January 7, 2025 • 47 mins
We met with former lawyer turned game designer Jason Cordova (he/him) for our first live streamed recording. We’re going to learn about Jason’s tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) writing process, running a successful crowd-funding campaign, and empowering other creatives and communities to play within your work.
One takeaway I can offer you already? Give things time to find their legs.
Mentioned in this Episode:
Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA)
Final Girl by Brett Gillan Game and Actual Play with Claire!
If you enjoyed this interview, find Jason online at gauntlet-rpg.com.
Submit your own community questions for our guests here!
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers themselves and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Living Arts Detroit.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Hello, I'm Laura Scales, a dedicated arts facilitator, career counselor, and the CEO ofLiving Arts Detroit.
Join us as we chat with both experienced and emerging artistic professionals who haveignited their creativity and shaped their careers to thrive while living in the arts.
Today's interview is with Jason Cordova.
We met with the former lawyer turned game designer in our first ever live streamedrecording.
(00:24):
We're going to learn about Jason's tabletop role playing game writing process,
running a successful crowdfunding campaign, and empowering other creatives and communitiesto play within your work.
One takeaway I can offer you already?
Give things time to find their legs.
For more, stay tuned.
(00:47):
Hi, hello, hello, hi, we're here.
Honestly, I can't believe that we made it.
Don't laugh, this is a live recording of the Living in the Arts podcast.
My name is Claire and I'm the producer of this podcast, but fear not, your intrepid,normal host, Laura Scales, is here with me as well.
And today I'm so excited to introduce an incredible guest that we have on the pod today.
(01:10):
Jason Cordova is the founder of the Gauntlet gaming community and the creator of gamessuch as Brindlewood Bay, The Between, and Public Access.
He's also the co-host of the podcast, Fear of a Black Dragon, and The Darkened Threshold.
Hi Jason, how are you today?
Hello, hello.
I'm great, thanks for having me on.
So the way that we usually start Living in the Arts podcast is actually a way that Lauralikes to start a lot of her meetings with something called Good Thing, Bad Thing.
(01:36):
And so, Laura, tell me if I misremember the rules.
You can have two good things, but you can't have two bad things.
And you don't have to have a bad thing if you don't want to.
And any of these things can be from any part of your life, whether related to work or not.
My bad thing is the power went out this morning and my good thing is the power is back on.
And I'm here with all of you.
(01:56):
So that's where we are.
Laura, do you want to go next?
my gosh.
Yes.
My good thing is also that Claire's power is back on.
Nobody had that one in the troubleshooting cards.
I don't have a bad thing.
I'm really excited to talk to you, Jason, and learn more about it.
I'm new to tabletop role-playing games, but I'm enjoying watching them.
(02:21):
Awesome.
Do I have to do a bad thing as well or a good thing?
Good thing, at least a good thing.
At least a good thing.
OK, well, will do a bad thing.
It's bad.
That's not the end of the world.
January for a small business owner is the worst month because of taxes and administrativestuff.
So that is a bad thing.
(02:42):
But it'll be done soon, hopefully.
And a good thing, I am really excited about my reading pace lately.
I made a commitment a couple of years ago to like increase the amount of books I read.
And so in 2022, I read 55 books and in 2023, I read 71 books.
Oh my god.
(03:03):
I've already, I got, I I started my year like kind of before Christmas last year.
So that's, so I've had kind of a slightly longer 2024, but for book purposes, but I'malready up to eight books and I'm really excited about that.
So yeah.
Yeah.
So I really, I'm really, I just, I love to read.
God, when the power was out this morning, I finished my second book of 2024 already, andI'm pretty proud of myself for that.
(03:29):
But if you started counting it, if you started counting at January 1st, that's a great.
I did.
I did.
I started counting December 23rd last year.
I've got a little bit of extra room.
Yeah, yeah, you got it.
got it.
Incredible.
Well, I would I mean, just to do a little bit of table setting for for listeners who maynot know already, we'd love to hear just like a little bit about you.
(03:51):
how your path into the umbrella arts and entertainment industry and how you got where youare now.
Yeah.
So, well, am, like you mentioned at the top, I am the founder of the Gauntlet gamingcommunity and I do podcasting and game publishing as part of that.
Originally, the Gauntlet started as just a quasi-formal game club in Houston, Texas.
(04:19):
This was in 2013, we were
I was sort of looking for people to play kind of smaller, more independent tabletop roleplaying games at that time.
I had just moved to the city and, and everybody was playing Pathfinder back then.
I don't know how well you know the scene, Laura, but like Pathfinder was the thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We have a couple of big Pathfinder fans around these parts and they love the crunch forsure.
(04:41):
Yeah.
Yeah.
No shame on Pathfinder.
Everybody can do whatever they love, but
But that's kind of all there was at that time.
And so I was like, well, I want to play these games.
And so I just sort of started asking around and managed to find this Google Plus groupthat was called the Gauntlet.
was pretty defunct at that point.
But we kind of revived it.
And we started meeting once a week to play games.
(05:03):
Then we started meeting twice a week to play games.
And then it became a Wednesday, Friday, Sunday thing every week playing games.
And at our height,
The Wednesday, which was like the big kind of public open day, we had like six or seventables going at once, like on those Wednesday nights.
so, and always, and it was like Monster Hearts, Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, like allof these kinds of games, you know?
(05:29):
And like in small stuff, indie stuff, like it was, was, was great.
And then eventually The Gauntlet became sort of more of an online thing.
We started doing podcasting and so we started to attract a wider kind of audience.
And so we took a lot of our operations online.
We started doing some small scale publishing in 2017.
That became bigger publishing in 2019 and now it's my job, which is to be publishing.
(05:53):
I put out my first game in early 2020, which was the original booklet version of BrendaWood Bay.
Brenda Wood Bay was the first, honestly, was the first creative thing I'd ever done in mylife at the age of 40.
I had never done.
Actually, I gave myself a couple of years there.
(06:13):
was 40.
How old was I?
42 when Fred and Woodvay came out.
So yeah, had never written anything.
I had never done anything like that.
I was an attorney.
so yeah, it was received really well.
And we've just been kind of keeping up a good pace ever since then as far as like newgames and new things.
(06:38):
And everyone's really
responded really well to it and it's been really exciting.
So, yeah, that's where I'm at now.
That's truly so incredible.
I do love the like attorney turns tabletop.
Yeah.
Game like aficionado.
The pipeline is probably it exists in some way.
I know a handful of attorneys that are in my games, but that when they finally kind ofbreak that creative seal, there's something beautiful and wonderful in there.
(07:06):
Yeah, I mean.
For me, like I had been really passionate about role playing games as just a fan and ahobbyist for years.
Like I played my first RPG when I was 10, you know?
But like growing up, I never really thought like it was a viable thing to do as a job.
And so I didn't pursue it, you know?
I mean, I think if you had asked, you know, 12 year old me.
(07:28):
or if you told me back then, like, you know, you're going to be publishing role playinggames someday, I would have been like, yeah, of course I am.
like, as you get older, you start to like, let your dreams, you know, like, you know,float away.
And really, I think what's makes what makes it possible for me and lots of people in thescene to, to publish and do gaming is just because there are so many barriers to entry
(07:49):
have been eliminated or reduced, right?
I mean, PDF, self publishing, all this stuff is just so much easier and so much more, itmakes it so much more viable.
And if you really focus on your particular play community, which is what we do in theGauntlet, we're very, very focused on play.
play is the first thing we always want to do, right?
(08:09):
Everything else is secondary to the act of playing role playing games.
You foster your community and that community is ready for whatever your next thing isgoing to be.
So when we got into publishing, it felt like a natural step for us.
And it's been really exciting.
Amazing.
So I wrote a bunch of questions that I'm just curious about, knowing that this is sort ofhas a bent toward like career advice and like getting getting folks involved in different
(08:40):
different types of artistic practice.
I would love to hear both like about your process of producing a game, but also how thesuccess of Brindlewood Bay may be either changed or iterated that process with like the
games after that first like big success.
I'm to start with that one first, actually, because Brindlewood was the first game Ipublished of mine, but it wasn't the first game I started working on.
(09:03):
The first game I started working on was the game that came after eventually called TheBetween, which is about, well, I didn't, should say for folks who don't know, Brindlewood
Bay is about elderly women who solve murder mysteries in their town.
And there's a vast occult conspiracy going on that connects the murders.
Murder, she wrote, meets, you know, Cosmic Horror.
The Between is about Victorian
(09:25):
era monster hunters in London, right?
Kind of inspired by Penny Dreadful and things like that.
And I had started working on the Between first.
And I knew that I wanted to do something kind of different with like the mystery solvingin that game.
Like I wanted to approach the solving of mysteries in a role playing game in a differentway, because I wasn't really thrilled with a lot of the way it was normally done at that
(09:47):
time.
And so rather than, I was kind of faced with this dilemma because this mystery system Iwas envisioning,
was either gonna work really well or it was gonna be something I was gonna have to likeiterate and change a lot.
And so rather than rewrite the between over and over again, I had the idea to just do asmaller game that I could try the mystery system out with, right?
(10:10):
And so that's where Brenda Wood Bay came from.
I kind of solicited some ideas from folks and kind of brainstormed with some folks aboutlike, what's a smaller game I could do that would let me just try out the mystery part.
And so if to see if it works for the between.
And that's where Brindlewood Bay originally came from.
so Brindlewood Bay was originally, in some sense, like a game design sketch for TheBetween, right?
(10:35):
And happily, it found its own audience and it became, and now it's our biggest game.
And The Between did eventually come out and people love The Between as well.
And we're gonna be kickstarting that later this year.
And I'm really excited about that, the physical edition of it.
But yeah.
from a sort of design standpoint, the Between and Brindlewood Bay are, they're very muchin conversation with each other because Brindlewood Bay was kind of a sketch for the
(11:00):
Between.
