Patrick Stuart (False Machine) Interview - The Doom of the Dark

Patrick Stuart of False Machine infamy has a Kickstarter out! The Doom of the Dark, a real-time, high-concept adventure for Tunnels & Trolls. It's now in stretch goal mode for the next week. I asked him some questions about it!

A mysterious Inn at the end of the world, an evil sorcerer, a talking shadow on the wall, a door down into the dark. The world must be saved and only this particular group of weirdoes (who happened to be staying overnight), can do it! They have until the Doom of the Dark is fulfilled!

Trailer for The Doom of the Dark

The art and writing in the Kickstarter description of The Doom of the Dark sounds like it leans dark and spooky but with a sense of humor, while the system sounded gonzo and wacky. What should people expect from the tone of this adventure? How did the tone of Tunnels & Trolls as a system inform your creative process?

Something about as scary as a Fairytale. more scary than an Adams Family cartoon, but less so than a horror movie; rated 'PG 13' for 'Mild Peril' - many imaginary mice were also harmed in the making of this adventure, maybe about as consequential as the events of a kids fantasy movie, the whole entire world will live or die depending on the adventure you have this very night! (but you can try again tomorrow).

I read Tunnels and Trolls as being almost 'Pure Play' (it barely works if you treat it any other way); that it dealt strongly in lively versions of familiar archetypes, with a slight Gygaxian riddlemaster cheesyness, that is was earnest, direct, that the villains were villains because they were bad - and the speed and rapid abstraction of encounters meant that a lot depended on how lively, vivid, immediate and consequential they were, there was only some room for complex tactical decisions, a lot was based on making an interesting scene with a short range of ways to manipulate it, and having that happen fast, and be resolved fast

Now, maybe someone familiar with my style would say that actually I just did a 'Patrick' adventure, and that the 'storybook' style was just a development of what I wanted to do anyway - who can say?

(Tunnels and Trolls did also encourage me to put in more weird 'early fantasy' stuff like changing size and magic pockets - if I were doing this in D&D I would have felt much more pressure to systematize these things and link them into a coherent pseudo-reality where as here I am fine with them essentially being the magic of this adventure.)

Which of the OSR/NSR systems would this adventure port the most seamlessly into? Are there any (barring the ampersand systems of course) that you can imagine would be more trouble than they're worth?

No idea but best guess is simplest easiest and the more complex you get the harder it's going to be. Culture of play should matter as well, T&T projects a very 'hearty' 'knockabout' culture of play
where a lot of questions don't need to be asked because by the time they are you have probably moved onto something else.

For normal D&D it probably moves in sequence of age OD&D > B/X > AD&D > the rest.

For Nu school probably Into the Odd (clean and fast), Troika (dirty and fast), followed by the various post-Odd clones and the various Borgs. Then everything else.

DCC has some of the cheese vibe of T&T but I think more complicated in action

How was the process of writing for a zine different than the process of creating some of your other, longer works?

It was shorter but still way way longer than I thought it would be. It's hard to have ideas you think are good. I got into this thinking I would be finished in a week! Instead, I was wandering around at work writing fragments of ideas on till receipts and worrying colleagues when I found them, then trying to arrange all these in a way that made some degree of sense, and was interesting, and, crucially, which would take roughly a night to play through. Editing and scrawling over things and altering stuff continued right up until the moment of play. It's kind of annoying when you spend ages and ages mulling over something and picking this thing or that and CONIDERING and then in the end what you get is very simple, I kind of want to shout at people that I took time with this

I loved Amanda's work on "YOU GOT A JOB ON THE GARBAGE BARGE"! What's the history of your creative working relationship? What nice things would you say about her?

Amanda is a genius artist and independent creator whose only failure is lack of greed and ambition, by now she should have produced her Magnum Opus and be coasting of the royalties but instead she can barely make rent. Probably defining qualities are obsessive hard work, a deeply idiosyncratic approach to varied works of art, a mania for getting things right, lyrical, somewhat pretentious, underpaid. Amanda will also be doing art for my first (and possibly only) Snail Knights novel, though I have no idea when that will be appearing.

You use the phrase 'real-time'-high-concept-single-evening-adventures on the Kickstarter page. What exactly has been interesting to you about games that run in real time? What in this case does high concept refer to?

With real time games, when playing, I tend to get frustrated with people not deciding things and/or looking for some 'optimal decision', I find games are best when things are chosen quickly. I also get tired after about four hours of play. Also I feel like most of the more-interesting people I know only have free time available in irregular intervals for the space of about two to four hours.

Actual Old School D&D was built for its social environment; pre digital attention spans, and crucially, a pre oil-crisis world where relatively intelligent and self-directed people could carve EIGHT HOURS out of their day or weekend to dick around and it wouldn't ruin them. Its also built for an American social world where you drive for a week to hang out with people so obviously you want to spend hours and hours and hours playing together or else the giant drive would be a waste.

And the conceit of it attracted me - it's very very very conceptually and perceptually simple and does a lot of very complex things in a very intuitive way. I feel like the cringe modern design language way would be to create a sub-currency of abstracted 'Time POints' and then you subscribe to an app that allocates you the points. Instead you just point at the clock - this is how much time your characters have, and this is how much time you have.

High Concept is old film lingo saying that a story has an 'elevator pitch'; a single main big original or interesting thing that you can say the story is about. Now that I think about it, I am not sure that 'DotD' has that, let me try;

"All light everywhere disappears, except for a single magic lamp. In six hours time the light runs out forever. The PC's have to go into the earth and get back the day."

What, if anything, can you share about the Turne-Spytte Dogge?

The Dogge is the key to all this. Those familiar with hermetic readings of texts - I only need to mention Leo Strauss, will already understand the significance of this particular dogge in this particular 'wheel'. Rotatio, calcinatio, driving transformation while unchanged and unrewarded. The Philosopher's Stone's dark inverse. Pure process, no product.. But I have already said too much. The Kynicos will understand...

If my symbol was not already the Trilobite, it would be the Turne Spytte Dogge. I am the Turne Spytte Dogge.

Tunnels & Trolls sounds like a fascinating experience. Having now gone on your entire experience of reading it, running it, writing for it, and running a Kickstarter for it, would you say you overall recommend Tunnels & Trolls as a system? And to whom?

Tunnels and Trolls is genuinely pretty bad if you care about coherent and sensible rules systems that don't consistently produce potentially incoherent results and need to be patched together with more and more crazy nailed-on rules. It is genuinely, from a game design perspective, bad.

Yet, it captures much that cannot be captured by systematic thought. If we imagine our coherent ideas as sponges, or perhaps pumice, floating upon an ocean of the unknown; that which supports thought but which thought itself cannot directly derive, then Tunnels and Trolls makes sense, it is almost pure spirit, pure 'pneuma', the exhalation of life, and in that respect it teaches something important about the difference between the world which we build with our thoughts and that which we inhabit. Good game designers (Chris McDowall) would probably benefit from *running* (not reading) Tunnels and Trolls.

"Patrick DMs like he is driving a bus with a bomb on it." Could you talk about that? What exactly are you doing?

I am behaving completely normally and any accusations to the contrary are LIES and calumny spread, perhaps by secret and invisible enemies, or agents of the Quiploth. I run D&D in an entirely stable, collegial and reasonable way.