Hello and welcome to the Weekly Scroll Podcast.
My name is Ryan and with me today we have a bunch of special
guests. We have Robbie, Tyler, and
Kelsey. How are you all doing today?
Hello. Doing well.
Great.
Thumbs up from Kelsey for all the people in podcast land since
it's a podcast. But yeah.
So how's it going? We're good, Everyone's good,
We're good. So you guys are Gossamer Coast.
So who who? Let's let's go left to right.
We got Robbie Tyler then Kelsey, what is Gossamer Coast?
What is your guys each? What do you do with it and what
might people know some of your stuff for here in the the TTRPG
space? So Gossamer Coast started out as
Glass Cutter and that was like 10 years ago or so.
Me and Tyler used to make a lot of comics together and I would
do the drawings and he would do the writings.
And then like 4 years ago or something like that we 5 five
years ago we started doing more TTRPG stuff and only a few years
ago we switched to Gossamer Coast.
But our first project that we did was Glimmers Rim, but copy
of it. Oh, this isn't like a home print
copy, but that's what that looks like.
But we did it for as. Which scene quest was it?
I don't know which one. One is like 2021.
Yeah. And then good one.
Yeah. It was great.
And we were a lot more successful with that than we had
ever been making comics. And it's like, oh, people like,
we can like make tools for people to use instead of like a
thing that is trying to, like, entertain them.
And that it just seemed it seemed a lot more fruitful.
And that was, yeah, it just, we've been doing TTRPG stuff
since then as Gossamer Coast. But you you kinda was where the
name came from though. Yeah, yeah, that's just the name
of of the home crew world that we play in.
But yeah, Robbie kind of hit all the notes on on on Gossamer
Coast stuff. Glimmers.
If anyone knows me from anything, it's Glimmers.
Room. Probably we have some other
short adventures. I have a stack of all the stuff
that I got from Jen Connor from you guys.
It literally just in the other room.
But I run back and forth so many times.
I'm going to maybe on a break. So that's, that's Gossamer Coast
and stuff. But where?
So so where does where Kelsey? Where do you fit into all of
this? Yeah, so I met Robbie and Tyler
like fall to like 2019 and then started dating Robbie a few
months after that. It was actually like our one
year anniversary where I remember we took a little
weekend trip and Tyler called Robbie like part way through to
be like, yeah, our project got funded and that was pretty
special. We were also snowed into a hotel
and it was a very poorly planned trip.
But anyway, so I didn't wasn't really all that involved until
after they had like finished like making glimmers ram and
we're doing the like fulfillment stuff.
I was just like a lot of envelopes to to stuff.
I think that y'all need some help.
And so I just kind of started doing like odds and ends kind of
stuff. I love tabling.
Like I, I was a Girl Scout. I sold cookies and I don't get
to do that anymore because now I'm an adult.
So I started tabling with Ravi more and like selling art in our
books. And then just over time it
became more. But it's like I'll just, I'll
just join for real for real and it'll make some things easier.
When, when Kelsey started tabling, like our sales went up
like 800%. Like it was like we would do
farmers markets and stuff and she'd be calling fools like from
the other side of the sidewalk that were just like looking at a
tree or whatever. And she'd be like, hey, we got
like D&D related stuff because no one knows what like TTRPTS
are. And people would just come over
and then like buy a lot of stuff.
And it's it's very, very magical to have Kelsey on board with.
That well, I mean, that's always good to have.
If you have artist, you have writer and you have like
basically the John Bottom of like everything else, you know,
that's that's a great a great person to have on the team.
You already held up Glimmers run.
You have a lot of stuff you've already done as a group.
Most of it is system agnostic adventures.
What was the kind of impetus to to, I guess, start with or do
mostly that kind of stuff? It was the, so it just started
with Glimmer's Rim and it was the idea that came to me at the
time was just to do a system agnostic adventure.
That was the thing I was interested in pursuing.
I wanted to make a a hex crawl that was, had smaller hexes and
was more focused so that it was you were, you were always
maximalizing the amount of content you had available to
pull up, pull on whenever, wherever you were.
And once we made one, it was just kind of easy to make a few
more. But I am I love general game
design stuff and I am very excited that we are starting to
do stuff that is not just system agnostic adventure things.
More systems, more small weird games.
The the original pitch for Glimmer's rim was as like a kind
of a stopgap thing, but it kind of ballooned out.
It is, it can absolutely like be its own little mini almost
campaign setting to a degree. But that the idea is like,
you're running a game and then like some folks find a ship and
I think it's literally happened to Tyler.
One DND thing. They're like, yeah, we just want
to like hide on that ship to see where that goes.
And you're just like, OK, well, I guess fuck my whole world
then. So the idea is like, you can
pull this off the shelf and then you have something that can be
as long, as short or short as you want.
And Kelsey was the project lead on Candleberry, which was the
next thing that came out. And she kind of, she wrote, she
wrote that. So I don't know if you want to
talk about that, Kelsey. Sure.
