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A fan podcast celebrating (mostly Swedish) RPGs including, but not limited to: Coriolis; Forbidden Lands; Symbaroum; Tales from the Loop; and, Alien.
Hello, and welcome to episode 285 of Effect, Into the Birch Basement. I'm Matthew, and as is becoming now quite a regular occurrence, there is no Dave. He is sunning himself in Rhodes. Well, think so. There are reports of a massive whale being, trapped on a beach, but I think it's Dave.
Matthew:So, yeah, it's it's me on my own today. And in respect of that, you are gonna hear Dave's voice very shortly, but we thought it might be fun actually to do a bit of a co production with, well, with somebody who we will keep secret at this stage, before that, we've a bit of news in the world of gaming and from the Old West. So we I shall tell you those things first before revealing a the secret co production. First of all, I should say, we don't have any new patrons to thank this time, but we do extend our thanks to to all our patrons. I was telling one of them, for example, only earlier today that one of the things our patrons pay for is Adobe Creative Studio, which is what I'm using to record this very podcast.
Matthew:In onto the world of gaming, I'm just gonna rush through a few things. I think I'm gonna wait until a couple of weeks until Dave is back when we would obviously discuss them in somewhat more deal detail. But first of all, the children of time RPG is now live on Kickstarter. There will be a link in the show notes. Now funny story here.
Matthew:Children of Time books are written by Adrian Tchaikovsky. We noticed that Adrian had backed Tales of the Old West. And I only realized this actually when, you know, he was opening his package up and did a nice tweet about well, not a tweet, a skeet blue sky post about it, which got us very excited because both Dave and I enjoyed children of time. And we got straight onto it and said, oh, is anybody doing an RPG of it? Because we would love to do one.
Matthew:And he said, yes. Somebody is. And that somebody turned out to be our friends, Rowan, Rook, and Deckard, and they now have that campaign live on Kickstarter. So check it out. There is a free quick start available to download, so check that out, and you'll know whether it's your sort of thing or not.
Matthew:It's weird doing this on my own. But, the next the next news item from the world of gaming comes from our friends at Free League. A the new alien cinematic operation leading edge, clue's in the name there, is ready to preorder. So get yourselves over to the Free League website to preorder that if you like. It is, of course, published by, corporal Hicks.
Matthew:No. Sorry. Jonathan Hicks, who, wrote the most recent one. It's the third part or or the second part, I should say, of his trilogy. These are cinematics, though, so you're not necessarily taking one character from one to the other.
Matthew:It's got its own new pre gens. But thematically, they're linked in a trilogy that players will see even if the characters they're playing don't see the whole thing through. That's going live on preorder. Old alien hands may chuckle a bit at that name, Operation Leading Edge. I myself am wondering whether there are gonna be new rules on wind shear and parabolas on phase rifles and the like just because there was well, research the history if you wanna get the joke.
Matthew:Also, the other thing, we spoke with Nordic Skalds a few weeks ago talking about their upcoming, at that point, Kickstarter for the Eater of Worlds, their new Coriolis, the third horizon campaign. There are just two weeks left to back that. I know I haven't done that yet, and I said I would. So, I gotta get my, yeah, get on with that. Anyway, there are two weeks to bat that.
Matthew:It's on Kickstarter. I will put a link in the show notes. And that's all from the world of gaming in this truncated world of gaming podcast. So I'm just gonna press the button here that tells me where to edit it. And, let's move on to Old West News.
Matthew:So we mentioned, I think, a couple of weeks ago, that I have completed the text for, Lone Rider. I'm that was something we'd done a little bit earlier. I've now had some, feedback from playtesting, and there is a thing I need to tweak and maybe a thing I need to add. So I am working on that even as we speak. But Lone Rider, our solo rule, should be coming out quite soon.
Matthew:So that's that. And the other exciting news and here is the link to the rest of this episode. The other exciting news is that Eleanor and Sydney from the lost mountain saga, which you may be aware of, is both a podcast and following that podcast, a campaign that you can buy from Free League for Versen. They have decided that their next season season should be using the tales from the Old West rules, which makes Dave and I both very excited. I'm not promising a campaign out of it, a printed campaign out of it, but if they want to publish one, I'll be very happy to let them.
Matthew:Using our Made in the Old West license. They don't need to come to us to do it. Anyway, so that's that's by the by. They're great people, and as part of their own Patreon, they have an exclusive podcast for their patrons paying patrons, that is. And we were on it.
Matthew:We recorded just before Dave went on holiday. Literally hours before Dave went on holiday, we recorded an interview for their exclusive podcast, but it's not so exclusive. This particular episode is going to be the rest of our content in this episode of our podcast. So a podcast within a podcast. Let's get on with that, shall we?
Ellinor:So you don't miss your flight, basically. Where are you going?
Dave:Rhodes in Greece.
Ellinor:Oh. Oh, god. That's isn't that Crete even?
Dave:No. Rhodes is the island. Yeah.
Ellinor:This is a different island. I'm so stupid. I've been and I'm supposed to be a European. Fuck. Alright.
Ellinor:Well
Dave:Yeah. So Yeah. Looking forward to just ten days doing very little indeed.
Ellinor:I mean, this is this is something I think everyone should do. They should do very little.
Matthew:Yeah. No.
Ellinor:They should
Dave:Once in a once in a while, you should get to park the word do at the door and leave Exactly.
Ellinor:By the way, love your backdrop, Dave. There's so many games.
Dave:Just my little my little cupboard of an office. Yeah. Yeah.
Ellinor:So welcome Dave and Matthew to
Dave:Hello. Our Thank you. Hello.
Ellinor:Wonderful Birch Basement is what we call this companion podcast because Sydney, who is the new GM for Tales of the Old West, and my co co conspirator, she made a character called Birch based on the Icelandic singer Bjork.
Dave:Okay. Cool.
Ellinor:It's like this crazy woman who has her own little basement. And we're like, okay, what if this basement also included a weird fucking podcast? And that's where we're at. Cool.
Matthew:It's a little bit like the harem that we might well invite you to on Yeah.
