September 5, 2023 • 50 mins
Today, we take an exclusive tour of board game development behind the scenes with the imaginative Kyle Rowan, Design Lead at Wyrd Games. Kyle delves into his personal trajectory from gamer to game designer, detailing the evolution of his role at Wyrd Games and the life of the board game Vagrantsong.
Kyle reflects on the spark that ignited Vagrantsong and the journey of developing the game and its expansions. He provides deeper insights into the mechanics and philosophy behind each expansion. We also touch upon the local legend of Slagpile Annie, a friendly Pittsburgh ghost, making her spectral debut in the game.
We also delve into the anticipation surrounding the upcoming Kickstarter and the reception of the game since its release. Kyle gives us an honest glimpse into the rollercoaster ride of the game industry, the highs, the lows and everything in between. He offers pearls of wisdom for those aspiring to make their mark in the gaming world. So, buckle up and enjoy this enlightening conversation with a true gaming wizard.
Find Kyle & Vagrantsong at:
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Courtney (00:08):
Hello and welcome to Roll Play Grow, the podcast for
tabletop entrepreneurs, creatorsand fans.
In this show we dig intoprocesses, challenges, tips and
really look at how to grow abusiness in the tabletop
role-play gaming space.
Sit back and join in as welearn from the creators behind
your favorite brands about whothey are and how they are
turning their passion for gaminginto a career.
(00:29):
Welcome back, lovely listeners.
I am so excited to introducetoday's guest to you, kyle Rowan
.
Kyle is the design lead at myfavorite gaming company, Wyrd
Games, which is known for theirstory-driven skirmish game,
malifaux and its offshoots, Awar game called the Other Side
and my favorite TTRPG, throughthe breach.
(00:50):
Wyrd also produces board gamesand today we actually spend most
of our time talking about oneof those board games, Vagrant
Song and its upcomingkickstarter for two expansions.
Kyle has worked at Wyrd forseven years and if I could have
quizzed him about every singlegame he's worked on, I
absolutely would have.
We spend a lot of time lookingat the board game development
process and how Vagrant Songchanged from conception to the
(01:13):
point that it's about to havetwo expansions.
I hope you all enjoy.
Before we dive into theinterview, I want to welcome any
new listeners to Roll Play Grow.
This show allows me to chatwith so many folks about
business, marketing, hardships,lessons learned and how-to
guides across a wide spectrum ofindustries within the tabletop
RPG scene, and every other weekI now have a lovely co-host on
(01:36):
special deep dive episodes.
Matt Joro, aka Dungeon Glitch,is my new co-host on every other
episode, where we focus onbusiness-related topics and how
they intersect with TTRPGs.
We just finished up athree-part series on growing
your social media accounts, andnext week we'll be digging into
project management what it isand why you need it on your
(01:56):
tabletop projects.
So be sure to subscribe to RollPlay Grow on your favorite
podcast player.
Lastly, before we get started, Iwant to shout out one of our
favorite dice companies DiceEnvy.
My very first interview on theshow was with David Daris, the
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Have some snazzy dice and helpsupport this show.
Thanks for hanging out,everybody and enjoy this chat
(02:39):
with Kyle.
Welcome back everybody.
I am here with the design leadof, frankly my favorite gaming
company, Wyrd Games, kyle Rowan.
Hi Kyle, how are you today?
Kyle (02:57):
I'm excellent.
How are you?
Courtney (02:59):
I am excited.
I've been really lookingforward to this conversation and
definitely geeking out tellingyou, before we got started
recording, that my favoriteTTRPG is done by Wyrd, so it's
just a good time.
Kyle (03:16):
I'm excited too.
Courtney (03:18):
Yeah, well, to kick us off, can you tell us a little
bit about yourself and how yougot into gaming?
Kyle (03:24):
Sure, yeah.
So I've been a game designer Imean probably since I was like
12 years old, making littlehobbyist things.
My first game was a little Playby Post forum thing on the
internet back in the day beforePlay by Post was a term.
I'm dating myself a little bitwith that.
(03:46):
Then I went to school for gamedesign and took a brief stint in
the indie video game space andthen saw that Wyrd was hiring.
Gave it a shot, they said no,and then I tried again.
They said yes, and seven yearslater here I am working in the
tabletop space.
So that's the ultra quickversion of my journey.
Courtney (04:13):
I also remember Play by Post stuff.
Pretty sure most of what I didwas like horse ones because I
was just in my horse gold phase.
Kyle (04:23):
Sure.
Courtney (04:26):
Yeah, I mean that's cool.
I didn't realize you'd beenthere for seven years.
Kyle (04:29):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I didn't realize that until
recently either.
Then someone reminded me.
It's like holy cow.
I've been working on a lot ofstuff since.
Courtney (04:39):
What was the first project you worked on?
Kyle (04:41):
It would be the other side and through the breach.
But really the very first thingwas the other side.
I remember day one they ploppedall the stories on Mainz and
start editing and I went to it.
I actually, when I applied atWyrd, I didn't actually know
anything about the world ofMalifaux, so they trusted my
(05:01):
game design background above allelse, luckily, and learning the
world has been a lot of funsince.
But it was daunting at first tobe like okay, here are the
gibbering hordes, all right, tryto figure out how they work.
But yeah, and then it waspretty much immediately after
the other side book.
(05:22):
It was through the breachsecond edition that I started
help editing on that.
Since then everything elseunder the Wyrd umbrella.
Courtney (05:32):
That's awesome.
I was just thinking like, okay,it's 20th, 23.
Oh wait, we back to theKickstarter for through the
breach in 2013.
Kyle (05:41):
Good Lord, yeah, yeah, and we're still fulfilling that
Kickstarter in some ways withthose expansions that we've been
releasing.
Courtney (05:53):
Hey, you know been great to get them.
Kyle (05:55):
Yeah, yeah, it's been fun to write them.
Courtney (06:02):
Yeah, so I'd love to just hear a little bit about how
your time at Wyrd has evolvedsince you started seven years
ago.
Kyle (06:08):
Yeah, so I started as a junior just kind of dabbling in
everything.
For the first few years it kindof stayed away from Malifaux.
We already had a team dedicatedto that, so it was really just
me on the outskirts droppingthat random bad idea for them to
juggle around with for a bit.
But in that time I was workingon in the board game space.
(06:28):
We had been messing around alot with Bayou Bash at the time,
a Darkness Comes, rattling,expansion, and my other focus
early on was our Chroniclesseries, our e-magazines that we
did with a lot of stories andstuff like that.
So that was my responsibility.
Then, about two to three orthree years in, everything
(06:51):
changed and became the designlead at the company, where
pretty much every facet of agame's design or story or
character I had a hand in someway, whether it was creating it
or walking someone through theprocess of design or editing.
(07:12):
Every little part of theproject got filtered through me
in some way and since thenVagrant Song you know that was.
I had a crazy idea that itpitched and they somehow let it
go through and here we are.
Courtney (07:31):
Okay, do you remember what that pitch was?
Kyle (07:35):
Oh yeah, so we were actually working on a different
dungeon crawler at the time andthere were a few things that
weren't quite clicking for me.
I was having trouble findingmyself in these characters in
this world that we were building.
So we kind of went back to thedrawing board and I remember
pitching probably a half dozenof ideas and I left Vagrant Song
(08:00):
as the last one.
It was the Hail Mary Like thisis the crazy idea that no one's
going to go for.
But this is the dream, right?
This is the thing that if Iwere looking for a game, this is
the type of thing I would want,and that's the one that's
strangely stuck.
So I'm extremely thankful forthat.
But it was pitched originally asa dungeon crawler, not as a
(08:24):
boss battler.
Lots of things have changedsince that pitch, but a lot
stayed the same.
The characters for the mostpart were I clearly imagine them
from the beginning A lot of thehints that you see in the game,
like Mako Joe, for example.
He was the very first scenariowe ever wrote but quite a few
(08:45):
differences too.
The very first draft of it wehad trained tiles, for example,
to make it feel a little bitmore dungeon crawly and that
sort of thing.
But yeah, that was a good day.
And hearing them say, yeah,let's do it.
When you pitched that crazyidea, it actually clicked that
(09:08):
was a good feeling.
Courtney (09:10):
Yeah, that's awesome.
Well, before we get too farinto just digging into Vagrant's
song, in case any of ourlisteners have not played this
game and aren't familiar with it, can you please tell us what
Vagrant's song is?
Kyle (09:22):
Yeah, absolutely so.
It's a cooperative boss battlertwo to four players.
You're playing as Vagrant's ona haunted ghost train and you
are trying to figure out how toget off the train while also
saving these ghosts that we callHaints by giving them back
their lost humanity before youlose your humanity, because you
(09:45):
can become a ghost along the way.
So it's a scenario-drivencampaign game.
Each scenario is going to playvery differently than the last
and it's a cross betweenfighting this boss with music
and speeches, while also tryingto solve their mystery a little
(10:06):
bit through objectives andpuzzles.
Courtney (10:10):
I realize I am pretty partial to board games that have
this like you're playing kindof through a story element, and
so that's one of the things thatI really appreciate about
Fagrin's arc.
And so I'm curious like whatled to the decision of?
You know, because you said thatfirst game was going to be more
of like a dungeon crawlerbefore it turned into what it is
.
What was, if you can rememberthe process of like leading to
(10:34):
the like, this is how the gameis going to work.
Kyle (10:37):
Uh, I mean, that's an iterative process and either the
more we shave off or the morewe build, you know, it just kind
of naturally changed over time.
So Fagrin's arc went through akind of a strange development
cycle in that we wereessentially brainstorming the
(10:57):
project for two years while wewere working on Malifo 3rd
Edition and the Explorer Societyfaction.
During that time, you know,there was right at the end of
the day, on a Thursday, we wouldjust be pitching random ideas
to one another, like what if theHaines did X, you know, and
that sort of thing, andeventually those ideas ended up
(11:21):
becoming something cohesive thateveryone saw in our heads
without actually putting it topaper, and I'd say about 60% of
the things ended up stayingmiraculously once we actually
got it into something playable.
