Jay Dragon (Steve Jackson Games/Possum Creek Games) Interview - Seven Part Pact

 I recently spoke with Jay Dragon, the creator of Seven Part Pact, Wanderhome, and Yazeba’s B&B about Seven Part Pact, which recently was successfully funded on Kickstarter for more than a million dollars. We spoke the final day of the Kickstarter, and I asked her questions about summoning 1,001 imps, gnostic esotericism, mechanical maximalism, invisible womanhood, and more. 

You can read my initial review of Seven Part Pact here. If you want to make a late pledge on Kickstarter, you can do so here. This interview was lightly edited for readability.

1. I saw that your mother, Jen Dragon, is an antique map restorationist and the artist for your hand-illuminated Orrery. Did growing up with a map restorationist/artist/curator as your mother shape the way you worldbuild or your internal topography? How do you think about maps and their aesthetics?

What a great question. I've been obsessed with maps ever since I was a little kid. I remember sitting on the floor of my mom's studio while she worked. I have always had a very strong sense of space. That's always been really important to me: to flesh out the space and environment of anything I'm working on. A lot of that comes from my mom and her love of maps.

But also many of the maps she worked with would be wrong because she was working with old maps. And it made me understand the ways in which a map is not the territory. Here is a map that is old, inaccurate to our current understanding, but it was useful. They didn't make the map for no reason. Why did they make the map even if it was wrong?

But all maps are wrong. All maps are biased, and all maps are showing something. They're all making an argument. And that I think really deeply informed my game design and my world design. That there's no objective view from which to see something. It's always subjective. It's always interpreted.

2. Did you have a favorite wrong map that she showed you?

I think probably one that she once showed me where it was petals of a flower. It's the Bünting Cloverleaf map. I love England just up there in the top left. It was like the T and O map, which was a very popular style of map from a bit earlier on.

The Bünting Cloverleaf map

But the reason why the continents are the same size is not because it's saying this is a objectively correct model of the world. It's saying this is how we understand the world. These are the three areas of equal importance to us. And then Jerusalem in the middle. It wasn't a claim about “we know with certainty that Europe and Asia are the same size,” because they knew that they were different sizes. It's just that for the point of making an argument, they’re the same size. Every map is making an argument.

3. You mention the similarities between the pact wizards and the “hebdomad of the archons in gnostic esotericism” and drawing inspiration from gnostic esotericism, but that you intentionally avoided using real religious studies and mysticism in your worldbuilding to avoid appropriation. Can you talk about how you got into Gnostic esotericism and what inspires you about it? Optionally: what is one element from it that you’d shamelessly have stolen if ethics weren’t a consideration?

Well, I will tell you that the thing that got me into it was Homestuck. Homestuck is a strangely gnostic text. It was very impactful on me when I was 14. It's been many, many years since I read Homestuck, but it left its mark on me. And when I was 14 and 15, I got really into Gnosticism. I was really fascinated by the demiurge. I was really captivated by the Ars Goetia and dark magic and talismans and summoning demons. And then I grew up a bit, but it was a fun teenage fixation. 

I think if I could borrow anything explicitly, I would love to do a lot more with The Lives of the Saints. I love weird heretical Catholicism. I love Book of the New Sun. I love stuff that's taking something from something familiar and making it weird. And with any kind of world building, you have to walk the line of what's going to be familiar and what's going to be weird.

If Ars Magica didn't exist, I'd probably be more willing to make a game like the Seven Part Pact in a grounded medieval setting. And if I did that, it would definitely incorporate much more of the Lives of the Saints.

4. I noticed that in the Necromancer’s material you refer frequently to death with feminine pronouns. Is that a simple stylistic choice? Or was there other reasoning behind having a female death?

One of the big things about Seven Part Pact is the idea of the invisible feminine. This shows up all across every single codex in different ways, which is just the idea that our main characters are men, and yet we are constantly being shifted by this kind of invisible womanhood. The woman being this kind of negative space that is acting upon the game in different ways.

A big thing I've learned about a game this big is that if I have a theme that matters to me, I need to make sure it shows up everywhere. You can't just have it be in one corner of the game and expect it to show up because not everything makes it into every single game. Companions do this really well. Wives and daughters are really impactful in that way. The Faustian has the devil, and sometimes the devil is presented as a woman. And so these are all impactful ways that can happen. But if it was just that, it wouldn't be enough.

So death being feminine is part of that idea of the invisible feminine. Maybe one in 10 groups does something interesting with that, and the other nine don't care and it’s just a stylistic choice. But it does reinforce the idea that the wizards of the pact, being men, are constantly being opposed or in juxtaposition to a feminine alternate force.

5. On a related note, one of the most important details in the game is the in-game established expectation of an all-male Pact. You have touched on your boredom with escapist or utopian gender in fantasy. If you were to make a game exploring femininity rather than masculinity, what elements would you be most interested in? What would be different about your approach?

