GETTING SALTY ABOUT IT: DESIGNING THE NEXT RESISTANCE GAME
I’ve been writing Salt, the follow-up to Heart and Spire, for about five years now. We’re just about to hit the first playtest.
Let’s talk a bit about how that’s all happened.
We’ll do it in two parts: the first is some inside baseball on how we actually make games at RRD, to set the scene. Then I’ll talk about what’s actually new with Salt, and what I’m doing to the Resistance system to make it do what I want. (Hopefully.)
BIG long blog. Hope you like reading, coz baby, that’s what’s in store:
WHY NOT TAKE A SIP OF ROWAN ROOK AND DECARD’S HOMEMADE OLD-FASHIONED ROLEPLAYING LIQUOR
We have a method for writing games, here at RRD, and I like to think of it in terms akin to those Jack Daniels adverts they did about twenty years ago: we’re slow. “We do things a little differently down here on the ol’ Rowan Rook and Decard ranch,” I’d say alongside some slow-motion black and white footage of Chant stirring a big mash tun full of dice or Matt pulling out a jeweller’s loupe and closely examining a GM screen.
“We know that the best roleplaying games take time. So we don’t rush. Our games are ready when they’re ready,” cut to a shot of me crowbarring open a barrel, extracting a sodden copy of Spire 5th Anniversary edition, taking a big sniff along the spine and nodding in a satisfied fashion.
Now: Jack Daniels know how long their syrupy piss takes to concoct - I presume it’s a half an hour or so and the remainder of the advertised time is taken up with bottling and administrative tasks - so the analogy runs out there, because we don’t really know how long anything is going to take.
This is because we’re creative-led, not money-led - I have a mantra, which might frustrate the more business-inclined members of the organisation, which is “we’re here to make books, not money.” Without IP owners breathing down our collective neck looking for returns or demanding we stick to schedules, and without shareholders asking for profits - not that a lot of RPG companies have shareholders - we can just make the damned things and hope that our dedicated core audience wants to buy them.
It takes a while. It takes a number of years. At least two.
STEP ONE: FALLING IN LOVE
Step one can take about six months, doesn’t really count towards the total length of design time, and it determines whether or not we’re going to try and make it. Chris and I have about one idea for a book each per week, depending on how sad, busy or stoned we are, and there’s no way we can make all of those books. But sometimes one breaks through, often when we’re in the fuzzy ending stage of the previous project, so we have an enthusiastic ideation stage where we throw every idea we have at it, and - gods - it’s wonderful.
I love the first bit of games design. There’s no wrong answers, no limits, no “oh we can’t do X because of Y,” everything is possible and it’s going to be the greatest game ever. I guess it’s like the opening stages of a romantic relationship: you’re crazy about them, you can’t shake them from your mind, and they’re the first thing that pops into your head when you light a cigarette or turn on the shower or wait for your tea to brew. They’re waiting.
Listen. I have a confession. I imagine this will surprise no-one, but: all I want to do is design the first ten percent of games all day.
You can’t get heartbroken when defence doesn’t work, you don’t need to cut a class because it doesn’t fit the new shape of the player character lineup, you don’t need to answer your Producer’s questions about paper quality vs cost vs shipping weight. It’s all gravy. It’s all genius. No wrong moves. Nothing but glittering potential stretching ahead forever.
STEP TWO: BEING IN LOVE WITH SOMEONE IS NOT THE SAME AS LOVING SOMEONE
- John Hurt in Captain Correlli’s Mandolin, I think
But: we must, at some point, decide whether or not there’s a whole game in here. That’s where most of these ideas die: there’s not quite enough there, there’s not the required enthusiasm, the spark doesn’t catch us. Not that we actually kill the ideas, mind - we leave them mouldering half out of shame and half out of hope that maybe, one day, we’ll rekindle the flame.
