Hello and welcome to the Weekly Scroll podcast.
My Name Is Ryan. And I am the Beetle King from
the Coconut estate. And with us today we have a
special guest that is Jim Hall of Brooklyn Games.
How you doing today, Jim? Hey, I'm doing great.
Glad to be here. Very nice to have you on.
Yeah. So what we have, well, you can
see above me. Well, you can't, but people out
there can see above me. You're currently funding a
project right now called Beatle Knight on Kickstarter 4
Zinequest. But before we get into that,
what you've I've seen your books everywhere, your zines
everywhere. They're very colorful.
They're very hard to miss. What are some of the projects
that people who might not know Brooklyn games know some of you
work from? Yeah, I mean, the more most
recent Kickstarter was something called Worldlings, and it's kind
of based on this amazing art from this artist, Okro.
She's fantastic, but it's a a world building book that gives
you these tiny little gods to sprinkle around the the
wilderness and add some sort of animistic spirits to to your
world. So you can really sprinkle it
into any system. But it's written for Karen and
Fivey. And then I I've got a bunch of
books or pamphlets out, but the the other one that most people
know me from is Escape the City. Oh hey yeah, you got Thorn from
the Fallen Kickstarter. But Escape the City is is a
pretty popular one that got picked up by a lot of or a few
solo Youtubers. It's like you draw cards to
build out a city as you play and then you can explore that way
and it's kind of a it's kind of a test to see if you can survive
to to escape. But I mean those are the big
ones. I've I've been writing and
publishing since probably 2021. COVID, you know, made me let's
start putting stuff out there. Oh I I also illustrate and so my
my big kind of achievement recently was doing the map for
barkeep on the Borderland and so yeah and WF Smith Warren, he was
he was really great and gave all the contributors and any medal
and so like I haven't any even though as I just did the map you
know but still pretty cool. Yeah, I mean, yeah, the
illustrations work is fantastic. I actually have Graves and
Groves that you did the cover for that.
It's a DCC module, which is absolutely stunning.
So I love that the cover, it was the first thing I saw.
I was like, damn, I gotta go back this now.
And then it was a great project too, but that's another thing
you've done and we've seen that. It's fantastic.
Yeah, there's a few other things I don't know.
I had a adventure in Knock issue 3 called Titan Cliffs that it's
a really nice one shot if you wanna like introduce someone to
sort of the old school style of play.
So yeah. A lot of the stuff you'd written
for, especially a lot of your zines like Escape City, Raw
Dragon, Orban In the Raw Dragon, I don't know, Forbidden Swamp, I
think is is more system, is that one more system neutral.
But a lot of stuff you write for is Karen and Five East.
Yeah, yeah. So when I the the very first
thing that I put out there was you can't even get it on itch.
Actually it's only on Patreon, but it is it is a 5E adventure.
So I started off with with 5th edition really.
I played a little bit of 3.5 like back in college, but like
really 5th edition was the one that got me hooked.
Then I discovered Nave, and eventually I discovered Cairn
and I just, I fell in love with Karen.
And it's just like so simple. We we talked a little bit before
the show about it. You can do a lot with it because
it's so boiled down. And so, you know, I'm putting
out these adventures, I'm testing them with my local group
that, you know, we play in person here.
And so, you know, I I figured I'll write it for this, this
system that I'm really excited about, Karen.
I'll also write it for 5th edition.
You get sort of a wider audience and that's what my local group
was playing. So.
So yeah. Makes sense?
Yeah, I mean five ES always gonna be a pretty, a pretty wide
audience. I guess it's not.
It's not going anywhere until. One until 1D and D comes out,
you know but. It's supposed to be in.
At all, you know. Sure, yeah.
Forbidden Swamp. Actually, I put out as a Karen
exclusive, and so you can go over to the Karen store and and
pick that one up. But yeah, there I also did one
with Perplexing Ruins where he did all the art and it's called
The Visitor. And it's just like some random
tables that help you create some pretty weird alien encounters.
It's a. It will explicitly take your
fantasy world into multi dimensional outer space style
play. So anyway.
I do. I do love that.
I like my fantasy weird and sometimes mixed with some
science. So yeah, weird.
Extra dimensional travelers. Great.
And also just like the visitor, like the vibes from like the art
from P Rs art. Very, very, very cool.
Yeah. Ryan Ryan's looking for a
booklet right now, and I know I. Have the visitor right next to
me and I can't find it. It's in here somewhere.
Oh, there it. Is.
I knew it. I know.
I know roughly where it is. Yeah, I This one is absolutely
fantastic. Love this one.
I'm I'm so excited that you guys actually have my stuff and I
feel like you put it out there and sometimes it's just, it just
disappears and yeah, so that's cool, yeah.
