Sarge, Norma, and Harmony - Troupe Style Play with Andrew Beauman (Out of Orbit)

Andrew Beauman brings Sarge and Norma to the table, and we create Harmony together. Sarge, Norma, and Harmony are survivors of a spaceship crash hoping to make it back out of orbit.

Andrew and I discuss troupe-style mechanics and playing multiple characters - and how that changes the way we create characters. We discuss finding empathy through TTRPGs and learning that not everything is made for our perspective.

These characters are built for Out of Orbit, currently Kickstarting as part of Zine Month.

Andrew Beauman is a game designer and artist with a background in graphic design and marketing. His first game was published through Zine Month 2024, titled Battle School. He also co-hosts a podcast called One Shot’s Tavern about exploring new ways to tell your story through different games.

You can learn more about Andrew at:
https://www.characterswithoutstories.com/guests/andrew-beauman

What's Your Damage? is a Fifth Edition actual play podcast taking place in a homebrew world based on Filipino mythology.

Whatcha Doing? is an interview podcast talking to creative people about the trials, tribulations and triumphs in their projects.

Cover art by The Curiographer
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Thanks for listening, and may all your characters find their stories!

Transcript

Andrew Beauman: 0:00

I think that we're very precious of our characters, right? Like, rightfully so. They, in a lot of ways, are our children. They are projections of ourselves. It kind of goes back to the ethos on game design for me of like, you don't exist in a vacuum. You are the sum of your experiences, but you're also some of those relationships and the way that you've interfaced with other people's complicated stories. The way we move forward is by inviting people into our stories. And keeping a perspective that's bigger than ourselves.

Star: 1:09

Hello friends! Welcome to Characters Without Stories, a TTRPG podcast about the roads not yet traveled. I'm Star. This episode I'm joined by Andrew Beauman, a game designer and artist with a background in graphic design and marketing. His first game was published through Zine Month 2024, titled Battle School. He also co hosts a podcast called One Shot's Tavern about exploring new ways to tell your story through different games. Andrew, welcome to the show.

Andrew Beauman: 1:37

Hi, I'm very glad to be here.

Star: 1:39

So we're going to be talking about a game that you actually designed and you'll be kickstarting today.

Andrew Beauman: 1:45

Oh, yeah. Yep. It's it's all getting started. Zine Month is kicking into high gear.

Star: 1:51

Tell me a little bit about Zine Month. What is it?

Andrew Beauman: 1:53

Yeah, so Zine Month is it's it's kind of been a thing outside of just Kickstarter, and it is. Um, on Backerkit and a couple other places as well. But it is the collective effort of a lot of creatives to produce zines and TTRPG products in, in smaller book form. Obviously zines have their own history outside of TTRPGs. And what makes a zine a zine? I know you did a video of that recently. I think my books typically extend a little bit outside of that into more traditionally published books, but they're small, you know, so I still think of them in that same broad umbrella. Um, but yeah, during the month of February, people launch their crowdfunding projects to bring their product into reality and get it into people's hands. And it was a huge push for me in starting in game design to just pull the trigger. Make a project and see if people like it. The huge benefit of doing it through Kickstarter is they are an insane marketing engine being effectively a nobody without an audience. I wasn't doing a lot of TikTok. I wasn't doing a lot of social media. We had just started our podcast, didn't have a lot of audience and was able to get a good following for the project. I was able to more than just fund my goal and really get launched into actually being a game designer. And now, no, I'm not like, making a living doing it yet, but I am doing it full time by way of a very supportive partner So zine month is very close to my heart and I am excited to be doing it again

Star: 3:29

What made you decide to get into game design?

Andrew Beauman: 3:31

So I, I mean, my history with gaming goes back to late high school, but with anybody that ever touched 3.5 D&D or Pathfinder, you were hacking everything. And if you really only were inside of that bubble. That was the only option you had. I didn't know about other games. I didn't really know about even Vampire the Masquerade or other things that would work. I was like, well, it's it's this or nothing. It's a D20 no matter what. And that was just, you know, an ignorance. Getting into the space and just having pretty much only access to the immediate people around me at the local game store. And so I was hacking 3.5 for years and years and years and then eventually moved over to 5th edition. Yeah, I just had always had tons of ideas. I had wrote a lot. I had lots of homebrew methods for handling things at the table. And when I kind of finally left that bubble, I was getting into Cypher at the time and Cypher really rewired my brain on how a game could work. The role of the GM specifically becoming so much more of a facilitator and a transparent communicator rather than God.

Star: 4:47

Yeah.

Andrew Beauman: 4:47

And this weird power dynamic with the players and it really gave me a lot of freedom to relax and not feel like I'm the man behind the curtain. It's a lot of pressure to feel like you're commanding this amazing narrative and you know, the Matt Mercer effect of like needing to really make this compelling narrative for your players and, and taking that and saying, what if we were doing that together instead of it just being on me and nobody needs to be under the illusion that I am the one making this work, but we're working together to make something we both enjoy. So that shift was huge for me. And that's when I was like, now that I know that things can look differently. Let's make them really different. Let's take the things that I struggled with at the table and really facilitate a different kind of play style that I think people crave and maybe don't even realize it.

Star: 5:41

So the game that you are Kickstarting is called Out of Orbit. What were the inspirations for the mechanics in this game?

Andrew Beauman: 5:49

There's a system, it's not exactly published yet, but my system I started with was Entwine. It's all about your actions do not exist within a void. That goes for life and the mechanics of this game. And it was built around you making decisions in a game that are about what everybody's trying to accomplish as opposed to individualized glory and spotlight moments being something that you're just waiting for. Round over round, just kind of waiting for your turn, hoping to do something crazy and cool that only gets foiled by somebody else doing the exact same thing. That drove me nuts. You know, so to be reactionary, I was like, What if we just work on making cool stuff happen together? And sure, you can handle that by way of actual communication. I highly encourage that. But also the game facilitating that. Being a priority was was something that I wanted in my games. So Battle School was the first attempt at using Entwine in like a combat sim focused game, whereas out of orbit, the inspiration was taking this kind of collective approach to mechanics and porting that into one of my favorite properties of all time, which is the show Lost. Lost is complicated, people have a complicated relationship with it, a lot of people feel strongly about it. I say to a lot of people, if I didn't like meandering narratives that ask more questions than they answer, I wouldn't play TTRPGs. That's not to say that an ending doesn't matter. It's not to say, you know, anything else. I'm not making a huge defense of the ending. You can think what you want. But I liked what the show did in terms of using their narrative structure of flashbacks and a huge group of people that we're getting to know. And I was watching it again for the who knows how many times. And I went, how do I do this at the table? This is not a way that we tell stories at the table in any games that I've played. And so I began to look into troupe style games, such as like Band of Blades, a little bit of Ars Magica that was way more involved than I was ready to dive into. But, you know, Band of Blades being a Forged in the Dark game and taking a like approach to like a military troupe that then goes out on missions and then advances that camp along was, was really interesting to me to have that cycle of gameplay. So that was a big part of it. So taking Entwine, making it troupe style. So we all are owning a group of characters as opposed to my singular character that I am embodying was a new thing to try out and play with. And like I said, there's other games that have done it. But for me, it was new. Again, it kind of went back to that core design principle of you being a part of the grander team, you know, playing this game together to tell a narrative that we all find satisfying and sharing those characters, you know, giving each other the opportunity to invest into each of the characters as opposed to just, again, being focused on individualized narrative satisfaction. Those are a lot of the main goals going through it, but very early on, if you know anything about the show, one of the biggest things that they deal with is flashbacks, and I knew I had to figure out an interesting way to use that. Narratively, I was excited by the aspect of diving deep into character backstories in the middle of gameplay, and finding ways to deepen that well of, of the characters, rather than just having your 10 page back story that you might be trickle feed to the other players throughout the course of a campaign. And again these characters are shared so we get to contribute and we get to weave a complicated web of all of these characters maybe having overlap in their past at the same time as finding ways for that to inform and define the character sheet and how we interface with the rules. So, everything you do in this game is made up of your experiences. Your sheet looks a whole lot more like, like a spreadsheet full of backstory details and events that have happened to you on the planet that you have crash landed on. I don't know if I mentioned yet, but the twist I'm taking on Lost is a spaceship traveling through frontier space, which is my setting, sci fi, far future, corporatocracy stuff. Uh, you know, think Alien and Cyberpunk and all that stuff mashed together, but with more of a frontier spin. But yeah, your spaceship crash lands on a weird planet and you can't get a signal off and you're stuck there and you have to survive with this group of people and maybe one day get out of orbit. Roll title credits.

