Intro

I'm finally joined by Jonas Tintenseher. They've recently published a shadow subclass, is currently working on an epic adventure for Triglav, and you can find traces of Jonas' work all over the third party supplements being published for Draw Steel. And I ask what makes Draw Steel so nice to design for.

I'm Jon de Nor and this is Goblin Points.

Interview

Jon de Nor: Welcome to Goblin Points, Jonas Tintenseher!

Jonas Tintenseher: Hi, I'm so happy to be here!

Jon de Nor: So give us a — well, you almost need no introduction, actually.

Jonas Tintenseher: No, come on!

Jon de Nor: (laughter) But give us an introduction of yourself, and also how you ended up in the Matt Colville/MCDM community.

Jonas Tintenseher: So I'm Jonas Tintenseher. I am a writer, game designer, video/audio editor, and lover of stories and tabletop games. My favorite thing to do. And I...I looked this up in preparation for this because I knew you'd ask this question. I subscribe to Colville...I don't remember what year was. I subscribed to him around the time that Strongholds and Followers was getting ready to go up, but I was watching him before that, because I remember clicking a new video that was talking about Adventure Lookup, and how they had created, like, community members had created that off his suggestion.

Jon de Nor: Ah!

Jonas Tintenseher: So I was pretty early on, not the earliest...I don't even remember what put me on to him. It might have been just something that popped up for me, or it might have been a recommendation, or something adjacent to Critical Role. I truly have no idea, but I've been watching him for a long time. I'd been a long term-GM at that point, so his advice mostly wasn't even that useful to me. But he was just, I just liked the way that he talked about it, and shared the history of the hobby, and gave ideas for how to build off of stuff and create villains and create interesting stories and the central tension, new ways to think about your game world.

And I especially liked that if I ever disagreed with him, I knew why. He wasn't just a random YouTuber who puts out all this stuff, and...can I curse on this show?

Jon de Nor: Yeah.

Jonas Tintenseher: Okay. (laughter) Puts out all this shit and doesn't have any support for it. Like, I could tell, I knew where he was coming from, he explained his thought process. I knew what kind of person he he was to say that. I mean, I don't know what kind of person he is, but like the points he came from. So I just, he was a good speaker, and a good GM. I enjoyed the campaign diaries, the GM advice, watched The Chain, I backed Strongholds and Followers and I backed. Draw Steel...or, no, I didn't back Draw Steel. Did I back Draw Steel? I don't remember.

Jon de Nor: (laughter)

Jonas Tintenseher: No — I think I did — yes! No, I did back Draw Steel — and then I ignored it, because I knew it would be a while before anything came of it, and I didn't want to sit through the process of getting excited for things that weren't going to happen. But I loved watching the Designing the Game videos. And then finally, finally, in fall of 2024, it kind of, I was kind of reminded of it, and I checked on it, and luck would have it, Packet 4 was going out, and the game was almost ready.

Jon de Nor: Yeah, yeah.

Jonas Tintenseher: And so I just started trying to push my way into as many playtests as possible. I just really quickly fell in love with the game, instantly started working on homebrew, adapting some of the stuff I had made for 5e, including, and some new stuff. Got to know a lot of cool people. Spent too much time in the rules questions channel in Discord, and now we're here! And now I'm even, I even get to say, a volunteer playtest coordinator for MCDM, which I'm very happy about.

Very early on — my first-ever playtest was with Alex August, one of the contract testers, and Alex appreciated my notes and feedback, I guess, enough to pick me again for future tests. And after just a couple of them, I would send my notes along — I would always take notes for the post-test discussion — and just after a couple of them, Alex was like, "Have you applied to be a playtest coordinator, by the way? Because you really should." (laughter)

Jon de Nor: (laughter)

Jonas Tintenseher: And then it took a while because they only do them in waves every year. But as they were gearing up for Encounters and Crack the Sun testing, they pulled me on. And I'm just, it's such a good time. I'm just so glad to be here. Yeah, I love Draw Steel, I love the community a lot, I love MCDM, and I'm just having a really good time, just all over the place. I'm putting my name on as much stuff as possible because I just love doing it. This is such a fun game and community.

Jon de Nor: And I think — well, you mentioned being very active in the rules question channel, which I assume a lot of people will know your name from there, but you've also been more or less present in every episode of Goblin Points because of all the work you do for third parties. (laughter)

Jonas Tintenseher: (laughter) Yeah. I started offering to do layout work for people because it was something I had a skill in. Not a major skill. It's not my career or anything. I did a little bit in college and a little bit for myself since then, making indie games. And in the early stages of the game, there were not a lot of resources for people to make good-looking homebrew. More of those resources exist. We still don't have like a full GM Binder type thing for Draw Steel, but there's a pretty good like Affinity and InDesign template. There's a lot of Google Docs templates out there.

But I had just come from Lancer and making a template for Lancer, which is a much simpler, even simpler style than Draw Steel, which means it's very easy for anyone in the Lancer community to make stuff that looks just like Lancer. And without that for Draw Steel, people were publishing all this stuff that I just found either hard to read just because it's a lot of big blocks of text on white pages, or just like, isn't doing the best job of communicating all the stuff. So I just started saying like, "Hey, if you're ready to publish this, you know, I know some layout stuff. I'll do it for cheap, just like as a side thing." And...like, I would have done it for free, probably. But I asked for money just to prove that I was worth it, basically.

Jon de Nor: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jonas Tintenseher: And a couple people took me up on it, and a couple more people, and a couple more people, and now I have my name on a lot of the big products out there, and one day, I will have them all.

Jon de Nor: (laughter)

Jonas Tintenseher: And then MCDM will have no choice but to hire me. No, I just really like...I do like, I just like talking to the people. I like seeing the designs. I like working on them with it. I like the work of layout, I like editing, so it's a win-win. And I'm very grateful to all the people who have been getting me to do that for them. And then, yeah, on top of that, I've also been doing just other collaborations with people and working with ChaoticGoodra or Mattelonian on a couple things, working with Jenny [REDACTED] on some stuff, working with Zetesofos.

And I...there's just a lot of really good designers, and I — a lot of them put out an idea that is like, "Hey, I kind of want to do that. Can I do that with you?" And they're like, "Yeah, let's do it together!" And it goes and it's great. I'm just really pumped all the time. Plus, also — what I thought you were going to say, by the way, when you were like, you're secretly on every episode of Goblin Points, is because I've also been doing the transcripts for Goblin Points.

Jon de Nor: Yes, yes! (laughter)

Jonas Tintenseher: (laughter) So really just worming my way in there!

Jon de Nor: You've got dozens of tentacles all over the Draw Steel community.

Jonas Tintenseher: Yeah. I am the voiceless talker, I am Lord Syuul. You See Only Me! That's his villain action, right? (laughter)

Jon de Nor: (laughter) But you're also doing your own stuff. Recently you published College of Infinite Reflections, which is a Shadow subclass.

