Snyder’s Return

Interview - Ella Watts - Upriver, Downriver Kickstarter

November 16, 2021 Adam Powell / Ella Watts Season 1 Episode 77
Snyder’s Return
Interview - Ella Watts - Upriver, Downriver Kickstarter
Show Notes Transcript

Today I talk with TTRPG Creator, Podcaster, Kickstarter and Audio Drama enthusiast - Ella Watts

We discuss the Tarot inspired TTRPG Kickstarter Project - Upriver, Downriver, Audio Dramas and much more.

You can find Ella and all of her content via the links below.

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/GejWatts
https://twitter.com/maxbriarart
https://twitter.com/OrphansAudio
https://twitter.com/RealmsPod
https://twitter.com/FableandFolly
https://twitter.com/MacguffinAndCo

https://twitter.com/theriverstrust

Website:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gejwatts/up-river-down-river
https://ko-fi.com/maxbriarart

Please leave reviews on ITunes to help us to learn and grow as a Podcast

Yours Sincerely,

Adam 'Cosy' Powell

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CAST & CREW

Host: Adam Powell

Guest: Ella Watts

Sound Design: Adam Powell

Edited by: Adam Powell

Music: Epidemic Sound

Cover Art: Tim Cunningham - www.Wix.com

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http://snydersreturn.squarespace.com

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Snyders Return:

Hello and welcome to snows return a tabletop roleplay podcast. My guest today has stepped away from the corporations ladder through realms of peril and glory and onto the deck of a ship bound for adventures unknown. Beyond fable and folly, my guest has kickstarted a project, which potentially was always on the cards. What is the source of her inspiration? That is something we are hoping to see from podcast panels to actual plays. And now game design. My guest has made an oath to the great river, which will carry her both upriver and downriver, and so on to great success. With sword sharp spirits raised tongues primed, it is an absolute pleasure to welcome podcast, game designer, and Kickstarter, Ella watts to the show. Hello, thank you for joining me.

Ella Watts:

Hi, Adam. I am a big fan of your podcast. I love these interviews that you do. And it was just honestly a personal highlight of my week in a month to get one of those for me with my work. That was so cool. Thank you. I love that.

Snyders Return:

The pleasure is genuinely all mine. And when we go a bit later into the interview and learn more about the projects and things that I've alluded to there, I'll be as excited as everybody else to learn more. But just as a touchstone, how did you get into tabletop role playing games, please?

Ella Watts:

Oh, gosh. So I played my first RPG at uni. And I believe it was fourth edition, we played one game once. And it was really fun. And I remember that we didn't have enough space for everyone to sit on chairs. So I was sitting on the floor having Chinese takeaway. And our GM did a really cool thing. Very, very simple, but very effective, I think for new players, where he had us all kind of do a combined role in a tug of war against this sort of monster trying to open these doors. And I just really distinctly remember going around the room and everyone rolling their day to see whether or not they pass the check. And all of us have stakes getting higher and higher and higher is it like kind of go. And I just remember that feeling when we kind of passed the check. Everyone was so excited and kind of jumped up. So that was that was when I started and then my first actual campaign, sort of still a little bit on the fourth edition theme was 13 phage. And that was run by a friend of mine called Sam Thompson, who was a wonderful Twitch streamer and RPG designer in his own right. And he GM, my very first campaign where I played a war forged occultist who had become obsessed with the nature of life, and collected Mohsen bits of people's bodies

Snyders Return:

while they go, and so from these, shall we say, humble beginnings of fourth edition and onwards through 13 age. Where is that? Where's, like, guided you to next? Where did your TTRPG path take you?

Ella Watts:

Yeah, so So I mentioned Sam Thompson and Pham really is kind of my gateway drug to all RPGs he introduced me to the concept of Dragon meat and you know, lots of RPG podcasts and and I did enjoy kind of the classic actual play show. So you know, I did watch critical role. I did watch dimension 20 I did listen to the adventure zone. But it was really Sam who sort of nurtured in me a very sort of hipster indie taste and games. So basically, every time I would hang out with Sam and his partner, Holly, who's a dear dear friend of mine, we would always play a new different indie RPG. So we will play like hell for leather, or we will play Rhapsody of blood, or, you know, we will play Basti and land. And over the course of like playing all of these games and getting to know all these different ways that RPG is works and different ways that people had approached game design. I started getting really excited about sort of writing with myself and also finding my own games that I liked, rather than just kind of the ones that Sam was giving me. So he started. I think, since I signed up to Kickstarter in 2018. I have back to 77 projects. I am aware that Kickstarter is far from the only RPG publishing platform, but I do have a problem. And I don't own enough money to back 77 projects. I have a Kickstarter soon aka so so I started getting really excited about kind of indie games that were published one of my current and kind of long lasting favourite games is Nibiru, which I first saw at Dragon meet before they even launched their Kickstarter. I was so excited, I opened every update email, because I had a little bit of flavour about the game. And I was just so thrilled to learn more. And I've run many one shots of Nibiru and a year long combat campaign, and stuff like that see sword lesbians, which I adore, and then kind of shorter, obviously, one page games and end games that I could find on edge. Anyway, that all kind of led me to, actually, oh, my goodness, three years ago, designing a game for the orphans podcast, which is a sci fi audio drama that I work on. And I kind of pitch the concept of role playing games to the cast, because they all recorded remotely. And so they a lot of them have never met each other. And I said, you know, what's a great way to get to know each other, or role playing game, we could have pizza and beer, and we can play in the world that you all already know. So that can be kind of the icebreaker. And then we can have a fun time. I pitched that to the show's creator, Zach. And he said, Cool, do you want to record that and make that an actual play podcast. And then I started writing the game. And I, you know, I knew that there were science fiction games, but because I wanted it very specifically to fit the orphans. I kind of took it further and further and further until I was essentially designing my own game using the archmage engine. Because at that point, that was the game that was the system that I knew best, which was the 30 day just ID. Um, and it just made this massive sci fi game, which was 150 pages, a4 pages, like over 50,000 words. And Zack kind of jokes that it's quite clear that this was written by someone with undiagnosed ADHD. But, you know, made this game recorded the actual play, and then the files were destroyed. And it was a huge tragedy. And we're actually still working on that game. We're hoping to publish that next year. But I kind of that broke my house a bit. So I stepped out. And then last year, you know, lockdown happened, and that was terrible. And I really wanted to have a creative project, like many people did, and it definitely wasn't cabin fever. It definitely wasn't anxiety. It definitely wasn't just an urge to prove myself as valuable in a world in which it was becoming very clear that my job as a radio comedy producer was not in any way vital. So society definitely wasn't to fill that dark night of the soul. But I I read a book called The weight of the sea by Caroline Crampton, which is a beautiful, powerful, brilliant, natural and social history of the Thames. And I was so inspired by that, that I wanted to try a game and I wanted to try designing a game this time, with everything I'd learned from the orphans game, which is called rebellion. Everything I'd learned from that about clunky game design, and all of this stuff that I gotten lost in the weeds with and I wanted to make something much simpler and lighter and take cues from the games that I'd begun to enjoy, like forged in the dark games, and blades in the dark, especially obviously. And so I kind of just hand wrote upriver downriver and actually have the notebook in my room with me and I just hadn't wrote from the start to the finish this entire game, sort of googling things and drawing tarot cards, and made the game that I wanted to see. And that kind of included a couple of elements. One of them was a short campaign, because I'd found that was I really liked one shots. I personally prefer campaigns, but I'd been in so many campaigns by that point, because I've been playing games for about eight years, I've been in so many campaigns that had kind of fizzled out because of you know, the perennial scheduling issues, because people just weren't feeling it anymore, because the story had gone in a different direction and people weren't communicating. And every single time that happened, it really broke my heart. So I wanted to make a game where you kind of went into it with the understanding that it has an ending and it's going to end it's going to be a self contained story in which you are going to get to know your characters a bit better than you would in a one shot. But also you're going to have closure on that story. So that was kind of the first big thing that I wanted out of kind of my ideal game. The other thing was I just love boats and I love rivers and I really want more sailing game like I am aware of sailing games like oh my god, my brain is going blank something fathoms I always get the number wrong. I have dyscalculia which is like dyslexia for numbers and it's not helpful 4555 Okay, anyway, there is a sailing game. There is a sailing game that has like ship rolls over whether there are a couple but I didn't want to setting I wanted like a game in which you are sailors and you're sailing is it is a problem. multisectoral thing in the narrative and I haven't seen a lot of those, so I really wanted to do that. I wanted a short self contained campaign about sailing. And yeah, and then everything else was kind of flavour stuff. As I mentioned, the way to the sea from Carolyn Crompton, really inspired like how vital rivers are to our natural and social history and how much of an impact they have on our world. I'd also just like fallen more and more and more in love with kind of belonging outside belonging style systems, where the whole game in the world is, is a collaborative process between the players and the GM. So everything in upriver down river is very deliberately invoking kind of, I would specifically say, early 20th century fantasy archetypes, but not the racist and terrible ones. And the idea is that you can kind of take the city, the forest, the whatever, and you can build on that your own interpretation. So one of my playtesters is a person who is a Romani person, a Romani Jewish person. And so he really wanted to build into the river folk kind of like brahminy culture. I had another player who was a Welsh person, and they wanted to make like the dwarves, well, Welsh, and then I had another player who's Swedish, but wanted to make the river folk like ancient Greek. And so we kind of take these things and let them kind of manipulate and mould the world to a story that makes everyone kind of happy and inspires everyone and is ultimately and fundamentally quite a self indulgent sort of fantasy ROM. But the idea is that I think, fundamentally, a lot of role playing games are a self indulgent fantasy ROM, and that that can be a very gentle kind of language of love between players, and also between players and their GM, where we hand each other, kind of the keys to Narnia, and we invite each other to come through the wardrobe. And I wanted this game to try and do that a little bit. That's a lot to put into one game. But there we go.

Snyders Return:

Well, from reading the Quickstart, that you've you've sent out and the stuff that's up on Kickstarter, and all that information we'll get to shortly. I think you've achieved it from from reading through it, it's so good. Some of the settings that the fact that you are given that that choice to go to the source or down to the sea. And it has that fixed but yet so open starting point of have Meadowbrook that. It can be as much as of miners as it is yours as much as the next group and the next 1000s of groups. You know, I'm for foretelling that. Pun intended for later that, you know that this will be a huge success, because I for one, I'm going to be back in it. So what was it been like sort of grounding the adventure? Ship upon them. But granting the adventure in in a single starting location like Meadowbrook and what does that allowed you to do mechanically from that point out?

Ella Watts:

So I think it's interesting. There's a couple things The first one was because so I think it's important to give a bit of context of the game. As I said, I wrote this game by hand in a notebook in lockdown in a sort of fever pitch, because I have ADHD. And the original plan was that me and my partner Max was going to do some formatting and illustrating and then we were going to put it on the Internet for free. And then I mentioned that to my friend, Sasha Seanna, who is a professional games publisher. And they said to me, Hey, maybe don't put 130 Page fully illustrated game manual on the Internet for free, because that kind of devalues my entire industry. And I work really hard to get people to pay money for what we do, and maybe don't do that. And so it's like, oh, well, okay, like, I guess I'll maybe put up for like, $5. And then Sasha was like, Okay, can I read the game, please. And so I sent him a copy. It's actually uses all pronouns, which is why I'm using multiple pronouns to refer to her. So I sent him a copy. And he came back to me with his husband, Gianni. And they said that they really liked it. And they wanted us to partner with MacGuffin to do a Kickstarter. And now we're here and it's all got a bit out of control. But the reason I kind of give this context is that when I was first doing the locations, just as a fun creative writing exercise for myself, I was like, I'm going to draw tarot cards for each of these locations. I knew that I was doing this thing with the Major Arcana because I love tarot and I know that using Tarot in a TTRPG is far from original like many people have done it beautifully. I do not claim to be unique in that respect. I hope that the way we've done it will be interesting for people but I thought you know just as a creative career writing exercise for myself. I'll draw tarot cards, and then let that inform what the location is and how it challenges the players. And so with metaphoric, I drew the Wheel of Fortune, which was very interesting to me. And so I thought, okay, I kind of had this mental image of essentially Hobbiton in the Peak District, and this kind of idea that rivers in reality, even though it's one river, it has many different guises and shapes and forms. And it's known for different things. And it has, you know, different habitats, but it also has different industries and settlements in different places. And so I kind of wanted there to be this sort of dividing line between the north of the river and the south of the river. And that might also be because I'm English, despite kind of growing up internationally. And so the north south divide is is massive in my kind of mental like in my consciousness, especially because I grew up in Derbyshire, but my mom's family are all from Somerset. So and I live in London, and I'm a traitor to everyone. But, so I had that kind of thing about the north and south of river being quite different rivers and the South southern river being golden in the northern river being silver. And then also, there's this thing, which which I've kind of said in a couple of the descriptions of the game, which is that it's a post war, environmentalist fantasy, and I talk about Ghibli and Tolkien. And I always worry that people who see that are going to be like, Ah, yes, person who has seen one film and read one book, My game is like the Hobbit. But I mean, specifically in the Tolkien, Amir Zacky, are both people who survived World Wars. And that impacted their writing hugely, because I think that we live in a war torn world. And we live in a world in which we in like Britain, for example, have experienced one of the longest periods of peace in our global history. But that is not true of many hundreds of countries around the world. And it's often something that we are directly inflicting on those countries. And so, for me, personally, I'm always thinking about like war and peace and what war means or what peace means. And so I wanted this world to be a world that was peaceful, but had recently not been and kind of question that what do we do when we come out of war? And how do we rebuild? And how do we try to avoid recreating the same mistakes because I think that people often invoke the 1950s in fiction, in a quite jingoistic, and naive way, which ignores a lot of the real, getting bigotries and injustices. And in even genocides that were happening in those decades, and sort of creates this rosy past, I had a quote recently that I really liked, which said, the Germans use history to, to learn, they look at history to learn from it, and like the British look at history to hide, like and not and not to sort of long for it and have nostalgia. Anyway, this is a big rambling tangent, but the point is, I think, actually, the fundamental things that we should remember about the 1950s in the UK, for example, was the construction of the welfare state, you know, pushing for women's rights, like the general progression of a kind of kinda sort of social structure because people had just come out of a war in which they had seen many awful things happen that had directly resulted from the economic depression of Germany that had directly resulted from kind of jingoistic empire building. And so I kind of wanted to make this game to kind of invite people to be like, actually put yourself in those shoes. What are you looking for? Are you looking for closing your borders and making it really hard for people to have houses to live in? Or are you looking to rebuild and make connections or build communities? So Meadowbrook is fundamentally at the heart of all of that because Meadowbrook is is, it's the farmer's boy in a war. It's, you know, Rupert Brooks, person from an English field dying in battle. It is a village that's between two warring parties that is kind of doing nothing. And whilst it seems to be a Dilek, actually, that kind of hopeful, optimistic kind community is a deliberate choice and quite a brave choice on the part of the residents. And that is supposed to kind of instigate for the players. This this fundamental conflict of the game and kind of be like you are being asked and challenged to be kind in the face of conflict and to make peace, whether it's war. I'm not sure how much that answered your question. I think it went a little bit philosophical.

Snyders Return:

I think it answered it wonderfully. Which leads you mentioned a good number of things. But but one you you mentioned was was the play So stepping into this world trying to find their place and and make peace where there could be conflict, as you mentioned, what role was to the players step into and how do they embody sort of the life in upriver downriver.

Ella Watts:

Well, I had so much fun with making the roles for approver downriver, so anyone familiar with first and the dark games will see but there is a lot of essentially a playbook happening here. The other thing to mention, although mechanics are currently going through refinement in playtesting, so this might change. But at the moment, everything in upriver or downriver is built on fours and multiples of four and sevens. Because there are seven seas. And there are four categories, categories of river, all rivers are divided into one or four categories, which is why when you roll to fail the river, you roll the force, because you've got four rivers, also four points of a compass. I thought about this anyway. So there are seven roles. And some of them are really obvious. So you can be the captain, you can be the first mate, you can be the gunner. You can be the doctor, which is maybe slightly less obvious, but I think still a classic in kind of nautical fiction and in reality, and the same for the ship's cook, which I had to have. And then you can also be an engineer or a priest. And I think that those were the two slightly more unusual ones. The engineer, I think makes sense. If you're imagining that your ship has an engine, which one of the ships that you can play with does, it's a narrow boat. I mean, the other ships could theoretically have engines, it's kind of up to you to decide how they're built. The priest is really inspired by so I studied early mediaeval history, in Britain in the British Isles, and Viking age can Navia. And something that I personally really enjoy is that the reason that we think Vikings have horns, is not because Vikings wore helmets with horns that is factually inaccurate. It is because we have one stone, which depicts an army going into battle. And it has a figure wearing a helmet with these huge horns. And that figure is not a warrior. And it's not even a man, it is a woman. And she was a priest. And she was there to kind of bless the army to give them strength against their enemies. And I've always just thought that that was really interesting. I also very much liked the idea that the priest, the doctor, and the cook can all sit in each other's roles. So the cook, depending on which path you follow, each role follows one of three parts. And each path is defined by the major arcana and is both a kind of role playing invitation and also has mechanical advantages and strictures. So you could be a captain of the Hanged Man, or you could be a first meet of the moon, or you could be a cook of the magician, or the world. So with the cook, that you can be more magical, and you can be like a priest, you can do enchantments, and you can kind of interpret the faces of the river God, you can also be used that kind of like practical medicine that you pick up in a life of Hard Knocks or a life at sea. So the cook can also heal people. And similarly, the doctor and the priest, the doctor could have been more in the line of kind of a sort of magical sort of hedge which sort of healing kind of thing using, you know, natural cures and stuff. Or they could be like, genuinely trained in a sort of Victorian level sort of surgical doctor. And the priests is someone who could be someone who follows like a very strict sort of built into institutional religion, or they could be someone who just sort of follows their own path and has a personal relationship with the divine. The engineer actually also can be magical, the engineer following the path of the hierophant, which I also do tarot cards for the roles, because again, this was originally a personal creative writing projects that got out of hand. But I think I think with that in my head, that's the kind of idea of the engineer who has a kind of magical mystical relationship with their ship. And so I always imagine that engine room was one that's like, full of kind of fetishism tokens and objects and little prayer scrolls, and they kind of slap a prayer scroll on so the engine to fix it, and that kind of like mental image, which I personally really enjoyed. Um, but yeah, so you have these different roles, and each one walks a different path. And then obviously, you have to work together as a crew. So we kind of recommend in the game that you have for players, I think that that's kind of the place where it starts working best. And we also recommend that you have a captain because it can be helpful both for the kind of immersion of the narrative, it is nice to have a captain on a boat, especially if you're on a kind of fantasy adventure. And also because that inspires interesting roleplay kind of dynamics and conversations because you know, does your captain make the final decision? Do you all like the final decision? How well do you know each other? Have you been sailing together for years or did they Just hire you? Did they want to hire you? Or did they eat, you trick them into hiring you, you know all of these kinds of dynamics, which can be really enjoyable. And then from there, in my opinion, I think kind of one of the best ways to play it is to have a captain and first mate. And then to have two players pick whatever they want, whether it's like, as I said, the cooks, the doctor, and the priests can all be fairly interchangeable. And then there's the engineer and the gunner, who are both people who can be very strong and practical, but but the engineer, as I mentioned, can also be a bit magic, depending on what your roleplay style is, and what intrigues you. And as I mentioned, there's also these pods. So there's, there are seven roles, three parts each. For people familiar with Tarot, we're using the Major Arcana, there are 22, Major Arcana cards, not 21. And that is because the full walks no path, because I didn't draw the full for any of the parts. And then I looked at it and thought, yeah, no, that checks out for the full card, the full log of snow path, the full cannot be confined to one part or one role. But yeah, so you know, you kind of look at the parts, look at the role, see which one kind of calls to you. And then from there, you get to pick a number of abilities, you get certain bonuses, your physical defence, your magical defence, your stats, and kind of progress as you would and I mentioned, parts have strictures, there is kind of this ongoing tension that you have, which is that each of the paths has things that they forbid, and things that they encourage. And the idea is that you are following one of the 22 phases of the river God one of its manifestations, that sort of this monotheistic, pantheistic sexual religion. But if you anger that face of the root of that face of the river God that iteration of the river god are you are you contradict it, it's fundamental values, then it might withdraw its blessing from you and all of your abilities and stat bonuses and everything else and give you it's curse, until you either learn from it or choose to walk a different path. And that's come up in some interesting ways in play. Like in one of our play tests, we had a captain of the Hanged Man. And one of the things that the captain the hangman can't do is reverse the death. In this game, if you die, you play as the ghost of your character, because that was another thing that I kind of wanted to see more of, and games and thought would be fun. And as a ghost, you get certain limitations, but you also get lots of cool new abilities. And the idea is that, you know, death in this game is not to be feared, because the other thing the game is very much about it's about death and normalising death and having a more healthy attitude today, then I think that we do in the UK at the moment, at least. Anyway. So I had a player character Captain following the path of the Hanged Man. And one of the strictures of the Hanged man's path is you can't reverse that. But in the very first session, this character drew the curse of the tower, as the captain sailed the ship into a storm and immediately killed the youngest woman on the ship as she was drowned. And, you know, she's She continued to play as a ghost of herself. But the captain was so overwhelmingly guilty about this, and spent most of the campaign. They also use multiple pronouns, this character, they spent most of the campaign trying to figure out how to fix this big mistake, this big failure that they saw that they'd done as a captain, see interesting roleplay opportunities. And then it got to the kind of our very last session where they were they were going towards the sea, they were about to reach the sea. And he wanted to reverse her death. And he had he drawn a blessing, which would let him do that, but he would lose his path. As he community spoke to the river garden. And the whole way through the game, there'd been this whole kind of theme, the reason that he was the Hanged Man, which is all about reinvention and moving forward and transformation was because he was of the river folk, and he didn't believe in the river folk traditions anymore, he didn't think they help. And he spoke to the river guard, and he chose to walk a new path in order to be able to kind of fix this mistake and restore her to life. And as they kind of went into the sea, it kind of opened up a new chapter of that character's journey as they began to walk a new path. That was very nicely. But there are other times when that might happen earlier in the campaign, and then you're in, you're in trouble. Also, some of the faces of the river are more forgiving than others. As I mentioned, the tower will just kill one of your crew.

Snyders Return:

harsh but fair, maybe. So you mentioned there about abilities and communing with a river. So what does it mean to commune with the river in the game?

Ella Watts:

So when you play the game, which we suggest you play for four to 12 sessions, and we strongly encourage trying to keep it to maximum 12. And really somewhere in the middle of those two, because again, it's designed to be a short campaign that has an ending. You have three communions across the course of that entire campaign. So across those four to 12 sessions, if you're Dorothy start with four. But the idea of the communions is that it is a spiritual meeting with the God of the river with the magic of the river itself. And that can be however you imagine it happening for your character. So I've had people say that they put on like ceremonial clothes and dive into the reverence of math themselves completely. I've had other people say they cook a curry and think about the river. The idea is that, you know, spirituality and faith and our relationship with magical just the world is different from person to person, and what we value and what we find magical whether we think of it as literally magical or just meaningful changes from person to person, but either way, you take this moment of contemplation. And during that moment of contemplation, the person running the game draws a card, a tarot card from the Major Arcana. And if the card is upright, then it's a blessing. And if it's reversed, then it's a curse. And the blessings will give you special powers and abilities and kind of rewards to show like the reverse that approval of what you're doing. The curses will inflict kind of situations or dramas or conflicts that are supposed to be lessons, not punishments. So you can always kind of inverted commas naturally lift the curse by following it structures and learning its lesson. But you can also choose to try and artificially break it by getting someone with powerful enough magic to break it for you. The other thing to mention is that if you draw a path blessing, which is that if you draw the upright card of the path, you walk, so say you're a captain of the sun, and you draw the sun, then you get a very powerful blessing. So to illustrate that, if you regularly get a blessing of the sun, then you can choose at one point to survive a wound or mishap that would have killed you. If you're a captain of the sun, and you draw the path of the sun, you can no longer be killed by mortal weapons. And then that's kind of like the level of kind of, you know, difference between those two things. But yeah, the idea is it, we kind of recommend people do it at the end of the session, because some of the curses and blessings will have a significant impact for the GM, for example, the curse of the moon, traps your ship on an illusion of the river in which the crew are attacked by ghosts of their greatest fears until the person who drew the cast admits a shameful secret, or something that they've been hiding to the rest of their crew and share something that they've been holding back. But you know, if you're a GM and you are suddenly told at the end of your session that you now have to put everyone on to a go ship at an illusion of the river and a sort of NetherRealm, you might maybe want a couple of hours, maybe a day or two to prep. We kind of suggest that you do communions before the end of the game. And we also suggest that you do communions before navigating the river. So at the end of every session of approver, down river, whoever is currently helping the ship, which is steering the ship doesn't roll using the whole cruise, we have a sense to kind of reflect your cumulative sailing expertise to try and reach the next location. And in the quickstart guide, that's a static role in the actual manual, the roles become more difficult depending on the location, but depending on how challenging the out of reach, but you're generally trying to get a number of falls. And if the reason that we have communions before navigating the river, is because some of the chameleons will impact that role. So, if you get the blessing of the world that lets you automatically succeed at one navigating the river role. If you get the blessing the curse of the tower, as I mentioned, your ship is struck by storm and swept randomly to one of the four nearest locations. So again, that's going to impact both what your GM is going to have to do in terms of prepping the next location and the next session, but also kind of what's happening to your characters and maybe what their decisions are. But yeah, like it's been, I personally am quite proud of the comedians, because I think what I've found so far in the play tests that I've run, is that people understand what they are quite quickly and use them as moments to essentially have sort of contemplative character moments where we learn a little bit more about who they are. And they can also then use those curses or blessings to inform their role playing. So like, if you're a captain starting the journey, I mentioned our captain who started and got the curse of the tower. He was originally supposed to be this overconfidence, swashbuckler. And immediately, his confidence was just like shattered and made very fragile because he was so worried that he was going to mess up again. On the other hand, I've had characters who've been unsure about starting their journey and then drawn a blessing and kind of felt reaffirmed and like the river is kind of supporting them in their choices and then sort of taken that into their games. And when they interact with NPCs. They know like, I know that I'm supposed to be doing this because I got this blessing and it told me that that was what I'm supposed to be doing. And then there's kind of more roleplay detail in there as well, but I'm aware that this has already been a very long So

Snyders Return:

there's nothing wrong with long insightful and inspirational answers. So don't feel bad about discussing, you know, clearly a passion and a project of love and of your own creation. There's nothing wrong with that at all. You mentioned this some conflict things. And so what where did the Where did the dice rolls? Where does the swords, spirits and tongues sort of weave their way into the narrative.

Ella Watts:

So in this way, it's a very classic kind of dis Haim. I will caution the listener that I am obviously a novice game designer, I've done a couple one page games. But I mentioned this big orphans game, but that that was never been shared with anyone. Sasha and Johnny are the accomplished and experienced designers and I expect that the mechanics might change, possibly quite significantly between now and when we're hoping to actually print the manual and get it out to people. But at the moment, sword spirits and tongs and expect this will stay the same. What's going to change is probably going to be the dice. It depends on how hard Johnny and Sasha are selling me on 2d Six, but I'm quite married to this new rule of fours and rule of sevens ideas, so let's see. But swords spirits, and tongues are kind of your general skill checks. So Swords is for physical prowess, fighting, but also kind of swimming, climbing, lifting things, etc. I also put swords into intimidation kind of style roles. Tongues is all about culture community. So crafting and cooking around here. But so it's kind of history and leadership and persuasion and deceit and just generally your insight into people. And then spirits is kind of book learning and magic. So it's how good are you at maths? How many books have you read? how much information do you remember, and it's less about kind of songs that you've heard around the campfire and more about kind of tomes that you've consumed, as well as your relationship with kind of the Divine and magic in your understanding of magic and the way that it works. So you're already 12 You add your swords, spirits, or tongue stat depending on what it is. We have this section in the manual, where we talk about how you can sometimes kind of pitch to your GM, that you might try and use one step for something else. So you could say that you want to use swords or tongs for dancing, I think both of those would make sense. But probably you can't use spirits, because reading a book about how to dance is not the same as being able to dance. And similarly, the cook uses tongues for magic, because their magic is much more about like folk magic and instinct of magic and emotional magic. Whereas the priest is much more about kind of like learning and heritage and tradition in a more formal way. So the priests would use spirits usually. Um, so you kind of roll your D 12, add the relevant stat. And then if you have an ability, you also add that the abilities are deliberately very loose because I wanted to make a rules light game. But there are essentially four categories of abilities. So there's magic medicine, combat and community. And within those there a specific abilities, so there is swimming, of course, there is swordfighting. There is also kind of specific spells, things like bewilder and shapeshift first aid for medicine surgery. And I mentioned already things like leadership, art history for community use me. Things like leadership, art history for community. And if you have the ability, you add plus one, go for it, if you don't have the ability, but you're trying to do something that's covered by an existing ability. So if you're trying to do magic, but you don't have any magic abilities, then you roll at disadvantage, and you take the lower result to reflects the fact that like, if you pick up a sword and try and sword fight for the first time ever in your life, you're probably not going to do great. And whereas someone who kind of has that ability, and therefore that's supposed to reflect the idea that they are trained in it in some way, is gonna do great and is going to have a bit of advantage. But yeah, dice rolls generally like fairly low. In the quickstart guide that we've released, the kind of DCs are like an eight for an easy track a 12 for something difficult and 16 for very difficult. Obviously, that also scales in the full manual. And in the full manual. There are sort of four broad levels that you get to you with your characters, because the idea is that every time you get to a new location, you level up and there are four and the minimum number of locations you need to do to get to the source of the sea is four. So there are four levels in the game. Everything kind of scales up and you get new abilities. And I mentioned you can play as a ghost of your character which means you get ghost abilities. So what happens when you die is you die and you immediately meet the river God you have no choice in this and you immediately get a free communion with the river God where you find out whether or not it is wrathful towards you or benevolent towards you. And once you've kind of got your castle your blessing, you get to pick a bunch of abilities as a ghost and some of those abilities are things that you can carry back with you into life. So for example, kind of speaking to the dead, is something that you will still be able to do in life because you kind of remember what those paths were. Others are limited to being a ghost sir, for example, as a ghost, you can fly as a person you cannot fly. And stuff like that. And there are kind of more powerful, and different abilities, things like you can curse to wander as a ghost, which is inspired by The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, so you can curse someone to walk forever, and never stop. And yeah, other kind of fun spooky things, which which are the prevail of ghosts, and when we'd go stabilities living players, a living player characters should say, cannot attempt those abilities they are they are something that they would not even know how to begin. So that is exclusive only to the dead.

