Welcome to Whatcha Doin', the interview podcast where I talk to cool people about the amazing stuff that they're working on.

My name is Matt, and this time I'm sitting down with Adam Bell to talk about his new game, Uneasy Lies the Head 2nd Edition.

Adam styles Uneasy Lies the Head as a competitive royal intrigue TTRPG.

And as we discussed in the interview, this is exactly the sort of game for the schemers and wheelers and dealers among you.

This is exactly the sort of game that I'm really curious how it would hit with people who are less familiar.

With TTRPGs, if the sort of more specific focus and different gameplay elements would grab them a little easier.

I've got some updates I need to share, but we'll worry about that later.

For now, let's get into the interview.

I'm already trying to get better about like podcast face.

Because it's podcast.

Yeah, so it's so it's it's a it's a thing that's really fun when you record like dozens of hours of yourself.

watching another person talk where it's where it says like hi question question question and then the guest will answer and i'll just sit here like just yeah a nice dead -eyed stare for the audience it's just like and i'm just looking at myself i'm like what is wrong with you what is happening yeah in your like what is what is happening here it's public hotkeys set up in obs so you can cut away from you when you're not talking i've thought i've thought about doing that especially with clips and stuff because it's it's doubly funny when both faces are like right next to each other just me in a corner like oh man i've been i've been reading the game the last week it's very funny to every time i read a game in a new like not necessarily like genre, but like new, new mechanisms and stuff, you know, when it's not like, oh, it's, you know, it's, it's based off this other thing where I'm just like, all right, what the hell are we doing?

What are we, how the hell, you know, it's, it's a fun, uh, it's like, it's every game.

Anytime I read a new game, I'm just like, I'm just, it's all right.

What are we?

All right.

We got cards.

Okay.

Where'd the cards go?

Okay.

Okay.

And.

it's it's very i there's a lot of like okay i understand that wait let's go back and read that it's fun yeah it's fun reading things with adhd it makes it it makes it real fun yeah it's i would say less fun writing them and trying to make sure that it works for your like whoever's reading it like will they be able to understand this i genuinely don't know i've stared at this shit for way too long at this point do you get the thing i do all the time where um like you'll be having a conversation with somebody and you will put a very important sentence where it's like this this is kind of like the linchpin of our conversation and you will forget to include a word and forgetting that word changes the entire intention of your sentence and you're like well that's not what i wanted to say shit um like every time i've forgotten to don't i'm just like no i meant a don't i'm sorry hang on everybody stop And I said the exact opposite of what you read is the exact.

What I meant was a hundred percent opposite of that sentence that I put.

Yeah.

Yeah, that happens.

It's just happened like the last two years.

It feels, it feels like I'm, I make this joke all the time where I'm like, I feel like I'm getting worse.

Like it's getting, it's degrading.

And it probably is.

There's more words.

You know, you have too many words in your brain that, of course, you're going to forget some.

That's what it is.

Yeah.

You've said too many sentences over the last however many years.

I saw somebody, they were like, they had to do vocal training and vocal care because they used their voice too much.

And I was like, oh no, that's going to be me.

That's me.

I was like, the idea that your voice has like a lifespan.

That it's like, yeah, you've got 12 billion words in you.

Use them wisely.

And it's like, oh, no, I got to be coming up on that.

Right.

A lot of it, I think, comes from, like, because I think part of it would be, like, making sure you're speaking, like, in the natural register versus, like, force it, like, accidentally without realizing forcing too high, too low could grind you up.

I don't know how it works.

That's what I figured.

There's, like, a more comfortable level to talk at.

Yeah.

I figure it's, it's there talking loudly or shouting, or like you said, like talking in a different register.

And, but I like, if I went down here for every day, you know, that would probably kill me and I'd have to get throat surgery, but this is business item.

This is what I'm going to meet.

That's all those.

That's just some, some like business nonsense trick.

I saw a while ago that was like, it was like when you take a phone call, like pretend like you're your assistant and then you pass the phone off and you do a slightly different voice.

And I was like, I was like, one, that's like, that's really like, I can't even imagine how you thought of this.

And two, I would forget immediately.

Yeah.

You really have to have two different voices that you can do and that you kind of can inhabit immediately because it's like, no, that.

hello adam's phone no that's you i know it's you come on don't all all the standing that you're pretending like you're gaining from doing this little trick saying that you have an assistant is lost whenever it's like this this guy's pretending yeah this is a pretend to have an assistant to make himself seem more important and that's why he put me on hold for six minutes that's even You just put your phone down next to a stereo and you're just like, OK, hang on.

I got to seem important.

I could hear breathe.

Didn't even put me on hold correctly.

Hear you like messing in the kitchen.

It's like I can I can hear you're there.

Just come on.

Hey, everybody.

Welcome to what you do in podcast interview podcast where I talk to cool people about the amazing stuff they're doing.

My name is Matt.

Today I'm sitting down with Adam.

Adam, say hello.

I'm Adam.

Adam Bell.

I make tabletop games.

You might have heard of them.

uh if you have we'll say you've heard of either grass mcdonald's or my brain is a stick of butter or hopefully the upcoming uneasy lies the head which is allegedly what we're here to talk about it's gonna be one of many things we talk about assuredly if if this podcast goes uh the way any of the other ones have gone it will be one of so many topics adam was adam was uh i've followed adam for a bit he's been talking about uneasy lies the head and um as i mentioned in the intro in case i cut it out Um, it's very, it's very fun and confusing and interesting to read a new game.

It's a lot of emotions to read a new game.

Um, because there's a lot of, there's a lot of information all at once and try as a designer and a layout person and an editor might, it's really hard sometimes to get sequential words into your brain in such a way that you understand what's happening.

And I will say I got there.

It's not that the text is confusing or anything like that.

I think the text is actually one of the things I love.

This is this is a thing that's going to happen a lot where I just talk effusively about the book.

One of the things I love is actually the layout is super clean.

The text is super clean.

There's a really nice image rules text set up.

There's always something like there's something exciting and is pulling me forward.

But also, man, words are hard sometimes to get in there.

It's good to hear that you got there.

and that yeah words are hard because it definitely i try to put that like in like the first it may be the second page where i'm like look there's five or so things that are going on in this game and they all relate so like i had to pick an order we have to we had to put the pages in a certain order just realistically and this is what we went with and hopefully this works out hopefully by the end they're they're connecting and then yeah like you said earlier you maybe you go back and reread and that's fine that means you have questions which means you're interested in the game we're doing we're doing a great job but uh it's always a big worry uh adam tells us tell us a little bit about uneasy lies the head um you know kind of a kind of a big uh uh like elevator pitch yeah so that the tagline that i have on it is is competitive gm list royal court role playing and it's kind of all of those things it's competitive in that your characters are like head they're butting heads all the time you're trying to like win the story so to speak like there's no points or anything at the end but you're you're you're trying to like succeed in your character's goals while like maybe stopping other characters and so like you're it's not like a you know a lot of rpgs we maybe we'll do pvp from time to time but like the base assumption is that we're cooperating but here since it's a royal court setting and the fun part of any sort of royal court drama is how these people like step on each other's toes and get out in front of each other's schemes and all this stuff so that's the idea you're you're a bunch of players i say two to five players uh hopping into a royal court setting that you are kind of making on the fly at the beginning of the game and just doing your stuff lying to each other you know allying here betraying there that kind of stuff i i appreciate the use of the word competitive because i think it's great to call it out i think a lot of i think there are a lot more competitive ttrbgs than people think because of the way it's framed like i think i think if you get i don't even want to say galaxy braid about something like fiasco But if once you kind of understand the play model of fiasco and like how you're doing, that's a competitive game.

There's a competitive streak to it for sure.

Yeah, especially you can get a good session of fiasco.

Yeah, because once once you once you get over the hump, I'm the first game of fiasco I ever did was an atrocity because it was with someone.

And I don't want to say that that's why this person was bad.

It was with someone.

It was their first time playing.

It was also my first time playing.

um he wasn't very experienced with ttrpgs i was not as experienced with ttrpgs the difference between us was he was trying to win and like win in a like win in the way that you can't win in fiasco do you know what i mean because if you get too many dice that's actually the bad ending right yeah and so and so i don't really know what you're winning i feel like i feel like as soon as you understand i think fiasco is a great litmus litmus test for getting ttrpgs where like you understand like oh sometimes things going bad is fun yeah sometimes the sometimes a bad thing happening in my character is great That's what we're here for.

Right.

And I think this game is competitive in that same way where it's like, oh, I'm scheming.

I'm trying to do something.

And then, you know, someone sitting across from me is like, oh, I'm going to mess up all your plans.

And then both of you are just like, oh, that sounds great.

Yeah.

Like, yes, I'm trying to take over.

I'm trying to, you know, poison my father so I become the king.

And it's like, oh, wouldn't it be bad if there was, you know, an advisor that knew and read you out?

It's like, oh, yes, that would suck.

That would be terrible.

This is great.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That, that competitiveness I think is what makes a lot of more narrative focused TTRPGs exciting is recognizing that that push and pull is what makes drama and excitement in the game.

Yeah.

And I think that's a, that's, that's really good.

So the, the way that it, the way that I do this in uneasy lies the head is, um, there's a couple of different ways.

The, the first in like the thing that runs through it all is the way kind of the, the dice mechanic works, which is everybody.

You're, you're basically always rolling dice whenever you're resolving one of the plans.

Now we're immediately getting into the problem of structuring.

How do you talk?

What order do you talk about these things?

Well, when you're resolving one of the plans, which are the big, the big things that happen in the game, like you're spreading rumors or you're declaring war on somebody, or you're proposing a duel at such and such time.

most a lot of these are going to resolve with a dice roll and i want those to be like the very fun moments that like no matter what happens everybody's everybody has players is happy because that's exactly what you're saying we're like okay if i completely blow this roll because everybody piled in on me um and i have to do the mar steps of my plan that's going to be fun or if i crush it and i have to i get to do the make steps and ruin your day I hope that's fun for you as well, because now you have a different situation to play in.

So like the way the dice work out is all players get a chance to like spend their resources, which are these no cards that they have lying around the table of like their, their peers and their, their holdings.

They're like cool castles and all this other stuff.

They get to like use those to get dice to interfere with your role or to help.

Maybe they're helping.

It could happen.

You know, it's an option.

Yeah, you can help.

Don't let me stop you.

And so then everybody rolls all the dice and there's a target number that's based on some other stuff that we don't have to get into at the moment, but it's between one and six.

So let's say it's three and you're just looking for a number of different faces on the die.

equal to your difficulty so like if you rolled three dice and you're looking for a three you need like a one a four and a five because it's three different faces but if i'm interfering and i also roll a five that cancels yours and so then we know exactly why you failed this role and it's because i rolled my die and i rolled my die by activating this peer i have in my retinue that's like your father the king that you're trying to poison he's in my retinue and his die made you fail so now we've got this whole pile of like mechanical goop that you're going to sit through and it's going to make a really great result.

