Intro
I'm joined by Peter LaCara. He's currently writing and crowdfunding The Withering War, an epic war story adventure, inspired by the classic Red Hand of Doom, but especially made for Draw Steel. Peter explains what makes it different from the original, and other interpretations.
I'm Jon de Nor and this is Goblin Points.
Interview
Jon de Nor: Welcome to Goblin Points, Peter LaCara!
Peter LaCara: Hi, Jon.
Jon de Nor: So give us an introduction of yourself, and also how you ended up in the Matt Colville/MCDM community.
Peter LaCara: I'm an independent RPG author. I know Matt from way back, because I basically grew up on the RPGnet forums where Matt used to post all the time, so we were actually like, weirdly, Facebook friends for a long time before he even started Running the Game channel. And I was one of his first subscribers just because, "Oh, cool, this dude I know from the internet started a YouTube channel. I'm going to support him." No, I'm like, weirdly adjacent to a number of people in D&D community. I went to high school with the McElroy brothers, of The Adventure Zone. Like, I was in community theater with Travis.
Jon de Nor: You've always been around! So you noticed that Matt started his channel back in 2016 or whatever. Did you end up being active in the community already then, or were you...?
Peter LaCara: I'd sort of been in the fringes. You know, you'll see me in the YouTube comments every now and again. I was not super active in the community. But you know, I've been around and get my finger on the pulse of it. And of course, I was very interested in Draw Steel. You know, I was one of the early backers for Strongholds and Followers. So I've been following the MCDM thing from a long time.
Jon de Nor: So you were probably immediately aware when they started working on Draw Steel?
Peter LaCara: Oh, yeah. No, I was very excited. Looking for...I'm one of the 15 people who was, like, very, very sad when 4th Edition died. And so looking for a game that, like, sort of promised to be a successor to that, I was very interested.
Jon de Nor: Oh, okay. So that's what drew you in, then? The tactical angle of a fantasy heroic game, then?
Peter LaCara: Yes.
Jon de Nor: You've been working on multiple RPGs yourself, which I want to ask about them because they look at least very intriguing. I haven't had much chance to look at them in detail. But it looks to me like you started out with something called Twilight Kingdoms.
Peter LaCara: Yeah. So that was my first sort of attempt at writing my own crunchy tactical game, which I published just for free during the pandemic. And it's based off of my D&D setting that I've been running games in since like 2008. So basically, I wrote a whole book, just like, learned how to format it, and put it out basically as an exercise.
The second thing that I wrote was a science fiction game called Mythic Space, whose entire premise is that it's supposed to feel like Halo, Mass Effect, and Cowboy Bebop had a baby. Just because, you know, anytime anyone asks for RPG recommendations, they're going to get recommended Traveler or Mothership or something like that. And it's like, those games are cool, but Traveler is very economics-focused, and Mothership is like super horror-focused. And it's not really like great for long campaigns. And Mothership itself will tell you that. You know, they've got rules for extended campaigns, but there's not much character development.
I wanted, you know, like...Halo 1's like my favorite game of all time. And I wanted to make an RPG that felt as fun to play at the table as, like a Bungie game feels. So that's my goal. And ironically, to do that, I borrowed a ton of mechanics from XCOM. So, you know, going in the complete opposite direction of something completely turn-based. And that...putting Mythic Space out is how I met Arcvein, because he did the cover and a lot of the art for them.
Jon de Nor: Oh, yeah.
Peter LaCara: And then once we finished up with Mythic Space, I decided that my next project would be to go back and take everything that I learned and apply that to Twilight Kingdoms. And so Arcvein and I had developed this whole...you know, we had this whole visual language and stuff all set up for the Twilight Kingdoms, a big mood board, everything. And then I was just...I was literally like a month away from starting a Kickstarter for Twilight Kingdoms Second Edition when Draw Steel released.
And then I sat down and I played Draw Steel just to like, try it out. I was like...I've just wasted the last year and a half.
Jon de Nor: Oh, no.
Peter LaCara: I've never been so angry to have so much fun in a session.
Jon de Nor: (laughter)
Peter LaCara: So I was like, there's no way that I'm going to be able to release something that's playing in the same space as, like, you know, both Draw Steel and Daggerheart that had also just recently released within a month or so. Like basically the giants of the "not Wizards of the Coast," you know, sort of fantasy RPG, like, these titans. And like, "I'm just this little guy, and I'm like...I can't beat these guys."
