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! 

Interview with Vivien Féasson

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. 

Eike: Your penchant for these word games also shows in the titles of your add-ons to Libreté. One of the books is called Fleurs du Mall, playing on the title of Charles Baudelaire's famous collection of poems, Fleurs du mal. The others a called La Forteresse des nuées and, your most recent one, De Bile et d'Acier. How do they expand the world, how do they alter it?

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.

Interview with Game Designer Wilhelm Person

When I started writing about Wilhelm Person's game Until Dawn, I got really fascinated by the simplicity of the rules and how they enforced the emotional drama that the game wants us to enact. I took a closer look at his other games and found them equally fascinating. So I contacted Wilhelm and asked him if he were available to answer a few questions. He was and here is my interview with Wilhelm:

Eike: Tell us a little bit about your roleplaying biography, Wilhelm!
Wilhelm: Hi, I'm Wilhelm, and I've been playing RPGs for 30 years. Like most of the young Swedish gamers who were pulled into the hobby in the 80s I started with the BRP based games from the company Äventyrsspel, Drakar och Demoner and Mutant (the very popular Mutant Year Zero game traces its roots to the old Mutant, even if they have little in common these days). In the 90s we moved over to more 'mature' games, that is 'games written in English'. For me that meant mostly stuff from GDW, Twilight 2000 and Mega Traveller, some Vampire and a bit of AD&D.

I went to the university by the turn of the century and played more Vampire, some Rolemaster, more Drakar och Demoner. 

And as The Forge and the Indie scene was slowly starting to take form in the US I played Shadowrun and D&D 3 and 3.5. And I suddenly realised that I didn't enjoy gaming anymore. I liked hanging out with my gamer friends, but I didn't like gaming. That was huge, I had been gaming for two decades by then. Should I stop?

One thing lead to another and there I was, designing my first game, one to address all the faults I felt that the games we played had. So quicker combat resolution, simplified equipment and inventory handling, char gen in a matter of minutes. That was Höstdimma, my first game, it sold 30 copies. The next year in a fit of hybris I ran a game design course/workshop online and built While the World Ends as a demonstration example. And suddenly I was a game designer.

Since then I have published about one game every year. The games being in the style I'm currently enjoying at the table. First it was all indie games, last year I published a Mutant retro clone, and now I'm doing things in the OSR style of games with my new horror RPG Kuf.

Eike: You mention a number of Swedish games and the publisher Äventyrsspel. That makes me curious... Sweden and Norway have an immensely active roleplaying scene. Could you tell us a bit about that? Is that a very centralized scene (with, perhaps, Stockholm and Oslo as its centers)? What are the commercially successful games in Scandinavia? And how connected are the scenes from the different Scandinavian countries?

Wilhelm: Well, less than one would think. While Norwegians seem to keep an eye on the Swedish scene, Swedes in general aren't even aware of the Norwegian one. The  Norwegian game Itras By has had some very minor following here but I think that is all.

As for sales in Sweden, I don't know of any good sources for sales figures. But Dungeons & Dragons is promoted heavily in online stores so I guess that sells well. And when people ask for recommendations for games on forums, 80% of the answers tell them to get whatever Fria Ligan makes in that genre. This doesn't seem to have dampened the enthusiasm among small scale designers however, and it seems that there's always a Kickstarter going that makes sales in the hundreds of copies. White Wolf is Swedish these days, but most don't seem to think of them as such, probably because they haven't started to release books in Swedish (not that they need to, their audience is fluent enough in English).

Eike: Thanks for all the insight into the roleplaying scene in Sweden! Let's talk about your game Until Dawn. In the rulebook, you both tell us where it went (it developed into Okult) and where it came from (you list Jackson Tegu's Silver and White as a source of inspiration). What was it in Silver and White that struck a spark and led you to develop Until Dawn? What was it in Until Dawn that you realized needed further development, so that it would become Okult?

Wilhelm: Silver and White was cool, the setting was amazing, but it was a one shot deal. One cool setup, one cool adventure, and not much replay value. I wanted something like it that we could play over and over. And I wanted something a bit simpler rules wise.