Well, it's cool you have AI actually, honestly have only
like looked through your itch. I didn't realize you have like a
big cartel like digital storefront where everyone get
your scenes physically and they're really very cool.
I to be quite honest with you, I've read through Escape the
City and I didn't realize that you did the art, but I really do
like the like the color palette and art in Escape the City so.
Thanks. I appreciate that.
Yeah, Yeah, I had some that cover that has this really cool
perspective and so I was having fun with.
The fisheye. Fisheye.
Yeah. So yeah, you you mentioned it's
been mentioned a couple times about the the color, the bright
colors from a lot of my covers. It's funny cuz with Beale Night
I'm actually going the opposite direction where the entire thing
is all black and white. And my hope is that it's
something that anyone can take and sort of print at home.
Because I've had, especially with like Escape The City is the
most popular thing that I have right now and people have asked
for a black and white printer friendly home printer friendly
edition because it's just super saturated and yeah, you need,
you need to just like a black and white version.
So yeah, with Beatle Night, I wanted to make that kind of the
default. So anyway.
Yeah, I do like the dichotomy though, between like you like
your ability to very effortlessly move from like this
very over like saturated, like ultra color, to this black and
white and the black and white you're like, oh, it looks great,
like it makes a lot of sense when reading through Beetle
Knight. It has that kind of like, like
darker aesthetic and it's still incredibly well done.
Well, thanks. I mean, I like color.
I like black and white. That's all good.
But so Speaking of Butylite, this is a project that you are
currently funding right now on Kickstarter.
It is funded just like a buck or two over goal, like 300 plus
percent of the funding. But for those that haven't yet
backed it, cuz they should go there and do that right now.
But what is Beatle Knight? Cuz this isn't a lot of what is
on your storefront and stuff are adventures, like we said for
Karen and five E some into the odd stuff too.
But this is a game, So what is Beatle Knight?
Yeah, so this is it's not actually the first game that I
put out there, but it's the first one that really has gotten
a lot of love from me. Is a game kind of inspired by
Hollow Knight and a few other sort of touchstones where you
step into the claws of a arthropod knight.
So it could be a beetle, it could be a moth or a lightning
bug. There, there's there actually
will be 20 different species that you can play.
And each of each of the Knights has a sort of motivation that
makes them kind of tears them away from their normal life and
sends them out into the world to try to create justice across
this sort of forest floor that's covered in a bunch of different
cultures of each different type of bug that you could possibly
think of and the interactions that they have.
I I like to think of it in terms of each sort of region of the
forest floor has a history of other kind of critters that have
lived there. And the people who you encounter
are just the latest and in a long line.
And it really opens you up for that sort of delving or digging
into these mysteries or or magics that kind of pop up.
So yeah, I mean, but I think it's captured well on on some of
the story prompts on the second page here.
So like deep in the rotting log that is the millipedes fortress,
a disease spreads like wire wildfire.
No one knows the source. Perhaps they discovered
something left by the termites long ago.
And so this sort of thing, like, I don't know, I find that fun.
And if you have played Holo Knight, like it's just filled
with that sort of kind of open-ended storytelling that
that it feels like there's depth there.
And so that's what I what I like and what I want to create in the
world here. I do really like that space that
you're like stepping into for storytelling.
Because it's like I I live in Oregon.
It's very forested. Like I go walk out and like look
at bugs, living in a small community and be like, oh like
that. That's a cool prompt to start a
direction for a story. Yeah, like I as an adult go into
my backyard and turn rocks and logs over to look at bugs.
And it's been just been like that my entire life And so I
don't know, like my logo is a slug or a snail and if you've
read some of my other stuff like Arbonne and the Rod Dragon, you
encounter bugs like ants that have been warring for a long
time. So it's a theme that I that I've
been working with in a for a while.
In fact, Beetle Knight was. I originally made it over two
years ago and it started off as a little pamphlet adventure and
I was rummaging through just before we got started here.
And I actually found my little print out of the original
pamphlet adventure. So this is what it yeah, this is
what it started off. As you can see I have my notes
from from play testing right in there.
But like it, it grew and I I found that I wanted to do more
with it. And next thing you know, we got
a game here. We got a book, a couple scenes
anyway. The setting is fantastic and I
know you said it's based on Hollow Knight.
From what I know of Hollow Knight, I've never played it.
It's a Metrovania with a little souls.
It's like a Soulsvania Ish, right?
Or is it pure Metrovania? Well you you do explore a lot.
Maybe you're you're the Souls Ness you're referring to is the
the extremely challenging combat.
