[SPEAKER_00]: Hello and welcome to Table Talk, a show where I chat with other creators in the TTRPG space about how they run their tables.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Danger Dangers, the GM and host of DN Dark, and joining us at the table today is a player, GM, and TTRPG designer who has been featured on numerous shows such as Dice Fiends, RPG R and D, and the 2025 Cridowords winner for Best Series, The Queer XP, Jonathan Greenall, aka Star Shine Skrybles.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hello, hey, thanks for having me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for being here, so to get us started, can you tell us just a little bit about yourself, your history and the TTRBG space, and about the various projects you're involved in.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I've been into the replays now for I've been saying three years, I think now for about five years.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I probably have to at some point let that out again.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't want to because I mean, I'm getting old.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I've been making games several years now.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've been involved in a lot of different projects.
[SPEAKER_01]: I did a lot of my own games.
[SPEAKER_01]: The one people pointing down before is you have one ability.
[SPEAKER_01]: The ability to fuck this up.
[SPEAKER_01]: And my girlfriend has turned to a car and we're escaping the city, I've also worked on the level one collection and some games for that, as well as the writers for Capers, Cyberpunk and Roll for Learning, which is an educational good-ending of games for classroom use.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm the lead writer for Library of Words, which is a TTRVG review site.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've also written for the half magazine, then I've also done video game writing for staff like Lost in Cults, console, Chronicles, Game of Thrones, and place like Polygone.
[SPEAKER_01]: And quite a few places, my list is slowly growing.
[SPEAKER_01]: and another big big problem we've got is that I also maintain the TTRBG creators that resources master post, which is aiming to help people find the resources they need to make games.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wear too many hats as well, I'm quickly learn.
[SPEAKER_00]: I understand that entirely, you're extremely prolific and I really admire that about you've got a very large body of work that is very versatile.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's start with your involvement on the different shows that you've been a part of, either as a performer in the actual play space or for your games being represented through actual play.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you tell us a little bit about what that experience has been like on either side of that
[SPEAKER_01]: It's always fun to be born.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love the actual place for it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's one of my favorite things to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wish I had more time to do it more often, but I think recordings enjoy the pain.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's a design and the thing you're going to learn very quickly is, hearing your work be played is never, it's cool, but it's never not awkward.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's always something weird before you're sick about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: One of my favorite things that ever happened to me was part of one, which is a great podcast, Jeff Storma played, or I want the Christmas to get out of this
[SPEAKER_01]: And they did ask me beforehand by totally forgotten about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I was go to the airport travel to see family for Christmas and I saw them wanted it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, part of one, you have so it's been down.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd like cool on visit at the airport in the game, sat in the airport Jeff starts talking what 13 he says is the intro to the game, like the little bit flavour text I wrote.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm like, this sounds weirdly familiar.
[SPEAKER_01]: Where have I heard this before?
[SPEAKER_01]: There needs to be a reason that, oh, now I can't listen to this, like, I can't sit here in there for one, I listen to this for fun, because I naturally end up as analyzing what's going on.
[SPEAKER_01]: It does lead to some cool things.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think one thing you're definitely asked to want me to know is that you can give players to benefit the doubt much more than you think.
[SPEAKER_01]: Players are usually fair actors.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not going to try and purposely ruin your game for you.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can leave things vague and they will reap between the lines,
[SPEAKER_01]: So I know a lot of new designers deal with is that you always feel a temptation to overexplain your rules.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I always click pan to my marketing, make sure Rowe's Ed totally gets what you're going out.
[SPEAKER_01]: But you don't have to most players will be perfectly happy to either read between the lines or go with it until they pick up what you're putting down.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you have to be super explicit.
[SPEAKER_01]: Dating is a really nice thing and just everyone's going to bring something different to your gaming.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's like you've got to accept is that I know death of the author has become a mean in some circles, but it's is the truth.
[SPEAKER_01]: People are going to take things in way you didn't expect.
[SPEAKER_01]: People are going to use things in way you didn't expect.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've had people explained to me really cool mechanical interactions, they've seen, you know, I guess, oh you must have for ages developing that as I think.
[SPEAKER_01]: What?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like what you can do that?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I guess I didn't say you couldn't do that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, and tip, if someone says that, you say yes, I did spend no just signing it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for noticing, claim the credit because yeah, sometimes the happy accidents are the best thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, then, but being a player is a game, so it's a really fun experience, some of my favorite things.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think one thing again, it's another thing about trusting yourself.
[SPEAKER_01]: In saying why we say that players will be good actors, you can also be a fair actor to yourself.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a real temptation when you're doing, especially early ones to overthink the things you say and be like, oh, I stumbled over that word, now I'm in the big amount of year.
[SPEAKER_01]: Most people won't notice.
[SPEAKER_01]: I had that recently.
[SPEAKER_01]: I host a podcast, not TTRVG1, but there was a gag, I was like, oh, man, I could live at that better.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the answer to the idea of progress with like, well, that was fine.
[SPEAKER_01]: What was it?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I stumbled over the word.
[SPEAKER_01]: Did you?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because people aren't going to sort of are micro-managing your performance.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not, you know, you don't have a Kubrick in the wings who is going to burn the set down because you, you know, set their slightly wrong.
[SPEAKER_01]: So just, you know, relax, take it as it goes.
[SPEAKER_01]: I always suggest having notes, notes of my comfort item, having notes around his grave, especially
[SPEAKER_01]: I can't remember that rule, write it down, stick it behind you.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have a little piece of cardboard that's even what is recording this, it's there.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just stick notes to it sometimes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, okay, cool, if I need to, you know, that rule I can't remember, there it is, I can just consult it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And again, if you need to take that moment, people won't notice that it won't be like, oh, they haven't memorized the rules.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are the new Satan.
[SPEAKER_01]: It took a breath.
[SPEAKER_00]: I relate to that in a major way, as a creator in the actual place space who edits his own show and frequently interacts with other people in the space.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a common discussion that comes up a bunch is that player brain editor brain, director brain and audience brain all perceive different things and it's amazing what in the moment
[SPEAKER_00]: feels a lot bigger than it is and what you take for granted that the audience will pick up on and jump to.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's the thing that I always brush up against when I'm discussing with other editors of their shows.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we ever get to a place of exchanging notes, they very frequently will not cling onto the pressure and stress points that I do.
[SPEAKER_00]: We do not notice each other's seams, but our very cognizant of our own, like, oh, I could have said that better.
[SPEAKER_00]: All my other players performed perfectly and made no mistakes whatsoever, but I could have done XYZ so much better.
[SPEAKER_00]: What do you mean they made mistakes?
[SPEAKER_00]: What do you mean they think they could do better?
