Hello and welcome to the Weekly Scroll podcast.
My Name Is Ryan. And I'm a raccoon with greedy
little hands and super speed. That's awesome.
Hey, I'm Wife Marshall, creator of the Stillfleet Studio over at
the game Stillfleet, and we are very, very happy to be producing
Blister Critters by Tony Grasso. Hi, I'm Tony.
I'm the creator of Odd Gob Games, creator of Blister
Critters, and I'm excited to be here.
Yeah, and if you couldn't tell already, we're talking about
blister critters today. So fun game coming up for Zine
Quest. Quick starts out right now,
highly recommend grabbing it. But to kick it off I guess let's
what it what? So let's start with what is
blister critters and then we'll come back to that again in a
little bit. Blister Critters is a mutant
cartoon animal TTRPG. You play as a little critter no
bigger than a foot tall, exploring the post eco
apocalypse. So it's set like 20 years after
humans poofed just kind of vanished from existence and you
run through suburbia with no humans around fighting off
beasts, so larger animals that have also mutated over time
under like a supercharged sun. You find other smaller groups in
Burrows, so smaller groups of animals, and you are just free
to set loose into the world full of human stuff.
The in game term for weapons and armor and medicine.
All the different equipment and stuff other games would have is
just called stuff and it's all of the human stuff.
Coffee mugs and paper clips and bananas are all at your disposal
in blister cutters. Yeah.
Important importantly to put a period on it, it's all wrapped
up in a Saturday morning cartoon.
So not only are you a little mutated animal, it's all taking
place as though you were on a cartoon.
So zany wacky antics are supposed to ensue.
Love it Yeah and if you've if you've read the quick start
before again if you haven't definitely go to the it's is it
on the still fleet one. I always just search Blister
Critters Quick start on Google and it takes me to the right
link. It'll pop up, but it's the still
Fleet itch page, yeah. Yeah highly recommend reading it
the the way that and and like I said we'll get to that again but
the way that the cartoony aspect actually melds with the
mechanics and the mechanics fit into the this you know eco
apocalypse thing. Absolutely fantastic so well
done but to start you guys are not you're you're two you're two
different things. We have Still Fleet and we have
Odd God Games. Still Fleet is this big, big
sci-fi book right here with some other stuff coming out.
What? How did Stillfleet and Odd Gob,
which if you look at, you know EMU, which I also have right
here too, those two thing next to each other, they're a little
bit kind of opposite. So how did how did this kind of
meeting of the minds come together?
Yeah, I mean, well, Stillfleet is is sort of the product of my
making games for my friends. I was always the forever GM.
I've been jamming since I was 12 and I was writing a lot of my
own content, you know, creating fast worlds and eventually game
systems and friends told me to publish them.
And when we started doing that, I started working with an
artist. He's a good friend of mine named
Ethan. But we quickly found we needed
more art. So we worked with a few other
artists and a couple have been really great.
And honestly, one of the the best contacts I made was, I
think just from randomly finding you an art station, Tony.
But I I'd reached out and hired Tony to do some sci-fi art and
Tony has a really great style. It's very graphic.
It's different from Ethan's, but it's sort of complements.
So we sort of like the idea of having you know, the secondary
style of art throughout the book, especially with sort of
monsters. Like Tony was obviously very
good and very fast at kind of creating creatures and so we
love that just throwing like aliens at him.
And so that's how we got in touch.
And I think Tony had gotten some familiarity with the system
behind still Fleet, the Grit system and so pitched me on sort
of a game using our system but totally you know, from his brain
of this kind of cartoon surreal Saturday morning eco apocalyptic
universe which we loved and just felt very much in keeping with
our work in terms of sort of the politics of of like production
and many other things. But that's something that we're
really interested in like in still Flee too.
There's a lot of stuff in Still flee.
It's called architect. But this sort of magic item
types, this sort of sci-fi Mac Guffins are a big part of the
game. And so I liked the idea that
this was a totally different universe.
But it's the same rules and it's the same obsession with yeah,
maybe humans have have screwed some things up.
Maybe they've made too much stuff.
Maybe some of that stuff is dangerous.
But here, you know, it's inverting it and and putting
emphasis on, all right so now you're playing as, you know, a
squirrel who's come in and and found this house full of crap.
What do they do with it? So it sort of made sense to me
even though, yeah, it's it's different, but but that was kind
of part of the appeal is it wasn't like very close to our
sci-fi vision. It was a, you know, alt modern
kind of setting and something we weren't going to do right.
So it didn't feel, it's like you're not competing with me
because I'm never going to write this book.
I don't have time and it's it's such a good idea.
Now I'm like, no, no, no, you do that like you own the cartoon
space, you know so. Yeah, the similarly, I'm sorry.
Yeah, I mean, I I after doing AMU, which you have, and some of
some of the work that I did with Wide is in the Stillfleet book.
But after doing AMU, I was like, oh, I like making these games
prior. I didn't make a bunch of them.
I run stuff at home, but not under any specific system, just
really cobbled together for fun. And then after making AMU, I
realized that I liked making the games that I had been doing all
this artwork for. And so the months after the
Kickstarter wrapped up for AMU specifically, I just made a
bunch of small like crap. And some of it's really good and
some of it's all right, but it was just a fun time to like
experiment and like try new stuff.
And in that Blister Critters came about through, I think like
a warm up sketch where I drawn like a mouse wearing like a
keyboard cap as a helmet. And like much of my work, it's
not like design or writing. Like first it's I had a cool
idea that looks cool on paper. How can I make a game where I
get to do more of this artwork now?
And like like I've said, I had been working with them for a
little while and I enjoyed what I had read through of the the
Stuff lead system and so here we are rambling about post
recruiters I feel. Like, that's so Saturday morning
cartoon though. It's just like, yeah, we came up
with these cool characters and like, we're just going to put
them somewhere. Like that's just the most, like,
he man Saturday morning cartoon thing ever, you know?
It was. Brute forcing it to existence
now. Hey, it's a method that's been
proven to work. We've already seen it work, so.
Yeah, it's designed the toy 1st and then you have to sell the
toys you're like. Need a whole.
Bottle to hook kids into buying Optimus Prime toys.
It doesn't really matter. But he's a truck.
He's a talking truck. I don't know.
Figure it out. Yeah.
I had Lionel underwear, so I think Thundercats are now.
Yeah, Thundercats was my gym. So funny.
It yeah, it's fantastic. Like I said, we're gonna talk
about the way that that's all pulled in, especially the
Saturday morning cartoon bit, which is such a good way to
really help players in GMs get to embrace those kind of
principles a bit better. Prior to that though, there's
another person who's working with you guys on the project.
I think much more in the background, but definitely there
is. Is Logan Dean, great, great
designer, definitely check out all their stuff.
Cycers is fantastic. The company is great.
How? How did he also get kind of
pulled into this, this cartooniness that we have going
on now? Yeah, I met Logan this year at
Gen. Con through our mutual friend
Taylor Moore of Fun City Ventures.
World's beyond Number, stuff like that.
And I think, you know, Taylor knew we were looking for help
with turning the still fit studio into a business.
Since I'm. I'm a writer, right?
I'm a social scientist and writer and I know how to write
games and I think I'm pretty good at it.
But in terms of running a small business, it's like, oh, wow,
that's that's annoying. That's a lot of numbers and
things that aren't creative, really, or they're a different
kind of creative. Let me say that.
So he put me in touch with Logan and Logan was kind of giving me
a lot of really good free advice and at some point we decided to
work together, you know and so brought Logan on as our
producing consultant for Blister Critters and there's a number of
other projects that we are talking about you know extending
his involvement to to make sure happen and and our high quality.
But for the since we know we want to do Blister Critters
next, it just made total sense to say all right we're going to
bring Logan into the team and the team will be you know the
still feed studio. It's Tony's game and Logan's are
our kind of consultant who's really an expert on all of the
other parts, The logistics of running big Kickstarters and
fulfilling box sets with lots of pieces.
I mean, he's done tons of board games, card games, So we have
done books and you know, my wife and I and the others in the team
know a lot about sort of book design.
But even like cards was new to us.
Last year we did a card deck. It came out really well, but you
know, that was our first time making something that wasn't a
book. So for this, we know that Tony
had this vision for lots of pieces and we can talk about
what goes in the box set and we have talked Tony and I've talked
about a lot of versions like options, some of which we might
do later on, right? Like if this goes well, some
might become super stretch goals if we do really, really well.
But for now, we have a core set of like what's in the box set,
what's the stretch goal. And a lot of that was in
conversation with Logan who's just, you know, really, really
great, you know, great person, really fun to to make games
with. So yeah, I'm looking forward to
doing more stuff. But for now, it's it's all eyes
on this box set prize. I know Logan just did 1978 with
Adam Vassa, World Champ and that had a bunch of pieces and stuff.
