've been making ass since 2017.
31:39.452 --> 31:41.194
[SPEAKER_01]: And then my other show is called The Dark and Threshold.
31:41.374 --> 31:44.056
[SPEAKER_01]: And that one is about mostly about car from Rindwood Games.
31:44.517 --> 31:50.743
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm still going and we talk about the design fundamentals and the gameplay fundamentals of car from Rindwood.
31:50.763 --> 31:53.946
[SPEAKER_01]: We also talk about just mystery and horror genres as well.
31:54.061 --> 31:58.531
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the newest show is called the Lans remaining podcast.
31:58.732 --> 32:03.984
[SPEAKER_01]: There's only been three episodes really so far, but we have like eight or nine in the can, but we've released three of them.
32:04.745 --> 32:09.857
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is a dev podcast about a game I'm working on called the Lans remaining.
32:10.438 --> 32:11.260
[SPEAKER_01]: Those are my shows.
32:11.493 --> 32:39.070
[SPEAKER_00]: There's so many little nuggets of things that I want to dive into and unpack there, but I think the biggest ones, like in the wide breadth of games that you've covered and the different aspects that you've approached them from, I guess what I'll narrow in on is, are there any specific games that jump out and stand out to you that you've covered, that maybe do something in a particular oddball way or that are especially memorable to you?
32:39.050 --> 32:40.192
[SPEAKER_01]: I've not already talked about it.
32:40.212 --> 32:41.254
[SPEAKER_01]: I would have said my life with Bester.
32:42.075 --> 32:47.364
[SPEAKER_01]: I am going to say monster hearts monster hearts is my favorite role playing game of all time of the games.
32:47.384 --> 32:53.776
[SPEAKER_01]: I've not written at least which I obviously love those in a different way but it is my absolute favorite game of all time.
32:53.816 --> 32:57.302
[SPEAKER_01]: It is about the messy lives of teenage monsters.
32:57.722 --> 33:01.229
[SPEAKER_01]: It's basically like twilight or buffy the role playing game but it's just great.
33:01.249 --> 33:02.030
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just so good.
33:03.052 --> 33:03.252
[SPEAKER_01]: And
33:03.232 --> 33:05.256
[SPEAKER_01]: And I just always have such a good time of it.
33:06.037 --> 33:07.680
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'd highlight that just because I think people should play it.
33:08.061 --> 33:09.824
[SPEAKER_01]: I love this game called the final girl.
33:10.124 --> 33:11.527
[SPEAKER_00]: I've heard of the final girl.
33:11.547 --> 33:12.348
[SPEAKER_01]: I've heard of the final girl.
33:12.368 --> 33:15.414
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, there's several different final girls, so hopefully it's the one you're thinking of.
33:15.674 --> 33:19.401
[SPEAKER_01]: The one I'm talking about is by Brett Gillin, it was published in the early 2000s.
33:19.381 --> 33:21.284
[SPEAKER_01]: and it's really cool.
33:21.664 --> 33:46.418
[SPEAKER_01]: It's what's called a troop style game meaning you make a bunch of characters so you have like 12 characters and then every round you each play a different character and one of you plays like a serial killer and so you're basically making like a horror movie and every round that character gets killed basically right and then at the end the last character has to face off against the killer and that's your final girl, doesn't it be a girl but that's just uh it could be a dog or a boy or whatever but uh
33:46.398 --> 33:48.140
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a really fun game.
33:48.480 --> 33:51.804
[SPEAKER_01]: It's one of the closest things to a party role playing game.
33:52.244 --> 33:54.847
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there aren't many games like that and that's one of them.
33:55.487 --> 33:57.990
[SPEAKER_01]: But speaking of party role playing games, I love for the Queen.
33:58.290 --> 34:00.953
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a terrific, terrific, party style role playing game.
34:01.313 --> 34:04.997
[SPEAKER_01]: You can pull out for the Queen with basically no prep.
34:05.017 --> 34:08.440
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just a deck of cards with a group of people and you'll have an amazing time.
34:08.861 --> 34:12.945
[SPEAKER_01]: With a mixed group of people, people who don't know anything about games is perfect for those groups.