[SPEAKER_00]: Their performance is perfect.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's, it really is just an
[SPEAKER_01]: It's especially weirdy around stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: I edit my own stuff as well and it's like things feel very differently when you hear them for the first time and when you hear it 67 times in about 25 minutes, you will slowly start hating yourself and then you say you have to overcome.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like the audience is not repeatedly listening to this.
[SPEAKER_01]: Same when you're editing again, they'll be like, little bit so, oh man, I could have done that and I could have bled it up pictures slightly better.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, they don't know that's the hair.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is the mountain out of a mole hill thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you
[SPEAKER_01]: You're not going to really notice it and if you do, you're going to be like, oh, moths.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you're at spend months working on the garden, you've got, oh my god, the moths are back.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that for most people, it's just like, oh.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, one of the most important things is it's not something that there's a quick fix to.
[SPEAKER_01]: You just kind of have to get used to it or reach that point of self-loving what kind of loops bat rounds an overflow area.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was like, oh, that's why I have now I go and edit a podcast, like, I know I hate how I sound.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I already know that, so it's not really surprising for me.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's just becoming something like, okay, this sounds like crap, but no one else is complaining.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we're just gonna presume that this is how it's meant to sound.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's kind of similar to the acting side of things.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know it's a really common perspective that a lot of people jump into for any kind of voice acting endeavor or anything where they have to listen to themselves repeatedly or see themselves on camera.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a hurdle that almost everyone has to jump over.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is, oh man, is that really how I sound?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that really how I look?
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I can't stand watching or listening to myself.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's just a thing you have to numb yourself to.
[SPEAKER_00]: After enough sheer exposure to it, you eventually stop noticing and can start looking at it from a more academic lens of like, what objectively can I improve about this?
[SPEAKER_00]: Can I break this down into a science so that I take myself out of the equation?
[SPEAKER_00]: I was an intern for a voiceover recording studio that did voice acting classes for a while, and that
[SPEAKER_00]: had to jump over and almost never was there anybody who was not in that same boat of man, I have to really go out of my way to force myself to listen to my work because I can't stand hearing my own voice.
[SPEAKER_00]: No matter how pleasant their voice is, no matter how good their delivery is, that's just a universal constant.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, especially with actual players.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, there is that whole point of, they are more free for you could sit there all night and say that, oh, well, yeah, I've had a script because I've done X, Y, and Z.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you're scripting it, you're not doing the medium.
[SPEAKER_01]: The medium is inherently messy.
[SPEAKER_01]: I always say my total actual play people.
[SPEAKER_01]: You shouldn't be sort of looking at produced works for your sort of,
[SPEAKER_01]: Inspiration should be looking so like improv more because, you know, often the thing you need to learn isn't I need to be perfect.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's how to roll with things go wrong.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I'm just actually saying one of the best things I would say is if you are running a game, you've got to have different options and not be too committed to any of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: If things go absolutely left fields, what is your way of pulling that back?
[SPEAKER_01]: Though, I would always say, use the common GMing cheat, and that if the players haven't seen something, then it could be anywhere.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's it's trodding as, you know, it's trodding as the enemy, it's trodding as item.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure, they were meant to find it in the other room, but they just walked right past.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it's in this other room.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's always been in this other room, because it hasn't been it's short in your on your map.
[SPEAKER_01]: It may have a little marker, but if you've never said it,
[SPEAKER_01]: not one else knows if you just shuffle it into the other room, move everything to fit to the left.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's such a great catch all and it lengthens off really nicely to my GM philosophy.
[SPEAKER_00]: I tend to approach games as I anticipate obstacles.
[SPEAKER_00]: I do not anticipate solutions.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's kind of two schools of thought there.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are the kind of GMs that come up with five different solutions
[SPEAKER_00]: Never anticipate any solution, just know what obstacles you are planning to put in the player's way, and then leave the problems open and did for them to solve however they will, because you can never truly anticipate everything your players will do, and the stuff that surprises you usually gives you the most ammunition going forward.
[SPEAKER_01]: You have to accept the something.
[SPEAKER_01]: So sometimes things are going to go off and yeah, but knowing how to pull things back, I think it's probably a more important skill than knowing how to set things up.
[SPEAKER_01]: A big chunk of it is just overcoming that everything's gone wrong, frames.
[SPEAKER_01]: And sometimes that does mean accepting that you know, you have to be more or front about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's a kind of as worried that from people is to highlight to
[SPEAKER_01]: And if it's soft sounds messy or if it sounds like I'm having to sort of go on the back foot, people are going to look down on that.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, actually a lot of them has bits people love.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, those moments.
[SPEAKER_01]: One of my biggest inspirations is A deadman.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was a British comedian.
[SPEAKER_01]: He made the show bottom and the young ones.
[SPEAKER_01]: But they need live show as many years.
[SPEAKER_01]: And quite often when something went wrong or one of the
[SPEAKER_01]: they would just be like, well, we ruined that, didn't we?
[SPEAKER_01]: And just tangent into this like, really does improv spur the moment set while they pulled it back.
[SPEAKER_01]: And those are some of the funniest moments of those shows.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the audience always love them, because at that moment, like, oh, hey, we're all at this together.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're all having none of us know where this is going.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's exciting.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, because this isn't the same show as been every night for the last two years.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a unique moment and the same with actual play.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes, you know, you can be fully up front, but then it's going away.
[SPEAKER_01]: Didn't see coming, but hey, we're going to roll with it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, your illness, it's exciting.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something different is happening.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it makes me think of how a lot of the most legendary Saturday night live sketches are the ones that completely fall apart and crash in on themselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a certain charm to watching things go off the rails, and even though it's not exclusively a live medium, even with the like edited and produced shows, you
[SPEAKER_00]: your in the moment performing as though you are alive.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I've found a good piece of wisdom.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you treat a tabletop RPG game as not performing for an audience, but performing for the people in the room with you.
[SPEAKER_00]: At a certain point, you have to ignore the audience and treat your table as your audience, and as long as your table is bought in and having fun on everything that is going on and you keep them engaged, the audience will prefer that to you pandering to them.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's true, and he's a form of art.
[SPEAKER_01]: You've got some what you've got to ignore the audience.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's an old PT bar in joke that the audience doesn't know what they've wanted to.
[SPEAKER_01]: You tell them what I want.
[SPEAKER_00]: But for all the man's flaws, it is actually true.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I know that that's a stumbling block that some of the bigger shows have gotten into.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the big points of inspiration for me for my show was Dungeons and Datties.
