It's the final countdown!
I'm Matthew.And I'm Dave.And, well, you can guess by the musical title that this is an episode all about the band Europe.I think it was Europe in The Final Countdown, wasn't it?
We are pleased to announce a role-playing game based on... It's the first jukebox role-playing game.It's going to be Europe's entire oeuvre translated into characters, scenarios, everything you possibly need.
Well, it's not.That might be our next project.But anyway, so we have some news which we will relay very shortly in our Old West News section.But yeah, today we've got quite a lot of World of Gaming to talk about.
Mostly Kickstarter stuff, I think, but not all.
There's all sorts of interesting news.Don't just say mostly Kickstarter stuff.
Yeah, but there is only one thing on Kickstarter right now that anybody, anybody should be thinking about. But we'll come to that in a moment.We do have a new patron to welcome and thank.
We do have some Old West news and then last time we said we would talk a little bit about some of the trickier issues in dealing with a game like Tales of the Old West.
So I've done a little essay on difficult history and how do we deal with or how can we best try and deal with The issues that that brings up in a inclusive and respectful way.So that's to come later on.
Cool, cool, cool.So let's crack on, shall we?I'm going to press the button to flag our next section, which is thank you to our new patron.
and we have a new patron and Jed welcome and thank you Jed McClure we've already seen you haven't we on the on the patreon discord yeah i think so yeah Yeah, I think we have.
I think he's talking alien stuff and things like that, getting stuck into the conversation.So yeah, welcome.Thank you for participating as well.
What we love about all our patrons, those who participate and those who just give us money, is that you just support us and it's brilliant. It is.We had the most gorgeous message from one of our other patrons.
I won't embarrass him by reading it out or anything.But we had a lovely message on the Discord.And if you want to know what one of our patrons said to us today, get on the Discord.
If you're not already on the Discord, get on the Discord and have a look.
Yeah, it was the loveliest comment and it took me by surprise.It gave me a shiver down my spine as I was reading it.It was so lovely.So thanks to him and thanks to all of our patrons, everyone who ever has or ever will or is currently supporting us.
You don't know how much we appreciate it.It's difficult for us to express our gratitude in words.It is.
So, should I press the button again?This will be for World of Gaming.
You don't have to tell us you're pressing the button, Matt.
It's okay.I guess not, no.Except that when I don't tell you, I forget to actually press the button.I go, I've got a function that flags all these things up.Why aren't I flagging all these things up?Anyway, bye-de-bye.
We'll have to ask our readers, our listeners to come back and say, do you mind if Matt says, oh, I'm going to press the button five times in an episode? Yeah, anyway, World of Gaming, what have we got to talk about there?
We've got a lot to talk about.I think the most exciting news definitely for one of our patrons is that Mongoose has actually bought Traveller outright from Mark Miller.Indeed.Which I think is a good thing.
I like the latest Mongoose edition of Traveller.For me, it feels like, you know, Traveller is an old game. How many years old is it?Many years old.Is it almost 50 years old now?
It's got to be 50... Andy will tell us.So it was 77 or something, was it, Traveller?So not quite... Yeah, only a few years off. I do very much like the Mongoose version that I've got, which I bought a few years ago.
That's the one with all the typos in it as well.I've got the second edition without the typos.
I haven't read it in great detail.I got it largely through nostalgia, but actually It really has a feel of the old original books, which as everyone remember were small books, quite thin little pamphlets, but lovely.
But it has a feel of that in a full-sized book, or what we would today call a full-sized book.It's lovely, it's a really nice book.I would quite like to play some Traveller again at some point, but I'm not sure when I'll get the chance.
Well, funnily enough, I was reading on one of my bookshelves and this thing fell out almost, before I'd heard this, but almost portentous thing.
This thing is the Aslan Traveller Alien Module 1, published in 1984.I think it's the oldest bit of Traveller stuff
have right and it's all about Aslan and you know it's funny seeing this you know we we've been talking a lot about illustration haven't we and we're trying to work out how many pictures can we afford and how many pictures do we need per spread
And believe me, there are wads.We have got pictures in this book.We've got some on the inner cover.I've just seen one somewhere on one of the pages.But the rest, most of the pages, are just two columns of small type. Again and again.
Oh no, my son's broken it up by a bit of a table.
It's quite dense, isn't it?Yeah.
So I've got my books down off the shelf here, and I've got book one, Characters in Combat, 1977. And I think it was Tony's first because on the front he's got TC mark 5 page So that was when he was a fifth former at age.
What would that have been 16 in page house the worst house?Of course the best house page house is much better than You are you you Croft?Cooper Cooper was rubbish.
No, they were the worst.You're right Croft was the coolest house all the cool people.Oh
Wallace was the absolute worst.Yeah, absolutely.Everybody wanted to be in Hale.No, no, no.Everybody wanted to be in Croft.No, everyone wanted to be in Page, really.
But Hale was kind of the cool one that you wanted to get into, but actually if you got into it, you wouldn't want to be there. It's the same as at university.I went to Lancaster and County College.
I went to Boland College, which is the best, but County College was the one that everybody wanted to be in, but it was full of people that you wouldn't want to associate with if you got into County College.
It did have the best end of year party though. Anyway, that's a significant digression.
It is.I just want to digress even further away though.In this book, I've just come across a photocopied but empty character sheet for an edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. And I'm guessing probably first edition Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.
Seems likely, yeah.So that is an interesting artefact there.I'm sure many other gamers of our vintage have similar tat lying about there.
Next time you take something down off your shelf, you find the body of your neighbour who disappeared 25 years ago.