Jonas Tintenseher: Yeah, I love the Shadow subclasses. I think they are probably the most interesting ones in the game, other than maybe Green Elementalist. Sorry, not Green Elementalist. Elementalist in general, especially Green and Void are just very cool and very unique. Shadow subclasses have a lot of the most, like, juice, packed into the subclass, instead of the core class. So, like, Tactician, all Tacticians do Mark, and they do support stuff, and they make enemies attack, attack your enemies, whatever. Censors all do Censor stuff. But the Shadows play really differently because you have either like very teleport-y, or all these like areas and bombs and surge focus, or the illusions.

And yeah, Infinite Reflections was something that started in 5e as a rogue subclass. I really liked the Echo Knight. I wanted to play a rogue version of Matt Mercer's Echo Knight, where you summon this echo of potential from...not...I don't think technically it's like an alternate universe, but it's like just potential alternate universes? So I really liked Matt Mercer's Echo Knight. I thought it was really cool. I thought the effects and features of it were really fun, and made fighter a lot more interesting than the base fighter, which mostly wasn't. And I wanted to play that as a rogue, kind of vaguely based on — this is a — wow. It's like, blocks on blocks on blocks of blocks of how I got here.

But it was vaguely based on this character I had made for a custom Magic set, which was also tabletop-inspired. So I really just wanted to play a rogue version of the Echo Knight. I made the subclass. I played it in a Spelljammer campaign. I had a lot of fun. The character is now very close to my heart, Ridian, who is also the iconic Infinite Reflections Shadow on the cover of that. And I hadn't thought about it in, like, years. But then I get to Draw Steel, Beastheart is on the table, Summoner is on the table. There's all kinds of wacky stuff happening. I'd also played a lot of Pathfinder Second Edition in the middle. They have their own summoner, which is like, more like a Beastheart. You have one big summon that you work with.

Jon de Nor: Oh!

Jonas Tintenseher: And I just had all these influences in my head and I was like, "You know, I bet that rogue subclass would be cooler in Draw Steel," because Draw Steel's a cooler game. And I knocked out most of the design pretty fast. And yeah, it was cooler in Draw Steel.

Jon de Nor: (laughter)

Jonas Tintenseher: And it took a long time to get ready. It was one of the very first projects in the Brewery server, but it took a lot of time to get publication-ready because, first of all, doing other stuff, but also just never have as much time for playtesting as I want. So I didn't get in as many as I want. But yeah, finally had enough playtests, felt good, tried all the levels, and came upon a visual design for the layout that I liked.

I commissioned — I wasn't even planning to commission art, but then I got started getting paid by some of these other projects and I was like, you know what? I might as well turn around and give that back, put that back into my projects. And like, commissioned three pieces when I was like, "I'm not going to do any. Okay, maybe I'll do one for the cover. Okay, maybe I'll get another one because the stained glass thing is really cool. Okay, maybe I'll get an item because it looks kind of weird that there's no art for the items." And then thankfully I stopped at that.

But yeah, I'm really proud of it. One of my next things that I've recently started working on is another 5e subclass I worked on that I'm also was just like, hey, this is cooler in Draw Steel, which is a Fury subclass that does earth magic. I...Fury has been my least favorite class. It's not, like, bad. It's cool. Great class, fun to smash things, throw them around. Just felt like it had the least going on for me, for the things that I like in a tactical game, at least, which include thinking a lot about positioning and supporting your allies and doing weird, kooky, unique effects. Which is all the things that Infinite Reflections does, because those are the things I'm interested in.

And I was talking in the Brewery, I was like, "Man, what class could take a subclass that can do all these things?" Which is the — I won't get into the list, but just like, what can do, like, this, this, and this, and dual-wield, and earth magic, and blah, blah, blah. And there were a couple options. I was like, "Okay, if none of these work, what kind of class could do that that I would have to make a homebrew class for?" And then one of the other community regulars, Voazinha, or Vinny, he was like, "What about Fury?" I was like, "Fury? No, come on, Fury can't — hold on a second."

Jon de Nor: (laughter)

Jonas Tintenseher: And yeah, it's a perfect fit. Fury, the base class actually already has a lot of the stuff that I want the subclass to do. It's kind of the perfect...one of the things people talk about with Fury is like, it's weird that it kind of just jumps into magic, primordial chaos stuff at 4th level.

Jon de Nor: Yeah.

Jonas Tintenseher: But this subclass is about protecting your world from other worlds and incursions and stuff, so it's actually a perfect fit. And it makes that make sense now, for base Fury. So yeah, I'm...been working on those. I have a million other things as well. I mean, there's, like, unique-to-Draw Steel stuff I want to do. I want to make more treasures, I want to make more adventures, I want to make more monsters. But those are the...Infinite Reflections and this one, because these were my two favorite things of 5e homebrew I made, they're very dear to my heart, and I'm very glad...theresponse has been great. I mean, Infinite Reflections has paid for all of its art already

Jon de Nor: Wow!

Jonas Tintenseher: Did within like the first week, it was great. Just really delighted to see people responding to it. A lot of people, more than one person said, "I have a player in my game who is a Shadow, who has this concept of being, like, torn between alternate universes and stuff, like Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, Spider-Verse..." They're like, "I have a Shadow who is this concept, and I didn't know I needed this until you put it here in front of me and I'm going to pick it up." And that, moreso than the art paying for itself, hearing that from not just one, but multiple people, has been the most rewarding thing. Just like, great, this resonates, I love it.

Jon de Nor: Wow. That actually surprises me that that it's apparently...! (laughter)

Jonas Tintenseher: Right?! I would expect, maybe, someone to be like, "I've had a concept like this, now I can play it." That makes sense. But for more than one person to be like, I already have a Shadow. Not just any class, specifically a Shadow, who is playing this this concept without having had this subclass. I mean, what can I say? Great minds think alike.

Jon de Nor: (laughter) One of the things that both myself wonder about, and also some of the people that have submitted questions, is where have you picked up all the different skills you apparently possess when it comes to design and layout and everything? It's like — oh, is this an expression in English, a Renaissance man?

Jonas Tintenseher: Yeah, yeah!

Jon de Nor: Yeah, yeah. You seem to be one.

Jonas Tintenseher: Well, thank you very much. A "Renaissance them", we'll say.

Jon de Nor: Yeah.

Jonas Tintenseher: (laughter) My friends and I have this — when I switched to using they/them pronouns, my friends and I — one of the running jokes in the group at the time was going "Brother!" just at anything. And then I was like, hey, I want to start going by they/them and like this, this, this. And they were like, "Okay, fuck, what do we do? We gotta — how do we refer to Jonas? Okay, sibling!"

Jon de Nor: (laughter)

Jonas Tintenseher: Just an unaffiliated aside. Yeah, I mean, so a lot of design — I can't say where I get the design from. I mean, I, I'm not I've never taken — that's not true. I have taken game design courses, when I was a teenager. I've just, I think I've just played a lot of games. I've played a lot of games. I've noticed what works. I've noticed what doesn't work. For me. I can't speak for everyone, of course. I mean, a lot of people in the community who don't agree with the way that I like things. Completely fine. I notice a lot of things at work, a lot of things that don't work.

