This week, Sam talks with Michael Elliott about Composure, a player resource mechanic from Ash McAllen’s game Antiquarian Adventures.
Michael is currently Kickstarting his game Nasty Brutish and Long, a simple RPG about lives complicated by revolution.
Some topics discussed today:
Failure and conflict, why they're great, and mechanics that encourage players to embrace them
Genre and mechanics that support it
Simplifying mechanics when hacking, with Blades in the Dark as an example
Passing the spotlight at the table
Games mentioned:
Sam’s blog post whether conflict is necessary in RPGs
James Mendez Hodes’ website and blog
Pam Punzalan’s blog post “The Unbearable Otherness of a Global South Creator”
Asians Represent podcast on Twitter
Michael’s on Twitter, dice.camp, itch.io, and other places @NotWriting
Sam is @sdunnewold on Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.io
The Dice Exploder logo is by sporgory, and the theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey
Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!
Transcript
Sam: Hello and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week we take a tabletop RPG mechanic, mash it up like a potato, and see what deliciousness awaits us inside. My name is Sam Dunnewold. My co-host today is Michael Elliott.
Michael is one of those designers I admire because he's just a workhorse. He's got a new game crowdfunding like every month. And it's good, interesting stuff about labor and capitalism like Dungeon Local 001, where you're the monsters in a dungeon who decide to unionize, and Nasty, Brutish, and Long, which is currently kickstarting now, about the lives of regular people and how they get complicated by revolution. Go check out the link in the show notes for that Crowdfunder.
Michael's also experimenting a lot with small games, small enough to like mail to backers in a regular envelope. Finally, a forum factor that will force people to make games at the size I want to read, and presumably cheap. It's a smart business thing, I think, too, that I hope catches on.
Today Michael brings us composure from Ash McAllen's Antiquarian Adventures, a condensing of several mechanics from Blades in the Dark that transforms into something completely new. We talk a lot about how to design games that make players excited to fail, plus genre and minimalism and how you can recontextualize mechanics when hacking other people's games.
It's a good episode, so let's get to it. Here is Michael Elliott with composure.
Hey Michael. How's it going?
Michael: Hi, I'm good.
Sam: What mechanic have you brought in for us today?
Michael: I have brought in the Composure mechanic from Antiquarian Adventures, a Game by Ash Macallan which is a game about Indiana Jones, uncharted, the Mummy. All those kind of like globe charting, adventure things, those sorts of stories and a forged in the dark system.
Sam: Yeah, trying to do a little bit less racist than Indiana Jones, is my understanding. But otherwise, sort of, that's the ballpark.
Michael: Yeah, it definitely acknowledges that like when you're going on these adventures, there is a tendency in those stories to exoticize and fall into racism and Orientalism and very much calls out the fact like, hey, don't rely on tropes or stereotypes, like, make these places feel real.
But yeah, it, it is all about treasure hunting and going on incredible adventures and there being magic and traps and Nazis you can punch.
Sam: Yeah. As much as it is possible to do all that and the treasure hunting and everything without being racist.
We should also disclaim as we get into this, that this game is in early access. And may or may not ever be completed, is my understanding, but the, it's totally playable. And we're gonna talk about it anyway.
Michael: Yeah, like it's one of those projects that I don't think it's been touched in a couple years, but Ash may come back and change it or remove what we're talking about or something like that. So it might not stand the test of time, but as it stands, composure exists and it's really cool.
Sam: And it's gonna be interesting to talk about. So, yeah. Without further ado, let's get into it. You wanna read us off roughly what composure is?
Michael: Yeah, uh, you start with six composure, each character. You may spend composure to activate inability from your role or personality, or aid another player character with a roll, or resist consequences.
Sam: All right. Let's stop before we get into some examples and break down like what our role and personality in this game
Michael: Yeah, so in a lot of the forged in the dark type games, you have like playbooks where like a certain type of character who is good at doing certain kind of things. In Blades in the Dark, you have like cutter, leech, whisper.