Star: 10:41

I think it's funny. Most of the sci fi games that I'm familiar with don't actually take place on a planet. Like they're very much like we visit a planet.

Andrew Beauman: 10:50

Yeah.

Star: 10:51

Most of it takes place on the spaceship. And you know, maybe this was intentional or not, but it's nice that you didn't have to worry too much about spaceship mechanics.

Andrew Beauman: 11:01

Right? Yeah. No, it's, there's, there's so many cool ways to do it. And actually a lot of the Entwine system came from me building a rule set for Cypher for ship mechanics. Basically the idea of we're flying a ship, right? So in that instance of using Entwine, we are the ship. And the way that I use my role in the ship, maybe as the gunner, is going to directly affect you flying the ship. And so if I'm just unloading the guns, maybe it throws us off a little bit. And so all of the actions then went into a pool that affected the DC for the entire round. And again, that's when I first was like, I think there's something here mechanically where my actions and my choice of actions should have some effect on the people around me. And we could then work together to do a better job of working together.

Star: 11:55

Yeah. When I think of Lost, I think of how each person has a different relationship with the collective of survivors. This is probably one way that your game would differ from Lost is that in Lost, it's not like they were all friends on the plane. They weren't working together to fly the plane or anything like that. But there's something I can see a correlation there in terms of a group of people that are banded together with a singular purpose, which is to survive, and that each person within that group has a lot of impact, not necessarily for good. Obviously, some of the people are causing conflict or trying to get their own without thinking of the needs of the collective. Do you think that there's space in your game for that kind of conflict as well?

Andrew Beauman: 12:40

Oh, absolutely. Lost is a drama. It's a sci fi. It's a drama. It is all about getting upset and yelling at each other until we figure out what's wrong. The way that I'm hoping to facilitate that is it almost functions as a safety tool at the same time as an opportunity and that is the fact again that we don't own these characters. And so we are working together to build the drama. And so if a character becomes a problem for the larger group, It's because we all chose that.

Star: 13:11

Yeah.

Andrew Beauman: 13:12

And we moved them or narratively it felt like it made sense for them to become a problem. And that in and of itself, I think it takes the pressure off, you know, wanting to be a dissenting force in a party and in a D&D kind of setting is narratively interesting, but can bring with it a lot of issues. It could trigger people. It could cause actual table conflict. You know, there's a lot going on when it comes to essentially PvP, but on a social dynamic. And like, there's opportunities for like, verbal abuse without realizing it, if you're choosing to be a dissenting force. And so, by way of it essentially making it not personal, I'm hoping for the drama of the conflict within a group to be an opportunity to really build a narrative together. To just focus on it as a story and have a little bit of arm's length detachment from the character that may be under attack or something like that.

Star: 14:05

The approach to building characters in this game is very different. Obviously a troupe style game is not something that a lot of people would be familiar. There are a lot of different approaches to building characters. But I think most people are used to like a D&D style where you have a character that's detailed, that has a backstory, that you're coming into the game with some sort of story already having taken place, or we have a game, a OSR type game like Mork Borg where it's, it doesn't really matter too much. You, we roll up a character, they're probably going to die. You don't really get too precious about it. You're not really worried about owning the character or making them very detailed. For me, personally, if I was going to play your game, I think it would be a little bit of a learning curve, just adjusting to that different style.

Andrew Beauman: 14:53

Totally. Yeah, the first session, I'm hoping to kind of tutorialize the beginning of the game to onboard people to mechanics, but also narratively. The beginning of the game is narratively us being introduced to the characters. That we as the audience and the director don't know yet. So what that means is I encourage people to like, try out the use of the camera, if you've heard that before, for for running a session. So the person that's GMing and facilitating this would be able to describe the crash scene. So this is the first moment in the game is the crash. You know, the ship has gone down. You're on an alien world and that camera moves over to the first survivor that we're going to roll. Characters are called survivors in this just because they hopefully survive, and the camera arriving at that survivor prompts the first player, doesn't matter who, to roll up using a roller table the first character that we're looking at. And, um, one that's kind of the narrative, narrative architecture of the beginning of Lost. Like, we just kind of zoom in on somebody's eye, we get introduced to them, we dive into their backstory a little bit, we cut back to other stuff. So the camera kind of arriving on the first person, you then get to roll up this character. You roll their background, that could be their role on the ship, it could be their job or history beforehand. They could be a con artist. They could be the pilot. They could be an asteroid miner, you know, all kinds of stuff. And this, if anything, is maybe the broadest umbrella that you could kind of consider the class of the character. But it just becomes what is called a tag on the character sheet. It is just another thing that you can call on in order to roll better when we're actually dealing with the dice confirmation mechanic and rolling tests and stuff like that. So the first thing is you roll background, then you roll hobbies. This is a lighthearted, you know, almost like a weird thing that's not necessarily directly related to their background. Like they might be at the pilot, but they also might just like be really into martial arts for some reason, you know, or they could just be an animal lover, you know. And again, this is a tag that gets called on for relevant situations. So even if the pilot, you know, happens to be an animal lover, maybe she is now in a situation where she's dealing with a potentially hostile beast. And she kind of wants to roll in interaction with that beast to maybe calm it down instead, because she's an animal lover you can call on that tag me roll a little bit better. And then we get into the negative tags, which is going to do the opposite. And that's going to be like a character flaw. They could be a very selfish person. They could be a kleptomaniac. They could be a compulsive liar. They could just be insanely insecure. You know, this is where we get into the kind of classic flaws situation. And then the last negative tag is more relevant to the current moment. And this is the first event that gets logged on a character sheet. And that is their injury. They just went through a spaceship crash. What just happened to their body? They could be untouched. They also could be dead. And that's interesting because you can die in character creation. Why does that matter? I find it interesting that if we roll, say, the pilot, that maybe she died. And now, if we ever find a ship or something to hopefully get off the planet, we don't have anybody that has experience flying it. It's like a form of resource attrition, right out the gate, of limiting what pool we might have. The chance of dying is pretty low. Like, it's, it's, it's rolling, you know, a one on a D20, for sure, during character creation. That's pretty much it. You roll up, uh, your health and drive, which are the only numerical stats on your entire sheet. And then you've got a character. You're gonna probably do two or three characters during character creation, where the kind of round robin the camera moves throughout the crash site. And we get introduced to these characters by you rolling them. And then kind of just defining a sentence or so about how you see this character being interpreted. And depending on their injury, they might become the very first dramatic scene we have to deal with because they're bleeding out and we want to save them. So that's kind of the weirdness of, of character creation in this game is we are through the course of play, and this is thematic of the game, we're discovering who these people are. And we're diving into their backstory, and then we all get to play with those levers of what's dramatic and interesting for us.