But a lot changed along the waytoo.
Plenty of things we thought, oh, this is definitely going to
(11:43):
work, did not work.
So I can't remember exactly theinstance where we changed to
from a dungeon crawler to a bossbattler, but there were a lot
of things that I could think ofthat contributed to that.
For example, setup time was areally big factor for us.
(12:03):
We wanted to make sure thatsetting up the game took minutes
because, as much as I lovethese giant dungeon crawls, I
don't like the 45 minutes ofsetup beforehand.
We're usually just end upleaving it on the table, you
know, and hopefully it's time toplay it next week.
So that was a major factor forit, and with that came other
(12:25):
decisions of like okay, then thetiles probably aren't going to
work, so let's go with more of astatic board that you can
manipulate very quickly.
Then it steamrolled from there.
You know, maybe we could tellmore isolated stories, one at a
time, to highlight the enemies,so on and so forth.
Courtney (12:45):
So yeah, like that, I feel like, is a pretty
interesting evolution, and I candefinitely see how, like, as
you're just trying to workthings out and figure out, I'm
also kind of curious about howthe fact that, like, every
scenario does play differentlyand so you've got just different
rules on how to save thesepaints and not die, which we
(13:08):
have- certain.
I was just dying all the time,Especially because we're usually
playing as like two player.
We're like, ah, okay, but yeah,I'm just I'm fascinated by the
amount of work, honestly, thatwould have to go into like
coming up with all of thesedifferent scenarios and the
(13:29):
rules for all of that.
So I would just love to hear alittle bit about that too.
Kyle (13:33):
Yeah, each scenario takes a lot of time, not only to
develop but to play test andmaking sure that we're hitting
certain lore points.
We're creating the rightescalating moments for each
scenario at interesting times.
We didn't want each scenario toescalate the same way every
(13:53):
single time, but we did wantthat feeling throughout of oh,
here's the oh shit button, youknow, and things just kind of
cascade down from there.
That was something we wanted tomaintain across all of them.
For me, when developing ascenario, I start with the story
first.
I start with first figuring outwho these ghosts are, then
(14:17):
figuring out the story that wewant to tell and kind of the for
lack of a better term the movieexperience, the whole thing,
the, what players areexperiencing, the back and forth
, the big oh wow moments, andcreating a rough outline,
shaping that in some way.
And the more scenarios we endedup creating, the more
(14:43):
opportunities we ended upfinding in kind of like the
strange crevices of the design.
Some scenarios might haveevents on the break track, for
example, but maybe that wowmoment actually happens on the
round track in the next one andthen it's recurring and
escalating.
Really, looking at everyscenario one at a time helped us
(15:03):
create more dynamic experienceslike well, we've done that
before, let's do something else,you know?
And strangely we still haveroom to explore in that space,
because we're coming out withtwo expansions.
Courtney (15:21):
Oh, I'm going to take into that in a minute, don't
worry, I know it's funny.
We're currently playing throughBangor and Song.
We're in the bone orchardscenarios and definitely there
was a recent one where I waslike, okay, we're playing to,
like we complete the rituals,like it's cool, we'll get the
milestone, it'll be great.
And then we got to the scenariowhere it's like we did the
(15:41):
rituals and we're not gettingthe milestone, and there was
like a bait and switch and it'slike, ah, Yep, I know exactly
which one you're talking about.
Kyle (15:53):
That one gets everybody the first time.
Courtney (15:57):
Prib is like you're going to yell Kyle about that
one, aren't you?
Kyle (16:03):
And then you look back at it and you're like the writing
was on the wall.
Courtney (16:08):
It's like, no, okay, that made sense.
That's what I'm really lovingabout this game is that it
really is different, and it'slike you go in thinking that you
know one thing and like, no, no, that's not how it works
anymore, yeah, so I also wouldjust like to dig into the kind
(16:31):
of the characters that areavailable in this version,
because I know that there'sgoing to be some new ones coming
out and the expansion and, yeah, how y'all came up with the
ideas for each of thosecharacters and like their
background, but also just theirunique skills that they have.
Kyle (16:47):
Sure, are we talking vagrants or are we talking hates
?
Okay, sure.
So some of the characters justcame from kind of tropey
stereotypes that we wanted tokind of help push this story
forward.
You know, like this sort ofworld didn't make sense without
a banjo playing wanderer tryingto make it big.
(17:08):
You know, hop and aboard thetrain.
Some characters came from filminspiration.
One of my favorite horror filmsis it Follows, and that is where
the cursebearer started.
So she's got this demon chasingher and that demon has chased
(17:29):
her as far as America, and youget to kind of see that her
subtitle is the Tired because ofhow far she's traveled.
You know, to avoid this thing,not to spoil too much, in Encore
, but you will get an ending tothat story and I'm really
excited about that, and anending to a lot of the vagrant
(17:51):
stories.
So we, rather than add newcharacters, for example, we
decided to kind of deep diveinto each character's lore.
Some characters though, you knowyou pull from personal stuff.
You know I think everyone's gota little bit of runaway in them
.
Yeah, no, they're all eitherpulled from real characters or
(18:16):
like twists or variations ofthem, like the Empress is a
loose variation of the Emperorof North America and others, are
just kind of the charactersthat you want on this sort of
travel.
So they all just kind of justnaturally came into be and I
wish I could explain better howthey shaped up, but it was day
(18:38):
one, here they are, you know,and it just worked out from
there.
Courtney (18:44):
Do you have a favorite that you like to play?
Kyle (18:48):
I'm not supposed to have a bias, but yes, the song Smith.
Absolutely, he's the characterI play.
Courtney (18:56):
What is it about him that you like so much?
Kyle (19:00):
I mean that's a good question.
I guess it's because I'vealways wanted to play the banjo.
I've picked it up a few times,plucked a few strings and yeah,
I mean, I've always been amusical person, not to the
extent of like mastering aninstrument or anything, but
music has always been a hugepart of my life.
So, yeah, it's just somethingabout that character that just
(19:24):
resonates with me In the wholechasing a dream thing.
Been chasing that dream for along time.
I do like how you can switch upwhich vagrants you play, and so
I know.
Courtney (19:40):
for me personally, I've been doing about like two
ages chapters worth at a timeand then like switching to a new
one.
I think so far my favorite isthe runaway, and that is mostly
because of the dog.
Kyle (19:54):
Yep, yep, it's a cool mechanic.
Courtney (19:58):
I would just dog, dog, Right yep, that's.
Kyle (20:03):
My wife's favorite character is the runaway she
play, tested the entire gamewith just her, so All right.
Courtney (20:15):
Hey, entrepreneurs, I love introducing you to new
creators every episode, but Icould really use your support.
I would love to invite you tojoin our Patreon page, where
you'll gain access to behind thescenes content.
Add your questions to upcominginterviews and you could even
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To learn more, go tolightheartadventurescom.
And now back to the show.
(20:38):
Okay, so yeah, let's talk aboutthe expansions that are coming
out soon.
Kyle (20:45):
Sure.
So we've got two that areheaded to Kickstarter mid
September.
The big one is on core andwe're doing another one called
off the rails.
So in the main game of vagrantsong, there's a total of 23
scenarios and we're almostdoubling up on that with another
(21:06):
18.
There's going to be a newchapter for the full campaign.
So not to spoil too much if youhaven't played vagrant song,
but at certain points in thecampaign you're going to run to
three different doors and that'show you choose your own
campaign structure.
You're going to go down door CMaybe you'll do a next and then
(21:27):
be last and this one's going toadd a fourth door that you can
go down, called the bridge ofleaves, which is going to
include another five brand newscenarios within that.
I'm real excited about some ofthese characters we're putting
in there.
But if you've already playedthe campaign, you've already
gone through the core game of it.
You can still enjoy bridge ofleaves, because what we're doing
(21:49):
is we're also coming out withshort trip mode, which is a new
game mode that you can play.
Each chapter in this microcampaign, essentially these
chapter chunks and with shorttrip mode, each chapter is going
to have a new beginningscenario and a new ending
scenario.
That's going to give you alittle bit more of a reason why
(22:12):
you've hopped aboard a secondtime and touch a little bit more
on the new antagonist that'sbeing presented.
In addition to that, we brieflytouched on the deep dives of
the vagrant stories.
So what we're doing is we callthem save your soul scenarios.
So if you go westbound one toomany times which that's our term
(22:35):
for player death, basicallyyou're going to get stuck on the
train.
You're going to have that onefoot in the grave, so to speak,
and your friends are going tohave to pull you out of that.
They're going to have to liftyou up and for each vagrant
you're going to experience kindof what puts them in the down
and out.
Everyone kind of has thatmoment in their past or that
(22:57):
thing that's lingering, andyou're going to have to pull
them out of that, essentiallylift them back up.
So you get to experience alittle bit of each character's
past and that's really fun.
And then we've got some otherscenarios too that are sprinkled
throughout.
We've shown off Slagpile Anniea little bit.
She's going to be a part of thefull campaign if you choose to
check her out and she's inspiredby another real ghost in
(23:24):
Pittsburgh at a steel mill.
She was one of those friendlyghosts.
People didn't realize that shewas a ghost when they would
speak to her.
They just thought that she wasjust another one of the workers.
So you get to kind ofexperience our version of
Slagpile Annie's story in this.
In addition to that we've gotall sorts of knickknacks,
(23:44):
doodads and things to kind ofmake your lives easier or more
difficult.
So we've got Smokey Bones.
Smokey Bones are just a newtype of dye that you can roll
and you will be earning thosethroughout the campaign and
basically, let's say, the normalbones just aren't on your side.
You can roll those Smokey Bonesand add up those numbers and
(24:08):
you can get some more successesalong those ways.
But they are a temporaryresource, so it's a when do I
use this sort of situation?
We've got some baggage cards.
So we talked about good thingswith Smokey Bones, baggage cards
are the bad things.
These are going to get added toyour vagrant card.
If you've got a baggage card,your passive goes away.