So in that in that way, yeah, I could see that it involves a lot
of exploration and as you explore there's sort of a
storytelling elements that emerges just by visiting places.
But then also over time the things change and the
environment and that really sort of creates movement in the
story. In terms of like the combat,
it's it's it's pretty technical like the there's a meme about it
that's just get good cuz it's it's just a hard game.
And in that, you know, as you're kinda working with that you're
optimizing your character, you're learning the skills
really well and you wind up in different situations, having to
do different builds. And so it's really cool in that
way. Maybe that's not for everybody,
certainly not, especially if you're like a cozy gamer, but
for me, that's like, that's fun. It's crunchy.
Yeah, it is cool. Yeah, well one of the other
things I love about It's interesting cuz I've read the
Quick Start a bunch. It's fantastic.
But when I read through it, I don't remember if it says Holla
Night in there anywhere. But as soon as you said Holla
Night, so much of it kind of clicked a little bit different
for me too, cuz I love Metroidvanias.
They are my favorite, even though I haven't played Holla
Night, Blasphemous Ori. Like all those kind of games and
I love where you like you explore and then you like enter
a new realm and it's like different colors and different
music and things like that. Metro Vanias do that a lot.
And when you read the About the Game section then go right into
the histories and mysteries, I'm talking about like the Realm of
Litter Fall, but especially that last part.
It's a patchwork of territories and everything is claimed and
everything. I can just imagine playing a
Beatle and like going into a new territory in Beatle night and
like the music changes a little bit and this one's like a foggy
one and stuff like that. So it's really, it's really
interesting to kind of get those parallels in some of the writing
as well. Yeah, I don't know if you've
ever seen the anime Mushishi. Yeah.
Anyway, absolutely. Yeah, some people have.
Yeah, there you go if you haven't.
Seen Mushushi. It's literally one of my
favorite of all time. Like being able to see the
things that some people can and some people can't see and like
how they think it's just the world, but it's really this like
thing on them. It's it's beautiful too.
Yeah, it is often poetic. That was inspiration in part for
World Links. But at any rate, the main
character kind of travels across the it's like a feudal Japanese,
you know, countryside kind of solving mysteries, these magical
mysteries for people. And so you know, one will be in
the city, one will be in, you know, some tea house or in a
swamp in in the middle of the woods.
And so I like that idea of a wanderer who their goal is to
try to help folks. And so I don't know that that's
that's how I see the game going about.
Nice. And so I maybe we touched on
this a little bit before you had, you showed the original
adventure that it was, and you said there were play tests and
everything. What was kind of the impetus?
Was it just like engaging with it so much that you kept wanting
to expand it into a game? But what was the what was the
impetus behind turning it from an adventure into a game and
adding your own mechanics and things to it?
Actually it was it was a game right from the get go.
So that little pamphlet is actually a full game and and
this is the game that we played at first nice and a lot of the
same text is still in in the book today but and so I I don't
know I wanted I had some ideas around mechanics.
I was inspired to create a piece of art that you see on the cover
and I spent around a month doing that illustration And so these
these things were happening at the same time and I I don't know
it just kind of came together where I had these ideas for a
different type of mechanic which wound up being called contests
and I needed a world to sort of you know populate with that
mechanic or like use that mechanic to explore and that's
just kind of what happened. Also at that time I had done a
collaborative world building session with some good friends
and we came up with this really wacky world that all takes place
on the back of a a giant that's like swimming through an ocean
of sugar water. And all the characters are like
pests living on the back of this giant and the the hairs are like
trees and all this stuff. And so all this was happening at
the same time and I started writing the game and we switched
that that giant game to playing Beatle Knight, that that's when
we started playing it, so. Did the original Beatle Beatle
Knight pamphlet use like the contest system or did it have a
different like resolution system?
It used contests, OK and like the the resolution system
contests, you know the way it works is you each of your
abilities has a die associated with it.
So you start off with like AD42-D sixes and AD 8 and you
spread that around your 4 abilities.
And then when you want to try something uncertain, you roll
those die against a challenge die that the arbiter rolls.
And so you know you want to convince the moth queen that the
ants are not spying on her or something like that.
So you what you would roll your presence die and the arbiter
would roll some difficulty dies. Maybe it's like AD 8 versus AD
10 or something like that. You compare those results.
If your result beats the arbiter, then you're successful.
If you get a tie, you're not successful, but you a new
opportunity presents itself. If you miss, you miss.
So that core resolution system was there from the beginning,
and it's just like an idea that I had and I thought would be
fun. Balancing that has been kind of
tricky. And so there's.
Because, yeah, it's it's just been a little tricky.
It's not like a nice bell curve to work with.
