Ethereal Mirror 

Welcome to Ethereal Mirror. Thank you so much for joining me.

Ava Islam 

Thanks for having me.

EM 

I wanted to start with asking you to talk about your sort of your tabletop role playing game origin story, like, how did you? How'd you come to the hobby?

AI 

As a kid, when we moved to Australia, we rented this little flat, this little unit that was adjoined to the larger house of the, the lady who owned it. And my parents were both working at the time. So our landlord was this older Italian lady who’d basically I hung out with her all the time. And she became my Nona. And she had an older son in his late 20s when I moved in, who lived with her, and he was a super nerdy, geeky dude. And so we got along super well. His name was Nunzio. We hung out all the time. We made a bunch of super inappropriate, politically incorrect jokes all the time. Like, whenever we would go to parties with his friends. He'd be like, ‘Yeah, this is like my little Bengali slave child.’ And I'd be like, ‘Yep, that's me.’ And so like, he's the person that taught me how to read in English and stuff. And so, as a kid, I was huge into fantasy, and I loved dragons. I was just like, absolutely obsessed with dragons. And so, obviously, I heard of this thing called Dungeons and Dragons, and I was like, I want to know what this is. I didn't even really know what it was, like fully. I didn't understand what a roleplaying game was. I just knew it was like something that nerds did, and it had the word “Dragons” in it. And so I wanted it, and he had all the old, 1E books. He had the special variant cover of the one DMG, the one where there's the dude in the robes opening the big brass doors to one of the Nine Realms of Hell or something, and it had all of these brass corners. He had those little brass tips that you put on to keep them from fraying and stuff. So he gave me his copy of the Mentzer red book. The Player's Handbook for the B part of BECMI. The one that has a little solo, intro play-it-yourself tutorial adventure, which all I remember about that was just, re-rolling my stats over and over until I got an 18 in Strength, and like being like, really upset that I couldn't save … there's like a cleric that you meet, Alina the cleric, and then she dies a horrible death, and you can't save her. Like there's nothing in the book that you can do to save her. I remember being very upset about that. But yeah, so, I would just pour through that book, over and over. And then once in a blue moon, when Nunzio, and his friends would play D&D, I'd hop in. So it'd be a bunch of dudes in their 30s playing second edition, and then this 10 year old kid there, being like, I'm gonna roll the dice. I'm gonna do a funny voice.

And then I remember just being like, I want to play Dungeons & Dragons again, and I was, telling my dad, and I was trying to convince him to go and buy me the Dungeons & Dragons stuff. And again, in my head, I didn't even have anyone that I could play with or whatever, and that wasn't even really something I thought about, I just wanted the books, and so we went. But my entire world was completely insulated from what D&D was actually like at that time period because my experience with it was filtered through all these older dudes.

So we went and we bought what I now know is the 4E Starter Set. It was this big box, and it had all of these miniatures and stuff in it. I was so confused because the BECMI book that I'd had was like, Yeah, you don't need miniatures or other things to play this game. You just need your imagination. So I was looking at this, and I was like, I was having my own, 12 year old little grognard moment of, This isn't my D&D, why are there why are there miniatures here? and just trying to read the rules and not getting it at all.

Then after that I just was kind of like, Okay. I mentally shoved D&D aside, until we moved. We moved to Canada. And then for a bit there in 2012/2013, when boutique board games are suddenly becoming a thing. Me and all my high school friends, we had a board game night. We would play every week and stuff. And then everyone was like, We want to try D&D. And so this was right around the time the 5E Starter Set had just come out. So we gave that a whirl. And it's been an unbroken stream of elf game obsession since.

EM 

So given the story you just told makes sense. Because I sort of identify you as somebody who's more into the OSR scene. That makes sense that since you started with the red book. So what what were some of the other OSR games that you started playing?

