A Pint Of Cthulhu
Interveiw with George of Three Sails Studio
Hello and welcome to a party cathedral with myself, Matt and my co-host Jay. Today we are interviewing another special guest, George from 3Sail Studios. We'd like to say hello. Hi guys! Jay, would you like the first icebreaker? So as always, our first question is, what drink, if pint of kiwli was a drink, or if kiwli in general was a drink, would you think it be? Okay, so for me, it has to be, I'm going to go with, like, 100% proof pure ethanol, like insanity-inducing blindness-inducing raw chemical alcohol. That seems to me, it's not particularly enjoyable, but then when is terrible eldritch horror enjoyable, right? Fair enough, ever clear with two drops of blackfoot color. Yeah, exactly, maybe a little bit of purple mix in there and some glitter. Oh, glitter, oh, never glitter. So, tell us a bit about yourself then. Well, yeah, I'm so I'm George. I am the studio lead here at 3Sail Studios, which makes me sound way more grand than it actually is. We are a small team. There's three of us on the creative team as myself, so I'm the lead designer and the studio lead. There is Joel Kilpatrick, who's our artist, and there is Mr Jeremy Blum, who is our developer and my co-writer as well. And I am the designer of Mapper Mundy and Exploration and Ecology RPG, which is, I'm pretty sure, the reason why I'm here today. It was looking at something else. So, what inspired you to create your own TTRPG? That's a little bit better. Wow, I mean, so, all right, let me, I'll break that down into two parts. So, what inspired me to create TTRPGs? So, I've always been really, really into storytelling. I am a huge JRPG fan ever since I was a young kid. I mean, when I was like six or seven, I played Final Fantasy 7 for the first time. And it's like, was it like a fully life-changing moment? Like, I look back on a lot of the things that inspire me, kind of socially, politically and gaming-wise and storytelling-wise now. And that's still a really huge part of it. When the remake came out, my partner was playing through it with me for the first time, and she's like, oh, this, this really explains quite a lot about you, doesn't it? So, that was, that's, that's kind of where it started. And then I remember being like 10 or 11 years old and we had this really shitty family laptop. Like, it was held together with, literally held together with masking tape. Like, it was really, really bad. I remember being sat at my mum's kitchen table, writing what in retrospect was just a huge Final Fantasy rip-off, but writing a script for it. And ever since then, I've been really, really into storytelling and writing and, and world-building and, and more recently, I've kind of gotten to the kind of like, I really like mechanics design as well. And that all kind of comes together quite nicely into, into trying to be a TTRPG designer. And so we're here with Mapper Monday now. Mapper is, so it's an exploration and ecology RPG for people that haven't heard of it. And you probably won't have yet because it's not like the actual book isn't out. We just got the pre-release guide available. Mapper is, it's a zero combat game. It's a unique system. It's a system that I designed and we've worked on together as a creator team. There's no combat in it. And you go out and you go out and explore a parallel version of our own world where monsters are real and document their behaviours and encounter monsters, creatures and cultures. And by documenting them and learning about their behaviours, you're kind of saving them from being unmade by fate. And so that ties in with a whole lot of stuff for me. Like it's like cash tag, vegan power and all stuff like that. It's nice to actually be going out and observing animals and monsters and not killing them instead. And the idea for it came to me in a dream, if you can believe that. I know that's really kind of cliche, but it actually came to me in a dream. My partner was, you know, when you're in a room with someone and you're asleep and they're awake, so you're kind of like partially awake as well. I was in that kind of weird, liminal dream state thing. And I don't even, it only been like 20 minutes of me being in that state. And suddenly I sat bolt upright and I was like, oh my God, what if it was like, what if there was a game that was like Pokemon and Monster Hunter, but you don't hurt any of them and you don't make them fight each other? And by the way, it's got medieval world maps in it. And like, I just jumped straight out of bed, came through into here and started writing, having not put any clothes on at all. And you guys can't see this right now, but there's like a big window right here with a row of houses behind. So thankfully my desk kind of covers the important stuff, but I was sat here fully just like trying to get this idea out as quickly as I could. Wow. Yeah, it's quite an image, right? That is fascinating. A little bit. I mean, especially in that kind of liminal dream state to have it, that clear to start writing away. I just sometimes, I mean, for me, it's, you know, there's this thing, a lot of people don't write and they don't create things because they think you have to wait until something is perfect before you even start writing it. And then that's so often not the case. That's the way you get nothing done. And it's certainly not the way that I normally design things. And it wasn't the way obviously your mapper has gone to gone. A lot of work since my naked dream writer session. But in that one instance, the idea came to me almost fully formed. Like the concept came to me almost fully formed. And it was just the case of then sitting down and getting work out. And I was like, if I don't, I was still in that kind of state where the idea was really, really fresh. I was like, if I don't get this out now, as it is, I'm going to forget things. So it was, it was now, now I have a notebook next to my bed. So I don't have to get, so I don't have to run between rooms undressed. But yeah, so that's where mapper, that's where mapper Monday came from. Seems like a very fascinating idea, because I've had that for two and playing Monster Hunter games, so I wish I could just study these things. Exactly, like killing them is the most boring thing you can do, right? And often, these things are like the only one of their kind. And you're like, oh, look, isn't it majestic? Isn't it fantastic? I better kill it. Like, it's just, I think it's, well, I mean, obviously in Monster Hunter, they're kind of like, they're more dangerous monsters or whatever. But it reminds me of that line from really, really, really early on in South Park, which is quick, it poses no threat, kill it. Oh, man, they're