GMBC ep18 - Biotech Horrors and Tabletop Adventures: A Deep Dive into Borne
Transcript: Speaker A
00:00:03.440 - 00:00:49.100
Welcome to the Game Masters Book Club, where great fiction becomes your next great tabletop role playing experience.
In this episode, Alex Jackal, Ian Eller and Sean Murphy scout out the gaming potential of Jeff Vandermeer's Bourne, where human and not so human characters come together in morally tangled relationships of dependence, deception and destruction, all against the backdrop of a post ecological disaster dystopia populated with biotech horrors. During this discussion, we move through topics ranging from can the Game Master be an unreliable narrator?
The use of factions and intrapersonal conflict in your gaming party, and our opinion that Jeff Vandermeer is most certainly a tabletop role player. Let's get into the conversation.
Speaker B
00:00:50.300 - 00:01:37.530
All right, everybody, welcome to another episode of the Game Masters Book Club where we talk about awesome books. And this week we're going to be talking about Bourne by Jeff Vandermeer, a fantastic sci fi book.
But before we get into that, we've got three great game masters returning again to talk to us about their reading experience and also about their gaming experience.
And given the book Born and its many factions within the story, we're going to have our game masters talk about multiple antagonists, intra party conflict, where we've got lots of different groups working in their campaign. So we're going to start with Ayin. Ian, are you ready to talk about games and intra party conflict?
Speaker C
00:01:37.930 - 00:01:40.490
I believe that I can handle this discussion.
Speaker B
00:01:40.810 - 00:01:42.650
Excellent. You may proceed, sir.
Speaker C
00:01:43.130 - 00:03:17.080
Oh, we're gonna do that part now. I see. Here's the thing that I think that is super important when we're discussing about how factions work in RPGs.
And I believe that the best way to put this is to say that factions are the way that the GM communicates to the players how their actions are changing or not changing the face of the world. When we create a campaign, what we often do is we drop the players into the middle of it and we ask them to do stuff.
And what sometimes we fail at is telling them what impact their choices had, faction play is the easiest way to show them how that works and what their choices change. Right.
And so when you have two powerful factions working against each other and the players aren't necessarily working for one or both of those, but they are doing things in the game that change the landscape. Those factions have to change their decisions. That is a Reward for the PCs in order to continue to engage in the game.
Like the fact that the Thieves Guild and the Assassin's Guild are now at tension because the players were the ones that took out the head of the Merchants Guild.
Just as something off the top of my head is a way to make that world alive and encourage the players to continue to act in the world, not just react to the world.
Speaker B
00:03:17.320 - 00:03:19.880
Sean, do you want to add to what I am saying here?
Speaker D
00:03:20.440 - 00:04:43.290
Yeah.
I'm going to disagree in some way by offering a specific example, which is what we're supposed to be doing is an example in play, not a lecture series. But that's iron so, you know, we'll, we'll move on. I had a campaign running where it was a Call of Cthulhu campaign.
They were investigating into strange events. There was a faction of cultists running around, but they were super personable cultists. They were like, we can give you money, we can give you power.
If we pull this off, we're going to be in charge of everything. Don't you want that? And then another group of cultists were like, we want to stop them.
And by the way, we don't care how many people die to make that happen. And so their actions didn't change.
I mean there was some reaction from them as they did it, but their action, they mostly had to pick which side they were more in favor of. Which leads to those, you know, inter party discussions over what the important thing is.
And you know, it worked well in this game and sometimes D and D it works well where you have situations where someone says, hey, have you tried not killing everybody and then taking the money, but tried something else and offered a different perspective on what it is the PCs could be doing with their time.
Speaker B
00:04:43.530 - 00:04:49.570
Excellent counterpoint, Alex. Would you care to comment on your colleague statements?
Speaker E
00:04:50.360 - 00:06:06.870
I actually think there's something to both. Remarkably, I actually mostly agree with both of them. So let's mark that down in the history books on the calendar.
I do think though there's an opportunity particularly to mix how faction play happens because in this particular story, right, you have people that are ostensibly part of say the magician's crew, who are these mutated kids and weird things, but they actually occur as a random encounter most of the time only an emergent piece of information that these people are actually part of a faction rather than just a random encounter that you get in the city or some environmental effect of the city. And that I think in some ways that's true too of the bears, all those things.
And so I think an opportunity is to create something that's complex enough that factions can emerge.
I think that Sean was pointing at of actually having there be parts of the faction that are actually quite possibly appealing to the player characters and some that are not appealing. Forcing them to make difficult choices like, oh my God, they're doing the right thing. That's what we want to do.
Oh, oh, they're also murdering children.
Speaker C
00:06:07.190 - 00:06:07.750
Damn.
Speaker E
00:06:08.330 - 00:07:00.060
You know, you know, so I think there's an opportunity and it doesn't. I don't think it takes a lot on the GM's part to weave that, because in this book I think there's probably only four or maybe five real factions.
But they all have that deep aspect where at some point in the book you go, oh, I see, well, that's sad, you know, and, oh, I can get why they're doing that.
Or think there's something that emergent factionalization and making sure that the factions are three dimensional enough that there's pros and cons to the faction and they're not just, you know, hand wringing, mustache twirling, evil people as a faction and then angelic, wonderful people in another faction. So I guess that's what I would say about the faction. What was the other question?
Speaker B
00:07:00.300 - 00:07:04.620
That's the main one. How the party interacts with factions is what we're going for.
Speaker D
00:07:05.200 - 00:07:05.520
Yeah.
Speaker E
00:07:05.600 - 00:08:03.470
And I think the one thing I would say as well, if you're going to have competing factions, right. Where you might set player against player, I do think from a metagaming standpoint, that's an excellent Session Zero thing to be responsible for.
Because some people do not want that. They don't want that. Some people love it.
And then if the person who loves it starts stabbing the person who really hates it, somebody's going to be unhappy with however that gets resolved.
And so I think in Session Zero, you should be clear if you're playing paranoia, for instance, you prepare people on Session Zero that you're going to be killing each other in all likelihood by the time this is 10 minutes in. But if you're playing a D and D game, people might be like, no, we're the party. The party never turns on itself.
