Co-Envisioning Worlds in Penumbra City

Here we are presenting Ian’s interview with members of Strangers In a Tangled Wilderness, a collectively run publisher of radical podcasts, fiction, zines, games, and much more. We discuss the kickstarter fundraiser the group just launched to fund their tabletop RPG, Penumbra City, their history with games and with each other, world building, the value of goal-free play, and how it might be applied to projects and organizing. You can watch a playthrough of the game on youtube.

Penumbra City links:

Kickstarter
Instagram @PenumbraCity

STW links:

STW Podcasts:

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Featured Track:

Spellwork by Austra from Feel It Break

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Transcription:

TFSR: So as it stands now, the Kickstarter, which launched at the beginning of June is standing at around $37,000 with 19 days to go! So, congratulations on that, obviously.

Can you all introduce yourselves, share your pronouns, your affiliations and maybe talk a little bit about how this came together?

Margaret Killjoy: Yeah. Am I going first? Someone else go first.

Inman: You’re already talking, so…

MK: All right. My name is Margaret. Margaret killjoy. I use she or they pronouns and, I, along with the other two people on this call are part of Strangers in the Tangled Wilderness, which is an anarchist publishing collective that is putting out a tabletop role playing game called Penumbra City that is currently being Kick Started. I’m going to pass it to Robin.

Robin: Hi, I’m Robin, I’m the artist for Penumbra City. I’m excited to be here. Can I pass to Inman?

I: Hi, I’m Inman, I use they/them pronouns. I’m the Game Designer for Penumbra City. So if the game doesn’t work when you play it, you can blame me… Or if you’re not having fun, you can blame me. [laughs]

R: If you are not having fun, then you’re doing it wrong. Also, I use she/her pronouns. Sorry, I left that part out.

MK: The background of Penumbra City is that a long time ago I was hired to write a game world for a universal game system by a different publisher. I wrote this whole crazy-big city world called Penumbra City that I put a lot of work into. It was like 40 or 50,000 words of world that I wrote, which is almost as long as… well, it’s longer than many of the books I’ve written. Then that publisher disappeared. This was about 10 years ago. They just collapsed and ghosted everyone. I had already done the work and I never got paid.

So, I had this world without a mechanical system just sitting around for a very long time. I spent a long time kind of trying to toss together different game systems to go with this game world. I tried figuring out if I could adapt it to Dungeons and Dragons, or Powered By The Apocalypse. We tried a couple other different systems. Me and my friends and a bunch of people play tested the early versions of it who also really liked the world. Then I started working with Robin and Inman, a number of years ago now on what is the current version. I would say the current version has probably been in progress for three or four years as well. I just got really lucky finding a bunch of people. Cassandra is also part of the group that is working on it too, but isn’t able to make to this particular interview.

So after several years of work, we Kick Started it on June 1. It has been more successful than we could have hoped. I think people are excited about role playing strange gang war versus the Immortal God King in a collapsing society. I actually think in a lot of ways the timing is better now than it would have been like four years ago, because there’s a little bit more on the nose now about a society that is increasingly polarized, and people attempting to come together to change everything and make things better.

TFSR: Can you talk a little bit about your experiences in relationships to gaming, how you got together, and how your experiences and relationships informed bringing this game together?

I: Yeah, I can talk a little bit about that. I know that Margaret and Robin have a little bit of a deeper history with this game than I do and in general. Actually, Robin, maybe you should start and then I’ll catch up where I come in.

R: Well, are we talking about our relationship to Penumbra or our relationship to gaming in general?

TFSR: I’d like to hear about your relationship to gaming in general, and then maybe zoom in on Penumbra?

R: Ok, yeah! In terms of my relationship to gaming in general… when I was a little kid my sister had the whole ‘80s Dungeons & Dragons module on the box. I was so fascinated with it. Then there were all these ‘80s Satanic Panic news pieces about how Dungeons & Dragons is evil and it’s making kids bad. That made me even more curious about it. My cousin and I were trying to find it and looking under her bed and digging through her old stuff and going into the basement trying to find the D&D stuff. It was like this object of mystery to me. I did eventually inherit that box from her and I still have it in my house. It’s missing half of the shit that it’s supposed to have in it. But it’s just a fun keepsake that I’ve had now for the rest of my life.

I started playing D&D with my cousins when I was probably like 12 or 13 years old. Although, at that age, we were really difficult to organize. So it never really stuck. Then when I was in high school I had a more regular gaming group. That was still mostly Dungeons and Dragons. We didn’t start branching out into different styles of role playing until we were a little bit older.

Margaret and I have been friends since we were in high school. I remember at one point, I think when we were both home visiting our parents for Christmas and she called me up and she was like, “Do you want to come play an RPG [Role Playing Game] in my parents basement?” and I was like, “Hell yeah!” So the two of us have been on and off playing together for quite a long time. So when we had the opportunity to make something like this together that is fun and exciting, because Margaret and her writing always really inspires me and makes me excited and makes me want to create. And then Inman has been able to not only add to the lore and help us develop this really amazing thing, but has also just made it just so functional and smooth and easy to do.

MK: Yeah! I’ve been playing D&D and other RPGs for about 30 years now which makes me feel old as hell. I started playing in fourth grade with my friends stepdad as the DM [Dungeon Master] in the basement of his house. The first time I ran a game that was also probably in fourth grade or something like that. These are some of the strongest memories I have of this age of my life. I did not have a particularly easy time socially. See the aforementioned hiding-in-the-basement-playing-Dungeons-&-Dragons.

Then I had a gaming group in fourth and fifth grade and by the time I went to middle school, my best friends moved away. So then I just started reading gaming books. That was like my primary… Well I read everything, but I read an awful lot of game books. I really just liked reading encyclopedias about fake worlds. I think what actually set up a lot of my expectations around what kind of creative stuff I like producing, was just realizing that the envisioning of these worlds is its own amazing thing.