I think I have a pretty good handle on player psychology. Especially in the sense that I know that a lot of what I know is anecdotal. So I know that my decisions, even though I feel like they're pretty well-supported, and maybe some of them are, mostly they are a narrow field of me and my experience, and I know that. And I can keep that in mind, in the back of my head when I'm working on stuff. How will this work? How will this work for people who aren't, don't think the way that I do, and a lot of the stuff I do is accounting for that.

Like for, when I write adventures, which is mostly a new thing for me, a lot of the stuff I'm putting in is like, "Okay, this is obvious to me, but if I pretend it's not obvious, if I pretend this is obtuse, how do I communicate it?" And that instinct as well comes not just from game design, but from writing. I am a writer first. I have a number of novels finished that I am querying for. I have a couple, like, poems and shorts and audio stuff published online here and there. A lot of those same lessons apply. Like, this is obvious to me because I wrote it. I know what's happening behind the scenes.

But I give it to my friend, and they're like, "Hey, I don't understand the arc that this character went on." This was a big thing for my first — not my first novel, but the first novel I was, like, really ready to send out and publish. It's about a valkyrie in Ohio. Some of my beta readers were like, "I don't really get the main character's arc. I don't really understand how she changes at the end." And I looked at it all and I was like, "Well, here's evidence A, and here's evidence B, and here's the climactic transition point, and here's where she realizes it. So what's missing?"

And so I just added a bit at the end where she just does a little bit more self-reflection, and just is a little bit more explicit about how she feels she's changed. And I gave that back to them and they were like, "Oh, I get it now." (laughter) So it's a lot of that. Just like, how do I, what would I do if this wasn't obvious to me?

Other than that, it's like...in layout stuff, I learned in college. I was the editor of my lit mag for a couple years. I was the editor-in-chief for a couple of years, so I worked with the layout person, and then I was also a layout editor for a year. So that's kind of where I learned how to do this stuff in the software. I also did the newspaper for a semester. The graphics stuff is pretty new to me. I still feel very amateurish and hobbyist at that point. I'm very much not skilled with making the icons and things, but I do my best.

A lot of it is like, grabbing — going online, finding an icon for what I want that someone else made, and then just trying to recreate it so that I learn how they did it. Or like, not even how they did it, because probably did it better than I did. Faster. But like how is it possible to make those shapes into the shape that I want? And then once I've done that, I can be like, okay, got it. I can't use that because that is just plagiarized. But now I know how to make that kind of shape and I can restart from there.

So like my icons for the font, that I made for like monster roles and stuff, 80% of those are like, I couldn't figure it out, I grabbed an icon, I recreated the icon, and then I made a new version with those lessons. The one that I'm most proud of is the dragon head for solo. That took me forever, but it looks great.

And I don't know, what else do I do? Video and audio editing. I've just...various things for a long time. I've done podcast stuff for several years. Photoshop, just a hobby. All just things I picked up for various things because either it was something that needed to be done, that I didn't know anyone who could do or couldn't pay anyone to do, so I had to learn it, or I just wanted it to be done at a standard for myself that I wanted to meet, and the options I had to do it other ways were not up to that standard. So I figured it out. And here we are.

And it's not easy! Everyone's always, "How do you do so much stuff?" It's not easy, alright? It's a lot of my time. It's a lot of work. It's difficult, and it's not like I'm just cranking this out day by day. Every little thing takes forever. But it's fun, it's rewarding, it's satisfying to get it right.

Jon de Nor: And speaking of the icons that you've designed that are used in a lot of third-party stuff that's coming out — and I've also, I'm also using them on Stawl. (laughter)

Jonas Tintenseher: That's one's, that's my favorite. I'm really glad. Did you see, you saw Colville called it out on his stream?

Jon de Nor: Yeah, yeah, yeah!

Jonas Tintenseher: He was like, "Why is it a scale?" So I was like, "Well, I'm sorry! (laughter) I couldn't figure out anything else."

Jon de Nor: I wanted to...because I did have some iconography, but I wanted to align with the rest of the community to make it make sense. That felt just natural to me. But I wanted to ask about those icons and also the consensus that has been reached, at least in the Brewery server, when it comes to color-coding different types of abilities. And I know that you wrote a message in the...

Jonas Tintenseher: A screed. (laughter)

Jon de Nor: A screed! (laughter) In the Brewery server, on why it's important to use those colors, even though you don't necessarily like them arranged that way, or those specific colors.

Jonas Tintenseher: Yeah! I don't like them that much. I think main action red makes sense to me. Maneuver blue makes sense to me. Trigger green? No. Green means go, so that should be something free. You know, like traits...

Jon de Nor: Oh, no, that makes sense! (laughter)

Jonas Tintenseher: So I don't — they wouldn't be my first pick, right? But they're no one's first pick. We ran a survey. It came up first when a user — ah, it's either Brett or Brent, I'm sorry, I don't remember. But a user made a post about, like, "This is something we should do as a community." And I was in the middle of making my icons, which were influenced a lot by Lancer and also by Jen Kretchmer, who's been a guest on here, and her talks about accessibility.

I was like, "Yeah, it does kind of suck, like — just looking at an ability block in Draw Steel — this is what really, this is the first, this is where it all started, was, there's an icon for distance, and there's an icon for targeting, but there's no icon for keywords and there's no icon for actions. And that feels like a pretty important gap to me. So that's where I started. And then it evolved into doing damage types, fixing potencies...fun fact, in the official glyphs — I hope this, I hope I can say this — the official glyphs, if you zoom all the way in...

Jon de Nor: Oh, no.

Jonas Tintenseher: The tier icons are not congruent. They have a little slight difference. Completely invisible at scale! Completely invisible. No one would ever know, unless you were pulling them into Illustrator and blowing them up to massive size. But they're just a little bit off! And I was like, "I can never unsee this. I need to fix that."

Jon de Nor: (laughter)

Jonas Tintenseher: So stuff like that, monster roles and icons, you know, all that stuff, was just like ways...what would be helpful to me — because I like icons, I like — the whole point of it is to be able to glance at the thing and see what's going on, without needing to read all of the text. So you can look and see, "Wait, there's a lightning bolt there. Something is happening here with surges. Which one of my abilities was, did sur —? Oh, this one, this one does surges. Got it."

The colors, then....so I was in the middle of doing all this, and this color post came up by this user — and I think it's, I think it is Brett, I really hope it's Brett — and he hadn't picked colors yet. I think he suggested some, but he was like, "This is something we should talk about as a community and we should come to an agreement, and we should all start using it together, because it's good for accessibility." It's good for — you need multiple avenues of accessibility. You can't just have colors, doesn't work for colorblind people. Doesn't work for black-and-white printing. Doesn't work for everything. You can't just have icons because some people are visually impaired, can't tell apart the things at small scale, maybe just don't like them. There are people for whom all of this effort does the opposite. Like, more bolding, more icons. You put that in the text, it makes it worse for them.

