Interviewing Chris Bissette

Chris is working on a solo game of murder and its consequences. As if academia wasn’t hard enough!

Please tell me a bit about yourself

I’m Chris Bissette, an award-winning game designer from Manchester in the UK. I’m best known for my solo journalling game The Wretched, which launched the ‘Wretched & Alone’ engine that spawned over 150 new games, and for my adventures for Mörk Borg (and other systems). I’ve worked on games like Pathfinder 2 and Discworld, and my adventure for the Fallout RPG was nominated for an Origins award. Most recently I’ve been helping to design the new edition of Tunnels & Trolls.

In addition to my games work I’m also a musician. I’ve toured the world with my band and I’ve written soundtrack albums for games like Orbital Blues, scored films, and am currently working on the soundtrack for the official Mörk Borg video game Heresy Supreme.

What do you like best about designing games?

I’ve been playing tabletop RPGs for a little over 30 years at this point and they were one of my first real passions as a kid. There’s something really exciting about sitting down with friends ready for a game and having no idea what’s going to emerge out of that play. The challenge as a writer is to put things into the books that give players something concrete to engage with that they couldn’t come up with themselves, but also that contains enough of a blank space that they can start to fill it with their own creativity.

I find this particularly interested when working in solo games, because the book has to fill the role that the rest of the group would usually take up when you play with friends. There’s a magic to it when you get it right that’s unmatched in any other field of writing that I’ve worked in.

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

I’m just wrapping up a crowdfunder for my new Wretched & Alone game Blood In The Margins. This marks a return to solo games after a few years away, and it’s been really fun to play in that pool again. It’s been five years since The Wretched first came out and in that time I’ve had the opportunity to play a lot of the games that were based on it, and to watch other people play them, and I’ve learned a lot about what the system does well and also what I wish it could do better. Being able to bring that into the new game and update Wretched & Alone to come a bit closer to delivering the sort of experience I want it to deliver has been very rewarding.

Can you tell me more about Blood In The Margins?

Blood In The Margins is a solo journalling game of murder and its consequences. It’s rooted firmly in the “dark academia” genre, drawing inspiration from books like The Secret History, If We Were Villains, and The Cloisters, as well as the genre of “magic school” fiction like Diana Wynne Jones’ Chrestomanci books and Naomi Novik’s Scholomance.

You play the role of a student at an elite academy. You’ve killed somebody, and now you’re trying to move on from that act while the web of investigation tightens around you. As you play you’ll develop your character, the world that you exist in (is it just a fancy school, or is there magic involved? etc.), the people around you, and explore the crime you committed. Like all Wretched & Alone games there’s a ticking clock underpinning everything, and the tension grows with each prompt as you try to cover up what you did and evade capture.

What experience(s) are you trying to give to players? Where do they find the fun in your game?

I don’t think I’m ever trying to give players an experience, because once the book is in their hands you don’t have any control over how they interact with it. All you can do is hope that what you’ve written is evocative and inspiring enough that it makes them want to engage with it in whatever what provides them with the most enjoyment possible. I think of it as being similar to designing a LEGO set. I can put a picture on the front cover of what I think you should do with this thing, but once you get hold of it it’s yours to do with as you see fit.

Is there anything you would like to promote right now?

I’d obviously like it if people picked up Blood In The Margins, which will be rolling out to backers over the next couple of weeks with a view to being on general sale by the time UKGE comes along in June.

I also currently have another solo game as part of the Weird Hope Engines exhibition at Bonnington Gallery in Nottingham. If you’re in the area you should go down to the show, which runs until the 10th of May. As well as my game - Directive 97A, which I pitch as Fahrenheit 451 meets Papers, Please - there are games and installations by Zedeck Siew, Amanda Lee Franck, Laurie O’Connell, and loads of other cool people.

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

I’m all over the place on the internet, but the best place to find me is on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/loottheroom.bsky.social. You should also go and check out my games at https://loottheroom.itch.io. If you want to work with me on something, my portfolio website and contact information can be found at https://bissette.bearblog.dev/