Here are some of the abandoned projects that we have, at least, put a month or two’s work:
OCEAN BASTARDS, a tactical area-based salt-water-in-your-robot-parts cyberpunk game about living in religious service to one of several counterculture Algorithms that set themselves against the dominant silicate intelligences that run the world - the harvest, the hearth, the eye. Came up with a neat reinforcements mechanic and stacking objectives around a 4x4 grid. First playtest in 2022 didn’t happen cause one of us was ill. I never went back to it ever again, aside from to recycle some of the weapon names for the back page of TONIGHT, TONIGHT.
BUBBLEGUM JUNGLE, which is cyberpunk again, the “wow, cool future!” meme but unironically. I wanted to make a game that felt the way it felt to look at an overclocked iridescent pink and yellow monocycle screaming down a Japanese high street. I wanted a game where my gun had a sponsorship contract and my ceramic vibroknife came in one of twenty colours. I came up with an interesting core mechanic which was basically Unbound but using dice instead of cards, but the big dumb straightforward aesthetic-first pitch bored me. It wasn’t about anything. It didn’t matter. Turns out I didn't want to make that game.
THE DEEP, which I wrote to playtest in 2016; a boardgame, of sorts, where futuristic spec ops clear out hordes of the undead from the condemned space station Elysium and uncover the horrible truth behind their involvement in the tragedy that befell the colony. I attempted to rejig it to fit the Havoc Engine that powered Eat the Reich last year, but it was boring. Too much saying “no” to the players. Interestingly enough, some of the names I stole from OCEAN BASTARDS to put in TONIGHT, TONIGHT originated here, so really we can see I have no original thoughts and I’m just scrubbing through a brief period of inspiration I had in the mid-2010’s.
WITCH BITCHES [working title], where you play mortals fated to do film-noir PI work for Ancient Greek witches who happen to live in 1930’s LA. Chris took the lead on this one. Some lovely bits about drug use - you were assumed to always be slightly high unless you sobered up on purpose, and the more twisted you became the better your magic got. In a move quite unlike him, Chris put forward a mechanic where success and failure were inconsequential and instead the dice rolled during an action determined how much of a prick you looked. Neat idea for an RPG, maybe a better idea for a point-and-click, and quite honestly just an excuse for us both to muse about dismissive women in big hats that could be mean to us in a sexy way.
THE BACHANNAL, a system-light scenario-heavy game where you were caught up in a never-ending fey party happening in the spaces between heartbeats and the leftover magical energy infected you with alien marks. Here’s a fun fact: the last time I took MDMA, the drug which inspired this game, was in 2015 - I can’t do it anymore on account of the brain medication I’m on. (And: I am nearly 40. It is a young man’s drug.) Each year I age away from the scintillating, ecstatic mess that was 2:30am at Planet Angel, borne skywards by the loving hands of trance music and class-As, suffused with dayglo radiation, mascara-daubed and gem-clad, the more faded and insincere the memory becomes. So I don’t think I could do it justice, and Chris doesn’t fuck with euphorics, so the time has passed.
None of those concepts passed muster; all of them have design specs, jamboards (remember those?) dozens of documents, pages of earnest notes in long-forgotten jotters. Sometimes it’s not enough. But sometimes you stick with it, and there’s enough there: enough grist for the mill, as it were, enough for the reader to bite down on and worry away at.
We need an interesting mechanical thing, for Chris; we need an interesting fluff thing, for me. I need it to be tragic and curious and strange; he needs it to be crunchy and clockworky and exploitable. Between the two of us, we tend to hit something interesting that’s pinned between both extremes, which makes for a good game (or at least an interesting game, which I often prize above “good” if I’m being honest).
WE DID THIS THREE TIMES FOR SALT
Salt broke the mould a bit. We knew that we wanted to write another game set in the same world as Spire and Heart because it’s an exciting place and both prior titles have been quite tightly focused with regards to geography; our first envisioning of Salt was as a free-wheeling pirate game, exploring the islands and coastlines of Destera, learning about other cultures and engaging in diplomacy and/or violence with them. Plenty to see and do, and an opportunity to talk about the broader setting in way we’d not been able to before.