[SPEAKER_00]: in their Patreon, they do a basically post show discussion, and there's a lot of really good nuggets of actual play wisdom that goes into that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the things that they talked about a bit with their second season, which is their kind of polarizing one, was that they were very aware that they were kind of becoming beholden to their audience, and they were internalizing
[SPEAKER_00]: audience feedback and critique in real time a little bit too much.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's a danger to watch out for.
[SPEAKER_00]: And letting things be messy and letting them have issues even in terms of starting off and being less polished and turning into something with higher production value going forward.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've chatted with a few fans of the show and that's a thing that
[SPEAKER_00]: it's always a little bizarre to me as an editor being so close to the project that I can't see this about my own show, but I can definitely see it about other people's shows that part of the charm for a longer running show is seeing the improvement over time.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the messiness at the beginning
[SPEAKER_00]: has a lot of charm to a certain subset of the audience because it lends an air of authenticity to it, and lets you see and feel the show grow with its players.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's also one of yours that we sit at is that no one's first draft is going to be perfect and you work with that how you do we have a term early in store with weirdness for a reason and that is on with TV pipes and you should be broadcast very often that's a show was big and even the pilot they broadcast and we pilot three pilot four.
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, that everything, even the biggest shows have messy, go back to the, yeah, I literally means up to people, go back to the very first episode of Seinfeld.
[SPEAKER_01]: It looks noticeably worse.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's shot noticeably worse.
[SPEAKER_01]: The timing is off on everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's mad.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, one problem that is my favorite shows is Mr. Sanchez 2000.
[SPEAKER_01]: You go back and look at Joel, what he was on KTMA and how the first episode of KTMA is literally held together was bits and cell attack.
[SPEAKER_01]: No one knows what they're doing, Joel is exhausted.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then you sort of see this rhythm for me.
[SPEAKER_01]: See everyone sort of get, okay, this is what we're doing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then after that, they sort of start building it up.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, we're going to improve the puppets.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to build this sort of arc nature into it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it works.
[SPEAKER_01]: No one, you're not going to be perfect on the first go.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's unfortunate.
[SPEAKER_01]: because God, it'd be lovely to be part of the first go, wouldn't it?
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you're part of it on the first go, you wouldn't get some of the really nice coincidence at yours.
[SPEAKER_01]: Our other early experiments, things develop in a way that you maybe will expect, and you pick up on things you normally wouldn't.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now some of my best things have come about due to messing up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's some really great running jokes and gags that you can get from that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And a comedy in particular, I know a lot of sitcoms have historically run into that hurdle that almost every sitcom struggles with their first season before they lock into their formula and find their identity.
[SPEAKER_00]: They more than dramas.
[SPEAKER_00]: comedy's really need time to find their footing and figure out their unique dynamic and energy, which is why sitcoms in their truest forms are pretty rare these days, just because the media ecosystem doesn't allow for that kind of development time for a show to find its identity if it's not an instant success, it's tossed out.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, my favorite accidents was when I ran to the correct speed when we ran a local slalom.
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the biggest and most impactful plot points that whole episode is the fact that one character changes the appearance because it's a hint to the fact that it actually has sister.
[SPEAKER_01]: But that whole plot point came around because when I was talking through the plot with a friend, I realized midway through that my original description said she had brown hair, then my later one said she had blonde hair, my friend was like, wait, her hair's changed color.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was like, I've had the a really good way to hints like really that she's not who the other person is and then that just stayed in it the bit I've had people come and said, Oh, that was a really good twist is like it was literally because I was running for I am I forgot what color my character's there was I didn't notice until I was doing a prep read.
[SPEAKER_00]: that's fantastic.
[SPEAKER_00]: So to circle back around to some of your shows and your works, I want to take a look at where your inspiration points are, what you're primarily drawing upon, because you've referenced quite a few things and you've got a really wide body of work that hits on a lot of different genres, you've got more comedy-focused games, more horror, sci-fi, anime, send-ups, stuff that is direct supplements to 5E.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when you're putting those together,
[SPEAKER_00]: What do you tend to draw from the most as an inspiration point to get the process started?
[SPEAKER_00]: And is there any particular design philosophy that you lean on that you like to explore there like certain mechanics that gets stuck in your head that you want to fiddle around with?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it kind of a combination of everything?
[SPEAKER_00]: What does the creation process generally look like for you?
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I'm a big believer in never having one inspiration.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why have one when you have six?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: One important thing that you can do is never box yourself in to one in one inspiration.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you start doing the same thing over and over again, it's going to show and you're going to start hating yourself pretty quickly.
[SPEAKER_01]: I flip between bottom-up and top-down design as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: Depending on project sometimes there's a problem like I have an idea from the canc.
[SPEAKER_01]: that was, uh, San Francisco's polter, which is my ghost hunting game.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was entirely based on the idea of me really liking the idea of a game where you have to try and raise a picture as quickly as humanly possible.
[SPEAKER_01]: Other times I come in with just a contact I like, so a game I'm working on at the moment called Warmaiden is, specifically because I just got really into gun down for a very well, got back into gun down for a very good time.
[SPEAKER_01]: Just love the idea of like,
[SPEAKER_01]: How do you do a server game where you manage a group of Met pilots and slowly get the more killed for fun?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, which did then these things build.
[SPEAKER_01]: I put on a lot of stuff generally, I think it's important to do that because it keeps you fresh, it keeps your games fresh.
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the end.
[SPEAKER_01]: My biggest influence ever was House of Leeds, claiming that book is a great example of how you can just break every single role in the book, every piece of writing advice.
[SPEAKER_01]: When I favor it, I can't remember who Todd's joke now, but it was the House of Leeds drinking game.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is to take a shot every time it breaks one of the rules of literature.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then by the end, you'll end up as mad as the characters are.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because yeah, it just breaks every single rule.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it works.
[SPEAKER_01]: It clearly knew what it was trying to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: And here, and now my mostly has a lot, I could list off 100 thing though, like Fanof, and that's kind of William Castle, the film director whose whole thing was, what's the stupidest gimmick I can give this film?
[SPEAKER_01]: So I have some haunted ill, he's strung up skeletons in the ceiling and had them fly at the audience, he made seats vibrate, you know, it's that kind of just inherent, just weirdness and similar to David Lynch, he was always never afraid to be like, this is what interests me, you know, I think one thing that never is appreciated enough for me is that Twin Peaks is not just like this high concept show, it is, at its core, a parody of trashy soap operas and Lynch
[SPEAKER_01]: while never looking down on them as a medium.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can tell, he liked them.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's such a good thing for me, so take your inspirations to look at them, play with them, have you feel like, and, yeah, probably one of my other inspirations is a curatorial.
