#5 Interview with David Blandy

We talked about tabletop role-playing games and art, Lost Eons and Eco Mofos.

David Blandy is a British artist who design tabletop role-playing games. He is the author of Lost Eons, Eco Mofos, World Engine, Babel, and more.

Mario | La esquina del rol: David Blandy, Welcome to La esquina del rol! Thank you very much for this opportunity. It's an honour to have you here. Seriously, thank you very much.

I've been fascinated to learn who you are outside of the scene. It was something I really didn't know about you.

But, for those who don't know you, I'd like to start by asking you about you. Who is David Blandy, who is he in the indie scene and why are you doing great things in the scene?

David Blandy: No thank you very much for the invitation! I’m really happy and honoured to be talking like this in the company of so many great designers.

So outside the scene I’m a video and performance artist, trying to make work about how we make ourselves, through the stories we tell ourselves and the images we create and consume. That’s meant thinking a lot about inequalities and how malleable the world is, how it can changed through thinking of new ways to live. As an artist, life is constant flux, and money is never certain, something I’m very aware of with my two now teenage kids.

I rediscovered roleplay with my kids. They were getting older (this was around 2015), and I wanted to do something with them that wasn’t screen-based. Fifth edition had just come out, and my friend Dan (artist for Eco Mofos) showed me a 1980s D&D red box that he’d just got off eBay. I realised that all the images in those booklets were seared into my mind. It wasn’t really nostalgia, more a recognition of an intense emotion. So I decided to try playing again. My kids and I had some wild adventures, and Dan encouraged me to start a group with friends in Brighton where we live, which is still going after 7 years, and was really important over lockdown. Anyway, I saw a potential in roleplay, the way that it could take a group to other worlds, to inhabit other bodies. Maybe I could try to bring some of my art ideas, of changing the world through collaboration and challenging power, of finding hope in sometimes hopeless times, to RPGs. Mostly this was an act of ridiculous hubris- there are so many better designers making incredible stuff - but I fell in love with the process of trying to craft these worlds, and making spaces that I wanted to explore and share. Within the scene? I don’t know. I think a few people know who I am through Lost Eons and now Eco Mofos. I got really into the indie/OSR scene through discord, especially the FKR Collective server. Lost Eons really came out of that space.

I’ve been taking TTRPGs into art spaces. I think it’s an incredible art form that has been ridiculously underappreciated. The difficult thing is that for me one of the important factors of the “art” is the intangible thing that happens at the table. Its internal, inside the minds of the players, and galleries are places so focused on the visual, the spectacular. The thing I’m most proud of is an event I put together with writer Jamie Sutcliffe at a gallery in London, where we held a day symposium talking about the space between art and TTRPGs, with designers Chris McDowall, Chris Bissette, Samuel Mui, Zedeck Siew and others. It was a good day.

Mario: Wow! As I told you before the interview, your background and the links you establish with the TTRPGs outside of our scene caught my attention. Many artists are designing and experimenting with role-playing games. That seems great to me because we are seeing really interesting artistic and gaming proposals. In my opinion, without being an expert on the subject, art went from being a decorative element to accompany the rules to becoming a fundamental element of the game itself that tells us more than just stories. A manifesto. How do you perceive this space of coincidence and innovation between art and TTRPGs?

David Blandy: I think a lot of artists becoming interested in games, particularly TTRPGs, are coming from performative or participatory practices, seeing that a lot of the problems that they are coming up against when engaging an audience are being dealt with by an art form that’s already 50 years old. Many of these artists come from a place that is looking for a way to create that both imagines a different way to run society and doesn’t create yet more commodities for the world. They make things to sell, but I guess we all have to eat.

If I think about my (very long) journey into ttrpgs, I started making paintings, but wanted to connect more with my lived existence, so started using “found objects” (art term for using things you find lying about to make your work). Then I realised the objects that meant the most to me were pop cultural artifacts, comics, records, games; so I started doing performance where I’d try to embody the games, videoing myself doing fighting game moves for real, and embodying songs, lipsyncing to songs that I love, often by people from very different socio-economic backgrounds. I then wanted to immerse the audience in the work, inside a found object of sort, so started making installations, artworks that the viewer could walk around in. So for me ttrpgs were the next step, making a space the audience, the players, could live in.