I think it's just important to meta that and have that be in the Session Zero part of the game if you're going to run competing factions.
Speaker B
00:08:04.440 - 00:08:30.490
I'd agree that if you're going to have competing factions and the party should have in the Session zero, a discussion of, like, we're not going to split on this. Right. Or if we are, you know, we're all going to eventually arrive at a decision that the.
We all want to support one faction or support a group of factions that in this one thing, that's the main thing that I was going to talk about is that I like factions.
Speaker E
00:08:30.490 - 00:08:47.770
Can I do that? Kind of respectfully disagree. I think it's tremendously exciting if you have people in competing factions in the same game.
They just need to understand that that's happening and be okay with it as a storytelling aspect.
Speaker B
00:08:48.330 - 00:10:20.140
I'm not saying that that is how it has to happen, but if it is, you have to find out if that is what people want. Right? Do they want that to be the conflict or do they always want the conflict to be outside of the party?
I was just going to say that I like the idea of different factions. I haven't used them as much as I should.
And I will say that, as Sean put it, lecture, I found it illuminating and I was like, yeah, I think that does really work.
I do think that for players to show impact on the world, I also think it's a great way for the game master to present options to players in a very organic way. Instead of saying. Instead of having to come up to them and saying what? Well, you could do this or you could do this.
Which feels very paternalistic and sort of railroady.
Whereas if there's already a group of people doing that over there and a group of people doing that over there, you're at least defining some choices and they can either decide to take one of your choices or they can pick a third road that way. The factions are a great way to have that happen.
In my current game, I have more urban law based group and I have a very rural, more chaos less rule based group. And I presented them both to my current campaign and they ignored them both.
But they're still there and they're involved in big things that are happening. And now the characters are getting to like ninth or 10th level. They're starting to take notice that these players are bigger players.
And I, thanks to you guys talking about this, I'm definitely going to have them push a little harder back on the players.
Speaker C
00:10:20.220 - 00:12:14.420
The other thing that we were going to kind of talk about, I believe was in addition to faction things, which is one thing, but also that intra party conflict bit, the potential for having people sort of on opposite sides but not necessarily outside of the same plot line. And we had discussed this and Sean, this is for you. I'm going to give a specific example.
I ran a game that was my 20th anniversary game for a D and D game that became a mutants and masterminds game because it was a long story about the development of a world that eventually landed in the superhero era. I won't go into further Details, because it's convoluted.
But for the 20th year that we had been playing that game, I had a big crossover event, a Crisis on Infinite Earth sort of thing.
And what I did is I brought a bunch of players that had played in the game before, but sort of as a guest basis or we had moved locations and they weren't playing anymore or whatever, all physically together to be the alternate universe team of the same group of characters.
And if I have any example of a game that fed off of and benefited from the idea of conflict without opposition, if that makes sense, it was that because everybody was on the same team from the like fighting the, the collapse of the multiverse level, but they were also from different universes and different attitudes about the things that they wanted and things that they thought were important. And that kind of thing, that intra party conflict that we had, we were, we were talking about that is not the same, I don't think as faction play.
That's a thing that we all need to do when we have access to complexities of playgroups, which is relatively rare and I'm not sure is super commonly applicable, but I think is an interesting story.
Speaker B
00:12:14.660 - 00:12:32.180
I mean just getting a group to stay together for enough years, you know, getting, getting a party together, getting a game together, then getting them to stay so that they have lore and then also having other groups that have, that are part of that lore and then getting all of those people together to talk. Yes, amazing.
Speaker C
00:12:32.340 - 00:13:55.490
But, but like West Marches games are a big deal right now, right? Like everybody loves West Marches games and they play it in whatever system that they, they feel like to play Shadow Dark or D and D or whatever.
And that's the kind of game that allows for that because there are player characters bopping in and out of play because somebody maybe comes once a month, but somebody comes weekly and da da, right. And so you have, you have group lore and you have group stories and then at some point you can have that sort of intra party conflict.
The kind of thing where Rachel and Whisk don't necessarily wink. What's his name? What's his name? Sean Wick. Wick. Don't agree at this hyper important aspect of the game.
Like if we, if we assume that's a game and Bourne is the center of play, which I know we're going to talk about that, about whether Bourne is a player character or not, but if that is the center thing, that's kind of what the question of inter party conflict is about, right? Not are they going to punch each other that Alex was talking about.
But how do they go about, like having different attitudes about the core center of play and because of the nature of west marches games. West marches games being open tables generally. That's the meaning of the play, right? Is that people coming in and out.
You can actually build that thing where you end up with groups that are not group groups, if that makes any sense.
Speaker B
00:13:55.490 - 00:13:57.130
No, that makes sense. That makes sense.
Speaker C
00:13:57.210 - 00:13:58.490
Sean's been really quiet.
Speaker D
00:13:59.130 - 00:14:03.410
Yeah, I'm trying to be respectful. It's a. It's a new thing for me.
Speaker C
00:14:03.410 - 00:14:04.970
I'm really having trouble with it.
Speaker B
00:14:06.450 - 00:15:23.130
All right, all right. So before we really get into talking about mechanics, let's just review the book for the folks at home. This is Bourne by Jeff Vandermeer.
In this book, Rachel is our main point of view character and she is in a climate ruined city borne is a strange creature she finds and raises against the wishes of her companion Wick. The city is rife with factions, monsters and trauma.
The book's vignettes show each of these in turn against a back backdrop of an insanely fantastic post apocalyptic ecology. As Bourne grows in power, he threatens not only the balance of power in the city, but also Rachel and Wick's very survival. Bourne.
The book is full of morally tangled relationships, ruined pasts and futures, and an exploration of what is humanity. It is the first book technically in a series. There is a second book called Dead Astronauts.
There is also a short story which is called the Strange Bird. So if you do end up reading this book and you liked it, there's more for you to read.
So gentlemen, given that, what themes have I not covered that we haven't already covered?
