An Interview! With Sarah Carapace!

1. Right! Something a bit different. Today, I'm interviewing my good friend Sarah Carapace to promote her current kickstarter Violet Core (linked here), in what can only be described as a feat of shameless nepotism. I've been following the development of Violet Core with interest for a few years now, and now I get to ask all the juicy questions I want about it.

   Anyway, with no further ado, let's begin. So! Sarah. First things first, where did the initial inspiration for Violet Core come from? How did you first decide to start designing something?
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3. Thank you Emily for the gracious co-conspirating, it's lovely to be here :D So! Easy question with kind of a long answer; Violet Core first started germinating after I played Heaven Will Be Mine, a gorgeous visual novel written by Aevee Bee with art by Max Schwartz and you should buy it and play it immediately. It's about messy space lesbians piloting giant robots and has a very unique vibe that I craved more of. The game stuck with me, and in early 2019 I thought it would be cool to try and run a HWBM game of some kind. But, the Mech-sub genre in rpgs leans very crunchy and simulationist and at the time I was really into PbtA style games and wanted something much lighter, swifter and character interaction focused. I turned to the ogs, D. Vincent and Meguey Baker and ended up getting a copy of Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands and started to do a re-flavoured hack of it, but found it wasn't really doing what I wanted. So I did what any other fired up rpg player would do and I started making a game from scratch. As I began to take the project more seriously I actually, somewhat awkwardly, reached out to Aevee about what I was working on, who very kindly encouraged me to keep making the game, but to make it it's own thing. Which was basically the kick in the ass I needed. While the game wears its main influence on its sleeve, it stopped being a fangame. I cooked up a fresh setting taking a cue from the 'nemesis-star hypothesis' and weaved in more diffused elements from other wildly unrepresented inspirations of mine such as Zone of the Enders, GunBuster and Knights of Sidonia. Over time Violet Core was able to evolve into what is is now!
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5. You mentioned you were into PbtA style games when you first started work on Violet Core. I'm curious, are there any specific games or mechanics you've taken inspiration from? What sort of things went into this things DNA?

6. Of course! My first exposure to PbtA games came from a MonsterHearts actual play podcast called Wintercrest (possibly the most thirsty pansexual podcast ever made?) So I read MH2 by Avery Alder, Velvet Glove by Sarah Doom and World Wide Wrestling (1st edition) by Nathan D. Paoletta.

   What really drew me to this style of game design is that its very light on maths and is an exceptionally good framework for creating a mood and simulating genre (I think you've said something like this before?) Also character creation in these sorts of games is genius, you tick a few boxes on a sheet and it's done. What may seem a little simple and limiting compared to more broader types of character creation is in fact a set of mood and genre guides and hooks at your finger tips. While PbtA design can often seem counter intuitive to people who have spent a lot of time playing more traditionally structured games (admittedly, it took me a little while to click with it, but I also had run Cyberpunk 2020 for almost ten years) I've found that it is actually extremely accessible and new-player friendly.
   For Mechanics, a lot of it is just the general structure of play, with Moves that typically need a situation to occur in the narrative in order to be triggered. But there are a few examples of things that really struck a cord with me, for example how MonsterHearts deals with violence and romance and how in Velvet Glove there is almost always some sort of social price to pay when attempting to convince someone to do something for you. In Violet Core, the Pilots are largely under the thumb of their various Authority Figures, so there is no 'persuade them to see things your way' sort of roll. The closest is the move 'Negotiate', which usually means the Pilots would need to offer something in exchange, be it information or a favour and so on. That alone might be something that they want to avoid doing...so it may encourage Pilots to act on their own without telling their superiors.
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8. That's an interesting point: the moves and mechanics not included in the game. Are there other areas or activities where you've deliberately not given the players any moves or mechanics? And if there are, what motivated you to leave those areas empty?

9. There is a lot of stuff the Pilots can do...but they can't be particularly sneaky.

   There are no dedicated stealth or 'lock pick'-y moves. The closest might be 'Machine Kin', a move from the returned-from-the-dead-or-mostly-dead cybernetically resuscitated Rebuilt Pilot playbook, that kinda lets them hack devices, by way of having a dream like conversation with whatever programming the device has but the game is mostly about Big Feelings and Big Fights so it was important that the mechanics reflect and reinforce that. Pilots can and should totally break the rules and cause problems, but most of the time, someone is gonna notice. There is a lot of that sort of thing in the game.
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11. So, you mentioned authority figures in the game just now, and you're keen to make sure that pilots aren't going to be able to concealn their actions easily. How do you expect the relationships between pilots and their authority figures to play out, and how much influence do you think an authority figure's agendas will have on the game compared to the pilots' own goals?