Narratively.

Those are the, those are the, uh, the, the things in more narrative focus games that I find, like I can really latch onto where it's like, okay, it's, it's being decided by a dice roll that, you know, we're, we have like, we have this opposed thing.

We're building a pool.

We're figuring it out.

But then as we go through it and we figure out we like you said, you merely have that thread of like you didn't succeed because I stopped you.

I stopped you because I use this asset.

That asset is your father.

And then, OK, cool.

There's our narrative that we're right into the next scene.

The game keeps rolling.

And that's just that's that gives me, you know, in sort of my mechanical like I need pieces to fit in the slots.

like oh cool i'm right here cool okay so my so my father messed me up he's because he's in your retinue so there's a combination of that so the next time your turn comes around or we have a scene we're we're off to the races we've got we're building we're building we're building and that's that's fantastic yeah yeah uh so for for anybody confused because it it did take me you know again reading a little bit uh plans i think in this are really exciting um Because it's it's it's basically the whole game is basically everyone.

Everyone has a has a turn it around.

All of you are playing some great of royal shithead.

And you're just basically calling your scenes of like of like, oh, I'm going to have a scene where you and I have a fight and I make you look stupid.

And that's going to happen in so many turns.

And then when you get there, you go, man, I hope I hope this fight goes well.

Oh, figure.

Oh, in three turns when I make you look stupid, it's going to go great.

And what I love about that is one of the things that gets derided a lot in TTRPGs.

And when I say T, well, when I say TTRPGs, I mean D &D and its derivatives is you can't have secrets.

You can't have a secret.

Never.

No, because people want secrets to be exciting, like on television.

Right.

People want people want a secret reveal to be like on TV where they go, actually.

I was this other guy.

And that sucks.

That's so unexciting in a TG RPG because what makes a secret exciting is foreshadowing dramatic irony and playing into the knowledge of that secret.

And so what I love that this does is it puts that it puts all of the information of what's going to happen for the rest of the game visible and in the hands of the players immediately.

So when I say in three turns, I'm going to we're going to have a duel and I'm going to make you look foolish.

you i say that to your face and you go okay cool so i have three turns or two turns possibly to stop you or try to finagle a way in which i don't look foolish actually i'm not owned is my plan for two turns my plan is simply to not get all right i would simply not be owned so by two turns what if and and and i like this game really this game is an incredibly narrative focused game There's so much narrative like meat and stuff to work with.

It's also so mechanically focused with the way that it works.

Players have a sort of noble like nobility rank, which, you know, goes from one to five.

And then in a really slick piece of design, they have status, which goes from five to one, the inverse, meaning basically the higher you are on the on sort of the nobility ranking, the harder it is to mess with you, which is really fun.

Because, OK, in three turns, you're going to you know, we're going to have a duel and you're going to make me look you're going to make me look foolish.

OK, in those three turns, I'm going to become king of Spain.

And then I will just simply not look foolish.

Right.

You will just simply not.

We'll be updating the rankings between then and now, and I'm going to go up.

Yeah, I knew this was coming.

I've prepared to be higher on on esteem.

I think it's I think because there are three rankings that you kind of are trying to balance.

There's power.

knowledge and esteem so i think the dual is esteem it doesn't matter but it's like yeah i'm going to become more esteem so when you try to duel me everybody's going to look at you and say no we we love this guy why would you try to do that everyone loves that's the king of spain leeson this is recent but we just made him king and we love him what was uh what was kind of your your design process with developing these it feels odd to call them stats but you know for just collection of numbers that represent things yeah they're stat adjacent yeah they come from stats for sure how did you how did you sort of build to this interplay that's a good question i don't know it's been so long so so brief history on uneasy lies the head is i have a first edition that i published just on itch in i want to say 2000 2020 It must've been.

And so that has the dice mechanic, but basically everything else is different and it's a decent game, but I wanted more.

And so ever since then, I've been kind of playing with how can I make the game that I wanted this to be, which I think I did.

So that's good.

Great news.

I'm going to make the game that I wanted this to be the first time, but like better.

And it took five years before I finally committed to this version.

Um, and the rankings or some version of the rankings hopped up whenever I was making this, it was a very, very board gamey version.

Um, or I imagine that you would have these kind of cards that are ordered and it was just, I wanted a way to calculate, to generate numbers, like you said, like a stat, but I wanted it to be like deeply narrative.

I wanted it to have like immediate implications, even if nobody ever rolls.

against my esteem and i'm at the bottom of the esteem track like we all know what that means is that nobody at court likes me compared to the other people i'm still a noble so i still have plenty of respect in the realm whether it's earned or just because of my status or whatever but yeah so it kind of came from this like okay how can i generate the numbers because i knew that the dice mechanic was going to stay the same it was going to be this count the different faces on the dice Which means a one is obviously you can basically always do a one and a six.

Good luck rolling six different dice unless you're rolling like 15 dice at once.

And so this relative ranking kind of emerged from wanting something to generate a number between one and five.

That's what it comes down to.

it's it's great because looking through all of the all of the design stuff and i can i can absolutely see this sort of more board gamey version where you know you have like tokens or something where you're moving stuff up and down we've all played those sorts of board games where it's like okay well now i've gained a point so now i go up and you go down and all of this and it's it feels much more complicated than what this looks like um i just i really i really just appreciate the sort of immediacy with how you're able to figure out like, okay, cool.

I'm, I'm this, I'm here.

You're here.

Boom.

Done.

And it, and it needs to be said, the, the game kind of, kind of says like, yeah, roll.

If you feel like it could happen.

And if you don't feel like it could happen, just, just, just, you would just say, no, that's fine.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Cause the roles, there's two types of roles.

There are roles that are from the plants.

So those are very, That's me putting my foot on the scale, foot on the scale, whatever.

That's me getting my foot in the door on your story.

That's me putting my foot in the door directly onto your scale.

Right.

Saying when you spread rumors, these are the results that can happen.

You get there.

They're very, very inspired.

These plans are very inspired by.

like pbta moves so there's a lot of pick lists a lot of um okay you successfully spread the rumor choose what happens like you can start tearing up the note cards of the other players and stuff like that but then there's the other thing which is the whole the whole system of having scenes that aren't tied to the plans um and so like that's the loop of the game is a scene that i have nothing to do with me adam the designer i wanted to have a sandbox for the players to play in like every time every time i get involved i want the players to have their own time because they're going to come up with some cool shit and sometimes this is where the dice rolls you were talking about um sometimes those scenes can come to some sort of head and this will depend on what type of group dynamic that you have um like if when i play with people that play a lot of story games we basically never do dice rolls in our scenes but if i play with more traditional gamers like dnd people um they're rolling dice like immediately and so there's a lot of like kind of massaging it to to work for both sets of groups um and trying to encourage you like you don't have to don't do this unless don't get the dice out unless you're stopping this person or you think this person um like they're not powerful enough to do the thing they're describing.

It's interesting that you mentioned like specifically thinking of the non -structured or sort of the, the sort of open -ended scenes as like the player's space.

And I've always, I've always like wondered reading, reading a book and talking and listening to designers like that, that balance of like, okay, this is my game.

Here are my rules.

Here are the things.

But then kind of also having to understand that there's only so much of that you can really control and codify and sort of say, here's what's happening.

Right.

And there's only so much that I would even want to, even if I could do more.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think it's interesting to, like, recognize and understand that one of the one of the big, you know, arguments against D &D.

I'm sorry.

We try not to.

I try not to do it.

I do it every time.

I'm sorry.

It's a touchstone.

What are you going to do is, you know, the idea of like rule zero, that GM's can do whatever they want, all of this.

And so it's always interesting to see when games are, you know, GM less games that are designed where it's like everyone has everyone is a player.

Everyone has sort of equal authorial intent and say and stuff is how do you how do you balance those interactions?

How do you balance that space?

How do you.

How do you find a way to create those boundaries to say, OK, here is the space that you can play in.

And then here are the spaces where you're going to be interacting with the rules.

And then, and we cross over into mechanical resolution, capital letters.

And how can you basically empower the players to know what their limits are?

I think that's a big thing for GM list games.

Cause there's not like somebody to look to, to say, okay, what, what can we do?

Like, where's, where are the bars of my enclosure without that?

I think a lot of players.

have a tendency to like hold back.

But if you provide these structures and then set them loose and say like, yeah, here you literally do anything you want because all other players have the opportunity to say, no, no, no, that's too far.

That hopefully will encourage players to like, yeah, push, push harder, know exactly like what their agency is and, and all that other good stuff.

Yeah.

I like that.

Cause that's.

It's it's the fun of like we talked about at the very start, the idea of a competitive TTRPG that like, OK, well, if I don't do anything, Adam's just going to make himself king of Spain and he can do whatever he wants.

It's like, OK, well, I wanted to be king of Spain.

So how do I?

And we're saying Spain.

I think I think a thing that's kind of like implied in the game, but not explicit is like this could be space.

Sure.

You could be, you could play the lion King.

Sure.

Why not?

It's not, it there's, there's no, it was, it was a thing that like hit me halfway through reading where I was like, Oh, none of these things are really explicit on any timeframe or, you know, like time period, physical location, temporal location.

Yeah.

Have a good time.

Cause you're going to spread rumors no matter what time you're in, you're going to do, you're going to declare war on each other.

Like I wanted to keep it.

very thematically this royal court vibe but yet not restrict you to like only being european kings this is only for people who like crusader kings and that's yeah that's it too bad i want to so i'm making a gm list game and i want to i'm thinking that's not a a limited enough audience i want it to be even smaller right it's it's people who like crusader kings 3 and play gmless ctrbgs yeah and that is my six friends and they all bought the game and that's great so i that's what adam meant when he said i made the game that i wanted the six people that i wanted bought it i actually spinning off of that do you ever do you ever find like do you ever find you have someone in mind when you write a rule or a mechanic or something for a game like do you ever in in the sense of either an individual that you know or have interacted with or in the style of making up a guy to get mad at do you ever do you ever go like i you know you write a rule and you go actually do you know power gamer gary would would this up too much so no actually we're gonna have to do this slightly different or do you think in in a nice way do you think of like oh my buddy gary that likes games, he would think this is really cool.

I do.

I don't know if I think of specific people that I know or specific made up guys, but I do try to like, think about like how different styles of play will interact with the different mechanics.

Like if power gaming gamer, Gary got ahold of this and like really gave every plan like a good, a good study.

Cause he's going to, this is power gaming, power gamer, Gary.

Gary's going to realize that the best thing that he could do is to immediately declare war, probably.