And then we did the Kickstarter edition of Brindlewood Bay, which took a lot of lessonsthat we learned post release of the Between.
you know, so that's been kind of really fun little circle of design, I guess.
But your first question, which is like just the process of putting the game together.
For me, I have to be able to envision the game.
This is what I've learned about my own creative process.
(11:22):
I don't do very well if I sit and just try to write drafts.
And so I try to avoid writing anything until I know in a real kind of basic sense, kind ofhow I think the game is supposed to work.
And so I just put out my fourth game that I was an author on.
(11:43):
I co-authored our newest game, the Silt versus Role Playing Game.
In each instance, what I discovered about my process is that
I need to just, I'm usually waiting for like one piece to fall into place, you know?
There's like one element, one rule, one mechanic, maybe one setting element or creativeelement.
There's like one thing that I'm trying to figure out.
(12:06):
And once that falls into place, I can usually then envision the whole work, right?
And that's when I write.
So the original Brenda Wood Bay, the original booklet version,
I thought about it for a fair amount, but when I actually started to write it, I wrote itin like, I think in two days.
(12:28):
The Between, which is a much more complex game and that I had been kind of like, doing allthis, a lot of loose play testing with without anything having been written down.
It mostly just lived in my head until Brentwood Bay helped me solve some design problemsthere.
And then once I'd figured that out,
I think I wrote the between in like in two weeks maybe.
And so it's just for me, like it's all about like just thinking, thinking, thinking,thinking, thinking, possibly for months, right?
(12:55):
In the case of Public Access, 10 years I thought about that game.
But then like I had the one little flash of insight and I was like, okay, I'm ready tomake that game I thought about 10 years ago that's been living in my head for 10 years.
I'm ready to do it now.
And so that's how my process is.
It's very much like,
I like to live with an idea until I have that like that lightning bolt.
(13:22):
I relate to that so much.
That's incredible.
It's like the opposite of my process and I am obsessed.
I'm obsessed with that right now.
I'd be curious to hear about your process.
mine's more like I will just do it.
Like I am the person who have seven million drafts of it.
Do it again.
Nope.
Didn't work.
Let's try that.
(13:42):
We'll change this one thing, but I have to like see it.
And I love that this is something that lives in your head.
And then like that one moment hits and it's like, okay, good.
And yeah, it lives in my head.
Once I have this sort of like fall into the sort of keystone idea fall into place, I thenmake an outline of the chapters.
or I basically use the.
(14:04):
the chapters as an outline essentially with little subheadings.
And then I write it and I do all that in a matter of days.
And I guess it's good that I can keep it all in my head.
Deliberately.
I feel like that's the law.
That's attorney helping.
Exactly.
exactly.
I feel like I keep thinking about Plinko.
Like I keep thinking about my mind as the Plinko board and like all of the projects I kindof have in the background of my brain or at the bottom.
(14:31):
And then it's just like.
At some point that puck is going to fall in there and then I'm going to know it's time.
Yeah.
So I was reading some of the between because I haven't played it yet, but I'm very excitedand I don't want to make any assumptions and I just want hear you talk about the like role
of genre and trope in your work.
(14:52):
And I'm sure you get asked this question a lot with like with cozy games and stuff likethat with the Mavens and whatever.
But I I want to hear you talk about it.
So please.
Yeah, I.
I think all of my games up to this point, with the exception of the newest one, the SiltVersus, which is based off of an established IP, it's based off this audio drama called
(15:13):
the Silt, that's S-I-L-T, the Silt Versus.
Excellent audio drama, folks should go check it out.
Apart from that game, the other three games are very much, they're pretty personal interms of their setting and their materials.
I put a lot of my own...
and sensibility into it under the fingers crossed proposition that my taste will telegraphto a sufficient number of people to make it commercially viable.
(15:41):
And part of that, to get to your question, part of that is I am really, really interestedin genre.
I am really interested in sort of, there's a certain nostalgia component to a lot of thegames I write and to a lot of stuff I write.
There's a certain love of kitsch.
And you can see that in Brindlewood Bay, obviously.
(16:03):
There's a love for like sort of like just like the people in my life and how they'veinfluenced me and affected me, you know?
And so it's all really, really quite personal.
And so Brindlewood Bay, it really, really, I mean, it comes from a lot of differentplaces, but it comes from, but honestly, the most like purest place it comes from is me
sitting with my grandmother when I was a kid watching Murder, She Wrote, you know, in themiddle of the afternoon because Murder, She Wrote was always on.
(16:30):
And so, and then that kind of extends out to, okay, well, like the, my aunties and mymother and my grandmothers, like my relationship to them and how I view them and kind of
what the lives they envision for themselves, the lives that society imposed upon them,like all that stuff, kind of, you know, really, really like connects up with the game too,
(16:53):
you know?
And so, it's all, it's really kind of personal in that way.
Like there's all these like kind of influences kind of swimming around.
The Between is really interesting because I'm not English, I'm not British.
I've never even been to London.
And I just happen to really love the TV show Penny Dreadful.
But there is still a lot of me in that game.
(17:15):
I do have a particular love, for example, for fashion and sensory detail.
And so one of the things that my game does that I don't think many role-playing games dois you...
Your character sheet has like a dress up component, right?
Like you get to pick the fabulous details and accessories on your character, right?
(17:36):
Like that kind of thing.
I've always had like a love of like the sensory, the sensual and there and even in thegame itself also has like lots of like, it's not even subtext, it's just text.
Like there's a lot of like eroticism.
There's a lot of like just, there's a real like kind of an obsession with like detailsessentially.
And so like that is very much me, right?
(17:59):
But there's also this desire in the between to capture this really particular feeling.
I did want it to feel like the Penny Dreadful game.
I wanted it to feel like you are playing a game that is reaching into British horrorclassics, which I love, like Mary Shelley, or graphic novels, like From Hell, all that
(18:21):
kind of stuff.
And there's this question of, well, how do I translate that into...
a coherent game, right?
Like, how do you make that into a game?
How do you put your own personal stamp on it?
And there's an even like, extra question, which is really relevant to the gauntlet, whichis, once I make the base thing that it is, how do I then invite other people to create for
(18:41):
it, you know, so that they are empowered to create for it.
And so the between was really our one of the things I love about once we released thatgame is the creative community.
around that game, the homebrew community is crazy.
Like there are so many homebrew playbooks and homebrew scenarios and like it's forwhatever reason, like people find something in that setting they can kind of grab onto.
(19:05):
and that was my hope.
Like my hope was if I can capture the genre well enough, if I can lay a really strongfoundation here, it doesn't, it, it'll be a good game in its own right, I hope.
But if I've really done my job, well, what I will have done is I'll have created a spacefor people to kind of creatively play, you know.
and kind of do their own thing with.
And a little bit of that happens with Brindlewood Bay, in a fair amount, I would say, butthe between is really, really invites it because there's so many more moving parts in that
(19:33):
game that people can kind of play around with.
yeah.
That was an all over the place answer, but...
No, I did lot of that.
Yeah,
It's really great to kind of hear you talk about that, especially, you know, the nerd inme loves your attention to detail in this, you know, Victorian setting, especially given
(19:54):
how like.
driven to detail they were.
And this is how the spoon like tilts and you know, these particular details have statusmeaning, they have, know, grounding meaning and, know, all the way down to the fashion at
the time.
So I think that it was, it was just really great to hear.
Cause I wondering if a lot of the joy that I found in watching Brenda Lugbe was likegetting into the characters, getting into the cast.
(20:23):
Like I felt like I
knew them.
Like I was like, oh, I know them.
I'm the shopkeeper at the coffee shop down the street, you know, type of deal.
So I'm really excited to see, kind of hear about that process as you're as you're goingthrough.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I'm sorry.
Say again, what was the question?
I don't know if there was one.
(20:44):
was no question.
was just excited.
She's just excited.
OK, so I'm curious.
I missed it.
I was like, wait, did I miss the question?
No, I appreciate that.
That's really, it's good to hear.
Taking from sort of synthesizing some of this and thinking about like the goals andstructure of living in the arts, I'm curious.
(21:05):
So at first you were a hobbyist.
Now it's your life.
Now it's your career.
So I'm curious to hear about like what that transition was like, kind of how you how youmade the leap and then also like any tips and tricks you might have for young people or
there.
also ask for their caregivers.
who might be hearing about these career aspirations.
(21:28):
anything on that vein might be good.
know, role-playing games are interesting because it is a...
It's kind of a double-edged sword in some ways.
On the one hand, it's still a relatively niche hobby, despite the popularity of thingslike Critical Role and actual play space and all that stuff.
To get into the business of publishing games is still a fairly niche thing to do.
(21:50):
But on the flip side, on the good side...
is if you do have that passion and you have a really good idea, like I mentioned earlier,the barriers to entry are so low that you can just give it a go.
You know, like you could just try and see how it goes.
So for the first part of your question, like making that transition, I mean, reallyfortunate because in some sense, I think waiting until I was older helped a lot.
(22:11):
Like this was not gonna be a, you know, am I gonna be living on the streets if thisdoesn't work out kind of thing for me, right?
You know, I think if I had had the courage and the bravery to do it in my 20s or early30s, I would have loved to have been that person.
think that would have been like harder, but I wish I had done it.
(22:32):
That said, having started so later in life, it came with some advantages, mainly beingthat I had a better sense of business.
I know how taxes work.
I know how to write contracts.
There's a lot of things that I came equipped to deal with, a lot of people don't have.
The main thing for me, I think just in terms of like that transition was really justbreaking out of what people think is possible and what people's expectations are.
(23:00):
This is the really tricky bit.
When I told people that I was leaving the law in order to pursue role playing gamepublishing full time, I can't begin to tell you how...
People weren't like unsupportive because I think people in my life know me well enough toknow that like, I'll handle my business, you know?
But I think there was a lot of surprise.