[SPEAKER_01]: Toriyama did something with Dragon Ball Dragon Ball Z that I think more I said to take into, which is, if you in the moment make something out to be the coolest thing in the world, the audience they'll go with you, because you sit back and you look at Dragon Ball synopsis, and it is this, do you pick this up?
[SPEAKER_01]: You put this show in existence like you look at the transition dragon multi dragon ball Z all the cat was an alien all along in most shows That would get you killed that's a terrible idea except in that first episode is a he It treats his rath as the basis hey rath it's the coolest guy in the world See for other cool guy you've liked they're gonna fight and there's gonna be awesome and everyone's like
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I want to see that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's what you've got to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, pull things together and go on, you know, this is what I want to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: And again, I'm going to make you think it's cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is not optional.
[SPEAKER_01]: You will come over here.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I need to point it except this.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that is, you know, why a lot of my games are these weird mismasses of different things, you know, not everything has to be a one to one.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a thing I hear a lot.
[SPEAKER_01]: One of my Lisa things in the world is Michelangelo.
[SPEAKER_01]: I hate the dude because of his, I saw the angel in the marble and set her free.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was very good, but the fact that that became sort of this thing of like, oh, inspiration from the Divine.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's why it was pushed because Ridersard is responsible by the church who participated in it of the inspiration of the Divine.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's box, pure box.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you want to make something, you just do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you think something's interesting, they're kind of like, get around, let's do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't, I certainly see with a lot of new developers.
[SPEAKER_01]: I talked to them quite a bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is even in video games as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: If they sit around, go, well, I haven't had the inspiration, like, you know, the sky opens up
[SPEAKER_01]: That could be funny.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've had games I've designed where I let you have set my gone.
[SPEAKER_01]: Man, I wonder if you can make a game with only the D1, which is a ball that would be really stupid.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's do it and see what happens.
[SPEAKER_01]: Doesn't have to be big.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, there's a philosophy that I like a lot more and that I've heard a lot of musicians will tend to harp upon is if you wait for a muse and for inspiration to strike, you will never make anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: you have to get the ball rolling yourself and you have to start the process and be confident that the inspiration will follow and will strike you when you set the table for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another thing that I also want to touch on that you brought up a bunch is how important sincerity is.
[SPEAKER_00]: in the work that you're doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that that's kind of the overlap with what you brought up with the curatorial man with David Lynch is they really genuinely believe in their own work.
[SPEAKER_00]: And with Twin Peaks being kind of a parody and send up of soap operas, it's coming from a place of love rather than a place of ridicule makes a parody work so much more often than
[SPEAKER_00]: All of the parodies that I have hated the most are clearly coming from a place where they detest the source material, and it just feels bad.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of my favorite movies of all time is a young Frankenstein, and you can tell the love and adoration that Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder had for the classic horror movies, and the Frankenstein movies in particular,
[SPEAKER_00]: similarly, not to necessarily tut our own horn with our bonus content on D&D arc, but one of the things that we've gotten as consistent, praise for in some of our bonus content when we did our Scooby-Doo parody Call of Kathubi-Doo and our Muppets parody Muppet Alien is
[SPEAKER_00]: that we really made a point of trying to celebrate the thing that we were parodying rather than ridicule it and come at it from a place of genuine love and care and passion for the source material, which we've got numerous comments and praise for that shining through.
[SPEAKER_00]: I really look at that sincerity as a very critical and important ingredient in anything that you do.
[SPEAKER_00]: As soon as you're starting to do a project like this, whether it's actual player any other creative endeavor, as soon as you're coming at it from a place of cynicism, is when you need to get out of the game.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think that's a thing you can chase trends,
[SPEAKER_01]: because you will slowly die on the inside.
[SPEAKER_01]: You've got to be having fun.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's hard to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's something that a lot of people struggle with.
[SPEAKER_01]: Obviously, the big thing one, especially when you start doing a podcast or switching from external to intrinsic motivation, which you've got to work through that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's also why I say, the holding about reading, watching widely.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's so important because keeps things for actually keeps things exciting.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, gives you new ways of looking at things.
[SPEAKER_01]: Don't.
[SPEAKER_01]: just feel like you've got to keep doing the same thing on a loop until the day you finally snuff it.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, and sometimes that means taking big swings and those big swings will be even if your audience ends up not liking it.
[SPEAKER_01]: You'll have a good time, I think that's important.
[SPEAKER_01]: It goes back to my saying early about, you know, sometimes you're going to treat your audience as a little bit of a stay.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is the case that I was going like, sure, I know I could make this game that would do well, but I don't want to, I want to make this thing that I like, and I am going to convince you that thing I like, is the thing you're going to like, and if you don't, well, tough, there will be another game along for you from me or someone else, wherever, deal with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That kind of strikes on another one of the criticisms that I have of the modern entertainment industry and media landscape is I feel like test audiences are a blight on modern entertainment and there's like a real case study that I can look to that's been in the zeitgeist for a little while as since James guns new Superman movie came out.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's been a lot of vocal discussion about the things that test audiences pointed out that they criticized, that he spiteed them by keeping in any way, and it's some of the more praised aspects of the movie.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like the famous one being during the big Kaiju fight, the fact that Superman goes out of his way to save a squirrel and a dog from being collateral damage in this big catastrophe.
[SPEAKER_00]: is really critically important to the character's ethos and value on protecting all life, and I think makes him significantly more interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was a thing that test audiences pushed back on, and that James gun couldn't bring himself to take out of the movie and said, no, this has to be in here.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is too important to me, and is one of the things that people hold up who are fans of that movie as like, this is a distillation of what you got right about
[SPEAKER_00]: So absolutely at a certain point, you can only take audience consideration so far before you have to stick with your own gut and do the story that is important to you to tell.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, if you want to know how to ask a bit of a problem, there's a Simpson's card with season 6, 7 has a joke of the guy when he gets the kids and he tells them to write each and scratch and they say they want a grounded show with dragons.
[SPEAKER_01]: The people aren't on microcosm there.
[SPEAKER_01]: I can never remember it.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was a German word for the realization that everyone has an internal life.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, Sunday.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Everyone has an early internal life as complex as yours.
[SPEAKER_01]: What keep that in mind, we did developing games and that you will realise that there is no way to sort of perfectly market in.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're never going to get that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, that does mean some products are doomed to fail, but if you have a good time with them, then you learn something and you improve something and set sometimes down the line, you get praise for things you didn't expect.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've had games I put out in do very well the next six months later I get people like, oh man, I really enjoyed that.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then my work here is done.
[SPEAKER_01]: Making games is about using yourself publicly.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you're going to have fun with it, the audience can tell.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I always sort of remember when you go to the like, you ever heard people who go see like an older band and they're just heart isn't in it anymore.
