Welcome home.
This is Audio EXP for July 26th, and the episode title is “Horror: White Wolf needs humans, uses AI”.
[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #296]
[Also on Stitcher | Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
Empyreal Media Productions won the RPG Publisher Spotlight this month.
I asked Julien, the one-man talent behind the studio, why he left computer games. He had been at Ubisoft for 10 years, first as a level designer on Heroes of Might & Magic and then with the writing and creative teams. Eventually, he felt trapped and was no longer excited by the games.
Now, as Empyreal Media, he’s doing innovative stuff with tabletop games and is worth checking out.
I’m going to talk about horror for most of this podcast and White Wolf and AI shortly, but I think the biggest news of the week was Gamefound buying fellow crowdfunding platform Indiegogo.
We’re told that the two sites will continue separately, but Indiegogo will use Gamefound’s tech stack. Crucially, crowdfunding projects will be cross-platform discoverable. So you might be on Indiegogo and get recommendations for Gamefound campaigns.
The deal was likely attractive for Gamefound as a way to buy eyeballs. They’re getting in front of people like me who don’t mind taking a risk on backing a crowdfunding campaign. Given that, it makes more sense to try to maximise both platforms’ user base, and I guess, for now, keeping them separate but linked makes sense.
Indiegogo, I fear, has a more significant problem with ghost campaigns than Gamefound. By which I mean campaigns that look good and then vanish pretty promptly once they have backers’ money. Gamefound, which is more about tabletop games, is less of a target because unproven studios can rarely attract the backing of trusted game designers.
Kickstarter must be feeling a little heat.
Now, White Wolf.
The newly re-created studio has taken the World of Darkness in-house, a few weeks ago hired Jess Lanzillo as Creative Director but only this week seems to have gotten serious with recruiting others and shared some job ads.
Here are the positions that White Wolf needs;
- Lead Game Designer
- Commissioning Art Director
- Editor / Rules Manager
- Operations Director
- Producer
It strikes me as a little odd that they didn’t have their Lead Game Designer sorted before announcing they were taking the World of Darkness back. Perhaps they did, and there’s now been a change of hands.
According to the job spec, the Lead Game Designer must be based in Sweden, have at least five years of experience in game design, and is not required to be familiar with the World of Darkness. Prior experience with Vampire: The Masquerade and the other titles is a nice-to-have, not a requirement.
If you keep scrolling down the job pages, you’ll get to a quiz form in which you reassure White Wolf that you can come to Sweden. It’s here, and very near the top, that the studio says that they’ve embraced AI for collaboration and productivity. As part of your application, White Wolf would like to know about your experience in using AI.
Importantly, White Wolf does not say they use generative AI in the final output of their games.
We’ve seen backlash against studios that have got too close to AI. Evil Genius insists they don’t, but still suffered much heat, and while there are thousands of downloads on DriveThruRPG that use generative AI images, the topic is a hot potato.
Most office software uses AI now, Slack does, Google does, Microsoft does, email spam filters and antivirus software do. White Wolf may be utilising AI for storyboards, which utilise numerous images but will likely never see the light of day, as well as note-taking and calendar coordination.
I think we’ll just have to watch this space.
An artist who doesn’t use AI is Zatnikotel, and the cartographer has just given his backers The One Mile. That’s a mile-long set of battlemaps designed to be played through. In area terms, that means one million square feet.
Should you have plenty of ink and print off the battlemaps for real-life use, then The One Mile will stretch for 90 feet.
Okay, let’s be brave and head back to horror.
How many RPGs have you played that came in sealed packets? Hellfinder does.
Hellfinder is a modern horror hack of Pathfinder by Jason Bulmahn. Jason wrote Pathfinder so he’s hacking his own system.
I was lucky enough to get an interview with Jason, which you can read on the blog, and I asked him about this self-hack. He said;
I get this question a lot. It’s true, the Pathfinder 2E engine is built for high fantasy, but much of that comes from the character power scaling and how it directly relates to the monster and treasure design rules. But beneath that is a very tidy game engine with a simple proficiency system, an elegant combat engine, and a robust action resolution mechanic that has degrees of success built into the core of the game. So.. if you change the character advancement system and present entirely new monsters based on that system, you can fundamentally alter the pace and feel of the game. “
Jason Bulmahn wasn’t the only designer I got to talk to this week about horror. I talked to Justin Achilli about Our Brilliant Ruin.