So I decided to join them. So basically, and to be honest, to give credit where credit is due, this is Arcvein — the artist that I've been working with — this was his idea, is that he was...he had been pitching to me to write a Draw Steel adventure, and I was like, "I don't know, Maybe. I'd rather just do my own thing." Until I actually tried MCDM's thing and I was like, "Oh, maybe I do wanna do that."
So what we did was we took all of that lore and that worldbuilding and all that visual language that we'd already established for Twilight Kingdoms. And I was like, "Well, I'm just going to keep this world and I'm going to start writing adventures in it." And The Withering War was the one that...we had, like, a big sort of Google Doc full of adventure ideas. And the one that was the most exciting to me was, spiritual successor to The Red Hand of Doom, which should sound familiar to basically anybody listening to this podcast.
Then, of course, you know, I've been working on that for like six months or whatever. And then, you know, MCDM teases Crack the Sun, and I'm like, you're killing me! But then I looked at their previews for Crack the Sun. And I think The Withering War is going to be significantly different than what Crack the Sun is doing, even though like superficially, the setup at the beginning is similar. Once you get past like the first couple sessions or so, it's going to be way, way different.
Jon de Nor: Oh, okay. You're going for a very different vibe in general, I'd say, or at least from what I've seen of the art for The Withering War.
Peter LaCara: Yeah, the vibe is very, very different. I tried to...like, in a way it's more grounded, in that I don't have you hopping through dimensions or anything like that. And I also try to stay very focused on the human story going on. Like, I'm really, really interested in the motivations of like, all the NPC and characters. And I've got this big list of NPCs in the first town that the players show up in, which of course, is eventually going to get destroyed.
And one of the things I do later on is if those people survive, we catch up with them later. And then I've got another table that tells you what they've been doing since then, how, like, the war has affected them. And that's going to be like a completely different vibe than, like, "We're going on space adventures and we're going to fight an alien god in the sun!"
Jon de Nor: (laughter)
Peter LaCara: I mean, I do have you fighting a kaiju-sized troll in a magic, like, Fallout setting, but like, still a little bit of like...like, the vibe is different, you know?
Jon de Nor: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Peter LaCara: It's...we want it to be, like...it's like if you look at a FromSoftware game, and you just start talking about the things that happen to it, it's completely batshit. Like, you know, you're going in this giant golden tree and then you're fighting like, you know, this god or whatever. But you know that, if you've played Elden Ring, the vibe is very somber, and it's...the quality of it is not the same, even though the actions of what you're actually doing are pretty gonzo. Just like, look at it objectively. It doesn't feel that way just because of how it's constructed. That's sort of...we've got some pretty gonzo things in the adventure. Spoiler: there's a magic nuke in there somewhere. That's a big Chekhov's gun that will come into play in the last act.
Jon de Nor: Wow.
Peter LaCara: It's the stuff along the way that makes you feel like this is a war story, you know? You feel that desperation and the time crunch and like, people around you are dying. Like NPCs that you've gotten to know. Basically any NPC. I mean, it's a roleplaying game, so you have that freedom, but the adventure is written in such a way that, like, anyone can die at any time, and the adventure will sort of just like keep trucking along.
The Marquise, Isabela — who is sort of the ruler of Valmure, this realm that you're defending from this hobgoblin invasion — she can be assassinated and the adventure will continue. Or, you know, there's a big point where the players can rescue her. And those micro-decisions that you make really matter because they will change how that adventure plays out dramatically. But it's written sort of in such a way as to be robust, like...
Jon de Nor: Because you already mentioned Crack the Sun, which is also a spiritual successor to Red Hand of Doom. And I've previously interviewed someone who's making a different version of Red Hand of Doom.
Peter LaCara: Yeah, I saw that in the in the community creations. I'm aware of that one.
Jon de Nor: Yeah. (laughter) Which is Keep on the Road to War.
Peter LaCara: I think maybe we all have sort of a fondness for that one.
Jon de Nor: Yeah. And the funny thing was, right after I'd interviewed him, Mastering Dungeons, the podcast, dropped an episode where they looked at Red Hand of Doom and kind of highlighted the good stuff from that adventure. So it felt almost like it's all coming up Red Hand of Doom all of a sudden.