You work with like D 20s. That's probably why the D 20s
kind of systems are so popular. It's it's easy to to grok.
And so we had to kind of go off of feel and say OK, well we'll
give you plus one for that ability.
How about that? And like we would do this for,
we'd play and it felt like nothing was hitting.
And so I'd say, all right, here's a new version.
Everyone gets to add plus one to one thing or something like
that. So I tried a few different
things, and what we have now is kind of the result of all that
experimentation. Yeah, it's a really interesting
mechanic because a lot of games are like player facing, so GM's
don't roll at all and an arbiter, the GM rolls against
everything but and there's some other games out there that do
like a kind of a standard array with like a dice.
But it's really interesting to have what amounts to like a.
The word's not getting like a mobile, There's no specific DC.
So instead of being like this is gonna be a 10 and you have to
work like write your time out, like put two together and do
this or that. It's interesting that like
instead of having a DC for something, the contest that
you're doing is also a dice which has potentially like a
different, you know, average and things like that.
So it's a really interesting mechanic and contest obviously
makes sense cuz you're contesting like every role.
But I really like that idea of like this is my dye versus your
dye. You might have different dye and
and changing the dye and things like that.
It's a really, really interesting mechanic that
definitely like as soon as I saw it my brain went I'm not good
enough at maths. I really like like really dig
deep enough into this but it's fun.
It seems fun. I spent a lot of time in that
dice simulation app that's online.
You know it. Perhaps the other one, anyway
is. It any dice?
Yeah, yeah. That's the one.
Yeah. Yeah, I have also spent a lot of
time on any dice. Yeah, yeah, that seems.
Fun like, like it's a fun like adversarial.
And I don't mean that as a negative like you can have a fun
adversarial time with your with your arbiter or game master.
But like, I think that'd be a blast to be rolling against my
players and kind of like this is a win out on this one, man.
Are there like a lot of fun? Like I want to like say
adversarial. Like a negative, like fun
rivalry moments between like the arbiter and the play testers
when you guys run it. You know, I I would say no more
than usual. I guess a lot of times, you
know, when I played other games, I have the screen up and I'm not
rolling publicly, but for some reason with Beatle Knight, I
have always played it rolling publicly.
And so you see the difficulty and you see the result.
And so there can be this dramatic moments where you
recognize how difficult it was gonna be, and then you're and
even if you have like AD 4, you can still beat AD 12.
So those can be some fun, dramatic moments.
I suppose that you don't really necessarily get another styles
play. If it's just too hard, it's too
hard, right? But in theory, you could roll AD
100 and beat it with AD 4, so it's just probably probably not
going to happen, yeah. And also I mean getting
expertise in like an ability in Butte Knight, which is like the
plus one you're talking about like that's like a + 1 key, very
meaningful, pretty much every die size.
I mean when you get to AD 20, it's less meaningful, but like
for A10 or A12 or 4I mean plus one is very meaningful.
I mean, if you're ruling D sixes against an enemy that has AD 8
as a defense, then it's it's not going to feel that you're you're
not going to feel that great. You're going to miss more often
than you hit. You put a plus one in there, it
starts feeling better. I, generally speaking, have not
given foes those plus one modifiers and so it's slightly
in the player's favor. However, if they're strong
enemy, they'll be using those higher die higher dice.
So anyway. Yeah, but no, that's I.
And just the more we talk about it, the more we're excited about
it. Cuz this is the nitty gritty of
like game design stuff that's like so like I get really
excited about because when you look at like the the dice
mechanics, I mean everything has an average, but like you said
like AD 100 could be beat by AD 4 every now and then.
So I really like this like AD six, more often than not is
gonna lose to AD 8. But it could also at any point
be a massive success or massive failure.
And it feels like there's a lot of like swing and an innate
feeling of like difficulty. So your successes feel more
successful. And I didn't even thought when I
read this that you would use the GM screen.
Like, it never even crossed my mind.
Because like with the contest role, I would assume that, like
that almost makes it less adversarial because it's just
like it's not you rolling, it's the queen rolling hard dye and
then when you roll the two together you see it.
So it never even crossed my mind to like 5 E fudge rolls or
whatever, like behind a screen and that just feels cool.
There's this other aspect there where because there's the
challenge. Well, OK, there's this mechanic
of promoting dice or demoting dice, and so you have like your
your array of dice D4 through pretty much D12.
It's what players will mostly play in.
And let's say you're really clever and you, you know, you
give yourself some sort of advantage.
Well, you can promote your dice using that advantage.
The arbiter will have to sort of grant you that, but it makes it
so you can use creativity in order to give yourself a a
better sort of position to play with.
And it's it's just baked right in.
