Interview with Catherine Ramen

Earlier today, I blogged about Catherine Ramen's fascinating game Red Carnations on a Black Grave. It just sounds so good that I really wanted to speak to Catherine about it. She kindly agreed to give me an interview. It helped that EST and CET are rather compatible time zones. 

Eike: Tell me a bit about yourself as game designer and about your roleplaying biography. 

Catherine: My first roleplaying game was Moldvay D&D Basic in the pink starter box with the cheap plastic dice... But my early games were mostly AD&D and Traveller. In my last year in college, I ran a 2nd Edition D&D campagin that was shockingly railroady. And then I didn't play for a long time after that. So I basically missed the enitre White Wolf era, all of that. I read Vampire when it came out, I knew about all these things, but I never got to play them. I missed a huge chunk of the 90s. And then, in 2010, I joined a D&D 3.5 group, and I also played some Call of Cthulhu, and the next thing I knew I started to read indie games for the first time. I then found Ben's site Ars Ludi and my journey was actually mirroring his, because I was reading his older articles about doing stuff with d20 to make it more story-driven and I thought: "I can try all of this in my Pathfinder campaign!" And that just gradually led me into more and more indie games, including games that became really influential to me. I played an amazing game of Witch: The Road to Lindisfarne. And that led me to Montsegur eventually. 

Eike: When did you start designing games?

Rovers by Catherine Ramen

Catherine: I wrote a little hack of World of Dungeons (Turbo) that I called Rovers. That was my love letter to classic Traveller. And I also wrote a game called Midnight at the Oasis. And then this, Red Carnations on a Black Grave.

Eike: ... and Nerves of Steel, a translation of a Swedish film noir game called Nerver av stål?

Catherine: Oh no, I didn't translate that. Nerves of Steel a game that Simon Petersson wrote and two years ago he wrote a long thread on the old storygames website that basically explained how to do it. So I used what was there to actually play the game once, and then I just messaged him and asked if he would mind if I turned this into an English edition. He gave me the Swedish rules. I machine-translated that and a Swedish friend helped me on a couple of things. I took that, made it a little more "American", wrote a section about how to use the rules to do neo noir. 

Nerves of Steel: A Film Noir Story Game

Eike: So, after Rovers ("A Retro Space Opera Hack of WoDu Turbo"), Midnight at the Oasis ("A Story Game of Queer Culture"), and the film noir game Nerves of Steel, you are now publishing Red Carnations (A Storygame of Resistance). How do you choose your topics and themes? Is it that you want to focus on one genre at a time, and then move on to the next? 

Catherine: I think we all have to acknowledge at this point that historical games are kind of my schtick. The series of online games I've been running mostly in the last couple of years has been my Kingsport series. It is mostly Monsterhearts, mostly set in Lovecraft's little town. I also did a three-months-long mini campagin that used Alas for the Awful Sea (Kingsport 1851), which was set on a whaling ship. And that was basically my love letter to Moby Dick. I also used War and Peace with Good Society, and I'm probably going to do another online run of that in January, except I think I'm going to use Anna Karenina this time. So, historical games are kind of my thing, and at the time I came up with Red Carnations, I had been kicking around the idea of maybe doing something with the French Revolution, and I just thought I could do something like Montsegur.
One day, I just walked around the Village for a while and I went into a large used book store called The Strand, where I found a copy of the graphic novel The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia. At some point, I was looking at this and I said: A bunch of people with different beliefs crammed into a small space and they all died... oh, this is Montsegur! Then I thought, I could write up a Montsegur hack pretty quickly. It started some time in September 2017, I guess, and I had a playtest version that I brought to Metatopia that year. People there liked it even in its very rough form, and so I kept developing and playtesting it. The playtests made the game a lot less "montsegury"... Also the ending is very different from Montsegur.

Cover of Red Carnations on a Black Grave

One of the things that died very early was any division between the two characters. Everytime I played it, I said, make one of the two characters your primary, but people kept playing their characters about the same amount of time.  Another thing that I changed was the opening scene. Jasmin Neitzel (@TheWorstRPG) invented the opening montage scene by accident. There was a scene in which she was playing Camille and during the question phase we determined Camille had started her own newspaper. So, the opening scene that Jasmin narrated was Camille running around Montmartre and just trying to interview everybody, and so we got to see all the characters. Thinking back after that round of playtest I thought: That was the only time I ever liked the opening scene, because before I couldn't get it to work. Originally, the opening prologue scene was where you play out the seizure of the cannons, but that never worked, because dramatically it was completely fucked, because we all knew what was going to happen... Then I tried just one person narrate something around the time of that and from that Jasmin came up with a better idea and then, after that, I just made that the formal way the game starts: Everybody just does a short image of what their character is doing before, after, or during the seizure of the cannons. And that turned out to be one of the best things in the game, I think.

Eike: You said earlier that the historical side of games is what interests you the most. At the same time you mentioned a lot of literary texts that inspired you. And I remember trying to persuade you writing up a Good Society hack that used Middlemarch -- 

Catherine: Middlemarch! That maybe a bit too much for me. However, on your insistence I did finally read Henry James's Portrait of a Lady, that is, finally got past page 100... 

Eike: So, literature and history seem to be equal sources of inspiration. I imagine there are many players who'd rather avoid historical games for fear of not living up to the standards of historical accuracy. So, how important would you say is historical accuracy for a game of Red Carnations?

Catherine: It's exactly as important as the table wants to make it. It's interesting that you bring this up, because we just had this discussion in a debrief of the Kingsport series last week, and my answer for Kingsport was: If I am running a historical game, it's my assumption that I'm the one who has to do the heavy work of correct historicity. 

Eike: Red Carnations is also politically charged. Did you ever fear that some might find it too heavy or would feel that it required too much expertise in revolutionary history and political systems.

