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Wonder and Madness

Back in the summer I mentioned that I had submitted an entry to the One Page Dungeon Contest, which challenges creators to make a table top RPG adventure or dungeon entirely contained to a single page. Of course, I thought 'one page?, pffff... that sounds easy.' Turns out, not so much. On top of that, this year's theme was 'Wonder', so I needed to come up with something that was more than just a map and a list of monsters - I needed something that would make people go wide-eyed, and give them an 'a-ha' moment.

I wracked my brains for a week or so, before finally asking myself the right question; 'what is a design that can ONLY work on a single sheet of paper?' That's when the idea for "The Fantastical Folding Fortress of Jaffee the Mad!" popped into my head.

Inspired by the work of cartoonist Al Jaffee of Mad Magazine fame, my One Page Dungeon works like a 'fold-in'; you need to fold the paper in different ways in order to access different parts of the dungeon. That made it extradimensional, and inspired the story of a wizard driven mad by his magical study of all things extradimensional, eventually drawing him into conflict with the Infernal God of Madness, Awhout-rout-yuth (pronounced in the way hyenas would howl it).

From there, it was easy (not really). All I had to do was figure out a progression in the story and challenges that would allow the dungeon to be folded and unfolded in a way that would lead players through it. As they figure out how the dungeon works, they confront Jaffee's pets, inspirations, failed experiments, and the three servants of Awhout-rout-yuth - all imprisoned in the dungeon. - before finally facing Jaffee himself - now possessed by the Mad God, who they can defeat in different ways.

Anyway - here is my One Page Dungeon for you to download and play with your group. Note - because you need to be able to fold the page, you will need to print it out to use it (or photoshop up the different configurations). The adventure is game-system agnostic (one of the rules of the contest), though it should be pretty easy to adapt it at run time if you play DnD or Pathfinder, or pretty much any fantasy RPG. I have also uploaded four characters that I used to test the adventure with my different gaming groups. The characters are made using a game system I have been developing for the past 10 years... COMING SOON!). While you won't be able to use these characters without my TTRPG rules, you should be able to roughly understand how they could translate your favourite system if you want to use them. Also, they include a little bit of individual backstory that connects them to the plot and gives more context to the story.

If you like this format, you can PWYW for the Compendium of all the 2022 One Page Dungeon contest entries (there were 84!). Even if you played one a week with your group, they will last you easily until next year's contest, so that's a good deal. I've only had a chance to skim through the book, but there are several in there that look really cool. My own entry made it into the Winners Circle, which, after looking at the competition, I must say I am proud of. You can see the list of the winners, runners-up and honorable mentions here.

Also worth noting, this would not have been possible without Dungeon Scrawl by @ProbableTrain. This is just a fantastic tool for making quick and easy underground dungeon maps to a high level of quality. In general, I don't make dungeon crawl style adventures, but that was what The Fantastical Folding Fortress of Jaffee the Mad! needed to be, and I couldn't have done it without a tool that allowed me to make and test a lot of different iterations quickly... even working on graph paper was tricky as I went through about 40 iterations before I even figured out the basics of how the dungeon needed to fold - so the digital tool really made that more efficient and less wasteful.

Perhaps I'll post more another time about some of the many online tools I've been using to build up my RPG game rules and content.

A final thanks also to my own playtesters... you know who you are. I couldn't have gotten this dungeon together with your skill and passion.

Anyway, hope you enjoy playing, and feel inspired to submit next year!

One Page Dungeon Contest 2022

Years ago, I used to do a lot of tabletop RPG gaming. I played almost every weekend for probably about 15 years from the time I joined my first real D&D group as part of a high school club in 1986 (yes, exactly like in Stranger Things), until I moved to Montreal in 2001 to become a professional videogame developer and was separated from my longtime gaming groups.

Over the years we tried many different games and systems. Starting from the original red box D&D basic set that I learned on, then moving to AD&D, Top Secret, Gamma World, Paranoia, Traveller, GURPS, and a weird but delightful science-fiction game made by a friend called EXP, and certainly some others that I have since forgotten.

