An Interview with Zzarchov Kowolski

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 Dunnsmouthhad 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 Zardaxis a showcase of how you can have a dungeon spanning set of interlocking puzzles. In addition to its spoiler based goal,  The Pale Ladywas 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 Seayou 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.

It ironically hasn’t done much better than my ill-advised surprise release for The Gem Prison of Zardax where I posted about it once on April 1st and then just released it later with no additional pre-release announcements. 

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.

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Talking Special Snowflakes and Strange Stars with Trey Causey

Resplendent in its Star Frontiers-homage, full color cover, Trey Causey's Strange Stars setting book has finally hit the virtual stands both in PDF and print form. Having watched this product grow from a wee germinal of an idea--and had any number of rambling, tangential conversations with Trey along the way--I feel entirely to close to give the book a decent, critical review. (But really you should buy this thing, it's one of the best pieces to come out of the tsunami wave of DIY hobbyist products in recent months).

A little more interesting is to open that conversation stream a little to a broader audience (as I did with his Weird Adventures) to hear the what and why that went into the making of SS.

Hill Cantons: Let's talk Strange Stars. I will admit to being deeply fascinated watching you grow these worlds and products bit by bit from the floor level via posts on your blog, From the Sorcerer's Skull. The sepia/black and white images and little digressions that came out with Weird Adventures sucked me in and kept me pulling for you all the way to press time. Tell me about how SS came to be and how it developed on the blog. What moved you to do this and what was the process like doing it in this slow reveal-by-blog type way?

Trey Causey: With doing a blog six days a week at one point (now roughly five), I spend a lot of time brainstorming/daydreaming content. I had toyed with a couple of science fictional concepts that didn’t quite take off (though I’d sort of like to return to them one day) like an alt-history pulp space and a science fantasy Greek mythology thing. One sort of fun (I thought) but largely throwaway post I did was on Talislanta as a space opera setting. That post got some positive feedback, which always tends to prompt me to expand on an idea a bit more.

I got maybe three more posts out of it and in the comments to one of those, Brutorz Bill of the Green Skeleton Gaming Guild suggested I ought to do my own sci-fi thing, like “Weird Adventures in Space.” Thinking about doing my own thing (but with Talislanta Space ideas still in my brain), I wound up writing the first of the Strange Stars posts—though it didn’t have that name or any name, at that point. It grew from there, becoming more and more its own thing as it went on. Ten posts and about a month later, it was christened “Strange Stars.”

As anything would that’s developed in bite-size bits over a period of a couple of years, Strange Stars sort of lurched in somewhat different directions at times. The earliest posts are trying hard to rationalize science fantasy concepts into something a little harder sci-fi. Then there came a bit of weirdness probably inspired by Prophet and revisiting old issues of Heavy Metal, and here and there, small doses of “serious” science fiction brought on by my reading Alistair Reynolds and Charles Stross. All the time though, I knew I wanted it to mix the stuff I read in modern science fiction novels with the stuff I saw in mid-60s to mid-80s sci-fi comics, films, and paperback covers. The aesthetic was always important—which is often a frustrating thing when you are not yourself an artist.

HC: We've talked a good deal one on one about immersive worldbuilding and setting work as part of the DIY rpg scene--both of us seeming to fall down on being fans of those kinds of efforts. I rather like how SS hits a sweet spot balance: it's unashamedly and purely about setting/worldbuilding but it breaks info-dump down into tiny bites and leaves a lot of evocative questions off stage. How do you see SS fitting into the discussion of so-called Special Snowflake settings?

TC: Looking at the stuff produced on blogs and in publications by the DIY crowd we’re both somewhat associated with, I think it’s clear people like setting stuff, despite what’s sometimes said about it in the abstract. I think the real issue isn’t “setting versus no setting” but the suggestive leanness of a pulp fiction novella versus the over-elaboration of a multi-volume, doorstop fantasy epic.

The debate often framed as “setting detail versus freedom” is really something more like “inspiring setting versus constraining setting.” If I'm right, and the second issue is the real one, then there are things we can do about it. The traditional, prose heavy ways of delivering setting information are the prevailing style, not necessarily the best way to do it. I wanted to try something at least a bit different.

