One of my favorite
guilty blogging pleasures has been using interviews as an excuse to have conversations with game designers whose work I enjoy. A guilty
pleasure I hope to indulge a bit more as I get into the home stretch
of the Slumbering Ursine Dunes project.
Today's interview is
with Zzarchov Kowolski, one of a handful of gaming folk that share a
single walkable community called Canada (or so I am told). On
again/off again in various Google Plus games I have run into Zzarchov
and found him to be hilarious, anarchic and creative, but it's his adventure design that I admire the most, in the main because he
eschews the D&D as a Straight Guy school of thought, never fails
to write a memorable adventure site, and doesn't seem afraid to
experiment with out-of-the-box forms.
Hill
Cantons: How did you get involved with all this? What drove you into
game design and publishing? What have you found to be most challenging
about DIY design/publishing?
Zzarchov
Kowolski:
NGR (Neoclassical Geek Revival) was my own collection of house rules
to run a game in the vein I wanted to run (a focus on stealth, more
gameable priest mechanics, more explicit hitpoint mechanics). At
a certain point, especially when bringing new players on board, it
became easier to just teach it as its own thing. So I began to
work upon streamline and better plugging things in together.
Eventually
I figured I may as well make this work available to others in case
they could provide any feedback or playtesting. Google+ and
Constantcon really kicked that into high gear by letting me run with
multiple groups which consisted almost entirely of GM’s in their
own right, which is a very unique opportunity. People like
Kyrinn S. Eis, Tim Shorts, and Ian Burns were really helpful during
the first release.
From
there I just kept putting out more and more things.
HC:
What
are some of the important things you learned about honing your craft?
Did the lessons come in big leaps or bit by bit?
ZK:
Once you’ve run through the gauntlet the first time it gets much
much easier for the second release. As a corollary your first
release is going to be pretty bad when you look back at in in five years
no matter what. If it didn’t it would mean you hadn’t
learned anything in the last five years. Also, invest heavily in
good layout and try to find someone who is good at it if you don’t
have the skill.
The
greatest challenge boils down to scheduling. Things always take
longer when you get a bigger and bigger team. DIY publishing is very
few people’s day jobs and the work has to navigate around people’s
schedules. The more people who are needed at any given point
the more likely that someone will experience a nasty dose of life and
will need to slow the project to a halt. Keeping small teams
for any individual project and/or a hefty dose of patience is really
helpful.
HC:
Dear
lord, tell me about it. What are some other ways you find to cope or
work around that kind of delay chain?
ZK:
There are limited things you can do to change delays unless you want
to become a taskmaster boss or a demanding client (which I do
not aspire to be during my off periods). Finding a good pool of
talented freelancers that you have a good relationship with will do
wonders. A pool is key, life will happen to people and if one
person is involved in everything you are doing then when life happens
to them everything grinds to a halt for everyone. That in turn
means you might not be able to keep things afloat in the interim, and
you’d just end up screwing them over even more by not having
anything for them to work on when their life calms down.
HC:
Many of your adventures feature procedural experiment, innovative
bits that set them apart from traditional adventure design. Scenic
Dunnsmouth
had
the randomly-changing, ever-replayable map, Under
the Waterless Sea
(a
personal favorite), alongside its fresh, fun Polynesian setting and
weird/beautiful pearl-based economy, had a dynamic mechanic for
changing the adventure if you switched sides and aided the Deep Ones.
Gem-Prison
of Zardax (your
most recent baby) has an intriguing series of puzzle diagrams. Can
you talk some about those experiments. What were you aiming for? How
did they work out in writing and most importantly at the table?
ZK:
Whenever I write an adventure for publishing I am trying to focus on
a specific reason for the adventure to exist on people’s shelves
and be used over and over again. Scenic Dunnsmouth was designed
to showcase how you can build replayable adventures for use with the
same game group each campaign without getting stale.
I
have run Dunnsmouth probably 8 or 10 times, with the same group at
least 4 times. I always stick a version of it somewhere in any game I
run. My home game is a post apocalyptic one at the moment, and
you can bet Dunnsmouth is there somewhere. One of the games
with my home group didn’t involve the “main adversary” of the
adventure. They burned the town to the ground trying to find
out where “they” were. It was great when I told them after
the fact.
Under
the Waterless Sea was on the one hand a way to showcase how to handle
the impact of PC shenanigans on large scale events
HC:
By
doing a weighted point system?
Yes,
but also in having a number of different “commando” actions
(including some that just worked out as wartime looting) that would
have an impact. That makes it easier to fairly adjudicate what
happens without letting your own moral compass shade reactions to PC
generated chaos. That is all secondary though, as far more
importantly to me it was a way to make a “water level” that
everyone doesn’t hate.
In
another example Thulian
Echoes was
showing how to replace the dreaded GM infodump for past expeditions.
The ability to “play through” the past dungeon delve in the past
is a repeatable way to make research into adventurers of your
campaign world’s past something more interesting than a sage roll.
It also lets you generate some neat consequences to surprise the GM a
bit. Much like Dunnsmouth,
I think there needs to be some interesting gameplay mechanics
for the GM.
Similarly,
Lamentations
of the Gingerbread Princess was
an alternate wish system, The
Gem Prison of Zardax
is a showcase of how you can have a dungeon spanning set of
interlocking puzzles. In addition to its spoiler based goal, The
Pale Lady
was also a good test of how much of a song’s lyrics I can get into
an adventure without anyone noticing (a lot). That last one is
really more of an author game mechanic.
HC:
You've
also experimented with trying different funding models. With Under
the Waterless Sea
you
attempted to try and use something like the Steam early access model.
Tell me about that. Did it work? Would you try it again?
ZK:
The “Buystarter” for Under the Waterless Sea worked, but it
was still a tempered success. On the one hand it no doubt might
have exploded larger if I could have allowed a kickstarter process
where people could pledge higher than the initial low amount (I had
more than a few people asking how they could do this), but it
also had very low risk. No one was going to be left waiting for
4 years wondering if they would ever get their adventure (I am not
immune to the risk of life happening after all). I might end up
doing it again for a small release.
HC: Word of mouth and the power of reviews—especially by “opinion leaders” (for lack of a better word)--seem hugely important to micropublishers.
ZK:
Absolutely, there are a lot of things released and no one has time to
read them all. The opinions of trusted reviewers are a big sway
to most people.
HC: What kind of reservations do you have about Kickstarter and crowdfunding in general?
ZK:
To follow up on the earlier questions, life happens. Delays
happen. With your own project, you and you alone as responsible for
those delays. Once you take someone's money, you now have
other stakeholders that you have obligations to. It doesn’t
help that the project can easily spiral beyond your control to manage
it. To pick, pack, and ship 50 books is a lot different than
1,000 books.
HC:
So what's next? You have a revision of NGR coming down the pike?
Anything else?
ZK:
I
have an updated layout and art version of NGR ready to go, but I
am looking to go for a larger project of breaking it down into a core
and full rule book. I might go for the dreaded kickstarter for
that project, with a guaranteed release of at least the updated
layout and art versions.
It reads like this got posted out of order / with parts duplicated?
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