So there's a balance to it. There's, you know, it's good to provide alternate options. So I jumped on this and I was like, you're absolutely right, we should standardize colors. We should do this as quickly as possible because we're still in the early stages here. This was like fairly early. We need to get ahead of this before everyone starts publishing all of their stuff so that we can make sure there's a standard. And it was hard for a little bit to convince people, because everyone was like, "I don't want to do the colors like that. It doesn't make sense to me." And eventually we took a survey, and we got not like a representative number of responses, but I think like 60 responses or something.

Jon de Nor: Oh, okay! Yeah.

Jonas Tintenseher: Which was pretty good for the time because it was again, like I said, it was early. And we came up with this list, and I didn't love the list. I don't think anyone loved the list. That was the point of the list, was to be average. And I started pushing as hard as I could. I was like, "Hey, use this list, please. I know you don't like it. I don't like it either. It's not perfect for everyone, but it is the best possible for everyone. At least as we polled it. I'm sure if we polled it now, it would be different. But we already have the standard, so doing that would kind of ruin it.

So yeah, this post I wrote was just like, I just was...I don't want to, I'm not going to call anybody out, of course, because again, I totally understand where they're coming from, as well. Me too! Like, I get it, right? But there were a lot of people who were just like, "Ehhh...I don't want to do that because I don't like it, and I don't think it matters that much, and I would rather do it my way. And then...isn't it more important that there's like internal consistency?" And it's like, the point of having a standard is that it's easy to translate between products. The point of having a standard for like outlets is that you don't need to bring an adapter with you each time you go to a different place, you have one plug and one outlet and it always works.

So having different colors between different products defeats the purpose, and the line that I use that seems to get a lot of people on board was like, "You're absolutely right. For 95% of people, they're not going to care. They're not going to notice. It's not going to help them anymore than just having it bare would be." But if there's 5% of people, if there's 1% of people, if there's a single person who ever reads these things and says, 'This makes more sense to me, having these two things have overlap. I can go from one product to the other and retain that information.' If it helps even one person, I don't — to me, there's no reason not to do it when there's no cost to us, right?

Jon de Nor: Yeah.

Jonas Tintenseher: Like, it's so easy to just turn off that part of your brain that cares, because, like, were you going to do it anyway? Probably not. Maybe you were, but it's not like it was something everyone was doing already, right? A lot of people weren't bothering with it. And you can help someone. You can help someone with minimal effort. And I think that's just always a good thing to do.

So yeah, like I said, they're no one's — and people have asked in the meantime, they're like, should we redo the survey? Should we reassess these things? It's like, people are already using it now. Triglav — at, you know, at my recommendation, but like, Triglav did it in Vampire, which I'm really happy about, because that's a big community touchstone. And of course, all the people I've been doing layout for, I've been like, "You want the colors, right?" And they're like, "Yeah, give me the colors." So it's just about being a community and coming together for people who are not like you, right?

I mean, hey, full circle, how do I think about this if I'm not me? What is the...what would I, how would I take this if it wasn't obvious to me already? And the answer is, I think I would prefer to be able to go from piece to piece and not have to do extra brainwork. Like that's the point. If you're visually impaired — even if you're not visually impaired, if you just like, are not looking that deeply into it, it's just so much easier to see one color, always, and know what it is.

So yeah. I'm not an accessibility expert. I'm not a consultant. I have not trained for this. I just have picked up what I've picked up from various things, and I'm always hoping to improve. I take the feedback wherever I get it.

Jon de Nor: Well, the colors is also one of the things that I implemented into Stawl, specifically for the monsters. When I think about it now...I don't do it for the character sheet actually. (laughter)

Jonas Tintenseher: Yeah, but on the character sheet you have it split out into sections anyway. I think it is way more relevant for monsters. I don't know — the core monsters, they split the...they have icons! Like, they have the technology, but it's for like, melee, ranged, area, and at least for me, those are not the things I need to know when I'm running a monster. Like, I know what this is going to do, I need to know what part of the turn it's going to be. So I think it's more valuable there.

Jon de Nor: You're also working on stuff for Triglav, which you — you joined their...their outfit — I don't know how these things are arranged, but you joined their outfit last year, right around the Boggits crowdfunder, I think? And now you're working on an adventure for a crowdfunder that's launching very soon as we speak, and will already have launched?

Jonas Tintenseher: A week ago, I think, if this is going up on...

Jon de Nor: 25th of...

Jonas Tintenseher: Yeah. So, yeah, it launches on the 19th, I believe.

Jon de Nor: Okay, yeah, yeah. What's in this new crowdfunder, Until the Last Villain Dies?

Jonas Tintenseher: Yeah. UTLVD.

Jon de Nor: (laughter)

Jonas Tintenseher: Let me say, I just think this is a fun story. It's, you know, I hope it shows my humility. But around...when Boggits was lining up, I was seeing — you know, GubDM had been with Triglav for a while. He told his story of how he joined on his interview, which I thought was really funny. I didn't know that story. But that he was, he had, like, playtested Sporebearer, told Ananam, "Hey, this is kind of janky. You need to fix it." Or not "You need to fix it," but like, "Here's how we fixed it. Maybe you would like to do that?" and Ananam was like, "Whatever, go away," and then came back a little while later and was like, "Actually, I kind of like that idea. Let's talk." And that's how GubDM got on.

I remember — I hadn't published anything yet, so completely irrational and egotistical of me to have this thought, but I remember looking at Gub's stuff and being like, "What's this guy doing that I'm not doing? I would like to be on Triglav. I like Vampire. Vampire's cool. I wanna work on Vampire. I want to work on stuff with people. I want to have a budget for things to do." Again, completely unsupported, unfounded. It's why — I didn't message Ananam or anything. But then actually, I messaged him first when transcribing his interview on Goblin Points, I was like, "What — how did you call this thing? Because I didn't understand the the way you pronounced it."

And he told me and then a couple days later, he was like, "Hey, of these ideas" — and he told me all the ideas that Triglav was thinking about, which is like dark fantasy, nautical, couple other things — "which would you be more interested in?" And I was like, "Well, I think this is actually the most interesting for Draw Steel, but I really want to do dark fantasy. So I'm going to say dark fantasy, and I hope you don't snipe me too much." And he was like, "Oh, cool, what are you working on?" I was like, "I have this idea for adventure, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Not the adventure that we're going to talk about in a minute, by the way. I just think this is a fun story. And then like a week or two or three after that, he just was like, "Hey, do you want to just come be on Triglav?"

Jon de Nor: (laughter)

Jonas Tintenseher: And I was like, "Okay, yes, I do! We can do some dark fantasy together, hm, hm, hm!" And so I got put on Boggits and stuff, and helped edit Vampire before release, and fix up, you know, language and rule stuff, and started doing design for Boggits and monsters. And we have an ideas channel in the Discord where we post ideas (shocker).

