Today I am releasing some of the work I’ve created through Patreon. Some of the work is mostly finished, while some of the work needs, well…work. I share in the hope that it you’ll find something useful in your games and storytelling endeavors. 

I encourage you to share the work if you like it, and if you want, you can support my work through Patreon. 

The first work I am releasing today is the intro for a fantasy game using Fate (Core and Accelerated) called the Tapestry. I created it around two years ago as a starting point for creating Fantasy settings and stories that were concerned about cultures and communities rather than the whim and power of individuals. It’s just the setting and character creation right now, but if there is demand it might be worth fleshing out some more. 

I hope you enjoy! The first few paragraphs are here, but you can grab the whole 12 pages from Gumroad.

The Tapestry

A Fate game of Fantasy Culture by Quinn Murphy

The Tapestry is a fantasy game using the Fate system (both elements of Fate Accelerated and Fate Core) that emphasizes the creation and exploration of fantasy cultures. Your group will first make a set of cultures (“a Tapestry”) that are intertwined and in conflict. Your group will then create personas attempting to meet their own goals and affect change in this nexus of cultures.

We use elements from Fate Core and Fate Accelerated. The game uses a mixture of approaches and skills, and uses the basic mechanics of stress and invocation as described in the Fate SRD. The SRD can be found here: http://fate-srd.com/

The Tapestry is released under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. The Tapestry uses modified text from the Fate SRD.

 Cultural Approaches

The Tapestry uses Approaches as described in Fate Accelerated, but it uses its own set of approaches, referred to in some places in the document as cultural approaches, but other times as simply approaches.  Assume that when we refer to approaches generically that we refer to cultural approaches.

A cultural approach describes how a culture can approach the problems and obstacles of their life.  Individuals from these cultures reject or embrace these cultural approaches and use them as well.

The cultural approaches are:

Proud. A Proud action is when you proclaim and assert your worth and accomplishments to intimidate, impress, or motivate. Scaring off a foe. Wooing a potential mate. Selling your wares.

Honorable. An honorable action enforces, respects and creates codes of behavior to bind people closer and create moral order. Impressing your superiors. Creating a peace treaty. Ethics of fair trade between merchants

Combative. A combative approach embraces conflict and tension rather than avoiding it. Advocating for one’s rights. Winning an argument. Overwhelming an enemy with force.

Spiritual. A spiritual approach finds answers, solutions and inspiration from religious or contemplative sources. Calming an angry person. Creating a beautiful poem. Negotiating a lasting peace between nations.

Lawful. A Lawful approach regulates the code of conduct and punishments between individuals and nations to create order and establish rules and punishments. Prosecuting a thief. Creating a peace-keeping milita. Establishing new rights for a persecuted group.

Insightful. An Insightful approach invents, observes, and creates new solutions to problems. Creating a secret language.  Inventing steam-powered machines. Analyzing complex magical patterns. Devising innovative defenses for a city.

Approaches are used on the personal level by characters and NPCs, are preferred and abhorred by cultures, and also used in regions to determine basic thresholds against changing the conditions in that region.  More on regions later.

Weaving

Weaving is the process of creating people and regions and a map to set up the region for play. The last stage of weaving is creating persons of interest for each player to control.  These characters will be tied to each other and the world you create.

Weaving is meant to take around two hours. You can split this up into two smaller sessions (I personally like to do hour long sessions) or one larger session to get everything done all at once. Optimal group size is three people and one GM, so if you have more people, this process can take a bit longer.  Once you’ve completed the Weaving you are ready to play with your characters in the world you created!

For the weaving you will want a blank piece of paper to serve as a map, some index cards to reference people and regions, and character sheets for your characters.

Download the Tapestry

“Why art? Why Now?” Audio

why art? why now?

The election has made everything seem scary, overwhelming, and futile.

What point is art in a dictatorship? It is an easy question to ask, but also easy to answer when you take the time to think about it. Art is the most important thing we can have in a dictatorship.

Resistance is suppressed but real art is resistance even when it lacks that intention. Art is self-expression so resists the whims of a fascist state that wants you to express what it tells you to express. The totalitarian will have the finest statues and paintings and design, sure…but we can say with confidence that that is propaganda and not art. What will be missing from all of these things is individual tastes and style. The will of the authoritarian avoids the vulnerability that makes art possible, masking it behind the falsehood of “perfect” standards that he alone defines.