Speaker E
00:15:23.130 - 00:16:38.340
Well, I, I think one of the things is the, the you talk about the ruined city, but I think the whole backdrop of climate change refugee and it being an environment ecos. I think the someone used the term eco survival for it.
It's like the main character grew up on an island which then dis because of climate change and then was constantly a refugee for the rest of her life from that point forward. And having a view from the point of view of an eco.
So climate change refugee I thought was an interesting theme of the book and it paints almost everything about how she looks at the world. So that was sort of cool. The other theme I thought was the parenting story.
The fact that this is a story about someone who finds something as salvage but then figures out and a constant theme throughout the book is is born a person or something else.
And that exploration is also I think a Pivotal theme of the story and an interesting theme that you could weave into a campaign if it was sufficiently long form. Like if you are Doom's people. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker C
00:16:39.130 - 00:16:40.090
Spoiler. They're not.
Speaker B
00:16:43.450 - 00:16:46.730
Well, Ian, were there any other themes that we missed that you want to bring in?
Speaker C
00:16:46.810 - 00:18:51.010
One of the things I find super interesting about it from a post apocalyptic perspective, because I love that genre, right, Is that we get a name for characters, but we don't get a name for any of the things that are world level, which is super interesting. You have a city that is unnamed and you have the company, but is otherwise unnamed.
But you know that there is a character called the magician and you know there is a character called Mord the giant flying bear. And you know of course that you're, you're our, our viewpoint character, Rachel and so on and so forth.
And I think that from a world building perspective there is something to be said for this idea that we have this apocalyptic world and we know that it is dying because of climate change. But also there's definitely a problem from the bioengineering perspective, right?
Because the centrality of the company and the bioengineered tools that people use and whatnot.
And I think that's an interesting juxtaposition that we talk about characters and we give them names and we don't and we talk about the world and we give it more vague feels. And for me personally that fits right in with the way that I write and the way that I run games.
I think that characters are more interesting than worlds and I think that it's totally okay to do Star wars level world building, which by that I mean shallow, cool, but shallow, and then dive into the value of characters and their motivations and the things that matter to them in a moment to moment.
That applies to both players and NPCs because players of course need to know what their character's motivations are and decide on those things and modify those things as play progresses. But GMs also need to know who the NPCs are, what they want in the context of what this world. And that's how you respond to play.
And I think that if nothing else, Born the book is a really great example of something coming up with a strong but shallow world building design and then letting loose on it some pretty deep characters, both PC and npc.
Speaker D
00:18:51.170 - 00:20:18.000
Sean, you know, the things I took from it in terms of overriding themes is this idea that they're in a survival situation and it sort of defines their humanity, which I'll use in A general rather than related to any one specific species. And Wick, on one hand, is sort of held out early on as Rachel's protector, but he's also a drug dealer.
He's tied into a lot of the horrors that are going on here. He knows that the magician is out gunning for her, but doesn't say anything. Bourne seems like, oh, my God, he ate those people, and that's horrible.
But those people there generally were bad.
And he protects those around him and makes significant choices based on that sort of leads to this question of who acted in the most moral way possible. We want to say, oh, well, you know, Mort is just a bad creature, but he was created this way at some level.
And he's a creature who's probably based on what we find out towards the end, although that is pretty loose in terms of level of detail. He's probably in a fair bit of pain or maybe even just being a tool filling out its mission. Like, is he evil and what is evil? What is humanity?
And what are the lengths people will do to survive is, I think, a constant theme in the book.
Speaker B
00:20:18.810 - 00:20:20.090
Alec, you had more to add.
Speaker E
00:20:20.490 - 00:20:21.210
Well, I was.
Speaker D
00:20:21.290 - 00:20:22.530
It's Alex. Of course he does.
Speaker E
00:20:22.530 - 00:21:14.310
Of course I do. Exactly. The other thing that's interesting is the fact that the hidden nature, a theme is that that you don't know what you think you know.
The author did an amazing job and actually a clearly intentional job, like, for instance, with not naming the city, not naming the company, but having names for the characters, as Sean was pointing to, I think.
I think the fact that the narrators are unreliable and that you slowly peel the onion away, that's also an interesting theme, and I think one that we can take that kind of thing in a group storytelling situation, like a campaign or a run, takes a little bit of finesse on the part of the GM to work with the players to actually have that work and have people remember enough details between runs and that kind of thing to actually make that work.
Speaker C
00:21:14.470 - 00:21:20.710
Do you think you can actually run a game with an unreliable narrator? I'm not sure you can.
Speaker E
00:21:20.790 - 00:21:22.070
Oh, you definitely can.
Speaker C
00:21:22.550 - 00:21:24.870
You definitely give me an example of how you do that.
Speaker E
00:21:24.950 - 00:24:00.980
I have a game where a character was running a cleric. He's still running that cleric. And he.
In the beginning, the church presented a particular story that was a creation story, and that was the story of who the God was, and he was operating with that story.
And over time, and he would got to the point where he was high enough level, he could ask his God questions, he could literally directly ask questions of the God. And he slowly figured out that the stories he had been told about that God were not true. They were literally not true.
And he slowly discovered that almost left his clericness because of that discovery.
And then slowly made his peace with it, and then spent literally years of player time figuring out who his God was really and what the histories were, and then learned that most of those histories weren't true. And slowly got a new appreciation of it and now has a much looser coupling with Scott. They're more like buddies. They are a priest and God.
But that was the place where it really worked. I have tried it in other places less.
That was like my most successful thing with that takes a little bit of Prep on the GM's part, because you have to know the story to make it consistent enough for that to work. You really need to know the story, and then you need to know what you're presenting to the player and to do it.
But you really can do it and it can be very interesting. It's just a little bit of storytelling work and world building that you need to prepare to really make it work.
I've also failed at it where I tried to do that. And then I painted myself into a storytelling corner where I had like one fact. I thought, oh, this will be clever. This would really be good, guys.
But then they did so many hard things early on. I was like, there's no way. These guys are good people. They just can't be. And I painted myself in some storytelling corners.
So it's tricky, but it can be fun. And if you prepare enough, you can really create something and it creates the experience for the players.
