Amazing. Thanks to all the crew in Edinburgh and good luck to all the other amazing entrants!

The Role-Playing Game Griffie Nominees are as follows.

Chronicles of Skin (CobWeb Games)
Cthulhu Britannica: Shadows Over Scotland (Cubicle 7)
Dark Harvest: Legacy of Frankenstein (Cubicle 7)
The Agency (Realms Publishing)
The One Ring (Cubicle 7)

The Board Game Griffie Nominees are as follows.

Crooks (White Goblin Games)
Last Will (Czech Games Edition, Rio Grande Games)
Ora et Labora (Z-Man Games)
Proud Monster Deluxe (Compass Games)
Ristorante Italia (ElfinWerks, Red Glove)

I’ll be there next weekend, demoing Chronicles of Skin, so if you’d like to see what all the fuss is about, come and see me at the convention (Conpulsion, Edinburgh).

Sebastian talks about his game, Jason offers witticisms and wisdom, and Jenn asks lovely questions. It’s a charming conversation.

Check it out.

Check it out.

* I just made that word up and it’s already trite.

Just take a picture of it in the shop, upload it on twitter (or whichever social media you prefer) and put a comment here.

I’m completely turned off by “comedy games.” Perhaps I have no sense of humour. If I do I have a sense of humour, here is my reasoning behind it:

There are very few universal comedians, ones that cross international boundaries, and most of them don’t write comedy RPGs.

However, I do laugh a lot when I play roleplaying games. I laugh a lot when I play games that could be funny, but that don’t hit the laughs on the nose. For example, I’ve been playing Apocalypse World recently, and I’ve enjoyed how my favourite characters are starting to pantomime themselves. I’m also playing Annalise and, while it’s dark and nasty, comedy happens. It’s us, the players, who laugh. We’re having fun (the real life, oooooh, hahahahaha, you cock, kind of fun).

I’m getting off topic. So…

1. Do you know games designed to allow funniness while keeping the seatbelt on?

Fiasco, Posin’d (controversial), Lady Blackbird, Durance, Spirit of the Century

2. How would you design a such game?

I wrote Hell for Leather and I think I can use that to make my point. It’s a game of dark comedy. People who like it like it because it makes them laugh. In that game, I tried to create a system of tension balanced by an exaggerated award/penalty response. In Hell for Leather, the tension is created using a tower of dice. An actual, physical, visible stack of dice. These dice are placed within a circular target at which you throw other dice. If the tower falls or you miss the circular target when trying to overcome a fictional challenge, horrible things happen (it’s players vs. system, there is no GM, so individual failures bleed into the group).

When the game is going well, there is a giddiness in that simple tension. Nevertheless, if you read the Hell for Leather rules, the comedy is pretty low key. It doesn’t look like it’s a funny game. That’s probably a failure of my marketing. But hey, it was my first game. Gimme a break.

People who enjoy Hell for Leather laugh a lot. The tension is relieved by acts of ludicrous, Hollywood violence, as they watch their asshole characters dig themselves deeper and deeper holes. But the thing is, one groups’ Hell for Leather comedy is another group’s Hell for Leather nightmare. I saw one game where it was all manga characters in robot suits, and super gonzo mayhem. I enjoyed watching their passion, but it didn’t make me laugh. Another time, I watch a guy talk about his old priest eating the kidneys out of a dying prophet, and it had me giggling for ages. Wow. I said it. You had to be there, etc. It was done in a funny way, with exaggeration and shouting obscenities for no reason. It was really well done.

It’s important to me that the author either writes comedy gold or gives me enough room to write my own. So if I were designing another comedy game, which I won’t, I’d stick to my guns. Write it like it’s not comedy, provide a decent hook for a crazy story, provide rules to increase tension, tools to control absurdity and then let the players make it funny.

Plucking samples from the recent Bill Reichle interview, the FAQ page has now got clickable mp3 soundbytes, thanks to the easy-to-embed Google Player. Let me know if you run into any issues!

It’s a great introduction if you’ve never heard of Chronicles of Skin.

The interview covers an overview of the game, with insights from the author.

There’s a new picture of the printed game!

In the meantime, the CoS website will need a little tweaking, so excuse the maintenance hiccups.

In the coming weeks, Bill Riechle will be interviewing me for the Director’s Commentary, so watch this space.

Actually, it’s about everyday mythology.

Actually, it’s about hate.

Really, it’s about all those things, and the stories that allow them to exist. How do you think about your neighbourhood, your neighbours or even your nation? If you live in a good area, why do you believe it’s good? What stories have you heard, told or experienced (or are experiencing) that support your belief?

As an Irishman, I’ve grown up with the hate-mythology of the vile Britannia. We’re taught to despise the English and we’re given stories to perpetuate it. If I’m not remembering those stories, like how Cromwell drove us to the west, I’m fabricating them (by using the word “us”). It’s very difficult for me, even though I’m here in the UK, to separate Irishness from kindness, even though I would struggle with that association back in Dublin. I love London, so how come I’m being such a fool? I’m confusing myself, living inside this mythology, peering through a stencil of stories that I learned in childhood.

Chronicles of Skin is a game that helps me to look at propaganda, hatred and history from a safe place. It helps me to understand why I’m still hating. In real life, I forget that hating is a choice. But in Chronicles of Skin, I am aware that I am constructing cultures that I will both hate and love, by the nature of the game process. I am given two sides for the same story, and I am witnessing atrocities every time.

So how does this relate to art? It is the recording of the story and its conclusion, the creation of the closed unit of time (the history), and crafting of symbols that helps compartmentalise the history into separate stories. These stories and symbols become the keystones of an interesting mythology: one culture was better than the other.

You just finished of game of Chronicles of Skin. So how much of that story you just told is a lie?