Intro
I'm joined by Gub of Look Out Behind You Studios and Triglav Games. Gub talks about his philosophy behind adventure design, contributing to the vampire class, working on The Boggits of Kingsmire, and where the Kiln class comes from.
I'm Jon de Nor and this is Goblin Points.
Interview
Jon de Nor: Welcome to Goblin Points, Gub!
GubDM: Hello!
Jon de Nor: So give us a bit of an introduction and how you ended up in the MCDM/Matt Colville community.
GubDM: So right now I am working with Triglav Games on their various products, including Boggits of Kingsmire. I have my own publishing company. It's just me, Look Out Behind You Studios. And right now, with that, I'm working on my Draw Steel player class, the Kiln, and I've done a bunch of stuff there. And other than that, I'm just a serial lurker among Draw Steel.
Jon de Nor: (laughter)
GubDM: What was the other question? How did I get into Colville stuff?
Jon de Nor: Yeah.
GubDM: That was how I got into TTRPGs in general. So out of college, my first job was a long commute with a bunch of people my age at a really dark, dank office. And yeah, someone just invited me. They were like, hey, we're going to play D&D. Like, sweet. I've never played. I've heard about it. I don't even know what to expect. And he's like, "Well, watch this!" And he sent me Colville's videos, and I watched them instead of working. And that's one of the reasons I probably left that gig, so...(laughter)...yeah.
Jon de Nor: (laughter) You mentioned you're working on lots of stuff, but I — in the beginning, I kind of want to jump back to the first stuff that I saw from you, mostly through Look Out Behind You Studios. Actually, I want to ask, where does that name come from? (laughter)
GubDM: Okay. Well, I've always wanted to make video games. So I've always kind of dreamed of owning a game company. I don't know if that's going to happen, but I have incorporated before, so I had the skills and the connections to do that. Not that it requires much skill. And as far as the name, it's just a stupid inside joke. Me and my friends, we were playing Halo Anniversary. We were in high school, so we were kind of getting out of that age where we were...we were kind of too cool for our own shoes at that point, right? And we were kind of making fun of people who reminded us of who we were in middle school, which was a lot of people who were playing online at that time on Xbox Live.
There was one — we were in, we were just playing Slayer or whatever. And my buddy...I was like, looking down the sights at this guy, and it feels like a longer memory than it probably was in the moment. But, you know, in voice comms, you can hear them in proximity chat or whatever. And his buddy was looking at him, so they were looking at each other. And I see my buddy Greg off to the side, walking up with an energy sword. And this kid, who sounds so young, he was like, "Look out behind you!" And his buddy turns around. My guy, my buddy gets a double kill. (laughter) So that's just what it was.
Jon de Nor: (laughter)
GubDM: On top of that, in high school, I also really enjoyed Moby Dick. That's my favorite book. I went through this sort of phase of...I was really picky when I was super young. Probably picked that up from my parents. Sorry. In high school, I was like, you know, there's a reason that a lot of these things are the way they are. I'm going to try the things, sort of, on default setting. And I went to McDonald's and I got a burger with lettuce and tomato, and I was, you know, I got all these things that are like, the classic, I guess, the way it's intended to be. And as part of that, I read a whole bunch of classic books just on a whim. And I read Moby Dick because I was an avid reader, and it didn't intimidate me at the time, and I really liked it.
And so, Look Out Behind You Studios...acronym is LOBY, right? So. I can't actually use LOBY because I think there's a, there's like a game website that's pretty popular called LOBY. And I think their images is a whale. So I feel, like, weird, going that close to someone else. I don't know if it would actually be an issue, but, anyway, it's Look Out Behind You Studios, so, yeah.
Jon de Nor: And as Look Out Behind You Studios, I think that was the first I noticed, kind of, your work, because so far you've published four adventures, I think, under...
GubDM: I would have to look, I don't know.
Jon de Nor: The ones I've noted down is Dread Abbey, Echoes Under Fort Thunder, Raiders of Ivywatch, and MacGraw Hideaway.
GubDM: And Fight on the Beaches. Although Echoes and Fight aren't really adventures, they're more just like a collection of combat encounters.
Jon de Nor: Sure, okay.
GubDM: But Dread Abbey, MacGraw Hideaway, Raiders of Ivywatch, those are the adventures, really.
Jon de Nor: And Raiders of Ivywatch, that was a Backerkit adventure.
GubDM: Yeah, that was my first time crowdfunding.
Jon de Nor: Yeah. What made you decide to go to crowdfunding with that adventure originally?
GubDM: So I started with Echoes and Fight on the Beaches, which weren't adventures. And I wanted to make an adventure. I wanted to be part of the discussion of starter adventures. You know? Like when someone says, "Hey, I'm just joining, I'm doing Draw Steel. My buddy is running Delian Tomb for me, I want to run something else. We're not beginners. What should I run?" I wanted people to be like, well, Raiders of Ivywatch is really fun.