AI 

Um, it was the Black Hack. So I think it was, I mean, I don't think I went to the OSR out of some sense of appeal to the game that I used to play. Because also I don't think the game even when I was a kid, the D&D—there's this notion that the OSR is about playing things how they were back in the day, but that's like, absolutely not true. The OSR is a culture based around a particular exegesis of older texts of looking in them and seeing this hypothetical game, and then everyone talked about it. And then, until we decided on all our classical notions of what an OSR game is, based around risk and you know exploration and resource management and diegetic positioning and all of that stuff.

But you know, growing up as a kid, for me, it was mostly about telling stories. I think the kinds of games that I ever actually played were a lot more on the “trad” Dragonlance, you-tell-a-story/path-type of game. And so that was my frame of reference when I started playing 5E.

And, you know, watching things like Critical Role, and just being part of the 5E play culture. And I think I just came to the OSR out of a sense of just wanting to do better. I wanted inspiration, I wanted to know how to game better. And just by searching on the internet, I stumbled into the blogosphere. And then sort of gradually from there seeing everyone talking about this “OSR play style” and stuff. I was like, This sounds really cool. This is maybe something that I want to try doing in my games more. And then for a long time I was really working on trying to make 5E a more OSR game. And I think since then a bunch of people have tackled that particular acorn and done a decent job of it with all the 05R games like Five Torches Deep. And there's a there's a few other ones that I can't think of off the top of my head, but I was having just an absolutely miserable time of it.

And in terms of the clash of expectations between players and me, like the different things that we want to have in the game, which in retrospect is completely a clash of play culture. But I didn't really have the vernacular to articulate that yet. And I really didn't actually until John Bell posted his excellent six cultures of play essay on his blog. But yeah, so then, after just like forever trying to make 5E work for me, I was just like, what if I just like stopped and played one of these OSR games instead. And it was right around that time that The Black Hack came out. And everyone like fell in love with The Black Hack. And I was like, cool, this makes sense. This is easy and minimalist. And I don't have to look through some book from the 80s that's kind of hard to read to figure out what the rules are. But almost immediately I started running into problems. I'd still never properly run an OSR game. So I was just like, How do you run a dungeon crawl? How do you run a hex crawl? And the book didn't offer a lot of support for that. And so, you know, through the process of trying to answer those questions for myself and reading other games and reading blogs and creating rules and stuff for that, I ended up basically coming up with my own system, which seems kind of like an inevitable thing that happens in this scene.

Everyone ends up—as much as people say, Rules don't matter and stuff—everyone ends up making their own eventually, and I think that's an irony that's long been realized in this hobby, or at least in this part of our hobby that everyone and their mother has their own set of house rules for how they play D&D. So mostly that's been it. It's really been majorly in my life like 5E, The Black Hack. And then like Errant, the game I ended up developing, and I have excursions here and there of playing other things for a few sessions. But since 2014 those have been the real big games. And I don't even know how much you can count The Black Hack. I guess like for a while there, we used most of the core mechanics and rules. But even from the beginning, I had my own house rules and hacks and classes and stuff that were part of it. But then again, everyone was doing that with The Black Hack, too. So yeah, I'd say those are like the big three.

EM 

And so it sounds like you, and correct me if I'm wrong, it transitioned your group from a 5E group to an OSR group?

AI 

No, it wasn't ever like one stable play group. I was mostly like playing Roll20. And you know Roll20 groups kind of collapse after three to six months. I would be playing a few games here and there. I would run a few games here and there. I had a miserable time running 5E games. So it's inevitable that those didn't last very long. Not just because of the system, but because, you know, like problem players and burnout and the sort of, expectation in 5E play culture of the GM to perform and have all the stuff prepped, you know, like, basically to be Matt Mercer.

And something that was already hard, and hard to feel like you could keep up with, and then when you have players who aren't simpatico with that, it was just exhausting.