Because when you resolve the make war plan, basically what that is, is whoever you declared war on and whoever else piled into the war, which could be all players, or it could just be a one -on -one, it could be whatever.

Every round, you have to pretty much tear up your note cards one by one.

every every round or agree to peace terms and the hidden thing here that power gamer gary has clocked immediately is that it does say that the peace terms can be anything you can break the rules of the game you can do all this shit so gary's gonna do that and he's going to yeah make himself King of everything and top of every track, except for other players aren't going to let it happen.

And he's going to fall into a huge trap that I've laid for him.

And then you'd be like, all right, that didn't work.

Making war.

I couldn't get everybody to agree to make me the God King of all mankind.

That war would have been great if everyone had simply agreed to make me King.

Right.

It would have been simple because we could have done it within the rules.

Right.

It says you could do anything as long as everybody agrees.

So then he's proposing a decree.

And it's a very similar thing of, I don't give any sort of guidance on what the laws that you're passing are.

And I even sort of hint in the clarification that like, yeah, you can add new rules to the game.

You can do all this silly stuff.

So there are levers in there that the power gamer is going to pull.

And that's great.

But then I also want to think on the complete other side, the narrative.

I don't have a name.

There's no real sort of like...

There's no opposite for the power gamer.

There's no other side of the coin for the power gamer.

But somebody who's just big on story, doesn't care about mechanics so much, is just trying to tell a good story.

I think that is where doing the scenes that don't correspond to the plans come in.

That is where plans like...

the host festivity come in which is very much just everybody comes in we have a party and people are going to be rolling dice and making an ass out of themselves sure but um yeah i think there's enough juice in all of the other mechanics that like the non -mechanical minded player will have fun with too so yeah no specific people that i'm keeping in mind for that but hoping to spread the gamut and that that a lot comes from what i was talking about that old version of it that was like mostly a board game i wanted that version to be still fun if you didn't set a single scene and you still got a story out of it but like incredible if you role played through everything and since then obviously i've put in these scenes so like i want you to role play all the time in the game i put the rules in there so i wanted that to happen yeah i told you you have to do something with your characters Um, but yeah, hopefully it's fun for a lot of people that have different tastes.

Yeah.

I think it's, I, it's very open -ended, like you said, where you can sort of engage with it the way that you want.

Uh, uh, as long as, as you, uh, uh, like you mentioned, you, you, you have these various tools, you have these various levers you can pull with, uh, and that's what you do with levers.

You pull with them.

Um, after you put your foot on the scale, uh, And I think that's sort of, to me, the big difference between a TTRBG and a board game is a board game kind of really wants you to engage with all of its mechanics all the time, every time.

You know, maybe not all the time, but every time you play the game, you're going to use all of the things in the game.

Whereas if you want to win, you have to push all the buttons.

If you want to.

That's true.

That's true.

You could not buy a property in Monopoly if you if you wanted.

Sure.

Yeah.

Have pop around.

I'm just kind of going around.

Yeah, I'm just.

Yeah, I'm I'm I'm going to be a tick tock guy and I'm just going to do little videos when I'm at those locations.

It'll be great.

And the thing that I like about TTRPG is.

you should engage with all of the rules because that's why you chose to play this game.

And that's kind of what the game brings to the table and that whole situation.

Um, I didn't say system matters so that Tony couldn't get mad at me, but, um, but you, you have all of these, all of these, all of these rules, all of these tools, all of these facets on the table.

And you can say, okay, we're going to use this one all the time because this is how this works.

This is what we want to see.

And then we've also got this one and, you know, maybe we'll use that, you know, maybe we'll use dice for scene resolution.

when we feel like it's really warranted, when we're not sure how it goes, but maybe sometimes we'll just, we'll compare our stats and we'll see, Oh, you're the king of Spain.

I probably can't do you.

All right.

When I'm not even, we won't worry about it.

Um, it's, it's interesting.

It's interesting.

The interplay between, uh, rules like that going from going from first to second edition.

I think that's come up a few times on the podcast is, um, getting something out, especially for people who are like, starting game design they're very early game designers of just like the idea of getting making a game saying hey here's the game maybe it's not complete maybe it's not perfect whatever and getting it out there um when going from first to second edition here did you feel like you were refining a thing and you sort of mentioned like you were making the game that you wanted it to be was that more of a i've got a lot of ideas that aren't fitting together properly let's take these ideas sand them edge them a little and let's put them in the proper shape or was it i've got some good ideas let's knock those out of this design and then push them over here into this new space it was more the second it's kind of a total demolition of the original like they have the same title the same dice mechanic and the same vibe of your doing this noble court stuff so that's why it's still the same title uh because it's a good title but the yeah i threw basically everything out and a few things kind of filtered back in slowly and then filtered out and in and out um but it was mostly starting from scratch uh i think sometime sometime at the end of last year i was like okay this is uneasy lies the head second edition like take four I'm going to start from nothing.

I'm going to think of what I would do for this Royal Court game, me in 2024 as opposed to me in 2020.

I'm a different person, different design sense, all of this stuff, and see what we can refine out of this and see what we can make and what we can bring in from the last one, like what was doing a good job.

And so like the dice, like I said, I think that was doing a good job.

And then what we can leave out, which is...

The first one had like a variable, a Troika style bag initiative system.

So you, cause I didn't want, one thing I didn't want was for everybody to be taking turns in order, like player A, then player B, then player C.

And so like that concept was still there of like, I still want some sort of variation in the order, but how can I achieve that in a way that is better than the Troika bag initiative?

And the way I did that was, that's where the plans kind of come in.

This delayed reaction, I'm going to spread rumors about you, but it's in three turns.

And then you're going to host a festivity, that's in six turns.

So we're taking turns in order to set our scenes, but then our plans are resolving in not a random order, but a shuffled order based on what we chose.

And I think that's important just from the sense of, from like a narrative sense.

of um getting everybody involved in the story but at different times so it doesn't feel too formulaic yeah because it could it could get a little boring too if it was okay i'm always i'm always after gary and so gary's gonna gary's gonna talk about how he's got to do the war and become the god king and then i'll eventually get to do my stuff right and that's actually reminds me of another thing i did to try to spice that that turn order up is you're still going in order to set these scenes like i said but if you're following somebody's plan so if you just spread your rumors um the end of your plan has a prompt for whoever started is to set a scene and they're they're very you know they're simple prompts but like just to push a vibe forward for the next scene so i think after spread rumors it's said set your scene you know with your character engaging in gossip and so now if i'm gary and i'm trying to do all this war stuff now i gotta show my character gossiping what does that mean for me because gossip is the kind of thing that's going to come up in royal court stories over and over and over so as a designer i don't feel bad making you do that probably once twice a game having a scene of somebody doing gossip because that's great um but i do want to you know push you in that direction to keep the scenes flowing between the plans.

So like we just did this big rumor and now my characters learning about a different rumor, this, this kind of stuff.

Yeah.

And it all comes from trying to reinvent bag initiative.

What's more exciting than thing from a bag.

How do I.

Yeah.

How do I get that vibe, but a little less chaotic, a little less.

Okay.

Fuck.

What do you mean?

I got to set.

it's my turn again i just had three turns yeah i just did come on i wanted multiple turns but not like this later give me put it later uh is that a thing that you you find yourself doing this is a thing i always i always wonder for people who have made like multiple games you know i i think it's interesting to consider you know your design uh language i guess like tools like the the things that you pull from when you're designing at you know in the early days when you've only done like one to three things and then i think later on once you've once you once you have like a large catalog do you find uh yourself kind of uh to get to what i'm going to ask So one of the things that Spencer Campbell does that really interests me is he has a lot of one of his habits is like he will take a thing that he's already done and he will essentially like knock a chunk off or add a chunk and see how to shape it in a new way, how to push it in a new way, how to use it in a new way.

And it's interesting to watch a sort of iterative design where you can be familiar with this stuff and then you can see how it flows through and how it connects and how it goes from this to this.

And then every so often a new ideal jump in there and then it becomes a new thing.

When you've designed, you know, once you've designed a handful of games, do you find yourself taking those ideas and like almost using them like like building blocks to say, I'm going to take this bit from this game and this bit from this game and this bit from this game or or maybe and or or not?

Do you find yourself saying, well, I just did that in that game, so I'm not going to do those things.

And I did that in this game, so I'm not going to do this game.

I do more, I think, the second part.

Let's try something new.

Let me go play around in a different pit and see what's over here.

And I think they all...

I can't escape note cards.

That's one thing.

Everyone loves note cards.

They're great.

Every game I make, there's way too many note cards.

You have to buy a pack of note cards to play one of my games.

Sorry about that.

They're an add -on.

They're just right there.

You can just...

i probably maybe i should um so but i do try to do different things and a lot of my design i think comes from the fact that i've played more board games than anybody should so like it's the right way to describe it once you've played enough that is the correct way to describe it so so yeah a lot of my designs come from okay i like board games a lot i think they're more narrative than any board gamers really understand not that they don't understand but you know what i mean like they don't give themselves credit for being great little narrative devices a lot of the times even though a lot of them are and so i like to kind of just sift around when i'm trying to make a new thing and be like what what kind of board game mechanism is going to feel good to get this type of story so like with uneasy lights the head there's a couple of like light sprinkles of worker placement in there Because that feels right for nobles.

Like I am taking this, the spread.

I keep coming back to spread rumors.

I'm taking the spread rumor spot.

And because you have less esteem than me, you can't take it.

This is from very dry Euro style board games that are about like farming mud.

And that's it.

But in terms of like, I think a lot of my smaller designs, so like things that I just put on itch and forget about or things that I.

turn into pamphlets and selling zine fairs and forget to tell anybody on the internet about a lot of those mechanics from my existing games and like in ways that I'm like workshopping that to get to the final version, I think.

But I do like to play around in new mud.

You've got to farm mud.

We talked about this.

So it'll probably be a bit.

And I think a lot of that comes from also.

I am not that good at like directly hacking a system.

Like I, I've tried to sit down like, Oh, what, what does a forge in the dark system look like if I make it?

And 10 minutes later, like I've thrown, I've thrown out the dice.

I've replaced this.

It's like, well, I'm just making a new thing that's inspired.

And so I, I find that it's very similar when I try to hack my own stuff.

So I just end up somewhere else.

Well, and that's I think that's an interesting part of it, though, right, is is seeing taking those ideas and and and running through that.

And I think what's what's interesting about creative pursuits of kind of any any any stripe is not cutting yourself off and saying, well, that's a bad idea and just stopping and saying, like, no, let's let's let's let's go.

Let's go where this, you know, let's see where this takes us or.

I don't think this is what I want to be doing right now.

And let's put this down.

