Ever since I have played Libreté with game designer Vivien Féasson (@Mangelune) in January, I wanted to discuss it with him. It was also clear to me that this game had to be introduced during my annual #indieseptember. Vivien was so kind to agree to answer a few of my questions on a Paris/Berlin video chat. He talks about roleplaying games in France, about his personal design decisions, and about the future of Libreté and other projects that he is currently working on.
Eike: Why don't you start by introducing yourself, Vivien? Tell us a little about who you are and what you're doing, and perhaps about your roleplaying biography, too.
Vivien: Well, I need to speak about my age first, I guess, as it is connected to my roleplaying biography. I'm almost 40 years old now and I started roleplaying games when I was 13 or 14 years old. I started with DnD, but in France there was a great number of roleplaying games that were developed at the time, i.e. in the mid-90s. These French games did not feature large fantasy worlds. Rather, they were about exploring old and enigmatic cities. In fact, many of them were inspired by Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum (1988; published in French in 1990) and similar texts. So, those are the games I grew up with.
Eike: I know that France has a very lively and active roleplaying scene. Could you tell us a bit about that, as compared to its European neighbors?
Vivien: I must admit that I know very little about roleplaying games in other countries. For instance, I know nothing about the scene in Germany, except for Das Schwarze Auge, which is not that much played nowadays; it has been somewhat forgotten in France. I know that the Spanish scene is quite active. But that is basically it. Most of the other games and scenes that I'm familiar with are in English, both from the UK, and the US. Here in France we have a rich scene, I think. It has started in the 1980s, when there were one or two big companies, which developed most of the roleplaying games at that time. Multisim, for instance, developed Nephilim, which was later published in English by Chaosium; and there was Siroz [Eike: the latter today belongs to Asmodee Éditions], which developed, among other things, In Nomine Satanis. That game was also translated into English, but I don't think it was very successful outside of France [Eike: It was also translated into German and published in 1993 by Truant Verlag]. The name of the company is a shortened version of French cirrhose for "cirrhosis", and that tells a lot about the spirit of the company. In a way, you had two separate philosophies. Multisim was more about developing roleplaying games as "the tenth art" (after the Nine Muses), it was them who developed games inspired by the Eco novel that I have mentioned before, games with serious themes and content. Siroz, on the other hand, was more about the fun of it, about grotesque jokes and so on.
Eike: How about the French Con scene? Is that centered around Paris?
Vivien: No, it's more like everywhere else. About ten years ago, they tried to establish a kind of French "Gen Con" here, but it failed dramatically. And today, Paris has the least amount of conventions. The important ones are in Provence (in the southeast) and in Brittany (in the northwest). Near Lyon, for instance, or also in Toulouse. Last week, the second Queervention rôlistes, a queer roleplaying convention, took place in Rennes at an LGBTI+ center.
Eike: That is a very interesting historical survey of roleplaying games and the industry in France, thank you! Let's talk about you, as someone who grew up in that scene: At what point did you decide to become a game designer yourself?
Vivien: I guess I started like many of us, by creating my own fantasy game, with different races and magic spells. I basically added all that I was missing in typical DnD to my own early games. But, like many others, I stopped doing that at some point. For a few years, I was trying to become a screen writer, before I set out on designing my first roleplaying game in the early 2000s. That was, so to say, the Robin D. Laws version of Hero Wars: Roleplaying in Glorantha. That first shot at designing games actually went quite well. I first released the book for free on the internet, where it was discovered by an editor. Together, we found a new illustrator and reedited the book, which would then sell about 200 copies.
Eike: When did you start working on Perdus sous la pluie [English: Lost in the Rain]?
Vivien: One source of inspiration was The Forge, where I learned about numerous other indie games, and their different mechanics, like playing without a GM, for instance. Another, more active engagement with the techniques that would later inform Perdus sous la pluie, was our podcast La Cellule (@blogdelacellule), where we presented US-American indie games, like D. Vincent and Meguey Baker's Apocalypse World, but also our own games. Of course, we weren't the first to create independent games in France, but we were among the first politically engaged designers. Together with one other guy from that group, I founded a game design group in Paris, where I also started creating Perdus sous la pluie.
Eike: In many ways, Perdus is a very innovative game. There are no dice, it's GM-less, its chapters ("scenes") tell a seamless story. And, above all, players are asked to talk in either first or third person depending on the role they play in the scene...
Vivien: I am not so sure anymore if that was a good or bad idea. I have to admit that most of the time when I demonstrate the game, I tend to put that rule (speaking in either first or third person) aside, as there are already so many things for the players to keep in mind. My experience is that people tend to forget that rule anyway, and I don't want to be always reminding them.
Eike: Mechanically, you made some important changes when you developed Libreté, although content-wise it continues in the Wet Lands, the setting of Perdus sous pluie. Why did you decide to expand an already existing story world instead of creating a new one?
Vivien: There is another French game designer who did that before me, Thomas Munier. But I cannot say that that was what gave me the idea. What I rather liked about this universe is that it was easy to introduce to people. You don't need to explain a lot of lore to the players, the different races, factions, spells, and that sort of thing. Mechanically, however, as you already pointed out, the game is very different from Perdus, more like a spin-off. It uses the Apocalypse World engine, not only because that was the game of the day back then, but also because the world of Libreté and the postapocalyptic setting of D. Vincent and Meguey Baker's game have a lot in common.