Then I had a bunch of different play groups over the years. I would play with some folks from university. I've had a few different campaigns. I'd say that I probably had three big campaigns after 5E that I ran. Two of them set in my own home settings. And then one of them was in Dolmenwood. And that was the one that I was running just before I launched the Kickstarter. So it hasn't been one continuous play group, although I've had a bunch of people who were friends of mine that would play in whatever I was playing. But it wasn't so much that I transitioned one group from one thing to the other thing. It was more like, I had one group that I was running 5E with, I stopped, then I started this other group with The Black Hack. And over the course of that campaign, to the end of it, I was constantly tweaking and changing the rules. And then I would end a campaign, or a campaign would end. And then I wouldn't really touch my rules for a bit, and then we would start a new campaign. And the rules tinkering would begin again, and again. Throughout that process things kind of slowly transitioned, in a herky-jerky stop-start type of way.

EM 

It sounds like you had some players who sort of stuck through and maybe realized that they also really liked this other style of play. I guess I wonder, Did you did you convert anyone?

AI 

I think I've converted a fair few people. Especially the Dolmenwood campaign that I was running before. That started out of a 5E group that I was playing in with a bunch of other players, and it was a great game, and we all got along super well. And then that game sort of started falling apart. And I stepped in, and I was like, I'll start learning this new game in this new style. And a few of the players from that group bounced off of it. And were like, This isn't for me. But a couple of folks from there—they still like 5E and stuff—but they really enjoy the OSR style of play. And just the other games that we've played, you know, like introduce them to other shit that's out there. Like Mothership and Into the Odd and stuff like that.

EM 

So I definitely want to talk about Errant and it's because it all this culminated in your own system, which you call “rules light and procedure heavy”. And so “rules light” is a term we see used a lot. I wonder what are some of the principles that you think are most important to Errant's ruleset?

AI 

Yeah. So I guess that phrase came about out of a little bit of insecurity almost in terms of looking at my game and seeing that it was this large game. When I would send the document to the players, it'd be like, Whoa, this is like a lot of words, this is like a lot of pages.

And I would get kind of insecure about that, because the games that people liked playing, that got a lot of buzz in the sphere, were like all of these like little elegant, minimalist, cute, slim, thin little things like Into the Odd and Black Hack.

Everybody wants to take them out for a dance on the world on the dance floor. And I was over here, like the chunky, ugly little kid with my big rules text. And I wanted to be like, No, like I can step up to the dance floor. And I wanted to convey that because even though I had a lot of stuff going on, I had a lot of individual rules, I felt that I had done a good job of keeping each individual thing pretty simple, pretty intuitive. Not like a lot of like complex math or anything in there. That's one of the things that I tried to keep out of the game was like, just as little math as possible. Especially like in the core things.

So I like wanting to get that sense across. It's not a minimalist game. But it's not a Pathfinder or GURPS or this high crunch, high complexity type game either. Each and every part of the package is really easily digestible. So that's where that phrase sort of came from. But there were definitely a few principles that I was like trying to keep in mind. Kind of like Chris McDowell who designed Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland, is one of my biggest design influences. He has his kind of strict principles that he writes his rules by, and I don't think I was as strict with mine, but like, “no math” was a big one.

I wanted things to be focused. I wanted things to be active—like no passive abilities. I wanted to center the game around choices, making meaningful choices. And, furthermore, I wanted to structure the game in such a way that the time in between meaningful choices was as short as possible. Either the players are making a decision or acting out their decision. Those are the only two things that I want happening: either deciding what to do, or doing the thing they decided to do.

And so structuring the game like that, I wanted a strong procedural loop, almost like I have these four types of turns that go from downtime, to travel, to inspiration, to initiative. And I envisioned this kind of loop of the game where you go down, from downtime to initiative, and then back up. You start in town, you travel, you go through the dungeon, you fight, you get out of the dungeon, you travel back, you have downtime again… And I was imagining this really tight procedural loop, almost like Boardgamey in a sense. I know I had other principles in there somewhere, but I think those were the biggest ones.

EM 

Yeah, I love that feeling of the loop, because it does feel like a lot of other games there's attention paid to some of those aspects, then it can feel like it's unclear sort of how to navigate those times if you're not kind of in those highly regulated ones.

