10 Years Making Stonetop (w/ Jeremy Strandberg)

Hello, hello, hello, welcome to the Yes Indeed podcast created by Mark Shepherd and our run by me, Thomas Manuel. Lots of happen since the last episode. I had a birthday. I moved houses. But we are back with another interview. And this time it's a really cool one. I let it run extra long because it was such a good conversation with a designer who has been thinking about this game, their game for for a decade. If you know dungeon world and the sort of like ecosystem around it, then you'll know Jeremy Strandberg, but he is one of those people who has been thinking about part by the apocalypse games for a very long time. And he's been working on stone top the game that we're going to be talking about for a very long time. If you haven't heard about it, stone top is a game about a little isolated village, a community, and you play people about this community who are trying to keep it safe, help it grow. It's a slow fantasy game. There are veered structures and mysteries around the village in the woods. There is a history to the world that is hiding under the surface waiting to be unlocked. It's a softer version of D&D. It is an image of D&D, a vision of D&D that a lot of people have. And stone top is a particularly well-baked incarnation of that. If you ever liked the sound of the phrase, like a low fantasy, then you might like stone top. If you like the idea of a heart fantasy, I've managed to read it, but I've not managed to play it, and I'm excited to. It's one of those games that I think is a long-term commitment a little bit. You have to really play it for a while. We talk about that. We talk about lots of other things. It's a very cool conversation. And I hope you enjoy it. This podcast and the newsletter is brought to you by my patrons over at patreon.com/indiarpg. Thanks to them and everyone else who supports me in helping me do this. I really am grateful for, I really am grateful for. I got some new patrons recently and I really am grateful that people are joining even now, even though I don't do anything extra special for people on the patreon or anything like that. It's just a way for people to support me and I really appreciate everyone who does. And with that said, let's get to the interview. And I am talking to Jeremy Strandberg, who is an instructional designer, software trainer, and game designer. He's the creator of Homebrew World and Defying Danger to RPGs you might have heard of in the sort of like post engine world scene. He has a blog called spoutinglord.blockspot.com and he is the designer of Stone Top, which we are going to be talking about today. Jeremy, welcome to the show. Thanks Thomas. You've done your homework. I could have said a lot more if I really wanted to do my homework, but I also have this worry that I might say something. I don't actually want me to say. So it is sometimes when I find a bio that's written by the person, I'm just like, this is good. Jeremy, this is a project that's been in the works for a long time. I heard about a long time ago, but I'm sure you've been working out for a very long time. Can you try to cast your mind back and tell me what was the sort of real seed of it where you would like this is a project and it's going to be called Stone Top. Yeah. So it actually harkens all the way back to playing D&D 4th edition. So I'd a group of friends that I would be playing D&D 4th edition with and I don't know if you've played D&D 4th edition, but it is very many's heavy, very tactically rich, very focused on the combat scenes. And that was the group I had that was that we enjoyed playing the game, but it definitely was like justifying a series of fights, this fight after that fight. We tried to make it a little bit more interesting than that, but I had of my group, I was always the one that was reading about all this weird indie stuff and trying to always look for ways to weave in more storytelling, more narrative types of mechanics into the games that we were playing. And 4th edition was at its peak or at least our plane of it was at its peak about the same time that Apocalypse World was like in development and coming out. And I had been following Vincent Baker for a long time, like just before that. And one of the games that he had written and then basically abandoned was this game Storming the Wizard's Tower, which I don't know if you've ever heard of it, but it is. So if you go back to the old 4th Jolingo, there's the narrativeist, the step on, or gameist, or the step on up right to dream story now type of games. And Storming the Wizard's Tower was his attempt to make a step on up like a gameist type of game, which 4y very much aligns with, right? It's very much, let's make this a game and the game bits are the interesting crunchy parts. But one of the things that he did in Storming the Wizard's Tower, and this is one of those things where Vincent Baker, he just has a cast off idea that isn't the core part of the game, but like that one kernel of an idea, plants a seed somewhere. But the thing that he did, the framing that he did in that game, was first thing you do is you create a village, or a small town. And that is where the PCs are from, and it's a nice place. And the whole, the part of the game that he did put out as a playtest mode was very focused on slain monsters, and the framework was to come up with a monster that threatens the livelihood of the village. And then the PCs are the people that everyone is going to turn to. I read that, I fiddled with that release draft of the game a little bit, there's a lot of really cool stuff in it, I believe if I remember correctly, Vincent said that he'd stop working on it just because he found some fundamental flaws in how the mechanics all work together. But that framework was really interesting to me. And so I had that in my pocket, I had a lot of stuff happening with Apocalypse World and reading that and trying to wrap my head around that. And then a lot of dissatisfaction about how Fourth Ed played out, particularly outside of combat. And so they all came together and as our, the campaign that we had been running and playing in Fourth Ed kind of started to fizzle out, I pitched the idea of a town centric version of D&D where we were all PCs from this small isolated town that we would, like adventures would be based on threats to the town or trying to get opportunities to the town. And we re-jiggered the framework quite a bit to say, okay, instead of daily powers, they're per adventure powers. So you could use them once on the adventure, but we'd frame things such that like each session or two ideally was a whole contained adventure, but you had to get back to town before you could replenish your daily lives. And started from there also like looking at the Apocalypse World concept moves and trying to apply them to the Fourth Edition skill system. And so like in my notes, I've got a bunch of like, how will we resolve investigating the scene and how will we resolve a travel log and how we resolve like, sussing someone out. And so they were all skill based, right? It was all using the Fourth Ed skills, which was still clunky, but it gave us something more interesting to do and something more provocative to do with the skill system. And it was a game that I was playing with my friends and we had a session zero and we sat down and, okay, how do what are the elements that we want on this? And there were a few things that I knew were important to just drive the game. It had to be isolated, right? Like a point of light type of thing. It had to be self-sufficient-ish, but reliant on trade with neighbors. And it had to have some vulnerabilities, right? There had to be specific things that if this is lost, then crap. What is the town going to do? But there also had to be enough interesting fun things to do adventurous-based stuff of. So we did the session zero event. People pitched ideas, we kicked things around. We said, "Okay, what's the central defining feature of the city or this town and someone through the idea of a megalith that it's at the center of it?" We kicked what kind of tech level do we want to have and someone threw out like iron age Celtic kind of, I don't even know if anyone said Celtic, but like we were talking about trying to have the naming schemes for things be fairly consistent and it's like, "So what kind of names do we want?" And one of the players is a big, I think he is of Welsh descent. And he was like, "Wellsh!" And you start looking at Welsh names. They're like, "Yes, these are wonderfully fantastic looking names, at least to non-Wellsh speakers. They seem very like lyrical and exotic." And that hit that landed. And then we, "Hey everybody, I need people to come up with ideas for adventure sites that are rumored to be around in town or legends that people know about." And they, like those things that we got were largely some of the like the core setting elements that made stoned up what it is. Like a ruined tower, not too far from town, with halls beneath it that are sized for giants. And a cave that is not too far from town that has nothing growing within a certain number of feed of it. And people are always worried that animals are going to go missing in there. A grove of trees that turns red every autumn and doesn't come back. A golden oak that's visible deep in the forest and the legend says that you can bury someone at its roots and they'll come back to life. And so like these all became the touchdowns of that world. And I think I remember asking someone, "Okay, how do we want to do supernatural evil? Do we want something more D&D devils and demons and that kind of thing?" Or