34:12.925 --> 34:22.995
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, so I love that one so many good PBTA games that have been so influential on me, I think people should really read the original apocalypse world.
34:23.555 --> 34:28.400
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think you should try to play it at the text is so interesting of that first edition.
34:28.820 --> 34:33.825
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not an easy text to understand, but it's such a cool, like artistic expression, right?
34:34.266 --> 34:38.330
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like what if the text of the role playing game could be part of the art here?
34:38.590 --> 34:40.772
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, what if it was more than just a manual?
34:40.752 --> 34:41.734
[SPEAKER_01]: I love that.
34:42.155 --> 34:45.000
[SPEAKER_01]: Another one of Vincent Baker's games called Dogs in the Vineyard.
34:45.220 --> 34:47.024
[SPEAKER_01]: I love very, very much.
34:47.304 --> 34:51.792
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a little clunky in 2026 gameplay wise, but it's a great game for what it does.
34:51.873 --> 34:55.960
[SPEAKER_01]: It's about fantasy Mormons in the late 19th century.
34:55.940 --> 35:02.611
[SPEAKER_01]: you essentially play these like young, like religious enforcers who go from community to community trying to root out sin and pride.
35:02.831 --> 35:05.676
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's a game that deals with so many big topics and themes.
35:06.016 --> 35:09.342
[SPEAKER_01]: And importantly, it has dice mechanics that are like poker.
35:09.362 --> 35:12.567
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like you play a little poker hands against each other with dice, which is kind of fun.
35:13.208 --> 35:14.951
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, there's so much I could go forever on this day.
35:14.971 --> 35:15.612
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's like so.
35:15.652 --> 35:16.253
[SPEAKER_01]: So many games.
35:16.714 --> 35:16.834
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
35:16.814 --> 35:18.578
[SPEAKER_00]: Those are awesome, great recommendations.
35:18.998 --> 35:20.181
[SPEAKER_00]: I've played for the Queen.
35:20.221 --> 35:20.762
[SPEAKER_01]: It's great, right?
35:21.063 --> 35:22.305
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I second that wholeheartedly.
35:22.906 --> 35:26.734
[SPEAKER_00]: Monster Hearts, I haven't played, but everyone I know who has swears by it.
35:26.974 --> 35:27.495
[SPEAKER_01]: I love it.
35:27.836 --> 35:33.287
[SPEAKER_01]: It was one of the first games that I'm aware of that dealt with like, queerness, queer sexuality.
35:33.528 --> 35:38.738
[SPEAKER_01]: It's one of the first games that treated like the idea of like romance and sex.
35:38.718 --> 35:59.308
[SPEAKER_01]: in a role-playing game and a really thoughtful and mature way, you know, in an interesting way, not just like a, you know, in a way that's like kind of cool to engage with, not like uncomfortable, you know, and the characters are just fun, like they're called skins, like you play the skins, and there's like the vampire, the werewolf, whatever, there's different ones, and they all just do such cool things, and
35:59.288 --> 36:07.223
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, they're fundamentally teenagers or young adults like college students or whatever they're young people, but they are also like, they have these monstrous aspects.
36:07.463 --> 36:15.879
[SPEAKER_01]: And the idea of like monstrousness being a metaphor for growing up and you're changing body and you're changing emotions.
36:15.959 --> 36:20.588
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, yeah, that's such a cool, it's a cool concept and it's just done so well.
36:20.821 --> 36:38.322
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, great recommendations all around and I'm sure that you've got a ton more, but like as a quick scatter shot, that's a really good like framework and jumping off point to touch back on the lands remaining since that is more of a developmental podcast and you're focusing more on like the design process.
36:38.763 --> 36:45.411
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to pull apart that a little bit whether it is about specifically the land remaining or just game design in general.
36:45.391 --> 36:56.869
[SPEAKER_00]: What are some of the like little bits and pieces of the process and advice that you would give as like a quick reference point for people wanting to pursue game development?
36:56.883 --> 36:58.185
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a terrific question.
36:58.205 --> 37:00.208
[SPEAKER_01]: I could probably talk about it for two hours.