Yeah, absolutely fantastic. So if if he brings that level
of, I mean it's a lot of pieces and it got together in a
beautiful box quick and got to us.
So you know that's that's what's important especially with
Kickstarter. So it's that's great to have
something that can do that for you.
Yeah. And his his whole shtick of like
it's you know, the evil company. I mean, that was very much when
he and I met. We talked a lot about that
because it's like that's the point of still fleet, right.
So the Still Fleet studio is not just the game, still Fleet, but
certainly the premise of, well, I made a company to make games
about sort of the evils of capitalism.
I mean that's something that he seems very much in line with.
So we were kind of like cool, let's do it and blister
critters. Like I said, totally different.
But it still has a bit of that vibe and partly it's through
making a box with lots of little pieces and some excess in there
to kind of set you in the mood. So I definitely think, yeah,
he's the right man for the job in that sense.
Fantastic. Yeah and and talk about blister
critters and stuff too. One of my favorite, I don't know
if I can find any Kickstarters, but like in the in the initial
pitch, like one of my favorite lines was Oh yeah, exploring and
surviving the post eco apocalypse.
Ignoring their own warnings of self-imposed ecological
disaster. The humans vanished and I was
just like, that sounds great, like they knew it was coming and
said fuck it, we're just gonna keep going.
And then now you get to play in the world after and that just
felt so like deep within this kind of like all those cartoons
ain'tiness. But it's like there's this
underlying like this is Amy and you have all these weird
blistered critters because we live in this like, you know,
post you know, Wally Ish, we fucked up the world now you're
now you're here kind of bit. And that's just such a good fun
vibe to feel you know, our own like, you know, species
existentialism feels good. So it's fun.
For me, it's like the embodiment of any cartoon where they cut
away to this long droning shot that's like hyper detailed and
it shows. It's like this really morbid or
kind of gross shot for way too long.
It's like, oh, we're having a bunch of fun.
There's cartoon stuff popping around and a weird sound effect
just went off. But then it pans over and some
dude just like deeply depressed or some horrible stuff's
happening and it cuts back to the fun for a little bit.
I kind of I I really enjoy that about blister critters that it
does both and then depending on who's running it you can lean
into one side or the other which is written into the to the rules
a bit to zany and gnarly. So I I definitely enjoy like the
tension of like the juxtaposition between the two,
like styles or like vibes. Yeah, and it reminds me of other
shows that do that, but they, I don't know, it's somewhat about
intent and foregrounding, backgrounding.
But like if you think of Adventure Time is a little bit
similar where oh is I think canonically a post apocalyptic
like Earth, right? It is.
Yeah. It becomes magical millions of
years or however long after sort of we screwed it all up and
that's not really explored much in the show and blister critters
similarly to a degree that's the setup where there isn't
background. You'll never get like a
supplement. I don't think this would be like
Tony correct me if I'm wrong, far from your vision like the
book of humans or something like there are no humans they're just
gone. But I think we do foreground in
various ways. We try to remind people that
this is kind of as like 1 philosopher said you know the
human furniture, right. All of the different stuff is
still there that makes the world altered by by people.
And the sapien animals, this mutant animals that are
wandering around in it know that, so they're living in this.
It's sort of ruins. And I think that haunting, I
like to think of it as like an elegiac feeling can be brought
through or you can completely ignore it and do like escapist
version. And I think that's kind of a
spectrum. And even within one story, there
might be scenes that are a little more haunted.
And there are scenes that are purely cartoon, you know, Tom
and Jerry like craziness. So I I think that's something
you can play with. I also will say again,
Transformers, if you really think about it, it's a show
about all these sapient robots whose world, like, died.
And then they come to Earth, hang out with dinosaurs and
eventually meet like a little like a teen boy or something.
And they're like, cool. Well, you know, let's hang out
now. And you know, they don't.
They're not constantly, like, damn, that sucks that everyone
we loved died back on Cybertron. But it's there.
You know, it's part of the show. So.
Very cool. So can you kind of explain the
base mechanics of blister critters?
Yeah. Tony, do you do you want to do
this or do you want me to do the the pitch for the system?
No. By all means, you've pitched the
grid system far more than I have.
Well, it's it's it's a system I came up with over years where
your scores are dice, which I think is really fun.
There are some other games I found that do this.
I think ours does it well and I've found it hard to go back to
systems where your scores aren't dice because it it allows for
kind of a fine-tuned variability, which I I can say
more about. But it's a nice like medium
crunch. Like you can have big epic
moments where you're rolling high, you can have big fails
where you roll A1, but it feels tighter, more responsive to like
OK, I have AD 12 that's high, so I'm probably going to be good at
something where most people have AD 6 and then right like I'm
usually going to get a a higher roll than someone with AD 6.
So you have 5 scores in this game we have scrap which in
still fleets called combat. So it's the same thing, right,
Fighting anytime you're trying to do harm and that's it.
If you're trying to hurt someone that's scrap scurry which is the
rest of your body in still fleet.
It's called movement and that's everything else.
You're trying to be sneaky. You're trying to steal
something. You're trying to run really
fast. It's all scurrying instinct is
all your animal smarts. You're like animal know how
which in still fleet for a human would be called will or
willpower noggin which is your human knowledge.
So in still fate that's reason that's like stuff you have to
like go to school to learn facts.
Technology in Blister Critters, Noggin is only used for stuff,
but there's a lot of stuff in the game.
So it sort of represents like like in a game I just ran like a
crow, had really high noggin and could kind of figure out what
human stuff did and put it together.
And there's like a really dumb platypus who like had no idea
like had AD 4IN that score and was just, I could not usually
need to roll A6 or higher. So it was just like, yeah, I
don't know, it's that's a thing. I don't care.
And then finally of vibes, which in stuff it is charm.
And when you're vibing, obviously that's all your social
interactions. You're trying to lie to someone
or seduce them or just be friendly.
So those five things, depending on how you distribute your dice.
If you have, you know, a high score in scrap, you're going to
be good at fighting. If you have a low score in
scrap, you probably don't want to be like the fighter who's
jumping out and defending everyone, because you're
probably going to roll worse than a beast who has, you know,
presumably, let's say AD 12, like a big feral cat or
something. And yeah, when you're rolling
against someone, you, the initiator of the action, wins
the tie. So you're trying to get sort of
you know if you're starting the action, you're trying to get the
same number or higher. And otherwise if you're trying
to beat like a the world, you're trying to get a six or higher.
And you can always burn your one main resource grit to get a plus
3A plus 6 or a + 9 which we found is a nice chunk where it
kind of hurts like 3 grit. You know if you have a starting
character like 1518 grit like 3 is going to be noticeable, but
it's not so much that you're not going to want to do it when
you're like, no, I I have to like destroy this role and you
can still fail on A1. So even if you burn so much
grit, like if you burn 9 grit, you still might roll that one.
So it's a gambling mechanic. The whole system is basically
about gambling. How good are you at the epic
stuff? How good are you at your normal
thing and when do you want to really push yourself and sort of
expend energy versus when you're like, no, I got this IVD 12
again you could still fail, but you roll without grit.
So it's it's we found it's really fun way.
We've played a lot of fantasy games with this kind of haunted
early modern games. We've played a few genres.
I honestly, we had not played any cartoon animal versions
until Tony brought it to us. So very fun to translate and it
and it worked pretty well. I mean, Tony, do you want to say
more about like bringing it into your world using those those
dice? Yeah, no.
So the my my approach is far less I think academic or
insightful where I was like man a bunch of dice.
This is going to be really cool to have on the table.
So like in designing like the the character sheet, again, a
theme throughout kind of how I approach a lot of it is what's
going to look and feel the coolest to do.
Which I think is why me and White work together really well
because that's kind of how I approach a lot of it.
And then why does that? OK, but what if we make this not
just look cool but also play right?
And so I enjoyed having like a large collection of dice to to
throw through and then being able to adapt it into the
cartoon world was fun. Like renaming the stats and then
choosing certain rules to make, like cannon or not.
I guess not cannon, but core to them.
So like specifically boosting when you roll a maximum on your
damage die. In blister critters you can burn
some grit to grit and then you can just roll the damaged die
again for as many times as you can burn the grit, you can keep
rolling damage. My players love it.
People that I've shown to really enjoy just getting to oh, it's
called exploding. I'm sorry you explode when you
would be able to roll damage again in still fleet that is a
power that you can like elect into or opt to take.
So then while I was adopting the still fleet or the grit system
rules I kind of had like this big menu of stuff.
I'm like that's cool boink. That's really awesome boink and
rather than having to be optional, I was like this would
be cool and kind of lean into the the heavy hitting and the
more fast-paced and like wackier nature.