In Antique Adventures, you don't have single playbooks, you have two parts that you kind of merge together. ,So you have a list of roles. and a list of personalities that often appear in these sorts of stories. So you have for roles, you have like the scoundrel, the scholar, the fool. And for personalities, you have someone who is obsessed, greedy, romantic. You mash them together. You have stuff like the heartfelt veteran, the, the obsessed scholar, that sort of thing.
Sam: And then you can also spend composure aiding another player character, which is presumably just, adding a die to their pool or otherwise, like, assisting on a role.
Michael: Yep. It's basically the same as blades in the dark.
Sam: Yeah. And resisting consequences is the same way. You can spend composure to negate consequences, like narrate how your character gets out of whatever the GM has narrated.
Michael: Yeah, you, you roll a dice based on your stats, and then based on the die roll, you always resist and say what happens instead when you resist a consequence, but you might pay more or less composure to do that.
Sam: Cool. So let's, let's look at a couple examples I pulled out here. So you want to give us this veteran example ability?
Michael: Yeah, when a new character is introduced, you can spend a composure to declare what your relationship was back in the old days.
Sam: And immediately evocative of what kind of a playbook the veteran is. And then the last piece of the mechanic is this out of composure trigger ability that every playbook has. So walk us through the veteran example of that one.
Michael: Yeah, so when you've used all of your composure, you cannot resist any consequences and roll zero dice for all your actions until you've been left behind or separated from your companions.
Sam: So this is how you get your composure back, right? You like play into this quote unquote negative thing for your character, and then that refreshes your composure.
Michael: Yeah. And each role has a different one. They're all template the same. Like when you use other composure, you can't resist, you roll zero dice, which in Forged in the Dark games tends to mean you roll 2d6 and take the lowest. So it kind of sucks. And then a specific thing you have to do that resets your composure so you can keep spending it to your special abilities or assist and resist.
Sam: Yeah, so the other thing I think is notable about this mechanic of composure is that playbooks your player characters don't really have much to them other than a few special abilities and your composure.
Like, that's kind of the entire game in some ways. So there's, there's a lot riding on this ability or on this mechanic. So why did you wanna bring this in? What is so cool about it?
Michael: I love it because it's such a really clever way of mechanically like refreshing the one resource you have to spend. But in addition to that, each of the abilities that let you regain your composure are things that aren't like, good decisions, or like they're bad twists of fate. Like you have to get captured. You have to unleash an ancient evil. You have to run away from a fight. And so I think it helps reinforce.
The thing I love about Antiquarian Adventures is that is telling these stories of daring due and adventure. But the characters are people, they are flawed. This is not a power fantasy. Sometimes you go up against a group of, you know, zombies or skeletons or Nazis and you gotta run away, or you get captured, or you read the book that's, you know, full of Latin that you shouldn't read and you unleash ancient evils.
And that's, it is a kind of hallmark of these sorts of stories, but it also encourages the players to do things that are suboptimal, that are mistakes that like you, as the player can tell, it would really suck to get captured here or unleash this ancient evil, but I have to get this resource back so I have no choice.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. In my experience running games, I play with people who really love playing like Fiasco by Bully Pulpit games. This game where you're like doing a Coen Brothers movie, everyone's not very intelligent. Everyone's making mistakes. You don't really like your characters. It's like this black comedy game that really encourages you to get in there and fail horribly over and over again. And my players kind of came out of that and bring that attitude to play at large of trying to make themselves fail and get into the most trouble they possibly can.
And I don't think that that is like a normal game group thing necessarily. I think a lot of people playing games are really precious with their characters.
And you, you're right, that composure here and these triggers in particular are a really good way to get people to act against their character's best interest because that's in their best interest as a player to make the story better.
Michael: Yeah, and I think that's it. It helps reinforce something. We've seen a lot of stories is that like if you're telling a story about a character who's kind of good at everything and what they do all the time and doesn't make mistakes for bad decisions, that's a very boring story. Like, they don't, they're not challenged. They don't change, they don't have to adapt to overcome something. They don't learn any lessons. They're just good all the time and that's like not interesting to watch.