Star: 19:20

Imagine, we're zooming into this person's eye. Who is this person? Who are we bringing to the table?

Andrew Beauman: 19:26

Yeah, so I've got a couple prepared here, but the first one that I like to talk about that I've worked on a couple times is, I call him Sarge. He is that classic gruff, ex military kind of guy from everything that we can see on the outside is a very rough person, but there's probably more to him than that. But that's not how most people experience him. When I roll him up, he rolls ex military, potentially like mercenary now that he's left the military. And then, uh, we roll on his, his hobby. And I kind of flesh it out a little bit further than what gets rolled on the table for him. Cause I had an idea. The thing I rolled was carpentry, and I was into that. I like that. But I was like, maybe he's just really crafty, and he just likes crafts, and I wanted to dive into that, and I was like, what weird thing could he collect? And I was like, he collects ceramic cat plates. I don't know why yet, but I think that's just weird and interesting, and it's juxtaposed to what people would expect from him. It's a narrative opportunity for us to discover the depth of Sarge. And then I rolled, you know, on his flaws, and I found out he's an overconfident gambler, which is absolutely terrifying for the military trained individual. You know, again, exciting potential for, uh, how he would play out at the table. And then we just roll on his injury. I love roller tables because they're serendipitous, often. Often they make gobbleygook, I get that. But more often than that, I feel like they just do something magic. I love that, uh, for him, he has a broken leg. And so, he is not really able to move around very easily right out the gate. He is limited. He may be a very capable individual when it comes to keeping people safe, but right out the gate, he is not in a good situation. He probably doesn't feel very useful when he would want to be. Maybe he finds his, his self worth in his ability to protect and take care of people. And again, something interesting. Well, good luck. You're not getting around very quickly right now. You're the equivalent of a turret. You can shoot your gun, but you're not moving. And again, that's, that's a big deal right away. You know, that is maybe the leg needs to be set by somebody with medical training. And that becomes a moment pretty early on. That's the amount that you would normally get introduced, and it would kind of be limited to that. And that would be all you'd be expected to do, is just like talk about it in that way as you're rolling it up, and write out like a sentence that kind of sums them up, because you don't know them very well yet. You know, much like in a TV show, it's just that brief character introduction of like, Oh, OK, I don't really know who they are. This is the vibe that I'm picking up. And we know a little bit more than if you're watching a show, then, you know, just the camera passing over them. But the depth isn't there yet. And this is kind of where, like, you might roll a character that's just never interesting at all. That's fine. We just won't play them a lot. We won't dive into their backstory very much. And then maybe down the road you will. And you'll find out they are interesting because at the surface, they were just one note boring, but somebody was inspired or had an idea and they really fleshed them out further. And then we can kind of get into like the flashbacks because that stuff logged on Sarge's sheet. So the flashbacks are a narrative opportunity to deepen that well. Right? So I've talked about developing these characters, but for Sarge, you know, he's going to go out on missions. He's going to come back to the camp. He's going to take care of his business. He's going to do what he's going to do. But as he gets played by myself and other players, whenever he's up against something that he needs to roll, he has to look to his sheet. And if military, overconfident gambler, carpentry, if those don't play into what he's doing, he's rolling basically flat. You know, not a whole lot is helping him out. So that's an opportunity for a player to say, I'd like to do a flashback and we get to dive into Sarge's backstory. I won't break down all the mechanics of what's required for a flashback. But in short, if you're familiar with microscope, it's like running a scene. And we at the table get to improv a flashback moment in Sarge's history. The person playing Sarge will present the table with a question, and they will describe the scene a bit, and then we play a little improv scene to find out the answer to that question. So the question that I started with, um, and I, I've named this flashback Under Fire. The question that would have been presented to the table is what was the moment when Sarge realized he wasn't cut out for military life anymore? I would also probably describe the scene a bit, um, and then these are the notes that I wanted to probably take after the fact, so I'll just read that real quick. So during a Gorgon skirmish on a desert planet against some locals, Sarge was working with new recruits fresh out of battle school. He was being really hard on them, and they were messing up a lot. One of the kids who he was most hard on, he clearly made very nervous. While Sarge was screaming at him, the kid was fumbling around with a mag, and stepped out of cover, and got shot in the head. Sarge didn't speak for a week. This is all stuff that we would kind of improv and discover in the moment. Maybe I'm just being Sarge, and you know, you could be playing as the cadet that I'm yelling at, and then you could be like, and then while I'm fumbling with the mag, I step back and bow. I, you know, horrible moment happens. In that moment, everybody at the table is like, Oh, you just decided the answer to this question in a really intense way. We wouldn't have talked that out before. You know, we would have set the scene and said, Sarge is there. He's just yelling at cadets. And then you would feel inspired and be like, Oh, this is an interesting way to answer that question. And then as we discover that, we zoom back into the moment. And now he's probably, one, more careful about staying in cover, and two, this is a deep well of things that we could call on for any number of reasons to play into his ability to keep his mouth shut. You know, how he talks to other people. You know, like, we can call on this flashback now for a lot of reasons because we just got a lot deeper into who he is.

Star: 25:30

Would adding this to Sarge's character have a mechanical benefit?

Andrew Beauman: 25:36

Yeah, so the flashbacks and events become equivalent tags to the background of, like, ex military and, and all that kind of stuff. So this is where it gets into more of the mechanics of the system, but, uh, brief on it is you're always rolling 2D6. It's just how we interpret the 2D6 that changes. So there's three degrees. There's rolling 2d6 and taking the lowest result. There's rolling 2d6 taking the highest result. And there's rolling 2d6 and summing them together. You do that by calling on a number of tags. No tags, you take the lowest. One tag, you take the highest. Two tags, You take both and you add them together. And that's how you get your magnitudes of rolling. So you can pull on two tags that feel relevant to the task at hand. You're rolling a heck of a lot better. You're never really like rolling neutral. You're either just bad at it or you're, you're actually have some experience with it. And which adds to kind of the swinginess of kind of letting people play into their story and their trope rather than it just being arbitrary numbers. It's always tied to who they are and what they've been through.

Star: 26:41

The swinginess of it also makes me think about how survival stories like Lost are often, if I was thinking about what are the dice rolls that go into some of these decisions that are made or some of the things that occur, I would think, yeah, this is somebody who rolled really poorly and they got shot, and this is somebody who rolled really well and they discovered that there's this underground bunker with a bunch of supplies in it.