Ellinor:I love that. Fortunately,
Dave:it's entirely, you know, not unreal, virtual, because otherwise that would be quite creepy. We But Yeah.
Matthew:You don't have to interview you naked with with steam everywhere. Yes.
Ellinor:I wanna do that. I wanna do so much more with I wanna do honestly, the thing the problem with and I think you guys can sympathize with this. The problem with the role playing world is that there's so much one wants to do and so little Yeah.
Dave:Yeah. Completely.
Ellinor:Because because you're going to Greece and no. That's not why. Partly. Partly.
Matthew:But yeah.
Ellinor:But I wanted to start with Effect Pod, which is the two of you sort of like love child. We do.
Matthew:That's what our wife's saying. Don't call it that
Dave:in front of Matt's wife. No. She's got enough concerns as it is.
Ellinor:So I wanted to, like, where did your journey start and how come you have this sort of love for Swedish role playing games? I mean, mostly, it says on your website, but mostly.
Matthew:Mostly. Well,
Dave:if I start
Matthew:Go on.
Dave:And then I'll I'll hand over to Matthew for the podcast. So many years ago, must have been 2015, Christmas twenty fifteen, I was in a shop in London called Ork's Nest, which is a quite well known game shop. And looking for just looking randomly for stuff for myself. And I found Mutant Year Zero and another kind of post apocalyptic game. I bought them and I gave them to my wife and said, give them give this to me for Christmas.
Matthew:Oh, I do I do just wanna point out, Dave, that you're telling here is incorrect. No. It's not. Jenny was not your wife at the time.
Dave:Okay. Alright. Actually want
Ellinor:Fake news.
Dave:No. No. No. Was she? Or thereabouts?
Matthew:She wasn't. No. Because it was at your wedding that you then told me about Coriolis.
Dave:Yeah. That's true. Okay. Yeah. Alright.
Dave:Fair enough. Oh my god. Sorry.
Ellinor:Scandal. All these scandals already.
Dave:Anyway. Okay. Okay. My now wife. If we if we have to be that accurate and boring.
Dave:Sorry listeners. So anyway, I I got them both for Christmas and I opened up Mutant New Zero first and I loved it so much that I didn't even get to really look at the other games at all. Right. Ran a campaign of it. And as I said, I've never heard of Free League before.
Dave:I've never heard of any of any of that. This is my first kind of totally random introduction to it. Ran a campaign of it. Then Coriolis came up as a Kickstarter. And I this is kind of the game I was always looking for.
Dave:You know, this sort of Mutant Year Zero style mechanics, but in in a sci fi setting where the ship is a key element and all the rest of it. So I went to Matt and said, you need to back this game because I want to play I want to play it.
Matthew:When did you come to me, Dave? When did you have this long conversation?
Dave:Well, it might have been at my wedding, possibly.
Matthew:It was. Yes.
Dave:At which at which, Massie gave me picked That as a wedding present.
Ellinor:Call of
Dave:good Call good of That's edition was my wedding present for Matt. Jenny didn't really make any comment on it thankfully because she doesn't role play. But So anyway, I want I wanted to play the game because you know if there's a game that you come across and you love it. Yeah. You know you get it and you end up GM ing it.
Dave:Now I wanted to play this game. So I basically instructed Matt that he had to back it and get it because he was gonna run it for me and I was gonna play.
Ellinor:Alright. And Matt yeah. So Matthew Yeah. Would you wanna corroborate this story?
Matthew:Other comments from the corrections I've already said. Did feel to me that I, you know, on this day that we were meant to be celebrating Dave and Jenny's love. It felt to me like a lot of that day was spent with Dave trying to persuade me to get this game. And and I wasn't didn't commit on the day. A bit later on, I said, okay.
Matthew:I'll get the PDF. And he said, no. You can't get the PDF. You've gotta get everything because you're gonna be the GM. So I went in for the whole lot.
Matthew:And then when the PDFs arrived as they do from Free League before the print books, I started reading it and I bloody loved it actually. I hadn't played for I can't quite remember I'd rolled up a character for your Mutant Year Zero campaign but I couldn't actually make
Dave:the dates
Matthew:you were running around because we live on opposite sides of London not in London but London is between the two of us and I was my job wouldn't let me do the travel on the day that was required or
Dave:something.
Matthew:So I had not played any year zero engine games so it was all new to me and I loved the mechanics and the way they worked. I particularly loved things that might now in retrospect feel a bit clunky in Coriolis because it was the first time they'd adapted the year zero engine into something else and a lot of the things that lots of people go oh I don't like that very much that could be better or more elegant the things I really enjoy but anyway the beauty of the Coriolis textbook, rule book, core book is every single paragraph gives you an idea for adventure or
Dave:a faction or Yeah,
Matthew:so very quickly as I read this through I phoned up Dave and I said I've got a bunch of ideas including the aforementioned HAMM that I can't remember that was before after we started recording, but I had immediately an idea for how obviously spaceships were limited in the water so every spaceport would have a hermam and in this broadly Arabic society you know that would be a great place where people would meet and make deals and stuff like that. And I was determined that we should publish this in some way. Now back in the day as old grog nards that we are, get somebody with a photocopying machine who you didn't care what they did with their photocopying budget and you'd make a little a five fanzine and you get it out that way. Dave and I did one years ago. Years and years ago.
Dave:Back in the eighties. Yeah.
Matthew:For Judge Dredd RPG at the time. But fanzines were not the way of the future. I'd just come off a podcast all about the science fiction series Firefly called the signal. Oh. And I I I'd got a bit too busy for that with my PhD and stuff, but obviously this was the future podcasting is the future you don't need to spend any time doing layout or editing or correcting your dreadful typing which is a thing that I may suffer from.
Matthew:You just speak into a device like this and then you can stick it out there. Don't even really need to edit the bugger. Well. So I said to Dave, let's do a podcast, which was new to Dave. And then Dave, you were very excited about this.
Matthew:Please tell the world exactly what you said would be the outcome of doing podcast?
Dave:Well I had this very very kind of foolish sort of like dream idea that once we did the podcast we would get to meet the guys in Sweden we'd go and see them we'd become friends
Ellinor:Yeah.
