Avatar Alert! Mothership Month Mini-Interviews, pt. 1
R.A. Creedon's Straight Arrows & Elliot Norwood's Death Pays All Debts
Greeting Void Travelers,
To celebrate Mothership Month, I met up with the folks who are running a crowdfund campaign for the first time! This will be a three-part series of mini-interviews, with part two integrated into this month’s Rokaner Report, and part three next Tuesday.
Straight Arrows, R.A. Creedon
Chris: Hi RAC, Great to have you on the newsletter! For folks who might not know, we first got to know each other when you contributed design on 5th Quinquennial Interstellar Interdisciplinary Conference with the FrogStar Jumpliners company and logo. That was over 2 years ago, if you can believe it!
Now, you’re launching Straight Arrows as part of Mothership Month. Can you let our readers know what it’s all about?
RAC: In Straight Arrows, you play as operatives who abduct people to a luxury drug rehabilitation black site, on behalf of wealthy friends and families. Part of the horror is this doom spiral of losing your sanity from all the horrors of the drug war, and all the bodies you have to step over to help over-privileged people who always had the best chance of being alright anyways. Eventually, your stress response spirals out of control, flipping the tables as you are targeted for involuntary rehab at your own facility.
Chris: The ol’ switcheroo. Sounds like this builds on paranoia like an inverted Unsane (2018), which itself is a massively unsettling psychological thriller. As you mention on your BackerKit page, this module is a deeply personal work. I am eager to see more unique voices bring new experiences to Mothership, which in a sci-fi genre is quite a feat. Can you elaborate on the challenges of how you transformed your personal experiences into a fun horror experience?
RAC: I honestly wouldn’t say the transformation into art has been a difficult process. A Tom Waits quote I come back to time and time again is:
“Most of the things you absorb you will ultimately secrete.”
I’ve lost and nearly lost people to addiction, had substance problems myself, been involuntarily committed for psych problems, all sorts of shit. If it all lived inside of me I’d explode and I’ve always needed to express myself with art. A lot of people wanna talk, but it doesn’t come out right if you don’t have anything to say, so I combine my interests with my experiences.
This premise was originally a dark joke, a weird sort of self consolation, but I elaborated on it and made it more serious. I hope some of the humor of the sheer absurdity of the premise comes through and is fun, but I don’t think good, enjoyable horror is always fun. Enjoyment can come in the form of many emotions and I think horror is a great example of that with people enjoying fear. Having fun, feeling accomplished, even experiencing second hand tragedy are also enjoyable. I don’t want to be pretentious, but I try to expand the range of enjoyable emotions in games. The Wire, a very serious show about drug crime, has some of the funniest TV moments I’ve ever seen, so hopefully one day I’ll be able to pull that off. Nothing should be one thing all the time.
Chris: You’re totally right, “fun” is really too diminutive–a meaningless metric in game design, as Max Lander has said in the past. I ought to know better, shame on me! The most enduring memories from my Mothership games have been the times when I’ve put ethical dilemmas front and center, and to me it sounds like that’s a major part of Straight Arrows. Thanks for sharing, RAC!
Death Pays All Debts, Elliot Norwood
Chris: Goodday Mr. Teuthida of Octopus Ink Games, a man of many names and many games! Gotta say, I am stoked to see your debut crowdfunder hit off so well. You were on the Mothership scene before I showed up, and I hope this means your Mothership adventures get out to more folk! But enough of the past, let’s talk the present, what is Death Pays All Debts?
Elliot: Thank you! I’ve been making my little modules and tweaks to the game and am excited to be producing a proper printed module for the first time. Death Pays All Debts is a heist set in Prospero’s Dream, specifically a new tower location in the Choke. The tower is the former headquarters of a bank, now taken over by the Gloyanovo II Bratva for use as a sort of emergency stash house (and more).
Chris: It’s exciting to see a return to Prospero’s Dream, especially with TKG announcing hardback revised editions in the pipeline, including one for A Pound of Flesh. What about Prospero specifically attracted you for this tower heist, and what drove your creative vision to make your own Prospero module distinct from the source material?
Elliot: When the Mothership Month project was announced I knew I wanted to take advantage of this opportunity, especially having that support structure running my first crowdfunding campaign. To fit with the theme I knew I wanted to make something where the players were the criminals and thought a classic bank heist with a big juicy vault and lots of security would be a great set up.
One thing I think is important if you’re going to have a heist is planning it all out, taking advantage of the factors outside the target to your advantage (like compromising guards, getting floor plans and schematics, and so on). That means having all the supporting infrastructure of a city or settlement around the heist as well. We were on a pretty short timeline and I didn’t think I could build all that out in that time, so I figured why not use an existing setting with the depth that can support this idea and the Dream was a natural fit.
With the Dream, you have all the tools built in to prep a heist: a location rife with criminals you can hire to help out, factions involved that may want to help or hinder the PC crew, and a rich location that allows creative players to thrive. The module is fairly self-contained: it doesn’t presume to make any changes to the wider Dream or its notable NPCs. So then to the bank target itself. Taking advantage of the setting of the Dream, let’s make it a former corpo headquarters taken over by the Novos, and for good measure let’s stick it in the Choke to add another layer of challenge and danger. And let’s have the Novos running some other operations out of there so there’s potential for discovery (and profit) all throughout the tower, things a normal bank wouldn’t have. Those spaces are where I found I could bring in the horror elements as well.
Luckily, I got the go ahead for Death Pays All Debts, and I’m very grateful to be given the opportunity to play in this setting.
Chris: Haha, I want to know more about those hidden Novo horrors! In my home games, I’ve played loads of 3pp but I’ve not touched on A Pound of Flesh, and I’m very much looking forward to adding Death Pays All Debts to the Dream once your module is released, :)
Signing off,
Chris Airiau