Andrew Beauman: 27:06

Yeah, totally. And I think that like, it's fun because there's so many times where at the table you think, Oh, I've got all this backstory for this character, but like, I feel like they'd be good at this. And like, there's so many GMs that are great. You can like kind of petition the GM, be like, "Hey, like, can I have advantage on this? Because it feels like it would make sense in my backstory." And they can do one of two things. They can say, "Yeah, totally. I'm on the same page as you." Or they could be like, "Well, that's not on your character sheet, and I'm not just going to give that up for whatever." But you know what I'm saying? This is basically codifying that mental process and putting it in a game where like, that's how it's supposed to work. You're supposed to feel inspired. By the fact that you feel like this character might be drawn to this task specifically, or you could make a negative tag if you're like, "No, I actually should be bad at this." And I want to put that on my sheet. But it's a negative tag only right now, like that Under Fire flashback could be a negative tag later. And that's something the GM can call on, right? It's like maybe it's a social interaction with somebody younger than him. And Sarge is maybe losing his temper a little bit. And then I call for some kind of roll for like convincing this younger person and I say actually have a negative tag so that's gonna work against any positive tag and bump you back down to rolling 2d6 and taking the lower result and so it's kind of like a way of forcing the hand. But again, he could be now good at staying in cover and keeping his mouth shut and and that kind of stuff. Sarge's second flashback, again, we're diving deep into the quirkiness and juxtaposition of gruff exterior, maybe crafty, softy on the inside. And I was, I was wondering what brought that love for this craft and precision and stuff. And so I called this flashback Eye for Detail when I logged it. But the question was, what caused Sarge to fall in love with these damn cat plates? And that's just a weird question, right? We, we, you set up these open mysteries and threads, and we don't know the answer until later when we dive into them. And so, probably what would happen is, the person prompting it is, is gonna stack the deck a little bit when they set the scene. And so they might say he's with a family member and he's very young. Maybe he's spending time at their house and then you could chime in or another player would just be like, OK, I'll I'll be his grandma. It's like, well, that makes sense. Cat plates. OK, cool. And so then we dive into the scene. And this is these are the notes that I would have taken after the fact. Grandma used to paint those cats on ceramic plates and Sarge would just watch her. He was basically raised by her since mom was always so busy. While grandma was painting in her art room one time, she tripped and fell over a tarp. Sarge came to help her, nothing was too serious, and then his mom showed up. While his mom was helping his grandma, he realized that mid fall she had knocked over the plate that she was working on and it had cracked to pieces. She had been working on it for weeks. Sarge then spent the next week gluing it all back together, meticulously knowing how hard that she had worked on the plate. In this, we get a sweet moment with this grandma that has a love for art and kitschy, you know, stuff and a kid that just cares about his grandma. And cares about the fact that she was working hard on it. He might not actually care about the cats on the plate. You know, he cares about the intentionality that she was showing towards the art that she was performing. And he cared to put it back together. And the nice part is this tag could get called on for so many reasons, right? Like you could easily pull on this for picking a lock or something meticulous, or it could just be crafting his tent. Like, clearly, he has a lot of crafty experience, not just in carpentry. Right. There's one tag, but also he has a huge eye for detail. And so now you've got two tags bumping you all the way up to adding your 2d6 together when you're rolling and you've got a way wider mechanical advantage now of succeeding at what you're doing and doing a very well.

Star: 31:04

When we talked about doing this interview, obviously there's a challenge here is that you're not coming in with a character that has a lot of information. And with a troupe, this is not one character that you would be creating, you're going to be helping to create every single character in this troupe. So you also prepared a second character.

Andrew Beauman: 31:24

Yes, I have. Her name is Norma. Norma is a 34 year old woman, um, from a megacity planet of Traya. So think like Coruscant, you know, like the whole thing is just a big old city. It's the most like cyberpunk y kind of place in the, the setting. This sentence is pulled from the things I rolled for her, but she is specialized in conning corporate assholes. Basically, she, whenever possible, takes a la Robin Hood style, takes the money she can scrounge together and help her family out. But also she uses that money to take trips to untamed planets and get away from the infinite drone of the city. She is a wildlife enthusiast. So when I rolled her up, I rolled con artist, but I was like, I don't. I don't want that to be a negative thing, really. So I went with kind of the Robin Hood-y trope of like, helping people out in the undercity and tricking the dumb corporate people and uh, using her wildlife enthusiasm and ability to take trips to some of these worlds to then like, procure goods that she might be able to snake oil convince some corporate person is a magical cure or part of some great like recipe for a stim or new hit drug or whatever. And so I rolled up con artist and wildlife enthusiast and then for her flaw I said she was bitterly envious of others. This was rolled, but again, serendipitous. I was like, hmm, maybe these rich people that she's conning, she is deeply, deeply envious of and is struggling with that wealth inequality and desire to be respected by her financial standing. And so maybe she hasn't always used the con artist-y bent for good, if you will. And so that being kind of the initial roll as we discover her character, I deepen that further by two of her flashbacks. So the first one is just hiking. Let's say this was a time where like we're out and she's on a mission and I'm like, I just want her not just to be a fan of nature, but like really good at climbing and getting up this cliff face or something. So I call on a flashback and the question that would be presented and then improv doubt was. Who did Norma meet that changed her mind about people being expendable? So this kind of goes back to maybe when she was first getting into her con artist stuff and maybe when it took a spin for good in a way. And basically when she was younger she was off on some forest moon gathering samples to trick some, some rich person. And met a young guy named Torrin and basically started to, you know, like take Torrin under her wing but then realized that her actions would essentially set Torrin up as a fall guy for the con that she was doing. We don't reveal in the flashback whether or not she goes through with it. You know, we would find out this is the person that she met that changed her mind about people being expendable. And it's kind of just an introductory flashback. We don't know the whole story about what happens with Torrin, because we improv'd a little bit of it out, but we end the scene there with the question that later hopefully gets delved into of what happened to Torrin? What did Norma do? How did she handle this? Did she, you know, set him up and screw him over? Or did she protect him and change how she was approaching stuff? That would be her first, uh, flashback, and where we kind of dive into the moral complexity of what she does. Norma's second flashback dives a little bit more into the nefarious side of her again. I saw the arc being that hopefully the present we've established that she's a better person. So most of her flashbacks are kind of diving into when she wasn't or why that shift happened. The first one definitely giving us a pivotal moment where she shifted, realizing people shouldn't be expendable. But this one was much more straightforward in trying to dive into kind of her enviousness and desire to be part of that upper crust. So simply titled it, uh, Breaking and Entering, the question that would have been presented is "What did Norma steal in her first B&E that gave her a taste of the high life?" And we probably then would set the stage with some characters and dive into improv-ing it out. I took some notes on it, and it probably would have played out something like this. Norma and fellow street kid Slug go to break into Old Man Trevor's pawn shop to steal back her speed skates that she sold to him last week. She needed the cash, but now she wants them back. Slug teaches her how to pick a lock, and while they're looking around for her skates, she sees that the case holding the most valuable stuff is wide open. She snags a gold necklace worth a few thousand creds because it made her feel important. Uh, Old Man Trevor walked in on them. Norma got away, but Slug got caught. She still blames herself. But, she wears that necklace. This is complex, right? This is regret, but it's also when she first was able to see like, Ooh, I could have these things. And she still keeps it with her. Maybe she keeps it with her to remind herself to not do that and value stuff over people. But maybe she also keeps it with her because it's really pretty and it's valuable and she wants to be seen that way. And so, again, you know, now, very simply, this probably got prompted because we have to break into a building and I want to pick a lock. But it's it's complex. And then you get to use it again later for a litany of reasons.

Star: 36:49

My first thought is, is she still wearing this necklace when we meet her? Was she wearing it on the ship? Has she moved past this feeling or, or is she still holding on to it?