I don't know, we might find the body of Mark Speakman who used to be a regular attender at Hasglab and I haven't seen him for years.
Why Mark particularly?Is this a deft cover-up by you because you have actually murdered him?
No, no, no.I went on a sailing holiday with him at one point.Me and Andy Gibbs and Mark Speedman all went sailing on the boards playing games.It was great fun.Anyway, that's by the by.As you say, a digression.Where are we?Yeah, Traveller.
Mongoose has bought Traveller.Did you know that?
What I liked about this news is apparently they did it way back in January, but they didn't tell anybody. And I think it was leaked in some way recently.I don't know.I don't know what the original source of the leak was.
I only saw the news after it had been made official by Mark Miller and the Mongoose guys.But yeah, I kind of find that a little bit hilarious.Secretly, let's buy this game off you, Mark.
It is quite funny, actually, because at that point, at least they weren't trying to use it simply as a marketing campaign, which is quite good.
yeah but yeah i think i would i don't wonder whether they were saving it for the anniversary and then they were going to make a big splash of it around possibly yeah in three years time right and we've got more game acquisition news as well have we
Yeah, you obviously haven't read the show notes, have you Dave?
Do you want me to do this one?I can say, ah, so Luke Crane has bought Dungeon World, but I know nothing.That's all I know about it.
So you don't know Luke Crane and you don't know Dungeon World?
I've heard of Dungeon World.Luke Crane, he's not the younger brother of Frasier, is he? The lost younger brother.
That would be a fascinating episode of the second season of Frasier, of which I saw a trailer.Did you see the trailer?
Yes, I've seen the trailer.I quite enjoyed the first season.It wasn't great. But it wasn't bad.And it wasn't bad.There were some things about it I didn't like so much.But it had a good blast of nostalgia.
And Kelsey Grammer's always quite fun to watch.And there were some really good bits in it as well.So I will watch the second season with interest when it comes out in next month, I think, isn't it?
The best thing about the first season, and this is going to sound terrible because I know you're a fan, but the best thing about the first season is it was short.So, you know, I watched them all.
They're, you know, as you say, not great, but not crap.Highly amusing in some places.Some jokes fell flat, but they always did.But at least you're not going through 22 episodes to find the best bits.You get it all done in a week if you want.
That's true.Although, I mean, as a super fan of original Frasier, There aren't many episodes that were duds.I have travelled with you, Dave.
I have travelled with you.I have been on planes, in hotel rooms, where the only soundtrack is old Frasier.
Yeah.There isn't a day where I don't watch some Frasier.Literally.Literally.Because I put it on if I'm in the bath.I put it on if I'm cleaning up in the kitchen.And, you know, I do spend a lot of time cleaning up in the kitchen.
Dave, there's a world of tat on YouTube for exactly those purposes.
I know, but the great thing with Frasier is I don't have to watch it, I could just listen to it, and I know it so well, my brain plays out the scene.
There's another thing they've invented, Dave, called the radio.It does much the same.
They do Frasier on the radio as well.Excellent.I have to catch that.
They probably do somewhere.
Anyway, we're not talking about Fraser Crane, we're talking about Luke Crane.We're doing really well on the news.So everyone, this really is a gaming podcast.We do talk about games, really, honestly.
Luke Crane is the mastermind behind games such as Burning Wheel and Mouse Guard, which people have heard of.
They're not games that I have ever played, but I have looked at Mouse Guard thinking it's a lovely object and I'd want it, but I haven't actually played it. from our patrons, I think Craig has a copy and has played it.
Anyway, Dungeon World, of course, was written by... I guess now one has to say the cancelled Adam Coble.Adam... Oh, damn, I've forgotten his names.It begins with a K, it's got to know it somewhere.
Did an unfortunate thing on an actual play a few years ago. And I guess needs, I mean, personally needs to get out of RPGs where he's not loved and so he seems to have handed that over to Luke Crane.
But I thought that was interesting, two game brand acquisition stories happening in the same week.Shall we move on now?
Okay.Lord of the Rings role-playing game is appearing apparently on D&D Beyond. Yeah.Is it, do we know for sure?I'm pretty confident now.
Then when we first heard the news that Free League was putting stuff on D&D beyond, I said, well, that'll be Symbaroum, because obviously they probably don't have the license to do that sort of shit.
Because we know that Middle Earth, well, Middle Earth Enterprises are quite strict on the terms of the gaming license that sophisticated games have. But I've since seen other people say, I think D&D Beyond have even advertised it.
There's a graphic I've seen with that book and another book by another publisher.They're bringing a whole new tranche of third-party publishers into D&D Beyond.
And Dave, do you need to guffaw and act surprised, or do you know what D&D Beyond actually is?
I vaguely know what D&D Beyond is, I think. Tell me, Dave, what is D&D Beyond?Well, isn't this the subscription model where you can get loads of content by subscribing to D&D Beyond?
It is.But also, very importantly, the thing, and in fact, there's a free subscription as well.It's a great way to design your characters because you've got all the resources there.You only get,
the free one you only get the sort of basic books but you know it does all the maths for you and stuff like that and it prints you out a nice character sheet.
Okay so it doesn't act as a VTT in the same in the same breath?
No but I think people feel there is a mood to make it VTT-ish.
It will be that one day yeah.
And we've seen some splendid graphics where actually You have little animated miniatures on an amazing looking table sort of thing.It looks like a really fancy one.
I don't know whether those are the same projects, because you know how interested I am in D&D, Dave?
Yeah, about as much as I am.
There is an interesting thing here, though.I know we've talked about the sort of D&D Beyond model before, but at the free level, do you actually get enough to make it worth playing?
