DON'T PLAY THIS GAME - You are Cursed to Play the Entity's Game...

If you are reading this, you are cursed by the entity to listen to this podcast and hear all about Don't Play This Game. A new found footage inspired horror solo TTRPG that is currently on Kickstarter from now until November 2nd!

I bring on special guest, co designer Barney to talk all about Don't Play This Game! We go into the background and inspiration that lead to him and his brother creating this game! The reception from the TTRPG community for Don't Paly His Game, What the entity is and even his own experiences of playing his own game and how terrified he felt!

Back "Don't play This Game" on Kickstarter here!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/327195066/dont-play-this-game-a-cursed-solo-rpg/description

Get the "Don't Play This Game" demo here!
https://www.dontplaythisga.me/

Where to find Parables Game:
https://linktr.ee/ParableGames

Transcript

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If you're listening to this episode, you're cursed by the entity to play a game and that curse won't leave you until you either complete the game or you disappear. That is the whole idea around the. Game that we are going to be. Talking about in today's episode of the RPG Goblin called Don't Play This Game, which is currently on Kickstarter right now. Right this moment as this episode comes out. And and the Kickstarter will be ending early November. So please make sure to go on over and back the Kickstarter because this is an amazing game. It is a solo horror TTRPG inspired by analog found footage horror and it is honestly spectacular. I bring on one of the lead. Designers, Barney, to talk all about this game and to talk about the history around it and how this game actually plays out and some of the horrifying things that has happened even in some of his own playthroughs. So if that sounds like a great. Time and you're ready to cozy up for the spooky season and listen to a very spooky game, then let's get into this episode. Welcome everyone to the RPG Goblin, a TTRPG podcast where we make learning these games fun by having really interesting and maybe sometimes off topic conversations about TTRPGs and people just talk about their favorite games. So I am your host, Willow, and the resident goblin. I'm a bit obsessed with these games. I can't stop talking about them. So I created the podcast and here we are for today's episode. I just want to preface it with saying you are all cursed. Now, if you are going to be listening to this episode, you're cursed. Even if you've got to this point, you're cursed. And that is because we are going to be talking about a game called Don't Play This Game. And anytime that you basically get exposed to it, that means you're cursed. And the only way to get rid of that cursed is by, well, playing the game. And so to talk about Don't Play This Game, we have one of the designers here, Barney, to talk about the game and chat with us. So Barney, would you like to introduce yourself, tell everyone, I guess, who you are, where people can find you and all of that fun stuff? Absolutely. So I'm Barney. I'm one of the brothers designer pair at Parallel games, makers of various spooky role playing games from Shiver to the new Don't Play This Game that we now have live on Kickstarter. People can find me anywhere online, at gamesparable on Twitter or at Shiverrpg or Don't Play This Game on Facebook and Instagram and pretty much just slam spooky RPGs into your search terms. You'll probably find me somewhere on the Internet. Yes, which I again think is fantastic. And I'd love to talk a bit more about the company and the idea behind it and all of that. But first, I think that we should say yes, don't play. This game is on kickstarter. And by the time this is releasing, which should be on October 20, the Kickstarter is still going and the link for it will be in the description of this episode so that you can go get the game because you're cursed now and you have to play it now. So it's just required at this point, but I just want to get that out of the way. And I think to kind of start, I would love to talk about, I guess the origin of the Parable Games company. You mentioned that it is you and your brother who kind of run this company together. What got it started? So I've been in tabletop games pretty much my entire professional career. I started out straight out of university with a game store which I run in Nottingham. And Parable games started when well, the initial genesis of Parable games started when my brother came to me one Christmas with scrawled notes in a little notebook about this game that he jammed together that he was playing with his friends at university. I took a look over it and I was like, oh, this is really good, we should have a go at making this. And so we spent a while sort of playing around with it, getting it to the point where we could play test it. And then COVID happened. In the six month sort of initial lockdown of COVID we were like, right, well, we can't go outside and do anything, so we might as well finish this project that we've been working on what seems like forever. So from that march to that Halloween, we finished the demo, got it live and sent it live on Kickstarter to a resounding success, which was lovely, lots of people very engaged with that and enjoying the game, which led to us sort of turning Parable games into a real thing. And now that's what we do as our day to day thing is make fun spooky games together. I love that so much as someone who I'm very close with my siblings as well and I do a lot of things with them. So that just makes me really excited and happy, like seeing that, like, oh man, you guys are working together on this and doing something you love. That's fantastic. And so your first game was Shiver, right? Yes. Obviously we're not talking about Shiver in this episode and maybe that could be a future thing. But I'm curious of you say that you kind of specialize in kind of the spooky and horror and while don't play this game as a little bit of spoiler for everyone of what we are going to be talking about is kind of a found footage type spooky horror game. What is shiver? I think you mentioned kind of based around like horror movies. Yes. The idea for Shiver was we wanted to create a well, Charlie's original idea was that he wanted to create something that he could play really bad horror B movies with his film school friends, which was what they were trying to do. And so what we turned Shiver into was a one shot system that where you could play movie night on the tabletop and you could do a one shot in an evening or a weekend playing your favorite scary movie. So as a result, the game is horror, but it is completely genre agnostic within the horror sphere. So you can play anything from slasher to gothic to paranormal, whatever your favorite genre is. It's kind of a Swiss Army knife system that you can use to play anything you like, which was kind of very broad. And then with Don't Play This Game, we're now having fun exploring sort of a much more specific and niche part of the horror subgenres. Yeah. And I was actually just about to ask, how has the shift over been to something that is more, I mean, I guess not contained, but more focused down? It is that kind of analog spooky. It is genuinely creepy, I'll give you that. When I first saw it and being in the discord and seeing people talk about it, I'm like, yeah, this is scary. So that was one of the great fun things about doing it is when we did Shiver, we were looking at how scary we wanted to make the game and we wanted to have that option from horror comedy through to very scary game. And so that meant that we were kind of always walking a thin tightrope of scary versus humorous. In the Shiver and a lot of the writing, there is an element of levity to it. There's some fun references and some bits that kind of take the edge of the darkness off. Whilst we don't play this game, it's like, right, how scary scary can we make a role playing game? Because found footage is so immersive in the way that you create stories with it that it's supposed to be very scary. And that's one of the reasons why we ended up creating the project as a solo game, is, well, there's nothing scarier than telling a horror story by yourself because you don't have anybody to take the strain away from you. It's just you and the story. Yeah. You're all alone. And there is seriously nothing scarier than being alone and having to go through that. And I just absolutely love it. And since we're starting to get a bit into Don't Play this game, I guess for everyone who's listening, who has no idea what this project is yet, can you explain the base premise of don't play this game for everyone? Yeah. So in Don't Play This Game, you take on the role of a character or yourself who has been cursed by a malevolent entity to play a game. And what the entity wants you to do is record your experience playing the game as you have a worse and worse time as things start to happen to you. And how that takes sort of shape within the gameplay is you receive events from the entity and as those events unfold, you record each one and what happens to your character, how your character feels, and then create something in your records to show that. So that could be writing a journal entry, it could be taking a photo of something, it could be going out and videoing in the woods. Whatever the event asks will give you kind of a prompt towards what you should be creating as part of your character's story. And then that cycle just repeats over and over again. So you have an event, you record what happens to your character in whatever kind of media that you want and then you have another event and you keep recording, recording until you create this condensed sort of artifact of the story of your character through their experience playing the game. And that's kind of your story loop. Yeah, but then the real fun happens when you go hello, my TTRPG friend. Here is don't play this game and here is my record. Now