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Our Slack Spotlight series features short interviews with active members of our Slack channel. Will Patterson: Ferrell, I understand you are OG Gauntlet. When did you first become involved? Ferrell Riley: Oh geez, like I wandered into a random Dungeon World game in 2013, back when Kerry was running Gauntlet, before Jason Cordova really took it over and shaped it into the glorious citizen-state it is now. Part of the time it was run out of a conference room that belonged to a company Kerry worked for, so he'd let us in the back basically and we'd be sitting there rolling dice surrounded by like 10 people. It was a bit of a mess, at times. About 2014 though Jason started hosting events at his place, which is where I got my taste of "World of Dungeons". And from that point onward we started doing a lot more story game style meetups, like Microscope, Technoir, Dream Askew…
It helped that Dan Lewis was on hand; he and Jason both really pushed for and brought these things to the table, and made sure that everyone knew how to get people on board. They also ensured that we had plenty of "social time" before the games where they'd both talk up what we were doing, and what was coming next. That really made sure to keep you on board with it all. So you have been here since the beginning. What has been your favorite part of the evolution to today’s Gauntlet? My personal favorite probably was seeing Codex take off. I love that we can fairly compensate artists, that we are generating and introducing new product to the market, and just in general making a more creative world. Now if you ask, I think the most impressive step was hosting GauntletCon. It feels like a trite answer, but going from a few people at tables to online, that felt pretty natural. Going to hosting an entire online event over a weekend? I have worked conventions, and even small single targeted cons require a massive volunteer and coordinator response. I loved GauntletCon. It was my first chance to game with the Gauntlet. Is there a particular moment from GauntletCon that stood out for you? It feels indulgent but I loved my character best in Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers. He was someone who was just resigned to being in servitude forever to their patron, and no matter the job, he was gonna do it just to live another day. And that lead to a moment when the job required we “escort” a lady back to the surface, and it was obvious she did not want to go back to her adviser/stalker. So we had a scene where I’m standing over her battered form in the burning husk of her home, and I told her “there’s nothing left for you here. Come with us.” And yes, we did our job, but man, I felt like a terrible person, and it lead to an amazing betrayal of our employer at the end of the game. Love it! What brought you to the hobby originally, and what keeps your around? I don't think I ever have been outside the hobby. I grew up in a comic book store that my dad ran, and adopted both PCs and Video Games at an early age, so RPGs were always around me. My first game was the Zanzer Tem module that came with the 2nd Edition box set (I think) and I played D&D from basically 5th grade onward. As for what keeps me around? Community, and a desire to see what was left behind here at Gauntlet Prime to keep growing and going. There's a bit of pride being part of the seed of all this, ya know? Absolutely! Imagine your perfect game night. What game are you playing, and are you the GM or a PC? Hard question. I think perfect game night is still up in the air, and I'm doing Bluebeard's Bride or Lovecraftesque with Jason, Kate, and a former Gauntleteer named Jessica. Something dark and twisted that leaves us all gasping for breath once we're done. I'd be playing, not facilitating, because while I love dark deep emotions, all my games seem to end up going down the Camp/Gonzo route when I GM. It's not bad, and everyone loves when I do Dungeon Planet as a terrible 70's rip-off of Star Trek, but I crave tapping into the Feels Aquifer. I really wish though I could GM a game and just at the end, have everyone completely devastated from the emotional fallout. Also, there's pineapple pizza. Cause pineapple pizza rules. All the haters can deal. Pineapple pizza is mandatory at my events too. Thanks for your time Ferrell, and for holding things down in Houston!