Yeah, I think you get everything that's in the kind of... Player's Handbook and some other stuff.Basic books though.
So if you're starting out playing, I think you can probably even, you know, if your friends are DM and you're 11 and you're playing your first game, I think you'd probably get a free subscription and be able to build a character for that person's game without having paid for the Player's Handbook, I think.
The two things with that, one, it's a subscription model, so when you stop paying your subscription, you lose access to all the material, which I know that's a very common thing now when we all do it with Netflix and Spotify and everything, and it becomes very normal.
It still feels a bit, in a gaming sense, it feels a bit, I don't know, I guess I've just got to get my head around being a bit more modern.The other one is I like to... Boy, Dave, you've got to get your head around being a bit more modern.
The other thing is I like to have the book in my hand.I don't like to do stuff all off a screen.I'd much rather have the book.I can see how it works really well for a lot of people.
I don't know what the subscription is for a standard subscription where you get access to plenty of good stuff. But if you're, you know, you pay that for 10 years, or let's say you're 20 now or you're 18, you pay it for 40 years.
You could have bought a lot of books with that probably.
You could have bought a damn, damn load of books with that money, yeah.Are the books still, can you still buy the books?Or is D&D Beyond one D&D, so it's all the new edition stuff?
Well, there's been a bit of a controversy about that, which frankly, I can't be bothered to look into.There was talk of getting rid of the fifth edition books when 1D&D came in, so you'd have to potentially buy them.
Anyway, that's all been solved now.You can still play old fifth edition on it and you will be able to in the future, I believe.
Yeah, it's the Rent model and I feel they're trying to make the Rent model more attractive by giving the opportunity to play all that third-party content as well, including Lord of the Rings.
And I am just intrigued because Lord of the Rings is so different from D&D.They've tried to... I think they've done a remarkably good job turning D&D into something that fits Tolkien's world.
Obviously I would say get the One Ring because I think that's pretty damn perfect.And I don't think Lord of the Rings does it as well as the One Ring, but still I think it feels very different from D&D.
So I'm intrigued to see whether you can even make a character that's got all the heroic
level three, but actually still quite super heroic power of a standard D&D character mixed with the low magic, full of despair, desperate for hope type characters you get in Lord of the Rings.
But anyway, it's news, Dave, and it's the world of gaming, so we should be talking about news like this.
That's fine.I'm quite happy to talk about it.It's interesting to talk about, even if I'm never going to go on D&D Beyond, and I'm probably never going to play Lord of the Rings 5th edition.
You've never... Right, yeah.Okay, let's move on.Let's not get into that argument again. So we do have some Kickstarters.You said there are some Kickstarters, and there are.
Now, we should preface all these Kickstarters by saying to everybody, they do exist, and you can spend your money wherever you want, but don't rush to Kickstarter while we're making these announcements until you've heard our Old West news.
I'm not revealing what we're saying in the Old West news, but don't rush.
You know, we are burying the lead very deep in this episode, you know.I'm not sure that's a good thing.We've buried it under Frasier, we've buried it under Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.It's so buried, you know.
That reminds me, I have to tell you what happened in yesterday's playtest.
Oh yes, you did.That can be our other bit of Old West news, what happened in your game yesterday.
right so first of all uh there is a fabulous new year zero game being kick-started and it's not yet tales of the old west it's terminal state it's a cyberpunk game um and it's on Kickstarter.I remember seeing the logo and stuff like that.
I think there may have been a beta version of Terminal State floating around on the Discord a couple of years back, or even on DriveThruRPG.
They definitely have a quick start, but I guess that hasn't been around that long.
It might be a new quick start.I just, I'm sure it's been around for a couple of years somewhere in the sub state terminal state, obviously.
Um, uh, so I have to say I'm not a major fan of cyberpunk and my favorite cyberpunk game is cyborg, which I think is the only game that gets the punk bit of cyberpunk.Um, yeah.
So I am a big Cyberpunk fan, but more in the past.My enthusiasm for Cyberpunk isn't as strong as it was.
I have to say that I very much liked the Gaia Complex by our friend Shep Shepperson, who I bought it off him as an impulse buy at UK Games Expo, not this year, the year before.
And that actually has got some nice ideas which are slightly different, and that takes it in another direction.So if I was going to play a cyberpunk game, I'd probably run that one nowadays.
Certainly having been playing in a Cyberpunk Red campaign in my Wednesday group, which frankly, I fucking hated it.Well, I didn't hate it, that's unfair.It was just... hours and hours of extended combat.It just got really boring really quickly.
I think when we were like 14 or something, that was quite important to us, but it's not what we like to do now.
No, exactly.So I think with Terminal State, it's a year zero engine game, they are using the stepped dice system, not the dice pool system.
Worth pointing that out, yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.If you like that, that might be something that attracts you.The push mechanic seems fairly straightforward.It seems to be mishaps or conditions.But yes, I'm probably not going to back it.It looks nice.Some of the artwork is lovely.
And it's up at the moment.It's got 27 days to go.It's got a little way to go to get to its goal.So if you're interested and you're
You're spending money that you haven't saved for the old way if you've got enough money to back two games on Kickstarter Then the next week or two.Yeah.
Yeah But yeah, so terminal state give it a look see what you think Oh, I tell you what Dave if people have got money that they can use to back it now This can be their August game and their September game has to be something we'll talk about later on.
Yeah, absolutely.Yeah.But don't waste your money there, guys.
Yeah.Be careful.Be careful where you spend your money because we know where you live.We don't know where you live, don't worry.Sentience is a kind of
So one of the things I was thinking about Terminal State, when I saw it as a step-type system, I thought, all right, so it's got to work quite hard to distinguish itself from Blade Runner.