Eike: Let's talk about the mechanics for a moment. In many ways, it's recognizably PbtA: There are playbooks to choose from; it's a question-driven game; we roll 2d6 to determine the outcome of a conflict, adding a modifier to the roll... And yet, you implemented some significant changes to classical PbtA. For instance, you decided to modify the success tiers (6-, 7-9, 10+) and you added the black bile tokens (calling them in your book, "une des règles majeures du jeu"). What led you to alter the standard PbtA engine?
Vivien: In fact, in an early version of Libreté I did not use the PbtA engine, but a d6 system, as you find it in games like World of Darkness or Burning Wheel. What that early draft had in common with the final version are the black bile tokens. That shows how important they are for the game. They are a representation of how many people (I among them) are often piling up stress until they "explode" at some point. So that was the central idea and the reason why I modified the PbtA target numbers. Players could use the black bile to increase their chances of getting a success, but always at the risk of going a little bit too far, of rolling, what I call, an excessive success (11+). That also led to the decision not to use character stats, as we find them in many PbtA games. The characters in Libreté are children, and I wanted to emphasize that what makes a difference in their actions is the energy that they put into it, rather than their natural differences in strength, stamina, wisdom and so on.
Eike: Let's talk about the children for a moment. In the rulebook, you often hint at the world's dangers and how deadly it is for the kids. Groups with a respectful gaming culture often use safety mechanisms like, for instance, lines and veils. These mechanisms exclude fully or partially specific content from the game. In my experience, violence against kids is almost always excluded. Do you see a conflict between the deadliness of the world of Libreté and the rise of a respectful gaming culture which often excludes violence against kids from its table?
Vivien: The tone of Libreté, I would say, is a mixture of funny moments -- with dark humor, yes, but still funny -- and more serious moments. So, from my experience it is good to stop when something becomes too hard and unbearable for players at the table and change the tone. I have also run the game at The Gauntlet, including all its standard safety mechanisms and precautions, and it went well. One player X-carded an element, a torture scene, we cut it out and continued the game, and the session did not in the least suffer from it. The same occurred when we playtested Libreté: X-Cards were used, content was modified, but we were always able to continue the game afterwards.
Eike: A completely different question that I always wanted to ask you: Why is the game called Libreté. It sounds a bit like liberté, but is spelled differently.
Vivien: Yes, it's spelled in the way that children would sometimes mispronounce the word liberté. The idea behind it was that some children in this world couldn't correctly pronounce the name of their city, and that they couldn't ask adults about the correct pronunciation of the word. Today, I myself have problems pronouncing the word liberté correctly, saying libreté most of the times.
Vivien: The Cloud Fortress was not really an expansion, but rather a demo kit to be used at conventions and for shorter games. It contains the basic rules, and, in a way, it also serves as a transition between the stories told in Perdus and Libreté, because the game ends just before you enter the city of Libreté. The second one, Fleurs du Mall, was born out of the decision that I made for Libreté not to create a definite city but leave that to the players at the table. But sometimes people feel intimidated if they need to make too many decisions themselves. Some players simply don't enjoy creating a world for themselves. That's why I created one in Fleurs du Mall, which contains a pre-written setting as well as some NPCs. Finally, there is De Bile et d'Acier, which is about mechs that can only be run by children. It's actually similar to Neon Genesis Evangelion. De Bile et d'Acier is more like a spin-off, or a What If kind of alternative story line: What if suddenly the world of Libreté collides with our own world? The book was recently funded on Ulule, a kind of kickstarter and is making good progress. I just reviewed the second version of the layout, and there are only a few corrections to be made. I hope the PDF will be finished in late September, so that the printed version should arrive shortly afterwards.
Eike: So many exciting products! Regrettably, the days in which French was frequently taught at German high schools are over, and many German role-players who'd love to play and run your games, won't be able to, due to the language barrier. Do you have any recommendations for them? Are there English translations available? Do you have plans for other languages?
Vivien: Yes, in fact I will launch a kickstarter for an English translation of Libreté very soon, perhaps already in September. I have translated parts of the game myself, and the company I'm working with, GMDK by David Shugars, are now turning that into more idiomatic English, making it sound less Frenchy. There is also, as you have pointed out before, the English translation of Lost in the Rain, which I also did myself. Then I know of an Italian translation of Perdus, which was, however, a translation of my English translation, rather than of the French original. My impression is that there must be an English version before a game is translated into other languages.
Eike: Busy as you certainly are with the editing of De Bile et d'Acier and the preparation of the English translation of Libreté, what are your plans for designing roleplaying games?
Vivien: Like all game designers I have tons of projects that might never see the light of day. Or perhaps these ideas might evolve into a full game one day. The most advanced of these ideas is an OSRish version of my world (OSR in the way of, say, Swordfish Island). That would be a story where parents enter the Wet Lands in search of their children, because they don't believe that their children have disappeared forever, and when they meet a psychic, telling them about the world of Libreté, they start off on their journey. The problem is that I am not very good at creating dungeons anymore. I lost that ability, spending so many years working on and with alternative systems and scenarios... I have one other idea for a supplement of Libreté, where you play magical girls. I guess that also would be more of a spin-off. We playtested an early version of that last week, but there is still a lot of work to do.
Eike: Thank you so much, Vivien! I wish you the best of luck with all your current and future projects.
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