do we want something more elder for like lovecraftian cosmic horror? And someone velled very strongly, "No, I want the cosmic horror shit." And then that with all of these other things just laid this framework of what would become the setting of stone-tong. And we played the hell out of that. We had a lot of fun. And eventually life happens, right? And people moved away, people came back. And fourth edition worked really well in my opinion up to like around 10th level. Once you got into that second tier of play, "Shit got weird." And the types of things that you were doing felt increasingly disconnected to the core. Oh, this is the heroes of a village. But we pushed it pretty far and eventually just collapsed under the weight of not being able to find time to schedule things and having too much time and just the encounters taking so long to create. So that was like the original, the OG stone top. It was a fourth edition D&D campaign. And then after that fizzled out, Dungeon World started to show off. I became increasingly interested in Dungeon World, just because my roots are in that kind of fantasy. And that's what I've always enjoyed. The power by the apocalypse approached two things, was just really refreshing and energizing to me. And so I became deeply involved in the Dungeon World community. And followed its development, would throw ideas at the developers like in the old Barthforth apocalyptic forums, and then followed things once it was released and got involved in the G+ community for Dungeon World. And what I found myself, one of the things that I found myself doing a lot was just explaining the game a lot. Here's how you do this in this type of game. Okay, here's how you can make combat more interesting in this. And I would spend way too much time probably writing out like elaborate examples of things. And some of them became touchstones that people would be like, oh yeah, you got to go read this. So you got to go read this. And I've also, there were a number of people that were making content and I'd start, oh, look at that, try looking at this, have you thought about this? And I of course started throwing my own stuff out there. And so I was involved in that Jason Loot, who's the publisher of Stone Tom, was similarly getting involved in that community. He did a Kickstarter for one of the first, in my opinion, one of the best Dungeon World adventures, which is servants of the Center Clean. And then he started working on this, the wilderness survival guide for Dungeon World, right? Dungeon World hex scrolling, the perilous wilds. All right, at the time it was called the perilous journeys after the move and in the game in Paul Wau. But he started working on the perilous wild and that was something I was very interested in. We kept started throwing ideas back and forth. I had come up with a followers system for the perilous wilds and I'd started working on Stone Top already and I'd put out like a couple of drafts of, okay, here's what the, the steady tight moves might look like if you were going to have that beer home base. I think Jason originally asked, what can I put these things in the perilous wilds? And I was like, I don't think the steady and stuff would work. But I think these followers moves have legs and let's work on them together, tidy them up. And then that was the beginning of our working relationship. So the follower moves in perilous wilds and stuff that I wrote. And then I don't remember if it was before or after perilous wilds came out. But Jason was like, I'd like to publish Stone Top. And originally Stone Top was just me tinkering with, oh, I'll just make a few pages. It'll just be like a setting overview and maybe a couple of adventure starters and some magic items. Maybe some extra rules for this and extra rules for that. Yeah, that didn't happen. It grew, grew and a grew and a grew and a grew and hard of that was just, there were two parts to that. And there was me actually starting to make content that was Stone Top specific and realizing that I actually think that this was feedback I got from Michael Prescott, if you know, and the Trelemna adventures guy. And Michael pointed out like, I love this setting overview. This seems very flavorful, but it really clashes with the PC Paladin showing up on their Warhorse and you got this bean chewing farmer that's just like looking up at them going what the heck. And that really just hammered home the fact that like the playbooks for Dungeon World didn't work in this isolated Iron Age mysterious, mist veiled set. So start making playbooks. A lot of that ended up again being inspired by the fourth edition game that we had played even the tweaks that we had made there, but also just, okay, what makes sense, right? Like you're not going to have a Paladin in this setting, but what could you have? Or you're probably not going to have a professional soldier. We barely have a militia. So if there is a professional soldier, that means they came from elsewhere and what does that mean? And we started making all that stuff. And I started working on the magic items. It would become the arcana with the whole idea of things being unlockable and having corrupting influences. And so again, it just grew. And so that's where part of this came from along with Jason being like get rid of the elves in the doors, make it weirder. And so we did that. And then I think the other thing that finally got me was I had been tweaking some of the Dungeon World moves to align more with what I wanted. And eventually I had tweaked all of them. And I could tell Jason was sitting back there going this is going to be its own game, isn't it? And he was just waiting for me to come to that conclusion. And eventually we did. And then I started making this as a standalone game. And I think the thing that happened that kind of got it to the weight that it is now, like the page count that it is now is all of that experience that I had explaining the game to people online and putting scenarios to examples together and rethinking the underlying. Like the social interactions that go into a typical PBTA game or at least a party of heroes united against the world PBTA game. So I took a lot of the stuff, a lot of my thoughts on that and I turned it into the actual rules of the game and the GM advice and so on. And then once you lay that level of groundwork, then okay now when you start talking how do NPCs fit into this? And so we have an actual. All right, if you haven't done this before, here's how NPCs fit into this. You portray them, but you also use them as vehicles for making your GM moves. You decide how they react to the players. Here's a couple different ways of portraying them. Right, stuff that is, if you've done a bunch of RPGs before, probably fairly obvious and intuitive to you. But I don't know if I felt like I was explaining the core conversation of, okay, the GM frames the scene and then does this and then makes a move and the whole point of a move is to do this and then they say, what do you do? And we have this conversation to figure, if I'm explaining that in that level of detail, it doesn't deserve to have that level of detail in all the different parts of doing this game and that's where the 600 page book came from. Sorry, you apparently put a quarter in me. No, that was good. There was such a good, thorough and measured answer. I really appreciate that. There's a bunch of different kind of places you could go from there. But I first came across your work, I think, in the exact scenario you're describing, which is I was somewhat, you know, a lot about role playing. I played D&D and because I started with D&D, even though it didn't make any sense to me before I started it, once I finished playing it, I was like, this is how it works. You go from zero to this is the only way something is possible, like very quickly, I think, when you pick up your first role playing game. So I encountered all of that. Here's how PBA works with Dungeon World in the here's how Dungeon World works. There's a lot of people explaining that. There was a little community. I remember your blog posts, home rule world, that kind of stuff. I remember there was a podcast by Jason Carter, we're just teaching Dungeon World. There was a guide. There was a PDF that was called How to Run Combat in Dungeon World. The guide. I read that probably before I read Dungeon World as a book. The guide was available for free. Even before I read the game, I'd come across that and it had already convinced me that this was interesting and exciting. This is how I wanted to do things. One quick question before we get into some of the design threads that you brought up. How do you think about all of that explanatory material now? Do you think that stonetop is, because even in that sort of very brief introduction I gave to you, when it says that you're a sort of instructional designer, I'm guessing that means you think a lot about how to teach things. So is stonetop your attempt at making an RPG that truly like somebody can start fresh with and you will hold their hand all the way through that's a goal? Maybe give me like an example of a thing you did that is in there for that reason. So yes, like very much one of my once I started writing this and realizing what it was going to be. One of the things that I wanted it to be was a text that people could go back to and come back to again and again and continue to get value out of continue to learn from continue. Oh, there's a technique I could use that I hadn't been using before. There's a thing that I could do. And yeah, there's a lot of not necessarily hand holding, but I didn't made a lot of assumptions