The fascist’s art is a flawless, stillborn dream that can only even be critiqued in the language of how much it meets the fascist’s standards.

To express yourself to others in a way that direct dialogue cannot, to bare parts of your vulnerable self; no matter how imperfect, that is art. That art, shared with others to critique and perceive as they will, is resistance to the solitary vision of life that the totalitarian holds for you.

So then this question, which I’ve asked myself and I bet many of you have as well…why bother with making art now?  Shouldn’t we be doing more?  Well, I think we should do those other things too! But we must make art in parallel. It affirms why we are here, who we are, and what we will try to retain or re-acquire. Without art we become fascists as we fight the fascists.

This is why I took the time to think through my problems and re-dedicate myself to making art. Is social fiction art? Are games art? Those questions actually bore the crap out of me so I’ll just circle YES, highlight it, and hire a plane to spell out Y, E , S in the clouds.

When you experience art, you create a moment in time that they can’t take away. They can force you to hide it, they can make you renounce it, they can kill you if they need to, but the brutal arms of a totalitarian state can’t reach far enough to take these moments from you or from others who experience them. They have no way to track or stop the way seeing one image, one phrase, one scene imperceptibly alters your vector, your direction, your life. Worse yet, if your art is out there, it has a chance to spread, and “infect” more minds and lives.

Art is what they can’t take away.

And in the end, I think that’s how we win. It sounds glib, but what I believe is this: vulnerability beats dogma in the long run. The chains of dogma are forged from the iron of deception and force. Without trust, these links are brittle inside. These chains cannot support the weight the fascist tells you they can.

Vulnerability builds trust. That trust, if well-honored (trust lasts best when it is not abused, taken for granted or assumed) creates a core of incredible strength. That strength becomes the hammer that breaks those chains.

And what helps us be vulnerable, and be true? Art.

That is why we must create art and support art now more than ever.

Signals are important because they control expectation, and the bulk of how an audience feels about a piece of work comes from expectation. A lot of frustration in design is intending one thing, but seeing people do something different than what you intended — heck, even contradicting what was literally stated in the text — and taking issue with that. This frustration is where the philosophy of “Playing well or right” in some storytelling circles evolves from.

All good designers borrow from other sources to create the best experience they can, but it is a common trap to forget that every structure, process and feedback mechanism we use comes with its own set of signals. Being unaware of those signals can lead to crossed up expectations and behaviors between designer and player.

What are signals in game design?

The absence of life-tracking elements signals through pattern-breaking. If there is no way to track life, it indicates through lack that the experience is not about a life or death struggle, but about other stakes.

Signals in RFK

What I like about Radio Free Kaiju’s structure currently is that every scene it gives someone a role with it’s own specialized brand of authority. I think that Channels as a concept work, even though I have been dissatisfied with the end result of the implementation. Individuals can make it work or not work, but it takes too much interpretation or feedback from the designer directly to bridge the gap created by cognitive dissonance.

Additionally, the way it is structured, it signals to valuing things it doesn’t. The game currently requires a facilitator because it has one book and a bunch of rules, which means one person is a faux GM/arbiter. This in turn signals to others that there are player roles to be had, whose only responsibility is to the control of a character. Also, it signals repeated campaign play, and I’m not intending that either. That’s not what I want or intend, so that means sending better role signals.

Last, the problem with my Social Fiction work so far is that it uses Freeform and improv but can sometime not guide sufficiently. Radio Free Kaiju does a lot of work of doing world creation but then doesn’t set you up to use all of those elements correctly. Too much upfront world-building creates an expectation of payoff and re-incorporation. It also signals that the game is about this steady buildup, best done over several sessions so we can use all of this juicy material.  But that’s not what I want, or what I think the best option for Radio Free Kaiju is.  I want RFK to be more improv and cinematic; more authorial and less about individuals connecting to individual characters.  The intent here is to enjoy the world as authors and co-creators, immersing in acting enough to see your creation in motion.

But again, signals! These structures I use aren’t bad generally — I actually think the worldbuilding piece is quite strong, for example — but many of the current structures in the game are bad for the context in which I use them.

Core to signal design is context. The reason we playtest games, in fact is to compare the context of designer intent with the context of player experience. Where there is a mismatch, we then need to see what we signaled as designers without being aware. What assumptions are players bringing in, and how did we match or break those assumptions? Whatever we say as designers works best when we create the proper mental environment for those who play our games. A lot of game design texts talk about proper reward/feedback design, but I believe paying more attention to what we signal implicitly through our structures is often forgotten.