Where I think and again where you want it to be combat to run
for a bit longer or where you want things to be a little bit
more paced. I've leaned into and some of the
rules that I've chosen or adapted from the grit system to
really just turn the knob like that one extra crank.
Further, to have combat last a couple of rounds, have the have
the hits be really heavy to have conversational encounters.
Be zany and they can just be wiped away with a silly quip to
have catch phrases. Where in blister critters as
part of creating your character you set you develop a catch
phrase and sometimes people will change it over time where they
take a couple episodes till they find it which is perfect.
But once per episode, once per session you can say your catch
phrase and you can choose any role to roll with advantage.
So it's just a cool way to incorporate like like a rule
with something that is super role play focused where you
don't really get to use it unless you go out of your way to
shout. It's time to like roll out stuff
like that. All right, cool.
I I like involving or incorporating stuff that goes
beyond like the mathematics of the mechanics and trying to tie
them into what would be a really fun role play or like vibe
setting. I don't know to to mechanicalize
the vibe if I can put it like in a really cross way.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, you also do something
similar with the like your nonsense powers.
There's like the the option to like only let the power activate
if you like, say the name of the power out loud, which is like
very cartoony, but also helps pull in that RP a little bit so
that it's it's a it's cool that it comes up more than once and
gives people that opportunity over and over again.
So that's really cool. It's a great, clean system.
Like reading through this, it's just it, you know, I haven't got
to play it, but it all makes sense.
It's super clean, which is really, really nice.
I love the pool between like, the grit and the health.
And when you're reading it and you're like, Oh yeah, like if
you still have grip but your health is gone, you're not dead.
But here's the terrible condition.
You still have health, but your grit is gone.
Like, you're not dead, but here's a terrible condition and
then it's just and it all just feeds back into itself, which is
always nice with any mechanics or systems.
Like if if the mechanic and the way you play that mechanic
constantly reinforces how the mechanic works and anything you
add to it just keeps feeling like it makes sense and keeps
that feedback loop going, then the system was always going to
feel consistent and good. And when I as I was reading
through this and and even through like still fleet and
stuff too it, that's what it feels like the system is.
It's just everything that keeps getting added to it just
continues to make sense and stay nice and clean.
So it's it's it's great. I really, really enjoyed the
system a lot. Yeah, you've really done a good
job of reinforcing the vibe of, like, this is like a Saturday
morning cartoon. Like things are epic.
You do fun stuff, like, yeah, you make quips at your enemies
and then knock them out. Or don't, and then it makes it
even funnier. You.
Might drop them and then you just get punched like.
All right, that works too. Yeah, I mean we we with the core
system, like there's a lot of fine tuning that's gone over
like 10 years into that. And and like I said, it's pretty
portable in other genres. And so it was pretty different
design brief to like bring it into blister critters.
But we're pretty confident that it would work in part like I'd
run AMU using the grid system. So like Tony and I had played a
game already where it was like kind of his work, but I was just
using my system and it worked like with very little.
Like I didn't really prep a lot. It was like, yeah, I mean I'll
assign stats to like the big fights or whatever.
So this was fun and it was fun to talk to Tony about what he
wanted and hear like OK, you wanted to feel kind of lower
powered but also zanier, which in a way you think of zaniness
could be like higher powered. But we wanted to keep the dice
rolling sort of lower like with still Fate you can do min Max
and get these epic like, OK, I've made AD 12 into AD 20,
which is like a huge deal, etcetera, etcetera.
And here we wanted to sort of have more of the narrative
powers, which there are a lot of, and still fate too.
Like, OK, you just flee the scene.
You just kill the monster or whatever if you if you're
successful, if you burn enough grit.
But here that we want to have more sort of very intuitive
powers like with the animal talents, for example, Tony had
all these great ideas for animals.
And OK, let's make a power that you know in in just two powers,
right. It gives you the sense of being
a crow or two powers. It gives you the sense of being,
you know, a chinchilla. And then we have players, Yeah,
yeah, the frog. We've had players come to us and
be like, okay, but I want to be a platypus.
And it's like, all right, well, we've made like 130 powers or
something, but it's like, go figure out what those are.
So okay, platypus have venom. It turns out they have, like,
spiked. Heels.
Spiked heels. Yeah, the only mammals with
venom. Yeah, yeah, great.
They're they're just, they're just amazing.
So like, that was fun. And then the other one was
because they lay eggs, we we have the chicken power where you
can be a chicken who shoots eggs, like just, you know, gives
birth and shoots with such force that you stun an enemy for one
round. So you burn grit and you just
auto stun. You don't have a role to hit.
It doesn't do damage. It just stuns them.
And that was something the platypode character, you know,
took on as well. And that just felt very cartoony
and fun and it took, you know, all of 10 seconds.
So it's been fun to both adapt the grid system, come up with
new stuff with Tony and then see our players, even in early play
testing, just look at the menu and be like, oh, I got this like
I've, I know what I want to do. I want to be a one foot tall
giraffe. So I'm going to pick this and
this, you know. And as AGM you're like, yeah,
cool, You're a one foot tall giraffe.
As long as you're you're not a big giraffe, that's fine with
me, because you have to be small.
Well, that that's another thing that I really enjoy the
characterization in general, but especially with the animals and
even with the rules and mechanics too.
Like, one thing I really like about this is like, it's it's
like rules for anything, like, you know, people there, there's
this common theme kind of in in post Pandemic indie games of
like, rules don't matter, do whatever rules you want.
But like, I'm like, I agree to a point, but like, try how they're
written first, 'cause there's a reason someone just thought that
those all worked well together, right?
And I really like the way it works in what you have here.
And also it's just there's not a lot like, as far as rules to
know. It all feels very clean.
But character creation is a part I really enjoyed for a bunch of
reasons. One I was like, damn, this is a
lot of animals. And then you see that like
sticky note that's like, this is only 24.
You really get 66 of them. And I'm like, I couldn't think
of 66 animals right now anyway. But I also like the I really
enjoyed the asymmetry of all of the different animals and not
only that, the different styles of animals too.
So like in the game right now there's, you know four of each
but there's like Fuzzy, Feathery, Warded, Scaly, Sheldon
Crawley. And a lot of games when you have
different styles will be like, you know if it's going to be
health, grit and and Dr. or whatever we're going to have
like 10 total points. We'll just like mix them.
So everyone kind of equals 10, you know and I was, I was
reading through this, I was like that's not none of that is in
here at all. Like, there's whole sections
where like like Scaly has Dr. but like Warded doesn't, you get
more like more grit or whatever. And like Scaly doesn't have a
bonus to health, but you get some other things too.
So there's a real asymmetry to it, which I think really lends
into that like, well, it's because of a one foot tall
giraffe is different than a frog.
Like, you don't need those same things, you're not supposed to
do those same things. So leaning into like what a frog
does really well or what a giraffe does really well is what
the character creation kind of and the abilities you get with
it feels like to me. I assume kind of based on what
you're talking about, like that was the intent.
But maybe, maybe, maybe I'm wrong?
No, exactly. When I was putting together the
different categories so you know fuzzy feathering down the line
and then mechanicalizing them to where like well what what would
a shell, what would a turtle have that like a frog wouldn't
or that a little mouse wouldn't. Well, you know, obviously
there's a big shell on their back but Shelled also receive I
believe a certain extra amount of like SP so you can carry more
stuff and thinking there is you just put stuff into your shelf.
That's probably not how that works.
But if you're playing, and that's how some of the
conversations that me and White have had sometimes is like,
could you realistically, if you were turtle stuff stuff into
your shell? Not really.
It's not how that works. But if I was playing a cartoon,
that's what I would intuitively want to do.
So that's that's the the guiding, I think focus when and
where I think it makes sense. There's been times where we've
reeled, reigned it in a little bit.
But for the most part, I like advocate.
Like, yeah, if I was playing as a frog, I would want to be able
to jump farther then this thing, even if realistically doesn't
like make sense. We're playing a cartoon and
people are playing a frog. They're going to want to be able
to use their tongue to do this thing or to have any of these
other, like, cartoony tropes kind of be the guiding focus.
So I guess back to what you were initially asking.
Yeah, the goal was to have each of the categories feel distinct,
like narratively, but also mechanically, so that you do get
the benefit of being a turtle. And it's a way different play,
way different play experience than playing like a Roach, which
is why enjoys playing roaches. I play it rich.
I mean, and I will say because there's a difference with like
balance is this thing in game design that I find really
annoying because it's often tied to mechanics in terms of numbers
like quantitative balance. Like you're saying, like, OK, I
have 10 points to distribute in four different categories, so
we'll just create a bunch of categories where there's
different arrays of those same 10 points.