or rather I chose to not make assumptions that you would just know how to do this. And there's two big things that kind of jumped to mind. Okay, what's in there? They facilitate this. Now the big one is just is this one little page in the running stone top chapter that it just has this heading of GMing is a practice. And just lays out, look, there's a lot here and this is a skill. This is something like doing yoga or practicing a martial art or meditation or painting. You don't just start being good at this. You do it, you get good at it by doing it and by reflecting on how you're doing and by trying to do better next time. And so that was just this one little half page spread in the GMing thing, but it's one of the things that I remember people reading and just being like, thank you for saying this. It just makes a difference to have that authorial voice saying, look, this is, this it takes work. It's a skill. It has to be developed and here's some ways that you can go about doing that. And then related to that, that one of the last chapters that we ended up writing was the game ongoing, which is the last chapter in the book. And it doubles down on that and just, okay, look, over time, here's how the game is going to play out and here's some things that you might encounter. And here's stuff that you do right at the end of the session and why that's valuable. Here's some stuff to do between the sessions, then not just prep, but also reflection, making notes, having to do lists that you like follow up on. And then also at the end of it, like talking about, okay, what happens when your players, when your PCs start to have come into conflict with each other, here's some things to watch out for. Here's some philosophies to have towards it. And like when you're ready to wrap the game up, here's some steps and some guidelines on how to do that. And so that was very much just recognizing there is a skill to running this and there are, there are very human soft skills involved in running a good game that I actually think, like the single most important thing that you can do to be a good GM is to care about the players that you are with, right, the people that you are playing, right, all of the creativity and all of the drama and all of the like awesome descriptions, et cetera, doesn't mean anything if you aren't paying attention to how your players are reacting to that. If you're not listening to the feedback that they give you, if you're not listening to the questions that they're asking and recognizing what is behind that question, right, or clarify the question, et cetera. Those are all really important skills. Also not just in gaming, but in life, like I wanted the game text to call that stuff out and give advice on it. If you've ever trolled Reddit, not trolled Reddit, if you ever trolled Reddit and looked over it, especially like RPG, you'll see all of these things like table troubles and every time somebody posts something there, the correct answer is talk to your players like they are adults. And I wanted the game to say that and also to give tools for doing that. And so there are some of those things in there. So sorry, again, you put a quarter in me. So that's one part of it is I included a lot of that stuff because especially if you're coming from that culture of like online play, D&D, adventure, adventure, yeah. If that's your experience with role playing games, then yeah, this stuff is as I'm asking you to do a lot of human social stuff that is not necessarily part of all of that. And if anything, from one benefit of age is having that some of those skills built up. And if I can help people like learn to do it, I think that's valuable. The other part of it is things like giving people step-by-step instructions for creative processes. So if you look through book one, Stone Top, you'll find a lot of, okay, here's a step-by-step process for creating a site. Or here's a step-by-step process for making a magic, like a new artifact. Or I even ended up making a step-by-step process for, okay, you want to make new moves? Here's what goes into making moves. And yeah, that was hard, right? Because it's not like anyone ever gave me a step-by-step process. No, that is a engineer. What am I doing when I'm doing all of this? That isn't just. Oh, yeah. Come up with a trigger and then draw the rest of the owl. I think that's really cool. I think that this is one of those things that I am hoping that Stone Top becomes a kind of reference text for this kind of thing. And once you've done the work, it's such a sort of like outward-flowing benefit for the community because then they can just point at your work. That's the nice thing about RPGs that it feels very constructive, like in a sense of people are always building other people's work and things like that. But I want to go back to. When you were telling the story of how the game came up, it was going to be a setting, and you added some rules, and then you added some setting, and then you added some rules, and then you added some setting. It felt like there was this interplay there. How do you think about the role-setting plays in designing a game? Maybe I should make this explicit. Stone Top comes as two books. One is the players guide the one with the rules and the GM guy by player, I mean everybody. And then there's the setting book. So I think for a long time, PBTA games assumed that there was not going to be a setting book. There was a kind of default for the genre. And now you have the setting here, but it has always felt like setting was essential to rules creation. So how do you see that? see that that interplay on that cause and effect. A big part of this comes back to what people will often say that PBTA is best at and that is genre emulation. And I don't know if you could hear my scare quotes on that. I think Vincent Baker has said it very well. They're not the best PBTA PBTA games and the PBTA games that the bakers make, they don't think of them as emulating shit. They are entries in the genre. And I think that's very true. I think that what people mean when they say genre emulation is I'm going to take a well known, maybe even not well known, but I'm going to take an established fairly specific micro genre. And I am going to make a game that can play out and rely on the tropes of that genre and thus not have to spell a lot of that stuff out. And if you do it right, you can absolutely do that. You think about games like, I mean, like masks, right? Like the one that everybody goes to is like pinnacle PBTA design. It is emotionally distraught teenagers who are dealing with being superheroes. Like that is admittedly, superheroes are a big thing. And there's plenty of examples of that. But that is a very specific narrow brief. And then the game does a good job of crafting its rules and its playbooks and its stuff around that. But it does have some setting, right? There is the whole assumption of what the Halcyon city and like you are a second generation. And it lays these, it lays out some very important setting details that are then reinforced by the moods and reinforced by the playbooks. And it all comes together and it leaves that that fruitful void of figuring out the specifics amongst the group based off of the decisions that they make and so forth. And there's plenty of other examples of that. Monsters of the week, the specifics of your mythology are determined in play by your group. It doesn't have a monster manual that you're picking from. What is a vampire in your version of monster the week? We're going to figure that out together the first time we encounter one. Or I'm going to defer to the monster hunter. Whoever is the playbook with a background of doing monster hunting, if you're the expert, but your probably the monster of the week is an example of a game that sort of seems to come not from setting, but from story structure, like genre for lack of a bit of words. And that one, it's doing a really nice job of grabbing from a bunch of different entries in a work of genre and just sort of like, oh, here's the divine. It's not Castiel, but it could be Castiel if you wanted it to be Castiel. And the expert, it's kind of child, but it could also be Billy. And it's doing a very good job of grabbing the tropes and grabbing that story structure. But then it's letting the fact that this is an existing genre with an awful lot of just a deep well for people to draw from. And an expectation, like if you look at all the different shows and works in that genre, there is no set. Okay, this is what a vampire is. This is the lore and aware. There's this expectation that each instantiation of it will create its own lore for the specific creatures that they're going to encounter, but you're always going to have vampires. Right. So like I think that approach is why so many power by the apocalypse games in particular are able to design to the genre and provide tools and scaffolding and structure that will let people just pull from the well and craft the specifics of their setting together. Which leads to the question of why is Stone Top have a 600 page setting guide, right? So I have thought about this a lot and I don't know that I have a particularly great answer for it. I think in a lot of ways you could take the 600 page book of Stone Top book one, right? You could just take that theoretically. You could take the setting overview, like the handbook that you give to the players. You could take the playbooks and you could take the arcana, right? The all of the magic items in the cards that have rules and game mechanics and hint at a setting. I imagine that somebody could take that stuff and never crack