Interviewing Lyme

By Alex White

- 5 minutes read - 864 words
Lyme is my first interviewee from the USA, and he enjoys creating and running horror games

Please tell me a bit about yourself

I’m a newer game designer. I started by running horror games in college. Listening to actual play podcasts exposed me to a whole world of different TTRPGs. In the 2010s I ran and played in way too many online games, which gave me a chance to rack up a lot of hours playing with different types of RPG players and seeing how different people approach the hobby. I like to look at the ways people play in practice and then build mechanics that support or enhance what already comes naturally.

Recently I’ve been putting a lot of time into building a local community of RPG creators where I live. I heard a podcast where Meguey Baker said, “just get some other people who like to make games and have coffee or beers together every week.” I took her advice and I’ve been shocked at how many other RPG creators live within 40 minutes of me.

What do you like best about designing games?

There’s something incredibly modern about describing a world in percentages and probabilities, and there’s something incredibly timeless about sitting down with friends to play games and tell stories. I like combining the two. Whether it happens on the notepad or in playtesting, my favorite part of game design is the wonderful “Aha” moment when a piece of mechanics and a piece of theme click together to reinforce and amplify each other.

What are you working on at the moment, and what excites you about it?

I’m in the middle of running my first Kickstarter, for the GMless Orc-building game Dawn of the Orcs. It’s been really encouraging to see something I made doing well in the wild. Once I get it shipped, I’m going to be splitting my time between a few projects.

I try to continuously improve Fear and Panic, my “best practices for horror” d100 horror game in the vein of Delta Green and Mothership. It’s not wildly different from any of the similar horror games, but I want to take the best lessons I can from 40+ years of people playing d100 horror RPGs and make the best expression of the genre I can.

I’m also working on the GM’s guide for The Lurking Fear, a stripped-down retroclone of Call of Cthulhu that I put on Itch for free a couple years ago.

The thing I’m most excited to be tinkering with right now is a yet to be titled near-future dystopian game that steals mechanics from the world of finance.

Can you tell me more about that last game?

There are a lot of RPGs that introduce themes of economic hardship by giving players depreciating assets to manage – equipment that loses value over time, because it costs resources to maintain, has a chance of breaking, or simply loses utility because it doesn’t keep pace with scaling difficulty.

Red Markets is a great example – a poverty simulator where maintaining your gear eats up the same wealth you need to use to feed your dependents. I want to see what happens when you turn things on their head and give the players a wealth simulator. They have assets that appreciate in value over time, but the catch is that they can’t just sell those assets; they depend on them, so their only way to get meaningful wealth is to borrow against the future growth of their assets, and then they have to match that growth with actual performance or face ruin.

My goal is to create situations where characters in combat need to make a tough choice between trying to finish off an enemy with a well-placed shot or taking a moment to trade futures while the have an information advantage about the outcome of the fight. I’ll probably throw in some other modern anxieties as well, like technofeudalism and energy diversification.

What experience(s) are you trying to give to players?

My overarching philosophy as a GM and game designer is that players have fun if they feel like they’re making meaningful decisions and they can see the consequences of those decisions. It’s as important to spotlight those moments of decision as it is to create them; in TTRPGs as in real life, they can be all too easy to miss.

If there’s a common theme in my games, it’s the steady and predictable escalation of horror. It shows up in both Rotting Potential and Dawn of the Orcs – the players can guess where the story is going, just not the exact details, or how their characters will end up positioned.

Is there anything you would like to promote right now?

I recently wrote Dawn of the Orcs, a GMless dark fantasy worldbuilding and roleplaying game. You play as the magical technocrats who create the first Orcs as weapons of war and tell the story of how the Orcs become their own people. You can find it on Kickstarter at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lyme/dawn-of-the-orcs. The Kickstarter runs until December 19th!

Where should people go to follow you, and to find your products?