And Sentience is going to have to work quite hard to distinguish itself from Blade Runner Replicant Rebellion, I feel, because that feels to be what it's all about.You are a, what do they call it?Not quite an android.
Words to that effect, I can't remember what it is.Quite a clever portmanteau word I quite liked.But you are definitely not sentient, you're just a machine, except...
you become self-aware and it's your adventures effectively on the other side of the curtain from, or the other side of the Voigt-Kampff machine from the gang in Blade Runner.
It looks initially like it might be a year zero system, but then you'll notice that you can succeed on fours, fives, or sixes, so it's gotta be an easy game.
It's like a Year Zero engine game, but not quite a Year Zero engine game.
There's Pushing.That makes it a bit like a Year Zero game.
There is Pushing, and it's a D6 dice pool where, like you say, you gain one point, effectively, or what they call marks, for a four and a five.You gain two for a six.So it's a bit like a mash-up between the two types of Year Zero.
So you've got the step dice and you've got the D6 dice pool.
Yeah, I mean, obviously what you're going to need is a target number of a number of marks, which is more than one generally.So, yeah, it's a little bit too much adding up and taking away from my liking.
It looks lovely though.Some of the artwork is really good.Looks really nice.
Not as good as the artwork of a game that we will be talking about later on.I just want to assure everybody that if they want to invest in one game with really good artwork, they should hold on.
We are desperately trying to dig up the buried lead here, guys.It'll be to the surface soon.
But Dave, Dave, we are champions of all games because a rising tide lifts all the boats.And so you'll see us, you know, we are doing this entirely without bias.
A rising tide swamps the shore and destroys the bars.
We are lovely people, Dave, and we are recommending all these other games a bit.We've got loads of spare money lying around that you don't need to spend on something coming up soon.
This is a great example of damning with faint praise. They are there, folks.Go and have a look.Go and have a look.Anthroids, that was the word you were looking for.
Anthroids, that was the thing.I like that because it was anthropomorph.Our friend Christos Sonderlind and the gang at Helmgaust have got a new expansion to Troubleshooters out.
They do.It's a two scenario expansion, two adventure books.One's called The Ghost Knight and the other is called The Great Champagne Gallop.Yeah, I just saw that today, this morning.I haven't looked into them anymore.
This is just what I got on email.But again, yeah, I mean, Troubleshooters is one of those games, again, that I really want to get to the table, but I've never managed it.
I love the look of it.I love how the book feels and how the game reads.I haven't played it.I don't know how well it plays.I've heard from others who have played it that it plays pretty well.
Yeah, it's broadly speaking BRP, but with some very interesting twists to it.So it makes it an interesting variant on BRP.The Minoan Affair I ran, which is the hardback scenario adventure that came with the original Kickstarter.
It was quite hard work to run.OK, but for what reason? I think it made some assumptions about player character actions that doesn't necessarily follow.
So you have to do a lot of, obviously they are going to do this, but when they don't do this, what do you do instead?And, you know, you're very much playing in a genre. of European bandesonet.And sometimes character choices go way outside that genre.
You've got to think, well, how do I stay within the genre here and yet satisfy the players and their sense of action?So, yeah, it's quite a challenge.
But I might be inclined to get those two because they're all numbered like proper old Tintin albums and stuff like that. One feels one has to have the full set on one's shelves.
You either have the collection or you don't, I guess.
Yeah, if I wasn't investing in a fabulous new game that I'm going to talk about in a little while, or you are, then I'd definitely be doing this.I'll have to see how my pay packet spreads, whether I can get
Obviously, I'm not going to invest in my own game.We've invested blood, sweat and tears in it.We're not going to buy our own game off Kickstarter.That's just giving Kickstarter money.You have a pay packet?I do actually have a pay packet, yeah.
I've forgotten what one of those looks like, frankly.Anyway, I think that's it for the world of games.
That's the end of the world of gaming, yeah. And what I did there is I pressed a button without talking about it, but now I'm talking about it.
This is becoming a bit of a nervous tick now, isn't it?You just can't press the button without talking about it.
Have we got any news from the Old West, Dave?
We have some news from the Old West.The news that we've had deeply buried for the last half an hour is... Oh yes, what your player did in the game you ran yesterday.
This is going to be exciting.
Before we get to that though, let's not bury it even further.So, we can announce the Kickstarter for Tales of the Old West is going to go live on Tuesday, the 3rd of September, 2024 at 1600 British Summer Time.
So next week, or by the time this comes out, wherever we're now, it'll be a couple of days.So gird your loins, gather up your wallets, and come and back us.Yeah, so... Please! Yeah, so there we go.
There has to be a little caveat behind that.
Something may intervene and we may have to delay it a bit because I've seen Kickstarter launches delayed, but everything going according to plan, four o'clock in the afternoon, our time, it's going to go live.
Which will be 11 o'clock Eastern and I think, what, eight o'clock Pacific.It'll be five o'clock for Central European time, so
All a good time for everyone who might be interested to be waiting by their computers, ready to press the pledge loads button.
Pledge loads.I don't think there is a pledge loads button.I think you have to decide.But I'm loving the way our Kickstarter page is looking, Dave, right now.
It's coming.I haven't looked at it today, so have you done some more?
Oh, you haven't looked at it?You want to look at it and see what the new backer levels are.
Right.Oh, okay.Yeah, we did talk about those.Yeah, they're quite cool, aren't they?They're quite cool.Yeah, so there we go.That's the news.That's the news that I guess nobody had thought that wasn't going to be the news for the last half an hour.