Andrew Beauman: 37:00

Yeah, or maybe it's missing during the crash, you know? And that could be interesting too, where something happens and maybe we decide after the flashback, like, she had it in the crash but she doesn't know where it is. And then it comes up later, and it's important and significant, or maybe she moves on and she lets it go, and that's where I like the Discovery piece, you know? I love deep backstories, obviously, but I like the fact that we're on that journey of Discovery, and nothing's too locked in before we do it, and actually, we can kinda retcon stuff with flashbacks. We can dive in and figure stuff out. Something I've mentioned to you before was, I've had players over the years that have very different playstyles, they handle narrative stuff very differently, and with there being a very GM-full approach to the entire group of players, even though there is still a facilitator in the GM, everybody's getting a lot of narrative control. And so when you're making a character, maybe somebody like Sarge, right? He doesn't strike you as somebody that would just, in cold blood, just kill somebody. And so if a player were to be using Sarge for a mission right now and they're playing him out, they maybe add a little flashback and, you know, they dive into this character, but then they just straight up kill somebody at the table. A lot of people, especially the person that made Sarge, is going to go, "Hold on a second. That doesn't make sense. Why would Sarge do that?" And so rather than saying, "Hey, you can't do that, Sarge would not do that." Essentially, that moment is still probably going to happen. But what I find exciting is when somebody asked me that question, I was like, Ooh, the best way to handle that is one communication. But two, like we can say "yes, and" and handle that through a flashback. So we go in the moment we hold on. Why did Sarge kill that person in cold blood? Boom. Flashback. Maybe that flashback answers the question specifically. that that person, you know, maybe betrayed his platoon back in the day and did horrible stuff and killed tons of people and was a very bad person. And now we've complicated our story and given him a personal tie to a current moment where he did something that seemed out of character but had justification, even if it was wrong, you know, and in terms of his character and internal consistency. And so these flashbacks and the way that we are telling the story gets complicated, but also deeper when those kind of things happen.

What's Your Damange?: 39:46

Enter the world of Onisino, where a pale purple sky hangs over a boiling. Roiling wine red ocean. The final prison of a once powerful god. Scattered across this dire sea lie the fallen corpses of more gods still. This is the way it was. This is the way it shall be again. But this is not the way that it is now. Now we enter the arcane era. Where magic was once the sole province of the divinely blessed, it can now be wielded by any privileged enough to afford the teaching. Our heroes, misfits, outcasts, and dreamers set out to define themselves in a world caught between tradition and innovation, none realizing how great Follow the cast of What's Your Damage, as Series 2 plunges headfirst into the home brewed archipelago world of Onisino, a land of magic, mystery, and mirth inspired by East Asian philosophy, Discworld, and the films of Studio Ghibli. Available wherever you get your podcasts.

Star: 40:57

Let's build a third character to demonstrate how this system works.

Andrew Beauman: 41:02

Do you have dice on hand? You'll just need a d20 for right now.

Star: 41:06

All right. I've got my d20.

Andrew Beauman: 41:08

Great. So go ahead and roll. You're going to roll it four times, but go ahead and just, we'll go one by one.

Star: 41:14

Two.

Andrew Beauman: 41:14

Two. Awesome. You rolled the pilot. So, you're going to be building the pilot. You can decide any physical, you know, gender, any of that kind of stuff as we, as we discover who they are. Now you're going to roll for their hobby.

new: 41:29

Nine.

Andrew Beauman: 41:29

Nine. Okay. Uh, they like hiking. That's great. That's super useful in this situation.

Star: 41:34

I can imagine.

Andrew Beauman: 41:35

I mean, yeah, the pilot likes to, you know, fly over beautiful landscapes and hike through them. Now we're going to roll a flaw.

Star: 41:43

Four.

Andrew Beauman: 41:44

Four. Uncontrollable temper. So they fly off the handle quickly. And then last, we're going to find out, again, zooming into this exact moment, how they are injured. So go ahead and roll your last one.

Star: 41:57

Twelve.

Andrew Beauman: 41:57

Twelve. They have a concussion.

Star: 42:00

OK.

Andrew Beauman: 42:00

That's very dangerous. Definitely something that once we start playing, it'd be like, I'm going to need to find somebody to help me out or I'm going to take it easy. Like, maybe this character cannot go out on a mission right out the gate because it's dangerous. And then, the only other thing that typically gets rolled, if you want, uh, you can roll 2d4. This is gonna determine your health. So you're gonna roll 2d4. And then whatever you get, take that away from 10, and the remainder is how many drive you have. So if you have, if you roll a 6, you get 4 drive. Conversely, if you roll 8, you get 2 drive.

Star: 42:34

Okay, that's a 4, and that's a 1.

Andrew Beauman: 42:37

Okay, so 5 and 5, which is great. So this pilot is fairly well rounded. They can take five wounds, but they also can push themselves pretty hard when it comes to rerolling, certain tests, and exploration. So that's another way that drive gets spent is through the exploration actions. It's kind of like, you can do a hex crawl or a point crawl where you're diving into the wilderness and rolling up with the different encounters and biomes are, but you spend drive to do that. If you only have a couple drive, you might just be the person letting other people lead and just kind of keeping in the back. But you're pretty well rounded. You can get up close and personal, take some hits, and you could lead the pack heading out into the wilderness. So, yeah. Do you want to tell me a little bit about who you feel like this character is?

Star: 43:22

She's somebody who really had to fight to get where she is. And I think part of that, there's the temper arises from a kind of impatience with other people who aren't really able to strive as hard as she does. I think there's a little bit of that mentality of like, I was able to do it, why can't you do it?

Andrew Beauman: 43:41

Get it together.

Star: 43:42

And I think that she's very wiry. She's very tenacious. She kind of, there's no nonsense about the way she dresses or the way she looks.

Andrew Beauman: 43:51

Yeah. Yeah, I think what's fun too is like, because she's a very capable person that can just get stuff done, it's not that she is a jerk, but maybe it's she expects the same from others. If I can move with this amount of forward momentum, I expect you to do the same. Like, not get on my level, but kind of get on my level. Do you want to give her a name?

Star: 44:15

Ooh, okay. Something a little ironic, like Harmony?