And that didn't really happen, and that's okay. It's not...I mean, it was my first, really, adventure that I'd written for Draw Steel. It's my first adventure I'd never published for anything. I felt like in order to give me the best chance of becoming that, I felt like it needed to have a price, right? Whenever something has a cost associated with it, people think, well, it's got to have some quality, right? I couldn't just give it away for free. And I also wanted to get art, and I wanted to pay for the art, and I didn't want to just do that out of pocket, I guess.
And for whatever reason, I felt really confident the Backerkit was going to be really easy. Which, it kind of was, right? It kind of was, because I wasn't shipping anything physical, right? It's just digital download, and it was literally just the adventure. There was no add-ons, there was no stretch goals. It went pretty well as far as it could for Backerkit, but it was probably the easiest project you could possibly do on Backerkit.
And the page for it was not impressive. I mean, all I got was the cover, and that's the only art I commissioned for the entire thing. I ended up paying for one other piece of art from one of my playtesters who's an incredible artist, and they're actually the one doing half of the art for the Kiln. They did all of the stuff for the crowdfunder for that. Jaspinplanet. And I've linked them a whole bunch on Bluesky, you can find them pretty easily. I think they're doing other stuff now. I think Cameron's stolen everyone that I use. But anyway.
Jon de Nor: (laughter)
GubDM: Yeah. (laughter) So I only had one piece of art. And I got it from a Fiverr Indonesian artist who I thought had really cool stuff. I wanted it to not look like an adventure cover, right? I wanted it to look like an album art cover. And so I got an album art artist, right? Album cover artist. Which is why it's square, right? (laughter)
GubDM: The cover art piece is square. I also didn't get layout because I didn't know any layout artists, and I'm like, eh, I can make it look...I'll make it usable. Which I think it is, but it's certainly not pretty. You know, maybe one day, I'll make Raiders of Ivywatch, version two.
Jon de Nor: Am I remembering correctly that MacGraw Hideaway, which is...it can be used as kind of a lead up to right Raiders of Ivywatch.
GubDM: Yeah.
Jon de Nor: And if I remember correctly, it's it's an anagram of Cragmaw, from...?
GubDM: Well, it's not really...it might be an anagram. I just didn't want to use the same title.
Jon de Nor: Okay. Sure.
GubDM: But it is...it was supposed to be...most of my adventures, I make because I want to be part of some conversation. And MacGraw Hideaway was, I want to be part of the conversation of, "I have all these 5e products, I want to run Draw Steel, how do I adapt? What's the process? What are the strengths of Draw Steel that I can bring out of 5e adventures to make them the most fun in Draw Steel?" And so I was like, well, let me take the first dungeon of Phandelver — pretty popular — and make that in Draw Steel and see how it goes. And I really like running it. I don't know anyone who has run it. (laughter) No one tells me anything, right?
Jon de Nor: Mm, sure.
GubDM: It's gotten purchases, but no one's reached out and been like, "I ran MacGraw Hidaway last night. It was sweet." Sometimes a Brewery person who knows what I'm trying to do with the product will recommend it to someone, but I don't think they've run it either, right? They're just like, "I like Gub," so...(laughter)
Jon de Nor: (laughter) More like an intellectual exercise more than...
GubDM: Yeah. Well, and I appreciate it. But yeah, I want people who have used my stuff to say it was cool, not just people who have faith in it, you know?
Jon de Nor: Yeah. That makes sense. I don't necessarily have this in the correct chronological order, but at some point you end up joining Triglav. How did that come about?
GubDM: I was running Raiders for two groups weekly, as playtests. Just doing my due diligence, really. And part of the draw to get players — I don't think I really needed this, but it was fun — was letting people play the Vampire, to playtest that, also, at the time.
Jon de Nor: Ah, yeah.
GubDM: I think there were only two Vampire subclasses at the time that were ready to playtest? I think it was Sporebearer and Shrouded Lurker, if I remember correctly. Or maybe it was Noxious Stalker, I don't remember. I think it was Noxious Stalker because of the savagery thing, I remember doing. But anyway, it doesn't matter because both of — I had one player in each group who wanted to be a Vampire, and both of them chose Sporebearer subclass. Both of them struggled at the beginning with it because it had...some interesting design decisions that Matt made, and.
Jon de Nor: (laughter) That's a very political way of putting it.
GubDM: I reached out to him, graciously, and said, "Matt, these suck. And here, I've just fixed it for you!" (laughter) No, that's kind of half what happened. I did want my players to have a better time. And I kind of saw a way, maybe, to tweak the Sporebearer to make it less annoying to play. I wasn't originally going to reach out — well, I did reach out to Triglav, and I reached out to Matt, and was like, "Hey, I kind of have this idea for the Sporebearer. What do you think? You're the one who made it." And he's like, "I don't care, just leave me alone," basically. And I was like, okay.