Sam: There's no story without conflict, right? And if you can just overcome every conflict immediately with no consequences, what are we doing here?
Michael: Yeah. And it's good to, to have those sorts of characters be able to make mistakes cause that pushes the narrative forward and like creates interesting dilemmas and problems that you have to solve.
And it's a lot more interesting to me than like having to spend a couple hours every week like treating this as a way I get what I want all the time if I manage to make the right gameplay decisions like that. That to me isn't what I come to RPGs for anymore. Like I come to RPGs for experience similar to what you described, like telling stories about often bad people or people who are very complicated or aren't, aren't there to save the day.
It is more like a story of tragedy or black comedy or things where characters find out something about themselves and isn't about saving anything or being the best they possibly can be.
Sam: Yeah. There's something about these composure abilities that are, is really good at defining the genre of game that we're playing into. Like, I think the overall like structure of composure is doing the thing that we have just talked about doing, right?
Of encouraging you to play to character weaknesses, but the actual details of each. Composure, refresh ability or composure. Spending ability really are doing the work to define not just who your character is and what your playbook archetype is, but like any move in any kind of powered by the apocalypse game, they're defining the like genre of the game that you're playing in entirely.
Like it's really easy to imagine basically playing the same game, but like doing the sci-fi version and coming up with a list of sci-fi abilities here and completely redefining the genre that.
Michael: Yeah, I agree. Like it's, we talked about this before the podcast, but like I could talk about every part of Antico adventures for, for
hours and hours. Cause it does such a great job of creating this feel of like, you are in this sort of, of story. There's a word for these sorts of stories. I keep not remembering it, Pulp,
pulp, adventure stories.
But yeah, like everything from like the, the, what the actions are called, what the special abilities is called, what the playbooks are called. Like it is just, it nails its intended tone and themes so well, and yeah, composure.
Just one small part of that where offering these stories. Yeah, like the fool. Bumbles their way into life-threatening peril. And like, if you're like a typical like D&D player, you don't wanna do that cuz that's a great way of killing your character you spent hours and hours with, right? Like you spent
all your, all your, your, in-game resources, your gold xp, and you're like in world time developing this person. You're not gonna willingly stumble into the murder pit full of scorpions.
Sam: Unless the playbook says Now it's time to stumble in the murder pit
Michael: Yeah.
and you
can't like really do anything until you do that.
Sam: It actually gets to something I've been thinking about in design more and more lately that like in story games, at least, it is a lot easier as a designer to just tell your players what you want them to do. Like this is the genre of story that we're telling. This is the kind of scene that should be in that genre.
This is the kind of thing you should do in that scene. Just walk into the murder pit now. Trust me, it'll be fine. And that kind of design is really good at defining genre and I think is really remarkably effective at telling a good story, even though it feels like it would be too much of like a rail shooter, you know, too much direction from the game designers to what your game should be like.
It just, it just never feels that way and is really effective.
Michael: Yeah. I found more and more as I make RPGs that specific beats general kind of all the time.
So like if you want to have a game about, I don't know, like a sci-fi version of anti-car adventures. Like doing something, like seeing a terrible vision of your future might not be as good as like something like, see a vision of you dying right now, or like try to do like the scene of Luke in the cave on, you know, empire strikes back in Star Wars, like being as specific as possible. Helps the players be creative cuz it's, it's basically prompting like, Hey, do this thing right now rather than come up with an idea right now.
Sam: Yeah. Like I can imagine a game that is like, okay, now you go into the cave and you see your a vision of your enemy, right? We're doing exactly Luke on Degoba in Empire. Seeing that horrible vision and that feels so restrictive. But the other thing that it does is it tells the players exactly where to go to start riffing in their like collective consciousness.
It, we immediately know as players, right? Empire strikes back. That's the thing that we're doing now. Like we know how we, we know not just empire, but all of the things that are in that ballpark and can immediately start going from there. Like, it, it's, it's like you're saying, it's a really good jumping off point.