Yeah, that one we I had talked to someone at PAX and they were
like yeah, we got this like small convention coming up
called game face can be in Baltimore like y'all should come
table and we were looking at the stuff we normally table with
we're like we want some new things.
We have two months. It's probably enough time.
And we learned that we don't do stuff quickly.
But around the same time, it for better or for worse, I got
COVID. And so I was like quarantining
in my room, and I was real bored.
And at the time, I was working on this campaign for saving
Philadelphia's Chinatown. There's this whole, like,
predatory development situation happening.
And there was a big coalition that I got to work and be a part
of to oppose it. And so, like, while I was stuck
in my room with COVID, I was just like, reflecting on the
feelings I had about that campaign, like the things I want
people to like, know and feel about, like Tory development.
And then I kind of like, spun that into some, like, Jewish
folklore. And yeah, that was that was
Candleberry GM. Awesome.
Do you now, I mean, I guess less, less Kelsey, but do you
guys think that your comic background moving over into
teach RPGs? What kind of things do you pull
from that into that? Because I to me, I think it
seems like a relatively to me, it made sense that you started
kind of started with adventures because you were kind of writing
like worlds and and everything before.
Is that, did that make it an easy transition or what kind of
stuff did you pull from that into into games?
On the writing side of things, I mean, it is fairly different
because you're having to focus on not building like a with
comics, it's all about like cut every inch of fat and make the
plot. Only the plot that matters is
happening or whatever. And that's like the kind of the
opposite of what you want going on an adventure.
But I do think that our comic background makes it really easy
to like have conversations about illustrations because art needs
a reason to be there in A and a thing behind us.
And I like an A moment to it. And it's we had a lot of
practice making in comics. Make sure like every panel was
like telling the thing that needed to be told.
And that's a pretty good translation over like spot
illustrations and even like, you know, like spread illustrations.
Yeah, for for me, it's definitely like page design and
like how a page, how, how a section of a, of a, of a page
like relates to itself and then how that section relates to the
page and then how that page relates to the spread.
Like all that stuff is, is very much like hard baked into my
brain. So like thinking about like
composition and path of the eye and you know, really the biggest
like if, if there's one kind of central, central concept
aesthetically is, is they're both all about like controlling
and managing some, some of its focus.
That's that's probably the big one, aesthetically at least.
Gotcha. And you guys talked about
tabling obviously. So you're, you're an incredible
artist, Robbie. You're it's if anyone that has
not seen Robbie's stuff, I'll make sure the links are down
below. But that's the first thing that
caught my eye was your art. It's crazy.
And what's funny is when we were talking at Gen.
Connor, we'll talk about Gen. Connor in a second.
You said that you're mostly like black and white, but the color
that you put in things like Canterbury Jam or even like
Hinch Light, we'll bring that cover up in a second.
It's it's crazy. It is so vibrant and like color
soaked. It's kind of shocking that you
say you mostly do black and white, but so you guys table a
lot. And I know I've met you guys
first at PAX, don't know if you remember that.
But then we met again at Gen. Con and what I guess about
tabling what was obviously PAX you is in Philadelphia.
You guys are, you know, big Philadelphia people, you know,
go Philly, but how long have you guys been doing like conventions
versus, like you said, you're doing like tabling at farmers
markets and things like that? So me and Robbie have been
tabling since we are in like college for me, maybe high
school for you. No, no, I went to college for
you. So yeah, but for comic stuff in
like small like tri-state regional conventions in like the
Memphis, TN area, but. Yeah.
Yeah, it was, this was not until we started doing TTRPG
conventions that we really were started selling anything to any
real degree. And I don't know you'll open to
in farmers markets for what? We did it a lot.
We did it at farmers markets a lot like one year and then a
little bit the next year and then we haven't done like any
this year, but that that's been pretty cool.
Other than farmers market stuff, we did like a RIN fair and then
we did Game Face in Baltimore twice.
Convention. And then you also did.
That very odd pancake event. Sure.
Oh. Yeah.
Yeah, that was like a yeah, that was that was an art show where
you could sell like prints and stuff like that.
But we had our TTRPGS. So yeah, we've as far as like
actual gaming conventions. We try a lot of stuff out, but.
Yeah, you could. Like you could.
You would. You only need one hand to count
the amount of actual gaming conventions that we've done.
But other kinds of conventions, a smattering, A smattering, and
they're always kind of oddball to a degree.
Something that has been kind of fun for me because I hope
Tabling is we've started to get to lend a hand to plus one Exp
when they need like extra people to table.
And so I got to join their booth for PAX and Plug last year.
We helped out a bit with too many games out in like Oaks, and
then this coming January we're actually going to have our own
table at a page, the Philly Area Gaming Expo.
That's cool. And you guys obviously were at
Gen. Con.
That's when we kind of chatted a lot.
Was that your first Gen. Con for all of you guys?
That was our first Gen. Con, yes.
What thought? What do you?
What were your thoughts on Gen.