And so I kind of wrote it up. It was a pretty small tweak, but significant. It was virulence, basically. The Sporebearer originally didn't have virulence, which is kind of like this meta-HR that just goes up over time. It's like a round counter, essentially. It used to be that when you infected someone, which is a condition that the Sporebearer can inflict, that came with a number. And when you infect people who are already infected, number goes up, and your abilities have different effects based on that number. Which I think Matt got from Magic: The Gathering. I don't play Magic, so I'm not sure.
That was really annoying to track, even in a VTT. So I was like, you know — and on top of that, it was like, because there are so many enemies in Draw Steel, and they're all kind of grouped up together, kind of? Vaguely. That's not necessarily true, but essentially what happened was, all of the enemies had the same infection count, mostly, anyway. They weren't — it was either they were infected or they weren't infected, and if they were infected, they basically all had the same number, or a similar number.
And so I was like, you know what? Let's just make the infected a condition with no number and let's separate the number. We'll say the number is like the round count, which is kind of what it was turning into anyway. By round two, anyone who was infected was sort of infected 2. By round three, everyone who was still infected was infected 3. There wasn't really anyone who was infected 1 on round three for whatever reason, just how it played out.
And so, that was way easier to play. We just ran it that way. I wasn't...I was just like, maybe Triglav is happy with the Sporebearer the way they have it right now, but let's just run it this way. It'll be easier for me, it'll be easier for you, and it's better. And so we did that, and it was really fun! And so I was like, hey, Matt, I know you kind of told me to buzz off, but, you know, we playtested this. and they really, really liked it. So, you know, think about it. And he appreciated that. And he started reaching out to me about some other stuff. I think it was like, we were just chatting at that point. But I think we were talking about like treasures or something. And at some point he's like, "Hey, do you just want to join Triglav?" And I'm like, "Yeah, sure."
Jon de Nor: You joined Triglav...was it, let's see, it was before the Boggits crowdfunder, correct?
GubDM: It was, yeah. I helped a lot, set up the Boggits crowdfunder. I think...trying to remember where Jonas joined us. I think Jonas was with us before Boggits. I think it was right before Boggits.
Jon de Nor: Oh, yeah. It might be him that I'm thinking of that joined right before.
GubDM: I joined before. Well, not like super substantially because the Draw Steel timeline isn't that long, right?
Jon de Nor: (laughter) Sure.
GubDM: I might have joined like a month or two before Boggits, and maybe Jonas joined a couple weeks before Boggits, I don't remember. But yeah, it was...I helped set up the — well, I didn't set up anything, but I helped argue for the — which I'm good at, what I like to do — argue for the pledge levels. The Swampshaper was my brainchild. Triglav was like — or Matt, Matt was like, "I don't think anyone's going to pay $80 for Boggits." I'm like, "Eh, I think someone's going to pay $80 for Boggits." (laughter)
You know, maybe we could do it like...my point of reference was, if you go to, like, the orchestra or something, they'll have sort of like, the high-falutin' people on a wall, like, these are the people who donated a shitload of money this year. And they're on little gold plaques on a nice wood board, and there's one for every year. And I'm like, you know, we could do something like that, where we could just say, like...you know, there's a long history of this kind of thing, like the...whatever, the Sistine Chapel was commissioned, wasn't it? I don't know, I'm not a historian.
But anyway, I was like, you know, we could just let people put names on the art pieces. Just say like, hey, I paid enough money that this could be made. Not that I had any hand in it, but maybe people would like that. And it turned out people were stoked on the Swampshaper, so.
Jon de Nor: I'm looking at it now. It says there's 14 backers.
GubDM: Yeah. Which, at that price point, made a huge difference, right? So...
Jon de Nor: Yeah, yeah. And what's even more interesting to me actually, you have a €50 pledge level which only has five. So there's almost three times as many! (laughter)
GubDM: Yeah, I had guessed that, actually. When we were estimating — because when you do a Backerkit, you have to estimate what the average pledge level is, which means you have to estimate what the average count is for each pledge level, and then by percentage, right? Like we think 10% will be this. We think 40% will be this, whatever. Multiply that by the pledge amount, add them all up, that's your average pledge level.
And I was like, I think that our $50 is going to be...I think I said that I thought it would be like, 50% would be Superbackers, 40% would be standard, 10% would be Swampshaper, and basically no one would do the third tier.
Jon de Nor: Warlord.
GubDM: Warlord. And the reason I thought some I thought more people would be, Superbackers and standard is because we had an add-on. It was the map pack, which was just barely...it was like two-thirds of the way to Superbacker, right? Like you get standard, you get map pack, you're...I think the difference was like ten bucks or something, and the map pack was like seven bucks. I don't remember exactly. But you have in front of you, you can see. You know, if you wanted — what we did, I think, if I remember correctly, I'm looking at it — the Superbackers get not only Superbacker credits, but also playtest material.