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 Greetings, and welcome to the weekly Gauntlet Hangouts video roundup! Don't miss any of the great sessions in the updated playlists and video links below. Star Wars Saturday
Sea of Stars (Session 1 of 3) Rich runs for Ary, Blaise, Pawel, and Walter The crew of the Silver Snake fly to the Roche Asteroid Field to take a message from the Rebel Alliance to Research Station Shantipole. Gauntlet Sunday Dungeon World: The Green Law of Varkith (Session 3 of 5) Lowell runs for Patrick, Rich, Rubin, and Steven The PCs' guild -- The Twilight Museum -- splits to deal with battle bakers and a stone crustacean before returning and uncovering a guild war aimed at them. TGI Thursday Masks: A New Generation (Session 3 of 4) Lowell runs for Hannah, Jesse, Larry, and Michael Whipette's scouting misstep leads to a battle that opens with the team setting a lair on fire and ends with them dumping the building in the bay. Gauntlet Quarterly Gauntlet League Wrestling: Season 3 (Session 2) Lowell runs for Ary, Chris, Gerwyn, Patrick, Tyler, and Zak A new manager gets burned protecting folks from backstage chicanery, an old hand takes a belt to help a buddy, and another tag team match descends into chaos. Gaunt Marches Dungeon World: Gaunt Marches - The Land of 1,000 Sloughs (Session 3 of 5) Spencer runs for Adam, Harry, Rubin, and Tyler Intrigue in the town of Alameen, ritual sacrifice to the Blind God, and a rat dragon! Dungeon World: Gaunt Marches: Desire to Despond (Session 2 of 3) Richard runs for Bethany Harvey, Catherine Ramen, Dylan, Kyle, and Stephen Gauntlet City Limits Katanas & Trenchcoats (Session 1 of 2) Ryan runs for Jason, Miguel, and Rich A time-traveling car wizard and his vampiric ancestor attend a street race that's interrupted by a dubstep dance battle while an Immortal "out of the game" fights pseudo-ninjas on his house boat. Plus were-snakes show up. Gauntlet Hangouts Monster of the Week: Big Business (Session 3 of 4) Sidney runs for Hayley, Lauren, Ryan, and Vee Magic Meditation saves the day! Monsterhearts 2: Ballhir (Session 3 of 3) Donogh runs for Asher, Jesse, Lauren, and Mark Finale where the fallout of the murderous showdown at the Abbey makes itself felt. Psychological trauma and political upheaval abound. Rhapsody of Blood: Creeping Darkness (Session 3 of 5) Maria runs for Jason, Taejas, and Vincent Psi*Run Ryan runs for Ellen, Sidney, and Tyler A trio of escaped assets weaponize feelings to evade a multinational corporation on the Russian steppe. Beyond the Castle Wall: Keep on the Barrowlands (Session 2 of 4) Richard runs for Christopher, Leandro, Maria, and Mark An heir apparent gets punched, a stableboy gets injured, a strange southerner acts suspiciously, the wine cellar is reorganized, a hug lingers, a smith’s apprentice discovers the value of free alcohol, and Lady Lyssa proves she can listen to farmers as intently as she listens to crows. Nahual: Playtest 1 (Session 2 of 4) Miguel runs for Brian, Rich, Tara, and Tomer Dungeon World: Beneath Cartannah (Session 2 of 4) Maxime runs for Jan, Robbie, Ryan, and Spencer The party safely arrives in Rift-Town after a few encounters in the sewers. Their dwarven guide is replaced by a backstabbing ratkin who brings them to the Diggers Sorrow Inn. Polaris Mikael runs for Horst, Ryan, and Sabine Good Society (Session 2 of 3) Yoshi runs for Christopher, Dan, David, and Jim Veil 2020: Land of the Free (Session 7) Fraser runs for Alex, Darren, Lauren, Matt, and Michael The Big Easy - The crew navigates through a much changed, futuristic New Orleans akin to Venice during Mardi Gras in order to find their new fixer, Michael Hart. Other Games Swords Without Master: Remnants: Year 1, Summer Pat runs for Aaron, Blake, and Maria Check out all the great videos on The Gauntlet's YouTube channel and be sure check out the playlists to catch up on all your favorite Gauntlet Hangouts games. If you'd like to play in games like these, check out the Gauntlet Hangouts Google+ Community where game signups are announced! To support The Gauntlet and Gauntlet Hangouts, please visit the Gauntlet Patreon at https://patreon.com/gauntlet where $7 and up patrons get priority RSVP for Gauntlet Hangouts games. Enjoy, and everyone have a great weekend!  