Con? It was quite overwhelming and
everyone we spoke to said, yeah, it's less overwhelming than most
years, so I really don't know what to say about that, but it
was pretty intense. I tell you what though, going
into it we thought it was going to be like a literal nightmare.
I thought it was going to have like a panic attack from the way
they described the crowds, but just the scope of it was in in a
different way, kind of like intense we.
We talked a bit about, we talked to Charlie first, Avery for for
a bit about it and he was just like, yeah, it is.
It is an absolute nightmare. And he really like he really
hyped it up. We really hyped it up to be
extremely bad. But yeah, so after going, we
were like, yeah, no, this is a lot, but it's like not crazy.
Also, see, I don't think we saw the whole thing.
We. Spent a lot of time in, like,
the main room and then halfway through, I was trying to find
something and I was asking one of the, like, people who worked
there, where would I go for this thing?
And they're like, yeah, that's a whole another building.
And that blew my mind. And then we looked at the map
and there was a whole lot of buildings that we just did not
step foot into. So maybe it was like less
overwhelming to us because we like narrowed down what we were
like willing to entertain, but like, I don't know.
We were also there a very short amount of time too.
Yeah, only like a couple days, 2 days.
Yeah, yeah, generally I I liked it though it.
Was fun. That was dope, yeah.
Yeah, it's cool. Yeah, it was interesting.
Anyone that listens to the podcast regularly, this will be
like the fourth time you're going to hear about Gen.
Con, but you're welcome. Indianapolis is very clean, but
I, I heard the same thing that like that it was going to be so
bad, so packed, so like everything.
And I also, I literally did nothing except for the
exhibition hall and PAX was my first con.
This was my second con. And for those that don't know,
the entire, the exhibition hall, just that alone at Gen.
Con is as big as all of PAX. And then there's the entire rest
of the Convention Center and the football stadium next to it that
is very full, which I didn't realize it was that big.
It's like 80,000 people a day. So I very much found the build,
the door that was the closest to the exhibition hall and just
went in and out that every day and did nothing else.
But it wasn't, I thought like walking around PAX was a lot
worse. Like there were times where I
was literally crushed at PAX and Gen.
Con. I was like the very wide
hallways the size of. The of the hallways is nice and.
Yeah, yeah, it was, It was interesting, Yeah.
And I don't know if I'll ever do it again because I feel like
maybe it would have been worse if I had tried to go to like the
football stadium or like the LARP stuff in the basement or
any of that. But.
But it was cool. It was fun.
Got to see and meet a lot of people, which is really nice.
Got to go out and about in, in Indianapolis, which is really
cool. Talked to you 3 a lot.
I probably talked to you guys more than just about anybody
except for the booth that I was actually working at.
So, so that was fun and then and then I harangued you into
eventually coming onto the show and that's that's how we got to
where we are now. So what you have coming up
though is Hinterlight, which is your next project, and I think I
could be wrong. This is, is this the first part
you guys are doing that isn't an adventure.
This is actually a a system that you guys are making and and
doing more right? We have, I have exactly 1 tiny
game system that I made before this.
It is just like a little bitty spooky Halloween ritual I made.
Yeah, it's a trifold. There you go.
But yeah, this is the first real kind of get a big boy thing that
that we've tried to do. It's like a silly, I said silly,
silly. It's, it's, it's fun.
It's like a little Lyrica game. It's.
Like a 5 minute little game. It's like kind of a little
challenge that you do that involves a live flame that is,
yeah, it's a it's a fun time. Yeah.
But yeah, Henry Lights is something that also started life
as a trifold, what, 2-3 years ago now?
I was, I had an idea to like have like a little thing where
AGM could like throw together kind of a ridiculously
complicated like fairy court hierarchy thing.
I was like, that would be a fun little thing to do for the same
Game Face that Kelsey was making Candleberry for.
I was trying to do that. It's quickly ballooned into a
larger thing. And then as once Game Face is
over and we wanted to try to make it a real book, we were
just fiddling the space. And the more we talked and the
more we tried stuff, the more it felt like something.
It was much more enjoyable as a way for a whole group of people
to be collaborative and make a world together than it is for
like one person to try and like prepare a game.
And that, yeah, that is the the the road that we've been on for
I guess like a year now since since that point.
I'm just like trying to make this sort of collaborative
ritual world building thing as good as it can be.
Yeah, I spent, we've been working on it over a year, but
this is what it what it used to be it it was called cryptarchy.
We sold it at game face. Tyler did it all all himself.
I just did like the cover and. Yeah, it was cool.
And then we all got our fingers up in it and that's yeah been
the been the last year. And although we like kind of
delineated a lot of like rules earlier in what we do for
Gossamer Coast, there are a lot of a lot of days where it is
just us kind of riders room brainstorming, throwing stuff
around, filling out tables together.
I sometimes like to call this tables the game because it's a
lot of tables. That's the whole, the whole gist
is about like interpreting tables or at least for the first
part of it, the ritual part. And so yeah, it is just a blast,
like hanging out on the couch trying to come up with the
weirdest shit we can to put on on these tables.