setting book and they could probably have a very good time and their world would probably end up looking a little bit different than what Stone Top, like the published version of Stone Top looks like, probably, but I think that they could have a very successful game. Yeah, I'm downed. I mean, they're probably doing that with every game they've made it exactly. Like, who really plays Eboron? The Forgotten Realms. Does anybody act? I know the answer to this is yes. Some people do actually get into the specific lore and details of the Forgotten Realms. But the whole point of the Forgotten Realms in a lot of ways is to just be a dumping ground setting that you can find anything you want in. So anyway, why is Stone Top the way that it is? Partly because I can't help myself. But also, I am very, it'll be clear to anyone that reads my stuff. I am obviously steeped in an influenced by the OSR style of exploratory play. I think that the OSR style play and the dungeon world style play are not that far away from each other. There are fundamental things that people that enjoy one versus the other really disagree about. But I think there's a spectrum of play particularly in the dungeon world side that can very easily get into pretty darn close to OSR style play. And without a lot of friction. And part of that is there's nothing in dungeon world that specifically requires the GM to defer to the players for what's happening or what's going on in the fiction or to make up details about the world. You're expected to do a lot of the same stuff that you would ideally be doing in a session zero or ideally be doing this part of character creation to find out what's interesting and exciting. Ask the player about their backstory. And it's just instead of asking the player to write a four page backstory and then try and incorporate that. You're just taking a rough outline of a character and then asking them in play about their backstory and what they might have heard about this and so forth. And you're taking those details and incorporating them into a story as you go. So with Stone Top specifically the layering of things like having all of the arcana and having those arcana that point at and hint at elements of a co-cure and underlying setting that is I think what largely prompted me to start writing more stuff up and making more of a setting guide. But also if you look at the tradition of dungeon world one of the big things that came out of dungeon world it wasn't even part of the core game. It was Marshall Miller kicking off this idea of adventure starters which were very evocative, gradi places and situations but that were had a handful of details but were very short on underlying specifics. They were all the term that has come to bogeyly they were all very anti-canon. Why are you here? What are you after? All of that stuff was a question that was left to play. And then the adventure starters were just a bunch of cool shit that kind of hung together thematically. And that was a very inspiring thing to me and so when I started making the setting guides for Stone Top I wanted that. I wanted enough of a framework that somebody could pick up this thing have a two three page setting guide that like dropped up a bunch of juicy hooks that got people interested in stuff. And then once you like open that up and went into it I'd already done a lot of the work thinking through a lot of the questions that you might have. And I don't necessarily have answers. Like why is this the only village here? Here's some reasons. We're terrified of deep water. The wild the grasses of the flats will just absolutely choke out anything that you try and cultivate outside of this one particular range. Page. You tell me players what ill fate happened to the people that last tried to clear more land outside of this. Or we don't cut down trees in the Great Forest. That's an established, juicy, rural or like the detailed setting, but I'm not going to tell you why. Right, I like there's a pact with the forest people at Forest Folk people are gone. Right, so why are we not chopping trees down anymore? What happened the last time somebody tried to chop a tree down? And here's some possible things that could happen as a result. And why the forest folk didn't want you to chop it down. Great, like you figure out together what that's going to be. So to get back to your question, I think the more specific a, the more narrow your genre is going to be your setting is going to be. And then, but less familiar is, right? The more work that is incumbent on the designer to communicate those specifics and those details and to do some of the work for people in advance to help, help slew the transition, give you a scaffolding to stand on. Yeah, this another sort of creator who was in the kind of dungeon, wider community is just a mess. Just a mess. So I was trying to break down sort of the tools RPG designers give people who run the games. This is a very sort of actionable, a very pragmatic framework. And the idea was like some designers, some games give you a linear storyline. Some games gives you a setting, some game gives you a map. And these are all like different things. And his sort of like last category was like tools for improvisation. And the sort of it's a kind of, it's the least defined category there. Like in that post of here are various things that designers give you. And the sort of big problem with that is that actually all of those things are tools for improvisation. Like even you write a six-hour page setting book and all you've done is said that if you find this useful for improvisation here, it is. You know what I mean? Like it isn't. Nobody with that book is not improvising even if they have it, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's one of the principles of Stone Top is exploit the setting guide. And it specifically is use what you want, right? And don't feel beholden to this book. It's just a book. Right. What you guys come up with is far more important. Yeah. And that kind of stuff, I don't know. But I first heard it. It was always, it felt almost like a plattitude, right? Here's all this information I wrote down. But just whatever you want. But the idea is that I think Stone Top and PBT really goes at extra step of explaining how to improvise of some setting. Like even this idea of ask questions will link to the Stone Top teaching actual play that you did in the description. But you really go, you model this thing that really blew my mind when I first discovered Dungeon World and PBT A. Just this thing of you ask good questions to the players and you listen to their answers and you improvise the whole story from there. The players are your setting guide this one next time. Right. And that's what you call every one of your playbooks comes with. Listen to questions you can ask them. You've done that work as well. These don't have a quote-unquote mechanical effect. They're there as tools for improvisation. Right. Like, yeah, some of these you should ask, I guess, maybe with something. You don't have to. They're just all good ideas for really good questions you can ask if these playbooks are going to play to get GM into the flow of things. It's funny because one of the things that regularly we would get feedback on in the first few rounds of play testing was people like coming back after the report of their session zero and just being like, my players are like, you're asking such good questions. These are so cool. Like, rough. One of the things I was really keen on talking about was all of the design around stoned up the village itself. Right. Like, the moves that you do for the homestead, like the seasons, like all of that stuff I want to talk about. And we haven't even really gotten there. So cool people. Let's get into that stuff right now. So stoned up as the village has a playbook by itself. And that's again one of those. It's an idea almost like two. It's almost an idea two good, right? I'm sure like a lot of people probably have this. This is a good idea, but it literally is that whole thing of the place is a character too, like that thing. But talk to me when you decide to concretize stoned up, make a playbook for it. You draw a little map for it and you put down like five, six, like places. Right. These places are there. And the rest of the places, the rest of the other sort of like buildings or places of interest in the town don't define. Tell me about why you go there are these six to start with. Sure. So part of doing that is just to provide a scaffolding, right? One of the things I will often hammer on is this idea that creativity requires hard edges to crystallize off of. And otherwise if you don't have something to build on, you just end up with this like, "Ahhhh, very much." And so a big part of it is simply giving people some evocative, interesting stuff that we can all use touchstones and things to build from. But the other thing that it does is it also establishes things that you don't have, right? It kind of defines the negative things that are not there. By saying that there is a public house and when travelers come through, that's like where the village gathers for like socializing and community. But like visitors from out of town just sleep in the common room of the public house. And yeah, we maybe got an extra stall to hold the store, hold one of the horses, but we only have two horses. Like when we establish that, we make it clear like this is not a setting that has an in. This is not a setting that has shops. This is not a setting that has, there is not a church. There's a pavilion that has shrines to four gods, maybe others, but definitely these