You know, the joke I always make is every game designer has the game that they just made, the game they're working on right now, the, the, the second game that they're working on sometimes when they're sick of working on the other game.

And then three to six, like crazed scribbles in a notebook, you know, where you, you wake up from a dream and you're like, what if it was Lancer, but ducks?

And then you're like, I, what did that mean?

I don't know.

And then zine quest rolls around and someone goes, wait, hang on.

I got Lancer, but ducks.

Let's get on this.

And sometimes, you know, sometimes you have to work on two, three games and then you realize, oh my God, I know exactly what I want to do with Lancer, but ducks.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's true.

And I'm definitely, I'm trying to count in my head.

I've got at least four that I'm actively, maybe we'll say five.

games that I'm actively working on that sort of bouncing between so yeah you're right and it's always interesting to hear like to talk to people and realize like the amount of I think it'd be very easy to assume from social media or project updates or whatever however you follow people that it's like oh you know they work on one thing and you know they work on it and there it is and it's like no that's they've been working on this yeah possibly but also maybe this was like this was a word doc that they've had on their computer in some way shape or form for six years and you know one day they one of those times they just went in there and shift a and deleted everything and started again maybe that happened they drag it into a folder like old version don't drag all the files right and so then there's nested old version folders you never fully delete you're like look there might be something in here i don't know Can't fully delete it.

There's probably something in there, surely for a different game.

What sort of drew you initially and with this version, what sort of drew you to make a court intrigue game like very specifically the idea of players are nobles representing whatever houses, countries, what have you?

What sort of made you interested in that?

play space design space narrative space i think a lot of games a lot of my favorite games are ones that allow you to behave in a way that you shouldn't and you you shouldn't do a normal life and you wouldn't do a normal life but you've created this little box for you to like what's it like to just be a little scheming prick like those so like social deduction board games like the resistance or um but on the clock tower, there's a bunch of these are probably my favorite games because it's like, what if I just get to lie to people and try to figure out if they're lying to me for an hour.

And then we walk out of that and we're still friends and nobody actually lied in real life because that would feel slimy.

So that is sort of the appeal on an, a personal level of like why I would want to do a Royal court game.

It's like, okay, these are some of the biggest fuckers.

That caused so many problems in our world that like, you would never want to be like this in real life.

Hopefully, you know, one day we can move away from powerful fuckers altogether, but that's, you know, this whole other thing.

People love making Kings.

People love it.

How can I create a game that lets us like pull on these neurons that are in all of our brains that like, are good at being shitheads that like we don't have to we can tell the other neurons in our brain they're like hey community and and you know being cool that's more important than turning on the fucker neurons we can give those ones a break and just be rude for two to three hours two to four times depending on how long our campaign is and that's great That's really what draws me to this, this type of game.

Look, I'll show you how important community is.

I spread rumors about everybody and it went terribly.

I shouldn't have done that.

We can all, we can all sit here and we can recognize that that's what happened.

Right.

Gary declared war turn one and look how well it worked for him.

Right.

All of his stuff is ripped up.

If this was real life, all of his actual stuff and friends and houses would be broken and shattered.

But they're not.

Because it was just a dang game.

And that's great.

But you got to feel it, Gary.

Right.

You got to be the guy who said, I declare war.

And then now you're here.

And now maybe you understand.

Yeah.

Gary having a moment.

Maybe war's bad.

It's like, okay, Gary, hang on.

I mean, listen, we can talk about this, but let's stay in the game.

Again, I'm going to start a sentence with just effusive praise about the game.

I really like the dice mechanism in this because I there's any number of games where you roll a D6 and you want to roll high or you want to roll low or whatever.

And that's great.

There's nothing wrong with this.

It's exciting when it's something new.

And as you mentioned before.

What you're what you're looking for when you roll these D6 is you're looking for different faces.

And then when people are rolling against you, that allows them to or, you know, against you specifically, that allows them to negate.

one of the faces that you've rolled to cut it down um and and i'm i'm curious kind of what brought you to that specific decision was it uh was it a a specific like idea for randomness for uh sort of being able to throw off whether people will be able to accurately predict OK, if I've got 3D6, that means I can probably, you know, oh, I'm rolling five.

That's that's almost certainly two and all of this, because it's such an interesting little little twist on it that, you know, my brain immediately goes like, well, there's got to be a reason.

He's got to have a good reason for it.

I like I think the biggest thing is I like how much it obfuscates the stats, like good luck mathing out the possibilities on this.

It's not going to happen.

So you have to go with a vibe.

It's a very vibe -driven, like, how much am I going to invest in this role?

Because I need a three.

So immediately the player knows, okay, they need a three.

Three dice is the minimum they get.

And they only start with two.

They've got to spend something here.

And so then they're like, okay, let me fly by the edge of my seat here.

Is that right?

Something.

seat of my pants if i do three then i'm and i fail then that's on me i should have brought more dice to the party and now somebody else is hopping in to interfere and so now i'm sweating because like i could roll three and you could roll six and i could still get three because you could whiff on all six of yours and i could hit three different dice and it will still work so there's always a possibility that it works if you bring enough dice but then you're always stressed.

That's like the two things that this specific dice mechanic really pulled together.

Well, while also obscuring what the hell, what are the odds of rolling four different faces on seven dice?

I genuinely don't know.

I tried to math it out.

It's got to be, it's, it sounds complicated.

I saw a tick tock literally just yesterday.

about what are what are actually the odds on rolling uh one on each of two dice is it one out of six or is it one out of 11 it turns out it's one out of 11 i don't know if that's true but it's more complicated than you think it is and then especially when you're thinking of like okay not i don't need to just roll numerically three i need to roll like differentially three i need to roll three different things three different things yeah that's that's and thinking about it in my head in the middle of while you were answering that question i think that i should have said at the beginning it does feel a lot more board gaming because in a lot of board games you're not just rolling d6s to like i gotta roll a three you're rolling some weird custom dice that's like all right so i got a blank i got a sword i got two swords i got a shield and i got a crown and what i need to do as a tag is i need three swords and Adam's going to roll defense and he can negate my swords with shields or crowns.

So what I got to do is figure out like how many do I think?

And that's the real dice man.

Yeah, it definitely I'm sure in some part comes from games like that.

Games like the Star Wars X -Wing miniatures game.

Oh, yeah.

I used to play a lot of that.

And so it's got these dates that have.

a lot of it's like three blank faces three hit faces and two if you spend resources you get a hit face and then the same on like the the dodge mostly blank a couple of dodges and so like that just throws you for a loop of like still anything's possible i could roll one die against your five evade dice and i could still hit you so we may as well play it out that's yeah it's definitely i'm sure and some part comes from there It has that feeling of, well, if the other option is nothing, I may as well do something.

You know, as long as it doesn't like if the answer, if OK, if I've got two things in front of me and I could try it and not have any massive benefit, but maybe get a hit or I could just not do nothing.

And let's let's let's let's start.

Let's see what happens.

Let's roll a dice.

Whatever.

All you have to do is use the.

My father, the king card to get that extra die, and then you're.

You're good to go.

You won't need them later.

Yeah, no, it's totally.

Yeah, I really want to spread this rumor.

So I'm going to tell my dad the king and that won't.

Yeah, that won't become important.

No, no worries.

Assets in this game.

This is the second time assets have sort of come up.

And I think assets are such an interesting piece of this game.

Like you said, you can't make a game without note cards.

And I and I just I love in TTRPGs.

When you have something, you have something physical, you have something you can like touch and play with and move around.

You know, all the all the greats of teacher RPGs have note cards in that way.

In Uneasy Lies Ahead, you have assets that, you know, represent people, places, things, concepts, you know, like like the love of the people or something like that.

And they have sort of traits.

assigned to them that you can you know sort of call on to to use scenes and the you know like sort of help lead your role play you know where is your is your advisor you know uh more loyal to the king or you know whatever any number of things um and what i love is one i just love the little design you came up with with name in the middle and the four traits around um because as you go through play you will tear these off uh whether you know you lose scenes you lose roles what have you you tear these off and that changes how they uh how they are it changes how they interact and i love any sort of i love any sort of system like that where you can define a thing and you have a very clear big moment when you change that like that's really that's really fun like i love the idea of like of like the king being generous And then we have a big scene and we're just like, no.

Not anymore.

Not anymore.

What's that going to look like?

We got to take that off.

That's fun.

The king has turned off the hose.

Good luck.

I got cut off.

One too many war.

Yeah.

But the other fun thing that happens with assets and this, we talked about secrets a little bit before.

This game has secret secrets.

And I really love the way that you do it where, you write it on the underside of an asset that it's connected to which is great for two reasons one it gives you the little schemey secret moment to be like but in the same way that we talked about it's visible to everybody at the table so everybody sees me pick up uh you know uh abraham my advisor and go and put it back down and they go hang on now that's a secret immediately i gotta see what's under right i gotta know i gotta know what that secret is my whole life is about that secret and then there's a the third angle of it where it's a secret it's not a secret to the players because you could do this too of like hey everything that just happened in that scene i'm putting it under abraham the advisor you don't know about it right it happened in front of us for you to know you don't know about it for you to know about it i have stored it under abraham come and get it good luck so you have you've got the the cool secrets of like this player is keeping a secret from the other players and that's fun for some people i think to have that ability to be like oh the big reveal is coming soon and you can come and get it if you want or the you know more story game style we all know but you have to play like you don't unless until you unlock it through this i think both of those being present um i like both of them like when they happen when somebody does a big reveal that's awesome when somebody tells me i'm not allowed to know a thing that i as adam know i'm into it because now i'm gonna now i'm gonna make a mess of that right oh i'm gonna i oh i don't know that you're uh that you have a twin brother i'm gonna walk into that room Right after he walks out every time, every time I walk in that room, he's just left.

Oh, it's incredible.

It's incredible.

The timing.

Yeah.

Uh, sometimes, sometimes I don't have a question.

Sometimes I just want to say this, this is cool.

Cool.

Yeah.

I appreciate it.

So like assets, I guess for a little bit more, I can just explain them a little bit.

I do.

I do honestly feel like this came up in another episode where it's like, sometimes the question is just like, this thing is cool.

Tell me about it.

And I feel like it should be more like exciting than that.

Like, I feel like I should learn, you know, how to like interview and try to like how to lead into that and make an interesting question.

But also sometimes just like that's rad.

How did you come up with that?

What made you think of this cool thing?

Yeah.

So, yeah, there are no cards.

There are four types of assets.

There are holdings, which is land, castles, manors, this kind of stuff.

There are peers, which are all of the main characters of the game and like some of the side characters.

So each player, their main character is an asset kind of undistinguished from any other.

They're on a no card and they can be ripped to pieces and stolen by other players and all this stuff, which we'll we can get to in a second.

There are artifacts, which is the cool trinkets.

