#9 Interview with Jesse Ross
We talk with Jesse Ross about playing/designing and writing games!
Jesse Ross is a fantastic game designer, graphic designer, and illustrator. He is creator of Trophy, Girl Underground, rlyehwatch, etc.
Mario | La esquina del rol: Jesse Ross, Welcome to La esquina del rol! I am so happy to chat with you.
Honestly, I love Trophy RPG, I think is a TTRPG very interesting and I know that in Spanish community was a successful when it was released. I know you have written and released other games like R’lyehwatch RPG and Girl Underground, which I would like to talk more about later on. But, I would like to start this interview with the next question.
Who is Jesse Ross and what do you do in relation to the indie TTRPG scene?
Jesse Ross: Hi, Mario! Thank you so much for having me!
I’m the founder of game publisher Hedgemaze Press where I do game design, graphic design, and illustration. I focus on making games that are easy to learn but have a strong theme. My start in the indie world of game design was as a contributor to the Gauntlet’s former magazine, Codex, and from there I expanded out to make my own games. Outside of making games, I’m a web designer/developer who lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota (USA) with my wife, two daughters, mother-in-law, and our dog, Jellybean.
Mario: Nice! I love the name of your dog!
Well, last weekend I watched you in an AP where you ran a Thropy Dark one-shot on your YouTube channel. It was very interesting to see you as a GM.
So, I was wondering how you got into TTRPGs as a player/gm. What kind of game did you like at the beginning when you started playing, and What kind of game you like now?
Jesse Ross: I started playing RPGs when I was 12, and started with AD&D 2nd edition. My friends and I played that for a few years, and then we mostly transitioned over to Vampire the Masquerade and other World of Darkness games. My friends and I all took turns GMing (though we often had our own GM-PCs in the games we ran). One of my favorite games from high school was a version of the World of Darkness where we all played as supernatural versions of ourselves. Grounding it in the reality of our lives made it more horrifying (and caused a fair amount of bleed, a term we wouldn’t have known about at the time).
I took a break from gaming during college and afterwards as I was starting my career. When my oldest daughter was in middle school, she and her friend got really into Stranger Things, and she knew that I had a bunch of old D&D books. I offered to run some games for her and her friends and that got me back into the hobby. I discovered that a lot had happened in the 15 years or so since I last played, and got really into the indie side of RPGs. I found myself drawn to the philosophy of Apocalypse World and other Powered by the Apocalypse World games, as well as other stuff that had come out of the Forge. The simplicity of those rules and the desire for emergent, player-driven games also got me into OSR games.
Right now, I play a lot of my own games (including playtesting new games I'm working on), but I also run a fortnightly Monster of the Week game and am looking to pick back up a Dolmenwood campaign that I started running for some friends earlier in the year.
Mario: You have a very interesting gaming background. I see games you have mentioned with dark settings or horror, they are very good games, I like it.
Also, I love that you play Monster of the Week, it is a game I like a lot, but unfortunately I have not played it much.
So, What is it about RPGs that keeps you interested in them and why did you decide to make your own games?
Jesse Ross: As I shared earlier, my day job is as a web designer/developer. One of the things I draws me to that work is also one of the things that draws me to making RPGs: it’s a good balance of right-brain and left-brain activities. There’s artistry and storytelling, combined with information design and rule-building. I love being able to build worlds for me and my friends to play in, and I enjoy sharing those worlds so others can play in them too. RPGs are an inherently collaborative activity, and the culture of sharing that’s so strong in the hobby is something that I really love being a part of.
Mario: I loved your answer! Now I'd like to talk a about game design. You've told me before that you were very interested in the PbtA design philosophy when you came back to play and, also, you really liked the rules-light approach. That shows in the direction your published games have taken. But what do you consider to be the design philosophy and principles that frame the way you design and write your role-playing games?
Jesse Ross: Oh, that’s a great question!
I have a digital journal on my phone that I has dozens and dozens of documents of little fragments of ideas. Sometimes a document is little more than a few sentences or bullet points of setting or character ideas, or they might be a bit of mechanical inspiration (I have a lot of snippets that include dice odds I’ve made using anydice.com). I find it hard to move forward with really building out a game until I have a name and a tagline for it. Those serve as the “north star” for me to go back to as I work on the game, to make sure what I’m creating fulfills the promise of the name and tagline. Ultimately, I like making games that have a clearly identifiable theme and aesthetic. I like games that are specific, where the rules reinforce the themes and visa versa. And all of that needs to work together with the game’s brand and art and design.