you have to tell a story, but you found my record. So this is your new starting off point and what it allows is for you to almost take this solo RPG and turn it into a multiplayer loop where you go round around creating an urban legend almost from your own stories together. That's so cool. God, I love that so much. It's such a fun idea and I know that the big thing that interests me when I looked at don't play this game as well was the fact that you called it a legacy game, that it was something that could be replayed over and over and over again and you could get different stories. And so is that just within sharing it with your friends? Or even if you decide to play it yourself over again, you can also get different stories? Yeah, absolutely. You can get different stories yourself as well. So the demo that we've put out is a linear ten event story, but in the full game it will be a multi branching narrative where your movement from event to event is semi random. We have taken the events and kind of clustered them into how you would normally structure a found footage horror movie or a found footage story. So your early events will always be light threat, a little bit creepy, spotting things behind you and in the mirror and those kind of tension building events and then you'll move through into more high intensity and more high intensity until your kind of final confrontation with the entity. But yes, all of those stories will branch differently. And obviously the events aren't completely prescriptive. They give you an idea of what's happening. But it is very much up to you, kind of how you interpret them, because some of them can be things like you're drawn to an abandoned place in the town that you live. Go and take a photo of it. And in one story that could be the shopping mall, but in another story that could be a factory. And those choices that you make within the narrative as your character really change the story. Because if I go to the factory in event three, then in event six, when I'm going to the library to research something, I'm going to be in the industry section rather than the however you want to kind of play with it. And then you can play as that character, complete a story, and then you yourself can just create another character inspired by your last character and keep going over and over and over again. I didn't even think about the fact that you could just take your own records. No, that makes so much sense though. And that would be so interesting to then because it's almost like being able to use a big notebook that you have dedicated to this game again and be able to actually use that versus I have tons of game. Notebooks from campaigns that I've run or played in. And they're full of all kinds of stuff, and it's like I could always flip through it. But the fact that you could actually use it for the next playthrough or to give your friend as their playthrough for it, I think that's really genius and that also for the people playing. They're going to put more effort into making this an actual experience. They're going to make this notebook seem really creepy. Could even print out photos, like you said, going out to take a photo of an abandoned factory. And even the aspects, because I know that in the Kickstarter page you mentioned that you kind of added in a little. Bit of LARP into this game because you are asking people to kind of go out into the world and record things or take pictures or do physical items. Because I think I saw a few things from the Kickstarter updates too which I think is really fabulous. So genuinely that is insanely cool. Yeah, it was something that we were really interested in doing because again it's part of that like, well, what's really scary and actually going out and interfacing with the world and finding locations that have atmosphere really adds to that role playing experience. We also got a lot of feedback from people who've played the demo now who is like, this is amazing. I'm like exploring my local area and going to places I've never been before. We put an event in the demo that was like go to your local library and there's those people like, I don't have a library card and now. I do and that's really cool, that's awesome. And it kind of increases that immersive storytelling by combining the multimedia creation of story elements belay, photos, text, video, et cetera, but then combining that with actually going out into the world and you can even with that storyloop. I was discussing with your own characters. Create essentially like an alternate reality town of your town you live in and create a whole universe of characters and stuff that are all interlinked within your own local area. It's really fun on that front. Yeah, no, it is. So, of course, TTRPGs are interactive, you're playing them, stuff like that. But this feels interactive on a much different level, and especially within a community, too, because, again, in your Discord, so far, I've seen people just go absolutely crazy for it. And I feel like once the game's out out, and a ton of people are playing it, there can be a lot of interactions between people, like, here's what happened for me on this day or for this event, and going back and forth and sharing it and, oh my God, I am obsessed with this project. Yeah. So one of the really nice things we kind of tapped into almost accidentally, and we kind of thought about it a bit because when we were designing it, one of the inspirations was like those old school chain emails and chain. Letters that you get, you must share. This, you will be cursed. That kind of idea. And that plugged into this idea of the old school gaming by email that used to exist in the early Internet, and even gaming post used to be a thing. And now that we have mon technology, it's really easy for the people in the discord to go, here's my record, and for somebody else to grab that record and then do another story inspired by it. And you have stories that are crossing country borders and stories that are just like, really spreading that curse far and wide. Oh, my God. I also just love the idea of the curse, too. It's like, okay, you looked at this Kickstarter, you're cursed. Yeah, it's over now. Yeah. It was really interesting to design for because what we wanted to do was have something that allowed you to project. So if you wanted to, say, play through a very specific found footage idea, say if you wanted to play with a known entity like Slender Man or something like that, we needed to create a narrative system in which those stories could happen, which is why we chose the entity. Because the entity is this overarching evil that can take any form and has minions, but also is like its own thing. So what that allows people to do is they can take existing stories that they really like and incorporate them within the bounds of the game. But it also means that they can. Create their own creepy monsters as well, their own entities. Which I saw one of the Kickstarter updates was like something with like, long fingers. And may I say, that was the most upsetting thing I've seen all week. Yeah. So Charlie's been having a lot of fun making some monsters, and we've been really lucky as well to work with some cursed image creators who are just like, trevor Henderson creates unbelievably terrifying creatures. And we're really leaning into that aspect of almost like the modern cryptid creature feature style stories because I think that's something that really resonates with people, especially when you're creating an urban legend monster in your own area. And it's like, oh, what is the thing that haunts the abandoned factory in my town? Yeah, that's so cool. This is so freaking awesome. And I love again, the entity is also a great name for it because it's so just suspicious. Like the entity. It's like, okay, you know you're going to get messed around with. And so we talked a little bit about this before we started to record, but I'd like to do this actually on the show of what did inspire don't play this game. What created this idea? I guess originally to then make the game. So one of the discussions that we were having was what stories would be really difficult for us to tell in a sort of a true way to the genre with Shiver. Okay, well, Shiver is this multi genre machine that people can play horror movies with. What things would it struggle with? And found footage was one of the things that we landed on very quickly is because it's so unique compared to other horror genres. And I mean, that's kind of why it was such a phenomenon in the early Naughties, because it was just completely new. And one of the reasons we wanted to sort of latch onto that was that it kind of plays with this idea of the democratization of creativity, this idea that if you've got a camcorder, if you've got a phone, if you've got a microphone, you can create something scary. That was kind of one end of the ideas. The other end of the ideas was my brother saying, oh, do you remember when you used to get those creepy chain emails? Those would probably not be super appropriate now. That's kind of weird. I can't believe that they used to be a thing. And we were like, oh, what have we made a game like that? That'd be really spooky, wouldn't it? It would be, and it is. Yeah. And so we're kind of just exploring that idea and then it's like, well, how would we kind of mash these elements together? We were very interested in the idea of solo role playing anyway, because it's quite new within the role playing game space as a concept. And so we'd been digging into that and reading a bunch of the games that had come out and we're like, okay, we'd like to have a crack at making something like that, but how would we do it for a horror setting? And so it's like, right, we want to make a solo game we want to make a found footage game. And so we're just going to smash those two ideas together and see where we got to. And it kind of just snowballed from there, really. I was actually saying on another podcast, they're asking, like, how did you develop the demo? And we wrote the demo