And so if you wanted the map pack, it was like two bucks more to just be a Superbacker and get playtest material and [Superbacker] credits, neither of which cost us anything. Right? Really, it's helpful for us, because we have more playtesters at that point. So I think I was under the impression, I was like, I think people are going to go for the Superbacker more than standard.
Which is not what happened with the Kiln if I remember, I think more people did standard for the Kiln. Even though I tried to do something similar with the quest, which gets you two-thirds of the way to Superbacker, and I also did Superbacker credits, I didn't do playtest material because I don't want to coordinate that. I'm a one-man show. Maybe that made a difference. I'm not sure. I don't know.
Jon de Nor: Did you end up doing any work...you did end up doing work on the Vampire, you didn't just do Boggits, correct?
GubDM: Yeah, I helped on the Vampire. Well, like I said, the Sporebearer...a lot of the Sporebearer was mine. Well, not a lot of it. I take that back entirely. Like, I did none of the heroic abilities, as far as I know. That was all Matt. And I think some of the other OG Triglav team whose names I can't pronounce because they're all Polish. I helped with titles, I helped with...I think I did some titles wholecloth, all me. I think Unslakable was mine. I know the flavor was mine, because it's from a song I like. I did some of the treasures, particularly the leveled treasures. I don't know if I did any trinkets, I don't like writing trinkets. I did do a lot of flavor and some names. And I did a lot of editing because English is my first language, so...
Jon de Nor: That helps.
GubDM: Yeah. (laughter) I did that throughout, yeah.
Jon de Nor: I can't say how many times I'm trying to write something, and I write it over and over, and I'm just shuffling the words around trying to make it work in English because, like, "Ah, I don't...what's the right way in..." (laughter)
GubDM: Yeah.
Jon de Nor: I don't know if that's because my native language is also a Germanic language, which makes them...
GubDM: You know, and we tried — at least, this was a point that I was trying to make when I was editing, was — if something felt like it was shuffled, just barely out of, like, the norm, we left that. Because it felt Polish to me.
Jon de Nor: You mentioned that in the stream when I looked through the Vampire. Because I reacted to one of the story text from one of the abilities and you mentioned that it...
GubDM: You were like, "That's one way to formulate the sentence," and I'm like, "That's the way we chose, yeah."
Jon de Nor: That was intentional. (laughter)
GubDM: Yeah. But if something was totally like, "I don't know what the hell you're saying," then Matt would kind of be like, "Well, I think it's this," and I'm like, okay, we're going to completely rewrite that. But if something got close, but not all the way, we didn't take it all the way. We left it as close.
Jon de Nor: Ah! I actually kind of like that. There's like a bit of Polish...
GubDM: I felt it was thematic.
Jon de Nor: Yeah, yeah. Especially with the Vampire.
GubDM: Yeah, for sure.
Jon de Nor: One of the questions that I've gotten from my patrons, which includes Matt, or Ananam...half a year later, what are your experiences collaborating on Draw Steel design inside of a team?
GubDM: That's a good question. It's a good question. You know, it's different because we've brought on a lot of people, and everyone has their own sort of experiences with working in teams. A lot of my experience is built up just from work, but I think a lot of some people's experience is built up from — you know, obviously different work, but some people, I think...for better or worse, I come from an environment where people talk over each other a lot, and that comes through, which is embarrassing.
We also try to get things done and try to stay on task a lot, and I don't think...I don't know what Matt does, but he does not like to stay on task, I'll tell you that. Sorry, Matt. Yeah, so, well, just generally, I think it's, you know, the buck kinda stops with Matt, right? He's he's sort of the design director. I wonder if every major Draw Steel third-party has a Matt at the head.
Jon de Nor: (laughter)
GubDM: And...well, first-party, I guess, for that matter. Yeah, so I'll come up with something, and then Matt will be like, "No, we're not going to do that." Okay! That's fine. Or sometimes he'll be like, "Yeah, let's definitely do that!" Which is probably more often. But the ones where he says no really stick with me, so...I try to give him grief about it so he does it less, but we'll see. It hasn't really proved out to work.
Jon de Nor: (laughter)
GubDM: Collaborating with everyone is really good. It's really good. It's a huge load off my back. I don't know if that's the right way to formulate that, but...to be able to delegate creative work because someone is going to be excited by the thing that we have to do, right? Like, if I don't want to make the Beastheart companions, someone's going to want to do that, right? Especially once we have art, then everyone's going to want to do it. So the the trick is to assign work before the art gets made, because afterwards it's hard.
Even when you're not excited by something, it's nice to be able to say, you know, maybe I will be excited by this in the future. This feels like something I will be excited by at some point in the next five months. So I'll take that. Or if, you know, three months have gone by and we need it, like the Gazetteer — the Gazetteer stuff, we were trying to do a lot of, and I was like, well, I can write. Whatever, I'll write some. I'm not — again, I'm amateurish at this. So I wrote a little bit and at some point I was like, you know, this is a drag. This takes a lot of energy.