Whatever we say as designers works best when we create the proper mental environment for those who play our games. A lot of game design texts talk about proper reward/feedback design, but I believe paying more attention to what we signal implicitly through our structures is often forgotten.

I call this a lament, signaling that the feeling of regret and grief is somehow atypical. The truth is that lamentation is the normal state of the playtest and revision cycle in design. In my experience (and in my shallow anecdotal corroboration from other designers) lament happens every time someone experiences your design. There is always some way to communicate or incentivize more efficiently. For every person who “gets it”, there are many people who don’t get it.

Your job as a designer is to figure out who is not “getting it”, why they are not “getting it”, and then start making decisions about who you want to “get it”. You build an experience, be it a game or media, and your refinement always includes (even if you wrap it in other contexts) who gets left out. To make something for someone, it means it must not be for someone else.

But even when you see someone who you know you didn’t build for not get it, it evokes that pain, that sorrow that all designers must face and reckon with: the sorrow of the failed experience. Even though as game designers we know that failure is a vital part of play, it’s still that unreasonable trick of psychology that we sometimes expect our ideas to connect with playtesters on the first try.  It never, ever works out this way, but well…never give up hope, right?

I say “Designer’s Lament” and I mean it tongue-in-cheek; Please don’t worry for my well-being!  Think of the lament as a “mid-mortem” of lessons I am in the process of learning after I process play-test feedback.  I like reading game design post-mortems, but always found myself wanting to look at the design lessons learned mid-stream that got the design team to the release of the final experience. Those principles we develop in the middle of a project connect to but stand apart from the lessons and principles created after a final release. I always thought it would be great to have both so we could see not only the snapshots of thinking, but to capture the delta between them.

In that spirit, I want to share a few things I am learning as I process playtest feedback from Radio Free Kaiju this month.  The current draft is available to those in my Patreon, and I’m looking to have a PDF available for sale in the next few weeks.

Radio Free Kaiju is a post-apocalyptic storytelling toolbox. Kaiju have attacked and we were unable to repel the strongest of them. In battling the monsters, we used nuclear weapons and still could not vanquish them. So we’ve made the planet mostly unlivable for us on the surface, while the Kaiju roam free. Human underground enclaves communicate with each other over distances via radio, and foolhardy/brave people we call “Topsiders” will travel from settlement to settlement delivering goods and reports from above.

I said this about Radio Free Kaiju’s goals:

While the game will have some post-apocalyptic elements, what I’ve been working for in honing this idea is capturing a sense of wonder. I want to set up scenes and mood where you are doing something normal or tedious for your survival, and then the world injects with some large event. Obviously, with Kaiju this means you might be picking the trash while Godzilla appears fighting another monster just hundreds of feet from you.  But it can also be electric dust storms that scintillate with light; sudden breaks in the sun-blotted sky where you can feel the true heat and warmth of the sun of your skin; following a long-hidden path to and underground river with enough clean water to quench the thirst of an entire outpost.

If I had to boil it down further, I’d say that Radio Free Kaiju aims to be a radio drama and improv experience that evokes “grit and wonder”. Players will be literally world-building through play, and then using that world-building and improvisation to feed back into the giant twists the framework will introduce to them.

I’ve had a few playtests done by other people, and I’ll recount what I’ve learned so far:

To Be Different is To Be Explicit

I don’t generally like talking about how different what I’m doing is from everything else. But when you get to that point where you have to say “it’s like this, except not this, that…” repeatedly, it’s a good sign you need to define yourself in a different way. And different is OK. But being different means being explicit about what you’re doing because you don’t have many assumptions for your prospective audience to rest on. You also need to have that conversation early, in a form that can be easily relayed.

A problem I’ve seen with RFK: I spend considerable time to explain what it wants to do and be as a work of social fiction but don’t have a bite-sized “elevator pitch” of expectations and play goals. When someone brings RFK to the table, the other people aren’t likely to read the book and even see those paragraphs.  The person bringing RFK to the group is the one who is likely going to facilitate (the game doesn’t centralize authority in a game master), so I need to explicitly call out what it is that I want people to understand.  Someone looking for a tactical Kaiju battle is going to be disappointed and I want to call that out; not to shame their desire (a tactical Kaiju battle game would be dope), but to make sure they aren’t trying to play something that I am not trying to give them.