12. Yeah yeah! So the setting is very much teetering on the edge of calamity, with an extinction event looming large on the horizon. One of the main points of drama in the game is that there are three factions that each have a mutually exclusive plan to save what's left of humankind. Typically speaking, in a given game, all three options could work, so what your Pilot personally believes in becomes important. There is a baseline level of expected friction between Pilots and their leaders which can very a lot depending on what faction she belongs to. One is very rigidly structured, another is more socialist but militaristic while the last is basically a faith-based commune. In some factions the Pilots are fairly isolated from the rest of the population, while in others they are totally integrated, etc.

    If a pilot doesn't get along with the faction she was born into, she can either defect or work to subvert them. If she is strongly allied with her own faction, then she might have more adversarial rivalries with the opposing factions and so on. But one of the features of the mecha they pilot is that they are very hard to monitor and track, so the Pilots end up having a lot more freedom to express themselves while on a mission than they might back home. There is also guidelines for tracking the progress of authority figures, with the longer the game going and the closer the crisis becomes the more hardline the authority figures can become especially if things aren't going their way. A previously fiery idealist can turn into a paranoid dictator and things like that, or the opposite can happen, where a deeply entrenched authoritarian may turn more anarchistic.
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14. Iiinteresting. So, tell me about this apocalypse! Do you expect it to be a thing that actually happens in the game, with the players getting to see its aftermath? And similarly, how much do you expect players to delve into the weirder mysteries of the setting during play?

15. The game is fairly fantastical, with a surreal edge and roots in the super robot sub-genre more so than the real-robot genre, so a lot of what grounds it is how the characters navigate the situation they are trapped in. Things are bad. In the world we live in I mean. It was bad when we were working on Dungeon Bitches together and currently, I'd say things are much worse. I find it really hard to have any kind of hope...and that attitude is reflected in the setting. The game is set around Nemesis, the (hypothetical) binary star to Sol. In Violet Core, the Nemesis star is real and has its own small set of planets. Decades before the story begins, the earth-like homeworld of humankind, Cerulea, is turbo fucked. A failed attempt to use a prototype faster-than-light-travel gateway to escape the system has marooned what is left of the species in space between the first couple of uninhabitable planets. So that's bad. This is coinciding with a once-a-25-million-years event where the long elliptical orbit of Nemesis brushes up against the Sol, disrupting the Oort Cloud the (theorized, again real in the game,) sphere of icy debris that surrounds Sol. This disruption flings a few billion tonnes of space junk across both systems, ushering in excitation events across both planetary systems. So that's also bad. This hangs over every thing the Pilots do in the game. It's seems unavoidable, the signs of it are everywhere. The stars appear as streaks instead of dots. Big comet storms regularly pelt through the system at a scarily increasing rate. Destructive gravity abnormalities ripple up from SubSpace. So snatching moments of peace, finding yourself, finding love, finding meaning, defiantly living and spitting in the face of calamity are all core things the players are likely to be tangled up in.
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    It would be nice if it wasn't so relatable, huh? I have an unfortunate nihilistic, mean spirited streak that I often struggle to manage. But the game doesn't. It sees the end looming and demands that the players see hope and fight for it.
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18. Violet Core advertises itself as being extremely Sapphic, and we worked together on Dungeon Bitches, which went all-in that sort of thing. Perhaps you could tell us more about how Violet Core deals with queerness and romance? How they'll affect the events of the game, and the different mechanics that might be relevant to them?