I think, of a world that's much deeper than it actually is, if you do it right.
Because they get the feeling that there's a whole world out there and they're just peeling away what they see and hear to get at the real world of it. Which is sort of my experience. Reading Bourne was sort of.
There was one way everything was presented and then slowly you peeled away and said, oh my God, that's not it at all.
Speaker B
00:24:00.980 - 00:24:01.260
Right.
Speaker E
00:24:01.260 - 00:24:09.300
So I think it's possible to do that in a campaign, but given the weird interactive nature of role playing games, tabletop role playing games, I think it's very difficult.
Speaker C
00:24:09.700 - 00:25:02.810
I think what you described is largely more of a setting secret than an unreliable narrator.
The reason I asked that question, and I know this is a tangent and we should move on for time purposes, but when you said that, it just sort of struck me that the GM is Kind of the information processing unit for the players. Right. And I was trying to figure out a way that you could do that that has an unreliable narrator, right?
The person telling the players what is happening. Can that be unreliable? I don't feel like you can do that.
You can have settings secrets and you can lie to them about those settings secrets, but I don't know that you can actually have an unreliable narrator in an RPG because the GM is responsible for telling the players how big the room is or who that guy at the throne is, or blah, da da da da. Right. You know what I mean? That's, that's what, that's all I was talking about. And again, it's probably off topic and probably we should move on.
Speaker E
00:25:02.810 - 00:25:48.750
But that's what I was suggesting. Moving on.
I know you were suggesting moving on, but I do want to say that example in that cleric, for instance, where he started to discover a problem was with the spell detect evil because he found that he was detecting evil and another cleric in the party was detecting evil and they weren't detecting evil on the same people. So the spell detect evil was unreliable. They started to relate to it as unreliable because the nature of who was telling them it was evil.
But at the beginning they were relating to it like, no, I cast detect evil. He's evil, we kill him. Right? And then later it started to become, wait a minute, who's evil? Okay, Heinl.
Speaker D
00:25:49.070 - 00:26:37.570
Yeah, but, but, but nothing you've said there. Alex is unreliable.
You didn't say you both detect these people are evil and then snicker to yourself and later on say, oh, well, your God was doing something different. Like, I can't believe this. I have to agree with Ian. If you, if you say the group like it's a 10 foot long room, 20ft wide, there's windows there.
And the first person walks in and says, okay, well you're now drowning in the water of the pool. You didn't say there was a pool. I'm an unreliable narrator.
Like it doesn't work then, like, at least at a basic sensory level, descriptions of things, which is what I think of as being the narrator. If you're not honest with the players, they have no way of knowing that that's something different until you, you know, mess with them.
Speaker C
00:26:37.570 - 00:26:41.970
There's no agency there. But again, secrets are okay. Lies are even okay as long as.
Speaker E
00:26:41.970 - 00:26:43.730
They'Re, oh my God, I love that.
Speaker D
00:26:43.730 - 00:26:57.770
Everything you know is wrong moment. Like when the player found out, you know, he had a book and he was trying to figure out who wrote it.
And then through some weird timey wimey stuff, he wrote it. Like, I pulled that in. And he loved that moment. And I was unreliable.
Speaker C
00:26:57.930 - 00:26:59.530
I just got chills. I love it.
Speaker D
00:26:59.530 - 00:27:23.110
You know, I was unreliable. I told him that he didn't recognize the old elf who brought him the book.
And then later on through timey me stuff, he's like, you look in a mirror and suddenly you recognize the old elf who brought you the book. That's different, though, than being like, yeah, you definitely saw it. It was a half orc. It was you the whole time. But I'm not a half orc.
I'm unreliable, baby.
Speaker B
00:27:23.830 - 00:27:50.240
Well, okay, just. I want to throw out one concept and yes, we are continuing on this tangent. I'm going to go all the way to the end on this. So what would happen in.
And this will lead us to our mechanics question, because I don't think any of us picked a game masterless system, but what if you had a game masterless system where all of the players are participating equally? Do you then have unreliable narrators?
Speaker D
00:27:50.560 - 00:27:55.840
Why, as a matter of fact, I did pick as my game A Quiet Year, which is a cooperative game.
Speaker B
00:27:55.840 - 00:27:56.400
There we go.
Speaker D
00:27:56.400 - 00:28:16.010
Not a gm where people sort of collaboratively put together the what's going on and build the story that way. It's interesting point. Can it be unreliable?
I suppose that somebody said in one round this happened, and later on another round said, well, it didn't happen. But I think that that seems unlikely.
Speaker B
00:28:16.170 - 00:28:28.970
Yeah, I agree. I agree in that situation for sure.
But, Sean, since we've gone that way already, why don't you continue and talk to us about the mechanics that you would use to evoke Bourne, since you've already mentioned your mechanics.
Speaker D
00:28:29.440 - 00:29:59.310
The Quiet Year is it's played with a deck of cards. Each card corresponds to a week in the year. Each card triggers some sort of event.
Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're omens, sometimes there's delays, change in luck. And you all know at the end of all this, the bad guy, the Frost Shepherds will arrive, ending the game.
And you've got this time to sort of try to build up against this oncoming enemy. So it's not an exact layover match to what's going on here. But it did strike me that a lot of the scenes here felt like they were.
They flipped over a card like, oh, and now there's a magician in the town and you know she's gunning for you. And then suddenly she has a rocket launcher that she has and she's attacking the big bad bear type thing. It's just sort of a lot of that.
And I think that the quiet year concept of putting together cards and building it in this world, particularly given as Ayin correctly points out, how open this is. Like, if you sort of all agreed, like whatever we're doing here is tied into this world and by the end of it, something has to happen.
Something's going to happen this year and we can sort of move towards that. You know, I did think about Gamma World.
That's an obvious choice for this sort of thing, but I thought this type of game, this type of story would work really well in a collective type fashion.
Speaker B
00:29:59.470 - 00:30:07.790
All right. Okay, Alex, do you want to tell us what your mechanics do you think would be best for evoking this? Sure.
Speaker E
00:30:08.670 - 00:31:26.400
Although I love chance, like both of those are good.