And I remember — I actually, I tried to look this up. I couldn't figure out what movie it was. I was watching a movie when this idea hit me, and I guess that's how boring the movie was, was I was thinking about something else. But I was watching the movie, and I came out of the movie and I posted the idea and I was like, "What if there was like a Fall of Blackbottom-style adventure where you are dragon knights and soldiers of Omund who are fleeing the castle as Ajax is attacking it? And that's the quest, is just like, Ajax is here, he's besieging Castle Omund, get out with your lives." Right?

And it could be called, Until the Last Villain Dies. Or I think I also said, or Against All Tyrants. But we're going to say that it's the first one, because that's what it stuck. And so I said that, and in the message I actually wrote, I said, "Idea that I'm not that interested in, but could be cool. Here's the idea." And then Gub came in and was like, "That's cool. What if it was Kill Bill instead?" And I was like, "Now I'm interested." (laughter)

Jon de Nor: (laughter)

Jonas Tintenseher: Specifically, I think the thing that that really hooked me was — I don't even remember if he said it first or I said it, but we like landed on, "What if you're going to hunt down traitor-knights later?" And we came up with the flashback idea of witnessing the fall of Castle Omund before you fight each one, and what they did to betray the Phalanx. And that was when I was like, "That's cool. That's Draw Steel. That's sick as hell."

So we just start kicking this round a bit and just, yeah, like everyone...I mean, at the time it was just me, Ananam, and Gub mostly, and I was like, "This is really cool. I want to make this now." And I was like, "Wow, you want to make my humble little idea? Oh, dear."

And then we started talking about it, and we're like planning the next crowdfunder after Boggits, and we're like, what's the big hook? And Gub, specifically, has been the biggest hype man. I'm very grateful to him. He's like, "This is the coolest adventure. Everyone should love to to play it." I'm like, "I'm glad you think so. Boy, I hope you're right."

So that became the centerpiece of the crowdfunder, which is very scary to me. And the...a lot of the other things in the crowdfunder — because we're doing kind of a Crack the Sun dealio, where you can pick and choose different things to preorder and support us making them — two of the other ones are also my pitches, and I have other pitches in the future that Triglav is also planning to make a Triglav thing. One of my homebrew things is a psionic class called the Collective, and it's not...it's early stages right now, but Ananam read through it at some point, he was like, "Jonas, this class is so cool. I want to crowdfund it. Can Triglav do this class?" And I was like, "Who am I to say no to getting me a bunch of art? Sure!"

Jon de Nor: (laughter)

Jonas Tintenseher: So I'm very grateful and humbled that so much of the Triglav lineup now is stuff that came from me. Of course, we're all working on it together. Nothing is just me anymore. But Murder of Corvenwights was something I was already working on, the corvenwight enemy band and ancestry as prep for a quest I wanted to do, or adventure. And Rocks Fall! is this thing I started doing in 31 Flavors of Draw Steel, the Promptober stuff I did last year, where I was like, I want something cooler than a dynamic terrain object. Which, you know, they can be cool, but like, they're very small and one-note most of the time, and often avoidable.

And people had been talking about ideas for Draw Steel stuff with like more MMO, video game-y mechanics of, an area appears and you have to get out of it before it fires. I was like, that sounds like Draw Steel. I bet Draw Steel can do that. So came up with these — originally they were called "dynamic terrain", which I decided was confusing. So now they're dynamic arenas. And they went through several iterations, but I'm really happy with where they are now, where you...the chief factor, the defining thing — not necessarily for all of them, but most of them — is that they have a terrain action, which is like a villain action, but at the start of the round, you foreshadow it.

Jon de Nor: Oh!

Jonas Tintenseher: Which means, you put it on the ground, you put it on the map, and you say, "Okay, at the end of the round, something bad is going to happen here in this 3 cube," or more likely, "in these five 3 cubes." (laughter) Or something good is going to happen! They can be buffs too. And then everyone has the — monsters and heroes have the whole round to maneuver around it, and they can push each other out of it, they can pull each other in, they can try their best to move around it. And then at the end of the round, it lands and whatever happens, happens.

So like my favorite — it's very straightforward, very simple, but one of my favorite from Promptober is the Ruined Keep, where the first terrain action is, pick like four cubes, and the end of the round they crumble into the floor and people fall, like Instantaneous Excavation. And the next one is like, the ramparts crumble, and rocks land on your head. And then the third one is just my favorite so far: a bell falls off the belltower, lands in the middle of the map, in the middle of the round, and does a burst that does sonic damage and dazes.

Like, just simple — the keyword here is cinematic. It's just meant to make your battles a little more cinematic and elevated. And just again, it was just another thing that I was like, Ananam saw it and was like, "This is so cool, we should make a supplement called — that's just like 20 or 30 dynamic arenas." And I was like, I would love to do that. So, you know, a lot of the stuff on the the docket and coming up is my brainchild, which I'm just so delighted about.

We also have two others that are not me in there. Grave Matter is, Ananam is the lead on that. It's about skeletons, and there's an undead quest, and a bunch of skeleton options. Really fun. We had a magic item shovel in there called Gravedigger. And then...was it Griffon's Saddlebag? Released — MCDM did a collab with a 5e magic item maker, and they have a magic shovel called Gravedigger. And we're like, okay, maybe we need to remake that one.

And then the timescape starter, Upper Worlds, Beware! That is DimaJeydar, who made the asomthas, The Astounding Asomaths, winner of the second — or Amazing Asomaths? — winner of the second Jams of the Timescape. Excellent entry, beautiful cover, beautiful layout, really fun sci-fantasy space pulp deal. And they are coming back around in this little starter pack of a quest, and some space pirates, and all that, and just...yeah.

So it's just, it's all this like, all the things we have been working on, and just pulling stuff in, and what are we most excited about doing. And that's really the thing that is the most fun about working with the Triglav team, which now includes a lot more people as well — Mattelonian, KingGurke, Dima of course. The primary...and similar to MCDM, I think, is like, what are we most excited about? What do we have cool ideas for? What do we think? We can really pull a lot of juice out of? And that makes it really fun and rewarding to work with them.

Jon de Nor: Wow. (laughter) That is a lot. (laughter)

Jonas Tintenseher: Yeah. What was the question? (laughter)

Jon de Nor: Well, you did kind of cover it. The question was about Until the Last Villain Dies.

Jonas Tintenseher: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to talk about everyone else's cool stuff. That's not, that's me. I talk about myself too much.

Jon de Nor: But you do so much, though. There's so much to talk about!

Jonas Tintenseher: Yeah, yeah. Little here, little there.

Jon de Nor: One of the questions that I've gotten from from my patrons is actually not related to Draw Steel at all...

Jonas Tintenseher: Ooh, yay.

Jon de Nor: ...but I'm also kind of curious about it. They mentioned, and I've seen you have them on your your Itch page, you've made a lot of smaller TTRPGs. Solo TTRPGs. What is...?

Jonas Tintenseher: Some of them, yeah.

Jon de Nor: Yeah, some of them. What is the...what are those about? (laughter)

Jonas Tintenseher: Oh gosh, I mean...foolish of me to just go down the whole list, but I'll try and summarize. In, I want to say 2020...so I had made a couple small things here and there just as ideas. One of them was a business card-sized RPG, that was my first thing I posted on Itch. Then I made a...was it for a jam? A lot of it's from jams. I did a lot of tabletop jams, just to kind of get my creativity going and see what happens.