There’s always a balance to be sought, though. The things that some people complain about regarding settings are exactly the things other people like about them. I got minor complaints about stuff that Weird Adventures didn’t address, and I don’t doubt I will get some of that with Strange Stars which leaves even larger lacunae. Sometimes I left things out due to space considerations, and other times because I hadn’t thought to include it. What I would really love to see is Strange Stars not as one special snowflake, but a number of them because people take it and come up with totally different stuff to fill in those holes. I want to read a G+ or a blog post and catch myself thinking: “but--but that’s not how I would do it at all!”

HC: The Terran Trade Authority and Galactic Encounter books of the late 1970s were huge aesthetic influences on my young brain (as were the Star Wars fan booklets and comics). Classic Traveller was free of any illustrations for years and those books filled in the blanks. There clearly seems some linkage to those image-rich books in your inspiration stew. Can you tell me about that and the other inspiration points?

TC: There is, indeed. The Galactic Encounters book, Aliens in Space, was the only one of these I read in childhood, but it made quite an impression. I bought it a few years ago and a couple of books from imitator series. I have also always been a fan of reference works for fictional worlds (particularly well-done, fan-made ones) like the Star Fleet Technical Manual, and the Starfleet Medical Reference Manual, but also more recent things like the image-heavy Dorling Kindersley Star Wars and Star Trek books. Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrialsis there, too. A lot of 70s comics like The Legion of Superheroesby Grell and Cockrum, and stuff by Chaykin and Starlin were on my mind, too.

A lot of these things have design aesthetics that seem a bit silly at times, perhaps. Certainly they never seem “cutting edge.” That was part of the reason I liked them and wanted to draw from them. The future is never going to be exactly how we view it in the present; like the past, it’s a different country. Using outdated styles, I feel like, gets us past what’s currently cool in to something just a bit alienating—like the real future is likely to be. Also, I wanted the future to seem “lived in” and grubby, but again not the lived in and grubby of dystopian futures of the 2000s. The seventies is the point where science fiction first moved from sterile and shiny to grubby and worn, visually.

HC: Layout and design wise SS is impressive for a one-man DIY outfit. What did it take to get it to that point?

TC: Thanks. Mostly, I would say it took the technical acumen of Lester B. Portly. Before that, though, the conception was a long time in coming. I had been sort of trying to write something “Strange Stars” since late 2013, but it just wasn’t flowing. Sometime in early 2014, I got the idea to do a whole setting book in pictures. I’m sure it wasn’t from nowhere; there was probably some discussion on G+ or something that inspired it.

Anyway, this panel in Prophet was the first thing I thought of.

I realized, of course, I wasn’t going to be able to afford enough art to do a whole setting book like that, so I looked to the Dorling Kindersley books as the primary model. I put sample pages from several of those, and sample pages from some pages from comic books like DC Secret Files and Handbook of the Marvel Universe and started talking to Lester. His initial thought was that what I wanted was too expensive, but was willing to provide his help to paring it down.

Once we had a vague idea of the basic template (which Lester would keep refining as we went on), I picked out the fonts I wanted and made a style guide. Before the design was finalized, I already had the artist working on the images. The first few pages (the Vokun and Alliance spreads) were the hardest, but after that we pretty much had it down.

HC: You have some mechanically-minded supplements coming up the pike that will translate SS into something that can be run straight out of the box. Tell me about those.

TC: I knew from early on that I wanted to do implementations of the setting in multiple systems. John Till of Fate SF stepped up and offered his services to do the Fate supplement, and he’s been putting a lot of work into it. I think Fate fans will be pleased. I’m compiling and rounding out the Stars Without Number based stats that I used with most of the blog posts in the setting, plus adding some random generators for orbital habitats, adventures,  and the like.

I got an email the other day from a guy wanting to do a Traveller supplement; I would love to see that and anything else that gets somebody fired up enough to do it.

HC:So what's next? What other projects have you been mulling?

