A Pint Of Cthulhu
Interview with Wes creator of No Nazis In Valhalla
Hello, and welcome to Apainic Thulu, myself, Matt, and I have my co-host Jay here. And today we are interviewing Wes, who has created and successfully kick-started the game, No Nazis in Valhalla. I had to restrain myself just then. So Wes, would you like to start us off with the first question that we ask every guest? If you could say Apainic Thulu is any type of drink, what would it be? Hmm, that's a hard one. Maybe something that's probably pretty awful to drink, but a nice dark beer with a shot of absinthe dropped into it. It's definitely weird enough, and it would be interesting to drink, that's for sure. At some point, Matt, if and when the cast meets up, we need to compile all the suggestions people have had. I don't think we're going to be able to try a glass of cosmic horror though. No, we've had, like, absinthe Guinness, a couple of other things, a feature, I believe. Oh god, that Guinness one. Just no. Okay, Jay, would you like to ask the first question? Of course. So, Wes, tell us about it yourself, really. Oh, sure. Who are you? What do you do? I am Wes Askely's native Texan here in the United States. I just got started into indie RPGs, probably about three years ago now. Well, maybe a little bit before that, but anyway, I've been playing Dungeons and Dragons forever, and then until recently I played it pretty much up until I got into indie TTRPGs. And when I got into indie games I was introduced to Mark Borg, and I produced my first product, which was Beyond Deep. And I'm a filthy leftist communist, what have you used, whatever you'd like to describe me. But Beyond Deep explores worker exploitation and things like that, specifically in the backdrop of something similar to the American coal mining industry and things like that. Heavily influenced by another podcast called Old Gods of Appalachia, but also just some of my family is from around the Appalachian area. I have friends and I've always been interested in that sort of time period. And that went very well, so of course I wanted to do more, but it took me a while to get on to no Nazis in Valhalla. I'd had the idea for probably about two years prior to this Kickstarter. And yeah, my friend Chris Coger wrote a system called Grindcore, which I'm sure we'll get into. So it seemed to fit what I wanted to do, and so I kind of ran with it and kind of just did it on a whim this year. It didn't advertise much or anything, yet somehow I still reached my goal. So yeah, I just kind of do what I want what I want. I'm not heavily business focused on my RPG products, I just kind of want to get stuff out there that expresses my values and things that I'd like to see in games. So can you tell us a bit about this latest creation, no Nazis in Valhalla? Absolutely. So I'll start with how it even got into my mind. I was at a witch festival, which sounds spooky and fun, but it's really just a bunch of vendors selling crystals, t-shirts, various witch-related and pagan-related paraphernalia. And I met this wonderful artist who's local to me named Wendy Fitch, and she had a shirt that said, "No Nazis in Valhalla." And I was like, "That's just the coolest thing I've ever seen." And so I wore that shirt for a long time. And I don't know, in case anyone doesn't know, but in the pagan community and specifically the Norse pagan community, there's a big issue with white supremacists and them co-opting symbols and traditions for their own nefarious means. So I kind of liked the idea of outright telling them that they're not allowed in the space that they want to be. And so shortly thereafter I messaged Wendy, "Hey, I want to make a game about this." She was all for it. And then for the longest time, I couldn't, I was just spinning wheels and couldn't get anything going. But every couple of months I would check in with Wendy being like, "Hey, is it so cool if I use this?" and she was very nice and very forthcoming with any sort of images I wanted to use. I didn't end up using any of her images because I think she deserves to be paid for her art and there wasn't a lot of meat on the bone, so to speak with this project. At any rate though. So I started writing shortly before I started the Kickstarter and basically the premise is it is the late war, late World War II. The Nazis are losing, they know that they're losing, and the Thule Society through goetic magic or estotericism type things, time travel back in time to a time in which they think A, they can take over. B, they think they'll be welcomed with open arms due to their obsession with Norse mythology and other things. And then turns out they end up getting to what is now the UK and the invasion of the Great Heathen army as it's so wonderfully called. And the Norse tend to disagree with them and in doing so they are empowered by the Norse deities to fight off this new invasion and players take control of heroic vikings for better or worse and get to do kind of whatever they want but generally destroying Nazis and foiling their plans is the name of the game. Nice, so do you have any connection with Norse countries or paganism yourself then? I've always, I am eternally fascinated with everything Scandinavian from prehistory to current and obviously the time period that's like most documented, really documented after the fact but most talked about is the Viking era which is roughly about mid-sixth century to roughly the twelfth century, very beginning of the