These are crowns, thrones.

Some badass sword.

The very first iron ingot was one of my favorites from a game that we played.

That's funny.

Became this like battle of history.

Like that was my family's ingot kind of shit.

I like the stuff like that always tickles me of just like, yeah, we made that and then we set it aside because we knew it would be important.

Then we kept going.

Right.

And then there's resources which are basically anything else.

Like you said, concepts like the love of the people, the fear of the people.

Or more concrete things like I've got great food supply lines.

I've got these fields of wheat that are lush.

And so each of the assets has the name of it on the inside and a box.

And then in the four margins, there are these four marginalia, which are these traits.

And the traits do a great thing for the players of like both.

I want you to describe each asset you make.

Like, tell me that this person is loyal to the king.

Tell me that she hates the king.

She could have both.

Why not?

Tell me that the king is generous.

Being loyal doesn't stop you from hating him.

Right.

You could grit your teeth and do your job if you have to.

That's the king.

What does it matter if I hate him?

So it's both describe this thing, but then also tell me what stories.

Tell the rest of the table what stories you're interested in with this thing, because hanging over every asset is the threat of being broken.

And so when you break an asset, this is where you tear off one of the marginalia that then suddenly loses this thing.

So the king is no longer generous.

The fields of wheat are no longer lush.

Suddenly they're barren.

This is going to have far -reaching concerns.

Putting these fields of wheat in the game.

So that's already a fictional flag that I'm planting, but now I'm telling you like what I want to see happen to them if something happens to them.

And so everybody has access to all of these at any given time.

And at the very beginning of the game in the prologue, which is where you make most of the assets for the game, there's also this element of taking them from each other where like you've defined the fields of wheat and you've also decided that you are the monarch in our story.

And that's given you these fields of wheat.

I have decided I'm from the plains and that allows me to take your fields of wheat.

They're mine now.

You've written all these cool things on them.

These are great.

I'm glad you made these so good for me.

This is mine.

And now we have a story that we have to figure out like in the past of like, why did I take this asset?

So this one note card is doing a lot of work on our story.

in a way that is hopefully like very smooth for the players but it also allows them to like write prompts for other players to tell the story in the future and that i like it a lot it would be weird to design a game that had a mechanic that you hated yeah Yeah, so assets are cards.

I hate using note cards in my games, but so there are note cards.

I'm under some sort of witch's spell that makes me keep putting the note cards in the game.

I got switched with a changeling, and so every game I design has to have a D20 initiative system.

It's just...

It must, and I love it.

Definitely.

It's so good.

I realize the head does a thing that I really like.

Again, I'm just going to talk about how cool the thing is.

It's half of what I do here.

It does a thing that I really like, which is I talked about this when I talked with Graham.

I like when games tell you the rules.

It's a great part of reading a game is when they tell you how to play it.

But then I also really like what a game tells you how to play it well.

I like this new, you know, this new thing in the OSR.

that a lot of games are doing that give the players and the GM guidelines, you know, that says, Hey, here are the things that are kind of, that are going to lead to maybe not like successful play, but effective play.

This is, this is the thing that the game wants you to be doing on either side of the table.

Um, and uneasy lies ahead does a very similar thing of, Hey, here are, here are ways to approach this game.

Here are ways to think about doing this.

Here are ways to sort of do this.

um how important did you feel it was to include kind of a a a in a in sort of a peek behind the curtain thing of here are the things i want you to be doing as a player as the designer yeah i think the more sort of kind of complicated the more different rules you have going on Which this game has quite a few relatively simple rules, but there's a lot going on.

The more that that's happening, the more as a designer, I worry that whenever I play test, I'm doing a lot of shit that I'm not writing down.

That is facilitating the game.

So how, how am I making sure to capture all of these little things that I might not notice that I'm doing to facilitate this game and put that in the book?

So that's, there's the whole, I assume you're.

Talking about the facilitator's guide zone of the book and the planned clarifications.

Those felt pretty important, just to make sure that it's one thing to have the rules and the structure written down, but without me at the table with you, you might play it wrong and that's fine, but you might play it wrong in a way that...

is worse and then you don't like it and then you think the game is bad and you're gonna play wrong you're gonna it's very hard to play a game quote -unquote correctly and not miss a rule or two like these these things are gonna happen with every game so if you if i put some tips on how to facilitate the game how to make sure that everybody's having fun make sure you're you're checking in with all the players um Make sure that I've listed in one specific spot all of these little tasks that I am pretty sure I'm doing every time I play.

And then saying, you should hand these out to the other player.

Make sure everybody's doing some of this so that this stuff is getting done.

And that's basic things like making sure that the plans get written down and that we're keeping track of what round we're on.

Somebody's going to do that.

I always do that when I play because I know it.

But you always worry.

that it's going to be harder i don't know but then also things like yeah make sure somebody is paying attention to make sure everybody's paying attention to the the safety tool at the beginning of the game but make sure that like somebody is specifically like hey wait a minute we crossed out incest we said no incest in the game you're getting a little close to yeah it sounds a little just it's getting Second cousins.

I don't know where the line anyway.

Yeah.

So making sure that that's all in there.

And then also just kind of chatting with the person reading the game about what I like about it in that same way, I think is, is good.

And then going through each of the big plans that felt like there was something missing.

in the doc until i did the plan clarifications where i just go through each one and i say this is why you might want to do this and this is sort of the vibe of it and this is why i put these options in here because they're weird and they're hard and maybe you never read that part if you're just playing and somebody else is facilitating but like if you get confused i want you to be able to find the answers or at least find me there to say it's good You're good to be confused.

Don't worry about it.

This is confusing.

You might be confused.

Oh, thank God.

Okay.

I'm safe.

It's not me.

Thank God.

You also have a glossary in the back, which I appreciate.

As a person who very specifically struggles to get my partner to play card games, my wife's rule for card games.

is uh there there's a certain amount of keywords on a card that she will accept without like clarification that she has to check a glossary and then there's a point where it will be too much and it's a it's a moving target um and so i always appreciate games when games have glossaries definitions appendices that sort of thing to one clarify language it's never bad to sort of make sure that to say like hey when i say this word in the rules text this is this is what i mean i mean this this this this and so we can be clear you know um but then also like we talked about coming from coming from board games it's a very very common thing in board games uh like you said describing the plans there's a lot of euro style board games where you'll flip to the back of the rule book and they'll be they will explain every card in way more language than they can put on a single card and sometimes having that sometimes having that language is really important to be able to say like well why would i want to do this this doesn't seem beneficial this doesn't this seems like too high of a cost for what i benefit from like i don't understand oh i see you know the the common euro game thing of like of like i pay two to gain three that doesn't oh i gain the two back uh you know it's three every round oh my god right the first time we played agricola where i was like wait i just put my wheat on the field that doesn't oh there's more wheat and that turns into okay now i see what's happening to to get wheat you have to put wheat you have to start with wheat and then pig beget cat pig yeah in the glossary in particular is one of those things that once i started writing it i was like oh i do need this because there's a lot of entries way more things in that glossary than i expected i had to shrink the the font from the body font it was that overflowing it's a thing that i think is kind of an unexplored space in ttrpgs is the separation of the the rules in the moment and then the expanded rules you know the greater rules where it's like okay here's here's everything and what you only need in the moment is is this and once you understand all of this you can reference it like this um yeah and probably just because a lot of teach rpgs probably just don't need big explainers with but sometimes you do and sometimes that's great yeah sometimes you sometimes you're like i really i remember one of the uh um long long ago before covid um we had a sort of ttrpg meetup thing where we would go to I was like Denny's.

Sometimes it was it was Denny's and then it was Perkins.

We would go to Perkins and every week somebody would just bring a TTRPG and we would just play and that would be that.

And we played one TTRPG once that was it was it was a it was incomplete.

Very specifically, it was like in development.

But it was so poorly.

Written from a.

Grammatical sense, I don't know.

they would they would use different words to describe seemingly the same like thing and so there was a lot of like there was a lot of cross language with that and i remember specifically being like i know it's in development all of that i feel like you got to have that together i feel like i've got to get your terms in order yeah you have to know your terms before you expect me to learn the terms yeah yeah and that's that's something especially as like versions go on and you like change one thing to another and you gotta be the whole crap i have to go through everything that mentioned this this term because i've changed it to another one which thankfully didn't happen too much in this specific version of uneasy so once the great wipe happened a lot of those terms i just sent away and like these new ones came in eventually i'm not using any of these words anymore ban these words from the design yeah ban these words what well at least they're not words and i think A large reason the glossary for me is important in this game is because I am a little bit averse to capitalizing or underlining or italicizing game terms in the book.

Because to me, if you're doing that too much, it messes with the flow of the text and the understandability.

Because I'm like, oh, whenever you make a die roll, it starts to get annoying.

And so I don't do any of that.

you've you it looks like die roll is italicized but it's actually die and roll separate yeah it's two different things right next to each other yeah i get that i i've read i've read any number of of board game rules and manuals and things where you're i i played a fantasy fight games i've had three world books in front of me at a time where i'm like cross i'm like i'm like okay So this says you're blinded and that, and then this means you get this condition in the fantasy flight way.

You get a condition that means a condition.

And then you're like, okay, according to this in the campaign mode, we treat this condition as this condition.

And then because we're playing this expansion, this character can do both of those things.

And then you just throw them all up in the air.

But this one says blinded with a lowercase B.

Am I good?

Does he just mean, like, narratively blind?

Like, is this blinded, like, for flavor?

Or did they just miss the capitalized, bold, underlined, italicized buttons on just this one?

When they wrote it, did they just search capital B blinded to make sure all of those were bold and then this one was lowercase so they didn't catch it?

Did you print out the errata that I emailed you this morning?

it's an actual thing i've had to say at a board game day and sometimes sometimes you sound like a looney tune because you have to say those sentences out loud that's fine yeah uh the the the fun question the you know i think i think the the the thing every every designer every creative wants to hear when they're finally done with the project is hey what's next yeah good question um It depends on timing and tariffs and all this other shit.

Yeah, what a fun time to be making things that need to be produced with paper from other countries.

Yeah, dumb idea.

Great.

So the next big project for me is...

So Uneasy Lies in the Head was actually supposed to be a little short, simple game that I make to remember how to make games as a diversion from this other one.

It didn't.

year later like i'm still not done because it ended up being big the game kept designing itself and being big and cool and i was like wait a minute i gotta so the next big one that i set aside for this is called the locker room murder mystery game um it is a basically a murder mystery generator it's like a gm -less storytelling role -playing game where you start by making a bunch of characters um that nobody's playing specifically.

So it's like a shared, a pile of shared characters.

And then you start setting scenes with these characters.

And at a certain point, the game tells you, Oh, this character dies.