(23:22):
It was like, what an interesting choice, you know?
And that's an extra difficult conversation because most people, if they don't play games,they don't know even what you're talking about, like at the basic level, you know?
So like there's that too.
But I think what I discovered is that if you really love a thing, and this sounds almostlike a platitude or trite to say, but it's really true.
(23:43):
If you really, really love a thing and you're willing in the first couple of years atleast to scrape by or to do a little bit without or to get by with the generosity of
people in your life or organizations in your life and just stick through those firstcouple years, you're either gonna find out that it's for you or you're gonna have that
(24:06):
moment.
You'll get through that threshold of like, okay, you're either gonna find out like, thisis not for me.
or it's not gonna work out for me, or you're gonna find out, hey, there's something here Ican pursue, and it will make itself known to you, right?
And so I do think that like in role-playing games especially, some people get reallylucky, they have a big like lightning bolt idea, and in some sense, Brenda Woodbay kinda
was that, but if you will just kinda stick with your, commit to your idea for a little bitand try to, you know, try to get mentorship from people who've done it already, even in my
(24:34):
40s, I did that, like I was very, you know.
because of my podcasting connections and because of the Gauntlet connections I had, I madeconnections in the industry even before I was in the industry, that all helped.
But I find that like people want to help you in that way.
Like people are very approachable in that way.
Like people who've done it are usually willing to talk about what their experience waslike.
(24:55):
But if you're willing to like kind of sacrifice for a couple of years to have a real go atit, I think you'll know by then.
I think you'll have a good sense of whether it's going to work out or not.
And
And I guess that that because that's what my experience was.
You know, the first couple of years were, you know, they were leaner years.
I had to really make a lot of sacrifices to do this.
But I guess I had I had like an instinctive understanding of like my trajectory.
(25:18):
I kind of knew we were going.
Brindlewood Bay was not the first game I published.
was first game I wrote that I published or that got published.
But it was not the first game we published.
I published other people's games first.
And I was able to in helping get those games, those folks games published, I was able tokind of like
learn a lot about the process enough to where I felt comfortable with my own, putting myown creative work out there in that way.
(25:41):
And so my path is a little different because I consider myself a publisher more than agame designer.
think publisher is kind of my bigger, that's my job, right?
But there's really something to be said about like being really clear-eyed about what youthink is possible.
Thinking about the market, I think is really important.
Is there like, is your game idea is something that already exists?
(26:05):
Is there a lot of it already out there?
If you're gonna make another fantasy, traditional fantasy role playing game, you reallyshould think about what sets your game apart.
You really wanna find out what your angle is.
But you also have to kind of just trust that you have to trust your passion, right?
Like, Brindlewood Bay is not an immediate slam dunk idea, right?
(26:26):
Like, we're going to play elderly women reading murder mystery books.
and solving, you know, like it's not typical role-playing game fair, you know?
But I think that, you know, if you believe in your idea and you're willing to give theprocess a couple of years to see how it shakes out, no matter how you have to do that, I
(26:48):
think that's kind of the commitment you have to make.
It's not necessarily gonna happen overnight.
I mean, some people get really lucky and it does, right?
But even Brenda Wood Bay, like I said, like it was my first game and it was a...
I think it's an idea that once people figured it out, they responded really well to it.
But we had built a lot of infrastructure before that, right?
Like there's a lot of that came before that.
yeah.
Yeah.
(27:08):
I mean, it struck me that it seems like you all are making both like fun, creative movesthat are great games, but also are making very strategic moves in terms of like marketing
and community building and like all that stuff.
Like I'm thinking about like.
carved from Brindlewood and also I'm thinking about how that Kickstarter was straight upeverywhere.
Like I felt like everywhere I looked on the internet was the Brindlewood Bank Kickstarterthere and making me aware that it existed.
(27:32):
And so like, I guess I'm curious about the kind of strategy behind some of those thingstoo as a publisher.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's a great question.
So our overall strategy I think is one that if you have the ability to do, it will serveyou well, which is
Before we did the Brindlewood Bay Kickstarter, two years before that, we did this bookletversion, right, which was digital.
(27:58):
And that booklet version's totally playable.
You could still go play that version.
There's nothing wrong with that.
But what we did was we gave Brindlewood Bay time to breathe, time to find its fan base,time to find its following, rather than going straight to Kickstarter, right?
I didn't just write the 40 page.
Brindlewood Bay thing in two days and then launch the Kickstarter, right?
(28:20):
We had two years of basically like, play this game, see if you like it, you know, talkingabout it wherever I could talk about it, giving it a chance to find its legs.
And we did that with a game that we published before too.
Prior to Brindlewood Bay, I published Jesse Ross's game Trophy and we did the same thingwith Trophy.
The original Trophy came out in like a really small digital form on our Patreon in like2018, but we didn't kickstart the
(28:46):
the physical edition until 2020.
And so we, again, there again, we gave it a couple years to kind of find its audience.
And we did the same thing with Grindlewood Bay.
We've done the same thing with The Between.
The Between's been out for a couple of years, and now we're just now going to Kickstarterfor the physical edition.
So that's our strategy.
Our strategy is a slow, it's a slow one, but I think it's one that it pays off, like itpays dividends.
(29:11):
If you have the ability and the time to give something some time,
Once you're ready to make that next move, then you're just positioned so much better,right?
So when we launched the Brindlewood Bay Kickstarter, I knew out of the gate, I could counton about 2000 pledges pretty fast without having to like really try that hard.
(29:31):
And then beyond that, there's just a, you you have that 30 days sprint or 14 days sprintor however many days you're doing.
We always do a 30 day campaign.
You have that day, like, all hands on deck kind of situation where you're just constantly,you know, trying to put it in people's faces.
And we were really successful with Brenda Wood Bay.
We had like a marketing plan and everything, which we didn't have for Trophy.
(29:54):
Trophy was also a pretty successful Kickstarter, but that was all just pure word of mouth.
Like, I like to say that because I think it's true.
It's not even, it's kind of hyperbolic, but not really.
I like to say that I basically interacted with every person who pledged for Trophy.
Like, I think I...
I think I had some kind of interaction with every single person.
But with Brindlewood Bay, we had more of a marketing plan by then.
(30:15):
We had like an actual plan, you know, and we had partners to help us with the marketingand stuff.
I don't think we would have been able to find those partners.
I don't think we would have been able to come up with that plan if we hadn't givenBrindlewood Bay time to be in the bloodstream, you know, time for people to kind of
understand it and know it.
And by the time we got ready to launch that Kickstarter, people were ready.
(30:38):
for it, right?
And I hope that's the feeling with The Between, too.
We have spent a couple years, like, nurturing the community around The Between, the playcommunity, the creative community.
I run it on my YouTube channel all the time.
Like, we talk about it in our podcasts.
Like, we've spent so much time just kind of, like, building up awareness of the game, justlike we did for Brentwood Bay, that when we launched this Kickstarter in a few months...
(31:02):
My hope is that it has another really good reception again.
So our process is a slow one, our strategy is a slow one, but it's a fun one, right?
Like it's fun to put out a game and just run it.
Run it for people, get people to play it, like it's fun, right?
You actually get to live in it a little bit more than...
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You get to keep falling in love with it over and over again.
(31:23):
I mean, I would be really upset if...
we just put out games and immediately move to the next thing.
I like that we put out a game and let it live for a while.
So Laura and I both come from a theater background, which that industry also requires alot of deep community connections and building relationships is a huge part of being able
(31:46):
to succeed and things like that.
Playwrights in theater have their own of zeitgeist around them.
I'm curious as a game designer, but also as a publisher, do you find yourself with thisbreathing strategy?
Do you feel like you're constantly iterating?
Are you able to sort of like take that step back as a designer?
Or are you like, because I know that Burndlewood Bay changed a lot over the course of it.
(32:08):
I imagine all the games change a lot over the course of that breathing room time.
But I'm curious about the like that sort of how those roles blend together for you, guess.
yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, it's interesting.
Like, there's a certain amount of like, when we put something out in this sort of likeinitial release, the digital only release that we've done for all of our games.
before we go to crowdfunding.
(32:29):
I think we do so with the understanding that this game is, from a mechanical andprocedural level, it's like 95 % done.
There's not too much to change.
But we do know that there's that 5%, right?
We're gonna get this game in the hands of our very dedicated play community, and they'regoing to put it through its paces, right?
And they're gonna have a great time with it, they're gonna love it.
(32:51):
But they're going to let us know when there is a thing, when there's an issue, you know,they're going to let us know like, hey, we keep running into this like particular problem.
I run the game, you know, I run all of my games all the time.
And I mean, I, I even with all my other responsibilities, I still run games four times aweek.
Right.
And I love that time because that is, you know, I'm constantly like just taking everythingthat happens in the games I run on board.
(33:16):
Like, like, like, like I said, we're, we're, we're play first in the gauntlet.
Right.
And so.
I'll know if something is not quite working.
If it falls into that 5%, you know, a little, like little gap.
And sometimes it's positive stuff.
I've had like characters that only exist in my games that I run that are not imaginedanywhere in the game text, but they're really popular.
(33:39):
And I think, I've got to get that character into the game.
You know, like people love this, people love this guy or they love this character andlet's, get them in there, you know?
And so.
For me, like, I love all of this part of it, right?
Like, there's very little daylight between me as game designer, me as publisher, and me asperson who just likes to play games, right?
(34:00):
All three of those things are really connected.
My job is game publisher, right?
Like, that's my job.
That's what pays the bills.
My passion is running games.
Like, I love to do that.
I would not do this job if I had to stop playing and running games.
I just wouldn't do it.
I would go back to being a lawyer because that's what I love to do.
Game design is almost like a...
(34:21):
I don't know, I love it.
It's really fun.
I enjoy it.
But all four of my designs are very iterative of each other, right?
So I don't think I'm so interested in like coming up with brand new systems.