peeing. Yeah, exactly, yeah. And so, you know, just being able to, it's a different take on things. It's, you know, it's, if you've played the Monster Hunter games, mapper is going to be familiar to you. But it's also, I mean, I've written in the introduction on my side of the inspirations, it literally says Monster Hunter, but turned upside down. Um, so yeah, that's, that's, you know, we're trying to do something a little bit different to it, but they're, and they're at the, they're, there are, there are inspirations for us beyond Monster Hunter as well, like in the TTRPG space. Like Monster Care, mapper Monday wouldn't exist without Monster Care Squad having broken this kind of ground for us. Um, you know, I don't know if you guys are familiar with Monster Care Squad at all, but literally you, you, you basically play Monster vets. Um, and you go out and you, like the world, I think all the world, uh, uh, Aldmurra, I think it's a great game. It's really, really worth getting. Um, and it's going to sound very much like mapper, but mapper goes a number of steps, adds another, another couple of steps into the whole process. Like, you know, goes beyond the, the, the kind of core concept that Monster Care Squad sets up. But you, you're basically playing vets, saving these kind of like, deity monsters from a kind of crystalline infection thing. And it's great. And it's, you know, mapper Monday exists in that kind of continuum. I didn't find out about Monster Care Squad until I'd started substantial design work on mapper Monday, then I was like, oh God, like that's it. We can't do this anymore. But then once I got, once I'd gotten to grips with Monster Care Squad, I was like, okay, we do, we are doing different things, but it exists in that kind of continuum. They broke ground for us to be able to go off and do something like this. So looking at the art style and the theming, it's absolutely incredible. But why did you go down that kind of route? What made you go, this is the art style we should use? Um, so, so Joel and I have been working together. We've been friends, friends for a very long time, best friends for a, you know, a really good amount of time. And we've been working together now for, um, two and a half years, not all of that time on mapper. We've only actually, weirdly, we've only, so mapper has moved very, very quickly. We only actually put pen to paper on the art style kind of nine months ago, I think, maybe like kind of September, October last year. Um, and so Joel, Joel and I, weirdly for two people who were working in creative spaces. Both of us have aphantasia, we can't see images. Like, will you close your eyes? So if you guys close your eyes and people at home can do this as well, close your eyes and picture an apple in your mind. Like, can you actually see that apple? Can you see, I mean, the apple is going to be different for you to everyone else. But can you actually see it and describe it? Because for Joel and I, it's just a kind of amorphous thing. Um, and the, in a way, it's, it's weird for both of us to have it, but it also works quite well for both of us working together. Because I describe everything I want to him in words. And I provide some kind of visual references as and where I can. And he's able to interpret rather than me saying, think about this image. We're able to describe things in almost like a collage of words. And we end up working really nicely together as a result of this. Like, you know, he is an incredible artist. I'm not going to, you know, I'm not going to deny that for a second. He's absolutely amazing. And we're really, really lucky to have him. He's also the shyest and most modest guy you'll ever meet. And he says the artwork so good is so good because I give him good briefs. Now, I do give him good briefs, but he is an incredible artist who takes, he takes things that I, I, I thought I wanted and makes, and makes them what I actually wanted. Like he, he interprets things in such an incredible way. And when I don't know what I want, I'm able to just throw things, throw words and phrases at him. And he ends up coming up with something that I could never even have envisioned. So in terms of the art style, we wanted, because, because in my mind, mapper, mapper Monday is kind of subverting that more traditional RPG core gameplay loop, which is go out into the world, find monsters and kill them. So we wanted to have the artwork kind of the reminiscent of games like Pathfinder and D&D, big sprawling vistas, big landscapes with characters that feature in them. But none of our characters carry weapons, like on the, on the front cover of our pre-release guide, two people are looking out into the wilds, a third person is kind of looking over, protecting them and one person is drawing a map and making notes. Like this is not something you typically see on, on combat focused RPGs, which is most of them. So in terms of that art style, I wanted something that was kind of, big and sprawling and captured the sense that you are, the thing that makes you are a tiny, tiny little part of this ecosystem. The world is largely indifferent. The world is not a hostile place, but it's not a benevolent place as well. You are, like all human beings, as individuals, you are an arguably insignificant part of this ecosystem. But what makes you heroic is that you are the ones who are stepping out into this world. And the world is there for you to help give shape to and for you to interpret and for you to work with people and monsters to bring that out. So I really wanted to try and see if we could capture that in the artwork. So that's what we've got. We've got a lot of sense of scale, but also proximity and trying to capture that vibe of discovery or of revelation is perhaps the wrong word because it comes with quite a lot of religious significance. But like the idea that you, the world is being revealed to you simply by you stepping out into it. And that's what we've tried to capture. And Joel just does an absolutely incredible job. Everything he does. So Fair enough. The artwork is absolutely stunning. Thank you. So I mean, we get, we get to really go into it as well. Because obviously we have the book and we have the monsters in the book, but we've also got the journey deck as well. So the journey decks going to have like the final journey deck will be 72 cards, 32 of which are individual landscapes. And these are, you know, tarot sized cards. I've got some, well, I've got some right here. And again, people at home, people at home can't see these, but they can go online and download them for free because we'll get onto this way. You can find mapper and stuff. But these are like, that's just, that's one piece. And they what they