Dave:We'd get a little bit of work you know. Then I could you know become a proper freelancer and then we'd do all this stuff. So I had all these plans. You know, naturally I'd done no freelancing before at all. Done loads of gaming but nothing nothing published.
Dave:And and so it's all a bit of fantasy, frankly.
Matthew:And I told him that isn't how podcasts work. You know, you don't go over to Sweden to interview a bunch of Swedes. You do it over the Internet. That's what the bloody Internet is there for.
Dave:So anyway, I I approached Matthijs Jonsson and Matthijs Lilia, I think were the two people I ended up speaking to initially. And we got
Matthew:because you're also playing by this time. Jack Lydia wasn't we?
Dave:Yeah. I managed to arrange a trip over that that Matteus Jonsson sort of organised for us to meet Martin Grip and Nils.
Matthew:Thomas and Nils and Costa.
Dave:So we didn't oh, and on that first trip. We didn't actually meet Thomas, but we met Nils and we met Costa. We met Ricard and Troya and a couple of others. And, you know, they sort of said yes. So we came over and had a fabulous couple of days sitting in cafes and pubs, having a laugh and chatting and recording stuff.
Dave:And just it was so lovely. When when that first day, we were in the Bishop's arms in Gamblestan waiting for Nils and Martin, I think it was, to turn up. And we just saw Nils over the, you know, across the bar. And he looked just like us. And you know, he sounded just like us.
Dave:And then we had old old kind of real gamer thing. Immediate But with a Swedish accent.
Ellinor:Yeah. Slight slight Swedish accent.
Dave:You can tell that Matthew gets a bit literal with everything here. Where I might be a little bit more metaphorical in my comments.
Ellinor:So you saw Nils. Beautiful Nils.
Dave:So we so yeah. And then we had a fabulous evening and we recorded some stuff and then came back over here and carried on with the podcast. And as I said I'd never podcasted before. The first episode we did was a bit shaky. We kind of thought no one's ever gonna listen to any of this.
Dave:But then they did, and we got a little following, and then we got a little more following, and we got a little bit better, I think, at our production values. I'm sure the content is equally Yeah.
Matthew:Episode four or five was our first actual play simply because we we had a session planned one of one of our people couldn't make it and I was gonna be running it it was Coriolis of course I was going to be running it and so I said let's do a bottle episode and then I said hey how about we try and record it? We got a little snowball mic that sat in the in the middle of the table. We learned some lessons there, like, it is customary
Dave:To
Matthew:in our group to eat Pringles while one is playing.
Dave:Oh my god.
Matthew:This Don't do you according do not mix. No.
Ellinor:Oh my god.
Dave:I mean I mean, it's fairly obvious, but who knew at the time? We were inexperienced, you know.
Ellinor:Yeah. Who knew? So this was around 2015, you said? Around twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, or is that, like, slightly?
Dave:Beginning of twenty seventeen was our first podcast. So March. Right. May, I think it was. May 2017, we started.
Matthew:March or May? Yeah. Can't remember. May.
Ellinor:Because I was worried you guys were gonna say, no. No. This was last year or something. And like with the whole Pringles, I'm like, we feel like people would know at at this point, but also Alright. So cool.
Dave:Sorry. Go and Ag. No. No. I'm just gonna prove how incompetent we are if I said that comment, so it's fine.
Dave:I'll leave it.
Ellinor:No. So basically alright. So but I mean, I that checks out that people are extremely they wanna hear nerds nerd out about the same things they nerd out about. Mhmm. And you two are charming enough to actually give it some you know, to to put words into their thoughts.
Ellinor:That's what I have noticed with people is that they were like, oh, yeah. They they think the same that I do about this thing that I love or hate. I mean, lot of hate podcasts are out there too, but in I'm assuming you guys love the stuff you're talking about, maybe. Maybe? No.
Dave:Generally. Yeah. Whole. Yes.
Matthew:We don't talk about stuff that we don't love. I mean, plan to have a bit of a philosophy in in the world of the Internet that there are far too many people using the Internet to tell tell us how much they hate a thing, be it politicians or a particular film or a particular studio that's making Star Wars now or whatever and they just tell you everything that's bad about it and it's a pretty sick and dreadful place and why are there not more voices telling you about what they love. So we're never going to do an episode saying I
Dave:Oh just tearing something down for the sake of you. Yeah.
Matthew:You know we don't play D and D. We don't play D and D much. We are not going to spend an hour of podcasting time telling you all the reasons why we don't play D and D. Know, loads of people love D and D and they're welcome to love D and D. It's not our place to say what's bad about D and D.
Matthew:We just don't play it. We don't need to talk about Yeah.
Ellinor:Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Alright. So that's sort of where you started with the free league.
Ellinor:You met the whole team. I love that because and I think people underestimate how easy it is to sort of make these connections with people in the industry current I mean, I guess, exception is Swizzers of the Coast and D and E. But but, like, for for these small indie developers and Free League used to be a small indie developer now and then they sort of exploded. Yeah. But they're still very approachable.
Ellinor:Like, I I had a similar experience starting my podcast that I basically rent wrote an email. And I'm like, hey. What's up? Do you guys wanna hang out? And they were like, sure.
Ellinor:You know? And then Yeah. Yeah. The rest is history.
Matthew:Mhmm.
Dave:Yeah. If you don't ask, you don't get. That's for sure. Yeah.
Ellinor:So we obviously, the main reason why I wanted to talk to you a little bit today, and I wanna make sure we have time to get into it, is Tales of the Old West, which is a system you guys created from the year zero engine Yep. And developed. And I kinda have, like I wanna hear, like, a little bit about that or origin story. And please lie Dave, and so Matthew can yell at you.
Matthew:I think it is worth saying, I do just want to point out that very early on, very early reviews of our first and early episodes said we love the dynamic between Matthew and Dave. They're like an old married couple. And and that has carried on ever since. Just to say this is this I'd like to say this is an act, but no, we really do.
Dave:Yeah. It really is like this when we're together. Yeah.