The Crying Spider - Odilon Redon (1881) by Horst Wurst, Keeper of the Yellow-Eyed Mask When I first played a Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) game, the magic happened within 5 minutes when I asked a player – a friend of mine with whom I had played trad games for 30 years – to add an important place to the map and to tell me why his character was afraid to go there. His eyes lit up and he produced a grim tale about the Island of the Finstermann, where shadows roam, whispering secrets and lies. Months later, in the final session of our epic Dungeon World campaign, they finally reached the island, slew the antagonist, and brought hope and light back to a place that was cursed for centuries. For this first session I had prepared: a starting situation, a rough map from a D&D module, and a million questions: who is following you? Why do they follow you? What monsters are rumored to be in the dungeon? Etc. What happened at the table was the emergent story of a duke who had sent his guards after the players, a dragon that was rumored to have inhabited the dungeon, which in turn was actually an abandoned dwarven city, and so forth. Not necessarily Hugo Award material but it didn’t matter: it was our story. Why questions? In PbtA games, almost every decision by the players is a flag waved at the GM: this is what I’m interested in. If they pick a Driver in Monster of the Week, there better be a car chase, a Fighter picked in DW demands epic fights against epic foes. Questions allow the players to more intimately contribute to the fiction and to give them a more personal stake in the world. A good question has enough context to inspire them and is open enough for the answer to surprise everyone at the table. Last year, we had a similar "Eureka!" moment. We were playing Uncharted Worlds and they botched their Wild Jump. I had prepared a couple of random tables inspired by Impulse Drive and Stars without Numbers about what could go wrong, which ship systems were affected, what kind of place they would end up at, etc. We found out that the star system was dominated by a gigantic black hole, had a mysterious ship graveyard just outside the gravity well and that the character's life support had stopped working. Eventually they managed to transfer their warp core to a freighter carrying precious metals, escaped the system, and started a trading mini-campaign. I never asked a single question about the world around them, instead every twist and turn that changed the course of the adventure was randomly rolled and it felt… somehow more relevant, more consequential, more “real” than if I had just picked it from a list or if I had asked the players to contribute to the fiction.  Everywhere eyeballs are aflame - Odilon Redon (1881) Why tables?
In sandbox games, tables can reinforce the themes of a setting (swampy results in a swamp, fairy-tale results in the dark wood) but can allow for surprising results, especially when using the synergy of two or more tables at the same time. A table where all results are aggressive monsters is boring. A monster table linked to a reaction roll is better: maybe the blink dogs are aggressive and attack immediately, maybe they are curious and can be tamed by treats and the ranger finds a new companion. Even better, if there are linked tables like two encounters and a Die of Fate (see John Harper's World of Dungeons 1979 for more info on the Die of Fate). A good recent example of the synergy from rolling on multiple tables is The Gardens of Ynn where a random location, detail, and encounter give rise to hundreds of interesting results. Loaded questions and random tables ultimately serve the same purpose: to prevent railroading, to unburden the GM from coming up with all the cool stuff, to allow emergent story and to surprise everybody at the table. Using random tables requires an additional risk: we completely surrender ourselves to the fates, we resist the urge to just pick the coolest result from a list. Sure, we might end up with a boring or unfitting result, but I claim it is well worth taking that risk. Our Slack Spotlight series features short interviews with active members of our Slack channel.