But we've found in practice running for 10 years versions of
Still fleet and now intensively a lot of blister critters in the
last few months, that that isn't as satisfying as having balance
that is sort of more narrative driven.
Like in Still Fate, there's a class that has the power to end
combat arbitrarily, to smooth things over the diplomat social
scientist class, and that's completely asymmetrical to all
the other combat powers because it ends combat.
So that's been really nice because you can have a, you can
have a party with a witness or with no witness and that will
change how you do combat because if you're getting pwned by
Cthulhu, you the witness could be like, guys, let's just talk
it out and then run away, you know.
And if you don't have that person, it's going to feel
different. So it's not a matter of whether
their stats are good or not. It's like does that person
exist? And I think here we, I think
Tony and I netted on something really nicely that fulfills
Tony's vision of a zany cartoon universe where like the SP for
being typically bigger, you know, like an alligator or a
turtle also you just have like flat areas you could strap stuff
to. I mean we just sort of justified
it however you want or it's cartoony and you open the the
secret compartment on your shell and drop stuff in, which is like
not how turtles work. Don't do that to a turtle.
It works either way. And it feels nice because it's
like cool. That's their thing.
They get more grit, they get more SP because their body plan,
but the fuzzy animals get more health because of our
metabolisms. So essentially as long as we're
eating we are kind of we've taken over the world because of
of being warm blooded. So it was just very simple like
trying to marry some of the what ifs about biology with these
kind of asymmetrical decisions to provide a kind of balance.
So everything, everything gets something fun, but it doesn't
have to feel A like a biology textbook or B to me like a more
boring game like a 5 E style. Like every category is strictly
quantitatively balanced. And to me that makes them a
little too similar to one another.
And they don't have that radical difference of like, cool, I'm a
Roach. I'm like, you know, yeah, I
could be a foot tall Roach, but I'm not going to be.
I'm going to be like a pretty big Roach, Like a gross large
size, like 4. Apocalyptic cartoon land like
it's Yeah, you're. Right.
But I'm not going to be a foot tall and I am squishy, right?
I'm just a Roach like and so, you know, I, I whatever.
So it's just, it's a different vibe.
Crunchy. Crunchy.
Exactly. Something that's well.
I think, oh, I'm sorry. So something that's also been
fun that we found in play testing, but also kind of trying
to future proof or think forward in terms of a character creation
and like pack. So party creation, a pack of
animals is like, well, what if people want to play a group of
frogs? Like what does that do if
everybody is the same kind of animal?
Or if everybody we haven't touched on this yet, What if
everybody picks the same role? What if they all want to be the
boss? Or what if they all want to be a
wallflower? What does that do for party
creation? And that's true for most any
like tabletop game that'll have those kind of archetypes in
there. But for, but specifically for
booster critters, it's fun. And that like the roles and then
the kind of animals that you're going to pair with them.
There's there's already a number of other other choices on the
menu where you can be a group of frogs, but one of those group of
frogs can be the brawler, and one of those frogs can be like
the brain of the group. So you can play a pack of Frog
and go through a whole season playing Battletoads if you
really want to. But yeah, I think there's so
much freedom and so much unexplored territory that that
I'm excited to see other people try out and Min Max to their
heart's delight. Right, Yeah.
Yeah. Like TMNT?
We talked a lot. A group of turtles.
You know, just four turtles. They're all wearing like, I
like, get a little mass and they all got like little plastic
weapons they found. So stuff, you know that's where
we're going. The one rat's the leader.
Yeah, it all makes perfect sense.
We're good here, you know, there's so many like we could
talk for like 2 hours on. Just like the the fun parts of
the system, like the surge die and things like that.
One of the things, one thing, and then I'll say the thing I
was really talking about what we were just talking about.
There's a lot of one thing I really enjoy and the way that
the game is written to is how much direction there is for
exactly. We all just talked about like
over and over again. It's like do fun shit because
it's fun. Like I don't care that things
don't fit in your shell. It's a cartoon like there's a
real sense of like strong mechanics mixed with this desire
to. I think this was something I was
trying to say before and and my brain went a different
direction. It's the rules feel so clean and
and and easy. Not easy but like just
straightforward. So you kind of really early get
this sense of like I can internalize them well enough to
know when I can break and tweak them, even as a player, even as
someone's like reading it, not just writing it.
And I think that cartoon aspect really kind of lends to that in
the system too, especially in like the nonsense powers and
things like that, where it's just the system allows for that
extra without the whole thing like falling apart.
And it that just feels really cool to see and to approach in a
game where you're like I couldn't just, I could be the
rage guy and go absolutely ape shit.
And I'm not gonna break this for the GM or for the other players.
Like there's plenty of room to kind of go off.
And one of the things that really allows that too early in
the quick start you talk about zany versus gnarly, which I mean
as far as I'm the gnarly, I would definitely go gnarly games
and I feel like kind of definitely go zany games.
So I guess just talk about that a little bit like what was the
reason to not only kind of have that as an option, but to
reinforce that kind of throughout too with different
ways to approach things? Yeah, this is, I mean Tony and I
talked a lot about this. Tony, do you want to, do you
want to sort of start off or? Yeah, I think we can bounce back
and forth on it because it's really, it's really like it came
from me and why they're working together and talking through and
how we wanted the game to feel. So I definitely approach
producing GM ING episodes very zany.
I lean full on into it being a cartoon.
It just paused to the wall. Go nuts with it being a cartoon
zaniness. And that was in the initial,
like, writings and ideas. It's kind of what I pitched to
live was this world that's like strictly cartoony and and zany
and stuff and live kind of bounced off of that a little bit
in a good way and was like, well, what if we incorporate
things that are, you know, more serious or the the gnarly bits
of it where it's like, well, this really was a world that
humans did once live in and they they did have these impacts.
And what would society look like for animals that are rebuilding
a civilization, you know, with or without the knowledge that
the humans had? And I like blister Critters more
now that I think it accommodates both ends where you can play a
episode of SpongeBob, but you can play an episode of I guess
whatever would be the other end where it's it's more focused
and. The Last of Us.
Like you could play walking. Dead, yeah, yeah.
Exactly. I run it as Walking Dead, but
you are. You look.
It looks like green and Stimpy, but you're in The Walking Dead,
you. Know what I mean?
Like. Yeah, and just instead of
zombies, they're just black bears with mutant, you know,
with like, tentacles and an elk with the skull.
The head is just a skull and there's like some sort of slime
dripping out of their neck. But it's it's The Walking Dead,
right. It's you're a bunch of critters
who are smart. There's the physics is the same.
It's just the world's gone to shit.
Humans fucked it up. You got to live here now and
you're like well well well I guess we got to make the most of
it and you have to like you know help each other and survive.
Tony runs it where the physics are cartoon physics and I think
what's that was such a fun challenge and I'm I'm really
appreciate that Tony worked with me because I was like this is so
fun and I know it would work and it would be fun and it would
probably like sell even if it was just the purely cartoony.
But I was like come on man, I'm a Marxist scholar.
Like can we make this about like climate change kinds and like
environmental disruption. Like can we make it like also
about those things and not take away from what you want to do.
And Tony was a real sport and we just sort of thought through in
each rules section you know. OK is there a way to modulator
offer opinions. And what I'd suggested was based
on a game called Rotted Capes which is a game I've read, I I
I've never actually played. But it's interesting because
it's about it's a superhero game, but it's it's in a zombie
apocalypse, so it's intentionally a mash up and it
has throughout these boxes on like almost every spread where
it's like if you're playing I forget the terms he uses, but
like pulp action comic, like it's pretty much just
superheroes and they're happening to be zombies.
Then do this. If you're playing the zombie
apocalypse version where it's very, very much about survival
and most of the A listers, the Superman's of the world, have
been turned to zombies. So they're still alive and they
have laser eyes and they can fly, but they're zombies.
They just want to eat your brains.
Then like, you're kind of screwed and like do this.
And there's also sort of middle. The implied thing is that the
main text is the middle option or you don't have to make that
choice. Like it's kind of a spectrum and
you can ignore it or you can lean One Direction or other.
So I sort of suggested to Tony, we could do something similar.
And we found the words gnarly and zany to describe these play
styles where it's very silly and you are cartoon animals, but
physics are basically physics. Or it's very zany in your
cartoon animals, but you're literally just purely in a
cartoon. There's no, like, outside of the
cartoon. It's not a comment on something,
it's a cartoon or song. And so that was fun to just sort
of check ourselves, like is a given rule set, you know, so
gnarly or so zany that it's going to like, upset the balance
of the universe. And honestly, I don't think
players even really care or like they get it So intuitively it
hasn't mattered in a in a good way.
Like, it hasn't come up as like, hey, this feels too zany.
Or you know what I mean, like why?
If you're not letting me be cartoon, like if someone
suggests something cartoony, I'm like, awesome.