Snyders Return:

I mean, it's a fantastic mechanic and a great use of of changing the way we look at death emit you mentioned it before and our attitudes toward death through games and and just life in general. So sticking with the this theme, more in a spiritual sense, and sort of backtracking slightly podcasting. Because we'll come back and we'll make sure we round out Kickstarter on those sort of things. Where did your path to podcasting? And where else can we find you podcast?

Ella Watts:

Oh, okay. That is an interesting question. So I have to come out at this point, I am queer, but that's not what I'm coming out about. I actually work for the BBC, I work for BBC studios as a radio comedy and Podcast Producer to my officially neutral feelings. No, I mean, there's lots of great privilege and opportunity that I'm grateful to working for the BBC for there are other things that the BBC does that I will not comment on. Um, but yeah, in terms of how I got into podcasting, I started doing community radio when I was 19. And I loved it, because I can fly a plane. And I also used to do a lot of acting. And radio was like a combination of flying a plane and acting, which are two of my favourite things to do. So I was like, this is perfect, I get to be in control of a big machine. And also I'm put on the spot in front of a large audience and forced to perform. And these two things are things that I really like to do. So I got really into radio. And then I found out that actually getting a job in radio was really hard. So I spent the next oh, gosh, like six years, volunteering with community radio stations, mostly in Bristol, which is a beautiful city and I worked for a wonderful community radio station there called BC FM. And I worked with the biggest LGBT plus news show in the southwest, which is called Shout out, which is a wonderful radio show on podcast. And I worked on the one of breakfast show as a producer and I worked on a an art show called The Saturday edition. And then from there, I got some work experience with BBC Radio Bristol, where I just sort of rocked up and answered phones. And then I applied and on my third consecutive year of applying, I got some two weeks of work experience at the kind of national networks at the national level of BBC Radio. And I got to do I got to work for Jeremy Vine on the Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio too. And I also answered the phones for pop master for Ken Bruce. And from those two weeks of experience, I, I had a lot of fun, and I decided that I would take out several loans. In order to do a master's degree in radio at Goldsmiths, which I then did. And during the course of that master's degree, I had kind of been listening to. So I love radio. I love podcasts. I've been listening to specifically drama podcasts audio fiction since 2012. And I sort of always had in the back of my mind this pipe dream about, you know, making an audio drama The friends who introduced me to d&d with whom I played that fourth edition session of tug of war. We had this idea for an audio drama called Zombie FM and for anyone who knows audio drama listening, it was a very cliched concept of like a radio show at the end of the world. It was a zombie apocalypse. It was much more Originally when we thought of it in 2012. But, you know, I had this idea. And so over the course of my master's, I got some work experience as a runner on wooden overcoats, which is a wonderful podcast sitcom about two rival funeral homes on a small island and the English Channel. And from then the lovely people I met there, I was able to get some work on the unseen hour, which is a was a radio comedy, which was recorded live every month at the rosemary branch Theatre in London, and we had live sound effects. So we would have smashing tomatoes and stabbing cabbages and bicycle wheels and all this kind of nonsense. And then I would turn that into a podcast. And then from there, I started working the orphans, which is the Sci Fi drama that I made the game for. As a as a dialogue editor initially, and now I'm an executive producer. And so that was all wonderful. And then I graduated uni and didn't have a job and had a lot of debt from my various loans. And I went to a kind of networking event and met Jason Phipps, who was he was the commissioner for BBC sounds, which at that point hadn't yet launched. And I was quite drunk. And I had seen seen, Brian, for your translations at the National Theatre, with Colin Morgan, and another famous actor whose name I've forgotten, but it was absolutely sensational. It's one of in my opinion, it's one of the best pieces of writing that has been published in the last 200 years. And so I shouted quite enthusiastically at Jason, who is himself Irish, about what a wonderful play translation was was and what an injustice, it was the way that the English had treated and do treat the Irish. And eventually, I kind of got to the end of this long, long rant about this play. And he said, Do you ever listen to like podcast drama, and I said, oh, and I started on my second round of the night. And I sort of gave him my big spiel of how much I loved audio dramas about actually volunteered. I was, you know, the most popular kid in the class, I volunteered to do an extra curricular lecture to my fellow students on audio drama, because I felt that they didn't know enough about audio trauma. I mentioned that I had this whole PowerPoint, you know, ready to go. And he was about to launch BBC sounds. And he said, Oh, well, would you mind coming in and doing that for the BBC, and we'll give you some money. And you can tell us what the situation was, is with audio drama, and I said, Oh, my God, I should have had last year. And yes, of course. And so I kind of turned up and I did this big presentation to the various commissioners of drama at the BBC, have a radio drama radio for and BBC sounds really you too. And then from there, I actually got some work with BBC sounds, they commissioned me to do a 10 year overview of the English language fiction podcast industry, which I did in 15, working days while sleeping on someone else's couch. And they published 40 pages of my 130 page report. But that kind of sort of made my name for me in the podcast industry. And people started to know me as a kind of audio fiction expert. And off the back of that I started doing articles and presenting on radio shows, I'm actually on podcast radio, I don't know when this is going to come out. But I'm on podcast Radio Hour this Friday, doing it doing an episode about spin offs, talking about audio drama, cuz I'm kind of the drama expert for podcasts radio, which is a BBC Radio four extra podcast recommendation radio programme. And yeah, and that that kind of takes me to here and I ended up getting a job. I did my presentation to BBC Studios, which is the production arm of the BBC. It's a private company. So it's not kind of BBC Radio in the way you're familiar with it. It's a production company. And they have a radio comedy team and I got a job with them part time as a Podcast Producer. And they've been working there for just over two years. And I make a variety of things. I lots of which are not currently available to the public, but the next one is going to be quote unquote, which is a quotations programme that has been running for over 40 years. Yeah, which is a very silly and fun thing to produce. And, yeah, and in my free time, I kind of do bits and pieces on lots of different dramas, I judge awards I volunteer, I organise the British podcast community so I organised kind of events and meetup. I recently ran London podcast festival audio drama day, which was something that I founded in partnership with Felix trench and Elizabeth Campbell as part of London podcast Festival, which is run at Kings place. I do all sorts of things. I'm worried that this is already very long, but yeah, I'm podcast gallop specifically the audio drama girl