Jonas comes on and is like, "Well, I mean, I'm a writer by trade." It was really good to just say, "Hey, Jonas, can you take this?" And they were like, "Yeah, for sure. This is my bread and butter. I'll take it and I'll plus-five it." And I'm like, "Great, excellent. In fact, just take it all." But...(laughter)
Jon de Nor: (laughter)
GubDM: Yeah, I have a lot on my plate with Boggits. I have to do four quests. And I feel like I have to meet the deadlines I set for y'all. Right? Like, first draft is due end of March. Don't forget, Jon. (laughter)
Jon de Nor: Sure. (laughter)
GubDM: And for me, I'm like, well, I would feel bad if I don't have all four of my quests in first draft by end of March, so I need to get, I need to get moving. I've got two done. I've almost got the third done. The third one's the hardest because it's a starter adventure. It really needs to follow Delian Tomb Part One very closely. So like with the other ones, I can kind of paint with a whole palette, right? If I feel like I need to open with a montage test, I can do that. With the starter quest, you cannot do that, because we're trying to make it so that you can use the pregens from Delian Tomb with the thing. And you don't get your features that deal with negotiation and montage. Like you don't get Put Your Back Into It, or...ah, that's not it. The Teamwork ones, the montage test perks.
Jon de Nor: Yeah. Yeah.
GubDM: You don't get that until after fourth encounter, right? Like you're out and past the Delian Tomb before that. You're back in Broadhurst when you get that. I can't open with a montage test. I can't put a montage test really anywhere in it. In fact, it's a lot worse than that, because it's like, you're not supposed to find out about edges until...we can introduce stuff a little bit out of order. But it can't be optional, that's for sure.
Like, in the quest that I'm working on for the starter quest, there's like a festival, you open with the festival, and you can pick one of three parts of the festival to go engage with, right? I can't introduce edges in one of those, because that would be super annoying to put in the book and be like, "Hey, here's an edge over here. This one doesn't give you an edge, so if you go over here and all of the heroes go over here, talk about edges later when they come up, good luck." You can't — that sucks! (laughter)
So I have to cover...if I'm going to cover anything new — which you kind of have to, in each thing — it kind of has to be an optional thing. So I cover, like, Wealth, when you go over here, and I cover Renown when you go over to this other place. Things that don't really come up in The Delian Tomb that they don't introduce at very specific points. I can talk about those, though. I hope it pans out. We'll see. That's a hard one. The other two are way easier to write. The fourth one, I think is going to be easier to write. It'll be a breath of fresh air. I'm excited for your quest. I want to hear about that. I'm gonna have to counter-interview you. I want to know all about it. (laughter)
Jon de Nor: (laughter) I'm gonna dodge that.
GubDM: How's it going with your ample time?
Jon de Nor: (laughter) Well, I did some work, and then I wasted the rest of it. (laughter)
GubDM: Yeah, I know what that's about. Yeah, I'm all about that.
Jon de Nor: You're both designing quests yourself, and you've assigned...
GubDM: Oh, and I'm making all the maps, right? (laughter)
Jon de Nor: Yes. And you're making a bunch of maps. And you're also leading others that are also designing quests. Do you have any tips or maybe tricks for aspiring quest designers?
GubDM: Well, I wrote the Theory of Mapping document, but I have not written a Theory of Questing, right? So I don't have like a...it's hard. I mean, it's easy if you're just running for your buddies, right? And you just need to make an adventure that night? That's fine. Got a lot of tools in your toolbox to do that. But when you need to write it out, and...you need to have really strong throughlines for the motivation to do things right? Because when you're running for your buddies, it's reactive, right? Like, oh, they go over here, I can handle that, whatever.
When you're writing a quest, it's all proactive, like you want to...you want to make sure that the heroes feel like the most obvious option is where the adventure leads, right? And not just make it, like, the barn is burning, you need to go do that or the night is...we're going to go play something else. Like that's totally heavy-handed. You need to make it, like...you need to make them feel good about going to do the thing, right?
Oh, here's a tip. Here's a tip. This is something I use in Raiders. So at the beginning of Raiders of Ivywatch, the town is...the town of Ivywatch is being raided. Which, you know. (laughter) You might not have guessed that, but that is what happens. And it is very much like, the barn is burning and you need to go save whoever's inside or the game's over for the night, that kind of thing. Or at least it was, to start. You know, you get to Ivywatch, and there's a question of, do we go into Ivywatch to save Ivywatch from the raiders? Or do we...you know, Ivywatch was supposed to be sort of like a, I guess a Cult of the Reptile God adaptation. Very loose.
Jon de Nor: Oh!