Michael: Yeah, and it often shows like how. How you've done your research in like the genre, right? Like if you've seen a
lot of the same sort of stuff and you've been taking notes, you've been studying it, you will be able to pull those sorts of tropes, those sorts of archetypes, and put them into your game. And if anyone at the table has watched those shows, read those books and sees that, you know, evocative sentence or description like, it's a reference to this, this time, you know, in Indiana Jones where he
shoots the guy with the sword.
I know exactly what that means. Like, I, I can do that now.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. And it defines like that ability, which is one of the veteran abilities, right, is like if you have a better weapon than your enemies, you can spend composure to just win the fight, I believe is the ability.
Michael: Yeah. It's for the, the scoundrel. Bring a gun to a sword fight. If you're facing down foes with a more dangerous weapon than them, you could spend a composure to just win.
Sam: Yeah.
Michael: it's
perfect. .
Sam: Yeah. And it's like I read that ability and I was immediately like, it's Indiana Jones with the gun in the sword fight. Great. And that tells me not just that, like I have that ability and that that's a scene that we could go to, but having that ability tells you so much about like which Indiana Jones tropes that playbook is pulling from.
Like that move also tells me that this character is carrying a gun probably. That like, I'm gonna be the person who's in fights in the first place so that in the right ones I can spend this composure. It's, it's amazing how much work a specific detail like that does to generalize.
Michael: Yeah, it's, it's a really, like I said, I could go on and on about this game cause it's so, it just fucking nails it so well.
Sam: Do you, do you have other things you wanna take us through?
Michael: Yeah, I would like to talk about how like it does a good job of like hacking like the stress mechanic in blades.
Sam: Yeah, absolutely. Because this is, we should say, Antiquarian Adventures is explicitly a forged in the dark game and feels in its core mechanics pretty similar to blades in the dark.
Michael: Yeah. And so like the composure mechanic is kind of a one for, one for like Blades stress mechanic where each character has nine stress, and you can use that for doing similar things. You can do like a special ability in your playbook or push yourself on a role which gives you more dice or makes you more effective and also resisting consequences.
But in Blades, when that stress meter fills you mark a trauma which kind of like changes your character in the long term. And is basically like a permanent change to your character and there's like a whole downtime phase where like if you're not in the action doing a score, you can indulge in your vice, which lets you recover some stress.
But I think because antique ventures is so much about these pulp action stories, which like, when you look at stuff like, even like Tomb Raider or Uncharted games, like the events of those games are like a couple days
of time at
most really. And so you don't really have like a downtime moment. You are exploring a tomb under a manor in England, and then you're in somewhere else looking for the Holy Grail.
Sam: Is this kind of like, clearly there's a lot of downtime for Indiana Jones when we're like, As an audience looking at the map, showing where he's traveling to next. But like, we never want to see that on camera cuz it's fucking boring. Like the only time it's not boring is when he's telling Marian point to somewhere where it hurts and he like points to his forehead and then they're kissing and then immediately Nazis show up.
Like the, the only time we're seeing the downtime is if the Nazis are coming in at the end of the scene.
Michael: Yeah. And so what another thing that makes integrated venture is like you get these moves to regain your composure kind of whenever, right? Like it could be
when you're fighting the Nazis, when you're exploring the haunted tomb, it means there is no like downtime component, like action can always be happening.
And so it makes it really good for like one shots, but also makes it like, if you want to do like a series, it could be like a se like much like a series of movies. Like yeah, you have the same kind of characters. You could have new characters but you don't really have to deal with like the downtime in between stuff.
It's more like everything's happening in the moment and
everything is always driving the fiction forward, creating new complications and consequences.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. It, it almost feels like Die hard to me, too.
Michael: Oh yeah.
Sam: It just in, in terms, I mean that's a different genre than what this game in particular is doing, but it has that amount of, like all of the game could be a real time two hour long thing, right?
Michael: Yeah, absolutely. You could start to see, right, like the connective tissue between like a movie, like the First Diehard and these sorts of movies. Like there's
moments in that movie where it's like, okay, yeah. Like he you know, he does have to walk on broken glass, but doesn't really that that slows him down.