Mario: Wow, I hadn't thought of it that way until now. What an interesting approach to role-playing games!!!

One thing I'm looking for with these interviews is to understand the creative process of creators like you related to TTRPGs. You have two very interesting long games, even one of them I didn't know it was yours until I started my research about you (lost eons). How is your creative process to create those worlds and games that you want your players to play?

David Blandy: Both Eco Mofos and Lost Eons began from the same idea; how do we have hope about a future after inevitable climate change? I wanted to build a space so players could experience a little pf what it's like to live as a posthuman, where the human body has drastically alterered, but also in a world that has recovered somehow, and changed, from the stress that humanity has put it under. My approach to worlding is very simple. After researching, through looking at history, science and sci fi, I try to imagine a particular place and think about what it would be like to live there. What would I see when I woke up in the morning? how would it feel? What would the people around me be doing? What are the different environments and creatures I'd encounter? Of course, tied in with that are thoughts about how people and their creations, like corporations, technology, social structures and norms, shape the world around us, and equivalents of those may evolve into things that we'd encounter in that future world.

These more abstract worlding ideas went together with some gaming principles that I wanted to explore. How do you make a game quick to start, quick to play, preferably with no prep, and yet still feel fun and make you want to explore more? How do you minimise book-keeping, so it's not hard to keep track of things, yet have a rich evolving world to inhabit? With Eco Mofos, I was also conscious of wanting to make it easy to convert old modules into this world, to have it be an extension of OSR play into a near-future space. This is why I ended up working with the bones of Into the Odd and Cairn as a starting point, games that had already thought through that issue and had come to very elegant solutions. The more I study both Chris McDowall and Yochai Gal's work, the more impressed I am. Every facet of the minimal rules works like a cog in a larger machine.

Mario: Nice! Hmm... I think I'm still obsessed with Into the Odd and, of course, Cairn. Right now they are two pillars that I can hardly get out of my head when analyzing new tabletop role-playing games.

However, Lost Eons is very interesting to me. I love the concept, it calls me to play. You say on your itch page: "Lost Eons is an innovative FKR-inspired combination of Blades in the Dark and 24XX, with an improvised card-based magic system".

And I have to tell you that the magic system using poker cards fascinates me. Tell me a little about the innovations you brought into Lost Eons mechanically and how are these mechanics related to the concept of the game?

David Blandy: Ha, thanks for looking into that! I had a lot of fun with Lost Eons mechanically, and the magic system was at the heart of that. I wanted magic to be strange, dangerous and mysterious. Magic in Wizard of Earthsea (one of my favourite fantasy series) is incredibly visceral, and defined by True Names of everything in the universe. So I created a word-based system, a bit inspired by Maze Rats, but mostly just by discussions I’d been having in the FKR Collevtive Discord, and had the words linked to cards. I liked the idea of these being hidden words that came to you as you slept, and were forgotten at the end of the day. And this aligned with my constant preoccupation with reducing book-keeping between sessions. If someone forgot what cards they had last time, no problem, it’s a new day, here’s your new cards.

So each of the cards indicates a word on the table of Magic, some pretty standard, (Fly, Speed, Grow) others a bit more funky, like Cheese, Spurt, Egg, Stink. Players really enjoy it, trying to find ways to use the words they’re given, or combine them for fun effects- Grow Egg to grow an egg around the party as a protective shell for the night, or Rewind Flood to clear the way of water. Thinking now, it would have been nice to introduce something like this as an alternative magic system for Eco Mofos, but I was keen to have it be very compatible with both old OSR adventures and Into the Odd and Cairn.

I put lots of ideas into Lost Eons. Adding a “Soul Die” to the Skill dice of 24XX to create a bell curve of success, creating a little dice pool, and having wounds to track rather than Health Points (or nothing in 24XX, which I actually love as a system). I was trying to consolidate all sorts of ideas around improvised and no-prep play, which might be accessible for players who had never used that style before.

Conceptually I suppose it was trying to introduce a new way of playing to more traditional gamers, for the new world, the post-human world that I was introducing with the setting in Lost Eons, the flooded land that used to be the fenland of Cambridgeshire and Norfolk. I wanted people to experience what it would be like to live after the effects of climate change have really been felt.