So yeah, Gambit Crew is a business card-sized game. Clean Streets is this stupid, silly game where you are janitors in a cyberpunk dystopia. Onward from Omelas was, I played this excellent like, worldbuilding game called i'm sorry did you say street magic, which I love, I adore. I should have put that in my recommendations, but here's the recommendation now. And I was like, I bet you could do a twist on this, kind of themed after the story, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin, which is one of my favorite shorts of all time.

And then in 2021, I think...so those were all just like side projects, like just little things I did in between other stuff. And then in 2021 to 20-something, I don't know, pandemic time, I said, I'm going to make an RPG every month. Just a little thing, just to kind of get my gears rolling, experience stuff with...get to know my tools, my software better, right? That's where I learned a lot of my layout stuff is from doing all these. And a lot of them — some of them, I am supposed to still be working on and I've gotten distracted. Some of them are just short, one-page things that aren't anything more than what they are...

Yeah, they're just little ways to explore different ideas I had. A lot of them come from like different random inspirations that I had. One of the first ones was Storm ♥ Circuit Odyssey, is like...I don't remember if I had played Lancer or not at that point. I don't think I had, but I was really interested in it. But I was also like, I want a mech game that's more about feelings than fighting. Because we had finished, we had just finished watching Neon Genesis Evangelion. So that's what that is. It's a game, it's themed around mechs, but really it's about your feelings.

Let's Kill Vampire Lord Rasputin and Get Back Home in Time for Christmas is, I had just seen, I think it was the Kingsman: Golden Circle movie where they, like, assassinate Rasputin. And he is...I remember like, in quote unquote, "real history" — this is maybe, like, a legend — but Rasputin was, like, shot, stabbed, poisoned, beaten, drowned, like they went through so much — this guy was unkillable. And then finally they chucked him in the river and he died. And we expected, my friend and I saw this movie and we expected something like that.

Jon de Nor: Oh, yeah!

Jonas Tintenseher: But there was...it wasn't, it was like a...there was an action scene, I think. It was like a dance fight. But then he just died. They just shot him and he died. And we were like, this...we thought from the trailer that this was the plot of the movie, was killing Rasputin. That would be a cooler story. So I was like, what if I made a game about that?

Again, I'm not going to go through this whole list, but there's like...just, each of them you can see is like a different idea I had that I wanted to just explore, and some of them came out better than others. Like The Machines We Built. I wanted to make a game where you have to arrange your dice on the paper to make stuff happen. So in that game, you are like a cute little post-apocalyptic robot, like Brave Little Toaster, and you have to...you roll your dice, and then you have to arrange them in equations. So like in order to do your big move, you need to be able to put three dice in ascending order that are all odd, right? Or something like that.

Jon de Nor: Okay!

Jonas Tintenseher: I could keep going. There's a lot. There's one that's inspired by Ten Candles. There's one, there's a Forged in the Dark hack. There's a Monster of the Week hack. One of my favorites is A Requiem for Horizon Prophecy Online: The Final Four. This is unique in that it was for a game jam called the Dying MMO Jam, that, most of the entries were video games, but they didn't say it had to be video games! So I had never written a solo game before. I had just seen a solo game that I liked for the first time, which was called Grey Moon Rising. I was like, I'll take a shot at it, and I came up with this thing. I really liked the lore and the worldbuilding of it. It's gotten really good reviews. Someone made a whole like article playthrough of it on Cannibal Halfling Gaming that I was really touched by. Flattered.

So all just like little, just little explorations I had. I said, I want to do one a [month], I did do one a [month], and then I kind of started doing other stuff and got distracted. But I still do stuff there, outside of Draw Steel. In 2024, actually, right around the time I was getting into Draw Steel, I made Neon Spider another solo game. So it's just a place for me to put my little ideas that I want to...what if that was a game? What if this could be this? What if this dice mechanic worked this way? And hopefully, someday, some of them will become bigger games. Like I do...Specters and Spurs is a Wild West — or, sorry, Weird West hack that I, like...the game I want to play there doesn't exist, so I had to make it. And it's not done. Needs to be finished. Something I'm supposed to be doing, but I'm doing Draw Steel stuff instead. Hopefully I'll come back around to it.

Jon de Nor: Cool! I find it so interesting because I'm so used to playing these TTRPGs with these tomes of rules. And while I have played like Honey Heist and Lasers and Feelings, these...is it Grant Howitt that designs them?

Jonas Tintenseher: Yeah. Big inspiration for me, of course.

Jon de Nor: Yeah, yeah. But yeah, it's so...I've never thought of designing so many games in such a short time. (laughter)

Jonas Tintenseher: I was inspired partially by Yahtzee Croshaw from Zero Punctuation.

Jon de Nor: Yes! he did a video game a month, didn't he?

Jonas Tintenseher: Little short video game every month. And I was like, it's got to be easier to do that with tabletop games.

Jon de Nor: Oh, yeah!

Jonas Tintenseher: Because I don't have to code anything. I can just write stuff. I can write words. I know how to write words. I'm good at writing words. Yeah.

Jon de Nor: We are closing in on an hour? Yeah....

Jonas Tintenseher: What? How? Come on. That can't be right.

Jon de Nor: Well, actually, I do have one question. Almost like a...not non-sequitur. Some other fancy word, probably. But I have one question that I wanted to ask. Especially as someone who's been or at least had their...I guess, a tentacle?

Jonas Tintenseher: Tentacles, yeah.

Jon de Nor: Tendrils, I don't know, in so many products around Draw Steel. Do you think there is anything inherently about Draw Steel that makes it such a fertile ground to design for?

Jonas Tintenseher: Oh, yeah.

Jon de Nor: Because it feels like there's so much happening around the game, and I'm...is that because of the game? (laughter)

Jonas Tintenseher: I think it's a lot of things. Of course, it's not just the game, but I do think a lot of it is the game. I think, for example, my first Jams of the Timescape entry, Memories of the North Wind...my initial thought there, like the seed that started that became that item set, was the spear, Íssgrein, the Frozen Bough, which is a frozen spear that, when you kill someone with it, they turn into an ice sculpture. And you can force move the ice sculpture, and when it collides with people, it explodes, makes a big cold burst of energy.

That's not something I ported from 5e. That's not something I had seen in any game, really. I did — I only realized after I made it that it kind of existed in Draw Steel already. The Icemaker Maul turns people into sculptures that explode at like 9th level. But I wasn't thinking about that. I just wanted to make a Legend of Zelda-type puzzle with slide-y ice sculptures.

Jon de Nor: (laughter)

Jonas Tintenseher: And I think part of the beauty of Draw Steel...Colville has gone on rants about how 5e's, like, focus on natural language really hurt the ability of the game to be a game. Maybe I'm paraphrasing him wrong there, but how, like, Fourth Edition was very clear with its keywords, damage, miss, effect, like...there was game design and game balance there, whereas 5e, in order to understand what a spell does, you have to read three paragraphs of text, a lot of which is basically flavor text, because people read that better.