AI 

Yeah.

EM 

And we sort of talked about rules, but like procedures is not necessarily a term that gets used all the time. When talking about mechanics, I wonder, why did you choose that term? And could you talk a little bit more about procedures in Errant?

AI 

Yeah, it's weird. This question is one that I feel like each time I've been asked this, and each time I answer it I feel like I understand it less.

I don't know what the fuck a procedure is anymore. But it's like, to me, rules—I mean to use maybe a trite metaphor here—but rules are like your toolbox, and your raw material. You know, you've got nails, and wood, and all that stuff. But you look at that, and it's like, how do I build a house with it?

So I think of procedures as sort of like the blueprints that tell you what to do with these things. Like how to use them. And in some case, the blueprint, the instructions introduced other tools and other specialized things that you use just for one task, but they're not like your general tools or whatever. And so I guess I got the idea from a blog post, actually hilariously enough, a person who I really do not like on a personal level, but who frustratingly has a lot of good ideas. And he was reviewing another work by another very problematic author in the OSR on downtimes, and demesne. And so he had a quote there, that the options presented to you in the book weren't rules in terms of hard and fast, like, Here's how you do this. And, Roll this to do that.

On the other hand, they weren't vague general guidance in terms of like, make resources matter, you know. That's kind of like hand wavy stuff, but in between that is where procedures live in my mind. It's not iron fast things. But it's like, Here's an idea of how to do something. Here's a guideline, and you don't have to adhere to it rigidly. One blueprint for a house isn't the only blueprint for a house. You can make things differently. You could build it in a different way. Or you could look at it and be like, It says here to build a gazebo, but I want a pool instead. But you have a general structure or a framework to start basing it off of.

EM 

You've talked about them as a way to help people run their games.

AI 

Yeah. And it's interesting, though, because I feel like it's a word that comes up a lot in the older editions. Like if you look at BX or AD&D, they throw the word 'procedure' around all the time. Like, Here's the procedure for dungeon crawling: the referee says this, and then they roll the wandering encounter die, and then they check for torches, and they check for rest. And then the players declare how many steps they move. And again, it gives you that almost that kind of board-game-feeling like you go through the steps.

It was just that sort of thing that when I when I started GMing, I was like, I don't know how to do this. I did. Like I remember finding out about hex crawls and spending so long trying to make it work in my head in a way that's kind of funny. It's hard to describe because I understand it now so well that it's almost difficult to understand why couldn't understand it. It's sort of like reading in that way. It's hard to remember what it was like before you could read. I just remember being like, How does a hex crawl work? How do I move my players from one part of the map to another? I literally couldn't figure it out. How does that actually like work? Because everyone—and Night at the Opera has a great blog post about this on how hexes are handled, which I think explains some of the confusion. Because there were almost two conflicting schools of thought. One, which is that you just sort of measure distance. You can go 20 miles in a day. And you use the hexes almost like a ruler. Oh, 20 Miles is like two and a half hexes or whatever.

And then there was a newer mode of play emerging where the hex was the movement unit. Like, You can move two hexes in a day. And that again is almost board gamey, the feeling of moving your pieces around. But yeah, I was reading all of these different, conflicting things about hex crawls, and just being like, I don't get it. What I was really missing was that I had a ton of rules, but I didn't have a lot of procedure on, Here's how you run a dungeon crawl: have the players declare their action, and then measure their movement, and then change the turn. It was in the process of like trying to figure out how to run things that I inevitably ended up creating those for myself out of other stuff that people would come up with.

EM 

That's really interesting. And so you mentioned the 4E Starter Set and being shocked I guess by the miniatures in there. So I wonder now that you're creating Errant, are you planning for people using minis in there?