GubDM: And that ends with a dungeon, right? Where you fight Explicitica Defilus. And so there's a...the dungeon is more than half of the adventure, Raiders of Ivywatch. For better or worse. I think a lot of people...a lot of testers found it to be a little too long, maybe. And I learned a lot about dungeon sizes for Draw Steel in that way. But the point that I'm trying to make is that it helps to have a foil. I did not get to that point yet, but I'm skipping there. The foil is everything. So in my case, I added a dog. (laughter) There's a dog who rides with you in the cart when you get attacked outside of Ivywatch, and at the end of the fight, hawklords fly over, and they start heading towards the center of Ivywatch.
And there's the question. Do you go into Ivywatch or do you follow the lizards back into the forest towards their dungeon? And I really wanted you to go into Ivywatch, because that's where a lot of the foreshadowing and the NPCs are, and it kind of sets up a whole bunch of stuff, and I can do some more things, and I was excited by the encounter. There's a whole slew of reasons I wanted to go into Ivywatch. Plus, there's a good opportunity for respite, and there's not one in the dungeon. So if you just go straight to the dungeon, you're like, well, where are we going to go respite? Well, you didn't go to Ivywatch yet, so you didn't know this, but I wanted you to go to Ivywatch first, but I didn't really have a good reason for anyone to do that yet.
So I added a dog, and I said, "Hey, look, the dog is going right into the fire. He's jumping into the city to go fight all of the hawklords on his own." And I drew the dog. I have, here is the portrait of the dog, and it's one of my little stick figure arts, essentially, in the book. "Here is the dog. This dog is going to go fight all of the hawklords. What are you going to go do?" Right? "Big heroes, what are you going to go do?" Right? You're gonna let the dog go fight the hawklords by itself? Sure, fine. If you want. I mean, this dog, this cute one right here, you're going to let him go?
That was helpful. And I feel like that is definitely a cheat code for quest design, is that, whenever you feel the need to split the adventure path, and you want the heroes to pick one, but just to have the other? And, you know, I tried to make the other path fun, but it's not as narratively consequential. And so if you want the heroes to do something and feel good about doing something, you add a foil.
And Delian Tomb does this right at the beginning, right? There's like, Ashleigh runs into the tavern, she's like, "Ahh! I need someone to help save my daughter from the goblins!" The first thing that happens is she turns to, not the heroes, but this other party. And the other party is like, "Eh, we don't really want to," right? That lets the players be like, "Oh, we have an opportunity to be better than those guys, at least," right?
Because, you know, if you just had Ashleigh come in and there was no one to turn to except for the heroes, I think there's a lot higher chance that the heroes would be like, "Well, what's in it for us?" Right? But if she turns to this group first and they're like, "What's in it for us?" You don't want to feel like...that type of character has already happened, basically, right? And so you're like, "Well, I guess we've just got to be heroes then, right? So I think that is something you can definitely lean on in basically every setting. I mean, it doesn't get...as far as I know, it doesn't get old, right? Foils are great, I love them.
Jon de Nor: We can't be having this interview without mentioning, or rather, going into detail about the Kiln. Which is the crowdfunder you ran in January, I believe.
GubDM: Yeah. January 5th. It was right when Crack the Sun ended.
Jon de Nor: Yes, I remember there was something about Crack the Sun involved here. But yeah, the Kiln, which is a...kind of almost like a gish, question mark?
GubDM: Yeah, so...I don't know how far back do you want me to go on this. But I did research. I told you this.
Jon de Nor: Yes, yes!
GubDM: I'll just go the whole way. Okay, so, I was running 5e for my buddies. What was the start? I like making maps, right? And 5e doesn't really interface with maps that much. I guess combat maps to some degree help make the combat not as boring as it is, but other maps aren't, like, essential in any way, right? There's no exploration pillar, that's fake.
So I, like any good beginner DM, I spent a lot of creative energy trying to make 5e different in the way that I wanted to play it, right? And so I tried to implement, like, Colville's montage test ideas into travel. That sucked. I tried to do all kinds of stuff to make it so that my hex maps at the time were more important to the campaign that I was running for my buddies.
And one of my friends really likes the Arcane Archer, but doesn't really like how few shots you get. I think it's a fair complaint of 5e in general, but...so I was trying to come up with a sort of Witcher/Arcane Archer mashup that I was going to call the Apothecary, and it involved looking at the hex map tile that you were in, on a short rest or a long rest, and that determined the type of herbs you could get. And then your herbs, you would pick two from the available — and there wouldn't be that many available, based on your biome — and the herbs would determine your, essentially, arrows. The Arcane Archer arrows. But I had a bigger list that I was making, and so you'd get about three arrows, three different arrows based on the herbs you picked.
Fast forward. We all hate, all my buddies hate 5e by this point. We've stopped playing entirely. I've started trying to make my own TTRPG like an insane person, because I'm just stoked on the development of Draw Steel. And one of my classes is the Apothecary, kind of expanding on this, but in a completely different system that makes no sense. And I don't really remember what was new there. But anyway, so the Apothecary was in my mind at the time. Draw Steel comes, everyone wants a gish.