But he's still like an action hero. So it's not like
it's a bad idea where like we were looking at the screen like, oh, don't do that. What are you doing? No, just do something else. Anything else than that. But like,
Sam: He's like, no, I have too much composure. I must.
Michael: Yeah, I have to reset my composure, so I have to do something. I have
to. Main, I have to like, you know, inflict upon myself a non-life threatening injury, and so I get it all back now,
Sam: Yeah,
Michael: But that feeds into the fiction because like if you are constantly doing those kind of things, that makes you feel like more of an action hero, right?
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. It's really interesting to me in the translation of this mechanic from Blades in the Dark stress to Antiquarian Adventures composure, how it's so easy as a designer to see how you could just mechanically nothing but flavor at all get from stress to composure. You could just sort of collapse all of these Blades in the Dark systems down into a simpler thing.
Like we don't want to deal with downtime. That sounds like a lot of excess rules and it doesn't really necessarily make sense for this genre. The thing that we want is just spending stress at that, getting stress back. So how are we gonna get stress? We're going to, you know, have a moment of downtime or do something bad. Okay. Now that, that's our, like bandaid on the hole now that we've cut downtime, but the like collapsing down changes it into this completely different thing, and that, that's really interesting to me, that it basically simpler version of the same mechanic feels completely different in tone.
Michael: Yeah, and it really speaks to like how, how much you can change in a system and still produce a really cool game that has that lineage, right? Like
Sam: And a really unique game too that's different from its, its ancestor, so to speak.
Michael: Yeah. But you can still like see the lineage there, right? Like this is a
conversation that's always happening in the Blades of the Dark Discord where it's like, Hey, is this often a new designer or someone new to the community who's like, Hey, is like, is this too much? Is this like, Am I losing what made Makes Blades?
Blades and like I'm always the person to be like, no, like you can do anything. Like Ash here has just jettisoned a whole phase of the game and
collapsed like stress into like two or three sentences. Nothing should be taken off the table. Hack everything to pieces.
Sam: Yeah. Whether it's still forged in the dark or Blades or not, who cares? You're gonna come up with some, well, the thing you're doing sounds interesting, you know? Do it.
Michael: Yeah, and it can, it can seem scary as like a first time desire cause you, when you're starting something, you kind of want guardrails, right? You want like someone to say
like, oh, like don't do this cuz like just to narrow the possibility space for yourself. So it doesn't
seem so big and scary. But like unfortunately, Blades the Dark is a 300 page book.
It's not a small
system. So it is going to feel a little scary about like, yeah, you absolutely don't have to be precious with any part of the game. Everything is on the chopping.
Sam: Yeah. The other thing that I find really interesting in the change from Blades in the Dark here is how it takes the moment of traumaing out in Blades and changes it because in Blades, that moment where you fill up your stress bar is really dramatic because you know, oh no, I'm gonna be taking out of the scene here. Something bad is gonna happen to my character and I'm permanently now going to be haunted, or whatever adjective I've picked as my trauma.
And you only get so many traumas, so people want to avoid this moment. Even though it's this big moment for your character, it's often very memorable and very cool and defines the next leg of the arc of your character at large. People avoid doing it because you only get so many. It feels like your character has died a little bit.
Whereas composure recognizes that that moment is really fucking cool.
Like, I wanna do that. Like we should be rewarding people for doing that moment and makes instead of kind of quote unquote punishing you by giving your character a trauma, composure is like, nah, you like, you gotta do the bad thing. Yeah. But we're gonna reward you mechanically instead. And I think that that is such a smart flip for this genre in particular.
Michael: Yeah, absolutely. And it is kind of like, like you say, it kind of collapses down that same system into just a couple sentences. Right? Because when you get a
trauma in Blades, that's character development and it's always bad. Like you can't, none of the
traumas are good or things you would want, right? They are.