do, they work with radio symmetry as well. So it's the same image up and down, but differently toned. So it's, you know, you can have a good experience or a bad experience based on the orientation that the card comes out with a deck. And so I set Joel that challenge. I love setting him challenges. I said to him, right, give me a tarot deck that works like a tarot deck. It means different things depending on the orientation, but they all need to be landscapes and that needs to be the same landscape up and down. And he was like, right, leave it with me. And he came back with this. And it's just so again, I didn't know this is what I wanted until he gave it to me. He took, he took the, he took the idea I had and then gave me exactly what I wanted without knowing that I wanted it. Nice. So with the lack of weapons and the focus being thoroughly away from combat, the mechanics of your game, the actual mechanics of them have to be pretty different from us. Uh, well, yeah, yes and no, really. I mean, so mapper Monday is, I designed it to be really accessible. It's a narrative focused game. There are some mechanics that I say that kind of set us apart. I always hesitate to say unique because I don't know every game out there, right? There might be someone who's done this before. Certainly the things that other people have done before that we're in the kind of same space, obviously, we still have dice. We have tarot cards, which are a lot of solo games use. We don't use them in the same way, but they're there as a kind of storytelling device in a way of visualizing the wilderness that you are traveling through and documenting. We have map making. There are some, again, there are solo games out there that engage in map making practices and stuff like that. We have abilities still. We have four abilities, um, exploration, observation, deduction and traversal, but so every test you do, every kind of mechanical test you do will be on one of those four things. Each one of those things has four dice attached, one dice attached to each. So whenever you're making a kind of rolling test, you're only ever rolling one dice. But one of the things that we try to do is, you know, you play as chroniclers. You are not, you know, you're not druids and bards and barbarians and fighters and stuff. You're chroniclers. You are either an, so I nearly said alchemist there. You are either an archivist, a diviner, a fixer or a guardian. These are trained jobs. You were trained by the mapamundi Institute to go out into the world and map it and document it. And so in theory, we're all supposed to get better at our jobs over time, right? We're supposed to get better at the things we do. So instead of experience in mapamundi, you have expertise. So as you succeed in your ability checks and fail at them, you, you notch up expertise points and then you use those instead of upgrading your character, you upgrade the dice associated with that ability. So you go from a D four to a D six to a D eight to a D 12 with the idea being that you are able to attempt more difficult things the more expert you are. So, you know, things that you couldn't do on a D four, you can't roll an eight on a D four, but you can roll it on a D eight and a D 12. So a fresh, a fresh graduate of the mapamundi Institute isn't going to attempt to do certain things. But someone that's been out in the wilds for a few years is going to attempt to do them because they've gained expertise. The other one, the one that I'm most proud of and the one that I think really makes mapamundi stand out, especially for people playing it for the first time, is this mechanic we call shaping. So mapamundi is a collaborative storytelling experience. There are no GMs or DMS here. There's no kind of hierarchies in place. The person running the game is a facilitator. We call them narrators. And their job is to kind of create the framework of the world. And then the players tell the narrator the story of the game. They give detail to the world and we call this mechanic shaping. And one of our playtesters described as adding flavor text to the world. But an example of this would be is you go so during the journey phase, which is a second or three phases, you know, the card comes out of the deck. The cliff card comes out of the deck, for example. And rather than me as the narrator telling you what those cliffs are like and what you see, I give you a really, really brief vibe check and then I go to each of you in turn and say, right, what what are the cliffs look like? What can you smell? What can you hear? What can you see? What animals are there? What does it feel like? And you might give me a single word, an emotion, a couple of words, a paragraph, a sentence, whatever. And then I pass it to the next person and they might respond to what you've said or add their own thing into it or zoom out of the picture or zoom right in. So over the course of the game, the players are telling the narrator, the world, the narrator is there to kind of tie that together and weave it through all the new things that are revealed. So that shaping and in this way, you know, mapper, I think in my mind, mapper stands out. It's the thing that all of our anyone that plays the game is like, God, that was really, I really, really enjoyed that bit. So in terms of like, kind of to return to your question, Jay, like that, that is where I think mapper stands out mechanically and makes it really, really different to combat. You are not being told about, you're not being told the world you're in. You are, it's your world, then a writer is just there to kind of help tie things together a bit. It does sound then that you need the cards to start developing the world. I mean, from what I understand, every card you choose is a new part of that world. Yeah, so, so the way the cards work, so mapper Monday works in three phases, you have the research phase, the journey phase and the encounter phase. And each of those are mechanically linked and they tend to be like the cards are the thing that kind of link them all together. So during the research phase, this is kind of your more standard role playing experience. You are, you know, you turn up in a town or a village, you and your party turn up in a town or a village, you might know what your target is. The target is normally a monster, but it's sometimes a kind of cultural event. You might know what your target is or know or heard rumors about it, or maybe you don't know at all and you're there to just gather information and see if to learn about the area. While you are in the research phase, the narrator is building a deck of journey cards based on what you do and crucially don't discover about the what the environment that you're