in a 16 hours drive, effectively from where we are in central UK to Scotland because we were up there for a convention at Tabletop Scotland. And in the drive to and from the convention, we essentially skeletoned out the demo and created it whilst driving through the Scottish Highlands, which was very atmospheric and spooky, which is fun. That's such a good story. And so before the demo, I mean, how much were you playing around with the idea of mechanics? Was the demo the first real look at bringing this game to life, or did you have some ideas you were already playing with? Yeah, we were kind of writing the demo as we were going, but the demo definitely got fleshed out beyond the skeleton that we wrote in that card drive. The initial concept was we had this idea of the story loop that was like the first thing that we landed on is like, well, this idea that you can play a story and then the story essentially can repeat itself infinitely through the events being fed by the previous story. And then we had to work out, well, there are some things that we need to provide as constraints to the story to provide threat. So there are things like, okay, we need to work out how we're going to track a character's health. We need to track what resources are we going to track and how are we going to do that? Are we going to go down the route of individual items? Are we going to say, you've got a dagger or you've got a pistol? Or are we going to say something else? And that's how we landed on the artifact resource friend style system, where it's okay, we're going to keep the inventory tracking system very broad so that you can interpret what that means within the bands of your story. So that if we're saying go to the abandoned location and find a thing, put it in your inventory as an artifact or a resource, then you, as the player can insert yourself into that artifact or resource and make it relevant to your story, which is quite interesting because for Shiva, it's very prescriptive. It's like you go in the box and you find a shotgun. It's a different style of storytelling. I think the other elements that we were playing around with is Shiva uses narrative dice, and they're fully symbolic. And for don't, this game, we wanted to have no barrier to entry on that front at all. So we just went with a traditional sort of Polyset, mostly because we could imagine this being the kind of thing that somebody might just, like, ship to somebody and it's like roll a dice. Just making sure that if you need to roll a dice, you might have some to hand anyway. Yeah, I mean, most people who play these games have at least like 30 sets. I mean, they can spare something. No, but I love keeping that in mind, though, of like because part of the game is the idea that you can go send it off to a friend. And not everyone has friends in their immediate area. I think Kurtico is a solo game that has mechanics for even having a. Pen pal within the game. And I love how you could have an actual person that you give it to or you can send it to anyone, you know, across the world, like, hey, here you go, here's the game. Go play and don't die, I guess. I hope. But I love also the freedom within what you can find and how it can change from what you do need. Because I think that's where you can get a little stuck with some solo games where if they have pre established events, if they are too restrictive on it, if you decide that you want to play kind of a different setting or an idea, it's hard to always and you write something that's concrete in it. So, like, hey, you go into this abandoned warehouse and you find a crowbar, maybe in another person's setting that doesn't make sense in this situation, or they don't need it. So I love having that openness that people can interpret how they want, which I think is a fantastic direction to take a solo game. Yeah. We were also very aware that people may want to play their story in a different time setting because we have alongside the core game, we have the inheritance boxes, which are the expansions for the game, really, and how they work. Is it's a box set that has a booklet expansion for the game with new events and a storyline, but it's a much more specific we call them cursed threads. So the idea that they are a collection of records found by us that are all about a similar branch of the entity's existence, within those, you'll have a booklet and then a record, essentially, of a previous player will inspire your story. So you'll have a record, it will have artifacts. So we have a bunch of those, and they range from things like the toy box, which is a slightly more modern story, to the factory, which is like a Victorian era story. And then we have the dig as well, which is very sort of early Victorian style story. And we're aware that some people would want to play those as a modern story with them investigating history, whilst others would be like, no, I want to investigate right now in Victorian London. Exactly. I'm in a smog filled city and enjoy that aspect of it. So that's another thing that we had to bear in mind when we were designing the events is making sure that they would be applicable to any sort of time setting that people would want to play in as well. Yeah, not too restrictive and I like those ideas of having the box sets. It's almost the same idea as like a pre written module. This is a story that you want to play in and they just set it up. They basically just give you extra resources for playing that kind of game, which I think is an absolute blast. And I am curious. So I know there's kind of a few different styles of solo games and I think as they're starting to get more popular, there are becoming more variety within that space. But I know there's things like game books kind of choose your own adventure type stuff. There's journaling games that you basically just roll prompts and journal what happens. And then there's ones that I find that are almost kind of more gamified. Rune is one that I put in this category as it's like okay, you're Dark Souls inspired, you're hunting or not you're hunting, you're fighting monsters and you're looting places and blah, blah, blah. So it's kind of more of a gamified. Would you say don't play this game fits in any of these categories or would you kind of put it in its own thing? So I think in terms of those three categories, I'd say the one it's closest to is probably journaling. But to be honest, one of the things that we wanted to do was take lots of elements of different solo role playing games and mash them together and do something completely new. Yeah. I think is where the multimedia and getting people out of away from the tabletop and actually into the outside world takes it kind of beyond that journaling element because it's not just prescriptive prompts that you're working with, there's a lot more elements feeding into your story. So yeah, we're kind of shooting really to turn it into its own category of solo game because we think it's something quite unique in that respect. I completely agree and I was already thinking that journaling would probably make the most sense if it were to fit into anything because you are keeping that record now. The fact that it's not just journaling does make it completely different. And again, I love the real world elements so very much but yeah, no, I think that's fantastic and I love that's kind of a goal make this its own thing. And I'm just curious if you think that your experience with creating don't play this game so far, do you think that you may experiment with doing other solo games in the future? Yeah, absolutely. I think because the response to this has been so good on Kickstarter, it's been unbelievably popular and the things that people are creating on our Discord are amazing. We had. An idea of how we thought people would play it in our heads and we put it out into the world. And that is exactly what they're doing with it. And sometimes they're even thinking of stuff that we haven't even thought of yet. And so we're definitely very much on the line of, okay, this multimedia solo storytelling is a thing that people are hungry for. So now we can start looking at, okay, well, what if we did a different style of solo RPG? How do we do that? We have lists and lists and lists of games that we want to make. Because as is the way, as a games designer, every other week you come up with something new that you want to make, and it's all about trying to work out which ones you should make and which ones the most amount of people are going to get the most amount of joy from. Absolutely. And I love that. Now I'm really excited to see what you may do. Pass Don't Play this Game, which I'm already excited about, don't play this game. So I'm just invested and excited about all the things that you guys are doing, which now I want to get shiver as well. So it's a whole thing. Oops, microphone. But yeah, no, that's seriously amazing. And I'd like to ask, how does generating the events work in Don't Play This Game? Are there tables that you're rolling as, like, you go by different days? How does it work? Yeah, so in the full version, it will be they're clustered and then we'll have like a background system as the player. You kind of won't see of how we've mapped it out in our crazy red string Spider diagram of how all of these stories mix together. But what you'll be doing is rolling dice or doing stuff depending based on outcome. So there are some stories where it's like story starts at the funeral of someone that's died. And that's just the start to your story that you've rolled up. And then you'll roll a D Four or a D Six or whatever dice it is, and that will take you to the next event. And that will be some of your elements of progression. But then there will be some that are narrative driven. So it's okay, you come to a crossroads. There's an example in the book which is you get offered a deal by a shady thing that you're not sure if it's the entity or something else. And it's like, yes, we'll give you something, but you have to sacrifice all of your friends to get