37:00.268 --> 37:00.809
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll try not to.
37:01.530 --> 37:06.618
[SPEAKER_01]: So the thing is, before I was writing my own games, I was a developmental editor for other role-playing games.
37:06.838 --> 37:14.090
[SPEAKER_01]: I've got a lot of credits and games out there because I would help people get there, essentially like they're kind of idea past the developmental stage, right?
37:14.450 --> 37:21.321
[SPEAKER_01]: And the reason why I did that is because I was playing so many games through the gauntlet that I just started to have a really good handle on what worked at the table, you know?
37:21.301 --> 37:22.423
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll stick to the big points.
37:22.904 --> 37:37.909
[SPEAKER_01]: I think if you're in the really early stages of your design, you have to be able to answer two questions that a surprising number people never do, which is who are the characters and what do they do?
37:37.889 --> 37:39.952
[SPEAKER_01]: This is so important.
37:40.873 --> 37:45.360
[SPEAKER_01]: Many, many people have great ideas for the world.
37:45.901 --> 37:47.904
[SPEAKER_01]: Their game takes place, and here's the world.
37:48.204 --> 37:49.746
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I've got this idea for a setting.
37:50.047 --> 37:51.749
[SPEAKER_01]: They might even know the genre they want to do.
37:51.970 --> 37:53.331
[SPEAKER_01]: They might have a world idea.
37:53.612 --> 37:55.094
[SPEAKER_01]: They might have thought of all the religions.
37:55.334 --> 37:56.676
[SPEAKER_01]: They've thought of all the factions.
37:57.157 --> 38:03.306
[SPEAKER_01]: Many, many, many game designers never give any thought, or at least they do it too late.
38:03.286 --> 38:05.929
[SPEAKER_01]: who are the player characters and what do they do?
38:06.650 --> 38:09.272
[SPEAKER_01]: Because that is our untray into the game.
38:09.473 --> 38:14.178
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you can't answer those questions, everything flows from those two questions, right, everything, every single part of it.
38:14.778 --> 38:22.426
[SPEAKER_01]: So that I think is going to smooth out the process for a lot of people, because I know from experience a lot of people don't answer those questions, but they should be your first questions.
38:23.047 --> 38:28.753
[SPEAKER_01]: Then, circling back to kind of like what I was saying earlier, you kind of think about your design goals.
38:28.733 --> 38:42.035
[SPEAKER_01]: So for the Lancer Manning, it's a car from Riddlewood Fantasy game, and one of my big design, the big design goal for the Lancer Manning is, I want to create the definitive souls like or Elden Ring style tabletop role playing game.
38:42.416 --> 38:44.199
[SPEAKER_01]: There's lots of games out there that think they're doing that.
38:44.319 --> 38:44.940
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think they are.
38:45.341 --> 38:46.362
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to make the definitive one.
38:46.683 --> 38:48.025
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that was my design goal.
38:48.005 --> 38:51.749
[SPEAKER_01]: But then within that big design goal, you should have other design goals, right?
38:51.769 --> 38:53.992
[SPEAKER_01]: You can have design goals at every step of the process.
38:54.392 --> 38:56.575
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, you're making your character sheet or what's my design goal there?
38:57.075 --> 38:59.218
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, I've got this scenario or mystery.
38:59.258 --> 39:00.899
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, what's the design goal this mystery?
39:00.919 --> 39:01.780
[SPEAKER_01]: What am I trying to accomplish?
39:02.381 --> 39:13.033
[SPEAKER_01]: I always think about things in terms of design goals and nested design goals, because it's a really good way of organizing your thinking and organizing your workflow and your process.
39:13.013 --> 39:25.605
[SPEAKER_01]: And it lets you like kind of compartmentalize, which is my next tip, this is going to sound a little weird and funny and a little like contradictory people are going to say this can't be right, but I promise you it is.
39:25.872 --> 39:30.101
[SPEAKER_01]: You can start play testing your game right away.
39:30.622 --> 39:32.827
[SPEAKER_01]: Play test parts of it.
39:33.449 --> 39:41.226
[SPEAKER_01]: Don't wait until you have the entire thing written before you start play testing because for one thing, you may never get there.