That hasn't been my passion so far.
I find a lot of pleasure in how do I take this base mystery horror system and tweak ithere and there to do this other thing?
(34:44):
You know, that's what I find.
That iterativeness is really pleasurable for me.
I don't know that answers the question except to say that like they're all such connectedideas, you know, and they feed into each other.
And unfortunately, I don't have a lot of time anymore to sort of be in the biggerpublishing game design community.
(35:06):
I think that's really hard to do because everybody's got their own thing they're trying todo and everything.
You know, you see people at conventions, that's kind of like the extent of it to somedegree, you know.
But I try to keep my eyes open to what other people are doing because the publishing partof my brain does want to always be mindful of the market, you know?
Unless it's D &D, I just ignore that part of the market.
Not because I have anything against D &D.
(35:26):
love D &D.
D &D is what I originally played, but it is so...
I truly believe that if you're an indie tabletop role-playing publisher...
the worst thing you can do is get caught up in the day-to-day online vicissitudes of D &Ddiscourse.
Like, just don't do it.
Like, you will never get anything done.
And so I just, you know, I just, I know it's there.
(35:49):
I'm trying to peel off as many people as I can, but otherwise it's none of my business.
So.
Incredible.
have questions in the chat that we'll do now for a little bit here.
This is just general, what is your most memorable TTRPG moment?
That's interesting.
My goodness, questioner, I play probably, I don't know, like 200 sessions.
(36:18):
Well, maybe not quite that many, but 150 sessions a year.
play a lot of games every year and I have a lot of really great moments.
If I had to pick one though, I don't know if I can say
one with specificity, but my favorite type of moment in a game, I love a stinger.
Okay, this is something that I do in my games.
(36:39):
It's built into my games and even games that are not mine that I'm running, I build thisinto them.
I love a little stinger at the end of a session.
So we played our session, we've done our stars and wishes, which is our little debrief.
And then at the very end I'm like, but wait.
And then I narrate something.
scary or weird or dramatic and it's like the very last thing and then we stop and likethat look of like people being like what just happened?
(37:08):
That's my favorite moment.
I love the stinger moment.
I love it so much that my games like incorporate that like at a system level like thekeeper will do end of session stingers from time to time because it keeps it keeps the
players excited.
It makes them want to come back for more and
And if you play your games all online, like I do, also gives you a really nice, like anice, like shocked face thumbnail, you know, all the players are like, you know, that's
(37:37):
good stuff.
What is your favorite game to run?
I'm actually gonna make this two parts.
What's your favorite of your games to run?
And then what's your favorite of all the other ones?
Of all the other ones is Monster Hearts by Avery Alder.
Love Monster Hearts.
Monster Hearts is along with Dungeon World.
Monster Hearts is the
game that I kind of built my reputation on.
(37:59):
I did some small but well-loved APs of Monster Hearts.
kind of, you know, in a lot of ways, the gauntlet was built up around Powered by theApocalypse games.
so Monster Hearts will always, always, always have a special place in my heart.
I love running it.
I also love running Cthulhu Dark by Graham Walmsley.
Cthulhu Dark, very, very rules-like, lovecrafty and horror game.
(38:21):
One of my favorite games to run...
Mechanically, it's quite light and it's a really simple, very, simple, but what it doesthat I love is because it's such a light framework, I can use it to try out ideas.
So if I have like character ideas or setting ideas I want to play with, I can kind of bangout a really quick Cthulhu Dark situation, try it out and see if the setting or the
(38:46):
characters are working.
And so I love Cthulhu Dark for that.
But just like, I love Monster Hearts so much.
Like, Monster Hearts is just, it's so special to me.
It's always such a good time.
And I, yeah, it does everything I want a role playing game to do in terms of emotion.
Like it is like, it's that messy, intense, know, melodrama even, like kind of feeling.
(39:10):
And I think the between captures a lot of that melodrama actually.
But my favorite of mine to run.
Oh, that's so hard.
I guess, I think it's the between actually.
Yeah, I really do.
I love Brindlewood Bay, Brindlewood Bay is a delight.
Public access is great fun.
I haven't had chance to run the Silt Versus as much yet.
Love the between though.
(39:31):
The between is just, I don't know, I like for things to bleed.
I just like for things to bleed.
I just like for things to bleed out and like the between does that.
Amazing.
I think this will be our last question here.
When you're writing a game, how do you think about how the players will improv orinterpret the rules of the game?
(39:53):
So like thinking process around players.
Yeah.
So all of my games are pretty collaborative in nature.
So the keeper has like a basic kind of scenario.
It's usually a two sheet, you know, kind of thing with just some basic elements that canbe used wherever they need to use them.
But for the most part, there's an expectation that the players will be doing a lot of theworld building as far as that goes.
(40:15):
So.
Because of that added responsibility of the players being quite heavily involved in stuffthat other games restrict to the GM, the player-facing materials are a little simpler.
So compared to other games that have Powered by the Apocalypse in their DNA, my games havefewer moves.
There are fewer moves, there are hard mechanical moving parts.
(40:39):
There's more narrative parts.
So I like a balance where the players don't have to
memorize or know hard mechanics so much, they do have to think about like story details asif they were the writer in a writer's room.
That's what I want because they are frequently going to be asked that.
And so in the game from a structural standpoint, that's built right into the games.
(41:02):
Like as the keeper is running the game, there are moments in their scenario where they askthe players to certain questions to get the players to help build out the world, right?
And so if I understand the question correctly,
I like for there to be a fairly light mechanical framework, but a pretty heavy narrativeand procedural framework so that the players are invited to talk and create story and not
(41:30):
worry too much about dice.
That's sort of the balance I like to strike.
All the character sheets in our games, for example, or in public access in between inBrunewood Bay at least and Silver's, they have this section which is essentially like
little prompts.
that they can mark them for advantage on die rolls, but what they really are is they'reprompts that are, if you read them straight down the line, they're like a little sort of
(41:54):
history of your character, right?
And so as you answer these prompts, you are, you over the course of play, and this couldbe over the course of 10 sessions, you're telling us flashbacks, you're showing us insight
into the character, you're teaching us about your character.
I have players who take that to a whole other level, and I love it.
they take it to a whole other level and in between sessions they use those prompts andthey essentially like script out their little narrations, you know?
(42:20):
And that's what I want players to do.
I want players to take those narrative prompts that we give them to think about story andto think about story as a storyteller, not just like living behind their character's eyes,
but stepping out of their character's eyes and thinking about the story as a whole and howto make the best story.
(42:41):
It's simply brilliant.
I'm sorry.
Okay, actual last lightning round question.
Favorite game to recommend to new TTRPG players?
There is a game called, and there's lots of games with this name, so I'm gonna be specifichere.
There's a game called The Final Girl.
This is the one by Brett Gillen, and it is a rules-like story game.
(43:06):
And what I love about it, for new role players especially, is it's a...
It's a troop style game.
So what that means is you're not responsible for playing just one character.
Every round you pick a new character to play.
And so what the game is, is you are essentially creating like horror movie.
And at the beginning of play, you all decide who the killer is, what's the killer's deal,you know.
(43:30):
And then you make like a pool of like 10 characters and you make up the characters withvery simple name.
adjective noun, know, chat the arrogant high school quarterback or something like that,right?
And you make a bunch of these characters, you put them in the middle of the table and thenevery round you kill them off one by one in the game.
(43:57):
Like you role play and then one of them dies every round until you get to the quoteunquote final girl, which is not always a girl, right?
And I've had the final girl be like a dog, you know, or whatever, you know, but I lovethat for new role players because it
does a lot of the basic kind of role-playing skills in a really like in a light frameworkand a fun, almost like a party game kind of framework.
(44:19):
And so I always recommend that for new groups because it is kind of a party role-playinggame.
I also think For the Queen is really good in this way as well.
And I have many, many people tell me Brindlewood Bay is their first role-playing game.
I, so know a couple people who that's true.
(44:39):
So amazing.
Well, do I guess either of you sorry, Laura, I sort of took over this one.
No, it's either of you have parting thoughts for the crew.
The chat's popping off about how we all need to play this version of Final Girl.
I've played the like another thing called Final Girl.
there's like so many things a solo board game.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I that sounds so fun.
(45:00):
This version is So fun.
yes, parting thoughts.
I'm just so excited to be here.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm I'm.
I got distracted by just listening, so I'm really grateful to not be hosting in themoment, because I was like, wow, yeah.
And I'm just thinking about all these things, but I will definitely take away how youbuilt creative community in an active way that's also sustainable.
(45:28):
And I think that that is just a really beautiful and wonderful idea.
And so my brain is already like, hmm.
How do we do that?
Yeah, absolutely.
I guess I would just say as a final thought for anybody who's watching, please go look atall the fundraiser links.
That's what we're all here doing.
(45:49):
But also, I guess if you have an idea that you're really passionate about, talk to someonewho's done it.
Talk to someone who's in your, no matter what your creative space is, whether that be somekind of literature or visual arts or some fine arts or whatever you're doing.
talk to someone who's done it and see if they'd be willing to do mentorship, because a lotof people are.
(46:13):
And I find mentorship to be really invaluable, even at my age and even in my particularposition, I still have my mentors, you know, I still have the people who I go to and I am
the mentor for other people, right?
So, the more I think creative people, really any profession, but but I think creativepeople can benefit a lot from.
(46:35):
from having like mentor networks and being part of a mentor network.
So.
Truly, you're looking at one of my mentors right now.
Laura was my teacher before any of all of this happened.
So, well, Jason, thank you so much for being here.
Chat, thank you so much for being here.
Laura, thank you so much for being here.
We are so grateful to have you here.
(46:56):
And if you're listening, So, all right, gang, bye.
Living in the Arts is hosted by Laura Scales with original music and editing by JasonDuran.
It is produced and co-hosted by Claire Haupe and our podcast coordinator is Colin Shy.