it. Oh, fine, yeah, lovely. And that then gives you a binary choice. And that binary choice turn into, well, if you choose to sacrifice your friend, go to event X. And if you don't choose sacrifice friend, go to event Y. And that then you have some elements like that. I know that in one of the inheritance boxes we're planning to include some old coins that we're going to ask people to flip as part of their flip a coin and see what happens to you kind of job. I love that. Terrifying. But I love that your fate rests in a coin. The weirdest thing that we've done so far for this project is I had to source some dolls heads. Just the heads for one of the box sets. But because, yeah, the doll's head is a key artifact in the story. That's so good. It's like nothing suspicious happening here. I just need some doll's heads. Perfectly innocent. We're not sacrificing it to some strange being. It's fine. We're good. Yeah, people are just going to receive the things that they've backed on Kickstarter. And it's like, oh, I have a doll's head in my TTRPG expansion, which is cool. And that's why I love designing the inheritance boxes because we were like, well, how would you do a module for this game? What would you do? And what unique elements of the design can you bring into it? I was like, well, you can just make a box of really cool stuff and then you get into this really interesting eco almost creativity. So a lot of what we're trying to do with those boxes is go to secondhand stores, go to charity shops, go to car boot sales, go to flea markets and collect really cool things and then adapt them into stories and stuff. So we can just go out and find a really cool box of old photos that then we're going to distress and turn into artifacts. For us, from a creative perspective, that's really fun because we could almost take some of these box sets with no idea of what we're going to do, go out into the world and try and recycle some old stuff into PG expansion, which is really fun. And then we can encourage other people to do the same thing where it's like, go to your local scrap store, go to your local flea market and find something that you want to turn into an artifact. Yeah, that's so cool. And I could even imagine people who would play this game, even making boxes that they could give to friends, like, here's a box of just random artifacts that we have and here you go, figure out something to do with it. I love that. And I love also the repurposing too. Just all this weird stuff. And it fits perfectly within the theme. That's so cool. And you can do it digitally as well, which is really nice. You can create like one of the things that we're looking at doing is like, oh, we could just send people like a USB drive full of cursed videos and artifacts and audio, all that kind of stuff. And that's really good if you're playing long distance with friends and stuff, it's like, right, we're going to do this. But the whole thing is going to be digital, so any artifacts that you make have to be digitally available. So you can even do your full record as like an audio diary or a blog. And you don't have to write anything if you're not a writer, but you can talk. That's a great way to record your experience as well. And we're having that now with some of some podcasts that are now coming out which are, oh, we're playing the game and we're turning it into almost like an audio drama of me playing the game. Yeah. And I can even see especially if people are like fans of the Magnus archives and I think, oh God, I never remember, it's like something night and like all those types of things that are like those spooky audio dramas. You could do that, but you could be playing a game. You don't have to create it yourself, you could just be narrating what happens. That is so seriously cool. Now I want to do so if. People want to listen to any of those, we have quite a few on the Kickstarter page under the cursed community sections you can go listen to. We worked with Trevor Henderson and the guys at Bloody Disgusting to make a special episode of Mayfair Watchers Society, which is their kind of found footage, cryptid style audio drama podcast. And there's a don't play this game episode of that that is awesome, amazing, and is one of the creepiest things I've ever heard. So it's brilliant. It's a really good listen. That's so good. And I'm curious, seeing all of this feedback and seeing people actually using the game and playing the game, how does it feel as the designer? It's just the demo now, it's not even the full game out. It's amazing. I get to go on the discord in the morning and just cheers me up. It's so great. Just see all of this cool stuff that people creating. And that's the whole reason we make games, is getting that buz of seeing people play a thing that you've made from scratches on a notebook into a full cohesive thing is the best bit of being a game designer is seeing people going, yes, that is what I want to do with my spare time to bring me joy. And so that's like the ultimate reward, really. And so, yeah, it's amazing as a designer for people that people are engaging so much and so well with just the demo. So we're very excited now to get the whole thing out there so that people can really get into it. Yeah, no, I bet it's seriously amazing. And I'm curious. So with the Kickstarter going right now, how much of the game do you have complete so far? So we have a lot of the game complete from a writing perspective. We have probably more events than we can actually fit into the book written because there's such a litany of cool story moments that you can grab from film and TV and popular media. So we have a lot of events, and what we're now working on in the background is that full engine for how do we get all of those events to fit together into our crazy Spider diagram? That will give players the most option for stories that we can possibly give them because we want to make sure that we're not missing any narrative threads so that we can have a weird jump from this event to this event. That kind of makes sense and is cool. So I'm curious of how big the book is actually going to be because it seems like there's a lot of possibilities that could happen. The demo is like mid 20 pages and we're saying that the book is going to be it's going to be at least 100 pages, but a lot of that is going to depend on things. Like we have some stretch goals that are adding art and we just announced one this week that is the avatars of the entity section, which is where kind of the creepy long hand and the umbrella man and all of these monsters we're showing off are which are like are they part of the entity? Are they somebody who played the game and got cursed really bad? Now they kind of work for the entity. There's this whole kind of almost law section that we want to add for people to create their own avatars of the entity. And so that obviously depending on how big that section gets, will add to the book. This is kind of almost how all of the Kickstarters go is. We say it's a page number and then it usually ends up being bigger. Shiver Gothic. When we initially did the Kickstarter, I think we said it was 200 pages and by the end of it was 320. Oh wow. The creative bloat can be really big when you're getting deep into the project and trying to make sure that you're making the best possible version of the game. So for now, 100 plus pages is all I've got. That's the most information that's totally fair. No, I'm just curious because I can just see this being like a tome and obviously that's not the most achievable thing to do and print and all of that but I could fully see it and I could even see there being expansions of don't play this game too. I mean that's kind of the idea with the boxes, right? Yes, we do want to make sure that the core game book is a manageable size because a lot of what we're trying to do as well is create games that give access to people who haven't necessarily role played before. And so the big weighty you could kill a man with that. Sized books aren't necessarily conducive to introducing new players into the hobby. We want to make sure that's condensed and then we can kind of drag a few extra events into the box sets and expansions as we go to make sure that people have that breadth of playability as well. Yeah, absolutely, and I love that. And I think that's something I've appreciated a lot in the TTRPG scene recently is people going for accessibility. We want to keep it simple, we want to keep it easy for people to pick up and play. I know a lot of people have gone with even D Six systems because it's like if anyone has any dice in their house, it's usually going to be a D Six or something like that. Going for something that is manageable for someone to pick up and not feel completely intimidated by is absolutely perfect. And it's interesting too, because Don't Play. This Game would be a really hey everyone. It is time for the mid episode break. I hope that you are doing well. And that you are enjoying this episode. So far, don't Play This Game is seriously such an amazing project and I am so thoroughly obsessed and I'm so happy that I was able to interview Barney about this game because I think the world should know about Don't Play This Game and should try it for themselves, especially if you're a fan of horror. If you are enjoying this episode and you haven't yet, please make sure to leave a review for the RPG Goblin wherever you listen to your podcasts. I have a whole dream of basically making my life surrounded by TTRPGs, starting the TTRPG empire and all of that, and every little bit of support that you can give this podcast, my YouTube, anything like that, helps make that dream come true. So if you really love TTRPGs and you want to see more content around it, please support me. It literally means the world and I thank you so, so very much. Also, if you haven't yet, please make sure to join the RPG Goblin Discord Server. It's been up for a few weeks. Now and so far it is slowly. Growing and it is becoming such a. Fun place, especially since all of my guests