This story gets a lot more complex and interesting in ways I'll discuss soon, but to get to the point - when COVID landed, I reached back out to my old gaming group, and we started playing again online. Over the course of the last 2+ years we've played most weekends using Zoom and Miro and other online tools to facilitate play. It's been a blast, and honestly, in some ways the pandemic has probably been a net positive for me thanks to that.

Recently, in looking for adventure materials, I started to come across of a lot of one page dungeons - which I find interesting and convenient. Soon, a search for one page dungeons led me to the One Page Dungeon Contest website, where they have been running an annual contest for the past 13 years! So I decided to enter.

I designed a dungeon, playtested it a couple of times, and submitted it a couple weeks ago. Since the contest is still open, I'm not going to share my dungeon yet - but you can at least read the blurb on the submission page. Mine is titled The Fantastical Folding Fortress of Jaffee the Mad! Also - you still have a few days before the contest closes, and there is no better way to get your hands on a pile of new content for your players than submitting an entry - as I understand it, all entrants will receive a copy of compendium that includes all the submissions - which I am very much looking forward to.

Once the contest is finished, I'll share my dungeon here as well, and I'll probably also include the pre-generated characters I made for my playtesters to use while testing it for me. Perhaps along with a few other surprises...

Let's Play... Screw the Banks!

Maybe you've been vacationing on Pitcairn Island since the beginning of April and you haven't gotten news yet, but a month or so ago millions of documents were leaked to the press from the Mossack Fonseca law firm in Panama. These papers reveal how hundreds, or potentially thousands of wealthy individuals have been using offshore companies, banks and law firms to avoid paying taxes in their home countries.

Leaving aside questions of whether or not this kind of shit should be legal at all, the probability is that some of it is not. I personally think tax avoidance (the legal optimization of your finances to minimize your tax payable) kind of sucks to begin with - for the simple fact that it disproportionately benefits people who already have lots of money and can hire lawyers and accountants to help them pay less tax. Tax evasion (the illegal concealment of income to avoid paying tax) is an actual crime - the crime that got Al Capone sent to prison. Money laundering is the transformation of money made through criminal enterprise (such as dealing in arms, slavery, drugs, conflict minerals, etc) into 'not-illegal' money. Law firms like Mossack Fonseca, and the offshore banks they work with, and the shell companies they create, explicitly, openly and legally help wealthy people avoid taxation. Unfortunately the same systems and structures they use to do so can (and are) used for tax evasion and money laundering. I think that sucks.

Anyway, the Prime Minister of Iceland was already forced to resign because of his involvement in this mess, but his is only the highest profile head to roll so far. Acting and former Heads of State and their immediate family members from over 40 countries appear to be named in the leaked documents along with many other wealthy individuals and public figures. Apparently on Monday, May 9th, a giant list will be published of all the people connected to the couple of hundred thousand offshore companies that have been created through Mossack Fonseca for the purposes of doing international business, avoiding taxes, evading taxes, cleaning the bloodstains off their cash, or hiding the fact that they simply stole it outright from the budgets of very countries they are supposed to be running.

While all of this has been going down, I got to reminiscing with Mathieu Berube, who I work with here at Ubi in Toronto. Mathieu was a level designer who worked with me back on the first Splinter Cell, and was the LD who built the Panama Bank level of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, which I personally think is the best Splinter Cell level ever made. In the story of the game, MCAS Banco de Panama was the financial middle-man able to conceal the people involved in the arms-for-information transaction between Displace International, Zherkezhi, and Peruvian revolutionary-wannabe Hugo Lacerda. Mathieu and I joked about how, when you work on these kinds of near-future political thriller kinds of games, you often end up predicting the future: the Bank level in Chaos Theory was ultimately about the power of offshore banks to make these kinds of illegal transactions anonymous.

After talking about it, we realized that it would be cool to see if we could get the game up and running and play through the level again while talking about how we designed and built it. It would also give us a chance to rant incoherently about our frustrations with all the shitheels who are screwing the rest of us by not paying their fair share. So that's what we did - we dug up a 360 (SCCT was on the original XBox, but was made backwards compatible) and did a run through and talked about some of the decisions we made.

So we made a Let's Play...