For more information about anything our guest mentioned, be sure to check out the shownotes.
Living in the Arts is made possible by listeners like you.
(47:16):
Don't forget to follow, rate, review, or share an episode that excites you.
To learn more and support Living in the Arts, please visit livingartsdetroit.org.
Thank you so much for joining us and so much
Hello, I'm Laura Scales, a dedicated arts facilitator, career counselor, and the CEO ofLiving Arts Detroit.
Join us as we chat with both experienced and emerging artistic professionals who haveignited their creativity and shaped their careers to thrive while living in the arts.
Today's interview is with Jason Cordova.
We met with the former lawyer turned game designer in our first ever live streamedrecording.
(00:24):
We're going to learn about Jason's tabletop role playing game writing process,
running a successful crowdfunding campaign, and empowering other creatives and communitiesto play within your work.
One takeaway I can offer you already?
Give things time to find their legs.
For more, stay tuned.
(00:47):
Hi, hello, hello, hi, we're here.
Honestly, I can't believe that we made it.
Don't laugh, this is a live recording of the Living in the Arts podcast.
My name is Claire and I'm the producer of this podcast, but fear not, your intrepid,normal host, Laura Scales, is here with me as well.
And today I'm so excited to introduce an incredible guest that we have on the pod today.
(01:10):
Jason Cordova is the founder of the Gauntlet gaming community and the creator of gamessuch as Brindlewood Bay, The Between, and Public Access.
He's also the co-host of the podcast, Fear of a Black Dragon, and The Darkened Threshold.
Hi Jason, how are you today?
Hello, hello.
I'm great, thanks for having me on.
So the way that we usually start Living in the Arts podcast is actually a way that Lauralikes to start a lot of her meetings with something called Good Thing, Bad Thing.
(01:36):
And so, Laura, tell me if I misremember the rules.
You can have two good things, but you can't have two bad things.
And you don't have to have a bad thing if you don't want to.
And any of these things can be from any part of your life, whether related to work or not.
My bad thing is the power went out this morning and my good thing is the power is back on.
And I'm here with all of you.
(01:56):
So that's where we are.
Laura, do you want to go next?
my gosh.
Yes.
My good thing is also that Claire's power is back on.
Nobody had that one in the troubleshooting cards.
I don't have a bad thing.
I'm really excited to talk to you, Jason, and learn more about it.
I'm new to tabletop role-playing games, but I'm enjoying watching them.
(02:21):
Awesome.
Do I have to do a bad thing as well or a good thing?
Good thing, at least a good thing.
At least a good thing.
OK, well, will do a bad thing.
It's bad.
That's not the end of the world.
January for a small business owner is the worst month because of taxes and administrativestuff.
So that is a bad thing.
(02:42):
But it'll be done soon, hopefully.
And a good thing, I am really excited about my reading pace lately.
I made a commitment a couple of years ago to like increase the amount of books I read.
And so in 2022, I read 55 books and in 2023, I read 71 books.
Oh my god.
(03:03):
I've already, I got, I I started my year like kind of before Christmas last year.
So that's, so I've had kind of a slightly longer 2024, but for book purposes, but I'malready up to eight books and I'm really excited about that.
So yeah.
Yeah.
So I really, I'm really, I just, I love to read.
God, when the power was out this morning, I finished my second book of 2024 already, andI'm pretty proud of myself for that.
(03:29):
But if you started counting it, if you started counting at January 1st, that's a great.
I did.
I did.
I started counting December 23rd last year.
I've got a little bit of extra room.
Yeah, yeah, you got it.
got it.
Incredible.
Well, I would I mean, just to do a little bit of table setting for for listeners who maynot know already, we'd love to hear just like a little bit about you.
(03:51):
how your path into the umbrella arts and entertainment industry and how you got where youare now.
Yeah.
So, well, am, like you mentioned at the top, I am the founder of the Gauntlet gamingcommunity and I do podcasting and game publishing as part of that.
Originally, the Gauntlet started as just a quasi-formal game club in Houston, Texas.
(04:19):
This was in 2013, we were
I was sort of looking for people to play kind of smaller, more independent tabletop roleplaying games at that time.
I had just moved to the city and, and everybody was playing Pathfinder back then.
I don't know how well you know the scene, Laura, but like Pathfinder was the thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We have a couple of big Pathfinder fans around these parts and they love the crunch forsure.
(04:41):
Yeah.
Yeah.
No shame on Pathfinder.
Everybody can do whatever they love, but
But that's kind of all there was at that time.
And so I was like, well, I want to play these games.
And so I just sort of started asking around and managed to find this Google Plus groupthat was called the Gauntlet.
was pretty defunct at that point.
But we kind of revived it.
And we started meeting once a week to play games.
(05:03):
Then we started meeting twice a week to play games.
And then it became a Wednesday, Friday, Sunday thing every week playing games.
And at our height,
The Wednesday, which was like the big kind of public open day, we had like six or seventables going at once, like on those Wednesday nights.
so, and always, and it was like Monster Hearts, Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, like allof these kinds of games, you know?
(05:29):
And like in small stuff, indie stuff, like it was, was, was great.
And then eventually The Gauntlet became sort of more of an online thing.
We started doing podcasting and so we started to attract a wider kind of audience.
And so we took a lot of our operations online.
We started doing some small scale publishing in 2017.
That became bigger publishing in 2019 and now it's my job, which is to be publishing.
(05:53):
I put out my first game in early 2020, which was the original booklet version of BrendaWood Bay.
Brenda Wood Bay was the first, honestly, was the first creative thing I'd ever done in mylife at the age of 40.
I had never done.
Actually, I gave myself a couple of years there.
(06:13):
was 40.
How old was I?
42 when Fred and Woodvay came out.
So yeah, had never written anything.
I had never done anything like that.
I was an attorney.
so yeah, it was received really well.
And we've just been kind of keeping up a good pace ever since then as far as like newgames and new things.
(06:38):
And everyone's really
responded really well to it and it's been really exciting.
So, yeah, that's where I'm at now.
That's truly so incredible.
I do love the like attorney turns tabletop.
Yeah.
Game like aficionado.
The pipeline is probably it exists in some way.
I know a handful of attorneys that are in my games, but that when they finally kind ofbreak that creative seal, there's something beautiful and wonderful in there.
(07:06):
Yeah, I mean.
For me, like I had been really passionate about role playing games as just a fan and ahobbyist for years.
Like I played my first RPG when I was 10, you know?
But like growing up, I never really thought like it was a viable thing to do as a job.
And so I didn't pursue it, you know?
I mean, I think if you had asked, you know, 12 year old me.
(07:28):
or if you told me back then, like, you know, you're going to be publishing role playinggames someday, I would have been like, yeah, of course I am.
like, as you get older, you start to like, let your dreams, you know, like, you know,float away.
And really, I think what's makes what makes it possible for me and lots of people in thescene to, to publish and do gaming is just because there are so many barriers to entry
(07:49):
have been eliminated or reduced, right?
I mean, PDF, self publishing, all this stuff is just so much easier and so much more, itmakes it so much more viable.
And if you really focus on your particular play community, which is what we do in theGauntlet, we're very, very focused on play.
play is the first thing we always want to do, right?
(08:09):
Everything else is secondary to the act of playing role playing games.
You foster your community and that community is ready for whatever your next thing isgoing to be.
So when we got into publishing, it felt like a natural step for us.
And it's been really exciting.
Amazing.
So I wrote a bunch of questions that I'm just curious about, knowing that this is sort ofhas a bent toward like career advice and like getting getting folks involved in different
(08:40):
different types of artistic practice.
I would love to hear both like about your process of producing a game, but also how thesuccess of Brindlewood Bay may be either changed or iterated that process with like the
games after that first like big success.
I'm to start with that one first, actually, because Brindlewood was the first game Ipublished of mine, but it wasn't the first game I started working on.
(09:03):
The first game I started working on was the game that came after eventually called TheBetween, which is about, well, I didn't, should say for folks who don't know, Brindlewood
Bay is about elderly women who solve murder mysteries in their town.
And there's a vast occult conspiracy going on that connects the murders.
Murder, she wrote, meets, you know, Cosmic Horror.
The Between is about Victorian
(09:25):
era monster hunters in London, right?
Kind of inspired by Penny Dreadful and things like that.
And I had started working on the Between first.
And I knew that I wanted to do something kind of different with like the mystery solvingin that game.
Like I wanted to approach the solving of mysteries in a role playing game in a differentway, because I wasn't really thrilled with a lot of the way it was normally done at that
(09:47):
time.
And so rather than, I was kind of faced with this dilemma because this mystery system Iwas envisioning,
was either gonna work really well or it was gonna be something I was gonna have to likeiterate and change a lot.
And so rather than rewrite the between over and over again, I had the idea to just do asmaller game that I could try the mystery system out with, right?
(10:10):
And so that's where Brenda Wood Bay came from.
I kind of solicited some ideas from folks and kind of brainstormed with some folks aboutlike, what's a smaller game I could do that would let me just try out the mystery part.
And so if to see if it works for the between.
And that's where Brindlewood Bay originally came from.
so Brindlewood Bay was originally, in some sense, like a game design sketch for TheBetween, right?
(10:35):
And happily, it found its own audience and it became, and now it's our biggest game.
And The Between did eventually come out and people love The Between as well.
And we're gonna be kickstarting that later this year.
And I'm really excited about that, the physical edition of it.
But yeah.
from a sort of design standpoint, the Between and Brindlewood Bay are, they're very muchin conversation with each other because Brindlewood Bay was kind of a sketch for the
(11:00):
Between.
And then we did the Kickstarter edition of Brindlewood Bay, which took a lot of lessonsthat we learned post release of the Between.
you know, so that's been kind of really fun little circle of design, I guess.
But your first question, which is like just the process of putting the game together.
For me, I have to be able to envision the game.
This is what I've learned about my own creative process.