[SPEAKER_01]: Got around when I saw the band wish but Ash no an old blues band.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was like one guy from the original band left and he just had
[SPEAKER_01]: look like he was sucking 11 or 9.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, well, mother repels us on.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love, but when you're set a subdego to say you were no passion, it's like, well, maybe it's time to sit down, man.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe it's time to say, well, we're done.
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: For me personally, I have so much more respect for a project that took a massive risk and it didn't pay off.
[SPEAKER_00]: then one that played it safe and did okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would much rather see a bold ambitious failure then a bland safe success.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, that is entirely true.
[SPEAKER_01]: So on the approach I run is a podcast, what's an army-absolution and we're going to be casting out a look at an army history.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's been our recurring thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: We've found some films that we have watched and gone, this was the worst thing we've ever seen, but it was so weird that you can't stop watching it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I have seen things that are currently trying to sell me a toy and gone, this is technically fine, but it made me want to get up, turn it off and never do this podcast again in my life
[SPEAKER_01]: I was bored.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's my favorite films ever is a film called The Apple, which is absolutely terrible.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a rock musical set in 1994.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know this because they say it's 994-16 times in a minute.
[SPEAKER_01]: The lead actress from Moose George is part of the reason I love it, which is like the Canadian town you come up with when you want to say this person is from nowhere and it's entirely a retelling
[SPEAKER_01]: but everything is made into a weird sci-fi prop, half the actors are from East Berlin and don't speak any English.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you can tell, the guy made it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It had so much faith in this project.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was willing to burn every bridge possible to make it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I have more fun watching the Apple, watching it's awfully composed ending than I do watching.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't want to pick something out because I'm going to email.
[SPEAKER_01]: generic drama number five right like okay here's the bit where we go for the Oscar here's the bit where we show it's like magic you might know where the tricks go and it's not fun the whole point of the trick I'm going to go wow okay cool history is full of big swings that suddenly don't work but they leave a lasting impact that the phrase cult classic
[SPEAKER_01]: is the thing for a reason.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I say even in TTRBG, some my favorite games are weird, unusual, maybe they're not of the best, but how they stand out.
[SPEAKER_01]: One of my favorite games is Apollo 47 technical manual.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is one of the clunkiest and most painful, most hard to play games in the world, but God damn, it's brilliant because of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because it clearly happens idea of like, let's make people role play a moon landing.
[SPEAKER_01]: not not sound the edges off.
[SPEAKER_01]: This isn't curve.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you're going to sit down and read the bloody manual boy.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the fact that, you know, I could then say that's a game I remember because it was so unique to anything else.
[SPEAKER_01]: One of my favorite games is chaotic.
[SPEAKER_01]: The best of you of chaotic I can give you is that it is basically unplayable.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the entire book is, um, no, I'm sorry, I'm not okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think counting is another game that is playable, but it's also very, very weird.
[SPEAKER_01]: Human occupied landfills game I think you have, which is basically unplayable.
[SPEAKER_01]: The entire book is handwritten.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's also scrolled in pen.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's such an experience, and it is a game I remember much more fondly than many bigger games, because I've just seen nothing like it before, and I've seen nothing like it since.
[SPEAKER_00]: That brings me back.
[SPEAKER_00]: That makes me nostalgic for during the 2020 lockdowns.
[SPEAKER_00]: My COVID hobby was.
[SPEAKER_00]: I got into the homebrew scene for the board game Disney villainous and there was a lot of discourse about quality versus ambition and a lot of the ones that I remember from the homebrew scene and that I have a fondness for are ones that were criticized for not being the most technically
[SPEAKER_00]: like objectively better designed and put together, but I don't remember the safe ones anywhere near as much as I remember the ones that took a real big swing.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a couple of that were literally unplayable in a physical space and that you had to have tabletop simulator in order to go through it would be impossible to replicate in person.
[SPEAKER_00]: were they involved destroying the board, destroying the cards, or you have to spawn in like six separate boards and refresh and reshuffle the deck each time as you move from one phase to the next.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they had a reputation both positively and negatively.
[SPEAKER_00]: for being so out there, but they're the ones that I really remember.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one that I have mixed feelings about myself that was kind of a personal landmark for me was I made, it's definitely not my best designed one, but it's one that has a cult following.
[SPEAKER_00]: I made a custom that is for a while I don't know any marks I've been out of the scene for so long, but was considered within
[SPEAKER_00]: and it had a cult following because of its complexity and because it was so out there and took so many wild swings.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's one that I had mixed feelings about and got a lot of heat for since I ingratiate myself more to the like,
[SPEAKER_00]: technical side of the community, they had a curation team and everything and it went into a direction that I didn't enjoy.
[SPEAKER_00]: I left because there was a lot of weird internal politics with the scene, but that sticks in my mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: The custom was for the villain of season three of the DuckTales reboot.
[SPEAKER_00]: I made a custom for Bradford buzzard.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it was a very simple gameplay premise on paper but quickly spiraled out of control the premise of it was basically that you had a chaos meter that you needed to get down to zero and every interaction with your board would make things more and more chaotic.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they were mechanics flying in from all over the place as every different card would make your game state more and more unruly, and your job would be to simplify it down and wipe the slate clean, get everything manageable.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was tons of fun, but had a reputation for being one of the most complicated games that exist, because there were so many different things to keep track of.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it was a very polarizing one for that reason, but it was damn well a memorable one.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's something fun about that, though.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I didn't say really good about games of fighting you back a little bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I guess why look at bilateral, I think it's a great example of a polished way of doing that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But lateral is against you most of the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: But when you crack it, it feels amazing because you feel like it hasn't handed you the victory on a plate.
[SPEAKER_01]: You've had to mess around and find where you'd send you same with that one of your games, finding a visa.
[SPEAKER_01]: Finding a visa is one of the most player on friendly games ever.
[SPEAKER_01]: But that works because when you go, all right, brimstone and doctor features make brimstone bombs that clear the stage or, all right, might take the Bible into mom.
[SPEAKER_01]: She dies immediately and then Satan kills me if I go to the Bible.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's having that idea of finance.
[SPEAKER_01]: What are my favorite games that ever made?
[SPEAKER_01]: Is a game called Cosmology of Kyoto, which I think is a game that literally hates you.
[SPEAKER_01]: When you die after you're through the Buddhist cycles of reincarnation, it makes you sit through.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, no.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like slowly.
[SPEAKER_01]: walk and decay and the puzzles are incomprehensible.
[SPEAKER_01]: You encounter a monster, so if you don't have to give them something, the only way to know that is to consult the game's in-game encyclopedia, which is not an encyclopedia of game mechanics.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is literally the encyclopedia of hay and they uploaded into the game, so it's just a book and it is like so.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've shown it's a fence I've streamed in my whole thing like this game is unfair.