Matthew:Yeah. But sometimes we can be civil to each other. And one of those times is around the publication of Forbidden Lands by Free League. Now when they brought out the Kickstarter for Forbidden Lands, it was a little bit like Dave and Coriolis Coriolis it was the fantasy game that I had been wanting since the eighties actually so I was very I went all in on it and I didn't go all in you had the deluxe deluxe version didn't you?
Dave:Yeah. But that
Matthew:was a waste of money actually talking about not saying bad things on the internet but a slip case around your box. It's
Dave:a nice one although I do like the original case very much as well. So it's fine.
Matthew:It's fine. Anyway, one of the things that happened in there is some wise backer, when they'd run out of stretch goals some incredibly clever person suggested that they might as a stretch goal license the free league license to your zero engine in what became now
Dave:open the
Matthew:FTL the open license I'm not going to say anything more about who that wise person was.
Dave:I've heard this hundreds of hundreds of times and I shouldn't know better now that I should tell this bit of the story rather Matthew sit there patting himself on the back. Because obviously, it was Matthew on a on a on a on a on the forums that suggested it. Now quite possibly, Free League were thinking about it anyway. But Matthew likes to take all the credit for that happening because he posted it before he saw anybody else talk about it.
Matthew:And then and then Mills came back saying good idea and I have screenshot photographic proof of this. Awesome. Anyway anyway, so with that in mind, there's me sitting down reading Lands. Obviously, you know, that is kind of based around the idea of a hex crawl and I thought, oh, you know, you could do a kind of hex crawl Oregon Trail idea. And, yeah, actually, this is quite a gritty version of the year zero engine.
Matthew:This could work quite well for a Western. So again I phone up Dave and I say I've got this great idea for making with the Friedleigh license, the open license that's coming out of this, we should do a western.
Dave:Well we we'd long wanted to have a good western. We'd always sort of Yeah. You know wanted to play a good western role playing game. And I many years ago had done a little homebrew thing which was fine but it never you know never quite hit the hit the spot.
Matthew:It wasn't very good Dave.
Ellinor:I'm sure it was fine.
Dave:Matthew would say that regardless whether he thought it was brilliant or not because he's just like that. And we played a bit of Aces of Eights. We played a bit of Boot Hill. We're not into Weird West, so obviously, tells the old West is a straight historical gritty game.
Ellinor:Yeah. I I I saw that you guys said that in an interview that, like, as opposed to fantasy elements, mystery elements, etcetera, in other role playing games to create, like, a a true gritty based in reality role playing world interested you. Yeah. And can I ask what, like, did you draw any inspiration from from recent media? For example, Deadwood is a is a series I've been watching a bunch, and
Matthew:I That's a that's a great one to pick up because Yeah. Although it started off with me saying Hexcrawl Oregon Trail, as soon as we sat down across the table from each other actually face to face to talk about it, we both said almost simultaneously, actually, we don't want to do the Oregon Trail. I don't want to do the Oregon Trail. And we both said, I want to do Deadwood. And so
Dave:Well, I think the thing was we we didn't want to just recreate Forbidden Lands in a western setting, which is kind of where we started out. Yeah. And that and that quite quickly we both realized quite quickly that that wasn't the game we wanted to play. And then the idea of the town became much more important and obviously both big fans of Deadwood. Deadwood is superb.
Dave:If anybody hasn't seen it, go and watch it. It's brilliant.
Ellinor:Oh, yeah.
Dave:Get ready for the language if you don't like French language, but
Ellinor:Yeah. And also get ready for it also cancelling after season. It's a little bit name of the wind. It's that it's never you never get a but honestly those first two three seasons four seasons are phenomenal.
Matthew:Three seasons of the
Dave:movie. Three of the movie. Yeah.
Matthew:Yeah.
Dave:But so yeah. So that was the point where we kinda decided the Oregon Trail is something we might do in the far future. But actually, the game we really wanted was something set around the town where the town is meaningful. You know, the people in the town are kinda driving story as, you know, as the characters.
Ellinor:Yeah. So we just had our session zero where we discussed that, where we had the whole town chapter and we figured out I think we have rank one on everything. And for those of you listening not knowing what that means, basically rank one is not great. We're basically like Yep. We're starting off pretty in a pretty rough spot.
Ellinor:But then you'd basically make roles based on these rankings and see how you advance the city or town. I haven't decided yet how I so what we will probably do is that we'll populate our world with more characters we're gonna play because there's so many cool characters and we're only two players. So we wanna have to so we wanna have options. And I'm currently thinking, like, should I? Can I be a very foul mouthed pub owning a brothel?
Ellinor:And then because I feel like that's his whole Alsweringian's whole thing in Deadwood is that he propels the city forward. Mhmm. Currently, I'm playing a character and I don't wanna spoil too much, but she is not she's young and she's not really someone who would take charge. And so I realized now, okay, what can I what can I be in this town that actually has some momentum to push it forward, like someone who wants to go as a for a mayor or, like, sheriff or something like that? So it's a very, very cool world building tool that you guys have included in this in this system.
Matthew:And the important thing, of course, is you can be anything you want to be. That that that's our big thing. And, you know, people made themselves in the West, whatever their past had been, they'd come in and, you know, if there'd been a murderer in one town, there'd be a sheriff in this town because
Ellinor:Oh, yeah.
Matthew:Didn't necessarily always catch up. So yeah you could you could turn yourself into housewearingen although I do want to raise the point that the script writers of Deadwood used all that foul language because that's what saying goddamn would have felt like back in the nineteenth Eighteenth century yeah. '19,
Dave:'19. Nineteen seventies yeah.
Matthew:Yeah. Yeah.
Ellinor:Yeah. Exactly. I mean, yeah. And it's also like it's I think Sydney and I also talked a little bit about that in in our session zero. It's like it's a it's a cruel world, obviously.
Ellinor:Like, you know, there's been, like, a lot of pretty horrifying themes that we all know the West to be, the frontier to be. Like, they they with not only Native Americans, but slavery Mhmm. Racism, like, crazy racism. Despite all of that, though, diversity so much diversity. You know, 25% of all cowboys were black.