Snyders Return:

One One thing that I alluded to at the start, and we haven't touched on just through that amazing, amazing, simply amazing podcast journey that you are continuing on and long may continue. realms of peril and glory.

Ella Watts:

Yes. So. Okay, so realms apparel and glory is run by a lovely man called Zachary PhotoScan. Zachary forces GM is the creator of the orphans which is a sci fi audio drama. I ran Zach's first RPG, which was 13th age, it was rescanned 13th Age using the arch major engine and it was the orphans rebellion game. Because I wanted to play us the game before we recorded it for our actual play. And so that played essentially a sci fi cleric, a Doctor Who, and I ran that campaign for two years, it was a massive campaign. I was very proud of the first arc because I made two of my players cry, including Zach. And I was like, if I can make this man cry with his own fictional worlds, then I'm doing something right. And yeah, and then off the back of that I kind of for a while. GMs lots of different games for them. So I used to GM birthday games, and we do kind of fantasy B sides of our sci fi game, sort of intro introducing that whole group to more indie RPGs and sort of infecting them with the indie RPG madness. And then, or actually, sorry, I'm gonna re say that because I know a couple of people who are uncomfortable with both infecting and badness. So I started kind of bringing them into kind of indie, RPG love. And off the back of all of that, and our failed attempt to make an orphans RPG podcast, Zach fell in love with this page, started running his own games, started playing more games, started buying more games and listening to actual plays and watching actual plays. And then after about a year of that was like kind of, I think, hit critical mass and was like, right, I'm making my own actual show. And he made this wonderful, wonderful show called realms apparel and glory, which is a it's an RPG variety, actual play podcasts. So there are several different campaigns on one shots and lots and lots and lots of different systems with different players. And the first kind of inverted commas. Kind of series on the podcast is Vale, which is a sort of urban fantasy 13 Page campaign, which is, I think, going to work out at about 11 or 12 sessions, I think, episodes, and then they've got other ones that they've currently put on their Patreon, the witches dead, which is a playthrough of grunt howitzer, which is dead. With better lists Campbell and gem saga. I have run for them spooky sword lesbians, which is a Buffy themed thirsty sword lesbians one shot set in the northern English town of snowy Vale and the Peak District. I've also run an apiary one shot for them. I've played in an Agon campaign, which is going to be coming out. I have also I'm going to be playing in a kids on bikes campaign. And there are many, many more things outside of just the ones that I am personally running or playing and. And yeah, it's gonna be a wonderful show. And I think the great thing about it is I mean, there are several wonderful things. One of them is that Zack is a fantastic sound designer. Professionally, he works in TV production and does stuff like he worked on the trailer for Spider Man far from home. So the sound design is really beautiful and cinematic and complex. And I can say this because none of the episodes will be in or out yet so we're just talking about someone else that you brilliant. So this is amazing sound design. So it's a fully sound design and edited and really well recorded actual play series and the performance Pip gladwyn. Live Campbell Maddy sell Jonesboro So Laura Girling are all just fabulous, really funny actors as well. They've, a lot of them have got a background in comedy. But then also James Barbera. So who I mentioned, is a composer. And so he composes custom scores for each series of the show. And so there's like graphics, there's sound design, there's music that's being composed for the podcast. And on top of all of that. Zach is a person who genuinely and sincerely loves independent RPGs and specifically wants to use rams apparel and glory, to advertise to people and kind of raise awareness of independent RPGs. And obviously, the games I've mentioned are not small, like I wouldn't say that no one's heard of Paragon, but I do think that it's nice to kind of like market that because the truth is that the majority of people coming to RPGs for the first time probably know the dragons games, they might know the Pathfinder game. But kind of having something out there that's like so well produced and so highly producing has got so much love in it, and is specifically working really, really, really hard to advertise kind of like more independent RPGs I think is lovely. And I think it's a fantastic podcast. and I really recommend you listen to it. And again, my episodes aren't out anywhere yet. So I'm not saying that for myself. I just think it's a good show. I was listening to it this morning

Snyders Return:

mazing amazing. If you want to a indie game a smaller game to play city mist I would recommend because by the sounds of it, your group would absolutely adore it.

Ella Watts:

I very badly want to place it if you do not need to sales pitch for your this. I am right there with you.