One thing I also always try to do is make games that are easy to teach and learn. Before I was fully immersed in the world of rules-light games, I just picked the current edition of D&D to introduce my daughter and her friends to RPGs. After losing our whole first session to analysis paralysis and struggling to make characters, I vowed to make sure my own games had a lower barrier to entry. I love the PbtA “everything on one sheet” playbook model of character creation, as well as the OSR “roll to discover” random table-based model of character creation. Humans are meaning-making machines, and so I found you can do a lot by just offering up a few evocative character snippets and letting the player make the connections themself.
Mario: How do you approach your creative process when you design a new game or write a new adventure?
Jesse Ross: I start with a lot of research! I’ll watch movies and TV shows that reflect the theme, I’ll read and play games to find inspirational mechanics, I’ll sift through Pinterest to find images that represent scenes I want to see in play or that capture the mood of the game. I always have lots of projects in various stages of development at the same time. Some of them will work, but most of them won’t, and there’s always stuff I can loot from those “dead bodies” for other games.
I do really like having a design partner on a project though too. It’s so helpful to have someone to bounce ideas off of, and most ideas are made better when you have another brain thinking through them.
And sometimes it just takes the right deadline! For years I had wanted to make a Powerpuff Girls-like game about superheroic kids with a 1950s retro vibe, but I never really knew what form it should take. Last year, I ran into the One-Page RPG Jam (thanks to Richard Woolcock, creator of Tricube Tales), and used the constraints of that jam to finally make Cosmic Ray Kids.
Mario: ha! I didn't know that you had a page on itch and that you have the game "baywatch" there that I want to read and play. Thanks for sharing the links with me.
The truth is that what you say about collaborative authorship is very interesting to me, very few authors have actually mentioned it to me. I also think that it is important to have someone to discuss what you are creating with. I think it greatly enriches the process and makes it less selfish.
Before talking about your games. I'd like to know how you approach the mechanical design of games. What you said really resonated with me that you like that the mechanics should reinforce the themes of the games. At what point in the design do you start to think about the mechanics and how do you reinforce their themes with them? Can you give us an example of how this creative process happens for you?
Jesse Ross: Haha! That game is called “R’lyehwatch” , which is a play on “Baywatch”, the melodramatic lifeguard show from the 1990s, and “R’lyeh”, the name of the fictional sunken city where Cthulhu is. It’s a really silly game that I made with Jayme Antrim from Third Chair Games, and is a prime example of how having a good design partner makes a game so much better. In this case, he had the initial concept of a game about lifeguards fighting Cthulhu, I suggested the name, and then we cranked it out over a span of just a few months. I literally wouldn't have made the game without him, and in making the project with him, I ended up with a really great friend and game design collaborator.
I can say the same thing about Gabriel Robinson of Glowing Roots Press. He was one of the major contributors to my game Trophy, and he and I have been slowly working on a new game for the past few years called “The Piper’s Call” which answers the question, “what if Robin Hood and his Merry Men lived in a haunted, monster-filled forest?” He’s just one of the most creative, poetic, kind, and generous people in the world, and I feel so lucky to have him to bounce ideas off of.
I don’t always have a co-designer on my games, but I’m always sharing ideas with my game designer friends and trying to get my games in front of playtesters. All that early feedback is so helpful.
When I start creating a new game, I usually start by having in mind the type of stories I want the game to help tell. As an example, when Lauren McManamon and I were working on our game “Girl Underground”, we knew we wanted to make a game about being a curious girl going into a wonderful world and learning about herself while she was there: stories like “Alice in Wonderland” and “Wizard of Oz”. And we knew we wanted a Powered by the Apocalypse game because we knew the playbook structure would work well for the various fantasy companions the girl would pick up along the way.
Two features of those stories that we really wanted to emulate were 1. that the girl would learn about herself and change along the way, and 2. that the girl would face some significant challenge toward the end of the game and be fairly certain of overcoming it. The way we solved both of those was with our “Manners” system. The game offers a bunch of stereotypical Manners that girls are supposed to behave, such as “young ladies must never brag or show off” and “young ladies must never take up too much space.” When the girl pushes back against these Manners, she crosses them off and writes a Belief about herself and the world, which could be things like “I have talents worth sharing with the world” or “I can tell a king when he is acting foolish.”