[SPEAKER_01]: It often doesn't work, but it is the best experience you'll ever have because by being unfair, it really gives the game this creepy, weird atmosphere that like, when you go against it, you do feel like, oh man, I am fighting against this, you know, trickster guard that is only stopped if I give it a rice pan.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, this is how it would interact.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you know, that stuff makes these games better.
[SPEAKER_01]: Talking of games, sort of, simply, there doesn't hate you as much.
[SPEAKER_01]: One thing I'm always admired by is the Sailor Moon teaching opportunity that I made.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm bias, I love Sailor Moon.
[SPEAKER_01]: But my favorite thing is about that game is how it so clearly knew who it was talking to.
[SPEAKER_01]: the entire first section I thought it's the history of magic a good old anime and you can tell it's been written by people who love magical girls and know all of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a really cute bit of an art man, Sally the Witch.
[SPEAKER_01]: You should go to the witch side of the witch side of the witch hand been released in English yet, but there was no way for the six short pining this game to
[SPEAKER_01]: But the same one is like, like, this is so cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have to see it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then it's like, and, you know, it was aimed at team girls, so it worked in a lot of ways to meet them where they were.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, oh, you see how you saw.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll give you a show.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, we're going to give you a diary as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you could write about what you're doing in the game.
[SPEAKER_01]: You'd write about that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it means a lot of big and good factions.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we're going to give you space to write down what your clothes are.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is there a mechanical benefit to that?
[SPEAKER_01]: No.
[SPEAKER_01]: But in the show, she'd go on about dresses, so why can't your character?
[SPEAKER_01]: And if that idea of knowing your audience and talking to a very specific group of people, you know, again, my favorite thing I was doing is that the section on Moonlight Night, who is a filler character, is massive, and you can clearly tell the writer doesn't really like to Moonlight Night, and I was like, I love Moonlight, you will agree with me in your case, this is not optional.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's fantastic.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and it's just, it's that money kind of feel like, oh, hey, I'm being the writer talking with the page isn't me talking to, uh, you know, the HR department and the financial department who have decided that this word will make us 50 extra dollars per year, I'm talking to the weirdo who wrote this and their weird obsession with Moonline night and sign on to you crazy diamond.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's a great, I guess, thing I like to aim for in my game.
[SPEAKER_01]: So my games are stupid inherently so, but sometimes here's, hey, I hope someone sees that and gets the joke.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you don't get the joke, well, the joke is them for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a great mindset to approach that with.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I will use that as a transition point to circle back around to your projects in particular again.
[SPEAKER_00]: for anybody who is just starting off and wanting to get into designing TTRPGs, do you have any advice that you would give to them?
[SPEAKER_00]: Or if you were to put yourself in the shoes of your past self when you were just starting to design, is there anything that you wish you knew then that you know now?
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, there's so much about you can give.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe the big one is that you've got to stop.
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, it's that thing of people wait for sort of permission.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, one is going to give you permission.
[SPEAKER_01]: You've just kind of got to roll into it and go with it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, your first work is going to be crap is one of this.
[SPEAKER_01]: It means nothing, I think the thing people don't address them and those are to get other geniuses.
[SPEAKER_01]: You have to learn a lot more skills than you think you do.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is unfortunate because all skills have a learning curve.
[SPEAKER_01]: So starting TT RPG doesn't just mean you're going to be bad at one thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're going to be bad at six things at once and you just kind of got to go well.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is just how it's going to be for a little bit, but over time you will get better of that and you cash starting proving.
[SPEAKER_01]: You've also just, I think one of the big things you've got to get used to finishing stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I know you said I'm prolific.
[SPEAKER_01]: I would argue against that I'm prolific, and just that I finished saying, I think a big problem you see a lot of new developers do is they get sucked into the perfection hole where like, oh man, I could just spend another couple of months just tweaking this, or I could swap for the adjectives, what you're doing is you're avoiding finishing something because you don't have faith in it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was talking about, it's a couple of months ago now who has a background in psychology and like, oh yes, that's an anxiety coping mechanism.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know that makes perfect sense.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's so simple, but it is true.
[SPEAKER_01]: It no one has to see it if you never do it, but you have to get used to finishing things.
[SPEAKER_01]: It isn't for sure, so how you move on on the industry.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you want to get roles writing, you've got to have stuff to show people to have stuff to show people.
[SPEAKER_01]: You've just got to have stuff out there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's unfortunate, but this is why I always suggest starting with game jams a little bit, especially format jams because they do kind of force you to go, you have two months.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the end of two months, this is going out whether you like it or not.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I will say, if you have friends in design, get them to support you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Basically, have them tell you, this is going up on in two months.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even if I have to come to your house and rip the file off myself and do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because you can just not sit there working on one game for 25 years.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you say one more month, but it doesn't mean one month.
[SPEAKER_01]: It means one more month, I find something else to change and then one more month, I have to ask change.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's understandable, but it's used to go finish things, and it's a skill we don't talk about enough, but it is a skill.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll say, again, the game champ's starting small.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know a lot of people who come into this wanting to make part finder, wants to make cyberpunk.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those are big projects for a reason.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not a good way to start.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're just going to go.
[SPEAKER_01]: I said, when you see those video game kick starts, where it's a one-man dev team from a remate skyrim.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, I admire your passion and this of cold dream to have, you're just not going to be able to.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a reason when you learn coding, we teach you to make pong, we teach you to make pack-round-ish, make donkey-com.
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't say, make GTA-6 because you can, you have chance to learn because you're stuck doing the one thing of ever.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the other thing you've got to do is you've got to learn to not compare yourself.
[SPEAKER_01]: The unfortunate problem with this is people come in and again to look for inspiration are the ones that are easy to find the ones that are in book big book stores.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those are games made by multi-actual conglomerates, they have teams of, you know, come on and I count how many people wrote the pathfinder book.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's about 115.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that sounds about right.
[SPEAKER_01]: I may be off there.
[SPEAKER_01]: I apologize for your number 1616.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wasn't in the team.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they have a budget earlier.
[SPEAKER_01]: They work nine to five on that game.
[SPEAKER_01]: They have a team of good soltons.
[SPEAKER_01]: They have a budget of probably in the high 100,000, maybe topping a million.
[SPEAKER_01]: They can do a lot of stuff for you.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, your game is never going to look as good as I think we're going to be as big as that.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's fine.
[SPEAKER_01]: When your little cousin comes to you with a cray and drawing, you don't grab them by the lapels, take them to the Louvre and show them Gernica and go, look, look, look, don't be stupid.