In the same way that every character in Spire is a cleric (if you squint) and every character in Heart is a warlock (if you fudge it) then every character in the first real draft of Salt was a druid. We had an image of a druid whose grove was the ship they sailed and whose magic heart tree was the ship’s mast; of weather witches, and whisperers of the deep, and a guy who could summon infinite seagulls at will. Nature was vast and unconquerable but you could tap into it, learn from it, be part of it and sculpt a tiny portion of it into a shape you desire. (I suppose Spire is man vs society, Heart is man vs himself, and Salt was man vs nature at this stage.)
Here are a few of the problems we faced with Salt:
SHIPS ARE BIG. You need a couple dozen people to make a big ship go - the kind big enough to take part in a proper sea battle with cannons and reloading and wind gauges and “crossing the T” and all the bits that get naval history fanatics fizzy in the knickers. The idea of a big ship fight excited us, but I didn’t want to do rules for a big crew, and it really saps the intimacy of a tight-knit roleplaying group to have thirty extras in the background picking their noses and fiddling with their peg-legs.
THERE’S ONE WAY TO WIN A NAVAL BATTLE. If cannons exist, you shoot the other ship with cannons up the bum (or up the nose if you can’t reach the bum). If cannons don’t exist, or aren’t small or safe enough to get on board a ship, you get more of your fighting guys onto the other ship than it has fighting guys of its own, and you hopefully win the ensuing close-quarters scuffle. There’s some business with facing and wind and sails and rudders but really it comes down to those two things. Without the minutiae involved, and Resistance struggles when mixed with minutiae, it just isn't very satisfying to go through.
(Oh and regardless of the period, if it's made out of wood, setting the other ship on fire is always a good idea if you don’t want to keep it when you’re done fighting.)
SAILING IS HALF BORING AND HALF DAFT. There’s nothing out there. It’s just sea. Some weather. Whatever biscuits you brought with you. A seagull or two. Maybe an island if you’re lucky. And there’s so much specialist terminology to deal with, and did you know they used to call it “larboard” instead of “port?” Or just “left?” Ridiculous business.
I LIKE CITIES. Not to live in, mind. I’ve done my fair share of that and I’m done with it. But from a writing point of view, as a place to set a game? Absolutely! So many options! So many ways to show humanity twisting in on itself! So many ways to portray the grand societal machines that cradle and bind us! Unfortunately, most ships are not located within cities, so I was stuck describing backwater ports and windswept islands.
TOO MANY OPTIONS. What is it you do, aside from “boat?” Spire is about failing to do a revolution. Heart is about dying in the most cathartic way possible. What was Salt about? We had a load of ideas about trying to outrun your past (could it hunt you across the sea?), finding a new family with the other player characters (how can we mechanise arguments to make them interesting and not frustrating?), building relationships with coastal communities and adapting to their culture (can we make backtracking worthwhile, to show your growth?), running out of stuff and starving to death on the open ocean (eh), and so on, and so forth. But nothing really landed. Because...
WE HAD TO DO IT. We kept toying with Salt, and trying to find the angle on it, because it was the next thing. We had to do another Destera game. It had to run on the Resistance engine, like the others. We just didn’t know what shape it should take.
We tried, back after Heart wrapped up, to make a monster-hunting game set on the decrepit human isle of Whitecross - but we couldn’t make the Resistance system do extended combats and not be either useless or unwieldy. (That game, Cross, would later filter into what would become Hollows.)
We took a turn at writing Dust, a game set in the desert warzone of Nujab scarred by multiple offensive demonic incursions triggered by heartless aelfir generals - but we felt that, given the number of immediate real-world parallels, a funtime pretendy game about the tensions of living in a desert warzone wasn’t in good taste.
Salt felt like it was possible. Salt felt like it hadn’t already been written, and that we could maybe do something interesting with as-yet untapped rich seams of wet mythology. We just had to find our angle. I asked Chris to watch every single film about pirates he could find and report back to me. (He did. It was useful! We very nearly wrote a Pirates of the Caribbean rip-off as a result, and honestly I’m not ruling it out.)