And Draw Steel still has a lot of that. There's still a lot of stuff, there's flavor text that gets put into the text of abilities sometimes. But it also still has better core design, better foundations, better keywording. And those two things together, I find, just create really fertile space to make stuff happen. Like in 5e, I think I would have, like if I had to write that item, would have had to be so long and so many caveats, and so many...and this is how it works with this rule, and this works with this rule, and also 5e doesn't have, like, forced movement as a theme, so I have to basically invent the first movement system for it. And if that's different in the new 2024 rules, I don't know and I don't care, so don't at me.

And in Draw Steel, not only can I still write out in natural language, basically, you know, they become a frozen statue and you can slide them and they explode. But there's also enough core game design there to support that without me doing a lot of extra work. We have forced movement, we have collisions, we have bursts and areas, and I can...and we have Knockback as a generic, base maneuver that everyone can do. So it's very, very easy for me to say, you make an ice sculpture. They are force-movable. When they collide, they explode. Instead of the, like, 12 paragraphs that would take in 5e.

So that is a big part of it, I think, is that the game has the right balance of mechanics and natural language to kind of make it easy to make cinematic abilities. I think that's a huge part of it for me. It's a huge part of it for a lot of designers. One of my favorite abilities in the game is Classic Chandelier Stunt, which is a Troubadour ability. Which, you read the title, you know what it does. And there's no, there isn't any of that text in the ability, like, some abilities say in the text. They say like "You blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," explaining what is happening in the fiction. And that's fine. It's not a problem. But I love Classic Chandelier Stunt because the core mechanics work with it so well, it doesn't need to do that.

It says, you vertically slide — or vertically shift — I forget — but you vertically, I think, slide yourself and a target, and you go through the air, you must land adjacent to each other, and then you both make a free strike, or something like that. And just reading those mechanics, you know, sort of...you can picture what's happening. And then the title gives you like, okay, if you didn't get it, here's what we think is happening, which is a chandelier stunt. And then those two parts together, instant, like, perfectly visual cinematic thing that you instantly understand, not just what it's doing mechanically, but what it's supposed to be doing, and that helps you make that ruling.

So that's one big part of it. The other big parts of it are just that Draw Steel got a lot of playtesting. You know that it's a reliable baseline to work from. You know that the math works. Of course, we've both had these conversations with homebrew people, like, the math doesn't always work.

Jon de Nor: (laughter) Sure.

Jonas Tintenseher: The math skews, in certain ways and certain abilities and certain levels, but for my money, and I've played a lot of tactical games, it skews some of the least. Maybe not the least ever, but it holds together a lot better than most other games like this. Even Lancer, which I love, gets really crazy at the top levels in a way that, you know, similar to Draw Steel, it becomes harder and harder to challenge your foes without just making these huge — whatever. Tangent.

So, the math works, the math is there, and the math will be patched. We hope. We think. They plan. They want to do balance patches. So even the things that we think are maybe broken or overpowered or underpowered — and when I say broken, I don't mean just overpowered, but like literally nonfunctional — they want to fix those. They also think that those things should be fixed. So the foundation, you know the foundation is good. It's not a rotten foundation, it's not a fragile foundation.

And then the third part of it is just the culture, the culture that Colville created through his YouTube videos, the culture that is now supported very heavily by James Introcaso, and Willy Abeel, and Paul Hughes, and Teos...and I forget his last name.

Jon de Nor: Abadía?

Jonas Tintenseher: Abadía. Thank you. And just all these designers who do great work and support the great work that the community does, and not only support it, but when, like, those Designing the Game videos from Colville and James and all those people — and, by the way, I say Colville because there's like five Matts in this hobby, so just to be clear who we're talking about — the Running the Game videos, evolving into Designing the Game, talking about what worked and what didn't. Talking about why they made the choices they made. Why they went with the "no oatmeal" thing.

You know, if you — and it kind of goes back to what I was saying, like why I like Colville in the first place. If you disagree, that's fine. But you know why they think that. They explain it. They give you the data for you to work with. I think that filters down, and it shows in the Brewery that people are always playtesting. People are always trying to make "no oatmeal" stuff. People are always trying to fit the dream of Draw Steel, even the dream of Draw Steel that Draw Steel maybe doesn't live up to in every way. I think it does in a lot of ways, but it's not a perfect game. Everyone would say that.

Yeah, so those three things together, I think are the main things. It's got the right — a good blend of both natural, easy-to-understand cinematic language and good keywords and mechanics and design foundations to support it. It's got the rigorous playtesting and design foundation and structure, like subclass structure is way — not everyone agrees with this, but I and several people have said, like, it feels way easier to design stuff in Draw Steel than for 5e because you know, you're like, "Okay, I need a maneuver, a trigger, two heroics at 1st level. Done. Then I need two more heroics at second, two more at fifth, a couple features..." Like, the ladder is much easier to climb there. And then the culture that MCDM has created around it, which is just —

Also, and like, just, they like, they support people's crowdfunders? Like, Colville and MCDM, like, you see from the MCDM Bsky account. They're always like, "Proud to be the first backer on these...!" you know? Willy is a patron of the arts on several Boggits — er, Triglav products, I mean. It's just a great warm community. And even when someone gets it wrong, whether that's a community member, or if the devs broke something, whatever, there's a great community effort of, "That's not it." Like, we can improve, right? We can make it better, we can do something different.

And that, to me, is really important. I really, I really hate in a creative endeavor, when you're like, "We know it's a problem, we have the ability to do something about it, and we're not going to." If there's a reason not to, if you're out of time, if you're out of money, whatever, I get it. But sometimes there's groups out there that are just like, it's good enough. And I — like there's something to be said for not always editing your own thing too much. I know that from novels, all that jazz. But like, if you know it's a problem, if you can fix it, I think you should. And I think you should not drop your standard just to, you know, let it ride, or not rock the boat. I think you should always keep innovating and keep moving up and to the right.

Jon de Nor: A profound end to the questions.

Jonas Tintenseher: Yay!

Jon de Nor: (laughter) I always ask my guests to bring some recommendations, and you've already told me that you have a list prepared.

Jonas Tintenseher: I have a list, I have a list. (page flip) Notepad.

Jon de Nor: (laughter) Lay it on us. What have you brought for our listeners to check out?

Jonas Tintenseher: I've got a few. I'm going to keep it short. So the reason — I should say also, the reason I brought a list is because most of them are pretty mainstream. So I need to shotgun spread to make sure that it's something that someone hasn't heard of yet, because I don't think my tastes are like super niche or anything. But these are the...I'm a creature of stories. I love stories. These are all the stories that, like, make me who I am, and have influenced me over the years.