I played off and on a little bit in high school and played with Robin a little bit, but it kind of fell out of it. I got back into it while I was living in a squat and Amsterdam and this super tough Anti Fascist skinhead friend of mine who I lived with, who spent all of his time lifting weights and fighting Nazis, he comes up to my room, and he’s like, “Magpie! Do you want to play D&D with me?” And I’m like, “Are you? Are you making fun of me? Did you come up here to make fun of me?” And he’s like, “No, a player dropped out. I need a new player for my campaign!” So I started getting back into playing Dungeons & Dragons. The whole time, also, I was playing Shadow-run and Vampire and some of the other games.

I came back to the states and then I just started making all my friends play role playing games with me. I used to be the ‘Forever DM’ until I tricked Inman into becoming the ‘Forever DM’ and now Inman is the ‘Forever DM,’ or a ‘Game Master’ now, because when you play not D&D, you’re not supposed to call it DM.

Then you know, all this time, I also had these other games I was working on. This isn’t the first game system or game world I’ve written. This is probably number three or four. But this is the good one. This is the one that’s worth publishing. All the others are like weird zines that may or may not be floating around the world. Like one of them’s called ‘Gray World,’ and I don’t remember anything about it.

I: I have always wanted to play RPGs or games in general. I was aware of these games when I was a kid, but I didn’t have friends to play them with. So, I just spent a lot of time running around in the woods like LARPing by myself and eventually started reading game books as well. I was like, “I don’t have people to play these games with because I barely have friends at all, so I’m just gonna read these games!” It’s funny because I think we think of nerd culture sometimes as where you are alone playing these things. But in order to play these games you need other people who feel alone to play them with. So I just read game-books until I was like 22 or something. I had been flirting with D&D for a long time, and someone was like, “I’ll run a campaign!” And I was like, “Great!” And I read the entire game book and come up with 10 characters, and then it would fall through.

Then Margaret, when we were both living in Asheville invited me to play in her D&D campaign. So that was the first time that I was actually playing D&D. It was immediately everything that I wanted it to be. I just started to GM because Margaret kind of stopped. And I was like, “I want to do this. But the only way that I’m going to be able to do it is if I learn how to run games.”

I ran a lot of really bad games for a while, but got really invested in learning it. Me and Margaret eventually started playing D&D Again, where she was playing in some of my games that I was running. We started to talk about game mechanics a lot and started to talk about the limitations of D&D, which is what we were mostly playing. I think I had just listened to Critical Roll or something and I was like, “How do I make this my job?” Margaret was like, “Well, do I have a project for you?” So I started to get involved with Penumbra City. I have done some game development on smaller games in the past, also, through Margaret. We wrote a weird game based on Honey Heist for her novel *Escape From Incel Island.

MK: You wrote a game, basically.

I: I wrote a game. Sorry. I wrote a game based on Margaret’s book. So, since getting involved with Penumbra… it’s just like this huge world. Margaret wrote the base for the game mechanics and in coming in, it’s been this fun work of cleaning them up, because they were really messy and trying to make it hold the original feeling that she created, but make it run a little bit smoother!

R: Inman, it’s so hard for me to imagine a version of you that’s not experienced running a game, because every time you run a game for us, we have such a delightful time and you structure this really beautiful experience. Even if we go completely off the rails, you just run with it and make sure that we have the best time.

I: Okay, Margaret was there for my first time running a game and it was like three sessions. I had played D&D three sessions as a player and I was like, “I want to run a game!” So I ran it for me and Margaret’s D&D group. It was like the off week game or something and the players immediately got through the thing that I had spent six hours planning in like 20 minutes. I froze. I had no idea what to do. Nothing made any sense and I was like, “The session is over because I know what happens next.”

R: Oh, no! But then in contrast to that, if you watch the YouTube or you listen to the podcast we just recorded of our play-through. You created such a fun experience and battle that was totally, really epic, rewarding and emotional. So that’s incredible and good for you!

I: Aw, thanks.

R: Oh, my gosh, wait, I also I wanted to say that another fun role playing story is that my nephew got his first role playing module for Christmas a couple years ago when I was visiting with my sister and her kids. He wanted it so bad and so then he read it in an afternoon and was like, “I’m gonna run a game for you guys!” And it was like that. It was like, “Oh, you should definitely try to put this helmet on your head. Do it! Do it! Do it!” It’s just clear that he’s trying to lead us towards something that he planned out really well. But then when things didn’t quite go the way he planned. He was like, “Oh, no. Let’s try this again later.” But it was still really very cute and fun.

TFSR: That’s awesome. So it sounds like Penumbra City was born from the world that Margaret wrote up in that initial document. Can you talk about how game design for something like this begins, and how this game system is similar or different to what’s out there?

MK: I can talk about how it started. From my point of view, game systems have developed a lot in the past, well only 10 years, but certainly in the past 30 years. There’s a lot of different styles of gaming and I sometimes get the different names of simulationist versus story versus… there’s like a third one or something. I get those mixed up. But from my point of view, the original version of this game had instead of a class based system, it had a skill based system. So it had this thing where any character can take any different abilities and you have different ability pools and skills, and all of these things, and you build these characters. There’s a certain realism to that style of gaming. But I find personally that I’m not as attracted to it.

I prefer class based games. I prefer games that have discrete categories of character, because I think that the archetypical characters are part of what define a game and make the game unique and describable and enjoyable. So even if in some ways it limits the realism or something, but I don’t always need realism when I’m summoning demons or whatever. So that was how it ended up building towards a class based game.