Normally, when the girl does something in the game, she rolls 2d6 to see how she does. However, when the girl stands strong in her convictions (typically at the end of a session, when she's facing a powerful adversary), she rolls 1d6, plus another 1d6 for each Belief about herself she can incorporate into her action, then she takes the highest 2 dice to see how she does. By building up these Beliefs over the course of the game, then using them at the end, the mechanics reinforce the arc of the stories that inspired the game: growing up, learning about yourself, and using that new self-knowledge to face big challenges.
That's a long example, but I hope it helps explain how mechanics and theme can pair together and reinforce one another. And again, it all starts with researching and thinking through what kind of stories you want to see come out of the games you make.
Mario: Wow, that's a great example and I love that you linked it to the Girl Underground game. I appreciate you sharing this with us.
If you'd like, I'd like to talk about Trophy. The first time I read it was in English and, recently I read it in Spanish again (in fact it was when I tagged you on Twitter), I have to admit that a good job of translation and editing was done. Plus, the setting is really incredible and it's so simple to explain that I can't believe it.
I would like to know how the idea and concept for Trophy was created? Is there a story behind it?
Jesse Ross: I fell in love with the setting of the game “Symbaroum,” but I wanted a ruleset that focused less on combat and more on the horror of being an adventurer exploring an overwhelmingly large and frightning forest. I came to the realization that the forest could be seen as a kind of cosmic horror: impersonal, dangerous, and too big to fully understand. I was already a fan of Graham Walmsley’s microgame “Cthulhu Dark,” so I adapted the rules of that game to play in the world of Symbaroum.
Multiple playtests lead me to push the rules and setting further in my own direction. Importantly, I was inspired by the idea of the Devil’s Bargain from “Blades in the Dark” and the creative chaos that mechanic could introduce. So I brought all those influences together and created “Trophy” (later renamed to “Trophy Dark”). I was lucky enough to have it be selected by Jason Cordova—editor at the Gauntlet—to appear in the Gauntlet’s magazine “Codex,” specifically the issue “Codex Dark 2.”
Mario: And the rest is history. Wow, it really is amazing! I had no idea it was inspired by Symbaroum (one of the best settings I've ever read, by the way). There is one quote in particular from Trophy Dark that I love and that to me means what the game experience is: 《Fight to survive, but know that you are marked. You will be claimed. You will be the forest’s trophy》. It's a really powerful quote, I really congratulate you. And I really like it because it sums up the reason for the name of the game, would you mind tell us how you came to name it Trophy Dark?
Jesse Ross: Of course! The game was originally named “Trophy,” which has the dual meaning of being about treasure-hunters searching for trophies, but the treasure-hunters themselves being the trophies of the forest. When I decided to adapt the game rules for campaign-style play in the vein of the OSR, I named that game “Trophy Gold.” It made sense to me to change the name of the original game so that we could more easily differentiate the two games and use the name “Trophy” as the general name for both games in the collection.
The name “Trophy Dark” comes from a few different places: 1) it reinforces the dark and tragic tone of the game, 2) it shows the game’s connection to its two mechanical influences (“Cthulhu Dark” and “Blades in the Dark”), and 3) it refers to where the game first appeared (the “Dark 2” issue of Codex).
Mario: The truth is that you gave a great name to your game. When I understood the dual meaning of the name I loved it. Speaking of trophy gold, the Spanish publisher that translated you into Spanish announced this week that we will finally have it in Spanish. Can you tell us a little bit about this edition of the game and the adjustments you made to adapt it more to the OSR style?
Jesse Ross: Well, it started because I had a bunch of old-school modules I wanted to play, but I wanted to use something other than D&D or a retroclone. So I made a list of what I wanted for a game, and this was my list:
I want an OSR game that:
only uses d6s
only uses player-facing rolls
has level-less spells
uses conditions instead of HP
doesn’t rely on levels
doesn’t need rolling for damage
And then I said, “Hmmm... that sounds an awful lot like a game I already made. I wonder if I could take the core of Trophy and turn that into what I want.” The biggest change was creating the Hunt Roll and introducing the Hunt Token economy. The Hunt Roll was my replacement for the old-school random encounter roll, and took some inspiration from Brendan Strejcek’s Overloaded Encounter Die. The Hunt Token was inspired by Jason Cordova’s Labyrinth Move for Dungeon World.
