Interviewing Laurence
By Alex White
- 8 minutes read - 1668 wordsPlease tell me a bit about yourself
Hello! I'm Laurence, I'm a writer/designer/editor/uh artist I guess. I've been working in and around games, both video and tabletop, for about 9 years now. I got my break in TTRPGs writing a supplement called Primal Pathways for UFO Press (now part of Rowan Rook and Decard) and their post-post-apoc game Legacy: Life Among the Ruins. It was inspired by the videogame Spore, of all things.
I later wrote a campaign frame for Spire about disabled characters, and made some contributions to Hard Wired Island as well. Other than that, my career has mostly been in either video game media (until I got sick of writing press releases for billionaires), and then in game development itself, where I worked on Vampire Survivors for a couple of years. After leaving that job I wanted to make a go of publishing my own stuff. I'd had a project on the backburner for years about violent cinema, which stalled due to lack of funds for art. As I'd been teaching myself 3D sculpting for a while, I thought I'd just have a go at doing it myself. And here we are!
What do you like best about designing games?
I think TTRPGs are a really wonderful creative exercise, both to play and to write. I really enjoy how many facets there are to how one communicates themes, tone, and ideas. They're part mood piece, part game, part creative jumping off point, part art book. There's so many types of writing and types of design to get your teeth into
I think my personal favourite thing is systems design. I'm really not a balance and maths type designer. I really like games that evoke a theme and communicate ideas, games that you can't help but play exactly as they were intended to be played. I really liked the idea, for my current project, of trying to to design a game about niche films for people who have never seen said niche films. It's really gratifying when you get it right!
What are you working on at the moment, and what excites you about it?
Currently I'm working on my aforementioned niche cinema game, Il Fantasma del Giallo. It's rather high concept, which was a definitely an ill-advised choice for a first big solo project purely from a marketing and communication perspective. People tend to come on board with you a bit more with stuff like this when you have a tally of prominent work under your belt. But I really can't work on things unless I'm really gung-ho about the ideas I'm interacting with, so I'll just have to do my best to sell it!
The basic pitch is that it's a magical realist game somewhat in the vein of reality-bending, metatextual media like The Twilight Zone or Inland Empire/Mulholland Drive. The players are actors who have lost their memories and become stuck in a strange european city, working for a strange european film studio, making a sequence of strange european thriller/horror films. For whatever reason they can't leave the city, and for whatever reason, whenever they start shooting a film, they're all drawn into the reality of that film. Into "The Yellow". The sets become real, their roles become part of their real identity, and the violence becomes quite real as well. The films they're acting in are inspired by the 60s and 70s ouvre of intense crime and murder thrillers/horrors. The design of the game is such that you don't need to know anything about those films, we've deliberately been playtesting almost entirely with people who have never seen any.
As characters go through films and roles - hurting themselves, hurting others, being hurt - they'll remember more and more about their lives before they got here. Few of these memories are going to be happy ones! Fundamentally this is a game about playing a person who's done bad things. So many bad things, in fact, that they're unlikely to be forgiven. If you're into angst, melodrama, and exploring shared humanity - whether or not its the lighter parts of that humanity - you'll dig this! It's also super collaborative, and plays around a lot with narrative fluidity and inconstancy. Things are only true as long as the narrative needs them to be true, reality bends with the whims of narrative and melodrama.
Also you'll dig it if you just want to make cheesy murder mystery films. It even has guidance for intensity level, vis-a-vis those themes.
Do you use new or established mechanics for "Il Fantasma del Giallo"?
New mechanics! To the extent that any mechanics are new. It takes some inspiration from D. Vincent Baker's Dogs in the Vineyard and RRD's Spire, as well as trick-taking games (new and old).
For conflict resolution, it's a playing card based system built around making bids and counterbids. A conflict is a back-and-forth process of bidding, with associated narrative descriptions. The "loser" of the conflict takes the whole pile of bids made so far in the conflict. It's a system based on pushing your luck, but in a way that incentivises risk. Taking on more "damage" is not a net negative, in fact it's often just as desirable as not doing so. That's part of how I'm driving player behaviour into living up to tropes they might not even be aware of.
For the film creating part of the game, the game uses a scene-based system, where players take it in turns to draft scenes with only very general parameters. Again, trying to set up loose guardrails. Gentle limitations that drive creativity. It also means that a lot of typical pre-prep is not really possible, or needed!
A major design question in the development was "how do we make a game where your character getting brutally murdered is A. Sustainable, and B. Desirable?" The answer ended up being through two metrics - firstly, depersonalisation, by separating out the core of the character from direct physical consequence while still providing a strong source of narrative consequence and by building a narrative possibility space in which players and GMs are encouraged to think outside of just their own characters. They don't just decide how they act, they decide how they're shot, what the lighting is like, what might be in the scene, the history they might have with NPCs. They even have greater control than in most RPGs over other player characters, especially within the Yellow. Truth is bendable! Nothing can be established about your character, by you or someone else, that can't be recontextualised by another.
The second way is by building that impermanence into the flow of the game. That's part of why we have this magical realist, entering films framework, but it also comes out in mechanics. The more horrible stuff happens to you, the more resources you have in the real world to develop your character narratively, to unlock new abilities, and also further the larger mysteries of why you're here (assuming you're playing more of a campaign). So after a couple of films under their belt, players are going to be actively trying to play into stuff, trying to get themselves killed or get revealed as the murderer! Because not even the GM knows who the murderer is in these films. It could be anyone, and we won't know until the big twist reveal at the end of the film (that, true to the genre, doesn't necessarily make perfect sense and requires a lot of twisted explanations - but that's the point).
A core part of the Giallo ouvre is that every single character has a motive, and that having an alibi is completely meaningless, because eye witness accounts are garbage! They're not really puzzle boxes, like an Agatha Christie tale or such, they're rollercoasters that use mystery and suspense as drivers for excitement, tension and horror
What experience(s) are you trying to give to players?
I want players to feel like they're free to be creative, with just enough guard-rails and funnels to channel that creativity into something in keeping with this really cool genre. Something that's been really gratifying in playtesting is the moments when a player realises that they can just say what's going on here, they don't have to ask me. I don't need to tell them what's in the room, and where everyone's standing, and whether it's ok to say that this NPC or that NPC has this or that character detail - that's something I want them to do! If our dirtbag cop needs that investigative reporter to be an ex-cop washout who got booted for exposing his corruption, that's true now. Go for it. We're all making a film together, that's the joy of cinema and the joy of roleplaying.
I also want players to come away with a level of appreciation for the kind of themes and ideas that this genre of film explores, even if they never bother watching one later. Themes like anti-authoritarianism, humanism, anti-empiricism, the transformative nature of trauma... it's rich stuff, even if it is cheesy and vulgar a lot of the time.
Is there anything you would like to promote right now?
Hell yes. The kickstarter prelaunch for Il Fantasma del Giallo is up right now, and set to launch as early in the spring as I can launch it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hardyroachgames/il-fantasma-del-giallo-an-rpg-of-violence-and-identity.
If you want updates as I go, and early access to the Quickstart that's going up in early February, please also sign up to the mailing list! https://hardyroachgames.co.uk/il-fantasma-del-giallo/
Also if you want to follow me on Bluesky, you can get my threads on Giallo films and game design stuff, along with a load of political posting that I probably shouldn't do on my main company channel, but f**k it, people who'll be turned away by me posting about how much Reform and ICE suck are probably not my main target regardless.
Where should people go to follow you?
I'm on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/hardyroachgames.bsky.social
My website is https://hardyroachgames.co.uk/