Will Patterson: Hi River, thank you for agreeing to speak with me. Let's jump right in. How long have you been a part of The Gauntlet? River Williamson: I've only been around since 2016, back when The Gauntlet online was still new. In that day I mistakenly thought it was all straight, white men. I found out pretty quickly that was not the case, even though they were the majority. What has been your favorite part of the evolution to today’s Gauntlet? Over the past two years, I've been very pleased with how many more queer people are part of The Gauntlet as players, GMs, and creators. I'm especially proud of how many of us, me included, got in touch with our queerness through The Gauntlet. Spending time with people who don't look, love, or live like you, but share an interest is instrumental in humanizing people we'd usually "other". It's not enough in itself, you have to be open minded and open eared helps. Beyond that, though, is the sort of games we play here. Monsterhearts, Pack of Strays, and other games which specifically address the PoV of non-mainstream people have a transformative effect on their players. Straight or queer. Out, questioning, or closeted. What brought you to the hobby originally? I first encountered formalized roleplay in middle school. My best friend and her younger brother played Advanced D&D. When I brought this up with my mom, she freaked and forbade my brother and I from playing. For context, her only exposure to D&D was the satanic panic of the 70s and 80s. She was also against my brother and me reading adventure fantasy (Conan, Lord of the Rings, etc.) because she feared that our delicate minds couldn't separate reality from fantasy. We rejected her concerns and played without her knowledge. My very first action with my very first character was to fail a check for traps roll and badly die from an axe trap to the chest. I was hooked. In fact, I met my first partner through “D&D.” My partner and I were using roleplaying to explore our gender and sexuality and so on. The games were changing us, but not in a way my mother could imagine. What current trends do you see in the industry that are particularly promising? I'm going to echo my favourite RPG writers here (most of whom are LGBTQ+ folx). I'm excited to see so many new games that focus like a laser on a specific feeling or atmosphere. These games are usually small and have play procedure baked right into the game. Two that I haven't played, but am very interested in, are Alex Roberts' “Star Crossed”, and Phil & Senda's game “Turning Point.” The key feature of this style of game is that players can keep both the story and the system in their heads simultaneously. You plan the perfect game night. What game? And are you playing or GMing? You know that game where you're heading into the climax of a short campaign? That's my perfect night, regardless of which side of the GM screen I'm on. Can’t argue with that. Thank you for your time River, and I look forward to the next time we get to share a table. by Jason Cordova
I often get credit for being a good improvisational GM. The players can take the story in whichever weird, unpredictable direction appeals to them and I can quickly adapt to that situation with NPCs and encounters that seem like they were always supposed to be there. There is a seamlessness to it; a sense that I have considered every possibility beforehand. Of course, that’s not the case at all; I have simply had a lot of practice rolling with the punches. That, and I use a GM technique called 7-3-1. 7-3-1 is… an exercise. I’m hesitant to call it “session prep,” because the point isn’t necessarily to end up with a bunch of notes I can use during the game. Rather, the point of 7-3-1 is to help interrogate my setting so I understand it at an intuitive level. I developed the technique around four years ago using bits of advice from the Vincent Baker game Dogs in the Vineyard, Jared Sorensen’s “Rule of Three,” and an episode of the Jank Cast. Here’s how it works: Before a session, I come up with 7 total NPCs, locations, and encounters. I give each of these a motivation. I then come up with 3 sensory details for each that I can describe at the table (sights, smells, sounds, and so forth). Finally, I think of 1 way I can physically embody each at the table (a distinct noise, voice, verbal tic, body posture, mannerism, etc.). I write all these things down. Here are a couple of examples for a zombie apocalypse setting (2 of my 7 items that I’m going to write): Charlie Steele, leader of the Decatur survivors
Willowbrook Mall, a makeshift refugee camp