Mario: Yes, of course, it's something that is also perceived aesthetically. That's why I love the layout and art direction of Lost Eons. It makes me feel something different, something close but distant at the same time (or maybe not?!), like a be in a posthuman environment. It's really weird feeling. And I think you wanted this, didn't you?

David Blandy: Yes, that was what I was trying to create, a way to feel what it’s like to live in a radically different time in a radically different body. A weird empathic dream, something that ttrpgs are really good at. Ttrpgs are empathy engines, they place you inside a different self. In some ways the character is an avatar, but in many ways it’s just you, like Sam in Quantum Leap.

Mario: Nice! Then we have eco mofos. Something thematically similar but with a totally different chassis. You mentioned looking for more compatibility, if I remember correctly. But what's different about this proposal?

David Blandy: Yeah Eco Mofos was a few things. One of them was exploring the idea from Lost Eons of the ones left behind. In Lost Eons everyone is emerging from vast underground silos after millennia living and evolving below ground, discovering this verdant world above. Eco Mofos was about the people who didn’t make it into the bunkers and had to find their own way, the dispossessed, the weirdos, the Punks. And you’re exploring this reviving world to try to find a safe space to found a new community, like in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. There’s something a bit ethereal about Lost Eons, and I wanted to make something more direct, in your face, maybe a bit stupid. It started as a hack of Micah Anderson’s bastards. which I called Solar Bastards, a solarpunk game with attitude, basically as a shitpost. Then it got out of hand, and became this big thing that had almost no relationship to Micah’s game, so I felt I had to rename it to avoid confusion. Thus Eco Mofos was born.

Mario: I have now read the ASHCAN version of Eco Mofos. There are several things on my mind that I am trying to process. The first one is the art by Daniel Locke. Wow! wow! That vibe the illustrations have, it's just amazing. How was it working with him? Did you work on it together or how was that creative process?

David Blandy: Dan and I have known each other for 20 years- we met at art school in London, and he was a big part of why we moved down to Brighton. He’s my best friend. We’ve worked on a few projects together before, including a graphic novel (called Out of Nothing). As I mentioned before, Dan is a big part of why I got back into ttrpgs. So we’re on a very similar wavelength. So I was working on Eco Mofos, talking about it for a while. He was really busy doing illustration for his graphic novels and stuff. Then he got Covid and in that weird state decided to read Eco mofos. And he got really excited about it. That’s when I did the itchfunding for the game, to try to buy a bit of Dan’s time to actually work on some images for it, to see what he would make of the world. And what he came up with was so cool, mixing all sorts of references to folk movements like the Kibbo Kift, Spanish revolutionaries and twists on classic D&D images. He really understood the text, and took it in unexpected directions sometimes, which is what I love about collaboration- seeing what an idea sparks in someone else’s mind. I’m not really interested in illustration, trying to get people to make an image I have already formed. I’m much more interested in the image the words form in another’s head, especially a head as eclectic and wild as Dan’s. As Dan started making work to fit this thing, this strange near-future, I kept trying to encourage him to go weirder, to not be worried about fidelity but make it his own thing, to fully own what he was doing. To the extent that I now think we have a shared vision of the world of the game, that neither of us came up with, but was born through the collaboration.

Mario: I ask this last question a lot in my interviews because I like to explore these collaborative creative processes. I've found very good examples in my other interviews, and I see I've found another one in the two of you. You both have achieved a very interesting synergy. The results are there.

So the second thing that strikes me is the twist you gave to ItO. Having luck as a stat and the mechanics of it is great to me. And introducing it into your game was a very interesting choice. (It's something I really like about Bastards. Also, the simplicity of presenting each dungeon). But. tell our readers what other adjustments and additions you made to the system to adapt it to the game concept you had in mind?

David Blandy: Giving Luck as a stat was a nod to other British games, like the Fighting Fantasy choose your own adventure books that I grew up on and Troika! that Daniel Sell built on that engine. Luck is there in Into the Odd, as a flat d6 roll, but I thought it elliot be interesting to turn it into a resource like in Call of Cthulhu, where you can choose to use your stat to bolster a bad roll. But the consequence is things can be very difficult from there on, as Luck affects the Weather and other in-game events. So the player is faced with an interesting choice in the moment. But it’s a stat that tends towards the mean (10) as it goes up when you fail a roll, up when you succeed. So if you get lucky, it’s harder to get lucky later on.

