Interviewing Josh Heath

Vampires and Consent. Two words that don’t often go together! Why not take a read of what Josh is planning to do in this area...

Please tell me a bit about yourself

I'm Josh Heath, Chief Operations Officer of High Level Games. I've done a myriad amount of work in the TTRPG industry, including writing, editing, layout, and development. My biggest claim to fame is winning an Ennie for Big Bad Booklets from Hit Point Press.

What do you like best about designing games?

I feel like I'm a natural storyteller and I love the ability to draw interesting stories out of various concepts. So designing games for me is about pulling out those interesting narrative concepts and giving them life.

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

In that vein, lately I've been developing the game May I Enter: A Vampire Game, which is due to hit Kickstarter in May... hopefully. Designer Alison Cybe did the main load of writing, based on my guidance and design approach. The thing that excites me about this game is the opportunity to dive into creating a hopepunk version of a vampire game. Our Vampires are bound by several magical principles, including May I Enter, and May I Feed. Which means they need to have active consent to feed on people or to use their vampiric powers. This makes our vampires a pretty small population in the world and they have to negotiate around building a better world while also exploring the ruins of ancient pre-human vampire societies.

Can you tell me more about these ruins and pre-human society and how that applies to the game world?

Yes. So vampires are at least as old as primates are, with one of our signature vampire NPCs being The Ancient, a vampire who happens to be an Australopithecus who was turned into a vampire millions of years ago. At some point, probably around 200,000-80,000 years ago there was an entire civilization run by vampires that collapsed before homo sapiens became the dominant hominid. This civilization evokes a sense of Castlevania and Vampire Hunter D for its ancient but future technology that players can recover from vaults around the world. It adds a bit of OSR dungeon crawl to the political and emotional elements of most vampire games about personal horror.

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

That ties into my previous response well. We want our players to practice skills around gaining active consent and thinking about ways to make a better world. But we want that to be a varied experience where some groups can lean into the personal horror elements or some groups can lean into the exploration and discover elements. In the end, all of these things are about exploring what it means to be human. What does it mean to have forever to exist? How do you balance that emotional load while also trying to create something new and interesting and good?

Is there anything you would like to promote right now?

Well May I Enter is the cool new book coming, but we also recently released Army Men: A Tactical TTRPG written by Neal Litherland that I developed that has you playing plastic Army toys as if they were people in a world of plastic people fighting against an invasion of dollar store toys.

Visit https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/highlevelgames/may-i-enter-a-vampire-game for more news about May I Enter and you can ‘follow’ the page to be notified when it launches.

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

Our website is at at https://www.highlevelgames.ca