And so I make a Tactician subclass prototype — I mean, it sucked — called the Spellbinder! And I put it in #ds_creations. You can go find it today. Again, it sucks, but it implemented a lot of what I liked about the Apothecary, which I had reimagined as sort of like a Stormwight kit. Instead of picking a number of herbs, and then your abilities are based on those, like with combinatorics or whatever, you just pick a kit, and it gets you your three abilities. Now it's starting to look like the Kiln!
And, at some point, someone...might have been SurfingBird, I don't remember. Someone was like, "You know, I don't think that focus is really doing anything here. Why is this a Tactician?" I'm like, well, you know, I just wanted a gish Tactician, but fair. I was thinking that the Spellbinder kit, as it was called at the time, would replace one of your Field Arsenal kits. So you would get one martial kit — or caster kit, I think they were around at the time — and you'd get one of this bespoke subclass kit, right?
And if you look at the other thing — this was kind of important — I wanted it to sort of feature, like, a trade-off where you have these, you start the encounter with three different triggered actions, and you can expend something — runes, whatever, I don't know. At the time, I didn't know. I still didn't know. I called it "flaring" because that felt final, in a way, like you're burning the thing. You flare a rune and it turns off your triggered action. You can no longer use that one of your three triggered actions, but you gain a signature action in exchange.
And your three subclasses of — now it's a class, by the way, it's not a Tactician anymore, now it's a class — the three subclasses had different things, like, oh, if you...this one wants you to flare very few. You want to keep your triggered actions, and so you get speed based on the number of runes that you still have available. This one wants you to flare everything as soon as possible, so you get temporary Stamina every time you flare one. That kind of thing, right? I like that sort of trade-off like, "Oh, this one, I really need the signature action, so I need to flare this, but oh, there's that tension between my subclass where I really don't want to flare anything," or, "I really want this trigger later, and, wouldn't it have been cool, had I not..." Anyway, I like the tension.
So I like the idea of sort of turning off these things and turning them into other things, like turn off this triggered action, turn it into a sort of a signature, kind of thing. And at some point I started working on heroic abilities, and the focus problem had not left. I had a new heroic resource because it was no longer a Tactician, it was a Spellbinder. And the heroic resource was "depth", because I thought, like, you're in a flow state, kind of a thing. I could never figure it out. It felt very nebulous to me. I was like, I don't like this. It doesn't feel like a clear vision at all. It just feels like I'm a gish. I think the Scion does it really well, by the way. I think Ben figured it out. But I could not, for the life of me.
And so I was like. And so basically, the Kiln came out of a mechanical need for a clear...well, I don't know if it's a mechanical need, but I needed a better guidepost for heroic stuff. And I had this idea of flaring, which I really liked. And so I thought, okay, what if we just re-envision this whole thing? Scrap the Spellbinder, whatever. It's just too "blah". And so I thought, you know, I think the Illrigger is cool. The Illrigger is really cool, right? And the Illrigger, I thought, was really cool because it was a Censor, or, I guess, a paladin, from Hell. It's from a specific place. It's not trying to be a class that can exist in every culture, everywhere.
I was really excited by the kits that had, like, very clear culture, like the Retiarius or whatever. I like those, because I feel like they're from a place. Like, if you're from Phaedros, you know what a retiarius is. But if, maybe, you're from Vanigar, you might call it something else, or you have some other kit that features a polearm and a net or whatever. I was really excited by the idea of making something that wasn't universal, which a lot of the classes in Draw Steel are. The core ones, at least, right?
And in fact, I think a lot of the third-party ones are still universal. Everyone's just making universal classes. I didn't really want to make a universal class. I wanted to make something that was more bespoke, more region-specific. At the time, I had even thought I would tie it to a setting product. Put the Kiln in with the setting.
Jon de Nor: Oh!
GubDM: And that's still on the backburner. I'm working on Boggits now. Anyway, eventually I kind of separated it from the setting. I just said, well, the Undermind isn't just here, it's everywhere. It's the roots of the wode that was the entire of Orden, right? So it's all over Orden, and it's also its own manifold, so it's everywhere. Undermind's everywhere. You can be a Kiln anywhere you want.
But yeah, so it the Kiln kind of came out of like needing to get rid of this shitty Heroic Resource that didn't mean anything, and coming up with something that felt more flavorful, narrative. And that's how I got "spark", which I feel like is a pretty good Heroic Resource name, and not a good Beastheart subclass name. (laughter)
Jon de Nor: (laughter)
GubDM: Every time someone playtests the Kiln, they never call it spark. They always call it essence or clarity. It makes me think, should I change it? But I'm not gonna. I like it, so I'm keeping it. Plus, we already have the pregens done, and they say spark on 'em, so, you know, that's it. It's spark. I like it. It's cool.