They make you worse at being a scoundrel. You're either become reckless or violent or cold or haunted. You become more difficult to work with and become, I think a richer character. And like you can't see how your character is existing in this very harsh, unforgiving world and what they're gonna be like and if they can, you know, stick with it until whatever the end is.
Sam: And we should say that that works super well for that game.
Michael: Yeah, absolutely. But here you kind of get a small encapsulation of that where, like for the scoundrel you reset your composure when you run away from the danger at hand. So like, yeah, you, you are this person who does daring do, who can like, get in fights against, you know, dozens of people and come out on top. But sometimes you see the, you know, weird undead, British royal. No, I'm good actually.
I'm gonna go.
Sam: yeah, yeah, Alright. Another thing that I really love about composure and to some extent stress too, but in particular, composure is the way it regulates how much spotlight time any given player has at the table. Because every time you're spending composure in this game, your character is sort of stepping forward and doing something cool.
The, the main way any character is gonna get spotlight in this game is by making an action roll rolling dice. But anytime you spend a composure, you're doing something extra cool, you're doing your special ability, you're like hitting a genre trope because that's what all the special abilities are.
Or like, something bad just happened to you and you're resisting it. You're, you are putting yourself forward. But you are limited in how many times you can do that before you're out of composure.
And then it's someone else's turn. Someone else has the composure left over, and they are much more likely to be the person who's going to have the spotlight next. And I think that is really smart. I think it is just a really good way of sort of passing that attention around the table and make sure that everyone you know, runs out at a certain point of the ability to be the protagonist.
Michael: Yeah. Especially cuz like, because each composure like refill ability has a specific kind of fictional trigger. Like for the scoundrel. Like yeah, if you fill out your composure, okay, I have to run away for a fight. But like if we're not a spot where a fight is or a danger is
about to happen, ,I gotta wait until that moment presents itself, right?
So, yeah, it's very, like I said, it's an inbuilt way of kind of regulating the spotlight and who is who the, the camera is framed on at any given moment.
Sam: Although I will say if I was playing a scoundrel and I ran out of composure, the thing that I would immediately do is start a fight so I could run away from it, which is kind of goes against the spotlight sharing thing that I was talking about here, but also is a really cool thing about the game that like it motivates you as a player to make your character do bad stuff, even beyond the like one level that it's suggesting.
Michael: Yeah, and it's still probably a bad idea because as the scoundrel, you are the one that's good at fighting. The rest of the
characters do not want you to run away from the fight.
Sam: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. But now we've got a cool chase on our hands and like that's a huge part of the genre also. It's,
Michael: let me.
Sam: really just all, it comes back together really
Michael: Let me run from some freaking corporate archeological stooges on a train or something. Hell
yeah,
Sam: yeah, yeah. I really just love these mechanics where you have some sort of mechanical through line from playbook to playbook, but you're able to put each playbook's own spin on it, like everyone has that refresh composure trigger, but everyone's trigger is different and unique to them themselves. It just makes the game easy to track and still really unique.
And I love that kind of minimalism.
Michael: it also makes it really easy to design as well. Like once you kind of
figure out what, what the base mechanics are, especially when you're making special abilities, cuz so often there are ways of like breaking or bending the rules.
Once you have that like, okay, like you see this in Blades in the Dark as well, like every playbook has certain templates of abilities.
Like they
almost always have something that lets them interact with ghosts. Something that makes them better at downtime, something that makes them, gives them some sort of fictional permission. And so as a designer, once you kinda like know, okay, like these are the rules and these are the ways every carriage wheel break them, then you suddenly have like a checklist for yourself, okay?
Like this role needs a way of spending composure and a way to get it back.
Sam: Yeah. It's a lot easier to fill in a madlibs for a playbook than to create an entirely new playbook from scratch. There is one playbook I noticed in this game that doesn't have a way to spend composure and all of the like adjective halfs of the playbooks have one. So it's not like you can end up at the table and have actual no ways to do it, but I did find that a little odd. I wonder if in a future version of the game that playbook would be updated.
Michael: That's a good point. Maybe.