You've got some sort ofpaint-like effect that you have
(24:31):
to get rid of, you kind ofchallenge how you look at
playing a certain scenario.
It's going to give you anotherobstacle that you're going to
have to overcome and a bunch ofother little twists and turns in
Encore, and then we've also gotOff the Rails.
Unless you wanted to dive intoEncore any deeper, A little bit
(24:52):
yeah.
Okay.
Courtney (24:54):
So, with the Smokey Bones and the baggage, what
causes you to earn those?
Kyle (25:02):
With Short Trip Mode, you're familiar with the
in-between cards that happen inbetween each scenario.
We're actually, for each shorttrip, we're doing a new deck of
cards, a do in-between, so youmight get it from those.
You might get it from junkcards, some new junk cards.
Certain scenarios might offerthose, so you're going to be
(25:22):
earning them from various thingsin the game.
Baggage cards.
Don't go westbound is all I'llsay.
Yeah, okay.
Courtney (25:35):
We'll just end with that.
Good luck.
Yeah, I think that's reallyinteresting.
I've got the web page pulled uptoo and just looking at the
image and I'm like, okay, so onthe Smokey Bones, I see a goal,
makes sense.
So I see a music note and I'mcurious about the music note.
Kyle (25:56):
Yeah, so there's plus 1's, there's plus 2.
There's a skull icon and themusic note.
The skull icon is the one youwant to avoid at all costs,
because if you roll a bunch ofSmokey Bones and any number of
skulls, all your Smokey Bonesturn into zeros.
So that's a little bit of therisk.
But the music note gives youtwo automatic successes in
(26:18):
addition to whatever you weredoing.
So that could really help in atight spot.
Courtney (26:25):
That was kind of a reward.
Kyle (26:27):
Exactly exactly.
Courtney (26:29):
Yeah, that's super cool.
Okay, yeah, let's talk aboutOff the Rails.
Kyle (26:34):
Sure.
So Off the Rails is both a wayto make the game more replayable
and more challenging.
So what we're doing is we'readding a new card to each
scenario in both the core gameand an encore that's going to
provide adjustments to the rules.
(26:54):
New Haint Actions because we'realso adding a new Remmage Token
called the Poison Berry andeach scenario is going to have
two new events that are eithergoing to dive deeper into their
story a little bit or add somenew obstacle or make you think
about the scenario in a new way.
So it's going to kind ofrefresh how you think about a
(27:18):
certain scenario.
And alongside the Off the Railscards, we're also doing an
objective-based system calledDevious Deeds.
Each Fagrin is going to havetheir own deck of Devious Deeds
cards and at the beginning of acampaign you're going to be able
to choose which one you want tostart off with and then you
kind of just go running with it.
(27:39):
Each one of these objectivesyou have to complete a certain
number of times throughout thecampaign and once you hit that
threshold you're going to flipit over and it's going to have
some sort of permanentadjustment to your character.
It might change your passiveeffect, it might give you more
humanity overall.
It might give you some speciallittle triggers when certain
(28:01):
things happen in the campaign.
So it allows you to kind ofcustomize your character even
further.
Courtney (28:08):
Interesting.
So with Off the Rails, is itsomething that you can play
without getting Encore, orshould you have both Encore and
Original if you're going to playthis?
Kyle (28:21):
I would recommend both, but you wouldn't have to Like.
If you're satisfied with theVagrant Song experience and you
just want to revisit thosescenarios again with friends, I
would suggest getting Off theRails to add a little bit more
of a mix to the scenarios you'realready familiar with, because
it's a good way of starting offwith a clean slate while still
(28:45):
being very familiar with themechanics, and that extra spike
in difficulty might end up beingmore fun because you are so
familiar with certain things.
But it is a great way toexperience Encore as well,
because if you already thatexperienced player and you just
want to dive deep into Bridge ofLeaves with Off the Rails, that
(29:08):
combination works well rightoff the bat.
All the stuff that's in bothexpansions isn't so overwhelming
that you have to feel likeyou're juggling.
You know it's okay, I couldcustomize my character a little
bit more.
Okay, I get a little bit moreresources here, and then the
rest is just kind of the normalflow of the campaign.
Courtney (29:27):
I'd like to just hear a little bit about the
concepting of behinds, likedoing the off the rails and you
know so, like on court.
I feel like it's moretraditional.
Okay, let's expand the game,make it so they can keep playing
for the campaign.
This is like a reallyinteresting twist, I think.
Kyle (29:47):
Sure.
Courtney (29:48):
Back.
Kyle (29:49):
So, as far as how we came to it, it was already kind of on
our minds right from the startof the game, but we knew that
when we were developing the coregame, we were developing
scenarios that are best thefirst time.
Sometimes you just make adecision when you're making a
game which way do we want to go?
And we wanted to make sure thatwe were telling a story.
(30:11):
We had escalating moments atcertain intervals, specific
moments, in order to push thedynamic aspects of each scenario
.
We had to kind of narrow in oncertain areas.
So the idea of making thesescenarios more replayable was
always something that I wantedto do, but I also didn't want to
(30:32):
overdo it either.
So it's like a delicate balanceof where we can push buttons.
So we found the sweet spot wasthe one new token that is going
to help you and hurt you.
The poison berry gets rid ofhate effects at a cost of a
little bit of humanity, butproviding that gave us more
(30:53):
options for hate actions, whichallowed us to open up all sorts
of things.
And then there were somecharacters that we just weren't
done telling the story with, orlike there was a gap in their
story that we wanted to fill, orwe needed more rats with candle
hats, so we added some of thoseto the Tommy Knocker fight
(31:17):
Spoilers.
But yeah, it essentially camefrom early thoughts right off
the bat of like okay, we wantedto make sure that once you're
done with the campaign, youdon't have to be done, you can
revisit it, and this is an easyway of going about that, while
being more difficult.
It totally works.
Courtney (31:42):
Yeah.
So talk to me about the timingwhere you know like you released
Vagrant Song a while ago andthen how long between when that
got released and you know dayone of starting on working on
these expansions like how muchtime passed.
Kyle (32:02):
A little bit of time.
So in between Vagrant Song, Ialso worked on an expansion for
our chaotic racing game, bayouBash, so that got released
Hogwild.
And then I also worked on asupplemental scenario for
Vagrant Song called the SeyantScenario or the Fox Sisters, and
(32:22):
that is probably our mostcomplex scenario to date,
definitely took the mostdevelopment time, where one
scenario with play testing onaverage took about a month.
That one was about almost four.
And then pretty much rightafter that it was time to start
(32:43):
digging into the expansionbecause, as we found out soon
upon releasing Vagrant Song, wecouldn't hold on to it.
It kept selling out, so wefigured players must be hungry
for more.
So let's take some of the ideasthat we had from the core game
that either got cut or we didn'thave time to visit.
(33:04):
That's where Savior SoulScenarios actually came from.
We wanted them in the core gameand just couldn't make it work.
And, yeah, just started gettingcracking on.
That.
It's been about, I want to say,about a year and a half now
that I've been working on theseexpansions.
Courtney (33:21):
All right and it's almost Kickstarter time.
I know Hopefully it'll beexciting, but I'm sure also
nerve-wracking.
Kyle (33:30):
Yeah, it's a little bit of both.
I'm still developing theseexpansions.
Luckily I'm in the fine tuningstages of them, so it's not like
I have to make anything fromscratch at this point.
But yeah, it's a lot to juggle,yeah.
Courtney (33:46):
Yeah, it's funny, you're talking about how I
couldn't keep it on the shelves,and it reminded me of like, oh
yeah, when I tried to buyVagrant Song because I was like
getting it as a birthday presentfor Britain.
We were living in Oregon at thetime and I had to buy it from
some random game store in NewJersey because that was the only
place I could find it.
Kyle (34:02):
Yeah, the game of gaming itself is kind of a joke we had
in the office, but we're alreadyon our fourth print.
I think we're working on afifth one now with the
Kickstarter.
So, yeah, the reception.
I can't believe it.
I still have to pinch myself,you know, but this has happened.
Courtney (34:21):
Yeah, definitely a good problem to have.
Kyle (34:23):
Yes, yes.
Courtney (34:26):
So what can you tell us about the Kickstarter itself
and, just like, what the plansare for that campaign?
Kyle (34:34):
So, yeah, what can I talk about?
Mid-september is what we'reaiming for.
There are so many neat thingsthat we're doing that I can't
talk about that.
I want to.
There are two things that Ithink I can comfortably spoil,
though.
So one of the stretch goalsthat we're doing is a brand new
(34:55):
spindle, because we understandthat that spindle might have not
been the right size foreveryone's hands, so we're
making a bigger spindle and it'sgorgeous.
I can't wait for people to seethis thing, and inside it we're
going to actually have acrylictokens for a good chunk of the
game, so pretty much anythingthat can go in the spindle will
(35:18):
get an acrylic token of itself,and you know, the acrylic
standees look so good on thattable, and these tokens just
help push that even a little bitmore.
It is a deluxe vacation, but Imean I want it, so I mean those
acrylic standees are amazingyeah.
(35:39):
And we do have one other thing Icould spoil.
I think, if not, my boss mightlisten to this and we'll cross
that bridge.
But we're planning on doing alittle ghost plushie of one of
our kind of our standard blueghosts, but it's not just the
ghost, it's going to have azipper at the bottom of it and
(36:00):
we're going to have glow in thedark bones six bones that you
can have with it, and, yeah,we're really excited about that.
So we're doing all sorts oflike fun little things like that
that we wouldn't normally beable to do without running a
crowdfunding campaign.
So that was one of the tworeasons why we decided to go to
Kickster to this ways.
(36:21):
We wanted to make these funlittle things, and if players
want them now, there's going tobe the option for them.
So, oh my God.
Courtney (36:32):
Now I'm a plushie, amazing.
Yeah, obviously it's not thesame, but when you saw that, it
reminded me of this one timethat we got a toy for our dog
that was like, oh, it'sHalloween themed, it's like a
coffin.
And then he tore it apart asyou do, and it had another toy
inside that was a bone.
Kyle (36:53):
That's smart of whoever developed that yeah.