Andrew Beauman: 44:20

Yeah, that's fun. Okay, so, probably, let's say, I'll DM this a little bit, but in a very overview kind of sense, so like, Harmony is at the crash, she probably has met Norma and Sarge, among other survivors, you know, they've set up a little bit of a camp. Some weird stuff's gone on around the camp. Maybe there's some like local fauna that has invaded the camp and taken what rations had already been cobbled from the wreckage of the ship. And everybody knows we are very low on food. We we can scrounge what we can right now for a little bit. But we need to get out into the wilderness, do some hunting, get something to actually satiate our people. But if we're going to be here for any amount of time, we need like a food source. So this is like not just getting food, but it's about scouting and knowing some of the immediate area. And as a result, they call on Harmony among other survivors to kind of go out and do some initial scouting and get a lay of the land to know what we're up against. During that scouting phase, she probably would be leading the pack, entering into new places, and getting a sense of the nearby locations. As well as some of the threats and the weirdness of this planet. It's, it's not just a lush forest moon like she may have been to before, but It is covered in strange anomalies. There's even some weird temporal anomalies. Maybe we lost somebody already. Where they encountered this weird puddle like anomaly in the area, walking through this forest, and they aged 60 years walking through this puddle. And ended up just having to go back to the camp maybe to only die a couple days later because of, they died of old age. So we're out on this, morale's a little bit low, and right now they know in order to keep going in this direction, um, where they see maybe some waterfall, hopefully fresh water source, not too far away, they gotta go down, um, this cliff face to get nearby and then maybe reroute another way. So if she's up against that and knowing she's got to navigate this cliff face with other people that maybe are not good at climbing, we would enter into like a round based encounter where everybody would declare actions of kind of pushing forward or pulling back and helping the team. And let's say you are wanting to do this even better. We've already got hiking as a tag that can help. But if we really want to get you to maximum affinity on this role, you're going to want another tag to support because pilots not going to help you. Your temper's not going to help you. In fact, your temper might be a negative tag. Yeah. So you really want something to help you out here. So in this moment, the flashback does not have to be necessarily only about climbing a cliff. This can be really about anything. And climbing just needs to be in there somewhere. You know, it just on some level, it makes sense to call on this for the task at hand. But, the goal here in defining this flashback and the question we ask is deepening the well of this character. To find out more of who they are. Because we don't know. And don't feel like you have to know the answer to the question. Architecture of a good question, and this is not restrictive, but just hopefully to give some inspiration, is to start out with your five W's. The who, what, where, when, why, and kind of call on that to frame your question. Look for important nouns, people, location, time, and then the result and change. Not necessarily prescriptive, but this is where you get to kind of stack the deck. So some examples of questions. would be, "Why is this fishing trip the last time me and my mother spoke?" You know, we know they're on a fishing trip. We know that something, conflict, or life change is gonna happen. Uh, another example would be, "What did they say to my father in law to convince him to sell me out?" Right? Like, whoa, there's a whole bunch of drama there. We know they've been sold out. What for? Who knows?"How did falling in love with my best friend hurt my self esteem?" Well, we can infer a lot. You know, like those are kind of just the really dramatic ones. It doesn't need to be that complicated, right? Think back to Sarge. Why does he like these plates? It doesn't need to be crazy, but we know that the liking of the plate is a big deal for him. And that's kind of the life change moment. So I think that in framing a good flashback for Harmony, I want to dive into other aspects of her. You know, we know she's got outdoorsy things. We know that she is a very confident, capable individual, but like I want to play into maybe some of her vulnerability and maybe the if and how she ever has questioned herself and her own ability to pull things off. Because maybe that plays into like a performative aspect of being capable. So those are the things that'd be going through my head and framing a question and wondering what the other side to this person is. And I would think, maybe I want to introduce some characters that are significant to her whether it's family members or friends I think that in this I might want to introduce just a close confidant individual so I would probably set the stage and say this is just Harmony and close friend who's going through a divorce and she's talking to this friend and being vulnerable about things and maybe the question that I would ask is, "So what did Harmony's relationship in regards to the ex have to do with this conversation she had with her friend when she came to her for advice amidst a divorce?" And then we would dive into that, and I don't, I don't know the answer. There feels like obvious answers that people would grab onto of that, but it's an opportunity to either subvert that or lean into it and enjoy the complexity of that narrative. I think the capability part of this, she maybe doesn't feel equipped to give this advice, or feels that because maybe she was close, not necessarily romantically, but like just as a friend of the ex that it makes it really complicated in giving advice to her friend who's coming to her. And that just created some inner inner turmoil or conflict. And then we really just have a backdrop of like they went out for coffee and went rock climbing.

Star: 50:40

Yeah, what I think is that when this woman comes to Harmony and Harmony is friends with both of them, that she reveals that the partner or the husband or wife or whoever was abusive, not necessarily physically, but maybe verbally abusive, or she's, there's a side of their relationship that she has never seen or been privy to, and it causes her to reconsider her own friendship with the ex.

Andrew Beauman: 51:09

Yeah, that's super interesting. I think that what this this leaves us with is maybe her relationship to abusers or her approach to just complicated relationship dynamics and how she maybe does or doesn't feel equipped in that space to maybe mediate, like, she's very confident about what she can physically do and what she can get done, but the minute other people are involved, it's messier.

Star: 51:36

Yeah, I would say maybe she has personal experience with being bullied, perhaps even being a bully. Yeah. Obviously, she has a temper and she expects people to just kind of go along with her and get to her level. So maybe it's complicated by the fact that she sees behavior that she personally has done that kind of aligns with that and she didn't recognize that. And so this is a turning point for her in terms of recognizing that behavior in herself and then becoming very protective of people who have had that situation too. So maybe, you know, in this situation of attempting with a group of people to Do this rock climbing, maybe there's a interaction between two of those people where one is bullying the other and what she gains from, from this flashback in terms of mechanically would be something like able to manage conflict in a group or protective of people who maybe are encountering that.

Andrew Beauman: 52:35

Yeah, definitely. We kind of have. Sarge, who has a bit of a proclivity to yelling at other people, similarly, that aren't doing things in a certain way. And maybe he's kind of falling back into that. Maybe we had that flashback, you know, this session of him jumping undercover and stuff. And so maybe she ends up able to kind of talk to him in a way that reminds him or pulls him out of that space and is able to protect the other person but also recognize that maybe he's experiencing some triggers or acting out of line with with who she thinks he is and and has experienced him so far. That's basically what you get to do then you get to roll better. You get to climb you get to dive into the drama of these people and they get into fights and they don't like each other and maybe the camp splits at some point. Maybe, you know, there's a lot of weird stuff that's going to be discovered while they explore into the wilderness. They're going to find very weird like alien life forms. They will find all kinds of threats. They'll find beauty. They'll find an insane landscape that's unlike anything in frontier space they've ever experienced. They're going to experience other bizarre anomalies like that one where somebody fell through and aged, you know, 60 years. They're gonna do things that they never thought they could do, and we get to go along with them on that journey, discover who they are and who they're becoming, and, and, and hopefully get them off this planet.

Star: 54:03

I also love that this creates a potential for developing or complicating relationships between the characters that everyone's playing like I could see Harmony and Sarge almost bonding over this like Harmony pushing Sarge to be better and Sarge in return kind of pushing Harmony coming from backgrounds where they're both kind of disciplined and and maybe a little bit rough around the edges at least at first glance giving them both a chance to grow together.

Andrew Beauman: 54:32

Yeah, and I think that it's fun that you could, through the course of multiple sessions, be on either sides of that conflict. Like, you could be Sarge the following session, and because you felt that from interacting with Sarge as Harmony, the next session you're like, I get to play into that. I get to show Sarge dealing with more of that and dive deeper into his flashbacks and in his history to develop him maybe in a different direction than like I rolled him up when I first started him. But we all get to go, whoa, that's cool. I didn't expect that in him and I wouldn't have put that in there. But Star did and now it's better. Yeah, that's, that's the kind of stuff I'm excited to see more at the table.

Star: 55:16

And it's, again, it's a very different approach because when you're playing a game or you're very invested in your character, you may not make the choice that makes the narrative more interesting because you're protective of your character. You maybe don't want to get them in risky situations or maybe you take kind of like a, "that's what my character would do," in air quotes, kind of approach to it, uh, which can be detrimental to the wider narrative or to other characters in the game. You know, I've had situations where, I mean, even I personally, but other people that I've played with at the table, where that has been a complication that occurs.

Andrew Beauman: 55:56

I think that we're very precious of our characters, right? Like, rightfully so. They, in a lot of ways, are our children. They are projections of ourselves. They are something that we want to take care of. Or get something out of, you know, in a transactional way of performance and like exploring ourselves. But I think that it kind of goes back to the ethos on game design for me of like, you don't exist in a vacuum. You are the sum of your experiences, but you're also some of those relationships and the way that you've interfaced with other people's complicated stories. And we get more interesting and better and we grow by discovering how deep people are. People that are very different than us. I have a hard time talking to people that I really strongly disagree with politically. But the longer I talk to them, the easier it often gets, as long as we're able to find those common ground moments. And I think that now more than ever, we need to find that. And it's hard, and sometimes we have to walk away and say, I can't. And I think that that is a thing that, you know, we don't always get to explore in the tabletop is the complicated side of the relationships. Because again, because it's not you playing your character, you're playing a survivor that might actually rage quit the group and leave.

Star: 57:11

Yeah

Andrew Beauman: 57:12

But you're not leaving the table. You get to keep playing. You know, they might be like, screw you, I'm out of here, I'm going off into the wilderness by myself. It's like, great, go. And, and I just think that that is an opportunity to be, like, intellectually honest with the arc of a character. Because sometimes we're playing a character and we keep it redemptive, we keep it good and fulfilling to play. But not necessarily, like, as if it were a TV show. Sometimes people that we see as a hero and a protagonist that we care about go down a dark path and they don't get redeemed and it is far more narratively satisfying for us. And I think that we miss out on those opportunities sometimes in a trad game that doesn't really facilitate that.