So at the same time if you're making mistakes and and slipping
and and fumbling a whole bunch then you can have your dye
demoted as well. And so yeah, and that's also
built in too. So like during combat, if you
try to do it's, it's actually based on Pathfinder.
You have three actions each round.
If you try to do the same action more than once, your dice get
demoted. If you try to do more than once,
not the same thing more than once.
And so yeah, it's just kind of a mechanic that gets used
throughout. Yeah, there's also powers that
give you that promote or demote dice for yourself, or propose
so. Again fun mathy dice fits are so
interesting like a lot of games would just go OK, you get
advantage now you get to roll 2D6, take the higher or
whatever. I love the idea of keeping it
consistent and keeping it with like the dice versus dice and if
AD 8 is better than AD 6, having the opportunity to roll the DA
instead of AD 6 because you put yourself in a better position or
something. It feels so clean and elegant
and staying within that feel where it almost has like a feel
of almost like a usage die ish feel, but as like a core
mechanic where it can like promote and demote and stuff and
it just it feels really elegant. Like I'm I'm really excited to
sit down and actually play this and actually get in hand just
cause it feels different than a lot of games that you play for a
lot of the reasons we've just had.
It's contested roles and everything.
But again, with like the set kind of array and the options to
go up and down on the dice, it just feels just interesting.
I appreciate that. I have other ideas with the
system. Anyway, maybe we'll talk about
that. I don't know.
Yeah, you start playing around with a system like this and it's
like there's different ways of doing things and all of a sudden
it changes the way that you think about how you do roles and
how you, like, resolve things. And it kind of brings me to
something here, which is this is being released under Creative
Commons BYS A4, point O. So my real, like, hope of like,
the legacy of the game is that other people will take it and do
crazy stuff with it that I never had hoped up.
So if you're listening to this, you know, go crazy.
I I will. I will tell and tell me about it
because I want to hear about it. Yeah.
I mean. A lot of games have seen a lot
of like Lifeblood infused into them by the Creative Commons and
like this that kind of like communal openness to like hacks
and 3rd party material. So that's AI think that's always
a really great approach. Yeah, I mean, I'm a heck of.
I've taken advantage of that with Karen.
So yeah. And it's, I mean it's been cool.
You can get kind of plugged into a community and there's all
these great Karen hacks out there now.
And I don't know. Anyway, I hope people do that do
it crazy well. It feels like a very.
Attackable game. Like even just going through it.
Like obviously we read a shit load of games and and everything
like that. So like we go through mechanics
and stuff a bunch. But like there's sometimes you
look at a game and go oh I could I could act the shit out of this
like this is this feels like one of those not only in we talked a
little bit before before we got on about we just played Blister
Curtis the other day and like Mouse readers like one of the
the flavors of of the year for Zing Quest and stuff.
I'm not playing humans opens the door.
It's like so much creativity. So like someone could easily
just be like well I don't like bugs so this is gonna be like
like birds or something and could really reskin it that way
Or the dice mechanic has so much fun math that could that could
come out of it too. So this is definitely one of
those ones where like I would, I'm excited for this game, but
I'm just as excited for like the community that could build up
around it and all of like the jams and things that could come
out to see it expand in in interesting ways.
Yeah. I mean if you can sort of like
wrap your heads around, all right, We want to be able to
give players an opportunity to have a plus one here or to be
able to promote permanently some ability.
Those are little mouths that you can add flavor that you can use
to add flavor. So for example previously we
just had the ability to add you you could promote one dye and
you give plus one to two different abilities.
So that's cool. But then people started saying
hey can I play you know a a Firefly.
Well what I what I did is I just took that same those same kind
of bonuses and spread it around the different species and it it
added a lot of flavor a lot more variety and but really under
under the hood it's the same thing happening same mechanics
so very cool. That's one of the nice things
about lighter systems is being able to just kind of use flavor
to move things around. It still feels good.
One of my other favorite parts about the game is the calling.
One of the issues with issues, I say issues.
One of the things that can come up in like OSR games is like,
why am I doing this? You know what I mean?
Like this world sucks. Like why am I adventuring or.
And this isn't like XP for gold, right?
Or Golda's XP. So there's a really elegant way
that you kind of fix that with this, especially with the idea
of the good night traveling. So what is the calling?
What was kind of your impetus for when to put that in the
system? Well, yeah, I mean from writing
a lot of adventures, there's always, I think it's always
helpful to have a motivation. And so, yeah, I mean you just
see that with adventures, if they don't have that motivation,
yeah, as a a game master you can create it, but if the character
has a motivation, it all of a sudden there there's emotional
investment. And so I wanted to get that with
Beetle Knight as well. And the idea here is that as in
order kind of to become a knight, you need to have lived
through some really tragedy. And so there's just a few tables
here to determine your calling, your call to knighthood.