But yeah, here we go, for God's sake.Blimey, fuck.
It's a family show, Dave.
Well, mostly.It's like being at the top of a ski jump and literally just taking our ass off the chair and we're beginning to move down towards the point where the thing happens.So yeah, it's exciting, but terrifying at the same time.
And also terrifying, yeah.
But I think, you know, we are quite confident in what we've done.And we are also massively humbled by the support that we've had so far and the number of people we've had sign up to the pre-launch page.
So we are remaining optimistic that it's going to go really well.Go on, Matt, you say.
I just want to say, Dave, that 456 people have followed as of this moment. our Kickstarter page, and that is just a page that says coming soon.
So thank you, all of you, if you, listener, are among those 456.
But also, thank you if you're amongst the unknown number of people who saw it and said, I'm not bothered about doing that, but I'm going to back them anyway when it comes out.Thank you as well.
We just don't know what that audience, that community looks like. So yeah, exciting times.But I was going to say, we had a great game of Tales of the Old West last night.Tony was running our playtest.
There's two things that are great about this, so I'm going to digress a little here.
Go ahead, we've got time to talk.
And I think they're both... illustrate a couple of the great things I think that we've got in Tales of the Old West.So the first is the whole scenario was based on a role that I made on the last turn of the season.
Which is the point of Turn of the Seasons, I love that.Exactly.What was the role you made?
So the role was, there's a problem with my compadre.It didn't specify what, but there's something going on.So, what happened?
Is this something you've talked about in previous interviews, what we have been doing, about this is Grandpa Joe or something has murdered somebody?
That's it, yeah, Grandpa Willie.So Grandpa Willie had gone on a, as you do with your compadre, so a NPC close friends of your character, although if you mistreat them, the GM can run them as well and they can betray you.
So you need to be, but otherwise you get to control them.So I sent him off to go and speak to some Native American friends of ours to keep the relationship warm. And he came back through a town called Sherman.
And a little while later, I had some deputies from Sherman turn up saying, oh, yeah, your Grandpa Willie, who we know works at the Anaheim Ranch, is wanted for murder.I was like, OK, that doesn't sound like Willie.
Anyway, so the whole scenario was based on that.So I managed to get Willie off into the woods.So he was hidden.And we then went to Sherman to try and work out what was going on.
So the whole two sessions, this is two weeks worth of play, was all based on that one role that I made several weeks ago, a couple of months ago, that Tony then, as the GM, noted it down, stuck it in his back pocket, and then brought it out a bit later on to
you know, make the story entirely about me.You know, I could have just let Grandpa Willy go and let them take him and say, I'm not going to risk myself for him.But he's an old friend of mine.So I was prepared to risk my life.
And it didn't end up in a gunfight.We managed to negotiate with the bad guy.But it was very close.We were all expected to have a big gunfight in the main street of Sherman.But the funny thing was, so the So that was great.
That shows how the turn of the season really works to help the GM run stories that really matter to your players.
The great thing was, so the guy had been murdered was a doctor and he seemingly got caught up in the middle of a gunfight in a bar and had apparently been shot through the chest with a shotgun.
Now he'd been buried, and we obviously had a lot of suspicion about that maybe he wasn't shot through the chest with a shotgun.
So two of our characters, Pete's character and Paul's character, went up to the graveyard one night to dig him up and check and see if there was a shotgun wound on him.So as they were doing that, there was some old warden in the church
He obviously heard them and he came out to see what was going on.
So Paul tried to sneak up behind him just to keep him quiet, screwed up his roll, pushed it, got two ones on his trouble, had no faith to buy them off because he had one faith point left.He rolled his trouble die, got a six, so that became a three.
And then the roll on that column gave a result of something goes wrong for a bystander.They suffer a six dice attack, crit one, damage one.
So we had Paul basically stumble in the dark, bump into this guy, knock him into an empty grave, where he then got a bang on the head, basically gouged his eye out when he hit some rocks on the bottom. And then he had to deal with him.
So he then jumped into the thing and killed him.And all of this was completely from the trouble dice and Paul pushing his role.And it was just so funny that, you know, we had no intention of killing anybody, but here we go.
Trouble meant that Paul had killed this poor guy. As it turned out, the guy, the doctor who'd been shot, did have a shotgun wound.So they then buried the guy they'd just killed in the same grave as the doctor.So he just disappeared.Yeah.
And then the rest of us didn't know anything about it.So we kind of had the moment as we were riding out of town after the adventure, and me turning around to them all saying, hey, great, we visited the town.We didn't kill anybody.Great fun.
It was a really good, really good session.
Cool. So yeah, Ted, that's an example of the fun you can have when you're running this game.If only you could back it.Let's just remind me, have we got any news about when that's going live?
I've heard a rumor it might be next Tuesday, the 3rd of September at 1600 British summertime.
That's brilliant news.That's brilliant news.
So yes, great. Yeah, cool.So, you know, it's been a great game to work on.It's been a lot of work.We've done a lot of research.
And one of the things that we had to sort of work, you know, particularly thoroughly on was, you know, trying to get the history right and then dealing with some of the more difficult questions that that history brings up.
Yeah, I mean, we realised that the easy way out is to just add vampires and zombies, but we determined we weren't going to do that, so... Yeah, so here's my take on dealing with difficult history.
Making a historical role-playing game brings challenges that other RPGs don't face, or at least don't have to face, if the design is mindful from the start.
I can see why game designers like to go for the fantastical and supernatural, creating enemies that are undoubtedly evil so it's 100% fine to kill them without a second's thought.