39:41.546 --> 39:45.535
[SPEAKER_01]: And so you're never even gonna know if your game had a chance, right?
39:45.515 --> 39:55.411
[SPEAKER_01]: For another thing, you don't want to have to go back and reinvent the wheel because you discover after you've done all this work, that a key element of your game doesn't work.
39:55.772 --> 39:57.355
[SPEAKER_01]: This is how Brenda Wood Bay came about.
39:57.795 --> 40:02.143
[SPEAKER_01]: I was actually writing the between first, and I was like, you know what?
40:02.203 --> 40:06.730
[SPEAKER_01]: I've got this idea for this mystery system, but I don't know exactly if it's going to work, right?
40:06.750 --> 40:12.079
[SPEAKER_01]: Like I don't know if it's going to work, and I don't want to have to rewrite all these
40:12.059 --> 40:12.981
[SPEAKER_01]: it doesn't work.
40:13.502 --> 40:22.317
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I had the idea, I need to make a smaller mystery game that just does one type of mystery with one type of character, just to try it out.
40:22.898 --> 40:33.176
[SPEAKER_01]: Happily, Bruno and Bay ended up being a really big deal on its own, but like setting that aside, what I was doing was I created a little game to essentially be like a sketch for the bigger game to try something out.
40:33.396 --> 40:36.582
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't have to go to that length, but you should feel like, okay, it's like,
40:36.562 --> 40:43.812
[SPEAKER_01]: If you get just enough of a character and just enough of a scenario and maybe like one or two core mechanics, start play testing that.
40:44.253 --> 40:46.036
[SPEAKER_01]: Make sure it works as you go.
40:46.056 --> 40:47.958
[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't have to be like super formal.
40:48.059 --> 40:51.483
[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't have to be like, you know, a big organized thing.
40:51.584 --> 40:54.748
[SPEAKER_01]: It can just be like you and a couple of friends trying out this one part of the game.
40:54.788 --> 40:59.134
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, hey, Joe, you got like 30 minutes so we can try out the combat to see if this works.
40:59.174 --> 41:00.176
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, let's do the combat.
41:00.196 --> 41:01.658
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's see if the combat feels good.
41:01.638 --> 41:02.962
[SPEAKER_01]: I think those are my three big tips.
41:03.122 --> 41:03.864
[SPEAKER_01]: Who are your characters?
41:04.085 --> 41:04.666
[SPEAKER_01]: What do they do?
41:04.987 --> 41:05.970
[SPEAKER_01]: What are your design goals?
41:06.111 --> 41:07.695
[SPEAKER_01]: And what are the nested design goals?
41:08.156 --> 41:10.563
[SPEAKER_01]: And then play test little parts.
41:11.145 --> 41:14.334
[SPEAKER_01]: Obviously, you got to play this the whole thing at some point, but just play test the parts.
41:14.574 --> 41:16.660
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, because my game design is so iterative.
41:16.640 --> 41:24.374
[SPEAKER_01]: I can get away with just play testing the weird parts because I know the core things work already, you know, which is nice when you reach that point.
41:24.735 --> 41:30.326
[SPEAKER_01]: But even the lands are made, though, I did like a three session play test of the full game rules, and I was really happy with it.
41:30.466 --> 41:34.834
[SPEAKER_01]: And I learned a couple things about my game, and I'm going to incorporate those changes, and that's great.
41:34.814 --> 41:42.365
[SPEAKER_01]: another reason why you want to have some modularity in your process is because you need those little victories, right?
41:42.586 --> 41:47.513
[SPEAKER_01]: You play to have a small part and it goes well and everyone loves it that gives you like an energy boost, right?
41:47.533 --> 41:48.795
[SPEAKER_01]: You're like, oh man, this is so cool.
41:48.855 --> 41:50.938
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm so hyped for I want to keep writing, you know?
41:51.399 --> 42:00.653
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you just kind of like stay forever in this like writing phase, you're going to like get down on the idea, you're not going to have that like kinetic energy, you know?
42:00.633 --> 42:02.515
[SPEAKER_00]: That is such fantastic advice.