Sam: It does seem like having a lot of ways to spend your composure is a pretty important part of this system mechanically. Like you, you don't want those special abilities to be too narrow or too few such all you're ever spending composure on is assisting people or resisting. Like the game will still work there, I'm sure, but you lose all that genre definition.
Michael: Mm-hmm. It's also worth knowing, like in this system, you don't have a whole lot of dice to start with in every action. Like
you're probably only gonna have like two, maybe three. So you're probably looking for ways of spending composure or aiding someone by spending composure with most roles, at least the way I've seen the game being played.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. Each composure, each assist matters a lot when you don't have a lot of dice, right?
Michael: it also
encourages people to work together, right? Absolutely.
Sam: All right. So unless you have anything else though, I think that is composure. Any final words about it, Michael?
Michael: No. It's a great system. It's a great game. Everyone should check.
Sam: Honestly, like if you are looking to hack Blades in the Dark as your first game, you should maybe look at hacking like this instead. This looks like a really easy game to hack, and I'm surprised that I haven't seen more of that before.
Michael: Yeah. It's, it's a really big, it's, it's a surprisingly big space. The, the forge of the dark.
Design lineage and it's, it's hard to see all of it. Like we try to see as much we can on itch or Drive Through RPG but like there's a lot of designers that aren't part of our community or part of different communities.
And so yeah, things, things, there are, there are amazing games out there that you have not heard of that are forged in the dark and it's worth, it's worth investigating them when you find them.
Sam: Thanks so much to Michael for being here! I've got a couple more things before I sign off and do the credits and all that though.
While putting this episode together, I was thinking more and more about our constant refrain in here about conflict being the fuel of good RPG sessions, and I was like, is that true? And I think mostly yes, but not always. So I went and blogged like 3000 words about slice of life games and non-narrative RPGs, and there's a link in the show notes if you're interested in that kind of thing.
I also wanted to add something more about potential racism in a game as heavily inspired by the Indiana Jones movies as Antiquarian Adventures is. Those movies are super racist and it's not clear to me that you can tell a non-racist story about going into quote unquote forgotten or lost parts of the world to find an ancient city filled with some treasure that no existing culture has a better claim to than you.
The game's text addresses some of this, but it's a pretty light touch because as we mentioned, the game was never fully published. So while I think we had a really interesting discussion about the mechanics of this game, I just wanna encourage you to do some research and think about the colonialism and racism at play in the genre if you're thinking about picking up the game.
And to that end, I've got some recommendations too, all of which you can find linked in the show notes for people who have much smarter things to say about all this than I do.
First is James Mendez Hodes, who is an award-winning game designer and cultural consultant who's written some extremely smart stuff about racism and cultural appropriation in games. I especially recommend his essays "May I Play A Character From Another Race?" and "How To Change Your Conversations About Cultural Appropriation."
Second, Pam Punzalan, next week's co-host actually, wrote a post a few weeks ago on their substack called "The Unbearable Otherness of a Global South Creator" about existing in this industry as someone from the global south. This is obviously less a piece about racism in your games, listener, and more about racism in our community. But I think that's honestly probably more important.
And finally, there's the Asians Represent podcast which talks about, uh, Asian representation in the RPG world. Tons of content. Check it out. It's a great show.
If you want to talk about this episode or anything else design, we've now got a Discord. There's a link in the show notes.
Michael can be found @NotWriting on Itch, Twitter dice.camp, and probably other places too. Once again, he's currently crowdfunding nasty, brutish, and long on Kickstarter. It only goes for one week, so get in there now.
Antiquarian Adventures can be found at acegiak.itch.io/antiquarian-adventures or you can probably just Google it.
Sam: And as always, you can find me on Twitter, dice.camp, and Itch @sdunnewold.
Our logo is designed by sporgory. Our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Gray.
And Dice Exploder is a production of the Fiction First Network, an actual play and podcast production co-op based outta the Blades in the Dark discord. Come on by and join us. We'd love to see you there.
And thanks as always to you for listening. See you next time.
Composure (Antiquarian Adventures) with Michael Elliott