That happens. It just was more for me, like as
AGM, the kind like I basically constantly reinvent these
stories about politics. So it instantly was about
squirrels. Take over Atlanta.
They set up a feudal society. They demand, you know, taxes.
And you, as these other critters have to like, figure out how to,
you know, push back on that or overthrow the queen or whatever.
But yes, you're all sort of cartoons and mutants and all
this other fun stuff. So it's somewhat like, just what
kind of games do you like to run?
I think, yeah. Go ahead, Tony.
I also like that it's not necessarily a binary either.
You can run a super zany game and then if you want to have
super hardcore rules about like this is the kind of food you can
eat and you as a producer want to lean into, you can only eat
food that you could actually consume.
You could do that. It may be it might feel weird if
you're you know. You know, blowing your arm up
like a balloon and bonking people on the head.
But, like, if that's what the table likes, there's rules in
there for you to pick and choose what parts of the game you want
to be zany, what games, what parts you want to be gnarly.
And it should be a conversation. It should be like evolving and
changing, where we're playing an episode, where we're just going
to go to the mall and have a good time, but then there's an
episode where, like, we're we're fighting like the bad guy and
we're going to play a little bit more serious, a little bit more
gnarly. I like that you can do both.
And it's pushed back on me like I have two examples, sorry if we
if we have time that I'll keep short.
But in recent play tests with a play tester, he plays a lot
named Ryan. He's really great.
He played a turtle who was a dasher.
So his mutant power is that he's superhumanly or super, really
fast. Yeah, super turtly fast.
But he's a turtle. And also like he, you know, he
was like, wait a second, turtles can't hold things.
So how do I grab that? And so we joked that you never
see him do it. So in this kind of because he, I
think he's used to my gnarly style of gaming ever into the
tables, we're kind of playing a gnarly game.
So it's not that it didn't happen, It's just you never see
it. So every scene he's at the back
of the group and he's like well I don't know guys and then cut
to he's at the front of the line.
He's the 1st to act and you just never like it's it's it's a joke
of camera cuts right. And it's so it's we leaned into
the cartoon aspect in a meta sense without changing the
gnarliness, the gnarly level of the feel of their their
campaign. And then another thing in just
trying to write this to plug the the quick Kickstarter.
You know, if you if you reserve a copy before the Kickstarter,
you get a short scene about the squirrel queendom of Atlanta
that's basically just coming out of a campaign I've been running.
And I was just trying to write out all the stuff.
And it's in the voice of the squirrels and they're explaining
to you their, their faction. And you know, you get all these
little venture hooks basically. But one of the things is they
just rediscovered, like they're paying soldiers and food and
also goof juice, which is clearly, like bottles of tequila
and vodka they found in the club in downtown Atlanta.
And so I was trying to write that out.
And even then, it's like, hard not to be cartoony.
So I was like, yeah, yeah, there's a special kind of more
fun water that our smartest, as scientists have dubbed Goofy
Juice or simply goof in honor of our wacky buddy Ronald T Juice.
We love that guy. And it's just that kind of,
like, energy that I'm like, you know, I'm just going to keep
that in even though it makes it it.
It's definitely not gnarly, but it's like, yeah, this is a
cartoon and I want people to have the the feeling that they
could run it in that completely just batshit cartoony style.
So yeah. It's interesting how good of
like a groove you guys have carved out in like this
narrative space that you're like operating in.
Like it does really seem like it works incredibly well.
I mean, even like if we, if we go to maybe not just Saturday
morning cartoons, the kind of cartoons that go on like
episodically that have like this deeper narrative, sometimes they
do have these moments that are really zany and sometimes they
do have these moments that are like, oh, it's fucking
emotionally heavy. Or like sometimes physics do
matter, sometimes they don't, doesn't really matter because
it's about like the episode that you're in.
So earlier, before we started talking, you guys kind of
mentioned like player agency within the rules and how they're
ridden. I would really like to hear you
expand upon that, if you wouldn't mind.
Yeah, that's like my favorite. I think one of, if not the
favorite bit of blister critters for me especially producing it
is I think. I think it's born out of how I
just run games generally where I'm very like player forward.
I do very little prep, very improv heavy and so blister
critters allows me to lean into that a lot.
But in that a lot of blister critters is set up so that it's
very familiar and easy to pick up and just really dive into
from a player perspective. So there's not this prerequisite
of knowledge for like what's the name of this weird medieval
weapon or I need to have some kind of you know knowledge about
how the Old West was set up or what's the name for this like
sci-fi thing. All of those are have a million
great games a still fleet included.
But for blister critters specifically it's it's your
house it's your world. It's the, you know, it's the
711. It's Walmart.
It's you know it's the arcade. And so in that there's like an
immediate click for players that I've seen.
And I think why this scene as well where players that are
getting into it, there's not like the world is strange, but
it's very familiar. And so then in that when you're
like, we're running through a house and they're like, I want
to find like a cool weapon, what's around.
I'm like, well, you're in a kids room.
What would be in a kids room? And so as part of setting up a
scene or setting up a location in the rules, it's suggested and
courage that producers ask players, Ask the people at the
table, you know, what's the theme of this room?
It's dinosaur themed. Sweet, Cool.
Can you give me like 3 big pieces of furniture that would
be in this room and then I'd look to a different player.
Yeah, there's a big dinosaur lamp and there's something
hanging from the ceiling. And the bed itself is shaped
like a, like, a Triceratops head.
Sweet. You know, what's his favorite?
What was this kid's favorite color?
Green. And then this whole room is made
for me as a producer. But now the players are super
invested in this dinosaur green room where they already know
there's like a Mecca Triceratops figure that's on one of the
shovels that they can definitely use as like a blaster, has a
little like plastic pellet that'll shoot out of it or has
like laser eyes. And that's been a lot of fun to
like, encourage and running it. People get that like
immediately. So all of this stuff and all of
at least the way that I run it, everything is super player
generated where when we did, we did an actual play recently and
I knew that it was going to be an arcade and I knew that there
was going to be like an alligator, like mob boss.
But prior to the episode IA core part of list recruiters is prior
to each episode we're offering like a book of ad libs.
So like a fill in the blank sheet where as people are
settling in at the table, you would pass it around as the GM,
as the producer and they can fill it in.
And then the idea is that just as the episode is starting, just
as you guys get ready to play, you read off this a crappy
infomercial filled in with all of the weird adjectives and
stuff. So as part of that, the the
players of our actual play called it the Roly Poly Arcade.
There was a big skee ball machine that was shaped like a
dog's head and like a number of other things that like I had not
set up in that that location prior but became like integral
parts of of that episode. As we walked into the arcade, I
I went around the table again and asked for like there's a
restaurant in here and what's the name of the restaurant?
What do they serve and why? They have like a Tex Mex place
that's in the corner of this, like Chuck E Cheese.
My other player introduced like this big ball pit, but because
the place was called Roly Poly instead of like plastic colorful
balls, they were all shaped like gross bugs all wrapped up.
And all of those elements play in.
Somebody slipped on one of the gross like burritos.
Later in the episode they swapped out one of the balls
with the gross bug balls while they were doing their final
batch off against the alligator mob boss playing Skee ball for
to win the to to save the day essentially.
And all of that is is a lot of fun.
I think it puts a certain amount of responsibility on players
that maybe other systems don't. But I think because it's so
familiar and because the rules are as like freeing and quick to
grab as they are, it makes all of that, like on the spot
content creation, super, super easy and super fun for them.
Because now they're like I I made-up that there's a dog
shaped skee ball machine and now we're playing on the dog shaped
skee ball machine. Yeah, yeah.
And there's there's also a rule of like coming up with canonical
products in the game universe. And that worked, works really
well with campaign play where each time I like check in with
players and if they don't have an idea, it's totally fine and
we kind of just quickly move on. But sometimes people will have
an idea. And so with, you know, this
convention, I ran a few in a row and and some people were
playing, you know, multiple times, like one person said, one
of one of the members of the studio said Chrome mouth
ointment, which was like a goop style, like toothpaste that
comes in like a bamboo box for some reason.
And we were all just like grossed out by that.
But what came up more is somebody said Marge Bar and
we're like Marge Bar, OK, go on. And he's like just the hair.
And we were like, what is it? He's like, it's an oversized,
it's like an XL size candy bar that's all blue chocolate all
the way down. It's just solid blue chocolate
in the shape. And the commercials are like all
really sad. It's like the it's like her
anxiety is like the thing foregrounded by this brand where
it's like oh and so we kept finding you know Marge Bar
became the go to food that that was one of the main things that
the Squirrel legionaries like you know that that's kind of
what they relied upon is they had found troves of this off
brand or like was like a knock off of The Simpsons or something
brand candy bar. And so I love that that the sort
of player agency it's it's just saying the quiet part out loud.