AI 

I don't know. I mean that depends on the person because, again, minis are a very flexible tool that you can use for a lot of things. You can use them just to be like, Here's what this thing looks like, or to add ambiance to your room, to the environment that it's in. And I don't use minis, and I don't even use battle maps and stuff, but I do run things off of a quasi-grid combat system. And Errant goes by 10 foot increments. I've done that mostly because it matches the squares that are already on most dungeon maps. And sometimes, if it's a particularly complex encounter, I'll draw it out, and I'll put little—I mostly play online—but I'll draw a little circles to represent everything, and people can move those around.

But most of the time it's pretty much theater of the mind. I've got the dungeon map in front of me, so I can keep track of the room's relative positions. But, yeah, people could use minis. I mean, I'm not going to tell anybody not to if they have the time and the money, the inclination. Like that's great. But, I guess, the funny thing is that there's no physical minis. But in my head, I almost think of it, again, I keep going back to board games. And I guess that's probably because I played a lot of board games right before I got it back into D&D. But that's how I like conceptualized a lot of things.

When I was designing Errant, for example—if you look at BX, traditional movement is given in the amount of feet that you can go in a turn. It's like, oh, you can move 120 feet in a turn. And so, traditionally, check that out and see how many spaces does your character move? I did what a lot of folks did, which was just abstract to like, oh, you can move one room, one room per turn in a dungeon. And thinking of rooms as the unit of movement. And in my mind, I almost visualize that as if you're playing a game like Gloomhaven or Betrayal at House on the Hill or Monopoly, you're moving from one square to another, you don't know the distance between, Park Road and Broadway. In Monopoly you don't know how many miles it is, but it doesn't matter. It's twelve spaces away or something. I'm sure I've insulted diehard Monopoly fans with my absolutely inaccurate info. But in that sense, if there's a broad sense that mini play or whatever influences Errant's design, it's almost like that in the board game usage of it rather than the war game or roleplaying game usage of it.

EM 

That’s so interesting, because I think we do often think of them as being a polar thing, where minis are tactical, and then the other alternative is just theater of the mind. But, really, there's a big gray space to play in too. I'm wondering how does that translate for you to your hex crawls? And that exploratory part of play?

AI 

I think it's similar, right? When I'm playing a game, I know a lot of GMs don't show the map to their players or don't show the maps of hexes on the players, but I just give it to them. If I need to make a player-friendly version with the notable details scrubbed out, I'll do that, but I like giving my players the full map.

And they can see there's a town over there. Or there's a mountain over there. It's called Manticore Mountain, maybe there's manticores there, and maybe we can go kill them and take their poison or whatever. And just putting a little token down on the map that represents the party and just playing it out like that…. You have that like procedure of, you can move this many spaces in a day. You move to one space, what do you want to do next? Do you want to explore the space? Do you want to move to a different one? We roll the die. We see what happens.

One of my favorite moments in my Dolmenwood campaign was when we ran (I keep mentioning controversial OSR products) we ran Tower of the Stargazer the Lamentations of the Flame Princess intro adventure. And there's this one room where there's a ghost that you're supposed to play chess against. And I've played chess in the middle of RPG sessions before, and it sucks. Yeah. And this is like a discussed thing. If you go read discussions about this module or whatever, everyone's like, playing chess sucks. And so he played a game of Connect Four. And I just found a random browser version of it. And everyone was spectating. And it was one player versus me. But Connect 4 is also simple enough that literally everyone can be like, Watch out, they’re trying to build it over there, or, Put your circle there! So everyone could participate.

And that Connect 4 game ended up being the most hyped moment of that campaign ever. That's what people talked about was like, You remember that Connect 4 game that we played? And that really instilled a love in me of just having these little mini-game-like parts of your game that feel completely different. And so I feel like how I run things like the hex map is its own mini game. You bust out the hex map and you're suddenly playing this little explorer/Catan-style thing. And then the dungeon map is a similar thing, but different. And so conceptualizing these modes of play that are all interrelated, they all feed through one another, but each of them has a pretty distinct game feel as if you'd busted out a new box with a new board and new pieces. I feel like that's like something—it's maybe not super explicit, but it's, I think something that informs both my design and GMing style.