in. And then when the research phase finishes, you go out into the wild. That's when the journey phase begins and the narrator starts playing these cards out one at a time. And that's where you have opportunities or challenges to overcome. And that's where you get to involve yourself in shaping. Once all those cards are played out, the narrator looks at the orientation. Are they right-wise, which means they're the right side up or are they inverted, which means they're upside down. And again, that's based on what you do and don't discover. And if you do overcome the challenges that are associated with them, if more of them are right-wise, the encounter with the monster in the encounter phase is going to be easier. If more of them are inverted, the encounter is going to be more difficult. So all three phases of the game are linked in that way. And that shaping mechanic also works in relation to your target as well. Your target, every target has eight unique behaviors and you have to uncover those behaviors through use of skills and interactions and clever use of the research findings you've learned. When you reveal a behavior, the narrator invites you to shape it. So every group is going to have a different interpretation of those behaviors that they've discovered. You know, I've run this game like 20 times now and not once have I had a group say the same things twice. Like, and you'd think, you'd think even, because it's the same eight behaviors, it's the same cards coming up in the in the journey phase, maybe in different orders or whatever, but not once have I had the same contributions from a group ever. And so every, you know, I'm a big fan of emergent narratives. I try and make sure that all of my games, all the games that I design are kind of working with this emergent narrative. And there are lots of different ways of achieving that. And obviously one of the ways that we do that in Mapper is to have the players telling the story, which means every single time it's different, every world, every time that world is recreated, it's a different looking, different feeling, different sounding, different smelling world. And there's something really beautiful about that. Like, at least once a session, I get full on like spine tingles based on what someone has said based on the contributions they've made. And it's just it's, it's a, I know, obviously, I would say this as the designer, but it's a really, really lovely, really beautiful, often quite profound, but often quite funny experience as well. Excuse me. So what challenges do you remember facing during the development of the game? This is going to sound, this is going to sound a bit weird. And I don't mean it to sound quite so self involved, but actually the design for Mapper was was actually quite straightforward. One of the challenge, there's the main challenge that I think we had, or certainly I had, because this is before I bought Jeremy on board as a developer. The main challenge that I had was combat. I knew I didn't want combat in the game. I knew I didn't want it in there. And I was just like, well, no one's going to want it. If there's no combat, no one's going to want to play it. No one's going to, you know, because I'm a designer, but I'm also a publisher, right? Like I need to sell this game. I need to, it's a business that I have to run as much as I hate talking about that. And I was like, well, no one's going to buy it. If there's no combat in it, no one's going to buy it. And so I was for weeks, maybe even months, I was going back and forward in my mind. I was like, do I try and de-emphasize combat? Like, do I write rules for combat and like really try and de-emphasize them, just allow people to do it if they want, but really try and disincentivize them from doing it. And then eventually I was like, you know what? Like, have the courage of your convictions. If you don't want combat in it, don't put combat in it. If that's going to turn people off, they probably weren't going to play it anyway, because they can get monster killing anywhere else. It's in almost every other game. Certainly in any mainstream game, you can go off and do combat. So have the courage of your convictions and just don't do the combat. So yeah, that was the toughest, honestly, that was the toughest bit. The design, I think that concept of having the courage of your convictions was the most difficult part of the experience. So I had a very, very clear vision. And it was just the case of executing that vision without trying to compromise on it. So yeah, that was where the challenges lie, I think. So without combat, how do you go about balancing the mechanics in the world itself? So balance is one of those really strange concepts, right? And this is good. I think this might turn a lot of some people off. So I come from a war gaming background where balance is like the be all an end to everyone's like, well, this game's unbalanced. It's broken. This unit's broken. It's terrible. So everyone starts using it or everyone explicitly doesn't use it because they really don't like it. Games that are balanced aren't necessarily fun games. Chess isn't balanced. Chess is basically the oldest game we have. And it's inherently unbalanced because white goes first. Like it's an unbalanced game. White has the advantage. And in RPGs, I don't really see the need for something to be balanced. Well, the world isn't balanced. The world is people have different abilities and different skills. Monsters exist. They're going to have different abilities and different skills. What makes them good in one thing is going to be, it could be bad in another. Like, look at pandas, for example, right? Pandas seem hell bent on their own extinction. This is, you know, this is an omnivorous animal. And I love pandas. Pandas are incredible. But this is an omnivorous animal that has chosen to eat the least nutritious food on the planet by choice. And, you know, like, so we're talking about, you know, you talk about having balance and stuff in it. If there was combat and it was PvP combat, like a war game, I could see the need for balancing stuff out. But actually, like, so I am more and more I'm being inspired by the kind of some of the design philosophies that a lot of kind of old school renaissance and new school, OSR and USR and NSR, sorry, designers are bringing to the world, which is actually player skill is what's important, not character skill. So the example I really, really like is back in early D and D, you would carry a 10 foot pole in your equipment. So when you were walking down, you know, a corridor and a dungeon, you're poking at the floor in front of you to make sure you don't fall down a trap. And if you forget, and there's a trap