There were a lot of decisions in the early stuff. Inman and I talked about this and I was talking about this with other people, too, as I was working on this initial version I was very inspired by the old school Renaissance. The OSR style of gaming, which is an attempt to simplify, essentially, Dungeons & Dragons. A lot of that stuff uses the same like six ability scores and uses a lot of the same fantasy archetypes and stuff, but it doesn’t have to be that. A lot of people have done a lot of work simplifying the mechanics of the game to make it more streamlined and more playable.

It shows that Dungeons & Dragons actually comes out of ‘Wargaming’, not ‘Roleplaying,’ right? It created role playing as we understand it, but it started off as people who played with miniatures, where they were having battles, and it was literally just about battles. But the way that people want to interact with this style of game tends to be a little bit different now. I also think it’s telling that role playing is having a golden age, a new golden age or whatever, where a lot more people are playing these games and a lot more ideas are being developed.

And so, we took a lot of the things from the ‘Old School Renaissance style,’ especially the simplified mechanics of it. One thing that I personally was inspired by *’Powered By The Apocalypse, which is another style of game was the idea of having (I actually think some OSR games have this too,) but where the players roll all the dice instead of the Game Master. In Dungeons & Dragons, if an enemy tries to hit you, the Game Master will roll a die and see if they hit you. Whereas in Penumbra City (and in a lot of other more modern games) if a monster tries to hit you, you roll to see if you dodge it instead. That puts a lot more agency into the hands of characters and it makes combat a little bit more engaging for the players and I think keeps things moving a little bit faster, even if mechanically you kind of have to build around that problem.

That’s where I made a big mess of it and then I handed it off to Inman, much like I’m handing off this part of talking about it.

I: Where I mostly came in, at first, was cleaning up the class systems that Margaret had mostly outlined already. I feel like a lot of my my job went into cleaning things up trying to normalize abilities across classes and create some kind of homogeneous structure to things. It’s funny, because for a while, we kept describing the game as this ‘rules-light’ game. At some point I was like, “This is not a rules-light game. You have to do a little bit of homework.” So we made this base of having this really simplified basic mechanics system.

One of the big troubles that I’ve had engaging new players in tabletop RPGs in the past has been, they’re like, “Okay, wait, what modifier do I add to what role to do this thing?” And you end up doing a whole bunch of math you end up having to reference where you’re getting modifiers and bonuses from a lot. I think that it directs people around this power gaming mentality of like, “How do I min/max my character to be the most efficient or the most effective.

Something that we tried really hard with the class abilities in Penumbra City is to say, “Yes, this game is more than ‘I attack this thing with my sword'” or like, “This game is more than ‘I dodged something,'” but trying to build in some narrative element to those class abilities. It’s really simple to swing a sword at something, but one of the class abilities is walking the ethereal plane and you have to like learn about the ethereal plane in order to do that. So we just really wanted to make these abilities that were really fun and really engaging for a character to be able to do in and out of combat. There’s character abilities that are like, “I know a guy,” and it just means that like your character knows an NPC [non-player character], and it brings the narrative into the hands of the characters in these small ways, which is something that I’ve grown really attracted to in a lot of modern RPGs is giving the players more narrative control.

So, that’s kind of what we hoped our mechanics system could do. Combat is really simple and easy but you might have to learn about how fungal magic works.

TFSR: In the materials on the Kickstarter you describe this development team as queer radical and proudly neurodivergent. Can you speak to any ways in which those qualities informed the design and maybe even the setting of Penumbra City?

MK: Yeah. It goes through all of it pretty thoroughly, right? And a lot of it isn’t conscious. The thing that I’ve come across, for example, when I write books is that people will be like, “Oh, wow, there’s all these queer characters in this book!” And I’m like, “I didn’t do that on purpose. I just put my friends in the book.” And not all my friends are queer, but like an awful lot of them are.

The same with neurodivergence. I think that everyone sees the world in very different ways and I think that role playing is a really good way to represent all of the different ways that we see the world. To try and create a little consensus reality among your friends and engage with that is a fun exercise from a consciousness point of view. So we want to represent characters that see the world in different ways. In a weird way, the queerness is not… everyone who is making the game is queer. There are no cis-men involved in the making of the game at the moment. That wasn’t like a rule. There’s four of us. Two of us are women and two of us are non binary.

The radical elements are baked in more obviously. One of the mechanical systems that we have is that there’s no money in the world of Penumbra City. Money has lost its meaning and the city is running on reputation as it collapses/falls into revolution. I think that this is one of the more… there are games that have reputation systems, but rarely are they reputation economics. That’s not because we’re not attempting to prefigure a world where you only get your stuff if you know people, right? But instead we are just trying to describe a world that is completely different than the one that we live in now.

I think that it is like actually very useful for people to figure out ways to think about solving problems instead of accumulating wealth in order to buy the bigger and more expensive sword in order to fight the dragon. In Penumbra City, if there was a dragon (there’s no dragons in it currently, but I’m not saying they’ll never be a dragon in it) but if a dragon comes you might have to instead unite all the gangs.

I think that is a more realistic way to deal with problems, rather than have four people, four adventurers, go save the world. But you run into this mechanical and story problem where you need characters have agency. This is a problem that has existed in D&D for a long time. It harkens back to Tolkien, for example. You can’t play the ‘Ride of the Rohirrim’ in D&D. You could, but it’s rare that these four players are going to turn the tide of a battle because there’s 1000’s of people on each side. That’s always been this thing that D&D or other role playing games, (not all of them. I’m sure some of them do it great and I’m not trying to be like ‘we’re the best in the world’ but I obviously like our game) but how do we actually go around and get the Riders of Rohan to get ready to go ride off into battle? That’s the story you can tell with four people. Actually, I mean, Tolkien does that.

So I think our radical politics, they come up in more obvious ways, like several of the factions are anarchist factions, several of the factions are republican factions, and several other factions that you can play are centrists or whatever. We did make a decision, Inman actually was the one who came up with this and it was brilliant, when we first started trying to write the game. I’ll let Inman tell this instead of me going on about it.