A game about femininity would be fundamentally different. I think that I naturally write more feminine games on account of being a woman. A lot of things that motivate me in play are kind of getting away from masculinity. Part of Seven Part Pact was to channel and embody and package in all that masculinity so that I can kind of set it adrift. I can be like, “There it is. There's my big phallic edifice. Now let me think about something else for once.”

I come back to Ursula Le Guin's writing on the Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. In 1986, Ursula Le Guin wrote an essay called "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" where she wants to go against the idea of the hero as a penetrative force, and she says, “Well, what if instead we re-approached it through femininity and circlusion?”

I think that I will end up making many games about femininity. It is hard to say, “and this is how,” because it's got to be specific to the game. There's no one thing that I could do about femininity in the same way that I did in Seven Part Pact. And I think I will have more to say about toxic masculinity. It's just that wizards kind of became so all-encompassing that I've almost said all that right now. But femininity, especially queer femininity, I can't just distill it into one game because I'm going to spend the rest of my life writing about it in different ways.

6. Do you think that the public reception to games of yours that have centered around femininity is different from the public reception to Seven Part Pact or other games that you consider centered around masculinity?

I'm relieved to say that the difference is not as big as I was worried about. Part of me was worried that Seven Part Pact would be responded to differently.

But I do think that there's a way that a lot of men are willing to take Seven Part Pact seriously in a way that they weren't willing to take Wanderhome or Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast, on account of its enormity. Part of the joke of Seven Part Pact to me is that it's a big fucking game in a masculine sense. It's a phallic symbol. It's doing the board game thing, and it's doing the crunchy thing, and it's doing the things that are signs of legitimacy in game design spaces because they're signs of masculinity. The game is stomping its foot and saying, "Hey, what if we did the bullish thing?"

And so I've definitely seen people willing to take it more seriously. And part of that is because the institutions that encode legitimacy are themselves masculine. So it's self-fulfilling where there is a model of masculinity people look to for legitimacy in play, and Seven Part Pact matches that while also kind of cutting against it. And I think the cutting against it is why you'll see people say, "I can't imagine playing this with people." But then the buying into it is the thing that's got people anyway.

7. Another thing stood out to me about the way that gender and the Companions in particular work in the game. In our playtest, I played the Hierophant, who is responsible for, among other things, the Companions. These Companions care for the wizards, but as you write, their perspectives are inaccessible to the wizards. And in my playthrough, I found that I was actually spending most of my time inhabiting Companions because I was role-playing as them in everybody else's scenes. And I thought it was really fascinating because it, to me, really concretely anchored the Hierophant's role as the representative of the common people. The Companions were walled off for everybody else, but not for the Hierophant. I assume that was intentional?

The Hierophant kept having a problem where he kept being too sympathetic to the plight of the non-wizards. And so the current state of Hierophant, where he does care a lot, but he's not actively rebelling, was the result of a lot of playtesting. The Hierophant would keep turning against the rest of the pact. At a certain point I was like, “okay, okay. We're going to get this in line a little bit.” And we got there.

But yeah, there's two things at work here. One of which is that I'm really interested in the negative space of play. And then also that in a tabletop game, the game as an object, the actual game text that I have control over is very minimal compared to the player's influence. Whereas in a video game, the game object can be much more alive and do things that don't require player intervention. 

So you do end up as the Hierophant thinking about people's companions in a way the other wizards don't. But I'm sure even with the Hierophant, you find yourself having moments of "Oh, this character must have been doing X or Y off screen." We just don't get to see it necessarily.

8. You have talked about the intentionally baroque nature of the mechanics, and how the game’s complexity drives appropriately wizardly self-absorption and narrative emergence. What part of the mechanics was the most fun to develop and why? Is mechanical maximalism a theme you plan to continue post-7PP?

I've been really captivated by board games. There's something very interesting about them. And I think that many people in the RPG space underappreciate them as works of art. I have been really kind of fascinated by the questions of what is a game and what are the limits of the game? 

Seven Part Pact was a really intricate clockwork machine that took me a lot of fine-tuning. A lot of the core came to me pretty quickly. It just was a lot of, okay, I need to spend six months playtesting to iron out these details over and over and over again and constantly kind of going in and tightening things up. It felt like I've got a machine, I've got little clockwork gears, and I have to screw them into place.

Seven interlocking games was kind of a fucking nightmare. I think that my next challenge is going to get better at doing less ornate things. I'm going to intentionally challenge myself to make things that are smaller scale, at least for a little bit. I'm going to on purpose make things that are 30 or whatever pages instead of one billion pages.

But I'm still interested in mechanical intricacy. I'm still interested in game mechanics as kind of subjective maps of the world. Building on what we were talking about earlier with maps, there's no such thing as an objective map. There's no such thing as an objective game mechanic. Every game mechanic is encoding something about the perspective of the narrator.