(11:22):
I don't do very well if I sit and just try to write drafts.
And so I try to avoid writing anything until I know in a real kind of basic sense, kind ofhow I think the game is supposed to work.
And so I just put out my fourth game that I was an author on.
(11:43):
I co-authored our newest game, the Silt versus Role Playing Game.
In each instance, what I discovered about my process is that
I need to just, I'm usually waiting for like one piece to fall into place, you know?
There's like one element, one rule, one mechanic, maybe one setting element or creativeelement.
There's like one thing that I'm trying to figure out.
(12:06):
And once that falls into place, I can usually then envision the whole work, right?
And that's when I write.
So the original Brenda Wood Bay, the original booklet version,
I thought about it for a fair amount, but when I actually started to write it, I wrote itin like, I think in two days.
(12:28):
The Between, which is a much more complex game and that I had been kind of like, doing allthis, a lot of loose play testing with without anything having been written down.
It mostly just lived in my head until Brentwood Bay helped me solve some design problemsthere.
And then once I'd figured that out,
I think I wrote the between in like in two weeks maybe.
And so it's just for me, like it's all about like just thinking, thinking, thinking,thinking, thinking, possibly for months, right?
(12:55):
In the case of Public Access, 10 years I thought about that game.
But then like I had the one little flash of insight and I was like, okay, I'm ready tomake that game I thought about 10 years ago that's been living in my head for 10 years.
I'm ready to do it now.
And so that's how my process is.
It's very much like,
I like to live with an idea until I have that like that lightning bolt.
(13:22):
I relate to that so much.
That's incredible.
It's like the opposite of my process and I am obsessed.
I'm obsessed with that right now.
I'd be curious to hear about your process.
mine's more like I will just do it.
Like I am the person who have seven million drafts of it.
Do it again.
Nope.
Didn't work.
Let's try that.
(13:42):
We'll change this one thing, but I have to like see it.
And I love that this is something that lives in your head.
And then like that one moment hits and it's like, okay, good.
And yeah, it lives in my head.
Once I have this sort of like fall into the sort of keystone idea fall into place, I thenmake an outline of the chapters.
or I basically use the.
(14:04):
the chapters as an outline essentially with little subheadings.
And then I write it and I do all that in a matter of days.
And I guess it's good that I can keep it all in my head.
Deliberately.
I feel like that's the law.
That's attorney helping.
Exactly.
exactly.
I feel like I keep thinking about Plinko.
Like I keep thinking about my mind as the Plinko board and like all of the projects I kindof have in the background of my brain or at the bottom.
(14:31):
And then it's just like.
At some point that puck is going to fall in there and then I'm going to know it's time.
Yeah.
So I was reading some of the between because I haven't played it yet, but I'm very excitedand I don't want to make any assumptions and I just want hear you talk about the like role
of genre and trope in your work.
(14:52):
And I'm sure you get asked this question a lot with like with cozy games and stuff likethat with the Mavens and whatever.
But I I want to hear you talk about it.
So please.
Yeah, I.
I think all of my games up to this point, with the exception of the newest one, the SiltVersus, which is based off of an established IP, it's based off this audio drama called
(15:13):
the Silt, that's S-I-L-T, the Silt Versus.
Excellent audio drama, folks should go check it out.
Apart from that game, the other three games are very much, they're pretty personal interms of their setting and their materials.
I put a lot of my own...
and sensibility into it under the fingers crossed proposition that my taste will telegraphto a sufficient number of people to make it commercially viable.
(15:41):
And part of that, to get to your question, part of that is I am really, really interestedin genre.
I am really interested in sort of, there's a certain nostalgia component to a lot of thegames I write and to a lot of stuff I write.
There's a certain love of kitsch.
And you can see that in Brindlewood Bay, obviously.
(16:03):
There's a love for like sort of like just like the people in my life and how they'veinfluenced me and affected me, you know?
And so it's all really, really quite personal.
And so Brindlewood Bay, it really, really, I mean, it comes from a lot of differentplaces, but it comes from, but honestly, the most like purest place it comes from is me
sitting with my grandmother when I was a kid watching Murder, She Wrote, you know, in themiddle of the afternoon because Murder, She Wrote was always on.
(16:30):
And so, and then that kind of extends out to, okay, well, like the, my aunties and mymother and my grandmothers, like my relationship to them and how I view them and kind of
what the lives they envision for themselves, the lives that society imposed upon them,like all that stuff, kind of, you know, really, really like connects up with the game too,
(16:53):
you know?
And so, it's all, it's really kind of personal in that way.
Like there's all these like kind of influences kind of swimming around.
The Between is really interesting because I'm not English, I'm not British.
I've never even been to London.
And I just happen to really love the TV show Penny Dreadful.
But there is still a lot of me in that game.
(17:15):
I do have a particular love, for example, for fashion and sensory detail.
And so one of the things that my game does that I don't think many role-playing games dois you...
Your character sheet has like a dress up component, right?
Like you get to pick the fabulous details and accessories on your character, right?
(17:36):
Like that kind of thing.
I've always had like a love of like the sensory, the sensual and there and even in thegame itself also has like lots of like, it's not even subtext, it's just text.
Like there's a lot of like eroticism.
There's a lot of like just, there's a real like kind of an obsession with like detailsessentially.
And so like that is very much me, right?
(17:59):
But there's also this desire in the between to capture this really particular feeling.
I did want it to feel like the Penny Dreadful game.
I wanted it to feel like you are playing a game that is reaching into British horrorclassics, which I love, like Mary Shelley, or graphic novels, like From Hell, all that
(18:21):
kind of stuff.
And there's this question of, well, how do I translate that into...
a coherent game, right?
Like, how do you make that into a game?
How do you put your own personal stamp on it?
And there's an even like, extra question, which is really relevant to the gauntlet, whichis, once I make the base thing that it is, how do I then invite other people to create for
(18:41):
it, you know, so that they are empowered to create for it.
And so the between was really our one of the things I love about once we released thatgame is the creative community.
around that game, the homebrew community is crazy.
Like there are so many homebrew playbooks and homebrew scenarios and like it's forwhatever reason, like people find something in that setting they can kind of grab onto.
(19:05):
and that was my hope.
Like my hope was if I can capture the genre well enough, if I can lay a really strongfoundation here, it doesn't, it, it'll be a good game in its own right, I hope.
But if I've really done my job, well, what I will have done is I'll have created a spacefor people to kind of creatively play, you know.
and kind of do their own thing with.
And a little bit of that happens with Brindlewood Bay, in a fair amount, I would say, butthe between is really, really invites it because there's so many more moving parts in that
(19:33):
game that people can kind of play around with.
yeah.
That was an all over the place answer, but...
No, I did lot of that.
Yeah,
It's really great to kind of hear you talk about that, especially, you know, the nerd inme loves your attention to detail in this, you know, Victorian setting, especially given
(19:54):
how like.
driven to detail they were.
And this is how the spoon like tilts and you know, these particular details have statusmeaning, they have, know, grounding meaning and, know, all the way down to the fashion at
the time.
So I think that it was, it was just really great to hear.
Cause I wondering if a lot of the joy that I found in watching Brenda Lugbe was likegetting into the characters, getting into the cast.
(20:23):
Like I felt like I
knew them.
Like I was like, oh, I know them.
I'm the shopkeeper at the coffee shop down the street, you know, type of deal.
So I'm really excited to see, kind of hear about that process as you're as you're goingthrough.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I'm sorry.
Say again, what was the question?
I don't know if there was one.
(20:44):
was no question.
was just excited.
She's just excited.
OK, so I'm curious.
I missed it.
I was like, wait, did I miss the question?
No, I appreciate that.
That's really, it's good to hear.
Taking from sort of synthesizing some of this and thinking about like the goals andstructure of living in the arts, I'm curious.
(21:05):
So at first you were a hobbyist.
Now it's your life.
Now it's your career.
So I'm curious to hear about like what that transition was like, kind of how you how youmade the leap and then also like any tips and tricks you might have for young people or
there.
also ask for their caregivers.
who might be hearing about these career aspirations.
(21:28):
anything on that vein might be good.
know, role-playing games are interesting because it is a...
It's kind of a double-edged sword in some ways.
On the one hand, it's still a relatively niche hobby, despite the popularity of thingslike Critical Role and actual play space and all that stuff.
To get into the business of publishing games is still a fairly niche thing to do.
(21:50):
But on the flip side, on the good side...
is if you do have that passion and you have a really good idea, like I mentioned earlier,the barriers to entry are so low that you can just give it a go.
You know, like you could just try and see how it goes.
So for the first part of your question, like making that transition, I mean, reallyfortunate because in some sense, I think waiting until I was older helped a lot.
(22:11):
Like this was not gonna be a, you know, am I gonna be living on the streets if thisdoesn't work out kind of thing for me, right?
You know, I think if I had had the courage and the bravery to do it in my 20s or early30s, I would have loved to have been that person.
think that would have been like harder, but I wish I had done it.
(22:32):
That said, having started so later in life, it came with some advantages, mainly beingthat I had a better sense of business.
I know how taxes work.
I know how to write contracts.
There's a lot of things that I came equipped to deal with, a lot of people don't have.
The main thing for me, I think just in terms of like that transition was really justbreaking out of what people think is possible and what people's expectations are.
(23:00):
This is the really tricky bit.
When I told people that I was leaving the law in order to pursue role playing gamepublishing full time, I can't begin to tell you how...
People weren't like unsupportive because I think people in my life know me well enough toknow that like, I'll handle my business, you know?
But I think there was a lot of surprise.
(23:22):
It was like, what an interesting choice, you know?
And that's an extra difficult conversation because most people, if they don't play games,they don't know even what you're talking about, like at the basic level, you know?
So like there's that too.
But I think what I discovered is that if you really love a thing, and this sounds almostlike a platitude or trite to say, but it's really true.