They has been kind of the journey of Henterlite so far.
It must be nice to have three people kind of work on a project
too, because at any point anyone can jump in and you have at
least one person bounce off and one person to test with.
So like I can imagine there's like a rotation of that between
you 3. We definitely do a lot of
bouncing around and talking to each other, being each other.
Springboards for sure, yeah. We did a lot we've we've play
tested this a lot of times in a row at a lot of iterations of
it. This is maybe like the 8th
iteration of the game, honestly. And it does say something that
every time I start play testing, I'm like, fuck, this is going to
be like a couple of hours and it's going to, I guess let's
just like get this over with. And then after 10 minutes I'm
like, Oh yeah. And then I'm like, I look so
invested in like into it. And I'm like, oh, I did forget.
This is like fun. So that's a good sign.
I mean, yeah, you most, I mean most games should be fun in some
way, shape or form, even if not being fun is the fun part.
But so, so I have, I have it, I have the quick chart up here and
there's links to that that will be where links are on the
Internet and available. But so what's, so what's the
pitch? What is?
What is Hinterley? The Yeah, Elevator pitch is that
Hinterlight is a collaborative world building, a game where you
and your friends come together. You build a band of ludicrously
gloomy gothic Victorian jerks, and you tell the story of how
you died in this fairy forest and then cast the ritual of your
resurrection and bond into the surface of these service of the
noble fae who rule over that forest.
And then that is a thing that can be taken forward into like
more standards TTRPG role play. And one of you can become a
guide and sort of build a campaign that is following your
adventures in service to these these noble fairy.
It's really neat. I like the world building to
start a game kind of thing like different, but in the same kind
of vein is like microscope and things like that where you can
collaborate to to to do a thing making like dying and then
basically working for like noble Faye is a pretty cool way to go.
Love a game where you start by dying.
So mechanically, how how to you know, we've heard lots of
tables, apparently. How does the game work?
Absolutely. So the the world building game,
all of the tables are purely there to make every version of
the the dwell, which is the name of the forest that the fairy
live in. You need to the table.
And the whole idea is that you are using cards to build this
pattern on the table and you're going to be revealing them and
playing cards on top of cards that get these prompts that are
hopefully very evocative and vague enough that you can
instill some of your own thoughts into them.
And if they can spark ideas. And the table as a whole
brainstorms within this sort of bounded experience that we have
set up to allow the thing that you get at the end to be a
useful workable like adventure space.
So the the book is basically just there to make sure that you
goofing off and talking with your friends about a spooky kind
of silly fae world makes sense once you get to the end of it.
Gotcha. And the book is broken up into I
believe it's four different psalms.
How do the Psalms kind of work with the the game?
It it seems it's like the IT is the game.
So. So how does that kind of tie in?
Yeah, the the metaphor there is that the, the, the spell of your
resurrection is a song that these fairy are singing and
having you sort of singing with them.
And the first Psalm is all about you.
And you, you're, you sort of getting sort of the information
you could get from like looking at a dead body lying at A at a
fairies table and sort of figuring out who you were before
you came to the Faye, the fairy lands, this other world.
And the second Psalm is all about building this forest where
you died. And then the third part is
building the, the Manor, the estate where you are resurrected
by the noble Faye. And the little coda in fourth
section is about the the absent crown from whose power you've
been resurrected. But they're like the the ruler
of this fair, these fairy that has been gone.
And it's a big mystery that you can sort of have as the central
core thing to your campaign, if you'd like it to be.
And then what you don't have in the quick starts would then be a
further section where one of the players for the ritual, their
character is sacrificed to the to the spell and they become the
guide. And there's tools that let them
use what you've made in the game and expand it into adventurable
content with things that the the other place, the carrot at the
table did not, you know, know at the time.
But it makes it as easy as you can make it to prep, you know,
two or three adventure locations before a first campaign and
have, like, a little mystery for them to figure out in the
courts. The court of the fairy.
Yeah. That's it.
Yeah, I mean it sounds awesome. Again, I love I'm an edge Lord
piece of shit. So any game, like I said, when
you start by dying and then you know, you have all section on
like just figuring out who what your body is.
I mean, you got me already. You sent me Robbie, you sent me
a a spread before we started the stream.
So talk to me about this this in this incredible page again.
What I what I was saying before with like your color and and and
everything. This is incredible.
So what? What is this spread?
Thank you. So this is supposed to be a mock
up of the when the quick start is timber.
We're there's going to be some some adjustments for the for the
final version, but and this version is called Firth instead
of temper, which I is like a old school word.
Yeah, it's like a narcanic word for yeah, like a like a
woodland. Yeah.