Ellinor:And I think, like, I think that's that's such a rich world to explore, and we have never shied away from that in our previous seasons either with Vassen. I'm like, there's gonna be a lot of sexism in this, you know, because that's just the way the world works back then. Yeah. And I think if you're not interested in those types of role play like, obviously, not everyone's gonna be into that. But for me, I think that is something that I think would cheapen the entire world if you sort of removed all of that and be like, no, this was just cowboys with a horse.
Ellinor:Yeah. Having a great time. Nothing ever bad happened.
Dave:We were always Yeah. We were always going to to to to come at the history head on. We we decided that early on, and we knew that was gonna bring challenges in the game about how we handled it. But the like you said, Eleanor, you know, if you take all that out and whitewash all of that then you take away kind of the whole foundation of the history of the time. And you know like you say the diversity and all the problems that it brought and all the problems that came up around it was was like such a key element of the West.
Dave:That it's not just white guys on a horse shooting everybody else. Know, it's there's so much more to it than that.
Matthew:Yeah. And I think there is a thing, you know, that actually a lot of the whitewashing of the American West happens in the early movies in the early part of the twentieth century, when there's a lot of racism it's where the time when Bass Reeves had been you know a great deputy marshal and then a policeman in Oklahoma, you know he lost his job because he was black only kind of around the turn of the century. Up until that point yes there is all that inherent racism and sexism but there's also the kind of opportunity that's there in this barely civilized using that word in terms of creating civic society as opposed to anything else. In in that world there's so many opportunities that if a woman can do the job or you know a man who doesn't look like you can do the job you still get them to do the job because somebody needs to do the job. Yeah.
Matthew:So So that's the wonderful opportunity of the West. Yeah. And to, yeah, to shy away from it ends up actually replicating the early movies of the early twentieth century, which is just white people.
Dave:Yeah. Shooting Yeah. Shooting Indians. Yeah. And and patting themselves on the back for doing so.
Ellinor:Yeah. My little sister lives in Colorado. And so I went out there a couple of I've been there several times, but it's always, you know, the Rockies and that entire nature is so extremely important Mhmm. To me. Mhmm.
Ellinor:And I know I mean, we come from Vassen, nineteenth century, like so I I also that that tickles me a lot, the fact that Sweden during this time is sort of contemporary to the Wild West. So you know? And in this mystical universe that we created for ourselves with the Lost Mountain saga, it's a shared mythical world where some of those things, like, maybe, like, folklore ish themes, especially coming in from the with the immigrants coming to this place at this time. Mhmm. And we'll see what that does because it's also based in nature as well, similar to what Sweden has been, for me at least.
Matthew:Yeah, it's funny actually we've we've as you know from the rulebook and from our discussion we've avoided all elements of the supernatural but in the last game I played we're doing a bit of sort of playtest campaign of our next supplement set in the gold rush in California in the eighteen forties early fifties and in and we're running that as a bit of a West Marches campaign with with rotating GM's coming in and running scenario and people dropping in and out of playing. And I was playing my first game a couple of weeks ago and one of our patrons Bruce was running it and he introduced in the story a bear that killed the bad guys in our campaign and then ambled off leaving us to discover the wreckage. Now that could be played interestingly in two ways. You could say this is a perfectly natural bear and give it stats and effectively make it killable, but we're at this point. So one of the dying men mentioned to me as as I cradled in his head in his arms, he called the bear a thing in the local native tongue, which is either mother or mouth, which I think is really interesting.
Matthew:And so I got a sneaky suspicion that, you know, as this little playtest campaign carries on, that may become an incredibly Versen like presence in the locality and you know we would probably what I don't want to do is simply say oh that was a grizzly let's get the grizzly stats out and put that there. Just like the idea of this being an enormous bear that may or may not be supernatural. I quite like that element there.
Dave:Well, I think the fact that the game is is a straight up historical recreation. Yeah. It doesn't deny the player the GM the opportunity to have things that some people are gonna think might be supernatural. Oh, yeah. You know, if if if there's like spirits that characters believe are doing stuff, then in their minds those spirits are doing stuff.
Dave:Fact that we haven't got stats for those spirits to then come and haunt you is
Ellinor:Exactly. This is one of my gripes with Wesson. I feel like the bestialities. So bestiality. I always say bestiality and then I mean bestiary.
Ellinor:So
Matthew:it's
Dave:a totally different thing.
Matthew:But you actually don't have enough bestiality there. Yeah.
Ellinor:The bestiary, I think, is, like, a little lackluster in in Vassen because I think they didn't want you to actually fight the Vassen. Like, wanted Yeah. To to have it be, like, is it Vassen or is it just, you know, Scooby Doo? There's a man with a ghost thing over over his head. So I think but then I think they added the stats because they realized a lot of people wanna fight dragons.
Ellinor:But but so to me, that is exactly what it is. I also feel like there's drugs and shit in this time era that like, nothing is regulated. Mhmm. And so, of course, you know, people still go out into the West and and have those fun drug riddled ventures for two days. They puke their brains out, etcetera.
Ellinor:And I'm like, why wouldn't they do that also in the nineteenth century and have experiences that may or may not have happened? So, yeah, I think you can tie in so much into this. But it's nice to for me, it's nice to also play in a grounded world that actually sort of has a historical real relevance and not have to worry about
Dave:You don't need vampires or owl bears or other, you know, things like that to make a western story really compelling. Right. You know, there's so much darkness in the heart of people. There's so much drama there. There's so much drama landscape that is trying to kill you whenever you venture out into it.
Dave:That you don't need all the other stuff to give you that excitement. And that's the philosophy we followed.
Matthew:And I think it's it's something that comes out of our Dave and I have been playing role playing games together since we were at school. Well actually not not Dave and I initially. I I used to play with his older brother but then he calmed his annoying younger brother onto me and But
Dave:we foolishly allowed me to join your group of guys who are all a couple of years older than I was, but you let me in and it was too late.
Matthew:But for decades we have been playing, let us just say we've been playing together for decades as a group and as a group we've always kind of looking back on it now you can see we've shied away from the fantastic elements a lot of our adventures have been about us interact our group of people interacting with other people and then not being if you like an othered evil thing that we have to defeat. So that's been our style of play for more years actually than I think we remember and it fits so well into the western thing maybe one of the reasons why we're thinking isn't there a good western game out there?