(23:43):
If you really, really love a thing and you're willing in the first couple of years atleast to scrape by or to do a little bit without or to get by with the generosity of
people in your life or organizations in your life and just stick through those firstcouple years, you're either gonna find out that it's for you or you're gonna have that
(24:06):
moment.
You'll get through that threshold of like, okay, you're either gonna find out like, thisis not for me.
or it's not gonna work out for me, or you're gonna find out, hey, there's something here Ican pursue, and it will make itself known to you, right?
And so I do think that like in role-playing games especially, some people get reallylucky, they have a big like lightning bolt idea, and in some sense, Brenda Woodbay kinda
was that, but if you will just kinda stick with your, commit to your idea for a little bitand try to, you know, try to get mentorship from people who've done it already, even in my
(24:34):
40s, I did that, like I was very, you know.
because of my podcasting connections and because of the Gauntlet connections I had, I madeconnections in the industry even before I was in the industry, that all helped.
But I find that like people want to help you in that way.
Like people are very approachable in that way.
Like people who've done it are usually willing to talk about what their experience waslike.
(24:55):
But if you're willing to like kind of sacrifice for a couple of years to have a real go atit, I think you'll know by then.
I think you'll have a good sense of whether it's going to work out or not.
And
And I guess that that because that's what my experience was.
You know, the first couple of years were, you know, they were leaner years.
I had to really make a lot of sacrifices to do this.
But I guess I had I had like an instinctive understanding of like my trajectory.
(25:18):
I kind of knew we were going.
Brindlewood Bay was not the first game I published.
was first game I wrote that I published or that got published.
But it was not the first game we published.
I published other people's games first.
And I was able to in helping get those games, those folks games published, I was able tokind of like
learn a lot about the process enough to where I felt comfortable with my own, putting myown creative work out there in that way.
(25:41):
And so my path is a little different because I consider myself a publisher more than agame designer.
think publisher is kind of my bigger, that's my job, right?
But there's really something to be said about like being really clear-eyed about what youthink is possible.
Thinking about the market, I think is really important.
Is there like, is your game idea is something that already exists?
(26:05):
Is there a lot of it already out there?
If you're gonna make another fantasy, traditional fantasy role playing game, you reallyshould think about what sets your game apart.
You really wanna find out what your angle is.
But you also have to kind of just trust that you have to trust your passion, right?
Like, Brindlewood Bay is not an immediate slam dunk idea, right?
(26:26):
Like, we're going to play elderly women reading murder mystery books.
and solving, you know, like it's not typical role-playing game fair, you know?
But I think that, you know, if you believe in your idea and you're willing to give theprocess a couple of years to see how it shakes out, no matter how you have to do that, I
(26:48):
think that's kind of the commitment you have to make.
It's not necessarily gonna happen overnight.
I mean, some people get really lucky and it does, right?
But even Brenda Wood Bay, like I said, like it was my first game and it was a...
I think it's an idea that once people figured it out, they responded really well to it.
But we had built a lot of infrastructure before that, right?
Like there's a lot of that came before that.
yeah.
Yeah.
(27:08):
I mean, it struck me that it seems like you all are making both like fun, creative movesthat are great games, but also are making very strategic moves in terms of like marketing
and community building and like all that stuff.
Like I'm thinking about like.
carved from Brindlewood and also I'm thinking about how that Kickstarter was straight upeverywhere.
Like I felt like everywhere I looked on the internet was the Brindlewood Bank Kickstarterthere and making me aware that it existed.
(27:32):
And so like, I guess I'm curious about the kind of strategy behind some of those thingstoo as a publisher.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's a great question.
So our overall strategy I think is one that if you have the ability to do, it will serveyou well, which is
Before we did the Brindlewood Bay Kickstarter, two years before that, we did this bookletversion, right, which was digital.
(27:58):
And that booklet version's totally playable.
You could still go play that version.
There's nothing wrong with that.
But what we did was we gave Brindlewood Bay time to breathe, time to find its fan base,time to find its following, rather than going straight to Kickstarter, right?
I didn't just write the 40 page.
Brindlewood Bay thing in two days and then launch the Kickstarter, right?
(28:20):
We had two years of basically like, play this game, see if you like it, you know, talkingabout it wherever I could talk about it, giving it a chance to find its legs.
And we did that with a game that we published before too.
Prior to Brindlewood Bay, I published Jesse Ross's game Trophy and we did the same thingwith Trophy.
The original Trophy came out in like a really small digital form on our Patreon in like2018, but we didn't kickstart the
(28:46):
the physical edition until 2020.
And so we, again, there again, we gave it a couple years to kind of find its audience.
And we did the same thing with Grindlewood Bay.
We've done the same thing with The Between.
The Between's been out for a couple of years, and now we're just now going to Kickstarterfor the physical edition.
So that's our strategy.
Our strategy is a slow, it's a slow one, but I think it's one that it pays off, like itpays dividends.
(29:11):
If you have the ability and the time to give something some time,
Once you're ready to make that next move, then you're just positioned so much better,right?
So when we launched the Brindlewood Bay Kickstarter, I knew out of the gate, I could counton about 2000 pledges pretty fast without having to like really try that hard.
(29:31):
And then beyond that, there's just a, you you have that 30 days sprint or 14 days sprintor however many days you're doing.
We always do a 30 day campaign.
You have that day, like, all hands on deck kind of situation where you're just constantly,you know, trying to put it in people's faces.
And we were really successful with Brenda Wood Bay.
We had like a marketing plan and everything, which we didn't have for Trophy.
(29:54):
Trophy was also a pretty successful Kickstarter, but that was all just pure word of mouth.
Like, I like to say that because I think it's true.
It's not even, it's kind of hyperbolic, but not really.
I like to say that I basically interacted with every person who pledged for Trophy.
Like, I think I...
I think I had some kind of interaction with every single person.
But with Brindlewood Bay, we had more of a marketing plan by then.
(30:15):
We had like an actual plan, you know, and we had partners to help us with the marketingand stuff.
I don't think we would have been able to find those partners.
I don't think we would have been able to come up with that plan if we hadn't givenBrindlewood Bay time to be in the bloodstream, you know, time for people to kind of
understand it and know it.
And by the time we got ready to launch that Kickstarter, people were ready.
(30:38):
for it, right?
And I hope that's the feeling with The Between, too.
We have spent a couple years, like, nurturing the community around The Between, the playcommunity, the creative community.
I run it on my YouTube channel all the time.
Like, we talk about it in our podcasts.
Like, we've spent so much time just kind of, like, building up awareness of the game, justlike we did for Brentwood Bay, that when we launched this Kickstarter in a few months...
(31:02):
My hope is that it has another really good reception again.
So our process is a slow one, our strategy is a slow one, but it's a fun one, right?
Like it's fun to put out a game and just run it.
Run it for people, get people to play it, like it's fun, right?
You actually get to live in it a little bit more than...
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You get to keep falling in love with it over and over again.
(31:23):
I mean, I would be really upset if...
we just put out games and immediately move to the next thing.
I like that we put out a game and let it live for a while.
So Laura and I both come from a theater background, which that industry also requires alot of deep community connections and building relationships is a huge part of being able
(31:46):
to succeed and things like that.
Playwrights in theater have their own of zeitgeist around them.
I'm curious as a game designer, but also as a publisher, do you find yourself with thisbreathing strategy?
Do you feel like you're constantly iterating?
Are you able to sort of like take that step back as a designer?
Or are you like, because I know that Burndlewood Bay changed a lot over the course of it.
(32:08):
I imagine all the games change a lot over the course of that breathing room time.
But I'm curious about the like that sort of how those roles blend together for you, guess.
yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, it's interesting.
Like, there's a certain amount of like, when we put something out in this sort of likeinitial release, the digital only release that we've done for all of our games.
before we go to crowdfunding.
(32:29):
I think we do so with the understanding that this game is, from a mechanical andprocedural level, it's like 95 % done.
There's not too much to change.
But we do know that there's that 5%, right?
We're gonna get this game in the hands of our very dedicated play community, and they'regoing to put it through its paces, right?
And they're gonna have a great time with it, they're gonna love it.
(32:51):
But they're going to let us know when there is a thing, when there's an issue, you know,they're going to let us know like, hey, we keep running into this like particular problem.
I run the game, you know, I run all of my games all the time.
And I mean, I, I even with all my other responsibilities, I still run games four times aweek.
Right.
And I love that time because that is, you know, I'm constantly like just taking everythingthat happens in the games I run on board.
(33:16):
Like, like, like, like I said, we're, we're, we're play first in the gauntlet.
Right.
And so.
I'll know if something is not quite working.
If it falls into that 5%, you know, a little, like little gap.
And sometimes it's positive stuff.
I've had like characters that only exist in my games that I run that are not imaginedanywhere in the game text, but they're really popular.
(33:39):
And I think, I've got to get that character into the game.
You know, like people love this, people love this guy or they love this character andlet's, get them in there, you know?
And so.
For me, like, I love all of this part of it, right?
Like, there's very little daylight between me as game designer, me as publisher, and me asperson who just likes to play games, right?
(34:00):
All three of those things are really connected.
My job is game publisher, right?
Like, that's my job.
That's what pays the bills.
My passion is running games.
Like, I love to do that.
I would not do this job if I had to stop playing and running games.
I just wouldn't do it.
I would go back to being a lawyer because that's what I love to do.
Game design is almost like a...
(34:21):
I don't know, I love it.
It's really fun.
I enjoy it.
But all four of my designs are very iterative of each other, right?
So I don't think I'm so interested in like coming up with brand new systems.
That hasn't been my passion so far.
I find a lot of pleasure in how do I take this base mystery horror system and tweak ithere and there to do this other thing?
(34:44):
You know, that's what I find.
That iterativeness is really pleasurable for me.
I don't know that answers the question except to say that like they're all such connectedideas, you know, and they feed into each other.