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, it's not going to be Gernica.
[SPEAKER_01]: You've got to imagine yourself as that little cousin for a breakman and go, what I say to someone who is just starting out.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, compare yourself to other indie games.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's why I always love format game jams.
[SPEAKER_01]: Stuff like the business card jam is all the bookmark jam or the one-page jam which is currently ongoing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Our great way to sort of compare yourself to others in that by having that strict format, it does undercut some of the advantages of having money.
[SPEAKER_01]: It does undercut some of the advantages of having a bigger team, because there is only so much you can do on one page.
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, don't still work around yourself to big teams, but at least you can have an idea of like, okay, how did I approach this?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's important.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like I think a lot of devs fall in terms of you make your first scene well, I could have made it better, don't have the resources, economics or a thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that tip I'll just give is that your first game is going to be hard.
[SPEAKER_01]: It'll be very, very hard because you've got to learn your workflows.
[SPEAKER_01]: Workflows are boring, but they exist.
[SPEAKER_01]: We probably have this as someone where it's podcasts.
[SPEAKER_01]: The first podcast you edit will take about four hours because you've got to work out wherever they go in the software.
[SPEAKER_01]: You want to find where you put the overlay,
[SPEAKER_01]: The first one took me out four hours at it because of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was like, oh, where do I put this now?
[SPEAKER_01]: I know I'm like, I have my folders laid out.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know where they go.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can do it now.
[SPEAKER_01]: You've got to get that sort of mechanism down and you know, over time you start knowing little things how to make things look better faster, where to find things even finding results.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, hey, if I want to find this kind of art, I look on this site.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, hey, this wouldn't look right with this painting or you know, this is how I do a march in.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I said, well, I was in that first edit, I had to look up how to do something in resolve.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that was like 25 minutes of looking through tutorials.
[SPEAKER_01]: Never have to do that again, now.
[SPEAKER_01]: I now have to do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Same with developing a TT RPG, you will learn and you will get faster over time, things will get smoother.
[SPEAKER_01]: When you start a TT RPG on your own, you are doing writing, layout, imaging, you're going to be crap at all of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: But over time, you will get slightly better at each of them, and those things will become faster, they'll become easier, and they'll become
[SPEAKER_01]: is the boring part of these kind of conversations.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wish I could say that there was, you know, go to the ancient temple of Canjard and put a friend down and you'll be blessed.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, you just have to do them.
[SPEAKER_01]: You will hate yourself for a brief period that will be the night so you go, I'm useless at everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: Father was right.
[SPEAKER_01]: But then, in two weeks, you'll look back and then go, what was I going on about that's mad, I'm over dramatic.
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember the absolute stress of laying out my first game and it looked crap and now I look at it and go, what was I complaining about?
[SPEAKER_01]: This is really easy and it's not easy.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the fact that I just got the skills and the I've spent years, how new it is, what it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: To quote the wisdom of adventure time, being bad at something is the first step to being sorta okay at something.
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly, advice for life.
[SPEAKER_01]: We were talking earlier as well, saying with podcast of, you've got never shut up.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's like the people struggle because if you're a soldier, you don't have to do the writing, you have to do the marketing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And marketing early on, I'm not maybe this is me, I'm British.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we have hilarious social codes on one.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is okay to like yourself when as a nation you kind of expect to hate yourself a little bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've like a weather person, but that marketing, you just got to learn to do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you've got to learn any good for that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh people will judge me if I say by my thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, that is what you've got to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's going to feel horrible.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's going to feel awkward.
[SPEAKER_01]: You've got to make the social media posts for me.
[SPEAKER_01]: I never got around to liking that part of doing it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I never did.
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought to the point of where I'd accept the fact I hate doing it is for me the equivalent of taking out the trash.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it is like, oh, this job sucks.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't want to do it, but I've got to do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I will do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I can go and do something much more interesting when this is done.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, I said, I wouldn't have got a lot of the jobs.
[SPEAKER_01]: I did unless I started talking to people and started being like, hey, I write this stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you want it, go to come and do me for us.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's it.
[SPEAKER_01]: One of my first things I got off of the job was, I said, in a sense, well, can you write some of my games?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, sure, sure, what do you want it?
[SPEAKER_01]: They sent me a contract, there was a brief amount of like, oh, you mean like job job.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: This isn't just me like doing a favor for you.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is actually something we're doing.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like we're doing a capitalism transaction here.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh dear.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, the only new I did stuff because I was saying I did stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: spotlighting of small media is very hard, places do not spotlight well.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you have to say that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I say it's a lot.
[SPEAKER_01]: I said again, I don't know where I'm site-puddling.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've read words, where I review specifically my sort of thesis that site is to talk about the games no one else will.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I get people like, oh, I wish I'd cover my games like there's a contact form on site.
[SPEAKER_01]: Have you emailed me?
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I can use it, it's tools, but they're not perfect.
[SPEAKER_01]: I can use drive-through tools.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're terrible.
[SPEAKER_01]: Cool, we'll also have to be a site full stop recently because it's gone down hill.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're not telling me that and you're not all you're not posting, I might love your game, but I'm never going to find it because of that side, because of that philosophy, I think I put more time into searching for games than your average consumer because I specifically make these lists and stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if I can't find your game, I don't think a random person is going to find it either.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even if they love, it could be their favorite game in the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: They could love the concept.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you're not saying, you know, it's the old joke of, you know, a restaurant is only as good as this marketing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: You may make the best cock of hand this side of the rhyme.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you are in a cupboard at the back of a safe way, no one's going to know your
[SPEAKER_00]: and get it sucks but you got to do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: Which to that end I will give you an opportunity to do that right now for anybody wanting to look into your work and your content.
[SPEAKER_00]: Where do you recommend they start?
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of the games I always say you have one of those things to talk it's up.
[SPEAKER_01]: because that is a very simple demo that is mechanically regretting the three stuages, because I love my whole satit comedy, but recently I've switched to a game called Polter, because I think it is the most, I jokingly call my design clown core, because I draw a lot of inspiration from the circus, and that is that to be a clown, you said, I've got to be stupid, and Polter is that, Polter is a game where you play as a freelance ghost removal technician.
[SPEAKER_01]: in a world where ghostbusting has become Uber and you fight ghosts by doing certain things you earn time and that lets you erase a board at the end.
[SPEAKER_01]: You got to erase it as quickly as possible to get rid of the ghost.
[SPEAKER_01]: You've got to literally bust the ghost by erasing it and I think that is the type of design I work with a lot of like this is fun, this is kinetic, it's a little bit silly.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's also one of my favorite designs of a book.