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19. The lesbian and sapphic nature of the game is honestly a little squirrelly and hard for me to pin down, but I'll give it a shot.
20. It's what I wanted to see more of, so it just kinda is. There isn't some lore reason as to why the Pilots tend to be women and tend to be lesbians or anything like that. Each faction has a different mainstream culture which is informed by their current Authority Figures and have pretty varying levels of overall acceptance for differing sexualities and gender expressions. Pilots, by their nature, form part of a very small subculture that can bump up against that. The Reach has a very binary way of looking at things and can be inflexible. They aren't very supportive of differing expressions, especially if a particular Pilot is being 'disruptive'. Homebound are a bit 2nd wave feminism inspired, and while trans Pilots are accepted, they don't have the same level of access to gender affirming care that others do. Lastly, Cosmic Embrace is extremely diverse with a lot more non-binary members and trans-men specifically. It's influenced by how groups self police and such. It sits a bit more in the background of the setting, but it's there.
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    The sapphic-ness of the game is infused into the writing, with well known lesbian culture stereotypes inspiring many of the mechanics. There is a lot of yearning, aching and searching in the Connection system, and a lot of moves that have a bit of a classic butch touch or disaster femme flavor. It's not as hardcore as something like Death Spiral, it's more like...you walk into a room and oops, all lesbians.
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    To talk more on how romance effects the game, it comes down to characters and player cooperation. I really like cooperative board-games and in theory appreciate co-op and assistance mechanics in ttrpgs...but in my experience a lot of these sorts of mechanics in rpgs are often a touch on the limp side? Strings and Bonds from MH and DB are interesting. It's fun to build up a stack of those and spend them all to really make or ruin someones day! But what I wanted to do was take that idea and try to make it the central pillar of the game, the core means of character progression as well as a tool to reinforce the themes. It makes it so the shape of characters important relationships, from friendships, to romances to rivalries have a feedback effect that makes the participants of those relationships stronger. I've gone into the nuts and bolts of mechanics themselves in detail over on one of the KS updates, so maybe link it here?
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    Pointy Shapes of Chaos – The Dice Mechanics of Violet Core Part I - Connections
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    There is a really simple way it effects play too. I'm gunna commit the indie dev cardinal sin and bring up DnD, but yanno alignments? I think they get a bit of a bad rap because I think they can be a very handy tool. If a player is in a bit of a tight spot and are not sure how to act in a situation...look at that alignment, what would the character do to be true to that nature? It's a little foothold with a lot of power behind it. The Connection System isn't totally unlike that. If a player is in a scene with other characters and finds they need to calibrate how they should be acting...they can check her connection sheet. “let's see what did I check here...it says I Admire her...and that she's my friend...annd...that I'd Die For Her. Alright. We are in trouble. I'm gunna put myself between trouble and her and see what happens, that's what is true to my character.” The core thing with connection sheets though, is that they are not immutable, the rule is that any checks that are made on a connection sheet must be true. If a characters relationship changes, she can scribble out a prior check and replace it with something else that is true. What happens is that even though the nature of the connections have changed, the magnitude of the sum total of them remains. There are also rules for managing a relationship that turns sour. While connections can't become weaker in the game, they can become Halted, meaning that a connection is no longer able to grow and it is harder for the characters with the halted connection to work together, unless the characters reconcile. I think it's also important to note that the game is Romantic in two ways. It's Romantic in that there are tools and frameworks designed so that romance can bloom between characters that effect the game both narratively and mechanically. But it's also Romantic in that, despite the dire situation, the same framework also encourages its characters to be idealistic.
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26. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that idealism also comes through in the approach the game has to fights, where duels between pilots are these almost formalised interpersonal affairs, rather than the sort of painful gritty violence you'd see in a more pessimistic game. Can you tell us a bit about what inspired the dance-like feel of the fights, and what inspired the mechanics you use for them?

27. Oh yeah! For sure. It's like the polar opposite of Death Spiral. So this is a bit of a tension point of the game that I've found some players take a bit of time to click with. While the game is about crisis and conflict, it's not exactly a war story. In the setting, Cerulea was a lot like modern day Earth. If you look around, see that? It was like that. When the spacers became isolated from Cerulea, ingrained vestigial bloodthirsty warmongering pretty quickly withered and died. The spacers are still at odds with one another, but there are so few people left that everyone who remains is seen as irreplaceable. Anytime someone dies, it brings the whole species closer and closer to extinction. So the Pilots are not soldiers, they are duellists. It's more like fencing or jousting. The weaponry their mechs are outfitted with are all designed to be non-lethal (although less-than-lethal is more accurate). There isn't exactly a military either, the way wings are organised is more like some sort of mash up between a sports team, a wrestling promotion and a co-op. There aren't so much commanding officers and more like coaches. Except for maybe Homebound, who are organised more like a militia, but even then the structure is fairly loose. While there are people who are in charge and call the shots, there are much fewer layers of separation between the person giving orders and the Pilot's themselves.