And So what, what we really wanted to do was have this vibe
of like the, the, the first thing we thought about is it is
it'd be cool to do like a big illustrative manuscript and make
it like very diegetic. So it looks like you're looking
to like A2 an old tome. But then more recently we were
like, fuck that. What if, what if we just did
like a like a just a top down like table of like what the
fairy like the, the, the whole setting for the game is kind of
like dead adventures, just face down, like all corpsed out and
dead sprawling on this table where there is this freaky evil
fairy dude, evil freaky, whatever that is, like doing
this spell. So we were like, yeah, what if
we could What if the whole thing is just we're trying to see what
that table looks like. And so we can have like the
pattern for the playing cards that you play on, that you play
on like carved into the table. And then like, let's get some
like scrying stuff. So we, I try to do like a mirror
type of thing where the first thing is like like the game, the
game is played or the at least in the beginning, the rituals,
it's very much like you get, you flip over and interpret this
playing card that is the initial thing that the game like gives
you. And you're like, oh, OK, what
does that look like? And then players play on that
card And so so the the first one would be like that reveal with
that's like on the mirror because you're like revealing,
flipping over the cards, it's on the pattern.
And then the second card is claim.
So that's whenever a player plays on that.
And so for that I tried to go for like kind of a messed up
like field notebook looking thing because it's kind of like
what the player is adding to the spell.
And then and then we have this little doll for Mark your
effigy. And that is like you talk about
being an edge word piece of shit.
This is a great opportunity for that where at like after every
round you just really just talk about how your guy got fucked up
like and psychologically, metaphysically, physically could
be very literal. And so the game is just like,
it's like, how cool can you make your desk kind of, or how like a
weird or crazy can you do it? And so we thought it'd be fun to
like have these assets that we can we can play with throughout
the game where like we can have this little effigy effigy doll
that's like slowly, it's like coming apart on over each
spread. Or, you know, we can see like
the the hand that says disgust up there.
Like those are kind of like help helpful prompts.
If you're kind of like want something to kind of like get
the juices going everywhere that says disgust is that's kind of
what that's for. And that's supposed to be like
the hand one of the dead guys laying on the table.
So it's like maybe that gets more messed up.
Maybe the field notebook gets bloodier, whatever.
And then we have this kind of UI thing at the bottom that is like
on the bottom. The bottom left is like this
pick list kind of thing. That's like, yeah, here's just
like an example of us basically doing this.
And then on the right, it's like this is supposed to tell you
what section of the book that you're in.
So the first little symbol there is character creation.
It's it's, it's your, your effigy.
The second one is like the Psalm, the first Psalm.
That's the little ritual with chanting and what have you that
like begins the thing. And then the third one is, is
the one that this is depicting where it's like you choose
either what in a quick start, what's what basically is most of
most of the quick start, which is like denizens, terrain and
timber. And in this one, we let folks
like choose choose what they want to do between the three.
And then as the book progresses, the tapestry will continue to
like weave together. And then we'll see more like
symbols that kind of notate where we are in the book, which
all that was Tyler's idea. The little tapestry thing.
I'm like, so no idea. Let's let's do it.
Let's see what we can do. So yeah, that's basically.
Oh, yeah. And then for the first, like I,
I tried to have like a wood coming up splintering through
the table to look like, you know, that's where we're at.
Maybe for terrain, it might be like little like tombstones or
whatever. And then for the denizens, or I
guess it's going to be called fear in the, in the book, It
could be like little spiders coming out from the pattern.
And so like it's, it was like a lot of work to do this, but also
like I'm excited to be able to reuse and very slightly modify
these assets and only only draw like a few, like very few new
things per spread. So hopefully we'll be able to
like get a lot of mileage out of, out of like these assets
that have been created. So it will look like way more
work than it actually will be. That's the goal.
But yeah, it was fun. Yeah, this spread is crazy.
How so? How much of the book is like
this done? You're looking at it, but.
Yeah, it's going rendered to this degree as this spread is
the sort of the the proof of concept spread that we put
together. For for fans of in game fiction
or whatever the probably the biggest actual like new
illustration part that'll be like straight illustration.
We're going to do open it up with like a little, a little a
little comic where we have like, well, we have a like kind of
thumbnail here to a degree, but it's just like maybe like a
little 6 page, 8 page. Oh, this is this is the oh now
welcome honored guest thumbnail page.
But yeah, that's going to be the most illustration heavy, heavy
thing. But sorry, yeah, to answer your
question, that level of done, Yeah.
Just what you said maybe like 8:00 this morning.
Got it perfect. It looks.
Gorgeous. I'm excited.
I mean the project doesn't doesn't hit Kickstarter until
when is it again? Mid November Mid.
November. Yeah, that is a ways off because
I remember you guys talking about it at PAX like that's
that's when I first heard about it and that was almost last, it
was last November. It was, yeah.
Yeah. And like in the in the meantime,
we've gone through a few more revisions of like the PAX and
game mechanics. We've done a few rounds of play
testing, we've gotten set off to beta readers.
And so we're hoping that we're on the last draft of the ritual
part of the game. So that's getting pretty
polished. And then our process is moving
from that's a layout just because the words have been like
kind of shifting and we don't want to get too far into the
play out just yet. Yeah.