And unfortunately, I don't have a lot of time anymore to sort of be in the biggerpublishing game design community.
(35:06):
I think that's really hard to do because everybody's got their own thing they're trying todo and everything.
You know, you see people at conventions, that's kind of like the extent of it to somedegree, you know.
But I try to keep my eyes open to what other people are doing because the publishing partof my brain does want to always be mindful of the market, you know?
Unless it's D &D, I just ignore that part of the market.
Not because I have anything against D &D.
(35:26):
love D &D.
D &D is what I originally played, but it is so...
I truly believe that if you're an indie tabletop role-playing publisher...
the worst thing you can do is get caught up in the day-to-day online vicissitudes of D &Ddiscourse.
Like, just don't do it.
Like, you will never get anything done.
And so I just, you know, I just, I know it's there.
(35:49):
I'm trying to peel off as many people as I can, but otherwise it's none of my business.
So.
Incredible.
have questions in the chat that we'll do now for a little bit here.
This is just general, what is your most memorable TTRPG moment?
That's interesting.
My goodness, questioner, I play probably, I don't know, like 200 sessions.
(36:18):
Well, maybe not quite that many, but 150 sessions a year.
play a lot of games every year and I have a lot of really great moments.
If I had to pick one though, I don't know if I can say
one with specificity, but my favorite type of moment in a game, I love a stinger.
Okay, this is something that I do in my games.
(36:39):
It's built into my games and even games that are not mine that I'm running, I build thisinto them.
I love a little stinger at the end of a session.
So we played our session, we've done our stars and wishes, which is our little debrief.
And then at the very end I'm like, but wait.
And then I narrate something.
scary or weird or dramatic and it's like the very last thing and then we stop and likethat look of like people being like what just happened?
(37:08):
That's my favorite moment.
I love the stinger moment.
I love it so much that my games like incorporate that like at a system level like thekeeper will do end of session stingers from time to time because it keeps it keeps the
players excited.
It makes them want to come back for more and
And if you play your games all online, like I do, also gives you a really nice, like anice, like shocked face thumbnail, you know, all the players are like, you know, that's
(37:37):
good stuff.
What is your favorite game to run?
I'm actually gonna make this two parts.
What's your favorite of your games to run?
And then what's your favorite of all the other ones?
Of all the other ones is Monster Hearts by Avery Alder.
Love Monster Hearts.
Monster Hearts is along with Dungeon World.
Monster Hearts is the
game that I kind of built my reputation on.
(37:59):
I did some small but well-loved APs of Monster Hearts.
kind of, you know, in a lot of ways, the gauntlet was built up around Powered by theApocalypse games.
so Monster Hearts will always, always, always have a special place in my heart.
I love running it.
I also love running Cthulhu Dark by Graham Walmsley.
Cthulhu Dark, very, very rules-like, lovecrafty and horror game.
(38:21):
One of my favorite games to run...
Mechanically, it's quite light and it's a really simple, very, simple, but what it doesthat I love is because it's such a light framework, I can use it to try out ideas.
So if I have like character ideas or setting ideas I want to play with, I can kind of bangout a really quick Cthulhu Dark situation, try it out and see if the setting or the
(38:46):
characters are working.
And so I love Cthulhu Dark for that.
But just like, I love Monster Hearts so much.
Like, Monster Hearts is just, it's so special to me.
It's always such a good time.
And I, yeah, it does everything I want a role playing game to do in terms of emotion.
Like it is like, it's that messy, intense, know, melodrama even, like kind of feeling.
(39:10):
And I think the between captures a lot of that melodrama actually.
But my favorite of mine to run.
Oh, that's so hard.
I guess, I think it's the between actually.
Yeah, I really do.
I love Brindlewood Bay, Brindlewood Bay is a delight.
Public access is great fun.
I haven't had chance to run the Silt Versus as much yet.
Love the between though.
(39:31):
The between is just, I don't know, I like for things to bleed.
I just like for things to bleed.
I just like for things to bleed out and like the between does that.
Amazing.
I think this will be our last question here.
When you're writing a game, how do you think about how the players will improv orinterpret the rules of the game?
(39:53):
So like thinking process around players.
Yeah.
So all of my games are pretty collaborative in nature.
So the keeper has like a basic kind of scenario.
It's usually a two sheet, you know, kind of thing with just some basic elements that canbe used wherever they need to use them.
But for the most part, there's an expectation that the players will be doing a lot of theworld building as far as that goes.
(40:15):
So.
Because of that added responsibility of the players being quite heavily involved in stuffthat other games restrict to the GM, the player-facing materials are a little simpler.
So compared to other games that have Powered by the Apocalypse in their DNA, my games havefewer moves.
There are fewer moves, there are hard mechanical moving parts.
(40:39):
There's more narrative parts.
So I like a balance where the players don't have to
memorize or know hard mechanics so much, they do have to think about like story details asif they were the writer in a writer's room.
That's what I want because they are frequently going to be asked that.
And so in the game from a structural standpoint, that's built right into the games.
(41:02):
Like as the keeper is running the game, there are moments in their scenario where they askthe players to certain questions to get the players to help build out the world, right?
And so if I understand the question correctly,
I like for there to be a fairly light mechanical framework, but a pretty heavy narrativeand procedural framework so that the players are invited to talk and create story and not
(41:30):
worry too much about dice.
That's sort of the balance I like to strike.
All the character sheets in our games, for example, or in public access in between inBrunewood Bay at least and Silver's, they have this section which is essentially like
little prompts.
that they can mark them for advantage on die rolls, but what they really are is they'reprompts that are, if you read them straight down the line, they're like a little sort of
(41:54):
history of your character, right?
And so as you answer these prompts, you are, you over the course of play, and this couldbe over the course of 10 sessions, you're telling us flashbacks, you're showing us insight
into the character, you're teaching us about your character.
I have players who take that to a whole other level, and I love it.
they take it to a whole other level and in between sessions they use those prompts andthey essentially like script out their little narrations, you know?
(42:20):
And that's what I want players to do.
I want players to take those narrative prompts that we give them to think about story andto think about story as a storyteller, not just like living behind their character's eyes,
but stepping out of their character's eyes and thinking about the story as a whole and howto make the best story.
(42:41):
It's simply brilliant.
I'm sorry.
Okay, actual last lightning round question.
Favorite game to recommend to new TTRPG players?
There is a game called, and there's lots of games with this name, so I'm gonna be specifichere.
There's a game called The Final Girl.
This is the one by Brett Gillen, and it is a rules-like story game.
(43:06):
And what I love about it, for new role players especially, is it's a...
It's a troop style game.
So what that means is you're not responsible for playing just one character.
Every round you pick a new character to play.
And so what the game is, is you are essentially creating like horror movie.
And at the beginning of play, you all decide who the killer is, what's the killer's deal,you know.
(43:30):
And then you make like a pool of like 10 characters and you make up the characters withvery simple name.
adjective noun, know, chat the arrogant high school quarterback or something like that,right?
And you make a bunch of these characters, you put them in the middle of the table and thenevery round you kill them off one by one in the game.
(43:57):
Like you role play and then one of them dies every round until you get to the quoteunquote final girl, which is not always a girl, right?
And I've had the final girl be like a dog, you know, or whatever, you know, but I lovethat for new role players because it
does a lot of the basic kind of role-playing skills in a really like in a light frameworkand a fun, almost like a party game kind of framework.
(44:19):
And so I always recommend that for new groups because it is kind of a party role-playinggame.
I also think For the Queen is really good in this way as well.
And I have many, many people tell me Brindlewood Bay is their first role-playing game.
I, so know a couple people who that's true.
(44:39):
So amazing.
Well, do I guess either of you sorry, Laura, I sort of took over this one.
No, it's either of you have parting thoughts for the crew.
The chat's popping off about how we all need to play this version of Final Girl.
I've played the like another thing called Final Girl.
there's like so many things a solo board game.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I that sounds so fun.
(45:00):
This version is So fun.
yes, parting thoughts.
I'm just so excited to be here.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm I'm.
I got distracted by just listening, so I'm really grateful to not be hosting in themoment, because I was like, wow, yeah.
And I'm just thinking about all these things, but I will definitely take away how youbuilt creative community in an active way that's also sustainable.
(45:28):
And I think that that is just a really beautiful and wonderful idea.
And so my brain is already like, hmm.
How do we do that?
Yeah, absolutely.
I guess I would just say as a final thought for anybody who's watching, please go look atall the fundraiser links.
That's what we're all here doing.
(45:49):
But also, I guess if you have an idea that you're really passionate about, talk to someonewho's done it.
Talk to someone who's in your, no matter what your creative space is, whether that be somekind of literature or visual arts or some fine arts or whatever you're doing.
talk to someone who's done it and see if they'd be willing to do mentorship, because a lotof people are.
(46:13):
And I find mentorship to be really invaluable, even at my age and even in my particularposition, I still have my mentors, you know, I still have the people who I go to and I am
the mentor for other people, right?
So, the more I think creative people, really any profession, but but I think creativepeople can benefit a lot from.
(46:35):
from having like mentor networks and being part of a mentor network.
So.
Truly, you're looking at one of my mentors right now.
Laura was my teacher before any of all of this happened.
So, well, Jason, thank you so much for being here.
Chat, thank you so much for being here.
Laura, thank you so much for being here.
We are so grateful to have you here.
(46:56):
And if you're listening, So, all right, gang, bye.
Living in the Arts is hosted by Laura Scales with original music and editing by JasonDuran.
It is produced and co-hosted by Claire Haupe and our podcast coordinator is Colin Shy.
For more information about anything our guest mentioned, be sure to check out the shownotes.
Living in the Arts is made possible by listeners like you.
(47:16):
Don't forget to follow, rate, review, or share an episode that excites you.
To learn more and support Living in the Arts, please visit livingartsdetroit.org.
Thank you so much for joining us and so much
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