four. And by laying that sort of detail out, you are saying a lot about the material culture of this setting or you're establishing tropes from fantasy that aren't necessarily true. And you're just reinforcing them with the physical space and the physical structure of this place. The fact that the village is at the center and the fields all spread around it, reinforces the idea that it is a communal place that I don't own these fields and work these fields. We all have this ring of fields that we all manage and work and benefit from together. So is the detail of how community oriented life is in stonto? Is that sort of principle of how this village is going to operate? Is that something that happens first? And then you, is that something that Jeremy is interested in as a person? And so he puts it into the setting and then it goes like into the rules and everything flows from I have an interest in that or does something else come that leads to that? Chicken and egg, right? Hard to say. But I think what it ultimately comes down to is two things. One that I wanted there to be established, I wanted to be given that you were the heroes of this isolated village and that there wasn't anyone that you could appeal to. Like you were it. So I didn't I wanted there to not be like a kingdom that you were a part of. I didn't want there to be a magistrate you could go to and appeal to. You were on your own and if anyone was going to solve these problems, it was the player characters. So I wanted that as a starting point. And also it was very important to me that this is a good place that this is a place worth fighting for that it's not just that you grew up here, but that it is actually a good place that has people that look out for each other and take care of each other and care about each other and that we struggle together and survive together and succeed together. And with the full recognition that like there's going to be politics and there's going to be conflict internally and there's going to be soap opera, but that core of it being a good a place worth fighting for was very important to. And I think it's to me, I don't see any other way that the village could be that way and meet both of those criteria. It has to be a fairly communal place. Otherwise, it's a shitty place that where one group is taking advantage of another group and now your conflict will inevitably become the PCs trying to overthrow that social order. And so if you want player characters that are going to be important. People, brave people, heroic people for this small village, that village has to be something that, like, they are, they feel invested in it and that they feel is worth fighting for. So that's really where that ultimately came from. I don't think it was a conscious decision, right? I think I just sat down to write what are the things about this place that make it worth fighting for and that's just what I imagined. So I guess that probably tells you something about me. Yeah, yeah, I think that's a really great answer. But it also does come from like on the canicle standpoint too because or one of the things we realized very early on in that fourth edition game is that there's no point in tracking how many gold pieces do I have because if you needed something, you just go to the Smith and be like, Hey, bud, you know how I go out and keep risking my life all the time to help this village. I need you to repair my armor. Like nobody is buying supplies when in order to go out and serve the village. So that kind of then goes back into the kind of the gear and the inventory system and the way that the stat, the steadings, stats influence like how much and what quality of gear you can have and how likely it is that you are able to find something that's not just like a commonly traded available item. Right? And so it just becomes this virtue a cycle of if it's a communal place, here's what's involved in getting stuff. How does that work under the hood? Then we have to think a little bit more about how that community space works. Yeah. No, I, there's the line in the book. I forget what they call homestead scenes or something like that. You know, just the play home front. Yeah. Home front where you say, no, this is the heart of the game. And yeah, it is so it cannot be understood. How much the fantasy of stone top in the kind of what is the fantasy of this game? The fantasy of stone top is way the village works. Right? Like the fact that you will take care of somebody else and they will take care of you. That's that's going to that's the heart of this game. I think the game wouldn't work without it. Yeah. Yeah. And it's sad that we say that's the fantasy. Yeah. Right. It is a small community that that takes care of itself and takes care of its own. But hey, life under Canada was a great. Yeah. Let's let's talk about the home front moves themselves. I'm interesting. But I think even more interesting is how you've got moves for seasons and how they fit into the flow of play. First of all, we were mentioning that stone top is a long term game. And that's not something we're used to. I think talking about in PBD games as well. What kind of links do you think first or dark campaigns? Oh gosh. Dozens. I would say like a fulfilling, okay, we feel like we've really got a feel for it. You're talking minimum of 10, maybe eight games or sessions if they're longer ones and you're really dialed in. I think you can get a season or two out of that and feel the real impact of the flow of the game. But personally, let's see here of the three campaigns, like from either play testing or just playing that I've either run or been a part of. First one was just shy of 70 sessions. Like I think we wrapped it around 69. The second one fizzled out during the pandemic, around 45 sessions. And then the last one, the one that the actual play recording was based off of that actually lasted right up to check my notes. But we are above 60 sessions on that one. And we put a pause on it. We put a pause in quotes on it last year. As I tried to like really focus and just get the game done. But we still probably have a half dozen sessions left before we'll get to like satisfying dinner month. So like long term games and like from asking around from the play test community and the early backer community. Yeah, that's not uncommon at all. 40 sessions, 50 sessions, 70 sessions. You will definitely see that stuff. Somebody actually just went and loaded session writeups for their entire first stone tap campaign onto RPG geek, like under the stone tap heading. There's 60, 50 something like that. There's just like a document for every session and you load it all them up. It's not just you. I think you can get a good feel for the game. Like you can get a satisfying arc in about three to four sessions. But you will be let. But that'll like basically just be the first cycle of their establishing the home front going on your first adventure coming back and having that return home set of scenes and the stuff that immediately follows it and maybe you'll hint at what might come next. But if you're not playing it for 10 sessions or so, you're not going to hit that season change point multiple times. You're not going to really see the growth and the rhythm of the game play. That's what I want to talk about. I want to talk with the growth in the gameplay. Tell me what do the seasons. What are those moves do? Why do you have seasons in the game? What are they bring to stone top? First of all, by having them, by making them a part of the game, an important part of the game, you're signaling to people and to the players that like we want to take our time here. This plays out slowly. This is not something where you know, this is the old D&D thing where it's oh, we leave fresh faced first level adventures. And then two months later, we're level 12 because we've been doing nothing but fucking adventuring for two months. And suddenly you're a minor deity, right? It doesn't have that. And I'm trying to avoid that. I'm trying to make it like make it a game where things breathe. And so having the seasons sends this implicit signal or I guess maybe not implicit signal, but it sends a signal that we should be taking our time and that we should let the seasons change and that the change of seasons will often be the indicator of what type of an adventure comes next. The specifically what the seasons changes are doing, they're setting that pace. They're establishing like this is the general beat of a rhythm of time passing. It's not a year. It's a season. And I think that's enough time to let things breathe, settle back into your normal day to day life and then see what new thing is in store for you. I'm sure that this is also influenced by the fact that I grew up in and live in the American Northwest or Midwest where seasons are extremely punctuated, right? Like spring and summer and fall and winter, very different from each other. And they feel different and they have a different aspects. As a side note, I there was someone that I chatted with a while back ago about the potential of making a stonetop inspired game in Southeast Asia, seven Southeast Asian. Like one of the first things that we had to kick around was how do the seasons work? Because you don't you've got the wet season and you got to say everything is constantly on grow. And how does that then change the pace of the game? Which is still, by the way, for anyone who wasn't this like that is still something I'm super interested in seeing someone do and I would be delighted to work with them to try and figure out what that would look like. It would have to be harvest in the rain. It would just