STEP THREE: WE FIND THE NUG
We call the fundamental part of something, the core or kernel or spark, the ticking cog at the centre of it, the “nug.” (I believe it’s a term for marijuana, originally. I don’t call it that. I call it “grass” like I’m a painfully square teacher in the 1980’s trying to sound cool.) Every good ability has a nug. Every good class has a nug.
There’s a moment in every game design project where you learn to work with it. You push and pull and cut and tweak and test and dither about back and forth, and it’s nebulous and loose, and one day you find something that puts it all in place. You find the nug. Sometimes it’s like lightning; sometimes it sneaks up on you. You push and it pushes back. You turn dial X and Y happens. You can see how it works.
(We were writing Chronicle, the game that would become Unbound, together in 2015. We spent a full day writing and rewriting ability fluff, strongarming the text into place, and it wasn’t working. “It feels like,” said Chris, “we’re trying to put lipstick on this horse. And we can’t even ride it yet.”)
For Hollows, it was one afternoon in 2022 when, instead of each Weapon just being a tool, it became a reflection of some facet of toxic masculinity. It wanted something. It spoke to you and wanted to nudge you down dark paths. Just as Heart was an excuse for me to write about dying when the thought occupied a solid 35% of my waking hours, Hollows was an excuse for me to let some of my inner demons run around.
The sudden flashes of violent imagery that hit me when I’m frustrated became the Bludgeon. Idle thoughts about pushing an anonymous home intruder down the stairs became the Spear. My pride and sense of entitlement became the Sword. Rerouting shame into thoughts of self-harm became the Shotgun.
Horrible stuff. But it’s there. And it’s worth writing about.
And like: the death of empire, and post-colonial generational guilt, and the capacity for cruelty to spread mimetically, and the importance of friendship and togetherness, and how no man is an island, and and and. But it was the “these guys are dicks and you need to work with them” that anchored everything down.
The nug for Salt came when Chris and I tried sketching out the world map, partly out of desperation. We’d need a map, obviously, for a game about travelling. We knew where Spire was: it was west of the human isles of Horizon, east of the dark elf underempire of Ys, south of the frozen north where the aelfir that occupy Spire lived originally, and north of Aliquam, Nujab, and Al’Marah (with more gnolls the more south you go). Cool.
And we’d need wet in there, for the boats. So an inland sea, and a coast above Spire. But what’s in the middle? You can’t go from polar to temperate without a good few miles between them. We have space to fill. What’s there, and why haven’t we mentioned it before?
“What if it was, you know. Atlantis?” said Chris.
“A city?” I said, immediately excited.
So we drew a big square in the middle of the map. And we drew lines between great sites of power through it - the roiling Source Pyramid in the south, the buried arcologies in the east, the demon-bound caverns to the west, the Everqueen’s ice palace in the north. Fuckin’ Atlantis has just appeared. Thrown everything out of whack. None of the compasses work now. Brand new frontier to go fuck around in.
The name of the city was Salt. Nothing else for it.
A CHANGE OF PROCEDURE
Now, if this was a more satisfying story, I would go on to say how we then immediately started writing Salt and it was good and it did the thing we wanted it to right away, first time, we all drank lemonade, the end. But it didn’t. I was still finishing Hollows, and Chris immediately got the yips and pivoted hard into an experimental King In Yellow Psyops game, and the prospect of a really interesting license came up and we all-handsed on that for a while only to have our contact go dark on us, and it was con season, and I was tired, and the dog et it, etc.
In fact, even once we had that bolt in place - the immortal city of Salt, risen from beneath the waves, and what that would do to the world of Spire - we still struggled. We tried to make a game we wanted to play, and we couldn’t. Salt was Salt for Salt’s sake. We couldn’t find common ground on it.
There was a boat. There were... wizards? Druids. People. Found family? Reputation. Hidden relics. Forerunners? Mutations? Rigging. A guy who was married to his cannon. A guy with a pet cat that could see ghosts. A class called “SHANTYMAN” with the note “Sings magic. Legs like fuckin tree trunks.” and no other details. Rules for cargo. Wind?