there, sorry, you're dead, or you're seriously injured. Now, your character sheet, which has 400 different abilities on it includes perception checks and passive perception checks. And all of these, if you walk into a room, you're like, I want to roll a perception check. And if you score highly enough on your dice, your character sheet has allowed you to uncover a hidden trap, which is ridiculous. It's hidden. You can't see it without testing whether it's there. You can't just passively perceive things. So player skill is really, really important. Map of Monday, the world of Map of Monday, a lot of people were asking us this at the UK games Expo, they were like, well, not a lot, but enough people for it to be a relevant thing to bring up. They were saying, well, if there's no combat, where's the jeopardy? And I was like, well, you've confused a world having jeopardy with you being a source of jeopardy. Like, a world is dangerous, whether you are holding a sword or not holding a sword, it's just slightly more dangerous if you're holding one. You are not a source of danger in this world, but the world is full of danger. We have one of our monsters, the Taraskones, is like a 70 foot tall dragon lion turtle. Like, that thing is dangerous. And you have to uncover its behaviors without killing it. Like, so in terms, when we talk to get back onto the kind of the idea of balance, the world is inherently an unbalanced place. And so by leaning into that, and again, courage of the convictions kind of thing, by leaning into that, which is you are one person in an indifferent world full of dangerous things, and also beautiful, wonderful things, but dangerous things as well. Like, balance is the least of my concern in, in, in, in when it comes to game design. Like I said, war game design, you're going to want some balance in there, because people are going to complain about it otherwise. But the motto, the motto, the motto that I came up with for three-cell studios was the real world done fantastically. My, my belief being that the real world is endlessly fascinating. And it's full of so many stories that I don't really need to create worlds with elves and dragons and, well, maybe sometimes dragons, map and Mondays, parallel. But I don't need elves and dwarves and, and, and all these other fantasy races for the world to be more interesting than the current world already is. And as long as that's done with requisite sensitivity and requisite understanding that you were dealing with real world cultures, and we make sure we use, we're always working with cultural consultants to make sure we are doing things properly and doing things respectfully. The real world is imbalanced. The real world is fascinating. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna try and balance out the world, because in my mind, that makes it more boring. You are not as, you are not capable of fighting off a 70-foot tall dragon lion turtle. You're not capable of doing it. No matter, no, no great godly weapon is going to allow you to do that, because, but before you even get close enough to use it, you've had your head caved in by a massive clawed, footed, hairy hand. So yeah, so I know that's a little bit of a long-winded way of saying, I haven't really attempted to balance it. Balance is none of my concern. All of the skills in map are Monday are narrative-based. Like when you, when people look through the book, the PDF is available to download for free. It's all of the rules, all of the characters and half of the skills, and a pre-written adventure, and one of our 10 regions as well. The skills are all narrative-based, but the only thing that's on your character sheet is the, the name of the skill. Again, you tell me as an orator how it works. If, if I think you're stretching it, I, I might ask you to make a test in addition to it, and I make that test a bit easier. If I think it's patently ridiculous, I'm gonna say no, you can't do that, but nine times out of ten, your interpretation of that skill is good enough for me because it's your character, it's your skills, and it's your player skill as well in being able to role-play your character in a skillful enough way within the boundaries of what that character is and who they are. If you can think about it, then I'm willing to hear it and that kind of, you know, within reason allow it to happen. Nice. So you mentioned that you've played through this, or done play through this game, what, 20 times? I think it's getting, it must be, it must be 20 times now. If not, I'm running two games next weekend for free RPG day. I know I'm running one for you guys as well. It's going to be 20 there or there about easily at this point. Not when you're doing with us, we'll, for our live deer lessons, we'll of course be recorded and posted sitting up. So what feedback have you received from play testers and how has it changed or influenced your game? So what I did, the first thing I did was I played with a group of people who've never played an RPG before. They were at first. We did internal play testing myself and Jeremy as kind of designer and developer respectively, we're doing kind of in, like we were doing in-house mechanical testing, we were checking stuff out. And initially, Mapper Mundi took to carry on from the balance point. Mapper Mundi was far more, or had far more of a mechanical edge to it in the early version that we then started with play testers. So all the skills, the skills could be used narratively or mechanically. So they had what they have now, which is a name and a short mechanical blurb, sorry, a short narrative blurb, but they also had a mechanic tied to it as well. And players really, really enjoyed the shaping, they loved the world, they loved the idea of expertise, and no one was using the mechanical skills, no one was using them, they were only using them narratively. And if people were you trying to use them mechanically, they were holding them and holding them and holding them until they saw what they felt was the optimal in inverted commas moment to use them. And actually, it was adding a huge amount of cognitive load to players. And they weren't using them anyway, and if they did try and use them, they often didn't, it didn't quite work in the way they thought it did. And so after a couple of play tests, so I played it with the group that had never played it before, then a group of other designers, friends of mine who were designers. And what everyone was like, I loved the shaping, I loved the encounters with the monsters, I loved the kind of research and deduction and intrigue and moving about the world. And I was like, what did you think of the skills? They're like, eh, didn't really think about it, or oh, I was