How did I manage this? Well, Hellfinder is crowdfunding on BackerKit, and Our Brilliant Ruin has a Starter Set coming to Kickstarter.
In Our Brilliant Ruin, there is the real danger of the Ruin. I like that the Ruin is weak against fire and alcohol, as both bring flamboyant parties to mind for me. I wanted to know why Justin had picked those weaknesses, and I won’t read his whole answer, just the first part.
One of the important parts of the setting is that you can’t beat the Ruin overall. However, you can definitely eke out individual victories over Ruined horrors or mitigate the Ruin that has previously claimed an estate or other location. So we needed some way for players to do this, some in-world tool or substance that could turn back the “entropic particulates.”
What stood out for me here is the reminder that in Our Brilliant Ruin is that you can’t beat it. Not in the long term.
One more? I can do. This week I also talked to Ashton Baker. Ashton is Catacolyte Games, so not as well known as our other two designers, but we’re keen to give indie studios equal support here at Geek Native.
Ashton has a newish TTRPG Sins of Our Mother on Itch and DriveThruRPG. You need your adult content turned on DriveThruRPG, and that’s one of the topics we covered. Ashton had told me that horror is a way for us to safely explore aspects of ourselves so I challenged him on that, asking how his games help.
He said;
Horror isn’t something we get to access in our daily lives. Not safely, at least. Yet emotions like fear and disgust are undeniably part of us, and engaging with them reveals something about ourselves. One of my goals as a game designer is to help people imagine themselves in horrifying situations, and thus explore aspects of themselves they couldn’t otherwise. More traditional narratives are great, but high adventure can only reveal so much about our own nature. Horror is where we access the truest, most primordial parts of ourselves.
Do you agree?
I must admit, I’ve been invited to tabletop games in which the PCs are based on the players. I’ve always refused. That’s not my thing. I play tabletop games for escapism and not to be me for a while. Not that it’s bad being me. I’m a middle-aged white man with a job. Statistically, it’s great to me and I’ve all the advantages, but I’m not an angry halfling who just wants to cook wyvern meat to find out if it tastes like chicken. It’s wyvern cooking that I game for.
This week, SoulMuppet Publishing released a free quickstart for Doomspiral.
Oh yes, this is a horror tabletop game inspired by the likes of Dark Souls and Elden Ring.
It’s almost as if our real-world news is filled with headlines that are encouraging large numbers of game designers to explore horror games.
In Doomspiral, characters explore a world ruined, rotten and in terminal decline.
It’s not all tabletop games this week, but there’s more horror to come. I hadn’t read The Count of Monte Cristo until this month. I did so after reading David Dabel‘s graphic novel The Curse of Monte Cristo.
While Dumas hints at otherworldly influence, Dabel re-imagines the story as there was direct demonic meddling. I liked it but I imagine purists might have concerns.
Before we get to the outro of bundles and a competition, I want to flag that Mongoose Publishing has released an official soundtrack for Traveller Frontier. You can get it from DriveThruFiction.
Since this is a podcast, I don’t get to show you things, but I can, in fair use, let you hear the first 30 seconds of the public preview Mongoose and Sonor Village have already released.
Okay, there are two bundles in our outro and both at the Bundle of Holding. The first is the Advanced Adventures mega bundle, which is an OSR, and the second is Neon Lords of the Toxic Wasteland from Super Savage Systems, which is much harder to describe except as a Toxic Avenger-style horror. Yes, even more horror.
However, we’re not going to leave on a horror and instead will be far more wholesome. If you’re in the UK, then you can enter the competition to win one of three copies of Adventuring Family. This is a tabletop RPG crafted by experts to be a great way to help kids who might need some extra and careful attention.
One final thing. Next week, the Edinburgh festival season will be kicking off and it’ll last until the end of August. We’re going to try to keep up with Geek Native despite being stretched very thin. Apologies in advance if schedules slip or episodes are missed.
On that note, that’s a wrap. Watch out for endless despair, and see you next week.