I: The game, when I came on to it was, it still is, but it was this three way battle between these different coalition’s. The revolutionists, which is pretty obvious, the reasonable, which is maybe also pretty obvious… the centrists of the game, then the bulwark, which is the authority or the establishment of the game. You could play as any character. There were factions and playable classes for all three of these coalitions. You might have a party that’s made up of someone from the revolutionists, someone from the weird capitalists, someone from the authority or the establishment.

When I started to try to write adventure content around this, I ran into a lot of problems. Because in other games in a class based game, if you’re playing a knight or a Paladin, you could be a knight or a Paladin of whoever. With the Penumbra City, it was like, “You’re an anarchist knight and you have a history with this group.” That suddenly became more complicated to streamline narratives around. I think that version of the game will exist someday. But for now, I ran into a roadblock where I was like, “What if we made the narrative about the revolutionists? What if the game was told from the perspective of the revolutionists and we entirely shifted the dynamic of the game to be this more neutral three way battle, to you are playing a revolutionist and you are trying to throw down the God King or whatever.” A lot of things kind of clicked into place after that.

Margaret had been writing some narrative stuff that was from the perspective of one of the anarchist factions and that became the game voice for the book. So now we have these easy narrators for the world through shifting the perspective of how players are engaging with it. You can still play as a couple people or classes from the different coalitions. We are trying to slowly introduce this dynamic that you can play as whoever, you can have these mixed reputation parties that don’t always have the same goals in mind. But we’re doing it in a much smaller way than we were before.

TFSR: Did you design the game with a certain kind of player in mind as a rules-light, it seems to have been designed to be accessible for beginners and players with less experience. That makes me wonder what kind of outcomes you envision for a successful play experience. From an anarchist perspective, I wonder to what degree it was conceived with instructive outcomes and qualities in mind. I think you spoke to that a little bit, but I wonder if you might elaborate further?

MK: Show me what you mean by instructive, in this case.

TFSR: I guess I mean imparting anarchist values.

MK: I think a lot about how the narratives that we tell impart values onto the world. I think a lot about the role of writing as propaganda. I also am a little bit nervous around that. I think one of my goals as an anarchist and as a fiction writer (they dovetail very well) which is to not tell people what to do or think. There’s always that complicated game of, “Well, I want everyone to think for themselves and end up ideologically aligned with me.” It’s the messy tension that anarchists have to have to consider. So, I think that the fact that the game is played from the perspective of the revolutionists is important. I want anarchist values to be some of the those that are available.

But I do also personally want to make sure that the players aren’t railroaded into that. You can play a game where it’s not about overthrowing the God King, or you can play from the point of view of someone who wants to overthrow the God King and create something that is like more traditionally Democratic or whatever. I’m not going to give people the instructions of how to play a game where you end up with a Stalin or something. There is not an authoritarian communist faction currently in the game. Although I guess that would be realistic. So maybe eventually there should be something that’s kind of like that.

But I do think that the process of co-envisioning something with a group of people, I think there’s an inherent radical value in tabletop role playing games, in co-imagining things. I think that the adventuring party very closely relates to the affinity group, the model that is traditionally used by anarchists for revolutionary purposes. I think that the fact that role playing games, if you play them well, you prioritize fun instead of rules, right? The rules are there for a reason and following them can make the game more playable and enjoyable. But at the end of the day, it is up to the people playing to do what they actually want. So on some level, rules are always guidelines. I think that is a valuable thing to impart upon people.

In terms of the ideal player, we talked about this a lot, actually in our internal conversations, how we can try and get this game to be playable by new people. That is actually a very hard thing. It is a very hard thing. Tabletop role playing game traditionally is passed on from a player to a player. It is not traditionally passed on by people picking up the book cold and starting to play. That is something that we are working to try and include in the game. I do think that you’re right. ‘Rules-light’ does lend itself to that, although we are now ‘rules-medium’ so, who knows?

TFSR: If nobody has anything else to add to that, I would like to know, in the course of designing this game, what were some of the hang ups and the pitfalls that you you all went through. I’m not sure who all among you would count yourselves as organizers, but I suspect that you’ll have some organizing experience. I was wondering if you could draw any parallels between the collaborations involved in game design and the work of organizing?

I: I’m going to put Margaret on the spot with something that she says a lot, but I think has been really good at. I think kind of like organizing, when you start a project, when you get really attached to it, there can be some kind of inherent dynamic to control it or shape it or guide it. This hasn’t been a problem because we have been involved in anarchist organizing before. We have this thing that Margaret did a lot of the work of creating the container for. Since then we have consensus meetings, we make decisions through consensus. For example, I’m coordinating the game rules, but that all affects stuff that Margaret does, or when Margaret writes something that affects how a game mechanic works, or if we introduce a different element that might shift how Robin envisions the artwork for the game. It’s this collaborative effort that affects all of us, all of our jobs affect each other.

I think that being involved in anarchist organizing helped create that container where we all have this, at this point, equal investment in the project and we’re all like telling these stories inside this container and making decisions together based on that. Margaret jokes about having founder syndrome a lot. But I think that she does a really awesome job of letting go of that in the service of a collaborative effort. I think is the root of anarchist organizing is collaboration. People taking on tasks to hyper focus on them instead of controlling them. That’s been really a fun thing about this project.

TFSR: This may be a little bit of a detour, but can you go into what a decision being brought up at a consensus meeting… what that looks like?

MK: Ours is fairly informal. It’s four of us. We organize together, we are also all four members of Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, the anarchist publishing collective. We’re not the entirety of that collective, but we’re actually majority of it. There are six people in Strangers at the moment. We have a meeting structure and we also talk informally outside of those meetings, and try to keep everyone abreast of what was talked about, especially if it was talked about behind closed doors. We’ll run into something… we’ll talk about the way to represent people visually. A big thing that Robin brings to the table is a lot of experience with representing different kinds of people in illustration and we’ll talk about, “What are the pros and cons of this?” But we also kind of trust Robin, at the end of the day, as more of the expert on that kind of thing. So we all come in and our opinions are a little bit weighted by the thing that we’re kind of in charge of. But we can lose, right? Like I can lose a world design decision if I’m the world designer.