PS Making this video is not in any way intended to imply we are working on any particular game. What we're working on is unannounced. The fact that we're talking about Chaos Theory is a coincidence related to current events and nothing more.

Ten Years Down

I realized earlier today that it's been ten years since Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory shipped.

Obviously, a lot has changed in that time, but I'm not going to wax nostalgic about that. I thought instead I would regale you a never before made public tale of what that game meant to me.

Chaos Theory was a hell of a project. I began as the Lead Level Designer and the Scriptwriter, which meant from the start I was doing two serious, full time jobs. I had to get the level design team queued up to deliver 12 maps that were of much higher and much more uniform quality than those in the original game, and I had to make sure we had a story and script that worked all the way through. I also had to get a commitment from that entire team that - come hell or high water - we would not cut a single level. This was doubling down on both the team, and on quality - it meant everyone on the level design side was bought in, but it also meant I could work with confidence on a script that would not later be hobbled by having to move or cut levels.

At the same time, there was a lot of stuff to fix in terms of the global vision of the game. The original Splinter Cell had been a big hit, but it was not without its serious faults. Punishing 'Game Over' gating and brutal trial-and-error gameplay that we should have fixed in the original needed some challenging and innovative solutions if Splinter Cell was to be moved forward.

Development was hard. Sometime around Alpha, mandate came down from Ubi that all internal projects needed to have a Creative Director. Mathieu Ferland - the Producer - asked me to do the job. I said no. I was not convinced that it was not just a bullshit management position and I was worried that I already had two jobs. But after a few discussions with friends and family and the team, a week or so later I changed my mind and became Creative Director, Lead Level Designer and Writer for the game. If you watch the credits, you'll see that three of the first five names in the credits are me. The other two were Mathieu Ferland, and the Art Director, The Chinh Ngo. Anyway, these responsibilities came with a heavy price, though. I spent most of the 24 months of Chaos Theory's development working 80 hours a week.

About six months after I became Creative Director, when the game was around Beta, my good friend Dave (who had been an AI programmer on the original Splinter Cell, and who is currently one of the founders of Tiger Style) came to Montreal to visit. He stayed with us, and he slept in our spare room for a week or ten days. That week I took 'time off' - by which I mean I left work at 6pm or so every night so we could have dinner and hang out. It was fun - I've been told. I don't really remember.

I went to GDC in March of 2005, while the game was in the distribution process, and I gave a talk about the narrative structure of the game. Of course, I also got to hang out with Dave under far less stressful circumstances. Over dinner one night, we got to talking about the time he'd last been in Montreal. During that discussion, I kept correcting him about what we'd done the last time he was in Montreal, but we kept disagreeing about the details and the timing. Over the course of the meal, we realized that I actually had no memory of his trip to Montreal six months previously, and that I was recalling a previous visit he'd made about a year or so before that. Dave had spent a week living in my house. I had curtailed my work week down from 70-80 hours to a normal 40 in order to spend time with him. We had eaten great meals, gone to great bars, seen movies, played games, and talked about our careers and the industry and our pasts and our futures, and all of it was simply fucking gone. I could not remember any of it.

To be clear - I do not mean I didn't remember what we did or what we talked about. I mean that I literally had no memory of the events. To me it was like it never happened. It was like he never visited. There was just an empty space in my brain that had been overwritten by the stress and anxiety of Splinter Cell. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory gave me brain damage.

Once we realized that the incongruities in our conversation were the result of a legitimate failing of my memory, Dave helped me trying to find a handle. We talked about it over dinner, and then on and off over time. I spoke with my wife about it (she, of course, had full recollection), and eventually, I was able to pin a few minor pieces of my memories to the cork board of my brain and piece together a kind of past.

Over time, I was able to slowly reconstruct some significant part of that lost week. I remember a few meals and a few conversations in a few bars. I remember my friend being in my house. I remember us drinking coffee together and smoking cigarettes.