In creative collaborative exercises, expectation is perhaps the most important aspect of player psychology to manage;  Players play towards their expectations. They can change their expectations mid-stream but that always comes with some displeasure and friction. If you can you must help players understand what the experience plans to do, so even if you fail to meet that plan through bad design, players evaluate it in that context.  When you don’t set expectations properly, players can get snagged up looking for things you never expected to give them.

Now, players can always get to confused expectations by refusing to honor what you state…it’s super frustrating when people do that and then evaluate you on their own misconceptions, but I can’t control that so I don’t try to.

More Preparation doesn’t Mean More Improv

Radio Free Kaiju has a pretty cool world-building section right at the beginning. This is actually the start of many of my design troubles with it right now!

Here is the thing: every thing you have someone do within an experience trains a person in what to expect in the future. We can set basic expectations up front, but we don’t just stop there. Every component of the experience should inform and lead up to its connected components.

But imagine coming into an experience where the group spends a lot of time creating a rich world from mostly scratch, but then asks you later to just “make up some stuff!” with loose guidance on how to use the detailed setting information it so meticulously guided you to build before. You’d feel some dissonance there, wouldn’t you?

But worse yet is this: doing a bunch of preparation at the start of the experience doesn’t prep you to do improvisational, on-the-spot play; it merely sets you up to expect that there will be more preparation work in the future.

To support improvisation in Radio Free Kaiju, I need to make the the world-building more evocative, and also “in-line” it into the Broadcast and Topsider scenes.  I also have found that improvisation is better when there are easy randomizers and seeds right at hand so players can “reach” for it when they are stuck. I don’t need to have them prepare a lot of material up front at all.

Too Much Structure can be Worse than no Structure

A feature I’m really proud of in Radio Free Kaiju is Channels:

Lastly, Radio Free Kaiju uses Channels to divide who tells what parts of the story.  Radio Free Kaiju uses no central referee/arbiter/director as an authority on the story being told, which can become confusing in practice. If we all have equal authority, how do we resolve disputes? How do we reconcile opposing visions for our story?  Channels  are a way of dividing who controls what part of a story. Each Channel is an area of dramatic concern in a scene.  The Danger Channel, for example, is concerned with non-Kaiju level dangers that the characters discover, while the Exploration Channel is concerned with discovery, finding useful items or making new discoveries about the world itself. Rather than giving each player characters, using Channels each player is responsible for the scene at a conceptual level, which the group can then play out.

Channels conceptually work really well, but the rules for using them are confusing.  One reason Channels confuse is that they insert themselves in the improvising with a relatively detailed set of rules. The depth of the Channel rules is even dissonant with the rest of the game. It makes the Topsider scenes feel very different from the Broadcast scenes and I want them to mesh better.

Putting too much structure in creative collaboration is actually worse than no structure because the human mind will try to create structure when there is no structure, but in the face of too much or too confusing structure, the human mind tends to shut down or tune out.  I’m trying to supplement and support creative thinking, not suppress it.  I know I want to keep Channels, but I also know that I need to remove the current rules and replace them with something less complex.

Moving On

The structure of Radio Free Kaiju will change in some very large ways, but I think these changes will support my goals and make it even more fun to play.  Even with its problems, I’ve seen people having fun with it and I know that I can take it to the next level. If you want to see what it looks like now, I’ll remind you about the Patreon (even $1 will get you access!) but otherwise I hope you’ll check it out in its final release!

I’ve been using NimbleNotes recently to capture my design thoughts and inspirations. I really like it as it makes putting together a multimedia notebook really simple and easy.  I recorded this video to give you a tour of how I use it. It might be something that you like to use as well!

Does an RPG needs stats?

Does it need dice?

Does it need conflict resolution?

Does it need quantitative character progression?

If a game has some or none of these things, can it be called a “true” RPG?

Normally, whether something is a “real” RPG is the most boring conversation I can think of happen.  Debating the reality of a method of creating fiction is banal in the best case scenario, but usually, such conversations are just gatekeeping in a flimsy disguise.  “You don’t play the way I lik, so your way is false.”  The most frequent scenario this conversation brings forth is one defending one’s thoughts and ideas of fun to a bunch off jerks, and rarely brings out interesting debate.