I mean, I can imagine doing that much work on every page and then
suddenly being like, well, we have to take that whole section
out, you know, And especially if so, Robbie, are you doing art
and layout? Because the layout is basically
in the art. So are you doing most of that or
you are you all of you guys working like what?
What is the? Are the visuals entirely you?
Definitely like conceptual stuff and probably some time sure
Tyler will wind up doing some small design elements and stuff
too like he does. He does some layout stuff and
some graphic design stuff and all like the text kind of stuff
like font choices and stuff like that is a lot of Tyler.
So I'd say like big picture conceptual stuff, layout in
terms of like fake kind of figuring out what we want to do,
where it's going to be. A lot of that is a is a bit of a
back and forth. It's it's a lot of a
conversation. But then, yeah, the kind of
mocking it up and then getting it laid out is is is mostly.
Yeah, execution is mostly and then I may have some like hands
in Polish making like you know for sure words look correct on
the page or whatever. But yeah.
And and you said you're starting with a comic.
Is that like harkening back to the the comic days or?
Yeah, it's just the thing that we kind of miss doing.
And Robbie wants to put more comics into our games in
different ways. And we thought, you know, we
have this this game is very flavourable in a very specific
sort of flavour. And if you get jump into the
game text and you've read things like the gourmet gas series by
Mervyn Peak or like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Nora, they'll
probably not going to need any more juice than that.
But if you haven't having like a little short, like 4 page comic
that is like really letting you understand that these are like
spooky in a kind of a ridiculous way.
These fairies are kind of outrageous in their in their
ritualistic nobility. Then that's kind of like get you
on the right page to play the game.
Yeah, it's really good for like tones.
Tone setting is like marrying the wryness with like the
morbidness of it is very like the the the comic is basically
this this fairy Butler freaky dude talking angrily at himself.
The doorbell rings and he opens it and it's like a bunch of dead
bodies scattered throughout. Like you get your first like big
look at the space or whatever. And he's like, oh, what hour is
this? And he, like, brings them in and
stuff. And it's like, yeah, this is
like, gloomy and dark but absolutely ridiculous at the
same time. And it's like, yeah.
And that arch sort of arrive always carries forward then into
like the the rest of the text in a way that maybe makes it make
more sense to like understand who it is that's saying these
things. Yeah, yeah.
That's awesome. There's I've seen a number of
books that start with comics and they're all it's always
incredible is exactly for the reasons you said.
Like a little bit of fiction writing in the beginning is
great, but comics are cool and being able to get the visual
tone along with like their narrative tone is, is really
fantastic. So I'm really excited to see
that. And I believe there's someone
else that's working on the project with you guys as well.
Oh, yeah. I mean, we've got a couple shout
outs at least. Richard.
Richard Ruin is doing the editing and then Tony Vicente
and Plus One obviously are helping us publish and run the
Kickstarter and just supporting in all possible ways.
So thank you to both of those folks.
Much appreciated. Yeah, love Richard.
I mean, Richard is one of the just nicest, most genuine people
I've ever met, especially from Philadelphia.
So you know it's. So you're saying very low bar?
Yeah, extremely low bar. Very long.
If you get for another year, he'll be as awful as we.
Are There you go. All the rest of all the rest of
them. I was, I this, I lived in that
area. And that's why I'm so terrible,
you know what I mean? So, yeah.
But so the Kickstarter's coming up, you guys, I mean, talk about
the spread, talk about everything.
You've been working on the game for a while now.
How? Is this is going to be your
first crowdfunding project, But obviously Tony does this as his
job over at +1. How, how, how ready are you guys
for November? Like how, how are you feeling
about running a Kickstarter and, and where you are with the
project? Like how's it going?
So. So we did Kickstart climbers for
them. But that only makes me more
excited to not be the only one running Kickstarter, because
there's a lot about doing a Kickstarter that is exciting and
fun and the dopamine rush and then other things that are like,
this is really miserable, and I wish I had support for it.
Yeah, fulfillments. And then like when you've got to
be the one apologizing to someone who's angry about
something that they probably shouldn't be angry about as, I
don't know, it's a little rough. But yeah, it'll be nice to have
a little bit of support. And I'm like, looking back on
the Glimmers Room Kickstarter, I'm like, I am 100% sure we
could have done some more things to make that a bigger deal than
it was. We were, I mean, we were kind of
overwhelmed and wanted it at all at that at that point.
But yeah, it's very exciting to have Tony on board because I
know he's done. You know, I don't know dozens of
Kickstarters at this point. Yeah, we're excited to get
everything we need ready for the Kickstarter and then we're very
excited to like not do the Kickstarter is like.
What we're not. So jazzed about.
Fixed labels to packages and then yeah, carry them to the
mailbox. Two blocks for my house like 4
times a week for three weeks. So I haven't so I haven't run
our previous Kickstarter. And you do have Tony coming on.
Do you guys, do you have plans to be like, all right, I'm going
to do this, I'm going to do that.
You're going to do this. You're going to be damage
control. Like are you more prepared?