are there. So if you want to talk to. People who are also massive nerds about TTRPGs, they are there. If you want to find people who want to play these games as well, we also have channels to look for groups and find DMs for these types of games, which is really, really fun. Plus, this is a growing community and. I'm just really excited to make a. Space to have people talk about TTRPGs and find like minded nerds that will also talk about them too. Because I know the DND world is so big and not a lot of people want to talk about how cool kids on bikes is. So if you want to talk about. TTRPGs, join the Discord. The link for it will be in the description of this episode in my link tree. Also, it is linked on all of. My social medias, on my link tree as well. Now it is time for the promo of today's midpoint Tales of the forsaken a Two Person Actual Play podcast, which. I think is really fascinating. And if you're curious of different ways that you can play TTRPGs other than one GM and a whole group of people, listen to this show. It shows you what you can do in a TTRPG with only two people. One GM and one player. And their world is amazing as it's almost kind of industrial Western fantasy where. They have greedy mining companies, vast deserts, the magic needs fuel to be used and things like that. Let's get into the promo. This is Tales of the forsaken the one on one actual play. Fatecore Podcast. Join us as we learn and play the flexible, narrative based Fatecore tabletop role playing game and immerse yourself in the Western fantasy world of Rillian. A place of fast deserts, dark rituals, and greedy mining companies. Saddle up for rich storytelling, a curated soundtrack, deep characters and mysteries. Review those creatures, they came back. Did we lose anybody? He looks over at Yarl and he says, no one that we know of has died. But I'm kind of picking up my Sam. I'm going to grab him and kind of like walk him over and have whispered, oh, Yarl follows you. He's like, he needs to know what's going on. Hang on, check on the rest. Here, let me just talk to Sonny real quick. No, he's clearly where is my mother? And Sonny just kind of shakes his head and says, Yarla, don't do anything rash. We think she's still in the town. And Yarl just leaps on his horse and hang up. Hold on. Ignores you. He rides directly towards the rouge. It's interesting too, because don't play this game would be a really interesting start to someone's role playing career if that was the first thing that you picked up as a new player and that was your experience, and then you got into the much larger hobby that would, I feel like, be a little bit of a culture shock. Like, okay, what are these games? I'm only used to this really cool analog horror game. Yeah, definitely. I think it's an interesting road in for sure. Yeah, and that's kind of what we're trying to do with all our games because Shiver as well, we designed to be very beginner friendly short stories, really easy to relate to because it's all pop culture inspired. So you can just grab whatever your favorite thing is and start playing it. And we've had loads of people now because we do lots of conventions and lots of events going out and trying to spread role playing, obviously introduce people to our games. So we've had people now where Shiver is the first role playing game that they've ever played. And that's really cool. That's like the big dream. It's like, oh wow, we've sent you on the long, scary road of role playing as a hobby. Now that's it. I'm sorry that I've stolen your time. Good luck. Yeah, good luck. It's an addiction. Yeah, absolutely. No, I love that so much. And again, I just love that that's an actual goal because there are definitely some TTRPGs that are easier to get into than others and keeping it simple keeps it easy. And while my first TTRPG was DND, we started off with like pre generated sheets that didn't even have all the skills on it. And I'm like, I don't even know what's going on here, but I'm just going to do what the person tells me to. And being able to actually understand the game a bit better and get a grasp of the rules within just one session I think is a much better way to introduce people. That's why I love running Powered by the Apocalypse games for especially new players. I've introduced two, three people into TTRPGs recently with one shots that they learned the rules of in the same session. And it just makes their lives easier. And it makes my life easier because I don't have to worry about them asking questions of, hey, can I use a crossbow? I'm like, well, it's not that complicated. These games aren't that complicated. You're good, you can use a crossbow. Yeah, no, for sure. I think that level of access is becoming more and more desirable as the sphere of nerddom expands, as it were, and more and more people are brought into the like. Oh, well, the mindset the nerds have where it's like, oh, yeah, well, I'm just going to do the thing that I want to do, and I don't care what anybody else thinks about it. That's becoming a broader and broader mindset as to like, I don't care what your Hobies are, as long as they're fun, who cares? Exactly. And that means that the breadth of people who want to pretend that they're a dwarf on a Wednesday night is expanding, which is great. It's just making sure that people who would not traditionally have played those games have access to that was like one of the things we did with Shiba was like, okay, we have a bunch of friends who are disnumerate. That don't can't really do quick maths in their head, which for most of the TTRPG community isn't an issue because usually pretty good mental arithmetic if you're into TTRPGs as a crossover. And so we're like, right, well, we'll just design all our dice with symbols on and then nobody has to do any maths. Seemed pretty simple. And people are like, oh yeah, this is exactly what we want. It's like awesome, it paid off taking that leap. And that's what I love even more, especially with we're not going to talk about it really much, but like the whole OGL stuff and even before that, the rise of Kickstarters that actually are becoming that are successful that are building these new games and taking these new leaps that change. The Hobbies is really good because everyone has their own different ways they want to play. Everyone has their own different ideas. And because people are more willing to try out more games now it's only improving the hobby because now it's like, okay, if you just like playing these games to tell a story, you can just play a game that tells a story and you don't have to worry about dice rolls or combat or anything like that. You just play a game that's perfect for what you want. Yeah, we're even now in the stage where people are developing games like Wonderhome that are like there essentially is no combat exactly. Can tell completely pastoral stories. And that's great. And that's one of the things that we've run into with another thing that we ran into with Don't Play This Game was a lot of the stuff that was being created in the solo sort of arena was that sort of cozy storytelling, very light, very easy going. And we were like, well, I wonder if there's a section of the solo people who want to play solo games that want something really scary and hardcore. And turns out the answer was yes, they did. Actually. I have a game on my shelf, seven Murders Till Midnight, which you are basically an investigator hunting down a serial killer. And it's got all those dark themes in it and immediately when I saw that one, I'm like, yes, I'm getting the game. Because you are right. There is a lot of cozy and self discovery and a lot of those themes within most solo RPGs, which I think is amazing. I love that. But at the same time you want to try some different things. What does a horror solo RPG look like? And I think that obviously the game isn't fully out yet, but I think so far with what I've heard and what I've seen of it, don't Play this Game seems to nail it really well. Thank you very much. Well, people can decide for themselves if they want to go and try it out. They can head to the Kickstarter and there's a link there to download the demo. So feel free to go. Scare yourself silly. Should you choose? Yes. Scare yourself silly. And so I am curious if within the game, when you're playing, do you do any, I guess, fleshing out of the entity or does that always stay kind of a mystery? So it depends entirely on how you're approaching it. So the entity is we within the prompts in the event, never really try to give too much specificity to what the entity actually is. So there is an element of you because we wanted to leave space for people who are creating the stories to interpret what the entity is within their own story worlds. We do have bits that are more keyed into kind of how the entity works as a concept and how we view it within the worlds that we're building. So things like the avatars of the entity, which are not necessarily the entity, but perhaps like either minions or they could be previous players that have been cursed to essentially work for the entity and going like, well, there are levels and very rarely, in fact, are you interacting directly with the entity. Even if you defeat something that you think is the entity, perhaps it was just an avatar, perhaps it wasn't even the entity at all. It was the entity sending you to fight something else. And so there's that level of mystery, and we want to maintain that level of mystery because I think having that empty space for people to fill with their own ideas about what the entity is and how they want it to work within their story is really important. Absolutely. No, I completely agree and actually with you just saying that defeat something that may be the entity is there. I guess mechanics for combat within this game, for interactions that are violent. There are some events that are confrontational in nature. The end of the demo has a showdown style event. There isn't mechanics for combat per se. It's something that we did look at. And I don't think