twelfth century with William the Conqueror being the death knell of the Viking era. I also tend to flock to areas that have a lot of unsavory people in them and try to make people aware of their presence and get them kicked out or noticed and try to ostracize as much hate as I can. Yeah, clear that in the trash. Yeah, fair play to you, I think I should introduce you to Kim but she's a resident pagan witch. Very cool. I think also maybe just because you said the communism like social stuff, maybe the salvage you guys would like to daughter them? Maybe, maybe. Fluttering and blining. So with your game, can you tell us about the core mechanics, how exactly do you balance the whole guns, modern warfare, semi-modernish warfare compared to Vikings and the mystical gods and things like that? Sure. Mechanically, it's fairly simple. The players just have better dice than the enemies. And that's by design. That is so that it feels good and doesn't feel like you're dodging bullets. Lore-wise, all of these people who go up against the Nazis are empowered by supernatural beings. And also on a more realistic point, the Nazis are at the end of the war and they were having real supply line issues. I used to be a bit into World War II, I guess as most male born folks in the United States are at some point, oddly enough, war culture and all that good stuff. Yeah, so supply lines were terrible for them at the end of the war. A lot of their weapons had high rates of fire and needed their barrels replaced quite frequently. So that's part of some of the mechanics and things like that. Also just the lack of being in a modern era where you can just manufacture bullets and things like that is somewhat of the realism. But obviously we're talking about time traveling Nazis fighting magically powered Vikings. So there's some suspension of disbelief for sure. But I mean, the Vikings have powers that are, I mean, if you follow Thor, you get a power that enables you to essentially blow up a tank or any other large thing with a single action. Yeah, so you're definitely super, super hero powered type of characters. It's a bit more dangerous than say like D&D 5E, but it is definitely not. While the system was built for an OSR game, this is OSR adjacent, you are definitely playing a more heroic role. Nice. So how did you approach the world building aspect of this? Because obviously you're setting it in a somewhat real world kind of situation. The Vikings actually existed in such not completely fantasy land, but how did you, are the gods like known about by regular people before this or do they show up specifically to punch Nazis? Well, so it's fairly realistic in that sense in that the Vikings were already obviously a at this point. So it takes place in around the year 865 AD in England and there's this large army that gets called the Great Heathen army that's made up of a bunch of different smaller armies. Its intention was to go take over all of England. Now there, while they have strong belief system, I sort of set it up to where that they didn't have so much actual magic before it was needed essentially. The gods existed in their minds and things like that and then they presented themselves in a time of great need as sort of the overall narrative because I like that idea. So I'm big into estitaricism and so that's predominantly around a book called the Goentia or the Key of Solomon. It's a lot of, it's what people would call like satanic magic. It's not particularly satanic, it's believed to be made up by the Italians in around 14th century something like that but it's made to look as though it's like pre-biblical and things like that and anyway it's a fascinating subject that I can talk about for a long time. But the Thule Society was really big into mysticism and things like that so it kind of was a natural fit, the Thule Society being the Nazi's sort of supernatural expert/secret society type of thing. Yeah I've seen quite a bit of them from my own interests in history and conspiracy theories especially who trace back enough more and want you to find the same five bits from the Nazi party. Yep, from cyclops schools to the end of the world. Yep, from circles back. So can you make your own viking in this or do you have preset characters? So that's a big thing that I wanted to have in this is that it's all completely modular so you will be making your own viking, essentially the pieces that you put together. There's no classes, there are somewhat archetypes but you get to pick and choose. So you have your, there are five main leaders to the Great Heathen Army historically so I put them in there and basically you get an ability from following them that speaks to their character, there's also a sixth option where you can be unaffiliated. Then after that you sort of pick your patron deity, you get two abilities out of the four to choose from from each one. I have six currently in future iterations I will have many more. So that's already you know 24 abilities to choose from and then another 12 from the leaders and then after that you get to choose your sort of background, vocation, job, what have you. Things like the Bridserker or the Vouva which is like a soothsayer or a hunter, things like that and those give you yet another two options out of four to choose from and then when you level up you can choose any ability from either the gods or the background talents to give yourself. You do not have to stick to one thing so it's very modular in that