Peter LaCara: Yeah. No, I definitely listened to those episodes while I was writing this just to like, learn, you know, what the good things were. So I could keep the good parts and then rework the things that didn't work.
Jon de Nor: Ah. That's a good strategy. Do you have any theory on why...what is it about Red Hand of Doom that really made it memorable? And what made you want to kind of do your own version of it?
Peter LaCara: I mean, it's so different from any other adventure in that era. If you think of...or most traditional indie adventures, really. Like the one, probably, it's spiritually closest to from old-school D&D is Against the Giants, but Against the Giants is still just like a series of dungeoncrawls. There's very, very few, just, published adventures that give you...like most adventures will make you feel like you're playing Fellowship. There's very few adventures that make you feel like you're playing Two Towers or Return.
Jon de Nor: Oh, interesting.
Peter LaCara: And Red Hand of Doom is a Two Towers-ass adventure.
Jon de Nor: (laughter) That's an interesting way to put it.
Peter LaCara: Yeah. Like if you think about it, most D&D adventures are either The Hobbit or Fellowship, or the Frodo and Sam parts of Return of the King. There's very few that are the, you know, Aragorn parts of Two Towers, where he's going around, gathering allies, and trying to, like, rally support, and then getting into insane, like, sieges and battles.
Jon de Nor: Yeah. (laughter) This is this is so interesting. This is rewiring my brain!
Peter LaCara: Like, that's what makes Red Hand of Doom so cool is because, you know, that's what you're doing. You know, you're going around like there's this whole thing where you recruit these elves on these, like, flying owls. And then there's this whole scene with a bunch of councillors where you have to...like the bit with the battle planning prior to, like, the big siege of the capital, that's a piece I kept, because that part of that adventure is so cool. We're like you...
So what I've done...and I'm really happy that Arcvein is so good at drawing maps. Like that dude had not really done cartography professionally before he and I started working together. And I can't believe that this dude never did it before, he knocked it out of the goddamn park. He's so good. I can't believe that he hasn't been, like...I'm getting a steal working with this guy. I'm like, you should do better stuff than hang out with me, man.
Jon de Nor: (laughter)
Peter LaCara: But the things that we made sure were, like, really, really done well, one of the first things we put together was the campaign map of the region and the city map for the capital city. Because there's nothing I like more than handing players a map, putting it in front of them, and being like, "Alright, how are you going to defend this crap? You have X, Y, Z forces. Where are you going to put them? What's your plan? You know the enemy is going to come at you with this, what are you going to do about it?"
And then, just like, you can get an entire session of just the players sitting there, looking at a map, and trying to figure out where they're going to put people. And the Director can just like, sit back and twiddle their thumbs and be like, "Yes, excellent!" while they...it's like the easiest session you will ever have and be like perfectly entertained is just like, hand the players a map and watch them go to town.
Jon de Nor: For Withering War, that's going to be the whole...how should I put it? The whole adventure in one big...
Peter LaCara: Yes. It's a 2nd-echelon adventure, so it takes you from levels 4 to 6. One of the things we're planning on doing is having a bunch of pregen characters, just because, you know, coming in with...if you just want to play this blank, with a...stepping into Draw Steel and building a fourth level character by itself can be a little daunting. Although I've been playtesting online and I believe that one of our playtesters just did that. Like, the very first session of Draw Steel he haven't played was, you know, my Withering War playtest where he just started with a 4th-level character. I'm like, good job, man.
Jon de Nor: (laughter) That's hardcore.
Peter LaCara: Yeah. For real.
Jon de Nor: So okay, so it takes you through the 2nd echelon of play.
Peter LaCara: Yes.
Jon de Nor: Is the adventure...because, my main, like, how should I put it...modern parallel is, of course, Crack the Sun, in which MCDM is taking you across manifolds, jumping between different planes, and going to the sun, and all that jazz. It sounds like Withering War is more about the Aragorn-ing parts, getting your ass all over the place, getting allies, and making people commit to help defend the capital.
Peter LaCara: Yeah, it's 100% like, there are all these different factions that are scattered around the map. Some of them are mutually exclusive with each other. Like, there's a bunch of elves, and there's a dragon that the elves really don't like. So you kind of...you can recruit either of them to help fight for you.