Courtney (36:57):
Obviously not the same , but also like kind of same if
there's six bones inside of thisplushie.
Kyle (37:03):
Yeah, yeah.
Courtney (37:04):
Okay, that sounds really cool and I'm a sucker for
cute ghost plushies, so I amexcited for that.
Honestly, you brought up thejust like tokens and even just
so that the stand is darelessand nice.
Like the art in this game is sogood, it's so pretty.
(37:25):
Like every time we pull out anew the hate to fight or even
just like a new character, wespend probably a solid five
minutes just looking, examininglike every detail, like how many
artists do you have working onthis?
Kyle (37:39):
One.
Courtney (37:41):
Well, oh, my gosh.
Kyle (37:42):
We is really really incredible.
Strangely, I mean now it lookslike a no brainer sort of thing
with the art, but we didn't getthere right off the bat with the
art.
We actually started off withthree or four different
aesthetics that we were playingaround with.
One in particular that reallysticks out to me as the one we
(38:04):
kind of venture down the mostoutside of the rubber hose style
was a wood carved Mike McNullaesque style, like from Hellboy,
so very strong shadow work butlike a wood carved variant of
that, and it worked.
I think the game would have beenmostly good with that, but it
(38:27):
didn't present the scary butfunny, you know, it didn't cross
that line or walk thattightrope that the rubber hose
style allowed us to do, and thegame takes place roughly in the
30s, you know.
So it made sense to have theart reflect that.
So once my other designer thatwas working on vagrant song at
(38:50):
the time proposed the idea, itjust was like a giant light bulb
above all of weird and snippy,just ran with it and every time
she came out with a new piece itwas just gold.
There were so many charactersthat didn't need any adjustments
or tweaks, it was just yep, yougot it.
(39:11):
That's it.
That's terrifying.
So yeah, it was.
It was kind of looking back atit and it's a no duh thing, but
it took us a long time to getthere.
Courtney (39:24):
I can see that.
You know, I do feel like it canbe hard to nail down a specific
style for really most games,but especially one that is like
trying to balance, like so manyexpressions, right yeah, gosh, I
am just so excited for theexpansions.
Kyle (39:46):
It's going to be a really fun time.
Courtney (39:50):
So yeah, I am also kind of curious about just
launching both of theseexpansions at the same time and
if there was like any kind ofspecific reasoning that went
into that.
Kyle (40:03):
Sure, yeah.
So when we started developingEncore and Off the Rails, it was
one expansion and everythingwas included in one package.
Play testing taught us somevaluable lessons, though, in
that every player is differentand every player wants something
different out of their game.
(40:24):
Some players want morescenarios, and other players
want to keep their existingcontent fresh, and a lot of that
overlapped, but not everywhere,so that's where we ultimately
decided to split the expansionsto accommodate as many players
(40:45):
as we could, so that you couldget what you want how you want,
essentially.
Courtney (40:51):
So yeah, but we're going to be offering both at the
same time during thisKickstarter, so yeah, I totally
can see that that makes a lot ofsense, especially since one of
them is kind of intended to helpmake it harder.
Kyle (41:03):
Right, exactly.
Not everyone is ready for thatstep.
Courtney (41:07):
Yeah, yeah I could totally imagine, like especially
early on, before you have awhole lot of skills, where
you're like I'm dying already.
Kyle (41:17):
When we were announcing it at GenCon recently and showing
people and explaining what Offthe Rails was and saying, yeah,
hard mode, that's when theireyes lit up and they said, hard
mode, the game's not alreadyhard enough.
So, yeah, that happened a lot.
But I mean, it's an excitingchallenge and you'll have enough
(41:39):
tools to get through it, I'msure.
Yeah.
Courtney (41:44):
So once the Kickstarter funds, which I
Crossing fingers, I have nodoubt you know back on one, what
will be the next steps betweenthat and being able to fulfill
it.
Kyle (41:57):
So, like I said, we're already almost done with these
projects.
So that's something that we'redoing a little bit differently.
It's really just going to bethe production that we're going
to wait for, so it's not goingto have to be a two-year wait of
development time or anythinglike that.
You know I'm making tweaksevery day.
(42:18):
I got an update I'm putting outto the playtesters right after
this interview, so we're movingright ahead and getting content
out.
So hopefully what our plan isis, once the Kickstarter is over
, we're more or less hitting theprint button and getting the
content to production and makingsure that that turnaround is as
(42:38):
fast as possible.
So hopefully that's fast.
At that point it is out of ourhands ultimately, but we've
worked to mitigate as many ofthose problems as possible, so
I'm pretty optimistic about it.
Courtney (42:55):
Sounds awesome.
So one thing I would like to dobefore we wrap up is I have a
couple of questions that I liketo ask.
In every interview which you'reworking in the game industry, I
would hope that you're doingthat because you love it, but I
can also recognize that thereare just a lot of challenges to
(43:18):
working on games and thesefandoms, and so when you just
look back over this process ofdeveloping Fagrin's song,
developing the expansions, whatwould you say have been some of
the more challenging aspects?
Kyle (43:33):
Challenging aspects of working on Fagrin's song
specifically, or just as like agame designer as a whole.
Courtney (43:40):
I mean I can do game designer as a whole.
You've worked on a lot ofthings.
Kyle (43:45):
So early on.
One thing I would really make apoint of if you're interested
in game design as a career, itdoes change the way you think
about games.
Prior to going to school forthis and trying it out myself, I
was just playing games to getimmersed in the world, you know,
(44:09):
to escape.
I can't always do that anymore.
It's more of a.
I look at games from a moreanalytical lens these days.
I still get to enjoy them andthere are the occasional games
that I just fully escape in.
But for the most part, the wayyou think about games does
(44:30):
change, and it should change,because you're now developing
them.
You're seeing behind thecurtain, so to speak, so you do
get to understand how thesausage is made.
So just be aware of that Justbecause you love games doesn't
mean you need to make them.
You can still find love in gamesthrough other ways.
(44:53):
You know, and I've seen thatpressure point be kind of a
breaking point for some people.
So I don't know if that's awarning or just a.
It's just something that youshould be aware of if you dive
into that.
Luckily, I've always wanted to.
(45:13):
I need to make things in orderto be happy.
So games are where I landed andI'm so thankful that I'm in
this space.
I can't see myself doinganything else.
Courtney (45:26):
I think that that's definitely a valid point is that
there is kind of a precariousbalance between like oh, I love
this, I want to be doing thisall the time, and then just
keeping that motivation and notjust being exhausted by the fact
of like okay, now I'm alwaysmaking this game and always in
this world and it would just benice to have a break.
(45:48):
Yeah, I think it's maybe not awarning, but just be cautious if
you're going into this.
Kyle (45:56):
Yeah, the biggest thing that I would recommend is find
another hobby outside of gaming,if you do decide to make it a
career, because you need to findthat other version of escapism.
I've got aquariums behind me.
That's how I do it, so buildinglittle aquatic worlds is how I
stay creative without having tomake games.
(46:17):
So just find that whateverworks for you.
And, yeah, touch grass everyonce in a while.
Courtney (46:29):
Yes, Okay, well, to flip this around, what would you
say have been some of the mostrewarding parts of working in
gaming?
Kyle (46:40):
Without a doubt.
Conventions and hearing peoplecome up to you and tell you that
they loved your game or thatone moment in that thing that
you helped make or a characteryou developed that energizes me
every single time I hear it.
I will never get sick of it andI'm eternally grateful to
(47:02):
everyone who enjoys these games.
So, yeah, that without a doubtis it.
Courtney (47:09):
How many conventions do you normally get to go to?
Kyle (47:12):
now that we're back into conventions, I do probably half
a dozen a year on averageAdepticon, origins, pax,
unplugged, gencon, and then alsosome trade shows as well, like
more retailer focused stuff andthat sort of thing, but despite
that, probably not enough.
(47:33):
I want to go to Auschuk's, Iwant to go to Essen.
There's still plenty of placesI'd like to show up in.
Courtney (47:42):
Oh, for sure.
Okay well, we've got thisKickstarter.
It's coming out mid September.
Yep, okay, the episode will beairing on September 5th, I think
.
So, yeah, it should be just ina couple more days.
So if people want to find you,find this Kickstarter, find out
(48:04):
more about all of the thingsthat Wyrd does, where should
they go?
Kyle (48:08):
Wyrd's website is Wyrdgames.
net, and you can find more aboutVagrant Song at this point just
by Googling Vagrant Song, butthere's a Notify Me page on
Kickstarter right now.
Or you can learn more abouteverything that's in these
expansions Well, maybe noteverything.
You'll learn about a good chunkof it in these expansions on
(48:31):
the Wyrd Games website, but youcan also join our Discord on the
Wyrd website.
I'm there all the time, so ifyou want to chat about any of
our games, I'm happy to chatalong.
Courtney (48:44):
Awesome.
I will have links to all ofthat in the show notes.
Kyle, this has been such atreat to talk to you today.
Thank you so much for coming.
Kyle (48:54):
Yeah, thank you for having me.
This has been great.
Courtney (48:58):
So at this point, listeners, we are going to wrap
up the interview portion of thisepisode and after I hit stop
recording, I'm going to turn itright back on and we are going
to do a fun little quickquestion blitz for patrons,
where I'm going to ask Kyle abunch of other silly questions
that may or may not be relatedto gaming, and we'll probably
(49:19):
involve some about theseaquariums because I want to know
more.
So if you are interested inhearing that or any of the other
quick question blitz from myguests, you can find that
Patreon at Patreon Roll PlayGrow.
Thank you again for coming on,kyle.
Kyle (49:34):
Thanks for having me.
Courtney (49:39):
You just finished another episode of Roll Play
Grow.
To check out the show notes andtranscript from today's
episode, You can go tolightheartadventures.
com rpg To keep up with everyepisode.
Please subscribe on yourpodcast player of choice and, if
you're enjoying the show, Iwould absolutely love if you
would leave me a review andshare this episode with your
friends.
Your review might even getfeatured on an upcoming episode.