thinking about it too much. And so I just I sent Jeremy a message on discord, and I was like, that's it, I'm getting rid of the mechanical skills. We're going to go again, courage of convictions. I'm going full narrative with this rather than trying to pack trying to make mapamundies something that it didn't want to be. And you know, I can get all like philosophical arts and arts and culture creation here. But like, games are their own thing, they exist largely independently of a creator, as they should once they're kind of birthed out into the world for to use a gross, a gross image of me pushing a book out of parts of my body. Once they're out in the world, they are largely independent of their creators. And obviously the creator is going to continue to have an influence kind of socially, culturally, whatever. And also in terms of the game's design. But yeah, it was a case of the game wants to be, it's more and more and more wanted to be this narrative game. And I was holding it back by trying to keep these mechanics in. And again, courage of convictions, get rid of them that people don't like. The play testers don't like them. Let's get rid of them. And then every experience since has been uniformly good. Great even, I would say. And people always have suggestions and feedback. And those are really, really lovely. But with those at tweaks, it's like, oh, this, this skill didn't feel like it was particularly relevant. You know, maybe think about changing it, maybe think about doing this. But those core mechanics, we were rewarded for the time and effort we put into the in house testing. And that allowed us to, that allowed us to to get good responses from play testers. The thing is, is it's also a game that's not for everyone. And we fully realized this like only once a lot of people made the joke when we were at the game's Expo, we, you know, I'd say to people, I'm going to give you the marmite bit of the pitch. There's no combat in it. And a lot of people would like pretend to turn their back and walk away. More people than I think a lot of people thought they were the first one to do it. And they definitely weren't. But it was, you know, it kept happening. One person actually just gave me their back and walked away. And I was like, well, obviously this game isn't for you. And that's totally fine. And so some people play it and they're like, yeah, I enjoyed the experience. I don't know that I'll play it again. It's not really my thing. Totally fine. Absolutely happy with that. What's been really, really nice is we had people coming up to the coming up to us at Expo and I'd be like, right, well, there's no combat in this game. And two people on different occasions were like, well, I play a barbarian in D and D and I hit things with an axe. And both of those people five minutes later were walking away having signed up to the mailing list being like, Oh my God, I'm a day one backer when it comes to crowdfunding. Like a lot of people don't know that they want it. And they don't know that they want a different experience. And so that has been a really rewarding thing from a game design perspective, which is when people give it a chance. They're actually like, Oh my God, I really, really didn't realize I wanted a game where you don't have to swing an axe into someone's face. But actually it's really, it's really, really nice. And that that's where I get the most satisfaction from in terms of a designer watching people enjoy it is the people that thought they wouldn't and end up actually really actively enjoying it. With that, can you give us any specific memorable moments so far that you've had in playtesting, developing one that really sticks out to you? Yeah, I can. It was the third game I ran, and I raised the first time I ran it for complete strangers. And I was, I was really nervous. We didn't even have, Oh, that was it. We just had the pre-release guy. So we've got like 10 hard copies of the pre-release guide printed. I'm holding it up on camera for you to obviously people at home can't see it, but you can see that's the noise that you want. But people at home can go and download this on drive through RPG or itch. If you go to threesellstudios.com, all of our links are on there, or map them under rpg.com, all of the links are on there. You can go and download it for free. So I was running it for strangers for the first time, and I'd been away for two days with work. I just got back into Manchester on the train, gone straight to this game store. I still had all my work stuff with me, and I sat down with this group, and it just, the time just flew by. I cannot tell you how wonderful it was. And this is the thing, there isn't even one specific moment in there that stands out, because it was just right from the word go. They were brought, they all bought into it. They were shaping beautifully. They were, like those, those fine tingles, I was telling you about like every five minutes, someone was saying something, and I was like, Oh my God, this is like, I'm trying to, I'm supposed to run the game here, and I'm being struck dumb by the things that they're adding. And I'm like, but that's the beauty of it. I don't have to contribute. I just have to, I can get to sit there and watch and enjoy what they're, what they're, what they're bringing together. But that was the moment for me, where I was like, okay, I've done, I've designed something that I think is maybe quite special here. At the very least, I think it's quite special. And the four people around the table think is special. That was, that was the moment for me, where I was like, this is, yeah, I, that was the moment I enjoyed the most in the whole process. That, I'm getting to see how people responded to it, when we were at Games Expo. So you mentioned 10 regions, huh? Yeah, 10 regions, expansions, updates, or going to be released as a new part of the game. So, like I said, Mapamundi is set in a parallel version of the real world, right? This, this world is called Ecumeni. It translates, I think it's Greek. I'm pretty sure it's Greek. Jeremy did this. It's, I'm pretty sure it's Greek. It translates to the inhabited world. But Mapamundi, the core rule book takes place on, I say one continent. It's technically two and a bit continents. It's our version of Europe, Asia, and North Africa. So we have 10 regions. So Barbecia is our version of kind of, and it's a kind of pan-global medieval period. But these regions have all been cut off from one another. So the reason the world is being unmade by fate, who unknowingly made it, is because people have stopped telling stories about the world. People used to, a hundred years before the game is set, people used to travel around. They travel across