So what were you before, then what happened?
And now because of that, what do you seek?
So for example, you could perhaps before you were a Moss
light scout scholar and then your world was destroyed by a
killing frost and then you seek to heal what was destroyed and
so and you know there's a few options and you know with the
combination there. There's a lot of different
options here. And I also explicitly say if if
you don't like what you get, you know come up with your own
thing. The idea here is to create a
motivation that in turn can be given to the arbiter, as you
know, quest fodder essentially. So I don't know when I've done
also like collaborative world building, you, you wind up
creating that emotional investment over the course of
the world building. And that as a game master has
given me lots of tools to work with.
So this just kind of builds that right in, yeah.
Yeah, so you know, I started with 5E like you said you did,
and it I feel like it was like it was like just yesterday, but
those ten years ago. And.
The thing, one of the reasons that I kind of moved away from
it, and this will be a point at some point was it just felt like
I didn't want to be just like a a a heroic, like somebody who
was chosen and eventually becomes a God.
And I was tired of just having to be like an OC generator where
I have no danger because you're not gonna kill this character
that I wrote a 10 page back story for.
So then you switch to OSR games or OSR style games or whatever
we're call it, NSR games, whatever it is.
Now sometimes you do feel that I don't want to write a 10 page
back story. I like the emergence of my
character in play and having something like this where I can
start the game with just like I don't need to write a bunch of
stuff. Like I can say like I know what
I did before, I know what happened.
I don't know what I'm like, doing now.
And it's really easy to be like, all right, 3D6, all right, this
is me, let's go figure out. And like you said, having these
options for like daggers that the the GM can have to like stab
you in the back later. Like the Locus swarm could be a
hold of Venture because they come back or something.
It's so it's so nice to be able to have that much information
and on both the player and the GM side without having to have a
huge back story, without having to have a whole module or
supplement that builds around stuff like that.
So it's really enjoyable and elegant and I wish more games
had exactly. That's like a reason to be doing
what you're doing. Well, I mean that's you know we
talked earlier before about into the odd.
It's one of those ones that's just kind of built in and you
just get it. You don't have to create
yourself and it it does, it may kind of force you to put
yourself into shoes that you wouldn't necessarily choose
yourself or or couldn't actually even create yourself because
you're not that person. You know, like it's it's nice to
be able to kind of let go of the reins and and see what you get.
But you know that with 5th edition, one thing that I I do
kind of like is the personal investment.
But with OSR style games, being able to spin up a character in
just you know, 15 minutes, it's so appealing.
I don't know. You sit down at the table and
and you just start playing right there is.
Something nice about like yeah it's like instead of having an
hour session where I make a character, I think I'm I'm
probably much quicker than that now but a lot of people aren't.
It's like no, just re roll, you know, like, I mean we were
playing bastards for a while at my table and it's like you it's
like 2 dice rolls and you're 3 dice rolls and your character's
made and I I don't know I do understand like that implicit
narrative that the player character creates themselves for
5E and like that being cool for buy in.
But like I am much more this like that emergence narrative.
But I do like like having like like the night calling like a
before then and seeks like that's as much information as I
want about my own character and that'll carry a long way you
know? Yeah.
And something else though that came up in this conversation is
beginning. God like ours.
So you know, each of these callings could be maybe a
adventure in itself, but I don't think Beatle Knight is gonna be
your multi year game. I would love it if it was.
We played it for about a year, but the way that leveling works,
there is no leveling in the game.
And so the only way that you gain more power is by getting
new emblems, which we haven't really talked about or special
items or you know, other things like that.
So I think it's just the right amount of sort of time to
resolve some of these these conflicts that come up during
character creation, if you see what I'm saying.
Yeah. No, absolutely.
Yeah and and kind of a hundreds out a little bit.
Like I like this feels like a nice medial middle ground
between like the the the 5E background stuff and with like
the OSR. Like you get nothing stuff where
like you can have some engagement with your character
and have a little bit of back story built in without having to
to, you know create a whole life story.
It's to me exactly what he said, like this feels like as much as
I want and it's more than you get with a lot of like more NSR
games. So I I really like that middle
ground it dude. It feels nice.
Cool. So, so this so this is on
Kickstarter right now. Thanks.
Yeah. We're just like, we like your
game. Go back it and go back it.
It is on Kickstarter right now. It is for Zinequest.
It's got 17 days left. I feel like we've been doing
Zinequest for like 6 years now is what it feels like, but
there's still like half a month left.
There's 17 days to go when people click the link which we
will provide for them and they come to be it all night and back
this project, what can they expect to get?