Ellinor:Yeah. A lot of people have been, like, asking that exact question since we announced. They're like, holy shit. Didn't realize there was, like, a very a good new western game out. Because a lot of people wanna do other things with their western stuff.
Ellinor:They wanna, like, give so many options. And I think, in this case, you know, keep it to Red Dead do you guys have played Red Dead Redemption two? Or what?
Matthew:I've I've played Red Dead Redemption. Red Dead Redemption two literally makes me sick. So
Ellinor:Because of motion sickness?
Matthew:Yeah. Motion I'm not great with any first person shooter So over the shoulder is good. But then when it forces you into first person mode so that it can sway the camera around and make you think you're an drunkard it totally puts me off playing for it.
Dave:To answer your question, Matthew did a PhD specifically so he could spend a year playing Red Dead Redemption.
Matthew:Yep. That is true.
Dave:That is exactly
Ellinor:I will say, Matthew, if you stay with it after that drunk, I know exactly which one and I also puked basically from that session. It gets really good after that with with the landscape. But but similar to I I wanted to talk a little bit on how you guys developed this game together. Like, how did you divide sort of the writing? You have, like, a long, long list of equipment and guns and things that you can buy.
Ellinor:But I just wanna I'm curious on like how how you basically, how what was the writing process like for you two?
Dave:So I can on the whole, we we we kinda started out doing it equally as it were. But when it came to the final the final sort of few drafts, I took on the majority of the writing sort of chores as it were. We'd we pretty much settled the rules kind of I What would tend to happen is I would come up with some rules ideas. Matthew would say it's shit. It's shit.
Dave:And then I would convince him why he was wrong. And then eventually he would recognize
Matthew:And then you'd see my point of view and adjust to rules.
Dave:The only the one thing I would say is I I I can get a bit overexcited sometimes and my rules need to be simplified a little bit. So when Matthew says simplify it a bit, then I give him credit. That's often a good good bit of advice. Mhmm. But on the whole most of it most of that stuff was was kind of led by me.
Dave:Right. I I love doing all that kind of research. So all the research into sort of the Native American stuff, not all of it, but a lot of the research into the Native American stuff I did. Yeah. A lot of the research into the weapons and stuff again is As a Yeah.
Matthew:You did all the way. I I we kind of shared duty although as you've said, you after the initial bit, you often were doing the finishing off and, you know, and find writing the final text. Yeah. But the I think the native American one, I think I started that and then handed a half complete project over to you and you did that. But the guns were pretty much all yours weren't they?
Dave:And horses I guess as well. So so things like this. I think we kind of I mean Matthew let me take on the stuff that I was really interested and excited about and got on with. And then, you know, would share that, Matthew would offer suggestions, we'd finish it up. So it's kind of quite it wasn't there wasn't any kind of formal division of labor on all of that.
Dave:But kind of I took the lead on a lot of that stuff. Matt took the lead on a lot of the graphic design and the art direction. Although again, we're both involved in that. Yeah. And Matthew's got the kind of the technical skills that I don't have for things like the layout and all of that.
Dave:So he's in a position to be able to have a meaningful conversation with those people that we are dealing with Right. In a way that I I'm not because I don't have that that knowledge, that skill. So that worked really well. Think that way complemented each other really well in terms of the design.
Ellinor:You self publishing or is Free League publishing or I don't remember or is Effekt Publishing?
Matthew:With self publishing we did and this is very early on and a long, long history to this. So cutting back to maybe maybe if we go and interview Friedy then we can be their friends and they'll offer a bit us a bit of work. Way back in what this be 2019 I think they came back to us and they said or they sent us an email saying oh we've got a thing we might need your help with it UK Games Expo but we can't tell you about it until you sign this NDA which was in itself very exciting. Brilliant. And what it turned out to be was Alien, and so they were effectively launching in that in those days the pre order for the first edition of Alien at UK Games Expo, so Dave and I were the first outside the team really to see the rules, and that was very exciting and so we did we did a thing we can talk about more about that later if you want to.
Matthew:There are other people I think other podcasts we've been on where we've explained more about that. But the key thing I wanted to go to is at one point in the evening we were having a drink at the Bulls Head pub in Meriden after the show with Nils and with Matthias.
Dave:Yep. Martin was there as well.
Matthew:And Martin was there as well. Yeah. And we said we've got this idea for this cowboy game using the a zero engine. If we if we wrote it up, you think Friedy might want to play it? And at that moment, from that very moment, I knew exactly how it was gonna pan out.
Matthew:Nils really loved the idea and Matthias really didn't.
Ellinor:Okay. Wait, Matthias so and you guys haven't had any touch so Thomas because I feel like he's the one
Matthew:No, we've not met Thomas until this point, have we? I don't think in any respect.
Ellinor:Because he's the one I feel like Neil says is the final decision maker. And he's like, catch him on a good day, and he'll say yes to stuff. That's why you experienced it.
Dave:It was it was quite interesting. There was a a couple of years after that. Matthew wasn't at the convention but I was. And I joined them all at the pub for dinner and I did something else and I got there late. And they were all a bit drunk.
Dave:Everyone was there pretty much except Thomas. And they were kind of debating when I arrived whether they could have an expensive dessert to go with the rest of the dinner. And they all went, well, mother isn't here so it's okay. Yeah.
Ellinor:That's my that's my take too. But he
Dave:That's very cool.
Ellinor:Because I think he's in charge of he's in charge of sort of the final the final he's the final boss, so to speak.
Matthew:I I think everybody says we take collective responsibility for every decision that Thomas makes. Yeah. Yeah.
Ellinor:But I have the exact same experience of Niels being extremely I've pitched so many things to Niels and I thought I had it in the bag. And he's like, that sounds great. Yes. Perfect. Yeah.
Ellinor:Well and I'm like, cool. Perfect. Then I go to Thomas and Thomas is like, we're we're gonna take a look at it and get back to you. Yeah. And I'm like, that's a big fat no.
Dave:That's a polite no, isn't it?
Ellinor:Yeah. Yeah.