It was everything all at once. And it had Atlantis in it, sure. But we were trying to build something by shoving handfuls of wet scree into piles and hoping it held.
So I did something I’ve never done before. I told Chris I was going to rewrite Salt for him. I was going to make a game for him, and if he liked it, we could finish it together.
I know he likes Indiana Jones, and pulp in general, so it’ll be pulp. I know he likes variable damage rolls so damage rolls matter. I know he likes horror so I’ll make it scary. I know he likes cyberpunk so I’ll put ancient technology in there and have people use it in ways it’s not supposed to be used. Pirates are present. The boats have guns on them. (I will remove, with great sadness, the guy with a pet cat that can see ghosts, because that’s precisely the sort of cockamamie bumph that sets his teeth on edge.)
Salt is, then, a love-letter to a man I admire and adore. And that’s how most games happen, really, isn’t it? You find a group of people and you make something for them, about them, and about you. (DIE - the comic, not the game - goes into great detail on this in the final arc. Games are things we do for each other.) I think somewhere along the way we stopped trying to impress each other and catered to an imaginary ur-audience, an indistinct amalgam of our imagined fans, and that sapped something from what we made.
STEP FOUR: SPEND ABOUT A YEAR AND A HALF ROTATING IT IN OUR HEADS
Everything up to this point has been intro, you understand. Nothing we’ve written before this is guaranteed to get in.
But once we find the nug - sometimes it takes fourteen drafts (like Spire), sometimes it takes three (like Heart) or five (like Unbound), sometimes it takes more than I can remember and we’re still not 100% convinced but we’re on the hook to release something (like The Door) - we can both look at the game and understand it.
We’ve smashed enough concepts together, and scraped out the spoil, to aggregate a shape out of the detritus. Each time we tear down the structure something remains and eventually we can see the shell of what the game could be. We can agree on the shape of it, the feel of it, the it-ness of it. We can point at a thing and say “oh that’s very Heart” or “that doesn’t feel at all like Spire” and, for the most part, come to the same conclusions.
What follows is eighteen months of writing classes and adversaries and rules, of making sure everything hangs together the way we want it to, of me going away and staying up late smoking and writing overwrought fluff and Chris politely agreeing to publish it. We have about one crisis of faith every four months and think about throwing the whole thing away. We shear away the old bits, the bits that no longer fit or function. Chris gathers together my darlings, erects a screen for decency’s sake, and wordlessly places a shotgun in my hands.
(I see Chris and I as yin and yang, sometimes. I flap around like a firehose and he calmly points the spray in the right direction. I engage in flights of unpublishable fancy and he tells me, lovingly, to reel my neck in. I think the reason for the ongoing strength of our relationship is, at the core of it, that I need someone to rein me in every now and again to be happy, and Chris needs to rein someone in every now and again to be happy, and here we are.)
STEP FIVE: MAZ MAKES IT LEGIBLE
This bit is still to come; Maz, or some other editor but really I hope it’s Maz, takes the text and makes it work.
They carve out my more egregious idiosyncrasies, force standardised terms into being, and bring in the “game” part of the “roleplaying game” that I’ve neglected in favour of showing off how many cool adjectives I know. They make it work like a reference manual, or a textbook, or a machine that makes stories happen rather than a loose bundle of concepts united behind the idea of dice. They make examples of play exist (whether I or they or a third party writes them), and gods do I hate writing examples of play.
And then steps six to a hundred: playtesting, and art briefs, and budgeting, and sensitivity reads, and layout, and proofing, and promotion, and crowdfunding, and manufacturing, and fulfilment, and import duties, and customer service, and community curation, and and and. But thankfully I know people who are good at those things, and I can pay them to do them when my limited skills are found wanting.
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That's all for now. Next week I'll go into detail on Salt in particular, and what I've done with regards to the setting and the mechanics, to make it play the way I want.
With love and fury,
Grant