I know you said at one point like multiple pamphlets or
something, but what can you actually get when you back the
project? Yeah, it has grown from even in
January when I started planning out the project.
At first it was just gonna be a zene, kind of a chunky zene.
But as kind of more people came on board with the project, I've
split it up into a few different books.
So what we have is the core rules.
So the quick start is the closest thing you'll see to the
core rules. But there's a couple other
things that we're going to add, like a new create your character
section and procedures for play and like recommendations for
arbiters, that sort of thing. So there's that.
Then we have the Litterfall World Guide, and Litterfall is
the the name of the of the world.
That Litterfall literally means the the leaves that cover the
forest for. And by the way, these first two
are gonna be riso graph printed on the covers on colored paper,
and then we're gonna get some nice kind of textured paper for
the interiors as well. Nice.
Yeah. I'm a big fan of that.
We're working with Hobos Collective, who you might know.
Yeah, Logar, yeah, And they're starting a new print outfit.
And so anyway, I'm working with them on that.
But the World Guide will also have like story hooks.
It has 10 NPCS by Amanda P and she's great.
And then Warren WF Smith from Prismatic Wasteland is going to
do some running for factions, gods and powers.
I'm just looking at the the Kickstarter now.
All right, so those are the kind of the two core books.
Now we have 2 adventures as well, the Elm Root glimmer,
which I am writing, which is a point crawl with the dungeon
crawl. So I think it'll take you quite
a well a handful of sessions to complete.
It's not done yet. And then what is tentatively
called Egg Fall, which is by M Quintanilla, who'd she did try
the beetle milk and oh gosh, now the the name of the other one is
eluding you. Falls.
Yes, thank you. I love.
I love that one. The Karen right here.
Yeah. Yeah.
Also another Karen author. So, yeah.
And they're doing great stuff. I've seen like, the worst in
progress. Yeah.
Fangwich balls. I just.
I love Fangwich Balls and the style.
I mean they're already working with beetles and bugs so it's
like right on brand. And then Matthew Morris is
actually going to be doing the the solo rolls.
So and he's started on those. So yeah that's what you get.
In addition, a couple, well, we've we've actually done all of
these stretch goals and so there's like a well, there'll be
more writing, but they'll also be like a bookmark and a rule
summary card for for players. So that's what you get a lot
going on there. There's multiple tiers too.
And so right now, if if you're on a budget, I know Zine Quest
is terrible for everyone's wallet.
Painful, but there. Yeah, there's an $8 tier to get
all of the PDFs, so it's it's really cheap and a lot of people
are backing at that level, which is great.
Then there's a level for $14.00, The Litter Fall Relic gets you
just the core book, the Beatle Knight core rules, and then gets
you PDFs of everything else. And then there's a version that
you get all the books and then lastly there's a T-shirt.
There is a tier with all the books and AT shirt.
We do love AT shirt, man, I mean.
Yeah, I'm leaning back to show the Goblins and Gardens T-shirt
that I'm wearing now. But yeah, that cover art, it I
think will just look really good as a screen print.
So yeah. Absolutely.
So I think there's a lot, I think it's enough where if you
if you back it, you'll have, you know a a lot of play out of the
system if you want it does sound.
Like, yeah, there's a lot like this.
I do appreciate the all PDF tier because yes, I feel like Zine
Quest. Like, I love the idea, but man,
it's sure an expensive. Expensive.
Time, you know. Yeah, and I I wanted.
I wanted something more affordable and so that's why I
had that $14.00 tier, because when you start putting all these
books together, like the production costs really, they
really go up. So, yeah, well.
Especially with the quality of the book that you're talking
about, like Rizzo graph printing with like a texture paper
inside, that's not the same as just ripping off like a regular
Zine too. So that's gonna go too as well.
But. Some of these will be kind of a
your Mixum prints, but I want the core book and the Litter
Fall guide to have that riso graph quality to them cuz I just
love that. We were talking about a game
last week, then the Rizo graph. It's so pretty, it's so nice.
It's so clean. It's really nice.
I'm really glad that that's what you went with.
And I mean, the list of people that you have on the project is
fantastic. And I don't even know if we
talked about there's additional art from PR from Perplexing
Ruins and Rock Romero 2, who are both fantastic artists.
Yeah, I mean Perplexing Ruins and I, we worked together well.
He worked, did the illustrations on my very first project that
it's like this 5th edition project that's only really on
Patreon so and we've been working together ever since.
I've done art for some of his books and back and forth, so I
always enjoy working with him. And then Roke, we've been
talking for a while, we've been wanting to do something together
and you know, this is the perfect, the perfect
opportunity. I really liked Kodak's R for for
Troika, the art and that that he did, it's just like awesome.