You know now not only just because you have someone who who
does this, but because of the previous one, like are you
already like batting down the hatches and stuff?
I would say no A. Certain degree, I'm sure.
Yeah, I'm like, yeah, I, I'm, I'm honestly, I'm focusing way
more on getting the thing where it needs to be than I feel like
I was at this point with Glimmer's room or I was just
like to be in pure marketing mode the whole time.
I'm getting ready. Having like a press kit, I'm
like, yeah, Oh yeah, I guess. I guess that's just a thing you
do have. That's a good thing to have it.
Is it is a thing? It's a good one I assume.
I mean Tony did run like how to make a press kit in like Zemo
like a couple years ago. So it's nice to have one.
It's good looking press kit. Yeah.
And also like Richard and Tony have been a huge help with that.
Like what should we be spending our time on to get ready for it?
So like we've been like going to a bunch of conventions over the
last few months. We've been passing out like
promo material. We have these like cute little
invitations that invite people to imagine themselves as dead
adventurers and and figure out what's going on and and follow
the Kickstarter. Getting people to follow the
Kickstarter has been one of our big focuses so that we have, you
know, a good amount of people who will be notified when it
launches and might decide to back our project.
And so following the Kickstarter is such a huge help.
I go to a lot of like conventions for work.
I've also been pitching it a lot there.
I don't know how effective that's been, but I try it
anyway. And then also like, I think
we've just been so grateful for the amount of support we've
gotten from other people in the RPG community.
Like Will Yost was one of our beta readers.
Sean Ireland sat down with us at Flame Con and like did a demo
with us. And so like definitely feeling
very supported going into to this one.
That's our two of the nicest and tallest people in this space, so
they're good people too, to have, yeah.
As nice as they are at all. Yeah, at least, Yeah, it comes
up over and over again. Almost everybody in the space is
for some reason 6 feet fucking tall, and you find that out
quick at a convention. I'm not so, but I had a question
and it completely escaped my brain.
So Nope, it's gone. It's gone.
Yeah, it's all gone. Where so you guys are in
Philadelphia, Obviously Tony's in Philadelphia, but how did you
guys get even get linked up with with Plus one and Richard and
Tony? That's the question there was.
I pulled it back in, guys. We're good.
Literally, literally Pax it was we went wandering around Pax
Tyler Creming was nice enough to talk to us for like 5 minutes
when we were nobodies and was like you should go 2 boots that
way and go talk to Tony because he lives 30 minutes away from
your house. And we did.
And yeah. And Tyler is so Tyler Creme is
so aggressively helpful to everyone all it's like crazy.
He's like, here's my discord. Please, like message me anytime
you need anything about like, yeah, any questions you have.
I I love helping people in all this time.
Yeah. And he was just like, he really
put us on the path. But I will say, do you have
something to say? Kelsey?
Sorry. Yeah, just while we're still
talking about Tyler Creme. He was such a huge help at
getting us to do our convention demos better.
Like when we did it at Gen. Con.
I mean like it was fine, but it was very like long.
And so we had like a great conversation with like 6 people
and we were like, what if we tried to get more people to have
a great, you know, experience with our game?
And we message Tyler and he, he gave us so much thought and so
much good advice and just yeah, that love Tyler Crevein.
He's wonderful. 'Cause he's, he's like the
master of doing quick table demos.
And now we have like we can get, we can give a taste of what this
game is like in like 5 minutes is what we got our demo down to.
Maybe less than that, yeah. Yeah, 3 minutes, yeah.
And we always say it's two. I can like when people are
walking five, we'll say it's two no matter what.
He's a bite size. It's 2 minutes, just stop for a
second. Yeah, you just got to get.
Them to stop yeah, that's it. I mean percentage wise in sales
Oh yeah. I mean, especially if you have
foam, throw down a piece of foam and be like, hey, stay on this
for a second, you got 2 minutes. Come sit with.
US 10 percent, 10% is the percentage of people that
generally stop. If you're if you're like, hey,
stop for a second and talk. So that's that's generally your
target audience. If you talk to 200 people, you
might get 20 people stop. Don't know why I know that, but
that thing. That's awesome, good to go also.
Tony shouted out Glimmer's Wren before we knew.
Yeah, he did on on the he had like the Zen month thing.
He was doing every every Zen club or Zen, Yeah, Zen quest.
Yeah, whichever 1 he did that on, he was like check out this
book. You definitely got us some
backers. And that was a really good end
to talking to him. Be like, hey, you talk about our
book. And he's like, oh, hi.
Yeah. So yeah, that and then Tyler and
then talking to him and then. We went to Tony's coffee shop
and he gave us a bunch of books and he was like, you want to
make something? And we're like, yeah, we do.
Here we go. And and as you said, you're
going to be launching in November.
Are you going to PAX this year? Yeah.
So we'll be at PAX. We'll probably be around the
plus one table quite a bit. We'll also be wandering around.
I'll say our launch date is variable based on the amount of
followers we get on. Yeah, we do need to get those
those those followers in there. But yeah, we are shooting for
that like kind of week before PAX I think.