But whoever you don't recruit, you have to fight in the end, because the hobgoblins are doing the same thing. They're sending envoys out all over the region, and they're basically making inroads with the population, and they're being like, "Hey, if you fight for us, you will get X, Y, Z reward." The dragon stole this treasure from the elves, and the hobgoblins have a way to basically mind-control the dragon to make her fight for them. They're going to give this treasure back to the elves so that the elves will fight for them.
And like, that's going to be the situation the players are walking into. They have to decide who they want to side with and what they're going to do about it.
Jon de Nor: Will the players have the...because it sounds like the hobgoblins, then, have the means to make those opposing sides join the hobgoblins side, willing or not? Do the players have the same opportunity to to recruit both of those opposites and fight on their side?
Peter LaCara: It's possible. It's very difficult.
Jon de Nor: Yeah, okay, nice.
Peter LaCara: I'm a big proponent of, you know, Alexandrian's philosophy of, you know, prep situations, not plots. This whole adventure is written as one big situation.
Jon de Nor: Okay.
Peter LaCara: It's very open. There's very...you know, it's not a full OSR-style dungeon where they just hand you like a list of NPCs and a map until you to go to town. There are events that happen, I've got a big timeline of what happens when. But it is written with the assumption that the players are going to screw up that timeline.
Basically, all the situations are written very open-endedly. So if the players find a way to recruit everybody, they're going to have a pretty easy time in the final battle. But I've done the hardest I can to make that as difficult as possible.
So right now, this playtest campaign that I've been running online, my players managed to recruit the goblins and the dragon. They killed the necromancer, so he's not fighting for either side. But they're fighting against hobgoblins and elves. They're singing, they're like..."We've got goblins and dragons on our side. Are we the baddies?"
Jon de Nor: (laughter)
Peter LaCara: And it's like, yeah, you could have had a bunch of zombies fighting for you too, man! If things had played out differently.
Jon de Nor: Yeah. You mentioned Arcvein being the artist, because one of the...it was more of a comment than a question! One of the comments I got on the Patreon post was about the art and how fantastic it looks, and...
Peter LaCara: It's so good.
Jon de Nor: I'm also looking at the Mythic Space cover, which also looks very good. Is Arcvein doing all of the art for Withering War...?
Peter LaCara: Yes.
Jon de Nor: Or are you working with multiple artists? Oh, they're doing everything?
Peter LaCara: He's doing everything. He planned...there's a chance we may hire a cartographer, but right now he's committed to doing all the battlemaps as well. Dude is a machine. He has done so much art and it's all absolutely gorgeous. And I can say that about my own game because I didn't make the thing, but I'm...in a way, even if, you know, the adventure doesn't take off and we make, you know, a million bucks or whatever, which I mean...but like, if I get that guy on the map, just showcasing his talent, that's what's making me happy.
The thing that makes me fortunate is that he feels the same way. He tells me that he thinks my writing is really good and he wants to put me on the map, so, you know. I feel very lucky to have found this guy. I think we work very well together.
Jon de Nor: You're aiming high with the funding goal for this. Is that because of the...just a production cost of having a lot of art or...?
Peter LaCara: Basically. I mean, Arcvein's a professional concept artist, he deserves to be paid as such.
Jon de Nor: Sure.
Peter LaCara: And I think, you know, we're putting out...it's a product that we've both sort of poured our hearts and souls, and like, have put a significant number of man-hours into. And we both have high standards, and want to polish it to the best that we can. And polish costs money.
Jon de Nor: Yeah, that's for sure. (laughter) The reason I bring it up is...
Peter LaCara: The thing is — I mean, our funding goal is not going to be that high. It's going to be like $8,000. So I mean, it's realistic and achievable, but it is higher than a lot of the other Draw Steel Kickstarters you may have seen have been.
Jon de Nor: That's kind of where I'm trying to get. (laughter)
Peter LaCara: Yeah. I mean, I'm not like asking for a Maserati or anything here. (laughter)
Jon de Nor: No, no, no, that's for sure. I will say though, Triglav Games have just passed, I think, €13,000 on their current thing, which makes me more hopeful that there is willingness at least to fund these bigger projects, because a lot of the projects that we've seen so far are in like, the hundreds of dollars. So I'm always a bit nervous when I see someone...when it's multiple of thousands, it's always like, "Hey, hoo, let's see how this goes."