Importantly, these 7-3-1 notes don’t necessarily have to “fit” anywhere in the ongoing story, nor do they have to be connected to one another. Remember: the purpose of the 7-3-1 exercise is to interrogate your setting. What do the people look like? What do they sound like? What sorts of places are there? What sorts of dangers can arise? What sorts of things do people want? We’re not creating a campaign world in the traditional sense, with each location and NPC mapped out. We’re answering the question “How does this world respond when the player characters take action?” Sometimes I have my 7-3-1 notes at-hand when I run the session, sometimes I don’t. If it’s early in the campaign, I might have them available for inspiration, but it’s just as likely I won’t because simply performing the exercise causes a swarm of characters and details to buzz around in my head. When we start playing, I just pluck from my brain whatever feels right in the moment. Perhaps I created a terrific uncle character during my 7-3-1, but the players choose to interact with the grandmother. Well, I’ll just take those cool details from the uncle and slap them on the grandmother. In the Charlie Steele example above, perhaps the players don’t wander over to the Decatur camp like I hoped they would, but instead choose to talk to the man trading guns off the back of his truck. If I am particularly enamored with Charlie’s lispy voice (that I have been practicing all week) maybe I take that element and give it to the gun trader. I can figure out the new way I’m going to embody Charlie later (or never, if it turns out the players don’t give a damn about the Decatur camp, in which case I’ll just keep picking Charlie’s bones for cool details to give to other characters). At some point after the session, perhaps when I am preparing the next session, I’ll pull out my 7-3-1 notes and revise them. I’ll make adjustments to the items that didn’t turn out exactly as I planned, cross out the items that are no longer relevant or useful, and write new ones so I am back up to 7. If the player characters are moving to a drastically different setting or environment, I’ll do an entirely new 7-3-1. Being a good improvisational GM takes practice. Sometimes, no matter how much you have thought about your setting, the players are going to stump you. And that’s ok. But if you develop good habits and use techniques like 7-3-1, you’ll get better and better at avoiding those situations. Eventually, you won’t even need 7-3-1; you’ll develop your own toolbox for interrogating the setting, your own methods for creating a seamless world on the fly. And that’s when you’ll know you’re getting to be a really good GM.  By Jason Cordova
I have been pitching the idea of a blog for several months now, and the reactions I get range from curious to puzzled. No one has had a negative reaction to the idea, but folks often wonder “Why now?” The Gauntlet has a successful podcast network, a small publishing arm, a vibrant gaming calendar, and runs an annual convention. The thinking, I suppose, is that most folks would have started with a blog and then moved onto those other things. We seem to be doing it backwards! But now is the right time for The Gauntlet Blog. Our community has been growing like crazy. Last month, we successfully organized over 140 game sessions on Gauntlet Hangouts; our Patreon subscriber count just passed the 500 mark; and each episode of every podcast we produce gets thousands of downloads. I don’t point these things out to boast, although I’m certainly proud of our accomplishments. Rather, as we have grown, so has the number of voices in our community. Everywhere you turn in The Gauntlet, be it on the Slack group or our various social media channels, interesting conversations about tabletop roleplaying games are taking place. Gauntleteers are the very best thinkers when it comes to indie RPGs, informed in part by the fact that we play so many of them. We have a lot of things to say about these games, our play culture, game design, GMing advice, our community, and more. We need a home–a permanent home–for these conversations to live. The Gauntlet Blog is that home. Our plan is for the blog to be on a daily release schedule. It may take us a few weeks to ramp up to that, but once we get going, you can look forward to the following types of content every single day: Play reports Game reviews Game design diaries Interviews Community spotlights Actual play round-ups Podcast round-ups RPG theory GMing advice And more! You can also expect blog posts from some of the best thinkers in the ttrpg industry, including Lowell Francis, whose ENnie award-winning Age of Ravens blog will merge with The Gauntlet Blog; Kate Bullock, author of the excellent Bluestockings blog; Rach Shelkey, co-host of +1 Forward; podcaster Kyle Thompson; and many more. (As for myself, I will be using the blog space to write down all those gameplay techniques I have been talking about for years but have never made available in a written form.) The Gauntleteer running the show will be Will Patterson, who has professional experience managing a blog. He will be assisted by various folks, including Michael X, who has professional experience with SEO. For now, they’re only going to take submissions from folks within The Gauntlet Slack group, or people we personally invite to write for the blog. If you’re a member of our Slack and have an idea for a post, be sure to contact Will. This is a very exciting new project for The Gauntlet, and represents the best new opportunity we have to show folks what our community is all about. Please be sure to bookmark the page, add it to your RSS feed, and, importantly, get involved in the conversation. We want to hear what you have to say! |
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