The main twist is Burdens, which I borrowed (with permission) from early builds of Mythic Bastionland. Instead of Fatigue, itself a hack of core Into the Odd from Cairn, Burdens are emotional states that fill up your inventory, the idea of being burdened by internal difficulties. And they are removed by player action. Like if you’re burdened by Sad, you have to share a deep secret or indulge in a shameful vice to be rid of it‭.‬ Or if you’re.

Enraged, you must unleash your anger on the world or refuse to engage in violence‭.‬ I introduced the double resolution to create, again, interesting choices, but also to add character and heart to the game. The Punks aren’t just avatars, they’re living beings with emotional motivations. It introduces something that people might call Storygamey into an OSR chassis.

Mario: I like what those burdens bring to the story and character growth. I notice you are very interested in exploring those elements of character growth and now I understand it with what you were explaining to me before. I really like this interest in design that I notice you have.

The third thing that caught my attention and is related to what I said before, was this mechanic of life paths. What was your design idea regarding these elements, because I see that you touch them independently from the idea of character growth?

David Blandy: Life paths are there as an aspect of worlding as much as character building. It reinforces that this is a dangerous place- each decade you’ve got a 1-in-6 chance of dying in the wastes! It’s a mini-game to get the group or a solo player into the world, ready to make difficult decisions- “well I’ve made my character, Jolt Winter. Do I want to risk her existence for the possibility of an extra ability? Maybe once. Twice?” It’s broad strokes where the direct influence, Traveler, is quite granular. It was a way of trying to encourage players to understand that these are fragile people in a hostile world, but also just poses the question “what was their life up to this point” without necessitating reams of backstory writing. It cements the character’s place in the world.

Mario: I like that very much. Let's think ahead. You will finish the shipments to your backers. You'll be happy and more relaxed at home. What do you think will follow for you as a designer? Will you complete the trilogy of games you already started with Lost Eons and Eco Mofos? Or where will you direct your creativity?

David Blandy: Ha! That’s hard to imagine right now, in the thick of sending the final files off to the printers… but once we’re there, for me it’s all about adventures and settings. I’ve been doing some bits of adventure design, like reformatting Palace of the Silver Princess for Cairn and making A-Hole in the Ground and the Art Lover, but I’m really excited about the possibilities there. And Zedeck Siew, Daniel Locke and I have plans for something that could be really interesting, but I probably can’t say more than that yet. But then I’ve just put out World Engine, a little 4 page diy guide to making games in the vein of 24XX and What’s so cool… and I really enjoyed putting that together. So just continuing to follow the work I guess, seeing what comes next. I’d love to start publishing other people’s work through Copy/Paste Co-Op, that’d be fun. To help more weird things into the world.

Mario:We will keep an eye on your work. And to finish this interview that has been a lot of fun for me, what are you playing or reading right now about the hobby that you really like so much that you would like to recommend it to all the people who read us?

David Blandy: It’s been really great to talk, thank you for all the questions and looking so deeply into the work. I’m really excited by adventures right now, so I’d like to mention Feast by Chris Bissette, The Isle by Luke Gearing, Wet Grandpa by Evey Lockhart and Rise of the Blood Olms by Yochai Gal, Garbage Barge by Amanda Lee Franck. All of them work as both tight adventures but are also really evokative spaces, implying an entire setting. Wet Grandpa’s movement from weird west to quasi-mythological is particularly inspiring. I also have a real soft spot for mini skirmish games (that’s something else I’d like to have a go at designing actually) and yet again Chris McDowall has made an incredible ruleset in The Doomed. I’m going to try to persuade Dan to make some stuff to play that with- he’s an expert scratch-builder along with his art skills. I’ve also got to mention Iko, who has been doing great things in the space- Skyrealms is so beautiful and the Lost Bay is a visceral and inventive take on weird suburbia. Oh and the podcast Between 2 Cairns lights up every Thursday for me

And he is David Blandy. See you next time!