(50:02):
To follow me on Twitter, youcan either find me at
lightheartadv for our businessaccount or at Ketra RPG for
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You can also find me on Patreonat Roll Play Grow.
Thank you so much for listeningand I'll see you next time on
Roll Play Grow.
Hello and welcome to Roll Play Grow, the podcast for
tabletop entrepreneurs, creatorsand fans.
In this show we dig intoprocesses, challenges, tips and
really look at how to grow abusiness in the tabletop
role-play gaming space.
Sit back and join in as welearn from the creators behind
your favorite brands about whothey are and how they are
turning their passion for gaminginto a career.
(00:29):
Welcome back, lovely listeners.
I am so excited to introducetoday's guest to you, kyle Rowan
.
Kyle is the design lead at myfavorite gaming company, Wyrd
Games, which is known for theirstory-driven skirmish game,
malifaux and its offshoots, Awar game called the Other Side
and my favorite TTRPG, throughthe breach.
(00:50):
Wyrd also produces board gamesand today we actually spend most
of our time talking about oneof those board games, Vagrant
Song and its upcomingkickstarter for two expansions.
Kyle has worked at Wyrd forseven years and if I could have
quizzed him about every singlegame he's worked on, I
absolutely would have.
We spend a lot of time lookingat the board game development
process and how Vagrant Songchanged from conception to the
(01:13):
point that it's about to havetwo expansions.
I hope you all enjoy.
Before we dive into theinterview, I want to welcome any
new listeners to Roll Play Grow.
This show allows me to chatwith so many folks about
business, marketing, hardships,lessons learned and how-to
guides across a wide spectrum ofindustries within the tabletop
RPG scene, and every other weekI now have a lovely co-host on
(01:36):
special deep dive episodes.
Matt Joro, aka Dungeon Glitch,is my new co-host on every other
episode, where we focus onbusiness-related topics and how
they intersect with TTRPGs.
We just finished up athree-part series on growing
your social media accounts, andnext week we'll be digging into
project management what it isand why you need it on your
(01:56):
tabletop projects.
So be sure to subscribe to RollPlay Grow on your favorite
podcast player.
Lastly, before we get started, Iwant to shout out one of our
favorite dice companies DiceEnvy.
My very first interview on theshow was with David Daris, the
founder of Dice Envy, and we'vegotten so many different dice
sets from them over the years.
I highly recommend you checkthem out, as they have dice in
(02:19):
all sorts of materials likeresin, muddle wood.
They've got chunky D20s, reallycool shapes for their D4s.
We are affiliates with them, soif you go to diceenvycom and
use the code LIGHT-A-D-V, you'llget 10% off your order.
Have some snazzy dice and helpsupport this show.
Thanks for hanging out,everybody and enjoy this chat
(02:39):
with Kyle.
Welcome back everybody.
I am here with the design leadof, frankly my favorite gaming
company, Wyrd Games, kyle Rowan.
Hi Kyle, how are you today?
Kyle (02:57):
I'm excellent.
How are you?
Courtney (02:59):
I am excited.
I've been really lookingforward to this conversation and
definitely geeking out tellingyou, before we got started
recording, that my favoriteTTRPG is done by Wyrd, so it's
just a good time.
Kyle (03:16):
I'm excited too.
Courtney (03:18):
Yeah, well, to kick us off, can you tell us a little
bit about yourself and how yougot into gaming?
Kyle (03:24):
Sure, yeah.
So I've been a game designer Imean probably since I was like
12 years old, making littlehobbyist things.
My first game was a little Playby Post forum thing on the
internet back in the day beforePlay by Post was a term.
I'm dating myself a little bitwith that.
(03:46):
Then I went to school for gamedesign and took a brief stint in
the indie video game space andthen saw that Wyrd was hiring.
Gave it a shot, they said no,and then I tried again.
They said yes, and seven yearslater here I am working in the
tabletop space.
So that's the ultra quickversion of my journey.
Courtney (04:13):
I also remember Play by Post stuff.
Pretty sure most of what I didwas like horse ones because I
was just in my horse gold phase.
Kyle (04:23):
Sure.
Courtney (04:26):
Yeah, I mean that's cool.
I didn't realize you'd beenthere for seven years.
Kyle (04:29):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I didn't realize that until
recently either.
Then someone reminded me.
It's like holy cow.
I've been working on a lot ofstuff since.
Courtney (04:39):
What was the first project you worked on?
Kyle (04:41):
It would be the other side and through the breach.
But really the very first thingwas the other side.
I remember day one they ploppedall the stories on Mainz and
start editing and I went to it.
I actually, when I applied atWyrd, I didn't actually know
anything about the world ofMalifaux, so they trusted my
(05:01):
game design background above allelse, luckily, and learning the
world has been a lot of funsince.
But it was daunting at first tobe like okay, here are the
gibbering hordes, all right, tryto figure out how they work.
But yeah, and then it waspretty much immediately after
the other side book.
(05:22):
It was through the breachsecond edition that I started
help editing on that.
Since then everything elseunder the Wyrd umbrella.
Courtney (05:32):
That's awesome.
I was just thinking like, okay,it's 20th, 23.
Oh wait, we back to theKickstarter for through the
breach in 2013.
Kyle (05:41):
Good Lord, yeah, yeah, and we're still fulfilling that
Kickstarter in some ways withthose expansions that we've been
releasing.
Courtney (05:53):
Hey, you know been great to get them.
Kyle (05:55):
Yeah, yeah, it's been fun to write them.
Courtney (06:02):
Yeah, so I'd love to just hear a little bit about how
your time at Wyrd has evolvedsince you started seven years
ago.
Kyle (06:08):
Yeah, so I started as a junior just kind of dabbling in
everything.
For the first few years it kindof stayed away from Malifaux.
We already had a team dedicatedto that, so it was really just
me on the outskirts droppingthat random bad idea for them to
juggle around with for a bit.
But in that time I was workingon in the board game space.
(06:28):
We had been messing around alot with Bayou Bash at the time,
a Darkness Comes, rattling,expansion, and my other focus
early on was our Chroniclesseries, our e-magazines that we
did with a lot of stories andstuff like that.
So that was my responsibility.
Then, about two to three orthree years in, everything
(06:51):
changed and became the designlead at the company, where
pretty much every facet of agame's design or story or
character I had a hand in someway, whether it was creating it
or walking someone through theprocess of design or editing.
(07:12):
Every little part of theproject got filtered through me
in some way and since thenVagrant Song you know that was.
I had a crazy idea that itpitched and they somehow let it
go through and here we are.
Courtney (07:31):
Okay, do you remember what that pitch was?
Kyle (07:35):
Oh yeah, so we were actually working on a different
dungeon crawler at the time andthere were a few things that
weren't quite clicking for me.
I was having trouble findingmyself in these characters in
this world that we were building.
So we kind of went back to thedrawing board and I remember
pitching probably a half dozenof ideas and I left Vagrant Song
(08:00):
as the last one.
It was the Hail Mary Like thisis the crazy idea that no one's
going to go for.
But this is the dream, right?
This is the thing that if Iwere looking for a game, this is
the type of thing I would want,and that's the one that's
strangely stuck.
So I'm extremely thankful forthat.
But it was pitched originally asa dungeon crawler, not as a
(08:24):
boss battler.
Lots of things have changedsince that pitch, but a lot
stayed the same.
The characters for the mostpart were I clearly imagine them
from the beginning A lot of thehints that you see in the game,
like Mako Joe, for example.
He was the very first scenariowe ever wrote but quite a few
(08:45):
differences too.
The very first draft of it wehad trained tiles, for example,
to make it feel a little bitmore dungeon crawly and that
sort of thing.
But yeah, that was a good day.
And hearing them say, yeah,let's do it.
When you pitched that crazyidea, it actually clicked that
(09:08):
was a good feeling.
Courtney (09:10):
Yeah, that's awesome.
Well, before we get too farinto just digging into Vagrant's
song, in case any of ourlisteners have not played this
game and aren't familiar with it, can you please tell us what
Vagrant's song is?
Kyle (09:22):
Yeah, absolutely so.
It's a cooperative boss battlertwo to four players.
You're playing as Vagrant's ona haunted ghost train and you
are trying to figure out how toget off the train while also
saving these ghosts that we callHaints by giving them back
their lost humanity before youlose your humanity, because you
(09:45):
can become a ghost along the way.
So it's a scenario-drivencampaign game.
Each scenario is going to playvery differently than the last
and it's a cross betweenfighting this boss with music
and speeches, while also tryingto solve their mystery a little
(10:06):
bit through objectives andpuzzles.
Courtney (10:10):
I realize I am pretty partial to board games that have
this like you're playing kindof through a story element, and
so that's one of the things thatI really appreciate about
Fagrin's arc.
And so I'm curious like whatled to the decision of?
You know, because you said thatfirst game was going to be more
of like a dungeon crawlerbefore it turned into what it is
.
What was, if you can rememberthe process of like leading to
(10:34):
the like, this is how the gameis going to work.
Kyle (10:37):
Uh, I mean, that's an iterative process and either the
more we shave off or the morewe build, you know, it just kind
of naturally changed over time.
So Fagrin's arc went through akind of a strange development
cycle in that we wereessentially brainstorming the
(10:57):
project for two years while wewere working on Malifo 3rd
Edition and the Explorer Societyfaction.
During that time, you know,there was right at the end of
the day, on a Thursday, we wouldjust be pitching random ideas
to one another, like what if theHaines did X, you know, and
that sort of thing, andeventually those ideas ended up
(11:21):
becoming something cohesive thateveryone saw in our heads
without actually putting it topaper, and I'd say about 60% of
the things ended up stayingmiraculously once we actually
got it into something playable.
But a lot changed along the waytoo.
Plenty of things we thought, oh, this is definitely going to
(11:43):
work, did not work.
So I can't remember exactly theinstance where we changed to
from a dungeon crawler to a bossbattler, but there were a lot
of things that I could think ofthat contributed to that.
For example, setup time was areally big factor for us.