42:02.775 --> 42:13.466
[SPEAKER_00]: I especially love the idea of spinning off and focusing in on unique specific aspects and mechanics and spinning those off into their own other things.
42:13.827 --> 42:29.323
[SPEAKER_00]: That meshes really well with advice that I got from an earlier interview that I did with Jonathan Greenall, who does tons and tons of like one to two page and like really small bite
42:29.303 --> 42:39.832
[SPEAKER_00]: And their big advice and their whole approach and aspect is that the important thing to being a prolific designer is getting really good at finishing things.
42:40.193 --> 42:41.534
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, the so true.
42:41.794 --> 42:42.355
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so true.
42:42.615 --> 42:59.310
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think that's a really good way for people who are more ambitious like me who tend to bite off more than we can chew, breaking up our meal into smaller projects to focus on one aspect at a time.
42:59.290 --> 43:01.153
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, sticking landing is hard, right?
43:01.313 --> 43:02.855
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the hard part of this.
43:03.195 --> 43:14.311
[SPEAKER_01]: And anytime you can kind of give yourself little check-in points or points to like, you know, to have success, little triumphs, that's what you want, you know, and until eventually you have a whole game, you know?
43:14.331 --> 43:14.692
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that's it.
43:14.712 --> 43:17.856
[SPEAKER_01]: You eventually end up in the, okay, another game is done in state, you know?
43:17.836 --> 43:39.372
[SPEAKER_01]: But I'm really lucky because I have a large thriving community of people who are particularly focused on the games we publish and so I have lots of immediate feedback and I get lots of good feedback on things and I know things are working and the way we do our games is we do just we do a digital only life span for a while like the games kind of live digitally for like a year or two or three before we go to Kickstarter, you know.
43:39.352 --> 43:43.797
[SPEAKER_01]: And what that does is it gets our community a chance to really put those games through their paces.
43:43.837 --> 43:51.627
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, these are games that are like kind of 95% done, but then we let them kind of stay digital for a minute to like really like perfect them.
43:52.168 --> 43:57.094
[SPEAKER_01]: And then we do the crowdfunding for the physical book and incorporate that, you know, year or two of thinking into it.
43:57.234 --> 44:08.768
[SPEAKER_01]: And so yeah, I'm really lucky because I have a nice healthy community of players who play by games and who understand what we're doing and kind of can give me like really good actionable feedback that I trust, you know,
44:08.748 --> 44:14.777
[SPEAKER_01]: has that and so it's good to make your process so that you can kind of have little moments of success regularly.
44:15.178 --> 44:17.001
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a very wise approach.
44:17.622 --> 44:22.990
[SPEAKER_00]: We're nearing the end of my list of questions, so I do want to touch on again real quick.
44:23.370 --> 44:36.831
[SPEAKER_00]: I know that the land remaining is still an iterative work in progress currently, but are there any projects like that that you are currently working on that you want to push and talk about any recent releases or upcoming projects?
44:36.811 --> 44:38.394
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, these are the lens remaining.
44:38.454 --> 44:39.336
[SPEAKER_01]: We do have this podcast.
44:39.356 --> 44:40.960
[SPEAKER_01]: So people are interested in learning more about it.
44:41.000 --> 44:43.786
[SPEAKER_01]: They should definitely go listen to Matt nice podcast about it.
44:43.826 --> 44:46.832
[SPEAKER_01]: It's all just about what is this game and what's the process of creating it.
44:46.872 --> 44:52.103
[SPEAKER_01]: Like we just released a game in our Patreon called Beach Blanket Body Bag.
44:52.083 --> 44:55.671
[SPEAKER_01]: which is it's a car for Brindlewood game but it's meant to be played in just two sessions.
44:55.931 --> 45:03.006
[SPEAKER_01]: So you kind of get it to the table for two sessions and you get the whole experience, the whole mystery solving and all that stuff in a short package or a small package.
45:03.026 --> 45:12.707
[SPEAKER_01]: It's about a group of kids, a 1965, like who kind of go have a beach party and then murder start happening and there's like a mystery on this island that they're on the party that they're having the party at.