[SPEAKER_01]: because the whole book is all device to look like you're what looking out on the screen of a smartphone, complete with a load of weird ads.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of the advert's reference other things I've done, like there's the haunted TV channel channel that takes six, I bring up a lot.
[SPEAKER_01]: They have a little advert, there's wobbly land, which is a haunted theme park that appeared in the other game, has a little advert.
[SPEAKER_01]: So for me, it's like, it's,
[SPEAKER_01]: both really good Microsoft design and so I really love because it's just me showing off the hey, these are all these things I love that I've made.
[SPEAKER_01]: It references a recurring joke of mine, which is, um, he didn't know a lot of my games.
[SPEAKER_01]: He has mentions of a character, a detective, who no one likes, who often dies, who is very clearly mean.
[SPEAKER_01]: As for links, oh gosh.
[SPEAKER_01]: Deep breaths, everybody.
[SPEAKER_01]: I apologize for this.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you want to find all my stuff that includes all my teaching opportunities, all my freelance writing, all of my podcasting stuff, that is on StarChionscribbles.com.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you just want the game to there on each StarSciencecribbles.its.io, you want me to see me on social media where you can hear me randomly talk about things like pro wrestling and theme parks.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's StarSciencecribbles.pluseguide.social.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then if you want to see me review and TDRPG to go to the library of words.com and again to really restress the early point I made.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you have a game and you think, yeah, I would like to maybe see this review.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've always got a comment, has an about page, has an email address, you can go on to email address immediately and I will have a look, too.
[SPEAKER_01]: I do not bite, so do not feel that you're going to have me publicly slandering you for your game.
[SPEAKER_01]: I review the things I like because I like them.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then finally, if you go on South Africa was a calm, you will find the TTL that you created, the master post, which is a database that I maintain of free, cheap, creative comments, creation resources for new developers.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, last count, I think we have about still
[SPEAKER_01]: 300 links on that page to stock images of all types of game systems you can have, place to find video sound fonts.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, please make use of that because every six months I get messages from my hosting provider saying that's too many links.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, the more people who use it, the more people who just find me having to tell my hosting provider, please stop even adding button up of links.
[SPEAKER_00]: fantastic, all of those resources will be in the description of this episode, but before we wrap up, I just want to make sure if there's any other miscellaneous topics that you want to touch on that we haven't had an opportunity to address, is there anything that we haven't talked about that you want to make sure that we do?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, as you want to talk a little bit about the journalism for a brief second.
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, is that a thing of reaching out to people is very, very important.
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the biggest tips I can give you if you want your game to be covered on somewhere is to make sure you have a good variety of art and I say good right if I don't mean commissioning 400 or piece again, a commission artist do it recommend it lovely fun.
[SPEAKER_01]: but having just a big version of your logo available, having a banner version of your logo available, is amazing.
[SPEAKER_01]: It saves me a lot of time, but when I work with other places, I said, I'm polygon, I'm okay, travel with other worlds.
[SPEAKER_01]: Bill Bell always asks you, what does the image team is doing?
[SPEAKER_01]: If I can say, well, here's the banner already made for this entry in this list, for this article, here's the art already made.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are so much more likely to let me run something that if I have to say, well, there's this kind of bit of word art here, but it's
[SPEAKER_01]: image team and gap to remake it, like I have to find the background image.
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, it sucks that is something that we have to do, but obviously everything is a time and straight.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you want your game covered, even if you want it on podcasts as well, it's very helpful.
[SPEAKER_01]: Get that pack of just get an even if it is just an in-gimp, which they've opened source photo editor, that is just your word out in different sizes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Make sure one's in 1080p.
[SPEAKER_01]: It just, it saves everyone a lot of time and in those moments, if people have a choice between, I've got a week to get this out, I have the one where all the image work is already done for me or the one I'm going to have to make all the images from scratch, they're going to go for the one where the images are made.
[SPEAKER_01]: It ruined your search ranking, which is like I hate the fact that I don't, that is the game, but if I don't know what a game is, the chance to be downloading it are much smaller.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even if it is just two cents to say, this is a game about dogs, it's for four players, it uses D12's.
[SPEAKER_01]: that immediately one that's people know what it is.
[SPEAKER_01]: So people who, like, oh, cool, I want to see if you have jogs, we'll download it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It means that people who don't want that kind of game won't feel like they've been ripped off.
[SPEAKER_01]: It means if someone picks what up on a whim, and I'm like, well, I can't play this, because I don't have this specific dice.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's again, it's a small detail, but it makes me world of difference to how your games will get covered, how your games will get looked at.
[SPEAKER_01]: And again, it's so nice for sort of people who search for new games, just being,
[SPEAKER_01]: gives them that little bit of a bit of just have to be like big copy and probably my final thing on that was also is knowing your worst is something we don't talk about enough in TTRP design.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are a lot of fly-by-night dicks who will try and although ball you will try and get something for free, people exist online in the TTRP space who are very public.
[SPEAKER_01]: Most of them,
[SPEAKER_01]: person, they may be this offer and I'm unsure about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll be happy to be like, okay, you know, that's clearly nonsense.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or you know, I've worked with them and they're cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I've, it's same in the writing community.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are whisper networks that you can tell you like, hey, if, yeah, this person just undercharge you, this person doesn't pay.
[SPEAKER_01]: Don't be afraid to reach out if you feel, if your gut says something about this is fields of fields who are going to be true.
[SPEAKER_01]: Most people in the community with more than happy to just have a look and give you that advice.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because, you know, over starting out, we're in that same position where we took a job as like, well, didn't get paid for it, didn't get my name on it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, and yeah, you want to make sure it doesn't happen to me, so feel free to reach out.
[SPEAKER_01]: Don't feel that you're alone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Awesome.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, thank you again so much for sitting down to chat with me.
[SPEAKER_00]: This has been a fantastic conversation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, thank you for having me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And thank you to all of you for listening.
[SPEAKER_00]: One more time, everybody.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Danger'd Andrews, the GM and host of Dien Dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been chatting with Star Shine scribbles, otherwise known as Jonathan Greenle, and this has been Table Talk.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I hope you enjoyed what we brought to the table.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Table Talk, created, hosted and edited by myself, Danger Dan Jers, with artwork by Jordan Nelson.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our guest this episode was Jonathan Greenhall, also known as Star Shine scribbles, links to their work can be found in the episode description.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're interested in being a guest on the show, reach out to us at dndarkpodcast.gmail.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our theme song in Outro was created by Jeremy Volucci.
[SPEAKER_00]: Check out more of his works on Instagram at Jeremy Volucci underscore wreck of time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks again for listening.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we'll see you next time we have a guest take a seat at the table.