9. Pick one person that you collaborated with - artistically, in playtesting, in the Kickstarter, etc. - and say nice things about them. Why do you admire them? What about them and your collaboration with them are you grateful for?

Just one person? Fuck. I'm going to say Ruby. Ruby Lavin co-founded Possum Creek with me. She has been the art director for the past six, seven years. She is brilliant and eclectic and stubborn and sharp as a tack. She has poured her heart and soul into so many projects. We would just simply not be the same without her. She established the company style in a way that goes beyond anything that I could have hoped to have done. She made Wanderhome look amazing. She made Yazeba’s look amazing. She's making Seven Part Pact look amazing. She also does not tolerate foolishness, which I deeply respect. If I'm doing something that she thinks is a bad idea, she says so. And she does not mince words, which is a beautiful quality for her to have. I don't know how to make a game without her. I don't know how to work on a project without knowing that she's going to come in and be like, "This is stupid, this is bad, this is good." That kind of thing.

10. If there's one piece of work that kind of best encapsulates her ethos or one kind of talisman of Ruby's work and worldview, what would it be?

Oh, that's so hard because she's crazy. And ultimately everything that we've done captures it in some way. She hates RPGs, so it's almost kind of unfair. Inscrutable Cities by Julian Jarboe, she did art direction for, and it turned out very beautifully and very unique and kind of very weird amongst RPGs. Last Train to Bremen also really has her style all over it. She fell into the weeds of historical fonts for that one, which she always does; she obsesses over fonts. But her historical work is really present there as well. It's hard to find one thing to be like “And that's her.” It's more just you look at Possum Creek holistically, and you see what we've been doing, and you see her handprint all over it.

11. I would like to take a guess and say that one of the main ways homebrewers will engage with 7PP is to create more wizards for 7PP (someone plays the sun! A horoscope-inspired 12-part pact! New invisible planets! etc.) Were there any major concepts for Domains that ended up on the cutting room floor that you’d like to see people take a stab at?

No, and I wish anyone who wants to make an eighth wizard luck. That's an insane activity. I suspect maybe more likely is seeing alternate wizards, right? Seeing a different take on the warlock or a different take on the necromancer. But I'll be honest, seven wizards was hard. It was at every step fighting and pulling teeth and struggling to get it in the right shape. Anyone who wants to make their own wizard is taking on a Herculean task. I hope they know how hard that is going in.

12. I know you’ve been writing thinkpieces about different elements of the game. Should we expect one about the grimoire? Do you have a favorite spell from the grimoire? What can you tell us about the Summoning 1,001 Imps spell that hasn’t been said already?

I'll write that article. I've just been burnt out. I'm so tired. I've been resting. Once I'm done resting, I will write more of those articles. I want to write one about the grimoire. I want to write one about the social audience. I just want to give them the time they're due, and I have been not on my A game.

My favorite spell in the grimoire is probably Murmuration. I love a spell that lets you turn yourself into a flock of birds. I think that rules. My other favorite spell is the Creation of Canopic Vessels, which is a spell you use to make a box that has a gnome in it.

I'm really proud of the rhyme scheme that I did for the grimoire, for the flavor text in Summoning 1,001 Imps:

A pleasure, an honor, no — pleasure's all mine!

My cousins will need introductions in time!

My name is Astoobi, if you it will please,

Now for my family: Shumple and Weez,

Scrembelie Ug, Tiz, Tazz n' Toz,

Rangle, Fleck n' Dob, the ditch-digger Goss,

Preposterous Wizz and the loathsome Ogbo,

with nine hundred eighty and eight more to go! 

When making a game, you have to put things in that you think are funny. And oftentimes these jokes are not funny to anyone else; they're just funny to me. There's like mechanical flourishes or little design choices or just like a paragraph written in Dr. Seussian double dactyls about a poem that's a bunch of imps introducing themselves. And you can just imagine this horrendous poem that goes on for like four more pages and the other 988 imps are introduced. Or it's cut off in a funny way. It's just a funny joke.

13. New idea for a stretch goal.

Oh God, yes. Stretch goal: I write the rest of that fucking song. And I make up 988 more specific names that fit the double dactyl time scheme. Yeah, that sounds great.

But yeah, so that's my fun little game for myself. You just have to put jokes in. Summoning 1,001 Imps is genuinely a pretty effective spell, but also more importantly, it makes me smile whenever I see it or someone brings it up.

14. Thank you so much for chatting with me today and answering all these questions. It was a lot of fun to think and talk more about this game. The final question is very simple. Which wizard are you? 

I am the sage. I love to engineer events. I love to know what's going to be best for my friends. Multiple long-term relationships have started because I have set up games of Seven Part Pact with the right people in the right space. I'm someone who loves doing a little bit of social engineering pro-socially, often with my friends’ consent. They'll joke, "Ooh, you're so sneaky." And I'm like, "He he, yeah." But I'm the sage. If I'm any wizard, I'm the sage.