Small Press, Big Game
Never one to turn down pizza, I immediately said yes.
The four of us sat down to a great meal and immediately started talking about a lot of different games. From the beginning, it was obvious that Seth knew a whole lot about many different role playing games. He was able to discuss at some length a number of games I had always wanted to play, but had not had the chance. Eventually the conversation turned to Seth’s own games and it became apparent that he wrote games that I would like, too.
Since I knew him primarily as a Forge-inspired role playing game designer, I was very surprised that his first game was a little known mecha fighting game called Junk: A Game Of Mechanized Combat In A Not So Intelligent Future published in 2001. Yeah, you read that right, a not-so-intelligent future.
In Junk, the planet Joisey has been settled in the wake of the Redneck Revolition and is now fought over by rednecks who battle in mecha made out of scrap metal and are powered by engines that run on alcohol. And yes, that means if you need more energy, you can always use a better quality beer! Keeping the redneck theme, Junk mecha deliver whuppings to each other until one of them gets a big enough whupping that it literally falls to pieces!
Like most first creative endeavors, Seth has mixed (though mostly positive) emotions about Junk. A self-professed lover of the mecha genre, he was happy to have added something unique to it, but at the same time there are certain passages which elicit a different response. “I read some sections and I’m like ‘Really? I let that pass?” Seth says. Still, he he swears the game is playable and a lot of fun, but he definitely sees things he would have done differently.
Would he do a second edition? “Sometimes I think about it,” he admits, but at this time, there are no plans to do so. Yet.
After Junk, Seth got involved in the Gaming Outpost (a website for game designers) and was one of the first members of the Forge, the independent community of small press game designers. (In fact, he has a lower member number than Forge creator Ron Edwards.) Just like Seth was outgoing with me at Gen Con, he was a very active participant in Forge discussions with designers who would go on to write some of the seminal works of indie game design including Ron Edwards, Mike Holmes, Ralph Mazza, Ben Lehman, and others. At the same time, he was working on a game called Legends of Alyria which is probably the game most people thought he designed first.
The elevator pitch for Legends of Alryia is simple. It’s the role playing game C.S. Lewis would have designed if had grown up playing Final Fantasy VII. It’s that good. Basically, one of Seth’s design goals was to make Final Fantasy VII make sense, at least the part where a man walks out of a monorail in front of an office high rise and fights gun-shooting robots with a sword.
He accomplishes that beautifully with a game that is expansive without being a giant info dump. There are cybernetically enhanced warriors, criminals, dragon cultists, and dozens of locations on the planet Alyria, each with their own theme. The write ups of each location give players and GMs just enough to get their imagination going, but not so much that the can’t make locations their own.
The system in Legends of Alyria is also interesting. It uses a custom set of ten-sided dice called clock dice which feature the phases of Alyria’s moon and a special symbol of disaster that is worshipped by some, feared by others. Even more interesting, the conflict resolution system revolves around three stats (Force, Insight, Determination) and traits, which both players and opponents have. In a conflict, players can choose to use one of their own traits to gain an advantage or one of their opponent’s traits against them. All in all, it is a great game which combines a very traditional feel (huge setting) with a more narrative approach to conflict resolution. It is the best of both worlds.
After Legends of Alyria, Seth played around with a few ideas, dutifully keeping notes on each in a composition notebooks. Then, inspiration struck, like it often does, completely out of nowhere. It was the midst of a hard move in which he and his family were jammed into a temporary house and all the stress that came with it that he got the inspiration to sit down one day and write a detective noir game that would be called Dirty Secrets.
Dirty Secrets is a game for “one player and many GMs,” Seth says because the game features one person as the Investigator and all the other players taking turns describing suspects and slowly revealing clues. The game is features a set of simple mechanics that create a lot of complexity and basically boil down to the crime-grid mechanic where the players keep track of who they are suspicious of and a mechanic for introducing NPCs. NPCs have six demographics including economic status, age, and race. Seth finds that just that combination of demographics, players begin to automatically make assumptions about the NPC.
These assumptions take on a whole new dynamic, though, because Dirty Secrets is set in the players’ hometown. Suddenly, players are not just struggling with their preconceived notions about the NPCs, they also have to deal with how they see their town and the legends built up around it. It’s an added dimension that makes the game that much more interesting.
Seth was debutting Dirty Secrets at the Gen Con at which I met him, however, he would turn right around the next year and release A Flower For Mara the next year.
“A A Flower For Mara is weird,” Seth laughs.
I wasn’t sure he was going to say more than that, but then he went on to explain that really he does not consider A Flower For Mara to be a role playing game at all, but rather a improvisational play with a few stage directions. The jeepform game/ improvisation play involves the actors taking on various roles (father, mother, husband, daughter) of a women who has passed away name Mara.
Throughout the course of the play (and by interacting with an actor who takes the role of Mara), players work face the fact Mara has died and the feelings they had about her while she was alive. To represent their relationship to Mara, players carry around a flower which they must hold until they have resolved their feelings. Only then are they able to lay the flower down at her grave and move on with their lives.
Laying the flower down is not mandatory, though usually the actors can work out their characters’ issues and move on. However, Seth says, when the actors move on, they are changed. There is something about the experience that causes them to open up, be vulnerable, and earn each other’s trust. So, A Flower For Mara is definitely weird, but also worth it.
If that weren’t enough, Seth has five games that he is currently working on, including a game called Showdown which is about a fight to the death between two characters. I’ve seen the playtest docs…it’s going to be huge.
After that, he’s also working on a game called Major Crimes, which he claims will allow you to play The Wire and let you take on the role of both criminals and villains. He’s also working on three more jeepform/improvisation plays. One called First Responders about burnt out cops on the beat, another called The Waiting Room a game culled from real life experiences before the death of a loved one, and a game called ’Til Death Do Us Part a role playing game about a happy marriage free of murder, adultery, and divorce…the things that make most games fun.
All in all, Seth has put together a tremendous library of games and, at the same, has evolved as a game designer. The games he put down have grown from Junk past Legends of Alyria and into a new set of games that challenge our definition of “role playing game,” but let us have a good time anyway.
