I recently had the opportunity to interview Jason Morningstar, the creative force behind Bully Pulpit Games, about his background in gaming and his design process, as well as some of the things that influence what I would consider to be some of the most original designs currently out there. Whether it’s the weirdness of Shab-al Hiri Roach, the tragedy of Grey Ranks, or the unpredictability of the soon-to-be-released Fiasco, Jason’s got a knack for creating really cool, innovative RPGs.
Let me start the questions by saying thanks once again for agreeing to the interview. I’ve been a fan of Bully Pulpit Games since picking up the Shab-al Hiri Roach after hearing about it on Have Games, Will Travel. I’ve also found the videos you’ve posted on Youtube, especially the “One cool thing I saw at…” series to be interesting, particularly since they put faces to a lot of names I recognize from the indie game community. I also was a fan of the Durham 3 podcast so I guess I’ve managed to experience your internet presence from three different angles.
First off, I’m curious about how you got started in roleplaying games. What got you started and what was your first RPG?
My dad and uncle were pretty serious SPI-style wargamers in the mid-seventies. My uncle picked up white box D&D and couldn’t make heads or tails of it. My brother and I grabbed it and the rest is history. That must have been in 1977. My first character was a magic user named Bulldrag.
It seems like most people who got started in the hobby in the 70′s and 80′s either began with some variation of D&D. What other games have you played in the past?
I’ve played lots of games, but my general “game arc” would go D&D – AD&D – Traveller – Small press games designed in Detroit including The Morrow Project and Fringeworthy – GURPS – FUDGE – homebrews – small press/indie games.
What games are you currently playing?
Right now it’s Primetime Adventures (PTA), all the way down. I just wrapped one PTA season and have two episodes left in another. We have plumbed the depths of PTA – two seasons of one show, three of another across two producers. One group is moving on to a few one-shots (Montsegur 1244 and probably Fiasco) and then some extended playtesting on a secret BPG project, and the other group I am not sure about. Mouse Guard maybe? Outside of that, my board game darling right now is Z-Man Games’ Pandemic.
PTA is one of my favorite games too – it seems to work on so many levels in providing a satisfying roleplaying experience and I’ve never had a session where someone hasn’t turned to the others and said “You know, if this was on TV I’d watch it!” However, I’ve never managed to run through an entire season, let alone a couple, due to the difficulties of trying to get everyone together on a regular basis which raises the question, how often do you get to play?
I’m in two regular weekly games. With any group there are conflicts, so it probably averages out to six session a month in reality.
Two regular weekly games! I’m jealous. Do you have a regular, set group or does it vary from session to session? It sounds like the former based on the multiple seasons of PTA you’re group has managed to finish.
They are set groups on both cases. The older of the two groups has seven members, and it is rare for all seven to show up at once. Our rule is that if more than one can’t make it, we skip the session. The other group is what the Durham Three has morphed into – five players. With a game like PTA a missing player is a total roadblock. Other games are more forgiving, and my larger group tends toward ensemble games like The Shadow of Yesterday where an absence isn’t so critical.
What got you interested in the indie/story games?
The ones I like definitely scratch an itch I was trying to scratch myself for many years, in terms of focus, mechanics, and the experience at the table. For a long time I was playing GURPS and even writing some material for Steve Jackson Games, and gradually I stripped that down to the most elemental, ephemeral GURPS game ever, and then jumped ship to FUDGE where I could have more control, and then I abandoned that for various proto-game homebrews, and then I heard about Dust Devils and a light went off in my brain. And then I read the Forge provisional glossary and became an insufferable zealot for a while.
You say “for a while.” Does that mean you’ve moved away from theorizing about roleplaying games/mechanics? I’ve often found discussions about the theory side of game design to be both fascinating and mind-bogglingly over-complicated at times. I love thinking about design & mechanics, and the types of play they encourage/discourage. For example, when I’m playing Dogs and pull out my gun, I know there are going to be consequences – the mechanics reinforce this. However, there’s also been a tendency to over-theorize things (and then quite vehemently defend those theories) without any sort of empirical data. It also seems to me to divide indie game designers into “camps” and at times lead to the same sorts of geek-on-geek rage that plagues mainstream games (i.e., the “you’re playing wrong” attitude).