Catherine: The thing I say when I facilitate it, and it's in the rules as well: The game is highly politically charged and everything in the game is going to push you into a political situation... the politics have never not happened. My advice is always to players that they should not try and jump in with both feet and try to figure out how to play a socialist revolutionary, because you know what: I don't know how to play a mid-nineteenth century French socialist, and I did the research! So, the game is designed to set up, at the beginning, through the question phase, a web of people that have different ideas, needs, injuries, and situations. And I always tell people that it's totally OK to have people that are doubtful about the Commune. The little story cards are almost entirely based on actual posters published by the Paris Commune during the 72 days it was around, and they, too, are going to push you in a political direction. 

Eike: There is only a handful of games with an explicitly political setting like Red Carnations. Games about revolutions. Do you have any ideas why that is so? 

Catherine: There is less of an interest in revolutions, especially doomed revolutions, as they're not so much a power fantasy. Also people are sometimes worried about getting the politics wrong. I think that Red Carnations works because of the specifically tragic nature of how it is going to play out. That can pull people in who might not know or even care that much about politics. I do think the fact that I'm not as leftist as the people in the game may have helped me write it. I'm reasonably leftist, but not generally revolutionary. Some of that is just informed by being queer and by the country I live in. My sympathies, however, are completely with the Commune. That said, there were reasons the Commune fell and not all of them were the army.

Karl Marx wrote about the Paris Commune

Eike: That's an interesting point. For Karl Marx, who, only two days after the end of the Paris Commune, wrote an article, "Civil War in France" ("Der Bürgerkrieg in Frankreich"), saw the central conflict as an inner/outer one: between the socialist Communards within Paris, and the bourgeois government outside of it, in Versailles. Does Red Carnations focus on that inner/outer conflict as well, or would you say that its sole interest is in the stories within the Commune?

Catherine: Actually, the design goal that emerged during the process was that I kind of pulled back from doing things at a very macro level of the Commune. The first thing I worked on when I wrote the game was the character cast list. I spent a couple of weeks researching names and coming up with ideas. The original cast list was also different. There was a priest, there were some explicitly religious characters, there were some middle-class characters. Then I saw La Commune (Paris, 1871) by Peter Watkins, for all 5,5 hours at Columbia University, sitting on an uncomfortable chair. It's a sort of mock documentary of the Commune. That movie focuses very tightly on the working-class elements of the Commune, and when I came out of that I realized I had to redo the cast list. So, I changed it. Some of the former characters, like Théophile Ferré, pulled the focus away from the Montmartre setting. And I wanted to pull away from having to worry about the struggle of the Commune council and the various factions. Instead I wanted to focus on the experience of a bunch of people who had survived the dreadful siege of Paris, and who now woke up one day to discover that the revolution was complete, and that they had everything they wanted, but now they're coming to take that away from them. I wanted to focus on that tragic dimension. 

Eike: You dropped characters like the priest... 

Catherine: ... and a nun, I also had a nun in the first version of the game!

Eike: ... and the nun. Does that mean that religion is not an issue in Red Carnations anymore?

Catherine: There is a question card that you can draw that asks "What was your religious upbringing? Why did you lose your faith?" I have played the game with characters that were irreligious and anti-religious, and also characters that were having a very deep and complicated argument with their religion in the course of the game.

Eike: What makes the Paris Commune a special setting? Would you say that your game is easily "hackable"? Could one write a "French Revolution hack" of your game, or, say, a "1989 revolution in Germany" hack and so on?

Montsegur 1244: An important source
of inspiration for Red Carnations

Catherine: Generally yes. Although some revolutions, like the French Revolution, might be a little more difficult. I mentioned before that I was inspired by Montsegur, which has a tragic dimension. And for that regard the Commune is great, because it was so unexpected, it had the potential to change so many things, to the point where nobody really knew what to do, and then it ends so tragically, and it is a little-known piece of history. The fact that the Commune is so compressed in space and time makes it very attractive to do for a dramatic setting. I even did at one point consider doing a whole trilogy of horribly failed leftist revolutions: The Spanish Civil War was on that list, or the turbulent months in Berlin after the end of the Great War, with the execution of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, and Kronstadt in 1921. At the same time I was developing the early parts of Red Carnations, I was working on a Dogs in the Vinyard hack to set it in the Russian Civil War... But I think at this point I'm not really sure if I want to do that many more failed leftist revolutions. But is my game hackable? Sure! Especially, if the revolution is not, like the French Revolution, too open-ended. 

Eike: The Kickstarter was extremely successful. It collected over $23.000 and reached a number of stretch goals (which means content that you had to create from scratch). Can you tell me a bit about where you are in the process of the production? Is everything still on schedule?

Catherine: Yes, it is going pretty well. I have a little more work to do on the new characters. Some of them are from outside the Western cultural sphere and I'm asking people to help me write them. A lot of the stuff I have commissioned has been sensitivity and history reads for the various different characters. There is now an Algerian and a Vietnamese character, and an African-American character from New Orleans. I'm hoping to get all of that to the editor in the middle of September and then hopefully getting it into layout by October. So, everything is on schedule. 

Eike: What are your roleplaying projects for the immediate future? 

Catherine: I promised some friends to try a Good Society Anton Chekhov play. I haven't had much time to do anything on it yet. I've started thinking more and more to do a game that will allow you to create the kind of story that you get in the realist theater, like Chekhov, Ibsen, and, maybe, O'Neill (though not Strindberg, because he was a nasty human being...). That's interesting on the level that a lot of the things that were of concern to the nineteenth century are still important: misogyny, queer love, and all of these questions are still relevant. So, in other words, I'm trying to design yet another game that 100 people will like (*laughs*). 

Eike: Thank you, Catherine, for your time!