I did think that Monte Cook's games, Numenera would be really good because Numenera has that sort of weirdness and post apocalyptic you find stuff but you really don't know what it is. Some of the stuff you find is really cool and some of it's biotech and some of it's electro tech and some of it's weird magic.
And just there's a whole feel to Numenera that I thought would be a really easy to weave Bourne's story into a Numenera universe and the rules would allow for it very easily. So that was one of them. And mothership, but mothership, because it's.
It's sort of sci fi horror and it has this whole dread and survival in this sort of a really unforgiving world. So I thought that would also work well to create that feeling of you're fighting for your survival all the time. It's always dangerous.
You have to trap your house. You have to. It's that sense of constant impending doom and fighting, scratching out survival against all these alien and encroaching horrors. Right.
So those were the two systems I thought would be very, would be very good for this.
Speaker C
00:31:27.840 - 00:33:33.900
As we all know, there are a ton of post apocalyptic games that could fit this. Everything from Gamma World as mentioned, through numenera, through Twilight 2000 or whatever.
The one I decided on as thinking about this was, is relatively recent, called Ashes Without Number. It is a Kevin Crawford game. It is a signed nominee game.
And anybody familiar with Kevin Crawford and his company, what he does really well is he creates games that encapsulate the genre. And now his mechanics tend to be what we call OSR ish.
In other words, they have sort of a foundation in old D and D and then expand upon those things. But what he really does really well is that he gives these tools to sort of build the world as you play.
There's a lot of discovery and a lot of using random charts and saying, but they're not. They're not incoherent. They're very coherent. Right. And so they. In the end, you've built this very, very interesting random yet coherent world.
Now, I understand that Vandermeer is a great author and he's really smart and this world is not random. But it feels that way from an RPG perspective. Right.
The evil children, for example, feel like something rolled up on a random encounter chart, then was given importance throughout the rest of the story. That's what sign nominee games look like. And Ashes Without Number in particular is the post apocalyptic one.
And the other benefit that it has, by the way, is that it allows normal people as player characters, where a lot of post apocalyptic games don't everybody's a mutant. Or even the normal people aren't just normal people. They are special super normal people.
So I kind of like the fact that Ashes Without Number has just like Rand, you could just be normal people. Yeah. And which of course leads to the question of whether or not Borne the character is a PC.
And I'm on Bourne as an NPC and the only PCs in this story are Rachel and her boyfriend sometimes. But others may disagree.
Speaker B
00:33:35.580 - 00:34:30.790
I would definitely disagree. I think the Bourne character is really interesting. Although if you're going to have Borne as a character.
The one time that I've played kids on bikes and I have been told since that this is not how it normally works. I played with Colleen and she had each. Everyone take a turn to play the main character. Like if it were ET it says everybody gets to play the alien.
If it's Stranger Things, everybody gets to play Seven for like a certain period, whereas everyone else is. You also. But you also have a satellite character who's doing things. I think it could work in a kids on bikes sort of situation in that regard.
But I do agree with you, Ian, that you can't have a completely amorphic, basically super powered character and everyone else is a normal person and have a very satisfying role playing experience unless everyone gets a chance to sort of experience being.
Speaker C
00:34:31.110 - 00:35:26.860
But that's not why I don't think he's a player character. Right. Because. Because Buffy came out 20 years ago, solved that problem by like, with its metacurrency. Blah. Da. Right.
Like, it did a good job of it like you can solve that problem mechanically. The reason I don't think Bourne is a PC is that Bourne's existence, Bourne's.
What Bourne does is Bourne drives action by the two characters I listed as PCs.
So that in a, in an RPG to me makes him an NPC because his choices and the weird stuff he does and following Rachel in the city and then she has to watch out for him and she's not paying attention as much as she should, blah, blah. That's why I think Bourne is an npc.
Not because he is more powerful than the, the human characters, but because his stuff feeds directly into the stuff that the people I think our PCs do.
Speaker D
00:35:27.900 - 00:36:26.050
I would argue there is a way of looking at that. He is the PC certainly more than the magician is and maybe even, you know, more than Wick is.
He comes in and he's developing and he's learning and at various points he does things that Rachel and Wick have real conversations in part because he imitates them and goes back and forth pretending to be the other one.
He has a journal that sort of has his thoughts and how he's really struggling not to eat them, even though at one point he surrounds Rachel as a rock and it would be very easy for him to digest her. And at no point did either Rachel or Wick say, oh by the way, maybe you should take care of Mord the giant bear.
He just kind of decides that's what he's going to do. It's one of the themes of identity here is who are these people and who do they want to be?
Speaker E
00:36:27.970 - 00:37:02.120
Alex, I'm definitely a camp PC born as PC. I enjoy the challenge myself of running non human characters and I push my races in that direction.
My long term fantasy campaigns like my elves are hive minded insect like creatures and my orcs have their creations, their artifacts. When I have players run them, I set them up to try and think like that as much as that's feasible and pleasant to play.
Speaker B
00:37:02.120 - 00:37:02.520
Right.
Speaker E
00:37:02.520 - 00:37:49.360
Which sometimes it might not be. So I think it's a fascinating challenge, but some people don't want to do that. And so I think the question of Born being a PC depends.
If it was me running Bourne, I think I would love Running Born and Draw the challenge. Other people would want to be one of the more human ish people like Running Rachel or even Wick.
And I think it depends on the player more than almost anything else whether or not a creature that's not human can be run by a player if you intend them to be run as Non human. Because that can be challenging and sometimes you can't do the things you want to do with a character if you're trying to hold to some kind of.
This is how these alien creatures act or something like that.
Speaker D
00:37:49.520 - 00:38:39.820
Yeah, I think if you gave the character sheets out and you said, all right, well, Born is curious, he's adaptable and he's kind of innocent about the world and wants to learn about it. He wants to protect Rachel and you same sort of, you know, three words for Rachel and three words for Wick. I think that would be interesting.
I mean, I think if somebody, you know, you said to Wick like, well, you're kind of manipulative, you need this medicine and if you don't have it, you'll die. But you can't tell people that because in this world that's how people end up dead. So you've got to maneuver things your way.