So, I guess I want to start this off by saying that I guess I’m not really trying to design an RPG anymore. The problem is that I come from RPGs as a consumer, player, and designer, and I don’t yet have language to call whatever it is I’m working towards something else. I think that anyone reading my blog is going to clearly see my origins, but may be unclear or even irritated or upset at where I plan to go. I love and respect my origins.  I love many old and modern RPGs still, but I don’t think it’s what I’m going to design anymore.  I am building the type of things that have other names.  I’ll name it later, but I want to talk about the whys of this change a bit. It will be easy for the usual suspects to take offense, but I really look at what I’m doing as a fork of the current model of RPGs, not a replacement.

I’ve spent the last year or so designing and pulling apart the threads of collaborative storytelling as I’ve experienced them.  I’ve found that when things are going right, system is almost un-needed, but when you really need it, system often muddles storytelling.  System –and by system I am talking about the way we convert meta-fictional decisions (what players do) into fictional outcomes by way of abstractions (stats,dice,conflict resolution) — only partially does in practice what in theory it should do all the time. What I’ve seen in myself and others is that we are often bending ourselves towards this system or that, stretching to incorporate new mindsets and rules and procedures for our storytelling to live in. We are always looking for a more elegant box for our imagination to exist inside. I appreciate constraints –it is the starting point from which creativity emerges — but I have wondered if our current model for systems is really providing the right constraints. I’ve seen perfectly good, dramatic moments come to abrupt halts as the table figures out how to quantitatively express the moment, or search for a rule that will capture it.

Here is one thing I believe: Humans are hard-wired for story.  When there is no narrative we create it.  Where there are voids, we create meaning. We are creatures with minds strong enough to not only create math and science, but also myth. Given the roots of the hobby in wargaming, I can see the push for elegant quantitative expression and fiction as emergent from game play, but what does it look like if we take another approach?  I feel that our current approach to system puts the onus on people to learn and master the system before they can tell the story, but I think that’s inverse to the truth of things. If humans are natural storytellers, should we not build systems to support that innate drive and ability? Should we not trust people to imagine and create, and only insert procedures and system when creative fatigue or disagreement settles in?

When I am ranting these days about how the pillars of RPG system design might be hindering our storytelling rather than helping it, I often recieve comments that amount too “how will we find our way to stories and imaginative play in the dark? The system is our light.” What if that light exists as a torch inside darkness?  What if the light simply helps us navigate the cave we are in? System  feels like a mechanism that humans learn to support, but what if we invert that and build systems that support us when stumble, and trust us the rest of the time?

I’m wondering what that looks like, and building towards that in my designs. As always, I reserve the right to fail or make a mess of things, but I reserve the right to try and to talk about it on the blog.

I think about why I play and design roleplaying games, and when I clear all lesser reasons out of the way, I’m left with this:

I play RPGs to feel.

Am I connecting to my own feelings? I may be, but i think it goes deeper. When I am playing an RPG, I am connecting to what other people feel.  It’s hard to accurately perceive one’s self, and almost as hard to perceive real people outside of oneself. It’s difficult to analyze the circumstances that you yourself occupy. I suspect that fiction makes the act of empathy easier but no less real. To create and inhabit fictional worlds and create these opportunities to safely but deeply see how another person might feel and deal with the world around them is a gift.

It may or may not be odd to think of empathy as a core by product of RPG play, but it’s where I’m at. It is totally possible to play a tabletop RPG in a way where empathy doesn’t enter your brain –you can run through the killing fields with your mind unfettered by empathy or compassion — but  honestly I feel that such play is running away from what is great about RPG play.

Remember when you didn’t know the rules properly for whatever game you started with but you still managed for a few moments to imagine what this fictional person who you described with numbers and words on paper might experience?  I can still remember being 11 years old and thinking to myself “how would this fighter feel if there were all these kobolds around and I had 1 hp?” What would I be doing? I’d run probably.  I’d want to live and adventure another day.  But what if I wasn’t me? What if honor demanded I stay my ground?  What if my best friend was on the ground beside me? What then?

Though I don’t find myself in these “slay the demi-human” situations anymore, I appreciate those early exercises of wearing the shoes of fictional people. I don’t have much nostalgia for the content of the games of my youth, but those feelings I can access so easily.  Joy, terror, triumph, delight, all readily accessed through the filters of fictional people. When I’m designing games now, several decades removed from those formative experiences, I still call back to those emotions when I’m stumped. How did I feel? Beyond any emotions, I  felt connected. Yes, to a fictional person, but it shouldn’t take me to tell you that fiction is real in its way.

At your table and in your game design, how would it affect your experience if you viewed the prime output of RPG systems as emotions instead of outcomes? Could that deepen your experience with an RPG?