One of the rules in Trophy Dark was that if you try to fight a monster, you die. I knew this new game, Trophy Gold, would at least have to allow the possibility to fight monsters (even if it wasn’t always smart or profitable). So I designed a new roll for combat, using some of the structure of the rolls from Trophy Dark.
To attack a monster, everyone in the fight says how they’re putting themselves in danger, then they roll 1 light-colored die, called their Weak Point. They hold onto that die, because the number on it will be important later.
Then, everyone rolls a dark-colored die to attack and we look at all the dice as a single pool. The only stat that a monster has is its Endurance, which is typically a number from 6–12. If the two highest dark dice in the roll are greater than or equal to the Endurance, the monster is defeated. If the dice don’t meet or beat the Endurance, then the players can add 1 more dark die to the pool and try again. However, anytime any of the dark dice matches a player’s Weak Point light die, then that player gets hurt. Each "round" of combat gives players a chance to narrate how the fight is going, and decide if they want to risk more harm by continuing the fight.
I’m really proud of the way the Combat Roll turned out, because it has tension, it has that risk-taking quality, and the roll itself goes very fast. It’s not a "war of attrition" you sometimes find in more traditional D&D-style games.
Whereas Trophy Dark says that you can’t fight monsters or you die, Trophy Gold has a rule that says if you don’t collect enough gold, you die. Your character is desperate and needs gold to survive, and you do that by making the dangerous decision to go into an ancient forest and the haunted ruins there. You can arm yourself with whatever equipment you think you might need, but you get all that gear on credit, so you need to come back with that much more gold. In Trophy Gold, the monsters are dangerous, but the need for more and more gold is the real killer.
Mario: For me trophy gold is still a mystery in terms of gameplay experience because I haven't played it. I had read about it before but I haven't had the chance, I think the modifications you have made sound very good, but I agree that the combat roll is what I find very interesting. I'm looking forward to see how it will be received in the Spanish community.
On the other hand, I see that the last two ‘smaller’ games you have successfully funded and published use the Apocalypse Engine. Both games seem to me very interesting and more risky in their approach if I'm honest. You have already published a well known game and translated into Spanish as the trophy series, what's next for Jesse Ross in terms of role playing games?
Jesse Ross: It's true, I do like Powered by the Apocalypse games, and even when I'm not using that system, the philosophy behind it inspires a lot of my work. My problem is that I always have too many ideas and not enough time, so I put a little bit of time into a lot of different games. Then when I feel particularly inspired, I push one of them to completion.
I have a couple of OSR-style games in the works right now, both of which I built up while playing duet games with my younger daughter over the past few years. One is called “Folktale” and is based on B/X D&D, and the other is called “Dragon Mail” and is about being a dragon-riding mail-delivering adventurer exploring a dynamically-created hex map. Those are still probably at least a year or two away from being available to the public.
In the more immediate term, I have two Trophy-adjacent projects I'm working on. One is the one I mentioned above: “The Piper’s Call”, which I'm working on with Gabriel Robinson. I'm also one of the organizers and the layout artist on a project called “Rooted in Crisis”, which is an eco-horror anthology with 5 different games based on Trophy, all exploring the climate crisis from different angles and in different environments. One unique feature of the project is that each game has been created by a game designer paired with a climate scientist or an environmentally-focused academic. You can learn more about that project at https://rootedincrisis.com/, and sign up for the Kickstarter here:
I have a few other things in the works: a messy and dramatic superhero game, a solo game about being a knight in the vein of the film “The Green Knight”, a setting and series of adventures for “Monster of the Week” and other urban horror games, and lots more stuff. Hopefully one day I’ll get to them all!
Mario: Oh I love the premise of Dragon mail! I'm really looking forward to those games!
Jesse it's been really awesome to talk to you and get to know you a little bit more as a designer. It's been very interesting and fun, thank you so much for your time.
Jesse Ross: Thank you so much! It's been a delight talking to you, Mario!
And he is Jesse Ross. See you next time!