It's like whatever GM wants is for players to be like yeah,
yeah, yeah. The Tavern also has my buddy
from whatever medieval high school you know is behind the
bar now and I'm an adventurer and like there's some weird
thing going on but players often don't do that.
They don't necessarily feel empowered.
So I really appreciate that Tony made that a core piece of
blister critters to try to think of rules where it's like at the
beginning of the game, ask people to do a little of that
work. And even if they don't do it,
frankly, it at least like puts that thought in their head.
And then maybe over time they're going to feel more comfortable
saying, you know what, I I do have an idea for what's in this
room. I do have an idea for, you know,
sort of the world and not just my my perspective.
So I think that's not something unique to this game, but it's
something we definitely wanted to sort of underline and carry
throughout the book. Well, one thing.
I love that. And I think one of the reasons
it works so well is because of the, like you said, the instant
familiarity you get because you're playing in this, like,
human world. So it's we all know the things.
You're like you're in a room and you're like, I'm in a room.
It could be any of these things. So they're like, it's really
easy. There's it reminds me, like part
of this, reminds me a lot about a Mouse Ritter, in that in mouse
Ritter you you exist in a human world and all the things you
find are human. So it's really easy to be like,
Oh well, my sword's just a needle or whatever.
You don't have to make up fantasy stuff or whatever.
You can just see things that are really familiar to you.
And I think having that player agency in a system in a world
that makes it easy because it is the world we already live in,
just really feeds into that a lot more than it might.
It would still be fun in, like I said, like a fantasy medieval
world or whatever. But I feel like it might be a
little bit more difficult because you have to think about
what's in like a fantasy medieval room versus knowing
what you're in there already. So it's just a really good, like
the two mesh really wheel together to make it, you know,
even even bigger and even better in that an aspect that's that's
really, really cool and really fun to see.
Yeah, it ties in really well with one of the massive pillars
of list recruiters being stuff. So like down all the equipment,
all of the things that people want to pick up and swing around
like a weapon. They're really only limited by
what you're willing to ask for as a player.
So like as part of the rules in the core book we have like
something like 200 like listed stuff currently for people to to
use as whatever they would want. But like one of my favorites
that's actually in the quick start is an action figure arm
and just like this big buff arm with like spikes on it.
And I found that people like using it.
I've had a player where their legs were blown off.
They were a praying mantis and both of their two, I guess
that's of their lips. One set of two legs were blown
off and they just so happened to have two action figure limbs on
them at the time. And they were, they asked me and
like you know before the next episode starts here at the end
of the episode, could I talk to like the borough medic or
whoever and have them attach both of the action figure limbs
to my praying mantis body? And because I run a super zany
game and I wanted, I wanted them to be able to do that.
I was like absolutely. So at the start of the next
episode the they they're also a brawler.
So it kind of made sense. They're like the buff fighting
person of the group. They started the next episode
the next session with two of their legs with these big
hulking plastic arms that don't bend right.
But now they get to do these really sweet punch kicks in.
Combat and stuff like that is just a lot of fun.
Punch Kicker A number of times I've thought of Community
through this too, which is not a cartoon, but it's probably the
most cartoon live action show ever, even in, like the Let's
have a zany one. But like let's make it like
extremely depressingly existential when you realize why
everyone is a clay figure, you know one of the things that's
coming up a bunch, the and the thing that I really, really
enjoy is episodes, the scenes, the pre show, all of that stuff
we talked about it being a feeling like a Saturday morning
cartoon in like the vibes and a lot of stuff you do, but
actually the the the way you play the game as far as your
sessions and things really feed into that as well.
So do you want to talk about that a little bit about why and
and how that works? Because I really, really enjoy
that mechanic as well. Yeah, that's just another step
towards mechanicalizing vibes of having it set up so that, like
when you play blister critters you are playing in an episode
there things are delineated by scenes, much like a cartoon or,
you know, a more serious animated show would be.
And in that way, it lets you segment play and approach,
approach play in a way where you're using terms that are
like, you know, associated with with TV shows and movies and
stuff, but also puts you in a position where play can be
segmented up like little beats, like little narrative story
beats, much like a cartoon would be, where maybe the narrative
doesn't take through the whole episode.
You get through this kind of weird interaction in one or two
scenes, and then something totally different happens.
And that's you're able to do that through blister critters,
through through setting things up and then through settings up
in that way. But I also enjoy like the
aesthetic of it, I guess of like making sure that every aspect of
blister critters that I can like really double down on be like,
no, this is a cartoon. Even if you're playing gnarly, I
want to be super undeniable and every weird facet that I can
make it. You're playing through a
cartoon, the GM is the producer. You are characters on ATV show.
Yeah, I don't know if why. Do you have something more
specific to bring up? Yeah, I mean, you know, I was
went to school to be a screenwriter and I love that
format. And I think there's something
really fulfilling still about the kind of Aristotelian arc and
you know, having a climax. I love ending on a cliffhanger
and I play a lot of campaigns of now still Fleet in what before
that became still fleet sort of an OSR game that evolved into
this rule set and Cyproach blister critters the same.
So even if we don't don't call them episodes in another game,
it's like that format works really well for a variety of
reasons. I think there's like an
inherent, like, narrative reason it works.
And also it's a familiarity thing.
People know what TV is. We all watch a lot of episodic
content. So people know, like, OK, we
have 15 minutes left IRL. We're going towards some kind of
ending. And you can as a player, you let
your unconscious, like, formulate, all right, I'm going
to do one more crazy thing. You know, I'm going to get in
the limelight one more time as AGM.
You're like, OK, crap, I have to like, get somewhere.
So I think it's effective even again if you don't call it out,
but making that quiet part louder and very apparent
throughout was really nice with blister critters because you
know there's a number of other games doing that also now, which
I I think makes total sense. I don't know why we weren't
doing that years ago in game design, but it works really well
because you with imagination based games you are kind of
telling these stories and you do have to be attentive to like
well so and so's got to leave at you know 3 whatever.
So there's just there, there are these pressures to kind of
tighten time and in organized time, but you don't want it to
be on fun. You don't want to be like time
referee. So I think having the idea of an
episode, episodes have a certain arc, they have a certain length
is sort of a natural way to like in a way make that less anxiety
producing that like, you know, we're only going to play so much
content today and that can be one episode in a show and the
show is ongoing. Cartoons that we grew up with
generally go on forever and sometimes to their detriment.
I mean you think of Dragon Ball Z, which I have fond memories of
watching. I mean, half of the time it was
a guy just doing this with, you know, animated fire around him.
Listen that shows perfect in every way sure something cuz one
of my one of my ideas for a character was a was a turtle
that watched DBZ and and for bulk up did koken you know.
Awesome. That's great.
Yeah. I mean, I love and I guess, you
know, you could play a campaign like that where you're like, OK,
roll to see how cool you look as you stare at the camera.
But I just mentioned that I think Tony had also had this
idea of like, well, because I play stuff like campaigns, I
have several that currently that have been gone on for like 4
years, you know, that are still active.
But I think one of the ideas here was, like, what if you had
roughly a season of like 10 episodes and then kind of
everyone's dead or a mutant or you've, you know, you probably
want to try something else, even if you just want to try maybe
another game of blister critters with a new animal.
So we tried to keep that in mind that, like, critters don't live
that long. And the kinds of epic even,
like, political shenanigans they get up to with their boroughs
are not going to be as big an epic as a human scale kind of
game. So yeah, we tried to think
about, OK, you're playing roughly 10/2 to 4 hour episodes
and what what could you do in that time?
And so the book kind of assumes that you could easily do other
things. But I think that was a, again,
again, good call on Tony's choice in terms of helping us
design a book. Right.
Yeah, I think. You can only do three seasons
anyway because then you know they cut your funding and re
review. Your contract.
Yeah, exactly, exactly. You have to go pitch Amazon or
something. Yeah, Yeah.
Well, one thing I really love about the episodes too, and this
is just another way that the game continues to reinforce
itself, is again, the familiarity.
The same thing with the setting with the episodes too because I
mean almost all of us are millennial, post millennial or
elder millennials. We did grow up with those Sunday
morning cartoons and we know exactly what the pre show is.
We know exactly what the recap is when half of DBZ was just
recapping how they stood there, you know for the entire episode
and then the scenes and then the ending credits and everything
too. So there is still that really
good sense of familiarity that you already understand the
concept from from other parts of the game.
So when it happens episodically too, you're like, oh, this is
just like that other thing, like it's AI feel like there's it's a
lot of game of like references to things that you know which
which makes it so much more approachable, which is really
great. Yeah, and it's even part of like
the powers that producers have to do like cutaways like I was
describing earlier, like it's, I'm sure it didn't originate in
SpongeBob, but that's my touchstone for it is like the
harsh cutaway. It's like an overly painted,
like Ren and Stimpy does them as well, the overly painted in
super detailed shot. I like doing those in my games.