(12:03):
We wanted to make sure thatsetting up the game took minutes
because, as much as I lovethese giant dungeon crawls, I
don't like the 45 minutes ofsetup beforehand.
We're usually just end upleaving it on the table, you
know, and hopefully it's time toplay it next week.
So that was a major factor forit, and with that came other
(12:25):
decisions of like okay, then thetiles probably aren't going to
work, so let's go with more of astatic board that you can
manipulate very quickly.
Then it steamrolled from there.
You know, maybe we could tellmore isolated stories, one at a
time, to highlight the enemies,so on and so forth.
Courtney (12:45):
So yeah, like that, I feel like, is a pretty
interesting evolution, and I candefinitely see how, like, as
you're just trying to workthings out and figure out, I'm
also kind of curious about howthe fact that, like, every
scenario does play differentlyand so you've got just different
rules on how to save thesepaints and not die, which we
(13:08):
have- certain.
I was just dying all the time,Especially because we're usually
playing as like two player.
We're like, ah, okay, but yeah,I'm just I'm fascinated by the
amount of work, honestly, thatwould have to go into like
coming up with all of thesedifferent scenarios and the
(13:29):
rules for all of that.
So I would just love to hear alittle bit about that too.
Kyle (13:33):
Yeah, each scenario takes a lot of time, not only to
develop but to play test andmaking sure that we're hitting
certain lore points.
We're creating the rightescalating moments for each
scenario at interesting times.
We didn't want each scenario toescalate the same way every
(13:53):
single time, but we did wantthat feeling throughout of oh,
here's the oh shit button, youknow, and things just kind of
cascade down from there.
That was something we wanted tomaintain across all of them.
For me, when developing ascenario, I start with the story
first.
I start with first figuring outwho these ghosts are, then
(14:17):
figuring out the story that wewant to tell and kind of the for
lack of a better term the movieexperience, the whole thing,
the, what players areexperiencing, the back and forth
, the big oh wow moments, andcreating a rough outline,
shaping that in some way.
And the more scenarios we endedup creating, the more
(14:43):
opportunities we ended upfinding in kind of like the
strange crevices of the design.
Some scenarios might haveevents on the break track, for
example, but maybe that wowmoment actually happens on the
round track in the next one andthen it's recurring and
escalating.
Really, looking at everyscenario one at a time helped us
(15:03):
create more dynamic experienceslike well, we've done that
before, let's do something else,you know?
And strangely we still haveroom to explore in that space,
because we're coming out withtwo expansions.
Courtney (15:21):
Oh, I'm going to take into that in a minute, don't
worry, I know it's funny.
We're currently playing throughBangor and Song.
We're in the bone orchardscenarios and definitely there
was a recent one where I waslike, okay, we're playing to,
like we complete the rituals,like it's cool, we'll get the
milestone, it'll be great.
And then we got to the scenariowhere it's like we did the
(15:41):
rituals and we're not gettingthe milestone, and there was
like a bait and switch and it'slike, ah, Yep, I know exactly
which one you're talking about.
Kyle (15:53):
That one gets everybody the first time.
Courtney (15:57):
Prib is like you're going to yell Kyle about that
one, aren't you?
Kyle (16:03):
And then you look back at it and you're like the writing
was on the wall.
Courtney (16:08):
It's like, no, okay, that made sense.
That's what I'm really lovingabout this game is that it
really is different, and it'slike you go in thinking that you
know one thing and like, no, no, that's not how it works
anymore, yeah, so I also wouldjust like to dig into the kind
(16:31):
of the characters that areavailable in this version,
because I know that there'sgoing to be some new ones coming
out and the expansion and, yeah, how y'all came up with the
ideas for each of thosecharacters and like their
background, but also just theirunique skills that they have.
Kyle (16:47):
Sure, are we talking vagrants or are we talking hates
?
Okay, sure.
So some of the characters justcame from kind of tropey
stereotypes that we wanted tokind of help push this story
forward.
You know, like this sort ofworld didn't make sense without
a banjo playing wanderer tryingto make it big.
(17:08):
You know, hop and aboard thetrain.
Some characters came from filminspiration.
One of my favorite horror filmsis it Follows, and that is where
the cursebearer started.
So she's got this demon chasingher and that demon has chased
(17:29):
her as far as America, and youget to kind of see that her
subtitle is the Tired because ofhow far she's traveled.
You know, to avoid this thing,not to spoil too much, in Encore
, but you will get an ending tothat story and I'm really
excited about that, and anending to a lot of the vagrant
(17:51):
stories.
So we, rather than add newcharacters, for example, we
decided to kind of deep diveinto each character's lore.
Some characters though, you knowyou pull from personal stuff.
You know I think everyone's gota little bit of runaway in them
.
Yeah, no, they're all eitherpulled from real characters or
(18:16):
like twists or variations ofthem, like the Empress is a
loose variation of the Emperorof North America and others, are
just kind of the charactersthat you want on this sort of
travel.
So they all just kind of justnaturally came into be and I
wish I could explain better howthey shaped up, but it was day
(18:38):
one, here they are, you know,and it just worked out from
there.
Courtney (18:44):
Do you have a favorite that you like to play?
Kyle (18:48):
I'm not supposed to have a bias, but yes, the song Smith.
Absolutely, he's the characterI play.
Courtney (18:56):
What is it about him that you like so much?
Kyle (19:00):
I mean that's a good question.
I guess it's because I'vealways wanted to play the banjo.
I've picked it up a few times,plucked a few strings and yeah,
I mean, I've always been amusical person, not to the
extent of like mastering aninstrument or anything, but
music has always been a hugepart of my life.
So, yeah, it's just somethingabout that character that just
(19:24):
resonates with me In the wholechasing a dream thing.
Been chasing that dream for along time.
I do like how you can switch upwhich vagrants you play, and so
I know.
Courtney (19:40):
for me personally, I've been doing about like two
ages chapters worth at a timeand then like switching to a new
one.
I think so far my favorite isthe runaway, and that is mostly
because of the dog.
Kyle (19:54):
Yep, yep, it's a cool mechanic.
Courtney (19:58):
I would just dog, dog, Right yep, that's.
Kyle (20:03):
My wife's favorite character is the runaway she
play, tested the entire gamewith just her, so All right.
Courtney (20:15):
Hey, entrepreneurs, I love introducing you to new
creators every episode, but Icould really use your support.
I would love to invite you tojoin our Patreon page, where
you'll gain access to behind thescenes content.
Add your questions to upcominginterviews and you could even
receive a shout out on our siteand an upcoming episode.
To learn more, go tolightheartadventurescom.
And now back to the show.
(20:38):
Okay, so yeah, let's talk aboutthe expansions that are coming
out soon.
Kyle (20:45):
Sure.
So we've got two that areheaded to Kickstarter mid
September.
The big one is on core andwe're doing another one called
off the rails.
So in the main game of vagrantsong, there's a total of 23
scenarios and we're almostdoubling up on that with another
(21:06):
18.
There's going to be a newchapter for the full campaign.
So not to spoil too much if youhaven't played vagrant song,
but at certain points in thecampaign you're going to run to
three different doors and that'show you choose your own
campaign structure.
You're going to go down door CMaybe you'll do a next and then
(21:27):
be last and this one's going toadd a fourth door that you can
go down, called the bridge ofleaves, which is going to
include another five brand newscenarios within that.
I'm real excited about some ofthese characters we're putting
in there.
But if you've already playedthe campaign, you've already
gone through the core game of it.
You can still enjoy bridge ofleaves, because what we're doing
(21:49):
is we're also coming out withshort trip mode, which is a new
game mode that you can play.
Each chapter in this microcampaign, essentially these
chapter chunks and with shorttrip mode, each chapter is going
to have a new beginningscenario and a new ending
scenario.
That's going to give you alittle bit more of a reason why
(22:12):
you've hopped aboard a secondtime and touch a little bit more
on the new antagonist that'sbeing presented.
In addition to that, we brieflytouched on the deep dives of
the vagrant stories.
So what we're doing is we callthem save your soul scenarios.
So if you go westbound one toomany times which that's our term
(22:35):
for player death, basicallyyou're going to get stuck on the
train.
You're going to have that onefoot in the grave, so to speak,
and your friends are going tohave to pull you out of that.
They're going to have to liftyou up and for each vagrant
you're going to experience kindof what puts them in the down
and out.
Everyone kind of has thatmoment in their past or that
(22:57):
thing that's lingering, andyou're going to have to pull
them out of that, essentiallylift them back up.
So you get to experience alittle bit of each character's
past and that's really fun.
And then we've got some otherscenarios too that are sprinkled
throughout.
We've shown off Slagpile Anniea little bit.
She's going to be a part of thefull campaign if you choose to
check her out and she's inspiredby another real ghost in
(23:24):
Pittsburgh at a steel mill.
She was one of those friendlyghosts.
People didn't realize that shewas a ghost when they would
speak to her.
They just thought that she wasjust another one of the workers.
So you get to kind ofexperience our version of
Slagpile Annie's story in this.
In addition to that we've gotall sorts of knickknacks,
(23:44):
doodads and things to kind ofmake your lives easier or more
difficult.
So we've got Smokey Bones.
Smokey Bones are just a newtype of dye that you can roll
and you will be earning thosethroughout the campaign and
basically, let's say, the normalbones just aren't on your side.
You can roll those Smokey Bonesand add up those numbers and
(24:08):
you can get some more successesalong those ways.
But they are a temporaryresource, so it's a when do I
use this sort of situation?
We've got some baggage cards.
So we talked about good thingswith Smokey Bones, baggage cards
are the bad things.
These are going to get added toyour vagrant card.
If you've got a baggage card,your passive goes away.
You've got some sort ofpaint-like effect that you have
(24:31):
to get rid of, you kind ofchallenge how you look at
playing a certain scenario.
It's going to give you anotherobstacle that you're going to
have to overcome and a bunch ofother little twists and turns in
Encore, and then we've also gotOff the Rails.
Unless you wanted to dive intoEncore any deeper, A little bit
(24:52):
yeah.
Okay.