respect. I didn't want anyone to fall into like oh well this vikings a healer, this vikings you know a damage dealer etc etc I want you to make sort of your own thing. Nice, so what's the kind of player experience I mean I am intrigued with this game. So more hack and slashy, more talk and play. So it's definitely I always like to say the cover is definitely a Nazi getting an extra space so combat is combat is definitely the focus. However it's also a bit takes a bit of inspiration from a game called Band of Blades where it's sort of military focused. There are opportunities to role play quite a few of them and you may not always be fighting and killing, you may be sabotaging, you may be exploring, scouting etc. There's definitely a it is not a catch all system it is not a I wouldn't recommend this for any sort of high politics and negotiation style things but there's definitely you can kind of do whatever you want with the system. The system is relatively rules light and it can suit a lot of needs but it is definitely more military focused. So you were saying about combat just then how do you go about balancing that? What kind of what kind of roles are we talking about here I mean you're fighting off against Nazis with limited resources you're shooting lightning at them. What kind of roles are you making here? So it is completely player side dice so if you are being attacked you are rolling to dodge or block or what have you you have attributes and like in most games that determine your finesse, your physical strength, your intelligence etc. But if you can come up with a good enough reason to roll a specific stat you can kind of roll it so it's definitely meant to be at the advantage of the players. A lot of the enemies are kind of predetermined they have a tier system in which they just do X amount of damage there will be optional rules for rolling that damage if you want a bit more swinging combat but they will do the basically their tier one through six they will do an average of the d6 equivalent to their tier so if it's a tier six they will be doing 66 but average on that. So it's kind of a very tactical game for the players in that respect because they understand what the challenges are very specifically and then from a how do I survive gunfire there's tons of supernatural abilities that allow blocking of bullets stealth abilities ability to manipulate the terrain before the fight things like that as well. So definitely have to like if you come upon a castle that has a bunch of MG42 light machine guns posted on it you may have to think about what you need to do you may have to understand that you cannot just because you are super heroic does not mean you are bulletproof. God this story sounds so fun. It does it really does. Ah I can't wait to try out. What challenges did you face during the development of your game was earning that was like really difficult to sort out. Yeah and not to tell on myself but that's kind of why we rescheduled the play test is there are so many abilities that I needed to write because not only did I write four abilities for so let's see there's six classes we'll call them classes six gods each of those have four each so that's 48 plus another 12 from the leaders so that's 60 and then on top of that I gave each one and out of combat or like a a a more vague ability so that to get people's brains thinking because also you can just kind of make up what you do with the ability the these are more guidelines but so basically I wrote a hundred and twenty abilities so that was my main hurdle is just a ton of work something that I didn't quite realize and then I was like oh yeah that's that's a lot luckily they kind of just come to you once you start getting get going things start to make sense when you build a world around it so it's not as horrifying as it sounds but it definitely was a struggle. Yeah I mean that many ability to learn how on earth have you not driven yourself. I think I think we're all mad here I mean I think that's kind of the point of developing T.P.T.T.R.B.G. is a play in them. So obviously we're not going to be the first people to play test this how have you taken feedback from play test groups how does that help you develop what you're creating now what you're nearly finished with mm-hmm yeah the the bulk of the writing is done just tweaking things now honestly but um feedback it all comes in the form of what feels good at the table with a rules light system there is no way that you can really take this is advice to anyone who wants to listen if you write a rules light system someone inevitably is going to tell you hey I think this needs to be a rule or this needs to be a rule or this needs to be a rule or this needs to be a rule it doesn't you can I am very much a believer of rulings not rules that's kind of a big OSR philosophy that is how games used to be played and while I love crunchy games I love games that have a rule for everything if you're setting out to write a rules light system do not try to do that don't don't turn it into a crunchy game if you want to write a crunchy game write a crunchy game but that being said you can have lots of guidelines lots of clarifying language things that will lead players in a direction that you want to go so feedback comes in the form of oh it feels like I just kill everything I touch or I feel like I'm not doing any damage or I feel like I have three skills that are the same exact thing just with different flavor text