Dave:We Of kind of we were hoping that they might publish for us. Ultimately the decision came back no which was fine and actually Absolutely
Matthew:fine.
Dave:In the long run was probably the best decision for us whether they knew it at the time or whether we knew it at the time. I don't know. But actually doing it ourselves kick starting ourselves Maintaining all of the the kind of control over everything was absolutely right for us. And we learned a lot. It was hard work doing the Kickstarter.
Dave:But we we managed it. We did it quite well in the end I think. Yeah. Yeah ultimately it was the right decision so delighted with that outcome.
Ellinor:I think so too. I think that too. I think everything every path will lead to another path so to speak. Yeah. Every no will lead to a different path.
Dave:When God closes a door, he opens a window. But,
Ellinor:and having said that, like, the reason why I know about you is because of Free League's SPL Congress last year, right, where Matthew gave us the book very graciously. You ran home to get the book, you crazy
Matthew:I ran back to the hotel Well, and I just want to say to all your listeners here, we did not give you the book. We well, for a start, we did not solely give you the book. I if you remember, I handed out copies to a whole bunch of people around the table that we were I sharing dinner
Ellinor:don't like that part of the story. I want to be
Dave:Hang on, Matt. Well, just just think about who you're talking to, mate.
Matthew:Think about It you're was people like Nils and Martin.
Ellinor:Matthew, I want to make it clear I'm not special. I get it. Sorry.
Matthew:But also we didn't give you the book, and this is the thing I really want to make clear, we didn't give the book thinking oh and then it was done a podcast and it's quite popular. If we give her the book maybe she'll do a podcast of our book was not in my mind at all you were just a lovely person
Ellinor:think you were
Matthew:also conversation at dinner and also I'd carried though we'd carried those books and more to Spell Congress in our luggage, slightly smuggling them in. Don't tell our patron, Nils, who works for their Swedish customs. He knows. It's okay.
Dave:Well, I'll this bit out.
Ellinor:It's a man of Pewald. They wanted to pay
Matthew:And I didn't I didn't wanna carry them back home, basically. So Oh, no.
Dave:You're making me worse. No, Matthew. Shut up. You're just
Ellinor:I love this. I love this this wonderful gift that Matthew had planned
Matthew:a long time to
Ellinor:give me specifically.
Dave:And he's completely destroyed the moment. What an idiot. No. But we were delighted that you were interested, Eleanor. Yes.
Dave:And then and certainly, you you were you were saying at the time that oh, we might, you know, there might be something we might run. And we thought wow, that's that that would be superb if if that was something you wanted to put up on your on your podcast. But
Ellinor:Yeah. Well, both Sydney and I were extremely or it's both very very into the West. I know it's not our fans' maybe favorite setting, but they can fuck off. No. They they they will like it because they're told they will like it.
Ellinor:It will I think we can do something about with it that I think will she and I really like everything that's grounded, and then you add sort of the humor or the crazy stuff on top of a very grounded base reality. Mhmm. And I think Sydney also she wanted to run some things. This is the first time she's GM ing, I think, something big ever. So so she's very excited to to dive into it.
Ellinor:And so I I gave her the book as a loan. She's thought it was a gift. So now I don't now I now I have but I have a new copy of it, Fred.
Matthew:Yeah. Was gonna say, hopefully, received the other copy.
Dave:Yeah. I was gonna say, but Eleanor, I thought you're angling for a fresh book then. No. She's stuck at it. And I'd say, yes.
Matthew:She's already got a fresh book.
Dave:I would shut Matthew up and say, yes. It would be a delight. Yeah.
Ellinor:No. No.
Matthew:No. We've got a second copy. I say we we should explain to our listeners that I thought it was important that
Dave:It's not our listeners, Matthew. We're not on our podcast here, mate.
Matthew:We're on the Well, the listeners of this conversation, I mean. I thought it was important that that Sydney should have the GM screen initially. And we're not exporting GM screens to The US at the moment because tariffs and they for one thing seem to get the most confused response from customs officers in the in The US So, you'd said, oh, I'm going home to Sweden for a bit, you can send it to me there. And I thought when I sent it to you that actually a second copy of the book, particularly because this second copy you've got, we didn't have all that many typos in the first book. We did have one bit of history that was picked up on by one listener that David oversimplified.
Matthew:I'm blaming Dave here. No.
Dave:No. I take it. Mayor Culper. Mayor Culper. Victoria, I was trying to sum up the causes of the American Civil War in one line and I kind of like focused on the union perspective rather than the confederate.
Dave:And it was
Matthew:a it
Dave:was a fair it was a fair comment.
Matthew:So anyway, so there's a few changes in there and a few typos that we got in that in that edition as opposed to the deluxe edition which only came out of the first print. So I thought it was important that you guys should have one of those as well. And you can argue with with Sydney about who gets to keep which
Dave:book. But
Ellinor:Yeah. No. I mean, she's already stolen the other one. So I'm not getting it. But she has the GM screen too.
Ellinor:So, yeah, we're very excited, and we've started it. We've started playing, and we will play out throughout July with just we have one more player that we're playing with, and then after that, we'll start inviting guests to have, like, one shots. And I'm excited for that because similar to Deadwood, I'm thinking they'll come in as, you know, the doctor or, like, the Yeah. The priest and crazy things will maybe happen to them. Or it would be great.
Ellinor:It will just be a social intrigue romance drama. But I kinda wanna wrap up wrap us up soon because once again, Dave's going to Greece. And I also have a meeting. But
Matthew:Also, do just want to say that when you talk about social intrigue, one of the things we're most proud of in the book is the social conflict rules that we've created in the book. If I can criticise Free League for one thing it says very often a manipulation rule role and if you succeed in the role the person has to do what they say or fight you that is kind of what the rules say. Yeah. Surely, conflict is a bit more nuanced than that.
Dave:Yeah. Yeah. Oh,
Ellinor:yeah. I played a bunch of Alien recently with the evolved rules, and it was a lot of opposed roles. But, you know, you were kind of fucked if someone won. They were like, I want my person to do this. And I'm like, I guess, alright, I'll go and get eaten by an alien.
Ellinor:Asshole. So talk a little bit about the social intrigue rules that you have set up.
