He was born and raised in the Czech Republic and currently resides in Sweden. Like Krakenhund I also enjoy spending time outdoors and grew up in the rural countryside of midwestern USA adjacent to farms, woods and streams. Earlier this month we discussed childhood RPG inspirations and our Mothership Month projects over Discord.
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ColumbaryTTRPG: When we spoke earlier you mentioned starting TTRPGs very young with Dračí Doupĕ as a kid. I didn’t start playing rpgs until adulthood and sometimes wonder what I would have taken from them as a kid and if I would have stuck with them through adulthood. What experiences with table top games as a child do you still [value] as an adult?
Dračí Doupĕ or Dragon’s Den. A Czech fantasy TTRPG.
Krakenhund: […]Oh my, the most wonderful thing about playing RPGs as a kid was that we had so much time to dedicate to it. We played every day, even between classes at school. We spent hours writing whole notebooks for our character - drawing pictures of our characters, creating custom illustrated character sheets, writing notes from adventures, creating maps... I really miss that. Now, with work, families, and all the boring adult stuff to deal with, it’s hard to completely escape into a fantastical world like we used to.
And we […pretended…] to be lost in the woods, exploring fantasy realms as a kid. We were part of a big cross-country skiing club with our parents, and we formed a group of friends whose favorite pastime on long treks through snowy wonderlands was imagining we had "crossed" a magical stone or circle that transported us to a fantasy realm. We played as ourselves and could only use whatever our real selves were carrying. Believe me, after a while, we started packing things like matches and knives to be better prepared for future adventures!
ColumbaryTTRPG grew up in the rural Illinois in the central United States, while Krakenhund spent their childhood in the Czech Republic and currently resides in Sweden. Above, some of the snowy wonderlands of Sweden.
Did your imaginary explorations in the countryside while fulfilling quests in magical streams and forests influence your writing or gaming today? For me, they were a huge influence - I definitely prefer outdoor adventures and sandbox-style settings over dungeons.
ColmubaryTTRPG: I would have a difficult time describing exactly how an imaginative childhood in the countryside impacted how I play games today, but I’m sure it did. I think when I played as a child it was really easy to imagine a world where I was at some kind of disadvantage: I was lost or stranded in a strange land [the back yard], had to find or build shelter (a lean-to from sticks), was hungry and had to forage food (chives, morels or blackberries). I can see this sort of echoed in the appeal of OSR and Mothership, where character failure, injury, and death are frequent and expected.
Often I’d make stories where I was allied with an innumerable host of tiny invisible elves of dubious disposition- sometimes good, sometimes evil. I still enjoy that dynamic of an ambiguous ally or enemy in games and stories. A friend reveals a motive in dire conflict with your own, or an enemy who players must unexpectedly lean on for survival.
I’m sure childhood me would be impressed with my fancy drawings and grown-up stories, but would lament just how much work is like school, and how much time it takes up. Why is it so hard to picture a trip to the grocery store or a walk through the park as the fantastic journey it might have been as a kid?
Krakenhund: Yeah, that’s why I try to hold on to as much child-like wonder as I can, even when doing the mundane adult stuff. When I see weirdly arranged stones in the forest, I still imagine them as a forgotten troll fortress, for example. Honestly, my walks in nature are a huge source of inspiration and motivation for me, helping me explore ideas for what to play or write about in RPGs.
Actually, since you mentioned imagining being stranded in a strange land, that’s the theme I want to base my next work on—a castaway stranded on a Norse dark folklore island. Let’s see how that turns out!
One can see the resemblance to a certain 4-legged friend….
What’s your main inspiration for RPGs? For me, aside from walking, it’s traveling/visiting museums (for learning about other cultures) and watching documentary movies and series. I often find that our world - its nature and history - is sometimes more fantastical than any made-up setting I have read. What drives you to come up with your RPG ideas?
ColumbaryTTRPG: Honestly I take a lot of inspiration from other media. Movies, television, books and sometimes other table top games. Usually just one little idea catches me and worms its way into my imagination, winding up very far away from the source thematically. They hit me kinda out of the blue, but often when I’m wrapping up another project I’ll start itching to run in a totally new direction.
I’m struggling with that now: there’s a lot of work yet to do for Mothership Month: illustrations, editing, layout, finalizing stickers and patches… but I’m already kind of fantasizing about what might come next. The history of my creative output is 99% half finished ideas. I struggle to put together one cohesive plan and carry it out.
I think that’s part of what appeals about games- a dungeon’s random encounter table can generate a whole saga in and of itself.
What’s something you struggle with when writing or making a game?
Krakenhund: I think I have the same problem as you - and probably a lot of other authors too! 🙂
Sticking with a project and finishing it is really hard work. Going over the same text again and again, polishing it, coming up with the last few entries for a random table... it’s tough. Starting a new project, on the other hand, is fun and rewarding. It brings an endorphin rush, and it’s easy and fun - it’s like exploring a brand-new world. So yeah, I also have a ton of unfinished projects sitting on my disk. But I’m trying to cannibalize them and use the ideas hidden in them for projects I do want to finish.
Another big challenge for me is translating. My native language is Czech, and I create RPG content in both Czech and English. Whenever I make something in one language, I want to publish it in the other, but I just can’t bring myself to translate, re-write, and edit it all over again. So not only do I have unfinished projects, but I also have finished, untranslated ones...
But now I’m curious about your MoshMo project. I read about Knowledge Asymmetry on the project page, but is there something about your product that you’re particularly proud of or excited about - something we don´t know yet?
ColumbaryTTRPG: Something […]that I’m excited to reveal to backers during fulfillment is a small bundle of Creative Commons art pulled directly from the booklet. Ship illustrations and maps that I draw for Knowledge Asymmetry I’m planning on releasing as separate files for people to use however they wish- including commercially-as long as they give attribution.
This isn’t ALL the art in the booklet, just a handful of illustrations, but it should be a nice thing to help other writers or artists spice up their own projects. One final question here. You are making Operation Golden Cut, a Mothership adventure featuring a spectacular gold heist in the midst of a pitched corporate battlefield. You’ve got some great patches and stickers for this module but I’m a sucker for maps. Can you tell me about how you came up with your battlefield map? What inspired its look and how did you make it?
Krakenhund: […]So, about the map - it ties back to what I mentioned earlier about finding inspiration in the real world. The map (and the setting) is inspired by the largest surface gold mine on Earth, Kalgoorlie in Australia. An aerial picture of it was the initial spark that gave me the idea for this whole gold-mine war-zone heist, so I wanted to use it as inspiration for the map as well.
Operation Golden Cut's battlefield map, and its inspiration: the Kalgoorlie Consolidated Gold Mines Fimiston Open Pit or "Super Pit," was once Australia's largest open pit gold mine.
From there, I found a great resource on the almighty internet: https://contours.axismaps.com/ This site lets you find any place on Earth and generates contour lines for it, which you can then export and work with. After that, it was just a matter of using Affinity and researching how military maps and symbols look so I could replicate that military style, adding a pinch of sci-fi.
So, that’s my secret! Now, everyone, go check out that site and use it in your projects or games. 🙂
Ben, thanks so much for the conversation. I really enjoyed it and wish you the best of luck with your project - may there be no hiccups along the way! And who knows, [maybe] our paths will cross again in the future (and I really hope they do).