and obviously with a hundred and twenty-ish abilities that's a big feedback that I like to take luckily I've been pretty good on the variety so I haven't gotten a ton of that yet but it will remain to be seen this is coming out in September it is now almost June so a lot of play testing will be happening in the next two months I've kind of gotten past the and actually I'm going to release a sort of quick start guide at some point in the near future don't hold me to that I could be lying completely but that is that is the call to get it into people's hands that want it and have them mess around with it and give me feedback while that feedback make it into the final version probably not it really depends it depends on if it fulfills what I want it to that is the advantage of making your own game but also I am very prone to peer pressure and enough people say something maybe I'll do it but yeah you heard that you heard that here folks and Billy and Billy they're making a sequel there's some some finished Wow so we're a we're a podcast that has members in multiple countries so we can't really meet up in person for games do you have any plans to sort of integrate this game before 2020 so not roll 20 specifically although I probably will just do roll 20 on my own however yeah however there is a a company called dice weaver that has a VTT that the owner/main contributor/person who does everything has reached out to me and wants to put my game into dice weaver dice weaver is really really fascinating to me I'm pretty picky about VTTs I don't use them a lot of times I'll I you begrudgingly use roll 20 because it seems to be the one that fits my brain the most and I've learned to use it if you like it you don't like it that's whatever but yeah yeah for sure and it's definitely like the most yeah and it's the most compatible it's it has the ability to adapt to a lot of systems without too much coding to be done there are other ones that have touted it but I haven't found one that that really enables anyone to just like put their own system into it so honestly yeah so like honestly it's just this guy reached out to me I liked his product and it seems like it'll be a good fit but I will likely put something not on roll 20 as well yeah we've seen everything from card games to coins to obviously dice and rolls when he probably there and to bring him discord so I haven't looked into that so that's hard about it so the games you've ran so far have you got any specific memorable moments has been any eye-opening events or just months you can't stop laughing at I really like so I have this artist named Hoadag he's done some other OSR stuff he's somewhat well known but he actually illustrated this moment of a Norse person blowing up a U-boat a submarine and oddly enough that happened my very first playtest and I don't think the person had seen the art yet I don't even think I had released it yet but it was it was a very epic and I don't use that term lightly despite being a millennial and overusing the term epic it was a very grandiose display of power that set the scene quite well and a lot of playtest I sort of start people out on a you have to get across this part of water there are German U-boats there are patrol vehicles and things like that and everyone was really quite scared because there's a lot of guns and they don't have any guns they made their way about halfway and happened to roll poorly and a U-boat shows up in surfaces and is causing quite an alarm and the I believe they were a worshipper of Thor a follower of Ivar the boneless and maybe a soothsayer maybe a move but at any rate called down an exceptional blast of lightning exploding the U-boats and causing others to flee and then Ivar has this gives their constituents an ability called cold and calculated where basically through military prowess they can route their enemies but also sort of cripple them at the same time and it it made the rest of the encounter rather trivial which was cool because the first half was rather slogging but yeah that was a fun moment so what's other than like actual Norse mythology what resources or books or games have you drawn upon for inspiration oh so many so I'm a bit of a collector as far as RPGs come I own conservatively upwards of 150 and I've only been collecting for about three years yeah so a lot of inspiration from a lot of things but specifically the Black Hack and more notably the Black Sword Hack which was put out by the Mary Muschman and a wonderful writer by the name of Kobayashi an exceptional ability to have modular characters that don't all feel the same I find that if a lot of classless systems tend to have all the same character you're all just a guy with a sword and you have one or two defining characteristics but yeah so Black Sword Hack by Mary Muschman or by Kobayashi rather distributed by Mary Muschman is probably a very big influence as far as mythology and resources and other things like I said the goetic magic and the key of Solomon are big influence on the enemies visually things like Junji Ito and Berserk as far as darkness and grit go that is actually a carryover from grindcore's original setting called Vail Thinner's which Chris Cobier came up with and then yeah it's not out yet so but I'm sure he would love to talk about it at some time this no nazis in Vaha actual be grindcore's first public setting so it'll be interesting it's a bit more OSR but also just tons of Norse mythology and specifically the sagas