We'll be good by then. Yeah, but we're sitting at 98,
so. Yeah, so everyone, anyone who
has parents. Yeah, get both of your parents.
Make some fake e-mail accounts. Yes, we're we're Kickstarter.
That's a really, Yeah, that's what we want to appreciate.
This is what? You really want to get people to
sign up for it so they remember to do it later, but what you
really want is the fake people that won't sign up for it
anyway. We definitely want the ones that
aren't going to give us money later.
That's. You know, I I forgot that
Richard's probably watching this.
Yeah, it's literally definitely right now watching it.
So, like, probably, I probably didn't make 20 e-mail accounts.
Just follow our Kickstarter. It's probably just to follow it.
Yeah, it's probably not what happened.
Probably less than 20, yeah. So and you're trying to launch
before, so are you trying to do some like cross promotion with
with PAX? Is that kind of the reason you
wanted to do November? We definitely want to be able to
be at PAX and like talking people about Internet and be
like and you can back it right now, like you can go and back it
like that. That is a thing you can do.
We didn't want us to like still be in the like.
You can only follow the page, but I mean, we will if that
needs to happen. But yeah, we're really shooting
to have it be a thing you can put put money down for by tax.
We're maybe going to try to do some some funky marketing stuff
too. Yeah, we're trying to maybe have
like a LARP kind of situation out of nearby local theater.
We have a theater place picked out they we've we've got a spot
there and the the head of the Philadelphia Area LARP Society
is, is helping us. I don't know if that's anything.
Kelsey made a face. No one knows what it's actually
called. It's it's, it's Sammy.
But their name is Sammy. And they're is helping us puts
together a little numerous of experience that for like 15
folks to do and that should be pretty dope.
We definitely, I mean, depending on how much our hearts are in
it, we would love to get as freaky with marketing as we can.
But yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll see what happens, how much we
want to dress up like fairy freaks and like trail behind
people attacks me like, oh, you dropped this invitation.
Yeah. I don't know.
I know there's a lot of people in Philadelphia, but I wonder
when I lived there, I went to this haunted house where they
they did Andrew Allen Poe, but every room in the haunted house
was based on a different story from Poe and it was like a
walking thing through. I would be curious if it's the
same kind of people because if they're getting freaky with one
thing that sounds like something that might be the same group.
Do you know the name of the group?
Kelsey? I think it's PLSI.
Think so as well. And in the area.
LARP society. Yeah, PLSI think not.
PS LS it was also the season for that but not quite the same
thing. So you want people to follow the
Kickstarter? Where can people follow the
Kickstarter at? Because I know Tony has a great
URL system for all of his games. A sweet short URL and the URL is
TTRPG dot link slash hinterlight.
Makes it super easy to follow that.
So we'll make sure again, that is where where you would expect
links to be on a video on YouTube.
And for all the rest of your stuff, for Blimmers, run and
everything else, where can they also find your art, your games,
like all the rest of that stuff? So we have a website
itsjustgossamercoast.com. We also have an itch page.
We are Gossamer coast dot itch. We have multiple things in the
plus one Exp store. Robbie, do you have anything
else on that front to plug Robbie's Instagram?
Yep. And Robbie's on blue.
Sky. Blue sky, yeah.
Yeah, I'm Robbie A Burns. There's no E and Robbie, I just
want to say that. Get that out there.
It's ROBBIABU R&S because of my middle initial.
There you go. Yeah.
Yeah, Well, I really appreciate you guys coming on.
I know I I, I bugged the hell of you at Gen.
Con to be here. So it's really nice to actually
get to talk to you guys and actually have you on the show.
So thank you so much for that. Thank.
You so much, yeah, we appreciate it a lot yeah of.
Course. You made our Gen.
Con experience very pleasant. It was very, very nice.
I feel like it was just the same joke 50 times.
So I guess that does it for you. That'll you're welcome, but not
the same. Obviously.
You guys were fantastic and that's one reason I really want
you guys on and inch light. It's fantastic.
All of you guys work is fantastic.
It's really great. Definitely go grab everything
you can from these guys and I'm very excited for the
Kickstarter. Yeah.
You're going to be at PAX Unplugged 2 maybe?
I will, yeah. I'm going to be running the
World Champ booth again with Adam Vass.
Oh hell yeah. Cool.
And he'll actually be there this year, which is going to be
really cool. It's funny because actually Jim
Cotton was the first time I ever met Adam, even though I ran the
booth for World Champ like the previous year.
So that was that was a cool thing.
And now we're going to work. Now we're going to do the thing
together. So yeah, we will.
I will be at pack so I will see you guys again in a couple of
months and hopefully the Kickstarter has launched and has
funded and we can like just cheer, cheer, cheer along with
with the scratch and everything. Yeah, yeah.
So that is going to be us for today.
Once again, thank you guys so much for being here and and we
will see all of you later. Have a wonderful day everybody.
Bye. Thank you so much.
Bye.