we're going to end up adding it in as like a solid mechanic because I think that makes what that does is it adds rules. Whilst if you keep the combat within the bounds of the narrative prompts within the events, you can then have the dice rolling within there. So the event that we have in the end of the demo works almost like a series of skill challenges where you have sections of the fight almost like an old school video game boss fight where you have stages to it and you're trying to do different stuff and describing that. And so I think we're going to be doing a lot more things like that than we would be doing traditional combat. But we definitely wanted there to be obviously there has to be some level to quite a high level of threat to your character because otherwise it's not scary. So there was like a long discussion about how do we do combat because there has to be a threat to life in this story because otherwise you're never going to be scared going into the abandoned building. Yeah, you know, it'll be okay. And that isn't what you want in a horror game. I want to feel like I am threatened at every moment. Please. Thank you. Yeah. And I want to know that I'm going into the abandoned building. I've only got three health left and that's not good. And I know that there's probably going to be something in here that's going to try and do bad things. To me that adds to the suspense of the story. Absolutely. I was curious on the combat because I think that's something that solo RPGs can struggle with sometimes with running combat. And it's not even necessarily a bad thing. I don't even know if it fits in most of these games most of the time because I think it's more fun for it to be narrative and for it to be something that happens off of different events or even gets resolved by narrative ideas. You have like maybe you have a gun when you're collecting items and artifacts throughout the game. Maybe you have a gun and you could decide to use that and not even do rolling. There could be a lot of options on how to resolve things and I think keeping it open ended like that is a very good idea. So I'm glad to hear there's not really, like, strong combat mechanics. Yeah, we wanted to definitely move away from like, ads the solo RPG, right. You've got to this section now. Get out your grid map and your miniature. Start playing the story. It doesn't really fit with the rest of the concepts. Yeah. The idea of like, oh, yes, we get to this event and it's like you can sacrifice a resource to win the fight effectively. And all of the things you've acquired in the mystery portion of the story, you can then bring to the fore in the later, more combat or conflicts orientated sections. Yeah, I think that's actually something that I've seen a few times in seven murders till midnight. I haven't played it yet, but I've read through the book or haven't read through the whole thing because I didn't want to spoil myself on the events. But I know that you can give up clues that you get within the game. You can give up different aspects that you find to be able to avoid a consequence or something like that, but you're giving up precious materials. So I like that approach that you're taking with it as well because I think that fits the theme of the game and fits the fact that there's some creepy shit going on and it's not going to be cut and dry hero versus a monster or anything like that. Absolutely. Yes. So that is fantastic. And so I know that there was another thing I was going to ask that I thought of right with the combat, and now I can't remember what it was. Oh, can you die in the game? Well, this is the kind of fun part don't play this game is when you run out of health, you don't know what's happened to your character. Maybe they died, maybe they've been enslaved by the entity. Maybe they've gone and run away into become a hermit so they don't spread the curse any further. There's a whole swathe of options for you as when your character hits zero health and that then allows you, when you're passing on your record, to be like, well, my character could be dead and you. Could have your character be confirmed they're dead, but it could also be your character is missing and that's way more fun because there's so many more story options. But yes, your character can die. And that's all part of the threat to life, is part of the suspense of the story. Oh, absolutely. Though I love the idea, especially if you're planning to pass it off to a friend and something bad happens to your character. The health goes to zero and the notebook just kind of ends and you could even maybe construct some sort of missing poster or a missing person's report or something like that and hand it off to the next person. I want that so bad. The ideas are endless. Yeah, that's the beauty of it really is. Because of how that story loop works, you end up being able to create essentially limitless stories as you would with the traditional role playing game. Yeah, that's so good. And again, you can do it all on your own, which I think is just a huge thing with solo games that I love is because there's a lot of times where it's a struggle to schedule games or you don't have a group or when I recently moved, I didn't have any people nearby that I knew that played these games. And I ended up just having groups online. But solo games, you don't need anyone else. You can decide to do this whole story yourself and the addition of other people is just an option. You can do whatever you want. And I think that I love solo games for that. I love giving that option to people like, hey, let's say you have a busy schedule, you can still play these games and enjoy this hobby without needing other people to play. Yeah, absolutely. And so I'm curious if you have actually played through some of don't play this game. I have, yes. And I am a massive coward generally. So the scarier it gets, the harder it is for me to play. So that is a good representative play test of what it would be like for somebody who isn't necessarily great with the spookier stuff playing. I'm much more a fan of pulp horror, horror, comedy, mystery type stuff than I am, like properly scary things when I was playing it. The beauty of it is I feel like the more scared you are of those scarier types of things, the better your ideas as a player are for the things that could be coming to get you. And so it kind of feeds into that terrifying cycle. But yes, I have played it. I've made some terribly cursed things and it was very fun. Yes. I love that so much. And I love what you said, even with being a player and being able to basically torture yourself even more. Because you know what is scary to you? And that's actually something a video I watched, basically an analysis of horror video games where they said some of the best horror video games come from people who don't like horror at all because it spooks them out. They don't like it, it scares them. But you then know how to scare people because you understand what it feels like to be scared. And so I kind of love that you're a bit of a scaredy cat and that can even enhance the game and some of the events and prompts and stuff you can give within the game because you know things that are genuinely spooky to you. Yeah, absolutely. It gives you loads of inspiration. And also it's a great litmus test because my brother will write something and be like, yeah, I don't want to do that. Then that's terrifying. No, keep that away from me. I don't want it. Please. Thank you. So I'm curious if you have any stories or even some of the artifacts or something that you've done for your playthrough of don't play this game. I think the hardest thing I had to do that I really didn't want to do in an event was it was an event where it's the classic words in the mirror style thing where it was like, you fog. Up the mirror and you have to write the words that you're hearing in your dreams three times, but you actually have to go and do it. And it's like, oh, I want to do that. Terrifying. Big bloody Mary energy. So, yeah, I'm going to die in real life. Yeah, that's kind of the interesting thing with solo games is something we identified very early with this game is like, right, we need to have very good safety tools in place because people will scare themselves silly with this game if we don't tell them that they need to stop. But that's also quite good from a kind of scariness point of view is you have the ultimate control over what is too far. So if I'm like, I want to ride that in the mirror, I can stop, I can reroll the event if I need to. And so it kind of gives you that option. But yes, they're terrifying. Very scary. What are some other ones that we had to I mean, some of the stuff that my brother has drawn for some of his playthroughs are just like I mean, some of them we've shown in the Kickstarter are just like stuff that he had from various playthroughs that we're going to include in the game because they're some of the creepiest stuff he's made. Yeah. Nightmare material. Yeah. The way he draws is kind of very scratchy, very loose and gives that idea of almost like an unknowable entity or evil, which is really cool. Also from this is another thing that we kind of had to work out from an illustrative and art style perspective to the game is we wanted everything that we were putting into the book to be something that a player as a creator could reasonably think that they could make be it a blurry photo or, like, a scrawled sketch or like, an artifact that they found in a flea market. And so we wanted to make sure that we weren't doing all of this very complicated or things that would require a lot of skill to create in terms of illustration and going much more on the kind of low tech end as is the analog horror way. Really. I love that. And especially with the idea of if you decide to do recordings or anything like that, you can use your phone. Most people have a phone or something. On hand that they can just say. Whatever they want to say. They can take videos, they can do those blurry photos because there is definitely