But even these antagonists, in a mature RPG that isn't just black and white, perhaps deserve more respect than simply being placed in the way of player characters so they can hack them to death.
It always brings to mind the Lord of the Rings movies, and particularly the scene in Fellowship where Aragorn finally kills Lurtz, the Uruk-hai leader, by slicing his head off.
Why is that okay, when they'd never have shown a human character being decapitated in the same way? It's because Lurz is bad.A monster.
And it's okay to slaughter monsters, because they don't have a backstory, or a history, or wants, needs, motivations or anything like that, right?
So actually, I think all games need to be careful in their design and representation of the individuals and characters, human or otherwise, in any game, historical or fantasy.
But there is greater onus on those trying to recreate a historical setting in an RPG.And that's me.It's on well-established record that I love historical settings.
I co-designed War Stories and wrote the campaign, which was specifically about two weeks in June, 1944, and the lives of a specific set of people.I've long had an ambition to bring a historical Roman RPG to the table, as well as a medieval one,
All of these come with a plethora of issues, from misogyny and prejudice, racism or classism in some cases, slavery or quasi-slavery in some cases, total disregard for and violations of what we would now call a person's human rights, ethnic cleansing, religious genocide, and on and on.
The history of the human race is pretty bleak for the most part, but it is our collective history.Nothing we can say or do will change what happened in the past.
But what we can do is shine a light on that history, sweep away the myths, the legends, and the rewriting by the victors, to reveal, as far as any historian can, what really happened, and bring to the fore the lived experience of those people who did, in fact, experience those times.
I feel a strong sense of responsibility to those people who actually lived through what we can only experience through games, books, films, and the occasional LARP.
As I said in the introduction to the War Stories Rendezvous with Destiny campaign, the history we explore has been immortalized through many books, films, and television shows, and written at the cost of the lives and suffering of countless men, women, and children.
A historical role-playing game invites you into the lives and experiences of those real people, and we must do so mindfully and with respect.What does mindfully and with respect actually mean?
Well, first up, it means laying out the history as it really happened.
In the case of the Wild West, it means, amongst other things, laying bare the imperial ambitions of European powers and how that affected 300 years of colonization of continental North America.
Laying bare the impact on those who already lived in those lands.Laying bare the impact of slavery on the millions who suffered it and on the political and cultural landscape.
and laying bare the power that rested largely in the hands of men, and the power of money.
Secondly, it means understanding, at least as far as possible without having lived them ourselves, the traditions and history of the people who lived there, and being respectful of those traditions.
As a key example in the Wild West, understanding the perspective of Native American peoples is vital to telling the tale of the West.
Now this isn't easy, as Native Americans across the continent are not a single entity, as they all too often have been portrayed in the past, but are a hugely diverse range of cultures and communities.
But it's important to understand enough to represent them respectfully, to encourage others to challenge the bad history rather than revel in it, and to encourage others to research themselves and learn some more.
Third, it's about getting underneath the myth of the history and uncovering the stories of those who've been marginalised by that myth.In the Wild West, the myth is all about the White Cowboy, working the range and riding off into the sunset.
But what about the tales of the Black Cowboys, for there were a lot of them, and the Vaqueros, who were working the land centuries before the White Cowboys turned up and taught them everything they knew?
What about those who were once enslaved and suddenly found themselves emancipated, free, such as it was, to try, and usually fail, to find their loved ones from whom they'd been separated by a callous slave owner?
What about the women who, all too often in the myth, are terrorised by those savage natives, only to be saved by the cowboys?
The stories of real women in the West, like Belle Starr, Mary Fields, Eleanor Dumont and Susan McSween are very different to that.And those savage natives, were they really so savage?I think we find that they were, on the whole, not.
In fact, if you look at the history, there are literally hundreds of examples of treaties being signed guaranteeing Native American people eternal rights over certain lands that were not worth the paper they were written on as soon as the settlers got a whiff of gold.
It's no surprise that many natives chose to fight.Fourth, it's about being clear on the injustices and misdeeds of the past. if indeed those two words are strong enough to describe what happened to so many people in the West.
The realities of racism, prejudice, discrimination and exploitation, in all the forms they took, need to be recognised, not to be glorified and revelled in, but to be understood as key threads in the tapestry of the time.
Managing all this takes a lot of work, effort, and research.But if you want to do right by those people who once lived through these times and present yourself as trustworthy and credible, it's work you must do.
The most important part of this work is seeking the perspectives of others, and particularly of those with cultural knowledge and experience.
There's no substitution for approaching those from within those communities to get an understanding that cannot be gained in any other way.
Nowadays, we call it sensitivity reading, but at its heart, it's simply having the respect to ask those who really know what they're talking about for their advice and guidance, an endorsement of the way you're approaching a subject.
This is really important in building your understanding of that subject matter at hand, but also respecting those for whom that subject matter is so much more than that.It's their history and their heritage.
While the history is what it is, in understanding it we can explore the actual lives of those who lived through it.The people of the Wild West are not the stereotypes that the myth would have us believe.Of course they aren't.
They are real folks with faith, big dreams, hopes, fears, loves and motivations.In seeing the myth for what it really is, and getting to the real history behind it, we can start to explore the fascinating and spellbinding stories of all these people,
and hopefully honor their memories by respectfully recreating their world within our own.
So, yes, the thing is, I know all this because I've been working with you through it.And it still makes me a little bit nervous because here we are about to go public.
reach you know all our patrons have been with us on this journey lots of them have read you know the drafts we've done of this but we're about to get out there on kickstarter to a bunch of people we don't know who don't know us who aren't necessarily aware of uh you know what we've talked about in the discord and stuff like that yeah um
And yeah, I'm just curious to see how they'll take it and whether they think we're the right people even to be doing a game like this.