    For this game, I wanted to attempt to present a game about big feelings, big fights and big stakes but strip out as much militarism as I could.
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    That's a big reason why the fights are dance inspired, it contextualises and reframes the violence. Which is what a lot of the combat in Zone of the Enders looks like, it's really flashy and fast and has a rhythm to it. Violet Core takes that idea and pushes it further, where the fights are in part, a performance. It's certainly not always gentle. I compared it to wrestling before, the Violence Burlesque (to paraphrase Aubrey Sitterson's essay in World Wide Wrestling) and wrestlers get fucked up. Pilot's can, and do, get hurt or killed when fighting. But it's not common, and anytime it happens it's a big deal that sends ripples through the whole community.
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30. Right right. Now, on a wild tangent, the game has a certain amount of setting detailed in the (GM equivallent) Celestial Mistress's book. Do you think the game works better if players don't read that stuff - to learn about it in play - or if they read ahead and go in informed? And more broadly, how much involvement do you expect players to have narrative control compared to The Plot being firmly in the hands of the Celestial Mistress?

31. It depends on what the group wants! One of the great innate features of the PbtA structure is that Moves act not only as a 'I do this thing' but as a generator for roleplaying prompts and branches in the way a story could head in. Because of this, these sorts of games lend themselves to be played without a dedicated MC. If the group is playing like that, It would be best for them to delve into that information to plan out their scenario. The game is designed so that it can be played in a few different ways and the setting as-written is partially modular and customisable, certain elements are designed so that they can be swapped in or out that would drastically change the scope and tone of the game.

    Also it depends on how much a group likes to be surprised, right? Sometimes it's better to have some foreknowledge so you are ready to play off it, but one of the benefits of being an unestablished game, is that you can actually have a few secrets. So if the game is playing in the more typical MC and Players style, then I'd suggest Players resist the temptation to read ahead. There are delicious hints of what could be around the corner sprinkled through out the core-rules and player sections of course.

    
    
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33. Gotcha. So, penultimate question. I'm curious, what - in your view - is the coolest bit of the setting that's initially hidden? What's your favourite juicy bit of Deep Lore?

34. Like I mentioned, there isn't a true canon to the setting with all the stuff that can be tweaked or changed.

    But, The mode I like to engage is a reveal that the binary star system of Sol and Nemesis is supposed to have what is essentially a burn ecology. Because of the way humankind has disrupted this cycle in the past, this time around the 'fire' will burn out of control. It will be close to impossible to avoid unless the spacers really pull together to manage it. With this in play, the late game becomes a high-stakes cosmic/body horror nightmare...with this shred of glimmering hope. It's awesome.

    
    
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37. And then, to close it out, what comes after Violet Core? Do you have other ideas for projects as a designer or illustrator knocking about?

38. I do! Once Violet Core is out in the wild There are uuuh...I was gunna say three but around four projects I've got at varying levels of planning and percolating?

    There is a duet game called 'The Grave Calls For You, Lady Django' which is about being a vengeful undead cowgirl travelling with one of three ghostly guides that might be using you for their own ends. There is already some art for that one! One of the key mechanics in Lady Django is having an infernal revolver that never misses but, each shot costs a part of your soul to fire and you only have six bullets.
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    There is an untitled Werewolf game that started at a similar scale but might be a touch bigger, the spine of the core rules for that one have already been sketched out too. It's intended to be an exploration on caustic, mutagenic anger. There can never be enough Werewolf games and they are surprisingly thin on the ground.
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    More murky ones are a project about dreamscape travelling psychics that I wanted to do with lots of surreal stuff and head explosions but currently I'm less sure about that as there have actually been a small handful of games with that kinda idea recently! And lastly, There is a smaller-scale Dungeon Bitches setting that I've been brewing in the damp, dank recesses of my brain that I'm tentatively calling 'Shock Collar'. It's a bit of a 'convicted-psychopathic-violence-lesbians-do-suicide-missions-under-duress' kinda deal. Not totally sure if that one will ever see the light of day, but it might! Not 100% sure which one will be first, but I'm leaning towards Untitled-Werewolf-game.

Personally, I'm fascinated to see what you do with werewolves, having seen a lot of the characters you play in other games, and will be following with interest. Anyway! Thank you for indulging my curiosity, and fingers crossed for the remainder of the kickstarter. Which, again, you can find here.