It's now a murder mystery.

That was the lead up.

Now it's time for the investigation.

And then you keep going and you do investigation and you're generating all these clues and updating the clues from the first phase.

And then the game tells you, Oh, this character did it.

And this is like randomly generated.

So it's one of your, but with a little bit of foreshadowing narratively, because it's like a piece bouncing around on the different character cards and whoever it lands on when a certain card is drawn, either dies or did it.

But yeah, then it's up to you to like piece.

Okay.

We've, we've dumped out all these clues.

We have all these characters that have done all this suspicious stuff.

What actually matters?

Let's tie it together.

And now we have our like completed murder mystery story.

So yeah, that's the next big one.

You can currently playtest it.

If you go to lockedroomgame .com, the full rules are there.

And I just need to produce it, which is in progress, question mark.

So that's the big one.

The side one, depending on the tariff situation, if I just go back to zines or books until the whole thing blows over, because the locked room is going to be like a full box.

experience with like the instead of note cards we've got dry erase cards that are reusable that's great everyone yeah i almost bought a bunch of those for ttrpgs once i saw them in a store and they were they were a little pricey and that's why i didn't but i was like these would be good these would be nice yeah um if i don't do that soon which would be like early next year, I would run a Kickstarter for it.

It would be, I've got a trio of apocalypse related games that I'm calling the end times trilogy.

It's a good, I might, I think I might do it for, um, for zine quest, whether I do the locked room or not, because they're almost done.

Um, yeah, it's three games basically unrelated, but For some reason, I keep making games about the end of the world.

Something going on.

I don't don't investigate that.

It seems unimportant.

I don't think it means anything.

So the first one is it's it's called Que Sera Sera, which is an old.

Not English, but it's it sounds like it's not English, but it's only used in English phrase for.

I've read a whole article about this name whenever I picked it because it's fascinating stuff.

It's like at a certain point it was spelled like the French version of case or also raw, which, which translates and it means what will be, will be anyway, linguistics aside, it's a fascinating word.

Look it up because it's only in English and not grammatically correct in the languages that it's spelled like at different times.

So it's just, that's English baby.

That's a game about basically you'll have four of these main characters kind of going through life while the entire world around them falls apart kind of in fast motion.

So it starts with a bunch of like guided scenes using prompts that I write.

And then the second part is no prompts.

You're just drawing cards to see how much shit you destroy.

And then if all of the things that are surrounding one of the main characters gets destroyed, then, you know, they're next on the list.

And that is cool and fun and great.

I love describing a mechanic of someone's entire world being destroyed and life falling apart and then being like, and that's great.

That's what we do it for.

The second one, it's called Into a Warm Sun.

This one is very, very inspired by, I always forget the number at the beginning, 10 Cloverfield Lane.

Yes.

It might be 11 or 12.

I think it's 10.

I think it's 10.

So it's basically a game where you're trapped in a bunker with a huge prick.

But he says the world is ending and you can't leave.

And so the GM of this game is also controlling the warden of this bunker.

And it's just got this very explicitly combative vibe that I don't...

I haven't released it yet because I don't know if I want to play as the warden.

So I got to get somebody who wants to do that.

Because it feels...

Like it'd be horrible.

It's like dog eat dog where it's like, that's a cool game.

I don't ever want to play that game.

I, that sounds like, that sounds like a time for everyone.

Yeah.

I'd happily play as somebody trapped in the bunker, but I don't know if I have what it takes to trap people in the bunker.

And then the third game is a game about basically a looping.

apocalypse type thing where it's the everybody has a character and they're hopping back and forth between um different like times and places because every time the world just ends what the hell and then as players we just cut to the next world same characters we just put them somewhere else and then it ends again and so it's just sort of a weird almost belonging outside belonging tarot driven experimental type game this this makes me my my immediate thoughts about hearing this trio of games and and this this is like this is this is this is me receiving this directly from adam this is my this is my live reaction to this moment it feels like adam sometimes you like it feels like a lot of your games are that scrawled notepad in the night where it's just like, where it's like, where it's like the GM is keeping you in a bunker.

And then you're like, oh shit, I guess that's the next one.

Oh no.

Okay.

And like, but in a way that like, that's good.

Like I, I, I always, I've said this, I say this on the podcast a lot.

I don't consider myself a creative person that I don't have like creative drive like that.

Like I, you know, I'm not like, oh, I need to write music.

I need to write a book.

I need to do these things.

And so I'm always part of why I made the podcast.

um i'm always interested in what drives people to create the things that they create in the way that they make them and all of this like i said hence the podcast and it's so interesting sometimes to hear that that that trio of games put together that's like no why the hell did you do that why is that what you did yeah it's a good question the interesting thing about the bunker one is that started with the dice mechanic i it's an adaptation of a gambling dice game called silo and i was like what the fuck is this is great for like i've come up with this idea that silo can be used as a dice mechanic that is very much about like battling for narrative control because basically what it is is the the gm anytime the players are like i don't think i'm just i'm officially disagreeing that's when you'll roll dice in this game whenever you're like no stop whether that's in character or like it'll say like the gym can set a new scene can just say no no that scene's over we're going to we're fast forwarding like a week if you're like no no i still have more i want to say here you can make the gm roll to see if they like keep control of the narrative um Because C -Low is a game where you roll three dice, and there are, I think, four or five different hands that you're looking for.

So either a run of three, a pair, or...

They're very odd.

The game is going to be difficult to explain because of the hands of dice.

But if you get no hand, then you reroll.

And so the idea is going to be, if the GM hits the thing that allows the players to step in and roll...

then they'll roll and, you know, maybe they wrestle control of the narrative for a second and they move some of these sliders that are going on to allow them to escape the bunker or whatever.

So that one came from a dice mechanic.

So I don't know.

I don't know why.

And then it was so combative.

I was like, I don't know where to put it.

What was that movie where they were in the bunker?

Let me remember that again.

Yeah.

And then we end up there.

And then these other two games kind of came from, um reading different books and just like thinking about how bad stuff is and like allowing my i've got sort of a sort of revolutionary optimism type thing that i try to nurture as much as i can then like better things are possible i swear but letting that like setting that aside maybe it's it's going back to like why i like lying in games and being a fucker is i can make a game that's like a total bummer i don't have to be a bummer to do that and it can like help me gas some of this some of these feelings some of this like doom and gloom that you can't help but but generate every day for the last 5 10 15 20.

we'll stop at 32 years because that's how many i have we'll say that many yeah i it's so the the the bunker game sounds immediately exciting because i've i i love the idea of you know we we we've talked about the idea of a competitive ttrpg and like what makes the game competitive and interestingly competitive and i like the idea of of making a game that's like no actually this one's actually competitive This one is the GM is like, you're going to stay in the bunker and you're not going to do anything.

You're going to shut up and we're going to live quietly.

And the player's like, well, I don't want to do that.

And the GM's like, too bad because I won three sixes.

So too bad.

Right.

Too bad.

I've actually, I'm more, I'm more in control now because you made me roll.

Right.

You made me roll.

You made me roll.

Now you don't get food because you were a jerk about it.

And it's like, well, hang on now.

Come on, man.

And then immediately they disagree.

And now we're rolling again.

I like, yeah, I love, I just, I love the idea.

It made me think of, it made me think of severance in an interesting way in the way that like seven sevens is a really interesting show.

It's because it, it feels like it felt like that, especially the second season.

It felt like there was like, I guess, I guess maybe more specifically the second season.

Cause the second season was a lot of fallout, but it felt like the first season was like, here are the things like, they were establishing the world and it's like here are the ways that the world works and the whole show was the characters like throwing rocks at that like no that's not what i want yeah that's not what i want to happen and sometimes they would succeed and sometimes they wouldn't and it's interesting especially when it's when it's a person it's just it's very funny to me that it's not just you know the faceless existence of the game but like no gary we want to go out we want to go outside gary Power Gamer Gary is stepping in.

Gary loves the idea.

Yeah, Gary loves the idea of being able to be in charge.

Type of game you don't necessarily want to play with the guy who loves the idea.

You need a reluctant GM for this one.

I'm so excited to run this.

No, we're not.

Sorry if you listen to this podcast, your name is Gary.

I apologize.

That's not on you.

not your fault as long as you're not power gamer gary we're not talking about yeah don't be a i hope you're not a jerk if you're a jerk gary maybe it's you but hopefully it's not moving away from moving away from gary gently gently moving aside from gary uh let's let's talk about uh let's talk about homework um as we're as we're sort of getting getting the end of our time here um if this is somehow your first episode first of all Welcome.

Hello.

Homework is the part of the show where I ask the guests to bring cool things that they're excited about in whatever sort of genre or whatever that they want to bring that they want to share.

And much the same way the podcast is.

Here's the thing that I'm excited about and want to share with you.

This is this is their opportunity.

So, Adam, go ahead.

Tell me what you got for homework.

Yeah, the first that I brought, it's a book.

that I've been reading on and off.

It's called exercises in style.

I have it here.

Cause I forget who it's by.

It's a book that, uh, originally came out in French in 1947, uh, and was recently translated to English.

Um, and so I picked it up at my local bookstore.

I'm not that recent 2012.

Anyway, that's, you know, considering it was written in 47, that's pretty recent.

Yeah.

On the timeline of the book was originally written to now.

Yeah.

It's closer to reason.

So it's, it's this book.

This guy just did these exercises in style, which is why it's called that he has one little story and he tells it over and over and over again in like a hundred different like writing styles.

It's a simple story of, I got on the bus.

There was this guy with a long neck and a weird hat.

And he got mad at the guy next to him.

And then he went and sat down.

And then I saw this guy later and his friend was telling him his button was too low.

That's the story that he tells a hundred times in this book, but in all kinds of different ways, like just playing with language in a way that I can't imagine being the translator for one, because it's like, Oh, now I'm doing this.

I just flipped a random page.

This is the precision chapter.

Where now it's like in a bus of the S line, 10 meters long, three wide, six high at three kilometers.

And it's like, this one is all about precisely describing the situation.

Whereas I don't know, they're just all different and weird and funny.

And I think it's, if you have any enjoyment of either linguistics, writing, reading, I think it's an interesting book.

yeah that's interesting that feels like one of those things that you would almost never seek out for yourself but hearing someone tell you about it you're like oh wow okay i see why that's i see why that's interesting that sounds pretty cool yeah there's one that yeah i'd never heard i saw it on the table at my local bookshop and i was like what is this because it has a great cover it's like the picture of the author kind of broken up in a bunch of weird ways um So I was drawn by the cover and then I was like, wait, this is just, this sounds really kind of dumb.

And so it's been great to have just like on top of whatever other book I'm reading.

Oh, let me just read a few.

I don't feel like reading a full book here.

I'll read the same story in now it's in dog Latin.