Snyders Return:

Wonderful. I went directly to her own natural play. That's a different this isn't a sales pitch for me. Anyway. So

Ella Watts:

it's a really good actual play though. I'll say that it's really great. I enjoy listening to I listened to hundreds of podcasts that it is a series that I like,

Snyders Return:

I'm not even sure how you find time to listen to. I'm impressed. I'm impressed. I will say what I would like to know is where we can find you and everything you're associated with on social media,

Ella Watts:

please, I Okay, so you can find me at GE J watts at gej watts on Twitter and Instagram. And I tweeting at the moment with the hashtag upriver or downriver. And if you search that hashtag, especially on Twitter, you'll be able to find lots and lots of kind of like little bits and pieces of information about the game and sneak previews of awesome playlists. And I'll draw tarot cards for you and all sorts of things. So you can find me and that there. You can also find my partner Max buyout, Max barrier who is illustrating the game at Max briah. Art on Twitter and Instagram. And then they're at juicy wizards on Tumblr, which is the adventure zone reference. They just haven't updated that URL yet, because they like it so much. You can find MacGuffin info at MacGuffin, and CO on Facebook and Twitter. And finally, if you would like to check out our Kickstarter, if you go to HTTPS, colon dash dash bit.li forward slash upriver or downriver? Why did I put the HTTP, we don't need to put that if you go to bit dot L y forward slash approver. Down river there, then you'll be able to find our campaign page. And I hope you consider supporting us.

Snyders Return:

I certainly will. And those listening, please scroll down you will find all of those links in the description below. So you won't need to listen to the HTTP section, you can just scroll down and click the link. One thing that is stunning, stunning. That's new word. Take that one for quotations. Stunning. And we haven't really been able to touch on because it's a visual medium in an audio podcast, but the artwork that my son is phenomenal.

Ella Watts:

Yes, so actually, so I should say that we've got multiple artists working on the project. So our cover for our cover image for the Kickstarter of the hands and the tarot cards is actually by kale. Leon's who is wonderful, and it's at King kale on social media. And it's just a wonderful, wonderful artist to work with. I very much recommend that you work with him if you're listening to this, and you're a person who needs to commission art. But yeah, I think he really understood the game. And that was fantastic. And then the kind of character art and the masks and things that's by Max. In fact, today Max was working on a pinup of our elven pirate queen the minnow, which is one of our stretch goals is a kind of like 20th century style pinup of this pirate, which I think is fantastic. And yeah, I mean, I'm in love with Mike so I could talk about how talented they are until the cows come home, but I think they're great.

Snyders Return:

Yeah, you mentioned their stretch goals, just in case or not, in case when someone's like, this game has inspired me I need to check it out. They click that link. You mentioned sort of sent out the the stretch goals. What is it people can contain to help stretch towards? Yes,

Ella Watts:

so there's a couple of big things. Uh, one of them is, and one that's really close to my heart that I hope that we reach is a soundtrack album. So David Devereaux, is a wonderful, queer trans Scottish composer, who has already kind of composed our title theme, which you can find on SoundCloud if you search up river down river. And if we hit one of us, I think it's our second third stretch goal. Then we will be able to have a whole album composed that you will be able to download and own and play whilst you're playing the game so that you've got the perfect atmospheric music that has been composed with this game in mind. And Dave's like music is just gorgeous, and it's so perfect for this game. And it's got like, just beautiful like sound effects of like birds and water and it's just like banjos and cool like sort of SIDS. It's very good and it's hard to describe music but I really hope we hit that one. We have a couple of our first stretch goal was kind of we get to commission more art. So if the artists something that you have enjoyed. We would really like to be able to commission artists To be more pieces of art to illustrate this game and kind of make it as beautiful as it can be. So that's kind of step one because, you know, pay your artists and, and then after that kind of our pie in the sky, ridiculously high stretch goal that, despite myself, and despite how hard I'm trying to manage my own expectations I really want us to reach is a custom printed deck of the major arcana. So tarot deck of Major Arcana cards that have been illustrated and designed for you to use and play in this game that are inspired by this world and these characters and these themes. And I so very badly want us to get there. But we will see kind of one of our penultimate stretch goals is a massive digital art pack, which is going to include a pinup of the Elven pirate queen, Julie Diamantidis, in the minnow in a kind of 1950s, queer tasteful style, by my lovely partner Max. But there's also going to be like digital tokens kind of art that you can use on things like roll 20, that kind of stuff like that. So if you're playing remotely, then you've got like a whole kind of graphic pack that you can play with together. And All backers at all levels will receive all digital rewards. So you everyone gets the soundtrack. If we get the soundtrack. You don't have to back at a super high level to get that if you back for five pounds on a hardship tier, you get it if you back for two pounds to follow along, you get it? If you're back at higher tiers, you get it too. Yeah. So that's kind of like a summary the Yes. Oh, sorry, I got really rambley there. And the other thing to mention, rivers are really important. It may surprise you to learn that I the woman who wrote a game called upriver or downriver, I think the rivers are important. But you know, they are fundamental, and they're often a little forgotten. But they really are the kind of lifeblood of our world. And we need them and we need to look after them. And, and I also do sincerely think if you're British, you very likely grew up by a river that was important to you, whether it's like the Thames or the oohs, like there are so many I mean, those are mighty rivers, but they're or the mercy. There are so many beautiful, important rivers that have impacted like almost all of our works of literature, our art, our trade, like the way that our cities and towns have evolved stuff like the Medway, the wonderful Medway, which is so underrated at the river. But it's so beautiful, and it's so ancient, and it has so much history.

Snyders Return:

Well, on that positive note, I feel like breaking out my copy of talk of the otter and some Riverside memories. But thank you all for joining me, it's been such a pleasure to get to speak with you not only about your personal projects about the Kickstarter, for art River, down river and all the fantastic work you do. And of course, rivers, which came up there at the end. So thank you so much.

Ella Watts:

Thank you very much for having,

Snyders Return:

it'd be an absolute pleasure to have you back on the show in the future future projects or as the Kickstarter finalises or for one shots or anything else like that. So I'd love to invite you back.

Ella Watts:

Please let me play in your games.

Snyders Return:

I'm sure we can get that arranged. But it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for listening. If you'd like to learn more about the show, then go to www dot Snyder's return.squarespace.com. Alternatively, you can find us over on Twitter. At return Snyder, you have a link tree link in the description of this episode. And if you want to support us, come and join us over on Patreon and we also have a Discord server. Please leave us a review because we'd love to learn how to improve the channel and provide better content alpha for those who are listening until we until we speak again. Thank you