And so you're smart, but you're also a little guilt ridden. It would take good players to make Born a PC. But you know, I think it could happen.
Speaker B
00:38:41.670 - 00:40:11.940
I think that from another direction and I know I've done this before because I remember Ayin saying, oh, you can use Fatecore for anything.
A lot of this book is about the social almost combat that takes place between Rachel and Wick and then eventually between Rachel and Bourne and they have to negotiate. And I think doing that from a game standpoint between these three player characters or between the NPC and the player character.
For Ayin, I would think that the Fate Corps, it's got a series of of roles that you can provoke people emotionally and then you can either use empathy or deception in order to determine how they react to. You can obviously see how Rachel is more skilled in the empathy section, although sometimes she shuts down and can't do that.
And Wick is much more in the deceive in order to get people to do the things that they want. So I just wanted to throw in my mechanic for the Fate Corps in there as well.
But on the flavor side, I think a reflavoring of the role playing game Trophy, specifically Trophy gold, which is where you travel down dark road.
It's a travel through a deep and dark fantasy forest and almost everybody dies that I think if you reflavored that into the post apocalyptic biowarfare landscape where everybody dies, you could use a lot of the mechanics and a lot of the background that's in that to make your game work as well.
Speaker C
00:40:12.100 - 00:40:14.100
I am not familiar with Trophy who makes that.
Speaker D
00:40:14.340 - 00:40:18.980
I'm not Even sure they're still even making it. I mean maybe. I'm sure it's out there somewhere, but.
Speaker B
00:40:21.060 - 00:41:20.570
They have a website you can buy stuff from it. Published by the Gauntlet and Hedge Maze Press and it was designed by Jesse Ross. Worth checking out. Seemed like a really cool thing.
Again, I haven't played it before, but I read through parts of the system and I was like, I got the feeling a lot of the time that I was walking through a dangerous place, almost like a deep and spooky wood and horrible things kept coming out and doing things and that's the entire basis of that role playing game. So I felt like it fit the Born model pretty well.
We've actually spent a decent amount of time talking about things that we would like to take away from Born and put into our games. We've talked a lot about the themes and how those themes are there.
But are there any more direct, let's say more concrete items from the story that you'd like to bring into your role playing games? Sean, I think you said something.
Speaker C
00:41:20.570 - 00:41:21.010
Yeah.
Speaker D
00:41:21.010 - 00:41:53.920
So in the back of my book, the author has kindly put in a B series and describes the creatures and has the page number you can go to to find out. So things are mentioned quickly in passing.
He provides two or three paragraphs on that, gives you a little bit more information on it and suddenly some of them pass by so quickly you don't even notice them.
But when you see them, when you see them sort of a B series out there, you get a sense of like, oh wait, this is a real thing that I could add on some stats and use in a game.
Speaker B
00:41:55.850 - 00:42:01.850
Almost clear that Jeff Vandermeer is a gamer and wanted to give us like oh yeah, that creature. Here's the flavor text.
Speaker C
00:42:02.170 - 00:42:07.690
Or at the very least he spent some time doing some discovery, right? And he's like, that's not going to waste.
Speaker E
00:42:08.010 - 00:43:30.080
One of the things I liked about that aspect of the book, which I think is very good for world building. Some GMs are not as crazy as I am, but I, I like to know who's in which niche. What's the apex predator?
What are the things that one of the scavengers? What are the flying scavengers? What are the land scavengers?
But having that as background text, I'll roll random encounters sometimes and then I'll roll the intensity of the encounter. Double zero. Could be more the flying bear. I might roll a 02 on percentile dice, right?
And then that would be, you see in the distance A fox dark between two buildings. And that kind of flavor tech, I think, adds a lot.
So if you know what that back what the city is, right, in terms of what are the most common things you might see walking down the street, it gives you that ability to flavor text the city into existence without you having to talk a lot and like narrate a lot.
You can just say, you know, have a random encounter where they see in the distance, distance a particular thing, or either an object or a building or an animal or a creature, or see more than the way off in the distance every now and then. Every half an hour you see more flying around somewhere or crashing into a building way off in the distance or something like that.
Speaker C
00:43:31.200 - 00:43:37.520
I am definitely team horrible murderous child cyborg bio monsters.
Speaker B
00:43:37.520 - 00:43:37.800
Right?
Speaker C
00:43:37.800 - 00:43:39.180
Yeah, Those are going in every game.
Speaker B
00:43:41.330 - 00:43:43.090
Absolutely. They are terrifying.
Speaker C
00:43:43.090 - 00:43:55.970
They're so horrible. And I stopped reading it, did a little clap when they got completely murdered by board proxies who are not all. They're not good things. Right.
Like, it wasn't like the good guys. What? It just was like, oh, those children are dead. That's great.
Speaker B
00:43:57.490 - 00:44:01.410
Alex, I know you had more things you wanted to talk about, so can you jump back in?
Speaker E
00:44:01.570 - 00:44:25.000
I think having sources of antagonists is nice.
For instance, the company there were like different, like three or four or antagonists or maybe only two or three, but two or three antagonists that came from this one source, which is almost like having a thematic source. And then there were climate change sort of eco sources, though, but they're all tied together.
Speaker B
00:44:25.160 - 00:44:25.480
Right?
Speaker E
00:44:25.480 - 00:44:50.690
The company clearly helped with the eco disaster, but the magician was connected to the company. And then having multiple sources for antagonists I think is a fun thing I would take away. The other thing is I am really fond.
I really liked Mort at first. I was like, are you serious? A flying giant bear? Seriously?
Speaker B
00:44:51.010 - 00:44:54.330
And flying, flying. You're great.
Speaker E
00:44:54.330 - 00:45:16.200
That's. That's so stupid. And at the end I was like, that's what awesome character, right? It's just an awesome thing.
And so having something that sounds so crazy.
And anyone listening to this, if you're thinking, I'm going to read a book about with a giant flying bear, and I want you to know something you will appreciate more by the time you finish the book.