oceans, they're traveling between regions, and they would take stories of their own place, of their own regions and homes with them, and the monsters that lived there. And they would bring other stories back with them, and people would sometimes settle down in regions, and they would share, you know, share stories like that. And then a big climate catastrophe happened that cut all the regions of the world off from it from one another. And something we now, in-game we call the flux, began to happen. And the flux is the unmaking of the world. So one year you'll go to a village for their harvest festival, and then you'll come back the next year, and the village is gone. Not destroyed, it's just gone, like it was never there. So the world is being unmade. So a hundred years after the, after the flux begins, the Mapamundi Institute, which conveniently has founded wherever you choose to start the game. Because we didn't, we wanted Mapamundis a specifically anti-colonial game as well, we didn't want it to be, everyone starts in medieval Europe and spreads across the world, in inverted commas, discovering the rest of the world. Oh, there's already people here. Oh, but we've discovered it. We didn't want it to be like that. So the Mapamundi Institute is, it starts wherever you start. So you can start in any of these 10 regions. So Barbesea is our version of kind of France and the Netherlands and the Low Countries. You've got Domilov, which is kind of Central Europe, like Nitsa, which is Eastern Europe, you've got the Kekau Rift, which is basically all of Eurasian Russia and Siberia. You have the Mutin Step, which is Mongolia in the Central Asian Republic. So you have, I'm trying to put myself to remember all of these without messing up now. You have Tia Hakeem, which is the kind of Middle and Near East and the Arabian Peninsula. You have Ishamet, which is North Africa above the Sahara. You have Garugoma, which is the Indian subcontinent of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, bits of Nepal. You have Zomung, which is China and Korea, and yeah, basically China and Korea. And then you have Fuondi, which is kind of Southeast Asia. So you have those 10 regions to start with. Now, obviously, this means we are missing all of the rest of Africa. We are missing both of the Americas and Central America as well. We're missing Australasia and we're potentially missing the Arctic and Antarctic as well, and all of the oceans and islands in those oceans. So there is plenty of plans for expanding Mapamundi beyond where we start now. Obviously, that would depend on the kind of public reaction to it. Certainly, we've already started designing monsters and creatures and doing our research for those potential expansions. What form may take? I'm not 100% sure yet, but the plan is definitely to expand beyond the Eurasian and North African context at the core book covers. So, one of the last questions we'll ask you today is what kind of advice would you give to anyone that's aspiring to become their own TTR region? Start doing things, do things. It's literally like, as we were saying at the start, right, when you were saying, "Oh, you got up and started, right, you want it right away," you have to act. The world is changed by action, not inaction. The world change happens around the inactive, and it often happens kind of in spite of them. So, the way that I grew up was very, very poor, and while my community was very, very supportive, there was no kind of financial support. It wasn't an option. They were supportive with their time and their attention and their love and to an extent, their understanding. But you learned very quickly that if you didn't do something, you didn't get anything. My nan's favorite thing to say is you don't ask, you don't get. I'm a friend of mine. I'm from Essex. Originally, I've been in Manchester for a long time now. Another designer friend of mine, one of his favorite phrases is, "Shybens get now." So, if you don't do things, you don't ask, you don't get, you don't do, you don't produce. If you want to design TTRPGs, start designing a TTRPG. It doesn't matter what it looks like. So, I think of one of the examples, so Grant Howet, who is one of the founders of Rowan Rock and Deckard, one of the things he's most well known for, in addition to all of the fantastic, amazing long games he's designed, is Honey Heist. Now, I don't know if you guys have seen Honey Heist before. It's one page of A4 and there are two stats, bear and crime. Those are your two abilities. Bear and crime? Bear and crime and there's an image of a bear in a hat trying to plan out how to steal some honey. That is, it's one page. Now, there's an article out there. I forget who did the article, but it basically talks about Honey Heist being Grant's inverted comma's legacy and Grant saw this as a ridiculous thing. It's like Honey Heist is, you know, someone is already talking about his legacy. This is a person who, with his design team, has also designed eat the Reich, die, spire, heart. They've got hollows coming out now. All of these amazing, huge, lavishly produced games and Honey Heist is bear and crime and it's easily the thing that, if you, if you mention Rowan Rock and Deckard, if you mention Grant Howet to a certain subset of people, they're like, "Oh, that's the Honey Heist guy." And he posted it on Imger and it was, it's huge, absolutely huge. And it, yeah, it inspired a whole subculture of game design, like single page game design. Now, so the question of do you want to design TTRPGs? If the answer to that is yes, then do it. You're not going to design a Honey Heist, but you might. You're not going to, you're not necessarily, you know, your vision is going to be your vision. The only way to give substance to that vision is to do it, act, write things down, throw dice around, pick cards out of a hat, whatever you want to do, start doing it because no one's going to do it for you. The barrier to entry has never, ever been so low. The only thing I will say is don't use generative AI. Don't do it. Don't rob things off other creators. I understand the temptation, right? Money is really, really difficult to come by. I work three jobs so I can pay Joel our artist, like, and even then he's earning below market rate. He co-owns the business as well. Like I said, I'm incredibly lucky to have him, but I graft to make sure he gets paid as much as I can possibly pay him with the idea that one day the business is going to take that over. So believe me, I fully understand the temptation. And people might look at the artwork of a map of Monday and be like, well, I can't find an artist like that. Well, no, you might not be able to, but they are out there and there's people