be like, we think about rain, we think about harvest and that's how you do it. Yes, please let's talk about the message to myself tonight talking about seasons. Yeah, yeah, understood. So the so you've got the seasons, right? They've to me that just seems like a very natural rhythm to follow. But what the move is then doing aside from setting that pace is it's saying it's generating possibilities, right? Generating things that the player is story looks basically, right? It's generating a threat that you have to deal with or an opportunity that you get to act on with a lot of levers to reflect like what the player group is actually interested in. For example, if you roll a threat, one of the things that the GM is advised to do is think about how big of a how big an urgent of a threat you want this to be. Because it could be little forest cobbling with raiding the village, right? That's a legit thing that you could just have happen. But it could also be word of like it could be more of a threat to the region and not something that's don't talk can actually deal with right now. And you just lay the scene or lay the seed. Yeah, there's a like a labor riot happening up in Gordon's Delve in the mining town off to the west, not directly your problem, but it could become your problem if you're not careful about this or nobody does anything. So, you've got the seasons to be serving as this prompt for whether or not you have an opportunity, whether or not you have a threat that you need to deal with. And then on the opportunity and the players can decide, is this just like a narrative opportunity where we learn about something that we can go out and do, which you choose if you want to have an adventure or is it like, no, we're just choosing good weather and like maybe a little trade boost. So we get some surplus, maybe we lay in for winter and okay, we've been meaning to do this project. So good weather is going to make it easier to get the project. So you're giving the players that kind of control over where do they want to focus their time and focus their energy in the playtime. But it's also tied into the surplus mechanic because the village has surplus, which is basically food and grain and trade goods that is more than people need for day-to-day life. But then winter comes around and winter eats your surplus. And it could be as little as one. It could be as much as eight and that's partly determined by just the luck of the role, but that's also going to be determined by what your fortunes are going into winter. And your fortunes are increased by accomplishing goals or dealing going out on adventures and coming back successfully. And then that your fortunes reset every season. So you basically want to make sure that in autumn you get a big harvest and you want to end autumn with your fortunes as high as possible so that when you go into winter, you're not eating all of your surplus and dealing with threats at the same time. So there's this mini-game strategy that you're playing both with where do you want to spend your time and effort as players and what shit do we just got to deal with? If you are going into winter with two surplus and like zero fortunes, it's going to be bad. And the consequences of not having enough food during winter are they're painful. Like people die or you could. One of the choices when that happens is you retire your character. Basically as a way to say, "Okay, there's a big change." But it affects me not everybody else. Yeah, I think that's a such a poetic sort of little bit of game design as well. It's like that in winter, one of the options is your character. Dyes, dyes, leaves. Whatever, but yeah. And I don't know if you noticed, but this was not intentional, at least consciously, but it was one of the things that when I introduced that, it was like, "Oh man, but does that make sense for just like whoever's rolling to do it?" And then I remembered what the trigger was for who rolls in winter, which is the weirdest character rolls. So if they are the one that chooses it, it makes sense. They're done. Yeah, the triggers on all of the season moves are so again, so beautiful, spring, the most hopeful rolls, summer, it's most content, autumn is most determined. That's really nice. Okay, what else is imagined? Okay, so we've got, I want to talk about, yeah, stomp top as a village. You can build things. I think that is the most obvious part of this that you can improve the setting with buildings and things like that. What is some aspect of the home front or this stomp top playbook itself that you think listeners might not be expecting to see if they have anything in the game. What do you think is an innovative or interesting or unique thing that you've put into the design of the scheme of those sections? That's an interesting question. You've got, there's three threads that I want to go with this. One of them is just mechanical going back to that aspect of improvements and sorry, I guess the mechanical part of them is the way that improvements and stats and the various moves related to adventuring all actually interact with each other. That's one of the things I want to talk about. The other is just the role that the improvements actually end up playing in game. The third thing is something that I was doing in the games that I was running well and not doing in the games that I wasn't doing very like that I wasn't particularly happy with the home front parts of and how that became like a bit of advice or structure or old support that's provided in the game. The first part is because the PCs are heroes of Stone Top and because the economy of Stone Top and the nature of Stone Top is an economy of trade and honor and debt and gift, that means that the fortunes and the prosperity of the village should be directly reflected in how well equipped the PCs are when they hit the road like when they go out. So that was a nasty little set of things to try and figure out how to reflect. So what it is the way that it does get reflected is if you do increase the prosperity level of the town, it means that you end up with each inventory slot of supplies gets you just a little bit more and each use of supplies does a little bit more healing and probably the most noticeable one is all of your iron weapons get one extra level of piercing which means they're just their better weapons, at least better weapons for the heroes of Stone Top. And that so that all kind of ties into and reflects okay we have spent a lot of time investing in having these extra resources, having enough space to support full time, another full time art is in or two and now as a result we have higher prosperity and so that should be reflected in the gear that we've got. So that's part of it and it's a subtle thing but it is like I think it's a very powerful feedback loop and then that kind of leads into the improvements to the village and how they actually play out in game. So if you haven't looked at the Stone Top, like I know you have Thomas but like for anyone that hasn't looked at this, if you pull up in the Stone Top playbook it has probably, somewhere between 15 to 20 improvements that you can chase and they range pretty significantly from just extra housing to like building more bigger houses to establish in a standing watch to having a far-flung reputation for the heroes of Stone Top, making an actual in out of the public house establishing a mill, things like that. And each one of them has a series of requirements that you have to meet. Some of them are simple, some of them you can meet incidentally, some of them but most of them require dedicating resources and finding expertise and then pulling together as a village often over multiple seasons. And like you are, they become prompts for adventures in a lot of cases. And that, secretly, not so secretly, that's the actual reason for them, right, is to provide hooks and avenues, directions that the players can choose to pursue when the seasons change come back with an opportunity or at least without a threat that the PCs have to deal with right now. Yeah, this is the proactive version that the re-act. Right. And again, it goes back also to that creative scaffolding where just it gives you a menu of things like, here you go. Do you want it? Which of these do you want to pursue? And some games of Stone Top will, for pace, stuff to reports that we've got. Sometimes they will be very focused on doing those things because the seasons change come up positively for them. They just get lucky. And so the players find themselves in a position of being proactive in trying to build the town up and not having to deal with all of the nonsense threats. But other times, you never barely even touch these things because your first spring breaks forth, season change roll, is a six minus and you're on your heels through that entire season. And then shit, we get a bad roll in summer too. And now you're just completely reactive and barely holding things together and you never really get an opportunity to breathe and work on this. And so the secret really is that you don't actually get that many improvements over time. Like unless you've got a really long game going where you've gotten quite lucky and managed to take these things off, you're probably only going to get three or four of these improvements over the course of a campaign. But that's not the point. The point is to dangle them out there as a thing that you can pursue and to give you something to do when otherwise it would be a peaceful season. That's the example. So those are the mechanical aspects of it. And I think that can sometimes surprise people. It feels like we're never making