45:12.687 --> 45:17.795
[SPEAKER_01]: And then we're getting ready to publish another one of these short form games called Dead Pilled.
45:18.256 --> 45:26.810
[SPEAKER_01]: And Dead Pilled is about a group of Manus Spear influencers and podcasters that they go to some horrible retreat in Bali.
45:26.910 --> 45:30.376
[SPEAKER_01]: And then they all get, they all start getting killed and it's very cathartic and wonderful.
45:30.476 --> 45:31.658
[SPEAKER_01]: So I wish to play it.
45:32.431 --> 45:39.341
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's the kind of smaller games, but we have so many games, though, there are always like in some different stage of completion.
45:39.361 --> 45:46.572
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you want to know more about what we're doing, our podcasts are a great place, but also the gauntlet discord is a very big thriving discord.
45:46.652 --> 45:54.924
[SPEAKER_01]: If people want to go in there and everybody's super friendly and probably those chill discord I've ever been a part of, like it's just really relaxed in there and everyone just kind of loves games.
45:55.025 --> 45:57.308
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's a good place to learn about things.
45:57.288 --> 46:00.395
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, links to those resources will be in the description.
46:00.455 --> 46:04.003
[SPEAKER_00]: So make sure that you do check those out if you are interested.
46:04.064 --> 46:08.213
[SPEAKER_00]: As we're wrapping up, are there any other miscellaneous things that you want to touch on?
46:08.333 --> 46:14.267
[SPEAKER_00]: Any other topics you want to hit or things you want to make sure don't get left on said before we wrap up.
46:14.365 --> 46:15.907
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe just a couple of marketing things.
46:15.927 --> 46:19.313
[SPEAKER_01]: The between hardcover is currently available for pre-order.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Those will be out in the middle of May as when the election be shipping.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But we are getting ready to kick start the hardcover edition of public access, the analog horror game.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So if we're excited about that, but in terms of topics, I guess I would just say more of a woo-woo thing, I guess.
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[SPEAKER_01]: which is, we live in really, really troubled times.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We are in very, very troubled times, and I would encourage everyone listening to take this opportunity to find the joy in tabletopural playing games.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's something that always brings me a lot of joy no matter what, but at really key moments in my life, it's also the thing that's kind of saved me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that there is something really profoundly important by engaging with your hobby in a way that just makes you feel good.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There's something powerful about that and people should do it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely, it's such a communal hobby.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that that aspect of it is very important.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And it feels important right now, doesn't it?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Like, it really, if you, it does.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It does.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, there are very few hobbies and interests like it that I found that have such a profound way of bringing people together.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I, wholeheartedly agree, I think that is a fantastic thing that the medium can really do.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And there's a lot to really gleam from it, especially now.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So thank you so much for having this conversation with me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It has been an absolute blast.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We've covered some really great ground as we wrap up.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Can you just let our listeners know one more time where they can find you and your works?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So our website is gauntlet-RPG.com.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You can learn everything you know there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then if you want to follow us, our official blue sky is not that active.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's not active at all.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Actually, my personal blue sky is Jason Kortova.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I think I'm the only Jason Kortova on blue sky currently.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So that should be easy to find.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and I don't really share much there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Mostly just like little thoughts about the hobby and about my games, but now gauntlet-RPG.com is the place.
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[SPEAKER_00]: All right.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, thank you again.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This has been wonderful.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, thank you for having me on.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And thank you all of you for listening.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One more time, everybody.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Danger Dancers, the GM and host of D&D Ark.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I've been chatting with Jason Cordava of the gauntlet and this has been table talk.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I hope you enjoyed what we brought to the table.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Table Talk, created hosted and edited by myself, dangered and jurors, with artwork by Jordan Nelson.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Our guest this episode was Jason Cordava from the gauntlet.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Links to his work can be found in the episode description.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If you're interested in being a guest on this show, reach out to us at dndarkpodcast at gmail.com.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Our theme song and outro were created by Jeremy Volucci.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Check out more of his works on Instagram at Jeremy Volucci underscore wreck of time.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next time we have a guest take a seat at the table.