out there who want to start being TTRPG artists as well, find them and partner up with them. That's what I did with Joel. That's what I did with Jeremy. And it's, that can sound, I'm hoping this isn't sounding sanctimonious because it's been a lot of real, real graph, like going without all the time in order for this to happen. But that's, you have to sacrifice things. And that sacrifice is easier or harder for some people. There's no money behind us. You know, none of our families have the money to support or to do this stuff. You go without, because if you don't do it, someone else will do it. And when other people are doing it, help them lift them up. That, that phrase, a high tide raises, you know, lifts all ships is normally capitalist neoliberal bullshit. But in the TTRPG space, it is actually genuinely true. The space is growing significantly. And the more, the more things come up, like the more of us that are doing things, the more of us that are creating genuinely original, beautiful things aren't stealing other people's work through generative AI, the better for all of us. So just start doing it and reach out to people. There are plenty of people out there. I reach out to people all the time. Don't be shy. The worst they're going to do is say no. The indifferent thing they'll do is ignore you. But actually, most people will be like, yeah, of course, I'm really happy to help. So sort of in that vein of lifting up TTRPG creators, if we can, probably. Where can people find you? And where's the funding, a lunch kickstarter? Yeah, so we're, we're, 99.9% certain that it's going to be kickstarter at this point, because we're, you know, first time indie creators. So kickstarter is still the place where you get a lot of your organic traffic from. So mapamundi, the pre-release guide for mapamundi is available now. Now it's 101 pages. It's free. I mean, it's paid what you want, but it's free. And a lot of people were saying, a lot of people were genuinely shocked when I was telling them all that we were giving you. Excellent. Like really that much. And my take on it is that if you are generous with people, they tend to be generous back. And I also want you to be able to play, to get properly played and know that you want to buy it and know that you want more. And if you don't, then that's fine. I don't, I don't need, you know, you don't need to buy it to find out whether you like it or not. So you can go, if you go to mapamundi RPG.com or threecellstudios.com forward slash mapamundi RPG, you will find all of the links that are in there. So you can download the pre-release guide from drive through RPG from itch.io. You can sign up to our mailing list. That's always really helpful. You can get links to our discord and our Facebook communities, come and join in the conversation, come and help us shape the game. We'd absolutely love to have you. You can find us on back a kit as well. We're using back a kit launch to kind of gather emails. Again, links are on the website. We are going to crowdfunding. Everything. The current plan is we're going to crowdfunding in the first week of February 2025. Now the thing is, is the game will be 100% finished by the time we start crowdfunding. We could, we could go to crowdfunding right now with the pre-release guide as it is and then finish the game off with the crowdfunding money. Um, but my take on it is, is that, you know, and it's, you know, every, this is different strokes for different folks. This is just the way that I want to do it and primarily because I panic about crowd fun, being on the hook for crowdfunding. Um, we will go, we are in a position where we can get the book finished and then hopefully pay ourselves something after the fact. Um, so the book will be 100% done by the time we go to kickstarter in February. The campaign will last until, again, all things planned out until the end of February. And then we will have the files go to the printer, the very day the kickstarter finishes. Literally the second it finishes, I will send the email to the printers and we will have the idea is, and again, don't, don't hold me to this because things might change in the meantime. But the idea is, is that if the crowd funner finishes on the first of March, I want those books in hand by the first of April. Um, in my hands by the first of April, and then shipping out across to wherever they need to go. Um, I've told myself, my internal deadline is that we should have the book on general sale by games Expo next year, which is the end of May. Now things can change in between now and then, and I'm kind of making a rod for my own back by saying this here, but this again, courage of your convictions, right? Set yourself a target with, you know, we've, we've all we're doing now is finishing the book off. The game is finished, we're just finishing the book and finishing the product. Um, and that takes time. Art work is the thing that takes the longest amount of time. And I'm also working on a number of other games at the same time, as well as having a full time job and a freelance job and the studio, all these kind of things. Um, but we are, I am confident that we will hit that start of February deadline for us to go to crowd funding. So if people want to come and support us, the best thing to do is come and join those communities, come and get involved, go and download the pre-release guide, pay for it if you want to. That's always nice, even if you chuck us a pound. It's always a big boost of confidence when I get an email or sell notification through. I'm amazed that people are even considering paying for the pre-release, considering, you know, it's a pre-release, but people are paying for it, which is lovely. Um, so yeah, come and join our communities. We run games on Discord. We're starting a kind of regular series of running games on Discord now, especially for first-timers, getting people, turning them into ambassadors for the game, because if they know how to run it, they can go and run it for their friends. That is incredible. George, thank you very much for your time. It has been absolutely a pleasure talking to you today. Thank you guys. I really appreciate it. We do wish you all the luck with this, because hell, I want to play this game. I know I'm playing it tomorrow. Yeah, you've got 23 hours to wait, and you'll be out in the wilds of Barbese here. Hell, yes. Well, thank you very much again, and for everyone listening, links will be in description to all of the links that George has said. If there is anything that you want us to put on the description, we will put it in there for you. But yeah, this has been a Pianta Cthulhu with three-sale studios, signing off. Thank you very much, and goodbye. And cut.