But by and large, this has been a really fun project, because it comes up, that we will have different ideas about how to do things, but usually we have different ideas more about, frankly, honestly, the the act of publishing and the bureaucratic side of it. It is is actually more complicated as compared to the creative side of it, which is a lot more like ‘yes, and…’ energy. Where someone’s going to be like, “Oh, I have an idea.” I think then the thing that behooves me, if I’m the world designer, I get almost ultimate say, but not actual ultimate say on world design decisions, right, but if someone has an idea, if if my first reaction is, “No, that’s not what I personally envisioned, so fuck off.” That is a bad way to have consensus decision making in a creative project. What we each try to do, and I know that this whole interview was us talking about how we just all get along great, but it’s like been pretty good and I love everyone I work with.

I’m probably the most obstinate person in the group. But worked very hard on if someone’s like, “That’s a little awkward. What if it was like this?” or, “Hey, I had this great idea that really flushes out this kind of character that’s been a little bit lacking.” It behooves me to take seriously that suggestion, and run it through in my head, different permutations of, “Does that work?” I might have to come back and be like, “Oh, that doesn’t really work, because it conflicts with this idea that the murder cranes…” There’s Murder Cranes in the game. They’ve been kicked out of the swamps by the fact that the war is destroying all the ecosystem and now they’re moving into the city and it causes some problems). But it’s like “Oh, if this doesn’t play with the way that I’ve been building this, then that might not work. But instead, I look to see, “Can this work? Can this fit?”

Some of this comes from my organizing background. But honestly, I hate organizing. I used to do it a lot and now I’m glad I mostly do creative projects. Creative organizing is a really similar process,

I: I would be super interested to hear how that has been for Robin, in distilling game world stuff or game design stuff into into artwork?

R: I think that got us this class is a really good example of that. Because originally, we had a game world that envisioned the idea of someone that summons demons and Margaret had written specific demons and what they looked like regarding how powerful they were more and more like very specifically what they did, and what they look like, and how they functioned. Then I was just drawing this thing and I went off the rails and I was looking at all these owl skulls. And I was like, what if what if you could just make it whatever you want, though? What if it’s a demonic presence but then you you just build a body for it out of scraps. Then it can be whatever you want. Then the player can just imagine whatever thing they like. Then I kind of just drew the thing and everyone was like, “Oh, we like that!”

Then Inman wrote an adventure where that monster was the big bad of the whole thing. So we were able to inform each other and collaborate on making something that engages player creativity also. I was excited that I made something that everybody else got excited about, even though I kind of went off the rails of what I was technically supposed to do in the moment.

I: Yeah, you had this beautiful idea around the goeticist having to scavenge all this organic material whatever to piece something together? I love that we’re putting the game out there now but I really have appreciated and loved those funny conversations where it’s been like, “Oh, how will this world design thing affect how Robin draws something?” and how the game mechanics function and finding that they’re all intertwined pretty heavily.

R: Yeah, we’ve definitely have had a lot of elaborate conversations about guns and how guns work, because that is not a thing that I know how to do. Fortunately, that’s something that Margaret knows a lot about. So I spent some really late nights panicking and telling her like, “Well, what about this?” And she was like, “No, you have to make it different. It has to look like this. This part has to go over here.” And I was like, “Oh God, I don’t understand guns and they kind of scare me.”

MK: It’s for the best.

R: The idea of making a steam powered motorcycle, which was originally part of the whole thing, and then we were talking to somebody who was like, “If you had to make something like that, it would be so tremendous that it would be unmanageable in size.” And we were like, “Okay, so how do we make something that looks like that, but also just kind of functions in a magical realism sort of way?” That’s probably also the only time Margaret has ever said to me, “Can you make it more like something out of an anime?”

MK: That’s true. That’s not my usual design choice.

R: I think you literally sent me a picture of cloud on his motorcycle for Final Fantasy VII and was like, “Make it like this,” or, “Make it like Akira. Make it like bigger and chunkier and fantasy anime motorcycle!” Because I was looking at old vintage motorcycles from the 20s through the 40s. I was like, “Oh, these are all really interesting.” It’s just like, “No, not big enough!” We wound up making something that was way more fun to draw, but I wasn’t really there yet. So it was nice to have.

I don’t I don’t tend to get too hung up on how something looks. I think I would have really dug my heels in on the owl monster if everyone was like, “We hate it.” I would say, “Too bad!” We’ve all had to kill some of our darlings to get here.

I: The owl monster is currently the image of the game, or it was until you finished the cover. But that was always the image we used and now you can’t even play a goeticist in this version of the game, which is really funny.

I: There is other really good stuff too!

R: A goeticist isn’t in one of our recently unlocked classes. Oh, no. Why did I think that it was?

MK: Maybe we will secret stretch goal it.

When we ran the Kickstarter, one of the things that we added was stretch goals. Basically, can this pay us enough to put in even more time to make more playable classes, because one of the things that happened in the beginning is we wrote 19 or 20 playable classes, and it was just too much to manage. It was also overwhelming our play testers. We had to do a lot of play testing on this game. It wasn’t just that it’s too much for us to manage balance of but literally players would be picking up the book and being like, “There’s too much. I don’t know.”

I: That was actually one of our funny roadblocks. I think one of our bigger disagreements: The amount of classes.