of the Icelanders I want more so a lot of people tend to focus on the barbarism and the animalistic nature of Vikings and all the machismo and you know puffing up your chest and what have you but they were also just like people so I like to examine the multifaceted nature of while yes they were courier soldiers they were also farmers and things like that so I kind of like to make them more believable as people the sagas are a good demonstration of that well since you said you have 150 RPGs on your collection can you name a few that you particularly enjoy oh absolutely so we have broken tails by world anvil uses the monad echo system it's very cool you get to roll as many d6s as you would like which is it's fun to see a player be like I can roll 100 d6s sure you can but if you roll a single one your entire action is considered a failure I also like games that sort of fail forward so while yes you may fail that role if you roll 100 dice and you get a single one obviously the implication is that you probably set out what you meant to do just you are in a less advantageous position let's see Troika is one of my first loves as far as OSR games are concerned that is Melsonian council they the game itself is based on fighting fantasy by a person named Steve Jackson not Steve Jackson games Steve Jackson it's very confusing but that one's just goofy and has a lot of genuine randomness that is enjoyable rune quest specifically the latest edition of rune quest as y'all know with that system percentile based it's the same system as call of Cthulhu very fun very crunchy the combat took me a minute to get my head around oh certainly the cipher system I run an old gods of Appalachia game once a month that's always fun but yeah all sort of all over the place yes once we finish this one give you a couple of recommendations of ours if you'd like sure absolutely that's our redis isn't kickstarter junkie can't help himself that the truth well speaking of kickstarter how did you find the kickstarter running you know how how was that for you um so this one was a bit more I was a bit more concerned um my first one I funded within like four hours so I was like really jazzed about it yeah it was really cool maybe it was like six hours but still yeah and that's because it's a Mark Borg adventure and Mark Borg sells itself but I I was surprised that I succeeded on this one because I was I think halfway through the campaign and I wasn't I was losing traction so I just like put out a call to all my friends I'm like hey if you could spread this around I would really like to at least make this uh that'd be cool um and I did I did alright I did double my goal I think um what my goal wasn't crazy um let's see I'll pull it up right here yeah my goal was two thousand I made it five thousand so yeah pretty pretty decent um and everyone who has signed up for it seems like super into it which is even better than doing really well um I am much more interested in in players uh playing my game that really want to play it rather than picking it up um as as a kickstart junkie myself um I know sometimes I will back a game without really thinking about it I'm like this looks cool and then and I'm like wait but I have ten other games that are like that do I really want this um yeah just quickly then the biggest amount you've dumped on a chaos um 360 360 US dollars so oh still two yeah no no no I have some I've summed self restraint and I'm poor so that one sent me a screenshot of a kickstart he was pledged to and it was in a different currency it was in pounds and it had 999 oh yeah oh that was the escape yeah well it's like uh I not only believed he'd done it I was like man no no not again you have to eat you have you have to pay for a home yeah yeah it's always it's always a struggle and then being like oh yeah I could pay that off over the next six months and then doing it five times and then you're like oh yeah turns out I'm just buying a kickstarter every month yep also have a specific type of evil to each other that if we're low on money uh other members of the podcast will like immediately start looking on kickstart and recommending shit this is a D&P enabled podcast yeah clearly well I think we've asked everything we need to ask not quite oh no we missed something uh yeah so do you have any plans sorry if you can hear a dog absolutely losing his fucking money um so what are your plans for after the game's release expansions updates yes uh yes uh almost certainly um definitely further games that's no doubt um but uh specifically even with just the amount of gods that I want to put in to this game uh 48 pages is not enough uh to fit this it will probably end up being more than 48 pages don't tell my backers although they'll be they'll be happy about it um but um yeah uh my next project my next immediate project is a expanded version of beyond deep we're going from a hundred page um perfect bound book to at least a two hundred page uh hardback book yeah kind of like a real like it's going to be a setting book for morkboard um it's going to be we're going to try to sort of balance the um Appalachian southern United States horror with the medieval um grim dark horror uh the first one's a little bit leans a little bit too much into the modern era but at any rate uh it will be a plethora of quest hooks monsters items NPCs several areas to explore and that sort of thing and eventually I'd like to do that with no Nazis in Valhalla I'd like to have a big old