any progress on these improvements. Yeah, the journey is the goal. The whole point is to give you something to work towards. And then there are very real mechanical benefits that come from unlocking these, but don't count on it. You're not necessarily going to get all get these. Yeah. You also enforce a rhythm to the game as well. So don't talk, cannot go in one year from being what it is to having walls and a militia. And it would be like a radical transformation of the village. You paste that out. Yep. There's unless you are ignoring all of the time constraints that the game tells you to pay attention to, you're not going to be able to get more than one or two of these a season. And sometimes you get like a season where everything comes together and two of them get unlocked at the same time. But yeah, whatever. It's slow kind of dripping out. So then the last thing, and this has nothing really to do with the playbook, but it's more just about the rhythm of adventure or crisis after math, transition to downtime. And it's in that transition to downtime. Like there's the scene that you always play out and that the game is very clear that you should play out the immediate aftermath of the PC's return. And it doesn't have to be long, but it should be there. Right. There's this transition of the PC's coming home or digging themselves out, like catching their breath after the raid or after the fire, whatever. But there's this moment after of coming home and seeing people react to you coming home and seeing how things have changed or like what people have been getting up to while you are gone and just reintegrating into the community. And there are moves related that is like the return triumphant move where you improve fortunes if you come home successfully. But that also has the implied and what if you don't, how do people react then? And maybe it's so bad that you meet with disaster and fortunes go down. But more often than not, it's just like you get some kind of mixed reactions as people come home. So that's an established thing. And then of course, he play out whatever scenes would come naturally from that. So if there's an urgent decision to be made, you deal with that. If there's a funeral to have because you took an NPC along with you and they died, right? That's something you do. We learn stuff about the PCs and the Village and so forth. But part of that transition to downtime is an excitation to always give each PC one scene with their family or whatever NPCs serve as family for them. And that is that thing that like when I realized that we were doing that success at doing that and what a difference it was making that became part of the book and part of the recommended stuff. And in the larger games where we just had so many PCs and we didn't necessarily have the time or the knowledge that was an important thing to do, it ended up feeling very disconnected where the PCs all cared about each other, but they didn't really care about the people that they were ostensibly doing this. And so that just little thing of have a scene with each PC's family to show that like coming back home and the importance of those people to them. That's something that I think is one, I think it's very portable if you've got any kind of home base that has NPCs out of it that I think that's a bit of a tack if you will or just a bit of advice that you should always do. Yeah, it's roleplaying magic, absolutely. It's a thing that you forget and you rediscover it again and again how powerful and important it can be. But yeah, that was such a great answer Jeremy. Looking at the time we go to say anything else you want to say about Stomp Top before we transition into kind of my final questions. And I think the other thing about the game that I'm like, inordinately proud of is the arcana, like the magic items and magical item like things that kind of take the place of spells for most people. So like your chief wizard stand in playbook is the seeker and the seeker's whole deal is they are like an archaeologist or maybe a sorcerer or a witch hunter. And the trick is that they don't start with spells. They start with a series of arcana. And so there's a major arcana which is like a two sided half page insert that's a pretty big deal type of magic item. And then they start with they start with one minor arcana that they've got and they've unlocked and they have all the powers for another one that they have in their possession that they haven't unlocked yet. And a third that they have a lead on so that they've got something to go up and pursue. And more than any other playbook they're good at dealing with these arcana of learning about them and mitigating their consequences and just like unlocking them. So that kind of stems from wanting to have as part of a part of the setting. This idea that magic is dangerous and poorly understood and you are borrowing trouble when you are dealing with it and it requires some effort to like unlock and work with and they end up serving as another adventure quest or thing for people to work on in the long term and slowing the pace of the game down. And that is a part of the game that just like grew and grew because we started with I don't know like a dozen of the major arcana and we ended up with about 18 of them. And I think I had when we went to kickstart we maybe had 24 maybe 30. I think 24 minor arcana. And we ended with 64. But each one of them series of unlocks and then a pretty bad ass cool thing that you can do on the back and they range from like just in the minor ones you've got something adds straightforward as a like a tablet that you find buried in a ruin somewhere that if you take it home and practice it you can basically learn a spell from it and it's a spell where you speak loudly it's like a thunderous bellow to spell that you can unlock and soak in anybody else that you like let study this thing. So potentially you could have a whole party that's just wandering around going like yelling at each other really left. So that's a very straightforward example and then you got one that is like a path in the woods where it's the series the sequence is basically an adventure where you like go on to some sort of faith pathway and end up making your way to a spirit tree and wrestling the spirit there. And if you can do this and pull it off which is not easy then you gain this like supernatural vitality. And then you've got you might find a little idle in a cave that's actually a fain imprisoned in us a little statuette that thinks he's a god and you can pull him free and he's still stuck as a statue and he still thinks he's a god but if flattering enough he'll make illusions on your behalf. And he's this horrible little imp that no one would actually want to deal with it. I just I'm dying for the day when I get to actually portray this guy. So it's this wide range of stuff that was a ton of work to make but they were super fun and they really making them help home my craft like rural writing and move writing and thinking about how things played into adventure and would be interesting to unlock. That's another area that I think like people could draw from and try and implement something like that and get a lot of my like out of it. Yeah I can imagine like some gms like curating those lists to be like I want to see this so I want to see that. I think you can put the tempo on the scale. No absolutely. Yeah I think there's just so much to this game I'm very excited for it to be out in the world for people to play. And I think genuinely people are looking forward to it. I've seen a lot of posts where people are like excitedly waiting for the physical release and all of that stuff. Cool. Let's move to my standard questions as we segment out of this. My first question as always is what is a game that you've had a lot of fun with and want to recommend? I have been writing this question. It is the easiest one. It is except for I have been working on this game for 10 years and I haven't played any other games. - Oh no. - I played. - You'd have to go back. (laughs) Yeah, and what was I played? The only games that I've played in the last 10 years, I'm not shitting you are games I've made. So, Stone Top, Homebrew World. - Actually, that's it, really. Just Stone Top and Homebrew World, because I guess there's probably been some dungeon world in there, but it's hard for me to say, what's dungeon world and what's Homebrew World anymore. - So, other games that I've played in there, there was a game of zombie world, and that's fun, right? It does a really good job going back to that hole, like building on a genre and relying on the tropes of a genre, and not just emulating, but being an entry in that genre. I think it does a very good job of that. I got some quibbles with like, how the character creation and so, feeling a little hit or miss, but the way that the moves and the card-based system for the drawing and things, the way that all works out, I think, is brilliant. And I think that would be a game that I would be more interested in playing. We tried, we were like, this close to playing a game of harvest last night from Luke Jordan. - No, no, no, I don't even know what Neo misses, but unfortunately, I just didn't have enough time to prep for it, and then when I went and looked to find the online materials to download them and print them out 'cause you're gonna play face to face, I ended up talking to Luke, and they're like, yeah, we don't actually have them yet. So, I didn't have anything to prep. - Luke was in your biggest stomp top, right? - Yeah, Luke started his some rando on the internet that I heard talking, like I was Googling myself