Matthew:Okay, so, so yeah, we were very keen that there should be more than one manipulation role. And so, for a start, there's a couple of things that you see in westerns when people are trying to convince other people to do a thing. Very often in a western, you know, hard stare and just being manly or a strong, strong womanly can can in lots of western movies you see that happening and they just get a hard stare and the other person backs down. So we've got for that an ability which we call presence which sort of recreates that sort of thing. And of course sometimes you're trying to persuade people and here we're looking at all those snake oil salesman that are a feature of a western trope as it were and people like Maverick and Alas Smith and Jones, sorry no Alias Smith and Jones, from the 70s TV shows, where you know they're fast talkers so we've got performance so you've got those two skills working in different ways to to do what the manipulation role in a lot of really games does, and then the other nuance we've got is that if you lose that role you don't immediately have a choice between doing what you're told or fighting, instead we've got, we use stat damage in this game which won't be familiar to Versum players, but it's quite common in Mutant Year Zero and in
Dave:Forbidden Lands.
Matthew:Forbidden Lands, and we have it here as well. And you can get stat damage to your, if you like, social stats, what we call wits and dossity.
Dave:Cunning and dossity.
Matthew:Cunning and dossity. Thank you. And so damage to cunning is called vexes, you get angrier and damage to dossier is called doubts, you begin to doubt yourself. So there's a point where you've got a little bit of saying right, well okay, maybe I'm not so sure that I've got that my idea is right I've lost a bit of doubt but I'm gonna still carry on and gonna have another go with with trying to convince the person I'm talking to of my argument and you've got reduced stats, so you know you might well be on a kind of death spiral, but when you're broken in one of those things you're broken it still doesn't mean you have to do the thing that you were told to do, means you're out of that social scene. So that's that's the way we've tried to nuance it.
Matthew:You know
Dave:it's like it's just like an old marriage you know what mean if you get a word legways.
Matthew:I just just want to you know so we had the great time Dave at the campaign that you're running where you had one of the non player characters trying to seduce me and now as a player I kind of I was happy with that yeah you know that's fine but you know I was able to roll that seduction and effectively get broken by her arguments kind of willingly as a
Dave:player more
Matthew:reluctantly and then you know and now now she's my wife so all things are good.
Dave:So but the idea behind that is that in you know when if you get broken on on cunning or on dossity you're not unconscious you're not you know you're not down in that sense. But you know you are so angry you can't continue the discussion and then you know we encourage the players to to narrate what they might do. We had one we had one where one of the this is a long time ago in an early playtest. A character got broken on on Vex's in in the newspaper office when the newspaper man wasn't gonna run the story he wanted. So he then said okay I'm gonna smash his printing press.
Dave:And so that was so he was out of the conflict but then that was the the upshot of being broken. Yeah.
Matthew:Being broken on facts is you're allowed to do one aggressive action before.
Ellinor:Oh, nice.
Dave:Before came in.
Matthew:So
Dave:He also have an ability called insight that if you're not doing a direct you know, if you're not doing a presence to presence where you're basically trying to both face face each other down, can then use your insight as your defensive stat. Right. And so you're you know you're understanding what they're trying to do and you're not falling for it kind of thing.
Ellinor:Very interesting. Okay. So we haven't really gotten to that yet, so I'm excited now for it to to explore that. Alright. Cool.
Ellinor:I I'm gonna stop this here simply because there's so much more I wanna talk to you guys about, but I also want to set up I mean, Sydney wanted to talk to you too off air and discuss rules, I think some of the stuff you've said now, I'm like, okay. Sydney needs to talk to you guys. Especially about, like, getting down taking damage to stat blocks. Is that what you said?
Matthew:Yeah. Effectively. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Ellinor:Okay. Sheen will she'll call you.
Dave:Cool.
Ellinor:She so we'll we'll stay in touch with that. But I wanted all of our listeners, please check out Effect Pod, which is a podcast series. You do actual plays, you do interviews, and you do a lot of general marriage banter between Dave and Matthew.
Matthew:Yeah. So we do on effect on effectpodcast.org, Effekt's spelled with a k, we do a fortnightly roughly, although Dave's holiday is screwing that up. Fortnightly magazine show and that's interviews and stuff like that or articles about the And mansions or whatever it then occasionally we will do a weekly podcast, but that requires me having a train.
Dave:Actual play podcast. Yeah.
Matthew:Yeah. And that that's on effectap.org..org.
Ellinor:So I will put all of this in the show notes for this episode, but I wanted
Matthew:to And also remember, effectpublishing.com, which is where people can buy our game.
Ellinor:Oh, okay. So this okay. I will add all of this. But but it's been such a such a fun time. I mean, it's my morning, but it's been so much fun to talk to you this afternoon slash morning.
Ellinor:Mhmm. And I hope to see you guys soon again. Maybe I'm not coming to this year's SPL Congress, unfortunately, but I wanna come. I mean, we'll be back in Europe soon. Cool.
Ellinor:Yeah.
Dave:Well, thanks for having us on. Thanks for doing It's been a pleasure. The Old West as as your next season, which is delightfully important to have.
Matthew:So that was great. Alan always, always great to talk to. This, as I say, it all came out of sitting across from her at dinner at Spell Congress last year. Dave and I are wondering, we've not been invited as guests this time. Two little mice are gonna be guests at spell congress, but we are seriously wondering whether we can stretch our company budget enough to take us over to Sweden, for the next spell congress because we enjoyed it so much.
Matthew:We're gonna have to have a think about that. Next episode. I don't know. I don't know what it's gonna be. It might be an interview with Jonathan Hicks about his upcoming second cinematic for Alien, or it might be something else.
Matthew:One One of the things that I've been asked is a guide to self publishing for people that might want to put stuff they've made for tales of the Old West for their home use. How can they get that into sellable quality? So I might well write a short article about that. Who can tell? Anyway, that's all for the next episode.
Matthew:Come back in two weeks' time. And in the meantime, may the icons bless your adventures.
Dave:You have been listening to the effect podcast presented by Fiction Suit and the RPG gods. Music stars on a black sea used with permission of Free League Publishing.