MK: To anyone who’s listening who’s like, “Oh, man, I don’t know about creative collaboration artist.” I’m someone who likes to work by myself in a lot of my projects. But we actually just do do better things in groups and I say this as someone who’s an introvert who avoids people on a regular basis. I think that this is true in role-play and it is true in creative projects and is absolutely true when literally trying to make the world a better place. We actually just do better when we work with other people and when we collaborate and when we learn how to let other people get their way sometimes about things that we are doing.

TFSR: That brings me to my next question here. What did play testing look like and how did you run through those iterations and implement the changes in a way that was manageable?

I: I guess I’ll talk about this because it was my job. I’m going to approach this with a small amount of shame. Play testing has been a lot of different things. There was an early part of play testing that was every week I would wrangle some people together and we called it stat bashing. Which was just the numbers and the math system. I would just get some players and I’d be like, “Okay, here’s your pre generated characters sheets, you’re fighting this.” We would just run combat after combat after combat to see how the balance was working with all the dice and the numbers and stuff. We would adjust things based on that, like the amount of hit points players had, or the amount of hit points monsters had or how much damage an ability does.

Then we wanted to move into a more complete version of testing, where we were giving players the game and essentially being like, “Run with it. Figure out adventures to run. Just just try stuff.” We got a lot of interest in it. I think there were 50 different play test groups at one point, all with four to eight players. There were literally a few 100 people play testing the game.

We got a lot of initial feedback that led us to believe that we were going to need to do a large restructuring of the game. So that version of the play-testing kind of ended pretty early in comparison to what it was supposed to do because there were all of this immediate feedback, like, “The game needs to be less overwhelming.” We need to change these larger elements of it. The play-testing for that ended pretty early because we just had this immediate sense of ‘big change.’

MK: I will say though, that a lot of those people really liked the game. We didn’t hear, “Oh, to hell with this game!” We heard a lot of people being like, “We are really excited about lots of pieces of this and are struggling to figure out how to put all the pieces together.” One of the thing that we’ve been dealing with with Penumbra City is that it’s almost like more people are excited about than we expected. We ended up with that many play testers because we put an open call out for play testers and we had a lot of people who were really interested. It exceeded our expectations. I’m trying to spin this around to point out that it’s actually going really well. It’s just hard to catch up.

TFSR: So, not to box in this world that you created, but the setting, from a sort of an uninitiated perspective, strikes me as an iteration of steampunk. I wonder if can you talk about what appeals to you both aesthetically and as it relates to the goals of the game, of the setting that you created. Generally, what I’m describing, a steampunk world, seems to strike me as a very delineated by class perspective. I wonder what you wanted to add or subtract from the genre when you’re making this game?

MK: We actually are not describing this game as steampunk anymore. There are obviously steampunk elements to it, right? The empire… well, not really an empire, but the the giant evil army or whatever is fighting with coal powered machinery. Obviously, it is a fantasy set at around the turn of the century in terms of the technological level. So there are certainly elements of that.

The very beginning of the game, when I was asked to do a world (I used to be fairly involved in steampunk and I’m kind of no longer involved in steampunk as a subculture or an aesthetic thing as much as I used to be) someone asked me to do a steampunk world and I was like, “Well, can it be my like ‘to hell with steampunk’ world instead? Can it be my ‘this is what I dislike about everything about steampunk, and this is what it should have been?'” They were like, “Yeah, please do that.” But in the time that has gone, the 10 years since, I would say that a lot more of the aesthetic vibe we’re going for is like Weimar Germany. The period in the 1920s when Germany was a republic, that was incredibly impoverished, and was a very polarized space with a lot of different factions, including anarchists and communists, as well as obviously fascist.

R: Also, notably pretty queer, right?

MK: Yeah, absolutely. So that is that is more the vibe that we’ve been going for with this iteration of the game.

There are some things that I think steampunk could have been. I think that steampunk could have been and started off in many ways as a critique. In the same way that Cyberpunk is a critique of giant global capitalist organizations that run the world and a celebration of the people who live in the cracks of that kind of society and fight against it. That is the idealized form of cyberpunk. Instead, the actual cyberpunk world we’re moving towards is the people celebrating the giant corporations. I think steampunk got a similar thing, where it started off, I believe, as a critique of colonialism, and a critique of the Industrial Revolution, and a critique of a lot of things that were happening in the world at the turn of the century. To kind of say that it’s not the place where society went off the rails, but it’s a really interesting pivotal place in history and it could have gone a lot of different ways. I think steampunk tried to imagine other ways it could have gone, or to celebrate the people fighting for other ways that it could have gone.

So I think that part of it does still come in through this game. This period in history in this place in a fantasy world where things could really actually change and this world has been stagnant for a very long time. The God Kings have been ruling for about 1000 years and playing the sort of eternal game of chess using everybody as pawns and there’s this moment (to make it more Weimar Germany, the pawn revolts – just some reference to something that Weimar Era filmmaker said once but I can’t remember where) it is the pawns revolt, the thing that we are describing. I’m kind of curious, you other two, your take on it. I don’t know I got weird feelings about steampunk.

I: What does that been like for for you, Robin, with developing the art and stuff?

R: I don’t know how to say this in a way that doesn’t sound kind of negative. But I feel like when Margaret and I were talking about this initially, a long time ago, and she was much more deeply involved in steampunk, we were like, “Yeah, this is fun!” Then at some point, when we reinvigorated this project a couple years ago, we were like, “Oh, that aesthetic seems really tired and questionable,” and we just wanted to move on from that and we just both felt like we wanted to move on from that idea. But I guess I’m just not saying it in as diplomatic of a way as she does, as is typical every fucking day of our lives. I’m sorry, I’m not supposed to swear.

TFSR: I think it’s okay. I think Bursts can fix it.