probably, and I found some, this person on YouTube just talking about my game and what the heck? And at some point, Luke reached out to play test, and then very quickly we became, "Chall me there," and Luke spent just an amazing resource and voice, like sounding board and advocate for stomp top, and has become a great friend, and honestly a mentor at this point, which is a fun thing when you realize that like, you have a mentor who's half your age. (laughing) - Yeah, no, Luke's delightful and super sharp, and everyone should check out their work. So, Harvest and Grand Guggenall, they're like at the top of my two playlist, like once life settles. - Absolutely. - Moving to what I mixed question is, what's a non-game work of art that has had a big influence on you? - So this is one I've given some thought to, right, 'cause I listen to your podcast, and I will find myself thinking as people are going to be like, "What answer will I give?" - Yeah. - "For the, for what I give for this, if I was doing it." And I've come up with two, and they're both trashy as hell. (laughing) So the first one is, I don't know if this was a thing that you encountered growing up. I think you're probably both a little too young, and I don't know if it got outside of the US and Europe. But back in the '80s, there was a series, time life, put out a whole bunch of book series. And there was this one series in particular, "The Enchanted World." And the model was, each of these books, there's like an eight and a half by 11 sized book. They weren't very thick, right? They're only like half an inch thick type books, and the Enchanted World series was like, had these cloth leather cover, or cloth covers, and it was like, wizards was the first book. Wizards and witches was the first book, and then the next one was like, elves and sprites, and the next one was like, night creatures, or something like that. And they were collections, it's not even right to say that they were collections. They were, these little books that would go over, various legends and folklore, and stories from all sorts of different cultures about wizards, that they do it in a way that was presenting an almost unified theory, and talk about like in the early days, like before the world was set in, wizards would have, and then they'd capture, they were very well done for the '80s as far as layout, and like the art they grab, art from like all the classics, and they put them in and have captions. And so this is Hitting Moon, I'm in junior high, and like six seventh grade, and go into the library and check these out, and just see if you can know them, and just seeped into who I am, and then they found me the half-friess bookstores, like used bookstores afterwards. And so I still got a collection of them on the bottom shelf of my bookshelf. So that's, that's, that's, that was definitely like a big kind of formative thing. I was finding those at the same time, I was finding like a D&D's first edition books in the library. But the other one, and this is the really trashy one, is back in the, again, back in the '80s, there was a Saturday morning cartoon, the real ghostbusters, looking back on it now, objectively, not good, right? It's a Saturday morning cartoon, so made in the '80s, but it managed to avoid being like G.I. Joe, which was just like a commercial for toys. They weren't really making toilands for these things. And what they, the thing that really stuck with me is they would take bits of mythology and religion and like fantasy stories, and they'd weave them into this absurd modern-day ghostbusters framework. Like, there was a series about the Necronomicon was on display at the New York Public Library, and of course, like some cultist steals it, and they've gotta go on a call of Cthulhu quest. Or there's a demon that lived in the north and some Inuit or other indigenous tribes like Castus Spellanid to freeze this flaming demon in a block of magical black eyes, and that caused the ice age. And then now, like this giant block of magical black eyes, somebody's turned it loose, and of course, like someone's trying to turn it into a stage show or like a spectacle. And so it was trashy, and it wasn't good. They suffered from all the problems of like 25 minute, or 20 minute children's episodes, but I remembered them being so much smarter than they really were, and I went back and I looked and it turns out, part of the reason that they were as good as they were is that they were written by Strazinski, the guy that rode that one fight. So anyway, it turns out that's where he got some of his first screenwriting at the time, was working on that, which. - Oh, that's a fun fact. - And a fun fact, okay. That's very good. It is very interesting to me what people answer to this question. Probably my favorite question, because it's either like you're going to reach into your childhood, or your young adulthood or something, or you're going to reach into something that has had very directly influenced some kind of work that you've made. If Stormtop was based on a book, then it would be that book or whatever. - Okay, so the final question is, what's a local feature or landmark of your local area, that means a lot to you. I mean something to you, I mean, influence on you. - So two answers are there related to each other. So one, just in general, I. So I live in Madison, Wisconsin, right, which is people, when people think of Wisconsin, they tend to think of either like the woods up north, or they just think of the big open fields where we're growing like corn and we have cats. - Just like that, kind of that's it. - Yeah, like the Midwest, I think a lot of times, people are picturing Kansas, which we are not. But there are parts of Wisconsin that are very big and flat and open, like with little spots of woods and just nothing that farmland. But Madison is right on the edge of an area, a region called the Driftless. And the Driftless, it's this area of Wisconsin into a little bit of Illinois, Iowa, and a little corner of Minnesota, right? And it's this area that never got hit by the glaciers. For whatever reason, like four ice ages in a row, the glaciers came down, they went around the Driftless area and then they receded and then they went around and they receded and they went around and they receded. And everything melted around it. Because it never got scraped flat by the glaciers, it's this incredibly rugged, cast topography. So limestone, like limestone and sandstone, which is very water soluble, right? And so you get caves, you get collapsed in areas, you get this really like hilly, rugged streams meandering around through it, type of terrain. And it's just absolutely gorgeous. And when particularly, I don't think I really appreciated this until the pandemic. Because the pandemic comes around and suddenly, you can't do anything, but you can go outside. And so I, my, friends of ours, Kat also from the actual play. We would pretty much every week just go find a place, go out hiking and Wisconsin and Dane County is blessed with a bunch of really nice state parks and county parks. So just getting out there and enjoying that like, hilly, roly, wooded streams meandering in the bottom type of landscape. So that's like a big part of my like sense of place is is the driftless area. And Madison being right on the edge of it has a little bit of that terrain and the kind of again, when the pandemic happened, it if you wanted to get out of your house, the only one of the only things you really had to do is just go and go for a walk. And I discovered that I live like within a 10 to 15 minute walk of four or five parks that are just like beautiful wooded old quarries. So you got chunks of stone walls that are carved out and trees grown out of them multiple levels. It's just beautiful areas that I didn't know existed until I couldn't do anything but go for walks on a daily basis. And then I was like, holy shit, this has been here all this time. That's an only code that's such a great answer. Other than the links to the game or the page where people might be able to order slash pre-ordered, where can people find you on internet? I'm not really super active on most social media. Like I'm not on Blue Sky or the Hellside. I don't have an Instagram Facebook. I just keep private for friends and family and I'm regularly considering deleting anyway. So mostly people want to find me the best place to find me is going to be on the Discord server for Stone Tell. I think it's at the point where it's probably going to be fun, but like right, because it had been like a backer zone-ly-ish sort of thing. If we're doing press for the game, we should probably let people know where to but yeah, if you post on the Dungeon World Discord or I guess the Dungeon World Reddit community, there's a decent chance that I'll see it. I might respond. Sometimes you'll put a court, you'll get lucky and ask something that I'm particularly interested in and you'll get an essay. I don't have a new answer. I hope so. People who said this before. You're a really good interviewer. Like you pay attention to what's being said. You have your own, like you ask very insightful questions. You're very good. I enjoy listening to your podcast. Thank you so much. And that's it for the interview. Thank you for listening folks. Thanks so much. The next episode is probably with Sam Dunewald, the host of Dice Exploder, the podcast and he's got a new game coming out. Band-Aids and bullet holes. So we're going to be talking about that. We're going to be talking about the podcast. It's another nice conversation. Got a good run going. So stay tuned for that. Till then, does Indy need you? Yes indeed.