EM 

That's awesome. So an important question, is now that we know you love dragons, are there going to be dragons in Errant? 

AI 

In Errant, it's already pushing the limits of size in terms of what our production budget is. It's only got a very small bestiary of creatures ranging from 1 Hit Die to 10 Hit Die. You get the nice gamut. And of course, the 10 Hit Die creature is a dragon. Like your archetypal big, red dragon. And I've made mine a little bit more of a Kaiju than traditional D&D dragons are, I think, but definitely.

So there's one dragon in Errant currently, and it's a very generic, standard dragon. But I want to keep supporting this game with new books, monster manuals… I'm planning after this edition is done to make the bigger version of it with the bestiary, and the magic items, and the GM advice, and all that jazz. And there will definitely be many, many dragons. I think that if you're playing D&D, and there's not a dungeon and a dragon, that you're doing it wrong.

Nick Whelan has great advice for building Random Encounter tables where he rolls them on a 2d6, and a two is always a dragon, and a 12 is always a wizard, or the other way around? I can't remember. And I think that should just be like a law. That's the best way to build encounter tables. Because it makes sense. And yeah, there should be like all kinds of dragons. A first level party should definitely be able to run into a big adult Red Dragon. But they should also like run into weird ostrich/emu dragons that are like 2 Hit Die and are more of a nuisance, but you still deal with them. There should just be more dragons in general.

EM 

We are pro dragon here.

AI 

There's way too many Not HumansTM. You've got goblins and orcs and fucking bug bears, and there's too many of them. And they're all basically just humans that have a different smell and color. There's not enough dragons.

EM 

So true. I feel like I remember reading somewhere that you wrote that you basically call your Errant game that you run Dungeons and Dragons. Is that true?

AI 

I do. I have. I have all of the fancy pretentious words when I'm actually writing it, you know. The classes are like the Violent and the Zealot. And the stats have all the names, but when I'm running the game, I'm like, Yeah, this is D&D. You're a Fighter. That's your Strength score. Which is actually starting to come back at me now. It's like been like, I go to people you know, who've never played D&D. And they're like, I want to play D&D. And I'm like, Cool. Come play D&D, and I use my rules and whatever. And nobody has read them except me. But now I'm playing with people who have read Errant, and I say things like, Give me a Dex check. And they're like, What do you mean Dex? There's no Dex score in this game, and I'm like, Oh, fuck, you're right. You know? Yeah. And so that's funny to me. In my head, Errant is—I'm giving it a legally distinct name, and legally, because I'm publishing it, but yeah it's really just my rules for playing D&D.

EM 

That’s like you said, part of the hobby, in a way.

AI 

I mean, D&D is folk art. And that's the folk process, you know. Bob Dylan didn't write any of his own melodies. He took other people's songs and put his own words on top. And, you know, if you're a lawyer, you might call that plagiarism or IP violation. But that's just, I think that's the folk process.

EM 

I love that. So last question, you've talked a little bit about, some follow ups once Errant is out and rolling and getting some more dragons out there. Any other plans you've got in the works that you can talk about that is,

AI 

The next immediate thing on the horizon is a Kickstarter for what will be the first official adventure for Errant, "Sanctimonious Slimes vs Expired Epicures," which is a very inventive dungeoncrawl written by Nick Whelan. While that's going on I'm working slowly on a larger adventure/campaign setting called "In the Court of the Avian Kings" as well as the expanded and revised version of Errant, "Errant Compleat". Ty, the third jester of Kill Jester games, is also working on the first in a series of urban horror adventures, called "Swineheart Motel", which I'm very excited about. Far off in the backburner I'm working on this weird, experimental tactics game that is exploring this design space I have been interested in of like, finite games (e.g. the book presents one singular complete campaign to play along with its system). I think the aim for a lot of the products Kill Jester puts out, outside of Errant, is for them to be as complete a package for gaming as possible; playable straight out of the box.