Really, really unique style. Yeah.
And I, as we're talking about contributors, I do want to shout
out Chris Shorb right now, who is the game design editor.
I put out a version of Beatle Knight on the NSR Discord this
past summer. And I'm like, this is ready, I'm
gonna, I'm gonna put it out there.
And he started just like, commenting and giving notes,
just for free. And I'm like, Oh my gosh, can I,
can I pay you to do this, please?
Because this is so valuable. So and he had never done
anything like that before, but he really helps like kind of
focus the project into something that's more usable.
So when you're working on one thing for two years, you become
blind to like some basics. So it's been, yeah, it's been
really great to have some detailed passes from him.
Yeah, I'm still working through his latest round of edits, but
they'll make it in there, be sure.
It's always great to have a good editor.
And just remember, even editors have editors.
So for anyone out there that's creating stuff that doesn't have
an editor, it's a good idea to reach out to somebody and have
an editor. Very, very, very much so.
So obviously we're super excited for this project.
Like, I'm so like, this is actually one of my, probably my
favorite projects that are in Z Inquest right now.
Just a lot of it, cuz the mechanics like again, like just
the simple elegance of something that's a little bit different is
really exciting to play with. So can't wait for this to come
out. But Beatle nights got 17 days
left on it. What's the future look like for
Brooklyn games after this? Well, in the past I've done like
a crazy clip of creating stuff and that was too much for me.
So really what I'm trying to do is like one really high quality
project a year. So Beetle Knight is going to be
the big thing for this year. I expect that it will require
support going forward. I well, I hope it does for the
the next few years. So what's coming next?
It might be something else for Beetle Night?
I don't really know really. I'm just focusing on this right
now. I do have another project that
I've been cooking for a while though, for Karen, and it's it's
like escape the City, where it's a generated, well, like grid
crawl, except it's through a sort of magical fae forest.
So I've totally destroyed it and built it up from scratch like 3
different times. It's one of those projects.
But yeah, I don't know, I've called it True Tales.
That's the latest name that I've had for it.
I don't know. That's about it, I guess.
Well, I. Mean.
It's good to hear that you're putting time into this and
hopefully expect more Beatle night to come out too.
Cuz once again this feels like something that it could and
should have like a lot of legs, maybe like other legs or
something like a centipede. But yeah, it feels like it could
go and I'm really excited for that.
Yeah, I mean realistically we got I'm writing an adventure and
I'm writing and coordinating the Litterfall World Guide, so
that's gonna really keep me busy.
But my goal is to have all this stuff done by the end of the
summer and print it in the fall and shift in the winter.
I've done a few things like this.
I think that's doable. It was very reasonable, which is
nice, and it's nice to see so much of it's done already too,
which is cool. So yeah, like I said, we're
obviously excited for Beatle night, but anyone listening for,
especially for the Canon 5 E stuff you've done already, like
where can people find the stuff you've already done and where
this stuff will be in the future?
I mean, you can just check me out at brooklyngames.com.
That's BRO. OK, LET games.
That's a tiny, tiny Creek, a tiny brook.
And I got my itch linked there and my big cartel linked there.
There's a big thing that says Zen, Zen, Zen.
So yeah, click that and you can find my stuff on the official
Karen store. But it goes out of stock pretty
quick there. So, yeah, yeah, that's that.
Nice. Yeah.
I saw the e-mail from the Karen store the other day that said
they had reset some of your stuff or put some new stuff on
there. So, and I do want to give a
quick shout out too. I know the Hobos collective, a
logar's like press that's coming out.
It's very, I mean it's it's it's going to be distributing Beatle
Night, but it's also very like Pro Union, very pro, very, very.
Go check it out, Please support them, support the stuff that
they're doing. Logar's fantastic and that I'm
really excited what they're doing with that press.
But it's cool to see that, that you're working with them for a
distribution on that. So just wanted to make sure they
shout them out. We'll make sure to link them as
well. Yeah, they're they're great.
I I really like working and and just talking with Logar, he's
awesome. So yeah.
Yeah. But hey, listen, Jim, thank you
so much for coming on. Like I said, obviously we're
very excited about this. Can't wait to get it in hand.
Absolutely. I can't wait to see more Beatle
night, too. But we really appreciate you
being here and letting me, like, talk at you for a while.
So thank you so much for that. Yeah, I appreciate you having me
on. That was great.
All right. So as always, the links for
everything we've talked about will be in the descriptions
below. Our links are next to us and
we'll be there too. And that's me, us for today.
So once again, thank you for being here and everyone out
there. Have a nice day.
Bye, bye.