a difference of if you were asking, I want you to take a picture of something deep in the mountains and it's like, okay, that might not be doable for everyone, especially if you live in flat states, which I do. I don't have any mountain syrup, but I love keeping it accessible for people. Again, it all comes back to that. I love the care put into it for that. And now I just thought of an idea of doing some weird analog horror creepiness in the Appalachian Mountains where it's like cryptics and oh God, that would be terrifying. Take your game, go to a log cabin. Yeah, I might be too scared for that. Oh my God. There are some things that are a little too spooky and like that. And in my Ten Candles episode, which another fantastic horror game, the guy I talked to, Curtis, played ten Candles in a log cabin in the middle of nowhere where it was like no light pollution or anything pitch black. And it's like that is like the proper way to experience the game. But I don't know if I could. I may just die on the inside because it would be so tense the entire time they had someone knock on the door and scare them in the middle of the game. It's insane. But no, now I kind of want to do that. That would be terrifying to play it in a middle of the log cabin, but I could do that. I could. It's possible. And if I'm never found that's, why no, I love that. Only your record is found. Exactly. And that's the whole premise of the game, truly. Oh my know there are so many Kickstarter projects, so many TTRPG projects that I get excited about and I love all of them so much. But when I saw your game on Twitter and I saw what it was and the whole idea behind it, I'm like, I have to I have to back this, and I have to see if I could maybe get, like, an interview or something, because this is just way too cool for me not to be able to talk about. So complete props to you guys for making this absolute, at least concept alone, insanely awesome game that is genuinely terrifying because I will get notifications sometimes on my phone from your server and it'll be someone talking about the entity and it freaks me out for a second until I realize where it's from. I'm like, okay, just the discord server. Yeah. People were very insistent on adding the in character roleplay section to that discord, which is very terrifying to read. Which I totally recommend. Anyone who's listening to this, you are able to join the Discord through the Kickstarter page, right? Yeah, please go join the discord. It is spooky. If you just want to enjoy a bunch of people who are so genuinely terrifying in the way that they write, go over there and check it out because it is so horrifying in the best way possible. It's a great way to see the kind of things that you could be creating as well with the game. That's what we want to do with this game really is inspire people to create in any way that they feel comfortable. And so that's, again, like taking that essence of found footage horror, the idea that anybody can create something as long as they've got access to literally anything from a phone to a pen and paper. And that's what the discord is amazing for. That because we do have everything from videos to audio logs to sketches to people making actual sculptures and things out of bones and twigs. There's a whole breadth of creativity there, which is amazing to see. I adore that so much. It is so cool. And then again, I just love the idea because I am definitely a fan of playing games at a physical table, being able to even if it's not using minis, but like actual, like, hey, I'm going to use dice to be able to represent enemies or being able to draw a map out and be around everyone. I love the physical elements of tabletop games so much. It's a crime that I haven't played at a physical table in years, but I love those elements and bringing that into a solo game where, again, it is more than just a journal. You could make a little figure out of twigs and you could keep that. That could be something you keep around. And it's like, oh, what's that? Oh, don't worry about it. That's my little Blair Witch style. Yeah, he just sits in the corner. He's a friend. It's fine. No, I love that so much. And I'm curious, through the process of creating don't play this game so far, has there been any moment where you've had to kill your darlings in the way of was there an element of the game you wanted to bring in at first or you thought was a really cool idea, but ended up not working? I don't think so. For this project, there definitely was with Shiver, like we killed a load of elements that we were like this would be really good and then it wasn't and it got canned. We were pretty happy almost at first draft with a lot of stuff. I think we'll definitely possibly have that a bit more when we're exploring some of the expansion work and looking at things like when we're doing those module style stories, whether we want to. Because for me I quite like them to be very themes to those records and have slightly more prescriptive events. But then what we might find is when you use the game to play through that actually that's not as fun as having them be open ended. And where should we take that as a narrative experience? Should it be much more creator led in terms of the narrative or should it be much more player led? So I think that's going to be interesting for us when we actually get to the point of play testing some of those modules more heavily and when. Is the Kickstarter is going to be ending? Around like the beginning of November and stuff, I guess. What's the timeline for starting on these modules and getting to play testing them and actually finishing the book and stuff like that? The plan will be that we'll have probably the digital versions of the book out around the same time as now next year with the physical rewards, starting shipping a couple of months after. So what we're aiming for at the moment is by the end of 2024 for everything to have started shipping just to give us a bit of room to make sure we're finishing everything off. And also there's some weird logistical things that we've got to do with this project because the inheritance boxes are very OD in terms of from just like a boring shipping taxation perspective. What do you classify a box of doll's heads with an RPG module in it as kind of like that is a very strange problem to have to deal with from my boring business management job. We're just making sure that we've got a bit of leeway time in there to work through any issues that we might encounter there as a customs official starts opening our boxes and getting very scared. I couldn't even imagine having that job and opening a box. Oh my God. Actually, I'm curious, are you planning on personally fulfilling or filling up and shipping out the inheritance boxes yourself? Yeah, that was the thing that we wanted to do from the start was make sure that it was handmade made by in country here so that we could try and reduce, one, try and reduce the amount of stuff that we're getting mass manufactured because it kind of wasn't the point of the project. And two, we knew that conveying what we wanted to do creatively from a three P artifact perspective was going to be almost impossible to do with any traditional factory. So it's like, well, the only real reasonable way to do this is for us to make it ourselves, which is why we put like a limit on some of the pledges because we knew that if we sold thousands of them, it would be an absolute nightmare to actually try and fulfill it. So that's why we're keeping them a relatively limited run initially, just so that we can get through that initial idea and make sure that it's actually feasible to do on a larger scale. Because we would like to make more of those box sets, but at the moment, we're not guaranteeing that they're going to exist after the kickstarter because we might try and make them. And it could just be an absolute nightmare for us because we're just going to spend all of our lives like editing photographs and blowtorching dolls heads. It's an interesting living of just doing that. And that was what I was curious of next, is if there was going to be a limit on these things or if there is a limit on them. And so I didn't look at the inheritance boxes specifically when I checked out the kickstarter. What is the limit? Like, how many of I guess each. Are you going to make? We set a limit. We still have quite a few left for the fully cursed, which was the one that we put the limit on, which is the one where you get all three box sets. I think we limited that 500 pledges only because any more than that and it will consume our lives forever. We also have some higher end pledges where we'll make custom one off boxes as well that will be a bit more unique. They'll have an expansion that we're not going to release for quite a while. I think we've got ten of those and I think we only have two left at the moment. And we have a top pledge as well where you can become part of the game. We'll insert you in a photograph or something like that, as well as part of that unique box set. I think we've only got one of those left, so there is a limit on them. But we still have some available for people because we wanted to make sure that enough people could get hold of them. Yeah, perfect, because I'm just going in for the book at first. But if you ever get them, offer them again. I definitely will be very interested in getting one because they sound very cool and also really creepy. I can just imagine someone accidentally opening a package and just doll's head and it's like, okay, why did you just receive a doll's head in the mail? It's like, don't worry about it again, it's fine, everything will be okay. So I was asking, since you had Shiver Go, you've done multiple kickstarters for that game. I'm guessing that having that experience helps kind of gauge the amount of work and stuff that you are going to be doing for don't play this game. And so I imagine that you feel pretty good on your expectations of being able to complete the project. Oh, yes, we're very happy that we're going to be able to complete the project. The more Kickstarters we do, the more pitfalls you discover. And we're very much taking a slow process of how we're expanding what we're doing because we didn't want to run before we could walk kind of thing. Things like this project is the first project where we're going to have Australia, New Zealand hub to ship from as well so that we could offer customs free shipping over there. And that's been a learning curve as we've been going, so that's been interesting. But yeah, the more Kickstarters you do, the more kind of common pitfalls that we know what to avoid and what's going to take us more time than we initially expected and that kind of thing. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm curious, from running all the stuff with Shiver, what do you think was one of the biggest lessons you learned from a Kickstarter standpoint? I think one thing that I definitely am glad that I spent a lot of time planning on on the first kickstarter was working out how we were going to do our shipping. Because I did a lot of research beforehand, had everything in place. So when the kickstarter actually succeeded, I didn't have to suddenly scrabble and say, like, oh, I don't actually know how I'm shipping this. I've already worked out how we were going to get stuff from the UK to the US and all of this kind of stuff. And so for me, shipping is by far and away the hardest thing to work out. Fortunately, now there are companies that can help you with that if you need the help is that and the marketing. But again, these are all things that I learned from my other business that I've kind of dragged into parable and that kind of experience has helped a lot. Of course. Yeah. I mean, marketing is always a fun thing. Yeah. My mom's a marketer and I listen to her talk all the time and then when it comes to actually marketing, it's like I feel like I know nothing. We're just figuring it out as we go along. But yeah, no, I love that. And I love that you're able to use the knowledge from previous Kickstarters to make sure that the ones that you're doing now can actually succeed and get everything shipped out and there are less hurdles to overcome. And I'm curious as well. I asked from a Kickstarter standpoint, but is there any lessons that you learned from developing Shiver that has come over from that into don't play this game that has changed anything? Yes, I think we've learned a lot about things like art process and the way that we're taking the game through the stages of creation. So taking it from design to plain text into layout and how that process works. Because a lot of what we were doing with Shiver was just like, deeply inefficient and awful. And we're like, oh, we're filling gaps with illustrations, like last minute just before we're going to the printers. And it's like, this is all terrible. This should have been way better planned than this. Learned quite a lot from that perspective of just like, the actual process of making a book, which was something that none of us had ever done before. And so now we're very seasoned in a production perspective in terms of what we actually need to get done, how it should be done, and the correct order to do it in order to get it from initial idea into finished form and sent off to the printers. Yeah, absolutely. No, I love that layout always seems so complicated. It's not anything I ever want to touch because it's like, how do you figure out work? How do you make it look good? I don't understand. Leave that to the people who actually know and want to learn it because it seems quite complicated. Oh, yeah, for sure. No, that's amazing. And I'm really excited though, mentioning layout to see how this book looks like layout, see all the different artwork, and I can just imagine it looking so creepy. And I know that kind of some of the flavor text within the don't play this game Kickstarter kind of mentions that. I think it's Charlie specifically is like, I died and left this book. Is there going to be kind of a meta to the book at all with added in things of people writing in it or something like that? Maybe. Yes. One of the creative challenges that we wanted to do with the book is make it incredibly immersive. So things like it's all written in the first person and stuff like that, just to make my brother's life really hard. Why would we write a traditional rules mania when we could write a weird immersive one? Exactly. So that's what we're going for. So, yeah, there's going to be all kinds of stuff like that. I can't wait. That's such a specific style that I think is so insanely fascinating. And I feel like there's no books that do it. And so I'm really excited about that. That's going to look really cool. Yes, it may be hard and difficult and I feel for your brother, but also it's going to be really awesome. Not enough sympathy because it's going to be cool. It's part of the fun bit of my job is Charlie will send me something. I'm like, yeah, but I think it needs more work. We should do more. Yeah. He's like, okay, I guess it will turn out better if we do that thing that takes forever. Sure, you're right. But I hate it. Yeah, I know. Yeah, I guess I have to write for a few more hours. I get it. It'll be okay with a layout for. Shiver Gothic where I basically made him relay out the entire book, but it looks amazing afterwards and it was worth doing at the point of that meeting, he was not happy with me. It's like, I did all of this and you're asking me to restart. Why? Oh, man, that's so heartbreaking. Just from a creative standpoint of like, I understand the feeling of like, almost. It's not even like losing the progress because you did it and you still have it. It's just it would be better if you changed it. Yeah, everything's fine. It's great. No, I love that though, and I love that you guys are able to do that, have those constructive talks of, like, to make this game better, here's things that we should add to it or here's things that we do need to change, even if it may be a hassle. Because you care about making a good game. Yeah, it's one of the things that it's one of the massive benefits of me and my brother working together is like, we can just be disastrously honest with each other. And so it means that the conversations that would otherwise be awkward are just really easy. Yeah. When it comes to siblings, they tend to be we've grown up together, it sucks. Come on, we're just going to cut through the bullshit. No, I love that. And so I think, though, that we are probably getting close to the end of the episode here, which this has been a fantastic chat. Thank you so much for agreeing to come on and doing this because I'm just really hyped about this game even more and it's going to be awesome. And 2024 can't come soon enough, which is a terrible thing to say when I don't want it to come at all. But I will embrace it just for the game. Thank you very much for having me on. It's been an absolute blast talking about all of our spooky creations and don't play this game. And I'm hopefully excited for some of your listeners to go and scare themselves silly with our demo as well and. Go check out the Kickstarter same. Yes. Which will all be in the description of this episode. So just please go check it out. At least check out the demo. It's free. You don't have to pay anything to get it. You can just check it out, see if it's something you're interested in, and you can join the Discord server, keep kind of updated and in the loop on the project and see again if it's something that's going to be up your alley. And I think before we end here, I'll have you kind of go through a final bit of where people can find you again. Anything that you would like to promo, stuff like that. But before we end, I would like to ask out of everything with Don't Play This Game, what makes you the most excited? I think the thing that I'm most excited about is this idea of creating modern urban legends with the game. Like this idea that some of the stories that people create could snowball over and over and over again and to the point where we create a bigfoot style cryptid that has been created by the community, I think is a really exciting idea. I love that I want that to happen. Yes, actual cryptid that is started by a role playing game, 2024 or 2025, I guess when that's more when the game is probably going to be out, but yes, no, actually that would be really cool. Yeah. Petition that. Yeah, please, everyone collectively start a cryptid together and it'll be a great time. But yeah, no. God, I am so excited about this so very much and I guess it has to end at some point. So I guess we will end the episode here right? Before we do, Barney, would you like to tell everyone where people can find you, where they can get the Kickstarter or find the Kickstarter, whatever else you would like to promo and all of that fun stuff and then we'll get done? Sure. So you can find don't play this game on kickstarter just search don't play this game or you can also find our website, which is Don'tplaythisgap Me, where you can find the demo and some more information about the game. But the Kickstarter is the best place to find information about it, along with podcasts stories that people have created and some really good examples, as well as on our discord of things that people have been making terrifying as a result of don't Play this game. You can find me on Twitter, at gamesparable or on Facebook at Don't Play this Game or at Shiverrpg and you can find us on Instagram at Shiverrpg or at Don't Play this RPG. Perfect. Thank you so much again for coming on and talking about the game with me. This was absolutely fantastic. So everyone, again, like I said, you're cursed and now required to actually go check out and get the game. Whether or not you actually want to get it, it's fine. You're still going to be cursed. So if you don't get it, you're going to be cursed. If you get it, then you can at least fight the curse. So it's up to you on what you want to do. But thank you so much for listening and check out this game.