Interview – Emma Larkins
Follow Emma at:
@/emmalarkins
Kickstarter
www.violetdaisygames.com/our-games
We're back for our Autumn/Winter interview season, celebrating all the incredible Women of TTRPGs and showcasing their work!
We're jumping in with Game Designer Emma Larkins, creator of the brand new role-play focused game, Epilogue. Create your own ghostly stories and tell the tales of your demise.
Emma spoke to us about her new game, incorporating RPGs into her games and how aspiring designers can ensure their games are welcoming to women.
1. How did you first discover TTRPGs?
A co-worker ran a session of FATE when I was working at Mox Boarding House (an awesome board game store in Seattle). I remember we played as cats... It might have been the Secrets of Cats?
I'd grown up telling my siblings choose-your-own-adventure style stories during long car trips, so I was fascinated to discover a structure that helped people do that collaboratively! Around the same time, I started playing in my first DnD campaign online with friends. I played as a Lawful Good paladin who had more honor than sense XD. Since then, I've played everything from Fiasco to the Alien RPG to Mouseguard, along with additional DND campaigns.
2. What was the inspiration for your new game: Epilogue
The idea came to me in a dream! I woke up with a feeling that I wanted to create something kind of spooky that played with the idea of pareidolia (seeing images in patterns like wallpaper). At first I tried to generate pictures using cards, but couldn't get it to feel like a fun game. I realized that people see words when letters are shuffled together, so I put word fragments on the cards and then used the words to help players tell stories. The rest is history!
3. What can players expect from this new game?
Although the premise feels kind of dark (players play as ghosts trying to figure out how they died together so they can pass on to the other side), the stories players tell are almost always humorous. Also, even though it's a relatively small deck of cards, the stories are always completely different. I've had players die from a shared nut allergy on board a cruise, from taking an unstable portal back through time, and from fighting their shared ex a la Scott Pilgrim. No matter whether the story ends up being funny or solemn, it's always an enlightening shared experience.
4. How can game designers make sure their games are welcoming to women?
First of all, there's no one theme, game complexity, art style or mechanic that specifically appeals to women! Women like all sorts of different types of games, and it's important to not limit your games based on what you think women want. Second, representation is important - if your game has any sort of humanoid characters, make sure they don't all present as male. Third, make sure your rulebooks are gender neutral!
5. What advice would you offer to newer board game designers looking to incorporate more RPG elements to their games?
I've noticed that sometimes designers who want to incorporate story/RPG elements into their games will rely on large swaths of text-based narrative. Some text-based narrative can be okay, but especially in a group setting, reading lots of text individually or out loud can slow the game down. I'm a big fan of environmental storytelling (often used in digital RPGs) - how can you use your components, mechanics and art to give your game a role-playing feel without lots of text to wade through? And how can you use your mechanics to encourage to create and incorporate stories of their own?
Thank you so much to Emma for speaking to us and giving us a behind the scenes look at Epilogue. Make sure you give Emma a follow and go check out Epilogue on Kickstarter now.