But when I produce, I also like to lean into describing things
like the camera pans down or the camera follows this here.
And while I'm producing, while I'm going through it, I try to
keep in mind, like, what does this look like?
How can I impart that? And I think players really get a
lot out of that and they know how to lean into it because they
do know, like at the end of an episode, like I'm going to use
all of my grit. I'm going to go for it, but I
think the backtrack only slightly.
Having them be episodic and having them be smaller in scope
encourages people to go all out with their critter.
If you only get 10 episodes, you're not going to waste an
episode sitting around. You're going to make sure you go
for it every time, Yeah, yeah. So yeah, love the game.
It's fantastic. Can't wait to get it, can't wait
to play it, can't wait to review it here on the show.
I could talk. We again, we could talk about
this for hours and hours. But also, this is going to be a
Kickstarter. This is happening for Zine
Quest. So as far as the Kickstarter
goes, I guess first we'll post the dates, obviously.
But what are the dates for the Kickstarter?
What can people expect from the Kickstarter?
And if you guys know, like, I mean whatever you want to say,
if you want to do price ranges, tears, talk about this box that
I keep hearing about. I got a whole bookshelf that's
literally just box sets. So I'll make room.
Talk to me about the Kickstarter.
What, what can, what do people need to know?
What can people expect and how much do they need to put aside
before February for this project?
Yeah, well, it is going to be a Kickstarter for Zine Quest and I
think that makes sense given, you know, it's that time of the
year and it feels it's it's an indie game, I mean at the end of
the day. So it's a little more ambitious
than some of the work Tony and I've done before, but it's still
just just us, right? It's not a big company.
So it's in questy. So February 6th is when we're
targeting the launch and you can pick up the just the PDF if you
just want the rules, all the rules, but you can also pick up
the book. But what we really want to sell
is the box set because we think that's kind of the full
experience. It's obviously the book also has
a bunch of other pieces that Tony has created, so he's making
this giant oversized double sided poster of stuff.
So tons and tons of artwork And on the back the rules for I I
don't know how much we could probably fit 200 like rules for
stuff. So that would be actually any
reference, right? And it'll look cool if you
again, if you like Tony's art, it's really rad.
Check it out. You can also get cards, which is
a big focus and we'd like to hit stretch goals to do more cards.
So we're we're definitely putting the box 48 cards.
We may be able to do more if we had some stretch goals.
The cards will have beasts and bliffs and so those will be fun
as a GM. I mean, I play a lot over
Discord and I do this with cards for Still fleet, where we can
still hold them up the camera and show you the art.
And it's just a fast way. It has the rules in one side,
art on the other. So it's useful for jamming.
It's just a fun interactive experience.
And who doesn't like, you know, a booster pack of awesome art
and fun ideas, right? So you can use them in your
games. They might inspire something a
little bit different format. Some people are a little more
sort of visual tactile as opposed to flipping through the
book. There's also stickers.
Who doesn't like a a sheet of like high quality vinyl
stickers? Again, Tony's awesome art and
there's dice. So that is sort of what's in the
box. If we don't hit any stretch
goals but we are able to produce this game, you can get sort of
the full experience and then as we have stretch goals, those
will also go in the the Deluxe Kickstarter exclusive box,
right. So that is our focus is trying
to make this box as awesome as possible, produce a lot of them
so that we have the ability to kind of bring blister critters
to the world post Kickstarter. And really so we can make more
of it because we have a lot of ideas for other fun things we
could do. But we would need to, you know,
sell enough of these boxes to sort of sustain that and and do
future rules and playing his plants and and fungi and all
kinds of other fun things that we've dreamed up.
So now, Tony, do you want to add any, any sort of details there?
I mean, there's a lot to say. No I please quick starter starts
launches February 6th. You know go to
blistercritters.com and hit the little notify button so you get
a nice e-mail from when we actually go live earlier.
Why It's just talking about a like a squirrel queendom set in
Atlanta that he is putting together.
You can reserve your copy of Blister Critters early for a
dollar at play.blistercritters.com and
that'll get you exclusive access to that Zine when it goes up.
The squirrel Zine? We're not going to be selling it
outside of that website and that link.
So play.blistercritters.com to grab up the squirrel
zineblistercritters.com to get notified on February 6th when we
launch. Yeah, I'm really excited about
the box set. I think it looks badass.
We're filling you with all kinds of cool stuff.
I'm. I think I'm most stoked about
the cards and just being able to have this really rad set of
beasts and bliffs and all kinds of other wacky things that are
going to go on the cards. Yeah.
And if we can hit. If we can hit the stretch goals,
we have some plans I think further down the stretch goal
line for adding in rules like Wythe said, for playing as
mushrooms and for expanding upon stuff and having like food
bliffs and all kinds of, you know, our our ideas aren't
aren't satiated. We have so much more to write
and put into it. We're kind of just limited by
the scope of how how well we fund and seeing what is going to
push us forward next for blister critters in the Still Fleet
Studio as a whole. Yeah, and Tony's time because
the art is amazing and Tony's already done so much, but we've
scoped out like wow, this is like hundreds of cool cartoon
animal scenes you have to draw. So to some degree, you know
that's that's why we've chosen the products that we have for
the box. We think it's it's a really good
deal and just to talk numbers since since you had brought that
up as well, you know it's going to retail for more than this
after. But on the Kickstarter the box
is 45 that the 1st 200 people can get it for 39.
So that's a pretty significant discount.
And as Tony said if you go to play.blistercritters.com for one
extra dollar you can also get as as in that you can only get that
way about you know essentially this this setting in faction
sort of with with some other little mechanical things.
So yeah we think it's it's a really fun set of objects and
there's a lot there's like a tons of stuff to do there and
you can easily make your own. One of the people on our server
that we play with a lot who lives in Australia is already
making like, OK, but I have to do the Australian version
because the animals and plants are very different there.
Tony and I grew up, you know, in the Sunbelt I live in, in New
York. And so, you know, it's a very,
it sort of reflects like East Coast urban suburban life.
But we have all these ideas for like how we have to do, you
know, a very rural setting. Like I want to do one set in
like the swamps of Louisiana, like where my family is from.
And you know, that's not going to be in the book right now, but
you know, if we'd hit a bunch of stretch goals, maybe we'll have
to add some stuff. So.
No, dude, I was immediately, especially after you talking
about like the the squirrel adventure in Atlanta that is
based off of your own experience.
I was thinking of, like, me, if I ran a game here because I'm in
Eugene, OR, I'm like, what would I do?
And there's like hundreds of geese and ducks here.
And so I was like, oh, the concordance of geese.
You know, they've taken over Eugene.
Yeah. But yeah, I think this this is
so rife with like, I think at one point in time we were
talking to you go from the Lost Bay about how you take these
games and you know when Lost Bay tries to put stuff out, they try
to strip away as much as they can and let you project your own
experience onto what comes out, like Sky Realms.
And this is another great one for you.
Like you can get this in hand and project your own experience
of like suburbia or like my weird rural art town that I live
in and the animals that live there or the wildlife there and
how you can create your own adventure.
I it's so cool. I'm really genuinely so excited
to play this and I definitely have a screen pulled up right
now that's the Lane County wildlife and.
It's it's awesome. I love hearing people like, oh,
what if I got to do it in my town?
Like, that's perfect. That's all.
That's all I really want out of sharing the game is that people
can be a little rat, be a little lizard and go go blow up their
local Walmart. Yeah, and we love, I love Eco's
work. I love Lost Bay.
And I think there is something about defining the balance.
That's something we try to do really hard.
That's like one of the precepts of the Sulfate studio is like
making games that have that feeling of depth, but they're
not restrictive. And there's kind of constant
reminders like hack this, make make stuff up, add stuff here.
This is a sketch. This is Mcguffin.
So with the flagship sci-fi game, we have tons of, like,
lore. But if you actually read it,
it's mostly like 2 paragraphs of like, yeah, the company went
here, some guys got blasted by lasers.
We ended up working out a deal. That was 20 years ago.
I don't know, maybe you should go back.
So it's sort of these evocative like possibilities that they're
sort of nods and genres or tropes or references, and the
we've seen GM's use those and tell amazing stories and really
make different worlds their own. So I think here, even more so to
Tony's point, that it's actual industrial modernity, just poof,
no humans. So it's very easy.
It should be easy for literally anyone to be like, cool.
I'm going to set it in the elementary school I attended.