Peter LaCara: Yeah. I mean, we're looking at a current backer count and being like, "Eh, maybe," but I mean, look at Night Shift. That's done really well. And to be fair, that game has an anime trailer and it looks sweet as hell.
Jon de Nor: Yes. (laughter)
Peter LaCara: So it's got that going for it. There is a community there and it's growing. So we hope that we can tap into that. Kickstarters always come with a risk. Mythic Space had higher cost and price point, and I hit that, but...
Jon de Nor: Hm! Okay, okay.
Peter LaCara: I think I raised around $11k for that one. So it's not my first rodeo. I've done it before, but it's my first time writing an adventure in a new community, so...I don't know if a Draw Steel adventure has more or less wide appeal than just like, you know, a brand-new RPG. But I guess we'll find out.
Jon de Nor: Yeah. My argument has been, because I speak to some of the people that have been crowdfunding in the Draw Steel community, and...(laughter) my kind of explanation is that people tend to collect RPGs like, "Oh, this looks neat. I'll play this someday, surely," in a way they don't with supplements for an RPG. So that's kind of me trying to rationalize their success.
Peter LaCara: I don't know, I own an awful lot of OSR supplements I haven't run.
Jon de Nor: (laughter) I have to admit that I'm kind of in the same boat, but I'm trying to tell myself that I'm the odd one out.
Peter LaCara: Yeah, I've got, I've got a decent DriveThruRPG library of stuff that I just, you know, read and I haven't run yet, so, you know.
Jon de Nor: Guilty. (laughter) But I've also seen, before the Triglav one, which is the biggest supplement one yet, we also saw an adventure being funded last November that was pretty successful, and a class just a couple of months ago that was really successful, raising thousands of dollars. So I hope that's an indication that there is a market for these high-production-cost supplements that people are willing to spend a bit to get me.
Peter LaCara: Oh, believe me, I watch that Draw Steel Creations page on the Discord like a hawk. I don't always post there because I'm a lurker by nature, but I'm very plugged into to what folks have been building, and...you know. And I like to do my homework, and I consider that page homework.
Jon de Nor: (laughter) Is there anything in the adventure that you really want to highlight? Kind of...what's interesting to me is this almost, like, serendipity, where multiple people are working on similar — or they're inspired by the same thing, I should say.
Peter LaCara: So the thing that makes my adventure different, I think, is how heavily it leans on the negotiation system.
Jon de Nor: Oh! Oh, interesting.
Peter LaCara: There's a lot of talking in this adventure for something that's ostensibly a war story. There's a lot of fighting, but there's a lot of talking. You know, they say that war is an extension of diplomacy by other means. And, you know, this adventure really takes that to heart. Like, you can sit down and have a negotiation with the hobgoblin general. And like all of those character, you know, different factions that you can go around and recruit, all of those have negotiation sets. And there's dozens of other people that you can talk to. And I tried to mechanically differentiate them as well.
I've been writing previews on the MCDM Discord, just like daily, just as a little teaser. And one of the things I wanted to highlight was the negotiation with the elves where you have...you're in a room with three different councillors, who all have three completely different sets of motivations and pitfalls and different interest and patience scores. And you basically have to make one argument, and you can trigger a motivation on one councillor and a pitfall on another one at the same time. And just like figuring out a way to sort of navigate that is going to be a different wrinkle.
Another one, like when you're trying to recruit the goblins, the goblin leader wants to invite the party for dinner to just, like, deal with them — with the hobgoblin envoy at the same time, by the way.
Jon de Nor: Oh, okay!
Peter LaCara: So it's this tense dinner scene where everybody is sitting down, and the entire thing plays out as a montage test because you have to adapt to goblin table manners.
Jon de Nor: (laughter)
Peter LaCara: You know, one of my playtesters said he's never had to make a roll to belch impressively before. But the whole thing plays out as a montage test where, at the end of that, the results of that test tell you what the goblin leader's starting interest and patience are going to be in the actual negotiation. So I tried to make it more than, just, figure out this person's motivation and target that and avoid their pitfalls. Because that's, by and large, the dominant strategy in just the negotiation system by itself.
But that's...you know, any combat system will get boring if the terrain is the same every time, you know? People talk about "white room" battles. A lot of the early Draw Steel negotiations are just white room negotiations. And I want my negotiations to have terrain, like, their own mechanical wrinkles and stuff.