Courtney (24:54):
So, with the Smokey Bones and the baggage, what
causes you to earn those?
Kyle (25:02):
With Short Trip Mode, you're familiar with the
in-between cards that happen inbetween each scenario.
We're actually, for each shorttrip, we're doing a new deck of
cards, a do in-between, so youmight get it from those.
You might get it from junkcards, some new junk cards.
Certain scenarios might offerthose, so you're going to be
(25:22):
earning them from various thingsin the game.
Baggage cards.
Don't go westbound is all I'llsay.
Yeah, okay.
Courtney (25:35):
We'll just end with that.
Good luck.
Yeah, I think that's reallyinteresting.
I've got the web page pulled uptoo and just looking at the
image and I'm like, okay, so onthe Smokey Bones, I see a goal,
makes sense.
So I see a music note and I'mcurious about the music note.
Kyle (25:56):
Yeah, so there's plus 1's, there's plus 2.
There's a skull icon and themusic note.
The skull icon is the one youwant to avoid at all costs,
because if you roll a bunch ofSmokey Bones and any number of
skulls, all your Smokey Bonesturn into zeros.
So that's a little bit of therisk.
But the music note gives youtwo automatic successes in
(26:18):
addition to whatever you weredoing.
So that could really help in atight spot.
Courtney (26:25):
That was kind of a reward.
Kyle (26:27):
Exactly exactly.
Courtney (26:29):
Yeah, that's super cool.
Okay, yeah, let's talk aboutOff the Rails.
Kyle (26:34):
Sure.
So Off the Rails is both a wayto make the game more replayable
and more challenging.
So what we're doing is we'readding a new card to each
scenario in both the core gameand an encore that's going to
provide adjustments to the rules.
(26:54):
New Haint Actions because we'realso adding a new Remmage Token
called the Poison Berry andeach scenario is going to have
two new events that are eithergoing to dive deeper into their
story a little bit or add somenew obstacle or make you think
about the scenario in a new way.
So it's going to kind ofrefresh how you think about a
(27:18):
certain scenario.
And alongside the Off the Railscards, we're also doing an
objective-based system calledDevious Deeds.
Each Fagrin is going to havetheir own deck of Devious Deeds
cards and at the beginning of acampaign you're going to be able
to choose which one you want tostart off with and then you
kind of just go running with it.
(27:39):
Each one of these objectivesyou have to complete a certain
number of times throughout thecampaign and once you hit that
threshold you're going to flipit over and it's going to have
some sort of permanentadjustment to your character.
It might change your passiveeffect, it might give you more
humanity overall.
It might give you some speciallittle triggers when certain
(28:01):
things happen in the campaign.
So it allows you to kind ofcustomize your character even
further.
Courtney (28:08):
Interesting.
So with Off the Rails, is itsomething that you can play
without getting Encore, orshould you have both Encore and
Original if you're going to playthis?
Kyle (28:21):
I would recommend both, but you wouldn't have to Like.
If you're satisfied with theVagrant Song experience and you
just want to revisit thosescenarios again with friends, I
would suggest getting Off theRails to add a little bit more
of a mix to the scenarios you'realready familiar with, because
it's a good way of starting offwith a clean slate while still
(28:45):
being very familiar with themechanics, and that extra spike
in difficulty might end up beingmore fun because you are so
familiar with certain things.
But it is a great way toexperience Encore as well,
because if you already thatexperienced player and you just
want to dive deep into Bridge ofLeaves with Off the Rails, that
(29:08):
combination works well rightoff the bat.
All the stuff that's in bothexpansions isn't so overwhelming
that you have to feel likeyou're juggling.
You know it's okay, I couldcustomize my character a little
bit more.
Okay, I get a little bit moreresources here, and then the
rest is just kind of the normalflow of the campaign.
Courtney (29:27):
I'd like to just hear a little bit about the
concepting of behinds, likedoing the off the rails and you
know so, like on court.
I feel like it's moretraditional.
Okay, let's expand the game,make it so they can keep playing
for the campaign.
This is like a reallyinteresting twist, I think.
Kyle (29:47):
Sure.
Courtney (29:48):
Back.
Kyle (29:49):
So, as far as how we came to it, it was already kind of on
our minds right from the startof the game, but we knew that
when we were developing the coregame, we were developing
scenarios that are best thefirst time.
Sometimes you just make adecision when you're making a
game which way do we want to go?
And we wanted to make sure thatwe were telling a story.
(30:11):
We had escalating moments atcertain intervals, specific
moments, in order to push thedynamic aspects of each scenario
.
We had to kind of narrow in oncertain areas.
So the idea of making thesescenarios more replayable was
always something that I wantedto do, but I also didn't want to
(30:32):
overdo it either.
So it's like a delicate balanceof where we can push buttons.
So we found the sweet spot wasthe one new token that is going
to help you and hurt you.
The poison berry gets rid ofhate effects at a cost of a
little bit of humanity, butproviding that gave us more
(30:53):
options for hate actions, whichallowed us to open up all sorts
of things.
And then there were somecharacters that we just weren't
done telling the story with, orlike there was a gap in their
story that we wanted to fill, orwe needed more rats with candle
hats, so we added some of thoseto the Tommy Knocker fight
(31:17):
Spoilers.
But yeah, it essentially camefrom early thoughts right off
the bat of like okay, we wantedto make sure that once you're
done with the campaign, youdon't have to be done, you can
revisit it, and this is an easyway of going about that, while
being more difficult.
It totally works.
Courtney (31:42):
Yeah.
So talk to me about the timingwhere you know like you released
Vagrant Song a while ago andthen how long between when that
got released and you know dayone of starting on working on
these expansions like how muchtime passed.
Kyle (32:02):
A little bit of time.
So in between Vagrant Song, Ialso worked on an expansion for
our chaotic racing game, bayouBash, so that got released
Hogwild.
And then I also worked on asupplemental scenario for
Vagrant Song called the SeyantScenario or the Fox Sisters, and
(32:22):
that is probably our mostcomplex scenario to date,
definitely took the mostdevelopment time, where one
scenario with play testing onaverage took about a month.
That one was about almost four.
And then pretty much rightafter that it was time to start
(32:43):
digging into the expansionbecause, as we found out soon
upon releasing Vagrant Song, wecouldn't hold on to it.
It kept selling out, so wefigured players must be hungry
for more.
So let's take some of the ideasthat we had from the core game
that either got cut or we didn'thave time to visit.
(33:04):
That's where Savior SoulScenarios actually came from.
We wanted them in the core gameand just couldn't make it work.
And, yeah, just started gettingcracking on.
That.
It's been about, I want to say,about a year and a half now
that I've been working on theseexpansions.
Courtney (33:21):
All right and it's almost Kickstarter time.
I know Hopefully it'll beexciting, but I'm sure also
nerve-wracking.
Kyle (33:30):
Yeah, it's a little bit of both.
I'm still developing theseexpansions.
Luckily I'm in the fine tuningstages of them, so it's not like
I have to make anything fromscratch at this point.
But yeah, it's a lot to juggle,yeah.
Courtney (33:46):
Yeah, it's funny, you're talking about how I
couldn't keep it on the shelves,and it reminded me of like, oh
yeah, when I tried to buyVagrant Song because I was like
getting it as a birthday presentfor Britain.
We were living in Oregon at thetime and I had to buy it from
some random game store in NewJersey because that was the only
place I could find it.
Kyle (34:02):
Yeah, the game of gaming itself is kind of a joke we had
in the office, but we're alreadyon our fourth print.
I think we're working on afifth one now with the
Kickstarter.
So, yeah, the reception.
I can't believe it.
I still have to pinch myself,you know, but this has happened.
Courtney (34:21):
Yeah, definitely a good problem to have.
Kyle (34:23):
Yes, yes.
Courtney (34:26):
So what can you tell us about the Kickstarter itself
and, just like, what the plansare for that campaign?
Kyle (34:34):
So, yeah, what can I talk about?
Mid-september is what we'reaiming for.
There are so many neat thingsthat we're doing that I can't
talk about that.
I want to.
There are two things that Ithink I can comfortably spoil,
though.
So one of the stretch goalsthat we're doing is a brand new
(34:55):
spindle, because we understandthat that spindle might have not
been the right size foreveryone's hands, so we're
making a bigger spindle and it'sgorgeous.
I can't wait for people to seethis thing, and inside it we're
going to actually have acrylictokens for a good chunk of the
game, so pretty much anythingthat can go in the spindle will
(35:18):
get an acrylic token of itself,and you know, the acrylic
standees look so good on thattable, and these tokens just
help push that even a little bitmore.
It is a deluxe vacation, but Imean I want it, so I mean those
acrylic standees are amazingyeah.
(35:39):
And we do have one other thing Icould spoil.
I think, if not, my boss mightlisten to this and we'll cross
that bridge.
But we're planning on doing alittle ghost plushie of one of
our kind of our standard blueghosts, but it's not just the
ghost, it's going to have azipper at the bottom of it and
(36:00):
we're going to have glow in thedark bones six bones that you
can have with it, and, yeah,we're really excited about that.
So we're doing all sorts oflike fun little things like that
that we wouldn't normally beable to do without running a
crowdfunding campaign.
So that was one of the tworeasons why we decided to go to
Kickster to this ways.
(36:21):
We wanted to make these funlittle things, and if players
want them now, there's going tobe the option for them.
So, oh my God.
Courtney (36:32):
Now I'm a plushie, amazing.
Yeah, obviously it's not thesame, but when you saw that, it
reminded me of this one timethat we got a toy for our dog
that was like, oh, it'sHalloween themed, it's like a
coffin.
And then he tore it apart asyou do, and it had another toy
inside that was a bone.
Kyle (36:53):
That's smart of whoever developed that yeah.
Courtney (36:57):
Obviously not the same , but also like kind of same if
there's six bones inside of thisplushie.
Kyle (37:03):
Yeah, yeah.
Courtney (37:04):
Okay, that sounds really cool and I'm a sucker for
cute ghost plushies, so I amexcited for that.