R: I think we just we were like, “Oh, it’s been done before,” and it definitely just now evokes a feeling of a parody of itself. Margaret’s always been good at getting me down these rabbit holes of research and wonder and interest. So when we started talking about Weimar Germany, the Spanish Civil War was another one, and all of these eras of resistance and revolution and I think we started building more off of the aesthetics of that. Again, like we said before, leaning into more of the idea of fantasy tech than like Steam tech. Talking about different engines and things like that.

I: You didn’t want to just slap some gears on it and call it a day?

R: I absolutely don’t want to do that.

MK: yeah. [laughs]

R: Every character class in this is going to be girl with a short fluffy crinoline, and a corset, a top hat, and striped stockings and a monocle that is also gear.

TFSR: Can you try to situate this game in relation to the larger Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness project? How does it dovetail with the broader goals of the collective? Or doesn’t it?

I: I think it does. I feel like one of our missions at Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness is that… obviously a lot of our lives are influenced by theory, the things that we read, and philosophy and stuff. But I feel like one of the big goals of Strangers is to create or curate these pieces of literature or writing or art or whatever that try to imagine more narrative and culture based ways of talking about things anarchistically, instead of writing a book about anarchy theory or whatever. We want to imagine these worlds that are influenced by these values.

I think that Penumbra City actually dovetails very nicely into that project, it is a place of imagining, it is a place of exploration, and allows people to, in a way that a lot of other games don’t, allows players to be like, “Okay, yes, we’re in this anarchistic world, that has elements of like anarchism in it and we need to figure out how to get by, we need to figure out how to survive in this world.” I mean, we do a podcast called “Live Like the World is Dying,” we do a lot of game content now and we put out a lot of pieces that talk about prefiguring the world and stuff. So Penumbra City, is in a way, a synthesis of a lot of the things, the larger projects of Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness.

R: That was really well said.

I: Oh, thanks. It’s funny to talk about a project that’s been around for like 19 years, or something, that I’ve been involved with for a couple of years. So I hope that was an accurate way to describe it.

R: Don’t underplay your involvement in it. You’ve been so instrumental in shaping it to the most ideal version of itself. We would not be where we are without you. I love that you tie the whole thing back to… I think that you’re right, the through line of every thing that we do is hopeful and about connection. That was really lovely.

I: Thanks.

TFSR: So for my last question: Organizing, creating things, going to work, all of that takes a physical and emotional toll on us. Can you make the case for people playing more? When it comes to playing, make the case maybe for open endedness? If you feel that there’s a case to be made. How important are goals in relationship to what you envision with this game? Does that make sense?

MK: Can you explain what you mean by goals?

TFSR: I guess the goals within the gaming, the goals of the the scenarios?

MK: I see. Yeah. When you play a tabletop role playing game, you have a goal. You have the, “we want to steal the dragon egg.” (I don’t know why everything’s not dragons. There’s no dragons in our game.) There’s that goal. There’s the cliche, “The real treasure was a friends you made along the way,” that’s what tabletop role playing game is. The point of playing a tabletop role playing game is the fun that you have with your friends and the connection you have with your friends. It’s not always just fun, but there’s also a lot of processing. The classic thing is you realize you play a long enough game with people like if you play a long campaign and you’re like, “Oh, this is just your therapy.” You’re playing this character that interacts with the world like your mom does in order to get through some issues.

Collective imagination is something that our society strips away from us. We are usually passive consumers and I like turning off my brain and watching TV or whatever. I’m not trying to be like, “Oh, anyone who watches a movie is bad, right?” But there is something about generative fun, generative storytelling and things like that. I think it’s really invigorating. I think it brings people together. I think that that is a thing. Society worked really hard to tear us apart.

I don’t hate magic the gathering. I like Magic the Gathering just fine. I don’t really play it anymore. I played it when I was a kid. I was really proud of myself that I got to like write a cannon Magic the Gathering story. So I’m not trying to talk shit on it. But the reason that I like role playing instead, even though both have like elements that I like, fantasy and playing with people and stuff. I like not playing competitive games. And I love cooperative gaming. Tabletop role playing game has been built with cooperation in mind.

I’m not saying that competition is bad. I don’t like what it brings out in me. That’s why I don’t like it. I suddenly want to win. I become a jerk and I don’t want to be a jerk. I want to be the best version of myself. I can be the best version of myself when I’m sitting around and collectively trying to figure out how to problem solve with my friends about something that doesn’t really matter.

All the other stuff that we have to deal with in our day to day lives… “the Nazis are coming into town, they want to murder us all. What do we do, right?” That is a very high stakes kind of consensus decision making to make. But when you’re sitting around playing tabletop role playing game, you’re like, “Well, the worst case scenario is that my character dies and I make a new one.” That’s like, not nothing and you want to avoid it happening. But it’s just nice. I don’t know. I really like tabletop role playing games. It is my favorite style of fun. I don’t even like people. So that’s like saying a lot. Someone on the internet is gonna be like, “Margaret said that she’s a misanthrope and that everyone’s bad.” I know it. I know you’re gonna say it. Don’t say it.

Okay, someone else.

I: Gaming is really cool for all the reasons that Margaret said. In a cleaner way of what I said earlier, gaming with your friends is prefigurative work. It is coming up with, in a lot of different ways, how you interact with people, and how you organize with people, and how you envision worlds. That’s what I really love about gaming. Obviously, it’s really fun too. I get to run around with my magical wand or whatever and fight the nameless terror. That’s fun. It is also my favorite way to have fun.

But the thing that I really love about it is that you get to tell stories with people, and you get to figure out how to tell stories together and those stories can be simple stories. They can be how to get to the market, they can be how to help your friendly neighborhood pie shop, or they can be about confronting things within yourself, or within society, or it can be about envisioning new societies and new things, or it can be like zoning out and killing whatever the fantasy mook version in our game is. I think it’s like giant centipedes or the saints.

MK: The patchwork dolls or the cops.

I: Yeah, the cops. I think the grinding in our game is the cops.

