Interviewing Evie
By Alex White
- 5 minutes read - 994 wordsPlease tell me a bit about yourself
I'm Evie Moriarty, I'm the Lead Game Designer at Modiphius Entertainment and also publish indie games when I have the time! I've worked in the industry for more than 15 years and make everything from roleplaying games to miniature games to board games.
What do you like best about designing games?
I love the challenge of taking an experience and finding ways to encode that experience in a ruleset. Games are such a unique opportunity in art to have the people engaging with them create their own narratives and experiences, but they're much less controllable than many other kinds of art. People think of rules as being dictatorial, but in truth someone playing a game has a lot more freedom over their experience than someone reading a novel. The real art of game design for me is curating that experience so they get what I intend out of it, while giving them the freedom that's key to the medium.
What are you working on at the moment, and what excites you about it?
I've been working recently on the next Discworld Roleplaying Game, Adventures in Lancre and Uberwald and that's been an absolute delight. I grew up with Pratchett's works, and the witches novels in particular mean a huge amount to me. It's been a dream to dive into it and make that an experience people get to share.
I've also been working very tentatively on an indie RPG with my friend Per Janke (incredibly talented artist) about occult conflicts in the Free State of Fiume, which is maybe the wildest history setting I've ever worked with. The challenge is really "how can we use the occult to make this more believable" because the historical record is just so implausible at first blush.
Can you tell me more about Fiume?
It's really very early days, we don't even have a firm title for it yet (our working title is Corpus Seperatum) but it's such a strange project. After the first world war Fiume became this hub of fringe politics and outsiders, and sliding the complete chaos that is early 20th century occultism into that is just adding fuel to the fire. This is the period where Crowley was setting up an abbey and over the Atlantic there was a lot of talking to ghosts. Massive amounts of material to mine for ideas.
At the end of the first world war Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia) was a disputed city. No one could agree who it belonged to, and so it became administered by the allies jointly, to stop war breaking out. Italy, one of the major claimants, was one of the partners responsible for keeping it independent. It was tense to say the least.
Enter Gabriele D'Annunzio, Italian celebrity poet. He'd been a rockstar in Italy before the war, and instrumental in them joining it. He'd then become a war hero by flying incredibly dangerous bombing runs and writing poetry about it. He believed in the beauty of death and militarism and Italy. Terrible person, amazing publicist.
He rounded up 200 or so Arditi, the Italian stormtroopers, and marched on Fiume to take it for Italy. The soldiers there basically just let him take it and ten thousand Italian soldiers joined him. The Kingdom of Italy refused to have anything to do with it, and so he claimed it for himself.
Over the next year the Free State of Fiume became a haven for outsiders, criminals and political dissidents. Fascists rubbed shoulders with communists. Irish freedom fighters went to dinner with Egyptian radicals. The ideas that would shape the rest of the century were being dreamed up here.
D'Annunzio declared music divine. He filled the fountains with cocaine. He slept on a bed of flowers. He held a mock battle in which dozens of people actually died. He held military parades that people made their own uniforms for. He was praised by Mussolini, and by Lenin.
At the end of 1920 he was ousted and fled to Italy. Fiume continued as an independent state for a few years, but the "glory days" were over very very fast.
What experience(s) are you trying to give to players?
It really depends on what I'm making. For me it's about either taking an existing setting and giving people an experience of it, or authentically portraying a new one. I have this phrase I use in the studio "evoke don't emulate" which is really key. I want to capture the excitement people have with an idea or a setting, rather than just relaying it or presenting it flat. If it's a video game adaptation I don't want to recreate the video game, I want to evoke the feeling of playing it. If it's a cool new concept I don't just want you to learn about it, I want to create a framework that makes you experience it by playing.
A good example is Mad as Hell, an indie RPG I published with Soulmuppet recently. That's about radicals fighting the literal demons of capital, and I wanted to make sure that the people playing felt like those kinds of people. A lot of book was dedicated to giving you ways to immerse yourself into the lifestyle and approach of those people.
Is there anything you would like to promote right now?
The new edition of Fallout: Wasteland Warfare has gone on preorder and I'm so excited about it. It's a true solo/coop miniatures game with a focus on exploration and relationship building as much as combat out in the Wasteland. I think it's genuinely novel, and I really hope people give it a go.
Where should people go to follow you, and to find your products?
If you want to follow me personally I'm over on Bluesky @eviemoriarty.bsky.social. To preorder Wasteland Warfare head over to the Modiphius Entertainment web store https://modiphius.net/collections/fallout-wasteland-warfare. If you want to buy Mad as Hell then go to https://soulmuppet-store.co.uk/pages/mad-as-hell