Honestly, you brought up thejust like tokens and even just
so that the stand is darelessand nice.
Like the art in this game is sogood, it's so pretty.
(37:25):
Like every time we pull out anew the hate to fight or even
just like a new character, wespend probably a solid five
minutes just looking, examininglike every detail, like how many
artists do you have working onthis?
Kyle (37:39):
One.
Courtney (37:41):
Well, oh, my gosh.
Kyle (37:42):
We is really really incredible.
Strangely, I mean now it lookslike a no brainer sort of thing
with the art, but we didn't getthere right off the bat with the
art.
We actually started off withthree or four different
aesthetics that we were playingaround with.
One in particular that reallysticks out to me as the one we
(38:04):
kind of venture down the mostoutside of the rubber hose style
was a wood carved Mike McNullaesque style, like from Hellboy,
so very strong shadow work butlike a wood carved variant of
that, and it worked.
I think the game would have beenmostly good with that, but it
(38:27):
didn't present the scary butfunny, you know, it didn't cross
that line or walk thattightrope that the rubber hose
style allowed us to do, and thegame takes place roughly in the
30s, you know.
So it made sense to have theart reflect that.
So once my other designer thatwas working on vagrant song at
(38:50):
the time proposed the idea, itjust was like a giant light bulb
above all of weird and snippy,just ran with it and every time
she came out with a new piece itwas just gold.
There were so many charactersthat didn't need any adjustments
or tweaks, it was just yep, yougot it.
(39:11):
That's it.
That's terrifying.
So yeah, it was.
It was kind of looking back atit and it's a no duh thing, but
it took us a long time to getthere.
Courtney (39:24):
I can see that.
You know, I do feel like it canbe hard to nail down a specific
style for really most games,but especially one that is like
trying to balance, like so manyexpressions, right yeah, gosh, I
am just so excited for theexpansions.
Kyle (39:46):
It's going to be a really fun time.
Courtney (39:50):
So yeah, I am also kind of curious about just
launching both of theseexpansions at the same time and
if there was like any kind ofspecific reasoning that went
into that.
Kyle (40:03):
Sure, yeah.
So when we started developingEncore and Off the Rails, it was
one expansion and everythingwas included in one package.
Play testing taught us somevaluable lessons, though, in
that every player is differentand every player wants something
different out of their game.
(40:24):
Some players want morescenarios, and other players
want to keep their existingcontent fresh, and a lot of that
overlapped, but not everywhere,so that's where we ultimately
decided to split the expansionsto accommodate as many players
(40:45):
as we could, so that you couldget what you want how you want,
essentially.
Courtney (40:51):
So yeah, but we're going to be offering both at the
same time during thisKickstarter, so yeah, I totally
can see that that makes a lot ofsense, especially since one of
them is kind of intended to helpmake it harder.
Kyle (41:03):
Right, exactly.
Not everyone is ready for thatstep.
Courtney (41:07):
Yeah, yeah I could totally imagine, like especially
early on, before you have awhole lot of skills, where
you're like I'm dying already.
Kyle (41:17):
When we were announcing it at GenCon recently and showing
people and explaining what Offthe Rails was and saying, yeah,
hard mode, that's when theireyes lit up and they said, hard
mode, the game's not alreadyhard enough.
So, yeah, that happened a lot.
But I mean, it's an excitingchallenge and you'll have enough
(41:39):
tools to get through it, I'msure.
Yeah.
Courtney (41:44):
So once the Kickstarter funds, which I
Crossing fingers, I have nodoubt you know back on one, what
will be the next steps betweenthat and being able to fulfill
it.
Kyle (41:57):
So, like I said, we're already almost done with these
projects.
So that's something that we'redoing a little bit differently.
It's really just going to bethe production that we're going
to wait for, so it's not goingto have to be a two-year wait of
development time or anythinglike that.
You know I'm making tweaksevery day.
(42:18):
I got an update I'm putting outto the playtesters right after
this interview, so we're movingright ahead and getting content
out.
So hopefully what our plan isis, once the Kickstarter is over
, we're more or less hitting theprint button and getting the
content to production and makingsure that that turnaround is as
(42:38):
fast as possible.
So hopefully that's fast.
At that point it is out of ourhands ultimately, but we've
worked to mitigate as many ofthose problems as possible, so
I'm pretty optimistic about it.
Courtney (42:55):
Sounds awesome.
So one thing I would like to dobefore we wrap up is I have a
couple of questions that I liketo ask.
In every interview which you'reworking in the game industry, I
would hope that you're doingthat because you love it, but I
can also recognize that thereare just a lot of challenges to
(43:18):
working on games and thesefandoms, and so when you just
look back over this process ofdeveloping Fagrin's song,
developing the expansions, whatwould you say have been some of
the more challenging aspects?
Kyle (43:33):
Challenging aspects of working on Fagrin's song
specifically, or just as like agame designer as a whole.
Courtney (43:40):
I mean I can do game designer as a whole.
You've worked on a lot ofthings.
Kyle (43:45):
So early on.
One thing I would really make apoint of if you're interested
in game design as a career, itdoes change the way you think
about games.
Prior to going to school forthis and trying it out myself, I
was just playing games to getimmersed in the world, you know,
(44:09):
to escape.
I can't always do that anymore.
It's more of a.
I look at games from a moreanalytical lens these days.
I still get to enjoy them andthere are the occasional games
that I just fully escape in.
But for the most part, the wayyou think about games does
(44:30):
change, and it should change,because you're now developing
them.
You're seeing behind thecurtain, so to speak, so you do
get to understand how thesausage is made.
So just be aware of that Justbecause you love games doesn't
mean you need to make them.
You can still find love in gamesthrough other ways.
(44:53):
You know, and I've seen thatpressure point be kind of a
breaking point for some people.
So I don't know if that's awarning or just a.
It's just something that youshould be aware of if you dive
into that.
Luckily, I've always wanted to.
(45:13):
I need to make things in orderto be happy.
So games are where I landed andI'm so thankful that I'm in
this space.
I can't see myself doinganything else.
Courtney (45:26):
I think that that's definitely a valid point is that
there is kind of a precariousbalance between like oh, I love
this, I want to be doing thisall the time, and then just
keeping that motivation and notjust being exhausted by the fact
of like okay, now I'm alwaysmaking this game and always in
this world and it would just benice to have a break.
(45:48):
Yeah, I think it's maybe not awarning, but just be cautious if
you're going into this.
Kyle (45:56):
Yeah, the biggest thing that I would recommend is find
another hobby outside of gaming,if you do decide to make it a
career, because you need to findthat other version of escapism.
I've got aquariums behind me.
That's how I do it, so buildinglittle aquatic worlds is how I
stay creative without having tomake games.
(46:17):
So just find that whateverworks for you.
And, yeah, touch grass everyonce in a while.
Courtney (46:29):
Yes, Okay, well, to flip this around, what would you
say have been some of the mostrewarding parts of working in
gaming?
Kyle (46:40):
Without a doubt.
Conventions and hearing peoplecome up to you and tell you that
they loved your game or thatone moment in that thing that
you helped make or a characteryou developed that energizes me
every single time I hear it.
I will never get sick of it andI'm eternally grateful to
(47:02):
everyone who enjoys these games.
So, yeah, that without a doubtis it.
Courtney (47:09):
How many conventions do you normally get to go to?
Kyle (47:12):
now that we're back into conventions, I do probably half
a dozen a year on averageAdepticon, origins, pax,
unplugged, gencon, and then alsosome trade shows as well, like
more retailer focused stuff andthat sort of thing, but despite
that, probably not enough.
(47:33):
I want to go to Auschuk's, Iwant to go to Essen.
There's still plenty of placesI'd like to show up in.
Courtney (47:42):
Oh, for sure.
Okay well, we've got thisKickstarter.
It's coming out mid September.
Yep, okay, the episode will beairing on September 5th, I think
.
So, yeah, it should be just ina couple more days.
So if people want to find you,find this Kickstarter, find out
(48:04):
more about all of the thingsthat Wyrd does, where should
they go?
Kyle (48:08):
Wyrd's website is Wyrdgames.
net, and you can find more aboutVagrant Song at this point just
by Googling Vagrant Song, butthere's a Notify Me page on
Kickstarter right now.
Or you can learn more abouteverything that's in these
expansions Well, maybe noteverything.
You'll learn about a good chunkof it in these expansions on
(48:31):
the Wyrd Games website, but youcan also join our Discord on the
Wyrd website.
I'm there all the time, so ifyou want to chat about any of
our games, I'm happy to chatalong.
Courtney (48:44):
Awesome.
I will have links to all ofthat in the show notes.
Kyle, this has been such atreat to talk to you today.
Thank you so much for coming.
Kyle (48:54):
Yeah, thank you for having me.
This has been great.
Courtney (48:58):
So at this point, listeners, we are going to wrap
up the interview portion of thisepisode and after I hit stop
recording, I'm going to turn itright back on and we are going
to do a fun little quickquestion blitz for patrons,
where I'm going to ask Kyle abunch of other silly questions
that may or may not be relatedto gaming, and we'll probably
(49:19):
involve some about theseaquariums because I want to know
more.
So if you are interested inhearing that or any of the other
quick question blitz from myguests, you can find that
Patreon at Patreon Roll PlayGrow.
Thank you again for coming on,kyle.
Kyle (49:34):
Thanks for having me.
Courtney (49:39):
You just finished another episode of Roll Play
Grow.
To check out the show notes andtranscript from today's
episode, You can go tolightheartadventures.
com rpg To keep up with everyepisode.
Please subscribe on yourpodcast player of choice and, if
you're enjoying the show, Iwould absolutely love if you
would leave me a review andshare this episode with your
friends.
Your review might even getfeatured on an upcoming episode.
(50:02):
To follow me on Twitter, youcan either find me at
lightheartadv for our businessaccount or at Ketra RPG for
tweets on gaming, my dog Bowserand other random shenanigans.
You can also find me on Patreonat Roll Play Grow.
Thank you so much for listeningand I'll see you next time on
Roll Play Grow.
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