R: I said don’t grind against cops. That’s gross. But the moment was gone. It just passed! Sorry.

For my part, at least on a personal level, I think that as a kid who grew up a bit weird and a bit lonely and with a really rich inner life inside my brain that I couldn’t really express to people or anything like that. Just finding people that are engaging in this kind of thing with me, made me feel very seen and very connected with people in a way that I couldn’t in a lot of other circumstances when I was younger. I think that’s really valuable and lovely.

TFSR: Is there anything that I didn’t ask that any of you would like to speak to before we wrap it up?

MK: Can I pitch the Kickstarter?

TFSR: Please do.

MK: We are currently Kickstarting this game in June 2023. If you’re listening to this after June 2023, you can still go find the game, possibly through the Kickstarter. If you Google Penumbra City, you’ll figure out how to buy this book. However, if you’re listening during the Kickstarter, there’s a lot of advantages to backing Kickstarter. The reason that pre-orders and Kickstarter type things are so important is that to a small press like ours, right, we are tiny press, it makes all the difference in the world to have a sense of how many copies we’re going to sell of something and to have the capital to put something out. We are making a foil embossed six by nine hardcover book. We want this book to be beautiful, we want this to be a thing that is worth having on your shelf and worth keeping around, something that will last. In order to do that, we need upfront capital.

We’ve already reached the upfront capital we need because of people who are excited about this game. However, there’s other advantages to backing the Kickstarter. In addition to being able to get the game at a discount. Also, because we’re making an expensive book, we’re making a very cheap digital version. The point is to have people to be able to play the game, not just make fancy objects, right? But fancy objects rule. So you can get the game at a discount. There’s also a ton of digital content, you will also get stickers that don’t exist anywhere else. There’s also a ton of digital content that you’ll get for free because we’ve unlocked a bunch of stretch goals. We might have unlocked our final stretch goal by the time you hear this.

So it’s possible that if you back this game, you will get three books, instead of one book. You’re already at least gonna get two books. You’re gonna get the physical book of Penumbra City, if you get that level. But you’re also going to get an entire campaign written by Inman. So a series of adventures that you can play together with your friends. Then the final stretch goal is going to be a novella by me written in this world. We’re just really excited about the amount of excitement that we’ve seen around this game. It feels like one of those ‘right place, right time’ moments. And we’ve been working on it for years and we’re just really excited to show it to people.

R: Yeah, you’re also gonna get my eternal love and gratitude specifically. Because I feel so happy to have put things that I’ve drawn out into the world for the first time in a really long time, and to have people like the way they look and be happy about them. Not that that matters in a Kickstarter reward kind of way. But you have my eternal love and gratitude.

I: Before I was able to play RPG games with my friends, the thing that drew them to me were the worlds. I would just read the lore and all that stuff, and the art. So, if you get this game, and even if you aren’t sure if you’re going to be able to play it, or if you’re new to gaming, it is a rich world that you can have a lot of fun exploring. The artwork in it is absolutely incredible, that Robin has created. So this is a book worth having even if you’re just going to read it to explore the world and even if you’re going to read it just to look at the amazing artwork. But you should find some friends and play it as well and then maybe kill a God King.

R: Don’t touch grass, play our game.

You put it that way and it connected something for me. I think we all haven’t really openly spoken to each other about this exact specific thing. But I have the same thing. Margaret was talking about how she had the magic cards and she was like, “Well, I don’t really want to play this because it’s competitive.” But I also, as a person who collected and played magic cards, was so much more into just reading them. There’s the little blurbs on them that are the little stories of these objects and these artifacts and these people, and I would wonder about them, and I would think about them. We’re all the types of people who were getting into the lore even when we didn’t have somebody to play the game with. With that in mind, I think we really have purposefully and accidentally tried to make a game book that would be just interesting to flip through and engage with on that level.

TFSR: Cool. Where can everybody find each of you online, should they desire?

I: You can find Penumbra City by googling Penumbra City, the Kickstarter will come out. You can also go to TangledWilderness.org to learn more about the publishing collective behind it, Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. You can find me personally on Instagram @ShadowTailArtificery, and I also host one of the Strangers Podcasts: Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. We talk about our monthly feature, and I do an interview with the author. You can also find me co hosting Live Like the World is Dying.

R: You can Find me on Instagram @MissRobinSavage and you can actually find Penumbra City on Instagram @PenumbraCity. You can also sometimes find me on a couple of strangers podcasts but not on a regular basis and not not anywhere except in the real world.

MK: You can’t find me in the real world. I’m hidden, usually on a mountaintop. You can find me on Twitter @MagpieKilljoy talking shit, claiming that I hate discourse while participating in discourse. You can find me on Instagram @MargaretKilljoy mostly posting pictures of my dog. You can hear me every Monday and Wednesday, host of Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, a History podcast. Then every Friday, Live Like the World is Dying comes out. I’m one of the hosts of Live Like the World is Dying. You can also hear us right now on the Final Straw Radio. And if this is your first time listening to the Final Straw Radio, which is probably not, you now know that’s a cool show, and you should listen to it.

I: You can also hear us play the Penumbra City, if this has piqued your interest. There’s an actual play recording of us playing the game with Jamie Loftus. You can find that on YouTube by YouTube searching it or you can find it on any of our podcast channels, Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness or Live Like the World is Dying.

R: And through the link on the Kickstarter, right?

I: Yeah, which is where you should go to find anything about the game because then you get to see the Kickstarter. So just find us on Kickstarter.

R: Consider submitting content to our collective, for zines and other publishing purposes. Tell us the things that you’re interested about. Find us at Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness and engage with us. All right.

TFSR: Thank you all for taking the time to talk to me. I really appreciate it. I apologize again for my not being able to get my camera to work.

MK: It’s okay, we know you secretly a wraith.

TFSR: Alright, take care, everybody. Thanks. Thank you so much.