And that's always been a worry for me, which is why I was quite keen quite early on in the process to involve, as you say, people who are now called sensitivity readers.Yeah.
No, absolutely.Like I said at the piece, Yeah, that's a really, you know, sensitivity reader is a label for doing things in the right way.
You know, so there's, you know, I think sometimes, even when I was writing the piece, it felt the term sensitivity reader almost feels like just a little bit of sometimes a bit of a,
a flag that someone waves and say, ah, sensitivity read, I've, you know, therefore I've done what I need to do to, you know, to make it okay to do whatever I'm doing.
And I think, you know, you shouldn't, maybe the point I didn't bring out very well is that just saying, oh yeah, we've had a sensitivity reader isn't enough. what you need to do is unpack what that actually means and what you've done under that.
So, in our sense, we've had sensitivity readers, professional sensitivity readers, read it.We've had, you know, a lot of our patrons.
The lovely Saul, one of our patrons.
We've had personal friends with some of the heritages that are involved in this reading it.
So it is a tricky one, and I think you'll always get someone whose view would be that, you know, as two white boys, we shouldn't be from England, we shouldn't be doing this kind of thing.
Now, I disagree with that, and I can go into the reasons why if you want me to.But you do need to treat it in the way that I think we've treated it.And we've gone into it with a genuine intent
to do it respectfully, to do it properly, to do it with knowledge, with insight that we gain from all the work we've put in and from those people we speak to and get to help us.
And if you do that and you do it with all the right intention, then I would hope that everyone would see that even if we do make a mistake somewhere, it's not been done through
kind of lack of effort to try and make things in the right way and do it in a sensitive way and not upset somebody unnecessarily.
Not that there's a way of upsetting somebody necessarily in this process, because we're obviously not trying to upset anyone.
And I think that's my big thing point about getting to the history and getting underneath the myth and getting to the history of the myth and the lived experience of the people who were there, whatever culture or heritage they might have been.
So I think that's the really key point for me.
Yeah, and particularly with coming back to us, as you say, it's important with any time, any period of history.I mean, I guess as it comes out of living memory, as it gets beyond living memory, it becomes slightly less important.
But if you're doing a thing on ancient Egypt, Yeah, I'd like to think we'd be involving Muhammad in that rather than just assuming that we can read a few textbooks on the ancient Egypt and make some assumptions about Egyptian people.
It's an interesting point.
So there was a whole huge hoo-ha. a while ago about a Netflix docudrama that they did about Cleopatra.And the state of Egypt sued Netflix for portraying Cleopatra and the people of the time in the wrong way.
And so they'd made a decision to portray her in a certain way.And that wasn't what all the archaeological evidence,
you know, the Egyptian, I guess, I don't want to say Egyptian people, but the authorities in Egypt who, you know, who I guess have a view of this.
And yeah, the state of Egypt, I think it was the state of Egypt sued Netflix over it because they were so angry at the depiction.So that's where you get it spectacularly wrong.
Now, I think if you wanted to depict someone like Cleopatra, a historical figure, or that culture as something different, then either you do that with all those people on board, and you explain to them where you're coming from, and you take their advice, and if their advice is, don't be stupid, don't do it, you take that bit of advice, or you say, this isn't a documentary, this is a drama, and we are not presenting it as history.
we're presenting it as a fictionalised drama, in which case, you know, you're kind of off the hook, you can do what you like, I guess.
Not everyone would agree with that, but yeah.
But I think it becomes more sensitive, you know, where the Old West is not quite within living memory, but still people know grandparents who, you know, potentially lived through this time.So it's,
It's not far off and obviously it is a heavily it's a time of great conflict and a heavily contested reading and Coming back to myth-making which is actually where I started this, you know, and then there was and I was watching something recently and I realized that there's There's this film
I know, I was watching Black Klansman Is It?And Black Klansman, have you ever seen that film?I can recommend it.I haven't, no.Okay.So Black Klansman is a Spike Lee film.
It's based on the true story of a black cop in Colorado who manages to join the Ku Klux Klan.
Yeah, I haven't seen it.I've seen bits of it.I've seen some clips, yeah.
And it starts off with this silent movie called Birth of a Nation, which is now a, you know, it's recognised as being a thing that sort of, you know, coalesced white anti-black racism in a popular culture media.
And, of course, what you kind of realise with Birth of a Nation is it's one of the first Westerns.So it kind of sets the tone then for westerns, shall we say, that are this heavily whitewashed version of the American West.
And so that's what we're, you know, and on one side of us we're celebrating those westerns because we've got gunfight rules and things like that and, you know, we talk about if you liked Tombstone,
you know you'll like this game or if you like um deadwood and things like that which are part of that genre but we've got to recognize the early part of that genre making is exclusively white and actually I think, intentionally racist.
It got better over time, through the decades, but it's only recently that we're seeing anything like the levels of representations of different cultures in the American West at the time.So that's what we're fighting against.
We want to celebrate that myth, or the wholesome parts of that myth-making, But we also want to recognise the actual history that went on.
And at the same time, again, give our players the opportunity not to be hidebound by people saying, oh, you can't do that because you're a woman, or you can't do that because you're black.
So that was the first thing that we sent to our sensitivity reader in America.I'm just trying to find her report because I wanted to mention a name because she did say we could use a name.
Yeah, Jordan something.Jordan, I can't remember the surname off the top of my head.
Yeah, I can't find her report.I was only looking at it a few weeks ago because I wanted to check something on Native Americans, she said.