historical map of of eight eight sixty five um England um the uh all the different kingdoms are quite fascinating uh and and would lend a lot to story prompts and things like that so uh it's definitely in my immediate future um it I may even do it start I'll probably start um before I even release this one like before it gets printed so yeah nice how would you we see a lot of TBRB's a lot of kickstart ones to get funded be successful and have people want to make essentially homebrew or one shots of it how would you feel about people doing that for no Nazis in Valhalla go for it uh I am um the one shot master um not really I don't think I'm quite that good at it however I run one shots of I've done over 20 systems already this year I plan to do 52 I was trying to do one a week this month kind of got bungled up due to various things um but uh I actually specialize in in teaching TBRPGs that are not Dungeons & Dragons uh over on a discord called the titter pick academy um if you if you all ever want to pick up a game and it fits into your time schedule I highly recommend that server at any rate um I want people to take what I have and use it to their own needs unless it is a power fantasy of fascism and siding with the Nazis I'm not particularly fond of that unfortunately there's not a real way I can stop that um but I do in as in my first book and I will put in this book a big old disclaimer that I don't like bigots and I don't want them interacting with my stuff generally that turns them off they don't like being told what to do um so they don't even purchase it and that's what I like to see uh but yeah I would love anyone to tell me their stories of no nazis and vala when it comes out and their experiences with it I think it's fun will they be a way of pre-ordering it for those of us yes the Kickstarter absolutely I will be opening up a backer kit either at the end of June or the beginning of July um I will keep everyone posted on that uh I did that for Beyond Deep and it did quite well for me and backer kit honestly it's probably where I'll run my crowdfunding in the future I prefer their tools it's just that Kickstarter has a lot more traction and um search engine optimization and things like that so but yeah there will be a way all right and finally do you have any advice you'd give to aspiring PTRPT creators oh totally uh the biggest one just do it it's not as hard as it think as you think it is uh I have read more um like half crafted ideas that I enjoy then fully fledged RPGs that are just like uh 300 paperweight 300 page paperweight um and uh I think people's ideas are much more varied and interesting uh if you just have a weird idea and you're like I don't even know how this would work right write it down on an napkin go to your two friends and be like hey play this game with me roll these dice you don't have to have a full session to like it doesn't have to be a proper uh RPG session for it to be a testing session you can literally just say okay this orca tax you roll these dice because I want to see how this mechanic works you know it doesn't have to be anything more than that now I will say uh while you should just do it um you should also edit it you should also get someone to edit it you should build in to every Kickstarter budget a budget for editors um most there are a ton in the community that will charge something like 10 cents a word um for reference that's uh about a thousand dollars for a like 48 page zine which sounds like a lot uh however um when you're printing a zine I'll give you a peek behind the curtain uh if you if you're printing anything more than a hundred copies you're probably printing them at four or five dollars a piece um so your print cost is really low also pay yourself um don't don't think that uh you don't deserve any money because you're doing something you like pay yourself uh however I do like to adopt the um the policy of everyone eats before I do so I tend to uh pay my collaborators more and sooner than I pay myself so take the approval yeah I try to be yeah well I think that's uh unless I forgot anything else Jay no I think we're good well I say thank you very much for your time and discussing your absolutely amazing sounding game we can't wait to play it's soon as well yes very soon yeah where people can find you if you want to go yeah sure uh TikTok is what I'm super active on there as far as social media goes uh nuclear wessels um but also twitter under west asquities uh if anyone uses that anymore uh instagram under atomic wessels uh kind of all over the place but also if you just search up spooky bell games uh we're gonna start posting there more often um we we're all really bad at social media when it comes to like a company so uh it is what it is but yeah it's your name a star trick joke it is uh yeah I thought so yes of course uh yes um I actually it was before I was even a trek fan which I think is very funny I had a friend who called me wessels all the time and I was like why do you call me that and he explained it to me and then it just kind of became my internet handle because it's a pretty good one and a lot of nerds enjoy it so yeah right well thank you very much for your time this has been a final cathedral and I think we're going to sign off now so uh keep your ears peeled for the playtest which should come out at the same time this is released if not a little bit later but until then thank you very much and goodbye bye! so so so so so so [BLANK_AUDIO]