Writing it all down, now, I have to confess I have mixed feelings about it. I am really, truly proud of what we accomplished with Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. It stands the test of time as one of the best games ever made. At the same time, the personal cost for making it was real and serious. It's not about forgotten beers in some bar on St Laurent. It's about brain damage and the loss of life. To this day, I am still not sure what the right equation is there. I'm still not sure if it was worth it. I'm still not sure if I would do it again if I had the chance.

Anyway, here's something you've never seen before:

Convergence Culture

Part Three: If you build it, they will come.

Ever since I can remember, I have loved using level editors. I got my start before I was even a teenager building Lode Runner levels on the Vic 20, by my mid twenties I was making levels in UnrealEd to play with friends, and my first game industry job was as a level designer. The game level editor was at least as important to my personal creative development as was the word processor. I believe a good level editor can be as engaging and entertaining as a game itself and - when combined with a great game - has the potential to create a positive feedback loop between playing and creating. This is important if you believe - as I do - that playing and creating are fundamentally the same thing.

But designing and building level editors is hard. On one hand, you want to give players unchecked freedom to design and build any environment they can imagine, from a space station to an African savanna to the Eiffel Tower, or even all of these things at once. Conversely, you also want player created environments to play well within the context of your game. Designing a level editor that connects creators who want to express themselves with players who want tightly designed levels is a challenge I believe can be overcome by making level building into a game itself.

The first time I saw a screenshot of the isometric grid of flowerbeds and fences, cornfields and cattle that we call Farmville, I was stricken with clammy-skinned flashbacks of Floaters and Chrysalids. I needed to know where 'Sniper' Sato was, and who was packing the Blaster Launcher. But regardless of superficial similarities, Farmville is nothing like X-Com. Farmville is essentially a level building game, and X-Com is a game that needs an unending stream of new levels. What a match.

Farmville affords player expression through the design of farms, and a forum for sharing those expressions with others. The actual gameplay of Farmville is either shoddy, evil or non-existent depending on your worldview. X-Com, by contrast, is a hardcore, single-player strategy game in which players express themselves through the way they confront the game challenges. The forum they have for sharing that expression is non-existent (but at least it's not evil).

One of the amazing achievements of X-Com is that it uses a procedural 'level assembler' to construct appropriate levels on demand, offering an infinite variety of terrain in which players battle to repel the alien invasion of Earth. Underlying this 'assembler' are simple rules which determine what makes a valid level. Farmville farms, by contrast, are player generated. Because Farmville explicitly rewards time spent with experience and profit, many Farmville farms are rigorously optimized with dense fields of high-yield crops. But because Farmville is also a platform for socialization and expression, there is also an incredible variety of farms that reject progression entirely; from eclectic need-one-of-everything collections, to idyllic pastoral scenes where some kind of virtual Feng Shui reigns.

In order to give players the feeling of scope required by an X-Com game, a modern remake must confront a difficult challenge. Building an entire planet worth of content by hand is not feasible. Procedural generation risks feeling wooden, and lacking in creative flourish. Relying simply on user generation risks undercutting serious themes with an overwhelming percentage of penis-shaped levels. But a game that incentivizes players to make appropriate X-Com levels can potentially solve this problem.

A casual game for mobile devices or the web that puts players in the role of Mayor, Farmer, or Ranger, and gives them the tools to build all the urban, rural and wilderness landscapes needed, while explicitly rewarded their time spent with experience and profit would quickly generate the needed content. Adding another reward axis selecting for designer-defined 'appropriateness' would lead to player created maps suitable for playing X-Com in. Those maps could then be published to the cloud and pulled down by the game on demand. These casual players cum level designers would be rewarded with experience, gifts, rare items and prestige for designing X-Com appropriate environments. Friend management, sharing, and publish/subscribe tools would begin to bridge the sadly widening gulf between two important groups of players.

It's been almost twenty years since X-Com and an entire generation of similarly hardcore games excluded a mass-market gaming audience a hundred times the size of the audience they chose to service. Today, the pendulum is swinging the other way. The casual revolution - as exemplified by Farmville - is excluding the hardcore gamer. It doesn't need to be this way. We do not have to accept the cynical segregation of diverse audiences when the technology exists today to unite us. By linking our games, we create new domains in which all kinds of players can create, co-operate, compete, collaborate, and ultimately converge.