Yeah. So that's the Kiln. I don't know if there was anything beyond that. After that point, it was just iteration on fire stuff. So yeah, just a lot of fire stuff after that. Which worried me at the beginning, right? I was like, well, can I make an entire class with three subclasses that feel distinct just based on, like, fire moves? Well, there's some soul stuff in there too, right? Like the nutrients of the Undermind are supposed to be souls of people who die, that kind of thing. There's there's enough going on, right?
And I feel like I've finally landed on something that feels sort of distinct. Distinct enough between subclasses. It's not, like, the difference between like, a Sporebearer and the Crimson Conductor Vampire, and it's not like the difference between a Stormwight and a Reaver Fury. But they feel pretty good. I think they're different enough. They feel like the difference between the Null subclasses, I would say. Yeah, I'm happy where that is. Still working on it, though. Still working.
Jon de Nor: We are closing in on the full hour here, and at the end of the interviews, I always ask for my guests to bring some kind of recommendation that they want the listeners to either know about or check out or whatever. So what kind of recommendations have you brought?
GubDM: Alright, well, I have one for you, which is a podcast. I don't know how much you're gonna get out of it, but I like it, and I think everyone would like it. It's called You'll Hear It. It's pretty popular, I guess, in certain circles. And it's two gigging jazz pianists in Saint Louis, basically kind of doing the Rick Beato thing, where they talk about albums that are popular and that they like. And they sometimes have pianos in front of them. It's just really good. It's really good. It's kind of become the place where I find new music at this point, even though it's old music.
But they don't just do jazz albums either, ahough they do jazz albums. They do a lot of, like, R&B, and Michael Jackson stuff, and I know Stevie Wonder is technically jazz, but I didn't always think of him as jazz. And so they do a lot of Stevie Wonder. They do...they love Stevie Wonder. They do all kinds of stuff. It's really cool, it's really cool. I love that. That's a podcast that I recommend.
And then today, I thought, you know, I should come up with more recommendations. So I have one, music you might not otherwise listen to, which is related. And that is, Miles Davis's Porgy and Bess suite. I don't know if you know what Porgy and Bess is, it's like a great American opera that Gershwin wrote. The Gershwins, I think. And it's where the song Summertime comes from, I don't know if you know that one. But Porgy and Bess...yeah. And Miles Davis did instrumental, or at least, his name's on it. I don't think he did a lot of the instrumentation. I don't know the history behind it. I'd like it if they covered it, but it's really good. So that is my music recommendation. Porgy and Bess, Miles Davis, whole album.
And then, movie you might not otherwise see, which is going to be The Adventures of Tintin, the 2011 movie.
Jon de Nor: Oh, interesting.
GubDM: I love it, I love it. And it's very Draw Steel in a way. They're not superheroes. It's more Sherlock Holmes-y, kind of, or Indiana Jones, really. It's like cartoon Indiana Jones. But, it's based on a comic, right? Tintin? The music is crazy. It's so good. It's John Williams! John Williams, jazz piano. It's, I guess there's a throughline for all of these, but...yeah, Tintin is crazy good. I need to rewatch it, because the more I think about it, the more I'm like, that could steal some stuff for Draw Steel for sure, for some adventure writing.
Like, there's this one scene where they're, there's like a chase sequence down a city on a hill, and there's like a tank that, like, runs through some architecture and they're like, running away from this tank, and there's like, a hawk that tries to steal some shit. That'd be such a cool montage test. I gotta do that. I need to rewatch that also. But yeah, those are my three. You'll Hear It, Porgy and Bess, Miles Davis; and Tintin, 2011.
Jon de Nor: Directed by...
GubDM: Steven Spielberg!
Jon de Nor: Yeah. Such a crazy movie. (laughter)
GubDM: Yeah, I love it. I think it's — oh, the scene transitions are crazy. I think at one point, Tintin and the other guy...
Jon de Nor: The captain.
GubDM: The captain, they do like a handshake. And then the camera zooms in on their hands, like their thumbs interlocked, and it becomes dunes of sand! And it, like, zooms in further and you can see, like, little camels. And then it scene-transitions, and they're riding through camels through the desert! You're like, what the hell just happened?! Yeah, it's wild. It's crazy. I got to watch it again. It's so good.
Jon de Nor: It has been a joy to basically listen to you just ramble your way through all the stuff you've done.
GubDM: Yeah. Happy to be here, Jon. I could go another hour if you want.
Jon de Nor: I've been loving this. Thank you so much for coming on.
GubDM: For sure, for sure. I enjoyed it. Thank you.
Outro
Thank you so much for coming on Gub. It was fascinating. The journey the Kiln went on before it ended up where it is today is wild. And I think it's a great example of how an idea might change over time, until it finds it groove.
I want to thank The Dice Society, Anatan Karmola, and Ananam for submitting questions for Gub.
If you want to be featured on Goblin Points, or know of someone else who should be, leave a comment on YouTube or Spotify, or send me an e-mail on tips@goblinpoints.com.
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Next episode is on the 5th. That's the roundup episode covering the important news for March.
See you next time. Snakkes.