Now it's.

Okay.

So he gets, he gets wild with it.

It's not just okay.

All right.

All right.

yeah because i was like oh that's a fun like like writing exercise book that's a great way to think about the ways that you describe things and it's like oh no he also gets weird with it okay cool good it's yeah it gets weird it's it's all over the place you don't know what you're gonna read next but you do because it's the same crappy story that's great i love that um a video game i've been playing is baby steps oh hell yeah which i don't know if you've tried it uh i i've not but i'm familiar cool to assume that the audience isn't familiar it's another game is a collaboration uh between benefati and a few other game designs but benefati is the the designer of like quop and getting over it just these like sort of weird experiments in game controls and frustration and whatever and so baby steps you're this guy named nathan who passes out on his couch and then you're in this like forest and you have you're walking and you're walking it's like awkward to walk it's hard at first so you're falling a lot because it's um basically like the triggers on your controller tell you tell the game which leg you want to push forward and so then the stick pushes the leg forward and it's like you get to a rhythm eventually but the the reason the game is fun is one it's like a great example of like an open world game very much understands that you don't need to fill a world with numbers with like fetch quests with any of this stuff you just got to put things that make you go what is that and then you got to make it fun to get there so there's no there's no points there's no leveling there's none of this shit there's just like points of interest and then you know that you have to go to the next campfire to like progress the story and that's the second part that's really good it's like the dialogue in the game is some of the most like natural dialogue i think i've ever seen in a video game which is just it's really good it's really fun i watched uh i watched someone play a little bit of it and yeah the the the in the the dialogue at the beginning feels it feels so natural it's like they didn't know they were doing a video it's like they didn't know they were being recorded like it just felt he just said it in a way that's like oh wow it just existed right because in the main character he's got this very anxious and shy personality that like comes out every time one of these the cut scenes happen of like I think maybe one of those very first ones the guy's like you need some shoes and he's like oh he's like just come with me I'm not gonna hurt you he's like no I'm just gonna yeah it's it's very good yeah it's it's uh i'm very very curious uh as a you know long time listeners of the podcast uh or if you've you know if you follow my blue sky hey plug um don't that felt gross i hate that um i i talk a lot about like accessibility and difficulty settings and games and controls and the way that those things interact and i'm super super curious about this game in particular kind of bennett fought he's like whole hold style i think he i think he if if nothing else he does interesting things with difficulty and controls and friction in games um that at least makes his designs with it interesting um so yeah i'm curious to check out baby steps yeah i think with the difficulty it's just how much time are you willing to i spent two hours trying to kick a soccer ball into a net nothing told me i needed to do that it's that video game thing where you see the net and you see the soccer ball and you go all right hang on this is what we're doing now i don't know if i get anything out of it but i i will get something out of it like the game doesn't change i had that moment when i was playing blueprints there's there's the gymnasium and there's the hoop and there's a ball and i'm like can i can i do anything come on come on man you cannot so you can't don't can you yeah no no sorry spoilers blueprint spoilers spoilers you can't dunk the ball yeah you can't you can't do a sick dunk in the middle of blueprints what the hell this game sucks yeah refund um okay last thing i brought a tv show uh because i just found out that it's back yesterday so it's like a it's a And I found it because I listened to an episode where I forget if it was you or the guest brought up culinary class wars.

Oh yeah.

So I watched that and that was great, but I'm not going to, I'm not going to double down.

That then brought me back to chef in my fridge, which is a really great Korean variety show that.

hasn't been around since like 2019 and i guess it came back just last year um it's a it the concept of the show is they bring on two celebrities so i don't know who they are but they bring on two celebrities they bring their fridges from their house like when they go to pick up the celebrity to bring them to the show they bring their whole fridge and then they have eight chefs that are like recurring cast members on the show and they do cooking challenges with the ingredients that are in the fridges that's great it's just total chaos because it's like a 15 minute cooking challenge um which is not enough time to do anything no and then you've got the two like hosts which are they're very much variety show hosts they're high energy they're screaming the whole time while they're cooking when the, when the five minute mark hits, like there's five minutes left in the cooking.

One of the, one of the two hosts has to get up and like, go and like, see what's like, taste the food that they're making.

And so like, they're just in the way.

And then the other host would be like, how is it?

And then they go, it's too salty.

And then everybody's screaming.

It's just really great.

So it's back.

And they brought on a lot of like, I knew a couple of the chefs from culinary class wars because they were, in chef in my fridge and then they brought even more of them on to this like new iterate i think like the popularity of culinary class wars maybe i i'd have to check but i think it revitalized chef in my fridge so then they brought all these people back on and it's fun it's great that's awesome chaos is it um is it one of the korean variety netflix shows it is on netflix yeah they used to have the old ones on there which is how I watched, but then they went away at some point and I was like, well, what the hell?

We didn't finish watching all that are on here.

Yeah.

They've, uh, they've gotten a bunch of, uh, Korean shows.

I, I read a, I read a thing not that long ago that it's, it's apparently working out for them and they're doing, you know, new seasons of a bunch of it.

So that's cool.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't think, I think Netflix just licenses this one, but.

yeah it's on there so that sounds great i'm gonna i'm definitely gonna watch that that's fantastic there are spoilers for culinary class wars if you haven't watched that oh shit culinary class wars multimedia universe pretty much yeah you find out that in the second episode he loses his eye and then he's gotta you know you want to see that happen in real time yeah Yeah.

I'll have to check.

I'll have to check that out.

Yeah.

They, um, uh, uh, Netflix actually, uh, uh, for, for, for my homework, um, Netflix actually just brought back a cream variety show that my partner and I really enjoyed that.

Um, I saw as part of us exploring, you know, uh, uh, getting into the journey to the West, expanding universe of shows, you know, checking out related things and, and all of that.

Um, it's called a crime scene.

Uh, there's a new season on Netflix called crime scene zero, which is a really, really cool show.

I think if you're into TTRPGs, uh, you will definitely enjoy it.

Basically what happens is I think it's eight, seven, eight, uh, hosts, you know, celebrities, personalities, all of this.

Uh, they're giving, uh, characters to play.

It's basically a murder mystery TV show.

Uh, they're given characters to play.

They're set in, uh, they're putting these very elaborate.

In the original seasons, they had a big warehouse that they would put like some artificial walls.

They would tape off where doors and stuff were.

And so you could be like, oh, we're going to go to the victim's house.

We're going to go to their girlfriend's apartment.

You can check their car.

You can check their workplace.

And so you just have this big space that everybody's moving around.

And people had timed sections to look for clues.

They had timed kind of cross -examination because the person who knew the person who was the murderer knew they were the murderer.

And, you know, obviously nobody else does.

But the big rule with the game that they didn't explain very well with the English subtitles was you can't ever lie unless you're the murderer.

And so you have to assume that all the information that you're being given is correct, except unless.

Oh, yeah.

Unless maybe it is.

So if you can disprove anybody, then, you know.

Right.

And so and so it became this really fun thing where.

uh the the actors in the show are simultaneously trying to portray their characters but not portray their characters too well but not give away information but and so it's really really uh interesting show uh really interesting like sort of mix of mix of stories and stuff uh my favorite one was it was like a three -parter of a murder on a cruise ship that then it ended and they were like oh great we did such a good job and then another one of the characters dropped dead and that was the next episode uh that was oh oh that was fun that's a fun narrative moment that's good um so like i said they have a new season on netflix that has a lot of the same um sort of recurring hosts which was uh really we haven't watched it yet but we're very excited um yeah uh another i feel like they get game designers for those shows yeah it's a it's a really there's proper game design going on there's there's so many really fun variety like i call I usually call Korean variety shows, game shows, because in a lot of ways, they're just, we're playing a game.

Um, uh, devil's plan.

If you're into, if you're a game designer and you're, and you haven't watched devil's plan, you should watch devil's plan.

You should go watch the second season, but that first one was so good.

The second one is good in different ways, but also is very good.

Um, you should definitely hunt down, uh, you know, you should go find downloads.

of the great escape which is uh kind of the one of the you know hallmark shows in the genre of really gamified friday shows um it it's so interesting to see like a show it's you know i called devil's plan like big brother but with mechanics and it's a and it's a it's such a weird way to describe that but i think if you watch like two episodes you're like oh i see exactly how we got here um and it's if you like uh reality uh tv shows like um uh traders i watched the first season of uk traders not that long ago and i feel like that is the same sort of uh vein of reality game show like that that really nice mix where it's not too drama focused and just enough game focused um shout out to the mole real ones remember um you never watched the mole on abc hostin no oh man oh it's great it was it was so good uh basically the mole is uh what if you did like i guess a great touchstone around that time was the amazing race what if you did the amazing race but someone was a traitor and worked for the show and was trying to stop people from getting money it's a great it's it was a new concept at the time you know i guess here 2025 yeah that sounds great um another another homework um that uh for a ttrbg i played recently that i definitely want to shout out is curios uh by will jobs and seb pine aka good luck press um i played that with uh played with my partner for for some extra streams stream stuff um curios is an epistolary kind of thriller game uh where you are reading the letters sent from sort of your your main POV character to his college friend.

He just moved into a new house and he's writing letters to her to sort of recount the situation.

And let me tell you, in the ways that it goes great for characters in such classics as House of Leaves, like it goes great for characters in Twin Peaks, like it goes great for characters in Alan Wake.

It goes great for this guy.

He moves in a new house and it's so good and normal and nice.

It's an excellent time.

Right.

Everybody.

He makes new friends.

He goes to the library.

He gets a new job.

It's fantastic.

It is.

It is such an interesting experience.

It's delivered through these specific letters.

And what I what I would absolutely recommend you do during this nice fall, quiet, spooky season is we did specifically Albrecht Manor.

So people are looking there are two versions of curious.

We did Albrecht Manor.

is uh is get this game comes in a fantastic uh manila envelope read a letter and then sit with it and then the next night two nights whenever the mood strikes you read another letter you know kind of tackle it tackle it like an experience yeah like really really get into it allow yourself to sit with it allow yourself to really engage with it um and i i think you will you will really get into it i think there's a lot of there's a lot of space to have for this um cool so yeah i always want to always want to shout out cool ttrpgs when i can um i don't think i have a video game i've been playing pokemon but it seems weird to suggest poke like it feels like my right i recommend I found this great new game.

Yeah, the most popular media franchise on the planet.

I don't know if you've heard about this.

You guys heard about these Marvel movies?

Wowzer.

Listen, I'll figure out a video game.

I just don't.

I don't have one ready.

There's a lot of them, and most of them are solid.

They're good.

You'll get something out of it.

You know what?