Speaker B
00:45:17.960 - 00:46:20.040
I will throw in my pitch at the end of that to say that anytime you can make a giant corporation the enemy I am in, I will always play that game. I will always run that game. I find corporations a continuous font of evil that feed almost every single one of my games.
Even if I don't live in a very corporate.
Even if I put my characters in a not very corporate sort of world, the idea of this faceless and sometimes mindless driving force that people are supporting feels, I mean it's, it feels cult like, but in a evil, greedy sort of way. And so it fulfills all the things it's, it's. So whenever you've got an evil corporation in charge of something, I'm always going to be there.
You guys covered a lot of the really good stuff, the beast and all the fun things that are there. I, I also especially like all of the ecological dangers that were out there.
That you can't drink the water and that the, the rain I think is dangerous and you know, you're walking by a plant and that plant will kill you.
Speaker E
00:46:20.040 - 00:46:25.000
And the rain, salamanders where it rains. Oh yeah, stuff like that.
Speaker B
00:46:27.000 - 00:46:55.600
Just, just crazy, insane stuff. Those kind of ecological and world weather effects like that, that's really makes for a, for a fantastic game world.
But media, yes, we know that Jeff Vandermeer has presence, he has a style, and he's written a bunch of other books. So please read everything by Jeff Vandermeer. But if you wanted to find inspiration along the lines of borne, where would we go and find that?
I end sure.
Speaker C
00:46:55.680 - 00:49:06.400
Now I'm a big fan of weird post apocalyptic fiction. And the weirdest post apocalyptic fiction came out in the 80s with a lot of movies and they're not good, but they're great.
And the one that I'm going to tell everybody to watch, especially you youngins who have discovered podcasts recently, should absolutely watch Hell Comes to Frogtown, which is an epic of epic proportions that stars one former wrestler and a bunch of people in frog costumes. And I'm being flipped. But seriously, the weirdness of the genre, especially as expressed in that era when a lot of it was complete garbage, right?
It was responses to Conan movies and Mad Max and they mixed those things and it was, it just got weirder and weird and weirder. But one of the beautiful things about Bourne is it is intentionally and beautifully weird, right?
Stuff happens that makes very little sense, but at the same time feels very real.
And if you find the examples in that era where people were experimenting with that post apocalyptic genre, Hell Comes to Frogtown is a funny movie, blah, blah. But you have Wizards by Ralph Bashke. Great, great movie.
You have Six String Samurai, which is a strange movie that's about music in the post apocalypse. But if you watch it and pay attention, the weirdness actually has meaning to it.
That's what I think that people that really like Bourne should sort of dig into.
There's an era in the 80s when post apocalyptic media, particularly movies, but there were books and stuff too that embraced the weirdness but still wanted to say something. And I think Born does that.
And Born does it differently in the sense that it is talking about climate change and it's talking about bio weapons and biotech. And in the 80s it was all about nuclear war.
But that idea that the world has been ruined and the world is weird now, but there is still something to seek out. There are relationships that we should have. I think you can find a lot of. A lot of that reflected in that era.
Speaker B
00:49:07.840 - 00:49:15.600
Yeah, like Night of the Comet, which is again not nuclear, but definitely that's.
Speaker C
00:49:15.600 - 00:49:17.120
A zombie movie technically.
Speaker B
00:49:19.360 - 00:49:30.240
Well, actually that's a zombie. Fine, fine. There we go. Fine. All right, fine. Alec, get me out of this trap and tell us about some of the.
Speaker E
00:49:30.240 - 00:49:47.500
Media that you're interested in. One of the of films I like is the.
The Girl with All the Gifts which has this theme of protecting this girl that is young but dangerous and has weird powers and you don't really know what's going on and there's a whole biotech infection and a lot of moral dilemma.
Speaker C
00:49:47.500 - 00:49:50.660
Great, great book by the way. Excellent, excellent book.
Speaker E
00:49:50.740 - 00:50:14.510
And I love District 9, which is such.
It's South African movie about this alien ship hanging over a city and this guy that starts actually turning into an alien and dealing with this change and who he is and what he's about. And it's about the corporation as the enemy. So you would really like it, Eric, right?
Speaker B
00:50:15.950 - 00:50:18.190
Yep, absolutely. Bad guy, corporations.
Speaker E
00:50:18.510 - 00:50:24.230
That's really good on that side. And I think on the book side I really thought Annihilation is a good counterpoint.
Speaker B
00:50:24.230 - 00:50:24.450
This is.
Speaker E
00:50:24.600 - 00:51:11.890
It's a different, very different book than this. Right. But one book I thought was would be really good counterpoint.
This is Ridley Walker which is a book by Russell Hoban and it's about post apocalyptic scavenging and this altered language and a fragmented history and sort of a weird. The Wind Up Girl. I don't know if you've read that. You guys have read that by Paulo, I can't say his last name. Bakigal Lupi.
And which is this like weird biotech dystopia with corporations controlling everything and biotechnically engineered species and it's all about survival. And also however has the same aspect of Born as really being about the characters and not about the world and.
Speaker C
00:51:11.890 - 00:51:21.720
Wind up Girl is one of the earlier eco apocalypse sci fi novel. It came about early in the state where people were starting to realize that maybe nuclear bombs were not our biggest problem.
Speaker D
00:51:21.800 - 00:52:12.590
Sean I wasn't as focused on the end of the world type stuff. I thought that the weirdness of it Tales from the Loop would be a more solid connection.
If you like the feel of not entirely knowing what's going on around you. But you want a gentler, kinder way than Black Mirror. Tales from the Loop is the would be the way I would go.
If you really like the idea of sort of people surviving in a horrible situation. I thought the later parts of BPRD where they're dealing with the end of the world fit that mode. It went on longer than it needed to.
But you do have a situation of large horrible creatures floating around and not knowing what to do with them. Alliances shifting from here to their old plots rising back up towards the end of the thing.
So those are what I would recommend if you like that spirit.
Speaker B
00:52:14.190 - 00:54:17.120
Agreed. Anything with the BPRD and Hellboy and that whole group is. Is always awesome.