Star: 57:56

What about your personal experience and your approach to playing TTRPGs informed this different approach?

Andrew Beauman: 58:06

I've always been of the mind that I am significantly better when other people are able to crack through my arrogant and confident shell and provide feedback. and make me better and I am far from ignorant of my own weaknesses, right? Like I, I'm very aware of them, but I, I like to act and move forward in spite of those. I think I'm good at that, but it also makes me less accessible feeling for some people that they don't feel like they can speak into that. Because I can come off very confident or very strong or very aggressive, it makes me feel less accessible. And that has always been one of my biggest struggles emotionally, is feeling as if somebody could fear speaking into me, and speaking into what I might need, because they might think my aggression might push back and be too much for them. I've always said in conversations with my partner, like, the worst thing somebody could say to me is that they're scared of me. The worst thing they could say. I know that I am not without intensity, and I know that people will be scared of me. And I think that that struggle throughout most of my life, of deeply, deeply wanting to be received as a gentle, safe person, and knowing that is not how I come off, has been the tension that I have lived in. All of that to say, I see the community and close people that are able to collaborate on complicated issues that are willing to speak in and work together on things are going to make me better. They're going to make me feel safe. They're going to make each other feel safe. And our vulnerability and our ability to say yes to the complicated and say yes to being in community, even when it's not easy, is so, so important to all of us having a valuable and quality of life that we want. All that to say is I just, I really, really believe in community, and I really love strongly, and I care deeply, and you know, I've been involved in lots of non profits, and I grew up in the church. I have a view on community and the place that it has in collective aid and communal strategies that we can work together for something that is better. And I think that hopefully that comes through in my games in the way that I desire for people to have a scope beyond themselves to recognize that their actions and the way they live their life has consequences outside of themselves and that the way we move forward is by inviting people into our stories and keeping a perspective that's bigger than ourselves.

Star: 1:00:51

Most people that I talk to talk about how they find commonalities or areas to explore by working through that character, by playing or embodying that character. Your approach seems almost diametrically opposed to that. But there's something I see in Sarge, for example, that echoes what you were saying about yourself, which is that it may not be clear to people from your exterior or from people first interacting with you that there's a softer, more vulnerable side.

Andrew Beauman: 1:01:23

I think that that's, I mean, it's very much the way I was seeing putting Sarge together is just people are complicated and the way that we receive each other just on any given day is just a slice, you know, it's just a little, little part and they are a deep, deep well of a person that is experiencing reality in a different way than us. And growing up with a very, very narrow worldview and a very specifically wired brain, not that it's more specific than other people, but like then learning like how much I had to learn to exercise empathy, you know, it came naturally in certain aspects. But like in other aspects, I think I relate more to like even how harmony is like, like, guys, come on, this is not hard. Let's let's do this. But realizing, oh, this is not how people receive me. This is not how people receive my communication. This is not how people think. This is how I think. And I, I try to explore that in the characters I play in other systems where it is much more traditional, where I embody a specific character. But what I'm personally excited about playing this game is letting people more quickly and comfortably change those hats and empathize with the greater collective group of characters that they wouldn't maybe play. And I know a lot of people that they never, you know, a lot of cishet white guys that have never played a woman that have never explored outside of that identity. And it's uncomfortable. And for me, for years, that was for all of the toxic masculine reasons. It was not OK. And it is. And you should. And that will teach you a lot about the world around you and like discovering, not necessarily like, you know, playing into negative tropes like that. Definitely could happen, have a session zero, talk about that stuff. But learning, maybe I do identify a lot more intensely with my femininity than I thought. And by playing out a character that, leaning into tropes or not, like we clearly put a romantic interest in their life and it's in her flashbacks. And I'm playing as her as a cishet white guy. This is weird. Like, I feel vulnerable. And maybe that unlocks something in me that I would not willingly come to the table and say, I am playing a woman that is soft and sensitive and loves deeply. Instead, it's like, well, she's the best one for this mission, so I'll pick her, and then I discover that along the way. And, I think that, you know, I, I, I say this, like, when I was talking with my partner about, like, we watched the Barbie movie, and I so clearly remember the moment where I'm like, that was such a good movie, but wow is it interesting to completely not be the target audience, right? Like for me, it was not that I didn't enjoy it. It's that it was like, wow, that wasn't speaking to me. I mean, it was in a different way, but it wasn't speaking to me in the way that I grew up with movies almost always speaking to me because I'm a white dude and like I get that experience, but I don't really get that experience until it's not talking to me anymore. And I'm experiencing it differently. And then I get to also tap into hopefully some empathy that, oh my gosh, other people feel like this all the time. This is different. And I think that we're, we're, we are creatures of habit and we do things that we find comfortable. And I do that with characters that I roll up at the table and I play out, you know, very intellectual, very confident people all the time. I love playing wizard in D&D, you know, I love having the ability to do what I need to do and not have to rely on anybody because I deeply need people. And I am very insecure and I lack a lot. And that's me going, well, what if I didn't? And I think that we will explore more when we are put in the situation that gives us the opportunity to empathize and learn about others and the diversity of people that are out there. And not everybody works like you.

Star: 1:05:21

Making work, whether that is a TTRPG, or a movie, or a piece of art, a piece of music, that speaks to an audience that isn't really being spoken to is really important. The Barbie movie, I mean, for me, as a woman, it's not perfect. But so much of it resonated for me. And there were parts of the movie where I was crying the first time I saw it because I was, I was so touched or so moved by some of the things that were said where I was like, "Wait a minute. Here's somebody speaking my truth."

Andrew Beauman: 1:05:52

Yeah.

Star: 1:05:53

And so I think obviously most of the works that we see in the mainstream are spoken to the truth of being a white man, or at least not really thinking about that actually being a truth.

Andrew Beauman: 1:06:05

Not the default, yeah.

Star: 1:06:07

Right, right. There's, there's this idea that like, oh, well, this is for everyone because it's for white cis men. I love that your game is giving people an opportunity to try something else and maybe realize that that's what they're usually experiencing.

Andrew Beauman: 1:06:22

I remember aspects of myself that I'm not proud of, where it's like when I started gaming, I was like, guys, can nobody gender bend and like play a different character than their gender? Like, this is weird because things made me uncomfortable. To be fair, a lot of the times back in the day, it was like some weird guy over sexualizing a woman and making it weird. So like that, that was mainly why I didn't like that. But like, Also, it was something that was new for me and I grew up with that toxic masculinity and I'm like this needs to be defined and clear cut and I'm scared of my femininity and I don't want to be perceived as something other than I am and I wasn't very in touch with like how I approach sexuality and it was just not, it was not comfortable at the table. This was not a space where I was ready to do that, but I found myself so much more comfortable. As I saw other people exploring themselves, becoming more vulnerable and being open to changing aspects of themselves and then having friends come out as bi, gay, whatever thing that they discovered through the course of their life and through play that they didn't know before. I have discovered a lot about myself, and I've, I think I first started to realize that I wanted to better understand my relationship to femininity through role playing out a romance between an NPC and one of my friends. And like, being like, that wasn't gay, that was cool, you know, like, that was cool, that was satisfying, that was interesting and narrative, and like, I was like, how do I make this narratively fulfilling for him, and for this NPC who doesn't exist, that's a representation of myself, I remember that moment so long ago, and I was like, did we just do that? And like, it was weird, but that pushed me. And like, as a GM, I get to experience a lot of that. That's why I see this game as very even though there's still a GM, but it's really a facilitator role, and it is encouraging everybody to experience things in a more GM-full way where everybody gets to do that. They get to play a little bit more than they're used to. And I, when I'm a player, it's like, I feel trapped sometimes. I'm only this character and I don't get to play with levers outside of myself. And I think the beauty of being a GM is you have such a, like a wide latitude of permission to interface. Yeah, I crave more of that. I crave that for other people. Because I don't think it needs to be restricted to just the GM who's god over your game. Like, that's insane. We're all equals at the table and we should be contributing in different ways. It doesn't need to be that way. But I don't look at GMing as, let me dictate. It's, let me ask questions. Let me prompt you with opportunities to build the narrative. And there are things that I will make for this table. I'll make lore and I'll make things that I'm excited about, that I want to give my friends as a gift, but I don't see it as holy. I don't see it as like sacrosanct, don't touch it, I'm in charge. Like, I want them to put their fingerprints on it.