TC: So many possibilities, so little time! I’ve got science fiction/science fantasy jones at the moment. I’d like to compile my Baroque Space (space travel in a solar system governed by alchemical science) posts and maybe go back and do the same with Gods, Demigods & Strangeness (the Greek myth thing I mentioned). The past couple of days, I’ve been contemplating a Heavy Metal –style psychedelic space opera universe design kit. I would love if Strange Stars was so successful that I was able to do a deluxe edition with pages and more art.

Of course, there’s my Baum/Dunsany/Adventure Time Land of Azurth campaign—and the Weird Adventures Companion that I want to get out before I die. That’s about all the dreaming for this month.

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Interview Series Index

When you run a blog for several years--and spend too many years abusing your head as a young man--a terrible thing starts to occur: you start losing touch with the things you wrote about. It comes way too often these days but long into gaming-related conversation in a strike of blindingly internal light I will suddenly find myself thinking “waitttt, didn't I write a whole mother-flippin' series of blog posts about that three years back?”

To stave off that “all that is solid melts into air” feeling, I've finally started on my long-procrastinated annotated blog index. As I do each chunk—and they are pretty much going to follow in the order of what I consider the best or most useful of the posts here—I will post about them and add them to a larger index page. Likely next is the long index of pointcrawl and wilderness posts. 

First up is one of my favorite (and neglected) groups of posts: the on-again/off-again interview series. A series which under pretext of presenting ideas, recollections, and analysis to a broader audience, selfishly allowed me to dig into the brains of people I have found interesting or critical to our hobby.

The Interview Series (in Chronological Order)

Jeff Berry

The first interviews on the HC where with Jeff Berry aka Chirine Ba Kal, a longtime player in M.A.R. Barker's Tekumel campaign and for a time a mover and shaker in its business end. I had originally reached out to him with the intention of doing a one-shot little piece on what the early Tekumel games were actually like. The ongoing conversation was so incredibly rich with insight and Jeff's memory so exact in the amounts of detail that it spilled over into several encores, all of which I still enjoy reading today.

Tales from Tékumel's First Campaign:An Interview with Jeff Berry

Exploring the Jakallan Underworld,Playing with Arneson, and More: Jeff Berry Interview Part II

Tékumel in Miniature: Jeff BerryInterview Part III

Why the Barker-Tékumel Collection isWorth Paying Attention To

David Dunham

If you pressed me for all my all-time favorite computer game it would have to be King of Dragon Pass. Not only was it a near-perfect blend of handpainted art, strategy, roleplaying and big ticket mythic themes it was set against the worldbuilding of Glorantha that I love (mostly from afar) so well. A huge treat to interview David Dunham, creator of the game, and pick his brain about the connections to KoDP to tabletop roleplaying.

Interview with the Man Behind the King(of Dragon Pass)

Magira

Digging into the altnerative paths that roleplaying could have taken in the 1960s and 1970s led me to places I had never known about notably such great “world games” as that of Magira in Germany. An interview with one of its participants.

Follow-Up Interview on the German Worldgame Magira

Jeff Dee

Looking back at this interview three years ago which focuses on Jeff Dee's then beginning drive to get his Tekumel rpg published, it makes to happy to see that it is not only sitting on my shelf right now but is helping re-raise the flag of Tekumel after Barker's passing.

In the Pocket With Jeff Dee

Kyrinn Eis

Kyrinn Eis talks about her fascinating worldbuilding and quirky attendant game.

Urutsk Rising: An Interview with KyrinnEis

Urutsk Rising Part II

Robert Kuntz

One of the more controversial outings of the blog but one I am still proud of running. The interview sprawls over great length but there are fascinating bits spread through out. While one may like or dislike the man, his recollections are important to our understanding of the early days of the hobby.

No Borders: A Conversation With RobKuntz

Dan Boggs

A look at Champion of Zed and its creator before it became another casualty of the rpg crowd-funding bubble. 

The Champion of Zed

Trey Causey

One of my favorite interviews with one of my favorite people from our side of the hobby. Trey on his post-Weird Adventures victory lap. You better believe I will be banging on his door again when his 70s space opera book Strange Stars sees the light of published day.

Beyond the Weird: an Interview withTrey Causey

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