Jon de Nor: Negotiations is probably one of the systems in Draw Steel that is...I'm not going to say controversial, but it's very heavily debated whether or not it has a place. But it sounds like you're really leaning into it, then?
Peter LaCara: Yeah, hard. I want to take the negotiation system and make it sing.
Jon de Nor: I am 100% on board. (laughter) There's nothing I want more than for the negotiation system to sing. I've been a proponent from it from the day it didn't work. (laughter)
Peter LaCara: Yeah. Well, and that's one of the things, when I looked at the original playtest packet for Draw Steel, I wasn't super impressed with it. And one of the things that bummed me out the most was the negotiation system, because I didn't think it worked. And, you know...but they reworked it. And I think what they came up with is actually something really cool. And I wanted to, wanted to take their toy and put it through its paces and see what it could do.
Jon de Nor: Oh, this is music to my ears. I love this, I really like the idea and the concept of the negotiation system. I have my objections to some parts of it, but I think there's a really awesome core there, that I wish would be more explored in general, and be utilized — as you say, kind of put it through the ringer and kind of see what we can do with it. And hopefully when..."If we were to fix something, what would it be?" kind of early ideas.
Peter LaCara: Yeah, I think the negotiation system is ripe for iteration, and I'm trying to..."Okay, here's my ideas for it, in here. Here's how you can get weird with it."
Jon de Nor: This has put an entirely new interest for me in The Withering War, just with the fact that negotiations feature heavily. I remember seeing comments questioning what a negotiation system was doing in Draw Steel at all, and I feel like I haven't seen it been deployed enough in any kind of adventure that I've looked, read through or played through. So I'm really looking forward to it having a bigger part.
Peter LaCara: I mean, I'm no stranger to social combat systems or whatever, you know, I played Exalted for years. For a long time, I came to the conclusion of, you don't need mechanics for just talking. But it turns out, just having like, that little bit of a mechanical framework that you can hang things on makes NPCs crystallize in a way that they didn't before.
Like I really tried to develop the NPCs in The Withering War, to make them feel sort of organic and well-rounded. And one of the things that let me do that is sit there and like, look at their list of motivations and pitfalls, be like, what does this tell me about this person? You know, who are they and what do they believe? Having that framework there, even though it's quite light, which I do think is the way to do it in general, forced me to think about them in a more complex way than I otherwise would have.
Jon de Nor: I've heard this multiple times where people say, well, if nothing else, the motivations and pitfalls is such a great way to give an NPC like a more rounded character where that actually feels like a person.
Peter LaCara: I mean, I honestly think that might be all you need in the actual system, although having the interest and patience scores there gives you a number that you can hang mechanics off of. And having a number that you can put mechanics on is a really useful game design tool. But then you're trying to quantify human interaction as numbers, and that rarely goes well. (laughter)
Jon de Nor: Oh, yeah. Good point. That is interesting, you mentioned mechanics. Because when I spoke with the designer of Keep on the Road to War, which is the other other Red Hand of Doom-inspired adventure, he mentioned introducing in his adventure new mechanics to kind of make the world connect with the players in certain ways. To give the story more mechanical impact, basically. Is that something you do too, or do you...?
Peter LaCara: Oh, sure. We've got a bunch of bespoke mechanics just for this, because time is so important. There is an exhaustion system, if players want to like force march themselves, or just like skip sleep, in order to get places faster. They start to accrue levels of exhaustion, which basically act as anti-Victories. They reduce the number of Heroic Resources that you start off with. So you could actually start with like, negative Heroic Resources if you have enough exhaustion on you, and you have to build up to it at the start of a fight.
Jon de Nor: (laughter) Wow.
Peter LaCara: The other main thing is that I am tracking warscore for the player's actions throughout basically the entire adventure, which sort of dictates whether they win or lose at the end. So like each faction, you recruit, just having them there, you know, awards you a bunch of warscore. And like, doing different actions to sabotage the invading army, or, you know, finding intelligence caches or, you know, like the battle plans, like the battle plans are a big source of warscore.