So top of the list. Number one, you don't listen to anything else I say: Outer Wilds. You must play Outer Wilds. There's only one excuse for not playing Outer Wilds, which is if you get motion-sick, because it's a lot of flying around in space. But otherwise, it is an absolute masterpiece. It is my favorite, not just my favorite video game, it is my favorite anything of all time. I aspire to one day make something half as good, 25% as good as Outer Wilds. It changed my life. It completely...it infects everything I do, all the time, forever. It's great.

And the only way — it's one of those things where, don't go in with spoilers! Just pick it up. Don't read anything. Just play it. Just figure it out. And the only way that you can relive the experience of playing Outer Wilds is by having other people play it and watching them or hearing about it. So if you pick it up because of this recommendation, DM me and feel free to tell me how your adventure goes and be curious on your journey.

Next is Puella Magi Madoka Magica. It's a magical girl series. I really like it. Fans of the magical girl genre are sick of hearing about it, and that's fair. But specifically, I love the way that the story moved in the sequel, called Rebellion. It was, again, like a life-changing — not so much life-changing, but like a mindset-altering way of doing a sequel that I just love. Probably not the first one to do it, but it's the first time I saw it happen. So check that out. Check out the sequel. I always, now — it seeps, this is how I think about all my novels and my stories, this way, now.

Speaking of books, Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams. Both very popular sci-fi. I'm not breaking any news here, but they're important to me. (laughter) They're good books, read 'em! Forest of Forgotten Vows, this is — I'm biased. A friend wrote this book and the sequel, and she's currently working on the third book. But I really genuinely like them. They are — if you are sick of the, like, faerie romantasy genre, these are faerie mystery-thrillers. And they are very compelling, very fun. And the protagonist is the most relatable protagonist I've ever read in the book. I have never connected to a protagonist the way that I have with Tamsin Bellamy in these books. So hard recommend there.

Your Name (Kimi no Na Wa). It's a movie. It's an anime movie. It's just one of my favorite movies all time. Made me cry a lot. Makes me cry every time. Also, Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. Favorite movie of all time. Just excellent, cinematic masterpiece. If you watch that, you will know why I made College of Infinite Reflections. I Saw the TV Glow — excellent, powerful queer movie. It was kind of billed, trailered, as a horror movie. It's not that scary. It's more of a psychological kind of drama. Watch it. It's beautiful. I know I've said this twice already; there's a scene in the middle that changed my life. Strong recommend.

Underwater, the horror movie with Kristen Stewart. My friend and I went to see this movie thinking it would be bad and laugh at it. And we spent 40 minutes in my car after the movie talking about how intricate the themes were, and we made a video essay about it.

Jon de Nor: (laughter)

Jonas Tintenseher: So watch Underwater, it's great. Pay attention to the background, lot of great details. Okay, we're coming to the end of the list. Tabletop — I already talked about Lancer. Lancer's a great game. It was my favorite tactical game before Draw Steel. You can miss in Lancer, and that sucks. The rest of the game is awesome.

If you're a fan of Colville, you've probably also heard already heard Ten Candles. It was in the recommendation series on his channel. It's great. I got to play it for the first time last November. It is powerful, immersive, beautiful, incredible. Similarly, Alice Is Missing is a unique take on tabletop games. Strong recommend, unforgettable experience. There is nothing like it out there. And Rocket Club is a new game from Evil Hat that I got to playtest. It feels to me the way that Kids on Bikes feels for other people. Everyone's always recommending Kids on Bikes. I never liked Kids on Bikes that much, feels kind of wonky. The dice system in that game is genuinely broken, like it does not function. You get worse at things as you get better. Rocket Club feels like what that game wants to be.

And then Tether is a two-player journaling game that is just, if you've never tried a journaling game before, it's where I would start. It's really cool, really fun premise. You both have a notebook. It's like diegetic — the notebook that you are journaling in is linked between two time periods, and the characters have to use that to figure out how to stop the bad thing from happening.

(inhale) Thank you, end of the list — music. Lord Huron, Yaelokre — which is Y-A-E-L-O-K-R-E — and Paris Paloma. These are just three artists who have been constantly on repeat as I have been finishing up writing and editing my most recent novel, so they deserve a shout-out. Thank you for letting me do all of those.

Jon de Nor: (laughter) That's a hell of a list!

Jonas Tintenseher: Like I said, they're all — a lot of it's mainstream, but someone, whoever's listening to this right now, one of those things, you haven't heard of! So go check it out. And make sure it's Outer Wilds first. (laughter)

Jon de Nor: (laughter) Jonas, it has been a real treat to have you on and way overdue, I'd say I.

Jonas Tintenseher: Yeah, I was always waiting to to like, request to be on for when I had a big project, and I'm very glad, man, I didn't talk about the adventure enough, but I'm very glad to be doing it. I'm really excited for it. I guess I should probably, I feel I feel silly saying it, but check out the crowdfunder.

Jonas Tintenseher: It's live right now. A lot of cool stuff in there until the last villain dies on Beckett kit. We'll appreciate your support very much. Thank you so much for having me. John.

Jon de Nor: Thank you so much for coming on.

Jon de Nor: Thank you so much for coming on, Jonas. I really like Jonas's insight on what makes Drawer Steel so fun and engaging to design for. I have my own theories too, but I think Jonas's point about the balance of mechanical and natural language is a good one. I want to thank the diocese and in Cromwell, two tall Fern and Anam for submitting questions for Jonas.

Jon de Nor: 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 email on tips at Goblin Points. Links to everything, including this script, can be found in the show notes and on Goblin Points com. You can support my work by becoming a patron member.

Jon de Nor: Paying members. Get to submit questions for my upcoming guests here on Golden Points. You also get access to premium features. Install stall is a digital toolset for playing and running. Draw, steal digital Hero sheets and Counter Builder Monster. Look up the complete rules, texts and more such as the Stall Supplement Index, a comprehensive list of supplements being published for Draw steal in one convenient place.

Jon de Nor: Visit stall Dot App Store app. Next episode is on the fifth. That's the news roundup for May featuring crows. Details. More supplements for draw still being released and funded. See you next time. Snack is.

Outro

Thank you so much for coming on Jonas. I really liked Jonas' insight on what makes Draw Steel so fun and engaging to design for. I have my own theories too, but I think Jonas point about the balance of mechanical and natural language is a good one.

I want to thank The Dice Society, Antan Karmola, totallferne, and Ananam for submitting questions for Jonas.

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.

Links to everything, including this script can be found in the show notes, and on goblinpoints.com.

You can support my work by becoming a Patreon member. Paying members get to submit questions to my upcoming guests here on Goblin Points. You also get access to premium features on Stawl. Stawl is a digital toolset for playing and running Draw Steel: digital hero sheets, encounter builder, monster look up, the complete rules text, and more. Such as the Stawl Supplement Index, a comprehensive list of supplements being published for Draw Steel, in one convenient place! Visit Stawl.app. S-T-A-W-L-dot-app.

Next episode is on the 5th. That's the news roundup for May, featuring Crows details more supplements for Draw Steel being released and funded.

See you next time. Snakkes.

Jonas Tintenseher: A Person for Every Occasion | Interview

Or listen here:

Intro

Interview

Outro

Links

Recommendations