When I looked at this, my first reaction was very China Melville or Mieville Peridot Street Station. I think that that has the weirdness factor but probably cranked up way more. Vandermeer is a bit more realistic and Melville is just.
Just turn that knob way up there. The one that I really like that I want to recommend is by Megan Lindholm, which is a pseudonym for Robin Hobb.
They wrote a book called wizard of Pigeons is an urban fantasy with a completely unreliable narrator.
So if you like the idea of not knowing what's going on and not really understanding how the world works until the very end, like this book does a lot of the. The wizard of Pigeons is basically a guy who, who is. Who is a wizard or is he a wizard or is he a homeless guy and he's in I think San Francisco.
I didn't double check that before we started, but he's in San Francisco and people are trying to help him. But he's also trying to save the world kind of from monsters. But is he really or is he just a crazy guy in. Yeah, it's. That's a great book and I.
That that's a mind bending book that I think is fantastic. I agree. It's brilliant. Well, it's one of the books that I read and was like after I.
There's, there's before I read Wizards of Pigeons and then after that and then the last thing I'm going to recommend is the first non fiction book I've ever recommended on the show, which is, I would recommend Under a White sky by Elizabeth Colbert. She is the person who wrote the Sixth Extinction and she is a scientist and that is her book on climate change and where the planet is heading.
So if you are interested in any of the real things that are going to happen in climate change and this whole climate survival and where we're going to end up is of interest to you after this, I would recommend Under a White sky by Elizabeth Kolbert.
Speaker C
00:54:17.200 - 00:54:19.320
And it's good for you to read nonfiction.
Speaker B
00:54:19.320 - 00:54:32.640
Nonfiction can be very enjoyable. At some point we're going to have to do a Game Masters Book Club where we read a non fiction book. It should happen.
I don't know what we would pick or when, but it will happen.
Speaker C
00:54:34.490 - 00:54:38.650
Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare number one. Do that. I'm not kidding. That one.
Speaker B
00:54:38.650 - 00:54:47.290
Maybe we'll discuss that as our next book for this group. It could be fun. But does anyone have any other media for this book that we haven't covered that maybe we didn't get to throw in?
Speaker E
00:54:47.610 - 00:55:07.720
There's a movie called Children of Men which is a post apocalyptic thing where kids aren't being born. And it doesn't have the same thematics to it exactly, but the feel of the movie is I think, very similar to the feel that Bourne has.
And so I, I, I was thinking of that as we were talking about media.
Speaker B
00:55:09.480 - 00:55:23.080
Wow. We made. Wait, that's the end, right?
So now it's time to talk about things that you guys want to promote because we've talked all about the book and now it's time to talk a little bit more about you guys. I'm going to save Ian for last because I know he has exciting, exciting things to say.
Speaker D
00:55:23.080 - 00:55:28.930
And we're going to start exciting things to say. Wow.
Speaker E
00:55:29.570 - 00:55:30.130
Go ahead.
Speaker D
00:55:32.290 - 00:55:35.170
All right, now we'll take a pause. Cut this part out too.
Speaker B
00:55:36.930 - 00:55:40.650
Okay. Cut this all out. Okay. Sean, do you want to lead us off?
Speaker D
00:55:40.650 - 00:56:00.580
Yeah. So I'm guessing that by the time this comes out, we'll be looking towards the beginning of 2026.
And I think everybody on this, I don't know about you, Eric, but I think all of the everybody else on here is going to be a total con. If you're there, our games will be up. You should sign up and come and make fun of what Ian does and try to be an unreliable character.
Speaker B
00:56:03.300 - 00:56:24.340
Just a note, Total Con will be in Massachusetts February 19th through the 22nd, 2026.
I, I will definitely talk to the guys at Total Con and see if I can't get as many of our GMs as possible since I think most of them will be at Total Con. We'll get as many people as we can to Total Con and have a giant Game Masters Book Club panel. That was.
Speaker C
00:56:24.340 - 00:56:30.540
You should do the panel. We should do it live. I. I want to do it with, with Sean live. We should make that happen.
Speaker B
00:56:31.100 - 00:56:33.020
Absolutely. Yeah, that should happen.
Speaker E
00:56:33.100 - 00:56:48.180
Jump on Sean's recommendation and just, you know, looking forward to seeing people at Total Con testing out a bunch of new stuff. Please come join us and in preparation for two months later, we'll be doing Rising Phoenix Gaming Con. So come and join us at Total Con.
Speaker B
00:56:50.250 - 00:56:53.130
Excellent. Ian, promos for you. Go ahead.
Speaker C
00:56:53.370 - 00:57:51.540
I have been very lucky and recently that now that I have finished getting my civil Engineering degree, I am doing some freelance work again and this year I have done some work for a setting called Nine Worlds.
It is a savage world setting, but it is also a 5e setting and will soon be a campaign frame for Daggerheart, which is exciting and I will be running that at Carnage. In addition, and I can say this here, everybody is is sworn to silence, but by the time this goes out it'll be available. Everybody will know.
I am working on the 5e conversion of deadlands that is coming from Sigil Entertainment this year. By the time this gets out, not only will it be announced, but the Kickstarter will probably already be either on or soon. Right? So.
But I am super excited to be back doing work for the industry and and making games great for people that are not just the people that I can get at my table.
Speaker B
00:57:51.540 - 00:57:54.420
That's fantastic news. Congratulations. Yay.
Speaker D
00:57:54.580 - 00:57:55.780
Indeed. That's great.
Speaker C
00:57:55.860 - 00:57:56.500
Thank you.
Speaker A
00:57:57.300 - 00:58:14.110
And that's our discussion of porn by Jeff Vandermeer. Thanks again to our sci fi Svants Sean Murphy, Alex Jackal and Ian Eller.
You guys are the best the them to return when the Game Masters Book Club covers Scales of justice by Maggie O. Marsh, a Roderick Allen mystery.
Speaker B
00:58:14.350 - 00:59:02.540
You can find a complete transcript of today's discussion as well as links to all of our podcasts@k-square productions.com GMBC.
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Later, gamers. And to paraphrase the Great Terror, Gary Pratchett, always try to be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.