And then the actual performance in the battle itself. My players just went through this huge gantlet, which is like the big sort of Helm's Deep-style siege. And I've got this whole mechanic where I've got a bunch of encounters. There's a pool of encounters that you build out based on which factions you've recruited and which ones are fighting for the hobgoblins, and you get a stack of index cards and you just write the different encounters on them, and then you shuffle those index cards up and you flip up like four events, basically. And the players have to choose which ones they're going to respond to, and which ones they're going to send the different factions they've recruited to respond.
And some of those factions are stronger against certain events, than others. Like, there's a bunch of wyvern-riders that, you know, are part of the thing. And if you try to send the dragon against them, she's just going to wreck the wyvern riders. Versus like, if you send like, the reanimated zombies against them, like, the wyvern riders are just going to tear them apart because they don't have any ranged attacks.
Jon de Nor: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Peter LaCara: And so you do that, and the whole thing is this big sort of exhausting thing. And it's a lot of fights in a row. But to switch it up, almost none of those fights have an objective of just kill all the other guys. There is always something that you're trying to do. Like the enemy is trying to destroy something, so you've got to...there's a cathedral door, and the hobgoblins have summoned a huge demon that's trying to break through it, that they're going to kill all the healers who are like, keeping the soldiers alive. You've got to stop that.
Or, you know, there's a bunch of elven snipers, like, moving through the rooftops, and you've got to try to track them down. Or, there's a bunch of raiders running through the streets and you're just trying to keep civilians alive. Or you have to go and, like, destroy hobgoblin artillery or something like that. So it's very rarely just, go in and kill all the bad guys. It's go in and do the thing, and you can win the fight but lose the encounter if you fail the objective, and then you won't get the warscore from that encounter, even though you might get the Victories from it, just for like, winning the fight.
Jon de Nor: I love that. (laughter) I love that idea of losing the encounter, but winning the fight because it feels like if you kill all the enemies, it feels like the default is that it's always a Victory. But you doing well but still losing makes it interesting. I love that.
Peter LaCara: Players hate when it happens. Watch their faces, it's so good to watch them be so pissed off.
Jon de Nor: (laughter) We're closing in on the hour, and I always ask my guests to bring some kind of recommendation that they want listeners to check out. So what have you brought?
Peter LaCara: Well, I've played an irresponsible amount of Slay the Spire 2. And also — this may surprise no one, seeing as it's been my online avatar for basically the last two decades — but I've been really loving the Marathon reboot.
Jon de Nor: Oh, interesting.
Peter LaCara: Which is interesting because I bounced off of it at first because I was being a grognard and being like, "Myeah, they turned my favorite Doom-style FPS into an extraction shooter!" And then I played it and I was like, wait, this is — those are cases where I'm very happy to admit when I'm wrong, is when I try a thing, and it's much better than I expected it to be.
I also just finished watching Better Call Saul with my wife, and we've been going back and rewatching Breaking Bad for the first time in, like, ten years, and that's been an interesting experience.
Jon de Nor: It's already been a decade? Wow. (laughter)
Peter LaCara: Yeah. Time is...time is a vicious beast that devours us all.
Jon de Nor: Thank you so much, Peter, for coming on Goblin Points. It's been a pleasure hearing about the ideas behind the adventure. And I can honestly say that it sounds very different from Crack the Sun, to such a degree that I think these are very different offerings for...not necessarily different people, but for very different vibes, at least.
Peter LaCara: No, I mean, it's...you know, it's like how you have A Bug's Life and Antz existing at the same time, or like, you know, Deep Impact and Armageddon. You know, it's like, two...the ideas are the same, but the execution is very different. And I think both can exist at the same time and be, you know, stand on their own as, you know, worthy things. I'm excited to read Crack the Sun. I want to see what they do with it, because I bet they'll do something cool. I bet it's going to be super duper different from what I've done.
Jon de Nor: You got me so hooked with the negotiations. (laughter)
Peter LaCara: Nice. I'll getcha!
Jon de Nor: I'm so looking forward to see how this goes. But yes, thank you again, Peter, for coming on. It's been very interesting and very fun.
Peter LaCara: This has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you, man.
Outro
Thank you so much for coming on Peter. You know. Negotiations. That's what got me excited. I really want to see someone take them as far as they can possibly go. We've done combats to death. Give me some good negotiations!
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Next episode is on the 5th. That's going to be the roundup episode with the news for June: more Crows, the Red Road and the wild success of Until the Last Villain Dies.
See you next time. Snakkes.