You know that's where the critters are or I'm going to set
it at the shopping mall near me or you know I went on vacation
once and I'm going to you know. So it's like it there should be
a lot of ideas percolating and certainly it's not restrictive
in the slightest and there is no setting with blister critters be
that's detailed in in in full just because it's like yeah the
setting is your place you live you know and there's lots of
rules about how you know from more optional to like the core
just rolling noggin to find stuff you want you know there's
ways to mechanicalize it but it's it's it's done in a kind of
light way that it that's meant to find that balance so it feels
deep. It implies that stuff went on
the poof was bad but from the perspective of the critters you
know you are wherever you are and you're just trying to
survive. So that's been fun.
That's definitely been fun to to see how how, how different
people you know play out. And I mean, let's talk about the
art too real quick. How nice is it to have an in
house artist and any time that you can have someone who is this
like this dual threat that's designer that can also like
actually do the art for what they see is is fantastic.
So I mean love your art, Tony, all super jealous that you can
do that and also design a good game too.
So that's it's good for you guys, it's.
It's something. So when it's something, when
we're talking about, yeah, let's just do like in our our high,
high pie in the sky dreams. Like let's just do 100 cards.
That's probably not going to be happening.
But then when I sat down, I was like, logistically, it's 100
illustrations that I have to do and it'd be really, really rad.
But I don't know this if we can do that.
So I also suffer from being like, OK, it's not enough for me
just to write this. I'm going to illustrate this as
well. So every page that I can fill
with artwork, I am definitely going to, because I like art
heavy, like tabletop games, and I like, I like people to be.
I like the idea and I like when I'm able to do is flipping the
page and having this wholly unique spread full of work.
So getting to do that is fun, but it is, it is wildly time
consuming, you know, wildly time consuming to do.
But it's a it's a good problem to have.
Yeah, and it's fun. It's fun to work on something
that's a little more art driven, because while still we had a
very distinct visual style and Ethan, the lead artist, was
involved from the very beginning of making that a product.
And it's contributed a lot both to the ideas in the game as well
as obviously the art. It was driven by.
Like, I'm a professional writer and I've already written a book.
So this is a little different in that Tony had written some
things, but it was more like, all right, let's talk about what
you want to do and look at the art.
And then in a way you're going to write a thing and I'm going
to help write bits and we're going to edit it and figure out
the mechanics together based on the art.
Like you said, like that was that incipient, like we have to
make a game about this art because the art is so cool,
which is very different from how I would work just because I
can't draw right. So I'm not that's that's just
not how I make games. So that's been fun and and
really easy and I think we'll probably end up doing you know
mix of these things in the future, so.
Yeah I the Sunday morning cartoon thing.
The kid like toy thing and everything.
If at some point in the future you could just go on the website
and buy booster packs of cards that'd be so cool to be able to
just like peel it open like a Pokémon pack and you get like a
new character option or like new stuff options new bliff, that
would be fantastic. I mean we'll we'll see how the
how it funds but honestly if I if you read this Kickstarter or
the the the quick start I can't imagine someone's gonna be like
no this is like super cool so I'm just gonna not like it it
this project looks great it sounds great the art's fantastic
the mechanics are great. Again, super, super excited for
this. We're talking still clean a
bunch. What's up if?
You weren't convinced by the quick Start?
Check out the video that we just dropped.
Oh yeah. On my Twitter, there is a bit of
animation that I've done, so there is actually a Blister
Critter's 30 Seconds of a Blister Critter's cartoon that
is canonized, as well as a bit of a shoddy infomercial that I
shot in my bedroom. I'm very proud of it.
That's going to be the Kickstarter video with some
updates as we get closer to the launch.
So the quick start isn't convincing.
Have me shout at you for a minute and 1/2 in a really goofy
voice and that should do the trick.
Yeah, so I'm saying he's a triple threat.
He's he's also doing animation. I mean it's it's wild.
So it's been a while to work with someone who can just bring
that energy and and talent to every aspect of this.
And all we have to do is you know, edit it, make a product
mark, you know like the, the sort of the, the other stuff
that I would have no idea how to to animate this so.
Make capitalism happen? Yeah, we're doing.
Capitalism. Yeah, hit the button.
There's a huge red. Button that says make the thing
and pipes that you know connects us to Shenzhen or whatever.
Critter in the future can find a box set and wonder what this
thing is that's inside. And it's.
Exactly. There is canonically the game
Still Fleet in the universe of still fleet and it's kind of
stuck in there. So I think this is similar where
I think Tony, you've already drawn some of the critters
playing with polyhedral dice and stuff, so.
I think that's. That's on our brains, but yeah.
Well, I think they're one of ones, One of the, I can't
remember which one it is that has an ability that I can
squeeze through any space that would fit AD 20.
And I was like, yeah, that's great.
So we've talked about Stillfleet a bunch.
Where can people find Stillfleet so that they can check out kind
of where the this grid system, the core system that was adapted
into blister critters, came from?
Yeah, so stillfleet.com is where all our stuff lives, and we're
redoing it right now. So in part mostly because of
blister critters, but also with the SRD coming out, I mean,
we're going to have the grid system, SRD.
We have a license, so we really want people to use the grid
system and have fun with it. And Blister Critters is going to
be sort of our first shining example of that of of, you know,
working with someone else to make it official.
But in a way it was, you know, Tony could have easily just made
a thing using our rules and again, there's a license.
So we want people to use our rules and we want to make that
easier. So we're we're we're working on
it. It's just a small team.
So read on the site right now and we will have later in the
year, we're going to reprint the sci-fi stuff so you'll be able
to get those books physically. In the meantime, you get the
PDFs, so you know we're on it, we're on drive through, drive
through RPG, all that stuff and we will have basically these,
these two products right, Still feed all the sci-fi stuff and
blister critters, which is amazing.
And hopefully by the end of the year you know you will be able
to get both physically, you know, in stores.
But of course with a Kickstarter you can get some exclusives only
through the Kickstarter. So that is the best place to
back blister critters. Kind of like exclusive stuff
from Kickstarter. It's it's kind of a whole thing
that I have. It's part of my personality at
this point and part of the show, so I will be getting all of the
stuff if I can. And same thing with you, Tony.
Odd Odd Games you put out. AMU.
We've already talked about this numerous time.
Gorgeous, beautiful, Super excited for that, to actually
get to go through that. Definitely going to do that with
Hunter, but where can people find that?
Where can people find the other stuff you've already done as
well? Yeah, I'm at Odd Gob Games on
both Instagram and X slash Twitter.
I post there as frequently as I can.
I post, like updates, and when I have to do the Capitalism
button, I post ads and promotional stuff there.
Odd Gob games dot H dot IOI have a handful of smaller games I've
dabbled in, like print and play. Board game stuff, like Frogs
with Shotguns is like a weird precursor to Blister Critters.
In a way, it's all illustrated, written, and done by me.
So if you're looking for some other fun games that look like
what I do, but have a distinctly different vibe, you can find
them there. Yeah, that's where I'm at.
Seriously, thank you guys so much for coming on the show.
Like I said, we both are so excited for this project.
And hey, listen, we're still weeks away from Zing Quest, but
at some point in the future, as Blister Critter gets funded and
we start making more Blister Critters, if you guys want to
come back and and and and play an episode, we'd be super down
for it. So just keep it in mind and
yeah, yeah, we'd love to have you guys back.
On the Still Fleet YouTube, which everywhere, just
everywhere at Still Fleets, if you go look this up, you can see
the first published actual play we did with Gende la Vega of Fun
City and Die RPG and on Replay and that was super fun and we
kept it really tight, Tony GM and it was really fun.
It was like honestly cutting out the beginning and it was like an
hour and a half game and it felt very narratively satisfying and
without spoilers like it's not combatty, but there were a lot
of roles. So it it gives you a good sense
of the grit system. It gives you a good sense of the
world of a game and Tony's amazing art actually, because
Tony also live like Drew stuff as we were describing it.
So you know, I, you know, I definitely recommend that, but
maybe we could even put together Tony not to put you in the spot
something like that for for, you know these guys.
Yeah, I'd love no spots. On everything.
All for the spots, yeah. Yeah, I'd like to come back and
produce, and if we can work it out, I'd love to because
sometimes different apps are weird about it.
But I'd love to share my screen. I like to.
I like to GM with a live drawing thing.
It just feels really natural. I think people get a lot out of
it, so. You can make it happen.
Technology does exist. We will do that, absolutely.
You just let us know the time after February because we are
just Zine quest is is really, really blowing us up and we will
100% make the time for that. So if you're watching or
listening now, definitely definitely plan to see that in
the future. But again, seriously, thank you
guys so much for coming on. It's been fantastic talking to
you. We could talk all day but both
of us have to go to bed. So again, really appreciate it.
Make sure you check out all this stuff and back blister critters
February 6th. We'll see you guys all later.
Bye, bye.