As for Okult, I didn't see the similarity between them until I did the revised edition of Until Dawn, until that time they had been completely separate things to my mind. But Until Dawn is only for one shots, and Okult needs the time for multiple sessions to be allocated. I clearly prefer Okult of the two, but it is much harder to schedule.

Eike: I understand your point. Okult is clearly more developed, although I really love the simplicity of Until Dawn. In my post, I compared the warming-up exercise in Until Dawn to that in Matthijs Holter's Society of Dreamers. While Matthijs stands firm over this exercise, you seemed to have some reservations. In your design notes you write that you decided to keep it "for completeness to the original game, but also because it has been an appreciated and memorable part of the play testing sessions". Why so apologetic? Has anything bad or awkward ever happened, while your players were sneaking around in your house, "stealing" things and bringing them to the table?

Wilhelm: When I first wrote Until Dawn we were experimenting with gaming rituals and warm ups. So I put one my new game. But ultimately I'm not a LARP'er. That stage always felt awkward to me, even if everyone else liked it a lot. So I left the rule in place, and I do adhere to it when I facilitate at conventions. Still, for me personally it would make the game a smoother experience without it.

But as I said, everyone else likes it a lot. So I suggest you try it the first time you play, and if you're like me you have my blessing to remove it.

Eike: The rules don't explicitly state what kind of stories you wish Until Dawn to tell. You highlight that it's about "relationships and feelings", but phases like "The Surreal", "Tension", and "Danger" suggest that it's also plot- and action-driven. Or is it both?
Wilhelm: Ultimately, Until Dawn is about the emotional rollercoaster that the characters go through during the night. The escalation of the themes is there to push the players to go wild, as the stress levels increase in the relationships between the characters.

Eike: Mechanically, that stress level is brought about by the touch and emotion card mechanisms only.. They help the players create a physical and interpersonal intimacy. How important was it to you that the characters experiencing this intimacy are teenagers, rather than adults?

Wilhelm: Teenagers are superheroes in a way. They see the world in absolutes, and they are victims to their emotions and the physical changes they go through. All coupled with the insecurities of finding out both who they are on the inside and what their place is in the social context.

At least the teenagers of popular culture are like that. And it is them that the game models. My own teenage years were uneventful and I don't have any kids of my own to serve as a template.

Eike: In 2014, you revised your earlier version of the game. Do you have any plans to expand or revise it further?
Wilhelm: One should never say never, but I can't think of anything further I'd like to do with Until Dawn. It’s a pure indie title, and I don’t play that kind of games much these days. Instead I focus on various kinds of retro gaming: OSR and Classical Swedish RPGs, that is clones of the BRP games that were huge here in the 80s.

Eike: What are you up to next? Any exciting roleplaying game projects you want to tell us about? 

Wilhelm: Absolutely! I’m wrapping up the English translation of this year’s game Kuf, and the game is already up on DriveThruRPG as a beta/early access. Kuf is a modern day Gnostic horror rpg, built on top of Ben Milton’s Knave rules (light OSR) [Eike: The German translation of Knave is available on Julian's blog tearlessretina]. But to those I have added some minor tweaks when it comes to experience and the combat/damage system to better emulate the genre. In Swedish there’s an adventure and a magazine for Kuf already. A second supplement - a campaign setting based on rural life in the northern parts of Sweden -  is already in play testing, and that one will likely see an English translation some day.

That one is my main project.  Then I have a handful of other, smaller, projects that compete for my attention. Sweden’s largest RPG con, GothCon, takes place every Easter in Gothenburg, and it would be nice to have something new with me next year, too. But that is just half a year away already so it is about time I decide what I want to do. 

I also edit Hydra, a small retro gaming fanzine in Swedish, and I host the Nordnordost podcast with some Swedish and some English language episodes. We try to make one episode of the podcast every month, so that is a returning project.

Eike: Thank you so much for your time, Wilhelm. I wish you the best of luck with all your ongoing and future projects, and I look forward to playing more of your games.