I played the DLC for Still Wakes the Deep today.

um i would absolutely recommend still wakes the deep um nice uh sort of uh i don't want to say quiet methodical horror because there's definitely a point in the story when it becomes not um but a fantastic game from the chinese room uh about uh you know in much the same way that uh we mentioned curios the the character has a nice fun time uh you play as a scotsman on an oil rig In the middle of the ocean.

And things go great.

Things are, as they always do when you're in the middle of the ocean, you have a nice, good, fun time.

You have a good Christmas.

So I'd say definitely, hey, with horror games, make sure you check out the content warnings.

Make sure you know what you're getting yourself into.

But I enjoyed the hell out of that game.

I enjoyed the hell out of its DLC.

Cool.

Why are they called the Chinese Room?

It's probably not time for that conversation.

What is that?

I've never heard of them.

Oh, it's just, it's just the name of the developers.

I don't know why they're called the Chinese room.

Okay.

Just send my eyebrow up.

You know, I feel like a lot of developers have names that you would go like, why did you, what?

We should get this one.

How'd you come about that one?

Uh, but yeah, that's, that's homework.

I always, I always enjoy this part of the podcast.

I always feel, I, I don't want to say I enjoyed this part of the podcast more, but I feel like this is, this is such a fun, punchy part of the show where it's just like, yeah, here's a bunch of cool shit to go check out.

I always enjoy this part.

It's fun.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I like it.

Absolutely.

So the idea from another podcast trying to figure out.

Nice.

Good job.

I, you know, it's nice to come up with, what do I like?

Let me, I gotta make sure to write down what I like before I got on this call.

I, I think it's, It sounds sappy.

I think it's fun to share stuff that you're excited about.

You know?

Hell yeah.

I think it's fun to be like, this thing's cool.

You should check out this cool thing.

So that brings us to the final question.

Before we get into it, Adam, thank you so much for being on the show.

Appreciate the hell out of you.

Thank you for taking time.

Thank you for having me.

Adam was amazing.

And let me reschedule because I was feeling like crap.

Which is always, always wonderful of people.

Listen, we would have done it if, you know, sometimes you got to do it and that's just life.

But we didn't have to.

And that's always that's always wonderful.

So, yeah, the three question, the final question, the secret question, the question Adam doesn't know is coming.

My first episode with the amazing star, I asked her what three guests she would love to have on her podcast.

And ever since then, I've asked every guest some sort of top three something.

uh i come up with it during the show so even i don't know what it's going to be when we get in to the uh the interview and this is this is me stalling for time very slowly as i figure out what the question's going to be we usually get to this point and i go right and i go hum this is a funny one and if it's if it's bad i'll come up with another one but let's this is a funny one uh adam what are uh what are your favorite three roles that john goodman has had like your favorite your favorite three movies and or tv shows that have starred john goodman yeah you gotta put star of 10 cloverfield yeah you gotta put walter from the big lebowski on there yeah obviously he's he's too good in that you probably gotta put um whatever his name is in the righteous gemstones oh sure yeah he's He's really good there.

I think I got to catch up on that show.

Anyway, let me think of a third.

He's too scary in 10 Cloverfield Lane.

I don't know if I'd give it to him.

I would want to give him...

I know he's good in Oh Brother Where Art Thou, but I fall asleep every time I try to watch that movie.

I don't know why.

Some sort of Pavlovian sleep response, so I never finish it.

That's funny.

I somehow fall asleep always before he shows up.

That's good.

Yeah.

I've never finished that movie, but I have slept to it a lot.

It's a, it's a, I don't want to say it's a slow movie.

It's, it's, it's, it's not actiony, you know, it's not high pace.

Yeah.

It's, it's very intentional.

I'm trying to think what else has he been in?

a lot obviously the the the big obvious one is roseanne which is you know weird to talk about in 2025 but i think love roseanne well that's what i you know what's she up to yeah i think it's i think it's weird to talk about in 2025 but i think of its time that was a that was a big thing you could talk about the flintstones you could talk about the flintstones definitely didn't remember that he was in the flintstones as i was talking about him being in roseanne i don't know who's a better who's a better friend oh man all right now i'm cheating i'm looking at no you should cheat no this is no this is this is not cheating let's see and it's going to come down to what have i actually seen i don't remember who he was in raising arizona so i guess that doesn't count i might end up having to go with 10 cloverfield late by default it's too scary i mean it technically i don't want to say it inspired you to write a a game but it was you know it was pivotal it definitely did yeah yeah so we'll go walter subject from the big lebowski mr gemstone and then the bunker boy he just looked it up that's obviously what his credit is he just looked it up so yeah I didn't even see 10 Cloverfield Lane on this Wikipedia page.

So I'm sure there's a lot that I'm forgetting that also they didn't put on here.

That's really funny.

That's really funny when you go to Wikipedia and there's a thing on there that you know that it's like, why isn't this on here?

Hang on.

I think he's done too much.

So they just kind of picked whoever was writing his page.

It's like, these are what I like.

No, come on, Wikipedia.

I expect complete information.

We're fighting against AI now.

You got to.

We got to work on this together.

I need to know everything Dan or John Goodman has been in.

Because now I'm on the full filmography page and there's too much.

I was worried.

I was I was like I was like, if he knows who John Goodman is, this will be a good question.

And if he doesn't, we'll figure something else out.

He was the cop in diner from Chud.

Oh, OK.

Wow.

I did take a whole second to remember what that movie was.

yeah i've never actually seen it but it's always fun trivia that that's why we call these guys this that's where it came from yeah gosh there's stuff that i that i'm like that i'm like wasn't he in this and then it's like probably not because they're just stuff of the time that it's like maybe he was in this it's like no you're you're thinking of john candy it always goes back to fred flintstone i'm always thinking of fred flintstone never not I took those vitamins for years and that's what it did to me.

It's John Goodman.

Yeah.

Always thinking of John Goodman.

Massaging your nutrients.

He's there.

He's helping you out.

Thousands of John Goodman's running through my body, keeping me strong.

Uh, so as the, in the way that the three question always does, uh, that's, that's the end.

We got to end the show cause it's, it's too goofy.

That's it.

We've hit, we've hit the point.

We've got the giggles.

Like I said, Adam, thank you so much for being on.

Go ahead.

Tell everybody where they can find you, where you want to point them to, to check out your stuff.

All that good stuff.

Yeah.

Find me on blue sky at Adam Bell dot games.

You can go to Adam Bell dot games.

That's the website.

But my blue sky, the pin post in the blue sky will have the backer kit for uneasy lies the head, which currently you can preorder there on the pledge manager.

So you should do that.

hell yeah because i am gonna need to sell these things and they're really good so yeah listen the secret of the podcast is go buy the thing so go buy we talked about this go buy adam needs a new camera go buy the games and then maybe eventually he'll get a new camera it's not as it's not as certain as if you sent him money directly but it's you know it's in the cards it's a possibility you get a game or a camera directly just send me whatever said yeah figure out where figure out his address and then send him a new camera that'd be great that would be great thank you so much um yeah links to everything will be in the description as always so if you can't be bothered to type adam bell dot games just right there you'll be all set uh but that's gonna be the end go ahead adam say bye everybody bye everybody And that's the podcast.

I want to thank Adam so much for sitting down and answering my silly questions about Uneasy Lies the Head.

You could go get the digital version on Adam's itch page, or you can pre -order the physical version on the backer kit, depending on when you're hearing this.

I'll say it again.

As always, the links to all of Adam's stuff will be in the show notes.

So make sure you go check it out.

Follow him everywhere.

Check out his games.

You know, as always, go buy stuff.

Give them money.

So I mentioned some updates in the intro, and the first is that the podcast is officially a year old.

We actually technically passed it, but I expected to have this episode out by then.

But yeah, so we've been doing this a whole year.

The first episode came out at the end of October, and then it took me almost a whole month to get another episode out.

It has been...

A lot of learning.

Honestly, I think the biggest thing about doing this podcast has been a lot of learning about myself and the processes that work for me to do this sort of venture.

I thank all of the amazing people that have been on the show so far.

Everyone that gave me their time and their effort to help do my silly little show.

Looking back at some of the episodes, it's wild to think how long ago some of them were.

You know, it feels cliche, but some of these feel like they literally just happened.

And of course, thank you.

Thank you to everybody who's listened to the show, who shared it with a friend, who's subscribed on whatever podcast app.

You know, I make jokes about this being my silly little show, but I have a fantastic time doing it.

Been amazing.

Going into the second year, I want to shift my focus very slightly.

I've talked about this on previous episodes, and I think more specifically what I want to do is shift back to kind of my original idea, my original sort of vision for the show, which is just to talk to cool people doing cool stuff.

I've settled into kind of a niche of talking to TTRPG people about their games right around when their crowdfunding stuff comes up.

And I don't have a problem with that.

I'm more than happy to continue to do that.

And I have interviews lined up and people who have expressed interest.

And I will continue to do that.

But I also noticed that I let myself shy away from reaching out and doing some interviews because it felt outside of that.

Or it felt like it wouldn't fit or all of these things.

And it's kind of silly to have to take a moment and remind myself that it's my show and I get to decide who's on it and what happens.

That's what happens sometimes.

So look forward to interviews with, hopefully, a lot more different people.

I want to get in the habit of seeing a cool thing and reaching out to that person and connecting with them and having them on the podcast.

The other big news, which isn't very exciting but is a big deal, is I moved podcast hosts.

This is something I've been thinking about doing for a little while and just kind of hit a point where I had a little bit of time where I knew I wasn't going to put a new episode out.

So I could take the time to do the import process and make sure everything was OK.

And I got a solid deal on top of it, which is always nice.

And then found out that my old host had doubled the rate that I was grandfathered into.

So, yeah.

So now I'm on a new host that has one flat fee that is less to have to worry about.

I will take this time to plug the Patreon if you would like to help me support the show and keep the lights on.

You can go over to the Patreon linked in the show notes.

You know, we pay for hosting fees and all that jazz.

You get access to an ad free RSS feed for all of the audio episodes, as well as access to silly behind the scenes outtakes.

Just little bits that I cut out of the episode that are funny on their own.

Don't contribute to the interview.

I don't really ever want to put an interview or anything like that behind a paywall because, you know.

I'm doing it for the love of the game, but it made sense to put little things like this here.

Now, I can't end the episode, of course, without talking about our friends over at Plus One EXP.

You can use the code WDPODCAST to get 10 % off anything you order or 10 % off your first month of Zine Club, which, as always, I highly, highly recommend.

Zine Club is a monthly subscription service that delivers you amazing, unique, and sometimes exclusive teach RPGs straight to your door or inbox.

You know, I should get someone from Zine Club on the podcast.

But again, that's code WDPodcast for 10 % off your order or your first month of Zine Club.

Now, as always, I hope wherever you are, you're happy, you're healthy, and you're safe.

I'll see you in the next one.