Star: 1:09:25

Yeah.

Andrew Beauman: 1:09:26

Yeah. I just want more games like that. So I make them.

Star: 1:09:28

The other thread I pick up on when talking about this is, and we mentioned this a little bit when we were talking about how you build characters in OSR games, and how so much of it is on a roll table, and there's a serendipity to making a character that you didn't expect and kind of forcing you into making a choice that you wouldn't have made. And I think that your game does this in a similar way, but allows you to be a little bit more in depth with it, because I think a lot of people, when they're creating a character, whether it's subconscious or conscious, I think there is a level of knowledge there. That you are exploring something about yourself. We recognize patterns in the way that we play characters, but we often struggle to move past them. And I think your game forces people to do that without telling them that you're forcing them to do that, which I really like.

Andrew Beauman: 1:10:17

That's what I'm all about. It's totally manipulative sounding, but like I just I love, like I said, I did not experience the world with a lot of empathy for a very long time and learning that I hadn't been doing that right because it was not conscious. Learning that I hadn't been doing that just changed my worldview. I want people to experience that. I want people to give a shit about each other and learn that they. Yeah, I don't need to preach. You get what I'm saying. I care a lot about this. Games are so important for that because of the exploration piece. And I think that we're willing to accept certain ideals when we're not, you know, like when we're playing. I remember the first time I played a cleric, it was like five years ago. I was watching clips the other day, and it's like I played a cleric of Dendar, the Night Serpent in D&D, and I wasn't like distinctly trying to be evil, right? I wasn't edgelording it, but like, I did have to go into it, and I'm like, why would somebody follow the Night Serpent who wants to eat the sun? And in the world, why? And so, like, I had to, like, make doctrine and, like, use my religious trauma for evil, but like make logic of his belief in in following this deity that is terrible and awful. It was an exercise of empathy and going- one, how do cults and indoctrination work? But also, like, what are maybe the positive spins on this? Like you think about how people talk about the Eucharist or communion. This is the body. This is the blood. That stuff sounds dark. Sounds very dark when you aren't experiencing it as a cultural norm. Right. So I was like, What if that's like how we received some of this stuff? Take these weird, dark, evil D&D deities and like, oh, it's just the body and the blood. No big deal. And build a thing around that. And that for me was huge because I was like, oh, this is not about painting somebody as other and evil. It's realizing they have a different cultural experience with this idea of godhood and the relationship with mortals and all that stuff. And then even creation and reality and what should or shouldn't happen. Dendar's all about fear and nightmares. I remember improv-ing out with a friend that I was corrupting a paladin. OK, I was corrupting a paladin to follow the night servant. He's like, I need to conquer my fear. I'm like, no, like you need to realize that you're afraid and that's OK. Like that was the kind of stuff that I was exploring and going like, that's not what I thought would come out of me. And like this evil cleric is like giving somebody a therapy session. That's not about being evil. It's not about being scared, but it's about realizing that fear is part of us and accepting that that's what games can do. And I love that. And those are some of my favorite memories.

Star: 1:13:24

Sarge, do you have trouble trusting someone?

Andrew Beauman: 1:13:27

There's not so much the trouble of of trusting. It's just recognizing that. It's, it's so much more of realizing that I am responsible for the people around me and what I do. Has a very, very deliberate effect on, on them and their safety. So it's, if somebody were to come to me and be contributing and doing something significant, I'd happily give that to them. It's just a matter of trusting myself to give away that responsibility and be alright with it. Cause there have been times where I've trusted others and handed that off and seen the consequences of someone not being worthy of that trust. But as long as they recognize the, the responsibility that goes with it, I think that they're worthy of another try of, of, of being given that trust.

Star: 1:14:14

Norma, is it hard for you to trust someone?

Andrew Beauman: 1:14:17

Yeah, I, uh, I've not been able to see people worthy of receiving my trust. And, uh, the world's full of horrible, horrible people that don't give a shit. They don't care what you're going through, they don't care where you came from, they just want something from you, and they aren't going to give you much to work with. They're always going to give you less than they take from you, and it's up to you to protect yourself, it's up to you to protect people you care about. So I'll trust somebody if they're close, and they've earned it, and they've got the, the legacy with me, but I can probably count on my hand the number of people that I would say I trust.

Star: 1:14:57

Thank you, Andrew, for coming on the podcast and for sharing Sarge and Norma and building harmony with me today. I will be putting a link in the show notes to a guest page where people can find all of your socials and everything you want to share with them. Are there any projects or anything you'd like to talk about?

Andrew Beauman: 1:15:14

If you like the kind of stuff you heard, um, a lot of it is true of, of my first game, Battle School, which you can get right now. I, I'm excited about what we're doing this month with zine month and out of orbit is going to be funding all month long. I'm also going to be hopefully doing an actual play, which, uh, you'll be able to find on my socials, do a couple sessions, dig into it, little play test games and still in development. But, uh, you can get everything. Um, I'm sure we've got links in the description, stuff like that, but it's andrewbohman. com. I'm on itch. I'm I'm all over the place. The world's changing in terms of social media, but we'll see what's next. This has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on

Star: 1:15:55

For my recommendation this episode, I'd like to introduce you to a podcast called. Whatcha Doing? My friend Matt decided he wanted to talk to people about creative projects they're working on and it's delightful. Hearing people talk about their passions is a fun listen. I'm not biased even though I'm Matt's first guest. I promise. Please share the podcast with a friend. Word of mouth is the best way to find new listeners. Your recommendations help me immensely. Thank you to all my listeners spreading the word. I am so grateful. One of the things that any creator wants to know is what people think of their work. For podcasters, it can be especially difficult to get feedback. Reviews on Apple Podcasts or Spotify are a great way to let me and others know that you love the podcast. I read every single one and treasure them. Did you know that you can now leave comments on individual episodes on Spotify? If you're listening there, I encourage you to leave a comment and let me know what you think about an episode. You may have also noticed a link in my show notes that says, "send us a text message." If you have a question you'd like me to answer in a future episode, or just want to leave a comment, send me a message. I started a newsletter! As our social media landscape is forever changing, this is one way to make sure we can always stay in touch. If you'd like to get a behind the scenes peek at the podcast, follow my other projects, and be notified when a new episode drops. You can find the signup form in the show notes or on my website. You can find me on Blue Sky Threads, Instagram, and Facebook as Characters Without Stories. You can also listen on YouTube at Characters Without Stories or just follow the link in the description. I'm currently accepting submissions for non D&D characters with a strong preference for creators from marginalized communities. If you'd like to share your character, you can go to characterswithoutstories. com and click submit in the navigation menu. Thanks for listening, and may all your characters find their stories.