Anyway, so I took it as a great compliment because I guess there's times when you're a sensitivity reader and you can say, well, I'm giving you this advice.You can take it or leave it as you want.
But I imagine sometimes they say, but please don't put my name in the credits, whatever you do with it.
She said, there's elements of this, I feel a reform letter, but she had the line in there that said, if you want to use by name the credits you can.That almost was, okay, we're not doing badly here.
She gave us great advice, but she saw our intentions were.Yes.
We have worked very hard.Right from the very start, the very first, When we sat down and said, OK, what's our philosophy for the game?
The very first thing we had was, you know, get the history right, not whitewash anything, portray all the people in the West in the right way, you know, and give everybody... You said it really well the other day, remove barriers to people understanding or playing those particular characters.
And I think that's one of the things that... We have worked very hard over the last few years to try and get right.Now, that's not saying that we haven't got something slightly wrong somewhere, or a tone wrong or something.
And if that's the case, then we want to know, because we want to get it right.We're not going to be defensive about it.We want to understand what, if we've missed something, then we want to know about it.
So particularly, a good chunk of what we sent to Jordan was our life path character creation system, which is at this moment still a stretch goal.So guys, if you want to see it, back it.
That was an interesting challenge because, and in fact, I think we've improved the life path based on her feedback.But there, you can't make assumptions.
You've got this thing where you've got really a tiny amount of words to sum up a culture, so you've got a hint at the culture, but you can't say, I feel, this is what that culture is.In fact, I think this is a lesson I learned from Coriolis.
We've given hooks for you to look into that and for you to come out there, but we're not telling you
this is what playing somebody from, say, New Mexico, be they Apache or Comanche, we haven't gone into pages and pages of description, this is what Comanche life was like.And I feel for two reasons.
One is that we're not really doing that with Europeans.We haven't got a page on, this is what Englishmen were like at the time.
Yeah, exactly, because that in itself is almost becoming, you know, a bit, what's the word I'm looking for?Stereotyping again, isn't it?It's like, yes, the average Comanche was like this.Well, yeah, that doesn't, no, that doesn't work.
So in the life path we've given prompts, and we haven't even said that these are Comanche prompts, what we've done now is we've said if you come from this area you could be a white European settler, you could be this, that or the other, and these particular
indigenous communities were living there at that time.We've just named them, it's up to you to decide.
Some of the sort of historic events may apply to some of those things but what we've tried to do is create like just a hook rather than saying this is what all the Native Americans were like in that corner of the continent.
Yeah absolutely.I think you know what we have tried to do is is draw out some of the history, and there are probably some generalizations in that because we're talking about the history of the continent in a few pages.
We're talking actually about the history of the whole bloody world, so there's going to be some generalizations.
But also, I did a lot of work to try and get the endonyms for different Native American communities right, different tribes right.
Now, I've done a lot of research there, but one of the things I found out in that research is you're probably going to get it wrong anyway, in some way or another, because the complexity of those communities is such that even if I find an endonym that works for some people in that community, then that won't work for others.
So we've done our best to try and give a flavor of that and try and reflect that, encouraging people to treat
those kind of characters with respect rather than treat them as mythological in the 1950s or 1960s movies characters and encourage people to go and do a bit of their own reading or research to understand them a little bit better and fill out their characters through, you only need a few Google searches, frankly, there's quite a lot of stuff that you can find.
Now we've read a lot of books and have gone through a lot of sort of scholarly stuff. But you can find out a lot of good information just by a little bit of effort.We are not crusading here for people to become historians of Native American history.
What we are doing is saying, don't make stupid assumptions.Don't make stupid stereotypes.Have a little look behind the curtain of the myth and see what those people really were like and the kind of thing they really went through.
And then you can build your character out of that.
Yeah, and it'll be more fun for that as well.
Yes, absolutely, completely.Right, I think we're done here.
We're coming up to an hour of recording and my friend's about to die.
So the next time we get together, we will be ten days, two weeks into the Kickstarter.
Yeah, expect an old West News in that episode.
Even if it's just us hanging ourselves because it's gone so badly.
Yeah, cancelling the Kickstarter because nobody backed it.
No, hopefully not. But yeah, so thanks everyone for listening.I'm really excited about what's going to happen over the next few weeks.Really excited for Tuesday.Tell all your friends, tell all your enemies, just tell everyone.
Tell everybody.I'm going to put it on my bloody LinkedIn as well.So all my professional colleagues who don't know that this is my hobby are going to find out.Cool.Good stuff.But I thought I'd wait until we were actually live before doing that.
One last thing, which I should have mentioned in the world of gaming.I'm going to be at Tabletop Scotland on the weekend of 6th to the 8th of September.So I'm going to be running demos of Tales of the Old West.
I'm going to be talking to people about Tales of the Old West.I'm going to be wearing Tales of the Old West t-shirts.I might even have a cowboy hat.Come and see me.Come and have a chat.Come and play the game.Come and back us.Yeah.
Yeah, and there's a lovely new banner you've got as well.
It's fabulous.That was really nice.The artwork we've got is super, but actually I didn't quite realise how good it was until I rolled up that banner when it arrived this morning in my kitchen and had a look at it really close up.It is fabulous.
Very, very pleased with that artwork.Some great work from both our artists, Thomas and Malin.Really superb. Right, we should call it there.So, until next time, it's goodbye from me.
And it's goodbye from him.
And may the icons back our Kickstarter.You have been listening to The Effect podcast, presented by Fiction Suit and the RPG Gods.Music stars on a black sea, used with permission of Free League Publishing.
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