I think it’s a common experience for someone to get exposed to theory (Forge theory for me) and suddenly see the light and want to share those insights with everyone. It makes a person a little hard to be around, and in my case I started telling my dear friends that everything they were doing was wrong. It took me a while to realize that what they were doing was not, in fact, wrong, and that my natural enthusiasm was making me be a dick. Whenever I see people making us versus them distinctions I cringe these days. I’m much more interested in practical tools and applications that theory can point toward than theory itself. If there’s any area where I think deeply, it’s authority and GM-less play, and even that is informed by play and practical observation.
Which leads me right into my next set of questions. You’re pretty well-known for making very off-beat games – the stuff you’ve produced, in my opinion, is amongst the most original I’ve seen, both in terms of mechanics and subject matter. For example, the Roach is just plain weird, by which I really mean that it’s “original, unusual, and utterly cool.” Where in the world did you come up with the idea for a game that mixes academic rivalry with an an ancient, soul-eating bug?
Thanks for the compliment! I live and work in academia so that was on my mind, I’m personally phobic about roaches, I adore creepy Lovecraftian stuff, and Game Chef demanded a game using wine, accuser, companion, and entomology. I immediately had this image of tweedy professors and soul-sucking horror. I had been reading about Sumeria and western Iraq for another project and it all came together in a week. There’s a potash mine at Shab Al-Hiri where they parked SCUDs during the first Gulf War. A perfect fit.
Wow, that’s fascinating how you took such apparently disparate elements and turned them in to a coherent game. I especially love the cut-throat academic part of it all. Grey Ranks is another game that’s not about a run-of-the-mill subject – the Warsaw Uprising is not something that most people have even heard of. What inspired it?
Again, it was a contest – a local version of Game Chef that required the use of “ruined city” and “romance”. I’d been doing some light reading about Nazi partisan-hunting in the Ukraine, and many of those astonishingly horrible people were pointed at Warsaw eventually. So I learned about the Uprising, and the Grey Ranks just leaped out at me. I lost some points with judge Luke Crane because in the contest version, it was mechanically impossible to be a homosexual.
You know there’s a twisted joke in the idea of it being mechanically impossible to be homosexual. I’m amazed you took those elements and cooked up something that is so evocative – Gray Ranks can lead to some heavy scenes.
It sounds like a lot of your games come out of the pressure of competition and are completed under tight time constraints; or at least the initial designs are. Do you find that those sorts of situations spark your creativity? Is it a matter of the time pressure, the tight design constraints, or just the thrill of competition?
I really like tight constraints, both as personal challenge and design paradigm.
Your games also seem to blend traditional roleplaying elements with some board & card game mechanics. With medical hospital you are even bringing in physical tasks which borders on LARP. How do you come up with these mechanics? Are they driven by some sort of theory or principle, or is it more inspirational in nature?
I don’t see board or card game mechanics in my games. The presence of a board or the use of cards – that’s just interaction design. You could play The Roach with a big printed table, rolling dice and crossing stuff off, but printed cards are a better solution. You could play Grey Ranks without a shared grid, but there are kinesthetic and social reasons why a central record of character states is best.
Which is to say I do think about this stuff quite a bit. I have a professional background in usability so I am always thinking about how objects will be used in play. With Medical Hospital, I was thinking about how, on a social level, many games place value on the ability of players to think quickly or be verbally agile, like Wushu. I wondered why there weren’t any games that valued other player skills, and a surgery simulator seemed like a great thing to experiment with. I think player skill = character effectiveness is a really fun area to explore. My current stumbling block with Medical Hospital is that the tactile scenes are so fun and central that the rest of the game feels weak in comparison. You just want to get back to performing nephrectomies.
Speaking of Medical Hospital, what is it? Is it a game in development or some sort of joke? I’m asking because I’ve seen the youtube videos and… I want to play it.
No, it isn’t a joke! It’s a real game. I have rules and everything. It’s sort of resting comfortably while I do some other things, but I plan to return to it and get it done. There are some procedural hurdles and I sort of wrote myself into a corner. I’ll approach it fresh and I’m looking forward to finishing Medical Hospital! I’ve really enjoyed working on it and learning the minutia of emergency medicine. I work with nurses all day, so that’s a help.
Awesome! I have a couple reasons for being interested in the game. The first is that as a grad student I took neuroanatomy with medical students and got to cut up real brains and thus the game immediately caught my attention. I also can envision playing the game with one of those “transparent man” models. The other reason is that now that I’m teaching I think I could adapt the game to create a class room exercise in my neuroanatomy unit – I think my students would love playing the role of neurosurgeons….hmmmm, maybe I have a game of my own there… check the symptoms, diagnose the problem, and surgically treat it. In any event, if you need any playtesters, let me know because I’d love to try the game.
Regarding current projects, what game(s) are you currently working on?
I’ve always got a dozen things going at once, and of those one or two will rise to the surface and maybe get finished. Some die on the vine, others get transformed or re-used in other ways, or grab me later. So my to do list right now looks like this:NEARLY FINISHED
Fiasco (An RPG that emulates Coen brothers movies), which is in the can and awaiting art and layout.
A substantial revision of Grey Ranks, clarifying and expanding a bit, and redoing the layoutPLAYTESTING
Carolina Death Crawl, a card-based quasi-historical RPG about Potter’s raid on Rocky Mount in July 1863. Super excited about this.
Jeepform teaching scenes: The Exit Interview and othersDESIGNING
Cowboys with Big Hearts, a small game about patent medicine, task resolution, and fun mechanical death spirals
A game about blood-drinking robots
A game about contamination, taboo, and collective belief based on Dena’ina Athabaskan cosmologySIMMERING
Open Boat, a card game about survival cannibalism
Medical Hospital, the medical game of medical melodrama
Business Solutions, a competitive RPG about photocopier repairmen
Fiasco sounds really cool. I love caper movies. Is there any indie RPG you wish you had thought of first?
There are so many devilishly brilliant games out there it is hard to pick. Every time I play Montsegur 1244 I feel a sharp pang of jealousy, though.
You’ve been a really good sport about answering all my questions so far. I promise I only have a couple more.
First, are we ever going to hear another episode of the Durham 3? I used to listen to it faithfully but it’s been nearly a year since the last episode and I kind of miss it.
I always enjoyed doing it, but not everybody was really having a great time. Plus we ran out of stuff we really wanted to talk about. I think we might return in some form but there’s so much good stuff out there, seriously, don’t pine for us. Go listen to Sons of Cryos or Master Plan or The Walking Eye or Canon Puncture or whatever Paul Tevis is doing. Those guys take it pretty seriously and do a good job.
That makes sense. I think what I liked most about the show was the way it was a short segment prior to play and than a follow-up, debrief after the session. What I found particularly interesting was how “pumped” everyone was after certain sessions – you could tell when the session was firing on all cylinders just by how excited everyone was after the fact. That’s a pretty sharp contrast to many situations where the anticipation of the event is much greater than the actual experience….
If you were to recommend one indie RPG for people to try, what would it be?
I’d want to find out about their play style, their history, their enthusiasms and interests and personality. Then I’d hand them Primetime Adventures.
Any last advice for aspiring game designers?
There are supportive communities you should take greedy advantage of, understanding that you are committing to helping others in the future.
Thanks again for the opportunity to pick your brain and I look forward to playing Fiasco as well as Medical Hospital in the not so distant future.
I really enjoyed this! Thanks!
Well, that’s it folks. If you want to hear more about Fiasco, check out the interview Jason did on episode #66 of the Canon Puncture Show.
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